Welcome to Lit Review, where columnist Dominiq Wilson will take apart a series of chapbooks to figure out what works and what doesn’t for the modern reader of poetry.
“Purgatory” is written by Amelia Martens, the same author of “The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat.” It’s a collection of 20 prose poems, and despite the various subjects this book discusses, all of them seem to take place in the middle of something like the title suggests.
Before going further, I will say that this chapbook wasn’t easy to navigate through. Each poem is untitled, which aids in the mystery of what point in time the poems take place, but when going back into the table of contents, the poems were marked by the first few words. Luckily for me, each poem is under a page long, so I will be referring to each poem by its page number.
It was clear to me that all of these poems are written in prose form, but unlike her other chapbook, these poems seemed to resemble streams of consciousness in the fact that some of these poems seemed to go off into an unplanned direction.
Having read Martens’ poetry before, I can say that this revelation isn’t new, but due to the wedge of time between the first reading and the second, I can say that I was thoroughly confused by these disconnected, run-on sentences. Despite this, as always, it made these poems very enjoyable to read. Take the third, for example:
“You stare at the electric coil, and wait for your watched pot to boil. You wear the first apron your mother made, out of the rocking horse curtains. Every time you take the lid off, the water is serene. Camel crickets skitter across the peach linoleum, and jump on a collision course with the backs of your bare knees. You wear white socks, the left one wet from the ice cube left to die just outside the freezer. You hold a baby spoon and tweezers. You realize, as you hear the roll of heat inside the thin tin pot, there is nothing to boil, nothing but insects.”
I noted that this poem may be about a lost family, considering the narrator mentions a mother-made apron and baby spoon without mentioning a mother or baby, but I can’t be too sure. There’s a lot of unnecessary information that throws that inference off.
Like her last book, Martens comments on social issues. In “The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat,” she commented on war and its effects on individuals and families, but she addresses other issues as well, such as beauty and the environment. The fifteenth poem mentions plastic almost too many times for me to think that the poem isn’t commenting on the use of plastic in our environment. Read it below:
“Your happiness is funded by solar panels and social security. Every day you sit on a park bench in the plastic universe and listen to the plastic blue bird feed his plastic chicks. Across the park, near the plastic public restroom, sits a mathematician. He eats egg salad sandwiches every day. First, he unwraps the plastic. You watch him do this through the figure eight of your plastic binoculars; the ones your parents would never let you use because they were afraid you’d break the glass lenses. Even now you feel their weight, and the plastic strap pulls on your neck when you let the lenses fall against your chest. All your life they never saw you, sitting in the backseat. Your face pressed against the window, tracking raindrops, the soft plastic of the window knob turning in your hand; there impressions were made, which looked like scars as you aged. You silly putty child, when are they coming to pick you up off this bench and put you back inside your egg?”
I enjoyed this book about as much as I loved her first, though the poems not having titles was a bit annoying while reading. Despite that, I do recommend that anyone should read it. You can buy it for around $9 or check it out in our campus library.
Column: “On The Table” and Productive Communication
On The Table came into existence thanks to the effort the Chicago Community Foundation put forth to bring people to the table to talk about important and contentious issues. Sounds simple, right?
The Lexington Bluegrass Community Foundation’s third annual On The Table discussion happened simultaneously in the afternoon and evening of March 27, 2019. Discussions centered around the theme of Belonging. The goal of these discussions was to engage the public, bringing people to the table that may not feel welcome or included enough, to speak on issues that affect the community collectively.
This year, the conversations were meant to focus on race relations and social inequality, analyzed under the umbrella of belonging. Surveys, based on respondents’ perception from previous years have shown that these topics were not as heavily discussed and that they merit the attention they haven’t been given.
As a host, I was charged with inviting 8-12 guests to my table. I chose to include people in the Lexington community as well as those directly affiliated with the Transy community in an effort to facilitate conversation with people from two environments I identify with. My personal goal was to invite people who represented the spectrum of views on social topics, but I was unable to convince individuals who had preconceived notions of how people would respond to their moderate-to-conservative viewpoints. Those that accepted my invitation all had liberal-leaning views on social issues and those facing our community.
Throughout and after my table’s discussion, I thought about a question that was raised, and for a moment, caused silence: In this increasingly isolated world where people have the illusion of being ever connected through the internet, how do we make sure that people are engaging with others while respecting and celebrating our differences through shared experiences?
Presented with this question, I am confounded. Bringing people to the table is easy when they are already open to it, but what about the people who still feel apprehensive about the idea itself, let alone actually interacting with strangers whose opinions differ from what we have always known?
It is, in my opinion, the biggest issue that faces our society today: lack of productive communication. Civil (in person) discourse is incredibly important in connecting with people and understand others’ behavior, beliefs, and convictions. However, when people are simply hearing each other and not listening to each other, progress will never be achieved.
My social-justice-packed evening ended with Sir Salman Rushdie’s Creative Intelligence lecture “On Civility.” Among other things to think about, I walked away with this quotation: “…The great constant is human nature, what we have in common, left or right, black or white…” (Rushdie 2019).