Mel Nichols’ book Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon was published by Edge Books in 2009. This was about a year before we met Mel and began regularly attending her reading series Ruthless Grip at the Black Squirrel in Adams Morgan, and her Thursday night drinks tradition when DC poets gathered weekly in the basement of the same bar. We were graduate students at the time, and our exposure to the world Mel gathered—great poets invested in poetry as a form of community—was an integral part of our poetic education. Like her poems, Mel had the paradoxical ability to be simultaneously both silly and stoic, ephemeral and eternal.
Most of the poems in CEP are entitled “Day Poem,” interrupted periodically by the whizzing inertia of a set of poems called “Bicycle Day” and several called “Stop.” We consider here two of the “Bicycle Day” poems, which appear sequentially late in the collection.
This particular “Bicycle Day” poem enacts the same practice Mel lived: of pulling anything and everything into her poems, especially the things that seem too far apart or too much in conflict. This poem opens with a scene one can imagine amongst poets—complaining about “the miseries of alphabets”—which feels like an intimate memory (there was nothing Mel found funnier than pretentious griping). What unfolds next, however, is a series of lines in which the expected leaves and gravel along a wooded drive become “an unmade garden of the mad,” a transformative defamiliarization. In this “unmade” space, which we might read as both disassembled and as-yet-unassembled, speech collides among upper and lower cases in conversation, giving printed language its own oddball humor: a “sideways smile.”
The later stanzas of the poem reveal, for me, the kind of network from which Mel’s poems emerged. When she appears in my mind’s eye, it’s always as someone surrounded by her interlocutors: in front of a crowd watching her perform an outlaw poem to welcome a guest reader, or amongst the piles of books on art, design, and poetry stacked precariously on every surface in her Washington, D.C. apartment. She always had the next thing just at hand, in her mind. Mention an interest in Frederick Law Olmsted, and she had a list of contemporary landscape theorists ready to recommend. Part of her network of thinking was the forest—where she spent much of her last years, re-planting native species around her home in Front Royal, Virginia—and another part was the rhythms and routes of her life in D.C. When she describes, in this poem, the letters “taking flight down the river of quaking aspens,” and then opens the next stanza by rendering how “the world is moon milk spilled on dark grass / among the trees,” I feel how her language was activated, sent into flight, in both of those spaces. In one image, the language dances amongst a stand of trees, talking underground and shaking above, joining their rippling force; in the second, discovering the “spilled” world is simply a matter of stopping, at night, to look.
There are poets who would write these lines with irony: “we know so little about the world now / we need an interface to tell us.” And I believe, of course, that there’s a little joke here in that potential, and in the emergence of the technical language of the “interface” in the woods. More consequentially, though, I think these lines suggest that poetry is tied to centuries (millennia, really), of human un-knowing, and that language is one of the places of connection, of radical transparency, where we might be able to experience a volt of truth. The final stanza employs one of Mel’s favorite moves in this direction: an attempt at repeating language into meaning (and not away from it). She writes, “to reclaim a certain always something is / a something or a something.” There is always something we’ve lost track of, or perhaps even that has been taken, that is still our own in language—even the story of a bracelet lost forever. Language is the forest we can return to, always. Just look, the poet gestures: “the woods are full.”
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Many poems end with an epiphany, but this “Bicycle Day” poem begins with one. As a leader in the Flarf movement, Mel found in poetry a place to make sense of the early Internet as it emerged. To do so, she sought meaning in chaos, finding how “everything rhymes” and how the absurd or mundane often occur beside the miraculous: “for what is love but falling/and a telemarketer calls back again.” But she also wanted to turn our attention back to the wonders of the natural world at the very moment when the human attention span began to rapidly deteriorate. “[G]ot lost watching birds at the feeder,” Mel writes, before pivoting, at the end, to that telemarketer. The poems in CEP care equally about the sacred, profound, and beautiful as they do about the ordinary, the boring, and the ugly. Part of Mel’s particular genius was the ability to juxtapose these modes, resulting in a feeling of radical openness and sincerity that has always felt, to me, rare and precious.
As we mentioned above, Mel lived her own life in an urban/rural juxtaposition between D.C. and Virginia—a juxtaposition relayed powerfully in CEP. She observes the telephone lines, utility poles, and squirrels of Washington, D.C. with as much reverence as the sycamore trees and creek water of rural Virginia. She finds in such contrasts, I think, not opposition but exciting tension and connection. “[E]verything rhymes” in this poem, starting with the indoor, domestic smell of coffee and the wild “madness in the clouds.” Absence transforms to presence and seeking leads to finding. Meaning abounds. Meaning prevails.
The heart of this poem contains a catalogue of all the things that rhyme, exhibiting (as all of Mel’s poems do) a pure delight in the world and all of its things. Fairy tales rhyme with light, with rain, with sun, with the supermarket, with great blue herons. Following this list is a little joke: “forgot to look in the field guide for that/radially symmetrical pink wildflower/got lost watching birds at the feeder all day.” The speaker was so immersed in actually watching the nature in the world around her that she forgot to stoop down into her book to identify any of it. She could not break her gaze. What a joyful problem to have!
Ultimately, Mel’s approach of writing “Day Poems” in CEP showcases her interest in ephemerality and dailiness—a practice some might call a “devotional.” And Mel was devoted—to poetry, to poets, to community, and, yes, to love. “[F]or what is love but falling”?
Perhaps it was in ephemerality itself that Mel found the most delight—a “carpe diem” for the digital age. She wrote of “ecstatic buckets of daytime” in CEP as though there were an endless number of days. She asks us to never break our gaze as the objects and landscapes of our existence collide. To read Mel’s poems again is to revel in the moments that compose our days, and the language that is our playful, insightful companion in rendering experience. Every day is a poem—and perhaps, if you lend it your full depth, a “bicycle day.”
