What Sparks Poetry

Life in Public

What Sparks Poetry is a new, serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In the newest series, Life in Public, we ask our editors to examine how poetry speaks to different aspects of public experience.

What does it mean to say that a poet is, as C. D. Wright has put it, “one with others”? What is poetry’s place in the public sphere today, of all times? How has life in that sphere been expressed in poems? Is all published poetry public speech? What is a private poem? What is occasional poetry? What is political poetry?

With questions such as these in mind, we asked each of our editors to select a poem written by another poet that addresses an aspect of public experience—that celebrates, historicizes, memorializes, critiques, questions, or subtly references its public element—and to write about what interests and inspires them about that poem.

We are excited to present to you the resulting sixteen meditations on the private and the public, and how the intersection of these states sometimes results in poetry.

Joyelle McSweeney on Sonority

“The Extermination showed up a few weeks before the machines came to Zanjón de la Aguada and drained the swamp (rank, fetid, black).”
– Mónica-Ramón Ríos tr. Robin Meyers

1.

The sonority arrives.

It arrives from a distance and makes an instrument of bone—the skull bone, the breast bone, the wrist that hefts the handless, heedless watch, its blank face, the little stapes that try to hold the tympanum in place. It may heft a strange burden, a sword of flame, to guard or else to indicate, like a struck plectrum or stuck frenum or with strange gait, a strange gate. Sonority, I

await thee, do sit here in my ossuary, in my sorority of skulls. They all look alike, and like me, ancient, young, and when the wind blows, we all turn like judgemental weeds in an alley. We all suck our teeth and hum. Like a dented dumb antennae, I’ve become

attuned to sonority through hearing loss. It makes my skull a hollow site, and sound a tide that arrives, arrives. My auditory nerves have idiopathically frayed, sound’s pulse won’t translate to audibility, it arrives at a lag or imperfectly, drops, comes back, goes off in some dingy cloud, sinks to die in some ravine. I’ve spent decades guessing. Sometimes I’m right. I study lips for their signs. When the audiologist covers her mouth, she says a word I cannot identify. The eye

in the hasp of her clipboard glints like a bird of prey’s. Evolutionarily, our mammal jawbones moved up to form the ossicles which allow us to hear as we move in space. Not mine. I unlatch my jaw like a snake’s for an egg that stands on its face at the equator. I lift a scope wrong-ways and watch a flea like a camel split a hair. Everything I

know about the world I learned from Looney Tunes. Its laws of chase-and-prey, momentum, gravity, an all-onomatopoeic universe, sound its percussive event. Looney Tunes, my first teacher. Looney Tunes, be my guide in Hell. You share a pattern

with Ovid: an implacable episodicness, each event suspended over the canyon of consequence on the thinnest of wires–and then it snaps. Damage is irreversible, yet the sequence can be run again and again, arrive and arrive with a clang. Consequence. Bang. Imperial entertainments. Wham. Among the Metamorphoses, Ovid tells that as the god Pan chased the nymph Syrinx through a creek, she prayed for escape and was changed to a reed. When Pan crashed through anyway, he broke the reeds in their bed, then on the breeze they sent up their alarm as musical notes. Thus was invented the first flute. An instrument named for him, naturally.

When I think of my own hearing loss, I think of irreparability, a loss that runs only one way, converting my skull to a locked vault, a cave. I like to be alone there, to study how it susurrates. Sonority, that tideline’s arrival, retreat. Other losses are more acute, and I bear them bitterly. Like the constellations in the dark night of Greek thinking, the night sky overwritten with predators and prey. Washed with milk, they sink away to hide behind the sun.

Now an ear worm plays in the bullet-less chamber of my brain: Charlotte Gainsbourg turns to her rock star husband who always gets his way. As he touches down from outer space, she says, of earth, or the cafe–

Did you invent this place, do you owwwn it?

The Francophone actress cannot easily shape the vowel in “own,” but twists her mouth as if she’s dropped an anvil on her toe: ow, ow. With my predator’s eye, I can see her hold it for a hypersecond too long, I can see where sound lies down in that canal, creates a little drag in time which fills with fluid.

This consequence. This catastrophe. This irreversibility.

Do you owwwn it?

—til scene sweeps the line away. Sound decays.

But you can read the signs if you still have eyes in your face.

2. Sonority and Death Styles

I wrote all the poems of Death Styles on the shockwave of catastrophic grief, and I wrote the Death Style for 2/8/21, “Mary Magdalene, Collectible Glasses,” trying to understand the physics of my new, confounding planet, a planet clammy with calamity, with weed beds and reed beds, NICU wards, of cause decoupled from event. The cave where Christ’s body was laid till he rose from the hole in the rock. Mary Magdalene was there at dawn and was the first to see the hole. Can you witness absence? With her mouth in an o, she imitated the hole in the rock, which imitated the hole in Christ’s side. How might sound sag over time in that permanent hole? O, oh, oww, oww. Do you own it? Do you owwwwn it? I tried to slow down the scene to study the way sound under the intense pressure of calamity might warp, go out of synch, get ahead or behind time, go away and re-arrive, resaturate the scene, spring from any orifice, peripheral or sublime, a soda siphon or the wound in Christ’s side. How does the individual body, immobilized by calamity, become a place to which sound and consequence flood? Through what holes might they drain?

Writing Prompt

SONORITY

PART 1
1) Think of a place you once considered home, or a place you used to live, where you do not now reside. Name it.
2) What is a word you heard only there
3)What is a name you were called, only there
4) What is a food you ate, only there
5) What is a sound you heard at night
5a) Spend time with this sound. Be very quiet and still; which part of your body does this sound begin to stir or strike? Write down an onomatopoeia of that sound. Draw a glyph for it. Write three-five metaphors describing that sound.
8) Describe the weather at its worst.
9) Name someone you never want to see again, and someone you would like to see.

PART 2
Imagine that you are going to invent an instrument that will allow you to send and receive a signal from where you are to this other place. What would it be made of? How would it send and retrieve messages? Would such messages be stored or disintegrate? What power source would this machine run on?

PART 2a
Make a diagram/blueprint of this dream instrument

PART 3
Plug in this machine into its power source and turn it on.

PART 4
Send out your signal– what does it sound like? Where does it go? Follow its voyage.

PART 5
What do you hear in return?

–Joyelle McSweeney

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Joyelle McSweeney

Joyelle McSweeney’s tenth book, Death Styles, is now available from Nightboat Books. A Guggenheim fellow among other honors, McSweeney teaches at Notre Dame and is a founding editor of the international press, Action Books.