Kelly DuMar

Kelly DuMar on “The Trouble of Us” and “\ ˈfä-t͟hər \”

Photo © Kelly DuMar, Dec. 26, 2016

Often, before it’s a poem it’s a picture. This is where many of my poems, including “The Trouble of Us,” begin. I live on the banks of the Charles River where it runs through the woods in a suburb of Boston, and every day, in every weather, this is where I hike with my dogs and take pictures. On December 26, 2016, the brook on property had iced over, and a glassy oval looked as un-ruined as the impromptu skating ponds of my childhood. 

Later, in my notebook, unpacking my memories from the photo into the raw material for a poem, I wrote a rough draft I called, “January Skating,” which was about both my parents. In subsequent drafts, I narrowed the theme to focus on my mother and the extraordinary efforts she made as a 1960’s homemaker to take the five of us skating, in the absence of any help from my father, to the ponds that would form and freeze at the bottom of our neighbor’s field when the brook would overflow. In later years, my mother would often complain about how stressful it had been to manage raising five children while my father was working in the city dawn to dusk. Her tone became martyred and too often featured her misery. So, when this poem emerged as a kind of thank you to her, it was a pleasant surprise, because I felt I could move beyond her resentments to express my gratitude to her for choosing discomfort to ensure we experienced these transcendent moments.

It’s particularly satisfying to have one mother-inspired and one father-inspired poem in issue 11 of Split Rock Review. My poem, “\ˈfä-t͟hər \,” was written around the same time as “The Touble of Us,” but it was inspired by an experience rather than a photo. Eight months after my father’s death, my siblings and I gathered to bury his ashes next to those of my mother, just a few days before his birthday on November 9. It was a dreary, windy fall afternoon, so, the word “billow” came to mind as a source of emotional energy driving the poem. Wanting precision, I looked up the definition of billow in the dictionary, and through many revisions, “bil oh” remained the working title and central concern. Drafts were shared multiple times in critique groups before I was able to identify the definition of the role of “father” as the most central concern of the poem, and the idea that he was born and his ashes were buried on virtually the same day struck me as startlingly poignant and profound. The word, billow, no longer exists in the poem, but its still energizes it. 

Over the course of about ten years, my siblings and I cared for our parents as a committed pack – grown children, we became the caretakers in the day-to-day caregiving, both routine and in crisis. The burial was a final act of caregiving we shared. A poetry mentor helped me, finally, with a nod to Plath, express the emotionally complex, final imperative of the poem.

Rosemary Royston

Rosemary Royston on “Rumex acetosella”

“Rumex acetosella” is a poem that comes from a larger collection of work where several poems are titled with by the scientific Latinate name for what is being described. The impetus for this idea was an earlier poem I wrote, “On the Discovery of Aspirin,” where I pondered who ate the leaves from a willow tree (and why), which in turn led to the discovery of acetylsalicylic acid. Think of all those who lost their lives (or their lunch) eating plants, herbs, fungi, flowers in order to find either basic nourishment or relief from an ailment. Not only did this thought lead me to look more closely at my own surroundings (southern Appalachia) and its use of herbal remedies, but I also reflected on what I, as a young person, put into my mouth that did not come from the garden that my family planted each summer at whichever parsonage we happened to be living. And I remember, distinctly, the briny taste of sourgrass that my elementary school friend and I regularly pulled from the pasture on her dad’s dairy farm. We sucked on this salty perennial as we played outdoors, never thinking twice about whether it was poisonous or not. Luckily, we were fine.

I value accessibility in poems, and while Latinate names are not “user friendly,” I like to title some of my poems with the name that we are not accustomed to (at least not the layperson). This naming scheme asks the reader to engage in the poem in order to determine what, exactly, is being described. Having spent the majority of my life in rural places, there is no escaping nature. Nor is there a way to escape that things have more than one name. Whether it’s called sourgrassor Rumex acetosella, it’s still a weed that kids playing outdoors put in their mouths, it’s a weed that some folks put in their salad, and it’s also a nutrient for the American Copper butterfly.  

Spotlight: Esther Vincent

Esther Vincent on “island city”

In “island city”, I juxtapose seemingly contradictory ideas of ‘the island’ and ‘the city’, in order to express the tensions I feel as a Singaporean living in a rapidly changing and urbanised environment. Having grown up in Singapore in the 1980s, all I ever knew was high-rise living, interspersed with occasional visits to the beaches in the East, near where I lived: Pasir Ris, Changi and East Coast beaches. I remember frolicking in the sea as a child, running barefoot in the sand, queueing up to shower in the smelly beach toilets, cycling, roller-blading or eating barbequed stingray and satay at the hawker centres. I have not been to the beach much lately, and sometimes, I even forget that I am living on an island. Instead, I feel landlocked and claustrophobic, resentful towards the concrete, steel and glass that have taken over the jungle. 

With this preamble in mind, I wrote “island city” as a reaction to feelings of alienation from nature and a more idyllic way of life. This was also a direct response to two videos that I saw. One was of strong winds hurling some trash bins and wooden paddle boats into the air at one of the beaches, and another was a video of flash floods at an industrial area in Singapore. Both these videos got me thinking about the conflict between urbanisation and nature, the former predicated upon the demise of the latter. How we uproot old trees to plant new ones, how we relentlessly destroy another precious plot of secondary rainforest to build yet another expressway, how we heap brick upon brick onto the back of our island because to be urbanised is to be relentless in the taking. And so man is responsible for tipping the balance, and a natural phenomenon like rain now produce unnatural flash floods which serve as a metaphor for our lack of spiritual irrigation. 

“island city” encapsulates a mood of impending fear, terror and uncertainty, and I make a significant reference to a recurring dream, one whereby I drive headlong into the sea. In this dream, I feel a palpable sense of helplessness as the deep swallows me whole, machine and all. I mention this once and refer to drowning again towards the end of the poem, and I conflate the persona’s body with the body of her city, to amplify the loss. I allude to the imagery of the sea and water to evoke a sense of nostalgia, melancholy and sadness associated with changing tides, both literally and metaphorically. There is an inevitability expressed in the poem, yet the rain is also likened to an angry pounding or drumming of war, which suggests that nature can never truly be quelled. 

While I prefer not to impose any particular reading of my poem onto my reader, I will say that form is important, in terms of how the words appear on the page, and the rhythms created by the gaps between unlikely phrases and the lack of punctuation altogether. In doing so, I hope to heighten the physical, emotional and psychological fragmentation and trauma the persona feels as she speaks and reaches out to anyone who will listen, but also as she reaches back into her mind and memory for a past image of home, and as she reaches even further back into history, time and place when her city was still just an island, still whole.

Spotlight: Derek Berry

Derek Berry on “Android Boy Builds A Body”

This poem, one of a series featuring the eponymous Android Boy, questions the relationship between the body and the mind. In this poem, intelligence is divorced from the body, operating in the realm of Internet persona, whether modified or wholly fabricated. Unlike many Internet users, whoever, the speaker is not human, but instead a form of artificial intelligence.  In the Android Boy poems, the speaker explores what it means to be human and what it means to be not-human, what it means to exist in the periphery consciousness.

This poem focuses on how Android Boy might approach desire, especially with the ability to use bodyless avatars in earlier iterations of AOL chat or messenger apps like Grindr. How might one understand sexuality and sexuality without a body with which to enact related acts? Would artificial intelligences, then, seek to construct a physical form? How else might one understand the body except to possess one? Android Boy considers these existential questions, and in turn, I hope that the reader will reframe their understanding of human sexuality. If, for example, we consider online personas, on which we are pretending to be what we are not, then are the stores we tell to confirm our own humanity anything more than faulty code? Do we consider the chemical impulses born in the brain more sophisticated than those that might navigate the actions of a robot?

There is hubris in the construction of a body, like someone attempting to build a house and instead building a house fire. We know this from pop culture, from Frankenstein to Ex Machina, but I find particularly interesting the questions that might arise from an artificially-intelligent robot building their own body. This will become a more concrete reality as machine learning progresses, but what will the machines learn? What will they learn from us? Will they peer down upon their human predecessors with pity—human cruelty & human want—and will they then instead learn to become something better? Perhaps manifesting desire in the body was the first mistake, the creation of a vessel that would carry our mistakes forward into history.