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do you ever feel like theres a part of you that can never be safe? anyway this is about how i have to kill black widows in my backyard
Until I See Guts / Discussion
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based on prior knowledge of how you said this affected you, i do think this is particularly emotional one,, and i do apprreciate more poems about insects. Some of the phrases don't really flow well in the poem for me, being one like "please don't hurt me", but it isn't enough to err my enjoyment of the overall piece. Thanks for posting.
"—I said, with a posed look."
I saw that this was about spiders partway through, which is fabulous.
Ah, glorious. There is a heartbreak, here, and knowledge of necessary violence towards a love to protect one's other love. This is known even without recalling the context — this is a tragic delight. The poem flutters moth-smooth, scales radiating butter-soft, lands in my mouth, clawed feet rough and light against the sensitive muscle of my tongue and I close my lips and then my teeth and its abdomen quivers and I in all my cherishing and solemn memory-severing, I—
I swallow.
-Styg
What is life if not the contrast between what has been and what will become?
Some people here on wanderers-library.wikidot.com might have noticed that I've been away from this website for a few months, again. Sure, I mostly blame my workload and general business of living, or else my ongoing disillusionment with the bare concept of online "community", even as offline community doesn't seem to be so hot either right now.
But… I also know that the manner in which this site encourages particular modes of readership can be grating, enough for me to need some distance now-and-again. I do really love the poetry that some write in comments sections, richly inspired by the works they are attached to; I do really love the encouragements from people engaging with artforms they might be unfamiliar with, but finding newfound appreciation for. I love that this website encourages not only writerly but readerly exploration.
Still I want for there to be criticism and comment that is as bit as intentional as the best poetry we make. I don't doubt that the comments most leave on this website are indeed rich with intention; I worry, however, that we often lose sight of the text we have ostensibly read, its formal qualities (beyond just being well-crafted, whatever that's worth), the specificity of the thing. That our intrusion into the comment section titled the same thing as a given poem, story, essay, or artwork, too often makes for a kind of shallow reading; particularly because close reading, deep reading, seems violent or intrusive or overly clinical or just plain hard. Also, it really, really takes time. Who has time to read all this stuff written by other amateurs when we're all busy writing our own amateur whatevers? Maybe it's easier to skim a poem and get the gist, rather than sacrifice a lot of time really closely attending to it, to its insinuations, its erotics, its form. All of this means I don't comment much because I simply don't find the time to demonstrate to the author the degree of attention I myself would desire. But then I see this poem, as maybe an example of a recent WL piece that I think has not gotten due diligence from some of its readers. I think I ought to try nudging the river's course a bit.
So, sure, shallow reading is superficial, vibey, alternately egotistical or avoidant; but deep reading, despite being kinda violent and exhausting, is where real engagement and entanglement with the object of reading lies. Sure. But if the dichotomy were so straightforward, and if shallow reading were really so superficial and easy, you wouldn't need to keep striking until you saw guts. One thing I do very much like about this poem is the degree to which violence towards the spider is so simultaneously easy—"not a difficult catch"—and unbearably difficult at the same time. Killing the spider, unseeing the spider, can't really be said to be a non-engagement, for how deeply the ramifications of such an act of erasure reach into the speaker's psyche. Our speaker's best attempt at repressing the spider leads to a louder announcement of the spider's irrepressibility; meanwhile the speaker's own anxieties and fears become heightened and restaged as King Kong dreading to touch Ann, the jolting thoughts of a guilty predator. And we all know King Kong would rather die than to really hurt Ann, right?
Which makes the last stanza, and its preamble, the more shocking. Let's look at some grammatical tenses (yes! i'm doing it!) as they shift over the course of that stanza; "do not stop" acts as a double for both the enjambed "and i do not stop" in the indicative mood (saying this is really happening), and as a dissociative imperative, the speaker commanding themselves to do something in the second-person (which is to say the killing is not real outside of fantasy and desire). "That's how" in both sentences also follows this dissociative double meaning, indicating either a present condition of a sense of certainty, or else merely the condition for certainty if we take the imperative mood from earlier. And then "Until then she might live" also has a twisted time function; if the killing had really happened, and the spider's living been already extinguished possibility, should this not be in the perfect tense, as "Until then she might have lived"? Instead, the fantasy of being rid of the irrepressible collapses, and the possibility is very much alive, a clear and present danger, that the spider might live.
Not just to go anywhere; to another place underneath tomorrow. The future which is not just a time, it's a place, and it's specifically in your home, and it has spiders in it, and you cannot rid yourself of these visions crawling forth, not because it is a temporal elsewhere, but because it is already spatially in these deadlong days. (what a phrase, deadlong days!) These sorts of constructions of the unbearable future play in a genre space moving from tragedy towards apocalyptic horror. The pain of the speaker speaks not just for pain's sake but reveals something unsettling underneath, something like the reanimated corpse of futurity itself; that the future can be seen, so long as you are willing not to look away, and its sight is searingly painful.
I think it makes a great deal of sense that this poem is broadly invested in doubleness and double meanings as a result, given a cohabitating alien future and anxious present, a real live wire status quo and its unthinkable alternative. There's "Until I see guts", which might refer to innards or to courage; the pun of "where she hangs out"; the suspended subject and object of "sure she won't hurt" in the last stanza; the compound words and kennings that keep expressing third things, starting with the innocuous brownstone all the way through to the moisture conjured by "shimmerglistening". The one most notable place where the poem briefly drops its guard is in the third stanza, in which the hormonal connotations of the letter E are briefly raised. I was astonished to see this completely slip past some readers in the Discord server, because I thought it was maybe a bit blunt on my first read. But I also recognize this as a moment in which the poem, its speaker, opens up to the spider-alternative for a second; even so, it remains guarded, as though the knowledge of the future must remain occulted in subcultural lingo, in "heralding". If the word were spoken plainly, it wouldn't be living underneath tomorrow anymore, it would just be here. (This is, I think, why the late José Esteban Muñoz talked about queerness in his fantastic Cruising Utopia as something that always exists in the future, and as soon as that future arrives, it's not really there anymore.) And, aren't we really talking about E Flat anyways? The one just before.
This poem acts to be seen and then unseen, acts to obscure itself. It positions itself equally as both spider and squasher, as undecided as a car in neutral on the crest of the hill. There are glittery moments of the lyric poem genre making itself more apparent, like the abandonment of "one" on its own lonesome line, or the Dickinsonian em-dashes, the enjambment on the strong syllable of "just" starting the second stanza, or the excellent twisting of "daddy long-legs" into "deadlong days" (deadlong days!!!), which weave in and out of the poem, as an invitation to readers. But these moments never fully surface or take center stage outside of these shifting cameos, with the poem as a whole remaining protean and undecidable, at least, until tomorrow.
As a fellow trader of ambivalence, I'd say "game sees game" if I were writing poetry at the moment. Maybe I lost track of time, that's why I'm really not participating on WL so much. Some people think I'm merely spatially clumsy, and then come to understand my chronoception, barely taped together by a default-color-only Google Calendar and denialism. Often I try to take things day-by-day, playing the coming week by ear, sometimes managing scheduling conflicts as they appear, unannounced, like earthquakes. This is not so much living in the moment as trying to be as forcefully unaware of the future as possible, the sustained thought of which sends me into anxious spirals. The fantasy is that the less I think about the future, the sooner I get it all over with: who I am becoming; what world I increasingly inhabit; the past I am excreting; the regret I, against my will, keep accumulating. Yet, despite all that, the future is keeping me unavoidable company in my home, in the objects I cannot help but want to read closely. It is already here even when it is tomorrow, the metamorphosis is already underway. I've just started methylphenidate. In my next poem I might end the lines with em-dashes. Later this month I might be bitten by a radioactive spider and pretend I can't climb up walls, that I couldn't climb up walls all along. (Yeah okay little miss muffet.)
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