Rachel Cualedare
Profane Conversions:
supermoon by Gillian Parrish (Singing Horse Press, 2020)
It might be observed that the poems of Gillian Parrish's supermoon, in their timely issue, accommodate detritus:
what's today
'shithole countries'
choking on meatloaf
patches of red on my skin
yellow dog dream
'content with little, he has nothing to fear'
two billion dollar tax break then they laid off the workers
'he who knows how to stop'
Through the whole of the book, the stuff of everyday America roundabout 2018 is flatly present, often unadorned. Phrases from the news abound, selected and trimmed so that the absurdity of their provenance is manifest, so that the ways in which popular words and events violate principles of humane living are traced. Distressing sensory experiences are inscribed in tandem with these bits and pieces of the general atmosphere, to the effect of the impression that a person's mental and physiological state is partly a function of the social and physical context. That is to say, the poems of supermoon take pains to present the world as it is.
Yet the junk the poems are obliged to engage is redeemed through a lyricism that is wholly organic. In the poem above, the trochaic deliberation of the first five lines measures the assimilation of their contents, slowing down the alternating regard of the self and the self's surroundings. Following this, "patches of red on my skin," fairly unambiguously unpleasant, link distantly to "yellow dog dream," which is in its tone indeterminate and open. The dream hinges to a shift in diction, the quotation offering a vision and register alternative to bleakness. Another phrase from the news follows, then a fact from the news conveyed in a mournful voice. But at the poem's close, the alternative stance of considerate prudence recasts all that precedes. The contrast is rueful yet insistent: There are other ways.
This lyricism is reluctant, despite its earnestness. The poet is careful to refract the authorial ego through other people's words ("''content with little, he has nothing to fear'"; "'he who knows how to stop'"). In all of supermoon, impetus toward closure is resisted, lovely images are consistently undercut with signifiers of crisis or disaffection, and interest in the person of the poet is deflected. Parrish displays the agency of twinned cognition and composition, but she insistently demurs when there is occasion for credit to her imaginative or linguistic facility.
Hank Lazer, in his 2018 review in Talisman of Parrish's first book of rain and nettles wove, notes that in her work, "humility before what has been written and is being written now by others makes it clear that a way to say it in 'our own voices' is by acknowledging and merging with other voices." Lazer calls Parrish's poetry a "phenomenological guide, a schooling in perception," finding in its orientation parallels with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "notion of seeking." supermoon is not constructed of lyric in the way of of rain and nettles wove; the hardness of the conditions it is constrained to acknowledge demands a more rigid form and a plainer diction. Yet Lazer's observations about the "phenomenology" of Parrish's work apply to this more recent book, too. Indeed, supermoon operates by virtue of "an ethics of respect for the limitations of knowing," in Lazer's words.
Given the writer's generosity in admitting into the poetic enterprise the unseemly, and welcoming into the poetic act the wisdom of other writers and other speakers, the consciousness behind supermoon might be called merciful—a consciousness that allows what is harsh as well as what is wholesome into articulations of wonder and archetype. In another poem: "pulled a dream horse from the flood waters / daily trails of spilled coffee." But at work here is more than an effort to figure the flawed world charitably. In evidence is, rather, a willingness to allow that detritus, accumulated, substantiates our days. And out of willingness arises an effort to theorize the mechanics of this substantiation.
The theory, though, is grey (to echo Goethe—whose recourse in the face of circumstantial horror might be, as for Parrish, to fathom natural phenomena). No maxim is distinct. Patterns are discerned, but conclusions are slippery, transitory, provisional.
supermoon does have structure. Aside from the opening "mother song" and the closing "dawn song," the book proceeds in eight-line installments. Each verse, so to speak, comprises four couplets, though It is hard to reconcile the poetic tradition of the couplet with the openness and parataxis of Parrish's voice. It is more proper to regard the lines as occurring in pairs—to receive them not as couplets, but as couples. The two lines within a pair might relate to one another in counterpoint ("woke to puke and bleed / the street softened by snow") or in complement ("embedded in relations / looked up remembering the trees are breathing"), as the poet inscribes thought.
Two of the book's epigraphs are from Stephen Berg's translations of the premodern poet Ikkyū, who wrote within the Japanese literary tradition of associative links, and the poems of supermoon follow through on this salutation with their juxtaposed images, their gaps, and their recurring tropes. The eight-line untitled verses, each of which may be read as a stand-alone poem, are strung in a series of seven titled series, suggesting that with discipline, coherence takes form not only in rhythm but in motif.
While lines, pairs of lines, verses, and series are nesting increments of thought, the spaces in between them are intervals of thought. And herein lies the design, the logic: the deliberately tenuous philosophy. The poet is not pure receptiveness. She subjects her material to a formal discipline. But the form, once it is in operation, reveals that phenomena are resistant to naming, to finality; they do not bear the weight of human reason. In the book's closing "dawn song," one half of a frame to the seven themed series:
so ordinary
like a cloud
like a cloud
like a cloud
therein
lies the blessing
nature of nature
shadows of the flowers
Our descriptions may spin out. Our eyes and minds may take in any number of events and devise of them significance. And yet perhaps all we have to do is consider the most basic of phenomena in their plainness. Perhaps we might heal the corrosive junkiness of our context by observing the "nature of nature" and settling within that sheer observation. Later in "dawn song": "flooding the beds where we lay our broken heads / Grenfell Aleppo St. Louis City Jail / flooding with sunlight on water singing." We observe, as well as natural phenomena, unnatural exploitations. In faith to the inextricability of experience from environment, the writer continually grapples with the relationship between meaning and context.
In the American tradition, this naturalistic rendering of the occurrence of thought has an affinity with George Oppen's exploration of the slippage between materialism and idealism. From Oppen's 1962 essay "The Mind's Own Place":
It is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue: but the image is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet’s perception, the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness. (31-32)
Parrish attends in her poetic practice to this kind of rapidly moving center from mind's eye to eye to object and back. She is careful not to claim, within the verse, either a sui generis vision or a sui generis language. She works assiduously against artifice, even as she shows the bones of her thought, the bones of the poems.
In "The Mind's Own Place," Oppen goes on to esteem the construction of "clear pictures of the world in verse, which means only to be clear, to be honest, to produce the realization of reality and to construct a form out of no desire for the trick of gracefulness, but in order to make it possible to grasp, to hold the insight which is the content of the poem" (32). Thought is represented in this way in the poems of supermoon. Quick flashes from image to impression to quotation to image signify the movement of the mind as well as its interaction with the material world's effects.
Also evident in supermoon is concurrence with A.R. Ammons' analogy of the poem to a walk. In Ammons' 1967 essay "A Poem Is a Walk":
I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking, so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal. ... [B]oth the real and the fictive walk are externalizations of an inward seeking. The walk magnified is the journey, and probably no figure has been used more often than the journey for both the structure and concern of an interior seeking. (5)
And so a poem. Parrish likewise in her composition hews to thought as it occurs; her poetry records the taking shape of an essential pursuit: toward faithfulness to what the self is in the world. Back and forth in the poems of supermoon, what is external to the self enters in and is, in turn, reflected outward. All the while, the poetry states itself to be body. At the closing of "solstice series":
gunshots mark the new year
dreaming deep hippy books, mostly sci-fi
'what forces us beyond ourselves'
finally getting wise, half-truthed the troll
light from this central place
(show me so there is time)
beads between the fingers
so another can be born
Violence interposes from a distance, conjoined with the contrivance of the calendar. Depth here is the counterpoint, both accessed and offered through the voice-based linked experiences of reading, writing, and dreaming. Some eavesdropped wisdom characterizes the situation and suggests a pragmatic attitude, partly undercut and partly corroborated by a being from another realm. Essentially, the light of clarity comes from the center of the physical surroundings, the center of the body, and the center of poetic composition. What might be despair or indifference upon the turn of the year is diverted, finally, to the prospect of new life—through physicality, through ritual. It is as if the writer takes phenomena into a centrifuge, separating and sorting them as she collects them. The nature of the given phenomena determines her tone as well as the direction of the poem; but at the same time, she is steering the poetic apparatus toward cohesion and subjecting her voice to salutary influence. This "inner seeking" is traced, as it were, in real time.
As per Ammons:
The pace at which a poet walks (and thinks), his natural breath-length, the line he pursues, whether forthright and straight or
weaving and meditative, his whole 'air,' whether of aimlessness or purpose--all these things and many more figure into the 'physiology'
of the poem he writes. (5)
Parrish takes care to display these guts of the poetry, so to speak. From the "Notes" we know whence strains of thought and lines derive; with the internal recursion and self-inquiry we are reminded that we are witness to the live process of composition. In "spacetime series": "dreaming half-thinking how to teach a walking song / 'some part doesn't want me to know where i am.'" To orient oneself within a poem, as it is composed, is a perpetual pursuit.
The form of the verses, too, makes plain their constructedness, the necessary subjection of thought to external constraints, even as thought clearly issues from what is constant in the body. Much in this poetry is oblique, but the transparency of its source communicates its endeavor of honesty in both thought and the representation of thought.
Parrish's writing can thus be read as grounded in William Carlos Williams' foundational poetics of the measure. In his 1948 lecture "The Poem as a Field of Action":
How can we accept Einstein’s theory of relativity, affecting our very conception of the heavens about us of which poets write so much,
without incorporating its essential fact—the relativity of measurements—into our own category of activity: the poem. Do we think we
stand outside the universe? Or that the Church of England does? Relativity applies to everything, like love, if it applies to anything in
the world.
What, by this approach I am trying to sketch, what we are trying to do is not only to disengage the elements of a measure but to seek
(what we believe is there) a new measure or a new way of measuring that will be commensurate with the social, economic world in
which we are living as contrasted with the past. It is in many ways a different world from the past calling for a different measure. (283)
As Parrish writes, "combine the visible and invisible / eyes aching all the way to the shoulder blades // for as long as i can-- / start a love train, love train." Poetry can exercise its contingency, can be like the observed world in its conspicuous relations. Agency is there in the joints of the relations. Volition is there is the direction the poetry points: in this case, to the wholly current and urgent tenor of some righteous song lyrics.
Contemporaneously, supermoon has kinship with the concerns of ecopoetics, in so far as ecopoetics as a tentative category, in the words of Jonathan Skinner in ecopoetics no. 6/7, can "ask and be asked the hard questions about language, representation, efficacy, ethics, community and identity ... paying more than lip service to the work of interconnecting sciences, humanities, and more. That it attend to the walk as much as the talk" (9). Parrish's poetry is indeed work in evidence, more than a mirror to the daily effort to live ethically; its generation is part and parcel with the holistic project of carrying out a human life in attendance to the non-human world and in the interest of repairing human damage to that world. From "empty-full series":
'what is most tender trumps what is most solid'
listening to where it hurts
old cat stalking sparrows in the snow
(i will care for your child)
arctic opened to plunder
neighbor's son on lockdown
headline: 'world leaders transformed by kind-minded lesbians'
what we dream when we dream in the dark
The line "arctic opened to plunder" is only the most explicit indication in this verse of the precarity of the natural world: a precarity that is in fact a source of power ("'what is tender trumps what is most solid'"). The practice of deep listening, of dreaming in an untainted place, discloses the most basic of instincts: the most sustainable. With "old cat stalking sparrows in the snow / (i will care for your child)," the author offers, as a result of poetic attention, an intention both specific and general, a minute solution to sweeping injury. With the first issue of the journal ecopoetics, Skinner glosses "ecology" as "the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings" (colophon) and "ecopoetics" itself as "a house making" (7). Parrish's house is modest but capacious, in a state of appropriate unrest. The poet's "sorrow at our species" is constitutional, and through the verses diffuse.
So Parrish's writing is native to its mother tongue as much as to its place of origin. But if there is a system at play behind the poems of supermoon, it is the bodhisattva philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism. In this strain of the religion, awakening is pursued not with the end of exiting the profane world, but with the aim of alleviating the suffering of living beings. A bodhisattva is a being who, through practice, has achieved an enlightened state yet has chosen to remain in the muck and mire of ordinary life in order to help others. Having glimpsed the beauty behind and beyond familiar facades, having arrived at the conviction that the really real world is not the world of violation and transaction, the bodhisattva might be tempted to renounce the mess of politics, senseless injury, and spite. Having vowed to hew to compassion as the primary motivation, however, this being persists in the unenlightened realm, and also works hard within it to lessen the agony of its residents—human and otherwise. A Mahayana Buddhist practitioner is "on the path": Though not a bodhisattva, this person will act in accord with the ideals of the corresponding philosophy. The practitioner, like the bodhisattva, vows to relieve all living beings of their hardship. It is a vow that is, naturally, impossible to fulfill. But taking the vow not only expresses faith in the redeemability of the shambles we exist within; the vow also enacts the principles of the practice, setting redemption in motion.
supermoon indicates some avenues for repair. But how do we, frankly, save the world? There is no answer here. Who could presume to have an answer to the question of why we collectively continue to squander life? As per the foundational truth of Buddhism: Suffering exists. Parrish's poetry is not, however, passive witness to the truth of suffering. There is conversion of the facts of suffering—the contagion of suffering—to the communication of faith.
Yet the book declines to showcase a Buddhist leaning. When the language of Buddhism does appear, the given reference allows for a lightly humorous valence. In "spacetime series":
too cold to type
hedgewitch watching the last light
dreamt they chanted sutras in a robot voice
in between past and future : heard the birds
sky like fire through the trees
dreamt I could not wake from sleep
reading how numbers will take our daily bread
let the sun in your eyes, he said
At first blush the line "dreamt they chanted sutras in a robot voice" is funny. But in a different kind of regard, it is unnerving: Impending dehumanization is insinuated, and thus a note of fear for the future is struck, resonating with the book's wider anxieties. And considered from yet another angle, the line is apt; the correlation it extends is accurate. The sound of monks chanting in unison, amplified in a temple hall, can, in fact, resemble the voice of a robot. So the line holds three senses up front. And then its context must be taken into consideration. The sound of the chanting has been dreamed, and is hinged to the joined abstraction and worldliness in its coupled line "in between past and future : heard the birds." Where are these voices coming from? Maybe that is the key question. Through supermoon there is a vein of inquiry into the substance of our dreams: an inquiry both religious and matter-of-fact. A dream exists outside of time ("between past and future"); it instructs us, but in a language with which we are not adequately acquainted. Monks chanting sutras belong to history, while robots should belong to the future. But both are present now. So who is the "they" chanting in the dream? In what ways are metaphysical lessons connected to our mundane experiences ("heard the birds")? Or is a dream of sutras essentially the sound of birds, filtered through an intelligence trained with books and discourse? Who is the source of the indecipherable futuristic doctrine?
Of course also the indication of Buddhism, weighting this verse with the gravity of distant provenance, is moderated with the summoning of flat fact ("too cold to type") and profane lore ("hedgewitch watching the last light"). And crucially, a brilliant sunset—itself evoking the long contemporary season of horrific wildfires ("sky like fire through the trees")—yields to a different dream: "dreamt I could not wake from sleep." This is, more explicitly than the dream of sutras, the poet's dream, the speaker's dream. It could be read as a crux of supermoon. It summons perennial questions: What is sleep, and what is waking? Which life is the dream? How many times will we die in a life? When will it be the final death? The terror of not being able to wake, contained within a dream, is linked in this verse to the wisdom of the sutras—but a wisdom possibly perverted; it is linked to our current hazards, to the error in our human systems ("reading how numbers will take our daily bread") but also to the wonder in our daily affairs (the birds, the sunset). How could these revelations resolve? The verse's final line reads, "let the sun in your eyes, he said." It is the voice of another—another person, saying (or singing) something that is at once ordinary, soothing, and instructive. In the end, there are the refuges we have in one another. There are words that make sense of nonsense—again, provisionally.
According to Parrish's "Notes" for the book, the touchpoint for "spacetime series" is The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. Maybe it is odd that a book with a Buddhist orientation is explicitly in debt to popular, secular texts: In addition to Greene's bestseller on theoretical physics, Funkadelic's albums and Tove Jansson's children's book Moominland Midwinter are cited as "tutelary spirits." The voice of supermoon is generous not only in its encompassment of the stuff of perception, but also in its eager absorption of texts that might shed light on the "interior seeking" as well as the work of compassion. Funkadelic's lyrics—not to mention the cited album title Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow--could register as instances of humor. So could the fancy of Jansson's characters Moomintroll and Snufkin. But the Afrofuturism of Funkadelic's George Clinton is serious: It is a vision of liberation from historical, political, and cultural constraints, an enterprise of tuning into the spheres in order to better understand our existence. In these qualities it aligns with Parrish's prerogative of expansiveness in her regard even as she drills down into questions about what is true. From "mothership series":
something inside that will never stop falling
where were you when they said no survivors
'deep in pain I called the names
of some funkified friends of mine'
Our bodies mirror the outer mysteries of emotional physics and resonate with unmysterious cruelty; we long for fellowship in the quest to overcome.
Likewise, Moominland Midwinter embraces linguistic silliness and narrative absurdity, yes, but its narrative of untimely waking out of hibernation also expresses alienation and melancholy, affirms fellowship and quotidian acts as substantiating, and sustains the question, "What is the real world?" Parrish builds on this complexity in supermoon. In "moomin series":
all the world died while i slept
such strange spring winds
that this is now possible:
chemical weapon a fine mist upon the cherries
Perceived reality is uncanny; body memory will not quite admit the debasement of elements of the collective unconscious. Each time we wake we must decipher the signs—as if we were coming out of hibernation at the wrong time.
In the eclectic nature of the source texts—which also include Sufism by Idries Shah, Owning Your Own Shadow by Robert Johnson, Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting by Francois Cheng, and Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global by Virgnia Held—there is resistance to artifice. The collection of influences is not molded to a predetermined project. Rather, the verses of supermoon chronicle not only the seasonal events, political casualties, and neighborhood occurrences incidental to this particular poetic agency, but also, in a stroke of realism, the books the writer happens to be reading. In these references, as well as in the design and form of supermoon, there is an easy interplay between cause and effect, source and result: What arises from what? It does not matter for us to know.
This poetry's concession that certainty is a fallacy does not involve either cynicism or vacuousness. Life has content, language has meaning, and actions have consequences. The poems have substance. While they rest on images and open out into lacunae, they record incidents specific to a time and place. In fact, the references are so precise that supermoon could be read as a log of the late teens of the twenty-first century—without a single mention of any politician's name. So the reader can behold expressions of outrage, sadness, and incredulity that do not devolve into tribalism or nastiness. supermoon is an instance of speaking truth to power, refusing to shy away from stark representation of malevolence and negligence. The poems do not use natural imagery to elide the horrors of the present day, and the voice does not default to the logic of ambiguity to unravel evidence of crimes of humanity. Parrish is clear eyed, forgoing quietism. The poet's ultimate truth of compassion, however, does not capsize. Maybe the disciplined construction of lines, kept up despite the responsibilities and weight of each day—and despite the chronic pain cited in many poems—is itself in the interest of maintaining compassion. To juxtapose testimony of nihilist acts, of sad facts, with the stuff of dreams, of natural phenomena, is to refine the consciousness into a realism that is not the least bit hateful.
Woven into the wide worldly regard is the poet's study of her own position in both space and time, her bodily and cognitive character. In "fikr series":
blood belly day grey cloud day
having absorbed all the unhappiness of that house
too much to remember / i cannot recall
dates names names of days days of birth or death
street lined with leaves
my story has never changed, said the troll
'ignorant repetition'
when the wind said open your arms
There is a hint at narrative here ("having absorbed all the unhappiness of that house"): an allowance that past experience shapes the present ("blood belly day grey cloud day"). But the immediate pivot is to dismissal of narrative in a tone of weariness ("too much to remember"). This dismissal yields, then, to the broader view of wisdom: How ludicrous that we fixate on names, that we name points in time, that we shape ourselves by way of these labels. (The ill-suitedness of the veneer of classification to the inexorable reality to which it is applied is explicitly remarked, too, in "spacetime series": "the persistent illusion of past, present, and future.") The poet waves the words away as generalizations, to arrive, after a pause, at what is material, sensible: "street lined with leaves." And sure enough, the elementary image is linked to an articulation of archetypal experience: "my story has never changed." In these anti-dramatic shifts of register, the poet presents choices: despite fatigue and despite disillusionment, to persist in rendering the world, and to thwart the egoistic impulse when it arises; to hold the world of surfeit at bay ("too much to remember") and call on sources of timelessness ("my story has never changed, said the troll"). Where to go from here? The verse's source of energy seems to be the word "when" at the start of its final (shifted) line. The conjunction activates time, moving swiftly from a static fact of human behavior ("'ignorant repetition'") to a command for the future given in the past tense—by an inanimate element ("when the wind said open your arms"). Wrapped up in this poem is a story of the writer's sadness and a map of the writer's way of progressing as a person. Vision and listening are essential to the self-humanizing endeavor, as is a recursive scrutiny of both the manifest present and its corresponding linguistic function.
Indeed, the title of this series, "fikr," refers to a Sufi method of meditation centered on awareness of the breath. The patterned lines of these poems are a form of breath, measured, and their composition is a chronic meditation. Such is the poet's story in supermoon. Each day contains pain, physical or psychic, and each day's phenomena are grounds for elucidation, for resolve to continue to seek what is right: also in "fikr series": "23 years reading how to be free."
The poet is in a sense the mother whose song begins the book, the other mother to all the injured entities addressed in the book. This is a mother who is a songstress, mainly, who watches over all visible categories of life, who recites the troubles therein, who puts us in mind of an earth that is properly itself a mother, and who, ultimately, reminds us that beyond our unitary existences we can be designated "us." Within "solstice series," in the poem "(for Madeleine Grace)," the songstress mother suggests that to love someone is to desire that they are never corrupted, that they remain close to the earthly logic and the earthly language:
she says heaven could be all around us says i'm happy tears
the game is simple they told us; then later, nobody wins
'when parents lay their shadow on their children'
dream-tree rains dream-dimes in a conjured yard
sang about singing in the dead of night
don't let anybody dull your sparkle, said her first gift given
Here, it is as if a spell is said over a child to protect her from the projections of a cynical society, an embittered provenance. A child is tuned into truly representational language ("i'm happy tears"), disposed to align a generous imagination with what is seen ("dream-tree rains dream-dimes"). The poet, too, is open to the unknown—in fact beholden to the unknown. The love she renders in these poems renounces expectation. In the poem "(for Erica Garner"), "the heart is the well of the world / 'unbought and unbossed.'" The excavation of authentic feeling is deadly earnest. When the poet utters, "Path of Love" at the conclusion of "fikr series," the utterance is not sweet but serious. What is the path of love, and how do we get everyone on it? supermoon answers these questions in its humble manner. In "spacetime series": "now let's change things / day going grey."
It is a hard practice. In the neighborhood there is a "young man slamming his grandmother's door"; there is "happy new year--get the fuck out"; there are "gunshots in the turtledove twilight." What's more, in the larger world, "homeless man asleep on a dining-room table / woke to a grandson shot in a courthouse"; there are "children forced to sleep in the daytime in our basements / (i want to talk differently)." In the course of living faithful to the charge to see the world as it really is, the writer is compelled to reflect the regnant reality in her language. She does not want her mental faculty to be appropriated by the acrimony in the surroundings, but it is not right to nurture disregard. It must be said: "and another raging man kills children // 'pushed the desks against the doors' / face flooded don't look away." Perennially, with each link in the diaristic verses, an abomination intercedes. The poet's practice is to bear the horror without tolerating it, to figure out how to generate health and good will from the given condition. A case in point: The post-atrocity line "face flooded don't look away" brings forth this verse's final pair of lines: "every particle is connection / 'to dance is a protection'." The lines' lyric lilt accords with their sense. After looking at the fact of horror, we look at a fact that can both implicate us and soothe us: the physical fact of contingency. While we do this we allow language to fall, as is its nature, to patterns and echoes, as in the manner of a blessing. It is the poet's practice to investigate language, to interrogate intuition, and to assiduously draw from texts and the knowledge to be gleaned therein, partly in the interest of sublimating despair—which act itself is in the interest of easing suffering generally.
The conviction that coalesces through supermoon is resounding: This is the only place. (William LaFleur in The Karma of Words: "[E]ven for the bodhisattva himself there is no other world in which to be, or to be saved.") Indeed, the book's third of three epigraphs, from Ikkyū, reads, "mirror facing mirror / nowhere else." This world is the "red dark story / of desire of disaster-scattered stars" in the book's opening "mother song." The poetry's ethos is to accept the bloodied world that overlays "the other lives in us." In fact, the poet is emphatic here: "no no no never would i trade this: / snowflake on the baby's fingertip." For we cannot encounter the grace of human and natural phenomena apart from the harshness these can alchemize. And so "mother song" ends: "sat down and wept for us by the slow water / singing the red dark secret land."
supermoon is one long verse within the song of sadness, a song whose substance cannot but be the profane world. Parrish reaches for the mystical but chooses the demotic. She insists that pain must be attended to. "mother song," and thus the book, opens:
'and all i could see was the faces of children'
the moment the bombs fell
lifetime of dreaming
child in her arms
the ground falling like rain
'expressing with broken brain'
There is nothing that will—or should—quell anguish. We must accept the perversion of life to be part of our experience even as we strive to make the world as true to its fundament as we can. How much can we do? Parrish's supermoon is an argument that we can do quite a bit to true the everyday fouled reality to a timeless hallowed reality—a reality that is more real; but we must work hard. As is evident in the book, responsibility is not easy. In "mothership series": "every cell in the musician tuned to listen / how many shots did you hear." It is for us in concert to take care: to listen, and to speak.
Works Cited:
A.R. Ammons, "The Poem is a Walk." In Claims for Poetry, ed. Donald Hall, University of Michigan Press (1982).
Hank Lazer, "way to stay true to what arises: Gillian Parrish’s of rain and nettles wove." In Talisman, November 2018.
George Oppen, "The Mind's Own Place." In George Oppen, Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, ed. Stephen Cope,
Jonathan Skinner, "Editor's Statement." In ecopoetics, no. 1, ecopoetics (2009).
Jonathan Skinner, "Editor's Notes." In ecopoetics, no. 6/7, Walch Publishing (2009).
William Carlos Williams, "The Poem as a Field of Action"
supermoon by Gillian Parrish (Singing Horse Press, 2020)
It might be observed that the poems of Gillian Parrish's supermoon, in their timely issue, accommodate detritus:
what's today
'shithole countries'
choking on meatloaf
patches of red on my skin
yellow dog dream
'content with little, he has nothing to fear'
two billion dollar tax break then they laid off the workers
'he who knows how to stop'
Through the whole of the book, the stuff of everyday America roundabout 2018 is flatly present, often unadorned. Phrases from the news abound, selected and trimmed so that the absurdity of their provenance is manifest, so that the ways in which popular words and events violate principles of humane living are traced. Distressing sensory experiences are inscribed in tandem with these bits and pieces of the general atmosphere, to the effect of the impression that a person's mental and physiological state is partly a function of the social and physical context. That is to say, the poems of supermoon take pains to present the world as it is.
Yet the junk the poems are obliged to engage is redeemed through a lyricism that is wholly organic. In the poem above, the trochaic deliberation of the first five lines measures the assimilation of their contents, slowing down the alternating regard of the self and the self's surroundings. Following this, "patches of red on my skin," fairly unambiguously unpleasant, link distantly to "yellow dog dream," which is in its tone indeterminate and open. The dream hinges to a shift in diction, the quotation offering a vision and register alternative to bleakness. Another phrase from the news follows, then a fact from the news conveyed in a mournful voice. But at the poem's close, the alternative stance of considerate prudence recasts all that precedes. The contrast is rueful yet insistent: There are other ways.
This lyricism is reluctant, despite its earnestness. The poet is careful to refract the authorial ego through other people's words ("''content with little, he has nothing to fear'"; "'he who knows how to stop'"). In all of supermoon, impetus toward closure is resisted, lovely images are consistently undercut with signifiers of crisis or disaffection, and interest in the person of the poet is deflected. Parrish displays the agency of twinned cognition and composition, but she insistently demurs when there is occasion for credit to her imaginative or linguistic facility.
Hank Lazer, in his 2018 review in Talisman of Parrish's first book of rain and nettles wove, notes that in her work, "humility before what has been written and is being written now by others makes it clear that a way to say it in 'our own voices' is by acknowledging and merging with other voices." Lazer calls Parrish's poetry a "phenomenological guide, a schooling in perception," finding in its orientation parallels with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "notion of seeking." supermoon is not constructed of lyric in the way of of rain and nettles wove; the hardness of the conditions it is constrained to acknowledge demands a more rigid form and a plainer diction. Yet Lazer's observations about the "phenomenology" of Parrish's work apply to this more recent book, too. Indeed, supermoon operates by virtue of "an ethics of respect for the limitations of knowing," in Lazer's words.
Given the writer's generosity in admitting into the poetic enterprise the unseemly, and welcoming into the poetic act the wisdom of other writers and other speakers, the consciousness behind supermoon might be called merciful—a consciousness that allows what is harsh as well as what is wholesome into articulations of wonder and archetype. In another poem: "pulled a dream horse from the flood waters / daily trails of spilled coffee." But at work here is more than an effort to figure the flawed world charitably. In evidence is, rather, a willingness to allow that detritus, accumulated, substantiates our days. And out of willingness arises an effort to theorize the mechanics of this substantiation.
The theory, though, is grey (to echo Goethe—whose recourse in the face of circumstantial horror might be, as for Parrish, to fathom natural phenomena). No maxim is distinct. Patterns are discerned, but conclusions are slippery, transitory, provisional.
supermoon does have structure. Aside from the opening "mother song" and the closing "dawn song," the book proceeds in eight-line installments. Each verse, so to speak, comprises four couplets, though It is hard to reconcile the poetic tradition of the couplet with the openness and parataxis of Parrish's voice. It is more proper to regard the lines as occurring in pairs—to receive them not as couplets, but as couples. The two lines within a pair might relate to one another in counterpoint ("woke to puke and bleed / the street softened by snow") or in complement ("embedded in relations / looked up remembering the trees are breathing"), as the poet inscribes thought.
Two of the book's epigraphs are from Stephen Berg's translations of the premodern poet Ikkyū, who wrote within the Japanese literary tradition of associative links, and the poems of supermoon follow through on this salutation with their juxtaposed images, their gaps, and their recurring tropes. The eight-line untitled verses, each of which may be read as a stand-alone poem, are strung in a series of seven titled series, suggesting that with discipline, coherence takes form not only in rhythm but in motif.
While lines, pairs of lines, verses, and series are nesting increments of thought, the spaces in between them are intervals of thought. And herein lies the design, the logic: the deliberately tenuous philosophy. The poet is not pure receptiveness. She subjects her material to a formal discipline. But the form, once it is in operation, reveals that phenomena are resistant to naming, to finality; they do not bear the weight of human reason. In the book's closing "dawn song," one half of a frame to the seven themed series:
so ordinary
like a cloud
like a cloud
like a cloud
therein
lies the blessing
nature of nature
shadows of the flowers
Our descriptions may spin out. Our eyes and minds may take in any number of events and devise of them significance. And yet perhaps all we have to do is consider the most basic of phenomena in their plainness. Perhaps we might heal the corrosive junkiness of our context by observing the "nature of nature" and settling within that sheer observation. Later in "dawn song": "flooding the beds where we lay our broken heads / Grenfell Aleppo St. Louis City Jail / flooding with sunlight on water singing." We observe, as well as natural phenomena, unnatural exploitations. In faith to the inextricability of experience from environment, the writer continually grapples with the relationship between meaning and context.
In the American tradition, this naturalistic rendering of the occurrence of thought has an affinity with George Oppen's exploration of the slippage between materialism and idealism. From Oppen's 1962 essay "The Mind's Own Place":
It is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue: but the image is encountered, not found; it is an account of the poet’s perception, the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness. (31-32)
Parrish attends in her poetic practice to this kind of rapidly moving center from mind's eye to eye to object and back. She is careful not to claim, within the verse, either a sui generis vision or a sui generis language. She works assiduously against artifice, even as she shows the bones of her thought, the bones of the poems.
In "The Mind's Own Place," Oppen goes on to esteem the construction of "clear pictures of the world in verse, which means only to be clear, to be honest, to produce the realization of reality and to construct a form out of no desire for the trick of gracefulness, but in order to make it possible to grasp, to hold the insight which is the content of the poem" (32). Thought is represented in this way in the poems of supermoon. Quick flashes from image to impression to quotation to image signify the movement of the mind as well as its interaction with the material world's effects.
Also evident in supermoon is concurrence with A.R. Ammons' analogy of the poem to a walk. In Ammons' 1967 essay "A Poem Is a Walk":
I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking, so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal. ... [B]oth the real and the fictive walk are externalizations of an inward seeking. The walk magnified is the journey, and probably no figure has been used more often than the journey for both the structure and concern of an interior seeking. (5)
And so a poem. Parrish likewise in her composition hews to thought as it occurs; her poetry records the taking shape of an essential pursuit: toward faithfulness to what the self is in the world. Back and forth in the poems of supermoon, what is external to the self enters in and is, in turn, reflected outward. All the while, the poetry states itself to be body. At the closing of "solstice series":
gunshots mark the new year
dreaming deep hippy books, mostly sci-fi
'what forces us beyond ourselves'
finally getting wise, half-truthed the troll
light from this central place
(show me so there is time)
beads between the fingers
so another can be born
Violence interposes from a distance, conjoined with the contrivance of the calendar. Depth here is the counterpoint, both accessed and offered through the voice-based linked experiences of reading, writing, and dreaming. Some eavesdropped wisdom characterizes the situation and suggests a pragmatic attitude, partly undercut and partly corroborated by a being from another realm. Essentially, the light of clarity comes from the center of the physical surroundings, the center of the body, and the center of poetic composition. What might be despair or indifference upon the turn of the year is diverted, finally, to the prospect of new life—through physicality, through ritual. It is as if the writer takes phenomena into a centrifuge, separating and sorting them as she collects them. The nature of the given phenomena determines her tone as well as the direction of the poem; but at the same time, she is steering the poetic apparatus toward cohesion and subjecting her voice to salutary influence. This "inner seeking" is traced, as it were, in real time.
As per Ammons:
The pace at which a poet walks (and thinks), his natural breath-length, the line he pursues, whether forthright and straight or
weaving and meditative, his whole 'air,' whether of aimlessness or purpose--all these things and many more figure into the 'physiology'
of the poem he writes. (5)
Parrish takes care to display these guts of the poetry, so to speak. From the "Notes" we know whence strains of thought and lines derive; with the internal recursion and self-inquiry we are reminded that we are witness to the live process of composition. In "spacetime series": "dreaming half-thinking how to teach a walking song / 'some part doesn't want me to know where i am.'" To orient oneself within a poem, as it is composed, is a perpetual pursuit.
The form of the verses, too, makes plain their constructedness, the necessary subjection of thought to external constraints, even as thought clearly issues from what is constant in the body. Much in this poetry is oblique, but the transparency of its source communicates its endeavor of honesty in both thought and the representation of thought.
Parrish's writing can thus be read as grounded in William Carlos Williams' foundational poetics of the measure. In his 1948 lecture "The Poem as a Field of Action":
How can we accept Einstein’s theory of relativity, affecting our very conception of the heavens about us of which poets write so much,
without incorporating its essential fact—the relativity of measurements—into our own category of activity: the poem. Do we think we
stand outside the universe? Or that the Church of England does? Relativity applies to everything, like love, if it applies to anything in
the world.
What, by this approach I am trying to sketch, what we are trying to do is not only to disengage the elements of a measure but to seek
(what we believe is there) a new measure or a new way of measuring that will be commensurate with the social, economic world in
which we are living as contrasted with the past. It is in many ways a different world from the past calling for a different measure. (283)
As Parrish writes, "combine the visible and invisible / eyes aching all the way to the shoulder blades // for as long as i can-- / start a love train, love train." Poetry can exercise its contingency, can be like the observed world in its conspicuous relations. Agency is there in the joints of the relations. Volition is there is the direction the poetry points: in this case, to the wholly current and urgent tenor of some righteous song lyrics.
Contemporaneously, supermoon has kinship with the concerns of ecopoetics, in so far as ecopoetics as a tentative category, in the words of Jonathan Skinner in ecopoetics no. 6/7, can "ask and be asked the hard questions about language, representation, efficacy, ethics, community and identity ... paying more than lip service to the work of interconnecting sciences, humanities, and more. That it attend to the walk as much as the talk" (9). Parrish's poetry is indeed work in evidence, more than a mirror to the daily effort to live ethically; its generation is part and parcel with the holistic project of carrying out a human life in attendance to the non-human world and in the interest of repairing human damage to that world. From "empty-full series":
'what is most tender trumps what is most solid'
listening to where it hurts
old cat stalking sparrows in the snow
(i will care for your child)
arctic opened to plunder
neighbor's son on lockdown
headline: 'world leaders transformed by kind-minded lesbians'
what we dream when we dream in the dark
The line "arctic opened to plunder" is only the most explicit indication in this verse of the precarity of the natural world: a precarity that is in fact a source of power ("'what is tender trumps what is most solid'"). The practice of deep listening, of dreaming in an untainted place, discloses the most basic of instincts: the most sustainable. With "old cat stalking sparrows in the snow / (i will care for your child)," the author offers, as a result of poetic attention, an intention both specific and general, a minute solution to sweeping injury. With the first issue of the journal ecopoetics, Skinner glosses "ecology" as "the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings" (colophon) and "ecopoetics" itself as "a house making" (7). Parrish's house is modest but capacious, in a state of appropriate unrest. The poet's "sorrow at our species" is constitutional, and through the verses diffuse.
So Parrish's writing is native to its mother tongue as much as to its place of origin. But if there is a system at play behind the poems of supermoon, it is the bodhisattva philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism. In this strain of the religion, awakening is pursued not with the end of exiting the profane world, but with the aim of alleviating the suffering of living beings. A bodhisattva is a being who, through practice, has achieved an enlightened state yet has chosen to remain in the muck and mire of ordinary life in order to help others. Having glimpsed the beauty behind and beyond familiar facades, having arrived at the conviction that the really real world is not the world of violation and transaction, the bodhisattva might be tempted to renounce the mess of politics, senseless injury, and spite. Having vowed to hew to compassion as the primary motivation, however, this being persists in the unenlightened realm, and also works hard within it to lessen the agony of its residents—human and otherwise. A Mahayana Buddhist practitioner is "on the path": Though not a bodhisattva, this person will act in accord with the ideals of the corresponding philosophy. The practitioner, like the bodhisattva, vows to relieve all living beings of their hardship. It is a vow that is, naturally, impossible to fulfill. But taking the vow not only expresses faith in the redeemability of the shambles we exist within; the vow also enacts the principles of the practice, setting redemption in motion.
supermoon indicates some avenues for repair. But how do we, frankly, save the world? There is no answer here. Who could presume to have an answer to the question of why we collectively continue to squander life? As per the foundational truth of Buddhism: Suffering exists. Parrish's poetry is not, however, passive witness to the truth of suffering. There is conversion of the facts of suffering—the contagion of suffering—to the communication of faith.
Yet the book declines to showcase a Buddhist leaning. When the language of Buddhism does appear, the given reference allows for a lightly humorous valence. In "spacetime series":
too cold to type
hedgewitch watching the last light
dreamt they chanted sutras in a robot voice
in between past and future : heard the birds
sky like fire through the trees
dreamt I could not wake from sleep
reading how numbers will take our daily bread
let the sun in your eyes, he said
At first blush the line "dreamt they chanted sutras in a robot voice" is funny. But in a different kind of regard, it is unnerving: Impending dehumanization is insinuated, and thus a note of fear for the future is struck, resonating with the book's wider anxieties. And considered from yet another angle, the line is apt; the correlation it extends is accurate. The sound of monks chanting in unison, amplified in a temple hall, can, in fact, resemble the voice of a robot. So the line holds three senses up front. And then its context must be taken into consideration. The sound of the chanting has been dreamed, and is hinged to the joined abstraction and worldliness in its coupled line "in between past and future : heard the birds." Where are these voices coming from? Maybe that is the key question. Through supermoon there is a vein of inquiry into the substance of our dreams: an inquiry both religious and matter-of-fact. A dream exists outside of time ("between past and future"); it instructs us, but in a language with which we are not adequately acquainted. Monks chanting sutras belong to history, while robots should belong to the future. But both are present now. So who is the "they" chanting in the dream? In what ways are metaphysical lessons connected to our mundane experiences ("heard the birds")? Or is a dream of sutras essentially the sound of birds, filtered through an intelligence trained with books and discourse? Who is the source of the indecipherable futuristic doctrine?
Of course also the indication of Buddhism, weighting this verse with the gravity of distant provenance, is moderated with the summoning of flat fact ("too cold to type") and profane lore ("hedgewitch watching the last light"). And crucially, a brilliant sunset—itself evoking the long contemporary season of horrific wildfires ("sky like fire through the trees")—yields to a different dream: "dreamt I could not wake from sleep." This is, more explicitly than the dream of sutras, the poet's dream, the speaker's dream. It could be read as a crux of supermoon. It summons perennial questions: What is sleep, and what is waking? Which life is the dream? How many times will we die in a life? When will it be the final death? The terror of not being able to wake, contained within a dream, is linked in this verse to the wisdom of the sutras—but a wisdom possibly perverted; it is linked to our current hazards, to the error in our human systems ("reading how numbers will take our daily bread") but also to the wonder in our daily affairs (the birds, the sunset). How could these revelations resolve? The verse's final line reads, "let the sun in your eyes, he said." It is the voice of another—another person, saying (or singing) something that is at once ordinary, soothing, and instructive. In the end, there are the refuges we have in one another. There are words that make sense of nonsense—again, provisionally.
According to Parrish's "Notes" for the book, the touchpoint for "spacetime series" is The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. Maybe it is odd that a book with a Buddhist orientation is explicitly in debt to popular, secular texts: In addition to Greene's bestseller on theoretical physics, Funkadelic's albums and Tove Jansson's children's book Moominland Midwinter are cited as "tutelary spirits." The voice of supermoon is generous not only in its encompassment of the stuff of perception, but also in its eager absorption of texts that might shed light on the "interior seeking" as well as the work of compassion. Funkadelic's lyrics—not to mention the cited album title Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow--could register as instances of humor. So could the fancy of Jansson's characters Moomintroll and Snufkin. But the Afrofuturism of Funkadelic's George Clinton is serious: It is a vision of liberation from historical, political, and cultural constraints, an enterprise of tuning into the spheres in order to better understand our existence. In these qualities it aligns with Parrish's prerogative of expansiveness in her regard even as she drills down into questions about what is true. From "mothership series":
something inside that will never stop falling
where were you when they said no survivors
'deep in pain I called the names
of some funkified friends of mine'
Our bodies mirror the outer mysteries of emotional physics and resonate with unmysterious cruelty; we long for fellowship in the quest to overcome.
Likewise, Moominland Midwinter embraces linguistic silliness and narrative absurdity, yes, but its narrative of untimely waking out of hibernation also expresses alienation and melancholy, affirms fellowship and quotidian acts as substantiating, and sustains the question, "What is the real world?" Parrish builds on this complexity in supermoon. In "moomin series":
all the world died while i slept
such strange spring winds
that this is now possible:
chemical weapon a fine mist upon the cherries
Perceived reality is uncanny; body memory will not quite admit the debasement of elements of the collective unconscious. Each time we wake we must decipher the signs—as if we were coming out of hibernation at the wrong time.
In the eclectic nature of the source texts—which also include Sufism by Idries Shah, Owning Your Own Shadow by Robert Johnson, Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting by Francois Cheng, and Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global by Virgnia Held—there is resistance to artifice. The collection of influences is not molded to a predetermined project. Rather, the verses of supermoon chronicle not only the seasonal events, political casualties, and neighborhood occurrences incidental to this particular poetic agency, but also, in a stroke of realism, the books the writer happens to be reading. In these references, as well as in the design and form of supermoon, there is an easy interplay between cause and effect, source and result: What arises from what? It does not matter for us to know.
This poetry's concession that certainty is a fallacy does not involve either cynicism or vacuousness. Life has content, language has meaning, and actions have consequences. The poems have substance. While they rest on images and open out into lacunae, they record incidents specific to a time and place. In fact, the references are so precise that supermoon could be read as a log of the late teens of the twenty-first century—without a single mention of any politician's name. So the reader can behold expressions of outrage, sadness, and incredulity that do not devolve into tribalism or nastiness. supermoon is an instance of speaking truth to power, refusing to shy away from stark representation of malevolence and negligence. The poems do not use natural imagery to elide the horrors of the present day, and the voice does not default to the logic of ambiguity to unravel evidence of crimes of humanity. Parrish is clear eyed, forgoing quietism. The poet's ultimate truth of compassion, however, does not capsize. Maybe the disciplined construction of lines, kept up despite the responsibilities and weight of each day—and despite the chronic pain cited in many poems—is itself in the interest of maintaining compassion. To juxtapose testimony of nihilist acts, of sad facts, with the stuff of dreams, of natural phenomena, is to refine the consciousness into a realism that is not the least bit hateful.
Woven into the wide worldly regard is the poet's study of her own position in both space and time, her bodily and cognitive character. In "fikr series":
blood belly day grey cloud day
having absorbed all the unhappiness of that house
too much to remember / i cannot recall
dates names names of days days of birth or death
street lined with leaves
my story has never changed, said the troll
'ignorant repetition'
when the wind said open your arms
There is a hint at narrative here ("having absorbed all the unhappiness of that house"): an allowance that past experience shapes the present ("blood belly day grey cloud day"). But the immediate pivot is to dismissal of narrative in a tone of weariness ("too much to remember"). This dismissal yields, then, to the broader view of wisdom: How ludicrous that we fixate on names, that we name points in time, that we shape ourselves by way of these labels. (The ill-suitedness of the veneer of classification to the inexorable reality to which it is applied is explicitly remarked, too, in "spacetime series": "the persistent illusion of past, present, and future.") The poet waves the words away as generalizations, to arrive, after a pause, at what is material, sensible: "street lined with leaves." And sure enough, the elementary image is linked to an articulation of archetypal experience: "my story has never changed." In these anti-dramatic shifts of register, the poet presents choices: despite fatigue and despite disillusionment, to persist in rendering the world, and to thwart the egoistic impulse when it arises; to hold the world of surfeit at bay ("too much to remember") and call on sources of timelessness ("my story has never changed, said the troll"). Where to go from here? The verse's source of energy seems to be the word "when" at the start of its final (shifted) line. The conjunction activates time, moving swiftly from a static fact of human behavior ("'ignorant repetition'") to a command for the future given in the past tense—by an inanimate element ("when the wind said open your arms"). Wrapped up in this poem is a story of the writer's sadness and a map of the writer's way of progressing as a person. Vision and listening are essential to the self-humanizing endeavor, as is a recursive scrutiny of both the manifest present and its corresponding linguistic function.
Indeed, the title of this series, "fikr," refers to a Sufi method of meditation centered on awareness of the breath. The patterned lines of these poems are a form of breath, measured, and their composition is a chronic meditation. Such is the poet's story in supermoon. Each day contains pain, physical or psychic, and each day's phenomena are grounds for elucidation, for resolve to continue to seek what is right: also in "fikr series": "23 years reading how to be free."
The poet is in a sense the mother whose song begins the book, the other mother to all the injured entities addressed in the book. This is a mother who is a songstress, mainly, who watches over all visible categories of life, who recites the troubles therein, who puts us in mind of an earth that is properly itself a mother, and who, ultimately, reminds us that beyond our unitary existences we can be designated "us." Within "solstice series," in the poem "(for Madeleine Grace)," the songstress mother suggests that to love someone is to desire that they are never corrupted, that they remain close to the earthly logic and the earthly language:
she says heaven could be all around us says i'm happy tears
the game is simple they told us; then later, nobody wins
'when parents lay their shadow on their children'
dream-tree rains dream-dimes in a conjured yard
sang about singing in the dead of night
don't let anybody dull your sparkle, said her first gift given
Here, it is as if a spell is said over a child to protect her from the projections of a cynical society, an embittered provenance. A child is tuned into truly representational language ("i'm happy tears"), disposed to align a generous imagination with what is seen ("dream-tree rains dream-dimes"). The poet, too, is open to the unknown—in fact beholden to the unknown. The love she renders in these poems renounces expectation. In the poem "(for Erica Garner"), "the heart is the well of the world / 'unbought and unbossed.'" The excavation of authentic feeling is deadly earnest. When the poet utters, "Path of Love" at the conclusion of "fikr series," the utterance is not sweet but serious. What is the path of love, and how do we get everyone on it? supermoon answers these questions in its humble manner. In "spacetime series": "now let's change things / day going grey."
It is a hard practice. In the neighborhood there is a "young man slamming his grandmother's door"; there is "happy new year--get the fuck out"; there are "gunshots in the turtledove twilight." What's more, in the larger world, "homeless man asleep on a dining-room table / woke to a grandson shot in a courthouse"; there are "children forced to sleep in the daytime in our basements / (i want to talk differently)." In the course of living faithful to the charge to see the world as it really is, the writer is compelled to reflect the regnant reality in her language. She does not want her mental faculty to be appropriated by the acrimony in the surroundings, but it is not right to nurture disregard. It must be said: "and another raging man kills children // 'pushed the desks against the doors' / face flooded don't look away." Perennially, with each link in the diaristic verses, an abomination intercedes. The poet's practice is to bear the horror without tolerating it, to figure out how to generate health and good will from the given condition. A case in point: The post-atrocity line "face flooded don't look away" brings forth this verse's final pair of lines: "every particle is connection / 'to dance is a protection'." The lines' lyric lilt accords with their sense. After looking at the fact of horror, we look at a fact that can both implicate us and soothe us: the physical fact of contingency. While we do this we allow language to fall, as is its nature, to patterns and echoes, as in the manner of a blessing. It is the poet's practice to investigate language, to interrogate intuition, and to assiduously draw from texts and the knowledge to be gleaned therein, partly in the interest of sublimating despair—which act itself is in the interest of easing suffering generally.
The conviction that coalesces through supermoon is resounding: This is the only place. (William LaFleur in The Karma of Words: "[E]ven for the bodhisattva himself there is no other world in which to be, or to be saved.") Indeed, the book's third of three epigraphs, from Ikkyū, reads, "mirror facing mirror / nowhere else." This world is the "red dark story / of desire of disaster-scattered stars" in the book's opening "mother song." The poetry's ethos is to accept the bloodied world that overlays "the other lives in us." In fact, the poet is emphatic here: "no no no never would i trade this: / snowflake on the baby's fingertip." For we cannot encounter the grace of human and natural phenomena apart from the harshness these can alchemize. And so "mother song" ends: "sat down and wept for us by the slow water / singing the red dark secret land."
supermoon is one long verse within the song of sadness, a song whose substance cannot but be the profane world. Parrish reaches for the mystical but chooses the demotic. She insists that pain must be attended to. "mother song," and thus the book, opens:
'and all i could see was the faces of children'
the moment the bombs fell
lifetime of dreaming
child in her arms
the ground falling like rain
'expressing with broken brain'
There is nothing that will—or should—quell anguish. We must accept the perversion of life to be part of our experience even as we strive to make the world as true to its fundament as we can. How much can we do? Parrish's supermoon is an argument that we can do quite a bit to true the everyday fouled reality to a timeless hallowed reality—a reality that is more real; but we must work hard. As is evident in the book, responsibility is not easy. In "mothership series": "every cell in the musician tuned to listen / how many shots did you hear." It is for us in concert to take care: to listen, and to speak.
Works Cited:
A.R. Ammons, "The Poem is a Walk." In Claims for Poetry, ed. Donald Hall, University of Michigan Press (1982).
Hank Lazer, "way to stay true to what arises: Gillian Parrish’s of rain and nettles wove." In Talisman, November 2018.
George Oppen, "The Mind's Own Place." In George Oppen, Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, ed. Stephen Cope,
Jonathan Skinner, "Editor's Statement." In ecopoetics, no. 1, ecopoetics (2009).
Jonathan Skinner, "Editor's Notes." In ecopoetics, no. 6/7, Walch Publishing (2009).
William Carlos Williams, "The Poem as a Field of Action"