Associate Editor Caitlin Doyle: In “Nocturne,” Claire Wahmanholm beckons our attention to the lives, both around us and within us, that bloom in darkness. Through Wahmanholm’s engagement with an epigraph drawn from Inger Christensen’s poetry collection Alphabet, a book in which Christensten uses a formal approach based on the Fibonnaci sequence to inventory the contents of the universe, we’re invited to view “Nocturne” simultaneously as an extension of and departure from that inventory. “Nocturne” finds its own form, unfolding as a single long sentence that modulates our breath through an artful interplay of overflow and restraint. Again and again, Wahmanholm’s language sprawls forward and spins back on itself, a rhythmic effect that mirrors the poem’s subject matter and heightens the impact of her powerful final lines. If Inger Christensen wants us to know that “the cloak of namelessness exists,” Claire Wahmanholm wishes to lift that cloak and show us what’s hiding beneath it.
To hear Claire read her poem, you can click here:
Nocturne
nights exist, nightshade exists
the dark side, the cloak of namelessness exists
—Inger Christensen
Night and nightshade, yes, but also
the night-blooming cereus, itself
a cloak of nameless fragrance,
its face an hours-long brightness
in the desert, crumpling under morning’s
fist—yes, the night-bloomers
and also the nightingale, night-
song, night-dew, the nightside
of the heart as if it were a moon,
the privacy, how lush,
how much its hushedness is a cloak
against the wind of terror, which drives
the names of all our favorite things
to the edge of the cliff—so yes,
the asylum of namelessness exists, and also
rest, and the turning from rest
into nothingness, the kind you’d never know
was happening, the eye of which
you have always been slowly spinning within.
Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Wilder (Milkweed Editions) and Night Vision (New Michigan Press). Her poems most recently appear in, or are forthcoming from, West Branch, Southeast Review, Louisville Review, Los Angeles Review, The Paris-American, Bomb Cyclone, and Foundry. Her second full-length collection, Redmouth, is forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions in 2019. She lives and works in the Twin Cities.
If you’re intrigued by the epigraph from Inger Christensen’s poetry collection Alphabet that accompanies Wahmanholm’s poem, we encourage you to check out CR Editorial Assistant Austin Allen’s astute “What We’re Reading” post about Alphabet.
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