Associate Editor Madeleine Wattenberg: “I don’t want to talk about it, and I certainly don’t want to write a poem . . . Just thinking is bad enough,” reflects Al, the narrator of Jason Ockert’s “Erase the Days,” (in Issue 17.1) while discussing his son’s school’s shooting drills over a family dinner.
Last week, Assistant Editor Toni Judnitch wrote about her love of poetry from the perspective of a fiction writer. This week, I’m flipping the concept. I open with this quote from Ockert’s piece because of what it suggests about poetry—that it’s beyond thinking, that to write a poem is to feel. But I also like it because it’s a discussion about poetry in a work of fiction.
I’m resistant to making generalizations about genres. I’m of the general opinion that poetry and fiction use the same ingredients, just with wildly different doses. But when Toni states that poetry “gets down into [her] bones,” I realize I think the opposite occurs when I’m reading fiction—I get to climb inside someone else’s bones and rattle around in them for the length of the story.
“Erase the Days” considers everyday threats of violence and the allure of denial. Ockert employs a tactic I’m familiar with from erasure poetry by covering with black highlight the language that directly refers to blood or gun violence. These blocks aren’t what I’d call super successful in their denial—and they’re not supposed to be. The thoughts we bury often live close to the surface of consciousness, ready to reformulate back into language at any minute. Even in this first-person limited perspective, denying the articulation of the thought does not deny the thought itself—and certainly not the reality of violence in the world. In fact, Al’s son points this out to him directly over their dinner: “[I]f you don’t talk about or think about cockroaches, it doesn’t make them disappear. Pass the sour cream.”
Still, Al gives it a good go. While denial feels like a pretty cross-genre coping mechanism, the impulse toward erasure feels like a poetic impulse to me—poems are often the result of attempting to write around and into the unsayable. However, Ockert’s story is stoutly in what I call fiction territory, in part because it has a lot of characters engaging in dialogue, and I gave up on writing fiction in college because I could never get my stories to include conversation.
In another detail that highlights the importance of language, Al’s job is to record migratory patterns. The very nature of his job depends on the idea that writing something down matters and makes a difference in the material world. The birds are assigned numbers, but Al also names them, and we must consider the difference between a designated number and a name, how it changes our relationship to the named. Al starts to assign names after a swan is (presumably, given the black box over the word) shot. Naming becomes a form of mourning, but also remembering.
I often think about a creative work’s organizing principles in terms of logics, which can be layered or in tension; either way, they’re what keep the writer writing. As a reader, I arrive at a work of fiction already assuming that narrative (i.e., cause-and-effect) logic will be its predominant mode. While Ockert considers the unsayable directly through dialogue and interior monologue, in the same issue of the CR, Lyndsey Reese’s “Recurring” examines the unsayable by shattering the foundation of narrative entirely. In short vignettes that sometimes operate like dreams, where apparitions appear and disappear, Reese destabilizes this basic conception of the narrative mode.
I began to think about this piece in terms of new logics—grief logic and tornado logic, a swirl of movement around a still center, a foundation entirely uprooted. Several sentences in this story seem to comment on its form, such as when the protagonist Gail reflects back to when she crouched with her family in the storm cellar: “Those afternoons where she prayed for disturbance, even if it meant destruction too. Anything to renounce the endless procession of days, seasons long as serialized novels, hours of chores like a Möbius strip.”
In a section titled “The Rash Haircut,” the cause-and-effect conditional if, then undoes what should be a straightforward recounting of a personal history—we never know if what could have happened does happen, or will happen: “If she is young, she hides from her mother, a woman of violent wind and chapped skin” and “If she is older, her hair is already shorter, but still, her dream-self is not immune to the lure of shears.” These syntactical constructions read as a narrator hoping to destabilize their own narrative trajectory by moving what has happened into the realm of the dream, the not-yet, the never-was.
But these unusual constructions work only because I approach the story assuming that it functions according to linear logic. Without this assumption, Reese’s alterations wouldn’t resonate as disorderly, the skeleton of story wouldn’t peek through dream. In one scene, Gail describes the appearance of the bridge on which the accident leading to her daughter’s death occurred: “It comes together like an image in an Etch A Sketch, all those lines connected, one leading to the next. That’s how the bridge appears.” This is how the story in “Recurring” eventually emerges despite the vignettes’ insistence on dream state and on the disordered. The tornado circles until it defines the center—if you talk round the unsayable enough, its shape emerges amidst the roar of all that language. Clearly, this is true for both poetry and prose.
You can purchase your own copy of Issue 17.1 here.
