There may be no more fleeting art form than poetry, and no better art form than poetry to convey the fleeting. Though most humans, me included, tend to cling to the illusion of permanence, some poets are able to relax their white-knuckled grip. I’m thinking of the much-beloved, recently deceased New York poet Bernadette Mayer.
As she writes in her poem “Walking Like a Robin”:
Local review
Courtesy of Moon Pie Press
“Homelands,” by Ellen Taylor, Moon Pie Press, $18
“Elegiaca Americana,” by Claire Millikin, Littoral Books, $20
“i must be very old, like seventy / i guess I’m falling apart, i’ll just / sew myself back together but will it last? / please take a piece of me back home, each piece / is anti-war and don’t pay your rent.”
See what I mean? That looseness to her logic makes me smile. And makes me a little nervous!
In 2022, two contemporary Maine poets came out with books that also keep a looser grip on the permanent. Both Claire Millikin and Ellen Taylor, with “Elegiaca Americana” and “Homelands” respectively, speak to a sense of the temporary, though each in her own way.
Consider Millikin’s poem “Etymology”: “Hospital and Hotel share the same root. / Both words mean a temporary room,” she tells us at the start of the poem. The poem, and many others in this collection, share a perpetual sense of movement, and the shift between such vastly different spaces as hospital and hotel generate that energy here.
The poem continues: “I have no choice but to choose the next room, / the one without you, / you in a hospital, me in a hotel… / it goes on.”
The speaker of many of these poems seems to find something approaching comfort in the transitory nature of places like hotels. In “Lithosphere,” she writes, “I used to stay in hotels because houses are terrifying / families keeping their secrets.” But she also knows the darker side of transience, something she addresses in “Adjunction”: “Teaching as an adjunct all my life I’ve learned the harm / of disappearing.”
In one particularly memorable and haunting poem, “My Last House Party,” the speaker takes “my infant son to a house party / that seemed to last forever.” The speaker ends up wandering from room to room, at one point laying down with the baby in an empty room, then finally leaving the party at dawn through a houseful of people who have passed out, a “newly-formed” world.
The speakers of the poems in “Homelands” also do a lot of walking and wandering through strange, newly formed worlds. The collection begins with the striking poem, “I am a Strange Person,” in which the idea of strangeness turns over and over upon itself as the speaker experiences Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital city, which dates back to the 12th century. She’s struck by the strangeness of humans living on top of the remains of so many other humans.
“Museum guides say pile dwellers / left an urn field under the street / where I live now… / where I plug in my electric toothbrush.” The strangeness of a foreign country gives way to the strangeness of human history, which, in turn, gives way to the profound strangeness of simply being alive: “The longer I’m here, the stranger it seems.”
Taylor cunningly transitions from this poem into “Going Home,” a surprising poem not about a return home after a trip, as the reader might expect, but instead about the tenuousness of home. The poem opens with the lines: “When you return home, if you return / home, follow the rubbled scar.” Coming home in a world where so many people lack homes is a privilege, the poem suggests.
America, as both home and anti-home, is never far from the minds of either poet, who address the country’s faults, as well as its fault lines. In “Driving with Lorca in Appleton, Maine,” Taylor writes, “Only in America, we see / this wasteland, farms of self-storage, / plazas ‘Reduced for Quick Sale’ / where a Dollar General just broke ground.” And in “Selfie in a Family of Campers,” Millikin writes, “It was everyone, looking for home / as if America were open, and not stolen.”
Millikin and Taylor are truth-tellers, making poems out of challenging material, whether from the news or their own experiences. And yet their books contain much joy. Both poets are animal lovers and each finds beauty in unexpected places — Millikin, in bus rides and fireflies, for instance, Taylor in libraries and even Velveeta cheese.
But the two are at their finest in quite different modes. Taylor writes beautiful poems that move quickly over broad swaths of time and space. In the exhilarating, one-page “Generation Poem,” she speeds through the decades from pillbox hats and Marilyn to pink pussy hats and pulling down monuments. If you blink, you’ll miss a few decades.
Millikin’s gift is for writing highly personal poems, searching and intimate, whether she’s talking about photographs, bad sex or, in “Whippoorwill,” when she asks, “Whippoorwill, / is the harm permanent or transient?”
After reading these two collections, it occurred to me that if anything resembles permanence, it’s in the temporary.
Jefferson Navicky is a poet and the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection.
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