Caroline Goodwin on Amber Flora Thomas, Red Channel in the Rupture
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(Guest post by Caroline Goodwin)
In fall 2020, I took an online class through the Poetry School with bilingual Welsh poet Rhys Trimble: “Poetry and Eclogue: Ritual Ecopoetics.” The prompts and the other students opened my eyes to many possibilities, and the “associative leap” became central to my practice in a new way. I have long been interested in writing about trauma survival, having lost an infant daughter in 2002 and my beloved husband suddenly in 2016. Trimble’s class challenged me to think about how I might continue to integrate these experiences into my creative practice in ways that honor their intensity and complexity. In my reading life, I began to ask myself: what leap might the poet be asking readers to make when juxtaposing wildly different images or tones? And, why might they be asking us to make it? In addition, I wondered how a poem might act through accrual, perhaps like a collage.
I came across Amber Flora Thomas’s work in one of my favorite anthologies, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry edited by Camille T. Dungy. I admired the way Thomas incorporated imagery from the natural world, often imagery that did not comfort but rather challenged me to see cruelty and survival, death and abundance, as a part of this universe we share. Here were shards of beach glass, “fat” moths, sand crabs, jellyfish, bunchberries, crab apples, woven into a voice unafraid of seeing them and offering them to me and my own “superstitious eye.” Thomas’ biography on the Poetry Foundation website asserts that her lyric poems often “engage the body as a record of loss and accrual.” Poet Carl Phillips identifies associative poetry as “poetry that works almost entirely by means of association—poetry that is characterized by leaps not just from stanza to stanza, but from one image to the next in ways that do not immediately make sense…” I find this quite thrilling; I love a poem whose “sense” lives in the gaps and the subtext, around the edges. While a poem might not immediately “make sense,” if I bring an open heart and mind to the work, and a willingness to look into it and ask questions, the “sense” takes shape for me. Also, I love rereading a poem, re-experiencing its sounds and its textures, and wondering about them.
One of Thomas’s poems in Black Nature is the moving “Miscarriage in October with Ladybugs” in “Cycle Four: Pests, People Too.” The poem immediately asks us to stop and consider that connection between human experience and the natural world, which is of course located in the body:
Window dusk mobilizes each blood drop.
And there is it, that associative leap, my invitation into the world of the poem, into the room (stanza) built for my imagination. After the words “Miscarriage” and “Ladybugs” in the title, I see the insects on a darkening window, and yet they have also become drops of blood. They move, they fly, they grow, they form blooms (large flocks of ladybugs), they are beautiful and terrible. They embody the pain of miscarriage and its aftermath, the chaos of grief. The first stanza continues:
Miniscule as bunchberries, they gather on the blinds,
crowd a transparent diagram of ovaries,
and I see and hear the wonderful word “bunchberries” (those clusters of red berries at the center of the dogwood plant, beautiful!), and the word “gather” (as in a flock of creatures, or crops, and as opposed to “collect” or “congregate” or a different word). Then we see that diagram of ovaries, also a word associated with plant parts, encased in the pistil, specifically female. But we’re shown here that the insects have made their way inside, and it quickly becomes clear we are in a clinic with the speaker and some “tools on a silver tray.” How skillful, and how haunting, to consider the speaker’s loss as a part of a natural process, that which ties us to the greater cycles of our planet, and that which we cannot escape. A bloom of ladybugs, a window, some blinds, and evidence that the insects are indoors with the speaker. I am uncomfortable, as I should be.
I also remember poems from my reading past; Plath (of course) spoke to me when I was in my twenties. I remember thinking, at the beginning of my writing life, wait! You mean you can write about that? So when I see the word “October” in a poem title, I think of “Poppies in October”:
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly--
As in Thomas’s “Miscarriage,” the imagery is startling and employs a blurring between the human and natural worlds, a sky with sun-clouds and agency, and a certain way in which we are asked to question what we’re made of. We want to look away from this particular kind of injury (pregnancy loss, violence against women), but these poems insist that we do not. And eventually they ask us to ask ourselves, what am I?
Lastly, “Miscarriage in October with Ladybugs” makes me remember the June 6, 2019 “strange news” story on WNYC: “Spotted: A Swarm of Ladybugs So Huge It Showed up on National Weather Service Radar.” While this seems kind of cool to me, and ladybugs do indeed have a sort of mythical beauty to them, they are also beetles. I can’t help but think of climate disruption and its consequences. What might it mean for our beautiful earth to have such an event? Again: what are we made of? Not only our physical bodies, but our spirits and minds, our human fortitude? How do we continue to survive such strange and destabilizing occurrences? These are questions Thomas insists that I consider as I continue to move into her work.
I’d put Thomas’s Red Channel in the Rupture (Red Hen Press, 2018) in the “marvelous poetry collection” category. Here, Thomas handles trauma survival through leaps and juxtapositions, shifts and surprise. While the specific traumas addressed are that of sexual violence in childhood and the violence of racism, among others, the poems invite and satisfy through their complexity and refusal to tidy things up. As Alaska-based poet Peggy Shumaker asserts in her blurb, “Thomas crafts poems of essential light—via photography, via the natural world.” Essential light, flash points of imagery from the speaker’s past juxtaposed with her present, the actual way in which our memories arrive and disappear, often unwelcome and disruptive. For example, here is a stanza from “Rest Stop”:
Because
youth is a cord
ripped by light
dragging me
into fifteen and
nobody again.
Indeed. I too was once “fifteen and / nobody.” Weren’t we all? Here, the poet opens the door to empathy. I would assert that many of us, being trauma survivors ourselves, deeply understand how an image or experience can act as a surprise trigger, like the boy “jumping / to slap the Exit sign and / the lizard sweeping / his metallic blue tail” in this Thomas poem. These images are mysterious and evocative, and yet relatable in spite of the fact that the reader’s trauma might be very different from the speaker’s.
In the opening poem of Red Channel in the Rupture, Thomas both invites and disturbs:
DAMAGED PHOTOS
You get into puddles with the sky
and when this fails
pit your girl against an ocean.
Oh, that experience of looking into the past, into those damaged photographs that sit in boxes and disintegrate, and how it feels to pick them up again in all their emotional power! I love the opening image: sky as an integral part of the human characters’ experiences. I love how the “you” gets in the puddles right away (and I love puddles, I grew up in Anchorage with many, many powerful spring puddles.). But in “Damaged Photos” I get the sense that the “you” is trying to escape something, trying to hide both in the ground and in the sky’s reflection. The poem continues to explore the domestic gestures of making coffee, folding dish towels, the strange image of “God with rattlesnakes”—that which lives in the home, perhaps, and aims to destroy, not to nurture. And the last stanza:
You as ether, over-exposed bursting place,
dulling with these selves, spun by light
and dropped into shadow places,
forgotten as you put the photos down.
I see the child-self “over-exposed,” the many “selves” that are ultimately forgotten (but are they, really? After all, this particular girl is strong enough to be pitted against an ocean!). There is danger everywhere, the work seems to say, and Thomas stares it down. And yet I come away from the book with a sense of hope: hope for my own grief journey, hope for the planet, hope that we might just be able to sort all this out after all. For me, this hope lives partly in the gaps and the associative leaps, those rich spaces where I get to be an active reader who participates in the poetry. And the natural world continues to provide its chaos and dynamic beauty and complexity and terror, its opportunities for associative leaps and juxtapositions, and on we go with our lives.
Caroline Goodwin moved from Sitka, Alaska to the California Bay Area in 1999 to attend Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry. Her books are Trapline and Old Snow, White Sun (JackLegPress), The Paper Tree and Madrigals (Big Yes Press), and Matanuska (forthcoming, Aquifer Press, Wales, UK). She teaches at Stanford Continuing Studies, California College of the Arts, and UC Berkeley Extension. From 2014 to 2016, she served as the first Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, CA.