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Bright portals: illness & the environment in contemporary poetry

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Bright portals: illness & the environment in contemporary poetry

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Content BRIGHT PORTALS:
ILLNESS & THE ENVIRONMENT IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY
by
Catherine Pond
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)
May 2024
Copyright 2024 Catherine Pond

ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my committee—David St. John, Susan McCabe, and Mary Sweeney—for your support
and for your own art, which has inspired me.
Thank you to my family, to Kai Carlson-Wee, and to Julia Anna Morrison for seeing me through
this process.
Thank you to my beloved friends Stephanie Horvath, Katharine Ogle, and Austen Rosenfeld. It’s
been a joy to journey alongside you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements...............................................................................................................ii
Abstract ...............................................................................................................................iv
Introduction..........................................................................................................................1
Chapter One: “Lake of Silver”: On Louise Glück................................................................5
“Hollow stems of the daffodil”: On The Wild Iris.....................................10
"The night was in my head": On Averno.....................................................14
Chapter Two: Moon on the Waves: On Childhood ..........................................................22
Chapter Three: Unfinished Ocean: On Julia Anna Morrison's Long Exposure.................28
Chapter Four: In the Absence of Rain: On Alcoholism.....................................................33
Chapter Five: Ice on Either Side: On Long Distance .........................................................37
Chapter Six: Notebook in the Snow: Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene....................................45
Bibliography .......................................................................................................................52

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ABSTRACT
My critical dissertation, “Bright Portals: Illness & the Environment in Contemporary Poetry,” is
comprised of six linked chapters. Alongside vignettes and meditations on my personal eco-poetics
(including meditations on grief, addiction, and the environment), I offer critical analyses of four
contemporary poetry collections which inform my own approach to eco-consciousness, including
Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris and Averno, Julia Anna Morrison’s Long Exposure, and Bhanu
Kapil’s Schizophrene. My intervention in the field considers the overlap between conditions of the
natural world and psychological fracture in these poetic speakers. In my meditation on Glück’s
Averno, for instance, I argue that cycles of the natural world are the catalyst for mythmaking, and
that mythmaking is one source of coping with mental illness and trauma. Later, I explore how Kapil’s
Schizophrene takes the prose poem as its form, both sprawling and contained, indicative of the
fluctuating state of the schizophrenic mind. I explore how Kapil, in contrast to Glück, depicts the
garden environment from an immigrant’s perspective as constrictive, rather than protective (as is
sometimes the case for Glück’s speakers). This synthesis of elegiac and ecopoetic concerns
underscores the four case studies.

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INTRODUCTION
Ekebergparken Sculpture Park, Oslo
Tram tracks glow white in the rain, curving down the hill behind me, like a spine stacked
into the earth.
In a clearing to my left, a woman sleeps, cloaked in stone. Nearby, a man presses his mouth
into a woman’s crotch. She slumps over him, holding his hair gently in her hands.
I follow a paved path into the forest. As I walk, faces peer out from behind leafy trees.
Around a bend, a woman in black approaches me on the path. I nod, give a half-smile. But when I
look up again, she stays where she stands, growing taller and taller, casting a long shadow on the
ground in front of me.
I keep walking as the rain grows heavier. I open my umbrella, twisting it in my hand. In the
rain, a river of fog moves through the trees, pumped over the path from a smoke machine in the
woods. Two lovers swing from a tree, silver and spinning. A concave face stares out of a stone slab.
It’s an optical illusion: a face that appears to be receding and protruding. In another clearing, a boy
stands poised to launch himself off a diving board. It’s a long way down to the water.
In the years since I started writing this dissertation, I have seen friends in and out of mental
hospitals. I lost a poet-friend to an accidental overdose. I entered treatment and made it to one year

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sober. I relapsed. I got sober again. I took prenatal vitamins and made long lists of the names of
children. Then I stopped. I slept long sleeps in dark winter nights, dreamt of the last Ice Age, ice
falling in sheets.
I step around thick pools of rain, sparkling in puddles. I come upon a plaque explaining that
I am standing in the spot where Munch painted “The Scream.” When I look out at Munch’s view,
I see clouds, grey streaks of rain falling into the fjord. I smell fresh air mixed with woodsmoke.
My whole life, I have written from the same place. Which is a small black lake in the
Adirondacks. What I love about this lake is that it allows me to study it for hours on end. The lake
never tires of my devotion or sends me away.
When Louise Glück passed away unexpectedly in October, I had been writing about her
work for several years. Some suggested, since she lived in Berkeley part-time, that I should reach
out, introduce myself, maybe take her to lunch, but we had already met. Each summer, for ten
summers, she gave a reading at the writer’s institute in upstate New York where I worked. Each
summer, I re-introduced myself in passing, positioning myself at a safe remove. I was intimidated.
Plus, I sensed what she valued most was being left alone. In Glück’s work, I found precision, longing,
clarity, and a search for spirituality in the face of adversity. Also, a voice: fierce/ exacting/ self-starving/
self-loathing. Also, madness.

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I think about madness as I study the view over the Oslofjord where Edward Munch painted
his vision. There is a theory that “The Scream” was a response to a real natural event. It’s
documented that an eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 sent ash from Indonesia all the way around the
globe, resulting in red-streaked, volcanic sunsets, even in Northern Europe. But the timing is a little
off. From 1893 to 1910, Munch painted four versions. Was the red sky Munch saw real? A function
of madness? Some combination?
Louise Glück’s poetry explores the loss of the ego through illness, and the work of recovering
it, through language and/or nature. Two of her collections in particular foreshadowed what was to
become a bigger conversation around the relationship between climate, eco-consciousness, and
dis/ease in contemporary poetry: The Wild Iris and Averno.
I will write about those books here, as well as Julia Anna Morrison’s dreamlike Long
Exposure, which explores the impact of mental illness and addiction on one family over several
decades, and Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene, which crosses continents, examining one speaker’s
experience of diaspora following the Partition of India in 1947.
In each of these collections, as in The Wild Iris and Averno, voice is an important survival
mechanism for the speakers. Morrison and Kapil embody what Glück describes as “a kind of
spiritual ventriloquism: [the poet] is able to project not merely voice but a whole sensibility.”
These books, in turn, offer a lens through which to understand my changing self in relation
to the world’s dysfunction.

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I find myself standing now before a nine-foot-tall, stainless-steel structure that resembles a
book propped open on its binding, two wavy mirrors where the text might be. In the mirrors, my
double shapeshifts against a backdrop of Norway pines. I float inside two reflective lakes, two parallel
universes. Like this, I am reflected in nature, nature reflected in me. The boundaries of the self,
merging with the natural world.
I walk back up the hill towards the path. It rejoins at a curve. A video installation is built into
the curve. Ten television screens flash: a man’s face contorting, an animated skeleton dancing, a
human girl tying back her hair. One screen is just filled with static. The screens play all day and night.
This sculpture park is like a poem, a liminal space between dreaming and waking, which is
so much of where I spend my time these days.

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CHAPTER ONE: “LAKE OF SILVER”: ON LOUISE GLÜCK
During my final summer working at the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Louise Glück
approached me, extending her wrist, on which she sported a thin silver bracelet. I heard you like
astrology. She spun the bracelet, revealing the constellations of her rising, sun, and moon signs
engraved in the metal. Her eyes flashed over me. A gift, she said, from my sister, who believes in
these sorts of things.
At a Q&A in Saratoga Springs in the summer of 2014, I attended a talk in which Louise Glück linked
her origins as a poet to her early experiences with anorexia and subsequently, psychoanalysis:
I thought I had found a way to separate the soul and the body. I thought, finally, everything
that is powerful in me is no longer hostage to everything that is weak and dangerous to me.
At some point I realized what I was doing was going to kill me. I was living on two pieces of
cantaloupe a day. My parents were catatonic with terror. They understood I would refuse
any suggestion that came from their mouths. I went upstairs and said I need an analyst, I
need a doctor, I need help. And my mother had done all the leg work and had someone all
lined up, which was fortunate because I don’t think I had too much time. I started seeing
him. At that point I wasn’t writing. And I thought: what I want in the world more than
anything is the chance to write my poems. I don’t want to die. I want a chance. In analysis,
as I moved away from physical precariousness, I became much more obsessed with the idea
that [the analyst] wasn’t going to let me write. And then I started writing again so that was
subsiding. I started a second analysis about ten years ago, when I was writing Averno. Initially,
I thought, I’m jeopardizing everything, I’m moving all the pieces of the personality around,
what if they don’t come back in the right way. But then I wrote three books, so now I’m
having a really terrible time trying to stop. Because I feel as though if I stop, I’ll stop writing.
I admired the frank discussion of disease in relation to life as an artist. At twenty-four, I wasn’t yet
ready to face up to my own disease, afraid of what would happen to my writing if I gave it up. Where
Glück leaned towards restriction, I struggled with overindulgence. And like many alcoholics, the
origin of my issue stemmed from wanting badly to be liked. Glück, I sensed, didn’t suffer this

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affliction. If I didn’t exactly exhibit restraint in the real world, I could emulate her sober approach
to language on the page. “She had what I wanted,” as they say in AA.
Glück’s landscapes are distinct for their sparse, almost wintry quality, like a field covered in a thin
layer of snow. They are pristine, glittering, clean with quick lines. Glück’s language tends toward the
monosyllabic. The anemic, and even emaciated quality of the writing seems a byproduct of the eating
disorder which followed her throughout her life. “To be one thing,” says the speaker in “Scilla,” “is
to be next to nothing.”
Glück published her first book, Firstborn, in 1968, six years after the death of the mid-century
Confessional poet Sylvia Plath. “Doesn’t sex, like death, make no sound?” she asks piercingly, in
her much-anthologized poem “Mock Orange.” Yet the classification confessional, applied perhaps
too liberally to Plath, cannot alone encompass the aesthetic individuality of Glück’s work, an
individuality which, already obvious in her earlier collections, was crystallized in 1992 with the
publication of The Wild Iris.
The Wild Iris begins with a speaker coming back from the dead, metaphorically, from a period of
extended breakdown. For Glück, the embattled position of the ego in the aftermath of breakdown
is precarious— unless it can be channeled into art. Poetry is the vessel through which this rewiring is
possible. Underlying these poems is a fear of probing the self to find a puzzle that no longer fits
together. But by positioning the self and its ego in concert with the larger ecological world, Glück
makes meaning of her surroundings, and finds a home for the self she is attempting to rehabilitate.
Burying the ego in the Earth, metaphorically, parallels the idea of burying oneself in one’s art.

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In 2006, Glück produced Averno, a collection with a different conceit than The Wild Iris but whose
poems circle a similar theme – the speaker’s depression. In this case, Glück uses the myth of
Persephone as a conduit. The myth tells the story of Persephone, daughter of the goddess Demeter,
who is abducted by Hades/Dis and dragged to the underworld. Here, Glück seems to be working
both from within the garden and apart from it. Persephone’s exile becomes a stand-in for any type
of interpersonal exile, even exile from the self, in a state of despair, as sometimes happens to the
depressive in a serious episode. In the title poem, Glück addresses this in plainspoken language:
I know what they say when I’m out of the room.
Should I be seeing someone, should I be taking
One of the new drugs for depression.
I can hear them, in whispers, planning how to divide the cost.
The poet’s matter-of-factness reveals a resignation at once sad and startling. Overheard “whispers”
discussing the poet’s condition lend the lines a haunted quality.
In both books there is an emphasis on multiple selves / perspectives. The speakers in The Wild Iris
are in a continual state of growth, death, stasis, and renewal, while the speaker(s) in Averno are
similarly “transient,” moving above and below ground. Depression exacerbates this tension between
the fixed and transient elements of the self. In many of her poems, stars are fixed, weather is
transient, plants are both fixed in the ground and capable of transformation.

In The Wild Iris, the speaker slips in and out of a first-person singular and first-person plural (“I”
versus “we”), encouraging an understanding of the garden as a sort of interconnected collective.
There is, embedded in this technique, a sense of evasion. A Glück poem is somehow both cold in
tone and intensely intimate. The concept of death and rebirth in The Wild Iris, interestingly, allows

8
the speaker to evade the former self. Therefore, the idea of rebirth here necessitates first a sort of
ego-death, which becomes an escape hatch from past pain. In Averno, one reading of the
Persephone myth is that Persephone, through her captivity to Hades/Dis, is evading a different sort
of emotional captivity, to that of her mother, Demeter.
In her essay “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence,” Glück speaks to her own aesthetic approach:
I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis,
to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great
power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the
unseen; for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete.
Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole,
though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to
have been whole, is implied.
I find it helpful to think of poets as people reaching for “a world in which they were whole.”
Another shared motif in these books is a preoccupation with time collapsing. In The Wild Iris and
Averno, depression is a phenomenon which destroys linearity. But this is not a solely negative
phenomenon. In “Lamium,”
Living things don’t all require
light in the same degree. Some of us
make our own light: a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.
The “us” here could be the lamium, but also the poets, who “make our own light” in the process of
writing. And what better definition of a poem than “a path no one can use”? And yet, if it is a useless

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path, it is also a “lake of silver in the darkness.” Glück implies that only in darkness are we compelled
to create new light.

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“HOLLOW STEMS OF THE DAFFODIL”: ON THE WILD IRIS
In her story “Planting,” Aoko Matsuda catalogues a list of things her protagonist plants. The list
begins with expected objects – flowers, mostly—and develops to include increasingly eccentric and
abstract items: “She planted roses. She planted violets. She planted lilies of the valley. She planted
clover…She planted soft, gentle colors. She planted soft, gentle textures.” The main character goes
on to plant “muddy water,” “a bird with its wings pulled off,” “a heart that nobody could love.”
Ultimately, she plants “fear,” “sadness,” and “anger.” Matsuda, by way of explanation, writes: “She
planted, though she wanted to bury.” “She planted, though she wanted to bury,” could be considered
the driving motivation behind the poems in The Wild Iris.
“Hear me out: that which you call death / I remember,” writes Glück in the title poem. Throughout
the collection, the speaker wakes, again and again, re-emerges, “returns.” “It is terrible to survive/ as
consciousness/ buried in the dark earth,” she explains. Planting a garden is a ritual that results in
growth, but it is growth that necessitates first burying something (in a literal sense, a seed—in a poetic
sense, a memory that is the source of pain). Glück is compelled by a plant’s ephemerality, its
“capacity for renewal,” it’s life cycle. The fraught aspect of a flower’s existence. The suffering and
stasis the seed must undergo to become fully realized. She is interested not in the final product but
in the process.
In fact, The Wild Iris is a book that can be read backwards and forwards, like a door swinging open
and closed on its hinges. Such is its relationship to time. The beginning is also an ending of sorts.

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Glück gives several poems the same title—“Vespers” (evening prayers) and “Matins” (morning
prayers)—so that even in the table of contents for The Wild Iris, we are alerted to the ways the
speaker will be revising/ remaking herself in this book. I am struck, when I finish the collection, by
the feeling of having come full circle. Here is the ending of the first poem:
whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.
“Oblivion” seems a metaphor for depression, and re-emerging, the speaker finds “a great fountain”
of inspiration, one that is nevertheless scarred by “deep blue shadows,” which I read as repressed
memories.
*
In the first of many poems in the book titled Matins, the speaker identifies herself as “a depressive.”
Following the title poem, a conversational tone signals the reader that we have moved out of the firstperson perspective of the wild iris and into a human voice.
There is a “mailbox” and a character named Noah (a name shared by the poet’s son) with whom the
speaker has a discussion. We see several elements of the garden observed from the outside— “hollow
stems of the daffodils, Ice Wings, Cantatrice; dark leaves of the wild violet.”
In “Matins,” the speaker names the tension between the “inner and outer world.” The “depressive”
speaker’s body is embedded in the tree, “actually curled in the split trunk.” This disembodiment

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calls back to the poet’s struggle with anorexia: the self within the self: the spirit locked inside the
“body” of the tree.
In “Retreating Wind,” the speaker and her husband are compared with “wild scilla” and “wood
violet,” marked by “deep blue” and “white” grief, calling to mind the shadows produced by the
fountain in the title poem. In “The Garden” we find our speaker “touching his cheek / to make a
truce, her fingers / cool with spring rain.” A deity cautions them in “Retreating Wind”:
…you will not find yourselves in the garden,
among the growing plants.
Your lives are not circular like theirs:
your lives are the bird’s flight
which begins and ends in stillness—
which begins and ends, in form echoing
this arc from the white birch
to the apple tree.
Glück’s garden calls to mind the book of Genesis, but spirituality in her poems seems separate from
one specific doctrine. She wonders, in her poem “Trillium,” about the presence of heaven, and she
struggles to find the faith to believe in it. Though sapped of hope, at times, her speaker is always
searching, and therefore faith in some form pulses through each poem in the collection. Whether
she seeks faith in a higher power outside the self, or within the self, this theme of seeking in its own
way carries with it a religiosity. For Glück’s speakers, faith is its own form of longing— “a
ladder/reaching through the firs.”
The poem “Trillium” describes a loss of faith (“it wasn’t possible any longer to stare at heaven / and
not be destroyed”) following a period of dormancy. The plant’s subsequent reemergence from the
earth results in disorientation: “When I woke up I was in a forest. The dark / seemed natural.” The

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speaker levels a judgment at those for whom faith comes easily, musing “if I speak long enough, I
will see whatever they see….whatever calls them to exchange their lives.” The repetition of the
flippant “whatever” in this utterance connotes distrust, skepticism, frustration, even resentment. And
yet. Though “full of grief,” though “ignorant,” the trillium in the final stanza has been changed by
this experience of dormancy and resulting distrust in the universe. The loss of faith has given way to
a deeper catharsis: “I didn’t even know I felt grief / until that word came, until I felt / rain streaming
from me.” Through the speaker’s acceptance of grief, a new, more substantial faith has emerged.

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“THE NIGHT WAS IN MY HEAD”: ON AVERNO
The word “earth” appears thirty-eight times in Averno, and it is depicted as having agency and
consciousness: “the earth felt,” “the earth intervened,” “the earth behaved,” “the earth darkened.”
Glück’s earth in Averno is capable of “bitterness,” “hostility,” and “cooling,” but it also has “the
power to console.” Averno, Glück writes, is a crater lake “regarded by the ancient Romans as the
entrance to the underworld.”
Louise Glück’s tenth book finds the speaker attempting to make sense of her depression through
the myth of Persephone. Snowfall, in Glück’s poems, represents the mother’s sorrow as the speaker
is forced “underground.” “You must ask yourself: where is it snowing?” asks Glück. “It is snowing
on earth; the cold wind says / Persephone is having sex in hell.” In winter, as the human world goes
on without her, Persephone lives a parallel life belowground, with Hades. But when she is reunited
with her mother aboveground for six months, spring appears, followed by lush summer.
In “Persephone the Wanderer,” the poet writes,
We begin to see here
the deep violence of the earth
whose hostility suggests
she has no wish
to continue as a source of life.
The speaker recognizes that the Earth’s violence stems from pain— that Earth, this life-giving force,
has resorted to violence to make her needs understood.

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*
In “The Night Migrations,” “mountain ash” haunts the “birds” that hover below it:
This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds’ night migrations.
This stanza finds us in the sky, in the atmosphere, with the migrating birds, in limbo between sky
and earth, autonomy and entrapment, life and death. In the next stanza, “the dead” make their
appearance. “These things we depend on / they disappear,” Glück explains, referring to the berries,
the night sky, the birds, or the dead themselves. And “The Night Migrations” of the title might refer
to a migration of souls, the “birds” translucent spirits floating overhead.
That ash is compared to something edible (berries) implies there is something nourishing in the
process of death and decay. It speaks to Glück’s idea of yield, of what comes from a time of
silence, depression, or burial. In her essay “On Impoverishment,” Glück writes “impoverishment
is also a teacher, unique in its capacity to renew, and…its yield, when it ends, is a passionate
openness which in turn re-invests the world with meaning.”
*
The seasons lend a structure to the natural world’s orders, as well as a structure to human experience.
But in the layered world of Averno, they are the source of Persephone’s grief, since the end of

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summer means returning to hell. Glück uses the seasons as a way of signaling the speaker’s confused
psychological condition. Here’s the first section of “October”:
1.
Is it winter again, is it cold again,
didn't Frank just slip on the ice,
didn't he heal, weren't the spring seeds planted
didn't the night end,
didn't the melting ice
flood the narrow gutters
wasn't my body
rescued, wasn't it safe
didn't the scar form, invisible
above the injury
terror and cold,
didn't they just end, wasn't the back garden
harrowed and planted—
I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,
in stiff rows, weren't the seeds planted,
didn't vines climb the south wall
I can't hear your voice
for the wind's cries, whistling over the bare ground
I no longer care
what sound it makes
when was I silenced, when did it first seem
pointless to describe that sound
what it sounds like can't change what it is—
didn't the night end, wasn't the earth
safe when it was planted
didn't we plant the seeds,
weren't we necessary to the earth,
the vines, were they harvested?

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The speaker’s litany of rhetorical questions– “didn’t the night end…wasn’t my body rescued…” –
imply, of course, that the “night” has not ended, the period of “terror and cold” remains ongoing.
Cycling through these questions, the poet seems to acknowledge the pervasive quality of trauma and
grief. “Didn’t the scar form, invisible/above the injury,” is a question that suggests that even after a
period of long healing, the wound remains unresolved, even if “invisible” to the viewer. Towards the
end of the section, the poet uses the same language to describe the raped body (Persephone’s,
presumably) as she does to describe the earth, unifying these two entities as corporeal doubles:
didn’t the night end, wasn’t the earth
safe when it was planted
didn’t we plant the seeds,
weren’t we necessary to the earth,
the vines, were they harvested?
Instead of “wasn’t my body / rescued, wasn’t it safe” the speaker asks the same question of the Earth.
Neither the body nor the Earth is safe from inevitable destruction. A declarative confirms this voice
is channeling Persephone’s mythic experience: “I remember how the earth felt, red and dense…I
can’t hear your voice / for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground.”
Removed from the Earth, Persephone is also removed from seasons, and thus from time itself. For
Glück’s speaker, the seasons and the environment are locked in a cycle of trauma. Though a tragedy
is not named explicitly in the body of the poem, it moves under every line, like ice running beneath
a glacier, forcing time back in on itself.

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In the third section of “October,” the poet gropes for an indicator of her placement in time, admitting
confusedly, “Snow had fallen. I remember music from an open window.”
Later, in the poem “Landscape,” she writes,
I can verify
that when the sun sets in winter it is
incomparably beautiful and the memory of it
lasts a long time. I think this means
there was no night.
The night was in my head.
“The night was in my head” underscores the impression of paranoia, of mental illness that the
speaker is grappling with. Ann Keniston writes, “Louise Glück's Averno fashions its mode of speech
from just these paradoxes: the speakers of these poems are caught not in a realm without future or
past, but rather in one that grants at times confusing access to both.”
Nature is one such realm that “grants confusing access to both” future and past. In the rings of a tree,
we can read centuries of growth. In the migration of birds, we can see a trajectory leading us straight
into the future. In the growing wildfires in the American west, we see the future in a different way, a
plume of smoke on the horizon, the ominous threat of continued climate change. In “Landscape,”
Glück writes: “Time passed, turning everything to ice. / Under the ice, the future stirred. / If you fell
into it, you died.” In some ways, these lines could be read explicitly: when the ice sheet melts, what
lies beneath it will become our reality and the new surface of the world.
*

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The renewals and transformations that offered solace to speakers in The Wild Iris begin to wear
on the speaker in Averno. She describes Persephone’s return from the underworld, the cycle of it,
saying “The terrible reunions in store for her / will take up the rest of her life.”
The Earth is beginning, likewise, to look ominous, not a place to return to, but a place in which we
are trapped. Glück points out “human beings take profound satisfaction in doing harm.” And
Persephone, having been pulled back and forth between hell and Earth, experiences a “rift,” a
disillusionment with “the mythic vision of eternal life”—
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs
about her mother’s
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.
Song of the earth,
song of the mythic vision of eternal life—
My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to the earth—
What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the God?
The “mother” in this section is possibly interchangeable with the earth itself, perhaps playing off the
idea of Mother Earth, whose “beauty and fecundity” is in question. Of course, it’s also a poem about
rape: “what will you do,” the speaker asks, “when it is your turn in the field with the God?”
*

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Averno returns to the idea of the eco-poem as ars poetica. In “Telescope”: “You exist as the stars
exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity. Then you’re in the world again. At night, on
the cold hill, taking the telescope apart.” One imagines the poet, immersed in the writing process,
as “participating in [the stars’s] stillness, their immensity.” This participation in something larger than
the self seems an apt metaphor for the artistic process. “Then you’re in the world again” – broken
from the spell of writing, the writer re-emerges—“taking the telescope apart.” This dissembling
suggests the editing process, revisiting and revising (which itself recalls psychoanalysis). In “Brown
Circle,” the poet unpacks this further:
BROWN CIRCLE
I don’t love my son
the way I meant to love him.
I thought I’d be
the lover of orchids who finds
red trillium growing
in the pine shade, and doesn’t
touch it, doesn’t need
to possess it. What I am
is the scientist,
who comes to that flower
with a magnifying glass
and doesn’t leave, though
the sun burns a brown
circle of grass around
the flower. Which is
more or less the way
my mother loved me.
Glück expresses the difficulties of wanting more than what nature offers: “I thought I’d be / a lover
of orchids,” she writes, but “What I am is the scientist, / who comes to that flower / with a magnifying
glass / and doesn’t leave.” She is addressing her style of parenting but also her approach to the writing
process. “That flower” refers to the garden-full of speakers in The Wild Iris. This is a poem about

21
the self-reflection required to be a maker. This theme is continued in “Echoes.” Consider the last
two sections, in which Glück isolates nature as the locus for her artistic inspiration:
2.
When I was still very young
my parents moved to a small valley
surrounded by mountains
in what was called the lake country.
From our kitchen garden
you could see the mountains,
snow covered, even in summer.
I remember peace of a kind
I never knew again.
Somewhat later, I took it upon myself
to become an artist,
to give voice to these impressions.
3.
The rest I have told you already.
A few years of fluency, and then
the long silence, like the silence in the valley
before the mountains send back
your own voice changed to the voice of nature.
“The long silence” following “a few years of fluency” can be read as signaling the depression, tying
back to that first poem in “The Wild Iris”: “I tell you I could speak again.”
Then the yield, which is the soul’s transformation: “your own voice changed to the voice of nature.”

22

CHAPTER TWO: MOON ON THE WAVES: ON CHILDHOOD
I play a woman walking in circles, spinning. A doll weighted to feel like a real infant is tied to my
chest. Large silver discs, like moons, glimmer near the ceiling of the museum hallway, aimed down.
Light moves from hot lamps to the silver discs, then down over me, gleaming off my hair, which I
have washed and brushed carefully. Behind large glass panes, taxidermized animals stand poised to
leap or fly. Wolves howl at the base of a painted blue mountain. Otters slide under the surface of a
photographic lake. Whalebones hang from the ceiling by wires. Philip, one of the two
cinematographers, follows me with a Flycam as I walk hurriedly past the displays. Later, in playback
on the monitor, I see these ecosystems flash past, one after another, to either side of me.
My best friend’s voice interrupts. Anna is the writer and director of this short film. As she reviews
the footage, the bright blue eyes of the baby stare up at me. Its plastic body sweats against my chest.
Its eyes won’t close.
Next scene. We move through the museum. At Anna’s instruction, I reach my arm towards the
mouth of a replica of a mammoth sloth. Voices echo in a circle around me. Sound speed. Camera
set. Camera ready. Action. I am attempting to cry for the camera. There is something both contained
and chaotic inside me.
My best friend says, Cut! My best friend is the double of me. Both seem to maintain themselves
through their doubleness. We grew up in tract houses built by the same contractor. As children, we

23
dressed each day in matching outfits, cut our hair the same lengths. Our mothers still can’t tell our
voices apart on the phone.
I enter the cyclorama room through a narrow hallway which slopes upwards. The ribbed walls and
low ceiling seem to contract in the light, like the soft sides of a birth canal. I walk through the dark,
narrow opening.
In the center of the doorframe stands Auden, the other cinematographer. Auden is the double of
Philip. They both wear all black, taking turns behind the camera. They move in sync.
The camera is trained on me as I walk up and into the room. When I go left, the camera goes right.
I leave the frame as Philip slow pans along the wall, capturing blue herons, marsh grass, prairies.
Anna’s voice guides me along the wall. Finally, the camera finds me again. Behind me, a field full of
birds lifts into the sky. We are all holding completely still. I am almost inanimate.
Then my godson enters to my left, tugs my hand. I come to life, feign surprise.
*
The day before he was born, Anna and I came to this museum. I wrote the following poem to
commemorate his birth:

24
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
Under a replica of a mammoth sloth, you place my hand
on your stomach and I feel the baby
kick. I look at a diorama of the Canadian Prairie, imagine
a tornado sweeping across the cardboard empire,
shaking the figurines loose from their toothpick fence.
We don’t speak; the museum
of tomorrow is small, and we are scared of the surgical knife
that will slice through your abdomen.
To exit, we walk backward through the Devonian era
where the world is mostly water
and you get tired quickly. Here, the fish are still just
forming. The first forests, taking shape.
*
Between takes, I sit on the huge steps of the museum, and my dreams come back to me in
fragments.

--Reports of a tornado touching down, no one else seems upset about it except me
--Flying in circles on a double decker private jet
--In a hotel somewhere, but when it’s time to check out of the hotel I have too much stuff to carry,
it isn’t manageable, I start leaving clothes behind, they are scattered all over the hotel room
--Walking on the Appalachian Trail with my Dad, reciting “Anecdote of the Jar” by Wallace Stevens
--Knocking on the door of a remote cabin, cut-outs of hearts in the door
--At a party, telling a man we can’t sleep together, but we can get very, very drunk
--Watching myself from outside myself, a rosebush wet with rain framing my face
--Reaching for my partner in bed and finding him gone
*

25
At dusk, we load the equipment into two trucks, leave the museum and drive to Terry Trueblood
Park. The lake gleams in the twilight. Thea, seven, stands in yellow boots at the edge of the water.
How deep can I go? She asks. Not deep, I say, stay here with me. Hold my hand. She is playing the
child version of me.
Later, when we’re rolling, she can’t stop laughing. I give her a hug, touch the top of her head. Then
I lean down and say, okay, we just have to be sad for one minute. Can you think of something sad?
Her face drops immediately. I am stunned and a little afraid. What have I asked her to do? Where
did she just go?
She stands in front of the camera, moving along the water. We take a stick and trace her footsteps
so that I can follow her trajectory. Then it’s my turn.
*
The water is a deep blue-green, different from the lake I spent my summers on, which was dark
blue, almost black, except in the shallows where it was almost colorless, just stones. I felt fish on my
legs sometimes when I swam, but I rarely saw them. Mountains shrouded the lake, and in the center
was a small island. From the island, I could see my summer house on the opposite shore. From my
own house at night I could see the light from my father’s boat flying low over the water, like a glowin-the-dark bird. Every time I write now, my computer screen glows like the moon on the waves at
night, and I am no longer myself, but a child, standing on the shore of that same island, looking out
over the water I love, and trying to find words to describe the distance between myself and home.

26
Writing a poem is like writing a letter, a very careful, clean letter. If I fold it and send it flying, it will
rise and float on the wind, higher than anything that’s ever hurt me. With a poem, I can collapse
distance, bridge a gap. I can bring anyone back.
*
It takes seven years for the light from a star to reach us. The stars we see, some of them no longer
exist. But their light remains real for us. Anna started coming to the lake with my family each summer
when we were still kids. In 2001, when I was eleven, and Anna was thirteen, we came home from
the lake one summer and then I wasn’t allowed to go over to her house anymore. Her brother Will
had been taking drugs. He was sixteen, in my brother’s grade, but they weren’t friends. We went to
school and came home and went to school and came home. It rained. It didn’t rain. On September
11th, we watched on TV as the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. On October 16th, Will died in
a hotel room.
*
It was not my brother that died, but my double’s.
This all happened in Georgia, a long time ago.
*
A few weeks after the funeral, Anna pressed a piece of paper into my hand. On it was a poem
she’d written, four lines long. The following day, I wrote back. We never said his name out loud.

27
As we got older, my poetry took on a careful, observational tone. Hers an associative tone, rooted
in dream-logic.
*
The wake is a wave that splits in two as it ripples out from behind a boat. The wake implies a
duality, a mirror image, a singular self divided. As the two waves break away from each other and
move outwards, a shimmering white path forms between them. Even as they move farther and
farther from each other, even as they begin to vanish, that path remains.

28
CHAPTER THREE: UNFINISHED OCEAN: ON JULIA ANNA MORRISON’S
LONG EXPOSURE
Sunflares. Light blinking through soft curtains. In the opening scene of Charlotte Wells’s soft-spoken
film Aftersun, eleven-year-old Sophie trains her handheld camera on her father. Calum is out of
focus at first. As their holiday in Turkey gets underway, the ocean flutters, the sky falters. It will be
their last summer together before Calum’s suicide. In the final scenes, an adult Sophie is reunited
briefly with him in frame, strobe lights illuminating his face before darkness swallows him.
Like Wells’s Aftersun, Julia Anna Morrison’s debut collection of poems, Long Exposure (winner of
the Moon City Press Poetry Prize), calls on autobiographical material to explore in surreal, intimate,
and cinematic poems the long legacy of her brother’s death. At times the speaker wants to escape it
all, moving from the sea to the snowy Midwest. At other times, the speaker chooses to live inside of
dreams and old video footage.
The title Long Exposure suggests the stillness required to move through grief, for a fuller picture to
form: “It takes a long time, at least a good night’s sleep, for you to burn / Your ashes snowing in
the fancy glass globe in front of us.” Morrison, recounting her brother’s cremation, turns him into
snow, softening an otherwise terrifying memory.
And snow falls throughout this book. Trees grow and are torn down. Early loss informs later losses.
Even desire becomes inextricable from death, associative: “I am reacting to him where you kiss me,”
the speaker says to a lover. “I have no other romantic comparison.” Later, motherhood carries this
same echo of grief: “I was right; I could not give birth without losing.”

29
*
The first section, “Fertile Window,” meditates on the speaker’s post-partum depression and
separation from her baby’s father:
I remember I have a child, vaguely
He wears a raincoat, tiny pine trees on his sailor shoes
I will have to give him away, very slowly
when winter comes. First one night a week, and then two.
Although she struggles with post-partum, the birth of her son is a balm and a focal point in the
book: “I made a child on my own. My first task was to let him be born, then / give him as many
horses as I could feed.” She recalls him in vitro with a certain fragility and mysticism:
The storm sprains the conifers against the
cabin. From the bed, I hear sorrow-boxes
crack open into the lake. Underneath as
many blankets as rose-petals, you float by a
thin cord.
Throughout this section, her brother’s death is a “plot hole” she “stares into”:
I am making a film. I film every day,
ten or so seconds, whatever I have to spare.
Tonight, the moon falls out of the frame.
I feel my husband watching me at the window.
I am late for dinner, distracted by evergreens
and plot holes in my life.

30
One, in particular, whose details have gone missing,
I stare into.
*
In the second section, “Montage of a Drowning,” the speaker lets down her guard, and memories
of her older brother flood in. At times she addresses him directly: “It isn’t suicide. You don’t leave
/ a note.” In “Mother Summer,” punctuation falls away completely, as the speaker breathlessly
recalls:
Summer and I am six in the snow out the window
my dad holds the video camera carves wood into
sounds sleeps next to my mother who is
miscarrying in the red dark she bathes us the next day
the good kind of bubbles. I like when she wraps me in a towel when she lets
me peel my own nails when she answers the phone
in the bathtub the cord twisted around her wrist
her gold shell earrings her white reeboks her garden shoes
by the front door she's always in the yard these days
making the garden do something for summer for spring
she sleeps in a white blanket in the yard when my brother
goes crazy and dies she sleeps under the very old trees
though she is very young younger than I could ever imagine
I come home to a clean house to a clean brother
after he’s gone the kitchen is always dirty and
we don't know what to do with his clothes
it starts to melt in the dead of christmas
we wear tank tops and skirts and make a boat
from bark and leaves
Morrison abides by her own sensitivities, her own intuitions, a set rules of her own making. Louise
Glück once described “a kind of spiritual ventriloquism: [the poet] is able to project not merely voice
but a whole sensibility.” Morrison’s sensibility is striking.

31
By now, a portrait of a family mottled by grief has emerged alongside the speaker. There is a mother
who “put her head in the lake to relax” and four siblings: “Half of the children inherited a gift for
painting terrifying / objects. The other half guessed what was in them.” The youngest brother
develops an addiction, following the older brother’s death: “The blue pills got out of hand,” the
speaker explains. “I have a disease in my mind, he tells me.”
*
“Rough Cut of Snow,” the third section, finds our speaker coming to terms. In “Some Wolves,” she
calls herself “beautiful and friendless.” “Some wolves,” she writes, “take a very long time to move
on.”
Through cinematic time leaps, jump cuts, and extraordinary and surreal imagery, Morrison enacts
the fractured psychology of grief, of searching and not finding, or finding but not feeling relief. In
“Wood Thrush” she writes:
At first what you left on earth had no end point
When I walked into your room, they flew out of my hands:
zeros & ohs, ones & eyes on the telephone keys
Icicles, details of tiring winter, thicken my song
dead in my mouth
Not a signal, or a sign, or a symptom
Just your bird, still after you in the dark, finding me instead
In Notes on a Cinematograph, Robert Bresson describes what he most values in film, which seems
to me to apply also to what I value in poetry: “Stick exclusively to impressions, sensations” / “An

32
image must be transformed by contact with another image” / “The thing that matters is not what
they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them.
Between them and me: telepathic exchanges, divinations.” Morrison’s poetry encompasses all of
this – hers is a poetics of impressions, sensations, and associative imagery. It is also a poetics of the
unsaid.
These poems are time capsules. They are hurt, afraid, lonely, terrified, and they are also unnaturally
self-determined, confident, and unwavering in their memory of events. One of the beautiful triumphs
of this book is that Morrison has created a space in which her lost brother and her young son can
co-exist. And yet, her brother still beckons to her: “When I die, I see him walking clearly into the
unfinished ocean, and even though I love you, I go with him.”

33
CHAPTER FOUR: IN THE ABSENCE OF RAIN: ON ALCOHOLISM
Dust bathes the tops of the cars. In New York it rained all the time, big passionate bursts. Now if
you want to see rain, you have to go to the museum. Stand on a platform alone, and watch it fall like
memory all around you, silver, soft, and wet. The catch? You can’t touch it. Each time you reach
out your hand, the thin braids recede. You miss those autumn nights in Saratoga, watching the water
slip from the leaves on the oak outside your window, a soft hush over the house. A girl in bed beside
you, squeezing the water from her hair. When you leave the museum, a couple near the exit forms
a heart with their bodies. There are no seasons here. Look around, you want to say, the whole world
has evaporated. You want to tell everyone, like the victim of a crime who can’t stop recounting it.
*
At the bar I sit on a swirly chair, reading the same sentence over and over as I sip on a Manhattan.
The first drink always goes down slowly. Sometimes I’m even surprised at how long I can make it
last. I am proud of myself, looking at the clock on the wall above the rows and rows of alcohol. I’ve
worked diligently all day not to think about alcohol, or if I did, to reassure myself I wouldn’t drink
tonight, or the next night, or ever again, but now that I’ve given in to it, now that the warmth is
coursing through me, I feel so much calmer. Now that I am no longer in the posture to resist, I can
relax. The night is over, from here on out there are no decisions to be made, no thinking will occur,
it will slope into a sweet dream of no pain.
*

34
Rain has no parameter, no geometry, no shape, no meter, no rhyme. It has no borders. It spills over
into everything. Perhaps you do not like the rain; you are one who likes limits. Or maybe it’s the
opposite. Maybe rain is all borders, and you are desperate to be hemmed in. You don’t want an
endless horizon. You want the dark body of the storm to bear down on you. You want to be left
alone inside your private weather to write. Franz Wright calls it wisteria rain. Charles Dickens calls
it lopping rain. It’s the silence you live inside. It’s in your house already, moving through the living
room to the kitchen, pooling in the doorway of the study. It lets itself in, which is the sort of love you
have come to rely on.

But addiction isn’t your story. It belongs to someone else. Your grandmother, your cousins. Do you
remember life before recovery? You tried to control everything. A little girl, you wanted to be a
lighthouse keeper and live in a dark cylindrical tower looking out over the sea.
*
When I met my partner, I thought, problem solved. I could see the lake in his eyes. A certain
depth. A certain pain, and lightness. That year I went from vodka to whiskey. I have always had
this weather inside me. Don’t try and solve it.
*
When did you know you had a problem? Snow over country churches. The bright blue sky beneath
tall oak trees. When did you know you had a problem? Nothing is anonymous but it’s a nice

35
idea. When did you know you had a problem? A mountain pass near Reno. Turning the mirror
from her face to yours. When did you know you had a problem? A photograph with a mug I bought
for his birthday in the background. When did you know you had a problem? Nothing I did made
the wound go away. When did you know you had a problem? Remember the night we met. Two
bolts lighting up the blank prairie. When did you know you had a problem? I couldn’t stop touching
the wound. When did you know you had a problem? When I touched it I felt nothing.
*
The tallest tree shivers in the dusk, like a knife left on the edge of a metal sink, waiting for
something gentle to bump it, make it drop.
*
My desire to merge completely with someone. My desire to focus on others rather than myself.
Even here. Even to experience success through the success of others, under the guise of empathy,
of kindness. This is the codependent state of the alcoholic.
*
Something brightening in the lens of my life. Something that didn’t have to, or couldn’t last, that
never even really happened. Except in my imagination. But that alone was enough. The possibility
to imagine.
*

36
The moon cracking open the sea like breaking open a mirror. The moon holding me in its strong
arms. I float in what remains of the broken mirror. I float in the magic mirror of a tide pool. The
road is so quiet at night you have no idea there’s a whole ocean beside you letting out a long, slow
breath, like someone trying hard not to scream.
*
And the terrifying stoicism of the depressive. Say something about that.

37

CHAPTER FIVE: ICE ON EITHER SIDE: ON LONG DISTANCE
I’m at an airport coffee shop, on a layover in Minneapolis, on my way
to Iowa to visit Anna. It is mid-April, but a snowstorm has descended.
Through the window, I watch as wind whips the snow on the ground
into thick plumes. A man trudges through the silver swirls, moving
slowly. He resembles an astronaut in his white jumpsuit, fluorescent
stripes glowing around his torso. He carries a long cord towards the
plane closest to the window. The plane is small, low to the ground.
With his right arm, he sweeps snow from the tops of the wings.
I rummage around in my backpack and pull my tarot cards out. I fan
the cards out on the table next to my cappuccino in its little to-go cup.
I ask the deck a question and pull a card from the center of the pile.
On it, there’s an illustration of a man lying under a checkered quilt,
staring upwards. I count seven swords dangling in the air above him.
They gleam silver. They mean pain, inertia. Stasis.1
*
1
[The Carboniferous collapses into a night that goes quiet for 300 million years. When we pick up a
piece of coal, it is the fossil residue of photosynthesis, a condensation of Paleozoic sunlight we hold in
our hands.]

38
In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes defines the beloved as one
in a “perpetual state of departure” and the lover as one in a “state of
waiting.”
Snow falls on the other side of the window. It falls in piles, in
paragraphs. It drifts down the page. If there is too much, it can
become hard, impenetrable. Packed tight.
In the last few months we’ve alternated between being overly kind to
one another and overly critical.
When I ask about your biggest fear, you give the same answer every
time.2
*
An hour passes, then another. On the loudspeaker overhead, a
woman’s voice explains that my flight will be the last one out before
the blizzard hits. I think about abandoning the trip. But I know it’s
too late now. I’m already halfway there. Waiting to board, I watch a
YouTube video on my phone about the International Space Station.
2
[What do I know of the inner meaning of dreams, I whose life is almost entirely founded on dreams (yes,
I will come to the suicide dream one of these days).]

39
An astronaut is giving the audience a tour. There’s not much to see
inside: the station looks like somebody’s basement office. Cords and
screens and electric sockets clog every free surface. The food they eat
is shrink-wrapped. Their urine is cleansed and re-processed into
water. According to the astronauts, it is like a sensory deprivation
tank, since there are no smells of nature, no feels of atmosphere, of
humidity or aridity, no time spent in the Sun.3 Their one consolation
is a view of Earth at all hours. They circle the Earth sixteen times a
day. Sixteen sunrises, sixteen sunsets.4

*
I remember that night you left me alone in the hotel room. How I felt
the tether float and tighten between us. Felt it threatening to break. I
spent hours like that, floating in space, suspended. But I could still
feel you. There was a row of Douglas firs on the horizon, and though
I couldn’t see them in the dark, I knew you were among them, still
alive. Neither of us slept that night. You came back to me, in the end.
3
[I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.]
4
[“Once there was no sea,” said Mrs Swithin. “No sea at all between us and the continent. I was reading
that in a book this morning. There were rhododendrons in the Strand; and mammoths in Piccadilly.”]

40
*
When you were eighteen, your doctor diagnosed you with major
depressive and “aspects” of schizophrenia. He said you had the
constitution of an astronaut. In that you could endure high levels of
pain without ever showing it on your face.
*
When I land in Cedar Rapids, the clouds are slate grey and full of the
recent memory of snow. When I arrive at Anna’s house, my godson
stands behind the glass door, his hand like a starfish pressed against
the glass. Sun moon stars rain, he says to me when I open it, bags of
gifts hanging from my arms.
Did your mom teach you that? I ask, kissing his cheeks.
He giggles. Sun, moon, stars, rain, he says again.
And only the snow can begin to explain, I say, handing him his gifts.
When by now and tree by leaf, Anna says, entering the room,
embracing me.

41
She laughed his joy she cried his grief, I say.
Bird by snow and stir by still, she says.
Anyone’s any was all to her.
Stop, my godson says. We look at him, surprised.
Sun moon stars rain, he insists.
This is the line he’s learned by heart. He doesn’t want to know what
comes next. 5

*
I fly back to Los Angeles on a Sunday and call you from the airport
when I land.
We could try an open relationship, I say.
5
[The Seasons. The Skull. The gradual dissolution of everything. This is to be contrasted with the
permanence of - what? Sun, moon & stars. Hopeless gulfs of misery. Cruelty. The War. Change.
Oblivion.]

42
I think I just need space, you say.
I stare at the large, celestial structure above the parking deck at LAX.
It looks like an ice-sculpture, arcing through the air.
But we live in separate cities, I say.6
That night I dream the lake I grew up on is filled with cement, and
wake sobbing.
*
With each blink I see a bright red flower. I’ve been here before. To
choose winter again all I have to do is open my eyes. Driving north
towards the lake, the windshield is wide as a sea, the landscape moving
in two directions, the road zooming towards me. Ice on either side of
the highway where a lake used to be.7
*
6
[Sshawls & shooting caps. A green-handled brush. The devouringness of nature. But all the time, this
passes, accumulates. Darkness. The welling winds & waves. What then is the medium through wh. we
regard human beings? Tears. &c. Sleep[?] th Slept[?] through life.]
7
[Cold and final, the imagination / shuts down its fabled summer house.]
[A sheet had been spread on the Terrace. It was a lake apparently. Roughly painted ripples represented
water. Rather prettily, real swallows darted across the sheet.]

43
When I was a child, my family lived in tornado alley. No twister ever
took my house, but for weeks after each big storm, I had trouble
sleeping. The idea of what a tornado could do tormented me.
Sometimes they skipped over my town entirely. But sometimes they
came too close, leaving a wake of tree branches and porch furniture
in the streets.8
*
I touch myself in the morning, under the sheets, waking from a dream
where you’ve been touching me.
My friend tells me to leave you. He’s selfish, she says. I shrug. So am
I, I say. 9
You won’t like me when you see how bad it gets, you say.
I laugh. I think I can handle it.
10

8
[No one had seen the cloud coming. There it was, black, swollen, on top of them. Down it poured like all
the people in the world weeping. Tears, Tears. Tears.]
9
[Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of storms]
10 [The storm’s my storm as well as his]

44
*
But sometimes your depression scares me.11
I make a collage. I choose images of mountains, lakes. A flower
growing through snow.
There’s still so much we don’t understand about each other, you say.
12

11 [I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.]
12 [Night __ succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly,
with with indefatigable fingers.]

45
CHAPTER SIX: NOTEBOOK IN THE SNOW:
BHANU KAPIL’S SCHIZOPHRENE
In the small grids of urban gardens, in heaps of snow in a backyard in Colorado, or riding the dreamwaves of ships to and from India, Bhanu Kapil’s speaker in Schizophrene is in transit.
In her introduction to Schizophrene, called “Passive Notes,” Kapil outlines the book’s primary
subject matter: “Partition and its transgenerational effects: the high incidence of schizophrenia in
diasporic Indian and Pakistani communities; the parallel social history of domestic violence,
relational disorders, and so on.” She also reveals that she’s been writing a novel in service of this
project:
On the night I knew my book had failed, I threw it– into the garden of my house in
Colorado…It snowed that winter and into the spring; before the weather turned truly
warm, I retrieved my notes, and began to write again, from the fragments, the phrases and
lines still legible on the warped, decayed but curiously rigid pages.
Kapil’s writing process mirrors the fractured experience of the schizophrenic. The self, like the novel
draft thrown to the snow, is “deconstructed” by the experience (of immigration, of schizophrenia).
*
In the opening section, “Schizophrene,” we find our speaker repeatedly “mid-ocean.” In prose
blocks that switch between past and present tense, we are in transit between homelands, between

46
realities. In flashes of recollection, the speaker recounts a journey by ship, out of India. Looking
back towards shore, she recalls “I saw an intense set of orange, red and gold lines above the place
where the sun would be.” Kapil calls these impressions “a rapid sketch.”
Space on the page between prose movements suggests gaps or blocks in memory. The speaker
references grids (London, for instance, is a “wet grid”) and also “lines” and an “axis.” These function
as the parts of a dissembled map the speaker is attempting to reconstruct.
Throughout this first section, the speaker returns to the scene of her novel draft, arcing through the
air, finally landing in the “blue fire of the individual blades of grass, the bonds of the plant material
that release a color when they are crushed.”
Here, Kapil seems to relate the spirit of the speaker, “crushed” by diaspora, to the plant that has
been flattened by the flying object, the failed novel. The “individual” blades of grass, now, under
collective pressure, blur together, “releasing a color” of “blue fire.” I read this as an outpouring of
grief, a depth of feeling. And perhaps this blue fire speaks to the futility of writing rationally about
an experience which is ultimately irrational.
*
In the second section, “India: Notebooks,” we are in Delhi, in an urban “garden with its triptych of
fuchsia, green, and black.” Kapil explains: “I was lying on my back in the snow, my notebook
balanced next to me on a crust of ice, like a wolf. Like a lion. Like a cobra. Like a tiger. Like a

47
schizophrenic.”
Cycling through this litany of similes—wolf, lion, cobra, and tiger—all animals with their own myths
and lores attached to them— Kapil lands on one final and surprising simile, “like a schizophrenic.”
In this way the speaker both associates herself and distances herself from the diagnosis. Whether
the speaker is in fact schizophrenic is secondary to the metaphorical implications.
The section continues, and we move in and out of mental hospitals, offered snapshots of a man “on
a stretcher,” “the delicate lace of his white cotton cap embroidered with tiny branching vines,” and a
woman “hospitalized for a phobia.” The speaker blows off an interview with “a doctor specializing
in migration and mental illness,” exclaiming later, “’Reverse migration…’ is psychotic.”
*
The fourth section is named Abiogenesis, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as “the evolution of
life from inorganic or inanimate substances.” Often abiogenesis references the origins of life on
Earth, scientific evolution. In this context it might reference the emergence of diasporic life in
response to the deadly events of Partition, the repercussions of which are still being felt today.
“Over the years,” Kapil writes, “I received my society’s support. In the States, I worked hard at
waitressing. Without any real feelings, I returned to the United Kingdom.” The immigrant
experience is “a root distinguished from its branching plant,” she writes.

48
“Nouns are magical to an immigrant,” Kapil explains in the fifth section, and she lists them, as if
trying to locate herself, via the fragments of a place: “Turmeric plant, lemon tree, amrooth tree,
pomegranate tree, mango tree, mint, tulsi, and some ragged flowering herbs.” Kapil’s is an ecopoetry
which seeks out balance, stability, and precision in nature as a way of counteracting the fragmented
trauma of the immigrant experience. She writes:
I lie down beneath the lemon tree then stand up, leaving an outline in the glossy pink
earth. I refill my silhouette with glossy, bi-color leaves creased down the middle, their
seams bulky with dust; lemons from the lowest branches; bunched garlands of marigolds
from the sloped shelf next to the Shiva temple, emptied from a white plastic bag.
The removal of her body from the earth, a resurrection of sorts, leaves behind an “outline,” a
“silhouette” into which she then piles elements from the natural world around her: glossy leaves,
lemons, garlands of marigolds. This process is a gentle one, a way of accumulating natural objects to
bolster the defined edges of a self, of a body. The earth, for its part, is “glossy pink,” almost celestial.
Kapil is at ease comparing psychological processes to nature or the weather. She describes profundity
of thought as “rainy quiet darkness,” a relationship as “staring into the blazing pink sun.”
“The diagonal shadow in the lemon tree,” she writes, “is a product of moonlight as much as sunlight.”
Having identified the self with nature, with the lemon tree, for instance, the speaker suggests that she
is a product of both light and dark, of oppositional forces, sorrow and joy, and that the artist emerges
from this dichotomy.
In the sixth section, Vertigo, the speaker returns to a lexicon of inorganic and organic materials,
describing a “triptych of ancestors composed of descending, passive, and synthetic scraps.” This

49
leads us to the seventh section, which in its title directly addresses the historical event that’s been
alluded to a few times: Partition.
The speaker recalls “a mother,” presumably her own, “who tells a bedtime story of ‘row after row of
women tied to border trees,’ “recounting how “their stomachs were cut out.’” The section gives way
to descriptions of the traumatic events of Partition, including this image of massacre, and later, a
scene of domestic violence, and an act of racism. The text then seems to back away, as if it’s touched
upon memories too terrifying to explicate.
“It is psychotic not to know where you are in a national space,” Kapil decides. Maps and the idea of
borders are recurrent themes. “I cannot make a map of healing and so this is a map of what
happened” and “a map is a kind of short-term memory,” she writes. The descriptions break down
into this litany:
It is psychotic to draw a line between two places.
It is psychotic to go.
It is psychotic to look.
Psychotic to live in a different country forever.
Psychotic to lose something forever.
The “line between two places” seems a clear reference to the hastily drawn borders of Pakistan and
India, devised during Great Britain’s withdrawal in 1947. The fallout from colonial rule left a
“psychotic” situation for the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, many of whom were forced to

50
“live in a different country forever,” having been divided and relocated based on their religious
affiliation.
In section 8, “India Fragments,” the speaker tucks a page from her buried manuscript “in a boat of
glossy leaves.” This boat of leaves is reminiscent of the ship in the first section, carrying survivors of
the bloodshed far from the homeland. The boat of glossy leaves could flutter apart — it is a fragile
invention, something to contain the memory, safe-keeping in the earth. The book ends with an
afterword, in which Kapil ends “in my own mother’s garden in Punjab.”
*
Schizophrene grapples with and eloquently depicts the trauma of migration and mental illness. In
describing a butterflies’ migration, Kapil also suggests there is, through trauma, the potential for a
deepened creative practice—
“On the strange morning when migrating butterflies swarm the garden, turning it, briefly, a pale and
biological green, I lift my head from the page and stare. I go to the window then the door, stepping
through the snow. To the book. Where it’s lying. On its side.”
Upon seeing the butterflies, the speaker enters the garden and reaches again for the unfinished book.
The snow she must walk through to reach the discarded manuscript could be read as a hinderance,
or, to borrow a phrase from Glück, an opportunity to “re-invest the world with meaning.” Snow
might suggest a new beginning, the hardship of migration, or the burying of the past in a dream

51
world. Either way, Kapil shares Glück’s dedication to the craft of writing as a way of processing
grief.

52

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Afferez, A.K. “Edens and Heavens in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris.” Ploughshares, Sept 24,
2019, https://blog.pshares.org/edens-and-heavens-in-louise-glucks-the-wild-iris/.
Bourgeois, Louise. The Couple. 2003, Cast and polished aluminum, Ekeberg Sculpture Park,
Oslo.
Boyers, Robert. “Writing Without a Mattress: On Louise Glück.” The Nation, November 20,
2012, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/writing-without-mattress-louise-glueck/.
Burt, Stephanie. “The nervous rose.” The Times Literary Supplement, https://www.thetls.co.uk/articles/wild-iris-louise-gluck-book-review/. Accessed October 20, 2022.
Cavaleri, Grace. “In the Magnificent Region of Courage: An Interview with Louise Glück.”
Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Volume 7:4, Winter 2006, https://www.beltwaypoetry.com/interviewgluck/.
Elmgreen and Dragset, Dilemma. 2017, Patinated bronze, stainless steel, Ekeberg Sculpture Park,
Oslo.
Gander, Forrest & John Kinsella. Redstart: An Ecological Poetics. University of Iowa Press, 2012.
Glück, Louise. Averno. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
---. “Nobel Lecture.” The Nobel Prize, December 7, 2020.
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2020/12/gluck-lecture-english.pdf..
---. Proofs and Theories. Ecco, 1995.
---. The Wild Iris. Ecco, 1993.
---. Winter Recipes from the Collective. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2021.
Hass, Robert. “American Ecopoetry: An Introduction.” The Ecopoetry Anthology. Edited by Ann
Fisher-Wirth & Laura-Gray Street. Trinity University Press, 2020.
Henry, Sean. Walking Woman. 2010, Painted bronze, Ekeberg Sculpture Park, Oslo.
Johnson, Matt. Levitating Woman. 2013, Bronze, Ekeberg Sculpture Park, Oslo.
Kapil, Bhanu. Schizophrene. Nightboat Books, 2011.

53
Keniston, Ann. “Balm after Violence: Louise Glück’s ‘Averno.’” The Kenyon Review, Fall 2008.
pp. 177-187.
Maclean, Diane. Open Book. 2010, Stainless steel, Ekeberg Sculpture Park, Oslo.
Maehlum, Hilde. Konkavt Ansikt. 2006, Marble, Ekeberg Sculpture Park, Oslo.
Mark, Sabrina Orah. Tsim Tsum. Saturnalia Books, 2009.
Matsuda, Aoko. “Planting.” Translated by Angus Turvill. The Penguin Book of Japanese Short
Stories, edited by Jay Rubin, Penguin Publishing Group, 2018.
Morrison, Julia Anna. Long Exposure. Moon City Press, 2023.
Nakaya, Fujiko. Pathfinder #18700 Oslo. 2018, Fog sculpture, Ekeberg Sculpture Park, Oslo.
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. 1981. Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint Edition,
2018.
Pond, Catherine. Audio recording: “Louise Glück discusses anorexia and psychoanalysis.”
Tumblr, https://twopeach.tumblr.com/post/91724068371, Saratoga Springs, NY, 2014.
Ryan, John Charles. “Consciousness Buried in the Earth: Vegetal Memory in Louise Glück’s The
Wild Iris.” Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination.
Routledge, 2020.
Vigeland, Gustav. Man and Woman. 1908, Bronze, Ekeberg Sculpture Park, Oslo.
Voight, Benjamin. “Sylvia Plath 101.” Poetry Foundation,
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70268/sylvia-plath-101. Accessed on August 16, 2021.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Oxford University Press, 2015.
---. Between the Acts. 1941. Oxford University Press, 2008.
---. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Oxford University Press, 2023.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract My critical dissertation, “Bright Portals: Illness & the Environment in Contemporary Poetry,” is comprised of six linked chapters. Alongside vignettes and meditations on my personal eco-poetics (including meditations on grief, addiction, and the environment), I offer critical analyses of four contemporary poetry collections which inform my own approach to eco-consciousness, including Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris and Averno , Julia Anna Morrison’s Long Exposure , and Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene . My intervention in the field considers the overlap between conditions of the natural world and psychological fracture in these poetic speakers. In my meditation on Glück’s Averno , for instance, I argue that cycles of the natural world are the catalyst for mythmaking, and that mythmaking is one source of coping with mental illness and trauma. Later, I explore how Kapil’s Schizophrene takes the prose poem as its form, both sprawling and contained, indicative of the fluctuating state of the schizophrenic mind. I explore how Kapil, in contrast to Glück, depicts the garden environment from an immigrant’s perspective as constrictive, rather than protective (as is sometimes the case for Glück’s speakers). This synthesis of elegiac and ecopoetic concerns underscores the four case studies.

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Creator Pond, Catherine (author)

Core Title Bright portals: illness & the environment in contemporary poetry

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Degree Conferral Date 2024-05

Publication Date 04/17/2024

Defense Date 04/08/2024

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art,Bhanu Kapil,confessional poetry,contemporary poetry,ecopoetics,ecopoetry,Film,illness,Julia Anna Morrison,Louise Glück,lyric poetry,mental illness,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,Poetry

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