On Writing #174 : Alyse Knorr

On Writing the West: The Lesbian Geological Erotic

Alyse Knorr

My wife and I moved west in 2013 after living our entire lives in the South. I’d always loved picking up and holding rocks, but it wasn’t until I moved to Alaska that I started noticing rock shops and shows, or that I learned the names for the massive geological formations surrounding me: mesas, buttes, spires, hoodoos, fins, and cinder cones.

If, as Olga Broumas writes in “Home Movies,” “awe is desire,” then the Western landscape is full of desire. The West is characterized by rich ongoing geological activity, evidenced by towering mountains and deep canyons, granite domes and natural bridges. The West is home to 16 of the 18 most dangerous active volcanoes in the U.S. It’s also home to some of the deepest and longest cave systems in the world—caves that contain gypsum chandeliers, rust icicles, calcite honeycombs, and staggering winds. The scale of this land’s size is rivaled only by the scope of its age: formations created over billions of years, dinosaur footprints peppering local hiking trails.

Self-exiled from the South, my wife and I drove the Alaska-Canada highway through this awe-inspiring, desire-inspiring landscape and settled down in Anchorage, where the local university offered a class on ice crevasse rescue techniques and where 10-mile hikes up mountains and across glaciers became common recreation for us.

The day I entered my first ice cave was also the day I learned the common name for a glacial moulin: “forever hole.” Because if you fall through the ice, you never stop falling. I feared this dark, limitless death just as I feared that the glacier would collapse and crush us while we walked into the cave. Once inside it, however, I felt strangely safe—even when we turned off our headlamps in the deepest corner and I knew utter darkness for the first time in my life.

          Why this feeling of safety in such a seemingly dangerous place? Because a cave is a womb, a den, a hidden and secret interior space. The bear curls up inside its tight, narrow walls, warm and secure. The stone around her is ancient and strong, permanent and durable and ageless.

          Western lesbian poets—myself included—render this conception in love poems that compare soft against hard, warm against cold—love poems that identify an erotic geology of the flesh. For instance, Mojave poet Natalie Diaz, a member of the Gila River Indian Community, compares her lover’s skull to a “hidden glacier” and writes of “the limestone grotto” of her lover’s clavicle (“I Lean Out the Window and She Nods Off in Bed, the Needle Gently Rocking on the Bedside Table”). In “Aphrodite,” Olga Broumas, who wrote her first book while living in Oregon, imagines the goddess of love and beauty as made entirely of stone. She describes Aphrodite’s “stone face,” “heart of pure/stone,” “stony lips,” “thighs of marble,” “petrified/genitals,” and “stony will,” “so like a stone/statue, herself.”

          One of the most compelling examples of this geological erotic is Elizabeth Bishop’s unpublished “Vague Poem,” in which she compares the barite roses she saw during a “trip west” to her lover’s body. When Bishop remembers beholding one of these rocks, her imagination is drawn inward even deeper, to a transformative power within: “Yes, perhaps/there was a secret, powerful crystal at work inside,” she writes. “I almost saw it: turning into a rose/without any of the intervening/roots, stems, buds, and so on; just/earth to rose and back again.”

Bishop then compares the rock to her beloved in a similarly fluid, transformative way: “Just now, when I saw you naked again,/I thought the same words: rose-rock, rock-rose…/Rose, trying, working, to show itself,/forming, folding over,/unimaginable connections, unseen, shining edges./Rose-rock, unformed, flesh beginning, crystal by crystal,/clear pink breasts and darker, crystalline nipples,/rose-rock, rose-quartz, roses, roses, roses,/exacting the even darker, accurate, rose of sex--”

The power Bishop imagines seeing at the center of the vaginal rose is that of self-knowledge. To be a queer woman is to be exiled from one’s own body, at least for a time, and to behold the beloved’s body is to return to one’s own body once again. To be welcomed back and to know oneself more completely through a process of erotic mirroring. In Speculum of the Other Woman, philosopher Luce Irigaray calls female homosexuality “woman’s desire for herself” (102). She writes, “What exhilarating pleasure it is to be partnered with someone like oneself. With a sister, in everyday terms. What need, attraction, passion, one feels for someone, for some woman, like oneself” (103).

This self-knowledge and self-passion occurs in the safe, hidden space of the cave, into which the poet-lover yearns to move deeper inward—“the single ache,” Diaz writes in “Toward the Amarath Gates of War or Love,” “is that I cannot crawl inside you—”

 For as she plunges deeper into the cave, the lover comes to know her own interiority better. In “Caritas,” for instance, Broumas describes her lover undertaking a spelunking expedition into the yonic cave: “With the clear/plastic speculum, transparent/and, when inserted, pink like the convex/carapace of a prawn, flashlight in hand, I/guide you/inside the small/cathedral of my cunt. The unexpected/light dazzles you. This flesh, my darling, always/invisible like the wet/side of stones, the hidden/hemisphere of the moon, startles you/with its brilliance.” This expedition then affords the lover the opportunity to better understand her own body, as Broumas writes in the lines: “You too, my darling, are/folded, clean/round a light-filled temple.”

The traditional love poem—a blazon, perhaps—makes of the body a land to be conquered, mapped, and catalogued, much as the traditional Western nature poem makes of the land itself. And just as describing the land estranges it from the writer, making it more Other, the blazon dis-members its subject, rendering her mere pieces of a fantasized yet irrelevant whole. But the queer West embodied in the geological lesbian love poem is un-bordered, as is the queer body. The poet does not move out onto the land but into it, diving into the cave deep enough to find herself.

          But she finds even more than that, for when she journeys inward she finds nothing less than the origins of the world—depicted in Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting of the same name as the vagina, the entrance to the womb from which all life emerges. Irigaray reads Plato’s cave as a womb, and emergence from the cave as a violent, traumatic experience in the ways it causes us to forget our origins: “The philosophy candidate,” she writes, “will be brought out of the cave so that he can be introduced to views that are fairer, loftier, and more precise. He is dragged away from error, indistinctness, indifferentiation, indecision [….] But the geneaological conception has been broken. The child […] will be cut off from any remaining empirical relation with the womb. From everything that might remind him, bring him back toward, turn him in the direction of his beginning, an origin that is still inscribed within and also inscribes a proper individual history of one’s own—one that re-marks itself in its projects, its projections, detours, returns” (293). In other words, in our quest to privilege the transcendent Forms, we forget our origins, our senses, matter, and earth. We forget our own formlessness. It is only by returning to the cave that we can remember and re-member these.

The West I write, then, is not the masculine West of expansive vistas or penetrative conquest. My poetic West exists within the glacial cave of self-knowledge, blue-lit and wet, with million-year-old rocks suspended in the ice like planets or moons. I chant with Bishop of “rose-rock, rose-quartz, roses, roses, roses,” floral and geologic, flexible, fixed, and ancient.

Archive Fever

The paper is thin as a foggy window—

I use a light touch. Prop it up on its pillow

to see what’s inside: pink quartz

and the wet side of stones chanting rock-rose,

rose-rock. The I fallen away and added in

again by hand. My muscles hurt like sin

but I lean even closer, nose against the page.

The word still illegible: is it love or lose or rage?

The I is back and jumping up—dear one,

can you even read this at all? How to clean

the ribbon, find the space within the ink

so letters will emerge—I cannot think

I am the audience. I am the reader,

holding a page up to my ear.

Alyse Knorr is an assistant professor of English at Regis University and, since 2017, co-editor of Switchback Books. Her most recent book of poems, Mega-City Redux, won the 2016 Green Mountains Review Poetry Prize, selected by Olena Kalytiak Davis. She is also the author of the poetry collections Copper Mother (Switchback Books 2016) and Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books 2013); the non-fiction book Super Mario Bros. 3 (Boss Fight Books 2016); and the poetry chapbooks Ballast (Seven Kitchens Press 2019), Epithalamia (Horse Less Press 2015), and Alternates (dancing girl press 2014).

Talking Poetics #18 : émilie kneifel

the poet holding a stick of dynamite

i am tom. jerry is anything -- joy, grief, my mother, the cardinal -- that runs into the wall as soon as i spot it. the poems are the ensuing chase, the intricate booby traps i spend hours constructing -- paying more mind to how pillow feathers look in the light than the fact that my tar vat is perfectly cat-sized -- and the drafts are what i break in the process: vases, doors, legs (always mine). but. even though i spend every waking hour sprinting, slinking, and scheming how better to sprintslink, i don’t really want to catch jerry. he’s my friend; we love to run together. it keeps us fit. it keeps us wanting.

émilie kneifel is a sick fish, goo fish, they fish, blue fish (poet, critic, editor, and co-creator of PLAYD8s). find 'em at emiliekneifel.com, @emiliekneifel, and in Tiohtiáke, hopping and hoping.

On Writing #173 : Kim Fahner

On Writing Into The Silence

Kim Fahner

I write in a few places inside my house, but the one I return to most often, where I can feel my feet on the floor, where I can feel grounded—especially in uncertain times like these—is at my little round table in the corner of my living room. From here, I can look out to the street as if it’s a stage, and then out my side window towards the trees that hover above my neighbours’ house. Daydreaming, for me, is part of the writing process. From here, I can hear the windchimes and watch the crows, and I can catch sight of the black squirrels that dance across the fence. My dog, Gully, sleeps on a chair cushion on the floor next to me as I work. One of my friends, Trish Stenabaugh, is a gifted artist—so I write with her beautiful peacock feather painting behind me. She gave it to me for my 40^th birthday and the generosity of that gift made me cry. I have a ‘thing’ for birds and feathers, and for all of the poetic symbolism that they hold.

I have a candle that I light when I work, and maybe that’s part of the ritual of how I prepare myself to write, and I often have a mug of ginger or rosehip tea that just goes cold when I am busy with words. Next to the candle is an old photo of my mum and two of my uncles, Terry and Michael, back from when they used to play on the rocks when they were little kids in the 1940s. It’s an old Sudbury photo, one I’m sure that many third or fourth generation Sudburians would likely find familiar to their own inherited bunches of photos. Then, I have a cape I throw on if it gets too cold. I like to write with the window open, which is the same way I like to sleep.

Lately, being at home during the pandemic, I am grateful to have made a space that feels creative, beautiful, and safe. Lately, though, the words I so wish would come aren’t coming as often. At first, I watched people say ‘Now that I have time, I’ll write a novel’ on social media when the self-isolation started in March, and I smiled and shook my head. It’s hardly as easy as people think, if you write creatively. It takes a great deal of energy, focus, and time. Now, being in this strange pandemic head space, I have a hard time writing anything except task-oriented pieces like poetry book reviews, or tiny reflections like this, or the smallest clutch of lines of poems. Nothing seems to be working properly, creatively, in my head. It frustrates me, and it makes me unbelievably sad. When you live alone, when it’s almost too quiet and there is too much empty space, and when words are your closest companions—alongside the dog, of course—their departure is a hard one to bear. Even reading, which I usually love, isn’t something I can do easily these days. I can manage poems, mostly, but I can’t focus to read anything of length or complexity. I fill the emptiest and loneliest spaces with music. These last few weeks, it’s been Tim Baker, Glen Hansard, Chopin, Bach, Thomas Tallis, The Chieftains, Amelia Curran, Sheila Carabine, Sarah Harmer, and Cara Dillon. They help make it feel less empty.

I have a journal that I bought in St. John’s when I was there last May to launch my book and write. I write in it every couple of days, in green pen. It’s full of too true thoughts that I hope no one will ever read. It’s full of my heart, my worries, and my mind. It sits next to me, too, for the times when I need to just ‘speak’ to someone, to get it out. The artist is Hannah Viano, from Winthrop, Washington. There are images scattered in between the lined pages. I bought it because the cover’s got the image of a woman by herself in a rowboat, on a lake, headed towards shore. The weather looks to be full of movement and passion in the sky above her. She’s sturdy, though, balanced in her rowboat, and trusting that the water will carry and hold her. I like to think that’s me, even on ‘bad days.’ I like to think that I’ll float and not sink, even in stormier weather. I’ve weathered storms before. This is just another one I hadn’t expected…

I thought, the other day, sitting here and daydreaming out the window, that it would be nice to know for sure that the words will come back…but maybe, like the world, they’ve changed…and maybe I need to lean into that, trust it, and the process itself. Maybe it’s more about ‘being’ than ‘doing’ for the moment. For now, I’ll just try and breathe deeply, feel my bare feet on the hardwood floor beneath me, and listen to the birds singing outside while I find small clutches of words, like islands where I can moor my boat.  

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Writers' Union of Canada, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim blogs fairly regularly at kimfahner.wordpress.com and can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com