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).