Second Acts: The “Thinglish Grammar” of Jenny George and Margaret Ross
An Essay Review of Second Books of Poems
BY LISA RUSS SPAAR
Jenny George, After Image (Copper Canyon Press, October 2024)
Margaret Ross, Saturday (The Song Cave, October 2024)
Anyone who has seriously studied poetry is aware that, over time, various confluences of culture, place, and aesthetic temperament have led poets with a shared ethos and style to be considered members of certain “schools” or movements of poetry—some that immediately come to mind, often replete with manifestos, are Dadaism, Surrealism, Vorticism, Objectivism, the Beats, Confessionalism, the New York School, the Black Mountain Poets, the New Formalism, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, and many more, some more obscure (Martian poetry, Cowboy poetry, Misty poetry) and fleeting (remember “Flarf”? or Lucie Brock-Broido’s posited “feral school”?) than others. At times, differences among various schools could be quite contentious, with vehement adherents to a particular aesthetic or approach engaged in heated battles on the page and even in person (the tension in the room at a presentation at the University of Virginia in the early aughts by John Hollander and Marjory Perloff was as palpable and exciting as at a prize fight).
In a 2021 essay in The Los Angeles Review of Books,, “Of Schools, Movements and Manifestos: Where Are the Poetry Wars of Yesteryear?” poet, critic, and translator Stephen Kessler notes the quieting down of the kind of fractious battles over poetics that marked and animated his own coming of age as a poet in the early 1970s. “Does the ethos of the current creative writing industry,” he wonders, “the culture of the masters of fine arts, still encourage this kind of contention? Apart from the cultivation and celebration of one’s ethnic and/or sexual identity, the processing of one’s personal trauma, and the pursuit of the well-wrought poem, do people still argue about what kind of poem is worth writing?”
I agree with Kessler that it may be a positive sign that attitudes about differences in poetic approaches have become more inclusive, especially when we writers can manage to care less about publishing, self-promotion, and branding and more about engaging in a “sense of mutual discovery, of imaginative more than professional ambition, [which fosters] a fertile if disorderly atmosphere in which to pursue our experiments and try to be true to our muses,” despite our dissimilar feelings about what poetry should be and mean and accomplish.
While reading with great admiration through two just-released second collections of poetry by Jenny George and Margaret Ross, I found myself thinking about a movement that was in high burgeon during my own apprenticeship as a young poet, the Deep Image School. The Poetry Foundation’s Glossary of Poetic Terms defines the “Deep Image” this way:
[Deep Image Poetry is] a term originally coined by poets Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly to describe stylized, resonant poetry that operated according to the Symbolist theory of correspondences, which posited a connection between the physical and spiritual realms. Rothenberg and Kelly were inspired by Federico García Lorca’s “deep song.” The idea was later redeveloped by the poet Robert Bly, and deep image became associated with a group of midcentury American poets including Galway Kinnell and James Wright. The new group of deep-image poets was often narrative, focusing on allowing concrete images and experiences to generate poetic meaning.
My encounters in the 1970s with the work of poets associated with this movement were mostly male—Bly, Kinnell, James Wright, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, James Tate, and Gregory Orr—in what was sometimes called the Deep Image “stones and bones” phase. I don’t mean to suggest that either George or Ross is working consciously within the loose strictures of the Deep Image school. But something that Robert Kelly said about that seminal movement in an essay called “Notes on the Poetry of Deep Image,” published in Trobar 2 (1961), rings true to the work I’m considering, and the particular ways in which both George and Ross “think” by an often oneiric and intuitive juxtapositions of images. “Deep image,” Kelly writes, “was a Thinglish Grammar forgotten into dream and awakened by music.”
Jenny George, who lives in Santa Fe and works in social justice philanthropy, published her debut, The Dream of Reason, with Copper Canyon in 2018. Her many awards include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo, and she is a recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. This first book takes its title and much of its imagery from Francisco Goya’s famous c.1799 print of a sleeping human pelted by a menagerie of animals, a work that suggests, among other things, that flights of imagination should never be abandoned for a strict adherence to Enlightenment rationality, since it is from a combination of both that the best art emerges. In poems of quiet, penetrating beauty and scrupulous intelligence, George’s first book explores the complex ways in which humans comprehend, fear, sentimentalize, consume, and mythologize other animals. George explores a subject it would be easy to sensationalize, but there is nothing flashy or gothic about the language. Rather, with pellucid precision, the poems achieve their power through juxtaposition of images and perceptions; like the many blind bats that haunt the collection, “they navigate by adjustment,” and the effect is haunting, intimate, unsettling, and powerful: utterly sensory and dreamlike at once.
In After Image, George turns this effect of lucid dreaming toward poems that excavate a speaker’s grief in the wake of the death of a lover. In their paradoxical “simplicity” and fresh details of the natural world, these short poems (only two of the book’s 57 poems extend to two pages) resonate with a koan-like qualia. Sometimes George evokes mythical lost loves and worlds (there are persona poems in the voices of both Orpheus and Eurydice, for example, and a poem about Adam and Eve) and at other times she speaks of herself in the third person in three eponymous poems: “Jenny George // Is a failure in the garden . . .”; Jenny George // Is not to be trusted . . .”; Jenny George // Is writing about snow again . . .”). But in most of the poems, the speaker (whether in the first- or the second-person) feels very close to the poet. And again, as in her first book, George refuses to sensationalize or capitalize her private feelings; she eschews, to paraphrase Adrienne Rich, the temptation to make a career of her pain. Perhaps for this reason, the suffering in the poems is all the more exquisitely felt.
Some of the poems revolve around a single image, as in “7 lb. 14 oz.,” in which the title provides crucial narrative tension:
They burned you down to a box
and gave you back
to me like that—newborn dust,
your exact birthweight’s
worth—now wrapped in a black
velvet bag and delivered
into my remaining hands.
No need for exposition or rhetorical flourish here; the reader feels the weightless weight, so eerily exact, of the lost body, of its after-image. Here are two other koan-like pieces, small in size but with nothing small about the sentience evoked:
Memory
Looking up at me from her bath
she said, Remember
everything we ever did? A garland
of bones down her back.
And “Untitled”:
You were showing me your new
white dress . . .
I wake to fresh snow. The woods
are giving off a low light, as though overnight
an aspect of their nature has been unconcealed.
The house is banked in quiet. You die each day.
In other pieces, George allows subtly shifting image systems to form through intuitive leaps or arrangements, navigating by adjustment. Here is “Quantum,” which opens the book:
A table. And on it a vase
of flowering quince branches.
But a table is only a joke the gods
are making: continuous motion
disguised as permanence,
as a “place.”
Something to set a vase on.
Something you can wipe with a cloth.
The body is not a place.
You learned this when her body became a sound
your voice was trying to make.
Like the orchard in spring, frenzied
with humming bees
ferrying the gold grains
from tree to tree, the endless
sexual material—
What you think is form
is just a kind of trembling.
Here George draws upon the notion from quantum physics that all physical matter is made up of constantly moving atoms. A table may seem like a stable object, a vase, a sturdy urn. When George credits this illusion of stability to a trick of “the gods” and not to the facts put forward by scientists, she is also addressing the notion of fate, of the “dirty trick” that fickle forces beyond our control might make us think one thing (a relationship is a stable thing; lovers will live long and happy lives together) and give us quite another. Of course the flowering quince branches in stanza one already give the lie to any notion of permanence. They are a vanitas; their blooms will fade and drop, the lopped limbs already severed from the rooted boscage to which they once belonged. Their trope of ephemerality is taken up again in the image cluster in the last stanza, in which George returns to living, rooted trees and to the bees moving among their blossoms, ferrying “the endless / sexual material.” By ending the poem with “trembling,” George manages a mix of sexual longing and terror. And of course her lines in the penultimate stanza—“The body is not a place. / You learned this when her body became a sound / your voice was trying to make”—is at the beating heart not only of this poem but of the collection as a whole. The voicings of these poems are an attempt to conjure and reconstitute the beloved lost body and all that went with it. It is an act of after image, of bodying forth an absence through imagined “things” and keening song.
Margaret Ross’s poems and translations have appeared in many venues, including Granta, The Paris Review, and Poetry. Her awards include a Stegner Fellowship as well as grants from the Fulbright and Henry Luce Foundations. She was a prestigious Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago and currently teaches poetry at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Ross’s first collection of poems, A Timeshare, chosen by Timothy Donnelly for the Omnidawn First/Second Book Prize and published by Omnidawn in 2015, was immediately lauded for its originality, its daring pitch between temporal strictures and often unsettling, fugue-state flights of imagination. Of the book, Terrance Hayes wrote, “A Timeshare channels that crepuscular space between waking and dreaming. ‘Could you tell which was your own if you were asked to touch ten silent faces in the dark?’ Margaret Ross asks in poems full of intense yet meditative wonder. They emit the ghostly ambience of ‘voices wafting past their sentences’ and ‘notes across a promissory silence.’ It’s as if someone was singing from the shadows, or the shadows themselves were singing throughout this stunning, truly singular debut. A Timeshare is a remarkable book.”
It is a compliment when I say that I never feel quite safe in a Margaret Ross poem, and this is especially true of my experience of reading Ross’s much anticipated Saturday. Ross’s ability to signal existential threat/fear in the most quotidian circumstances of “immortal dailiness” or, perhaps most intensely, in moments of desire, is one of the great gifts of these poems. In “Love” she writes
How do you get close to a person?
Once you got past pleasure
there was pain. No
there was pleasure turning
into something pain was
part of. If you can let them
hurt you deep enough, you’ll be
inside the other person.
Driving up nights on the freeway, dark fields
tearing by on either side, I practice
saying hi. Hi.
In another poem, “Spring,” as the speaker drives with her visiting father to a shrine-like spring high in cliffs beside the sea, her thoughts are full of a new lover she has just met the day before. With this “you” inside her head, the speaker feels “generous / and extravagantly cheerful” despite inklings that her father is on the brink of dementia. The road is “sharp // and the rail, where it exists, / is too low to do more than trick a driver / into feeling safe.”
. . . Why build a road
in such a dangerous way?
Nobody asks that question.
Everyone knows a beautiful view
from a vertiginous place
solves certain problems
in the brain. It convinces me
I love you.
This nuanced exploration of the heady emotions and anticipated aftermath inspired by new infatuation (“you / you were still only the feeling / of escaping my life”) is accomplished in part by Ross’s uncanny juxtapositions of physical detail (the switchbacks, the “eternal” spring and its pilgrims, the father’s fury when a car accident stalls traffic on their drive home) with internal musings that touch the large, unanswerable questions. There is the plot, rendered through imagery, and then there is what roils beneath or within it. In “Birthday,” she writes: “I touch a new scab // Inmost inner life / whose pleasure / we protect with silence.”
Always in question in these poems is the possibility of any sort of coherent self, fixed or over time. And of the value of that self, its worth (“I didn’t need anything / I could buy” she writes in “Socks”), as defined by its desires. Here is the title poem, “Saturday”:
It was, it was explained to me,
a holiday to enter spring
while honoring the dead
and so its celebration was
a picnic in a cemetery. Flowers
and fruit and fish
cooked as her father liked
and a kind of pastry
that had been her uncle’s
nickname. Her aunt was
bringing paper iphones, purses
and a little villa, just for fun
to burn. I passed carts
selling them as I walked up
the slope behind the city
hospital. A child
climbed a parked car
shouting that he was
a horse. I took
a picture and the colors
on screen looked richer, less
mutable. Downhill
a stadium surrounded
by white trailers. Undershirts
hung from the clotheslines.
I took a picture of myself
but I did not appear
the person that I was.
The picnic would be
nearly done. She said
they’d leave behind
chrysanthemums
made of cloth to last
and scented so they smelled
not like chrysanthemums
but like a woman.
Everything in this vertiginous, highly enjambed sensory poem is portrayed with both piercing physical, temporal intimacy (the speaker’s walk to the picnic feels almost painstakingly in real time) and unsettling distance (at other times, we leap to the past and fast-forward to the future). We learn from line one that “it” is something that is “explained to me.” From the start, there is that remove. The holiday being explained celebrates the season’s new life but is set among the tombstones of the invisible dead. The poem’s commodities—the fish, the fruit, the pastry, the paper iPhones, purses, houses—are all for show, for burning, not for sustenance. The festivities are in the same precinct as a hospital. A child is a horse. A photograph looks “richer, less / mutable” than reality. Other lives are implied by a trailer-crowded stadium seen from above and on undershirts hung from clotheslines above, all perceived from afar. The flowers left commemoratively behind are not real but rather made of cloth and scented to smell floral, “like a [proxy] woman.”
This topsy-turvy evocation of experience comes uncannily close to what, I think, many of us feel in any given circumstance without realizing it. That Ross helps us to see, to feel that complexity, is one of the marvels of her work. The word “Saturday” derives from the Old English Sætern(es)dæg, a translation of Latin Saturni dies ‘day of Saturn’, the ancient Roman god of agriculture. Saturnalia, the festival celebrating this Roman god, was a time of carnival upending, during which masters often served slaves and many expected activities and traditions were inverted. I love Ross’s choice of “Saturday” for the title of this book. It signals, on the one hand, the relative quietness and ease of the work-week’s “day off,” but it also signals that disruptive or potentially disruptive energies exist in every temporal instance. “Can something be its opposite?” Ross asks in “The Pillow Book.” What’s near is far, what’s far is near in these poems of childhood, desire, and vexed selfhood. In “Historic District,” the speaker makes her way through a city’s old precinct, where “the present leaks across the past / like motor oil over water,” and where she finds,
. . . . on oxblood doors
a shiny placard of the character for fortune
hanging upside down, upturned
being a homonym for comes here.
“[A] Thinglish Grammar forgotten into dream and awakened by music.” To return for a moment to Kelly’s description of Deep Image poetry, I think we see this alchemic juxtaposition of physical detail with oneiric “logic” at play in the original musics of both George and Ross—in George’s after-image voicings, in Ross’s rhythmic swervings. In Stephen Kessler’s essay about the Deep Image, he writes, “While I’ve never completely belonged to a school or movement, the idea has endured from my early reading of diverse contenders for poetic supremacy that what one writes, and how, must be made to matter.” For me, writing these Second Acts reviews is an attempt to make sure that poems deserving of a wide readership, whether or not they are affiliated with particular schools or tribes, receive the attention they warrant and are “made to matter.”
