Before I was sent to Little Sir Echo I had an imaginary friend who lived in our Buffalo mailbox. His name was Mr. Bickle. When we moved to Cambridge he vanished as transitional objects tend to do although his name lives on as a family anecdote.
Strange that one half-suffocated picnic in the course of life can disappear into Lake Armington’s hanging rock echo portals. Until the replication of love prevails in art and Periscope – one of Paul Thek’s late “picture-light” paintings, bubbles up from puddle blue depths
So many things happen by bringing to light what has long been hidden. Lilting betwixt and between. Between what? Oh everything. Take your microphone. Cross your voice with the ocean.
I’m here, I’m still American
Notes on the Poem
Poem of the Week is now on the second week of a seven-week exploration of selections from the just announced 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist. This time, we're delving into the riches of the extended Foreword of Susan Howe's work, Debths. "Epistolary Correspondences" picks up from the very beginning of the Foreword section, where Howe reminisces, but in somewhat pointed fashion, about the summer camp her parents sent her to when seh was eight. "I hated the place." In one visit where she had a solemn picnic with her parents, "I begged them to ransom me" ... but they departed at the end of the day and left her at the camp. Clearly, that incident still haunts her, not only raising the spectre of Mr. Bickle (although surely we think fondly about childhood imaginary friends, he's rather coldly referred to as a "transitional object") but earning the troubling adjective "half-suffocated" and other haunting analogies for that unfortunate picnic. The leap from there to the paintings of Paul Threk - here is a gallery of them to capture the mood - is fascinating. Did Threk's images somehow disinter the unhappy summer camp and perceived parental insensitivity? "So many things happen by bringing to light what has long been hidden." That images - not words - provoked this unearthing of memories further intrigues. If Mr. Bickle lived in a mailbox, perhaps he would have witnessed some written missives petitioning for a summer camp reprieve ... but no, he had already transitioned and vanished, perhaps taking the power of words with him. As we delve into Howe's Debths, we see that images and text often battle it out on the page, deepening our curiosity and drawing us into her explorations.