Some Electric Hum
by Janice Northerns
There were several nominees this year that made excellent use of visual art alongside their original verse, and I was charmed enough by each of them that I struggled to put them in a comparable context with works that did not include a visual antecedent for the poetry. The engaging and immediate doodles that illustrate Ruth Maus's Valentine and the historicizations that Mark Scheel offers as paratext for Joseph Maino’s photographs in Star Chaser were both enchanting, but I think the most impressive entrant from this subgenre of poetry was by Robert L. Dean, Jr. I found the intertextual ekphrastic play between Dean’s poems and Steven Schroeder’s watercolors in The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing worked to emphasize the elastic exchange of aesthetic impressions that the images create as context for the poems. I was delighted to find references to REM peppered alongside allusions to Homeric verse, both given equal weight as vehicles for transtextual poetic maneuvers managed with aplomb.
In spite of how impressed I was with that book, I ultimately decided that I must use the verse alone as a means of adjudication. In an effort to decide using that criterion, I noted that three poets in particular—Brian Daldorph, Michael Poage, and Janice Northerns—made use of intricate formal structures for some of their poems but also included poetry that felt highly naturalistic, improvisational, or even overheard. All three poets somehow made at least two disparate modes of narrative verse fit easily into their three respective volumes, and since the Nelson prize is for a book rather than a single poem, I thought I ought weigh the poetry within each volume in terms of how it functions as a unified whole.
Daldorph’s sequencing of Kansas Poems worked beautifully a means by which to evoke the cycles of seasons and human lives; those cycles are woven into the content of poetry, whether rendered individually in bursts of uncomfortable confession, as in “The Football Coach’s Wife,” or colloquially, as is the case for mundane childhood remembrances or even for lists, as in “Laurel Avenue,” that all feel strangely profound in spite of their everyday qualities. Each poem is a small textured fragment given meaning by its place in a larger mosaic that creates an image of Kansas as both a landscape and a cultural context for the residual agrarian rhythms that still shape the early 20th Century.
Likewise, the narrative voice in Poage’s You Must Have Your Famine is less varied than the speakers who make up Daldorph's polyphonic mosaic, but the form of Poage’s poetry shifts from the controlled and neoclassical (perhaps most obviously on display in “Scottish Sonnet”) to the conversational and postmodern (“Affection,” for instance, seems as much a review of Lahiri’s The Lowlands as a musing on what love looks like from the outside). As the going-away and coming-home of the poems’ speaker pushes readers away and then pulls them close by turns, the mode of address moves from proud to vulnerable and back around by way of shame and delight, which is surely an achievement of narrative suture owed to the poet’s great skill.
In spite of the achievements I’ve noted in Maus, Scheel, Dean, Daldorph and Poage’s collections, I think my favorite of the nominated books is Some Electric Hum. Like Daldorph, Northerns excels at embedding a depth of characterization in an abbreviated sketch of her poem’s speakers, some of whom seem to confess or extemporize in direct address to her readers. Not all the narrative poems function this way; some of the speakers are spied upon from around hospital corners or just-glimpsed in family histories told by distant cousins to readers who find themselves embarrassed witnesses of private dramas and secret tragedies. Northern crafts tender portraits of women held hostage by desire, imagining them in a kind of atemporal community, grappling together with transgenerational trauma and pedestrian misogyny. The poems “Boys Would Come on Horses,” “Zinnia Women,” and “Mother-daughter Dresses” fit together like a puzzle, and their shared thematic content sets up a series of formal poems about marriage in the final section of the volume. This section also achieves the combination of craft with innovation that was so apparent in Poage’s verse; Northerns includes a modified sestina about what holds married people together, a fourteener-ballad about how sometimes marriages fall apart anyway, and an open-verse musing on what it means to watch a once-dear loved one slowly pass away. Whether considering family, motherhood or romantic connections, Some Electric Hum reads to me like a treatise on the ways communities are crafted by wanting, having, and then letting go. Perhaps this year more than any other, readers may wish to consider how desire, possession and loss might become meaningful if understood as necessary preconditions for human connectedness. Janice Northerns uses her poetry to explore how wanting, needing, and even withholding are the practices by which families are forged, maintained, and, when necessary, broken. This book exemplifies her skill in giving language to those fragile and ephemeral experiences of connection, as well as her determination to understand how connection might be felt in the barely perceptible hum of a completed circuit, closed but still alive with alternating electric currents. For this reason, I feel that her work is most deserving of this year's Nelson Award and I congratulate her on the achievement.
All best,
Dr. Sandra Cox
In spite of how impressed I was with that book, I ultimately decided that I must use the verse alone as a means of adjudication. In an effort to decide using that criterion, I noted that three poets in particular—Brian Daldorph, Michael Poage, and Janice Northerns—made use of intricate formal structures for some of their poems but also included poetry that felt highly naturalistic, improvisational, or even overheard. All three poets somehow made at least two disparate modes of narrative verse fit easily into their three respective volumes, and since the Nelson prize is for a book rather than a single poem, I thought I ought weigh the poetry within each volume in terms of how it functions as a unified whole.
Daldorph’s sequencing of Kansas Poems worked beautifully a means by which to evoke the cycles of seasons and human lives; those cycles are woven into the content of poetry, whether rendered individually in bursts of uncomfortable confession, as in “The Football Coach’s Wife,” or colloquially, as is the case for mundane childhood remembrances or even for lists, as in “Laurel Avenue,” that all feel strangely profound in spite of their everyday qualities. Each poem is a small textured fragment given meaning by its place in a larger mosaic that creates an image of Kansas as both a landscape and a cultural context for the residual agrarian rhythms that still shape the early 20th Century.
Likewise, the narrative voice in Poage’s You Must Have Your Famine is less varied than the speakers who make up Daldorph's polyphonic mosaic, but the form of Poage’s poetry shifts from the controlled and neoclassical (perhaps most obviously on display in “Scottish Sonnet”) to the conversational and postmodern (“Affection,” for instance, seems as much a review of Lahiri’s The Lowlands as a musing on what love looks like from the outside). As the going-away and coming-home of the poems’ speaker pushes readers away and then pulls them close by turns, the mode of address moves from proud to vulnerable and back around by way of shame and delight, which is surely an achievement of narrative suture owed to the poet’s great skill.
In spite of the achievements I’ve noted in Maus, Scheel, Dean, Daldorph and Poage’s collections, I think my favorite of the nominated books is Some Electric Hum. Like Daldorph, Northerns excels at embedding a depth of characterization in an abbreviated sketch of her poem’s speakers, some of whom seem to confess or extemporize in direct address to her readers. Not all the narrative poems function this way; some of the speakers are spied upon from around hospital corners or just-glimpsed in family histories told by distant cousins to readers who find themselves embarrassed witnesses of private dramas and secret tragedies. Northern crafts tender portraits of women held hostage by desire, imagining them in a kind of atemporal community, grappling together with transgenerational trauma and pedestrian misogyny. The poems “Boys Would Come on Horses,” “Zinnia Women,” and “Mother-daughter Dresses” fit together like a puzzle, and their shared thematic content sets up a series of formal poems about marriage in the final section of the volume. This section also achieves the combination of craft with innovation that was so apparent in Poage’s verse; Northerns includes a modified sestina about what holds married people together, a fourteener-ballad about how sometimes marriages fall apart anyway, and an open-verse musing on what it means to watch a once-dear loved one slowly pass away. Whether considering family, motherhood or romantic connections, Some Electric Hum reads to me like a treatise on the ways communities are crafted by wanting, having, and then letting go. Perhaps this year more than any other, readers may wish to consider how desire, possession and loss might become meaningful if understood as necessary preconditions for human connectedness. Janice Northerns uses her poetry to explore how wanting, needing, and even withholding are the practices by which families are forged, maintained, and, when necessary, broken. This book exemplifies her skill in giving language to those fragile and ephemeral experiences of connection, as well as her determination to understand how connection might be felt in the barely perceptible hum of a completed circuit, closed but still alive with alternating electric currents. For this reason, I feel that her work is most deserving of this year's Nelson Award and I congratulate her on the achievement.
All best,
Dr. Sandra Cox
Sandra Cox is an Associate Professor at Southeast Missouri State University, where she teaches courses in contemporary American literature. She holds a doctorate in English from the University of Kansas (2011). Her first monograph, entitled An Ethics of Reading, was published in 2015. Her second book-length project, a collection of essays about gender as represented in visual narratives written by scholars from several academic disciplines, will be published under the title Intersectional Feminist Readings of Comics by Routledge this September. Her essays have also appeared in several collections edited by other scholars, including Where is Adaptation (2018), Weaving the Legacy: Remembering Paula Gunn Allen (2017), Louise Erdrich: Critical Insights (2012) and Bodies and Culture: Discourses, Communities, Representations (2012). In addition to her research on fiction and graphic novels in the US diaspora, Dr. Cox's work on cultural poetics has been published by the journals Red Feather, Interdisciplinary Literary Research, and Studies in American Indian Literature. She lives in southeast Missouri with her incredibly clever wife, two poorly trained Welsh corgis, and one very, very old Siamese cat.
RSS Feed