While still an undergrad, I was lucky enough to attend a reading by Joanna Klink. We had been reading her second book, Circadian, in my poetry class that week, and I was eager to hear some of the poems that I found so simultaneously enchanting and frustrating read out loud. Enchanting in the way she made each landscape terrifying and bleak with this lush, ringing language. Frustrating in the way that I felt I couldn’t quite enter any of these landscapes, that I was always on the periphery; frustrating that I never quite connected the circadian theme to the poems. Frustrating that I had no idea a book of poetry could have so many endnotes (something that, now, I always flip to first, eager to see how a poet manages their resources, to what they see fit to give credit).
Did her reading offer any kind of navigation to her poems? Not really. But it did provide an atmosphere where I began to understand why these poems seemed so impenetrable—they were wrapped in layers and layers of a heartbreaking, heightened consciousness, wrapped in layers of suffering. Klink seemed on the verge of tears throughout most of the reading, but not in the please-get-some-medication Cat Power manner. More in that the entirety of the reading was compiled of what sounded like truly felt utterances, almost as if each poem was being admitted to, or admitted into, the world for the first time. I walked away with a beautiful broadside of the poem “Some Feel Rain,” which had yet to be published in her following collection, Raptus.
Before I get to this poem, let me just say that for the past year, I have taken this book with me on every single vacation. It has been out of the country. To New York, Iowa, Illinois, Colorado, and to AWP in Washington D.C. It is now back in Oregon, where I am visiting my mother, and will fly back to Indiana with me in a month. It is a book I live with, one that feels utterly unfamiliar when I come back to it, as if I’ve never seen each poem before. And what a respite from the catchy, easy poetry I, like so many others, read (and, admittedly, enjoy) so often. That’s a fairly large preamble, but I often find these are necessary while getting into the thick of difficult poetry, an am I really going to get myself into this again sort of routine.
“Some Feel Rain” relies heavily on the anaphora “some feel” spilling out from the title. This continues for the first three lines (“Some feel rain,” Some feel the beetle…,” “Some feel musk”) before being interrupted by the description of what happens “when it falls apart.” Just as the couple “asleep against / each other” are falling apart, so is the anaphora. This is the genius of the poem: the layering, the interrupting, the way the voices seem to weave in and out, creating rhythm then breaking rhythm. I’m reminded of listening to Julianna Barwick’s music, the almost religious experience of her voice circling over itself again and again without ever seeming static. This is something the poem never is: static. Just when a kind of pattern seems to assert itself, Klink introduces a question: “Do I imagine there is any place so safe it can’t be / snapped?” Someone once told me that they didn’t believe in asking questions in poems. Instead, they thought that truly deft poems were a question in themselves, and so did not need the signaling punctuation. I’ve mulled this over for some time, but Klink’s question is one that has continually haunted me, one that has reinstated my faith in the question mark. The speaker is simultaneously reprimanding and wondering; she chides herself for being so naïve while asking herself if she ever knew she was. Then back to the anaphora: “Some feel the rivers shift.” The poem, too, is shifting into what I assume to be a self-address:
You can wait
to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury
the early star underdraws the night and its blackest
districts.
Dang, Joanna—you had me at ankle-burrs. These kennings (“ghost-part,” “patch-thick,” “coal-thick”) are what I would call one of her trademarks, which I can’t help but attribute to her love of Paul Celan (about whom she has a book-in-progress, titled Strangeness). Trademarks, but not gimmicks, for they are necessary, stringing together language with a sense of desperation, as if words-in-themselves cannot suffice to convey, well, anything, really. No wonder I first found her poems evasive.
The last three lines shift again, this time toward a new anaphora:
Why others feel
through coal-thick night that deeply colored garnet
star. Why sparring and pins are all you have.
Why the earth cannot make its way toward you.
Indeed, a lovely lyric ending—one I could picture Sappho playing on her lyre, calling out with that devastating mix of beauty and angst and knowledge and the realization that none of what has been said gains any proximity. Not to the lover. Not to the earth.
There are some poems I want to memorize to keep with me every day; this is one I will never commit to memory, as I hope for it to be just as unfamiliar, just as strange, each time I return.
