Sarah Audsley’s Landlock X and Adoption Poetics

A version of this review (and a better edited version) may appear in a future issue of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics.

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Adoptee poetics is a means of exploring the unique experiences and perspectives of adoptees by using poetry as a tool for exploring issues such as identity, belonging and “the cadence of unspoken longing” (“Broken Palette :: a retrospective in panels”), loss, abandonment, and family, such as these lines from “Letter to My Adoptee Diaspora”:

. . . I wonder if you long
for an unnamed touch or smell, a sense of gnawing
from the inside . . .
then you, dear adoptee, are not alone.
I am lonely, too.

In addition, adoptee poets often use language in a way that is both playful and subversive, playing with traditional ideas of family and identity to create new and more inclusive narratives. They use poetry as a means of redefining what it means to be a family, and of challenging the traditional definitions of belonging and identity that have long been associated with adoption. At its core, adoptee poetics is a means of reclaiming agency and autonomy or trying to resolve:

Again, I try to remember what
it was like in an orphanage
in a country where I’ve never lived,
in a foreign tongue.

(“On Meeting My Biological Father”)

The above quote acts as a pivot between adoption poetics in general and a sub-genre – transnational adoptee poetics. Transnational adoption poetics explores the experiences of adoptees who have been brought up in cultures and countries different from the country of their birthplace. For instance, in “Letter to My Adoptee Diaspora”:

We are . . .
. . . shoveling ramen into our mouths
trying to make us “Real Asians.” . . .
. . .
What do we replace for DNA – a house, new cars,
inadequate lovers . . .
. . . Do you feel like you
were robbed of your culture?

Transnational adoption poems often focus on the intersection of race [transracial adoption poetry], nationality, and adoption, and the challenges faced by adoptees in reconciling their identities and finding a sense of belonging. Transnational poetry is based on the premise that transnational adoption:

is a global phenomenon that is informed by the intersections of multiple systems of power, including white supremacy, sexism, ableism, war, and colonialism. Erasure and displacement are inherent in adoption stories, and there is no singular adoptee narrative. (Cancio-Bello)

These type of poems often reflect the tension and confusion that can arise when adoptees are raised in a culture that is different from their own, and the struggle to reconcile their adoptive and birth cultures. Transnational adoption poetry also explores the complex relationship between identity and language. Adoptees may grow up speaking a different language from their birth culture, and they may struggle to fully understand and connect with their heritage. These poems often reflect the importance of language in shaping their understanding of their world, and the ways in which it can be a means of connection or disconnection. (You can learn more about transnational adoption poetry and transracial adoption poetry at The Starlings Collective.) In Sarah Audsley’s Landlock X, adoption poetics and transnational adoption poetics are experienced.

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Landlock X opens with “[untranslated],” a two-page spread of an image “of a handwritten letter from the poet’s biological father” (“Notes”), which I assume is written in Korean. It appears to be written in a journal with pristine handwriting on each line of the page. It also appears to present order, structure, and depth of thought. The letter presents the stories/tropes/lies people hear about adoption, but in fact, adoption is quite distant from those propagandist terms. Audsley points this out in the first translation of the letter and erasure poem “[translation/1].” The translation reads in broken English just as the father might speak, and it reads like stream of consciousness. The erasure occurs in all the letters being crossed out and grayed out (as if faded by time end/or memory) except for each occurrence of “I” and “i,” which are bolded.  The first paragraph of the letter holds a common cliche of a birth parent (bparent) – “I couldn’t properly raise you” – that adopted children prefer not to hear as they don’t believe it is a genuine excuse. (I will make assumptions like this based on my adoption experiences and from interacting with and reading about many other adoption experiences.) This cliche is heightened even more in the next paragraph where he writes, “Few month later” [sic] he was married and had children. That must be devastating for the Audsley to hear. It’s sounds dismissive and hints that the father may be thinking the newborn Audsley was not worthy enough to raise. The preceding plus the bolded and uncrossed out “I”s and “i”s in the erasure letter leads the reading audience to realize the selfishness of the father. It’s seems to be all about him. The subtext is that he has essentially erased the origin of the poet. (Later, the reader learns the newborn Audsley becomes a repressed memory of the father that is mixed into the repressed memories of the father during a war.) In the end, the  poet probably feels unwanted as most adopted people at multiple points in their lives do. This leads to many adopted poets searching for identity and agency.

In “[translation/3],” the poet almost finds both. Using the same translated letter from her father, this time, however, Audsley gains agency, in a way, from “you” and “u,” the letters that are bolded, not grayed out, and not crossed out in this translation. She is present in her boldedness. However, since this is from the father’s writing, it’s as if he still controls her agency. She still cannot use the pronoun “I,” and is referred to as “you,” as if an outsider. It even recalls the lines “Do you feel like you / were robbed of your culture?” The linebreak on “you” poses the real question for adoptees: do you feel like a you or an I?

Audsley does struggle with the proper pronoun of individuality and which pronoun to adopt: “I,” “you,” or “X.” For instance, in the haibun “Now, where are you from?” where she has to respond to ignorant questions, she ends the paragraph: “I am from Vermont / I am from the sea / I grew up here / I am from the stars / I am from Korea / I am not from Korea / I am, I am, I . . . i . . . i . . .” She tries to identify who she is, and she is all of these things even if they are contradictory, which in my mind recalls Whitman’s “Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” And her I-ness is large and multitudinal. What’s interesting, however, is the last lower-case “i”s. On one level it sounds like an exasperating “aye, aye, aye” to all the ignorant questions. And it also suggests the uneasiness of her identity as it loses the confidence in the uppercase “I.” She might be feeling less than “I.” Or maybe she is feeling the unidentifiable X that needs to be solved for – “the X / inside a body” (“Caspian Lake”), where X is the fetus insider her bmother’s body and X is also inside Audsey’s own body. Is it possible to solve for X with those two equations? Is it possible to solve the pronoun issue of the confident “I,” the inconsequential “i,” the othering “you,” or the X not marking the spot? These are some of the questions her adoption poetics tries to reconcile.

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Throughout the collection, the color yellow is repeated. Yellow is first examined in “Crown of Yellow,” a poem of one-line aphorisms, such as “Or shame. Yellow, I think, is always this way.” This is built on later when Audsley’s adoption mother (amother) tells her,  “Never dress Asian babies in yellow, my mother instructs me, Clashes with their skin. I learned from you, she says.” Yellow is unflattering in clothing and in the racist coloring of an Asian person’s skin. This sets up a real conflict of transnational and transracial adoption poetry – racism. For example, Audsley’s college boyfriend makes a racist remark in “Broken Palette :: a retrospective in panels” when he says, “You’re a Twinkie. You know, yellow on the outside, white on the inside.” This remark also suggests that she only appears Korean but her soul is white. And this type of racism is later built on in “[American] Sampler,” which has the picture of “an advertisement in Ours Magazine, November-December, 1983, Vol. 16, No. 6” (“Notes”). In part it reads: “Korean-American Alphabet / Sampler Counted Cross Stitch,” and below it shows the Korean alphabet and the Roman alphabet. The suggestion is that the language can easily be overlapped, cross stitched, by replacing the Korean alphabet character with the Roman equivalent. This presents the oversimplification of what people assume adopting a person from another country is like. It’s as if the ad is suggesting a Twinkie can exist with two simple ingredients: yellow and white, or “Just drop the kid in a new culture and language, and they will adapt because it’s just simple swapping and translating.” And as anyone who has tried to translate a poem from another language knows, “poetry is what gets lost in translation” (Robert Frost). In this case, poetry can also mean individuality.

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So much more can be said about this collection of poems and her adoption poetics, but in Landlocked X, Sarah Audsley appears to have unlocked herselves and has shared those selves with us.

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Works Cited

Cancio-Bello, Marci Calabretta, Ausley Moon, and Tiana Nobile. “Resistance and Reclamation: Three Poets Revise the Narrative of Transracial, Transnational Adoption.” Poets & Writers, 13 Oct. 2021, www.pw.org/content/resistance_and_reclamation_three_poets_revise_the_narrative_of_transracial_transnational.

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Audsley, Sarah. Landlock X. Texas A&M University Press, 2003.

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Yesterday and Today Arrive in Chalk Song

A version of this review (and a better edited version) may appear in a future issue of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics.

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Chalk Song (Lily Poetry Review Books) is the first book of poetry that I have encountered with a triumvirate of authors – Gale Batchelder, Susan Berger-Jones, and Judson Evans. It’s quite a feat to compose poems with three minds swirling together, especially when I consider all the times I tried to write something by committee and that almost always led to over-simplification, compromises, and confusing text. These authors, however, have succeeded in following the advice of Robert Creeley, “Our approach was guided by Robert Creeley’s collaborations with visual artists, of which he said, ‘if collaboration is to be at all successful, it must be the result of different individuals . . . working together to make something that is larger than sensibility’” (ix). These three authors found a voice who speaks of and to the Paleolithic era, its art and artists, and to today’s eight-plus billion humans.

The concept of this collection of poems was inspired by Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which is documentary that explores the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France that contains some of the oldest known cave paintings in the world, dating back to over 30,000 years ago and maybe even 50,000 years ago. In the documentary, Herzog used 3D cameras to capture stunning images of paintings and sculptures. In doing so, he muses on the nature of human creativity and humanity’s connection to the past.

As I entered Chalk Song, I expected, based on the above information, investigations similar to Clayton Eshleman’s many poetry books on Paleolithic art which often through dream imagery examine the Paleolithic art and artists and the roots of human consciousness, or my collection of poems on Paleolithic art and culture that examines paleolithic art and artists to not only understand them but to better understand ourselves today. The poems in Chalk Song achieve both those ends, but they don’t feel obligated to remain situated in the Paleolithic era. It’s as if their book is a wormhole that not only connects today to the Paleolithic era, but it allows information to move back and forth For instance, there are references to x-rays, shepherds, cameras, cities, a Swiss Army knife, GPS, fortune cookies, etc. More specifically, here are the opening the second and third stanzas and closing stanza of “Codex Collapse Syndrome” (19):

Everything is early, spry with milt, the delicate climate

of arrival, draughts of air so narrow our ears fold back

their sounds. Comb over psalms smelt muzzles

from the overlap of horse heads. Music can’t

caress itself by these long-playing lassoes

 

Contour before line, overtones before the molten bell

of an opening. We are sphinx-cubs in our hiding places.

The sky on our skin still unhewn,

our scribbled brochures of lighting.

 

. . .

 

Anyone can draw a blue bead

on the G.P.S.  forking river for the vector

home, or carve a new nipple

 

Here, the speaker is navigating in and between two times and comparing methods of mapping. Or later in “Confetti Score” (25), where the speaker is talking to and asking a Paleolithic artist questions like, “If you hands had drawn me, would I have been marooned?” While still in the past, “Someone sneezes” and her (the speaker’s) “heather is cloned.” Then all of the sudden, she see “glyph structures . . . on the Internet.” The past has not only travelled through time, but it has been cloned and digitized and reality becomes blended like “computer strings [hanging] from elms.”

Throughout the collection, the poems, stanzas, and even lines at times behave like the paintings on a Paleolithic cave wall. The paintings in the same cave or even on the same cave wall do not appear to be related or have a narrative flow between them, but they are connected by artists’ visions and by a viewer trying to make meaning of and from them, much like Herzog’s documentary. When combined into the figurative cave of Chalk Song, the poems of three individuals create questions and meanings of our origins and where we are today, which is a place still deeply connected to 50,000 years ago. In essence, the poets indicate that the past is an echo of today.

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Batchelder, Gale, Susan Berger-Jones, and Judson Evans. Chalk Song. Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022.

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Redactions: Poetry & Poetics 2022 Pushcart Nomination

Redactions: Poetry & Poetics has made its nominations for the 2022 Pushcart Prize. In the order of appearance in issue 25 are:

1. Jeannine Hall Gailey: When I Try to Write an Elegy (page 12)
2. Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas: The Wheelchair (page 14)
3. Cliff Saunders: Blank Page (page 16)
4. Xiaoly Li: What Language (page 23)
5. Susan Cohen: Lost in Sutzkever (page 27)
6. Melody Wilson: When it comes down to it (page 38)

For two years in a row, the poems that appeared on pages 14 and 38 were nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

To read these poems go here: https://redactions.com/pushcart-poems.asp or order a copy of issue 25 from here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/redactionspoetry.

Four New Poetic Forms

For the poetry club at Nashville State Community College, the participants asked me to prepare some lessons on some poetic forms. I decided to go with new forms. With the help of Facebook, I found a quite a few, and then I narrowed the list down to the four below. Perhaps they will be new to you, too.

The Gigan

This form was invented by poet Ruth Ellen Kocher. Kocher named the form in honor of her favorite monster from Godzilla.

Here are the rules:

1. The poem is 16 lines.
2. The lines are broken into couplet, tercet, couplet, couplet, couplet, tercet, couplet.
3. Line 1 is repeated as line 11.
4. Line 6 is repeated as line 12.
5. Ideally, the closing couplet should put a twist on the poem.

(from https://bit.ly/3CQ6BXo)

Samples at above link

The Bop

The Bop is a form of poetic argument consisting of three stanzas, each followed by a repeated line or refrain. The first stanza is six lines and presents a problem; the second stanza is eight lines and further expands upon the problem; and the third stanza is six lines and either resolves or documents the failure of resolving the problem. . . . Afaa Michael Weaver . . . created the form during a Cave Canem writing retreat (from https://www.pw.org/content/the_bop)

To me it appears that the overall structure resembles a sonnet with the open two quatrains acting as a thesis, the following quatrain acting as antithesis, and the couplet acting as synthesis.

Sample: https://poets.org/poem/rambling

The Duplex

Jericho Brown introduced the poetry world to the duplex form with the publication of his 2019 collection, The Tradition, which includes several poems written in this style. In an interview, Brown revealed that the form came about when he was trying to “gut the sonnet,” as he wanted to create a “disparate couplet” and move the repeating lines of the sonnet closer together. In the end, the duplex became a sort of hybrid between the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues.

The poem starts with a couplet, then the second line repeats and the poet adds a new line, following this structure until seven couplets form the poem. The last line of the poem repeats the first, with an increased or changed resonance that the rest of the poem’s context provides. (from https://bit.ly/3erboFr)

Sample: https://www.aprweb.org/poems/duplex-i-begin-with-love

12²

Created by Charles Bernstein and unearthed by me. 😀 There are twelve stanzas. The first line of each stanza is five syllables, the second line has three syllables, and the third line has four syllables: a Pythagorean triple 5²=3²+4². Each stanza has 12 syllables, so there should be 144 syllables or 12² syllables. That’s the promise, but the promise is broken. Because of the broken promise, the poem actually has 145 syllables. There is also no punctuation and there is a line between each stanza. In addition, there are no articles (“a,” “an,” and “the”) or superfluous adjectives or adverbs.

For more on the form and for a sample poem, see: https://wp.me/pS37c-1kG

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Introduction to the Sitcom Section of Redactions Issue 27: A Rough Draft

Below is a draft for the introduction of the sitcom-themed section of Redactions issue 27, which is due out in early summer 2023. I am posting it here to give people a better sense of what I am looking for in submissions for the sitcom issue. I hope you enjoy it, and if you are submitting, I hope it helps provide directions for my expectations.

For submission information, please visit: Redactions: Poetry & Poetics: Submissions and Ordering.

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Many of us grew up watching sitcoms. For some, it was a family bonding experience. For me, that was about the only time our family got along and were quiet. Also, for me, having returned to America from England midway through second grade, a sitcom allowed me to have something to talk about with fellow students in an attempt to make new friends.

Sitcoms are still a way to interact with others. Who hasn’t bonded with someone or someones by singing the theme song to The Brady Bunch, Cheers, or Gilligan’s Island? (According to critics the Gilligan’s Island theme song is the best theme song because it is catchy and because it informs the viewers of the situation and the characters they will soon encounter. It informs the viewers of the show’s premise.) For me, sitcoms were also a learning experience. My parents were quite distant, and I hated reading, but sitcoms taught me. The Fonz from Happy Days taught me ethics. Yes, the Fonz had a code. One Day at a Time and Alice taught me about the increasingly frequent situation of a single mother raising children. (Julia, however, was the first to cover this topic from 1968 to 1971, but I was unable to watch that show.) Welcome Back Kotter exposed me to a neighborhood of diverse students that I was unfamiliar with. Good Times showed me the life of a struggling black family, and The Jeffersons celebrated a wealthy black family and the mother (Louise “Weezy” Jefferson) who was uncomfortable with her wealth.

Sitcoms, especially in the early seasons of their run, tried to explore issues of the day. For instance, The Brady Bunch in season one tried to explore an increasingly common experience of two formerly married people with children remarrying, and the issues that arise when two families combine. After season one, the show slowly became ridiculous and a little absurd. All in the Family explored many topics, especially racism via Archie Bunker. Archie, though compassionate, would argue about many topics with his liberal son-in-law, Meathead. I usually thought Meathead won the arguments, but I had my doubts when he left Gloria for another woman. Archie and Meathead were so contentious that they even argued about how to put on socks and shoes. Kate and Allie proposed a new definition of what constitutes a family. Who’s the Boss challenged gender roles in adults as it presented the idea that a man could perform “woman” chores without the stigma of castration being present, and it presented gender fluidity in children. And The Golden Girls and Valerie (later Valerie’s Family and then The Hogan Family) addressed AIDS in unique ways that undermined the bigoted idea that AIDS could only be transferred via gay sex or drug addicts. All of this was important because sitcoms reached a large audience of people who were uninformed on these issues. As a result, the sitcom with its huge audiences had huge responsibilities. Sitcoms became an active learning experience. Sitcoms attempted to teach serious topics through a comedic approach, and I, like many others, was an avid student ready to learn without having to read.

No place was this more evident than in M*A*S*H. Robert Frost once said about the poem, “If it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness. Neither one alone with the other under it will do.” I didn’t know this at the time, but I intuited this about M*A*S*H. Rather, I was shocked. I thought a sitcom was just supposed to be funny, but M*A*S*H was humorous on the outside and serious on the inside. This, in a sense, means sitcoms are more than just ha ha laughs. Sitcoms can be used to explore serious issues that one might not otherwise encounter, especially for me as a non-reader for about the first 19 years of my life. Sitcoms are tools that help the viewer explore . . .  at least in the early seasons, as noted above. Eventually, most sitcoms will jump the shark. Initially, however, they have serious goals: “If we happen to laugh hysterically along the way, all the better because humor has always been a successful way to look at our differences and find our commonality” (Robinson, 99). This is what I hoped this section would explore.

I find it challenging to write about a sitcom. One reason is that a sitcom seems so antithetical to poetry, and perhaps it is. However, many poets of my age have ingested sitcoms, and those television shows are part of them like real memories. The nostalgia plus the antithetical spirit creates the difficulty of writing a sitcom poem with integrity. M*A*S*H is important to me, but I can’t yet find a way to bring it or its characters into a poem. This might be true of all subjects, but tv and poetry have historically been judged at opposing ends. In this issue of Redactions, I hope the ends will meet. I hope when reading these poems, you will find humor outside and seriousness inside, or even seriousness outside and humor inside. Perhaps a bit of both. //

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Works Cited

Robinson, Mark A. Sitcommentary: Television Comedies that Changed America. Rowan & Littlefield, 2019.

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