Name: Jessica Lee Richardson, but Jess is fine.
What does poetry mean to you?
It means the air has changed. It glints. I am somewhere I was always going, a place I know, but I have never been and will never return. Am I accidentally quoting someone here? I might be. . .
What is your favorite poem?
No, I can’t do it. Some poems have impacted me so much they’ve become a part of my life. So how about if I shrink the question? Favorite poem I’ve heard read (by a poet I didn’t know)?
I would pick this one by Kate Greenstreet. It stunned me when I heard it in Tuscaloosa sometime in the early 2010’s at Green Bar, surrounded by a big, quiet crowd:
our weakness no stranger
It must have been great at first. The gravel lane,
the white phone, the cakes. That lampshade,
we had. Absolutely exact.
A family was standing in a high place.
Down in the street, a car beeped
and then they all waved. You see what it becomes.
He was a boy once.
He remembers
his father. And all the men.
He rebuilds the maze, he’ll bring his son here.
Why do you laugh? are you afraid?
Will you sit here ’til I fall asleep?
She has her habit in the suitcase.
Even a stone can disappear.
And now this. This is really hard.
Yes. Or “be a man.”
Imagine how strong he’d need to be.
Please don’t tell me more about the future.
As you’ve heard
it has started to
snow
again
snow chains
on the mountain roads
chains are needed
What light!
He beats her.
And everybody knows.
Here’s the house, still white.
Arms
Sight
Absence
The life I’d have. Giant apples?
or the first red leaves? What else did he like?
Let’s go under those trees.
She looks after them
with concern. How long? Considering the ties
of that year. The knots. Was it just a sex thing?
We were looking for a street.
There had been
some kind of earthquake.
And I remember this part very clearly—
Something so familiar, not from now
but—it’s like dating a statue. I mean,
500 BC600 BCdating it.
There were no men. I don’t know why.
War.
Or just the time of day. Let me hear his name again.
I looked it up, but it wasn’t there. I got
“Do I have to use a condom?” and
“Your camera doesn’t matter.”
Promise.
Swear not to.
The shelves are empty. Everyone’s
lifetime.
I thought you didn’t believe in sin.
Statue burns down, we make another statue.
There’s a special name for
all of us are having the same dream.
Why do you like this poem?
It really arrested me when I heard it. It still does. Her voice. There’s no pushing. It’s hard and warm and creates an atmosphere that’s irreal even though it's authentic. It’s completely singular. But I recognize it. The clipping of thoughts. Endless conversations that can’t go on. The way trauma chops the memory, the sentence, the line.
Every simple word of this poem is charged. There is constant surprise.
What light!
He beats her.
And everybody knows.
The narrator is present here holding this devastation, saying, “You see what it becomes.” Saying, “Why do you laugh? are you afraid?” Or telling us where to look. “Let’s go under those trees.” There is a kindness and also a ferocity in the way it’s held. “Please don’t tell me more about the future.” We have a guide in this narrator, the only kind there is, the kind not pretending to be capable of the job, the one admitting the job can’t be done. But it doesn’t need to be, because you know the truth, don’t you? You coauthored this dream and the dream that allows this dream.
Not only can the metaphorical statue not be dated, it can be burned down, made anew. There is nothing to hold onto. Time is exploded at the end enacting this:
The shelves are empty. Everyone’s
lifetime.
It’s a terrible intimacy that’s created, this warmth constructed from eerily familiar scraps of reckoning. Statue making. Ligaments we know are erased. Halting lines encased in breath.
In the last line "dream" can be interpreted in enough ways to offer a glimmer of gritty hope, or at least wonder. The dream of the patriarchy is only one dream. There are others we can have. There is the dream of the poem. And then there are the ones at night and maybe we can meet up there and begin to remake.
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Jessica Lee Richardson is the author of It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides (FC2, 2015), which won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award in 2016. Poems have appeared in Posit, Sundog, Big Lucks and other places. She is from New Jersey, and spent her twenties in Brooklyn working in Off-Broadway theatre. Lately, she’s been writing about (and running from) record-breaking storms in the southeast.