This post is the work of Jessica Johnson, who makes her home in Portland, Oregon, and reads poetry for the Burnside Review. –TM
I’m mainly a poet, but lately I’ve been reading fiction. A couple of weeks ago I woke up at 3:30 in the morning to finish Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I loved it in the way I loved books when I was ten: in a fully-absorbed, can’t-wait-to find-out-what-happens, dream-about-it way.
Later that day the novel was still kicking around that part of my mind where ragged half-thoughts turn to search engine queries. I actually Googled (Atonement character) Robbie Turner. I expected a picture of him in uniform, maybe a Wikipedia biography; above all, I thought I could reconnect to a world that seemed entirely real“until 30 seconds later when I remembered that Robbie was fictional.
Maybe it was sleep deprivation. But I think Geoff Dyer got it right in his Guardian review when he said of McEwan: “When he writes ???a glass of beer’ we do not just see it; we are willing to drink from it vicariously“the ability to make the invented seem real animates every page of his work.” It’s a kind of conjuring, this ability, and language being strange and slippery, it’s remarkable.
So my question is: what constitutes this “archival imagination” (Dyer again) and how does it relate to poetry?
Certainly it doesn’t hurt that McEwan situates expertly crafted characters alongside real, historical characters in real, historical settings. (He talks about this in the latest KR pod cast). The novel’s world corresponds to events and places we can recognize as historical (e.g., real wars, real battles, real hospitals, real cities) and the characters themselves are skillfully constructed and believable; hence it’s easy to equate the novel’s world with the actual world and place McEwan’s characters there.
But the aspect of McEwan’s conjuring that interests me as a poet is his quiet attention to the material existence of specific things and events. The contents of a room or a meal, the processes of a wartime hospital, the daily events of war are depicted subtly (so as not to draw attention to the past-ness of the past), but with the odd details that make the images catch. (For example, the revolting cocktail served by a revolting character: chopped mint, melted chocolate, egg yolk, coconut milk, rum, gin, crushed banana, and powdered sugar).
In a recent Burnside Review interview, poet Linda Bierds mentions McEwan as a fiction writer she admires, which is fitting, since Bierds makes heavy use of arcane objects and acts (mantles, coffers, peat chest, ear cushions, to name a few on one page of The Seconds) in her imaginative re-occupations of historical characters and events. Other poems document the times in which they are written: Elizabeth Bishop’s filling station no longer exists, but its greasy materiality lives. In “The Whitsun Weddings” Larkin’s specificity about the clothes and customs belonging to a particular kind of wedding speaks volumes.
I find this impulse to conjure a particular world refreshing in newer poems, which sometimes seem to exist in a timeless, natural ether that is not especially memorable. The “archival imagination” may be considered more a virtue of prose than of poetry. Taking the long, long view, back to the time when poetry was oral history or a medium for agricultural advice, I might argue that poems have a legitimate right to documentary particulars.
But mostly I like documentary moments as a reader. I find them thrilling, as in Victoria Chang’s spot-on rendering of the contemporary business world in “How Much,” a poem in this spring’s Paris Review. An excerpt: “Dimmed rooms with white/ screens, a man with a pointer. No one stops/ him. Someone make him stop.” And aren’t all of poetry’s pleasures legitimate?
New work from Jessica is forthcoming from Prairie Schooner and The Paris Review. Find one of Jessica’s poems here. –TM