You might know how it feels to live in a capitalist country. To be a potted plant in the window, to see pictures of things you’d likely take pleasure in. Maybe it’ll bring you to bloom. To realize the pursuit of pleasure can be the time when you’re looking at something filled with “pleasure.” Maybe there are people in the picture, and they feel like a source of pleasure. Or pretending to make plans for the future is a pleasure. And then, as capitalism is wont, you find a way to go do what you see in the picture. But you realize you’re doing it as part of a system.
That’s what Stephanie Cawley’s book is about. Being in the middle of systems, whether it’s a system called “plot” or “loving relationship” or “hot sex.” The capitalistic systems that surround them like a cocoon—one with an especially tight grip. How is the self supposed to exist in all that? Is there space for maneuverability? Is the self a hole that people think is a thing, but, as is commonly known, a hole is whatever exists in the hole. Can you enjoy pleasure inside a hole, if you’re mainly thinking about the air in a hole? Is it possible to register scorn at all the constraints capitalism puts on a person’s life?
It’s not exactly easy to locate Cawley’s mode in the book. Or it’s not easy to recognize the organic quality of Cawley’s poetic speaker, because the organic quality occupies that space joining corporeal body and emotions and thoughts. In an organic system like that, which of them is running the show? How much of the book might be an explicit reaction against the capitalist desires that press harder and harder on any one person’s consciousness. And how much is the book a tale of containment, and what the poet can accomplish when they feel suitably contained. At one point I started to see this image of Stephanie Cawley as a potted plant. Where any one poem was so involved with a series of oppressions and micro-oppressions placed on them by the world, or sometimes it’s their own expectations making the moment feel like it could be more momentous, if only _. And the blankness of that blank represents the oppression.
But I gravitate to the image of the poet as potted plant because it’s suffocating. It’s real. And it’s gestural. It’s watering a house plant, and what’s the sensation of heavy soil closing in on a root system? How is writing a poem comparable to the biological reactions local to that clay plot. It’s the fact she feels herself buried by something that makes “life” operate at a remove. Or life feels somewhat removed from her. And yet there’s suffering to that. And that suffering is also a part of life. So where does all this lead, then? The lightness of that paradox is figured in my mind as the contained nature of potted plants. Where the poems register the mild weight of wet soil. Or the poems record the sensation of water touching soil touching the various parts of the poet’s body.
Perhaps this is too limited a consideration. But it’s the teeming nature of potted soil that I’m drawn to. How it feels unnoticed. Like the individual in a system (like capitalism) that’s really only interested in “individuals,” the ones operating in quotation marks. For me, the potted plant is mimetic of the book’s sentimental motions to that state of “individualism.” Often exhibited line to line, or sentence to sentence in the prose poems, Cawley makes a statement, then there’s another statement. And reading poems like that is comparable to the difference between a potted plant watching the sun rise through a closed window, and watching that same scene with the window open in spring.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.