What would autobiography look like if it were forced into a rigid box. If the writer was forced to perform in the box. The parameters pre-defined. But, then, the poet embraces the requirements given to her. Because the autobiographies she’s writing don’t actually concede to a set of uniform boxes. They’re designed to make you feel boxed-into a set context while you’re reading. They’re a series of boxes but made from different shapes, different contortions of “shape.” It’s like they’re “autobiographies” in the end, interested in what a box means, and what a box must feel like.
That’s what reading Margaret Ross’s Saturday is. Autobiography aware it might be read as “autobiography.” Where Ross stares hard at her every intention to write an autobiography, but only if it’s done while the family reunion takes place, only if it’s done in the room you shared with your sister as a child, only during that summer when you taught a course and met a man who would impose himself on your life. There are many shapes a life can be shaped into depending on what the autobiography focuses on. What if commerce or money served as a centripetal force throwing the poet’s version of life out from the center. What order would they have? What shape? And what I appreciate is Ross looking at purchases or services rendered as an action in life rather than some distilled essence of who she is. Like each transaction could be folded into a series of silhouettes pressing into the walls of the house. I’m thinking in particular of the poems framing her life via the babysitter she had growing up. A relationship filled with genuine affection, but also something that was purchased.
At the heart, Ross’s exist as a discursive misshapenness. What it would feel like to have rugs piled on top of you. Each poetic statement weighting you down. And you have to admit, it’s a little comforting. Maybe even cozy beneath all the layers. And whereas there is discursiveness in poetry that exists mainly in that pile-on mode, I read Ross’s fitting an order or shape. Her commitment to context defines what could be considered their edges.
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.