I wish I was an expert on Affect Theory. Alas. I’m more like someone who follows @AffectTheory on Twitter and just tries to piece things together. The concept of it. The activity of it. The seeming presence that’s not really a presence, maybe a vibe, but explicitly not a vibe (according to theory I’ve read), and definitely not a tone. And if you’re like me thinking, um, can WTF be an affect, and knowing, yes, it likely can be, then you and me are in the same place regarding affect theory.
And yet, I will say with better-than-medium confidence that Katie Peterson’s Fog and Smoke is definitely a demonstration of affect theory on some level. At least if you think of a COVID lockdown as having an affect that everyone shared in. Or California wildfires. Or motherhood. Or womanhood. The containers of each and the sinuous relationship variables inside those containers take on. Like think of COVID, early on, when you would walk through a city wearing a mask, and you were grateful other people could be considerate. The isolation felt insidious and necessary. Which feels like affect laying itself over the entire culture. And it might be this is how I reveal my imperfect knowledge of this critical lens.
But it’s how the book’s opening poem, “Fog,” operates, blurring the line between cultural anxiety and personal reckoning, “an alphabet on top / of the one you knew, a redo,” that feels affect-ish. Because it’s not that Peterson is only thinking about COVID. It’s how she’s accounting for concerns. The concern of motherhood. The concern of wildfires. The metaphors that could provide some insight, but not an entirety of insight. In this way, it reminds me of Paul Otremba’s book, ‣, which folds local events into the general anxiety of the book. Like living through local events (in Otremba’s case, the flooding incidental to Hurricane Harvey) shape the personal aspect of concern, but also preserve the overwhelmingly intimate nature of the personal when it appears in poems.
For instance, in Peterson’s poem, “The Fire Map,” she assembles a complex analog connecting California’s fire maps with her own feelings of love—familial love, romantic love. In particular, the idea that her own romantic history could be registered on a map, but the love that feels most immediately relevant is what she experiences now. Which is like the map California maintains about its wildfires. Updated to show the current positions and containments of fires, and imperfectly reflecting where previous fires had been. The nature of this analogy, where cultural experience of a natural disaster meets personal reckoning with history, the influence of the general on Peterson’s perspective is how I think affect is particularly at play. Mainly in the way analogy in “The Fire Map” is not so hard-edged. It feels atmospheric. The cultural inflecting on the personal and the personal absorbing the cultural into a poetic understanding, and the poet’s light discursive feathering joining the two together.
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.