Describing Waincsott’s The Star Cabins requires first, a clearing, a plane of existence, something geometric and shaped, but also lacking edges. Because Waincsott’s book is more an experience than it is a series of events. Like a poetics of the push pin, indicating what matters on this plane of existence. What are the daily moments that feel significant. A topographical map? Maybe. A chronometer that hums as the hands move around the edge. Whatever seems to be familiar to the poet. While also recognizing the poet’s surprise that some things are so similar.
What’s difficult about describing Waincsott’s poems is that they wander through language, and they identify moments that might provide access to what lies at the center (and it does feel like something is at the center, something involving “Elizabeth”). But everything is so incidental and it doesn’t lend itself to sentences. Think of minimalist fiction and its broad muscular strides to force the reader through different actions and perspectives on what might have just happened. That’s not Wainscott’s style. She’s a syntacticist, blurring one moment into the next. Time experienced as a wash in and of significantly individual moments.
It’s absolute poetry magic designed around the most subtle nudgings. Like having cut grass poured over your hands, but the smell makes you think of the whole freshly mown lawn. The challenge in this specific-moment-versus-the-larger-frame situation is how individual moments feel accountable only to an individual-ish frame. But there are clues in the book pointing to a much broader frame. Meaning the poet is suffering from something very significant that happened in her life. And I’m not sure what it is. But I know it involves someone named Elizabeth. And I think Elizabeth was a dear friend. But Elizabeth also makes the poet think about motherhood. And possibly suicide (pills in a silver envelope portentously appear many times in the book). Wainscott’s language is involved in the claustrophobic stream of existence and also the tragedy that makes it even heavier to bear.
Imagine, for instance, you had lost someone named Elizabeth. Imagine the poems you loved that had been written by someone named Elizabeth: Elizabeth Arnold. Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Elizabeth Alexander. All four of these poets appear in the Notes, or in Epigraph. The space between this kind of Elizabethan poetry and a life with Elizabeth’s name echoing through it. This is Waincsott poetically navigating a life that Elizabeth has departed. How or what a speaking subject might say about that reality, marking its patterns as they appear. Its very subjective factuality.
But also what Waincscott as a speaking subject might also be observing that is more than the entire reality around. Like the poet is aware of this panoptic reality radiating out from her, which she can see poetically, but it doesn’t feel like she’s actually seeing it when she writes, or she’s only seeing it in her mind’s eye. Again, my thoughts that these poems exist in a plane of existence. Where existence is both what the speaking subject immediately involves herself with, and existence in the details that must be populating this world she’s in, even if she doesn’t actually see them. Whatever nature keeps doing things that no people are seeing, and recognizing how these things participate with reality.
Maybe it’s also an imagined reality.
The angel in the painting Wakes with his wing the little kids
Was comfort the intention I never got that
Beyond the painting’s mossy frame Sconces dipped down their tin-can moon dust
On the wallpaper what I thought Were cabbages I found were roses
Inside those roses I wrote my name When the angel wakes those kids they die
They pass through a needle’s eye With other formerly alive creatures
Cattle wearing veils of flies And sacrificed lab mice
(from [I look cross-eyed for you every day])
Wainscott can see the angel in the painting waking “the little kids.” But she can also see past the painting’s frame, to the wallpaper, then back to the painting. Maybe we are not all significant in ourselves I read as the subext of Wainscott’s book. But whatever the moment there is a persistent significance occupying the self. Someone who would write her name inside the roses on the wallpaper. Someone who could witness the little kids dying, and mark the equivalence to other creatures dying. Maybe Wainscott’s subjectivity can’t know the actual mountain hiding behind a cloud, but knowing of it, and naming it in a poem makes that significance exist within the compass of all the significant things that happen for her.
Because it’s fitting into the language. The rhythm of sentencing without considering the benefits or necessities of sentences when they’re finishing. Wainscott is at home. She’s attending to a family. She’s remembering Elizabeth. She’s considering whether Elizabeth exists within the word, Elizabeth, and she might exist more if Wainscott’s poem says the name more. Is that how significance and existence work?
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.