Dear Hannah Emerson,
I spent the twelfth summer of my life on a sailboat. It was a rinky dink thing. The captain’s name was Randolph. For an egregiously low price he’d take your kid out on the Hudson every day for a month. He called it “Sailing Camp,” and it was pretty popular with locals. We would dock on the shores of river islands, trespass and jump off cliffs. Randolph always sported a pair of wraparound sunglasses that pinched the fleshy sides of his semi-balding head, which was connected — impossibly, it seemed — to a stocky body whose arms were tanned to a deep and sickly shade of orange.
It was the hottest day of the year when Randolph told us about the Green Flash. There being more campers than room on the boat, half of us were splayed out on the prow, heat stroke pushing black dots into the corners of our vision. The details of Randolph’s maritime background are a bit foggy now, but I know he spent some time on a ship on the Atlantic. With his massive legs crossed and resting on the railing, he told us about looking at the sun set over the ocean. One night, right as the sun disappeared, he watched a beam of green light burst out of the water and somersault into the air. It was the Green Flash— the curve of the Earth refracting sunlight. The flash is contingent on a bunch of atmospheric factors being just right and is pretty rare to see, but it happens.
Hannah, I think about your poetry as that brief beam of light. To give everyone else here a better idea of what I mean, I’ll quote one of your poems, called ‘The Edge,’ in full:
“To be down
down look for
the grownd.
Help me look
help me go
to the edge.
Yes it is
lovely here
on the edge.
I want to go
to the edge
frequently.
It is keeping
the ground
growing now
more nothing.
How to take
nothing. ”
The small, almost imperceptible message that the sun sends out as it disappears on the other side of the planet, over the edge— that looks like nothing, that goes to a place unknown to the onlooker and sends back brief and dazzling words. It’s the closest thing in life that I can find to the way you tease out, through repetition and furious attention, the messages that the world leaves us from its other side. You want to find out. You scan the horizon for flashes of light.
The first thing people tend to notice about you is your tendency to repeat words inside of a poem (“great great person of the light,” “moment moment moment moment keep in the moment,” ) until their meaning expands. The title of your book repeats itself. The Kissing of Kissing calls to mind an egg, with the broader category of “kissing” acting as the shell and the more specific sensation of kissing that you refer to resting inside the word like a yolk. You seem to be telling us that every word is like this. A rigid, unifying shell with a whole mess of blended meanings hidden inside of it. The “beautiful muck,” in your words! The more you repeat a word, the more its meaning falls away and the act of repetition takes over. Language ceases to work didactically and starts to move emphatically.
This emphasis is helped by your constant pleading, asking much more of some second presence. Plenty of your poems begin with the word “please.” “Please try to go / to hell / frequently,” you write, and I can feel how desperate you’re getting. “Please/ try to help yourself/ by kissing the hot hot/ hot life that is born there.” It is easy to think that you are talking to the reader, and it probably helps for the reader to think they’re being addressed. But I think that you’re really talking to the poem. Or a centaur of the poem and yourself. “I sound/ each prayer to let all of / language answer me,” you write later. I like to think that the prayer is the poem, going down to hell and coming back with language’s answer. It can’t perform this task without some prompting. For you a poem isn’t an inert thing on a page for an audience to pick up and put down. It’s a spell, an incantation. It can make language move.
But what exactly are you asking of the poem? I think it’s easier just to read what you wrote, but I can try and take a stab at it. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you are asking for it to cross through a crucible of extreme perception into a greater sense of the world as it actually is. And what the world actually is to you — now I’m really stepping out! — is a prehistoric, miasmatic goo that the visible, more categorizable world emerged from. In this goo there are no distinctions. It moves through the world and is a constant state of becoming— Hegel’s geist in hiking boots. “Let’s try to go/ to the underworld/ that melts us/ into one yes,” you write, acknowledging the “great great life that grows/ from there.” That life you’re talking about is in a constant state of flux: “please/ help kiss the process that is happening/ in this world now yes,” you write. Everything is everything else: “The bird lands// on the top/ of the tree/ and realizes it/is me.” That’s not an analogy. By repeating words you break their shells and show us the ambiguity inside of them. Through direct address you turn your poems into actions. Through actions you bend down into the underworld of experience and scoop up heaps of primordial gunk.
Most days, Randolph would dock the ship at the train station under the Kingston-Rhinecliff bridge and we’d have lunch. After lunch we would take turns throwing each other into the water. Sometimes, kids would wrestle, trying to suplex each other off the dock. When these wrestling matches would start to get heated, all the kids would chant: “River! River! River!” until one of the wrestlers fell. Maybe if we hadn’t performed this chant no one would’ve been plunged into the water. Maybe we brought the river closer.
I hope this letter finds you well and in good health. Enjoy the rest of your day!
All the best,
Dante Kanter
