Kristen Hanlon: Lines: From Five Poems: A Study
To Ilsa
signifier, then that sad sack
standing in the rain at the station
got what he deserved
The dedication as title strikes me first. It asks that we read at twice our resonant attention.
All eleven lines that make up the poem give Ilsa—the “us” in Ilsa—a cinematics of place,
a presaged peril. Each word is in answer to the next. But you can’t hide in the spare
“aboutness” or the stippled in between. Kristen’s voice creates a way to upend conceit.
There is no room for radical equivocation. And what ample and measured air is that on a
page? Clarity as an exponent of address and departure.
So Much Leftover Life to Kill
cloud resembling minnow shifts to shark
breeze through a keyhole, water, music, lark
In time all fragments become love letters--
This is a eulogy for that which is no longer and that which has yet to vanish. A reader
discovers absence via the extinction of a species of blue butterfly. A world without is the
world within the poem: a poetic geography of delicate multitudinous death. The lines feel
lithe and light. There is so much space weaving across the page. And that’s just it: the
spaciousness belies the claustrophobia of what is at hand. An environment at risk in the
largess of what otherwise could be. It is a searing apposition. Gossamer wings failing in
the predatory repeat of our failure. But again Kristen gives us an elegant lineated
compare:
…is the enemy of my enemy
my friend?
There is much leftover to be lived--
Pulled from a Dead Woman’s Comb
I no longer discern
asterisk from email,
blank page from broken tine--
the clouds, impassive.
Dickinson appears. Multiplicities of clouds appear. They are: hammerhead sharks,
waterlogged books, dissolving roofs, an angry goat, a cartoon dog. Or they are the cloud
of forgetting, the cloud of unknowing, the cloud of hair set loose on afternoon wind.
There is an imagistic exactitude of slant rhyme, internal rhyme, and intricately balanced
rhythm. Em dashes in homage. The language is precise and yet reaches from every
direction. The lines are short and interior. Dickinson disappears. I want to ask the poet
the question asked in the last lines of the third stanza: What would perfect quiet look
like--/a lone cloud’s shadow? But in this 21st century moment, long past the possibility
of certain reply, quiet is at its most virulent diminution: All best wishes, your/connection
has timed out.
Sadness Starts Early, Scientists Say
One holds fast to the belief love will win, but sadness starts early…
Sad scientists lugging their suitcases to conventions, sad scientists with
animated PowerPoints of icebergs melting…
Now we are in a poem of witness. Climate change, environmental disaster, capitalist
complicity: mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, insects, human, plants, kingdom, phylum,
nevermore. Scientists rise and fall. The possibility of remedy and rescue must first be
subject ultimately to ruinous experiment—and come to grief. Sorrow titrates sentience
and vice versa. This is when there is no metaphor. There is loss of life in loss of fact in
loss of truth in loss of art. Kristen’s is an unflinching view into a toxic State and “Sadness
Starts Early, Scientists Say” is a poem without pretense. Especially now, we can’t pretend
it isn’t happening.
“Don’t worry, Mama, the wind knows my name”
Tumult is another mother.
As grasses lean….
I want to leave these lines to stand alone. Except to say: read them all. These five poems.
Make them your own.
To Ilsa
signifier, then that sad sack
standing in the rain at the station
got what he deserved
The dedication as title strikes me first. It asks that we read at twice our resonant attention.
All eleven lines that make up the poem give Ilsa—the “us” in Ilsa—a cinematics of place,
a presaged peril. Each word is in answer to the next. But you can’t hide in the spare
“aboutness” or the stippled in between. Kristen’s voice creates a way to upend conceit.
There is no room for radical equivocation. And what ample and measured air is that on a
page? Clarity as an exponent of address and departure.
So Much Leftover Life to Kill
cloud resembling minnow shifts to shark
breeze through a keyhole, water, music, lark
In time all fragments become love letters--
This is a eulogy for that which is no longer and that which has yet to vanish. A reader
discovers absence via the extinction of a species of blue butterfly. A world without is the
world within the poem: a poetic geography of delicate multitudinous death. The lines feel
lithe and light. There is so much space weaving across the page. And that’s just it: the
spaciousness belies the claustrophobia of what is at hand. An environment at risk in the
largess of what otherwise could be. It is a searing apposition. Gossamer wings failing in
the predatory repeat of our failure. But again Kristen gives us an elegant lineated
compare:
…is the enemy of my enemy
my friend?
There is much leftover to be lived--
Pulled from a Dead Woman’s Comb
I no longer discern
asterisk from email,
blank page from broken tine--
the clouds, impassive.
Dickinson appears. Multiplicities of clouds appear. They are: hammerhead sharks,
waterlogged books, dissolving roofs, an angry goat, a cartoon dog. Or they are the cloud
of forgetting, the cloud of unknowing, the cloud of hair set loose on afternoon wind.
There is an imagistic exactitude of slant rhyme, internal rhyme, and intricately balanced
rhythm. Em dashes in homage. The language is precise and yet reaches from every
direction. The lines are short and interior. Dickinson disappears. I want to ask the poet
the question asked in the last lines of the third stanza: What would perfect quiet look
like--/a lone cloud’s shadow? But in this 21st century moment, long past the possibility
of certain reply, quiet is at its most virulent diminution: All best wishes, your/connection
has timed out.
Sadness Starts Early, Scientists Say
One holds fast to the belief love will win, but sadness starts early…
Sad scientists lugging their suitcases to conventions, sad scientists with
animated PowerPoints of icebergs melting…
Now we are in a poem of witness. Climate change, environmental disaster, capitalist
complicity: mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, insects, human, plants, kingdom, phylum,
nevermore. Scientists rise and fall. The possibility of remedy and rescue must first be
subject ultimately to ruinous experiment—and come to grief. Sorrow titrates sentience
and vice versa. This is when there is no metaphor. There is loss of life in loss of fact in
loss of truth in loss of art. Kristen’s is an unflinching view into a toxic State and “Sadness
Starts Early, Scientists Say” is a poem without pretense. Especially now, we can’t pretend
it isn’t happening.
“Don’t worry, Mama, the wind knows my name”
Tumult is another mother.
As grasses lean….
I want to leave these lines to stand alone. Except to say: read them all. These five poems.
Make them your own.