On Men and Meter(s)
by Marc Zegans
Rachelle Escamilla’s gathering of five poems, excerpted from Me Drawing a Picture of Me[n], carries us through tonally, emotionally and formally varied poetic recollections of encounters with men responding to a craigslist ad. The poems, cannily crafted and emotionally frank, are individually arresting, and collectively instructive about the possibilities for and limited access to transcendence in the context of brief (and often sexual) encounter.
In the first poem, unnamed, Escamilla actively situates us in a time of ritual, when men in their thirties, not quite beginners but bound by convention, don “slick business suits” carrying “horned lilac/ blossoms in their pockets.” We’re four lines on and she’s dropped us into a reversal of expectation and a confusion of senses: Where are these pockets? Are the lilacs visible? Are they boutonnières? And if so why and when?
Now, for we are in this time of slick suits, she slips in second stanza into conditional characterization, “It is a sort of feeding frenzy…” raising questions—What sort of frenzy? What other sorts might there be? What does noting this frenzy as being one of a variety tell us? How does that placement matter to our reading?—even as she defines type, “for/walkers, wine drinkers.” Her play between kind and category, specificity and space is achingly sexy for what it leaves blank.
Consider as alternative a straight descriptive account of what, in this suited time, is happening. It is a feeding frenzy for/walkers, wine drinkers. That’s how a man, a man in a slick suit would have written it: dumb, denotative and direct. Dropping, “a sort of” from the first line alters the emphasis. We’re now smacked in the face with the consonant urgency of the triple struck f words and the alliterative ws in the second line as proxies for women. It’s about sound and a fuck, hard in the first, soft in the second lacking in ache, allure and the possibility of transcendence (and the author in her craigslist post asks for a “fellow transcendentalist).
Escamilla’s choice to enter the line with, “sort” detunes, the string, complexifies the action and creates a richly dissonant overtone structure that ruins the simple consumptive man-world she simultaneously describes and decomposes. We know now that a woman operating on her own terms is leading us into and through this poem, and then she instructs, raises and subordinates, shifting entirely the nominal power structure that defines the first stanza and enters the second,
Fellows! Let your hair grow long
Your pubis bald with vulgarity!
Raise yourself to my liking.
She has announced herself in call to action as ancient god, above, but profoundly interested in mortal play, and then, she, as poet, above this stanzaically bound goddess, cups us gently in hand, bringing us down to simple soil and the intercourse between situated people, coming face to face, “out of our sweet emails you come.” The speaker, now is a “she;” who is she and how is she situated in relation to the online gathering of lovers that gave rise to the poems? We do not know, simply that Pittsburgh misses the poem’s protagonist today, and that this dialogue of absence unfolds over three stanzas, giving priority to where as people, transcendentalist perhaps, but not transcendent, we meet.
In poem two, “Dear Mister G,” our author shifts shape and form, turning from declamation to missive, offering relief from the onslaught of high imagery, quantum leaping, and intimate bargaining between the unseen she and poetic “I” in poem one.
Escamilla’s spelling out of “Mister” is simultaneously lyrical, plaintive and a reminder that a letter’s opening is a supplication, an importuning. She restores meaning to the perfunctory greeting that we slap on business letters in a ritual of asking that mimics the felt plea and parallels the mimickry of masculinity in the sea of suits in poem one. We know, we think, that we will be led forthwith into something real, and then, unexpectedly, in the first line, the letter’s author (not the poet) announces, “this faulty form of communication is rendering—“ In a flash, Escamilla has ruined the world of the letter, breaking the trope its formal salutation anticipates, and returning us to the method of statement that introduces us to the time of suits.
I’m now arrested, not as a reader, but as a poet, stunned by Escamilla’s virtuoso technique, and yet as a reader propelled forward, “What, I wonder is beyond the dash?”
Again questions, and a visceral urge toward and into the poem as letter, and into the space she has opened between my embodied self, my reading self as curious witness and myself as poet. She has deconstructed me, ruined the world in which these selves, now differentiated, were once alloyed, and laid bare the empty ground between the unified construction by which we give ourselves comfort, and the society of selves that so easily can become un-joined—and this in the first line.
Wryly, she finds “Mister G,” whomever he may be, “between the lines. Somehow the reality, the person, the truth appear in the place between—the space not filled.
The letter’s writer tells us what she’s looking for, fundamentals and lost words, and reminds Mister G of what they never did, and Pittsburgh misses him, and he has so little time these days, and what is missing, and why has absence now become so dear?
“Where are we tonight?” she the poem’s author, perhaps the same as she who wrote to Mister G, asks at the opening of poem three. We’ve moved from supplication to query, putatively as direct address, but then she tells him, or perhaps not him but us, “Here in Pittsburgh…” We are coupled with her in Pittsburgh; coupled in her couple, the receiving side of the duet in which she now speaks. We, us readers that is, are part of her we, and yet, separate. We’re on the edge of implication and forced to choice; to read on means that we’ve got skin in the game (it’s no longer possible to continue as un-tethered observer); to read on is to descend from innocence into experience, and so she has ruined our safe world as readers: to remain separate we must put the poem down and let the reader who brought us to this moment die; to read on we must enter the physical place of thwacked parking meters, and into immanent exchange of body fluids, “here’s a picture/our fingers together/like your zipper/and then not.” “Where are we tonight?,” really?
The fourth poem, unnamed also, forms a block. It’s a nice almost square, and it’s got gaps in it white space in lines one and four that suggest nothing of caesura. These are not pauses; they are not a crack through which light passes; they are not an interruption. They are white and they are empty; they demand attention and they do not explain themselves. “Oh me,” she says, “oh me.” And we learn about banana muffins and Pittsburgh mornings and rubbing her body against an Obama poster, and your body in her hard hands that scrape your penis, and it’s a penis, not a cock and there’s something softer about that, a reversal of the soft hand and the hard cock in this line, in this block, and she is “soft now, softest when [she] touch[es] parking meters, and the hard block ends soft(ly).
And at last we come to Cystina for Scott, and we think, “this is cheap,” Cystina/Sestina, why such an obvious gambit? And we are disappointed, and yet we are here, and we have read on, and we are implicated, and we cannot stop and Cyst and Scott somehow rhyme in a bad way that we don’t quite trust, and yet we know that it is true, and we know that we are going to be sad, and that all this observation and space and opening and prodigious use of intellect in the preceding poems are going to be set aside as a wanted space is filled by something unbidden, and we feel dread.
They found a cyst today I thought of you
They found another cyst, the old ones are still
They found a cyst today, I thought of how you looked
The finding, the layering of cyst upon cyst, the stacking of unbidden growth overlaid with memory of Scott’s head on her shoulder, intimacy and comfort in contour, and meaning entirely different. She, the speaker of the cystina is alone, no ride home; the interior space is filled, in part by something alien, and the space outside is empty, and he laughs, as she thinks of him in the Saturday cold, her Scott, her mister, mister, mister,” and as we read until the poem becomes its last, we know that she is brave and that we have somehow missed her.
In the first poem, unnamed, Escamilla actively situates us in a time of ritual, when men in their thirties, not quite beginners but bound by convention, don “slick business suits” carrying “horned lilac/ blossoms in their pockets.” We’re four lines on and she’s dropped us into a reversal of expectation and a confusion of senses: Where are these pockets? Are the lilacs visible? Are they boutonnières? And if so why and when?
Now, for we are in this time of slick suits, she slips in second stanza into conditional characterization, “It is a sort of feeding frenzy…” raising questions—What sort of frenzy? What other sorts might there be? What does noting this frenzy as being one of a variety tell us? How does that placement matter to our reading?—even as she defines type, “for/walkers, wine drinkers.” Her play between kind and category, specificity and space is achingly sexy for what it leaves blank.
Consider as alternative a straight descriptive account of what, in this suited time, is happening. It is a feeding frenzy for/walkers, wine drinkers. That’s how a man, a man in a slick suit would have written it: dumb, denotative and direct. Dropping, “a sort of” from the first line alters the emphasis. We’re now smacked in the face with the consonant urgency of the triple struck f words and the alliterative ws in the second line as proxies for women. It’s about sound and a fuck, hard in the first, soft in the second lacking in ache, allure and the possibility of transcendence (and the author in her craigslist post asks for a “fellow transcendentalist).
Escamilla’s choice to enter the line with, “sort” detunes, the string, complexifies the action and creates a richly dissonant overtone structure that ruins the simple consumptive man-world she simultaneously describes and decomposes. We know now that a woman operating on her own terms is leading us into and through this poem, and then she instructs, raises and subordinates, shifting entirely the nominal power structure that defines the first stanza and enters the second,
Fellows! Let your hair grow long
Your pubis bald with vulgarity!
Raise yourself to my liking.
She has announced herself in call to action as ancient god, above, but profoundly interested in mortal play, and then, she, as poet, above this stanzaically bound goddess, cups us gently in hand, bringing us down to simple soil and the intercourse between situated people, coming face to face, “out of our sweet emails you come.” The speaker, now is a “she;” who is she and how is she situated in relation to the online gathering of lovers that gave rise to the poems? We do not know, simply that Pittsburgh misses the poem’s protagonist today, and that this dialogue of absence unfolds over three stanzas, giving priority to where as people, transcendentalist perhaps, but not transcendent, we meet.
In poem two, “Dear Mister G,” our author shifts shape and form, turning from declamation to missive, offering relief from the onslaught of high imagery, quantum leaping, and intimate bargaining between the unseen she and poetic “I” in poem one.
Escamilla’s spelling out of “Mister” is simultaneously lyrical, plaintive and a reminder that a letter’s opening is a supplication, an importuning. She restores meaning to the perfunctory greeting that we slap on business letters in a ritual of asking that mimics the felt plea and parallels the mimickry of masculinity in the sea of suits in poem one. We know, we think, that we will be led forthwith into something real, and then, unexpectedly, in the first line, the letter’s author (not the poet) announces, “this faulty form of communication is rendering—“ In a flash, Escamilla has ruined the world of the letter, breaking the trope its formal salutation anticipates, and returning us to the method of statement that introduces us to the time of suits.
I’m now arrested, not as a reader, but as a poet, stunned by Escamilla’s virtuoso technique, and yet as a reader propelled forward, “What, I wonder is beyond the dash?”
Again questions, and a visceral urge toward and into the poem as letter, and into the space she has opened between my embodied self, my reading self as curious witness and myself as poet. She has deconstructed me, ruined the world in which these selves, now differentiated, were once alloyed, and laid bare the empty ground between the unified construction by which we give ourselves comfort, and the society of selves that so easily can become un-joined—and this in the first line.
Wryly, she finds “Mister G,” whomever he may be, “between the lines. Somehow the reality, the person, the truth appear in the place between—the space not filled.
The letter’s writer tells us what she’s looking for, fundamentals and lost words, and reminds Mister G of what they never did, and Pittsburgh misses him, and he has so little time these days, and what is missing, and why has absence now become so dear?
“Where are we tonight?” she the poem’s author, perhaps the same as she who wrote to Mister G, asks at the opening of poem three. We’ve moved from supplication to query, putatively as direct address, but then she tells him, or perhaps not him but us, “Here in Pittsburgh…” We are coupled with her in Pittsburgh; coupled in her couple, the receiving side of the duet in which she now speaks. We, us readers that is, are part of her we, and yet, separate. We’re on the edge of implication and forced to choice; to read on means that we’ve got skin in the game (it’s no longer possible to continue as un-tethered observer); to read on is to descend from innocence into experience, and so she has ruined our safe world as readers: to remain separate we must put the poem down and let the reader who brought us to this moment die; to read on we must enter the physical place of thwacked parking meters, and into immanent exchange of body fluids, “here’s a picture/our fingers together/like your zipper/and then not.” “Where are we tonight?,” really?
The fourth poem, unnamed also, forms a block. It’s a nice almost square, and it’s got gaps in it white space in lines one and four that suggest nothing of caesura. These are not pauses; they are not a crack through which light passes; they are not an interruption. They are white and they are empty; they demand attention and they do not explain themselves. “Oh me,” she says, “oh me.” And we learn about banana muffins and Pittsburgh mornings and rubbing her body against an Obama poster, and your body in her hard hands that scrape your penis, and it’s a penis, not a cock and there’s something softer about that, a reversal of the soft hand and the hard cock in this line, in this block, and she is “soft now, softest when [she] touch[es] parking meters, and the hard block ends soft(ly).
And at last we come to Cystina for Scott, and we think, “this is cheap,” Cystina/Sestina, why such an obvious gambit? And we are disappointed, and yet we are here, and we have read on, and we are implicated, and we cannot stop and Cyst and Scott somehow rhyme in a bad way that we don’t quite trust, and yet we know that it is true, and we know that we are going to be sad, and that all this observation and space and opening and prodigious use of intellect in the preceding poems are going to be set aside as a wanted space is filled by something unbidden, and we feel dread.
They found a cyst today I thought of you
They found another cyst, the old ones are still
They found a cyst today, I thought of how you looked
The finding, the layering of cyst upon cyst, the stacking of unbidden growth overlaid with memory of Scott’s head on her shoulder, intimacy and comfort in contour, and meaning entirely different. She, the speaker of the cystina is alone, no ride home; the interior space is filled, in part by something alien, and the space outside is empty, and he laughs, as she thinks of him in the Saturday cold, her Scott, her mister, mister, mister,” and as we read until the poem becomes its last, we know that she is brave and that we have somehow missed her.