Prolifically Raw: Book Talk: Magnetic North by Linda Gregerson

Friday, April 22, 2011

Book Talk: Magnetic North by Linda Gregerson

Contributed by Cindy Stewart-Rinier

So much of the difficulty I experience when trying to focus in on a writing subject arises from the dissonance between my personal experience and the larger context of the world. How to position oneself? What do you do with the relative comfort of American existence when you know that comfort is dependent on the suffering it has created elsewhere? I remember feeling this most acutely shortly after America began bombing Afghanistan and Iraq. I’d be sitting in my back yard, breathing in the night air, the smell of honeysuckle and scented clematis lacing it, looking into the deepening blue of the sky, feeling this sense of pleasure and wonder and then this heaviness would overtake me: that my pleasure, to some very real degree, was predicated on the suffering of others in the world. That there was a direct line between my comfort and those whose homes and cities were being bombed, whose mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers and children were being shot or killed by fire, flying shrapnel. The horror of it moved me to gather a group of women to protest in the style of the women in black at Lloyd Center, Portland’s oldest and largest shopping mall. For a solid year, every Saturday morning, we silently stood at the main entrance of the mall with blown up photos on signs that depicted what we were not being shown on the news. The idea was to make visible the reality of what we were doing, to resist the complicity of silence.

Linda Gregerson’s Magnetic North probes this quality of consciousness, the places where it, like the possum’s foot in her first poem, breaks through the thin crust of ice on the snow. Through a variety of subjects that range from her mother’s reaction to 9/11, to various artists and scientists and the implications of their work, to the young woman sitting at her breakfast table one morning whose inner arm is a hieroglyphics of scars from cutting, there is an engagement with the question raised in her first poem about self-correction.

The phenomenon Magnetic North, with its bifurcation between “the north we can steer by and the north we call the true” becomes the overarching metaphor for the narratives by which we navigate our lives, our choices, how self-correction is often the only way to ensure safe landings. The collection exhibits its own form of magnetism in its construction, with the poem “De Magnete” like a lodestone at its center and the other poems that comprise her deep and nuanced argument bound around it.

The opening poem, “Sweet”, sets up a tension between two ways of positioning oneself to the world. The first voice is that of the mother: “We cannot/ continue to live in a world where we/ have so much/ and other people have so little.” Its assertion is quiet, introspective, passionate, compassionate. It sees how the pieces relate to one another. It takes responsibility. The second is of an undisclosed “he.” Its refutation is louder, self-satisfied, dismissive. It sees the world “as we have made it” as true and immutable. Its judgment that, “Your mother’s wrong but sweet, the world/ has never self-corrected,” overmarks the mother’s recognition of the urgent need for social justice with the premise that historic precedent is inevitability. It denies responsibility.

These two positions constitute the polarity that Gregerson negotiates as she treats each subject in the subsequent poems. “Bicameral” picks up the thread of social inequity, unravels it and weaves it together with the story and art of Magdalena Abakonowicz. The poem itself becomes a mimesis of that artist’s weaving's, her sensibility and its obsessions with biology, politics and metaphysical mystery. Both the poet and the artist she treats are tough-minded, rigorous in their knowledge of the biology in which they find the metaphors that support their socio-political stances. The cleft palate, cell division, cell accretion all resonate with the political implications that the title sets as a frame.

The power of this collection is that it proffers this possibility: that the world as we’ve made it “is wholly premise, rather like the crusted snow.” If it is simply a narrative, then a different narrative is possible. Even in Darwin’s work were two competing narratives: survival of the fittest and mutual aid. Magnetic North gives us the sense that if there is a world as we’ve made it, there is also a world as we would make it.

Cindy and I will be reading together at the Mountain Writer's Series, May 18th! We look forward to seeing you there. And thank you Cindy, for your smart and depth filled contribution to Book Talk!