One cannot blog this weekend without referring to Independence Day. I thought of honoring the holiday by writing about patriotism, and how liberal thinkers should reclaim the term as a way to strive for the great ideals our nation was founded upon. And I thought of saying how such ideals always come face-to-face with the messiness, the ambiguity of reality -- and, how poems are ideally equipped to showcase the latter in service of the former. I even started searching for a good poem from jubilat's pages that deals with politics and identity in the complex ways I think they ought to be dealt with -- with an understanding that we, and the world, never operate in an either/or manner (or, in terms of metaphor, never operate according to tenor or vehicle), but by holding both at once, and then some.
But something funny happened: I found a poem that went in a different direction in relation to our annual celebration of nationhood. Which is the point: any point I was going to make about the above, in a polemical way, is far less interesting than what I can discover by looking for what a given poem can tell me. The poem below, by Paige Ackerson-Kiely from issue 11, made me think of fireworks -- not their pyrotechnical specs, but the great rapturous spectacle of them, and the cultural event (with crowded streets of onlookers) that takes place around their going off. If I weren't looking for a poem to write about on this holiday, I'm sure I never would've made such an associate leap with Paige's poem -- even now, I know it's a stretch. But that's one of the wonderful ways poems work: by suggesting more than they seem to mean on the surface, and being open to larger possibilities -- allowing a reader to read into its images, its epiphanies. I love to imagine that when Page's poem begins "I locked up all / of the beautiful things / that might move me" it could refer to those big large colorful explosions in the sky, and that by time it arrives at "Lay / down your sweet head / for now // to know as we do know / to know. To know / one damn thing" it could be saying something essential about who we are -- alone and together -- at this moment, when we celebrate how our country began and dream of what it can become.
-- Rob Casper
THE POTENTIAL OF RAPTURE
I locked up all
of the beautiful things
that might move me.
The bell around a dark ankle
turning and turning.
A stranger smiles.
Her face is no curling-up
in bed.
If I knew the world was going
to end, I’d just run out into
the street and fuck the first
chick I saw, says a
teenage virgin.
Where you go when you are scared
that we might have the verdant
and the humid. Friendly air.
People meaning their handwaves.
An answer is the way you can jump
from a ledge equal to your height
without getting hurt.
Your home.
Every pane of glass
someone laid on their precious
breath. There.
Or there.
Boy I am
leaving too many rooms
for the crowded street. Lay
down your sweet head
for now
to know as we do know
to know. To know
one damn thing.
-– Paige Ackerson-Kiely
