Traci Brimhall is the author of three collections of poetry: Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her next collection, a hybrid of essays and poems, Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2020. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. She’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.
A Process Note
The selection below is from my most recent collection, Saudade (Copper Canyon, 2017). They are verse plays spoken by a chorus of ageless girls and appear spread out in the book across multiple personas. They’re supposed to function sort of like a Greek chorus and some of them were once written as poems in a single voice but got broken into this community voice. I’m interested in the ways oral storytelling are narratives that can be reshaped or lost and how poetry is often so focused on the singular “I”. My books so often engage the mythic, and myths seem to me to be collaboratively composed as allegories for the social and cultural moment.
Formally, I think it’s difficult only in that it is unexpected. And because it is formally odd, I try and make its content a bit more clear at times. Although I want to challenge a reader at times, I also want to be generous with them. I love them, though it’s fair to say my love isn’t always easy. The form also allows me a different form of maximalism. In workshops, rejections, and reviews of my books I’ve been criticized for being, essentially, too much. I know I’m a poet (and person) of excess. The verse play lets me take up lots of visual space and extend the line beyond even the lengths I usually allow myself. I think female poets have traditionally been celebrated for being concise and controlled, and I feel downright naughty for trying to spread across both margins.
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In Which the Chorus Describes Cafuné on the Eve of the Passion
Maria Helena:
The night in costumes, in church bells, in pews sucking on free salted caramels.
Maria Thereza:
In the general’s breath before he pinches the child's jaw open and spits in her mouth.
Maria Helena:
We did nothing to stop it. Why would we? We only witness, record, recite.
Maria Thereza:
Besides, no one else tried to stop history from making itself on stage. Everyone fantasized a different present.
Maria de Lourdes:
In the pews, the unrepentant traced their hands onto hymnal pages. Behind the curtain, the toothless, the leprous, burying themselves in scherzo and nude boas.
Maria Thereza:
Jesus makes it to stage but forgets his lines, the new Passion simmers in the journalist, the priest, the poet watching the dictator's parade from an unlit room, composing meager epics and running the planchette across the letters written on the wall:
Maria Madalena:
Will we survive?
Maria Aparecida:
Of course not.
Maria Madalena:
Will the country?
Maria Aparecida:
Ask again later.
Maria Madalena:
Is God's love absolute?
Maria Aparecida:
Nana, nenê.
Maria de Lourdes:
The night is ripping its dress to bind soldiers' wounds. It's painting the church with the blood on the torturer’s floor.
Maria Helena:
It’s nailing together the gallows.
Maria Thereza:
It’s combing men's hair with its fingers, singing, o nenê dorme no chão, and measuring their necks.
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In Which the Chorus Explains What Was Stolen in 1966
Maria de Lourdes:
One candidate swore he’d import artists from Paris to paint every voter’s portrait.
Maria Helena:
But the wiretap revealed that of the six masked balls and two bullfights he promised, he only planned to pass out free twelve packs of Guaraná Antarctica on election day.
Maria Aparecida:
One candidate skipped town when someone caught him digging up a body and reburying it beneath the courthouse.
Maria Thereza:
Another rumor said he was caught tattooing women after curfew, inking diabolical love letters onto their ankles.
Maria Madalena:
He was part of a conspiracy of windmills, others claimed.
Maria de Lourdes:
They said his chickens accused him of unspeakable things.
Maria Helena:
When we arrived to cast your ballots, the soldiers at the polls handed us a picture of the general leading the charge against the Bolivian army and a picture of the president’s house stormed by sailors.
Maria Aparecida:
We all voted for the general twice, the dim X of our voice. We went to the town square, and danced with short men with long mustaches who buried their bristled cheeks in our chests and swore to help you when the borders open if we’d only let them sign their names on our thighs.
Maria Thereza:
We tried to tell them, we did. We were born a century before them and will last centuries after. This was not a fear to run from, but we liked it, their acrid sweat, their promises of a future.
Maria Madalena:
One planned our escape in a canoe under a dead fisherman.
Maria de Lourdes:
One said he’d pack us in a sack when he shipped his manioc.
Maria Aparecida:
One promised to write us a poem whose music would transport us over the Andes, even if
our bodies remained here.
Maria Thereza:
My brides, said the first, offering a hook.
Maria Madalena:
Beloveds, said the second, holding a rose.
Maria de Lourdes:
Muses, wrote the third, slipping notes in each of our pockets.
Maria Helena:
We chose.
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In Which the Chorus Provides a Possible Chronology
Maria de Lourdes:
History began but did not write itself.
Maria Madalena:
Language, or at least a word.
Maria Aparecida:
War. Famine. Plague. Birth. Another war. Weddings. A country is called discovered by another country, the people called converts. Sapphires. Sugarcane. Rubies. In 1879, rubber.
Maria Helena:
An opera house in the jungle. The age of the rubber baron. Desire begets money begets happiness begets desire begets an affair between an opera singer and a rubber baron.
Maria Thereza:
Then yellow fever. Then rubber seeds smuggled out. Then villas burn.
Maria de Lourdes:
1918, those who are left make towns out of bends in the river. Capitalists builds rubber plantations. An island becomes a leper colony.
Maria Madalena:
Date unknown: Freedom begets too much idle love. A boto arrives and begins to sing his pink song to town daughters.
Maria Aparecida:
Time passes marked by floods and all the children born of the boto are named Maria.
Maria Helena:
Then an American missionary comes to town with three crates: bibles, medicine, and food. He is two-thirds beloved.
Maria Thereza:
1964, coup d’etat. Disappearances, death, torture, death, etc.
Maria de Lourdes:
And then a child’s hand is found in a jaguar’s mouth. It belongs to a missing girl/a leper/is God’s gangrenous stump. Miracles arrive whether they are welcome or not.
Maria Madalena:
Unknown, the date of the plantation fire. Caused by arson/lightning/the amputated hand. Miracles stop or they never happened at all.
Maria Aparecida:
1972, the town of Puraquequara vanishes and rises again.
Maria de Lourdes:
All the children flee and begin to sing for their supper in Manaus. We sing of a boto, of miracles, of the hand that gave and took away. We sing fire. We sing flood. We sing the word carved into rubber trees. We sing for the childhoods they never had and the childhood they did. We sing history in reverse so the story might end in birth.
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In Which the Chorus Relates the Somewhat True History of Puraquequara
Maria Helena:
On Saturday nights everyone gathers in the rooster graveyard to reenact the town’s founding.
Maria Madalena:
We wear pineapple headdresses and inside-out nightgowns while counting off Paz, Baptista, Lua, Souza, da Silva, da Ouro, pretending to be daughters of the founding fathers who fled sapphire mines upriver in search of a place where each could find his one, his only, his starstruck beloved and shudder with her in the open air.
Maria de Lourdes:
The miners swam with chests of cayenne pepper and chicken eggs on their heads seeking a mythical tribe of one-breasted warriors.
Maria Thereza:
Instead they met a swarm of eels who morphed into women wearing electric dresses that slid to their waists as the men asked what is this place, who are you, may I touch you here, trembled, and opened their eyes to find their brides gone, their children in their arms, and a word carved into a tree.
Maria Aparecida:
Now, chaperoned by a priest picking the scabs of his stigmata, we walk clockwise around the statue of Barcelos, and boys sting their lips with wasps before circling.
Maria Helena:
When an arrangement of grapes, guava, and ripe banana catches his eye, a boy will ask us a riddle.
Maria Madalena:
If we answer correctly, we can stroll to the edges of the gravestones so he may confess his love of thick earlobes.
Maria de Lourdes:
If we answer incorrectly, he must scratch the grass looking for worms.
Maria Thereza:
When one of us notices a boy’s pouting lips and flushed eyelids, we stake our headdress on the granite rooster’s spur and offers the weeping boy a wax starfruit.
Maria Aparecida:
They’ll leave the turning of their brothers and sisters to steal pastéis from the bakery and eat in the alley with plastic spoons.
Maria Helena:
We’ll soothe the boy’s fevered lips as hormones loosen our hips and the capillaries in our cheeks.
Maria Madalena:
He’ll swear to build a city when he grows up where all lovers will have careers in pleasure, and eggs will bring forth rum and menthol cigarettes while we undress asking do you want to, are you ready, does that hurt, before they see a hand writing on the wall, before it picks the crushed açaí from our hair, before it marks the boy’s chest with an X, before we are found, sated, beneath the word pulled from us like a rib.
Felicidades e parabens! Like a molotov cocktail disguised as a bottle of milk. I knew some of the feminists who fled. I loved one of the resistants, formerly a member of the Brazilian Parliament, who subsequently volunteered to sew up the wounds of the resistance in Angola and Mozambique. Some of the Marias in the chorus are still alive. Most protest in our fading memory. Saudade...
Posted by: Jacqueline Lapidus | March 02, 2019 at 11:32 AM