The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Five): Catherine Pierce [by Angela Ball]

 

The Town Dreams the Tornado Apologizes
       

And then we woke up. And our uncles
were still missing, our azaleas yanked

and gone, our dogs dashed against oaks.
But before we woke, we heard you say

in a voice that hummed without words
that you'd gone too far and would hold

that rushing hole at your center for the rest
of your life. Hearing that made us feel a little

like church. We are people who forgive, but
who can forgive something with no eyes,

no ribs, no head to bow in shame?
In the dream, though, we sat and spoke

somber. In the dream, we reached out
and took what must have been your hand,

vanishing and damp. You let us.
And when your whir-voice said, full

of torn-off roof shingles and children's
coin collections, that you were sorry,

we wanted, with all our blood and breath,
to believe you. So, for the span of a sleep, we did.

--Catherine Pierce

When a devastating natural disaster occurs, it’s so hard to reckon with the seeming arbitrariness of the destruction—why this town and not that one? Why this house, this car, this family? In this poem, I wanted to give the townspeople a chance to imagine, at least briefly, intention, remorse, and grace.—Catherine Pierce

Catherine Pierce is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi and the author of four books of poems: Danger Days (2020), The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words, all from Saturnalia Books. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. An NEA Fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize winner, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Five): Catherine Pierce

Catherine Pierce’s revelatory poem begins with its title, “The Town Dreams the Tornado Apologizes.” “And then we woke up” dashes this fantasy, yet the poem obsessively continues it: working to anthropomorphize, even negotiate with, an impossibly brutal natural force that slams all it encounters, killing cowering people and animals and carrying photographs thousands of miles to where they are sometimes posted on social media and recovered. Catherine Pierce lives in Tornado Alley, as do I. Coined as part of a geographical research project in 1952, the term, with its Noir quality, suggests permanent destitution—and indeed, many towns must rebuild from zero, knowing that more tornados will spin towards them.

How to deal psychologically with this situation, let alone poetically? Though this is a more rural than urban problem, urbanity is needed—an approach with play in it—play that, far from trivializing the tornado’s impact, lets us, in part, get our minds around it. One model informing this poem may be Kenneth Koch’s brilliant addresses to large, abstract entities, such as World War II. Another may be Frank O’Hara channeling Mayakovsky in the famous sun-initiated conversation poem, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” 

A true literalist of the imagination, Pierce begins by dramatizing the phenomenon’s absurd violence: “And our uncles / were still missing, our azaleas yanked / / and gone, our dogs dashed against oaks.” Like O'Hara's sun, Pierce's tornado speaks first:

 

     But before we woke, we heard you say

 

     in a voice that hummed without words

     that you'd gone too far and would hold

 

     that rushing hole at your center for the rest

     of your life. Hearing that made us feel a little

 

     like a church . . . .

 

“We heard you say” reminds us that this is fantasy—but it is also reality: a tornado cannot live without its “rushing hole.” Feeling “a little / like a church” is a wonderful literalization of faith, akin to William Blake’s expose of hypocrisy in “London,” where “the Chimney-sweepers cry / Every blackning Church appalls.” Then there is the wonderfully funny and spot-on

     We are people who forgive, but

     who can forgive something with no eyes,

     no ribs, no head to bow in shame?

In what context can this happen? In dream, of course. There, the tornado has a “whir-voice” that Pierce, in an inspired move, fills with “roof shingles and children’s / coin collections”; a voice that says “sorry,” a bare-bones apology that the town wants desperately “with all our breath and blood” to believe. Catherine Pierce’s riveting “The Town Dreams the Tornado Apologizes,” a poem that reminds us of the radically communal nature of weather, ends with a modest Shakespearean sentence—one that encompasses much of human nature: “So, for the span of a sleep, we did.”

--Angela Ball

Comments

[Lindsay Doukopoulos]

I've never thought of the nature of weather as "radically communal" before. This description as annotation to the poem opens up the meaning in a wonderful way. The act of acting like there is a "we" and that suffering and loss could be communal, could be shared, instead of personal/singular, is a wonderful trick that we can believe for the span of a poem... or a sleep...

I also really love the framing of "Tornado Alley" as having a "Noir quality." It's funny and accurate-- I'm imagining a companion poem, The Maltese Cyclone..

Grateful for your poem selection, annotations, and reading, Angela.

[Angela Ball]

Lindsay, I am grateful for your generous comments--the poem is truly wonderful, indeed.

[J. Zheng]

An interesting way to present the tornado. Enjoy reading the poem and the analysis.

[Angela Ball]

Thank you, J.Zheng!