The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Four): Catherine Wagner [by Angela Ball]

from "The city has sex with everything"

                                                                     The city has sex with Megan

when the air shaped like the inverse of Megan
accepts Megan as she moves.

   If Megan is a system of exchange
that floats her labor and her point

  of view in vapor/liquid soup
passàging through her valves

and if her later corpse, collapsing,
  updates its inversion of the air

 even more than did the air displace
when she grew from brown-eyed baby

into strong laboring woman in blue jeans
  and heathered wool,

and if the air and earth draw from Megan’s corpse
  all the energy and minerals

  she pulled from her surrounds
to build her nails and bones and teeth—

  if the exchange doesn’t stop
but only ceases to support her consciousness,

 and if her consciousness was corpse anyway until
it found relation,

 then what demises
is the potential for the human social,

and another sociality
 will unbutton my whole shoe

and tongue hang limp,
  what sex is for but stops me

  at the barrier, a pixellated
glamor reef though very

   close and simple, smell a
flurry, parapluie paraphrase,

 energy funneled through a shape.
You filtered chemical

 information in such a pointy
fulgent scrambled way, in the city

    and outside the city in the vernal zones
   and aqua zones the city shaped, flow-charted, realist

trucked. The city caved under
    when the zones rose and lapped around the pilings,

manged foundations green,
   rotted the teeth out of the mouth of the city,

 harbor high-rises
dark and blown. The city is extremely fragile tender

human mesh and will be mush
  and mushrooms grow in, there is room in, ruins

roam the rearticulated harm.

 

                                          Speech by a flaneur—no a flaneuse

         On my face, D. folliculorum are relaxing
          like Tenniel caterpillars leaning on mushroom stalks
           against the bases of my hair follicles
          which provide shelter and shade.
         These critters are peculiar to
            the ecology of the human face
             which I take around the city
             open, close it is my means
            of feeding I rely on
         changing its shape
        in response to others’ faces and postures
         to reduce my risk and increase my safety
          and my likelihood of being
           included in the group’s collective
            life. I smile a lot and hope it
           don’t look fake.

--Catherine Wagner                              (first appeared in Poetry)

 

Catherine Wagner is a Cincinnati poet originally from Baltimore. She is author of five books of poems, most recently Of Course (Fence, 2020) and Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012), and she recently co-edited a collection of environmental humanities essays, Contesting Extinctions (2021). She is professor of English at Miami University in southwest Ohio, where she is organizing a labor union with colleagues.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Forty-Four): Catherine Wagner

Catherine Wagner’s extended poem, “The city has sex with everything,” like William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, is an epic built on the urban mundane. Instead of personifying the city (“a man in himself is a city”-W.C.W.), in this excerpt it depicts, as if from above, the city’s consumption of a person, Megan (“strong laboring woman in blue jeans / and heathered wool”) and also, I think, hers of it.

The poem is remarkable for its mating of metropolis with organic decay:

 

The city is extremely fragile tender

 human mesh and will be mush

    and mushrooms grow in, there is room in, ruins

roam the rearticulated harm.

 

and also for its mating of the abstract/philosophical to the immediate/physical, done in pungent language:

 

what sex is for but stops me

 at the barrier, a pixelated

glamour reef though very

   close and simple, smell a

  flurry, parapluie paraphrase,

The “pixelated / glamour reef” may call to mind comic-book illustration, while the last phrase, a ballet of p’s, lingers, dropleted, in mind and on the tongue.

The poem traffics in pulchritude and homeliness, giving both life and afterlife to its “manged foundations.”

Who is the “you”? Is it Megan? Us? It hardly matters, since matter is now  so confounded with idea and association.

Then we arrive at a kind of window in which the poet [?] announces herself as Baudelaire and/or O’Hara-like “flaneuse,” where we see, in all its teeming vitality, “the ecology of a human face” in hyper-granular detail:

1. folliculorum are relaxing

 like Tenniel caterpillars leaning on mushroom stalks

  against the bases of my hair follicles

 which provide shelter and shade

The extended poem, in a breath-taking alteration in scale, has taken us from observation-deck telescope to microscope; from the city’s destructive and destroyed life force to the intimacy of one human’s personal biosphere, in the process taking its diction from wet and marvelous hybridity to bland scientific specificity. Cartoonist Sir John Tenniel was the organism-portmanteau illustrator for Alice in Wonderland. As these ultra-specific organisms relax, they imitate art. Catherine Wagner’s riveting and wonderful dystopian  “The City Has Sex with Megan,” after having its brilliant way with us, ends by conveying the poet’s forlorn hope of survival, fronted by a humble, demotic teeth-baring:

I smile a lot and hope it

     don’t look fake

-Angela Ball

 

Comments

[Karen Beckworth]

Terrific post.