The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty): Noelle Kocot [by Angela Ball]

CRYSTAL GAYLE

My mother picks her arm
Like a gorilla
Searching for lice

*

I am stable now,
But the world is not.

*

I go to see my trees
In the mornings—
Horace, Rothgar, Hildegaard,
Piney, Tall, Barney, Fred, Wilma,
Pebbles, George, Elroy, Astro, Frau Starr and Goethe.
They are part of my family.

*

Trump ding ding dings
On television
As I dump the wastebaskets.
Getting cold again.
Nine months of this.

*

Theology interests me.
And aliens.

I don’t know what to make
Of either.
And oh, the books about mosses. I
Wish I were in North Carolina now,
But there is no chance of that.

*

I thought a lot about how
My father tried to murder me,
How I ruined my teeth
With bulimia.

*

I lost my job
Because a consulting firm
Told them to cut my classes out.
Students said they did not
Commit suicide
Because of my classes.

*

I’m fed up with the world,
But I love it all the same.

*

I’ve had a lot of time to think.
Thinking is not dangerous.

*

I need to rest now,
As I’ve been staying up nights
For no particular reason.
Mosses gather around my legs in dreams,
And the city seems far behind.

*

The light on my skin is bright
And unforgiving.
I need a haircut,
Or maybe I don’t.
Maybe I’ll let my hair grow
Down to my knees
Like Crystal Gayle.

-Noelle Kocot

"Crystal Gayle" from Ascent of the Mothers, copyright 2023 by Noelle Kocot. Used with the permission of the author and Wave Books.

Noelle Kocot is the author of many collections of poetry, including Ascent of the Mothers (2023) God's Green Earth (2020), Phantom Pains of Madness (2016), Soul in Space (2013), The Bigger World (2011), and a book of translations of some of the poems of Tristan Corbière, Poet by Default (2011), all from Wave Books. Their previous works include the discography Damon's Room, (Wave Books Pamphlet Series, 2010), Sunny Wednesday (2009) and Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (2006). They are also the author of 4 and The Raving Fortune (both from Four Way Books). Their poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry in 2001, 2012, and 2013. They are the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, The Fund for Poetry, the American Poetry Review, and a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Kocot has taught at the University of Texas New Writers' Project and currently teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the New School. They live in New Jersey.

Photo by Ann Sleight

The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty): Noelle Kocot

Noelle Kocot’s direct and disturbing “Crystal Gayle” opens with the micro detail of a mother’s nervous habit grown maddening, perhaps, by repetition; then pans out to generality: "I am stable now, / But the world is not."

We learn  from these two lines that there have been times when the speaker/poet has not been “stable”; that the world belies that stability. We’re on alert.

“Crystal Gayle” proceeds through asterisked vignettes; the third introduces pet trees with names that conjure a disorienting mélange of Roman poet, descriptive terms (“Piney, Tall”), Norse mythology, The Flintstones, German tragedy. The trees’ intact identities reassure: “They are part of my family.” Evidently, this is a family that keeps to itself, our speaker its one voice (the mother, unspeaking, appears to disappear) isolated in marked-out units. This aloneness may remind us of James Schuyler, the New York School poet Kocot most resembles. In his “Payne Whitney Poems,” the more he animates the world outside the mental hospital, the more apart from it he becomes:

     . . . After the blizzard

     cold days of shrinking snow.

     At visiting hours the cars

     below my window form up

     in a traffic jam. A fast

     moving man is in charge

     herding the big machines

     like cattle.

 

The cars, “big machines,” comically become unruly animals—lives to be observed, the way Kocot’s trees, once named, become pets at a distance, unengagable.

Next, Kocot’s poem gives us a passing physical sensation (“Getting cold again”) then a revelation: “Nine months of this.” The speaker must be pregnant, expecting. Is “this “not the beginnings of “family”? But the tone, far from expectant, is  flatness voiced in monosyllables.

What is wanted? Not “theology” or “aliens”—entities that interest and confound, or “mosses” told about in books—so much as “North Carolina,” a missing home, mourned: “But there is little chance of that.”

The poem shifts to the past tense. We are now in retrospect, that gives the poem’s disturbing frankness—so not the playful variety employed by Frank O’Hara--more room to operate.

 

     I thought a lot about how

     My father tried to murder me,

     How I ruined my teeth

     With bulimia.

 

There’s a dark ghost of humor behind these lines, that incongruously place the speaker in danger from her father and, somewhat anticlimactically, from herself. The lines nearly groan from the pressure of the unsaid.

The mournful litany continues with the speaker’s unjust and dispiriting job loss at the hands of clueless bureaucracy, leaving students bereft:

 

     Students said they did not

     Commit suicide

     Because of my classes.

 

This statement becomes comic when we realize it can be read two ways—the construction mimicking the sort of confusion that often—rather delightfully--enters student writing.

Do we believe the poem’s next statement?  "I’m fed up with the world / But I love it all the same."

Perhaps we have no choice. This statement is followed, after a break, with another: "I’ve had a lot of time to think. / Thinking is not dangerous."

Yet the act of declaring something “not dangerous” suggests that in fact it is.

Kocot’s is a quintessential poetry of ambivalence, a quality absent from less-nuanced poetry that revels in strong opinions—when more often, in life, we don’t quite know how to take things, “staying up nights” “For no particular reason.”

The poem’s deliberate phrasing resembles the steps of someone negotiating a brittle surface, its effort negative—not to fall—of a piece with the silence surrounding the pregnancy suggested by “nine months.”

The dream mosses that gather around the speaker’s legs, a marvelous embodiment of the books above, are like the mosses in Ezra Pound’s adaptation, “The River-Merchant’s Wife, A Letter”—"By the gate, now, the moss has grown, the different mosses, / Too deep to clear them away!”—the burden of an absence here never defined, only pointed toward: “And the city seems far away.”

For some reason, the world seems to believe that depressed women would feel better if they did not ‘let themselves go’—phrase that confuses freedom and ruin.

 

     The light on my skin is bright

     And unforgiving.

     I need a haircut

     Or maybe I don’t.

     Maybe I’ll let my hair grow

     Down to my knees

     Like Crystal Gayle.

The poem’s self-isolated stanzas are the opposite of William Wordsworth’s “spots of time”—instead of resonating outward, they seem small implosions. Noelle Kocot’s lucid, confounding, and rebellious “Crystal Gayle” leaves us with the image of a country-music idol whose most noticeable feature is the length of her hair. In “Crystal Gayle,” Kocot powerfully reminds us that that experience is riddled with the ordinary, the arbitrary, the anarchic, and the absurd, and that to value it we must acknowledge this or fail in our understanding. --Angela Ball

Comments

[Denise Duhamel]

Angela,

Thank you for posting Noelle's poem and your brilliant observations about it!

I’m fed up with the world,
But I love it all the same.

Yes yes yes!

[Angela Ball]

Denise,

Thank you for your generous take on the post. I loved talking about Noelle's poem.

[Emily Fragos]

Wonderful poem. Wonderful explication, too.
Thank you for posting it.

[Angela Ball]

Thank you so much, Emily.