Abigail Chabitnoy: The Field

Abigail Chabitnoy curates poems that dwell in fields of searching, connecting, and being. She introduces Michael Wasson communing with those who are no longer breathing (“Aposiopesis [or, The Field between the Living & the Dead]”), Jean Valentine considering the moment and its boundaries (“To my soul”), and Saretta Morgan writing into love over many years (“Dearth-light”). To close, Chabitnoy reads her poem “Signs You Are Standing at the End,” which enters its own field of imagining across time.

Find the full recordings of Wasson, Valentine, and Morgan reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:

Michael Wasson (April 27, 2023)
Jean Valentine (September 25, 2008)
Saretta Morgan (March 28, 2024)

Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.

Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.

Transcript

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[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON: 0:02

Welcome to Poetry Centered, the show that brings you archival recordings of poets reading and speaking about their work, curated and introduced by a contemporary poet. The show features recordings from Voca, an online archive of poetry readings from the University of Arizona Poetry Center. I'm Julie Swarstad Johnson. Thank you for joining us to celebrate the new year with poetry. It's a pleasure to welcome poet Abigail Chabitnoy as our host today. Abigail is the author of two full-length poetry collections-- How to Dress a Fish and In the Current Where Drowning is Beautiful. She is a professor at UMass Amherst and a mentor at the Institute of American Indian Arts. For this episode, Abigail has brought together poems by Michael Wasson, Jean Valentine, and Saretta Morgan. She thinks about them each as dwelling in a type of field, places where we search and wait inhabit a moment and commune with those who are gone. Her own poem offered at the end enters this same space. Abigail, thank you so much for bringing these poems to us. Welcome to the show.[MUSIC PLAYING]

ABIGAIL CHABITNOY: 1:21

Cama'i. Hello. This is Abigail Chabitnoy. And I'm recording this at my desk in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The first recording I would like to share is Michael Wasson reading "Aposiopesis or The Field Between the Living and the Dead" recorded on April 27, 2023. I adore Michael Wasson's poetry, and even more so, enjoy hearing them read it. There is such tenderness. A softness that if perhaps a vulnerability is not a weakness. Michael Wasson's poems remind me, both in the poem and in life, the importance of allowing oneself to feel and to feel deeply. This poem in particular reminds me how in such feeling, in the poetic act, we participate in a continuity of being from and before and beyond the self."Aposiopesis or The Field Between the Living and the Dead" is the first poem of his collection, Swallowed Light. The poem begins with the word and."And forgive me for I cannot tell you how to begin." It begins with a gesture of picking up or joining a thread already existing. The poem is honest in that the speaker is forthright in what they cannot tell you, but in that admission, rather than finding a lack, the reader is afforded a glimpse into the speaker's yearning. And of course, it is the body as much as the heart and mind in which we locate feeling. And in the poem, a kind of prayer that, for me still resonates with an authenticity I often find lacking outside of poetry. The body and the heart and mind are not to be separate. This is another lesson I find in Michael Wasson's work. Increasingly, in my own work, I'm interested in the poem and its gesture. Its intention. The poem's strengths, but also its failings. This poem does not provide answers. I'm not even sure that it is comfort I find in the final lines, though that is at first what I'm expecting. That's where I thought the poem was leading. Perhaps, you will hear something different. But the poem, both on the page and in its utterance, its sounding in the world, calls into being the very field Michael Wasson speaks of, where quote,"the animal made with two hands," end quote, is lost but waiting, and where we find, quote,"the dead who still love you, who are still remembering," end quote. Past and present. Our ancestors before and after and ourselves in our softness and our hurt all meet in the field, wherewith loss to one might find the promise for beginning the promise of carrying on. So here is Michael Wasson reading "Aposiopesis or The Field Between the Living and the Dead."[MUSIC PLAYING]

MICHAEL WASSON: 5:30

We're going to start with the first poem in the book. This is "Aposiopesis or The Field Between the Living and the Dead." And forgive me for I cannot tell you how to begin, But here is the body, like the urge to pray. Your mouth already gone, and we never said you; a boy, woman, man. Only the animal made with two hands, And lost in the field waiting for human life to re-enter, as if through a door broken. And yet the dead who love you, Who are still remembering the touch of blood-warmed skin, Abandon you like every yesterday. Like this single paradise of every body's silence resting daylight into the only dusk we have been made to see.[MUSIC PLAYING]

ABIGAIL CHABITNOY: 7:03

The second recording I would like to share is Jean Valentine reading "To My Soul" recorded on September 25, 2008. Jean Valentine's poems have been influential to my own work from the very beginning. She was, in fact, one of the first poets I fell in love with, and I often returned to her work when I need a reminder of how much joy is to be experienced in poetry. So often of late, it's become for me a scholarly or ambitious or perhaps possessing pursuit. But poems such as these remind me why I turned to the medium in the first place. I imagine the time I spend reading poems, often as part of my ideal morning ritual with coffee before the day is in full swing and the demands of the outside world will not be put off any longer as a bonus time. Though, even as I say that, I'm struck by the essential value of this time I spend supposedly not contributing in any productive way to society at large. Not to be dramatic, but frankly, it's a crime that takes such time is a privilege, when, in fact, it is an utter human necessity. Because this bonus time is a time where I am not alone, where I am in the company of another. Not for any utilitarian function beyond being for a moment. Absolutely and transcendently human. We've made living such a difficult and toilsome business, and despite the many advancements we have made meant to increase what time we might put towards leisure, we find more ways to promote labor as our highest purpose. While I do not think the definition of a poem is contingent on compression for compression sake, I'm struck by how a well-crafted short poem can similarly exceed the pragmatic limits of its existence, whether on the page or as we hear it spoken. The moment becomes briefly infinite. I'm also increasingly finding myself tuned in to moments of serendipitous connection. In this poem, too, a field wherein the soul remains still as the speaker is swept in motion, separate and not from the daily simple act of sweeping coffee grains from the table. In perhaps another message from the universe, I recently shared with my students how I often bulk when I read the words soul in a poem. For me, it is a word that is either loaded down with personal baggage or used as a lazy substitute. It's a personal cringe word, if you will, which is perhaps another crime of the modern era. And yet, when used effectively, it does remind me of the original potential scope of the sacred and how it can be found within the self, even within the daily. Here is Jean Valentine reading "To My Soul."[MUSIC PLAYING]

JEAN VALENTINE: 10:40

This one is called "To My Soul." Will I miss you uncanny other in the next life? And you and I, my other, leave the body, Not leave the Earth. And you, a child in the field, And a child on a train, go by, go by. And what we had give way like coffee grains, Brushed across paper.[MUSIC PLAYING]

ABIGAIL CHABITNOY: 11:27

The third and last recording I would like to share is Saretta Morgan reading "Dearth-light" recorded on March 28, 2024. In her own introduction of the poem, Saretta Morgan says, it was written over the course of five years, and I love this as a reminder that for as little space as a poem might occupy on the page, even as it can be recited in mere minutes, it is such long work we as poets are bent to. The work of the poet is a lifestyle, is a tuning that can be such a labor. But as I mentioned before, is perhaps the most deserving labor of our brief time on this plane. It is also a reminder to allow the poem to be open to the forces of and beyond its incitement, and to move beyond them, as she says, how the relationship changed over the course of the writing. As an educator and practitioner, it is an example of what we mean to not let the poem be stifled by where we thought we were heading when we began. This long seeing labor and openness to allow the poem to chart its own becoming, our two key lessons I strive to impart to my students. I'm also drawn to this poem as someone who has admittedly not even attempted a love poem, since some very cliched and melodramatic lines written in high school. For its assumption of the difficulty of practicing love as its subject as love poem. The poem makes space for the true contradictions and complexities of feeling, not attempting resolve, but creating a field. Yes, in this poem, too, a field, albeit quote, "a ruined field." And I promise, this was completely unintentional and unplanned, though I'm delighted by the circumstance. But as I was saying, creating a field in which again, our idea of love can expand. Beyond the idea of romantic and idyllic lifetime-lasting love I realize that I also immediately think of love and the ways the world imposes on it as a subject of human interest. But here, the field is a landscape, is a desert. Is teeming with so much life, so much world. The poem is situated in the gesture of moving between, not the boundaries, but in this state of movement. And while there is a feeling of distance, of lament almost, even as the speaker imagines what it would be to harvest light, another impossible and essential labor, even as the poem ends in an assertion of love, albeit one that is changing and not always easy, that is not the end of the story. Once again, this is Saretta Morgan reading "Dearth-light."[MUSIC PLAYING]

SARETTA MORGAN: 15:18

I'm going to read a long one right now, which is a love poem that I wrote over the course of five years. And by the end of those five years, the relationship had changed form. But it remains in my mind, a love poem about the difficulties of practicing love with another person and all the ways the world imposes on that."Dearth-light." Now, in coming between one desert and another, I recognize the edges parting and clear. I dip my hand into the bath, over your hair. I ask you not to shave. I ask, open the hair, and skin blades open the river. And your great eye opens over a ruined field. From here, geography extends a labored pulse, More music, palmed casings. This love story-- a horse still drunk from war, Where I am the incredible absence of her jaw. A soft pink gaining. You say, Dearth is no name for a horse, here. How she rises from every passing wound. The officer's gouged Jasper eyes from the mud, I love you. Dearth irrational, makes empty the valley, From elongated shadows, pulp of her desire. When this happens, we must love ourselves fiercely, The ancestors and lost humans declared. The human who was wearing the hat of a particular sports team. The human who dropped their hair comb. The human who thought she would reach Utah. By Tuesday. Only deserts witnessed the slow and complete life of water, a story of justice and foraged box springs. The one sound offered wandering night without horizon, Each exceeds its genre while remaining truly intact. This epic has no hero but flesh, which defies imagination. The carrion large birds fear ambulant and calling your name For grounding and comments for what hinges beyond a thorough wound. Likely to suffer, my gift stumbles graft with sores. Bring me the officer's music. Bring me the landscape gouged from your eyes. Low basin flora. Verdant inching, vertebral ache. A warm anatomy to feel threatened, Endangered by thick, muscled, and in danger of iridescent over, And in the tissue between floodplains and the officer's science, And the quiet between and want for shade, The hooded eyes and fluid body. Gentle body for whom I lie down. Tonight, I walk the dog, Committing to memory the darkened color and shape of each car to pass. So it must have been for the first stars to harvest light from what they followed. I've placed a shotgun on layaway, A service I haven't used since I was 12, Having unlearned to be ashamed of needing time or not knowing how to use it. Knowing the distinction harbored in the officer's heart, Perceiving it through its disciplinary veils. The horse stamps out from waxy brush, Viral smell and the cuts up her thighs tell me, Baby duck, your wrecked unsleeping door. Love, if you are where I am, Even your smallest of errors, Your most wrecked door. The rock faces are opened. The genres are all up for aerial eradication, To the 40-year-old fish, To the abundant bufflehead and ring necked ducks drifting south across the sunset, I love you.[MUSIC PLAYING]

ABIGAIL CHABITNOY: 19:15

In light of these serendipitous meetings in the field, I'm going to read one of the earlier poems in my second collection, In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful. Like Michael Wilson, I am searching in this poem for a field in which to commune with those no longer breathing. Those outside of my own self. While not as brief as Jean Valentine's, it is interested in the moment and its boundaries and what is woven between numerous such singularities. And, like Saretta Morgan, the poem, from the conception of its first images to its life on the page, was years before I understood what the lines were sounding. And I and the poem have changed in the meantime. I and how I relate to the world have changed, continue to change. Each time I utter the poem is a reminder of this ongoing life. Here is "Signs You Are Standing at the End." Quyanaa. Thank you for joining me."Signs You Are Standing at the End." Two-thirds of the country is in drought. The waters have all gone walking. Nunakuarluni. When white peaks crested the rolling hills behind our house, I knew it was time. We understand since we are children, waves, break waves, travel waves, do the wave. Did the wave make it across the room? Did the people who started it move across the room? Cause of death, traumatized. Cause of death, bad heart. Cause of death, exposure to the cold air, To want of sea ice, To warming air, To a landscape without trees. Too many ribs to the sea, to ghosts, to loss of stable Earth. To plant one's feet, One's seed, one's egg, one's teeth. I heard it was an accident in the end in the breakers. There was no boat when I heard it. I took my sister and some others out the back door. The calm was not. And the neatly kept lawn was not. The sleeper wave was not. Too many teeth I saw too late. The wave would not be dove under. It turned snow, wet, and heaving. And we were already running after a field. I could hear every dead thing. How do we behave in the field? They asked for a story. The ones we'd have to leave behind, Swallowed by the hoary mouth roar. Never ignore what someone tells you in a dream. Once the women said, You are trying to remember what someone said, who is dead. Quliyangua'uciikamken. Laam'paaq kuarsgu. I will tell you a story, hard to leave in good light. Quyanaa. Thanks for listening.[MUSIC PLAYING]

JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON: 23:25

You've been listening to Abigail Chabitnoy. And this is Poetry Centered. Abigail, thank you so much for bringing us into this field of attention with you. Listeners, thank you, as always, for spending this time with us. We hope you're enjoying these curated forays into the vocal archive. You too are invited to explore the archive on your own. In the show notes, you can always find links to the full recordings of poetry readings that include the individual poems you've heard today. Voca is home to recordings from 1963 through the present, and they're free and available to you anywhere in the world at voca.arizona.edu. In two weeks, we hope you'll join us for a new episode hosted by Mackenzie Polonyi. Happy New Year to each of you, and take care.

ARIA PAHARI: 24:19

Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui. Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari, that's me, and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca-- the Poetry Center's audio-visual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.