Mary Kasimor's "portraits in time"

 by Jefferson Hansen

Mary's chapbook portraits in time is available from the Trainwreck Press website.

Mary Kasimor has long been one of my favorite poets. Her poems consistently amaze and startle me—of this I am sure. But I am not certain exactly why they have this impact on me. Their appeal remains primarily visceral and intuitive. This essay traces my attempt to come to some sort of (conceptual? affective? linguistic?) clarity about why her poems move me the way they do. Perhaps I will fail. If so, this essay will be a record of my failure, of my inability to come to terms with why Mary's poems move me the way they obviously do.

Mary's poems immediately strike me as intimate, intricate, and fresh. They are also laser focused on the highly dramatic moments of everyday life where belief, linguistic assumptions, and feelings reveal and cloak themselves. I never know what to expect as I move from one intricate phrase, insight, or image to the next. Hers is a tight focus, but within that fucus she finds and names and plays with multitudes.

The title poem of her latest collection, portraits in time, begins:

        stripped down to my shivers
        what did you say?
        the balance is calm no one changes
        direction to this direction
        i am going

The initial line implies vulnerability and nakedness and coolness, as if all the speaker has is her chilly feeling. Why does the speaker move to a question in line two? Given the upsetting image in the first line, I feel as if this line is not positive. We sometimes ask this question when angry with someone over a statement they made; we use it to express our amazement that someone would say such a stupid or insensitive thing. It implies intimacy, alienation, hurt. Coldness.

How does this coldness and alienation relate to the next line? Where does calmness enter the picture? Why the claim that "no one changes"? This poetry carries with it tremendous ambiguities. Reading this poem, I feel as if I am eavesdropping on the fractured remains of an interaction, as if I am an archaeologist coming upon the shards not of a dead culture, but of an intimate, strained encounter from the past. I don't feel I can fully account for what is happening here. The poem offers glinting and glistening hints and partialities, leaving much open.

The final line in the above quotation points to a number of possibilities: it could be modifying the word "direction" from the previous line. It could be a statement about leaving the encounter, perhaps for a couple hour break or maybe forever. What am I sure of? This poem presents a fraught, intense and dramatic moment, probably in an ongoing relationship. I feel a little uneasy, but I also feel unsure, unsettled, as if I don't know enough to say anything for sure.

The poem continues:

        allowing the numbness
        and pulling out the silence
        it is not around the corner
        the day is not the same
        but it's monotonous in the same way
        placing my life into categories
        like a brutal law
        leaving my direction behind

Enough words with a negative connotation make clear the process described by the poem is not pleasant: "numbness," "silence," "monotonous," "brutal." I feel as if we have left the initial encounter — "i am going" —and moved out into a wider vista, perhaps the world outside where the encounter took place, perhaps just another room. There is a sense of displacement here.

        i liked her far away
        it's just another riddle with eyes 

        when i got off the bus and smelled
        the neighbor's busyness
        i visited the world and we
        met halfway

The funny opening line of the above quotation plays on the preference we sometimes have for a long-distance friendship, one that is intermittent and places fewer demands on us. Does the "riddle" refer to wondering why the "i" doesn't want to be near "her"? What is the importance of "eyes"? It points to seeing. How does a riddle see? The ambiguities continue with the imagery of smell, busyness, and the world. Who is this neighbor? How does he or she relate to the "her" in the first line of the quotation? I take it from the description of the encounter, "we met halfway," that it was not terribly intimate, but perhaps good enough for the moment. 

                     i listened
        to the old people living in the halls
        between facts emerging from
        the mutated corn fields and wheat
        sweating out bread making friends
        and now crawling out of time
        you are the portrait 

 The poem ends with the above lines. The image of the people "living in the halls" is surrealistic—not even homeless people usually live in halls. They are passageways. What is it to live not in a destination, but a passageway? What is it not to see them, but to listen? Does this imply distance?

Towards the end of the poem, the speaker warms up and starts sweating. This is tied, somehow, to mutating food, agriculture, friends, and portraiture. I am not sure how this all fits together, but it feels viscerally right to me. The "theme" of this poem is clearly ambiguous. It is not apparently clear what she is talking about on any obvious level. What holds the poem together? Form. The look of the poem on the page, the pacing, the line breaks, the repetition of sounds. The "meaning" wiggles; the form, while elastic, fluidly grounds the poem. 

Where do I stand, now? I don't understand this poem in any conventional way, but I like it. For me, it gets at the openness and layered complication and complexities of the ongoing dramas with the people in the speaker's life, and my life. It makes me think of how I can never be sure of those around me, including people closest to be, because their meaning and intuitions, thoughts and obsessions remain partially unknown by me. Of course, my own meanings and intentions, thoughts and obsessions, remain partially unknown by myself. Kasimor situates this poem, and most of her other poetry, in this unfolding ambiguity, where clarity is provisional, and we always keep uncovering, and also covering.

Mary manages in her poems, I think, to articulate the drama and tension in our inability to fully know, in our always feeling out and feeling our way "off the bus" and into what we smell — our constant explorations, our fears. We are all portraits in the moment, a moment that gives way to further moments, further portraits, further mysterious smiles and half-gleaned postures. This is my provisional conclusion: Mary's poems emerge from the ambiguous linguistic possibilities that make life not only interesting, but possible, and scary. She does this through intricacy, freshness, and an intimate relation to the proliferating nuances of language. Let's end with a few of my favorite lines from later in the book:

        everyone              drinks from the sun (24)

                                           the brain opens
        to strangers in the spirit of apples (27)

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Over the years, Mary has been featured on this blog in various ways. The following links take you to a few of those posts.

Two Poems by Mary Kasimor

Review of Mary Kasimor's The Landfill Dancers

Film of Mary Kasimor reading in 2013