Community Feedback — Still Life of Central Valley with X-Files Rerun by torrin a. greathouse
Community Feedback is our recurring column that provides an opportunity for our audience to get some quick, free & exceptional feedback on a new poem.
It works like this: we give the prompt and the link to our open submittable category.
The category closes in two weeks, and afterwards our editorial staff selects a poem to critique and comment on.
We publish the poem and the comments a month after the original post, and repeat the process. The window for next month’s poem will close in two weeks.
Submit your poem here.
This month, we chose torrin a. greathouse’s poem, “Still Life of Central Valley with X-Files Rerun.” Thank you to all of our submitters.
Still Life of Central Valley with X-Files Rerun
Drought came first as a curse, then as a season, then as a second
name for a place. When we first made home here, my mother
said that after all the gold was pried from her flesh,
we let California keep her name for the way sun sharpened
grass to hematite blades, called desiccation the only gold
which remains. How fitting one myth says she takes her name
from a queen, our entire nation monickered by theft.
On all the back roads in the valley farmers tilled
soil while their crops brittled. Unused to all the sky’s bake
and flame, I wasted summers in the dark. Watched two detectives
grasp at the ineffable. It was not the impossible which first taught
me wonder, but the way it was explained away. In a re-run
of an episode from ’96, Detective Scully said: Nothing happens
in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know
of it. Her partner discovered a farm of cloned human “drones”
and twelve years later bees are tumbling from the sky. Nazis trade
jackboots for wingtips and administrative positions. The writers
named this episode Herrenvolk—or master race. Drought maps blotch
red like a white shirt after a wound. In all the neighbors houses, the local
news buzzes like a kicked hive. When the county made watering
your yard a fineable offense, all the stores rebranded non-toxic green
aerosols as lawn paint. The next summer, every neighborhood glimmered.
Blocks of emerald, malachite, olive. I wonder if Scully would call this
nature, or rather contradiction.
Feedback
There are three lenses through which I want to view and discuss this wonderful poem by torrin a. greathouse. Before we get into them though, I just want to commend torrin and their poem for its maturity of tone and voice, its wonderful imagery, and the pleasure of the experience as a whole.
The ending of,
When the county made watering
your yard a fineable offense, all the stores rebranded non-toxic green
aerosols as lawn paint. The next summer, every neighborhood glimmered.
Blocks of emerald, malachite, olive.
is exquisite.
Culture Shocking
The title of the poem announces clearly a deliberate mash-up of modes for the piece—an immediately intriguing choice. I think the title here is working quite well.
We’ve seen a lot of poets turn to pop-culture to find inspiration. Morgan Parker’s There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé erupts with pop-culture, powerfully turning all sorts of “low culture” toward her self-expression (low is used with no judgement).
But “Still Life” here might even be more related to Jos Charles’ feeld, which subverts high culture—Chaucer—with puns and politics and contemporary voices. The title collides together high and low culture by putting a “Still Life” together with an episode of procedural, supernatural mystery TV show.
The poem continues off that energy, finding its intellectual heat in the combination.
A couple of notes:
Scully’s quote may work quite well as an epigraph—again, a subversion of tradition. I think the ending may even pay off more if that were the case.
I’m not quite seeing the associative connection of “a farm of cloned human ‘drones’” with bees, Nazis and droughts. Bees are called “drones”, often live on farms—but it doesn’t feel like a thick enough connection to justify the episode’s insertion. There must be a strong association for torrin, or else it never would have been written—I think it can be expressed a little more clearly here. It’s a difficult moment for a poet: when am I restraining too much, vs when am I explaining too much. That’s what drafts and friends are for.
Line Shapes
Logenbach, in The Art of the Poetic Line, argues that there are three types of lines: those that parse the syntax by ending the line on a grammatical phrase ending, those that annotate the syntax by ending the line in the middle of a grammatical phrase (as most of these do), and those that are end-stopped on a piece of punctuation. There is no one line shape better than another, but only that “dynamic force” that builds in how they all interact with the other poetic elements.
In the case of “Still Life,” lines that annotate the syntax predominate. This is signaled well in the first line as a noun, “name”, is split from it’s modifier, “second”, by a line break. The piece continues with a smaller amount of parsed lines that break at prepositional phrases, and only four lines that are end-stopped with either a comma or a period.
The point of knowing the balance of these three different lines in a piece is to get at purifying that “dynamic force” Logenbach described.
Torrin’s poem calls out for long enjambed and annotated lines—reflecting the rolling California valleys and mountains, the elegant lines and shapes of a topographical map of the Central Valley. But also, the lines break lightly uncomfortable in the middle of grammatical units, like peaks of mountains jabbing at the white space of the sky. Choosing to heavily lean on annotated lines works, but I think there is wasted potential then in the use of end-stopped lines to highlight and contrast.
There is likely some room in here to create a few more end-stopped lines—particularly I’m pulled toward “I wasted summers in the dark.” There’s room to play and I suggest that torrin try out creating a little more contrast and rhythm with line shapes, while keeping the annotated line as the base.
Generative Subject
If you’ve read my other feedback pieces, you know this is an important feature that I personally look for in poetry.
“Still Life” does not face the trouble of getting stuck on its triggering subject. Drought is introduced as first subject, rolling through mothers, California, queens, farmers, and eventually the collision with X-Files.
The associative movements feel organic and authentic. In fact though, I think this poem might benefit from being a little longer—in the right ways.
One of the most interesting moments for me in the poem was the appearance of the speaker’s mother. This is also where some of the best imagery of the poem is weighted—
“When we first made home here, my mother
said that after all the gold was pried from her flesh,
we let California keep her name for the way sun sharpened
grass to hematite blades, called desiccation the only gold
which remains.”
Hematite is a very brittle form of iron, beautifully black.
I kept hoping the mother would return to the scene later in the poem, and I feel her ghost knocking at the later lines. There is something intangible that, as a reader, I want—the way the mother, Scully, the bees, the drought all fit together.
“It was not the impossible which first taught
me wonder, but the way it was explained away.”
This epiphany line has yet to complete its fullest work, and I think it requires a little more time spent in the poem, searching out vulnerable moments. Perhaps the key is in that relationship introduced in line two: mother and speaker, alone together in a new place, new world, vulnerable.
Thank you, torrin, for sharing this wonderful poem with us. I sincerely hope this feedback helps you!