Poetry Flowing from History in “You’re Called by the Same Sound” https://ift.tt/KtfUT3p
What is the work of the archivist? Certificates, deeds, reports—uninterpreted, they paint a picture of the way life was once. But the archive has never been comprehensive, particularly in the South, and written-down histories have never been neutral ground. The dogged, acute poet Alicia Wright, hailing from Rome, Georgia, uses her family’s archive and her town’s recorded history as a fount for her debut poetry collection, You’re Called by the Same Sound, which excavates and reanimates long-gone centuries. Through persona and personal recollection, Wright brings old life back into the firelight—sometimes with a nudge, sometimes at knifepoint.
In the first of three sections, in contrast to many of the later poems, there are no epigraphs orienting us in time and space. The first-person contemporary speaker(s) in these early six poems place us in a Southern landscape familiar to a 21st century reader—the tender images of flora and fauna, the devil’s itch that comes with knowledge of the blood-soaked past. The opening poem, “Wraparound,” says in its first lines:
I thought that if we let it go—the property—the daisy field—the dog’s small coffin—the osage orange tree—… …we’d be unlocked—no holding pattern—we’d know— reinvention…
Property is one of Wright’s concerns throughout the collection—as well as capital, industry—and the many figures who committed knowing or unknowing violence in its service. But because these images of living (and dead) beings are what make up this first “property,” like land, they are not so easily let go.
And then, these lines from the second poem, “Town Under Lake”:
When we come here we hear it I have so many handfuls of shadows looking backward ten degrees
The drowned town is heard, but vaguely; the shadows (held in the hand, then embodied) barely look over their shoulders, unable or perhaps afraid to turn their heads to fully face the past.
To complete orientation into her project in the first section, Wright lands with “Historical Eye,” a beanstalk of a poem with the central metaphor of prying open the eye of a horse. The animal’s gaze is “impassive,” fixed on the speaker as she pries it open with “forceps / opening / wider its // fissure.” This action is nearing violence itself, but in the action, she experiences the gaze back at her “for as / long // as I can / think.”
The second section is populated with figures, actions, and moments throughout Rome’s history—a surveyor dividing plots of land, flamingos being made into hats, “Tabloid Facts” from the early 1920s. Wright is a formidable researcher and terrifyingly well read. This section spans references to the Aceldama (which could easily be the name of a depot town in Georgia, but refers to the plot of land purchased by Judas with his thirty silver pieces), Flannery O’Connor, her mother’s wedding photograph, reports and surveys from early colonists, and the fraught tome The History of Rome and Floyd County, which is, as Wright shares in this interview with Southeastern Review, a “Jim Crow-era” relic where families could pay to feature their legacy more prominently.
Though Alicia Wright’s poems speak to the South as a region, they do so through the specificity of Rome, a town founded directly after the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Her northwest corner of Georgia, near the Coosa River, has a long Cherokee and Creek history scarred by forced removal, which Wright explores in “Removal Fort,” “Undated Incidents Concerning Occupation,” and other poems that name Rome as Cherokee land. She explores its later long history of industry, production, and pollution more thoroughly in the third section, which wraps some of her historical research back into personal experience. Wright’s acknowledgement for her responsibilities to her research bears noting:
“My deepest regard for those whose histories I have lived alongside, and on whose thresholds I have stood with respectful intention as I’ve written descriptions of real historical events, sourced from both archive and folklore, and tied inexorably to place. No amount of justice can ever correct all the harm my forebears caused, but I stand beside you now in the work toward liberation, reparation, and environmental restoration.”
Shapes sprawl across this collection, making use of white space between lines, at times between words, giving the effect of half-formed memories, or perhaps words that are difficult to get quite right. Stanzas are rigid or flowing across the page; poems are boxes, lines, tight lists or loose clouds of words. Though none of these shapes are necessarily inventions of Wright’s, her expansiveness of style speaks to her precision in approaching each poem’s ideal shape. Similarly, her voice can be academic, imagistic, or narrative—she does it all deftly in service of what each poem needs.
Wright balances the work of the historical poet with that of the modernist—to translate the experiential (past and present) into insufficient language. Wright has written a collection of poetry that is inextricable from the self, one’s own lineage of toxins and violence, and yet is primarily interested in turning away from how the self feels about it all. Or rather, the deep feeling is left for the reader to interpret. In this, Wright acts as the honest archivist who keeps her humanity, and that of her subjects, front and center.
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