“A Self Portrait of a Reader”: on Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Self Portrait Poems in Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018)
by Maureen Alsop
Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s collection, Oceanic, includes several poems of self-portraiture. These poems include: “Self-Portrait as a Sea Scallop,” “Self-Portrait as Niagara Falls in Winter,” “Self Portrait as Egg-Tempera Illuminated Manuscript,” and “Self Portrait as a C-Section”. Though the book itself, Oceanic, portrays the narrative of pregnancy, motherhood, and the waves and patterns of nature, her self-portrayal offer an increasingly prescient angle in contemporary poetry. Nezhukumatathil’s confident, clear voice offers an exquisite complement to her collections’ narrative arc, one which is transparent and lulling for any reader. She masterfully wields the underside of daily living as she navigates a reader into the mysteries and interludes of love’s immersions and dangers.
The following, “A Self Portrait of a Reader,” is a response to the portrait poems in Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Oceanic.
A scar-line sag, all the way across my hip bone. I’ve gone
writhe. Below my hand, I am hiding her, the seawashed girl.
It is seashell season.
The fog horn blows in a legible direction, we know there is a different paradise we can read through the gulls’ formations.
It’s never been simple to walk away.
Under the moon’s mortality we listen to the cruel untired shore. I’ve defined the artillery, my preferences, my command.
I'm given this one star.
My resonant rejection, a lowering: “These poems/prose pieces are very closed, and not open for a reader. I work hard on finding poetry that speaks to readers - especially readers who are afraid of poetry. My goal as an editor is to have a magazine my neighbors, relatives, and the folks down at the Way Station who are struggling for shelter will be able to read & find themselves in. This particular set simply doesn't fit our mission statement - poetry that people will read, understand, and want to return to. I do appreciate that you are willing to share your work with a small magazine like ours.
Or: “I want my poems to be understood by a woman standing in line at grocery store line” (from a poet who publishes in the New Yorker. Regularly.).
Rejection is springs incubated arrangement, a sequence of preconditions.
What I want to say. I don’t.
Maybe I am the one afraid.
Every few seconds, somebody with or without an id-card on their neck disturbs me. The beaches here are ungroomed. The trailer park’s washrooms are average, but there is plenty of hot water for everyone.
I believed I needed to share with you where I was in order to gain repose and seek renewal. This is the language of a story which requires location. Who was the girl. Where were you that morning.
My personal apocalypse is this page, after she turns her back, a breeze in the moment--her face, a stillness I can touch through the haze. In an incubated arrangement I ordered the pictures of the sun into a sequence—right to left. She wasn’t anyone you knew. She is a cosmos.
The sea is like a disease breaking between us. I am tethered. My body waits for a cure.