Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

The Church of St. Materiana, a chapbook which I won as a door prize at the WomPo first annual festival of women’s poetry is honestly not the sort of text I would pick up for myself. When selecting books and chapbooks to read, I tend to avoid those that sport blurbs with words like ‘honest’, ‘emotional’, ‘Frost-ian’: this is not because of anything wrong with the writing such words describe. They are, however, simply not what I usually enjoy.

Right now, however, I am thanking synchronicity for sending it my way, thanking it not only because Anne Britting Oleson does so well within the requirements of confessional writing but also because within this chapbook I found myself reading a poem about someone who could be me. Many of the poems contained such a person for a few lines—in good confessional writing, this should be true for most readers or at least those within the targeted audience—but in “Earl’s Court” “[t]he young woman / in the center of the platform” could have been me (though on a different station’s platform).

What made this experience of finding myself in a poem unusual was that I was not the I and, moreover, this was me not as I would have seen myself but as others, strangers, may have seen me. The woman cries, “traces of tears tracking the hollows / of her cheeks” as I sometimes cried on subway platforms in the aftermath of the trauma I experienced in New York. Of course, the speaker does not know why this woman cries and imagines something much less than the trauma I endured: who wants to imagine the worst? “No one touches her, / lays a consoling hand on her shoulder”, not even the speaker. The only time someone comforted me was to offer advice to go home and have a nice cup of tea (really, that meant the world to me).

The woman “seems stuck” whereas I kept going. It might not have looked that way to those around me, however, when I leaned against pillars or walls.

In the end, the observer proves more insightful (or would if the woman were me):

a crumpled bit of paper, held
loosely in her fingers, as though

the entire universe doesn’t depend
upon the straggling word written there.

This is what raised the experience of reading this poem to the level of the uncanny: to think that someone watching may have recognized the importance of the poems I scribbled through those terrible days, even if they didn’t realize that I did too.

Related posts:

1. Reading Should Be Gloriously Subjective

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