Poetry Friday: The Poems of Stacy Gnall

Welcome to the Poetry Friday Round-up! 

The Drift Record is proud to play host to Poetry Friday this week, and we'll cross our fingers & hope that those of us who use Blogger sites don't lose our access as we did last week! If you're looking to share a link, do so in the Comments field.  Have a good time browsing and reading!

[Added note: though I originally said I would list links in the main body of this post, it seemed redundant, so if you're looking to read this week's posts, just go to the Comments field and link directly or cut & paste the provided URL. Hope everyone is okay with that!]

Stacy Gnall's debut book of poetry: Heart First Into the Forest

For my own contribution this week, I'd like to point people toward the website of ALICE JAMES BOOKS, where the publishers are currently promoting the work of a new poet I've never read before but want very much to read now. Her name is Stacy Gnall , she's Los-Angeles based, and her debut book of poetry is titled Heart First Into the Forest.

Though Alice James Books does not publish children's books, I'd like to recommend Gnall's work to people working with young adult readers or writing for a YA audience, based on the huge interest among kids that age  in fantasy and fairy tale revisions. Gnall, I think is doing something that bright young adults might be interested in: She recreates the mood of the classic tales, less Disney and hauntingly Grimm. And she doesn't just write prose and divide it into arbitrary lines - she isn't just hoping the "white space" will make readers think it's easy, as some people writing "novels in verse" do now. She is really going for poetry, for the compression of it, and for the mysterious power and music of language. She stranges it up, she doesn't mind exploring the dark side, she touches on the sensuality and awakening sexuality which YA readers long to explore, and her work is excitingly different. 

It isn't easy, true, but I think we honor YA readers when we credit them with being able to linger in the unexplained and challenging. And we honor poetry when we acknowledge the fact that it's not prose. I look for poets who handlethe particular shaping of poetry with elegance, power, wit, and a good understanding of the tools available.  It might take some time floating in the middle of a good poem - reading and re-reading - to get not only the mood but the meaning. But that's okay. In fact, it's more than okay - it's what poetry is really all about. Slowing down, listening to the music of both the words and the world. 

In my work at Vermont College of Fine Arts, students are often eager to learn how to write rhymed and metered poetry for young children. But the interest in poetry wanes when they move over into work for young adults. Then their writing focuses exclusively on fiction. Why is that? I'd love to see more of my students thinking about the power of poetry in the lives of teenagers. And this fairy-tale fascination might be a way in. It seems to me some of Gnall's poems would be a perfect way into more sophisticated adult poetry for teachers working in a high school setting.

Here's the poem Alice James Books sent out in its pre-publication publicity:

Bella in the Wych Elm


She through the rootlets.
She murked by moss.
She in its whelm.

She the owl in the tree
trunk’s mouth stretched
to canvas a scream.

She the taffeta still
in her teeth.

She slight in the night’s dark
peignoir, eyes on the sky
so long stars disappear.

She flesh left
for the air to edit.
She year after year. 

First, she gold rush of hair
as she collapse, light
avalanche from the hands
that ferried her there.

She slung on his arm
and set—an epaulette.

She first dragged
down the woods’ brusque
tangent, first taken
from the tousled ground.

She a splurge—scarved
and sexed. She slim consent.
She the throat’s spangled
cackle and choke.

She first in the trysted park.
She in his arms his lips the grass.
Through the rootlets.
Murked by moss.
In its whelm.                                   
She our sleep
thrashed and thrummed.

She spurns our nerves,
she trips our veins.
She missing reel,
we scratch the blanks.

She for his mantel.
She for your mantel.
She my trinket too.

I don't think there's anything more explicit there than in many YA books now. To me, this poem stands alongside something like  Margo Lanagan's extraordinary YA novel Tender Morsels (marketed to both YA and adults in Lanagan's home turf, Australia - and why do we have to choose between these designations in the U.S.?) which also dwells in the world of the fairy tale.

You can read more about Stacy Gnall and Heart First Into the Forest here (Alice James Books....)

POETRY FRIDAY ROUND-UP: To see what other people are posting at The Drift Record today, just go to the Comments field here - links are provided by individual bloggers. You can click on some of them for the direct link, or cut & paste the URL's for others. Have a great time reading through them.