The 2016 Writers Harvest welcomes poet Kathryn Nuernberger, along with writers Gwen E. Kirby, Dinty W. Moore, and David Sanders, for a reading on Thursday, Sept. 22, at 7:30 p.m., in the Walter Hall Rotunda; $5 suggested donation.
By Morgan Cappel, intern for the Office of Special Programs Here, she offers an overview of Nuernberger’s work
Kathryn Nuernberger has written two collections of poetry, The End of Pink, which won the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and Rag & Bone, which won the Elixir Press Antivenom Prize. Nuernberger received her Ph.D. here at Ohio University and is now a professor at the University of Central Missouri, where she also works as the director of Pleiades Press. She will publish a collection of lyric essays, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, in 2017.
Nuernberger’s The End of Pink, her more recent collection of poetry, is full of eccentric characters, like Benjamin Franklin, Bat Boy, mermaids, gnomes, and princesses, and the book fuses myth with fact, many of the poems exploring the realms of fantasy and folklore, and others asking questions about scientific exploration.
“More Experiments with the Mysterious Property of Animal Magnetism (1769)” is one of these poems that plays with the world of discovery. It begins:
Finding myself in a mesmeric orientation,
before me appeared Benjamin Franklin,
who magnetized his French paramours
at dinner parties as an amusing diversion
from his most serious studies of electricity
and the ethereal fire.
Throughout the poem, Nuernberger returns to Franklin. He is not merely a scientist, but a mythical character, a touchstone. We move from this historical figure to the high school where the speaker used to teach, to her house. In that movement, we see some of Nuernberger’s infectious intelligence, but she never loses the main thread of her poem—this man Franklin and his example:
Benjamin Franklin was so jolly with his kite
and his key and his scandalous electricity.
He was so in love with women and drink
and democracy.
Hidden in between these two excerpts are some of the speaker’s concerns. She ponders her role as a wife, her corporeal instincts, and the insecurities that accompany these aspects of the human experience. Franklin, who is “so jolly with his kite / and his key and his scandalous electricity,” might be a sort of inspiration to the speaker, who struggles to “be a joy to others”; or he is simply a vehicle for revealing her gloomy wonderings. He’s real, but he’s also an invention—a magical version of the true person. These are the kinds of figures upon which Nuernberger’s electric poems are composed.
“P.T. Barnum’s Fiji Mermaid Exhibition as I Was Not the Girl I Think I Was” contains a speaker who is “a wife and a mother and a responsible member of the electorate” but also “a zombie-mermaid girl.” The mermaid part of the speaker permits her to open up about her darkness—which, in this poem, is a frustration with public authority’s treatment of sexual assault. She, as a mermaid, is empowered in the poem, and this transfiguration into a mythical creature enables the speaker to confront “The one I have been loving and who says he loves me,” to ask him “who the honorable representative from Missouri raped and who the one from Indiana [. . .].”
Nuernberger turns to mythology in order to find an important truth; she explores the reality of the human female experience, exposing a key difference between most women and the jolly Franklin she’d considered earlier in the book.
Nuernberger’s lively poetry moves readers to ask questions about the relationship of people to both science and fantasy. How must our bodies interact with the world? When is fantasy truer than science? When will we acknowledge the chaos of personal experience as a fact of life?
Searching for the answers is not the only thing the author encourages us to do, though. She and her rich, fantastical characters ask us to embrace uncertainty. They take our hands gently, at first, and then plunge with us into darkness. In the end, the evil that things like scientific overreach and misogyny have brought into our world become myth, and we are left with Nuernberger emphasizing “how very emerald joy is, / how very leafed with lapis and gilding.”
Nuernberger’s poetic world might not always be a totally pleasant place, but it’s a real one, full of bizarre, concealed beauty.
Comments