January 15, 2019

Sally Ashton

LISTENING TO MARS,

ear pressed to my laptop’s
small speaker that replays a recording
captured by seismometer, a bass tone
drones some 140 million miles from Earth,
kabillion being another useful term
because “Martian wind” seems a kabillion
million miles from anything I know, gusting
unseen across the parched red surface only
accidentally captured by the InSight lander’s
equipment instead tuned to intercept signals
from Mars’s deep interior, a seismic pulse
that will say something about the planet’s
inner space, the kind of low frequency waves
whales and elephants can hear, though
elephants hear through their feet,
sound traveling through their giant
toenails to the ear via bone
while whales’ tiny ears sift the deep
for sound vibrations the way their massive
mouths sift volumes of water for also-invisible
krill, at the same time we’re messing them
up with underwater sonar blasts like
we’ve messed up our own atmosphere
with radio waves so that the only peaceful
place free of frequency noise
where we might hear from the universe
is on the far side of the moon—
once called “dark” because we’d never seen it—
where China just landed a mooncraft to listen
to what might come from that great stillness,
such as the repeating fast radio blasts
from some distant galaxy detected by Canadian
astronomers who describe the bursts as the
“wah wah wah wah” of a sad trombone,
and it is this immensity, the kabillioness
of it all that keeps me sitting here
on the dark side of everything, motionless
next to my laptop, a type of spacecraft,
hitting replay, straining to hear an alien wind
singing its deep melody through space.

from Poets Respond
January 15, 2019

__________

Sally Ashton: “January, better known as winter break for teachers, traditionally serves as a quieter month for me, a chance to read, write, and contemplate the coming year. I was first struck when my daughter posted a haunting video playing the just-captured first time ever sound of Martian wind. Then on January 3, a Chinese lander touched down on the far side of the moon, followed this week by the report of 13 new intergalactic fast radio bursts discovered, all of which, when you pause to consider, is pretty mind-boggling and serves to drown out the white noise of this week’s political frenzies. At least for a few minutes.” (web)

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February 13, 2018

Sally Ashton

LET’S GET RID OF VALENTINE’S DAY AND REPLACE IT WITH SECOND HALLOWEEN

You know an idea’s hot
when it has 126,876
Facebook likes before you’ve
even seen it and it’s only
mid-January. Already thousands
are dreading the Day
in spite of those yummy
conversation hearts and gummy
bears that spill from aisle-caps in every
store making their appearance
in my CVS December 26th
along with hearts pierced by arrows
which is possibly one of the reasons
many of us would rather
bring back the Halloween displays
witches spiders and monsters
the bloody fingers and mummies
ax murderers and vampires,
zombies and ghosts, even
the French maids or sexy costumes
for men which unfortunately
are more ludicrous than sexy
my favorite however being the Golden
Dong—Google it—which seems
to bring us somewhat back around
to the problem with Valentine’s Day
and why many of us would prefer
to apply fake scars and warts rather
than face the sickly array of red satin
lace and roses, the profit-driven
reminder to get it on. What’s the point
of a holiday that excludes nearly
half of us, those who for whatever
reason identified as “single”
on the last county census though many
choose “single” vs the only other choice,
“married,” so who knows
what really goes on
behind closed doors but Halloween
is all about opening doors and giving
away something sweet to whoever
is standing there no matter what
they look like or who they are—perfect
strangers—and all anyone has to do
is hold out a bag and ask

from Poets Respond
February 13, 2018

__________

Sally Ashton: “This is a poem in response to Valentine’s Day via a random Facebook post that appeared in my newsfeed. The poem expresses what seems to be a widespread reaction to an awkward, often-dreaded holiday that loudly separates the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots.’ Valentine’s Day not only marginalizes millions of people, it serves to ostracize or even break the hearts of people who, for whatever reason, are partner-less. Cupid’s cruel and heartless slings and arrows. I’ve been part of an annual Valentine’s reading for nine years and play the role of the anti-Valentine for this same reason.” (web)

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October 20, 2010

Review by Dean Rader Some Odd Afternoon by Sally Ashton

SOME ODD AFTERNOON
by Sally Ashton

BlazeVox [books]
303 Bedford Ave.
Buffalo, NY 14216
IBSN 9781935402817
2010, 93 pp., $16.00
www.blazevox.org

In “Ander Alert,” Ander Monson’s winky essay about Googling other Anders, Monson discovers, paradoxically, that unearthing his namesakes actually makes him feel more alone, his significance diffused. “The more Anders we run across,” he muses, “the less Ander begins to mean, to sound in the hollows of the mouth.” For Sally Ashton on the other hand, self-Googling serves as a portal into various modes of identity which multiply and accrue. The entire second section of her new book is called “In Which I Google Sally Ashton,” and not-paradoxically, the poems within it explore the many Sally Ashtons the poet encounters, the most compelling of which is an African American slave born in Kentucky in 1845. But there are others, and the tension (and difference) between those Sally Ashtons and this Sally Ashton can serve as a kind of metaphor for the main questions the poet poses in her new collection, Some Odd Afternoon—what is it we find when we find the self?

Ashton goes looking for the self in both high and low places—the poetry of Emily Dickinson, her own past, other Sally Ashtons, the stars, maps, and the hinterlands of memory. But, Ashton is leery of places. She seeks the self through seeking, through the act of finding. Wallace Stevens asks the same of poetry in the opening lines of his fabulous “Of Modern Poetry”: “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.” Like Stevens, Ashton turns to the act of poetry as a means of locating that which the self needs in order to come to terms with its own selfness.

This is nothing new for the contemporary poet, but what makes these poems unusual is the form they take (which is itself a form of seeking). A solid half of the poems in Some Odd Afternoon are prose poems, while about another quarter are comprised of one-line sentences, while the remaining quarter are standard poems written in verses and stanzas (usually tercets or couplets). For many poets, form is linked to identity. Consider C. K. Williams’ stretched lines, Jorie Graham’s dropped lines, William Carlos Williams’ clipped feet, Stevens’ penchant for the qualification in apposition. But, like the many Sally Ashtons Google ferrets out, Ashton’s poetic identity takes many shapes, speaks in many voices, and embodies many identities. For her, fluidity of form—not consistency of form— is part of identify formation.

In general, prose poetry shies away from the formalist lens; its formlessness a beguiling beard that protects it from the critical paparazzi. If, as Charles Wright and others have suggested, the poetic line is a single unit of thought, the prose poet does not enjoy the luxury of form as a default organizer of ideas. Or of breath. Or halts. Or movements. Lines, line breaks, enjambments, stanzas and stanza breaks are the motherboard of poetry—without them, a poem can look like a tangle of wires. Where, the reader might ask, does the poet want me to stop? Where am I supposed to place emphasis? Is there a protagonist? Why isn’t this flash fiction?

Ashton makes this ambiguity her friend; she uses prose’s narrativy to take the pressure off of line making, opting instead for story-making.

Consider the opening lines—wait, scratch that—sentences of “Snowfall”: “The furnace knows something. The thermostat on the wall registers complaints. Snow cloud blots out the sky one shade darker than the ground. I can’t write by snowlight and covet lamps cushions, must build a fire, this house the animal I live inside like some kind of parasite worked in to its intestines most unwilling to leave.” Despite the lack of “line” we still hear and feel the heavy iambs in the first two sentences, and we know that iambs and snowfall are supposed to lull us. So they do. But by sentence three we encounter a run-on. We expect a period where a comma is. We expect a period where there is none. And suddenly, grammar, not line, has lifted the poem to a new register. However, we feel it internally before we see it visually. Since we can’t see a stanza break ahead of us, we don’t always know when the unit of thought will end. It’s a bit like walking a path with sunglasses on; you can kind of see your way, but not really. In this case, the two short sentences that begin the poem set us up for that long one, and we get sort of lost in it as it moseys along. And we love it.

One reason we love it is because the semiotics of prose indicate story. This is not the case with verse. So, we are prepared to be narrated to in a prose poem. Ashton takes advantage of this in a good way. She allows her poems to be stories. Mostly, they are stories of release, of escape, of liberation. In the title poem, for instance, Emily Dickinson, mired in starchy old Amherst, daydreams about visiting Italy. On the other hand, a poem like “The Map” begs the reader to believe that it just might be about an intergalactic romance! “She loved that he called her earthling, how she felt utterly alien yet most human in that same instant.” And then there are poems that go meta—that remind the reader he is not experiencing life but text, as in “Donkeys”: “I don’t remember if this happened or not but let’s say it did and you were there.” This poem gets its energy from poetry’s secret history of orality. We don’t always like to talk about that now in the age of print and text and visuality, but this poem’s poetry is found in the voice of narrative: “What did you say that I said that made us laugh and laugh until soda did shoot out our nostrils? It’s on the tip . . . you were there, I know it, whether either of you would ever admit it. I see every detail like ten minutes ago.”

As I was writing this review, I decided to reformat some of the sentences above as verse just to see how Ashton’s poetics would look as sound as more “formal” verse. Here is an example:

I don’t remember

If this happened

Or not but let’s say

It did and you were there.

As verse, it feels lazy, but, as prose, this opening line is sort of exciting. In verse, I actually feel more like I’m reading a journal entry; whereas as the opening sentence of a prose poem, this line prepares me for a fun story set in a poetic land that I have never visited but know well.

The final poem in the collection, “How To,” functions as an ars prose poetica. Of course, it contains advice on living (what doesn’t?) but it also contains advice on how to make poetry out of the story of our lives. Or, is it advice on how to make a story out of the poetry of our lives? “Don’t waste a feeling. Or a story. Or a way to worry. A minute . A birdsong. Not even one shade of green. Promise the crows anything.” Ashton’s inability to waste experience makes her a good chronicler of the human interior condition and good poet.

Some Odd Afternoon won’t please all readers. Some won’t like the prose poetry; others won’t like the line poems; and still others won’t appreciate the occasionally jarring shifts from prose poem to verse poem to line poem. These readers won’t know if Ashton is a “prose poet,” or a “traditional poet” or an “experimental poet,” so they won’t really know what’s going on with her project, and they will find her plurality of voices discordant.

They can have that.

Most others will see Ashton’s plurality as democratic. Despite her references to Dickinson, Ashton is, after all, strangely Whitmanian in her desire to modulate her poetic voice so that any reader might find herself on the same frequency as the poet. Do the Ashtons contradict themselves? Very well, they contradict themselves. The many Ashtons Google give us are vast; the many poems Ashton gives us contain multitudes.

____________

Dean Rader reviews regularly for the San Francisco Chronicle and most recently for The Rumpus. His own recently released book of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize.

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