One of the things so compelling about Margaret Ross’s Saturday is her obsessive fidelity to a purity of description: “Beige clouds in a greenish sky / seen through cheap sunglasses.” To that, she adds an instability of syntax and line break that she makes into a thing of cool beauty. Here’s a couple of stanzas at the end of “A Present,” a title whose multiple possible meanings is also a sign of Ross’s themes and capacities:
Touching certain strangers
I could feel the future just
below the surface of their skin, things
can happen, you could sense time
quicken beneath your hand.
The future? I want to know do I
hurt people because of what
they have made me feel or do I
have feelings I have always had
and try to make the world
look like it gave them to me?
The sentences, measured but already somehow headlong, roll against and over the ends of the lines. Sentences do not match the length of line. Sometimes these two elements dance, and sometimes they quarrel. Here they are dancing, at the beginning of “New York”:
The vitamin man did not complain.
Every day he took his vitamins.
And here they are quarreling, in “Blood”:
Thirty white people wearing white and posing
by the sea. Actually two of them
wear pink. One of the wives
who always tries to distance herself
from the family and one of her daughters.
It will ruin the picture but better to pretend
nobody notices …
There is much alienation in these poems, but also faithfulness to the music of what is, wherever it goes. There is also much fucking, much dissociated ritual, much intimacy and longing and staying close to matter. The basic contours of our lives are teeming with poetry, but mostly there’s no vocabulary for such things, and that’s what makes Ross’s work so thrilling, her search for the unsayable as it can be glimpsed or evinced in her compressed, far-seeing lines. The mundane, maddened into poetry:
The socks came in a pack of five.
What is the most boring subject
possible? Translucent blue
with punctures pierced to shape
a star around the ankle.
Ross is a singular talent. Unafraid to write directly about the body and the body’s movements through time and space. The sensibility of a witness bound to a traveler’s wandering heart. The song she makes will wake you up.
JESSE NATHAN: Would you talk a little bit about how you compose? Do poems arrive for you in bursts? Do they accrete slowly? Flashes and then silence and then another flurry of activity? Your poems often seem made of one gorgeous, weird, precise description after another, punctuated by occasional observations—but every line, every word seems achieved and hard-won. Do you get rid of a lot of material in the process?
MARGARET ROSS: Poems come really slowly to me. It’s like you say, flashes and silence. A lot of the latter. I try when I can to write before talking in the morning, just scrawling, basically, on paper until my hand outstrips my brain and whatever wants to appear appears. Most of that is nothing worth saving, but sometimes there’s a line. If I get a line, it stays in my head for weeks. I’ll say it when alone to hear where it leads and find the next lines by ear. It helps to say a draft while I’m walking or driving, somehow being in transit tenses the language and makes clearer where it needs to change, what music might emerge. I started working this way when I was full of doubt and couldn’t write and was living in California, stuck in traffic all the time. Letting a poem accrue in the car gradually restored my belief. That gut sense of a poem when it only exists as speech and sound feels like brushing up against some ambient spirit I want to follow even after things are written down. Working from memory has given me an inner life I rely on, plus it detaches poetry from my laptop, which I’m always relieved to avoid.
As for description, I’ve found it essential because I trust my senses more than my thoughts. I’m not very good at having ideas. What I mostly have are scraps of images, things I see or hear or touch that lodge in my mind and exert some pressure there. Transcribing the scraps relieves the pressure. Ideally, transfers the pressure into tone and syntax, which magnetizes disparate scraps until I start to recognize the force field of a poem.
In many of the books I love to read, description holds the palpable charge of an almost mystical solidity. Its images feel autonomous, at least semi-opaque. Whether or not they’re invented, they seem observed. Which is to say, they belong to a world much larger than the book. That’s where the charge comes from, I think. The charge, the pressure. I would call it meaning, the sensation of elaborate, unspeakable reality extending outward from a detail. I often sense it reading details that don’t fit neatly into a prevailing mood or subject, certain stray lines regarding surroundings and peripheral objects, people’s things. Sharp, metaphor-resistant images whose particularity is a form of traction. By staying literal, they stay closer to physical life and can get at irreducible wordless processes going on and on. Interactions of matter, tacit human communication, sensory perception, plant and animal operations, decay, huge portions of experience which don’t occur in language. That a verbal medium can convey them never ceases to amaze me.