A chapbook-length poem about ships is not what I would normally expect to come from Milwaukee, but Milwaukee is a surprising city. This Midwestern metropolis began as a Great Lakes port in 1835. Milwaukee also has – and has had for some 24 years now – hands down the finest poetry bookstore in the United States, Woodland Pattern, with over 25.000 small press titles.

 

There was a time, early enough into this bookstore’s history, when Woodland Pattern was virtually the only place in the United States where one could get a broad & diverse selection of Canadian books of poetry. In these days of easy internet access & international exchange, it’s hard even to keep in mind just how disconnected these literatures were a couple of decades ago. One reason why this is no longer true can be traced back to the efforts of people like Anne Kingsbury & Karl Gartung, co-founders of Woodland Pattern.

 

There is an integral connection between the bookstore & the idea of a poem about ships, which is simply that Stacy Szymaszek, author of Emptied of All Ships, a chapbook released by Bob Harrison’s Bronze Skull Press, happens also to be the Literary Program Manager at the Pattern.

 

Szymaszek’s writing is spare & clean, giving it a sense of austerity that might remind one of George Oppen’s very earliest poems. This is the sixth of the poem’s ten sections:

 

game of

checkers

 

wood-

pecker

 

gazebo

lemon

 

 

marlin

 

wide

brim

 

song

belted

in a note

thought

mutineer

 

 The inescapable rhyme of the first two stanzas triggers the reader’s attention to hear the great divergence of sounds that show up next, gazebo, pulled immediately back tight into the following lemon. The extra space given before the first word in this section that ties it back into the sea & ships motif of the overall poem allows us, I think, to hear more clearly how marlin & lemon exploit the same three consonants. The two words of the fifth stanza – wide / brim – shift our referential focus once again, but more importantly return us to an elemental state – one syllable, one word – a space this section has not in fact seen since its first line. But before these two adjectives can arrive at their inevitable noun, the reader’s attention shifts again to a final, longer stanza, whose lines proceed syllabically one, two, three, before suddenly bringing us back to the single syllable of thought, leading finally to the gaudiest word in the whole piece, mutineer. Mutineer is not the first three-syllable word in the piece, which in part is why wood- / pecker carries above over two lines. Mutineer has the same burst of sound & color as does gazebo.

 

There’s much more going on here than just this – the lovely shifting of the O sound from note to thought, for example – but I want to give a sense of how a section functions, the importance of each word’s physical qualities before I call attention to the two aspects of this piece I find myself thinking most obsessively about. The first is how the two terms that might fit into the shipping cognitive frame do so at great distance from any association with Midwestern industrial cargo logistics – sport fishing & mutinies. The second is how this poem is & is not “about” shipping at all.

 

The poem itself begins with three parallel stanzas, all in italics:

 

ships launch

into world

from stripe

in garb

chemical sails

float them far

 

 

ships launch

into world

from crash

in flesh

tugboats

tow them far

 

 

ships launch

into world

from excised

anchor

reef knots

pull them far

 

 

watch blips

on hour

 

 

hand glides

into chest

of slippery

combs

 

 

emptied of

all ships

 

One carries a sense, after the image of a radar screen & the final couplet of this opening section, that the ships have gone, leaving one – less a persona or narrator than a point-of-view – behind. This is reinforced in the opening stanza of the second section, which recalls the “domestic” crafts that underpinned the sailing industry for centuries:

 

mother

folds

sails

as I

count

flower

parts

 

But from this moment on in this work, the sea literally recedes. Just three strophes hence, we will find the lone-word stanza Pompeii. Other exotic names & adjectives are soon invoked as the poem unveils: Egyptian, Elysium, Cypress, Finnish, Chinese, Nefertiti, Arabic. This is very much a work about the distance of the Other, a concept that is extremely hard to convey in the hard, almost Objectivist language employed by Szymaszek, which she manages with great dexterity.

 

The poem ends satisfyingly, but I think it would be wrong to say that it concludes. Emptied of All Ships feels open-ended & consciously indeterminate. The sea, sailing & ships offer a cognitive frame for a series of moves, but it seems to me almost always the case there that it is the underlying dynamics that is the thrust of Szymaszek’s writing. As in the sixth section, quoted above, the continuing refocus of attention seems most truly the point (or, as I quoted Olson just the other day, “that movement or action is home”).

 

I would be curious to understand how Emptied of All Ships fits in with Some Mariners, another series by Szymaszek that you can find on the web (for instance, here, or here), which uses the same at sea construct. I invoked Oppen earlier &, as I also think of him as the “poet who sailed,” I turned back to the Collected, reading in particular first the poems from Seascape: Needle’s Eye and then the sailing pieces from Discrete Series. I was surprised to discover just how much more spare than Oppen Szymaszek really is.

 

To suggest her own reading, I note that she is included as one of the recommenders in the “Staff Picks” page of Woodland Pattern. Here is her current list, an interesting mix of New American & other post avant writing:

 

• Head, Bill Kushner, United Artists
• Voice-Over, Elaine Equi, Coffee House Press
• Tea Shack Interior, Andrew Schelling, Talisman
• Cultural Affairs In Boston, John Wieners, Black Sparrow
• Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn, edited by Edith Jarolim, Persea
• Evidence, Ted Pearson, Gaz Editions
• The Low East, David Henderson, North Atlantic Books