Meredith MacLeod Davidson on Dominic Holt’s “American Garden”

I was not surprised to see my poem paired with Dominic’s for this dialogue. Our poems take similar shape across the page. There’s movement, there’s an effort against rigidity. The poems host memories, these memories exist beyond the page. This is concrete poetry.  

I wonder constantly at the meaning of “concrete” – it means both tangible and fixed. But there are so many tangible things that may not be fixed. Take memory – it is ephemeral, difficult to bring into to focus. But nonetheless something I can feel in my hands, taste in my mouth, smell! Poetry for me often feels like memory work. A conjuring in which my past, present, and future are invoked, in which all the pasts, presents, and futures of my subjects, my images, my memories, my relationships, my people are invoked. See Derrida’s Hauntology, or Jake Skeets’ Memory Field. That “concrete poetry” as a concept is largely defined by its endeavour to solidify a poem into shape on the page continues to fascinate. The page itself will always be limited. There are margins on a digital document. A physical page is limited by the measurements of its production. All page poetry in this way is concrete. 

“American Garden” struggles against rigidity at every line break, every shift of language and image. It conveys in its movement the porousness of soil and of seeds planted in soil, moving around as rains fall, as soils expand and tighten, as seeds sprout and spread roots.

These roots seek purchase through language. Maybe the roots are language, reaching in opposite directions, as clematis, as puss white / honeysuckle, as petunias or zucchini leaves / curl.

But different images of a subtle violence intersperse these reaching roots, form constricted frequently with the introduction of the throats of / pinwheels and / flags / hung or star / splattered / blues / jagged tooth

With this contrast most exemplified in the single line:

sprawl     gripping

which in an expert dilution suggests that perhaps expansion can be claustrophobic – think of the effect of suburban sprawl, of invasive weeds, or fauna.

Indeed the poem begins to shrink as these subtly violent images become more and more explicit and pronounced. The moment the police enter the poem, the poem recedes back toward the left margin and the space between words contracts.

As I write this, police sirens erupt in the streets around where I stay. Did I conjure them?  Their sound alone makes me shrink. I feel myself returning to a fixed place under threat of carceral observation.

I wonder what an American Garden might be. Is it a place to grow? To be observed? To be planted? To be extracted?

American as a classifier can feel like a threat. It is often a threat. American foreign policy. American ideology. American bombs. American stupidity. American selfishness.

But American as a classifier is also a sort of ownership. American accountability. The work is somewhere in this possession. I sense it. The poem senses it; teases it out through the earth.  

Indeed Holt’s poem by its end becomes a work of decomposition. Perhaps an American Garden is decomposition. The surreal blending of the past and present through the image of the newspaper, inked (“permanent”) with a history, then disposed to decompose as something nutritious toward plant growth in the garden, which in turn, fuels humanity through food, or joy (color, beauty, flowers!). The poem decomposes in form as well – struggles against expectation, stretches itself as far as it is able across the page. Yes, there are things holding it back, or hindering its growth. But the poem absorbs these things – takes ownership. Promises to make something new. It holds the past, present, and future together. Takes that rigid history and expands with a new missive: crowd out / the weeds.