Dialogue:
Christopher Klingbeil & Cecille Marcato
Christopher Klingbeil on Cecille Marcato’s “Modern Cartography”
Go back and grab an atlas. Make sure it’s out of date; it must contain amoebas from a time that no longer exists when you get home to read it. Do you know how to read a map in a foreign language? Can you offer directions? The language you speak will be both marble and your own exploit in moving strangers to find how marbles move within the orbits of whatever makes us remember that dead bodies and bodies of water are never entirely still.
You can’t exhume the same corpse twice, Hereclitus confesses. Others laugh, We’ll see.
Cecille Marcato’s “Modern Cartography” gives us both the rocks we’ve made, this time along the shore, and the mouths we’ve made to move them. Time and its many bodies. Water first, then teeth. Anything can become a comedy with enough time, assuming growth. Our tectonic plates are only one more example, “with their restless-leg syndrome always in a constant war between the hot and the cold.” Aggrandized atomics.
Nothing is static, nothing solid, “it begs for revision because you did (and, honestly, how could you not?) dislodge a pebble.” Soon, too, your memory of the place the pebble moved from replaces the true location you stood in such that you’ll come to stand in two places simultaneously. Here and now plus then,”modifying itself moment to moment.” The way back is any time you remember you have to drive across the country once again to go back home.
Marcato asks us to imagine a holographic, real time cartography dancing in the corner of our room, of the inner most aspects of our mind, conflating then plus now with how. Any pebble kicked foreshadows tectonic movements. Yet the past is also always present. This Fourth, we drove across the country, west to east, losing hours, guided by satellite pictures of patchwork farmland beneath a quilted network of cumulus clouds being torn apart by tomorrow's weather and in between we landed at a familiar, if altered, location.
“My map has Yugoslavia — vanished now — but I have been there so where was I?” Marcato asks, in an eddy of geographic time about to fall apart.
In the house we entered as our home, temporarily, there hangs a picture of some mule ear flowers, gold against green leaves against the ragged mountains of Idaho in the otherwise clear blue sky. It's at eye level now, this photo in Michigan. Hard to believe I was there, crouched and capturing the very moment aside a trail I wouldn't visit again apart from here, so far away. Harder still to understand the time it takes to comprehend both the placed pebble and the place you started kicking.
Cecille Marcato on Christopher Klingbeil’s “Western sugar cooperative”
To me, making a really good poem is about structuring its craft elements to achieve a kind of tension between their balance and their surprise. I envision Christopher Klingbeil moving lines and phrases around building “Western sugar cooperative” in multiple revisions so that his setting (a former sugar factory) and narrative (walking his child through a plant repurposed into city park), his deliberate movement of time and direction (present, past, near future, shadowy future and forward/backward movement), the soupçon of metaphor (“I am a vise and shoulder”) and aphorism strike the precise bell he wants the reader to hear. The result evokes a familiar feeling, since many of us have taken care of young children and every one of us has been one: that sense of inescapable routine, relentless responsibility, the specter of dread. What holds the reader to the scene is the speaker’s particular details. He directs our gaze with prepositions and conjunctions allowing us to know where we are back and forth in time and space, to be present completely through invoked warm colors, the shapes of circles and shadow-animal shapes, the sounds of “squawking” and “wailing,” the imagined feel of dirt against wood and the very real sense of a small, sweaty body next to skin. Every sense is engaged.
“[H]alf of comfort is proximity,” he tells us almost off-handedly. “I’m right here I’m here,” is meant to self-soothe his fear and guilt as much as the child’s. At the turn, the speaker relates to the reader the telling of an anecdote to his charge. He’s interrupted by his anxieties before another anecdote, this time in the present – solidly shaping the narrative. I couldn’t help imagining my own father writing a poem about such an incident. We are in our driveway, my father washing and waxing the family car with me, his toddler daughter, keeping him company; my mother rushing outdoors, screaming at him after grabbing a can of pink liquid polish I was about to glug down. He had let me “continue barefoot in the first warm sun,” had not foreseen danger, as my mother was practiced in doing.
All of this is not to explicate the poem beyond an inch of its life but to understand how smoothly it moves from the quotidian through emergency into a future of shadowy, projected anxiety. All this while being as nimble as a child’s slight body despite the cumbersome weight that the fear of being responsible for another, much beloved human being brings to bear. Ah, the pain to come. The pain to come.
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.