Dialogue:
Kelly R. Samuels & Jory Mickelson
Kelly R. Samuels on Jory Mickelson’s “[Sometimes a hotel room]”
After Reading Jory Mickelson’s [sometimes a hotel room]
I kept thinking about a photograph of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall taken in Paris in 1979. They’re in a car, on their way to or from some event. He looks resigned. She seems startled, her arm up, her mouth open. Years ago, I wrote a poem addressed to her in that photo, tapping into how she appeared, caught in that moment.
There is the desire to be out there and, yet, then, the letdowns, the chaos, prompting a wish to retreat. Who hasn’t felt this?
A weariness permeates Mickelson’s poem that resonates with me. Most “everything is artificial,” the dew on flowers “actually glue.” There’s the bombardment of “too many lights,” too few people you like at a party you thought you wanted to or should attend.
Is the hotel room a haven from all this? Are we Scarlett Johansson in that opening scene in Coppola’s Lost in Translation? Somewhat. Maybe. Mickelson’s hotel room, like the receipt for it, are fake and there’s a pubic hair of a stranger in the bathroom. We can try and make it pastoral, pretty, but it’s an effort. And anyway, the lover isn’t there, but on another continent. Calling us, yes, but via the “anonymous bedside / line” that eerily resembles a connection to a serial killer.
Some people have resided in hotels, calling them home — Bob Dylan, Simone de Beauvoir — but most of us have stayed only very temporarily. We’re there because of something else: the obligatory conference, a vacation involving visits to cultural landmarks and historic sites with the crush of tourists taking selfies, an event, like a party, that others clamor to attend. We probably don’t even unpack our undies and put them in the dresser. There are the pillows with varying degrees of firmness and the little bars of soap. There’s the blare of taxi horns through the windows that don’t open. And whatever there is we think we want to do or must do outside of that space, past the vast lobby.
“But we know / how that ends:”
Jory Mickelson on Kelly Samuels’ “Re: Talking of Wallpaper”
In a Eudora Welty story I read, the narrator lies on a couch, finding the sound of her husband’s creaky boots unbearable. They weary her. The story, as I remember it, is a satire on the travails of a certain class of privileged women, and also demonstrates in a way, a concrete example of the honeymoon being over. I say remember, because I’ve never been able to find the exact scene in Welty’s work again. It’s fuzzy. I am probably getting the details or even the gist of it wrong.
Kelly R. Samuels poem “Re: Talking of Wallpaper” evokes a similar feeling in me. An abhorrence for having to discuss the quotidian and mundane. Do we really need to waste our time talking about interior design or the weather, the speaker of the poem laments? I get the sense that this small talk is killing them. As the creaking boots were killing Welty’s protagonist.
Which brings to mind another author I adore: Denton Welch. A writer friend said to me, “I’ve got such a great book for you! Nothing happens in it at all.” They gave me a copy of Welch’s 1945 debut, In Youth is Pleasure. The book centers on an adolescent boy who feels trapped vacationing with his father for the summer in a country hotel. He wanders, he observes, and not much happens. The book is exquisite for its fine emotional tuning as well as its stack upon stack of small details about items, landscape, and people. Welch’s keen eye makes even the smallest detail luminous.
So too with “Re: Talking of Wallpaper.” Everything we know about the speaker is given away in one carefully observed element after another. The forward momentum of the poem are the details the speaker says they are weary of, yet can’t help telling us about. They imagine a more intelligent or exciting crowd to discuss things with. They long for a bright oil painting to liven up the room—even their life.
Yet, simultaneously with that longing, the speaker shows how deeply aware they are of nearly everything going on around them. They aren’t asleep. The speaker is wide awake. This poem invites us—under a guise of boredom and maybe even pretension into the intricate and dynamic world going on around us at every moment. Boredom, it turns out, is only another name for attention.
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.