Poet as Microphotographer

I’ve been completely geeking out over Oceanic, so if I approach this blog with the enthusiasm of an unchecked child in a candy store, that’s because I am. Nezhukumatathil’s camera moves in a way I have not encountered before. It's wild.

I want to map out the trajectory of one of her poems in an attempt to understand how she gets from point A to point B. In the poem I’ve picked to analyze below, I’m SUPER intrigued by how she superimposes the image of a flower capturing a butterfly in stanza 8 over a kiss. I think this places an inevitability on the speaker and this man’s desire, like it was beyond their control. Like there is something murky and foreboding about the whole affair.

“When Lucille Bogan Sings ‘Shave ‘Em Dry’” (lyrics here)

Stanza	What is happening	Object of focus
1	The speaker blushes quickly, reminds her of sea animals	School of blue jack mackerel
2	Speaker imagines that dolphins have been waiting to try to catch the mackerel off guard	Dolphins, mackerel
3/4	The speaker hears Lucille Bogan start to growl. Speaker can’t even look at her this man when she asks him to listen	Lucille Bogan’s voice, avoiding man’s gaze
5	Speaker and man both sweat. They’re getting desirous. “All this time” suggests that this poem is written after they are still bonded by the sweat of their bodies	Sweat, “bright address that maps”
6	The lyrics make speaker blush	Pink, orchid mantis
7	The speaker imagines a flower (which is pink like her cheeks) snatching a butterfly from the air	pink flower, butterfly
8	Speaker clarifies: flower means Lucille Bogan’s song, and pink means a kiss. In one fell swoop, the image of the flower capturing the butterfly becomes the speaker and her husband. This suggests their passion was at the whim of Lucille Bogan’s control, and not of their own accord. Nature and lust are inextricably linked	sound of cicadas, night, nectar of a “long kiss good and sweet”

Throughout this collection, I was struck by how narrow and precise Nezhukumatathil’s lens is from objects to raw emotion. She is appreciative of the way light strikes a certain object, encountering the world as a vehicle to processing emotion, idea, revelation, extrapolation, philosophy -- whatever it is that the poem is doing at that moment.

She absorbs the universe through small things: it might be grainy soapcakes (45), or a spoon scooping butternut squash (17), or a snatched butterfly from the air (16). These crystallized moments are what make me FREAK out over Nezhukumatathil’s poetry.

I bet it looks like this: Nezhukumatathil notices the sharp blade on the counter, how it glints and menaces, and it stirs up a resentment living in her body.

Nezhukumatathil’s poems feel like microphotography -- the message comes from being completely zoomed in. I think she listens to her subconscious through nature, where she finds complex truths and understanding. Her emotional order of operations is not “Know what you’re feeling, then find an object to represent that.” No, no no nonono. I posit that these revelations and epiphanies swirl around in Nezhukumatathil’s heart like the sugar cube on her dish (28) until it sparkles with meaning.

I won’t make another table, but “Meals of Grief and Happiness” is one of my favorite poems. I think that the structure mirrors this method of processing I’ve been trying to articulate. I think the order of these two stanzas -- grief and then happiness -- foreshadows the speaker’s sense of losing her husband, the “you” of the poem (WHO, by the way, appears in the last four lines of the poem, and I think this suggests the speaker will miss the “you”).

~HJ