FROSTBITE

a LitCafe🔥production

A few quick, newsie-floozy items before I get going:

1. My new book of poems, Flesh & Language, will be published in 2027 by Cornerstone Press out of U of Wisconsin!

2. Soon Herring Alley Pamphlets will be releasing my chapbook, Coil, which is sort of the core of the above book, as the first “pamphlet” in an experiment about new poetry: Herring Alley will put together a list of folks who are especially interested in new poetry and wish to see it before it enters the world in full book form; these names will go on a subscription list to receive periodic (free / donation-based) mailings of new-poetry pamphlets, or the work of contemporary poets hot off the brain-press. Email or message me if you want to be on this list. The pamphlet is run in a limited edition of 100 copies.

3. I’ll be teaching at the Journey to Jupiter Writing Retreat this year. It’s a retreat I’ve attended twice and can’t recommend highly enough. You don’t have to be a published writer to go any more than you have to win an Olympic track medal to be a runner. This is a wonderful, invigorating, and sustaining experience for any and all types of writers who are working in or hope to work in long form (any full-length work of prose), and they’re approaching their last call for applications. HMU if you want to chat about it. Also: if anyone wants to get me set up for real headshots without headphones around my neck, please feel free to help this particular ambulating laundy-pile. Here’s the link to apply.

   

   —Welcome to all of the new folks! My subscribership has grown by over a hundred in the last few weeks! I know no one has time or energy, but I hope if you’re feeling especially lawless you’ll let yourself browse around some of the other Dishwasher Cafe posts and be fed and entertained. I’m hoping, just as I visit in the below essay, to help us all feel less alone by writing this Substack. I mostly do that through laughter in the Dishwasher Cafe posts, but today’s post, like about one in every four, is from the LitCafe, a sub-substack of Dishwasher Cafe, which is where I let my “feral professor”-self loose on a poem, for all of our enjoyment and hopefully illumination. But I’m still the cranky, tired mom-of-twins you’ve come to know, and will return to those shorter, funnier offerings from the DC next week.

OK, that’s all for news. Enjoy the preview of the LitCafe below if you’re a free subscriber, and enjoy the whole shebang if you’re a paid subscriber! Thanks as always for keeping me writing, and, as always, your likes and shares and comments and subscriptions really matter. xc

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I’m not interested in adults who haven’t come apart at the seams. Literal seams will do— rheumatoid arthritis or surprise gallbladder surgery at the very least— but I also accept internal ones, the kind of thing where you feel like your soul might be leaking out your ears while you pump gas.

If you haven’t suddenly wondered what in hell is even real—like, been chased by existential panic in the drive-thru lane such that you cannot remember your two kids’ donut orders, which are “strawberry and vanilla,” to save your life or theirs—then I am very glad for you. But for the rest of us, there is The Night to contend with. The periodic visitation to a place no one would especially choose to go.

Poets are good for some things. This is one of them.

You can bet for every sinking dread that grabs your gizzard there are a hundred poets having a worse time of it. If your heart is bruised, some poet’s is smithereened and slime-molded over; if your loneliness is the size and flavor of sweaty elephant balls, theirs is mammoth and woolly.

In short, poetry is a place to go to know that you are not alone. Of course, one way to deal with loneliness is to, you know, do things with people, but some of us retain our ability to believe on a molecular level that the world is ending even while we’re in the presence of others. We’ve got Tonic-resistant Rot of the Heart.

Enter just about any poet, but especially a stiff-upper-lip one, one who can do both Rot and Recovery. The million-dollar skill in this case is—surprisingly, given that poets are known for being hot messes— a very particular form of restraint. It’s a deliberate and light but tenaciously strong disposition. It is a rare and beautiful voice that can take the darkest places and make them walkable.

This poem seems, like so many of Frost’s, to be simple. Straightforward. What I like about it is that he’s entering patently smithereening circumstances, and he deals with it calmly. Some of my favorite people in the world can do this: see the scary thing, know it is scary, feel enough of the horror to honor the reality, and yet remain intact by refraining from defense beyond what’s strictly necessary to proceed. Here we have someone able to meet The Night. He admits, absorbs, and makes a home for what might otherwise be panic, and in doing so, he makes it possible to not-succumb.

“I have been one acquainted with the night” is about as straightforward-sounding a first line as can be, but inside of it, many profound subtleties lie folded, almost starched and ironed in their tidy efficiency of vastness.

First, “have been” is a choice, and one that we have to admit did win out over “was” or “am.” It’s not just current; it’s not just past. There’s a simultaneous closure and ongoingness here. It happened and is over, but not on any specific timeline, and not guaranteed never to happen again. It’s a thing completed but also feels ongoing the way an adjective to describe the self works, a “this is a thing that describes me”: “I have been one acquainted with the night” is almost a compound adjective-sentence that describes who the person is, so the event that seems to be “over” persists outside of time as a quality of being.

Next, the “one”: “I have been one acquainted with the night” (emphasis mine) calls forth, as all things do, its opposite. If I say “Hi I’m Caroline and I ate one of the cookies from the tray you brought to my party” we know one of two things: a) I wanted to eat all of them, or b) I didn’t like the one I had and am glad I didn’t have to eat more (unlikely). Either way, the story of the one cookie I mention calls forth in our minds the story of the rest. Frost easily could have written only “I have been acquainted with the night” and left out that pesky “one” entirely, but he does put it in, and so we see two things: both that he is distinct, a separate and lone entity among many, and that he is one of a many, which puts him in company, not alone. Again, a simultaneity, but this time it’s not about temporality or done vs. ongoing; this time it’s about being both discrete and indiscrete from his surroundings. If that doesn’t feel like a night-walk in rain I’m not sure what does.

The word “acquainted,” of course, has its own ocean of subtlety. He’s not “friends with the night,” nor is he “enemies with the night.” He doesn’t profess to know it intimately, nor is he a stranger to it. The choice of “acquainted” walks a delicate line, smacks of accuracy and a stunningly functional neutrality. This is someone approaching the thing without predetermining its qualities and values. He’s retaining his powers of responsiveness by wording as nearly without judgment as possible. If you go into a situation already decided about what and how a phenomenon is, why are you writing about it at all?