The novel as poem. The poem as novel.

Storytelling as drifting with ghosts ...

We all live with ghosts. Ghosts of the dead, but also the ghosts of the living: lost family members, lost lovers, lost friends, lost homes.

I suppose we lose a sense of belonging in the world with each loss. We’re a little less secure in the world, a little more adrift.

It would be an interesting exercise to sit down and write down everything you’ve lost, large and small. To start a catalogue of loss. I might actually do that. It would essentially be a list of things to write about for the rest of my days.

Pulitzer Prize award-winning poet Forrest Gander excavates his loss in Mojave Ghost, a poetry collection that he calls a “novel-poem.”

I love how new forms of storytelling keep emerging. It’s a lesson: we can make up the form that best holds our expression.

You might say that he himself is a ghost as he drifts through the land and his poems, trying to come to terms with the the recent loss of his wife, the poet C.D. Wright, his mother, and his sister.

He’s reckoning with memories, and that reckoning isn’t always fulfilling. A pervasive theme of this book is the narrator’s inability to embrace the full history of others, whether the ghosts of his past or the slightly hallucinatory but living friend who is sometimes with him.

It’s one of the most meaningful books that I’ve read in quite a while.

A novel new form

I chose to write about Mojave Ghost today because Forrest Gander was on my podcast, Write-minded, and I was so intrigued by this new form he defined as a “novel-poem.” I didn’t know what a “novel-poem” was except what I’d learned from Gander’s preface: that the book was born out of his grief and his walks along the San Andreas fault to return to the place he grew up in, Barstow, California.

I was actually a little confused by the reading experience at first because it was different than other poetry collections. None of the poems had titles. Reading the book was kind of drifty and meandering, with a somewhat indistinct narrative running through poems inviting the reader to fill in the gaps.

But novels usually avoid narrative gaps. This one goes in and out of scenes and memories, and you’re constantly grappling with the gaps, which is, to be honest, perhaps my favorite type of reading experience these days. Loss is surrounded by amorphous, ever shifting gaps, after all.

Gander said he wanted to write more intimately and directly in this poem, without the acrobatic syntax that interested him in his previous work. This is more plaintive, he said, and it takes place more in sentences than the drama of a poem’s broken lines.

The self and the land around the self

Gander said that he feels his self as a collage, or kaleidoscopic, which is an interesting metaphor to view self through. I’ve always liked the quilt as a metaphor for self because a quilt is a type of “catalogue of loss”—a collection of patchwork fabrics, no longer useful, stitched together into a new work of art.

Like a quilt, one of the fascinating parts of the collection is how his self isn’t just an isolated, separate entity, but part of the landscape around it. Gander referenced a body of South Indian literature called Sangam and its poems called akam. In that tradition, it was considered not only unethical but impossible to write about the self without taking into account the landscape around you.

The connection to the landscape is natural for Gander because he has a degree in geology, and as he says in the preface to the book, geology is a profession of “disinterring memories.”

He starts Mojave Ghost with a poignant phrase on the first page: “There is nothing in me now / of what I was before.”

I often think about what Edwidge Danticat wrote about grief, that it’s not linear or chronological. It spirals through life. And then Roland Barthes wrote about how grief can interrupt the most mundane moments.

When you talk with Gander, you get a sense of how filled he is with loss, especially regarding his wife, the poet C.D. Wright, who he reveres as a genius. He writes words as if reaching for her, yearning to touch her, to be with her. I’ve been writing a series on what “writing with love” means, and perhaps this is what it is at its best: writing to be with another, to feel another.

Loss is ever present. Absence forms us. We hold conversations with the dead. A good companion doesn’t have to be alive or with us.

I felt those feelings amid the many textures of grief and searching in Mojave Ghost. Gander read this excerpt on the podcast:

The changing dune line opens contours of meanings 
other than the ones for which we're prepared, 
we treat it with suspicion.

When he smiled and shook his head no, his face
connoted the presumption that you and I live in a different world.
He took us in like the scent of a dead animal.

But how to sustain attentiveness? How to keep 
the mind from dropping its needle 
into the worn grooves of association?

My art, you said in passing, is nothing much 
more than the discipline of an embodied life.

Articulating nuance. The delicate 
palette. You paint details
with a tiny brush you made yourself 
of hair plucked from your forearm.

They distrust me, you said, because 
they can tell I prefer my work to their own.

Which is when I tucked a red anemone 
under your pillow to bring you good dreams. What

else did you say?
Fair enough. It is a marriage of equals and without degree.

Your trace on me
like rope marks on the well's mouth.

Here, have a thought.

As for our misfit status: Brecht observed,
the palace of canonical culture is built on—
Not to interpret. To feel life course through you.

From Mojave Ghost

Today’s writing exercise: a catalogue of loss

Write down everything you’ve lost, large and small.

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Because a quote

I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
              but no: there isn't an anchor anywhere.
There isn't an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
   I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

—William Bronk¹

Because another quote

I have lost the consolation of faith 
though not the ambition to worship

―Forrest Gander

Please buy The Art of Brevity!

Because a photo

1. This is the opening quote from Forrest Gander's collection, Be With.