"gods make of me a bear said no one"

by Jen Jabaily-Blackburn: Guest Writer!!

It’s my pleasure to introduce you to my friend and fellow poet, Jen Jabaily-Blackburn.
Here’s Jen—

It is such a relief when a poem finds its form. One piece in particular from my first book of poems, Girl in a Bear Suit (Elixir Press, 2024) that had to grow into its full expression was “Ars Ambulatoria” (my corrupted Latin for “the art of walking,” a play on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, “the art of love.” More on Ovid later.) For the longest time, this poem was a fairly straightforward prose poem, a block of text on a page. It was only when I thought about what I wanted to say (and a well-timed gift of Manuel Lima’s The Book of Circles) that I figured out that the rules of the page would not apply here. I was writing about the vulnerability present in moving through the world in a femme body. Of course there is no beginning or end. 

I love getting to know a poem on the page in a way that grants it its own identity, expressed by its aesthetics. (In other cases, we might call this fashion. In other cases, we might call fashion frivolous. Let’s not.) I love getting to know the poem’s expression of its selfhood in a way that stands separate from its author. This might be the closest to what I mean when I talk about “the speaker” of a poem. At risk of anthropomorphizing, the poem’s shape on the page sometimes feels like its body.  In some ways it is like a doll or a household god. An automaton. A— and I mean this in the most affectionate way— a puppet.

This applies to a wide variety of forms, some received, some not. A sonnet might feel very full compared to long columns of short couplets. A prose poem that used to be a sonnet still maintains some of the sonnet’s rhythms and logics but might feel different, more conversational. Sometimes form can be quite literal, with poems trying on the shapes of surveys or official documents. In recent years, I’ve been exploring mixed media pieces that make poems through redaction of text (usually with white gel pen), crayon and colored pencil, and collage. I think of these mixed media pieces as works of visual poetry rather than artworks, though I know those lines are blurry, and sometimes say more about the maker than the work itself.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the visual life of a poem, whether it employs mixed media or otherwise. I’m deeply curious about what the visual identity of a poem says about its ambitions. I think of Richard Siken’s bone-dry funny final line from his poem “Logic”: “This / is an argument about goals.” (Earlier in the same poem: “Logic is boring because it works.”) I love visual poems’ associative logic. They do not care about the page and what it is for. The page’s rules are so hilarious.

Often, in my own process, a poem’s layout is an integral and intuitive part of the process. In another poem from Girl in a Bear Suit, “Callisto: diastema”, a medial caesura (an exaggerated space in the center of the line) runs down the page, with offset couplets on either side of this divide. These choices are deliberate attempts to organize the poem’s disparate narratives into something resembling form; this poem introduces another story from The Metamorphoses, that of Procne and Philomela, sisters who were transformed into birds. For a long time, this poem was in more regular couplets (two sisters, of course.) I wanted to explore the tension between flight and tether. I wanted to make the diastema (a gap in teeth) visible on the page. This space was also the space between Callisto’s girl self and bear self, now living in the same body. As ever, some things were misunderstood. Some were familiar. The divide isn’t that big, just a little gap.

Form is possibility, but also limits. When I wrote “Callisto: dramatis personae”, I was hesitant to fix it into its eventual form; I knew that the form it wanted to be— something that felt choral and architectural— would not lend itself to being read aloud at readings. It was a hard choice, but one that I felt served the poem best.

In some ways, I feel the work of the visual poem is to bring the imagination out into the open. To make its contents so fully known. I will always love this line by Annie Boutelle, my one-time colleague and founder of my poetry home for the last 13 years, from her poem “What Caravaggio Knows About Giorgione”: “All you can know is there on the canvas.”

Another thing I love about a poem’s existence on a page is its entry into collaboration with time. A timely poem may become weathered by history. Insect holes, foxing spots, each one a collaboration. Much of this happens outside of the life of the poem’s maker. It’s embarrassing, sometimes, to think of how much I want my poems to live outside of me, to outlive me. Once the poems leave me to go live on pages or screens, I am done* making them. But this doesn’t mean that the poem is done, or that it will always be as I left it.

(*Sort of. Some people don’t believe in editing post-initial publication. I am not one of those people.)

My own mixed media poetry project started as a form of play and response, a release valve from my regular work. I took pages from The Metamorphoses by Ovid (translated by Allen Mandelbaum, Harcourt Brace, 1993) and gave myself permission to make marks. I was writing what would become Girl in a Bear Suit, a book of many forms and moods, centered around the narrative of Callisto, a human(-oid) figure— a nymph— whose body was transformed into a bear’s as a form of punishment. (Her crime? Existing. Like many characters in The Metamorphoses, she was punished for being attractive to the gods.) 

Ovid concludes his own text by granting it—  and by extension himself— immortality:

“And now my work is done: no wrath of Jove
nor fire nor sword nor time, which would erode
all things, has power to blot out this poem.
Now, when it wills, the fatal day (which has
only the body in its grasp) can end
my years, however long or short their span.
But, with the better part of me, I’ll gain
a place that’s higher than the stars: my name,
indelible, eternal, will remain.
And everywhere that Roman power has sway,
in all domains the Latins gain, my lines
will be on people’s lips; and through all time—
if poets’ prophecies are ever right—
my name and fame are sure: I shall have life.”
(The Metamorphoses, Book XV, translated by Allen Mandelbaum)

If you know one thing about Ovid, it’s that he wrote The Metamorphoses, a great big fantastical love letter to imperial power. If you know two things, it’s that he died in exile at the furthest reaches of that same empire. 

Fuck around and find out, I guess.

I found myself wanting to not only respond to the text in writing as I was in my more traditionally rendered poems, but to push back against its structures of power in more immediate ways. One way of pushing back against the text was to physically adapt it. I won’t lie and say all this work is animated by white-hot fury:

It is also fun. Loads of fun. I love— truly— many things about The Metamorphoses. Nothing ever stays where you left it. I think even Ovid knew this. We are ruled, more than anything, by change. 

If you’re interested in exploring more works of mixed media poetry, a few recommendations: Sarah J. Sloat’s “Hotel Almighty”, Mary Ruefle’s “A Little White Shadow”, Naoko Fujimoto’s “GLYPH”, Kylie Gellatly’s “The Fever Poems,” Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s “Her Read”

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Jen Jabaily-Blackburn’s first book of poems, Girl in a Bear Suit, was selected by Christopher Citro as winner of the 2023 Elixir Press Annual Poetry Prize. She is the winner of the 2024 Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Award from Salamander, selected by Stephanie Burt. Her recent work has appeared in or is coming soon from SIR, Arkansas International, Palette Poetry, Salamander, Fugue, Banshee, On the Seawall and Couplet Poetry, and her poems have twice been selected for Best New Poets. She is at work on a series of mixed-media blackout poems, hem, drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Originally from the Boston area, she now lives in Western Massachusetts with her family. In 2024, she joined the advisory board of Perugia Press, and she is an associate editor of Nine Syllables Press, housed at Smith College, where she is the Program & Outreach coordinator for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center. More at jenjabailyblackburn.com.