Multiple Metamorphoses: White Porcupine Wonderments

By Demetra Saldaris

Today, the shifting ground in Sue Sinclair’s Breaker was brought to our attention.  Last week, in wonderments about Breaker, we noted the refusal of things to stay as they are and reflected that it is hard to stay in a world like that. This changeability and challenge rang true for me upon my first reading of White Porcupine, in which multiple metamorphoses are announced immediately on the book’s back cover — where marrow and tomorrow blur — and then continue inside: speed changes a snow storm to quills (18); dumplings are little clouds in a stew that is named after a job (lumberjack stew, 18) but made by a jobless man; loons are audited (21); a “blue” is broken-throttled (23); there is a meat canoe (51), a liver knocking at the back door (61); groundhogs are doormen (25); and prayers are unsustainable (19).  All are party to juxtapositions of the organic/inorganic, natural/man-made, comprehensible/incomprehensible … or, is it real/surreal?  Does Hall deliberately make this a world that is hard to stay in yet so eerily familiar that it is impossible to leave? 

A previous “wonderment” queried juxtaposition as a tool in Billeh Nickerson’s The Asthmatic Glassblower noting the “mixed emotions, mixed textures.”  Here, in White Porcupine the tension is both repulsive and seductive. Early in the collection we learn Mom grows what Dad kills, mutual child / father hatred is nourished by the love of a storm / porcupine that buries them, and as the book closes we encounter an “I” that doesn’t want to be an “I.” 

I wonder if this tension exposes a nature/nurture dichotomy. I also wonder what role the capital G God plays … this God that is thanked for man-made commodities: “thank God for peanut butter — & construction.”  This, taken from page 18 printed with a tilda atop, asterisk in its midst, then a dash and ampersand in the final line.  I wonder what to make of these text features.

I wonder if this “juxtapositioning” is part of the topography of Influency 6 wherein we have been transported from the “she” of Queyras, to Nickerson’s “you”/ I, to Sinclair’s almost absolute avoidance of  “I” — what Margaret called “the howl of we” — and now to Hall’s “I,” first person pronoun, and direct address of the  “I as I” … is this the reader, or poet whose poem WRATER speaks of “The I / changing from a Ionic column / to a fallen slot __ … the I goes looking for water to share / goes why-ing for itself thawed ~” (63). Which I? What’s an I? I? Why-ing? Why?

Do I have the courage to ask if anyone else, upon reading this, thought of the mnemonic device helping children to distinguish vowels from consonants? “A-E-I-O-U and sometimes Y when it sounds like an I.”  Are we somehow beginning that poetic transplantation of one word, sound, meaning for another as we attempt or perhaps relive early literacy?  Will I wonder aloud, here at this podium, if the ecological and the ego-logical are at odds?  Does the I as pronoun melt along with its ego or is it more seriously affected by climate change from I to ~?

And, finally, I wonder, with language so long seen as differentiating us from nature, what role can poetry play in helping us ecologically reimagine ourselves?

I want to extend my wonderments to thank Phil for this work — especially for two images from White Porcupine that will hauntertain me indefinitely.  The first is created by the final words on page 29 —words that provide an anchoring, a sense of much-needed security, in this disquieting poem connecting the “am” of the clock to the “am” of existence and the concrete number four to the body shape abed (I can imagine a class of students, prone, trying to form and figure this shape—well, okay, I did) finally finding some safety with “one hand on Ann’s hip / shore.”  The second is the mesmerizing, visceral, great white porcupine to which I have already paid some tribute—porcupine storm/nature altered by the man/man-made speed of a vehicle: “speed changes a storm to quills that are broken passing lines in sharp bouquet” (18).