Words Scumble the View: On Lindsay Turner’s “The Upstate”
Lindsay Turner | The Upstate | University of Chicago Press | October 2023 | 72 Pages
By the moment this sentence ends, as you pause to see a new sentence will begin, a garden has been populated: “Once there was an image of a garden projected on a screen.” The garden is a representation of a garden, projected on a screen and on the page, as the doubled image frees us from the literal: do not try to find this garden elsewhere, anywhere that is not the first poem of Lindsay Turner’s The Upstate (2023). “The garden wasn’t planned for getting lost in but that’s what people did there,” Turner continues in “Planning,” and just as suddenly the garden disappears. Where did everyone go, the people who were lost? Where do we go now that we occupied this place from the past? Do we live in “the depopulated suburbs”; do we move through “strip malls, parking lots of trailers selling pills and armchairs”? The figure who moves us from the garden feels similarly displaced, so we return to her sense of “once,” a place that has become familiar to us: “Once I couldn’t wait a moment longer in Virginia / Once the sun rose red outside a hotel room in the cold New England dawn.” The sentence becomes a fixture of the past as we move to new places line-by-line. Each “once” deepens the knowledge that transforms in the present. Will we return to the garden, the image projected on the screen; is that even possible? “I couldn’t imagine any other way to sleep I hadn’t tried / Cocooned inside one form or another // Why doesn’t anyone in these poems speak for her own life”—knowledge capped by experience, the sentence spilling into another line, “Planning” shifts into a different kind of address. What poems, and who can speak inside of them? The artifice of form elides a person, a group of people in Virginia or New England or South Carolina: a poem is a structure of language that, at times, might give the impression that someone is here who can interject, who can “speak for her own life.” Except no one is exactly here as you read these words (someone might be in the other room, on the couch, or looking over your shoulder). The garden is emptied; the suburbs have been depopulated.
Where is upstate? A proximity, a region positioned degrees away from somewhere not upstate, forever elsewhere. The first of four poems titled “The Upstate” begins: “It always was a little like an outpost here.” The militaristic “outpost” is detached from a primary group of people, a relation to what happens in another place. What happens upstate, where life channels this proximity? “The sun is big behind the smog / You fill out forms and then you die,” and this is a tedium that both prevents and requires action. Can we clear the sky of smog, is all life a pattern of filling out forms? Now that she is no longer there, a person remembers what upstate seemed like in the past; in the present, another poem observes, “this is now / the dark underbelly.” An outpost and underbelly, the sharp transition between two metaphors nonetheless maintains its question of proximity: the underbelly of what? By the time “now” happens, we know, this figure has been elsewhere—so how did she spend her time in the upstate, daily habits that now shape these memories? “I cleaned so hard we could see the outlines / Then I fell asleep and woke up on the porch”: carefully, the unpunctuated clause matches the line, one action in proximity to what happens next (remember: you fill out forms and then you die).
The outline is significant because it requires attaining. And the outlined shape is filled in another upstate: “what would a cent get you if you spent it / what would it take to get at the truth of it / the truth is what everything is when you squint.” If you squint to focus the image, what surrounds that object will be obscured; if you look at what has been obscured, the image is no longer in focus. How to enact “the truth of it” in a poem becomes an echo of the question posed in “Planning”: “why doesn’t anyone in these poems speak for her own life”? To isolate the upstate from its proximities feels similar to shedding artifice for experience: the poem is not adjacent to time, the poem becomes time. Watch how, in the last poem titled “The Upstate,” Turner moves us from event to event, deepening the bond between social apparatus and the private person who might speak for her own life:
now draw down the light of evening
there’s a substance that the toxins want to claim and have
they put solutions straight into the bloodstream
before we knew I felt the silence fall
hold a silence in your hand or fight it
They becomes we becomes I: each group colludes to join and resist the others. To “hold the silence in your hand” situates it privately, a personal object; to “fight” the silence requires a social stage on which silence can transform into something else. Between the act of filling out forms and the event of death, Turner echoes, “the people gather somewhere or die trying / this is neither metaphorical nor new.” Neither metaphorical nor new, the poem tells its readers to understand this statement as communicating a kind of knowledge about particular people in a particular place, which belies a rhetorical boundary the line sets up. This statement becomes in part political observation—“I said I needed to be able to blame someone exactly”—yet one unrestrained by ideological underpinning. The poem does not shove itself toward idea; the poem enacts its unfaltering concern with our ability to look at suffering plainly. This is the same figure who earlier “cleaned so hard we could see the outlines.”
Turner includes this fourth and final “Upstate” poem in a section titled “Spells & Charms.” This category of ritual, somewhere between the performance of a song and the recitation of a poem, is similiarly regional. The charms that work here, in The Upstate, will not work elsewhere—though people might carry and recite them elsewhere, an emblem of the transformation that will occur. Listen to the second half of “Charm for W”:
golden fleece, bladder wrack
a kind of commitment
the sea by the seawall smelling like death
sugar kelp, sea silk
sun burn a space for you
lacy queen anne’s lace and rockweed on rock
This is a kind of line that readers have not heard before “Spells & Charms,” leaping from one sea-stained object to another, sound wrapping around fragmented sound. The charm does not articulate a particular function beyond the protection it offers through pattern (didn’t we earlier hear form described as a cocoon?). What kind of defense does poetry offer here? Local knowledge unbound by regional aesthetics, maybe, or the insistence that local knowledge is a pathway to the global without obscuring the particulars of either. Turner writes in “Charm for G,” “I don’t know how you could fight them // had a thought, lost it / don’t take the debt they offer you.” This is smart advice, and the poem situates it as a necessary realization after forgetfulness—after I and you and they triangulate a relation to each other, as if nothing else could occur in this moment. Here, they are a figure against which you need to be protected, “stabbed in the neck at the Regal Inn.” Yet the charm’s defense does not come from advice, even if it’s good to not “take the debt they offer you”; defense becomes a possibility through the way the charm is recited. One misspoken syllable and suddenly we’ve cast the wrong conditions: a change has happened that we did not imagine. Of course, a spell can also curse, so dramatizes the poem “It Imagines the Destruction It Wants”: “That the next storm rips the faces off your pretty seaward-facing houses with their / painted-spindle porches.” The figurative action extends into the physical world. The destruction anticipated by Turner’s curse happens now, as we imagine the “painted-spindle porches” overlooking the ocean. By the end of the curse, the physical world returns to the figurative, conferring a local knowledge, of the space and of oneself: “That the ground you fitted for the gates be stripped again of its green sod, unnamed / by you removed beyond your measure.” These boundaries, the outlines of suburban green sod, must exceed themselves, just as the homeowner’s measurements must be acknowledged, then broken.
A line intersects the outlined shape: the figure that travels, cannot stop traveling, and does not want to go outside again. The Upstate stages political-ecological crises as the poems meet these conditions with rage, but a rage that transforms by the desire for a different kind of reaction. “Tender Publics,” in response, begins in media res with the famous pilgrim (“Midway or the midpoint of my life”) who understands, in Turner’s terms, “the need to decompress”:
There was never enough tenderness in texts
Storms rolled through every day for weeks
I drove through some of them
I drove through many strip malls on the way—it felt familiar
The sign said ‘window tinting’ or ‘sunless tanning’
I drove through and forgot immediately
Along the way were many forms of tyranny
The mist rolled up the mountain as I drove
The question of “enough tenderness” is not a public demand for those “texts” to change, rather a reflection of the person who seeks out “enough tenderness” in these moments. The poem moves panoramically: by the time we pause at the end of a line, a new image unveils itself to the past. “Window tinting” or “sunless tanning”: who remembers what the sign said? She drove through storms and a changing familiarity, she turned away a hitchhiker, all the while observing “many forms of tyranny”—and what’s left? “Chemicals and plastics make such differences,” the poem continues, and the productively generalizing “such differences” leads back to familiar objects: “Closets and cabinets etc. make such differences // Everybody wants to give me a china set / No one in this life wants a china set.” A suburban divertissement from the “chemicals and plastics,” from the “many forms of tyranny” she passes while driving down the highway, even the gesture of giving cannot quite be infused with tenderness. The sensation, instead, arrives in the between moments, looking back at how one has survived: “I know I said I didn’t want to go outside ever again / No but I did.” The experience of rage is unresolved to rage, tenderness unresolved to tenderness: a style that exceeds regional images while attending to local experience.
“it was not regional it was systemic”: Turner takes her epigraph for The Upstate from C.D. Wright’s essay “Frank Stanford Of the Mulberry Family: An Arkansas Epilogue” (1997). In the penultimate section of her essay, Wright observes, “Over here is the periphery. From whence you came. Can you describe it. In detail. What you remember is moving. Backward. You do not see the beginning. Words scumble the view.” Even the thinnest veneer of language will scumble experience, the view; the artifice creates a new sensation of “moving,” one that transgresses a particular place in a particular time. To resist calling The Upstate a volume of regional poems, set in southern Appalachia, is to honor the stylistic impulse that surpasses one moment in time; just as important, to call The Upstate a volume of regional poems is to acknowledge its attention to these proximities. Categories do not obtain as precisely as the poems, so one returns to what’s on the page: “Why doesn’t anyone in these poems speak for her own life.” By the end of “Planning,” the volume’s first poem, this question is repeated to exceed the individual: “Why doesn’t anyone here speak for their own life.” Imagine you have reached the end of the volume, the garden disappeared long ago: has the answer to this question changed? Has this figure spoken for her life; have the people spoken for their lives? The final lines of the poem look forward: “In my life the major errors accumulate behind me as I go / Soon you will be able to read them like a poem.”