Poet’s Corner: “Ordinary Sugar” by Amanda Gunn

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

Amanda Gunn, “Ordinary Sugar” from Things I Didn’t Do with This Body. Copyright © 2023 by Amanda Gunn.

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it. 

My first encounter with Amanda Gunn’s “Ordinary Sugar” was through Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó’Tuama, not long after I read his bread recipe-poem and reflections on soup. Poems and recipes are kindred spirits, both in form and function. And, as Anthony Bourdain writes in Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, “the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency” is a vital, fundamental skill. Perhaps the same is true of poetry: We’re not all poets, but everyone can ask how they’re nourishing others with words, or learning how to absorb them for the soul. As Ó’Tuama writes:

“[R]ecipes are an old form of poetry, and I think a recipe and a poem each have a measure at the heart of them—a measure about pain, a measure about love, a measure about pleasure, or about survival. They’re giving a certain form of instruction that can turn you either towards the deliciousness of food or the deliciousness of language, that can help you look at your own life and feel like you’re finding something from it in the engagement with the writing.”

Gunn’s “Ordinary Sugar,” like opening an heirloom cookbook, unfolds the complexities of the generational relationship between poem and recipe. Recipes as poems—and vice versa—are a form of ancestral archiving and memory, amplified here in the rhyme of the second stanza: keep, knees, pristine, sweet, green, pleasurably, plenty. These words summarize the ‘story’ Gunn is sharing with us; rhyme aids memory for prayer, song, patience, attention, and presence.

Remembering is also an honouring of people and their circumstances, especially through a recipe and how it’s engaged with or followed: Making sweet potato pie from russets, the gleaming glass eye, pregnant wordlessness, and fast spinning through the kitchen. There isn’t a distinct narrative arc in the poem, per se, true to the patchwork our memories often are, but Gunn includes clear, specific, detailed snapshots—not temporally bound—and brings them alongside her present-day voice’s reflections, inviting us into Grandma Mattie’s life experience and ensuing motivations. Then, the poem tethers this archiving to a bearing of witness through time—how Gunn paid attention as a child and how she’s paying attention now, through inheritance. The stanzas move from Aunts Mary & Earline → Amanda → Grandma Mattie → Amanda → Amanda’s mother → Amanda. Generational influence is layered, akin to those graham cracker cakes, yellow cakes, and the recipe book they’re making was kept safe in.

In this vein, Gunn shows not only the desire her family had to soothe what might have been a difficult life, but a witnessing of why: Hunger, poverty, starvation, and the threat of scarcity are present because they’re remembered in the body, and therefore inherited as well: “Too, the ruthless / manic canning, putting by, / putting by, against memories / too near starvation—the / machine in her belly built / to last.”

Like the inheritance of poverty or scarcity—and the accompanying shame, fear, and silence—some things aren’t documented in a recipe book. Ways of survival and being are altogether missing from our present day-to-day lives: The economic intelligence and commitment to caring for a summer garden—weeding, tilling, watering, and feeding with eggshells and coffee grounds—and harvesting it before the first frost to have enough food for winter. But we all come from oral cultures, and Gunn’s poem seems to say: Don’t forget to witness and remember what wasn’t written down—it’s as much a part of the recipe (of survival) as the ordinary sugar made extraordinarily by love.

And ultimately, though an accessible free-verse poem in five stanzas, “Ordinary Sugar,” is in fact the recipe that includes as much as Gunn can gather. Through the language of food and cooking, it alchemizes its reader and speaker: What’s inherited takes a new shape when digested, then gifted, like the bread and jam in the final stanza. As Ó’Tuama says: “[A] recipe is an opportunity in writing to give some tools for survival as well as maybe a couple of quantities.” When we follow a recipe, it’s not only those fed who survive. The person who crafted it lives on, too.

Poet’s Corner: “The First Water Is the Body” by Natalie Diaz

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

“The First Water Is the Body” by Natalie Diaz, from Postcolonial Love Poem. Copyright ©2020 by Natalie Diaz. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Graywolf Press, in Emergence Magazine.

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it. 

When I read “The First Water Is the Body” in 2020, after Natalie Diaz’s book, Postcolonial Love Poem (in which the poem appears), won the Pulitzer Prize, my consciousness felt diverted like a river around a boulder. I struggled to grasp another poem as this one settled, alive, into my body. Perhaps it didn’t settle at all, like the settler I am in Canada. The poem helped me remember the river that I, too, already am.   

At first, before reading, you may wonder: Is this a poem? The prose poem and lyric essay have much in common—often a blend of narrative and personal experience held by poetic, lyric language and juxtaposition. You might say this form is much like a river, bed, and bank—curving, compressing, and expanding. What makes it a poem, to me, is the flow: Uninhibited, and yet, tethered to a strong form: A body, if you will. It’s also a poem because Natalie Diaz says it is (can you tell I’m a fan?). 

Further, deeper into the water, the poem’s syntax, diction, and imagery lift each other. The word ‘conservative’—and the way it’s included as the last word of a section and stanza—implicates many meanings. There’s also the use of red, white, and blue—the colours of the American flag—appearing as silt, rock, sun burns, Native/white bodies, blood, and water. The body, of course, recurs, but here is my favourite example:

“If I was created to hold the Colorado River, to carry its rushing inside me, if the very shape of my throat, of my thighs is for wetness, how can I say who I am if the river is gone?”

Like a river, most stanzas are only one sentence. The sentences, as water holds pebbles, carry images, descriptions, and declarations; muscles to the bones of the poem (of which there are many). The most visceral, I felt, is Diaz’s reckoning with translation, noting John Berger’s belief that true translation returns to the non-verbal. In this sense, what kind of translation is happening in the poem and outside of it? Who is it for? What has been lost in this process?

“In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by the letters ‘ii and ‘a: ‘iimat for body, ‘amat for land. In conversation, we often use a shortened form for each: mat-. Unless you know the context of a conversation, you might not know if we are speaking about our body or our land. You might not know which has been injured, which is remembering, which is alive, which was dreamed, which needs care. You might not know we mean both. // “If I say, My river is disappearing, do I also mean, My people are disappearing?”

The body and river cannot be separated—they are one. Therefore, as Diaz writes, there’s no metaphor or juxtaposition of tears, river, blood, though these appear in the poem side-by-side. This shows us the limit of language on the page, which Diaz reflects stunningly. Poems, often, tangle with metaphor and myth—which are in close relationship. Diaz writes that “What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. I have never been true in America. America is my myth.” She follows this by asking, “If the river is a ghost, am I? // Unsoothable thirst is one type of haunting.” I’m reminded here of “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” a paper by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. 

Thus, the hope of the poem may be to haunt us via the feelings attributed to mythological spirits and ghosts—a sense of loss, grief, lingering, and fear—in a way that convinces: “If I could convince you, would our brown bodies and our blue rivers be more loved and less ruined?” We know that the body remembers trauma spatially. So, too, does the water. If you’re curious about Indigenous ghost/horror stories, I recommend Never Whistle At Night, expanded on here. 

Alongside Berger, Diaz brings in Toni Morrison’s quote: “All water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” Other voices in the poems, alongside Diaz, work formally to help us see and feel plurality: If “We think of our bodies as being all that we are: I am my body [, t]his thinking helps us disrespect water, air, land, one another. But water is not external from our body, our self.”

Lastly, Diaz uses questions throughout the poem—something that’s tricky to get right. To a few, she responds:

“Will we remember from where we’ve come? The water.”

Others, she asks rhetorically, the answer implied:

“Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?”

And some, she leaves, necessarily, for all of us:

“And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other?”

This poem is full of life, as a river is—as a body is. Please continue spending time with it beyond this brief, surely inadequate introduction. And perhaps ask: What river am I?

Poet’s Corner: “In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.” by Andrea Gibson

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

“In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.” Copyright © 2023 by Andrea Gibson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 30, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

Andrea Gibson, courtesy of the Boulder Library Foundation

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it. 

I’ve loved Andrea Gibson’s work for years, and was heartbroken when they passed away not long ago. I’ll always recommend spending time with my favourite poem of theirs, “What Love Is.” But today, honouring the ways the world is raising awareness about cancer throughout April and May, we’re looking at “In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.” 

The first thing you might notice is the length of the title: It’s two sentences, which we don’t see often. But this craft choice sets up the dialogue, structure, and voice of the poem. The title’s language doesn’t appear as succinct or compressed as the poem’s, and through its length and likeness to prose, it tells us how to read the poem: As something brave, as a risk. The content/subject is the act of bravery, but formally it’s supported by writing that begins as two prose-like sentences and takes the risk of becoming a poem instead, like the expansiveness of life transitioning into the (seeming) narrowness of death. 

In the poem, we encounter couplets and many pairs of images—gloves, life and death, etc. The couplet form seems to say 1) ‘this,’ 2) pause for a breath on the hinge of the line break, and then 3) ‘that.’ It’s almost as if the first line is a breath in and the second is a breath out. 

Similarly, there’s an ebb and flow of thinking one thing, and then another—fear followed by belief. The enjambed lines, often across stanza breaks, amplify this stunningly:

“I could survive forever // on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me /  to stop measuring my lifespan by length, // but by width?”

Further, the brilliance of this poem is that it reads as if Andrea wrote it down in a notebook (likely they did). But the precision of the diction, syntax, and images is carefully crafted. The woods challenge our notions and metaphors for death and darkness, for example. 

And then, time moves with Andrea’s thoughtful, patient touch.

The spaces between God, basketball, and balloons are presumably only a few seconds of thought, but the seconds of reading time slow and swell, mirroring the expansiveness of a balloon, a court, and God. The careful placing of images and metaphor enact this feeling. We move between time periods and time ‘owed,’ to literal outer space (from the balloon to the sky to the moon). And then we’re brought gently back to Earth, where death has been happening rather than coming. So often we think of the afterlife as “up there.” We look to the sky when we think of someone who’s no longer with us. But our bodies are “down there.” Down here, really. To remember—and be remembered—is to remain with the Earth. And as Andrea remembers their loved ones, we remember them, too.