Selvages: Edges of Selfhood

Perhaps poets are attracted to edges because, as Anne Carson puts it in Eros the Bittersweet, “Words…have edges. So do you,” and perhaps also because notions of the self tend to form in response to and because of those limits. Identity—what Emily Dickinson called the “Campaign inscrutable / Of the interior”—has always concerned the lyric poet, but what might constitute a “self” has perhaps never been more prevalent on the public radar than in our current moment. In three new, mercurial books—Magdalene, by Marie Howe; In Full Velvet, by Jenny Johnson; and Milk Black Carbon, by Joan Naviyuk Kane —poets resist, succumb to, and transgress the identities—familial, social, ecological, biological, sexual—to which they attend.

The opening poem of Howe’s Magdalene, “Before the Beginning,” steps directly into vexed notions of selfhood by evoking the great biblical poem of mystery and identity, Psalm 139:

Thou knowest me right well; my frame was not hidden from thee, / when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth. / Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance; in thy book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.

Howe writes:

Was I ever virgin?

Did someone touch me before I could speak?

Who had me before I knew I was an I?

So that I wanted that touch again and again

Without knowing who or why or from whence it came?

What follows in Magdalene is an extended meditation on the false and true “I”: on the costs of and compensations for foregoing the familiarity and protection of the former and opening up to the vulnerabilities of the latter. To speak of false and true selves, of course, is another way to speak about love, the central theme and preoccupation of this book: “Can the body love beyond hunger? /…/ Can we love without greed?” the speaker asks in one of the collection’s two poems titled “The Teacher,” “Without wanting to be first?” Howe, forthright as ever, richly complicates her foray into this terrain of identity by conflating the experiences of her twenty-first-century speaker—middle-aged mother, survivor of abuse and depression, and lover—with those of another narrator whose experiences resemble those of Mary Magdalene. Magdalene, a figure from the New Testament, was a follower of Jesus (and considered by some to have been more to him than friend and student), a woman granted, by grace, the chance to shed one identity (prostitute) for another (woman free to learn and to love by choice).

Illuminating Magdalene are the provocative ways in which the various players and scenarios seem to turn into and transform one another. For example, the speaker in “The Affliction”—who has, after a long period of depression, and perhaps mourning, stopped taking the mind- and soul-numbing medications that have apparently helped her cope “for Months”—begins, in moments, to find herself “inside looking out” instead of seeing herself from the outside, “as if I were someone else.” Encountering an old friend, the narrator tells us:

: suddenly I was in: and I saw him,

and he: (and this was almost unbearable)

he saw me see him,

and I saw him see me.

He said something like, You’re going to be ok now,

or, It’s been difficult hasn’t it,

but what he said mattered only a little.

Abruptly, the speaker is back inside her own mind and body, not in her old skin but in a new place, “a third place I’d not yet been.” The reader finds this sea change of the inner life occur in another pair of poems, “Magdalene: The Woman Taken in Adultery” and “Magdalene: The Next Day.” In the first, the speaker turns from a woman whose life is about to end by stoning into a person who realizes...