This strategy has made poetry readings a difficult, but worthwhile exercise because the poems are in some ways bound to the page. In the past few years, Savage has devoted most of her writing to critical work on poetry, and her book manuscript “True Value Expands”: Lorine Niedecker, Gender, and Cultural Worth is close to completion. Her poetry manuscript, Blue Bison, is looking for a publisher. Poems from this collection as well as new work have been published or are forthcoming in The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Meanie, Court Green, Jelly Bucket, and Off the Coast.

 

Photograph by Molly Born

 

 

 

The many authors, the different voices they speak in, and the many ways to read narratives like the eyewitness accounts from Jamestown’s first decade are concerns the poems generally try to keep in the foreground in several ways. In “Sir Dale Reads,” my sense of the poem as an act and instrument of reading, of constructing a person from the narratives, most directly informs the stylistic choice highlighted in the title, but I also wanted to display my very 20^th century judgment that notes immediately, for instance, the erasure of Dale’s wives from the historical record. I wanted this poem to point to all the other participants who aren’t part of recorded history (like the first Mrs. D) or who are noted but anonymous, like the second Mrs. Dale is, sealed within a husband’s or father’s name.  Equally important, however, are my privileges and experiences that permit me to recognize what’s missing—I don’t want these poems merely to wag a finger at the past for its limited and often disgraceful “modes of thinking” as you put it so well.  My readings are also limited by my time, place, interests, and beliefs, although I don’t say so to excuse the sometimes outrageous blind spots of these men and the history they together create, often deliberately and performatively.  This last feature, performance, is also part of what struck me about many of the Jamestown narratives: they know they’re writing history and they’re trying to control what goes in and what doesn’t; they want to look good, sometimes in recognizably literary ways (hero, martyr, courageous leader, etc).  While historiography has changed dramatically in the last couple of decades, yes, I do think it continues to be “enameled” still, with the experiences of women and people who aren’t white engaged as corrective footnotes to or as alternative, “enriched” versions of the established past.

 

 

Ed Haile, the editor of the text I used as my primary source for Jamestown Koan, drew me to the Jamestown settlers as much as the settlers themselves.  Growing up in Richmond, Virginia, I was trained from early childhood to revere Smith and Dale; they were serious business and the subject of annual field trips. So I was delighted to read Haile’s casual, humanizing descriptions of these important men and entertained by Haile’s alternately joyful and cutting commentaries on their writing.  I was disturbed, too, by Haile’s sometimes strangely cheery vision of events, like Pocahontas’ kidnapping, which “Peaceable Securities” confronts. This teenager is taken captive by a group of white men while she’s visiting family friends, then held on a boat for weeks waiting for her father to agree to the terms of her return, and she’s pictured as having a big laugh over her quirky part in “Englishmen . . . filling the American landscape,” as if the landscape were empty, her young mind impervious to outrage, and her sexuality irrelevant.  This project began because of my fascination with the different registers of voice, the editor’s as well as the settlers’, as they read and represent their respective landscapes or texts and write their voices into them. Thomas Dale is incredibly open, often painfully vulnerable in his writing; his nakedly emotional dreams of converting  and fathering Native American children horrified and fascinated me, especially his lush expressions, which to my modern eye are intensely erotic  and remind me of Donne’s racy articulations of the sacred (although Dale’s eroticism is, I’m sure, unintentional in that he does not intend to reveal the sexual charge of his religious zeal).  I did not plan, believe me, to spend so much time with Thomas Dale, but he merited many readings and many returns.

“Smith’s Nightown” references Smith’s injury (his groin was burned when his men, fed up with Smith’s hard-line leadership, set his gunpowder sack on fire) that sends him back to England for medical treatment and literally preempts his becoming father of the New World. Melville’s Moby-Dick is one of the series’ intertexts, and like Ishmael’s translation of Queequeg’s history, Smith’s version of his life and this history of Jamestown is a “mere skeleton,” a collection of slips of paper put together and augmented, and I read and write, in part, to contact these voices, formed by once-bodies, to know them, even as I am aware that I can obtain only a form of fictional clothing.

 

 

Your question is so well considered, I think you answer it for me.  While the majority of my poetry looks much more traditional formally, Jamestown Koan, in dealing with history made of shards (Ed Haile says the history is the shards, the narratives, not what’s left over from some prior whole), needed to show the cracks and to keep in view the incompleteness and the silences.  Sometimes, the arrangements suggest competing interpretations or inflections of a single narrative, sometimes simultaneous interests or preoccupations, and sometimes the arrangement is my effort to give one voice center stage and shove others into the margin.  In short, sometimes I use punctuation and line breaks to tease out multiple meanings; other times, punctuation and positioning are judgments.

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