PRELUDE: A LUMP OF PURE SOUND by Emily Skillings
As I set out to write—as I wrote—I asked myself, am I stupid? The thought appeared like a gold leap, it rushed from somewhere only to sit in tissue. It festered there. Could I be stupid? It wasn’t new. The question had increased in potency and frequency. I had been taught by women not to pay attention to this thought. That the men had given it to me. My condition was caused by the men and the institutions they dominated that poisoned me into thinking I was an impostor. But I had always been an impostor. A fake. When I was a ballet dancer learning modern dance, I copied the looseness of dancers’ limbs and sockets, the mannerisms of release. I watched videos of people with training to approximate my own, having learned none of the techniques of letting go. This was how I’d learned everything. By mimicking others until I could be, for a little while, unsupervised in movement and thought. To deny this would be a lie. I felt betrayed by the insistence that I was not a fraud. The shape and dimensions of the space that your body takes up as you move, as you walk and dance—measured from the most distal points of your limbs—is referred to as kinesphere, a term coined by Austrian movement theoretician Rudolf Laban, who invented a system of choreographic notation. He would later play a major role in the movement choir demonstrations of the Nazi Party. What is the kinesphere of my dull brain, my leaping body? I do not want one at all. I see a single oat, tumbling. When I was done with the dancers, I moved on to the poets. As a poet you never had to be anything, since whatever you did was pretty much fine. I wrote a few poems. Then a book. It was published. People read it. I began to teach, as one does. When I taught poetry I could get caught at any moment. I didn’t know anything. I love literature but hadn’t studied it in a serious way. A student points out a line in a contemporary poem cribbed from Paradise Lost. I have never bothered to read Milton. I once read the section where Eve wakes up, but I don’t remember any of it. I read it because my friend told me it possessed “insane beauty,” and that’s not the kind of thing you ignore. In preparation for an interview to teach at a university, my former professor sat me down and told me how Milton called rhymed verse “the invention of a barbarous Age.” I forgot to mention this at the interview, but I repeat this later to the students, without ever having read Milton’s introduction. It wouldn’t matter if I had. I read things and they float away. I would rather stare at my own breasts. “Mind like a steel sieve,” my father would say. Yet I do know some things, I do understand. I do not have to be smart, repeated something within me, its insistence a kind of dull whimper, as from a child. I am a poet. “Poets are something else,” Eileen Myles once wrote. I thought I’d found a haven where I could be half thinking, half nothing. I will not RSVP for a conference on anything at all. My students email me asking for things because I seem nice. They do not know I am bad. I say, “Yes of course.” When it comes to their poems I want to say, “Just do whatever you want.” At the faculty party, I walk away from the conversation about Mr. Heidegger, whom I do not understand, toward one about furniture, which I think about all day. I wish I could make a chair, but I don’t have the energy to learn. Of course I am being defensive. Passive-aggressive, even. Why stop now? I think prose introduced the problem. I had to write about a dead man, a man I love who is dead. He was smarter than me and he was smarter than you. Writing prose was like crawling into my own grave and looking up at the sky. A brown tunnel with a scrap of blue at the end. Or it was like trying to catch snakes made of loose earth. Things seem close yet far away. The poets fucked me, wanted to fuck me for a while, they fell in and out of love with me. They sent me messages late at night and I rehearsed each reply like I was preparing for an examination. They texted screenshots of poems I was supposed to have known by now and I Googled the lines to see who they were written by. “I love this poem,” I would reply, “one of my favorites.” I see now how I thought being with them was part of what made me one of them, but I never said this out loud, because of course it is a stupid thought. On a date with a nice poet at some launch party for a literary journal I said a very famous poem by James Merrill was by some other poet. I think about this for months; in the dark, my face turns red and then drains. I do like Merrill’s poem about the waterfall: There is a chamber of black stone. High and dry behind my stunning life. A different poet once told me I never talked about literature while we were together. I was teaching Kafka to freshmen and had paused, excitedly, on the section about the wound. Blooming with worms. They weren’t there and then they were, poking in and out of the flesh of the little story. “But I talk about literature all the time,” I said, staring into him like a basin full of rainwater. “Of course, of course you do.” The water has filtered through all life, all horrible thought. The prose writer writes poems, essays, and novels, writes books I wish I knew how to write. She uses words I do not know. Has studied with French and German philosophers. At the party, the timid girl has taken too much cake (the icing an iridescent, living green; it spreads and spreads like tender shoots of clover) and cannot put it back, nor can she eat it all. There is dirt under my fingernails. I want to get very drunk in a dress and be loud. The tears lift off the pages of my homework, returning to my eyes. The symbols un-smear. “Good,” says my father. “Now how do you solve for Y?” It is impossible. Could I be stupid? Perhaps one way forward was to consider the thought like an object. To give it my full and loving attention. To sit with it like a kind of pet or a child and see what it could teach me. I would invite it in for a year. We were inside a plague. The television and the radio spewing. Here is my furniture. Here is what I know. Sit. Don’t run away. I felt highly oxygenated, high on the relief of the possibility. Now you’ve seen through me, sang the cataract. I, a kind of stunned worm, would sleep gluttonous in the stinking hole of the question. See, that was such a stupid thing to have written.
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” Her recent poems can be found in POETRY, Harper’s, Granta, FOLDER, The Drift, and the New York Review of Books. Tantrums in Air is forthcoming in June 2025. Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Skillings currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn.
