Ode to Kanawha City
I'm writing, or rather struggling to write, a particularly challenging essay. But I do have a poem.
Writing poetry, for me, is the most expansive form of writing, a regenerative and creative exercise that burnishes the intuitive, painterly part of my brain (even though there is also a lot of editing and cutting and culling that takes place, too). The critical essay — which I tend to read and write on Substack — dependent on its depth of argument, can be more akin to the process of undoing a thousand tiny knots. Both genres stimulate the mind, though the analytical one is more likely to collapse in on itself; one can absolutely overanalyze something into perpetual circle. (Look no further than Dostoevsky’s Underground Man.)
I do have a poem to share. For the past few years I have been working on a collection of odes and lamentations; this is one of the odes. The subject is a more universal experience: running away from home into the wider world only to reach an eventual spiritual return, that necessary quest to make sense of all that occurred. It is an expression of nostalgia though not inherently false, just a deep reverence for memory.
When I wrote this poem Solange had just released her album When I Get Home and I was listening incessantly. It remains a perfect album, meaning I can play it through without tiring or skipping a moment. The album — and its accompanying film — venerates her hometown of Houston, Texas, seeking to elevate the city’s diacritic culture and aesthetic. Her devotion to a sometimes forgotten but personally seminal place mirrored what I was concurrently feeling and writing about at the time: my childhood in West Virginia and all its contained multiplicities. I hear this poem with her album playing in background.
This is an ode to a West Virginia neighborhood I never lived in but only entered into, because it was where my friends lived (and also, if you recall from previous writing, where Southern Kitchen lived), providing it a mystical, otherly quality. It is also about life’s circular tendency. Unlike the intellectual loop that can constrict and suffocate, this kind of return to memory, when accompanied by perspective, can be widening. Perhaps time isn’t linear but rather burgeoning circle, expanding with time to encompass everything.
ODE TO KANAWHA CITY Here is eternally verdant, humid memory— entering the valley for freedom of plains. Small flat vastness by foot, on bike; seeking something of transcendence in car. Heeding machine as it consumed the Avenue, losing all form through the window, until what grew outside seeped in: plump, pallid suburban fig, butter- shaded pollen, rampant mint bourgeoned by season. (Wild as it is in Beirut, wild as it is anywhere.) And what grew inside poured out: sonic meditation, skin shuddering bass, perpetual tones like cinema. All was drenched emerald, overwhelmed by leaf canopy, a West Virginia hue – particular in depth, sublime and subliminal, color of paradise few see. Kanawha, City at the center of everything, far from anywhere. Other worlds spin by proxy. Nothing ever happened here but us, souls eternally verdant, sipping from a river where our circle completes, still— going around and around, eternal.