poetry: a dowsing rod for alive

introduction by Rachelle Toarmino
a dowsing rod for alive: canese jarboe’s SISSY

“Are you above or below?” Canese Jarboe asks in “dark acre,” a twelve-page poem that appears toward the beginning of SISSY, their debut collection of poetry out from Garden-Door Press last year. I first encountered the poem in 2018, when Willow Springs Books published it as a chapbook. A lyric investigation, “dark acre” finds the speaker counting eggs, spreading rumors, witching for water–the poetic voice as “a dowsing rod for alive.” Situated now within SISSY, the poem signals Jarboe’s interest in orientation that will animate their entire collection while expanding to include other modes and approaches: poetry as the synthesis of imaginative thinking, transmitted perspectives, and documentary record in a search for understanding.

With SISSY, Jarboe joins the tradition of poets seeking correspondences between person and place, voice and inheritance. In Jarboe’s rural landscape, Jack Spicer’s radio tower is a weathervane or lightning rod; Dante’s dark wood is out back behind the house. “I am standing / in a room / full of taxidermy / ducks / suspended / in flight,” Jarboe writes later in “dark acre.” The poet’s task, if we assume they want to find their way, begins with this return to geography–backstitching their steps to stand at the center of history’s overlapping occasions, hit the lyric’s pause, and listen.

Throughout the book, Jarboe reminds us that memory, both personal and collective, is always a group project. This concern is more clearly on display in poems like the eponymous “SISSY,” which documents the American tradition of gay rodeo, particularly in the 1980s and 90s through the height of the AIDS epidemic. In the poem, Jarboe positions color photographs and excerpts from interview transcriptions alongside their own voice to orient themself within the context of what they’ve most immediately inherited as a queer millennial.

But the collaborative quality of memory is equally operative in the most personal poems of the book, such as “Not Even with Three Brains Can We Remember,” where three siblings pool their perspectives to construct “One childhood.” One of them tends to notice by crouching down; another clocks “Something about apricots,” or what’s above. Each sees green–the color of innocence, resource, and luck. By standing in the middle of three intersecting circles, the siblings try to stitch something like a record. In their ongoing attempt, Jarboe reminds us that remembering together is an act of faith and care.

“I have been a weathervane,” Jarboe’s speaker asserts in the collection’s opening poem, “Gumption.” But immediately they doubt the investigative power of the tool, ubiquitous in the rural landscapes that they conjure. The poem ends with a question, repeated: “What / if there is no wind // What if there is no wind.”

In the silence of the turning page and the stillness of the weathervane, in all the unanswered questions, Jarboe draws our attention to the limits of any singular lyric subjectivity. And as the book expands to accommodate additional forms and means of exchanging sentiment and information–redacted letters, oral histories, siblings’ memories, YouTube videos, quilts, four-leaf clovers–we encounter the far greater possibilities of collective wayfinding.

What if there is no wind? In Jarboe’s capacious poetry, still the weathervane spins.

m. dellas

not even with three brains can we remember

One childhood Something about apricots
Always too green Too sour
Something about protecting themselves Our brains
I mean (My baby brain

Never understood how you could find 5    12
26 four-leaf clovers in an afternoon, Sorry I
Am still impatient when you crouch down in Queens
For every green thing Finding one Despite

Oh but I admire you for it too So much
I have yet to apologize for
There was a time I went to my brother’s room
Empty
I stayed up all night Staring at the barn light
Thinking I would find you And I didn’t want to
Find you Turns out you were just at a party

When you tried later Sorry I told mom and dad
You didn’t talk to me for weeks Then asked
If I remembered the time when you were 5
And dad was talking
Suicide so I sent you out like a diplomat Yeah
Sorry for that too

How lucky are we to have a sibling
With a box full of four-leaf clovers
Who pulls one out to burn
When she worries about us