A Vocabulary of Alarm: A Review of Emily Pettit's Goat in the Snow

I have always been a sucker for what’s been called UMass surrealism. There’s certainly something in the water up there that gives poets the exact skills and tricks they need to appeal to me. Of the magazines and presses I subscribe to, at least half have some connection to UMass Amherst. So it come as no surprise that Emily Pettit’s debut collection of poems, Goat in the Snow (Birds, LLC, 2011), has become my favorite book of the winter. That’s Emily Pettit, publisher of Jubilat, co-editor of nosnostrums, co-founder of Flying Object, and one of the forces behind Factory Hollow Press. In other words, if something is in the water in Western Massachusetts, Pettit’s got a fire hose — several of them, actually — and they’re aimed right at us.

Did I go into the book expecting to like it? I did. But while you’ll find some of the hallmarks of contemporary surrealism here (wordplay really at play, the Hegelian dialectic run wild, a big heart), what sets Pettit’s collection apart from the rest is that these poems address the two most basic questions of philosophy: What can we know? How should we live?

In “How to Recognize a Stranger” she writes:

“We would like to speak to the operator.
Are we speaking to the operator?
The problem is solved. We etch-a-sketch
the problem being solved. It’s pretty
complicated looking. It looks like a duck,
until we shake it. And when we shake it,
it looks like a new stranger, a fancy glance,
too many telephone poles, a twitching mind.
We are working on recognizing the noise a twitching
mind makes. That we would know this noise,
that we would act accordingly.”

These poems have a graceful movement to them. In fact, I’ve never seen such smooth disassociation. The collection’s closing poem, “How to Build a Fire in the Snow” just carries you along on the strength of its language and the flow of its thought. This often leads to beautiful thought experiments, as in “How to Carefully Consider Interstellar Space Travel”:

“. . . There is a chance that the elasticity
we want will be ours. All there is, is a chance.
And everyone knows chances are strange.
And sometimes chances are like planets
that get too close to their stars.”

At their best, which is often, these poems do not offer cognitive dissonance, but the illusion of cognitive harmony. There is a comfort in the false promise of Pettit’s “How to . . .” titles, a comfort in the false confidence of the speaker’s delivery: “. . . Who needs a map of the friction / when the lightning looks like a plan?” (“Go Airplane, Sway Tree”).

What made this collection truly special to me is that it crystallized why I love this style of poetry so much. I don’t know Pettit, but I think we’re about the same age (I turned 30 earlier this month). Our adult lives began on September 11th. For the past 10 years we’ve been mired in wars with undefined missions. For the past 4 years we’ve seen the world economy on the verge of collapse. Why do I find such comfort in words of those compassionate, raving New Englanders? Because just as the original Surrealists were reacting to the horrors of WWI, Pettit and her clan are reacting to the reversals and uncertainty of the 21st century; uncertainty, not in the sense of “I don’t believe this is reality,” but in that a common construction through which we understand the world, the reality of our assumptions, has fallen apart. What can we know to be true when everything we thought we knew proved false? How should we proceed?

In that sense, these are poems in a state of emergency. These are poems that are going through something and we’re all going through it too, as in “How to Avoid Confronting Most Large Animals”:

“ . . . You know
you know you know. It’s all uncertainty
and your neck. You walk slowly
in a calm voice.”

They are poems distrustful of even the most basic tenets — “It’s like our deal with gravity, / it continually deceives,” from “Your Job Is to Look Both Ways” — but doing their best to carry on. “The world is potentially over and we are interested / in potential. Now go back to where you were / and try not to light everything on fire,” she writes in “Building Smoke Detectors.” First off, damn those are some good lines. Second, this is exactly how I feel a lot of the time. Everything is falling apart, but we’re doing our best to keep things going and not make things worse.

With uncertainty, there is almost always fear, but in Pettit’s hands it’s not the fear you might expect. These poems aren’t quite paranoid — nothing that dark, at least on the surface. You get the sense that the speaker is at the best party, but is somehow disconnected from the rest of the guests. “Someone” is always saying something, but we don’t know who. The fear is of greater disconnection.

When Pettit writes in “Go Airplane, Sway Tree,” “I want to know why I’m not whispering this / in your ear. Why is it that you can’t hear me,” we don’t get the sense that the person the speaker is addressing is dead, as we might in a Poe poem, but rather that they are unreachable, and these poems, or the speakers in these poems, are trying to do nothing if not communicate. They may not know or understand what is to be communicated, what instructions are to be given, but what matters above all else is that the communication continues, that a connection is made, even in confusion, between two people. And that, to me, is poetry.