Self-Portrait with Cephalopod by Kathryn Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Self-Portrait with Cephalopod by Kathryn Smith Sean H Jenkins Kathryn Smith. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2021. 72 p. The Hebrew Bible, particularly Psalms, is part of the seam of this little book of bespoke poetry, much as it was in Smith's previous The Book of Exodus. The two volumes differ radically in perspective, the earlier volume concentrating on the unlikely survival of a destitute family in the remote Russian taiga, while the latter is concerned with the (again, unlikely) survival of the planet. One finds another shift in perspective in the author's use of the Bible throughout. The Russian volume implores, celebrates and begs with a holy sincerity and lacks all trace of irony. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod uses fragments of scripture to power lines with the same load of seriousness, but also with (sometimes black) humor and even a trace of blasphemy: "An erroneous vision/of heaven and hell shall come to you/in books, and this will divide you.//Some will say it's possible for a child to die and come back [End Page 344] /from death having seen the realm of God. But some will say what/does it matter when earth is a lonely/chasm where children die unnoticed as/we sharpen our knives and whiten/our teeth and tighten our skin and/implore our screens to refresh." William Blake is much subtler, but the insufficiency of the sacred text, its need to pierce beyond, is an insight common to them both. In a mash-up of Paul and Psalms, Smith writes, "I am fearfully and wonderfully/made, made wonderfully/fearful. When I was a child, I acted/like a child./When I was afraid,/I acted afraid. Put these things/away. Surely goodness/will dog me all the days of my life." One finds a number of these transformations throughout. In my first journey through Self-Portrait with Cephalopod, I marked in pencil "R" for "rancid" next to some lines that offended my judgement of what a line of poetry should say and sound like. On my second read through, I erased a number of these, finally erasing them all on my third. "Why do mammograms make me//contemplate apocalypse?" Why indeed? I am a man, and the question scrambles me. And there are lines of arresting purity as when she writes, "I have recently, to hone/my objectivity, stopped observing. I don't remember/the sound of snowmelt dripping from a roof, the gleam of icicles'/sharp translucence." Smith's language is neither complicated nor particularly challenging, but it is taut, coherent and in parts enthralling. In the apocalyptic poems there is a discussion to be had about what sort of life deserves to survive, both the lives on which we feed and the lives which feed on us. Smith is willing to entertain fetal rights in the light of an ordinary breakfast: "I scramble the egg/until it does not resemble/egg—no longer the globe//a body bore into/the world for a purpose/entirely other. First I scraped//the blood-knot/from the albumen—trace/of its potential, of what//reminds me of me,/life force hidden/in the viscous clot." For Smith, this is the axial question: is the grandeur and simultaneous squalor of the life of earthly being, with all its chances and changes and transformations for good and evil—is such life worthy and fit for an open-ended existence, unconditionally? In what terms, by whose argument, do we frame the question? This question of questions, which bears down upon us in the form of legal pronouncements subject to change and climate catastrophe much less responsive to even the most vigorous efforts of the scientific elite, is one we no longer look to canonical [End Page 345] texts to answer. This is where Smith's earlier work parts company from Self-Portrait with Cephalopod. In this later poetry we ourselves become the question as incarnate in the all-encompassing world of internet calculations. In a poem whose title poses its own answer—"Photos of Pig That Appears to Have Blue Fat Beneath Skin Shared on Social Media"—she writes...