A Review of Kevin McLellan’s Sky. Pond. Mouth.
Sky. Pond. Mouth., by Kevin McLellan. Yas Press, 2024. 140 pages. $18.00
by Paul Haney
I first met Kevin McLellan in the summer of 2018, at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, during a week-long poetry workshop we both were taking. Over that week Kevin and I and other workshop participants, plus a FAWC intern or two, roamed Commercial Street drinking our fill and talking about books and authors, forms and styles. In the mornings we showed up bleary eyed to the drafty barn with our manuscripts and critiqued each other’s work. I was a recent MFA grad in nonfiction at the time still grappling with my queer sexuality, both in the flesh and on the page, while Kevin was an openly gay man and seasoned poet with a ready grin. I didn’t always get Kevin’s poems, trained as I was toward narrative coherence, though others in the room surely did. I also didn’t realize Kevin’s bonafides: a poetry chapbook with Seven Kitchens Press (Round Trip, 2010); two full collections titled Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015) and Ornitheology (Word Works, 2018). Add to those publications in other words you/ (Word Works, 2023); a number of video projects and book objects; and now Sky. Pond. Mouth., recipient of the 2024 Granite State Poetry Prize by Yas Press, judged and introduced by New Hampshire Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary. This latest collection continues Kevin’s bold formal innovation, his ontological delving into observation and memory, and his situating human consciousness within the natural world.
“Here, a valley” begins “Ecosystem,” the initial poem in “Ecosystems,” the first of the book’s four parts. This prose poem establishes a speaker who enters that valley void to “look for answers from the wellspring.” Somehow “the sky on top of the pond” (all italics McLellan’s) captures the speaker’s “lack of awareness” while the clouds hang with “half-submerged thoughts.” The valley itself represents an ecosystem, but it’s the environment of self, thought, and experience that concerns this collection. In the pages to follow “the pond / stretched out inside my chest” (“Clouds”) while “The mouth of the canyon yawns” and “The mouth of the sky is vast” (“A Definition of Loss”). In “Always Something Falling,” the speaker ponders how “The lake // is a mirror, then it isn’t.” In realizing the water in the tent
might be condensation from
my own breath that beaded
above my head & the-once-
a-part-of-me rained,
the speaker recognizes his own part to play in this metaphysical landscape where sky, pond, and mouth breathe life into one another. These connotative layers, for Kevin, create the structures of experience.
Though “Ecosystems” transitions from these first four poems into an arrangement of plant life personas—“Bloodroot,” “Interrupted Fern,” “Floriculture,” “The Geranium,”—the initial conceit still applies. “Sheep Laurel” enjoys the benefits of flipping one’s perspective, its “seeds turned / 180 degrees” as it flourishes and taunts: “go ahead—tease me.” In “Swamp Rose,” the flower is “not / seizing / a swamp,” an inscrutable image in reverse as the rose concludes “–nor / a swamp / over me.” And like the pond before, the speaker in “The Geranium” finds “This blooming privy / to my secrets. Its language // isn’t translatable.” These poems acknowledge that the natural world possesses a kind of knowledge we humans could never hope to comprehend.
While playing with the form and dispensing his poetic wit, Kevin creates an ecosystem of thought and image, commentary and memory. Over seven pages the first part’s final poem, “Narrative,” includes couplets with passages erased in strikethrough font, section and column breaks, lineated lines and prose sections with stanza breaks written as “[stanza break],” without the actual break. “I had / someone else’s dreams. He / didn’t know / the concept of before and after,” the speaker proclaims before discovering his younger self in the dreamscape all the same. After recounting two would-be sex partners, the speaker claims, “I can’t stop / indexing,” which explains the profusion of ruminations, sometimes lustful, often cheeky: “Manhumpsamericanflagpillowtoorgasm.” In the end, says the speaker, “I resist [stanza break] the narrative” (brackets McLellan’s) though less so “when I am in nature. & I am in nature.” Spatially perhaps, the speaker’s still camping—still “in nature”—but in practice too, the natural world encroaches upon the space of thought, language, and poetics.
Another seven-page poem comprises Sky. Pond. Mouth.’s part two, “The Corridor.” Short prose passages here speak to desire, regret, and how language’s simultaneous signification and confusion infiltrates our daily experience. “My mother says, they changed the weather” says the speaker, though of course the mother means “forecast.” References to A.R. Ammons center on that prolific poet’s use of the word “nothingness,” a something that stands for nothing. When people ask “How are you?,” the speaker admits “The English language confuses me … I don’t know how to answer.” How are we, indeed? An honest answer must begin with the inexplicable fact of existence and account for the subjectivity that comprises experience, the “corridor” of the poem.
“A theme of Sky. Pond. Mouth. is patience,” writes Alexandria Peary in her introduction: “it’s worth it.” The close reading of self and other in nature, the epistemology of experience produces a distinct and rewarding shift in how this reader, at least, engages the world. After our workshop in Provincetown that summer of 2018, Kevin had me over to his Cambridge apartment for dinner. It was a short trek from where I lived in Brighton, south of the Charles River. Over seafood pasta and red wine, we continued our conversation about writing, and poetry, and our respective aspirations. We retired to Kevin’s living room and, after some hits from the weed pipe, read to each other from our works in progress. Kevin nestled in his armchair, shelves and shelves of nothing but poetry books behind him, and in stacks beside him, and tucked in corners all over the apartment. So many poetry books and Kevin ensconced in their pages, in his craft. I left that night with his first two books in hand – Tributary and Ornitheology – and as I flipped through them over the following days and weeks I came to see both the singular perspective and precision of this poet I’d chanced to meet. Kevin’s gaze was unfailingly open, inquisitive, even seductive as he revealed his pains and desires in choice moments. All the same his linguistic crafting was as evocative as it was unpredictable. I started looking forward to each new poem he posted to social media as literary journals scooped them up. Once I understood Kevin’s unfaltering commitment—a poet’s poet—I found myself becoming a fan.
In the third part of Sky. Pond. Mouth., Kevin’s artistry is on full display. This largest of the four parts, “Other Indices; and the Eves,” contains the meat of the book. Whereas the previous part finds the speaker asking, “Have I become too personal here?,” part three’s first poem, “Regarding What Was Lost Before I Knew It Was Taken,” recounts a litany of dalliances, sudden desires, flirtations. But were they flirtations, or simply a “man outside who I misrecognized”? “Our eyes locked,” the speaker says of a grocery store employee, yet when he goes “back the next day to give him my number… He didn’t acknowledge me.” The speaker fixates on another man whom, he says, “passed me and glanced back,” but nothing else develops. Again, while cruising on the sidewalk in the rain, a potential sex partner follows partway but, says the speaker, “I walked toward the park, / turned, and discovered he / hadn’t followed me.” Meanwhile vignettes with references to “the cocktail” and “you-are-positive / news/taken / within” intersperse this third seven-page poem in a row, an unapologetic portrait of queer sexuality that concludes, “I am: the refracted light, the book, a blurred man, and just an ordinary man.”
“Ordinary” feels both an undeniable and unacceptable descriptor for these poems, enthralled as they are with looking. After the structural pyrotechnics of those three long poems, the forms in part three become more standard, more familiar. Fueled by the urgency of observation, “Blue” proceeds in couplets:
notice the exit sign and the left side
of flickering faces. I must return
to where you sit, once sat,
behind blue. The textured collage
of sounds a way to make sense
of, what you call, ‘abnormal thoughts’
And though the speaker here is referring to the late Derek Jarman’s documentary, Blue, the reader by now is attuned to these “abnormal thoughts,” understanding their ubiquity – the fact that we all have them, but that this writer has taken such pains to put them down: linguistic artifacts of a human life. Kevin’s ability to capture the quotidian is nearly as impressive as his determination to reveal the inherent strangeness of quotidian phenomena to begin with. Take “A Housefly” for example, a creature which draws the poet’s eye until it “flies away / and I feel lost // again.” The poem continues: “I feel lost / and I am looking / at glass.” The minute longing of this image – a speaker suddenly bereft of their object of study – is both singular and achingly familiar to anyone attuned to their inner world. Or “The Crumpled Paper” blowing around the subway station: “Quick & jagged / 90 degree arcs. I can’t / escape it. The crumpled paper.” What is the significance? Something to do, no doubt, with “the straightening / little town I left.” This mash-up of inner and outer experience intensifies through the quirks of form and language that Kevin renders so well. In “Ashbery,” the speaker finds “Going awry’s why I have // known division intimately. // Poetry separates further.” It’s only in language that the self can split with such definition. Meanwhile Gertrude Stein gets a shout out for “Colored Condoms,” which “reflect the variety of ways to protect oneself and others from routine,” a claim doing double duty at least. Protection from disease, boredom, blandness – the rote manner of living that too often flattens our days.
A sizable collection, Sky. Pond. Mouth.—while cohering to that central concept of interconnectedness – contains a multitude of registers and moods. For the fourth and final part, “Winterberries,” that mood is one of measured panic in the face of illness. In sixteen sections this longest of the book’s poems weaves together inner and outer realities with allusions to valleys and ferns, memories of “misinterpreting situations” as a child, and medical terminology. “Dare I say / the viaduct is arrhythmic?,” the speaker wonders, a metaphor that estranges the language of the heart: “I’d tell the engineers, but they / are too busy talking.” Engineers, doctors – either way, the speaker says of the prescribed testosterone, “I will need to rub / the controlled substance / on my shoulders” before taking us “back to / the surgical theater which could / be an office without windows.” Finally, the speaker reflects, “Inside: the radiologist said, you’re going to live.” The specifics of the intervention Kevin writes in strikethrough font, daring us to look. But it’s the inside/outside dichotomy which, as with much of this book, drives the narrative tension. “I went too far inside / while outside,” Kevin writes in section “iv,” though by the end this imbalance finds its equilibrium. Section “xv” begins, “Outside: a plane at dawn / stitches the sky and the flickering / red light from a tower,” while the next and final section concludes, “Inside: I decide / I don’t believe him. Inside: looking out / to the swirling snow the color of margarine.” This unrelenting pursuit of what takes place within, and what goes on without, fuels Kevin’s poetry. I keep reading because his endeavors help clarify, if only for a moment, where my own boundaries begin and end.
Paul Haney is a queer writer and educator in the Boston area. His work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Potomac Review, Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Executive editor of the Dylan Review, his manuscript in progress is a queer Bob Dylan memoir. Follow him @paulhaney.