by Chris Banks

The persona book is not something I enjoy reading, but there are always exceptions to the rule like Gwendolyn MacEwen’s brilliant The T.E. Lawrence Poems, or the envy-inducing White Stone: The Alice Poems by Stephanie Bolster, or now Johanna Skibsrud’s book Medium out now with Book*hug Press.

Johanna Skibsrud’s Medium does not simply use the lives of historical women as ‘artistic wallpaper’, but as Skibsrud herself says in her preface to the collection: the lives and work of these other women act “as conduits of knowledge and intuition; as points of convergence for the past, present, and the future; and as concrete points of channeling and accessing a way forward — or sideways, or otherwise.”

I guess this is to say the“voices” of these historical women become doorways leading to Skibsrud’s own thoughts about female artistic identity, lyricism, and the self. Indeed, the first line of the collection, in a poem entitled “The Sybil Speaks”, says, “A voice is an opening; nothing more” which is a poignant way to begin a collection as intentional as this one.

In an essay by Shara McCallum called “Myth, Persona, and The Personal” in Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets To Poets, McCallum notes, “The speaker of a poem is always a persona since the voice on the page is never identical to the writer’s voice off the page… …In the case of the persona poem, the speaker is not overtly an aspect of the poet but rather serves as a mask for the poet.” I like this idea of ‘persona as mask’ in talking about Skibsrud channeling other women because underneath their stories, are not just the facts and myths that make up their historical lives, but there is the voice of Skibsrud herself playing with the details, creating something new, hinting at the fact we make a community, not just with living, breathing artists, but with those also who came before us, or we risk too little.

The poems in Medium tend to have spare line-lengths, and spare imagery, but the “voice” of the poet channeling these powerful female figures is strong and intimate, knitting together poems that run over several pages. 

I was really struck by how much I appreciated Skibsrud’s vidas that are interspersed between all of the poems, which are part Wikipedia entry, part conjuring, so these forgotten women Skibsrud looks up to–and indeed, wants to connect with–are given a presence in the collection, beyond the poems themselves.  

I think the best way to get a sense of what Skibsrud is up to is to excerpt a vida, and an accompanying poem, so I chose the vida about Julian of Norwich of the 14th Century who was the first known woman to write a book in the English language. Here is the vida:

And now the accompanying poem “We Feared The Wood”:

This is a typical poem from the collection, and I think it gives you a strong sense of the vatic lyricism Skibsrud is invoking here. “How I wanted to suffer. How I wanted to be nailed up” and later the lines, “There’s no limit, I thought. To any of this. / The body, the river, the muddy edge…. / Ice collects on the surface, is real, but it is also /just water” juxtaposes Julian of Norwich’s own wish to suffer; her apprehension of “the real” and “the divine”; the transubstantiation of water into ice; with that of Christianity and its divine bro-culture.

I really enjoyed this poem, just as I liked many, many lines from other poems. For instance, “A bird is a sum of its feathers; a necklace its pearls”, or “the magpie’s mad chattering at the window pane”, or “my skin was thin; but nevertheless it proved a barrier; I could bring nothing closer.” That last line is just wow!

Other times I felt the imagery felt a little conventional like in lines “My brain ticks like a clock” or “a bird dives for a worm; a moth to the flame”, but overall I felt Skibsrud was not attempting to smuggle in ground-shaking imagery as much as the import of the high and low speech that would make these women she is channeling in this collection real, or at the very least real in the time it takes to read each poem.

One more of Skibsrud’s poetic strengths in this collection are her endings. In Medium, they are complexly wrought and thought-rippling. In her poem, “Time Exists, It Does Not Flow Backwards”, the speaker ends with, “my voice is muffled-sounding but I have the feeling / it’s still being / broadcast somehow.” Again, in another poem “There Is No Reason“, check out the simple eloquence of “ freedom exists — a simple fact — which, like God, / can be denied. For no reason.”

Johanna Skibsrud’s Medium out with Book*hug Press is a rhapsody of voices and imaginative conversations with powerful historical females, both the exalted kind and the forgotten, making for a poetic dialectic that satisfies both mind and heart, and reminds us that, like the work of Gwendolyn MacEwen or the recently passed American poet Louise Glück, that persona, myth and history are rich territories for individual poets seeking greater connection and a way to, if not transcend, to enrich individual lived experience. 

Please go read Johanna Skibsrud’s poetry collection Medium out with Book*hug Press now!