BY AAKASH SUCHAK

In print | October 25, 2007

“Please, I need something primitive and complex, / to relieve me of this world subdivided into better / and better ways to avoid life.”

Last week, English professor Nathalie Anderson and I went to a reading at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House. I hadn’t heard of the poet Olena K. Davis before, but I learned in the nights prior that she was a Detroit-born Ukranian with fearless verse, and that it would be an undoubtedly thrilling reading. We rode South Street down to the teeth, where Penn’s campus merges with the city, where students revel in anonymity.

Nat’s colleague gave a flattering introduction, characterizing Davis’s poetry as “an exigent rush” of some thing and another, which, when Davis took the podium, she immediately replied to with confused refutation and half-gratitude, then bespectacled herself and waved to her children in the audience. She writes, “Once I looked good standing there, no one could see the inside of my head.”

Davis does not match the delicate photograph on the back of “And Her Soul Out of Nothing.” She’s aged since she published her first anthology, and as a new mother to two angel-headed young Alaskans, she could not stop referring to them, waving to them and talking to them during the reading. She transformed the vulgarities of her verse, the notorious curse of our consonant ‘f,’ into “cuff,” its linear opposite. It was funny, actually, that in front of an audience determined to maintain an atmosphere of intellectualism, she blew them all away by rambling, showing all her strange poetic quirks, and talking outright about her lover and how she doesn’t love him anymore, as he sat in the audience with their children. She was a wild one, with the candor of a rose. “He’s thinking I’m carved of sweet-smelling wood.”

Her poetry is the sort that makes me write inflamed, passionate letters about the consummation of our ideas, the strange sort of coincidences we share in thinking, and I didn’t stop thinking about her for days after the reading. I felt as though my arm was a chain saw, and she was the board. The most technically accomplished poems were in a series where the narrator adopts the stance of Francesca de Rimini, a medieval contemporary of Dante who, with her lover, was seduced by reading the stories of Lancelot and Guinevere. The series gave Davis the allusive guise to comment on her own sex life, rather explicitly as well, and she ended with a sonnet that had a title to the effect of “And At Last Francesca Proves She Can Write a Real Sonnet Too.”

The games she played with language were pixie-like and mischievous. The last thing she read was an endless poem of meditative narration, where she referred to herself, “I,” in the third person, like “I doesn’t believe that her son hasn’t left school yet,” but in such hilarious, witty ways. Neither the Francesca series nor the unending meditation has been published yet and both exist only in her possession, so it was quite a privilege to hear her work in progress. However, her anthology “And Her Soul Out of Nothing” certainly satisfies the poetic hankering. Some of her phrasing is unparalleled, and her exact, sterling images, such as “A screaming saw in the soundless space of the late summer day” characterize Olena K. Davis as a dominant writer of our time. I think her poetry sort of maps the trajectory of modern writing, that form is losing ground to impulse and that personal and instinctual poetry is an outlet from what Davis calls, “a still, still life.”

She insists on tragic, truthful statements that expose her as a fragile, unsatisfied soul, a pattern of sadness which I’ve witnessed in the more accomplished female poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. There is a choice that each artist must make; to either resign themselves to ordinary happiness or grapple with the misery of celestial ambition. Most great writers are not recognized until their “foreheads have been bleached to the bone,” until they’re food for the daisies, until their last breath has passed. In the interim, they’ve lived lonely lives in the seclusion of creation. Thus is the sad paradox of literary greatness.

Aakash is a freshman. You can reach him at asuchak1@swarthmore.edu.

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