Elizabeth A.I. Powell on Rituals and Spells so Nothing Heinous Happens (by Nin Andrews)

It’s Easter Sunday, and I’m remembering how my father used to equate religion and superstition. He practiced both, just in case. He made me practice them, too, insisting that I go to church, understand the basic tenets of the faith,  pray on my knees before bed, and also, that I never pass the salt shaker hand-to-hand, and if I spilled salt, I tossed it right hand over left shoulder. I was instructed to hold my breath when we drove into a tunnel or under a bridge or past a graveyard. I still find myself touching wood, crossing my fingers, my toes, myself, and I can still hear my father’s voice advising me on how each superstition is best performed. Maybe it’s no surprise then that I was completely taken with Elizabeth A. I. Powell’s series of prose poems that were published in the recent issue of the Seneca Review titled Rituals and Spells so Nothing Heinous Happens. There was quite a buzz about one that also appeared in Pleiades and Poetry Daily. I decided to ask Elizabeth to say a few words about these poems and to let me post a poem from the series.

Elizabeth A.I. Powell:

These poems use the ritual and spell-like qualities of poetry to try and discern and examine the liminal space between rituals and spells on the one hand and madness on the other. Rituals live in our mythologies and religions, but when a ritual goes off kilter it turns on a person. I’ve tried to reflect on the space where that yin and yang meet, the between thing between the two. Samuel Coleridge famously said poems are the best words in the best order, which is similar in definition of what a spell is, giving letters in the right order, or a state of enchantment enacted by words.  Spells are more like content in poetry, and rituals are more like poetic form in that they observe a set of forms to enact a kind of worship.  Indeed, many of us have written ourselves out of the mental abyss through poems. Where ritual becomes pathological or a mental illness is interesting because on the one hand you can pray and it’s lovely, but when it is obsessive, compulsive, and superstitious it begins to be a most egregious interrogation.

 

Touch Wood

Everyone agrees since I’m the prettiest, I’m the stupidest. Our grandfather sips scotch, loosens his tie we picked out for him to wear to MC our Miss America Pageant. This year’s real pick for Miss America was from Wisconsin: in ten years she’ll host the 700 club that fuels the Moral Majority that will upset me. You don’t even know where Wisconsin is, my sister says. I will remember this moment forever, and when I’m nineteen, I’ll go to the University of Wisconsin, where I will be incredibly miserable just to prove that I know where Wisconsin is.

I’m touching wood, wearing an evening dress. In reality, we are all wearing our grandmother’s silk nightgowns, hitched up. What are you doing? my cousin asks.
I am touching this wood, I say.
That’s not wood, she says.
Yes, it is! Grandpa this is wood, right? I say. It’s Formica, Josephine, he says. He calls all us girls Josephine. Maybe its because Josephine is Hebrew for God’s increase, and he has lots of granddaughters. We don’t yet know the name for flirt. We love him fiercely. Bet you don’t even know what Formica is anyway, my older cousin says. It’s melamine, a laminate, right Grandpa?

Our grandfather announces: No Miss America if you can’t get along. Also, Formica is made of melamine. Wood is from trees, Josephines. We are the e pluribus Unum of Josephine, he is the king of midcentury modern office furniture. He’s a long way from Vilnius. If we can’t be Miss America, we want to work in the family office furniture business as his secretary, have a mahogany desk and a credenza. Now that I know it is Formica I have touched instead of wood,
I am anxious to proceed. We are getting ready to walk down the stairs with books on our head to show poise, but we have to wait for our grandfather to announce
us to our audience, which is the rest of the family. Our cousins are behaving perfectly, so they might win.

I hobble in my grandmother’s gold lame 1940’s shoes, I love them more than the 1972 Democratic National Convention passes my grandfather got us because he supplied chairs. I sleep with mine under my pillow. To me, wood is the brain of God, but I touch the bannister made of brass, which means, jinxed, I will lose, which will make me sad and itchy. I balance two books on my head.

 

Elizabeth powell author photoElizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, most recently “Atomizer” (LSU Press). Her second book of poems, “Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances” was a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker.  The Boston Globe has called her recent work “wry and fervent” and “awash in synesthesiastic revelation.” Her novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” was published in 2019 in the U.K. 

Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Women’s Review of Books, among others. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University. Find her at www.elizabethaipowell.com

        

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Author: Nin Andrews