Living the Therapeutic Process in Aversion:

d. ellis phelps’ what she holds

A review by Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah

 

d. ellis phelps, what she holds Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press, 2020 122 pages, softcover, $12.00

 

When critiquing the dominant values of a community, like the family, the church, or the shared in-difference towards the state, it is often difficult to navigate and elaborate those cultural norms. One might find themselves differentiating between those norms and the individual feelings that counter those beliefs finding less ontological struggle through solitude and secrecy. However, this form of questioning still provides a context for a person to build their lives on a body of fulsome beliefs that extend beyond cultural archetypes.

Can we ask the same questions of a memoir written as poetry? Is there a way to define poetry and memoir when such divergent formats are bound together?

The answers to these questions are at the core of d. ellis phelps’s second book what she holds. Of course, this is not the first time an author has written a memoir in a genre other than the usual prose. For example, Kimiko Hahn’s “The Narrow Road to the Interior,” published in 2006, is a volume of zuihitsu, and hybrid forms, including tanka. However, in what she holds, d. ellis phelps deals strictly with poetry.

In the first pages of what she holds we see the poem, “alchemical fire.” With such a sparse use of words phelps manages to give meaning to the voice through its blank spaces and absences.The po-em, “uninvited” does this as well. The words are very nuclear, extended, and broken:

born

                my breath
                my body

into this:

she left you
in your crib

you know
when you were two

she went down the road
to see        that man

The sounds and patterns of the poems form an environment, that encourage readers to discover their different meanings upon the page. The lines of text are short, almost broken, highlighting how phelp’s personal experiences blend with her practice of writing. As a non-traditional memoir, this collection of poetry has readers asking: it in haikuesque or tankaesque? Why the continuous themes of suffering and pain? Is it realistic, or covertly making comments on various social, cultural, reli-gious, or political values? Does the voice of the poems represent a stoical person?
In the last section of the poem “after the roses” in parallelism, we see a response to some of these questions :

(                i cannot
say it                )
it                is not happening
now        my body
not knowing
the difference

The different materials of pain and joy mesh successfully. At each poem, the book defines and re-defines what this collection can mean. There is freshness, imagery that tests typical cultural norms, a persistent, though at times absent, voice that resonates far beyond the impact of the individual lines. Is this because phelps is seeing time pass? Seeing herself as her mother in the coming years as suggested in the poem “after the roses”?

at home:
my mother wearing blue
the outfit        new
her round hips buxom breasts
brickhouse body ─thinner now
than sometimes

The direct and unapologetic prose does not invite the reader to act as an interpreter of the imperfect characters—her aging mother, her estranged father—the reader acts as a preservative to this memory and messy depiction of life. This is an act of kindness.

phelps uses incongruity in her writing to achieve a balance between the facts and their poetic repre-sentation. In poetry we think of art, and in art we think of imagination. Imagination remains su-preme, when we write our conflict, we open the door onto our primary relationship with conflict; we write with the whole self: the ears, the eyes, the hands and the body, the nose, and tongue; we write the space we inhabit: the nest, the ambiguity, the spirit of the place, a new angle of vision, the voice of the place; we write the irony, the paradox, the satire; we write the tension and the energy, cutting everything to the bones. These act as raw materials that are slowly revealed to the reader almost at the same time as the characters. Life ends well with the last poem, “the shaman said”:

to this day
the scent

of sweet

smoke

takes me
home

to you

& here
you are

─black
raven

telling me
who you were

nanih waiya
nanih waiya

heal
us

Suffering, pain, forgiveness, and joy match phelp’s rhythm, allowing the reader to find more mean-ing between words. This text is full of flashes of memory, messy entanglements, and imperfect, perhaps, duplicitous characters that makes reading an insightful experience of a personal life.
The narrative of this hybrid, poetic, memoir, does not follow the typical confessional narratives from poets like Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton, nor does phelps seem to be a pur-veyor of exhibitionism or self-effacing in her description of her own public persona. phelp’s is in between—her words are direct punctuations, but she also seems to claim that there is nothing spe-cial behind the surface of these punctuations.

Poets are tempestuous, and like slam poets, the identity and performativity are also a critical look at both the lines of the poems and the whole poems of the book. We make distinctions between our “real” and “staged” selves, despite the inherent difficulty in imitation. This is exactly what she holds is about. A simple beautiful piece of art.

 

Jacob Kobina Ayiah Mensah, who is an algebraist, artist, and author of several books, works in mixed media. His poetry, songs, prose, art and hybrid have appeared in numerous journals, including JMWW, Constellations, Trampoline, 1-70 Review, and many others. He lives in the southern part of Ghana, in Spain, and the Turtle Mountains, North Dakota.