The octopus museum Poems

THE TERM "POSTAPOCALYPTIC," as in "pOStapocalyptic fiction," assumes an existencechanging event has already happened. A novel or movie set in the postapocalypse asks what life looks like after. But what if the apocalypse is ongoing? Climate change isn't a single, contained event. Its effects will continue so far into the future that scientists have called it our "forever legacy." If global warming is the apocalypse, there is no conceivable post-, only during. "The Octopus Museum," Brenda Shaughnessy's fifth collection of poems, posits an apocalyptic future that looks a lot like now, an extension of our current dystopia in which food, water, housing and medical care are scarce or too expensive to access. What is it like to live in this world of "irreversible change"? It's hotter, naturally, more peripatetic. Less obviously, "the Octopodes," a conglomerate of semi-benevolent cephalopods, are our new non-alien overlords: "We still do not know their language. We think they think we are too stupid to learn it and we know they know they are probably right." There's also a lot of basic, familiar disappointment. In "I Want the World," a nod to the bottomless desires of Veruca Salt, the speaker mourns her daughter's loss of choice: "She still thinks we can choose between ice cream flavors, bless her that she has so many possible flavors in mind." So this is the nearish future; they remember the pre-apocalypse, the "back then." But the mother, if not the child, knows that even this new worse reality will slide away: "Her complaints were especially unpleasant since they only pointed up how innocent she was of how bad everything could get." With a few exceptions, "The Octopus Museum" consists of prose poems - not Shaughnessy's usual mode, and not the quadrilateral blocks we usually picture when we hear the words "prose poem." They are prose lines broken into "stanzas" of one or several sentences, each an almost paragraph. This form allows for a blending of poetry moves - sonic riffing, say ("The shame of never leaving home. The anguish of no home. Changing housekeys on the unchanged ring. The ring is the home, the thing inside trees"), or anaphora ("Is DNA people? / Is a torso people? / Is a neck people?") - and essayistic moves, like the aphoristic declaration "All traveling's a way to imagine having a home to leave or return to," which sounds like a sentence out of a travel magazine. This formal strategy allows Shaughnessy to ask direct questions like "What about future people?" - which, in a way, is the question of the book, the question of what we owe not just our children but all of our descendants in the abstract, humanity writ large. But she can also leave the question unanswered, or orbit it elliptically, meditating on it via variations ("Are dead people still people? ... Are people's plans to have children people?"). A poem provides less context for a thought than does an essay; it makes room for the idea in isolation. In a recent piece for The New York Review of Books, Emily Raboteau describes visiting "Nature's Fury," a special exhibition on the "violent weather" of the Anthropocene, with her two children, an experience that filled her and her husband with guilt: " Are they too young for this?' my husband questioned, too late." They call their 5-year-old son away from an interactive flood map of New York. Later, she reflects: "What strikes me now as irrational about our response isn't our ordinary parental instinct to protect our kids from scary stuff. It was our denial. Their father and I treated that display as a vision we could put off until later when it clearly conveyed what had already transpired." "The Octopus Museum" contends with this same feeling, a future-fear so ever-present and overwhelming we almost have to deny it, just to get through the day ("This poem I stole from my fear, my endless fear," Shaughnessy writes in "Nest," one of the few poems composed in verse), mixed with an equally overwhelming sense of guilt, a terrible knowledge that this is our fault; we "ruined that delicate world." At times this book almost wallows in guilt, in the performance of self-flagellation. "Tell myself the weather ruined my plans, though it's me ruined the weather's," Shaughnessy writes in one poem, and, in another, "I'm ashamed of us all." In "Sel de la Terre, Sel de Mer," the speaker addresses an octopod or a jellyfish: "Oh funny, runny little god who lived in the sea we cut to ribbons! Tell us the big story with your infected mouth. Tell us the big story is so far beyond us we can't possibly ruin it." "Here," another speaker tells her hungry, bored daughter, handing her a pencil, "chew on this_It's all yours, darling." It feels like a challenge to the reader: Chew on this, chumps. We made this hell and now we have to sleep in it; it's "well- deserved." Are these poems preachy? Do we deserve a poetry that isn't preachy? And what's the alternative? Raboteau writes, of her own children, "It's pointless to question whether or not it was ethical to have them in the first place since, in any case, they are here." That doesn't feel quite right either. It's a feature of apocalyptic living: There's no right way to be. If they are often bleak, Shaughnessy's poems are also very funny. In a short series of epistolary poems, a character named Ned Grimley-Groves, "formerly of New Hampshire" and now living in "Salinization Pod #11298 N.E.," sends a "Dear Humans" letter to the past: "I won't withhold everything I've learned. I'll tell you plain. You will miss plastics." Two pages later, in a new letter: "It's me, again. Ned Grimley-Groves. I just had a couple more things to say" - among them, "you'll miss the luxurious wastefulness," and everything being "ridiculously clean," perhaps too clean. Mid-letter, he admits: "I'm just kind of losing my momentum here. Is anyone reading this?" (Sick burn on poetry.) Two more pages later, he's back with another letter: "Hi, hi. It's Ned, again. Seems to be just me, these days." Shaughnessy can also write the kind of line that is confusing in its beauty, whose beauty exceeds its sense, which is the thing I go to poetry for - lines that can be read and reread without exhausting their potential meaning: "What could be queerer than this queer tug-lust for what already is, who already am, but other of it?" she writes in the book's first poem, a kind of awed love letter to the rising sea (we can't blame it for killing us): " If there's anything bluer than the ocean it's its greenness. It's its turquoise blood, mixing me." The book's central question is what we owe our children and all our descendants: humanity writ large. ELISA GABBERT is the author, most recently, of "The Word Pretty."

In her fifth collection, Shaughnessy (So Much Synth), who is married to PW's director of special editorial projects, imagines a dystopian future in which octopuses reign, while humans receive their just deserts for centuries of environmental devastation. This new ruling class is dubbed the COO (Cephalopod Octopoid Overlords), and enforces strict rations ("farm-fresh slowpoke foam" and "Soapish fish braised in its own frothing broth"). Shaughnessy's conceptual work is clever as always, but even more extraordinary is her talent for crafting musical, expressive lines that triumph in their complexity and grace: "Once a wild tentacled screaming creature every inch a kissed lip of a beloved place/ a true and relentless mind, all heart if heart is a dumb hope of reusable pump." In the politically charged poem "Are Women People," the COO sifts through cultural and legal detritus to determine who was and was not given status of personhood: "Children are, at the very least, future people, but anything could happen. They could be female, and a good half of them do end up as such." Suffused with a melancholic nostalgia for what once was and what might have been, the poet turns to her inability to protect her childrens' innocence, saying of her daughter "I hope she can learn to like lizard blood and shoelace chewing gum, because that's what's coming." With an unparalleled ear for language, Shaughnessy excels at making the tragic transcendent. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

I Want the World     You never know, when you say goodbye, if it's the last time. Last time for who? For what?   Every time is the last--for that particular goodbye, wearing those clothes, at that airport. Me in my black dress--nightgown, '50s housecoat, funeral uniform. It passes for anything.   My daughter in her fuchsia track shorts and faded green t-shirt almost as soft as her luscious little arms. She was complaining, as usual. She was hungry. She was tired of traveling.   Her complaints were especially unpleasant since they only pointed up how innocent she was of how bad everything could get. The Legos are boring? Imagine no toys of any kind.   The chicken nuggets are too hot? Just wait. They'll cool and by then, I hope she can learn to like lizard blood and shoelace chewing gum, because that's what's coming.   A fierce zip of pride bites my heart. She demands more because she knows there's more in the world and she believes she should have it all. She knows what she wants: what she wants.   She believes the world is coming to her, not veering definitively away. She still thinks we can choose between ice cream flavors, bless her that she has so many possible flavors in mind.   Between stuffed animals and dolls. Which color lunch box you want for the whole school year. What school year, I think? Will first grade exist this coming fall?   She still thinks that what she thinks will affect what she gets. She still believes tantrums might get her her way. She doesn't know yet that nobody gets her way.   We're all lucky if we get anything at all, come dinnertime, come night, the next morning and the next hot morning, the next endangered livingspace if we get to stay there. We can't carry all that stuff. But she doesn't think of it as stuff.   She thinks of it as what she wants. Life's been consistent--me resisting her demands, me in my black dress, cutting my hair to make her paintbrushes. If something happens to me, who will help her believe her beliefs?   She believes her desires--as erratic and irrational as a six-year old's desire's can be--nevertheless have intrinsic value.  A thread of hope wound, inextricable, all around and through her very person. I believe that too.    One of these mornings I'll say goodbye, a routine goodbye when I go to the FedPlex warehouse to work or pick my rations, and in my absence she will lose that thread, come to fully understand what she wants is impossible in our world.   All of it, any of it, the tiniest thing, impossible.   I won't have known but I'll be walking away from my daughter for the last time, coming home (wherever home is) to someone new, someone broken off from my old girl, six years old.   Here, I tell her, providing a pencil with a pristine, unsharpened end, chew on this. Nobody's touched it yet. It's all yours, darling.   Somewhere I'll find a blade to sharpen it, and we'll find a scrap for drawing, a bit of napkin or a smooth, light stone. For now, you can chew on it. Soon you'll be able to draw whatever you want. Excerpted from The Octopus Museum: Poems by Brenda Shaughnessy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.