We shouldn’t read poetry to quiet the mind. We should read poetry to wake us the hell up.
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There was a time when Cameron Conaway diligently trained to break other men. He prowled caged arenas, his hands and feet honed as weapons to inflict pain, his body and mind drilled in techniques to smash another man into submission.
Nowadays he does the same with verse. Reading Cameron Conaway’s Until You Make the Shore (Salmon Poetry, 2014), I’m reminded of these lines from “Asphodel, The Greeny Flower” by William Carlos Williams: “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”
This is a book of poems arranged to do just that, to give you that news you could not get any way else, so that you will live knowing more and with an opportunity to do more about what you know.
The poems are exercises in imposing empathy.
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“We need engaged poets,” Cameron Conaway says. MMA fighter, world traveler, writer, Executive Editor here at The Good Men Project, and social justice advocate and activist, he is the real deal. His writing – be it poetry, essays, articles, or memoir – is rich in detail, precise language, word play, and cleanly broken lines, making the reading a shared, living experience. With Conaway, clarity is mindful and meditative. He takes you there.
Divided into four parts coinciding with the four progressive levels of a rehabilitative juvenile detention program, each section of the collection is narrated in the voice of a different female teenage prisoner detained in that level. Based on Conaway’s experiences teaching creative writing in a special program at the Pima County Juvenile Detention Center in Tucson, Arizona, the poems shape a narrative of pain, regret, desire, and love.
The poems are exercises in imposing empathy. Verses brake into staccato rhythms like echoes of a chorus of doors opening and shutting, letting us in but simultaneously reminding us we’re from the outs.
These girls speak, write, and think about their desires, their dreams and nightmares, their hopes, and their fears. Every once in a while, Conaway’s voice comes in, gives us a peak from the outsider’s perspective, the one with which we’re most familiar.
In answer to the question “Is there hope?” Graciela, at Level 1, says,
fuck there’s hope yeah
sometimes you gotta make it though
sometimes it’ll get down stuck in your throat and hurt.
For Eva, in Level 2, it matters that when taking a beating your scars should show in the front because that means you “done took it lookin.” Here Conaway reveals a key theme: what’s important is not just the fight, it’s how you fight. And not just how you fight. What’s important is how you survive.
Later, Eva shares a love poem her boyfriend sends her in which he wishes to be the moon peeking in on her. It concludes:
and so see you from infinite angles
and so see you in a way
i haven’t before.
if the moon were an eye
and i could be the moon.
What are we the readers but the eyes of the moon given a new perspective?
If we are to understand the basis for the rehabilitation of criminal girls, shouldn’t we, all of us on the outside, also give a try at understanding those girls?
These poems break me and fix me back up with words strung into verses like sutures.
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They persist in revealing themselves to their teacher, and therefore to us, sometimes with pride, sometimes with shame, and always with searing honesty.
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One of Carl Sandburg’s 38 definitions of poetry reads like this: Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.
The poems in Until You Make the Shore want to be more than poems and want us to more than readers. These poems break me and fix me back up with words strung into verses like sutures. I’m a new person for reading them. I’m a stranger to my old self because he never gave a thought to consider the lives of girls in juvie other than as mere statistics, if that.
I’m of the belief that good poetry should scar the mind with new patterns, sear the heart with new fire, and smash preconceptions to their atomic core, and then smash that too. Conaway’s poems accomplish that feat well.
They will wake you the hell up.
These are poems of the engaged, plain enough for anyone to grasp, cradle, and cherish. The question isn’t whether it’s good poetry or not. That is answered quickly and in the affirmative. This collection is a bounty of joyful reading for those who appreciate verses that peel back the curtain and line breaks that change your breathing pattern. The question is this: Can it convince a reader to engage?
◊♦◊
MMA fighting gets very up close and personal. Against the cage, dirty boxing, clinching, grappling – it’s all up in your face. In the brawl, sweat and blood mix. The violence is intimate. These are men who fight and then are brothers forever in the experience. They have faced each other in ways only other opponents will almost know. What they see in each other’s faces is truth as naked as it can ever be shown. Blatant and blunt.
The brave poems in Until You Make the Shore take us up against the cage and force us to get into the mix in a world most of us have never bothered to imagine. While the simplicity of the language bares a certain humility in its respect for what we bring to this fight – our apathy, our resistance to deep and lasting empathy – the powerful syntax, a calculus of head/body/body/head combinations, doesn’t stop coming until the very last words: “let me drop a dime to you.”
Inside, that idiom means “let me help you.”
Yes, please, and thank you.
Cameron Conaway’s next book, Malaria: Poems, is available for pre-order now at Michigan State University Press. —
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