Chris Rice Cooper
*The images in this
specific piece are granted copyright privilege by: Public Domain, CCSAL,
GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright
Law, or given copyright privilege by the copyright holder which is identified
beneath the individual photo.
Fairy Tale Imagery In Kelli Allen’s Imagine Not Drowning
“what once upon time really means”
On
April 15, 2017 C & R Press Conscious & Responsible (https://www.crpress.org) published Imagine Not Drowning by Kelli Allen
(https://www.kelli-allen.com), the cover art by Eugenia Loli (http://eugenialoli.tictail.com) and cover design by Victoria Dinning (https://www.facebook.com/victoria.dinning.75/about?lst=100004428366683%3A100004055173643%3A1494345687).
third from left, Kelli Allen copyright granted by Kelli Allen
Eugenia Loli- web photo Fair Use
Victoria Dinning - Facebook photo Fair Use
Allen (https://www.facebook.com/kelliallenpoetry) is also the author of the poetry collection Otherwise Soft White Ash; and two chapbooks How We Disappear, and Some Animals. (https://www.kelli-allen.com/books)
The Speaker of the Poem is an adult woman mourning the loss of both of her parents; torn in a passionate love affair; and struggling to live amongst worlds and even between worlds.
The poems
are erotic, descriptive poems to her lover, the overwhelming lust they share,
and the magical world they inhabit with plant life, water life, sky life,
animals, insects, humans, gods, and other magical beings. This world is pleasurable and joyous; but
also deliciously violent, unstable, unpleasant and even painful.
Take
every opportunity to own and wield the weapons for cutting, as
every-
thing
begs, at some sharp moment, to be severed, to be made sweetly
clean.
--
Excerpt, “Here Are Instructions for Removing the Scissors.”
Copyright granted by Christal Rice Cooper
But the fantasy and magical worlds for
these lovers is always colorful and takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride,
where, by the end of the book, we don’t want to get off.
The
one theme in all of these poems is that of the fairy
tale world. Reading Imagine Not Drowning is like being
with Mary Poppins, jumping with her into Bert’s chalk painting only to have it
become a fantasy world of every imaginable description one can think of.
The one
Allen uses the most is that of birds and relating to birds. And these bird descriptions engage every
sense we have – the sense of sight (these black ducks/ tucked in rain-refusing jackets
“Feeding Birds, or, rather, Some
Magic”), the sense of hearing (I remember first the gathering of sound, “The
Rooster’s Daydream”), the sense of scent (how it forces our halls to smell like cinnamon
until night, “Later Afternoon in Tall Grass”), the sense of
taste (taste
the busy stems as they/ fall beneath us, “Wishing Adeline and
the Shooting Stars”), and the sense of touch (Some towns are the wing bones we
crush/ in our hands “Market
Day in Someone Else’s City”).
Painting attributed to Victor Vaspetsov. Depicting the birds of sadness and joy. Public Domain
In
“Becoming a Woman of the Brook, Shade, and Moss” the speaker of the poem is
like Alice
In Wonderland where she falls into a new world:
What
if my body fell through bliss,
caught
its late small toe on some hook of descent?
The
speaker of the poem mentions Ivan and the firebird from the Russian Fairytale Tsarevich
Ivan, the Firebird and the Gray Wolf:
You tell me it’s easy to pretend Ivan
will make room on his flaming bird’s back,
Ivan catching the Firebird's feather. Attributed to Ivon Bilibin. Public Domain
The speaker
of the poem further describes Ivan’s bird and how she and her lover hear its
wings when “the fruit just drops/ jeweled
carnage into the stream.”
Ivan is mentioned again in the
poem “We make nothing from instinct.”
is it you, Ivan? We
remember, at once, the feathers
don’t come from the tail, they come from the breast.
In “Late Afternoon in Tall Grass” the
speaker of the poem is on a journey with her lover playing the game of pretend
that “the path to some castle must be
there.”
The Papal Palace Avignon attributed to Paul Signas. Public Domain
There is more fairy tale imagery in the
poem “Eventually, we go inside” where the speaker of the poem’s lover is
building a house around her. This house
is being built out of “stones as
rabbits” with the only way of finding home through “a conversation, punctuated as it would be/ with
silences.” In the same
way the lovers are trying to find peace for their final home, and in the end of
the poem, the last stanza, they find their path marked by pennies.
the spell cast becoming little other than pennies’
left on the path, the one we marked, some time
ago, in chalked letters, as this way, home.
Copyright granted by Christal Rice Cooper
The poem is reminiscent of the fairy tale called The Stolen Pennies about a family
whose son has recently died. They invite
a neighbor for dinner and the neighbor receives a visit from the son but only
the neighbor can see him. The child
appears for five days always ending up in a room digging near a floor of
boards. The family asks the neighbor to
describe what he was seeing and after his description the family knows it’s
their son. The mother goes to the floor
boards and opens them up and sees two pennies – that the son was supposed to
give to a poor man but instead kept for himself to buy a biscuit. The boy was appearing to the family to regain
those pennies back in death so he could have peace.
Illustration depicting the little boy searching for the two pennies. Public Domain
In “Wishing Adeline and the Shooting
Stars” the speaker of the poem admits to her lover that she “not once in my
whole life have I left the/ slipper on the stairs.” Is the speaker of the poem telling her lover
she wants to go to anther world but will not leave him a mark of the path she
has gone? Or is she saying that even
though she wants to say goodbye she will never runaway and therefore have cause
to accidentally lose a glass slipper on the stairs? Or perhaps the speaker of the poem is
fantasizing in this magical fantasy world but realizes that in real life there
are no fairy tales – even in the act of pretending?
In “How Much Tenderness, When We Consider
How to Lose”, the speaker of the poem addresses her mother and reveals to the
reader that she is not only a fairy tale princess but a fairy tale orphan; her
mother dying on July of 2012 and her father passing away in 2015.
Kelli Allen's parents - her mother is pregnant with Kelli Allen.
I whispered,
just like Alice
in the Queen’s hall, and waited, looking down at the
cylinder
wherein you, something of you, rested all dust and what
must seem
like so many broken black sand shells to the fire keeper
who placed you first in the flames, and then, here in this
silver
capsule.
The orphan views herself as the princess and her lover as the dragon in the poems “This is the part where we don’t say “love”; “Imagine Not Drowning”; and “Quills are for the stories that stay written”.
In “Unbreakable hour after hour” the speaker of the
poem is facing the reality that there perhaps is no happily ever after for her
and her lover:
and I am still looking up
at you, your fingers nested in my fine hair,
and we both know what once upon a time really means.
Copyright granted by Kelli Allen
Imagine
Not Drowning are poems detailing a passionate love affair amidst a
world of fairytale, magic, and fantasy; and in these worlds the questions the speaker
of the poem asks are questions we ask in real life: is this real love? Is this lover my soul mate? How to let go of worlds that may pleasure us
to the core, but are not healthy for our spirit? How do we say goodbye to those we love and
maintain a fruitful life without them, without abandoning them, or their memory?
Copyright granted by Kelli Allen
Allen answers these questions in the last
stanza of her poem “Ghosting” which brings comfort and peace to all who read
its powerful lines:
What came before
certainly does not wish for us to forget
and so offers a seeding of questions, which we embrace
without intention, and this I call, not paranoia,
rather knowing-lust.
That radiance we suspect
has been threaded into our every lysosome, namelessly,
unearned, ours as a right of carrying cells upon
cells until we think we might be whole, is never really new and so we keep vigil for signifiers.
