Contributor’s Marginalia: J.P. Grasser on “There Are No Garbage Days” by Cate Lycurgus

I’ve always felt the lunar pull of poems that bring contemporary experience (for me, often characterized by misrecognition) into conversation with the tradition. To literalize a figure, to take the conceptual and return to it materiality, to give formless idea form, is an urge that strikes me as more than just willful ignorance or poetic duplicity. It’s a fundamental plea for simplicity in our ever-more-complicated, self-complicating world.

Cate Lycurgus’s “There Are No Garbage Days” does just that. The poem takes Yeats’s Gyre, and literalizes it as the North Pacific Gyre—a trash vortex held in place by the currents’ convergence. It’s a trash island, a real wasteland. What’s “turning and turning” (Yeats) in the “gyre, widening” (Lycurgus) is not just a generation’s worth of debris, but the generation itself, our generation: “before long, thirty years have slipped /down a bay-bound drain.” There’s the hint of ecopoetics here, but more, I think, metaphysics—the gyre isn’t just a place of the mind, but a place of the current world—it has its own terrible, beautiful genius loci; the spirit of the place communes with the place’s placeness. Cate’s ghost-image—the whirlpool, the last slosh spinning down the drain—enacts the ghost of Yeats’s poem. But time doesn’t return, it goes to sea. There are no days (garbage or otherwise) which come around a second time, as Yeats might have it. That fact of existence, of experience, can only confound.

Our simple understanding is, of course, muddied by the near-overwhelming flow of sharp images & complicated sound-work Cate gives us—“I watch her clip /each six-pack loop to Cs so when they wash / to sea, bottle-nosed dolphins won’t go for tuna, get Coke //choke-holds.” Even in desiring simplicity, we can’t ignore the world’s multiplicity. I love the enjambment of “we…can’t ignore a mass / like that.” Its meaning complicates itself, even as it argues simply. Sure, as a first order image, we’re talking about the oceanic mass. But is this a malignant tumor, is this Catholic mass? All three? We don’t have an answer to this, and we don’t have to answer it.

That’s the terrible beauty born of our modern condition. That’s the beauty Cate gets, and gets me to in this poem.