Contributor’s Marginalia: John Philip Drury responding to Paula Cisewski’s “Superfoetation”

Titles are gateways, some open and inviting (like “What Was Your First Concert?”), some shut and possibly locked, like Paula Cisewski’s other poem in this issue, “Superfoetation.” I could have looked up the word immediately in a dictionary, but I was so curious to see how a Latinate term I didn’t know could represent a poem that I walked right in, hopeful that the word would be defined or explained within the poem itself. And it was, but not until lines 5-7, when the speaker ends a list of sure signs of Spring (“daffodils, wren / song, sugar eggs,”) with the longer and more surprising “getting pregnant while already / pregnant, which is a thing rabbits can do, and mice can do,” the definition I was hoping for.

“Yes,” the opening word of the first line, follows the unfamiliar title with a note of welcome that invites the reader to enter. However, it leads almost immediately to the second line’s “but,” posing a dilemma for this poem about Spring. It may exult, but it also admits to doubts, reservations, anxieties, quibbles, second thoughts, and concessions. Affirmations and negations volley back and forth as Cisewski explores the ironic predicament of “unmaking in the making.” That isolated “Yes” leads eventually to the more colloquial “Yeah yeah,” which appears twice, first in the opening line of the second stanza and then in the opening line of the fourth. The poem doesn’t simplify or sentimentalize the season but packs a woven, complicated tangle of variegated threads into a maximalist ode in a minimal space—five quatrains and a couplet.

E.E. Cummings, in Part I of “Chansons Innocentes” (which begins “in Just- / spring”), describes the vernal world of rebirth as “mud- / luscious” and “puddle-wonderful,” reveling in assonance, the same earthy uh vowels Cisewski uses when she writes “thwucked off in the mud,” “sloughed off” (pronounced as sluffed), and “buds and multiple clutches / of bunnies.” The onomatopoeia of “thwucked,” a word that does not (at least not yet) appear in the O.E.D., makes the most of the smuttiest vowel in the language, the guttural grunt of wanting. The physicality of Cisewski’s diction celebrates “fecundity’s gross mess,” and the slippery wetness of “gross mess” represents another example of meaning in the imitative music.

Actual marginalia jotted down for this poem would crisscross the text with red-penned lines making various connections, like an evidence board for a crime scene investigation—and her poem is an investigation, not just a celebration:

For example, the original “Yes” echoes twice as the slangy, jazzy, and somewhat impatient “Yeah yeah.”

For example, the list beginning with “daffodils” in line 5 is followed by other lists: “doubled / up language, blood and spittle, the incubating truth // begot in the tenuous vessel of yesterday’s body” (lines 11-13) and “peach blossoms, / iris blades, buds and multiple clutches / of bunnies” (lines 13-15). (Lists, as in Walt Whitman’s catalogues, represent plenitude, abundance, litters of language, fecundity.)

For example, “rabbits” morphs into the more childlike and Eastery “bunnies” (line 15).

For example, religious allusions proliferate: “dogwood” (legendary as the tree from which Judas hanged himself), “sugar eggs” (an Easter decoration, often with a bunny inside a hollowed-out egg), “We kill our gods to make them rise” (hence Easter), “a half hallelujah” (which might sound like the slangy “Hella” or might simply be an utterance that is “tenuous” in a world that’s tentative about dogma and declarations), “rise again,” and burying “dead god parts.”

“Superfoetation” is a fast-moving meditation on Spring’s lesson of how rebirth must follow death, as we know from Wallace Stevens’s “Death is the mother of beauty” (which he says twice in “Sunday Morning”). I’m reminded of how Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales begins with a reference to “Aprill with his shoures soote,” followed by the “droghte of March,” and how that drought of winter resembles Cisewski’s “sterile quarantine” (which also suggests the recent Covid pandemic, no less devastating or frightening than the Black Death to the Canterbury pilgrims).

“There’s no cruelest month” counters T.S. Eliot’s assertion about April, the first full month of Spring, in the opening clause of The Waste Land. But some of his evidence, in the form of participles at the end of the first three lines, could find their place in “Superfoetation”: “breeding,” “mixing,” and “stirring.” Both poets choose diction that’s erotically charged. It’s simply that their conclusions differ.

Birth and new beginnings proliferate and resound: “some new start,” “how this whole rebirth thing works,” “incubating,” and even the wryly comic image of the “tossed diaper / blooming beneath the dogwood.” This fertility rite of spring also includes the waste products of childcare. But the poet also recognizes that the process is not necessarily cyclical: “not every gone thing will rise again.” We may “kill our gods to watch them rise,” but they may or may not return from the underworld. There may be “unmaking in the making,” but it’s not guaranteed.

Religious strains run through this poem. The urge to bury “dead god parts” or “throw them in the sea” does suggest a desire for rebirth, rejuvenation, a fresh beginning, or some new poems after a dry spell, but it also suggests an urge to get rid of the parts within us that harbor “dead gods.”

One of my personal rules of thumb is that if a poem has a voice that’s compelling, the poet can get away with almost anything. It should usually be conversational, of course, but it could also be fresh, surprising, informative, and/or melodious. Cisewski manages to hit all of those notes. She keeps the aria flowing while offering a bounty of facts, myths, details, and images that proliferate like the blossomings of Spring. I also admire her scrupulous, skeptical impulse to “doublecheck what feels made up.” That’s part of her voice too.

I like poems that are maximalist, packing in all sorts of things, generating details like a slot machine delivering its jackpot, moving from list to list, gathering energy each time they flex their muscles by naming things. I once delivered a lecture, at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop, about what I called “stuff” in poetry, and that’s one of the attractions of this poem. I’m interested in how a poet brings a lot of interesting stuff, especially weird, quirky facts, into the song-structure that constitutes a poem. That’s one of the chief technical puzzles that a poet has to solve. How do you make facts sing?

After I had finished reading the poem, I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary and found that the word superfoetation is a “variant of superfetation,” first used (spelled as “superfætations”) in a 1603 translation of Plutarch’s Morals 843. Its primary meaning is physiological: “A second conception occurring after (esp. some time after) a prior one and before the delivery; the presence of fetuses of different gestational ages within the uterus (resulting from fertilization of eggs produced during different ovulatory cycles).” A note follows: “Superfetation occurs normally in some animals, and is believed by some to occur exceptionally in women.” There are secondary meanings for this maculate conception: (1) “A superfluous or excessive addition; an excrescence. Also: an outgrowth or accumulation of something.” and (2) “Additional or superabundant production or occurrence; the growth or accretion of one thing on another; proliferation.”

I also checked “iris blade” online and found that it refers to the flower’s sepals (called “falls”), which provide a landing pad for bees and access to nectar: the pleasure of pollination resting on a word associated with a cutting, lethal edge, rebirth depending upon death.

When I was a kid and Spring meant attending or at least listening to the game on Opening Day, one of my favorite books was Leonard Koppett’s A Thinking Man’s Guide to Baseball (later rephrased and corrected as “…Thinking Fan’s Guide…”). Paula Cisewski’s mini-encyclopedic “Superfoetation” could serve as a brilliantly compressed Thinking Person’s Guide to Spring.