Looking at the Debuts of Aditi Machado and Emily Skillings Through the Category of 'Interesting'

For On the Seawall, a "community gallery of new writing, art, and commentary hosted by Ron Slate," Nathaniel Rosenthalis considers Some Beheadings (Nightboat, 2017), by Aditi Machado, and Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), by Emily Skillings. "Rather than just examine the debuts of these poets individually, I prefer to ask to what extent Skillings and Machado remix some of the aspects of an aesthetic category that is often associated with the late poet [John Ashbery] himself — that of the 'interesting.'" From there:

The power of Skillings’ work, in terms of the interesting, is the degree to which it transparently makes use of Ashberyian maneuver but dramatizes a difference between her position in history and that of a poet of previous generations. This difference is only one way in which Skillings differentiates herself from a precursor.

A poem like “Girls Online” epitomizes another way. The positioning of the material of a porn or perhaps a sex chat site becomes occasion for elegy. And as in many poems by Skillings, the title serves as a conceit that clearly frames the whole. “The first line is a row of girls, / twenty-five of them, almost / a painting,” the poem begins, giving us a clear visual of the layout of female bodies in the market of aesthetic experience — compared to that classic instance of high art, the painting (which Skillings also explores in poems, like the “Matron of No,” where the speaker deadpans that her “personal favorites” of “paintings of Lucretia / stabbing herself” include one ones where “she’s just sticking / a casual reminder / between her tits that life is suffering”). In “Girls Online,” the performance of identity – “One says: I’m myself here” — centers on a social context where “the others shudder and laugh / through the ribbon core that strings / them.” The odd detail here is that the poem re-positions the public — the interested people, the consumers. The “one” who speaks is heard by her peers, and the peers react. This is a public, and the one who speaks gathers the interest of her peers. But however much the girls online have the agency of the laugh, they are objects: “the girls are a fence, / a fibrous network.” Towards its end, the speaker speaks to the reader (or perhaps herself):

One will choose you, press you

into the ground. You may never

recover. The second-to-last line

has a fold in it. The last line is

the steady pour of their names.

The closing lines re-situate the alienation of performers — they have names and so seem differentiated even as they are ambiguously posed for consuming, but the ominous quality that resonates in the closing lines is the self-deletion principle, or a kind of outpouring of some kind of essence, or what was once a sacred essence, a name.

Read the full essay at On the Seawall.