Laura Moriarty opens Which Walks with an epigraph from the poet H.D.: “we walk continually // on thin air.” It’s a fitting sentiment for a poetic sequence grounded in process: a book about becoming, one might say. Centered in many ways by the pandemic, the work here is steeped in questions, but even more in the idea of exchange. “An old woman wanders the pestilential streets,” Moriarty begins. “She sees herself from the outside. She feels like an archeologist of the present. She makes ‘finds.’” Could there be a more vivid explanation of how a writer operates, moving through the world (to invert Virginia Woolf) as a miner, a diver, a seeker after buried treasure, which is to say an excavator of a sort? For Moriarty, this means walking—hence her title—as well as the sort of witchiness that comes with age.
I keep wanting to use the phrase hiding in plain sight in regard to Moriarty, although I don’t think it’s entirely accurate. Born in Minnesota and raised in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Northern California, she published a chapbook, Escape from Veils, in 1976; her first full-length work, Persia, appeared in 1983. In the years since, she has worked as director of the American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State’s Poetry Center and as deputy director of Small Press Distribution. (She retired in 2018.)
And yet, hiding in plain sight: Couldn’t that be said of every writer, moving through the world with double vision, like specters in real life? We are always observing, taking notes, “assembling”—to use a word Moriarty invokes—trying to find a passage to something we cannot quite recognize. “If you leave off you are lost,” she warns, quoting William Blake. It is all in the doing, then, all in the practice; that is everything and only what is possible. “she dreams the boxes,” Moriarty writes, “and wakes up arranging them in her mind, individually and in groups.” The poem as reflection of its own construction, in other words, an incantation whispered upon the silent surface of the world.
That’s where the pandemic enters—in its silence and its separation, in the isolation it imposed. The paradox is that these conditions are also a necessity for creative work. “There is a constant unmaking of self,” Moriarty suggests, “in writing or in making art,” and in that unmaking, some sort of shape, or form, begins to emerge. “Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts,” she explains, quoting once more, this time from the theorist Jane Bennett. “Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within.”
Let’s consider the implications of such a statement, falling, as it does, in the middle of Which Walks. On the one hand, it represents an apt metaphor for both the pandemic and the poems Moriarty extracts from the experience, with their persistent presence of energies that confound. In such a territory, what choice do we have but to seek meaning wherever we can find it, even if that entails creating a space of our own? On the other hand, the quoting…this, too, becomes a metaphor, if not entirely, a manifestation of the various voices and conversations with which the poet is engaged. “All of it—walking, writing, assembling, time—seems like a single practice involving lines,” she writes. “Eventually, drawing is added to assembling. The lines of what she now sees is a long poem are written in relation to her art practice, to her own precarity, and to that of her loved ones, which, terrifyingly, seems to include everyone.”
In that regard, Which Walks embodies an interplay of influences in which Moriarty functions as conductor, in more than one definition of the word.
First is as the leader of an ensemble, of a chorus, if you will. Many of these poems begin with an epigraph or dedication, and all are forays in their own right, language as a weave or tapestry in which identities or viewpoints coalesce. This includes us, the readers to whom Moriarty is writing, as well as the creatures who inhabit the natural world. “The woman walks in and out of the fallen world, collecting broken shells from the birds with whom she shares the air,” she confides, referring to herself. (Note the use of “whom” instead of “which” when she refers to the birds—not anthropomorphic but a deeper recognition of their sentience.) “She is followed by ghosts. Crows are of particular interest.… She thinks of them as Apollo’s birds, resisting their morbid reputation. Which of us doesn’t survive on carrion?”
Second, there’s the matter of energy transmission, which feels equally essential as a form of conduction—not only because this, too, is what a poem, or set of poems, requires, but also because the transfer of energy, of material, brings to mind the question of remaining grounded, although that, as the pandemic forcefully asserted, can only be an illusion in the fallen world Which Walks seeks to navigate.
For this reason, perhaps, Moriarty moves between verse and prose, first and third person, the abstract and the concrete. Her lines are most often arranged as couplets, but she is not shy about breaking form. “I added indented stanzas, the single word lines I call ‘scatters,’ and the prose sections (which I think of as memoirs of the present) to the mix,” she explains in an interview on the website of her publisher, Nightboat Books. The result is a work that is sui generis in the finest and most fundamental sense. “where for all / the time left // while busy / living, dying,” she reflects, “trying to sit still / quietly expressed.” What she’s evoking is the opposite of grounding. What she’s evoking is a wildness instead.
And that wildness is where we find ourselves. Or maybe it’s where we’ve always been. We are mortal beings, after all, every one of us, born to live but for a moment. This, too, emerges as a crucial thread in Moriarty’s tapestry. The “old woman,” she calls herself, gathering string and bits of glass to make a nest, not unlike the birds with whom she communes, knowing all the while that this will represent a temporary solace—if it can console at all. Or, as she insists: “this catastrophe or that / contagion emblematic // of the age we are in / or I am at, unmasked, // incomplete as thought / which is nevertheless // a sentence stating what / can’t be said but // shouted only as / eternity settles in.”•
