1 essay by Cody Walker,
on the poetry of Hannah/Hans Kesling

Game Changer

​

I play in a tennis clinic with a coach who shouts, after nearly every mistake I make on the court, “What happened?!” I’ve started quoting it to my fellow players, layering it with (I hope) irony and affection. What happened is I—or someone else, if I’m repeating the line—flubbed the shot. That’s clear. But also: I don’t know what happened! Was it my grip? My follow-through? I’d like to know!

The mechanics of tennis can be broken down in ways that life and poetry cannot. Take this marvelous poem sequence, which tells us, in four carefully constructed parts, what happened and happened and happened and happened. Or does it? We have a speaker, certainly, and the speaker has a father, an uncle, and a “someone” (fantastic descriptor, that). A job is lost; an unhoused woman speaks her multiple truths; a baby, perhaps, is on the way. And yet: When I turn away from these poems, what I feel is not so much the memory of a linear narrative as the continuing vibrations of an experience. It’s the experience of change—of, as Ovid would put it, bodies turning into other forms. It’s metamorphosis, mutability—it’s the moving river you can’t step into twice. The sequence foregrounds iterations: a young self, a fifteen-years-later self. It nods to Whitman (“my / self, my song”), singer of multitudes. It suggests layers of trauma that can only be approached through metaphor. Stones become spider sacs. Spider sacs hatch.

Persian fairy tales often begin, “There was one, there was not one; this happened, this did not happen.” That’s my preferred world: one of happening and not happening, one of knowing and not knowing. Fairy tales exist comfortably in that world; so, often, does poetry. The poems in this sequence welcome things that seem immutable (a flatbed truck) and things that seem entirely in flux (the word “tender,” which presents as both an adjective and a noun). They have purposefully prosaic titles (titles that recall—for me, anyway—Frank O’Hara’s description of his own poems: “I do this I do that”), but they pivot quickly to verse and use verse’s tools to wondrous effect. Listen to the sonic kapow of “blessed in my bloomlessness.” Note the enjambed surprise of “My someone loves me, but I am / ecology.”

For the past few years, I’ve kept Suzanne Vega’s 1985 self-titled debut album on one of my turntables. I like how it sends me back to an earlier iteration of myself: the eighteen-year-old me. And I especially like the moment near the end of “Marlene on the Wall” when Vega sings, “I think it’s called my destiny / That I am changing / Changing, changing, changing, changing.” I know those four extra “changing”s are coming (I’ve listened to the song 2,000 times), but they still bring me nearly to tears.

Change is our great theme, our paradoxical constant. If something’s changing (and something is changing, always), then something’s happening—and poetry (to rework a famous line) makes something happen. It makes us laugh (air going out) and gasp (air coming in). It enacts, as occurs in this kinetic sequence, a “turning / back,” a “turning / in,” a “holding,” an “unfurling”—and suddenly we find ourselves mirroring its motions. It coughs and trumpets. It is, as Auden comes round to saying in his elegy for Yeats, a “way of happening, a mouth.” What happens at the end of the sequence? Something hatches—a mystery, a sac, a past or future trauma, a newly-seeded self. The verb’s both brutal (“hatched” summons, to my ears, “hatchet”) and protean (might it morph into a noun and suggest a passageway?). All’s in doubt and in flux, but for this: The poet has served an ace, right down the T.