by John Kendall Hawkins
A Juror Must Fold in on Herself
by Kathleen McClung
Rattle Foundation (2020)
Chapbook $6
Chapbooks are making a big comeback since their heyday in the '60s when they were the bread and butter of small literary presses, and bread and butter was often all they had to eat. And government-issued cheese. I briefly lived at a William Blake-inspired poetry commune -- the Four Zoas Press in western Mass. -- in the mid-'70s, freezing my ass off in winter, having an affair with a cute, freckled social worker, living off cheap spaghetti and the aforementioned cheese. It was good.
There was a small letterpress machine
there. I raided my journal and composed my poems, letter by lead letter, found
scraps of quality paper on the floor, and pressed together my first chapbook,
bound by string. Out from the Darkness.
The love poems of groundhog Spring. Dig this:
The Sunflower
On an overcast day
a sunflower droops
his head to snooze
and dreams nervously
of his idol.
When I wake up
and drowsily lift my
face
will I see your
flashing eyes?
I was reading a lot of German
Romanticism at the time. Young Werther
soon followed. So much for Spring. And love.
It took me a long time to get
comfortable with free verse; I'd been 'trained' by educators to imbibe the
rhythms and introject the values and forms of the blessed Canon. In my honors
English, we had to stand up and recite a classic once per week, and I loved it.
All I knew how to do was to rhyme sublime in iambic time. Milton, Keats,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shakespeare. I still love classic sonnets to this day.
But now I'm free. And freedom is harder than it looks. Or, just another word for nothing left to
lose, as Janis sang it.
In Kathleen McClung's new prize-winning
chapbook, A Juror Must Fold in on Herself,
from Rattle Books, all the elements of form and function, freedom and sentences
come together in a distillation of the poetic elements -- a bliss of plainspeak
that listens and sees. And there's humor, the banality of common ironies and
evils too small to fail us, or inspire us to move forward. McClung has been an
adjunct professor at Skyline College, in California, for 20 years. As she puts
it at her website, "I may not have adequate health insurance, but my iambs feel
good." This sentiment is in keeping with spirit of the chapbook: a smart,
working-class professor struggling to survive in a gig-economy culture.
McClung's Juror is a 15-poem collection of 'a day in the life of' set pieces
drawn out over the span of a trial for which the poet has been called up for
jury duty -- from the first day driving in to the Hall of Justice parking lot,
opening statements, noting judge and fellow jurors, observing benign omerta
rules, deciding a peer's fate, driving away from Justice on the last day,
epilogic nods to jurors now mere passersby in the community, out, like her, back
to shopping.
McClung's Sequestered Juror is empathetic,
observant, commonsense wise, and sometimes funny. We learn about the monotony
of duty, the conceits of logic systems in which we are mere switches for the
whole, that we can vote, and declare Guilty or Not Guilty in a courtroom of our
peers. We find we can set free the eye of our mind's purchasing power on a mall
of our choosing and time, while deliberating on the fate of our fellow man,
multitasking, as it were. And with the Juror's luck, her duty is called upon
during summer vacation.
McClung accomplishes all of this while
offering up poetic forms -- rondeaus, pantoums, sestinas, centos, and sonnets
-- in a celebration of voice and rhythm, that surprises -- like finding on the
rack of a Goodwill store an old cotton shirt, plaid and button-down, instant
retro, still fits, to your delight, in the mirrored fitting room, then back to
the rack, buried among the many shirts, in the many river Nostalgia. There is
grace, and simplicity. I had fun looking up the quaint but useful forms, now
explained on YouTube (theoretically, you could write a pantoum while driving in
your car, "with one hand whipping free", as The Bard from Duluth would say),
and had more fun staging the texts in my mind, reader response-style.
In her rich opening poem, "Field Notes,
Hall of Justice Parking Lot", our Juror, not yet sequestered "for the summer", is parking her car, "nearly full with Early / Birds"; she sees, not far away,
the suited Accused, getting off his bike and "locking / it with a gigantic U to
the Hall of / Justice rack". She just sits there listening to Mozart, observing
without notes, thinking, "He may / know I watch him." But she's not going to risk contempt of court
by saying, G'day, how's it going, as one might feel inclined to do, with a
defendant in your community, innocent until proven guilty. She's not gonna be a
renegade that browbeats the jury into Innocence. It's enough, she tells
herself, that "I was already spending my / vacation in a crummy swivel chair."
The free-verse poem is stranger than it
seems at first (and, even on the surface, it's sufficient for its purpose). The
Early Birds tell of a consciousness of tight budgets, the suit and bike and U
lock of the defendant already suggests so much; and the projected intuition
that he is being watched, community eye-bees bobbing, wherever he goes, ready
to sting, is not mere paranoia, but the raw energy of community watches,
surveillance states, and the suspended disbelief of the intensely observing
courtroom, which betoken a subject under powerful, but subtle siege, a life in
the balance of the Forewoman's pronouncement, Guilty or Not, him to be fed in
the end to the lion of Justice or to the Christian, who hasn't eaten in weeks.
"Field Notes" is the Juror's awareness of all this, but she wants (and probably
needs) a vacation; even her empathy is on a tight budget. We're strange to each
other, but in an intimate way.
In the second poem, we switch out of
the civilian life of free-verse observing to the more formal musicality of
courtroom rituals that McClung brings to life, starting with "The D.A.'s
Opening Statement", a villanelle. The anchor line is a perfect pitch from the
DA, "Don't put yourself in anybody's shoes." Just the facts, ma'am.
Nevertheless, the Juror notes, "(The prosecutor looks me in the eye.)" You are
only to see through his shoes. The
repeated "shoes" is repeated with the admonition "lose". An empathetic prosecutor would be a failing
prosecutor: now introject that. Be a logical positivist, not a teary
metaphysician. If you must, the DA says, "Go somewhere else behind closed doors
to cry."
The Juror hears the sing-song rite,
detached, and one is reminded of T.S. Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady", where a
tea-mate goes on, in her wistful, matronly intonations:
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