Morgan Võ’s collection of poetry, The Selkie, has as its title creature a creature that can transform from human to seal and back. A “selkie” means “seal” and is from the Scots. The poetic works are rife with fish of all kinds.
The collection opens with a monger (dealer, peddler) at a fish market in “The Four Corners.” The fish have a fleeting desirability, a fleeting freshness. There are four fish left in a plastic trough:
one curled
in each corner
in a shrimp-like
decline
The monger, who makes his living from the creatures of the sea, lists out various new fish, and a janitor walks by not particularly caring about the variances.
The described interchange may make a little more sense with a note excerpted on the back cover of the chapbook from another poem in the collection. It is an announcement by The Monger about a year-long performance piece that he will hold from April 1975 to 1976. He proclaims:
I shall seal myself in my stall, in solitary confinement inside a tray of ice measuring 6’ x 3’ x 2’. I shall NOT converse, read, write, listen to the radio or watch television until I unseal myself on April 29, 1976. I shall have fresh fish every day.
The Monger will be supported in this performance feat by The Janitor, who will handle logistics.
The performance is clearly for an audience, but the purpose of the performance does not have any clear meaning, except perhaps of a human allying more closely to a fish given the living on a tray of ice in solitary. The poet is the monger, and his musings are the performance, to an audience of whomever may stop by to watch. Regardless, Võ’s works exist in an ecosystem of humanity in nature, artifice, and personality.
In “Other Things Laying in an Ice Trough,” a toddler-child of a couple approach a fish seller at his stall and takes one fish, then another, without permission. The adults look on and seem to share an understanding between them. The mundane interaction has so meaning beyond the mundane, but the meaning eludes. A fish gets shuffled in with the money and is used to pay for various things in the span of a week:
an oil change
a bag of candy
a seafood platter
margarine
tickets to Black Adam
a discount prescription for albuterol
discount ammo
lavender-scented candles
a toll
Sometimes, an idea catches in a poem, and that is caught up in torrents of language before the poetic narrative falls back to earth. Some turns of phrase remind of dadaist poetic traditions. In some ways, language might just be sound, sensation, building blocks, or a small push against incoherence.
Võ’s poems highlight a life in which fish are kin to people, and they are central to lifestyles:
they use fish to stain the skin around their eyes
they use fish to make sequins a dark color green
they use fish to find leaks in pools
they use fish to induce labor
they use fish to send messages to people who have died
they use fish to catch birds
they use fish to oil hinges
they use fish to fertilize corn, peanuts, garlic, and wheat
“A Look into a Succulent’s Finger” introduces two views of a dying fish held by a human against a window. On the one side is the garden. On the other are flowers on the wrist of the hand holding it out of water and out of its element as it is struggling and dying. The fish muses about vitality on the one hand and sickness on the other.
“After Death” celebrates the closeness of non-existence. At one point, the poem reads:
Its symptomatic accompaniment bears a sudden accumulation of sanguinated dots and arrows oversaturating the visual field, to the point that light must be exhumed and/or beckoned from its low tide hiding place, while dark messages fly to and fro inside the havoc. Heaven is this excited heaviness, where clarity has no truck.
“The Selkie” reads like a mystery. The Form of Fish Life (FFL) goes up to an employee at the hardware store and asks for various building materials. The FFL returns shortly thereafter and asks for the same set of materials. The human is fooled by the selkie, when the selkie comes back to buy different supplies the time after. What it is building is never clear.
“Earth Falls into Heaven” provides what seems to be a vision of a post-human world in which a different species can take over to “ferry peace.” The poet writes of a post-apocalyptic space:
When there is no weather report, and the birds have gone into separatism, then there’ll be stillness, an extension of stillness that is its own form of land—a renewed chance for peace. When Earth becomes a star and enters the world of Heaven, then there’ll be an emptiness that doesn’t rob time I order to keep itself calm. Then there’ll be another form in which to ferry peace.
It is not that humans cannot survive on something less than peace, but perhaps this is about a time when people have outlived their welcome, their ability to adapt?.
“People Like Monsters” continues on a morbid theme, with people knowing to appreciate a fast death. They write:
People want to get squished or eaten whole, and not so secretly.
People want a short distinction between life and death.
“The Break” depicts a world of “losers”. In this work, there is something of a performer’s impulse:
I love crowds in the stratosphere
I love crowds in the sea
Finally, another work titled “The Selkie” opens with an imagination projected into the ocean deep:
A fish will lick my fingers while I sleep deeply.
A pineapple fish will unite all places savvily combined.
A broken rose of fish drifts through clouds of baby formula, to be berated by
A dozing sea. Burrow, ochre craniates! Crater deep below the steam vents
At the Marianas…
Morgan Võ works in the visual arts as well as poetics. The Selkie is his debut collection.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
