Olivia Cronk, Skin Horse, Action Books, 2012.
"Like a secret date with Lizzie Borden, these moody lyrics thrill as they incriminate. SKIN HORSE shows that history is a crime scene, and that crime is theatrical, rife with costumes, masks, hats, props, weapons, scripts, dialogue, wooden scenery and dreamlike reenactments. These poems are anachronistic yet uncannily alive, furtive yet frank like an incriminating note forgotten in an apron pocket. Cronk locks words together like a lace collar which flutters attractively even as it tightens at the reader's throat. She writes, "with velvet trim / in the whistle of seeing." She writes, "Is it too untoward to say Please Go Back to Normal Life?" She writes, "Gotta nest of woe a nest of wail / and pardon my tied-on prom."
"If 'the wind cries Mary' sounds to you more like 'The ring pulsed Maria' then you have your ears tuned to Cronk's idiosyncratic sonics. You can't be overtly prepared for Cronk's directions, all you can do is gladly if a little hesitantly follow the paths her word combinations offer: 'Back in the city in chains... trees typewritering... I am indeed a nurse.' SKIN HORSE will stimulate some neurons to try some new actions, to scare up some gathering, to be thrilled to be amongst her magnifications."—Dara Wier
"Welcome to SKIN HORSE: Olivia Cronk's topographical map of a version of the world in which deformed humans squirm through the muck of a mutilated nature: a burning zone of mechanical, brain-dripping horrors, a degraded rendering of the extreme consequences of natural and corporal decay."—Daniel Borzutzky
"I enjoy it when I don’t exactly know what to expect. I do make certain assumptions about the titles that Action Books produces – they will be thick in language, they will sing of desperation, they will crave and carve, they will confound but then beautifully unwind – but of Olivia Cronk, I knew little more than a few sample poems before having digested her forthcoming Action Books volume Skin Horse, and I was nicely and verily impressed. And now, thanks to the magic of our Monkeybicycle machine, we get to do a little interview + review for these wonderfully woven new words.
To begin with, I read Skin Horse as a narrative or story told in poems – was this wrong? Should I have read this book instead as a poetry collection, as only a loosely threaded volume of like-minded poems?
- Well, first I’d respond that I do not believe in strictly right or wrong responses to texts, especially my own. I’d also say that I think that any sort of curated collection, or any bunch of things magically/accidentally thrown together, does suggest a narrative. And third, while I see most conventional narrative as tyrannical (a narrative tells the reader what to do, while I would rather collaborate with the reader in creative exchange/intercourse), I do and did intend to suggest a kind of coherent world where things happen—so, yes, that must be a narrative.
I have, though, just lately, thought much more about narrative than I used to—and the more recent poems in Skin Horse reflect some of what I am thinking. The poems that drop the second person pronoun (I know that this technique is not entirely apparent to the reader) are meant to tug the reader into the scene as an actor and to suggest the flimsy, excitingly thin world of storytelling. The self can split, can contain others, can project, can act voyeuristically and selfishly, can piece things together in pattern where there is none at all, where there could just as easily be recognition of an absolute empty. I favor a reader-centered poetics, and whatever narrative emerges, I hope, is created by the reader’s use of some tools that I pre-manipulated and some other wonderful—and totally unknown to me—tools with which the reader enters the exchange.
There is something about our sense of a timeline and the way we access memory that makes narrative so easy. I am excited by the feeling that this is ridiculous, seeing as we simply impose time on experience and imagine ourselves in a kind of gauzy strip of events that runs from birth to now to death. I like the failure of narratives. I like that narratives entertain; I think that readers should feel inside a poem the way we feel when we watch a film or hear music or eat dinner—inside of something that is outside of something else.
Skin Horse seems to reside, at least in tone if not in more concrete ways, in the idea of small town / farm life. Even when a poem loops out to technology or lasers or anything citified, it revolves right back to the tight fabric of community and rugged pastoral landscape just pages later. How does this extension away from and then retreat back to small town imagery connect with you as a writer? What does it tell us about you?
- I adore the pastoral—for tone, for the language associated with land, for experiences in physical reality, for imaginary experiences . . . but, mostly, I just use the pastoral as a theater for other things. It is a place where I can insert electrical lemur-faces and where I can do myself in drag. I grew up very much in the city, went to warm and cheerful YMCA summer camps for my childhood exposure to “Nature,” and maybe I slightly exoticize the world you see depicted . . . ultimately, though, I see the boundaries between these different spaces as barely there. I like that the imagination can bounce and flee through and out of setting. I see a fine floral tapestry pillow on a wooden chair and I feel my grandma’s northside Chicago apartment as quickly and as easily as I feel a long winter walk in a state park, with a dip and a cliff and a deer corpse torn up on the path. These are the same to me, feeling-wise.
And when it isn’t animals pulling us into each moment of Skin Horse, the most constant images are equally nature-bound (trees, weather, etc.). For instance:
as a cougar
in the leaves a mother
in our mouths we called
one another
with black willow lip: Please It.
Or:
There is the wide stone water.
There is my own terror.
The seahorse of all this
is hacking yellow
a dry lung.
Or:
Think of my little albino deer
alone in the winter garden.
The tooth in the sky
making sea around him.
Where do these images come from and how do they manifest themselves as you write?
- I often think of words as cheap trinkets that I arrange and rearrange on my dresser. Animals work very well for this. Also, aren’t animals so delightful to observe? It is an ethically appropriate sort of spying on private lives. I like to see what other creatures do, what their mannerisms and facial expressions are, and what tasks they have to complete. So, when I am not just lazily throwing around animal names for aesthetic s, I am writing about animals I have seen or imagined or obsessed over in some way.
Sometimes a poem/a word predicts the event about which it will be. The deer corpse I mentioned in the answer above was probably the result of a cougar attack. I actually saw this with my husband. It was dusk, and we were frightened and thrilled by the shock of it. Of course, I wrote “cougar/ in the leaves” a year before the “real-life” event. On another walk, we had imagined a cougar following us, and I put that in my poem. Later, it was real and the poem’s content, though not its words, changed.
As for seahorses, I just love them; I think they are amazing and alien. I used to play this strange youtube clip over and over:. I was disturbed by how the filmmaker’s ordinary domestic life created the audio backdrop of this fairly dramatic event in the seahorse’s life. I like the micro/macrocosms. And my friend introduced me to Jean Painlevé’s movies, where you can learn more about many strange little ones like the seahorse.
Albino deer live in northern Wisconsin. They are ghostly and ghastly. I have only seen pictures.
Likewise, over the course of Skin Horse, a rural accents slips in, as here:
I got deer-injecting to do.
Cup scams to pull.
A whole basket of others.
Or shouts in loudly, as here:
and here comes the thirsty one
a clickin’ away in the night.
A mirror pink locket all broke open
to unfold the awkward beast
a knockin’ in the night.
It’s us born to the weave
of nightmare and prairie and crow
and snow
so so piled plenty—
Why is this accentuated voice only used on occasion and what character or persona does it evoke in Skin Horse?
- Like moving in and out of different spaces, I feel free to move in and out of costumes. On one hand, the different accents reflect different periods of writing, where I may have been “doing” a different persona. On the other hand, I find that in my physical life I speak in different voices all the time, obviously—and these can pop up and infect the poem or can be suppressed or mutated. Finally, I like to think there are many selves present in the poems, all very possible at once.
Lastly, there is a collective ‘us’ or ‘we’ referenced throughout the poems in Skin Horse. As in the previous sample, or this others, like this:
In us ‘til ten p.m.
In us like devil meat.
I was saying it
in us.
Who is this ‘us’, and/or what does it represent?
- I don’t always know, but sometimes, often, it is my husband, with whom I write and read and have many adventures. Sometimes, it is my brother, my mother, one of my friends; sometimes it is you. And sometimes I am you or the you is me.
Olivia Cronk is making poems that read like vignettes of a total story taken apart and restructured into a new song, the same story but told in razed and rebuilt ways. Having fully eaten Skin Horse, I now know what to expect from Cronk, and it is in line with all we assume of Action Books – constant new titles that shiver and shake with goodness, that make us want to be better poets, better writers, and readers with all the time and money in the world to read books like this the instant they are released." - Interview by J. A. Tyler
"What lipstick lights.
Through a branch, one creeped to scream.
The pond was a bad window. A turkey frighted.
The ring pulsed maria
all over
a crystal ball flyer in my bag.
I thought I could find
some Boschists out back.
I couldn’t sleep last night so I took the opportunity to re-read Olivia Cronk’s absolutely stunning collection Skin Horse, and then I got back to it a little while ago when Joyelle took the demonic daughters to a birthday party. In light of my recent kvetchings about “context,” I started thinking about Skin Horse and connections to other books, and all my examples were Swedish. So I thought I would scribble down a few notes about that: How again context does not need to be something settling, lineage-making.
What I love about this book is this sense of a murder mystery hidden beneath layers and layers of textures (“crisp muslin,” “lace”) and media (corroded video, mirrors). A part of this textural/mediumistic ambience is the gaps and erasures in the text. Unlike so many erasures, here the gaps seem really important: as if the secret to the poems could be in those gaps. I really feel the gaps reading the text. These gaps may be erased to maintain the secret or from a sense of delapitation: the books seems to take place in an old house. There is something inherently anachronistic about the poems: the secrets but also the nearly Victorian sensibility.
A little how Anna Morgan appears like a Wisconsin Death Trip/Victorian era woman in the cursed video of The Ring (even though she’s from the late 1960s):
The title absolutely influences my reading of this mystery: the horses (the breeder, the phallic, the muscular) has been “skinned” so to speak: made into another texture, another media, a ring:
(I should say that the reason I couldn’t sleep last night was that I had watched The Ring for the fourth time, and this no doubt colors my reading of Olivia’s book…. Sorry dear readers!)
…He has come from war and has no home and is waiting for another war.But I doubt that
will help him.
I doubt there will be seasons at all.Just peels of skin.
or:
… it is terrifying to see – the back of a man shaking at a sink, some dandruff on his sweater, some action with the hands in the sink, the back of a man shaking, just hours ago.”
It’s interesting to see how the odd moment of very clarity – there’s a man shaking by the sink – is undermined by his turned-away head and by the way this instantaneous-seeming moment actually, it turns out, took place “hours ago.”
Though we never get this moment of patricide:
"Dear Olivia Cronk,
Your book, Skin Horse, is not a collection of poems. Stay with me, for I mean this in the best possible way, I swear. Olivia, your book, Skin Horse, is not a collection of poems, but a collection of tiny + terrifying moments of language. Your writing is syntactically-enchanted, your is writing is “very fucking chainlessly on golden floors.”
Many of these tiny + terrifying moments of language you’ve crafted take great delight in costuming themselves with bits + pieces swiped from a Great-Grandmama’s poison-apple-scented chiffarobe. Skin Horse is adorned in “untrue pearl buttons,” “wing glue, sunset skirts,” “gloves with the crust of lip,” + “brushing skulled velvet/and Veronique/turned blue paper blue.” Forgive me, this is going to sound dirtier than I mean it to, but, Olivia, I enjoy playing dress up with your Skin Horse.
90% of my favorite poems/tiny + terrifying moments of language contain one or more animals. So, obviously, your book makes me kind of giddy. Most of the animals in your book strike me as poetic + genetic d/evolutions. Your work is full of albino deer, screaming squids, rooster sleeves, and electrical lemur faces. Olivia, you remind of Aase Berg at her best (or, at least, Berg at her my favorite). Like Berg, you coat your animals in skins of lustre and terror.
I am trying to think of which other poets you remind me of. Lara Glenum, for sure. And Elizabeth Treadwell. And maybe Interior With Sudden Joy-ish Brenda Shaughnessy. At some points, you frustrate me, as I feel as if you are tipping your hat to some specific scribes. For example:
I had business on that side of town I did
wish myself a basket of cut throat, I admit—
just to find the tell-quail
dusting graves.
I heard of the trees typewritering before and those nymph-nosed.
makes me want to Google each phrase until I find the exact “source” of these images. But I sense that this a project that isn’t interested in genealogy. Skin Horse isn’t dependent on readers “catching” allusions, it’s dependent on readers’ willingness to sit back and marvel at the herd of images galloping past them.
Olivia, your tiny + terrifying moments of language incorporate motherloving multitudes. In one of my favorite sections of the book, you merge the voices of an evil veterinarian, a haunted blues musician, + a sneering debutante to give us this hard, pink gem of a piece:
Got trouble my jar of pills.
Got bells all me dead ones.
Gotta nest of woe a nest of wail.
And pardon my tied-on prom.
I got deer-injecting to do.
Cup scams to pull.
A whole basket of others.
Lovely. Just lovely. Look at that phrase “my tied-on prom.” Every time I re-read that, my brain does a happy flip.
It occurs to me that the phrase “tiny + terrifying moments of language” is a bit cumbersome. I am looking over the last page of Skin Horse and I see this phrase “word tunnel” and now I am thinking that “word tunnel” is a better description of your astonishing “non-poems”:
On a lap I dress for dinner.
I see to my old man’s tongue
caught on a tooth
just as the word tunnel
finishes.
I smack it out on a leather wall.
Yes, word tunnel. I like this phrase, I’m going to steal it. Although maybe it’s not really stealing if I’m using it to describe you? It’s like breaking into someone’s house to take eggs and sugar and then using those eggs and sugar to bake that person a Congratulations on Being Awesome cake. Anyway, Olivia, your book, Skin Horse, is not a collection of poems, but a collection of word tunnels. And I’m really glad you were able to smack it out on a leather wall.
Yrs.,
Daniela Olszewska"
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