Poem of the Week | September 11, 2017

Patti White: “Immersion”
Patti White is the author of three collections of poems, Tackle Box (2002), Yellow Jackets (2007), and Chain Link Fence (2013), all from Anhinga Press. Her fourth collection, Pink Motel, was published in Summer 2017. Her work has appeared in journals including Iowa Review, North American Review, River Styx, Nimrod, DIAGRAM, Forklift Ohio, and New Madrid. She teaches creative writing at the University of Alabama, and was co-founder of Slash Pine Press.
White was a finalist for the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Enter this year’s contest here!
Immersion
Author’s Note:
“Immersion” is one of several experiments with a long form called the kontakion. The poem reflects on a love lost long ago and moves dreamwise from the Arctic, to a rain-spattered motel, to the Gulf of Mexico, always coming back to images of water, to the nature of desire, to a sense of the vastness of love and loss. It also speaks to its form; in the end, the poem drowns itself in its own images, in a rush of language that just keeps flowing.
In Byzantine Rite liturgy, the kontakion is a praise poem of 18-24 acrostic stanzas linked by a refrain. Here, the acrostic is of course immersion and the shorter “refrain” stanzas continue that conceit (iii – mmm – mmm, etc.). I love this form because it is both expansive and constricted. It allows space for a narrative, but forces me to use words in ways that make crazy sense. For instance, zinc oxide and margarine would never be linked in my mind if I hadn’t needed that m word just there; the form pushed me outside of my normal image lexicon.
I have three other kontakions. Another one (“Immersion II”) about this same love — and the Rocky Mountains. One (“Lipstick”) about the life and death of Anna Nicole Smith (a very fleshy poem). And one (“The Air at That Moment”) about my relationship to weather, which ends with the tornado that struck my home in 2011. The last two were published as a chapbook called Kontakion, in The Chapbook Vol. 5.
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