A Pink Wilderness of Sod and Infrastructure

Katherine Gibbel reviews Lindsey Webb’s “Plat.”

By Katherine GibbelOctober 28, 2024

• Poetry

• Philosophy & Religion

LINDSEY WEBB’S NEW debut poetry collection from Archway Editions, Plat, is divided into three parts: “Garden,” “Mancala,” and “House.” (“House” was previously published as a charming, long rectangular chapbook by Ghost Proposal in 2020.) Both “House” and “Garden” share the same formal constraint: short, justified prose poems, which vary in length but hover at around six lines with a descriptive energy that is solid, precise, and thrilling. In the section “Mancala,” the poems escape from that boxy form into free verse—a surprise, given the section’s name. I was thinking of the board, and not the marbles, “plucked, gathered up, then dropped.” The push and pull between structure and its disassembly preoccupies the poems in this book.

There are many subjects of Plat: the suicide of Webb’s childhood friend, who was also raised in the Mormon faith; grids; domesticity and its relationship to the outdoors; worms; architecture; God; death and its relationship to heaven; gender; the color pink; labor and its relationship or nonrelationship to commerce; and the Plat of Zion, which Webb helpfully describes at the beginning of her book for readers like me who are ignorant of the particularities of the Mormon Church. At a time when shows like The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (2024– ) and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (2020– ) have brought Mormonism into the zeitgeist, Plat takes seriously a Mormon poetics that complicates its reader’s understanding of the Mormon faith without being overly zealous. What happens, her book seems to ask, when you find yourself in the structure, in the plat, of a religion? Webb charts the topography of gender, landscape, and architecture within this tradition.

The plat, Webb explains, was Joseph Smith’s vision for utopia: with 24 houses of the Lord (temples) in the middle, ringed by a large grid of residential plots, and then a ring of fields and farmlands. There is both punishment and solace in the grids of the plat. And in lattices, garden beds, windows, and understanding—Webb charts them all. Although Plat is bookended by sections diametrically titled “Garden” and “House,” the poems position those exterior and interior spaces as permeable. The garden and the house are not separate—far more interestingly, her poems reveal solidarities between those two domains through a shared form, and exchanges between the domestic and the wild. Hers is a complicated antipastoral. “Meanwhile,” Webb writes, “the kitchen takes its orders from the garden” and “the windows are an open topology.” We understand that objects can be flexible—I can look out a window toward the mountain, or through the window toward a room; I can enter and exit without the window changing its shape. Likewise, the speaker of Plat draws her reader’s attention to the outdoor space around her falling into patterns. Architecture is everywhere.

Although many of the poems give the appearance of structure with their strict boxy forms, they refuse narrativity. Her freely associating lyric responds directly to the chaos of grief. In the section “Mancala,” Webb writes, “They tell me to build a narrative of your death. / I find a seashell in a hollow tree, pretending nothing is as it shouldn’t be: things just are.” The speaker cannot linger directly on death. She pivots to describe a seashell in a tree: two incongruent items, one signaling the woods, the other signaling the ocean, both signaling a concavity—a lack, an empty space. Plat’s speaker refuses a manufactured plot that would make sense of her friend’s death. She observes things as they are: incongruent and beautiful, strange and comforting. Nothing as it should be, everything as it is. What can’t be deduced can be described. Later, the poem reads, “they tell me to build a narrative of your death that exonerates them.” The reader never learns who “they” are, but I felt implicated in this desire to know. This is so often what we want from a story: to tell our version of things. A story in which we are better, brighter, kinder. Webb’s poetry brushes up against beauty, but it brushes up against poison too—the rigidity of the grid. When there’s no beginning, middle, and end, things just are.

A woman interacting with a tree—with or without a seashell—is a recurring image in Plat. In the opening poem, Webb writes: “Before you died, I confused the personal with the ecological, die with dye. Now I hold my mouth to the mouth of a tree and blow.” Toward the end of “Garden,” she writes, “I [once] saw a young woman walk up to a scrub oak and put her mouth on it.” Though Webb never mentions her, I cannot help but think of Eve in the Garden of Eden. What might she have said to the tree, to the snake? In one poem, Webb’s speaker observes that “an apple tree painted on the wall looks like a plan.” Again, nature appears in the built environment.

Narrative has a structure, and the idea of the plat’s grid, its inherent structural logic, is a different architecture that Webb investigates. In Webb’s Plat, physical, domestic, and emotional landscapes are highly structured forms from which wisps fly, signaling a type of movement between spaces or states of being. Laundry on the line outside interrupts the view of the sky with its waving. The inside travels outside and flutters in its own in-betweenness. Things fluctuate. In the book’s fourth poem, “the catalpa, too, with help from the fugitive wind, has decided to escape its plot.” I imagine white flowers floating above a fence, escaping the planned garden to seed someone else’s yard. A message from one home to another, the accidental touching of two distinct places. A surprise. A seashell in a hollow tree.

Plat is steeped in an avant-garde writing tradition. In the book’s endnotes, Webb acknowledges three writers whose work she directly pulls from: Clarice Lispector, as translated by Katrina Dodson; Gertrude Stein; and Lyn Hejinian. I was surprised and almost refreshed by Plat’s unironic stance toward God—and toward the Mormon Church. Although Webb certainly voices suspicions of the church’s settler past and stance on women, there is an unwavering faith in this book that is uncommon in my reading diet.

My advance reader copy of Plat arrived Easter weekend. The book very quickly sent me to cross-reference the dictionary and the Bible. “Garden,” the first section, opens with an epigraph from W. B. Yeats’s poem “Fragments”:

Locke sank into a swoon:
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
Out of his side.

Webb uses the word “spinning-jenny” in the third section of her book as well. What is its etymology? Did Christ, I wondered that Easter, enter Jerusalem on a female donkey, a jenny?

No. According to John, Christ entered Jerusalem on a young male ass.

According to Matthew, though, Jesus directed his disciples to “go into the village over against [them], and straightway [they] shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her.” No other gospels mention this implied mother. Matthew doesn’t update us on what happens to her. In all four accounts, the disciples put their clothes on the colt, Jesus sits upon him, and then he rides into Jerusalem to his eventual death. The jenny is forgotten.

A spinning-jenny is an early form of spinning machine. In his essay “Poetry and History,” poet Howard Nemerov argues that Yeats’s spinning-jenny “may be taken as a synecdoche for the Industrial Revolution generally but it has some special appropriatenesses of its own. One is, of course, that it is a girl’s name.” “Jenny” is slang for a young woman, for feminine interests, and for a female donkey. In her new collection Liontaming in America, Elizabeth Willis writes that Joseph Smith “never, in short, quite had an adulthood without women.” Early in “Garden,” Plat’s speaker asks her reader: “If heaven will arrive one day on earth, as Joseph Smith said, will it appear as a grid? If women don’t speak to God directly, what will they say when heaven falls to earth like a curtain?”

Who made the garments that Christ’s disciples used to outfit their donkeys? Who carded, processed, and wove the material by hand 1,740 years before the spinning-jenny? I ask largely because Webb’s poems pay close attention to the materiality of objects, surfaces, religion, and language. Webb writes about a “pearly vapor,” “texture’s catchy loss,” “a pink wilderness of sod and infrastructure,” a wall that “billows like laundry on a wire,” and a young woman pissing outside where “the stones froth [and] get holy.” I can’t help but think that in the Gospel According to Webb, the garments the disciples place on the donkey would have been more described: a loose weave, pale beige with pink undertones, a rough edge tucked so as not to chafe the leg; the jenny watching her colt as the crowd places green feathered palm branches before him.

In her introductory note for the book, Webb writes, admiringly, that “no spaces on the plat were reserved for commerce.” Yet commerce is everywhere. She writes later in “Garden” that “the garden is not a nightmare: it hallucinates itself each season. Where’s my dream and where’s my cultivation? Death or capital? I remember weedkiller was born of a man’s desire, so I can’t address my femininity in a garden. Too expensive.”

Industry has seeped into the plat, into the garden, into the home. “[T]he house has no language of ownership,” Webb writes, “though it does have a language of material.” Has ownership spoiled material, the way one rotten apple spoils the bushel? I think about the famous line from Matthew: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” The jenny stops her spinning and observes her position in the room. Observes the patterns in it. God, take this spinning-jenny out of my side.