How the Light Gets In: On Katie Farris’s “A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving”
By Olga LivshinNovember 1, 2021
The capacity to love, and to receive love with gratitude, are the core themes of this chapbook. Love is the will to keep living; it lets the speaker know her body is “still / beautiful enough.” It is what allows the ailing person to be far more than the lack she may be seen as by some — it enables her to “imagine living the body / washing the body / replacing a loose front / porch step.”
Cancer threatens to obliterate the reciprocity of love, replacing it with the hierarchical duo of the caretaker and the recipient of care. Yet Farris uses the language of love poetry to recuperate her dignity. The speaker pictures herself “asking / your assistance / unwinding that pale hair / from my hemorrhoid”; in this situation, she “would still beg / your forgiveness” for asking to do so. The speaker is deprived of energy to perform a basic task, deprived of dignity. But the powerfully lyrical language (“beg / your forgiveness”) seeks to compensate for the physical feebleness in the moment. It shows compassion for the partner, his harrowing and exhausting experience of everyday care for the speaker. When we continue to love, through powerful words (and not only our physical energy!), we are still able to give, not merely receive. This restores our ability to act in the world, to shape others’ lives.
A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving is part of a transformation happening in American culture, and in poetry in particular, in how we understand physical and mental health. It used to be normal — and remains customary in many communities, and many sections of the medical system — to see a person with a medical condition as a passive recipient of care, a cog in the system, or a mere body failing in some respect. The disability rights movement, however, underscores the capacity of a person living with an illness to be an active participant in their journey. Poetry takes this endeavor to yet another level, highlighting the role of language in self-creation, in the effort to be seen. Many poets are writing about their conditions or those of the loved ones for whom they act as caretakers with a profound sense of choice: how to identify, and how to understand their condition. In a note to the list of books compiled by Camille T. Dungy for October, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, Dungy spotlights this diversity:
Some are well-known voices in disability poetics, while others don’t consider their diagnosed conditions to be disabling on most or perhaps any days. Some live with invisible or hidden disabilities […] while others live with reproductive health issues, or varying degrees of neurodivergence. You will also find poets who are family members or caretakers of members of the disability community, poets who don’t use the word “disabled” to describe themselves, and poets who claim crip labels.
Like other members of this vibrant choir of poetic voices, Farris yearns for an existence outside the boundaries of medical language. Her poems frame the experience of her illness as a spiritual journey — and the journey has capacity for more than one. It is infused with the warmth of a connection with others, and that warmth lends these poems a playful tone. In the poem titled “An Unexpected Turn of Events Midway through Chemotherapy,” the speaker requests: “I’d like some sex please,” and elaborates: “Philosophical, soft and / Gentle, a real / Straight fucking, rhymed / Or metrical — whatever / You’ve got, I’ll take it.” In another poem, she reminisces with her partner about a certain chair, just excellent for making love. Illness and eros coalesce, creating a — paradise? circus? — just for two. Yet this playfulness is no mere child’s play: it implies resilience and the possibility of healing.
Another connection made by Farris “in the midst of hell” is that with the reader. The most frequent pronoun (other than “I”) in the chapbook is “you” — you the partner and you the person reading her chapbook. There is, then, a sense that we are included in the dramatic events of love and sickness. The speaker shares freely of herself, and what she offers — unlike certain kinds of confessional poetry where the speaker appears to be circling around trauma, revisiting trauma and becoming retraumatized — does not feel burdensome. Instead, it works as a form of support for our own hardships.
In addition to her affection for the “you” of her poems, Farris also forms an intimate and invigorating bond with Emily Dickinson. In the first line of a poem dedicated to the 19th-century poet, she jumps into an address that is at once odic and familiar: “Oh, Emily …!” She goes on to praise what Dickinson sees as “sweet velocity in every / thing that flies.” Dickinson provides her with the capacity to marvel at nature even in the hell of illness. She finds the sublime — that amazing ability to fly — not only in birds and insects evoked by “every / thing that flies,” but also in other natural phenomena: the sky and trees, and the color green, which all figure prominently in Farris’s imagery.
Cancer itself also, paradoxically, becomes cause for astonishment, a reason to see how precious our lives are. Farris speaks of “the forest of being alive,” and her own physical weakness causes her to marvel at our ability to be healthy, to be in the world at all: we stand “on such small feet? And only two? / What vertical absurdity! / What upright madness!” Later in the poem, this bemused statement leads to hope, as Farris traces the imaginary lineage of the upright human body to trees, and to the deliciously childlike experience of “longing for fruit,” stretching upward, plucking the fruit.
But light can only enter through cracks in the darkness — and, as Leonard Cohen reminded us, “there is a crack in everything.” In the beginning of the poem about standing “on such feet,” Farris states, “I return to this point of wonder,” and at the end she repeats that sentence. The pair of sentences represent wonder as part of the speaker’s ongoing reflection, a cognitive matter at a slight remove from what is happening in the body. Wonderment feels like an experiment — a choice that is not always easy. For Farris, nature signifies not only external phenomena such as the sky, but also the human body in the midst of an acute and potentially deadly illness, one for which treatment can be as destructive as the illness itself. It is as if Farris has set up a particular challenge for herself, asking: Can we be surprised when we are this ill? Can we be delighted when we are this discouraged?
Yes, she seems to answer, over and over again, but it comes at a cost. Many of the poems in A Net to Catch My Body explore the interplay of love, illness, and caretaking. “We’ve both grown / silver around the eyes,” the speaker comments about her partner and herself. Both lovers are now isolated from the world: they are in their own universe. Shared vulnerability, however, deepens their relationship. “You issue commands // like an old man,” the speaker remarks, “then take out / my trash like a young boy // with a crush.”
Still, the light returns, and with it, a strange, new vigor. Farris’s capacity for awe includes the tentative possibility of an existence after the end. “In the Event of My Death,” from which the collection’s title is drawn, posits:
What used to be
a rope descending
my vertebrae to the basement
of my spine
grew thin.
In solidarity with my first chemotherapy,
our cat leaves her whiskers on
the hardwood floor,
and I gather them, each purewhite parenthesis,
and plant them
in the throat of the earth.
In quarantine,
I learned to trim your barbarian
hair. Now it stands always on end:
a salute to my superior barbery skills. In the event
of my death, promise you will find my heavy braid
and bury it —
I will need a rope
to let me down into the earth.
I’ve hidden others
strategically around the globe,
a net to catch
my body in its weaving.
The speaker’s partner might want to retain the speaker’s braid, lost to chemotherapy, after she passes away, but she needs it to complete her passage. The image can be read as either full of faith or full of sadness. I would argue for the former. The speaker’s braid is like Rapunzel’s: long and strong enough to climb. The speaker takes the image of a braid meant for a fairy-tale male figure to climb and repurposes it for her own, female self. Burying the braid (presumably, alongside the body) also evokes the practices of the ancient Egyptians, who believed we would need our quotidian objects after death. That tradition treats possessions as traces of an individual; as artful, carefully crafted objects worth preserving in their own right; and as parts of a time capsule. So much of us may yet endure.
Poetry, of course, also has the potential to last. “In the Event of My Death” is a net that has caught Farris’s voice and the substance of her experience, delivering them to the reader of the future. Her chapbook helps those of us struggling with our own chronic or acute conditions by casting wise, healing light on our eventual end.
¤
Olga Livshin is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman (2019). Her work has been recognized by the journal CALYX’s Lois Cranston Memorial Prize, the Cambridge Sidewalk Poetry project, and Slice Literary’s Bridging the Gap award.
LARB Contributor
Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?
LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!