George Kovalenko's "Spooky Action at a Distance"

Thoughts on duality.

Disclaimer: Substack’s formatting will inevitably cut off George’s beautiful long lines of poetry. To read the original (with lines intact), click through to this link.

Spooky Action at a Distance

Somehow it seems like almost every night now most everyone disappears someplace:

Portland or Hanoi or the dark side of Uranus. And it stings, remembering how
all together we passed the yard where once we prodded in the debris what we shouldn’t have,

baby fat coagulate with hornet-welts, swooning and shrieking, face down on the lawn,
flesh patterned thicker and thicker by the moment, remembering that bad ideas

are always better than the worst ones. I already miss that kind of memory,
angry and pointed enough to prick its way into the future.

When, in the thin transatlantic warble of absolute distance, you broke my heart
and insisted I quit my graveyard watch as a complete fucking downer,

I know we both felt it then as clearly as a pinkie caught between the prongs
of a string of Christmas lights and the socket’s withering white:

if time is always on the precipice of leaving us, of breaking down into particulates,
is always oil-wet light, waveform, parapet, public park, windbalm, bayside in the capital,

fourth birthday, reconceptualization, terrarium, split lip, pop music, space,
is the mid-afternoon moon—which is a bull to the cloudbank’s sheeted dodge—​​

is walking this way, talking, taking our time, is trying to recollect, is the worst
possible breath in the most beautiful mouth, is this again at three in the morning,

is deathly ill, and cool, and ankle deep, which is itself a kind of recollection
of possibility, is itself a tectonic slippage represented as the biggest mistake of all,

then, in these moments, please: let’s try again.

Remember how we used to wonder rather than know? We, wasted
on the dawn, sickled over and over again; we, torpid, mal-equipped magicians;

we, livid, caustic potion to the storehouses, hex over hex over hex;
how many times we rose and fell; we, too much even to ourselves; we and the living;

could we but remember it completely; we, dreamcrackers; we, distant,
once and again, magnificent cavalcades against the monstrous camps of our conditions.

from American Literary Review, 2018

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I should put another disclaimer before I begin that says: I love George Kovalenko. I should put another disclaimer to throw onto that disclaimer that says that my friendship with George was spawned by poetry, that he read at a reading I hosted and we spoke at the bar for hours after, that, in the years that followed, we have since been to many bars and found ourselves yelling or whispering or just plainly speaking our poems at one another on sidewalks, under neon signs, as the last bus rolled by and the sharp rattling hum of the final train home echoed from beneath or above our feet.

My friendship with George has taught me that it is not a kind of work to speak critically — which I often take to mean generously — about poems. It is instead, a kind of love. So many of my own poems were edited in those moments with George — those first-time renditions of things, when words met air and then met ears. A few winters ago, the two of us stayed together and worked at a residency near Ithaca, New York. We met for brief instances during the day — to pour coffee, or labor briefly over lunch (which for me just meant making boxed mac and cheese) — but George insisted on retreating back to our separate spaces. We’d emerge at night to share dinner, and read what we had written, and cherish the space, and by virtue of such cherishing, cherish one another.

Today’s poem is a George-favorite of mine. There are many favorites I have. But today’s poem embodies so much of what I love about George’s work. Even the title — “Spooky Action at a Distance” — is a beautiful thing, this reference to Einstein’s phrasing of what happens when two objects, seemingly separate, are entwined and connected to one another. By what? Physics? Mystery? Spacetime? All of the above?

That notion of connection is so integral not just to this poem, but to all of George’s work. In one poem, “The Stars Down to Earth,” he writes:

I’d say I had a dream, but maybe it was just the frost

under my soles that broke and opened up as a reminder that the earth insists
on holding us aloft. The space between any two objects is called a symptom.

That play between dreamwork and the real is echoed throughout today’s poem, which tiptoes between the present tense and memory, between appearance and disappearance, between what we know and what we wonder. And maybe that is what I have always been drawn to in George’s work: that in-between-ness. You notice it immediately in this poem at the level of language. So many of these lines fill the mouth. I mean, say this phrase out loud:

baby fat coagulate with hornet-welts

Or this one:

the thin transatlantic warble of absolute distance

Or this litany of detail:

oil-wet light, waveform, parapet, public park, windbalm, bayside in the capital

These moments serve as delightful, visceral renderings of an indescribable world, but they are heightened by their placement next to other, more pointed moments of language that extend the poet’s hand out toward the reader’s. As a poet, I am absolutely gutted by George’s use of rhythm, syntax, and lyricism to play and elevate each word, like a chef plating food. But as a person, as someone caught up in the daily-ness of this world, I am gutted by the cliff-drop between such language and the moments that read:

bad ideas

are always better than the worst ones

Or:

worst
possible breath in the most beautiful mouth

Or:

Remember how we used to wonder rather than know?

This poem today moves between those dualities. It says a poem can be both extraordinary and ordinary. It says that a person, each of us included, can be both real and mystery. It says, as the title suggests, that two seemingly unrelated bodies in space can tremble together even when it seems that such a thing should not be the case.

So much of this poem lingers on that careful, murmuring border of nostalgia. You see it when George writes I already miss that kind of memory, or speculates if time is always on the precipice of leaving us. But what the poem longs for is not some glossy beauty-world that exists only in memory. Rather, it makes an argument. It is almost sonnet-like in its structure. It says time itself is slipping away. It says time contains this litany of specificities. It says time contains pleasure when we did not think we’d find it, mystery when we thought we knew everything, loss when we thought we held tightly. It asks, essentially: have we forgotten this? And it begs: please: let’s try again.

If nostalgia is, in some ways, the absence of acknowledgement, then this poem today is acknowledgement itself. When it turns from the first person singular to the first person plural — that sometimes-dreaded, sometimes too-inclusive we — notice how it longs not for a specific past world, but for a merely specific world, one caught up in wonder, excess, and spirit. And it’s hard not to trust this poem’s speaker, because, from everything that comes before, one falls for the way this poem is absolutely hell-bent on seeing the world, even if it means prodding “in the debris what we shouldn’t have.”

I know George loves the poet Jeff Schultz, but even still, his work reminds me of Schultz’s lines from his poem “J. Finds in His Pocket Neither Change Nor Small Bills”:

Abstraction’s

its own little crime against humanity, but euphemism

Is still a lovely word to say aloud.

How to balance that human desire to live between abstraction and actuality? How to carve one’s own small space of enjoyment in the midst of so much that pushes against such enjoyment? George does this so well. I notice it in another poem, “The Narrows,” where he writes:

to be here able to discern

the goodness of all things in gradients and only so by squinting

Sometimes we have to squint to see the good. Sometimes we have to indulge ourselves in the pleasure of saying a word aloud. Sometimes even our memory of desire being felled, of our knees being scraped, of our rummaging coming up short is better than whatever word we have for this reality. Sometimes there is the worst possible breath coming from the best possible mouth. Sometimes what we wonder points us toward a better collective future than what we simply know. Perhaps most times. Perhaps all times.

George’s poetry is pointed toward that future. I will never forget that line — Remember how we used to wonder rather than know? Even the use of how there instead of when sings. It asks for a better way of living, not just a better state of living. I think, perhaps, that such a thing is its own definition of poetry, that poetry itself is an act of wondering, always, before knowing. I think of this beautiful moment from (my too-often quoted) Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead:

It's an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder where it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except laughter is much more easily spent.

Wonder. Look how often it is repeated. And I think, too, of Mary Jo Bang, and how she writes in her poem, “Consider This Corruption”:

Thank you.

We are for all intents and purposes broken.

George’s poetry lives in that same duality of gratitude and acknowledgement. Of love-of-life and longing-for-better.

During that week we spent writing together, there was a singular moment when we wrote together, unlike the deep independence of the days that came before. We were sitting outside, occasionally glancing up from our words to watch the sun descend behind the ridgeline. George was silent. He was almost ferocious, scribbling lines onto his page, counting syllables, marking and re-marking words, erasing and then writing again, staring at the light and its departure and its bending and all of its novel particulate matter that made new colors of the sky. I realized, in that moment, that I was witnessing the remarkable — that rare instance when you bear witness to someone bearing witness, when you are caught up in the silence that comes when someone is caught up. He left for a few minutes to type up what he had written. When he returned, he read it to me aloud.