Izzy Casey's "King Midas"

Thoughts on the subversion of expectation.

King Midas

Everything I touch turns into a golden retriever. Some call it the dog touch-me-not. Others call it the woof-woof. I prefer the former. It has a maverick ring to it. There are many kinds of maverick. There are many kinds of dogs. Dogs that once were toothbrushes. Dogs that once were dishwashers. Sea devils and oranges. Once, I ran head first into a warrior. He became a dog warrior. The dog warrior ran right back into me and became two dogs. Once, I clapped for a dog and a dog fell out. Once, I wept so hard into the washcloth and found a dog against my face. I thought the touch would go away, but it didn't. I thought I'd never meet my father, but I did. I met him in an airport. The airport turned into a dog who wagged its tail at me. The plane took off with me inside it and became a dog that fell from the sky. Each tiny little strand of golden hair a tiny little golden dog. Once, I didn't eat anything for days. I refused to open my mouth for the dog to enter. Once, I pulled a dead hair from my head. I pulled a dead dog from my head. How awful it is to become attached to a thing that is living. My father is a dog. My house is a dog. I have never touched my mother. What a monster I am. Time is a dog. Romance is the ugly dog that the car hits. Eating Disorder is a dog that drags me by the collar. Rows and rows of flowers become roses and roses of dogs. I move through empty space. Every dog becomes a blur. Every nicey-nice. Every wake-up time. There is a howling and I am somewhere in it. It is sabotage alone that I confuse for love.


first published in Gulf Coast (Issue 32.1)

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I had the immense pleasure of first hearing this poem out loud a few months ago, when I attended a reading where Izzy Casey was on the lineup. I had never heard of Izzy Casey before, and I had never read her work. But then I heard it, like literally heard it. I was sitting right next to the podium with my friends Bud and Jimmy and Michael, and I think Bud turned to me right before Izzy read and said something like have you ever seen Izzy read and I said no and then she read and I said wow. I really did. I think I texted my wife and said something like I just heard a really good poet. I remember sitting there, having not been to a reading in a long time, wishing that I still made the effort — which I stopped doing, often because sometimes teaching at a high school feels like living in a papier-mâché version of your face — to go to readings. And I remember hearing this poem in particular, which Izzy read with a kind of driving, relentless force, this almost-staccato intensity that I loved. And then, months later, only earlier this week, I saw Izzy again, at a reading I gave, and I told her how much I loved her reading, and I remembered this poem again, and now it is here, and you, too, have just read it — maybe for the first time. Don’t forget that. Reading this poem for the first time. It’s a special feeling. I bet you won’t forget it.

This is maybe my favorite kind of poem. Which I will seek to define. Which in turn is probably not the best thing. Because no poem exists like this poem. Which maybe is what I mean when I say my favorite kind of poem. A poem that feels so wholly its own that it can only be its own. And so I won’t define it.

But here’s an example, by James Tate, of what I mean:

Man with wooden leg escapes prison. He’s caught.
They take his wooden leg away from him. Each day
he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river
to get to the field where he must work all day on
one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas
Party they give him back his leg. Now he doesn’t
want it. His escape is all planned. It requires
only one leg.

Or here’s another, by Russell Edson:

               On the other side of a mirror there’s an inverse world, where the insane go
sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love.
               And in the evening the sun is just rising.
               Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood robs them
of their pleasure.
               In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy …

These poems, like today’s by Izzy, operate with that timeless, perfect trick. And the trick, I think, is that they begin in this world. And I don’t mean in their first lines or first words. I just mean that you read these poems in this world, which is a world that, though it is at times absurd and at times magical, is still this world, which is a world of expectation meeting, an understandable amount of times, reality. And so these poems begin in this world, where what we expect sometimes — even often — happens. But then, quite quickly, these poems diverge. Sometimes in the first line. Sometimes with the introduction of an “inverse world.” Sometimes with the knowledge that everything someone touches “turns into a golden retriever.”

And we, then, reading such moments from our place within this world, must quickly catch up to the world that we are reading, which is a world borne out of this world, as anything created in this world is. And that act of catching up, like running after a train we just missed, is — while reading a poem — so wildly joyful and surprising. We are catching up, or trying to catch up, I think, because we want to know. Which is to say we want to believe. Which is to say we have belief, still, even in this world, where we are reading, which is a world, I know, that sometimes frustrates us and sometimes hurts us because of its relentless sameness, this way we sometimes expect the worst, and then the worst happens. Over and over again. All the time. And so we keep reading because we have hope. Because that hope — just the fact of having it, not even the fact of trying to understand something we don’t understand, not even the fact of making sense of things — is a beautiful thing. It’s sometimes even fun. It’s really fucking fun.

Anyways, this poem today. It is fun, isn’t it? But it’s also wildly heartbreaking. It does that special thing where it delights at the same time as it aches. But that delight — I want to talk briefly about that. Notice these lines:

Once, I ran head first into a warrior. He became a dog warrior. The dog warrior ran right back into me and became two dogs.

Once, I clapped for a dog and a dog fell out. Once, I wept so hard into the washcloth and found a dog against my face. 

Rows and rows of flowers become roses and roses of dogs.

These moments in the poem are moments of world-subversion, where the gap between what you expect and what you encounter is so large that it can be filled with one of two things: confusion or delight. I hope you choose the latter. I’ve learned, in life, that that’s the better choice.

And so yes, these moments absolutely delight me. They let me know that I am in the hands of a writer who is willing to take the risk of imagining. Wild and beautiful risk that is. But that risk — it is not simply a risk for the sake of risk, imagination for the sake of oddity. Instead, it is a risk that, in moving us further from the physics and laws of this world, moves us closer to understanding ourselves. Yes. It moves us further from our knowledge so that we can move closer to our understanding. Nuts! Absolutely nuts! But think about it. Think about what that first moment — the warrior turning into a dog, then into two — tells us about the strange absurdity of violence. How quickly the seriousness of violence — and all of those who proclaim the need for it — can slip into the absurd. It has the ring of the surreal that Bill Knott’s “Alternate Fates,” a poem I’ve mentioned before, contains:

What if right
in the middle of a battle
across the battlefield the wind
blew thousands of
lottery tickets, what then?

But this poem today does more than just delight. It moves. It aches. Interspersed between those lines I quoted above are moments such as these:

I thought I'd never meet my father, but I did. I met him in an airport. The airport turned into a dog who wagged its tail at me. The plane took off with me inside it and became a dog that fell from the sky.

My father is a dog. My house is a dog. I have never touched my mother. What a monster I am. Time is a dog. Romance is the ugly dog that the car hits. Eating Disorder is a dog that drags me by the collar.

Right? Such moments, especially in a poem such as this one, one that is so delightful and surprising, operate as stunning reminders of how fine the line is between our joy and our hurt. I am reminded of a poem by Larry Levis, “God Is Always Seventeen,” that I discussed with

Julia St. John

of

Washington Review of Books

, where Levis interrupts the meandering, long-lined quality of his work with a sudden reminder of something so personal and intimate:

I have a child who isn’t doing well in school. 

That moment stuns for the same reason a moment like I have never touched my mother stuns in Izzy Casey’s poem today. It works within the same metaphysical reality of our own lives, where the possibility of heartbreak, or loss, is only a beat away from the possibility of joy. We live there, too, always in that fragile possibility.

And, too, when the poem extends the magic law that it makes — everything I touch turns into a golden retriever — into the most vulnerable places, it starts to pulse with the sorrow that comes with being alive. The poem becomes a poem not just about the intimacy of touch, but also about avoidance. I have never touched my mother. And it also becomes a poem not just about the beauty of touch, but also about the near-constant burden of what clings to us in all the worst ways. Eating Disorder is a dog that drags me by the collar. The most painful parts of the speaker — because they touch the speaker near-constantly in invisible ways — also turn to dogs. And it’s not all beautiful. Not all joyful.

I think I love this poem because it reminds me that we have a responsibility to our imagination. That it’s not oddity for the sake of oddity. That sometimes it must be the stories we create out of the wide and wild confines of our minds that give us the language to encounter what we think we already know, and what we are still capable of changing. This poem teaches me that.

It makes me think of something my friend Bud told me when I was working on my novel. It was an early draft, and I was struggling to make sense of all the journeying that was happening in the story. And he told me something like don’t be afraid to give your story a magic map. I think that’s what he said, like almost verbatim. And so I did (spoiler alert?). I gave my story a bit of a magic map. But he told me that people will believe the rules of the world you set up in story. I think because they want to believe. Because we do. When we encounter the absurd, the magical, and the surreal, there is a part of us that wants to believe that such things are possible. That’s one reason, of many, that we turn to story. When we allow ourselves this possibility — that something isn’t quite fixed — then we also don’t shut out the opportunity to encounter new language for understanding our own world, where sometimes things feel too fixed, too stuck, and too hard.

In other words: how many times have you read or listened to something and had the thought I’ll never see the world in the same way again? Gather those moments up like flowers, and keep gathering them. There’s no endpoint. There are only more magic maps.

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Some ongoing notes:

1. I am really excited to be teaching an online class with the Adirondack Center for Writers (thank you, Tyler Barton) on getting away from a prescriptive language when it comes to reading and writing poetry. We’ll read a bunch; we’ll write a bunch; we’ll talk a bunch. It’ll start in February. If you’re interested, here’s the link to register. And here’s a class description: A poem is an offering. In this five-week class, poet and critic Devin Kelly will introduce students to a language of generosity for modern poetry. Instead of talking prescriptively about a poem’s quality (“good” or “bad”), students will take an expansive and holistic approach to engaging with poetry and crafting their own. Works by Larry Levis, Mary Oliver, Ross Gay, W.S. Merwin, and many others will serve as models for developing and practicing what Kelly calls “a vocabulary of grace”. Think of a poem as a window, a room, or a landscape—something that expands the more you pay attention to it. Students will discuss and write new poems weekly, and twice over the course of five weeks everyone will receive one-on-one feedback from Kelly on their work.

2. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

3. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.