Jackie Wang's "Companion Species"

Thoughts on re-enchantment.

Companion Species

Once I went to see a performance by a guy from Paper Rad. While waiting for the set to begin I heard, for the first time, the song “Me and My Puppy”—a kind of anthem for lonely 11-year-olds looking for something to love. All over the world young girls were befriending creatures and trees and constructing fantasy worlds of reciprocated love.

While some lonely girls have puppies, I have a shapeshifting butterfly.

The monarch butterfly clings to me for years. It never leaves my body and I feel loved.

I don’t want the butterfly to die. Ever.

The monarch crawls to the bottom of my foot and turns into a clouded sulphur: a common yellow butterfly.

Because it has shed its lepidopterous beauty in exchange for anonymity it no longer desires to come out to greet others.

It lives on the bottom of my foot.

With the butterfly using my body as its home I feel like somebody special…chosen.

People don’t believe that the butterfly stays with me and their disbelief makes me crazy.

They think I’m making it up so I take my foot out of my shoe and there she is, little yellow wings.



from A Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save us from the Void (Nightboat, 2021)

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Whenever we are walking together and a monarch butterfly flits across our collective vision, my wife will point it out, and we will stop together for a second, a minute, maybe longer, and we will look at it. The butterfly reminds her of a late relative; it carries a soul within it. It carries, I imagine, many souls. Do you ever think about that? This butterfly, moving through the world — and all who stop to pause to look at it, and in such pausing, remember something or someone. In this way, the butterfly is like a poem in the world — another reminder that we learn more from what we open ourselves up to than what we don’t. Another reminder, too, that the world is this living, breathing thing full of what carries us in the ways we each need to be carried. Or want to be. Or both.

Those moments of pausing to look at the passing butterfly — those were what I thought of when I first read this poem, standing up and facing the poetry section at Spoonbill Books in Brooklyn. I had just been leafing through books by Joe Brainard and John Wieners, and when I left the bookstore I had Wang’s book under my arm, and it was wildly hot outside and when I opened the book again while sitting on the subway, I dripped a single bead of sweat onto it from my chin.

There is something — speaking of Brainard and Wieners — of that New York School that this poem reminds me of, especially with its opening:

Once I went to see a performance by a guy from Paper Rad. While waiting for the set to begin I heard, for the first time, the song “Me and My Puppy”—a kind of anthem for lonely 11-year-olds looking for something to love. All over the world young girls were befriending creatures and trees and constructing fantasy worlds of reciprocated love.

This stanza (or paragraph) performs that kind of situational noticing work that might seem — when you finish the poem — almost inconsequential. What, you might ask, does this first sentence have to do with what follows? But it has so much to do with it. With all of it. Perhaps most importantly, it begins the poem. It situates the poem in a context that allows for the rest of it to happen. Why does this performance matter, or Paper Rad, or the song that is overheard? It matters because, within the context of the poem, it happened. And its happening prompted the act of attention and the chain-of-things-noticed that allowed the poem to begin and then, after beginning, offer the butterfly, the meditation on imagination, companionship, and more.

Some thoughts, before I continue:

• Sometimes, I think, we cut things out in order to build a door through which to enter.

• Sometimes, I think, we keep things in because they are the door through which we enter.

• Figuring out one or the other: one of the many forever ongoing tasks of a life. Don’t you think?

One of my favorite Frank O’Hara poems is just titled “Poem,” which, to be honest, is one of my secret favorite titles for any poem. That poem reads, in full:

Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it, and a phone call to the beyond
which doesn’t seem to be coming any nearer.
"Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days"
on the poetry of a new friend
my life held precariously in the seeing
hands of others, their and my impossibilities.
Is this love, now that the first love
has finally died, where there were no impossibilities?

The poem’s weight, if you could call it that, lands with its fullness in those final two lines, but that weight — of love, precarity, so much — begins with instant coffee and slightly sour cream. How could it not? Our lives begin in the ordinary. Without it, we would be feeling uninspired. We would be forever waiting to be reminded.

And so, I think of all of that when I read today’s poem, which I absolutely love. It is hard not to read these lines and feel something:

While some lonely girls have puppies, I have a shapeshifting butterfly.

The monarch butterfly clings to me for years. It never leaves my body and I feel loved.

I don’t want the butterfly to die. Ever.

There’s something so deeply and powerfully kind and compassionate in these lines and this poem. I love this poem for both what and how it conveys. The how is interesting. These alternating-length lines that also use such a breadth of vocabulary. You have words like “lepidopterous” and the knowledge of different types of butterflies, from the monarch to the clouded sulphur. But you also have these blunt, declarative lines with their insistent periods, ones like: I don’t want the butterfly to die. Ever.

In order to live in a poem such as this, you have to, I think, allow yourself to give up what the world teaches you a poem — or anything — must do. You have to allow a poem to be conversational and candid, imaginative and digressive, full of the space it chooses to create.

And it’s funny, because this poem almost enacts the exact feeling it inspires in me. I think of this final line:

They think I’m making it up so I take my foot out of my shoe and there she is, little yellow wings.

And I can’t help but wonder, yes — couldn’t you say the same thing about a poem? About this very poem? They think I’m making it up, but then we read it, right? And there it is, this poem, this living thing. It’s full of yellow wings. It’s full of so much else. To believe it, we have to read it. To refuse to believe it is a refusal to read it.

In her book Carceral Capitalism, Wang writes:

Can the re-enchantment of the world be an instrument that we use to shatter the realism of the prison?

Later in that same essay, Wang writes:

For some time I have been thinking about how to convey the message of police and prison abolition to you, but I know that as a poet, it is not my job to win you over with a persuasive argument, but to impart to you a vibrational experience that is capable of awakening your desire for another world.

And, in another one of her poems, “Creatures Abandoned by Time,” Wang writes:

You can't imagine how much attention I give the worm on the sidewalk of LA
or the tree of coral inside my dream

I think that all of these moments, including today’s poem, exist in conversation with one another. And I think of them offering another form of conversation and attention with the world. In her book, Wang writes of the current dominant structures of the world as things that are at once “predatory” and “parasitic.” And, in these moments quoted above, I notice Wang modeling a form of being-in-the-world that is entirely opposed to the predatory and the parasitic. A vocabulary of re-enchantment. Awakening. Attention. Dreaming.

And maybe, perhaps, someone might read Wang’s work and say something somewhat dismissive, even cynical. Maybe that someone might say okay, sure, re-enchantment, vibrational experience, coral dream-trees — what are such things actually going to do or change? But, as Wang writes, maybe a poet’s job has nothing to do with “persuasive argument,” that five-paragraph essay structure I still find myself teaching to high schoolers because…well, why? I’m not entirely sure always. So, yes — when I read Wang’s work, I’m reminded that so much of the pain of this world lies in the fact that we’ve often grown dismissive of the way-of-seeing that poetry introduces us to, and that, instead, we have — myself, certainly — instead internalized and performed and been subject to countless parasitic actions (for example: getting, and paying, a bill for crutches from a hospital contractor located over a thousand miles away from where I once stayed in a hospital months after that hospital stay) in the course of our everyday lives.

There is an immense strangeness to the awareness that comes with that contrast — the contrast of knowing, with real certainty, that this world offers near-infinite possibilities for enchantment at the same time as it throws at us, time and time again, examples of near-constant diminishment. Moving through life today sometimes feels like being put on hold for an eternity in order to ask a question about an ambulance bill you received months after the fact of that ambulance while, at the same time, witnessing a hawk alight on the railing of the fire escape just outside your window. There is the automated music in your ear, tinny and generated by a computer, and there is the world on the other side of the glass. And you exist in all of it, wondering. Hoping, maybe. Smiling sometimes. Crying. Hoping again. Wondering still.

Consider these facts, from Kate Soper’s Post-Growth Living — a book put out by Verso that, when I read it, felt so remarkably aware of that aforementioned strangeness and contrast in this world:

The average child in the US, UK and Australia sees between 20,000 and 40,000 TV ads a year…

According to research by the National Consumer Council in the UK, the average ten-year-old has internalised 300 to 400 brands — perhaps twenty times the number of birds in the wild that they could name.

“Business as usual,” Soper writes later, “is in this sense no longer so easy to defend, and will prove impossible to pursue.”

And so what replaces such business as usual? Dare I say the re-enchantment that Wang proposes? The vibrational experience? Attention? Dreaming? Something other than — gesturing at all of this — this?

I think again of the final lines of today’s poem:

People don’t believe that the butterfly stays with me and their disbelief makes me crazy.

They think I’m making it up so I take my foot out of my shoe and there she is, little yellow wings.

That disbelief that Wang captures above is not just some whimsical thing. Neither is the butterfly hidden at the bottom of her speaker’s foot. That disbelief reminds me of the dismissiveness mentioned above. It reminds me of how people sometimes react to possibilities of enchantment, to the various antidotes to the parasitic nature of the world that things like poetry or art or attention offer. And I’ve seen it — haven’t you? I’ve seen the way people who really feel the world, who live for their art, can be cast off by that dismissiveness of society, that disbelief in enchantment and in dreams. People talk about the commitment and discipline needed to build a credit score, to move up into the corner office, but to live each day with the painful awareness of the sheer diminishment that is society, and to continue, each day, to make art that refuses that diminishment and chooses enchantment instead — the people who I have seen perform that attention and imagination over and over again are some of the most committed people I have ever met.

And so, again, yes — the vibrational experience. Re-enchantment. Dreaming. I long for it all. In her poem “Singing,” Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge — whose work exists, I think, in conversation with Wang’s — writes, of swimming and singing with dolphins:

They teach me to hum, to whistle and sing; sound amplifies my body across open water; even their joyous play has this sensation of creating space, and when they sleep, stars augment their frequencies.

We converse by mind-cell helixes of image and feeling.

Cosmic legacy, cosmic extension imprint holographically on my heart neurons as dolphin empathy.

There are sounds which can stop time, alter surroundings or shift your dimension.

Swimming I lose my sense of place, even physicality, and connect with collective love.

They teach me to join my aura to the cosmos by spiraling with me in sound-star tetrahedrons and to love those with whom we merge.

Then being is healing, through innocence, when the animal becomes the teacher.

You can dismiss such lines or you can allow yourself to be overcome by them. To say yes — this must be one way of being in touch with the world. I’ve found, over time, that allowance offers more for me than dismissal ever did. There are rooms inside of me, and I am hardly aware of how much they can hold. I don’t think they’re even a tenth of the way full. A hundredth. A thousandth.

And, too, in his poem “The Absolutely Huge and Incredible Injustice in the World,” Ron Padgett writes:

But meanness comes back right away
while kindness takes its own sweet time
and compassion is busy shimmering always a little above us and
      behind,
swooping down and transfusing us only when we don't expect it
and then only for a moment.
How can I trap it?
Allow it in and then
turn my body into steel? No.
The exit holes will still be there and besides
compassion doesn't need an exit it is an exit—
from the prison that each moment is

Compassion doesn’t need an exit it is an exit. There, too, something about allowance allowing more for us than refusal ever will.

In Carceral Capitalism, Wang asks:

What counter-spell is powerful enough to break the prison’s stranglehold on our imaginations?

I find many of my answers in poetry, which is why I keep reading it. Padgett’s compassion. Berssenbrugge’s singing. Wang’s butterfly, her enchantment, her attention. I also find it in that hawk that really did land on my fire escape, years ago, not long after my shitty oven blew up while I was baking bread. I find it in the laughter that happened after the damage; the way I couldn’t help but find it hilarious, all of it, this life. I find it in friendship, and in music, in that chord change from the E to the F#m in The Band’s “I Shall Be Released.” I want to live a life in the space between those chords, between and among so many things, where enchantment dwells.

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