Patrycja Humienik on Joanna Klink's "On Kingdoms"

An Ordinary Plots Guest Post

Every so often, I will be featuring essays by poets I love and admire in response to poems of their choosing. They will appear at random, whenever such poets are moved. I’m honored to include the fifth installment this week, by the poet Patrycja Humienik, writing about Joanna Klink’s poem “On Kingdoms.” Humienik’s work as a poet is brilliant and generous — see here for a personal favorite example, and read also this moving recent essay on beauty, language, and attention. Her essay today on Klink’s poem is a curious interrogation of selfhood, desire, and more. I’m honored to share it with you today.

---

On Kingdoms

Who is ever at home in oneself.
Land without mercy. Interstates
set flickering by night. When I speak to you
I can feel a storm falling blackly to the roads,
the pelting rains the instant they
hit. Devotion is full of arrows.
Most weeks I am no more than the color of the walls
in the room where we sit, or I am blind to clocks,
restless, off-guard, accomplice to the weathers
that burn and flee, foamless, across a sky
that was my past, that is
what I was. I am always too close.
I am not sure I will ever be
wholly alive. Still—we are faithful.
Small birds hook their flights into the fog.
The heat crosses in shoals over these roads
and this evening the cottonwoods may sway
with that slow darkgold wind
beyond all urgency. I am listening to you.

from The Nightfields (Penguin, 2020)

---

When you memorize a poem, you get to keep it with you. Talisman is the wrong word—it’s not yours really, and it’s not so much that a poem brings luck but that it might clear some cobwebs in the mind. “On Kingdoms” by Joanna Klink is a kind of ghost rosary for me. Every time I speak it aloud, or read it, I feel the poem making space for simultaneous intimacies. Speaker to God, writer to reader, lover to beloved, self with self’s storms.

From the beginning, Klink invites me into the strange mystery and multiplicity of self, and the limits of self-knowledge:

Who is ever at home in oneself.

Land without mercy. 

I’m reminded of my own tendency toward self-criticism. That harsh internal landscape I’ve co-constructed alongside the institutions that discipline us, from a young age, into self-doubt. Beyond the intensity and compromised nature of self-perception, this opening gets me thinking, also, about the ways we surprise ourselves. A different place, person, language, can elicit a side of myself hardly known to me. As other poets have written, selfhood is not so fixed as we might have been taught to believe. I’m reminded of Czesław Miłosz's words in “Ars Poetica?” (The Collected Poems 1931-1987): 

The purpose of poetry is to remind us   

how difficult it is to remain just one person,   

for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,   

and invisible guests come in and out at will.

And Etel Adnan’s words from “Final Vital Data” (In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country): 

I go always faster than I go. This is why I am such a stranger to myself.

Site of strangers and shadows, Klink situates us in the night by the third line. Night is full of possibility. More dreams, fewer emails. In my nights, more space is available for thinking than in my days. But night is also a site of restriction—I rarely walk or drive alone at night. Despite the presence of a “you” here, I feel aware of aloneness and possible danger in this poem, in the growing storm of “pelting rains.” I’m brought back to childhood in the midwest, alone in my bed counting the seconds between each flash of lighting and thunder, calculating the storm’s proximity.

Perhaps what draws me most to “On Kingdoms” is the sentence that follows, which feels like the poem’s pulse: 

Devotion is full of arrows. 

I associate arrows these days with my keyboard, with screens, with what comes next, and the suggestion to keep going. I am a child of late stage capitalism after all. I’m still unlearning the idea that onwardness is the only life-giving force. But arrows are an ancient technology. The earliest evidence of arrowheads goes back 60,000+ years to a cave in South Africa. A student of devotion, this line feels endlessly thought-provoking and charged to me. Does devotion inherently have aim? Can it be a weapon? Does it chart our path forward? How might devotion protect us, and what from?

The risks and possible dangers of devotion lie in obsession. How much of obsession is a choice, and how much is compulsion? That gorgeous echo of eros in “arrows” nods to the sensual dimensions of devotion, inviting desire into the conversation. They are, for me, inextricably linked. I’m not sure I know where the lines are between devotion and desire, desire and obsession.

In the next line, the distinction blurs between the speaker and the very walls “in the room where we sit.” The “we” invites a reading of the poem as addressed to a beloved that could be present, or the reader themself. Memorization creates a slippage in which I can more easily imagine myself as the speaker of the poem. Such intimacy with a poem is ripe for narratives imposed and misreadings (if there is such a thing).

One morning, reciting the poem in the shower, I pictured sitting in that room in Klink’s poem with a past self. To be "an accomplice to the weathers" moving "across a sky/ that was my past, that is/ what I was" might be an argument about agency, suggesting that the stories we tell about our lives are what shape us. 

A confession that reads like self-criticism follows: “I am always too close.” Too close to what? There are no question marks in the poem. The speaker makes the reader ask the questions. Is the speaker too close to the past? To death? To the beloved? To God? To intimacy? Is there something I, the reader, am too close to? 

The lack of question marks makes me think of these lines from Vievee Francis’ poem, “Anti-Pastoral” (Horse in the Dark): 

I've grown tired

of my questions. And you've grown tired

of the limits of my language.

Doubt and questioning are ever-present in Klink’s poem, alongside faith:

I am not sure I will ever be

wholly alive. Still—we are faithful.

Instead of answers—to who the "we" is, to what it is we are faithful to—we’re invited to watch the birds with her, the ones that “hook their flights into the fog.” What follows is a longer unfolding scene of a sentence, with words not so specific as to narrow the imagination, inviting the reader to co-create the place: heat, crosses, shoals, roads, evening. We are asked to slow down, with those cottonwoods “beyond all urgency.” 

By the end of the poem, I feel like I’m sitting with the speaker, waiting for that “slow darkgold wind.” I sense, in that moment, her face turning toward us, the readers, when she says:

I am listening to you.

That closing line feels so intimate. And intimacy is something to live for. When I read the ending out loud, depending on where I am, I might be saying it to the trees, a beloved, to God, or to myself. Either way, I'm listening.