Sum of Every Lost Ship by Allison Titus

Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010

Reviewed by David Carillo

In Allison Titus’ The Sum of Every Lost Ship, there are four separate poems entitled “Motel.” The “motel poems” have identical structures: short lines that break along a justified right edge, with the overall length of the poem roughly equal to the length of the lines, resulting in a terse, cramped poem, a textual space that mirrors the kind of room one tends to find in a motel.

These poems fulfill expectations concerning the “traditional narrative” space the motel inhabits: in this case, a rundown building sprung up amidst industrial decay, itself in the midst of some kind of decay, offering little comfort to the folks within. Consider these lines from the first motel poem:

……..From the

floral bed of our discount suite the view is

Industrial, all oil slick and water tower. No

Permanent forest no fox skulking the river;

no river. Just the concrete. Just transformer

boxes upholstered in snow.

Or these from the third motel poem:

Aspirin, radiator, one week for a modest rate.

Thin drawers, thin shower, local calls only

phone

In fact, this room seems to be an exceptional example of that particular motel narrative: “The room has earned its sadness. / Non-descript despite how we have arranged ourselves inside it….”

I admit that this could be construed as a fairly broad portrayal of the notion of “the motel,” but I think that in some ways it is elemental, and, I would argue, necessary, maybe even unavoidable here, because of the significance of that physical space itself. The room may be non-descript, sad even, the landscape may overwhelm, but it is solid ground, which seems vital for the speaker and companion who have “pilgrim heart[s]” and who from first poem on find their “familiar vocabularies ruined.”

Speaker and companion continue to arrange themselves inside, calling attention to the space they seem forced to occupy, one that won’t bend or give way, and the exigencies and hazards of travel. Of course, we might expect this too. The motel implies travel, movement, though not necessarily a destination. And in these poems, the motel suggests shelter, rather than arrival; necessity, rather than choice, or a mistake, which must be endured until, say, morning.

And these distinctions here are important, because our having a direction or purpose does not always secure our arrival. Yet, one cannot always argue with sanctuary, whatever lowly form it takes (I keep thinking of Lear’s farmhouse, though admittedly he had a choice of farmhouse or cave). This situation takes on greater meaning when we consider lines from the poem “Patron Saint of the Deathwatch Beetle.” The poem takes the form of a series of couplets, each offering prayers to a different patron saint. The first line calls on the saint, the second articulates the need. The couplet that speaks to the motel poems calls on the “Patron saint of grieving what’s hollow, not what is lost— / because nothing that lives is not meant to run.”

The idea that we are meant to run and that of the motel (or any such shelter) as a necessity, or an inevitability, however solemn or decayed the space may be, create a certain harmony, albeit an apprehensive and imperfect one, especially when we consider the relationship between that which is lost and our “meaning” here: running. What’s compelling is that the lines make it clear that the state of being lost, or that which is lost either in and of itself or lost to us or someone else, is not worth grief and needs no patron saint. Lost is a purpose, it is our meaning. Though as clearly seem to establish the relationship (x because y) the state of both “lost” and “run” remain ambiguous, taking on many forms throughout the book.

In the motel poems, the speaker and companion certainly seem aware of their own particular manifestations of such states: “Your funeral jacket. My handmade lace. / We have made a confederacy of meanwhile, / tender by tender….” Though meanwhile suggests an element of being lost temporally, they do what they can to locate themselves, take shelter, “Us with our pilgrim hearts. Stationed / fast to parenthesis of sleep and winter,” even if what they hold on to here are themselves somewhat momentary.

What complicates matters further is the epigraph to the book itself: “There is a motel in the heart of every man.” It is a quotation from Don Delillo’s first novel, Americana, in which the protagonist, David Bell, an introspective, cynical, yet pensive television executive gone AWOL from his assignment overseeing a documentary on the Navajo, endeavors to film a loose and scattered film about his own life. This is Bell, further in the passage: “….you can easily forget who you are here; you can sit on your bed and become man sitting on bed…..But for all its spiritual impoverishments, this isn’t the worst of places, if not freedom, then liberation is possible, deliverance….”

This suggests a somewhat more romantic view of the motel, even when pointing to the abstracting power of such a place, which seems to invoke a somewhat transcendental power. But even Bell is somewhat pragmatic, in terms of admitting the motel’s spiritual limitations, even when lauding its liberating powers.

So while such tensions and flawed harmonies unfold in the space around us, what the epigraph seems intent on making clear is that such space in which these forces interact exists within us. Whether we have any more control over the spaces within or when and how we come upon them is questionable, but Titus tries to prepare us for the moments when we will.

“Think of the nights that / have broken without a word, / have left a starless sky in your throat” begins the first poem of the book. The poem is untitled and stands outside the numbered sections.

The motel poems appear evenly throughout this book, like a pulse. Conversely this poem stands outside the body, unnamed, a separate phenomenon we may well observe, but that observes us nonetheless. In it, the speaker looks to provide some sort of solace: “We do our best to forget. / These quiet hours, a forest / of motels…../ Tonight / seemed as long as an unwritten / letter.

These lines will echo throughout the book, motels and the letters and they will seem, in the hands of their authors of the intended, fleeting, unwritten, incomplete, or as in the series of poems “Instructions From the Narwhal” limitless, sent from a great distance, after years and years of composition.

By the end of “untitled.” one of the book’s great labors is made plain:

It is time to go in.

We take ourselves away.

At the heart of the book, is the beautiful multi-part poem entitled “From the Lost Diary of Anna Anderson” which begins just after of the paramount acts of taking oneself away.

In 1920, Anna Anderson attempted suicide by leaping off the Bendler Bridge into the Landwehr canal in Berlin. She survived and a police officer fished her from the water and checked her into a hospital for the mentally ill.

What better lesson in what we can and cannot control than the failed suicide; the desire for nothingness, the expectation of that, followed by the pulse, the rude expansion, contraction of the lungs? What greater disorientation than to find oneself still running? Early on, no one is sure, though she is, how she ended up in the river: “They ask if I fell from the bridge / or did I jump”

Anna Anderson (a name she took later in life) would become famous for supposedly being Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, or Anastasia, youngest daughter in the Russian Imperial family who were all executed by Bolsheviks in 1918. Though an imposter, many considered her to be the long lost sole survivor of that massacre.

The poem chronicles the first few months or so after her rescue. Her story compounds and complicates the internal and external tensions of the individual and space in which she finds herself. Flight within flight. The lines on the page sprawl and leap, as if in defiance of the constricted text of the motel poems, or as if space were breaking apart. Take a look at this passage:

At night the moon plies the walls to wax.

For this comb of window I am lucky.

But the way the air moves outside

this room, how it fills the empty spaces

between leaves on branches, the soft pockets

of our lungs,

how it lichens—

Inside this room I am not forgiven……

The ache of location is striking in these lines, particularly in the attention she pays to the air outside her room, the breaths the lines take as she contemplates the air’s presence between the leaves, its eventual place in the lungs, its growth there. Here, and throughout the sanitarium entries we find her coming to terms with this new space, a gradual realignment, a relearning to inhale, exhale.

Similarly, Anna must navigate the memories of her (Anastasia’s “escape”). Toward the end of diary, she speaks of the time after the executions that took the rest of her family. She finds herself huddled on a farmer’s cart. “What comes to me in my sleep,” she says, still unable to pinpoint certain elements herself, “brings me closer to speaking / of home / and of leaving.” Here we have, in this story (which we must take at the diary’s word) an individual once inordinately wealthy, aristocratic, sequestered from the rest of her country, now hopeless lost, that is, surviving, carrying on. She speaks of having been on the run for weeks, eating “rotted pairs…. / the only food / no one else would touch.” They make their way through swamps and marshes, “….acres of woods / and saw no shadows, no shadows subtracted us / from the trees”.

In these last lines, I sense a glimmer of hope in her voice, at the absence of shadow and what she perceives shadow is capable of doing to her. It’s difficult to tell, however, where she believes she is, in the cart, or elsewhere, assimilated with the acres around her. There is a sense, or rather, what’s certain is that Anna (as Anastasia) is struggling for a kind of control she does not yet have, or hasn’t had in some time. “I was taken….” the last entry ends, “….. And every minute I might have been dying. / I think you know. / You want me to tell you the ending. / It was a mistake / I was still alive.”

Whether this mistake is a tragic (for Anna) or lucky (for Anastasia), or more likely, an event that never quite betrays its full significance, the diary must be read as speaking to the difficulty of locating ourselves and others, proceeding, continuing on, navigating the spaces in and around us.

In the poem “Letter,” the speaker sits “for hours with the word Dear / on the page, forgetting what should have / come next / thinking only of the whitetail / in the woods, body frozen & body darting / in the same instant.”

Few moments in this book speak to this difficulty as poignantly as this poem, because the course and purpose seem so clear, even simple—just a letter; then again, what could be more daunting, terrifying even. And the speaker desperate for the language to communicate cannot move past the salutation, but rather becomes trapped in a forest, fixed on a deer, which itself is caught up in some wrenching flux, frozen and darting at once.

This moment remains and “Years passed this way, a slow theft / having altered our hands”

And maybe the most difficult lesson of the motel is that despite all, it remains impermanent, we must leave again, move on, grow lost and more lost. The pulse that runs through the book is that which is not home, not us, an elsewhere, an other.

The speaker, at the end of the poem, finally moves on past the salutation, past “dear”:

what Greenland we have chosen:

The colon indicating elements to follow is the last mark in the poem, the last on the page. The Greenland: a vast and difficult terrain; a dark place; an island of borealis and mostly ice.