D.S. Stymeist's Cluster Flux
Containers and linkages
A friend who’s on the autism spectrum is constantly joking about her enduring fascination with trains, and I have to admit I’m also compelled by this mode of transport. Something about its soothing linearity, the variation within the uniformity of the repeating cars, how it’s both nostalgic and futuristic. So imagine my delight when I opened D.S. Stymeist’s 2023 poetry collection Cluster Flux to read the following: “Steel cars ride the jolt and jive of the rails; / scattered chunks of landscape heave into view, / recede in saltando, clacking beats.”
One of the many, many cool things about trains is their role in the intermodal freight system, which is to say that the cars carry standardized containers that may have come off of international cargo ships at a port, destined for points inland. Containers look the same and fit into same-sized spaces, regardless if they’re carrying rice or soap or Barbies or ballbearings. This greatly simplifies cargo transport, and it also gets me thinking about forms of containerization in poetry.
First, there’s the collection. Poetry collections are an odd beast. For the purposes of writing jacket copy, publishers need collections to be “about” something, but lots of poets write about lots of things all at once, so how to find this aboutness? One way to deal with the messiness of multiple threads running through a collection is to subdivide it into sections. Cluster Flux has five sections loosely grouped around themes including evolution, parenting, sex, chronic illness, and bush life on the reservation where the author grew up as a non-Indigenous member of a mixed heritage family. We can think of these as the cars of the train. The sections are linked by movements of a long-running poem titled “Mass Transfer” that follows the train itself, from which I’ve quoted above.
The poem itself is a container, and within it, the stanza. Stymeist likes to play with stanzas of varying lengths, sometimes a regular couplet or triplet mode, but elsewhere an uneven division allowing breaks to fall where they fit for sense or emphasis.
Most of us have spent more time watching trains go by than we’ve spent riding them, but both perspectives coexist—the repeating of the train cars, or the flashing past of slow-shifting landscape. The “Mass Transfer” passages neatly interweave these two perspectives by describing landscape using short, linked phrases reminiscent of passing railcars: “We tunnel through crooked, winding heart / of mountain, cross trans-continental divides, / erupt into scab-lands, scree and talus, / gangrenous meadow, high-altitude muck-lake. // Steel flange, rolling rim wheel— / torsion drags us up the dark gap, / crevasse, rift-canyon, Ginnunga-gap, / gravity dump of broken-up roots, broken- / down stone, tinsel-shine of tin-plated wreck, / one lone cow chewing on rim-lip, chewing / salt weed, salt wrack on crack’s edge.”
You can hear the train in these lines, and feel its movement. (I had to look up “Ginnunga-gap.” According to Wikipedia, it’s the primordial “gaping abyss” or “yawning void” of Norse mythology, referenced in The Poetic Edda and also within the Marvel universe and the works of Jethro Tull.)
I’ve not really delved into the non-train-related material in this collection (because, really, trains are very distracting! They easily suck up all my attention!) but it’s also worth your while. Stymeist has an acute sensitivity for the muck and glory of the unromantic natural world, and it’s on display throughout the book. I particularly jive to his parallel strands of gardening and managing chronic illness in the last section of the book: “As backyard soil enriches, darkens, worms proliferate. / Meadow voles appreciate the work of decomposition. // Later on, I’ll chronicle brute measures of inflammation, / leakage, and decay, indignities I keep even from my wife.”
The natural world is origin and beauty but is no haven. The processes of decay are implicated in those of regeneration. It’s all in the flux.
Publication Details
Author: D. S. Stymeist
Title: Cluster Flux
Publisher: Frontenac House
Year: 2023