I'd like to comment...on Eyes Moving Through The Dark by William Woolfit

A chance encounter at one of my favorite bookstores continues to inform not only my reading choices, but also the way I read. The idea of the “subtle reader” continues to grow in my mind ever since it was said to me. What does it mean to be this subtle reader and why has it started to change my reading habits?

When I say my reading habits, I don’t mean the kinds of books I read. I read voraciously across different kinds of books, both before and after I was aware of subtle reading. The pace and space of this reading, however, has changed. I used to think about my reading in a very simple way: number of titles read per anum. It was an accounting of reading. But now I’m focused on the quality of my reading, both the quality of the book, as well as the time, care, and attention I focus on the task.

Eyes Moving Through the Dark: Essays by William Woolfit is the perfect book for the subtle reader. Lyric and dense, it rewards the slow and careful read, the pause between essays to absorb and interpret the work, sometimes returning to passages or rereading whole essays, being open to the surprise of realizing new things upon rereading. Don’t misunderstand me, though. Just because Eyes Moving Through The Dark rewards slow reading, do not be tempted to equate “slow,” with “boring.” Because these essays have an essential urgency within them. It’s a collection for the person who respects history, especially personal histories that transcend the self, one for the person worried for a rapidly changing planet and the attendant climate concerns this rapidity continues to expose, a mediatation on parenting and being raised, a hard-won love letter to Appalachia.

I’ve been savoring this collection as I’ve been writing poems that have taken on more ecological themes, and I have to wonder if its the presence of Woolfit in my subconscious that prods my conscious self to pay better attention. He often slides nature into the work, even as he discusses some other subject, such as in “E is for Eve the Serpent”:

All my prayers are like that, and my favorite mountains, my loves, smashed up, shedding pieces that had been vital, snapping off, surling like a blighted leaf, frog shrinking back to tadpole, puddle dwindling to cracked earth. Maybe all my prayers could also be dry twigs that a campfire turns into a little light and warmth, or cracker crumbs from the bottom of a purse that a body feeds on.

While Woolfit begins us on a meditation on the letter “E” that, in some incarnations, used to look like a person praying, and then him at prayer, where the natural world seeps in. Loves smashed up. A poet’s sensibility saturates this prose, and it’s the kind of associative writing that captures my attention. Here, the tumbling of associations suggest an active mind sifting to say what it needs, showing its work like an algebraic equation. It is the logic that tethers the mind to the heart.

In the tradition of the found poem, Woolfit gives us a found essay, “K is for Kanawha Valley” which pulls from various sources to piece together a history of distruction in West Virginia’s Chemical Valley, as the people who survive it enough add to this mosaic of turmoil. Early in the essay, Woolfit shares a particularly resonant image of this distruction and the carelessness of those who caused it:

In Boomer, G says that fumes caused the forearm of the St. Anthony statue, holding a book, to rot off and plop to the ground. Union Carbide mended the arm, provided a transparent plastic box to keep St. Anthony safe.

St. Anthony, of course, is often known as the saint of lost articles. Union Carbide sees the most utility, irconically, in safeguarding the saint, but not what’s truly lost, of course.

Continuing in a multivocal way, we are also shown that which cannot be shed, as if some answer to that which is lost:

J still smells the chemicals coming from his skin when he sweats; in summer, his cheeks yellow his pillowcase. I know the smell anywhere, he says. I know the old dioxin smell.

A particularly poignant section of this essay is where Woolfit shows us the convoluted logic that allows for one atrocity to exist because others do, in this case, the presence of the pollutants of chemical companies in West Virginia because of the relative health concerns that pervade it:

The lobbyists say, because West Virginians are heavier, their bodies can handle more pollutants, and because they drink less water, they are less exposed to pollutants.

What a terrible position, unless you consider the consumption of say, Coca-Cola or Mountain Dew pollutants, in which case, the argument breaks, which is, I think, exactly what Woolfit wants us to do: break the argument. Health disparities should never be used as a reason that chemicals won’t do as much damage. I’m sure the narrative medcine researcher in me seized on this section with a certain vehemence. I can’t help it, and I think that’s part of the wonder of this section of Eyes Moving Through The Dark. It’s pieces of different voices telling the same story, a story that’s certainly known to West Virginians and other Appalachians, and yet one that never ceases to pick off the scab covering an injustice to make the wound fresh again.

But consider this essay along the many that connect Woolfit to his home state in other ways. Pea Ridge, where his grandparents’ farm is nestled in Barbour County, surfaces throughout the book, and the memory of time spent with his grandparents serve as a counterbalance to destruction, to modern life, and as a way to ground oneself in a personal history. Woolfit connects his current life as a writer back to the memory of his grandmother in a way that connects his history as a writer back to her as well:

She saw a future version of me, a better version. Those were lonely years, solitary years when I tried to piece together—from farm visits and the good that gleamed in my grandparents and their dreams and stubborn hopes, their memories—the different history I wanted to claim, a kind of invocation, or recipe, or magic net for the life that for years I would be writing my way toward, sometimes scratching out, erasing, tearing and crumpling, writing down again.

Oh, my god, Will Woolfit, how many of us have searched out such a magic net? How many make the scratches, erasures, tears, and crumples? And this made me stop and make a list of all the people who have, in some way or another, been that person who saw the better future version of me—me as writer, who held me to it when my confidence in myself waned. In Woolfit, there is something beautiful about the writer connecting to the stubborn hopes of his grandparents, their memory, that different history that maybe is the one true history any writer needs.

In the penultimate essay—which is for the letter “Z” in an alaphabet book that includes a letter no longer used in English, and ends on “&” since the ampersand used to be the last letter in the English language—Woolfit chooses connection. We are awarded for our attentiveness with hiking the Appalachian Trail, where he writes that days of solitude would be punctuated by with calls—old fashioned, non cellular telephone calls—to Woolfit’s grandmother:

If I could wish for one more moment, it might be something like this, time for commarderie after time for solitude, the phone in its cradle, and my hand reaching for it, the promise of connection, a person with kindess and curiosity and knowledge of our world, things I have not lost, spreading aster, vagrant seagull, coltsfoot in the spring.

Eyes Moving Through the Dark is the kind of book to savor, over and again. It is for the subtle reader, the person who is not seduced by the page-turner, the overly-clever, the person who doesn’t pause to bring her own consciousness to the page. Publishing has brought us enough entertainment-only volumes, and it seems to me that the more I read the more that small and university publishers are bringing me the bulk of the subtle reads I crave. I don’t want more pages so much as I want more from the pages. This doesn’t mean I don’t want loads of books, because I do. But I want more writers like Woolfit, who force me out of complacency and into real dialogue, slow, meadering, and maybe with a cup of coffee. The kind of reading that sinks into the mind, somehow lodging there in harmony with my ideas and memories and dreams and prayers.

News and Notes

• It’s time for a roadtrip! I’m heading out to East Carolina University to deliver a talk on narrative medicine, and meet some students and visit my dear friend John Hoppenthaler (also really recommend his latest, Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area). If you’re in or near Greenville, NC this coming Wednesday, I’d love to see you.

• Next up in my subtle reading is my friend and former MFA classmate, Kori Morgan’s Why I Died My Hair Purple, another collection of essays. What can I say, essays make for very subtle reading. And I love them.

• I was excited when the folks at The Creative Process reached out to me about contributing. A new-ish poem, “Diagnosis Color-By-Number” is available there to read, and, cross your fingers, may be on a one of their future podcasts. Stay tuned (fun fact, the poem has also been on an episode of the Healthcare Is Human podcast).

• It looks like I’ll be heading back to one of my favorite indie bookstores, Booktenders in Barboursville, WV, for a National Poetry Month reading. Details to follow soon.