Author: Nancy Lynée Woo

Nancy Lynée Woo is a poet, educator, and community organizer. As a 2022 Artists at Work fellow, she brings arts programming to community gardens. Previously, she has received fellowships from PEN America, Arts Council for Long Beach, and Idyllwild Writers Week. Nancy has an MFA in poetry from Antioch University and a BA in sociology from UC Santa Cruz. Find her cavorting around Long Beach (Tongva), California, and online at nancylyneewoo.com or @fancifulnance on social.

Podcast Episode 13: When someone says the world is a fish

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Welcome back to the Reckoning Press podcast. It’s been ages, but we’re ramping up to a lot of cool new stuff in the coming year and beyond, including lots more podcasts, a fundraiser to increase payrates to 10c/word, $50/page for poetry and pay staff better too, t-shirts, pins, who knows what else. Homebrew recipes. Foraging instructions. Bespoke lectures about culling invasive species. We’re flush with ideas, as we should be, but we’re always looking for more. Drop us a line if you’ve got any?

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Thank you very much for listening.

This week’s episode features Nancy Lynée Woo reading her poem “When someone says the world is a fish” from Reckoning 6. You’re going to wish you had Catherine Rockwood here to help ground you in this delightful, funny, nesting puzzle of a poem, but she’s off for a bit, so you’re stuck with me. I’ll make it quick. The way I read it, this is a poem about metonymy, the endlessly regressing act of replacement that we’re always performing when we engage in language. We use language to situate ourselves in the world, in nature, but each time we interpose a word describing a thing—a silk worm, a rat, a wisteria—we distance ourselves from that thing by introducing another layer of interpretation. It doesn’t take many iterations of a poem interpreting a children’s science book interpreting science interpreting nature before we arrive at something that feels and works a lot like decadence. How do we find our way back? Can we? What gets lost on the way?

[Bio below.]

When someone says the world is a fish by Nancy Lynée Woo

When someone says the world is a fish

Someone has left the building. The building is now

a rubble of bones. Butterflies are sometimes kisses,

but mostly larvae. Language: a cocoon to emerge into.

 

To come down from the tree means breaking

a bough. Rocking to wake. The world is a nursery

and rhymes are waves. To be a person describing

 

is to be a rat scavenging at the crumbs of language

for the remains of thought. Holiness has nothing

to do with it. Yet, meringue. Yet, music.

 

Yet, everything. In other words, divinity is a shoebox

at a science fair for the other words. I am not sure

my words are my own. I walk past a bookshelf

 

and read How Nature Works. I read how nature works

in the spinning of a silk worm. Someone reads out loud,

“How nature works.” To be awake in the world

 

means to be aware of sleeping. I won’t survive language.

Language is the only way to survive. Thank goddess,

I was never given a god to flounder for. A man with a tie

 

can be an instrument of violence. Why not say so?

For fear of being locked up, we keep our wisteria

to ourselves. I am bursting dragonfruit, pulling cards

 

and reading. The definition of “apocalypse” is “to reveal.”

So what if my language is pleased with itself?

To speak at all has been a travail. I am cacophonous

 

now, a body of scales dragging along the sand.

Don’t mind me while I feast on oil fumes.

How are we still manufacturing plastic foam?

 

Even fairies need to breathe. The slot machine

dings. Any money I get needs to be cleansed.

Who has the power to move the currency of thought?

 

Whose hook is in my cheek? I eat puzzles for lunch.

A bomb goes off in a break room. If the poem is a vine,

the climbing to where becomes the question.