In Defense of Subjective Silences: Audience, archive and access in three debut poetry collections

James Tate once explained that “poetry speaks against an essential backdrop of silence. It is almost reluctant to speak at all, knowing that it can never fully name what is at the heart of its intention. There is a prayerful, haunted silence between words, between phrases, between images, ideas and lines. This is one reason why good poems can be read over and over. The reader, perhaps without knowing it, instinctively desires to peer between the cracks into the other world where the unspoken rests in darkness.” I love this definition of poetry, that reluctance which Tate identifies, and how he recognizes the role of the reader, seeking access “into the other world.” But if speaking alongside and “between” silences is the difficulty (and risk) of poetry, why are writers of color so often asked to do more?

Twice last summer, I heard about editors translating multilingual poems into English without first consulting the authors. A judgment made in the name of accessibility, because editors feared that the reader might face too much of that unspoken realm which Tate identifies as essential to poetry. As I prepare my own poetry collection for publication, I realize that it’s a privilege for me to write towards an audience who feels a degree of recognition with what I leave unsaid. My poems, after all, come after decades of Filipinx writers in diaspora who have done the work of explication for me, or who have cultivated an audience for whom the “haunted silence between words” might have more reverberation because we’re familiar with the same words. But it’s also a question of trust. To whom do I grant access? I'm interested in how accessibility, a word meant to offer greater equity, is used in this context to force visibility and digestibility for an unidentified, but presumably white audience.  

What tools are available to the poet who doesn’t want to explain what’s familiar but who also doesn’t want to obscure? When writing from an underrecognized tradition, how much of making work accessible is establishing a familiar pattern (in terms of identity, in terms of narrative) for the reader?

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Perhaps it might be helpful for us to consider some kinds of silence subjective, a matter of audience. In Annie Wenstrup’s debut collection The Museum of Unnatural Histories, a cheeky “Event Score for the Curator” invites readers to:

Make the most of your time at the Museum of Unnatural Histories by following along with the event score.
Carefully created and timed, the Event Score allows your body to mirror the curator’s path through the
museum exhibits. See what she sees! Feel what she feels! Dwell inside the problem of empathy. Alternatively: you may pause the tracks at any time. You may complete her work at your own pace.

Aware of an audience who may approach the text as a form of cultural tourism—a way to “See what she sees! Feel what she feels!”—Wenstrup offers the reader a familiar framework and an assignment. The “Event Score,” which follows, is “for the Curator,” but Wenstrup makes the score available to the audience under the condition that they “Dwell inside the problem of empathy.” A reader seeking to play the tourist must change their role. They must study a text that demands they enter as students of their own intentions. 

The Museum of Unnatural Histories presents exhibit halls with installations of living and imagined Indigenous bodies—to whom Wenstrup offers the autonomy to step beyond the stanchion, or more plainly, to deny access to the viewer. In one “Diorama,” Wenstrup illustrates a white (or colorless) square with a black border to represent the Curator’s office without the Curator. In place of explication, she offers her audience questions that might feel familiar in this situation: “This is The Curator’s Office. / Have you ever visited an office? / Did it look like this?”

Between the fabled Indian and breathing Dena’ina woman, Wenstrup disrupts the institution’s narrative of conservation (Wenstrup’s Museum of Unnatural Histories standing in for many museums) with her narrator, “the Curator,” and the sukdu'a, “a story that’s become a personal story” that explores questions of authenticity and belonging. Pulling from inherited stories and pop culture icons, Wenstrup’s Museum puts into action an array of figures: the Curator, Ggugguyni (the Dena'ina raven), princesses and Starfleet officers. The poems perform for a general audience (humanity, Starfleet) while also whispering to a specific audience (the self or an approximate self). The speaker curates the distance between these two audiences. When Wenstrup’s “Sukdu’a II” introduces the figure of Half-human-woman, we see her first through Ggugguyni’s interactions:

There was no business of saying what strong teeth
or big eyes between the two of them.

Nor did Ggugguyni say anything about Half-human’s
divisions. Instead, she took in the woman’s doubleness.
From one angle Half-human-woman has a face like ours
The other, I imagine, looks like how I feel when I am alone.

Essential to this introduction is the speaker’s rejection of comparisons to a western fairy tale. This is a retelling and an expansion of one of the many folktales about Ggugguyni, but part of the retelling is an exploration of what we lose by explaining a familiar lexicon to a generalized audience. In describing the indescribable aspect of Half-human-woman, the speaker turns to her own silences. She opens questions about the distance between the self (imagined, alone, omitted) and the performance of such a self. 

What opportunities do we create for ourselves and readers by choosing illegibility? In “Ggugguyni Transcribes the Archives As Girl,” Wenstrup includes the note, “I want Roddenberrian optimism, but I worry that one of us misunderstands a / time-paradox. I worry one of us misunderstands humanoids.” The speaker, too, must dwell between the projection and perception of the self, a space where a mis-translation may be the only translation. I think this, too, is the “essential backdrop of silence” that Tate describes, though I hope future generations will find this representation of isolation less “essential.” 

Wenstrup's Museum reclaims the right to interpret and reinvent objects of her own mythos, in order to imagine a future home, a future stardate. The storyteller becomes a generative and adaptive force, sustaining multiple tellings, even ones others might discount as self-indulgent like the “self-insert” fan narrative (a favorite form for young critics seeking to amend the stories they care most about). In one such self-insert, the speaker suggests, “Each of us may imagine our own misbehavior, / bundle it and chuck it into an abyss” while recognizing “this may be uncomfortable / for you to name. Here is permission.”  

The Curator gives the reader permission to inhabit a space of discomfort.  Her permission is specific: to name, to be uncomfortable. It’s a kind of permission that asks readers to question their intent if they enjoyed the earlier invitation to “See what she sees! Feel what she feels!” Within The Museum, the reader is a participant. Like the curator, the reader, too, must demonstrate their relationship to the text, and throughout The Museum footnotes and exhibits widen the framework we inhabit, reaching into a science fiction future and an archived past. 

When we revisit Half-human-woman, we see her through Star Trek Voyager’s Commander Chakotay’s logs:

From one side, she looked like a beautiful maiden. Exactly like you’d see in a
holo-novel. Her hide dress—fringed and beaded—her hair a blue-black braid,
she looked like home. We waved and she moved towards me. I suppose I can
tell you that too. I wanted to meet her. I wanted to ask what it was like to
still live in her ancestral home, with her people, what it was like to be made
of salmon and moose and berry—to know herself as both the land and the
body. When I say I want—what I mean is . . . I envy. I am enough of a man
to know that. And yet, when she turned sideways to step over a large piece of
driftwood—terror replaced desire. Like I said in my report: from the other side,
she was indescribable, but I tried. Four-legged, more animal than girl. When I
looked at her, all I could remember is that I was far from home.

Within the Star Trek universe, Commander Chakotay is himself a faceted character. He is a Starfleet officer and a member of the Maquis, an organization depicted both as a terrorist cell and a resistance group. In our universe, Chokotay is an indigenous character (without tribal affiliation) played by Latino actor Robert Beltran. I think it’s important to note that Beltran has, himself, considered Commander Chakotay’s future. On X (formerly Twitter), he has hinted at a complicated, and perhaps curatorial, relationship with the character, explaining, “I was offered an episode (first 2 then 1) in Picard but I simply did not like what they had written for Chakotay so I turned them down. I won't go into detail but I have no animosity toward the Picard producers at all. ST Prodigy offers a Chakotay that I AM enthusiastic about.” Discussing the addendums within The Museum with the Academy of American Poets, particularly the inclusion of the Roddenberry franchise, Wenstrup explains, “I am interested in examining how different chronotopes destabilize or reinforce colonial constructions of time and space.” Like Half-human-woman, Wenstrup’s addendums expand the projected image and replace desire with a more complex feeling. We cannot separate the “Commander’s Log” from a version of the Dena'ina speaker watching Voyager in the 90s, scanning the abyss for a reflection of the self that has yet to come into being.

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There’s a gesture regarding language and translation in Jimin Seo’s Ossia, which came out last fall, that I keep coming back to as I consider what it means to write towards a subjective silence, one that creates a rest or omission in the music for some readers and not others. In a collection that explores grief, desire and coming of age as a queer poet, Seo provides Korean text the primacy of the right page. The English text mirrors (though I do not mean to suggest a translation so much as a complementary text, or perhaps, even, a distortion) on the left (or back) of each page spread. What is centered is not necessarily what I have access to. As a reader I must accept that the heart of this text exists outside of the language I know.

The English text, too, demands that I consider multiple traditions and modes of transaction. If I were to attempt a narrative reading of Ossia, I would be diverted by the opening poem which assesses and dismisses the western romance of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey (along with its claims of universalism). Seo writes:

Reader, I’ve sold you my story. I am what you think
wrongly, half-beast, half-boy, too weak to carry
your pastoral flag, your mule-ride, cash strapped
belly-side. You ride and whip me into starlight, Rightly,
no time is enough time 잡아도 잡아도 지나가는 시간.

Isn’t this perhaps the most clear-eyed recognition of values, to say to an American audience, this is a bill of sale? The last line lingers as a silence to some audiences, and an amendment for others (there is a bit of fairy tale here, too, in “Pastoral” like the fairies in Sleeping Beauty who say to us that the harm is real but that we may yet amend our story to survive). Within Seo’s collection are ghosts and afterimages: that of the mother, of the mentor Richard Howard, and of the self who is multiple and prismatic and also irrecoverable from the past.

I should confess here that I had the privilege of participating in a workshop with Jimin Seo in 2022 where he shared an early version of his poems addressed to Richard Howard. One question from the workshop that stayed with me was, “what is the significance of writing in Korean to a French translator?” It's a question I wanted to reject but I think it gets to the heart of Ossia. Behind the question of language is the question, does inheritance change who we are and how we interpret the work of others? Perhaps, better than the question of, why Korean, is the question, why English (and its accompanying inheritance). Like the dollar, English is the currency through which others are exchanged. As a child of a multilingual Tagalog/English household, I learned English then I learned French from English. If I were to attempt some translation of French to Tagalog (though I doubt my ability to read much of either), it would almost certainly be through English.

Instead of demanding inheritance or mastery (though Ossia is not without a show of formal skill and a nod towards Richard Howard’s aesthetics), Ossia chooses, perhaps in opposition, to prolong the intimacy of friendship–of collaboration–even with the dead. And to do so means that Seo puts himself in conversation, also, with a younger and alternate self. As the reader, I must know that what Ossia presents to me is the poem that’s never handed over to Howard. When Seo writes in Howard’s voice “So use me while I’m useful. It’s the reason / we met, your poems from your hands into mine,” it is a command to the self. Yet the voice of the departed, real or imagined, is on a different scale from our own. I’m offered a sense of belonging at this moment. I am holding the object which might be handed over from the living to the dead. Perhaps I, too, can be useful. Threaded throughout this collection is an “Ossia” sequence underscoring the distances between these multiple selves via content but also placement. The distance is not in one direction, but in all directions. And there's something to be said about the structure here being a kind of classic hero's journey which the opening poem addresses and diverts from. Each “Ossia” stands as a gray monolith, a separate and concurrent narrative of “A Venus of / Migration,” a speaker who demands:

Write about my body or another less
Hellenistic one: Cadillac, Escalade, Rust:
deer-field-sometime-car, fleshier if less
sublime than the divine model every 
woman emanates in a man: Venus of
Parts: doe-ish, dim. So let me snap off my
hood, startle the cock making shit talk on
my collarbone.

I briefly mentioned Joseph Campbell’s archetype of the hero’s journey, which is a favorite and familiar pattern for readers. It is one I have always disliked. Campbell’s Eurocentric “universal” story starts with a young man who answers the call to adventure and meets women helpers who offer him knowledge or quests along the way. But in Seo’s hands, the Venus mother has her own adventure in between the erudite conversations of men and poets. It is her voice that moves most throughout the text. She pokes fun at the earnestness of poets–“My son, I bless you as a god is hired to do.”–as she pursues the body she desires–“I know our body. I / take your red into my red, push my breath against / yours, and nothing of your great belly heaves old /life.”

Each “Ossia” propels a Venus speaker forward with a “Life / in this parallel / western where / wingéd things fall / off of me.” As a foil to the opening poem, the young man’s voice is replaced by the mother’s. She no longer carries the son “two hundred / steps up an unremarkable hill” but takes “the mountain path / and kill[s] my son / before it’s too hungry / to eat.” I’m interested in Seo’s desire to sustain a happiness that might exclude him, to offer a loved one the knife they needed, an optimism towards alternatives. Seo is willing to kill off a few younger versions of himself to open the multiverse for others. Ossia is a collection that both recognizes the hubris of the poet and the utility of the creative act. If some poets enter the personal archive seeking belonging, Seo enters bearing speculative gifts that may change the outcome.

***

How else might a poem inhabit the many silences, omissive or otherwise, that necessarily proliferate within a fragile archive? Writing into the gaps of a researched and remembered archive, E. Hughes' debut Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, explores how both the personal and historic record are incomplete and complementary. Hughes' collection pinpoints the absence of one body with the eye of another, like a relative “obscured / by the mark of someone’s careless / fingertip on the lens.” It is not simply that these bodies overlap; they reach across generations like the titular Pacific water in “Black Women Standing Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water,” which reappears, connecting different speakers throughout the text. Always with an eye towards the reader, Hughes introduces the ocean as a rare memory from her California childhood, one which, like other memories, is frequently disputed by a larger audience:

In the present, no one believes me
when I say We rarely saw the ocean or
It’s the children who are the silent casualties
of unprotection or Even now, the memories
siphon through me instead of blood. 

The language of this opening poem echoes throughout the collection. Later, we find, “Even now, the memories siphon through me,” revisited in the final section of Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, as  "Even now, loneliness / is a portal I enter.” Memory and loneliness are entwined but not stagnant. They offer entry and transition. If “loneliness / is a portal,” does the portal pull in both directions? 

I think we often give into the fiction that there must be a linear narrative, and as a result, there must be a main character with whom a story begins and ends. But Hughes' collection presses towards the uncomfortable vastness of the archive, of living past it, and how that corresponds to craft. When Hughes writes:

By then, I understood what happens
to the Negro in water, had grown so tired
of the disappearing. I could no longer
care if my life was the ransom for rebellion
against chains. In California, I stood facing
the cold visage of this other ocean, terrified
by who lurks in its waters, knowing what
we were never to become without war.

They are speaking through the voice of a historical figure and through generations of Black women. They are writing into the gaps of a historical record (which has omitted the voices of Black women), and they are writing in the present tense, a tense that carries their language into the future. Much like Seo’s speculative “Ossia” sequence, what Hughes writes into the archive changes the present, or as they describe in the “Epilogue,” “If I write this, everything about us will be true—.” These poems are their own evidence entered into the record, a scholarly testament to the anti-Blackness of America and a practice against a white-washed history.

It’s important to note that Hughes' work is grounded by their training as both a poet and a philosopher. A couple years ago, we had the chance to talk together about our work. They were studying Kant, with distaste, among other western standard-bearers. I was working as a librarian at the time, and expressed that I felt guilty because I distrusted a segment of patrons who called themselves “readers.” For these readers, the act of reading any book was a sign of their self worth and virtue. (Of course reading is an important tool for dispersing feelings and ideas, but what are the virtues gifted to one by a Patterson tomb? And why did it distress a reader when I removed from the collection a 1990 guide to Microsoft Word?) Hughes streamlined for me the issues of value theory, or as they described, we live in a culture in which ethics and aesthetics are intertwined. The beautiful is equated to the moral good, and the book becomes a representation of both. In Hughes' collection, that intersection of ethical and aesthetic value leads to the question, what do we do if we don’t want to partake in systemc violence to illustrate value, to embody care? Hughes’ poem “Rupture in Memory” frames the difficulty of receiving a fractured history:

My story began in pieces—in the wake of four migrations, 
in my mother’s and father’s initial exchange, in the heat
of confinement and emancipation. I began like whip
of lightning in a night sky, a moment shared between two

hurting people. If it is difficult to recover from the body,
fathom what it is to endure.

The text reenacts for readers the difficulty of a silence the author, too, cannot enter. The speaker asks that we “fathom what it is to endure,” and in doing so, the speaker is not beholden to offer the testimony of a witness. Instead they center “the memoirs of our large memory,” a multivocal poetics. They hold space for an absence/rupture that is universally perceived within the population of the poem, but unique to each speaker:

In this case, the thin veil

between generations torn and each woman left with her own 
piercing memories.        Picture, if you will, an autumn day further back in the past—  

The speaker performs the repetition of an unseen autumn day which we revisit throughout the poem–“Picture another scene in autumn”–pointing at the image and its absence that is now a physical manifestation—a gap between the text—so that the audience must replicate “the inherited work of a child—“/ to retreat and endure.” What we cannot know as an audience (the withheld “autumn day further back in the past,” the open space between text) invents the illusion of participation. 

Hughes devises poems that preserve and partition, that connect a personal archive to a historical one. Each story is a variation of departure and a reframing of where we begin. In “The Accounts of Mammy Pleasant, I. Truth and Lies”, Mary Ellen “Mammy” Pleasant introduces herself:

Call me a great financier, a witch, Queen
Esther—whatever you need to justify
my longstanding status as a free woman
and why I was the one who possessed all
that money. It does not matter how
I got here—I am. Despite all those years…

I want to say that this proclamation is a lie, that it does matter “How I got here,” but the more essential statement is that she exists. And perhaps the “how” is more fiction than fact; the archive is sparse. I care most about what Hughes adds to the historical record. Before leaving home, having received her freedom papers through some passing and mysterious interaction, Pleasant receives from her mother “a single piece of fruit— / the last gift she would ever give me.” This gift from Hughes to their subject reminds me of Barracoon, and how Zora Neale Hurston once brought Cudjo Lewis a gift of peaches while transcribing his oral history. The apple is Hughes' invention, and it is what feeds us—perhaps because the invented gift stands in relief to the autobiographical. Hughes provides for the historical speaker the concrete memory of the apple in contrast to the younger self who writes in “What Should We Call This Space” that “There was never /a goodbye” to mark their separation from their mother. Instead, the speaker notes how the departure shapes “between us—its dark outlines given / to the bleak pressures of subtly now / after this many years?”  Earlier, I mentioned a line from “Even Now—” which states that “Even now, loneliness / is a portal I enter.” Loneliness is shaped within that dark outline but also becomes the catalyst that draws the speaker to gaps within the archive. For me, this metaphor centers the manuscript and the many speakers and subjects who are then gathered into the speakers’ sight. Within Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water, the archive’s work is not to stop our loneliness. What the archive offers is resonance and silence that calls out to a human hand.

***

As poets, we navigate silence, but we also have the choice to proliferate some silences and not others. We may lock a door to one audience and open it for another. There are doors we, ourselves, may not open. It’s important to say that none of these meticulously crafted debuts are illegible. Each chooses their audience. Each recognizes that the world is not a monoculture. And each responds to this knowledge with an exploration of form—the ekphrastic that births an archive, the elegy that creates an afterlife, the sukdu’a which inserts the teller into the telling. Pattern offers even a spurned reader something to hold on to, and I’d like to believe that formal constraint allows for a kind of generosity to the specific reader who recognizes the silence each poet writes into and the silences each chooses to maintain.

The Museum of Unnatural Histories. By Annie Wenstrup, Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 2025. 104 pp. $16.95

Ossia. By Jimin Seo. New York: Changes Press, 2024. 136 pp. $18.99

Ankle-Deep In Pacific Water. By E. Hughes. Haymarket Books, 2024. 96 pp. $17.00