Solid Objects: Carlina Duan
Tayari Jones keeps a baby food jar of dirt on her desk from Toni Morrison’s hometown. CJ Hauser gifts her students a tiny plastic chicken to pull out whenever and wherever it’s time to write. Writing totems, talismans, amulets—we ascribe many names to the objects we keep close while we write. These objects inspire us, comfort us; they can prompt our productivity, make their way into our writing, or at the very least, serve as a dangling carrot to the world beyond our daily pages.
In Virginia Woolf’s short story, “Solid Objects” her main character grows enamored with a smooth piece of green glass he finds at the beach. “It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore.” The right object can be our own green glass; a raft when we’re treading the slippery shapes thoughts take.
In SOLID OBJECTS, we ask writers about the objects most essential to their creative practice, and what exactly these objects do for their brains.
This edition is written by Carlina Duan, whose poetry collection Alien Miss is out now from University of Wisconsin Press.
July 2020: I moved the desk up two flights of stairs—straining to clutch onto a mahogany corner—while a friend and my partner hooked their arms over the desk’s back legs and we entered my tiny studio apartment with much gusto, inviting sweat while I raced to fling open windows, breathless and hungry to (finally!) have somewhere to sit at other than my bed. I’d just moved into the space: a studio wedged on the second floor of a blue house with an electric stovetop and a mirror emblazoned with a tiny, eight-armed star. A neighborhood with a community flower garden and a woodsy recreation area where I could walk, on summer afternoons, amidst the certainty of mosquitos, gathering pinecones while swatting unromantically at my legs, my thighs, my arms until—splat! A dart of red.
I wasn’t writing that summer. I was trying to understand how to share my screen on Zoom, trying to understand the best way to leave my parents groceries at their doorstep, the best way to double-mask, distinguishing between care and fear, fear and fumble, communal, trouble, trying to understand a labyrinth of language, words that snaked around my tongue until, suddenly, they felt rooted into me like ancient memory: lock down, lock down, stay at home, stay at home, stay—on my pandemic walks, I caught the little light that leaked between branches of the pines, watching my body engulfed by the shapes of leaves, and, once, the shadow of a bird of prey from high above, circling me, then passing on by.
That summer, I sat at the desk, seeking relief in sealing envelopes. Running a thumb along the ridges of postage stamps, that tiny word—forever—ticking across each stamp’s glossy face. I wasn’t writing. Not really. Poems had once landed on my shoulder like tiny birds, shouting at me to begin! But that summer, like so much else, they’d stopped their migration, leaving me crumbly and quiet. Stripped of song.
Conrad Hilberry [1]:
So words, as I say, poke around like ants
in the blown leaves, unable to run
I wasn’t writing. Instead, I was shoving tiny objects inside envelopes, addressing them to friends. Dried-out maple leaves. Recipes. A photograph of a watermelon patch. A photograph of stained glass. Cut-out crossword puzzles from newspapers, the backs featuring headlines split in half: another police-involved—statues falling—high court block—small etchings of river stones. Quotes from whatever book I was reading: other people’s words, copied down in my own hand.
Mary Ruefle [2]:
Everything that ever happened to me
is just hanging—crushed
and sparkling—in the air,
waiting to happen to you.
What graced my desk that summer: sheets of forever stamps. Little anchors.
Still, days beyond my desk pulsed on. Neighborhood blocks fell in and out of bloom: tulips, dahlias, blades of long and eloquent Michigan grass. Once, while preparing a salad, I plucked a caterpillar out of a head of lettuce, her green legs wriggling a beat, then two, in my open hands. Then, the world again: seeds, lawns, children in masks, neighbors with basketballs glued to their hips. I read the news. Erupting. Erupting. Erupting.
In a season where my poems remained mute, an envelope provided me with a container to fill. Small solace. Conversation. All season long, I collected tiny scraps of my world for friends, recording addresses carefully in black pen.
Lately, when I write, I am overwhelmed. Often, I freeze. The whole, jagged rhythm and line-work of the world, entering the poem, nothing and nobody begging to be written, Let me be, Let me be. But when I recall it: conversations with friends, the shared tether between me and you, the easy slope of my words resting near my beloveds’ words, the language clicks together. An image demanding, Let me be, shifts gears: Let me be with you [3]. So when I write these days, I am writing to friends.
And while my memory of that summer pulls up along a curb, tells me, I wasn’t writing, I was, in fact, writing. Corresponding, collaborating with, receiving. Letters from B. Letters from S. Letters from M. Postcards from E., and more from Y. At my desk, I sat and unsealed envelopes. Outside, bike tires spun. Owls released their soft night sounds. I pulled out cards with recipes for orange spice cake. I pulled out letters speaking of quotidian joy, or stillness, or new love, struggle. Comic strips from Tennessee and B.’s tiny, homemade zines, crayoned with pictures of blue doors, an illustration of tinned fish.
What is solid to me: the feeling of a letter. Of handwriting. Shared space through an envelope. Proximity.
Writing about the book as a physical form, Jill Magi [4] observes “the link between paper and skin.” And that bridge between paper and skin—what connects us—can be applied, too, to a delivered envelope, significant and firmly tactile. Magi writes: “[…] readers must hold the page, lift, and turn. So they are quite close to whatever content is delivered, and they literally hold this content in their hands.”
On my desk sits a letter S. wrote me once, after reading a poem draft from Alien Miss: “[One] of the great gifts of friendship is the ability to spell each other in these times of doubt and dormancy, to pass the light to another when we cannot hold it alone—so I am here to carry the light with you and for you for as long as you need,” she wrote.
And so, what a solid object can pass on—can teach—to me, my hands: I am capable of holding. And if I’m lucky, it’s the holding of steady weight, which is to say, tomorrow I’ll open an envelope from a dear friend, and out comes her sheet of paper, out comes her text. On the back of the envelope sits a postage stamp: a herd of deer, the tiny word forever. Onwards. We are building this archive together.
[1] From Hilberry’s poem, “A Procession of Ants, Chanting.”
[2] From Ruefle’s poem, “Saga,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books, 2012).
[3] Alexis Gumbs, too, speaks of this in her beautiful observation on poetry as a practice of being together.
[4] See Magi’s Chicago Review essay, “Poetry in Light of Documentary.”
Carlina Duan is a writer-educator from Michigan, and the author of the poetry collections I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017) and Alien Miss (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Poets.org, The Rumpus, and other publications. Carlina received her M.F.A. in Poetry from Vanderbilt University. She is currently a doctoral student in the University of Michigan’s Joint Program in English and Education, where she studies community-engaged writing and documentary poetics. Among many things, she loves river walks, snail mail, and being a sister.