Shay Alexi: Emotional Earnestness as Strength
There has never been a poet who's words click immediately in me like Shay Alexi does. Every poem resonates with me in a way few other artists have ever done. I am knocked sideways by their images and methods. I had the opportunity to see them perform live in Orlando about a year ago and I was a screaming stan the whole time. I had to contain myself and not be too loud, since it was a closet of a bar and there were other people that wanted to hear them and not just hear me silently mouthing along with their poems. I got them to sign my copy of their chapbook, bought a button with a quote from their piece "And This Time the Butter Rejects the Knife," The quote "The hardest work is that which it takes to cultivate softness." is a testament to what I think is what they do best in their poems: to be earnest in a tender and empathetic approach to life. It is a hard life to be soft; to be emotional, and openly so, is not something that is seen as a strong way to live one's life. But that whole poem, and especially that line, recognizes the hard work that it takes to allow yourself to be emotionally agile in a world that values rigidity. And that women are asked to do all this hard work and remain "soft" and distribute that softness to others. Others who haven't done the hard work to be soft.
As an admittedly emotional person, it means so much to be told that it's ok to be emotional. I know that this poem is more addressed to women, and I want very much to not appropriate it for myself, but those individual lines mean so much to me. It means so much to see how strong Alexi is standing on a stage with a voice that doesn't hide the emotional power of their work but instead uses it to boost their ability and power. They are an absolute inspiration, and my favorite poet.
I LOVE Shay Alexi. Unashamedly.
So let's talk about one of their works.
"OUR MOTHER IS A NIGHTWITCH OR AN ODE TO FEMME FRIENDSHIP" by Shay Alexi
I have tried to write this poem a thousand times / and mostly it started with fire /
I have tried to write this poem a thousand times / and mostly it started with fire / I have fallen in love with this poem a thousand times / mostly about wildfire women / people who live in the dirt and on the moon / reckless and weightless /
I have tried to write this poem a thousand times / and mostly it started with fire / I have fallen in love with this poem a thousand times / mostly about wildfire women / people who live in the dirt and on the moon / reckless and weightless / I have fallen in love a thousand times / mostly with wildfire women / mostly with burning things down
I have fallen in love mostly with burning things down / and I still like the smell of bonfire in my hair / still like that my hair looks like fire / still like waking up with singed roots / but I have tried to write this poem a thousand times / mostly about forest fires / and it wasn’t working
so today the tree isn’t on fire / because the women aren’t on fire / because today the women don’t have to be on fire / (the women are always on fire but its your day and its my poem and its my tree and its our women so today the women don’t have to be on fire)
today the women are a tree / because we are a tree / and I like that you’re growing next to me / in tandem even though we aren’t / we never shared a womb or a bedroom / (contrary to popular belief those aren’t the same thing) / so we are not sisters of blood / except that we are:
see / in world war ii / they gave some girls what they always do / popsicle sticks and tissue and they said / make something if you want I guess we don’t really care anymore everybody is dying / so they made planes / embroidered them with flowers / and took to flying / 800 times a piece
and they did a lot of extraordinary things / but the main point is that the wings were / so flimsy and shitty they had to get so close to the Nazis / that they couldn’t speak /
so all the men heard was a “woosh” / like that of a broomstick / before the whole world was sick with smoke and justice / reeling
so they were called the night witches / so we are the daughters of night witches / of those who hold their tongues only in proximity of lighting the night / with bombs in the shadow of daffodils stitched on to canvas
so they were the night witches / so we are the night witches /
and I cannot spool up the hundreds of miles / between our bedframes / but I hear your refrain / in my exhale / your broomstick / just overhead
I have tried to write this poem a thousand times / and I thought it was a poem about fire / but then it was a tree / and then it was an airplane / and then it was a love letter
Analysis:
FIRST OFF those slashes. When writing about poetry in an analytical way, you use a slash to indicate a line break. This conserves space; line breaks are an important decision in poetry, but if you were to include them while analyzing a poem a five line poem takes up five lines on the paper. Instead, we use the slash to represent the line break and take those five lines and turn it into one and a half. It's cleaner and nicer when analyzing. So there's clearly stanzas, but at first seemingly no line breaks. Alexi's decision to use slashes instead creates a tighter frame for their lines and is a cool stylistic choice. Something that an experienced reader of poetry might recognize immediately, like a musician switching our a small note to change the chord. The average person might not hear it, but the musicians in the crowd will give that knowing look and maybe a little "OOooohhh."
I am in love with the strikethrough text here. The poem starts so indecisively, both in form and in text. "I have tried to write this poem a thousand times / and mostly it started with fire /" They literally say they haven't been able to start this poem. And the immediately strike it through and start over. This is editing in real time, the poem is being edited as it appears before you. It's indecisive in the sweetest possible way; the way you don't know how to start a letter to someone that is about an emotional subject. And so Alexi starts over three times, but letting us see it so we can follow their emotional difficulty.
This first one brings up fire, an important motif in this poem. When talking about emotions fire often represents passion and desire, but also the pain and suffering. Fire does both of these things in the real world: it is a source of warmth and safety while also being a destructive force capable of leveling an entire city. We use fire in contradictory ways in our language ("She lights a fire in me" vs "My insides are on fire") and so we need to be aware of that contradiction as we go through this poem. "mostly it started with fire" doesn't give us TOO much to go on yet, but we'll move on and see how else Alexi uses it later.
"I have fallen in love with this poem a thousand times / mostly about wildfire women / people who live in the dirt and on the moon / reckless and weightless /"
Now we get a thousand times of falling in love with the poem, and instead of mostly being about fire, it's about wildfire women. This conjures several contradictory images again: the history the west has for burning women alive, the power and independence of "wild" women who went against the wishes of society in order to be more true to themselves, wildfire being an important ecological event and a destructive event at the same time. Those two lines make a connection with the previous lines, still visible but crossed out before: this is a more refined thought. They thought the previous line would accomplish their goal, but this one seems to do a better job. It's more specific: the act of writing is the act of falling in love, and it's not just about fire, it's about wildfire women. Alexi does define wildfire women for us: they live in the dirt and on the moon, reckless and weightless. To be weightless here, especially for women, is not just to float , as in being on the moon, but to not have a weight. A woman's weight is often, and cruelly, discussed at length by whoever wants to. It is a topic that so many men and women feel unjustly comfortable talking about, either behind the person's back or directly to their face. Just check out the instagram comments on any model.
On second thought, don't do that.
It stands, however, that to be weightless is not just to float, but to no longer have weight as a property associated with you. Whether it's that you're too skinny, or too fat, or not curvy enough, too curvy, curvy but not slim thicc... it's all different ways to make a woman dissatisfied with her body. To be weightless is not something allowed to women in western society.
"I have fallen in love a thousand times / mostly with wildfire women / mostly with burning things down"
It's no longer about the poem, it's about falling in love, and falling in love with wildfire women. Now, since the title is an ode to femme friendship, this is likely about non romantic love, but it could be about romantic love, but what's the difference, really? They both are about caring for another, whether you're sleeping with them or not. But, since friendship is in the title, we'll say it's non romantic. So here it is: Alexi has felt love for wildfire women, the women that were defined earlier as living in the dirt (confined to earth, but in tune with it) AND on the moon (floating above Earth in the boundless SPACE) and being reckless and weightless, both spun positively here. so these wildfire women are what they've fallen in love with but they've also fallen in love with burning things down. Look at the strikethroughs, the removal and starting over, and you can see that burning down in action. Here, Alexi moves on and seems to be done reworking the title. The strikethroughs don't return, but there is one more repetition.
"I have fallen in love mostly with burning things down / and I still like the smell of bonfire in my hair / still like that my hair looks like fire / still like waking up with singed roots / but I have tried to write this poem a thousand times / mostly about forest fires / and it wasn’t working"
So here's Fire again; it's been in nearly every line, but this one is kind of repeated twice nearly exactly the same. To fall in love with burning things down is to fall in love with the destructive side of fire, but to use that destruction to start over. Look at the images after burning things down: the smell of bonfire in my hair, my hair looks like fire, waking up with singed roots (oh man that forest fire/singed roots/fire hair/hair roots word play is just top notch): there's an after the fire feel here. Using "still" means the event is in the past but the transformative power of fire lingers and changes the present. After all this, Alexi goes back to the beginning and says "With all this fire talk, I tried to make this poem about forest fires and it doesn't work." They're giving us the history of the poem as it unfolds and saying, "This is what I wanted but I didn't get it." Let's see what we do get instead.
The next line makes this nice change. The previous method of the poem wasn't working. What to do? Well, start with the obvious. "so today the tree isn't on fire." This goes to establish more of the *point* of the poem. There isn't any fire today, it's not the destructive force, even though Alexi says they likes what fire does to them (singed roots, bonfire hair) today is not a day for fire. And since the trees aren't on fire, neither are the women, again calling on the image of women being burned for various HUGE FINGER AIR QUOTES "crimes." So today, there's no fire. So there's a freedom in this, we can talk about anything, since there's no fire.
"today the women are a tree/ because we are a tree"
So here we move away from fire, something that destroys trees, to being trees. And Alexi says that this tree and the one next to it grow in tandem. This is the friendship they were referring to. And even thought they're not related ("we never shared a womb or a bedroom") there is still a blood connection. Alexi explains this blood connection by using the Night Witches.
Y'all are gonna want to follow that link. And read it. The Night Witches, or Nachthexen as the Germans called them, were an amazing group of Russian female pilots given barebones equipment. With these meager materials, they became one of the most fearsome groups of fighters in Russia's fight against the invading NAZI army. Alexi's allusion here assumes the reader knows, but they use this time to expand on the idea of what the Night Witches did.
This section reads a bit like explanation, but there's still some important poetry and imagery happening here.
"see / in world war ii / they gave some girls what they always do / popsicle sticks and tissue and they said / make something if you want I guess we don’t really care anymore everybody is dying / so they made planes / embroidered them with flowers / and took to flying / 800 times a piece
and they did a lot of extraordinary things / but the main point is that the wings were / so flimsy and shitty they had to get so close to the Nazis / that they couldn’t speak /
so all the men heard was a “woosh” / like that of a broomstick / before the whole world was sick with smoke and justice / reeling"
The first stanza in this section talks about the role women were often relegated to, not just in war, but in general. "Here's some materials, do whatever." the popsicle sticks and tissue allude to the wartime efforts of many women making bandages for the red cross, but also to the materials the planes were made out of. They didn't give these women good planes. They were plywood with canvas stretched over them. Basically barely modified model planes. They weren't given any tech: no radar, no radio, nothing. This had hidden advantages: they were almost invisible to other tech. The only thing you would hear is the "Woosh" as they flew near and lit you up with, throughout the war, 23,000 tons of bombs. That woosh was described as the sweep of a broom, thus Night Witches.
Now, to be honest, you already know that Night Witch just sounds badass. And I agree. But historically, as you also know, witch is not the best thing to be called as a woman. And here's the tie back to fire and wildfire women, Witches were burned at the stake. Burned often for being smart, for being outspoken, or for leading the French army to victory. So the germans invoked this idea of othering the women, making them something evil and thus trying to remove their humanity. Alexi denies them that chance and turns it into what it always has been, a badass display of what it means to be strong when the whole world writes you off as weak, something that has been happening to women throughout world history.
"of those who hold their tongues only in proximity of lighting the night / with bombs in the shadow of daffodils stitched on to canvas" in particular does an excellent job of juxtaposition and irony. Alexi says there's only one reason to hold your tongue when you're a night witch: to light up the night. In all other occasions you are speaking up and out. And the daffodil, which symbolizes new beginnings and rebirth shadowing the bombs, agents of destruction and fire...
Oh.
OoooooOOOOOOHHHHH.
Do you see now? Fire is back. The destruction of bombs and fire are OVERSHADOWED by the flowers stitched into the canvas on their planes. These women were fierce and fearless, yet never lost those "feminine" traits. The flower stitched on canvas, stitching being a traditionally feminine hobby, and the flower often used to symbolize women in, like, a million ways is more important than the bomb itself. The bomb is a method, but the flower is the woman. So here we see that the power of fire in this poem has not been destructive, but reformative. The fire burns and can cause pain (and today the forest is not on fire) but even when it is, afterwards, the rebirth of the daffodil comes through and there is life after burning.
There's a strength in these women, odds against them, the Russian army barely giving them the supplies and materials to be successful, and these women doing it anyway. As women have been asked to do for millennia. So Alexi invokes them to discuss... well, we still haven't hit that quite yet.
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