In No One’s Land

Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Selected for the 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by D.A. Powell

An author's statement

Perhaps because I am a beginner, a student, a perpetual and oft-failed seeker of humility and quandary, I find it difficult to discuss In No One’s Land or my work in general in any way that isn’t prefaced with: “I might have had a nebulous feeling about something, I don’t know what—I remember it was small and fleeting—at one time or another, but that, my friend, I cannot say with any certainty.” I can talk a little about the birth of the book, whence it came, the months surrounding its genesis, and maybe it will, in all of its off-handedness and fear of commitment, offer a little perspective on the actual work.

To say there was a dearth of poetry in my adolescent landscape would be an understatement. I lived with a quirky, loving family as much as I lived with a pretext of ill-begotten suburban platitudes, and what I knew of poetry I knew through my own lens of individuation. Early attempts at writing were anonymous letters relegated to paramours through inter-campus mail. They were thrilling to compose, and left me feeling fully independent of their subject—desire, and the body, worship and godliness, and I will say that when I began writing poetry in earnest, about 5 years ago, the thrill of that independence returned.

When I began In No One’s Land, I was immersed in the writing of Edith Sodergran, Henrik Nordbrandt, Tomas Transtromer—and lesser known 19th and early 20th century Finnish-Swedish poets. The title In No One’s Land owes a debt to Bertel Gripenberg, who penned the line i intet land, hos ingen vill jag stanna, which translates to In no one’s land, with no one I will stay. I was completely undone by this line, to the point of having it tattooed on my shoulder—it became for me a trajectory of sorts, a way for me to make an angle out of my work, to create it, to also abandon it—to love other things I helped to create, my home, my children—it allowed me to eat the food and drink the wine—it taught me to lie appropriately—it helped me envision the future and partake in the ruin—it made me a better kisser—it lent me a couple of dollars when I needed a cup of coffee—anyway, it created a presence, headlong into the book.

David McDuff in his book Ice Around Our Lips described other work of Gripenberg’s era as “the elaboration of an austerely beautiful nature poetry in which man is portrayed as a lonely, alien guest awaiting reabsorption into a cosmic night.” Although I would never embolden my own verse in such a lofty and lovely description, I cannot help but feel that there is some relationship there—if only because I clutched at it so unbecomingly—to create with words that threshold, that wait, that laborious and lonely wait one waits until the very last finger releases the side of the cliff, and one is free, completely and finally free of the cliff.

Admittedly I am uncomfortable with worship in all of its various incarnations yet I struggle with keeping desire at bay, as desire feels like a less informed version of worship. Because I am a human being and an unenlightened human being at that, I cannot will desire away, but it felt to me during the birthing of the book that entering into creation, a la poem-making, well, it just felt like creating the object was an act of individuating from the object, whereas worshipping or desiring an object, at least where I am concerned, subjugates. It has almost totally perverted me.

I hope this doesn’t cause readers to view In No One’s Land as another first book eager to weigh-in as evidence of ‘the human experience’, but here I am again, disguising desire as its prudent sister hope, what a headache! If you felt so inclined, you could read the book as a retrospective love-letter. You are beautiful, and I don’t need you. That should take some pressure off us both.