F L O W E R   C A R T

Lisa Fishman

An author’s statement

 

The book opens with a letter, found in a thrift shop, written from a Milwaukee soil scientist to a librarian in 1916. The letter bears the faint imprint of a corn sample that wore through the paper and made holes in it. The corn had been examined by the soil scientist, who found that it “does not possess the characteristics of any one particular variety” ; he tells the librarian, “the sample submitted by you includes a distinct mixture of at least three different types of corn.”

Later in the book, a notebook appears, found in the same thrift shop, full of lists, sentences, repetitions and elisions that evoke a sort of Niedeckerian-Steinian, rural Midwestern grandmother during the Iran hostage crisis, disclosing in her “Herald Square” notebook a kind of Yellow Wallpaper world of her own and not her own.

Finally in the book, another book appears: Trees I Have Seen, published in 1901 for field notes and drawings. The handwritten descriptions and drawings of leaf shapes, bark textures and growth processes are fluid and precise, somehow (to me) enabling script to be experienced as description itself. If not for the anonymous handwriting and drawing in Trees I Have Seen, that “book” would consist mostly of blank pages.

There was never an intention or purpose or “project” in mind with the letter, notebook, and fieldbook I finally transcribed and/or materially reproduced after years of living with them and feeling in contact with them in ways not clear to myself. That feeling of contact is still not 100% articulable, and there remains no project in mind, even in retrospect. But I can try to understand why they became necessary to me, how they were functioning, what they have to do, for me, with writing or with the possibility of writing.

I live in a cash-crop farmtown of about 1,300 people, in a small farmhouse on a state highway in southern Wisconsin. Henry and I began transforming the land (about 10 acres not visible from the highway) from fallow pasture to orchards starting in May, 1999. At a small college 15 miles away, I was the only person writing and teaching poetry. There are rural places known for being socially progressive; Orfordville is not that. I understand now that for years I felt (perhaps extremely) isolated.

In that context, I was given those texts by people who found them. The language and sense of location and place in which the language was written (or typed or drawn), felt both familiar and strange, uncanny. Lacking interlocutors or maybe what’ s called community, I felt in tune with the random, unknown people who wrote/typed/drew those things on paper where I live, or near where I live. There was the pressing in by them and their own and pressing back against reality in the form of absolute fidelity to reality. In their various forms of being precise, I felt there was making—unsought, but palpable and new. Meanwhile, the traces of another place—California— also kept appearing in actual and notional ways for certain biographical and psychobiographical reasons, and the book ended up being finished there, on a trip when my eye was caught both by the lettering of the words F L O W E R C A R T on a flyer and by the texture of the street-vendor’ s cart on which it was taped. It—the sign and my attraction to it—seemed in dialogue with certain ambivalences and necessities about place and making throughout the work and so became the title.

Everything I was writing of “my own” over the years the book spans—it was finished in April 2007, before the writing of Current—was not written “in response to” others’ texts or found objects. They are things that were occurring in the same place and time: the reading and writing in specific circumstances. When I wrote the meditation on letters and listening and shapes and writing that became the “KabbaLoom” sequence, I started to sense more overtly that I felt deeply connected to the Herald Square notebook I’ d lived with for years, for instance, and that its anonymous writer of sentences and lists had taught me something or brought to the surface something important about words, sounds, sentences, meaning, desire to speak, sensation of disappearing (“—was missing”). So it started to feel as though the true thing would be to include it all.

The actual things and activities around me are part of that “all” —a hoophouse gets made, machines get moved by tornadoes, girls hide in lilac bushes, grapevines get tied to wires. There are things and bodies in relation to other things and bodies. Specificity is a stay against mortality, maybe—it’ s central to me and it’ s fleeting, and that doubleness (the exact/the physical, and the knowledge of its transitoriness) is probably here too.