There is geography in the title of Lindsay Turner’s latest book of poems, The Upstate (University of Chicago Press, 2023). But what kind? Except for New York (which always seems to be the center of the world), the adjective “upstate” doesn’t get much use. Some readers might recognize a reference to upstate South Carolina, also known as the “upcountry,” where part of the book was written (56). The substantive “the upstate,” however, suggests a more generic type of geographic zone. Turner moves from a particular region to a broader question of naming and defining the “upstate”—which is why the epigraph of the book, from the late poet C. D. Wright, rings so true: “it wasn’t regional it was systemic.” How does a book named after a defined place take us beyond the regional? And what kind of “system” can a book of poetry provide?
In the first poem, “Planning,” Turner describes a garden that “wasn’t planned for getting lost in but that’s what people did there” (3). This line recalls the metaphor of the poetry book as florilège, a carefully curated assemblage of selected beauties: although gardens and books have their own organization and principles, perhaps we are meant to get lost in The Upstate. As Turner takes us from Tennessee (11) to “the capitals” (45), we understand that “the upstate” is not meant to comfort us with familiar regions and categories. In fact, in the three poems bearing the title “The Upstate,” which appear in the book’s first section, disorientation is central to the text’s internal logic. The saturation of spatial indicators, prepositions, and locators challenges the reader’s capacity for projection and envisioning, as if the texture of the world itself were being rewoven. The second “upstate” poem begins as such:
this is now
the dark underbelly
dogfights in the mountain county where they found the dog beside the road
the edges turning yellow, strain in the house and over it (6)
Quickly, the “up” of upstate turns into “under”: if you thought this was going to be about a landscape, you were mistaken. This is an exploration of darker, hidden perspectives—rife with dogfights and empty lots. In the following two lines, multiple spatial indicators clash: the dog is “in” but “beside”; the strain is “in” and “over.” Though the avalanche of spatial and visual markers might encourage you to try, this is not a book where you find your bearings. You stand atop a valley, you’re looking for information, but Turner will not tell you where or how to look. Things are not what they seem, and “truth is what everything is when you squint” (10). The above poem clearly announces that the poet’s upstate is not a world of Hummers and New Yorkers on vacation. Instead, the “dark underbelly” sounds akin to many regions that America has long used as its backwaters, from the textile mills of upcountry South Carolina to the ravaged ecologies of Louisiana (6). There are heat waves and fires in this book, as well as varying instances of devastated landscapes. Is the concept of the upstate, then, meant to reunify these places, to turn them into a “system” (to return to the epigraph), albeit one of discarded underbellies?
Yet underbellies, for Turner, seldom stay hidden for long. Indeed, the image and concept of the sky (itself a kind of underbelly, depending on how you look at it) is one of the unifying factors of The Upstate. In “Song of Accumulation,” as in many other poems in the collection, we look at places that have been “so long since out under the sky” (16). Here Turner takes the sky in and pays critical attention to such exposed landscapes. The short poem “Superstition,” meanwhile, turns red skies into a system that transcends time and space: “red sky whenever / whatever the weather / red sky at all times / will all the rhymes fail” (29). Such poems withdraw from expected contemplations of dusk, hinting at a more sinister atmosphere, drawing us closer to a bloodied world and to the burning forests of our age: Canada and Hawai’i, and the many to come.
Skies are a defining element of The Upstate’s systemic ambitions, as aesthetic moments that are immediately bound to ominous political implications—most acutely, the mutually reinforcing ravages of climate change and capitalism. In such moments, the book takes a deep, disillusioned look at American peripheries, but at the same time it proposes ways to live in them, staying with their devastation. The Upstate can be read as a method: it asks us to train our perception and question our conceptual categories. Early in the book, Turner asks: “to whom does the texture of a landscape matter” (12)—and this is an invitation. In the “Tennessee Quatrains,” Turner repeatedly asks “what kind of” questions (“what kind of thing’s hiding under this rock,” 12; “what kind of mud understructures the house,” 13), and frames them in relation to specific figures of perception and encounter. The desire to uncover has a specific purpose in the systemic endeavor of The Upstate. What kind of knowledge, for instance, is gathered by “unearthing” (12) as opposed to “squint[ing]” (10)? Squinting is an effort of the eyes and facial muscles which does not improve your vision but provides a different worldview (at the cost of aperture) without modifying the world itself. Unearthing, which is what “the men” who “put their hands everywhere” are doing in one poem (12), represents a power of manipulation that discovers a system by disrupting it: men are excavating the world, altering it in a way that produces meaning. Instead, in The Upstate, Turner experiments with non-transformative relationships to places and landscapes. While unearthing requires a whole infrastructure of industrious labor (which is disappearing from these deindustrialized landscapes), squinting is a minor and intimate gesture that ceaselessly shifts how we orient ourselves within the world.
As it progresses, The Upstate becomes a guide, a handbook on squinting—a way to relate to so many American landscapes without reproducing the geographies of capital that dismissed them as backwaters. In this regard, “Song of Accumulation” is one of the most striking pieces in the book. We find another tenet: “I should pay more attention to what’s strange” (16). What is strange in this poem is the irreducible tension between quantities and densities. We have “office[s]” and a field, whose purposes are unclear (16). In these spaces, there is “less” and more, shrinking and growing at the same time. The image of “stubble in the field” plays a central role (16). Stubble is the perfect example of something that doesn’t fully accomplish its own essence: it is hair, or grass, but not entirely. It’s less than something, more than nothing—and it can go easily unnoticed, even though the field would not exist without grass. Accumulation, whether of plant life or of capital, happens when things grow to become themselves, thus earning their denomination. This process in Turner’s book stands for the upstate itself: more than nothing, but not enough to be noticed (without squinting). It also stands for the way Turner writes, and how she urges us to read: with an attention to minimal details and small jumps between locations and points of view. Poems like this one pick up on this betweenness, this state of revertible accumulation.
Late in the book, in a poem aptly titled “The Capitals,” Turner delves still further into the geographic and political exclusions linked to the upstate. “It is a garden whose real lives are distanced / In function of your money,” she writes (46). Not everyone gets to enjoy the riches of a pink sky with “white roses” in the garden, which hides the “rubbled” lives of those who are exiled from capital(s) (47). A few commodities, such as pillows and champagne, appear in various poems as markers of privilege under warm skies. But just like smoke clouds, this “toxic money” moves between capitals, drawing a clear yet impalpable line between these territories and the scene of the upstate. “In the capitals one day will your money will fall silent,” Turner predicts (47). The careless luxury of bathing under warm skies will eventually wane. This doomed vanity of the capitals is woven with the old metaphor of the rose as we watch “your money rising and the roses”—two riches meant to wilt (47). As one of the last poems of the book, “The Capitals” brings closure to the systemic ambitions of Turner’s project: capital and capitals act as a machine that feeds on “rubbled lives” and on the disregard for the backcountry that fuels it—the exact lives and landscapes The Upstate squints at. In a way that reminds us of the “Song of Accumulation,” Turner fleshes out a series of contradictions and circularities of capital: “your money has no border so it makes one where it goes”; “it is a garden it is a cycle of toxic violence it grows” (45–46). Capitalism forces us into an unending feedback loop—waiting for “money [to] fall silent”—and “The Capitals” weaves this ever-expanding system of accumulation and exclusion into verses that repeat and echo throughout the poem.
Though “The Capitals” may hold the clearest political claims of The Upstate, the book contains many more. However, the majority of political perspectives in Turner’s work comes from individual, minor acts of perception—the careful, painstaking work of squinting, noticing, acknowledging. From her dense use of adverbs and locators in poems like “The Upstate” to repetition and loops in “The Capitals,” Turner makes it clear that nothing is evident about perception and orientation: this is a continuation of an aesthetics she named, in her previous book Songs & Ballads, “visual difficulty.”[1] She does not attempt to restore objects and landscapes to a readily usable and visible coherence, but to relay their difficult textures and the way they disorient us. In this regard, Turner writes in the vicinity and heritage of Language poetry—closest to Fred Wah, who is deeply rooted in the difficulties of observing and exploring a landscape: “What I thought would be there is not / I’m sorry to say,” he acknowledges in his poem “They are Burning.”[2] Brian Kim Stefans writes that Wah’s poems place the “self amidst the flux of nature as much as the lyric amidst language.”[3] In Turner’s work, too, the “flux of nature” in late-stage capital is intertwined with the subject’s search for language. This combination is what triggers the practice of disoriented squinting that undergirds The Upstate. Turner never takes us from A to B, but instead echoes Stefans’s image of nature as a “flux.” Her disorientations challenge us to keep a sharp perspective on what surrounds us, in reading and living: they are invitations to explore for ourselves “what might outlast” (7).
Notes:
[1] Lindsay Turner, Songs & Ballads (Brooklyn: Prelude Books, 2018), 29.
[2] Fred Wah, Loki is Buried at Smoky Creek: Selected Poems (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1980), 39.
[3] Brian Kim Stefans, “Remote Parsee: A Grammar of Alternative Asian North American Poetry,” in Before Starting Over: Selected Writings and Interviews 1994–2005 (Cambridge, UK: Salt, 2006), 71–107, 92.