There's something we call imagination and the thing is, it's not even a thing. Imagination, in actuality, is always closer to a process, rather than a discrete event.
But in the poems featured here by Laura Ohlmann (linked below), this kind of thinking is displaced for more immediate, earthy concerns, the sort that easily provoke the imagination regardless of its nature—making event soon transform into eventually. This is apparent in “Lightning Wildfires,” which begins:
Driving through San Francisco,
the sun has a red shroud around
its shoulders. The candelabra
aloe stands on the street corner,
illuminated by pinwheels of grey light.
In this poem, the world is unstable and without clear meaning, yet worth focusing on and preserving. That the aloe looks like a candelabra, that this plant with cooling properties seems to be held upright just to be set aflame, is striking in its echoing paradox. That the aloe is also “illuminated by pinwheels of grey light” is all the more striking as we soon discover, in the following lines, that there is smoke on the streets. This moment of seeing smoke first as pinwheels, obscuring as they may be, frames the scene as almost entertaining, despite the dizzying, destructive fire. Imagination has morphed the world, asking: would you mind if this was messier than you tell yourself it is?
Laura’s poems are filled with the tension between the imagination’s often frustrating ability to scatter or focus the mind, depending on circumstance. Juxtapositions highlight this tension with lines like “When I wash the matter from her back and my hand brushes her breast beneath the sudsy water, we are like two animals in the womb” or these, from another poem: “We sleep under the backyard orchard in Seattle— / apples fall to the roof like a mallet against a gong. Back home, Dad is spinning the chamber of his revolver / from bed.” These kind of lines are written with the knowledge that we must accept the world as it seems if we hope to survive altering it through the fickle imagination.
In getting to know Laura, it both makes sense that she lives in a converted Honda as she travels (pandemic appropriately) with her partner and dog and also that she says she tries to “tell secrets” in her writing. Her poems feature the messy panoramas of a restless, searching mind beset by the eventual need for (en)closures. The vulnerability in her poems leaps out, but what keeps me reading is the skill with which she imaginatively complicates what secrets actually are. Once you've told or heard a secret, you often find later that imagination was at work as your sense of truth about something has (inevitably, if minimally) altered; but if you're a poet with enough craft, you can actually create secrets—not just uncover them.
When I conceived of this newsletter, I wanted to feature poets that were, for whatever reason, living outside the realm of the culturally elite. I didn't want to promote already well-known, open secrets. I didn't want to promote writers whose money and / or social capital helps their name resonate the way a brand like Apple does, where you trust there's a high level of quality, but are also sure many resources are needed to obtain this resonance.
Ultimately, I feel that writers too drawn in by brand-thinking often imprison their imagination through what Laura generously calls “schmoozing” in their engagement with the literary world. The conferences, the correct retweets, the dinners, the cynical friendships made to (eventually) gain an opportunity—it's like rising in the complex ranks of a giant company. And sure, I am writing this introduction with an iPhone, and you may be reading on one—but these facts only further the need for more important questions. How much must we corporatize ourselves? Do we want our secrets corporatized, making our deepest selves like marketing copy (or, maybe worse, memes), and is this somewhat inevitable? (Am I doing this via my newsletter)?
Thankfully, Laura Ohlmann seems too attentive to her experience for it to be reduced to lifestyle ads. The things she tells me she loves about her peripatetic life—”fresh mountain air in the morning, the chafed skin from being too cold, the plastic melting in my car from the desert heat, the woodpecker hopping from tree to tree”—certainly don't fit in ads as they are, the stark realism they share being unprofitable on its own. Seeing these everyday things anew every day requires a free imagination to balance (rather than capitalize on) their influence over a life. Poems like those included here are a place to seek the peace of this balance, especially for less socioeconomically privileged readers, those who can’t constantly distract themselves from the deep indifference physical reality casts against the imagination. Laura’s poems know this indifference well—they carve secrets out of the always shapeless air.
“Wellspring” and “Dad's Bedroom”
Laura Ohlmann is a Florida poet and an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida. Her work has appeared in The Lindenwood Review, The Maine Review, GASHER, West Trade Review, South Florida Poetry Journal and others. She enjoys sleeping in her converted Honda Element and biking up mountains with her partner and dog.