Serviceable Clothes for Life in the Open by Laura Woltag (speCt!, 2022)

A poet’s first book is worth celebrating, more so when they’re mid-career. I can only speculate about the development of Serviceable Clothes for Life in the Open, but Laura Woltag makes a case for a poet taking their time. The poems are witty and tender, mournful and whimsical. They feel vibrantly unique while harmonizing well with my library. Namechecked influences include Diane di Prima, Ovid, Edmund Spencer, Anna Akhmatova, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Carrie Hunter, Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger.

I associate Woltag with Bernadette Mayer’s sexy, sensitive, and sweetly waggish lyrics. “Trust in Everyday,” the title of the first poem directs us, though I wish I shared Woltag’s unique perspective on the everyday, an eye like Mayer’s that elevates the so-called mundane through writing that makes me hesitate to call anything mundane. Replenishing my sensitivities, the poems are often occasional, topical, spanning not just the ordinary, but also literary community, family, ecology, American injustice, queer romance, animals upon animals.

Regarding the book’s concerns around climate change, statements like “I am a walking popsicle”—not “just like” or “similar to” or “becoming” but am—lose their outlandishness, become weighty, showing me my fragility, how I’m continually exposed to the elements. “I’m melting here,” I often gripe on vacation. Blazing beneath the Carnegie Hall spotlights, Judy Garland, with the punchiness of a great rhetorician or vaudevillian, said, “Ladies perspire; I sweat.” (That’s probably the clearest semicolon in audio recording history.) I recall those suburban Houston summers when the pavement was brightly splattered by melting popsicles not yet discovered by dog or armadillo, like a classmate’s diorama of some chemical plant’s explosion. We were surrounded by refineries.

Woltag’s poems align fecundity with futurity, eliding them into the Earth’s generative potential, a resilience that combats its destructive occupants. While the book is “dedicated to other species,” “the world is an endless French fry / for the resting gull.” There’s superabundance for many. Gulls work little for their dinner, but it’s not nutritious. We’re “propelled by fat,” whether we’re elephant seals or poachers. It’s a disconcerting commonality to alight upon. The Emerald Tablet notes, “As above, so below,” for Woltag to reply, “everything up here cooked as everything down there cooked.” A galaxy fried hard.

Invoking much, from barnacles to seals to horses to maples, Woltag notes, “When we attempt to collaborate with animals in the open space of composition, we enter the possibility of translating instinct.” Woltag identifies with the flowers they cut, storing death, addresses lover and mineral, alternates between the domestic and encroaching fascism or some scenario of America in collapse.

“What happens after hope?” Self-invention is an option: “You need to make the being you’ll become.” Even a poem has the capacity to transform the Statue of Liberty into a vibrating dildo. (There’s no mention of whom the lady is meant to pleasure, though I volunteer myself.) Later, Woltag continues breaking distinctions like a geologist beginning to identify with their subject: “what can we hear in one another that is rock?”

Alongside these shifts from ocean depths to distant stars, Serviceable Clothes deftly leaps between degrees of abstraction and straightforward reportage. A poet requires time to learn how to handle multiple registers. The book’s incubation period must be longer than most I’ve read. It’s another argument for writers to take it slow. Like an outfit harmonizing colors and fabrics collected over time, an item from a friend, an accessory purchased at a dusty market abroad, another item from an Oakland clothing swap, Woltag’s sensuous, lush, agile vocabulary makes Clothes cohere: “Texture chips at lament. Pulls, shifts, returns. Remains / abandoned to motion.”

Dreamlike narrative and visionary encounters occupy the middle zone between abstraction and clarity, and here Woltag reminds me of Alice Notley: “Others had jumped, their falling slowed or distilled for me, so I could see the smooth slow falling time, the torso in time, moving through what I thought was resulting in death… Having gone through the fall, bodies swam in the square.” The flooded square evokes for me Venice, that sinking dreamworld that’s neither land nor water. And elsewhere is “…the dream I had earlier in the summer about each horse I knew and cared for at the barn where I worked in my teens appearing before me, one by one, to be seen, to say goodbye, perhaps, because I never said goodbye. The field open enough for the nature of their haunting to cease via just being seen, beheld.”

This is queer thinking, identifying with everything, struggling but shifting in form, “living outside the body” while making oneself at home in corporality and fulfilling its pleasures, gratifying its wants. This is what’s so great about being queer. I love it. I needed to be reminded I love it. It’s like a blessing is being explained to me. I am cutting the confetti for the day I make a wildlife sanctuary of my body. I want nature to occupy every opening along whatever form it finds me taking, or, as Woltag writes, “Loon in a panther’s den, butterflies marveling penguins, an owl cuddling with kittens.”

Does the Bay Area inspire such thoughts? I’ve been obsessed by these concerns since The Sissies (Futurepoem, 2016), my love letter to San Francisco and Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals like the dog-masked boys on Folsom Street. Endorsing the warning voiced by Woltag’s zoo constellations, the dog-boys sense we’re approaching closing time in the gardens of the west. They wag their tails (however they’re attached) and gnaw their leashes.