A Close Reading of Erin Coughlin Hollowell's "Maria and Oceanus"

Sure, you've read poems about the moon, but this one's different. It's full of lunar sea.

Over the next two weeks I’ll be engaging in close readings of poems by three Alaskan poets; in addition to Erin Coughlin Hollowell, I’ll feature poems by Peggy Shumaker and Annie Wenstrup, as they’ll be reading together for What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series on March 14 at 8:30pm Eastern. I hope you’ll join us, because it promises to be an unforgettable event. You can register quickly and easily at bit.ly/WTUIMar2024.

Maria and Oceanus

1. Mare Crisium

battery of wind   |   car sliding toward the
ditch   |   phantom in the left hemisphere   |   blood
down wrong   |   an erase   |   drumbeat   |  rip along
the seam   |   drumbeat   |    landslide and shatter   |   oh
drumbeat   |   how you became ashes when we
weren’t there   |   silence   |   silence   |  silence   |   silence   ||

2. Mare Nubium

Turn west toward granite chop and shut
your eyes. Think of what you desire. Spread
your arms to manifest four humors in the arc. Clouds

will form in the shape of a precipice woman stone
eagle. You will be torn. You will be called
a fumbler. Clouds will form in the shape of a

child wren hand boat. You will be lofted.
You will be called a savior. Clouds form.
You open your arms. Rain at last lets down.

3. Mare Tranquillitatis

All our stories sputtered
out. Waves
the only language
left. Empty wine bottle

nestled against
a driftwood bulwark.
Blue hour after
the sun, before dark,

and you kept
pushing your hair
out of your eyes
so you could watch

light forget
the mountains.

4. Mare Cognitum

Maybe afterward we know.
In this living there is no space

for recognition. I’d hang a ribbon
above the water. I’d be a book.

Finder’s fee to anyone who can
point out the route. Here. After.

5. Oceanus Procellarum

Once, electricity crawled through my arm and raised
a blister on each fingertip. Once, I choked on a stone.
Air pushing against barrier. Once, a car struck and I
kept traveling. Glass fragments in my hair and a broken

wing. I’ve never been good at this, saying which thump
bruised and which thump distorted. I wanted with
the whole structure I built as my being. Pulled myself
out of a life and into another. Low pressure rolling in

along my spine and settling. I want to open up now
and let it all out. Go ahead, make up a story of how
I was cold and unapproachable. Most shining when
closest but still bringing out the wind, bringing out the storm.

[Published by the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day on November 12, 2021]

Most poems I’ve read that invoke the moon do so as an ornament of the night sky, a dimmer counterpart to the sun, or a quasi-mystical or romantic presence that functions as a witness to whatever is happening under its oft-personified gaze. It has become such a cliche that I know poets who tell their students to leave it alone. (I don’t think this is bad advice, frankly.)

I don’t know if Erin was ever told this, but if she was, I’m glad she chose to ignore whatever admonishment was levied at her. Aside from the formal dexterity and the freshness of imagery, this poem is exceptional for turning the above-mentioned moonishness on its head. The moon in this poem isn’t a character or a scenic element in the backdrop of human dramatic action or a celestial spotlight; no, Erin’s too good a poet for that.

And despite the fact that the sections of this poem bear the names of regions on the moon - the so-called lunar seas - this is also not a poem in which the moon is the literal setting. I’ve read it multiple times now and have not registered a single spacesuit or lunar lander or any other accoutrements of space-age exploration.

Instead, what Erin has very smartly done is to depart from these place names in the associative and relational mode of the poet.

The first section, Mare Crisium (“Sea of Crisis”) is built from fragments divided by vertical bars, with a double vertical bar at the conclusion of the section. The fragments are divided by the bars, but they’re laced together by sonic elements of assonance and consonance and repetition, constructing a cognitive web that supports both a literal and figurative reading of this section, in which one may understand both the impressionistic description of a car accident and the physical and emotional aftereffects of the loss of a loved one through that accident.

In the second section, Mare Nubium (“Sea of Clouds”), we’re offered less fragmentary syntax and what feels like a more direct address; where Mare Crisium felt descriptive, this section feels prescriptive, or at least imperative, in a way that to me erodes the distance between speaker and spoken-to. I find this to be a potent rhetorical gesture, especially following a first section that is more oblique.

The third section, Mare Tranquillitatis (“Sea of Tranquility,” perhaps the most well-known of the lunar seas thanks to the Apollo space program) shifts again, this time feeling quieter (appropriately enough), but also smaller, and like the intimacy between speaker and spoken-to has eroded. “All our stories sputtered / out. Waves / the only language / left.” All of the images in this stanza either explicitly or implicitly gesture towards emptiness, and none of them quite come to any resolution: “Blue hour after / the sun, before dark,” for instance, locates us in an interstitial space, and the closing image of the spoken-to watching “light forget / the mountains.” manages somehow to be both highly abstract (how can light forget anything?) and also quite concrete (we all can envision light fading on mountains, right?) Given the way it’s framed, it becomes an evocative moment in which we understand gradually that the spoken-to is focused on the landscape, and the speaker is focused on the spoken-to. It wasn’t until I’d read the poem several times that I recognized the tenderness present in the speaker’s observations, and the manner in which that tenderness is not returned.

Section four, “Mare Cognitum” (“The Known Sea”), is the shortest section of the poem, and in this section I’m fascinated by the tension between the form and the content of the poem. The first line — “Maybe afterward we know.” — reads to me like it’s tearing itself apart. The equivocal nature of the first word (when has maybe ever signaled sureness?) is at odds with the tone of the line, which I read as something like surrender, or perhaps more precisely as the relinquishment of a claim to that which is now divided into “afterward” and whatever came before.

I think that surrender or relinquishment is key to understanding the tone in the rest of this section; it opens the poem up to possibilities that would be unthinkable (or at least un-thought of) if the speaker and the spoken-to were still linked, still working to maintain a link. Instead, “[i]n this living” — and note that it’s not “in this life,” which would suggest something communal, something shared between people — the speaker is freed from the need for recognition, and in that freedom is able to choose how they move through “this living.” In keeping with the pattern established in the earlier sections, this one, too, ends on a somewhat abstract image, but it’s one that also slips in as a multilayered reference. Read literally it circles back to the first line’s “afterward,” but in our Englsh-speaking world, freighted with thousands of years of Christian theological interpretations, we’re all familiar with “the hereafter” as a term used to refer to what comes after death. I daresay most people reading this poem would immediately understand those two single-word sentences as a reinforcement of the finality of the split. It’s also a bit of gallows humor; the sort of rueful laugh that can only come after one has accepted one’s fate. (It also brings to mind for me a bit from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In; I don’t think Erin had this in mind when she was writing, but for me it adds another layer.)

The final section of the poem, “Oceanus Procellarum” (“Ocean of Storms”) shifts again in both form and content, becoming both more narrative and more focused on the speaker as an individual, as an “I.” The departure from the naming convention of the earlier sections reflects these changes; Oceanus Procellarum is the only “ocean” on the moon, having been dubbed that due to its sheer vastness. That matches this section’s expansiveness; the lines here are less compressed, less breathless than the earlier sections. (And in case I haven’t said this to you before, I strongly recommend reading poems aloud and paying attention to what’s going on with your breath while you do so - or listening to poets read aloud and paying attention to their breathing. One way to think about poetry is as shaped breath. I should probably devote a future Substack to that…)

Back to the poem at hand, though, and to this final section, which I read as commenting on and potentially clarifying the arc of some earlier sections. Our speaker recounts a litany of bodily harm that has been visited upon them, including a car accident related in more concrete images than the impressionistic initial section. I think we can also read the lines “I wanted with / the whole structure I built as my being. Pulled myself / out of a life and into another.” as description of the initial flush of romantic connection, though “Low pressure rolling in // along my spine and settling.” is not the kind of weather report I would want for a romance, and the subsequent lines strongly suggest to me that the speaker has fully accepted this relationship’s end. Indeed, I read the line “Go ahead, make up a story of how / I was cold and unapproachable.” as a kiss-off (or, if you prefer, the high hat), and the final image of this poem is (unlike the earlier sections) definitive, concrete, and wild: “Most shining when / closest but still bringing out the wind, bringing out the storm.”

The cumulative effect of this poem is remarkable, taking as departure points the names (which are already figurative and poetic) of features on the lunar landscape and mapping the incidents and accidents of the speaker’s life to them. There are thematic elements that track throughout the poem’s five sections, effectively unifying the speaker’s voice and allowing us to know it more as the poem progresses through the emotional journey the speaker undertakes. And though it may be tempting to try to align the five sections of this poem with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, I think the speaker’s path here is distinct and deeply personal. I think grief is always distinct and deeply personal, in fact, and behaves as both emotion and process in the same way that light behaves as both particle and wave. (I will definitely be touching on that in a future essay.) So much of this poem’s power lies in how it traces the way the speaker’s mind moves through the emotion and process of grief, in the honesty on display as we the readers witness the struggle. It’s gorgeous liberation and re-establishment of the self through harrowing work. I hope you’ll come hear Erin read more of her poems with Peggy Shumaker and Annie Wenstrup on March 14.

And, as always, thank you for reading.