A Close Reading of MJ's Poem "Praying Mantis"
In which your Gen X writer tries (and probably fails) to make it through a close reading of a poem about a mantis without a Zorak reference.
First and foremost: Congratulations to Michal ‘MJ’ Jones for winning the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry with their book Hood Vacations!
MJ will be reading with Quintin Collins for What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series on June 18 at 8:30pm Eastern, so I hope you’ll come celebrate this well-deserved award with us! You can register at bit.ly/WTUIJun2024,
As is my habit around here, I’d like to whet your appetite for MJ’s work by offering a close reading of their poem “Praying Mantis,” which appeared in Poetry Daily in September of 2023 and is collected in Hood Vacations:
Praying Mantis At twilight amidst fireflies I find him in garden cabbages, lift him gently into an open-faced K-Swiss box. Undisturbed. I watch him stand still in deceptive devotion. Spike-lined limbs fold to an unruly God, how any preacher's son enchants. I'm entranced, seduced almost. Clocks slow as his movements glacier before heat came. Transfixed til lightning bugs fade their sleep. Mama comes over to collect me indoors, stares at my staring, and cautions: be careful, those can be dangerous.
There’s a curious thing about the pastoral tradition in English-language poetry. For a lot of people who don’t read a lot of poetry — people for whom poetry was just another thing to endure in school, the way algebra and gym class were for me — it seems that poems are expected to be about nature and flowers and forests and the like.
And it’s true that a great many poems do make use of the natural world as their subject matter, including “Praying Mantis,” which I would place in the pastoral tradition; it begins, after all, with the invocation of twilight and fireflies and a praying mantis found in “garden cabbages.” I was 42 years old before I lived in a place that could sustain fireflies; the Boston suburb where I spent the first 18 years of my life didn’t ever seem to have them (too many pesticides, I’d guess), and the urban locales where I spent my 20s and 30s (including Providence, RI, and Somerville, MA) didn’t have enough wild space for such things to flourish. Where I live now, in the Western part of Massachusetts, there are fireflies aplenty, and though it may be my own association and gloss on this poem, I have a strong sense that the fireflies here represent a sort of wildness, a stepping-out of the expected world. The praying mantis does, too, though in that case it’s a wildness that the speaker wants to hold on to, at least for a while, to the point where they “lift him gently into an open-faced K-Swiss box.” I love the specificity of this naming of the brand; it gives us some insight into the speaker, letting us know that they keep shoeboxes around and that this poem might be written in the present tense, but it may not be happening in the present, as K-Swiss seems to have peaked in the ‘90s in terms of popularity. (It’s entirely possible I’m wrong about this, by the way; I don’t generally stray too far from the Doc Martens realm in terms of footwear, so if you know more than I do about this, sound off in the comments.)
Once secured in the box, the mantis becomes a focal point for the speaker’s observation and contemplation; we as readers are treated to exquisite detail and incredible control of the language and lines in which that detail unfolds. For instance, “Undisturbed, I watch him stand / still in deceptive devotion.” has a remarkable amount going on in the course of 9 words spread across two lines. “Undisturbed,” for example; does it refer to the speaker or to the mantis? Presumably the mantis might be disturbed by being taken from among the cabbages and being placed in an artificial container, but it could also be a reflection on the state of mind of the speaker themself; perhaps we’re to recognize that neither mantis nor speaker are disturbed by each other’s presence — that even under these artificial conditions, both of them are part of the natural order. I’m leaning towards the understanding that this description encompasses both speaker and mantis, and I’m doing so because of the razor-sharp brilliance of the break in and enjambment of this line:
”I watch him stand / still in deceptive devotion.”
I can (and do) read this in two ways: The speaker watches the mantis not moving but poised in the classic mantis predatory posture in which their arms are folded as if in prayer while they wait for prey to come along. But also, the speaker watches the mantis stand while the speaker themself continues to enact a devotion that they may not feel or see as true. Is this pastoral poem also a poem in which there’s a crisis of faith that isn’t soothed by time in nature?
I mentioned above that there’s something curious about the English-language pastoral tradition. It’s possible you’ve already guessed what it is; at the very least, I don’t expect you to be surprised now when I mention it:
For centuries, the pastoral tradition in English was associated with white writers. Think about Wordsworth’s famous “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798”, or Andrew Marvell’s “Damon the Mower”, or Robert Frost’s “Design,” or scores of other poems that have been enshrined in anthologies and lesson plans through the years. This despite the fact that writers of color have made use of the same pastoral elements in poems for centuries as well, though it feels to me like readers struggle still to recognize that, despite poems and anthologies by Camille Dungy, Ross Gay, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Hanif Abdurraqib, Nathan McClain, and so many others.
I think MJ’s work in “Praying Mantis” joins the poets named above and serves as a powerful corrective to that lack of recognition; the speaker in this poem brings a naturalist’s keen eye to the “Spike-lined / limbs” that are eye-catching (almost) to the point of seduction, leading the speaker into a supernatural-seeming trancelike state where “Clocks / slow as his movements / glacier before heat came.” This tangle of syntax is thrilling; is “slow” a verb or an adjective? Is “glacier” a noun or a verb? We’re carried along on the energy and tension of this helical language, told the speaker is “Transfixed til / lightning bugs fade / their sleep.” The interruption that ends the trance comes from Mama, who “comes over / to collect me indoors, stares at my / staring, and cautions: / be careful, those can be dangerous.” And given the mesmerized state in which the speaker stares until interrupted, it does seem like there’s some menace inherent in the mantis, even though the speaker was the captor and the mantis the captive. It has not escaped my notice that some of that menace also takes the form of references to “an / unruly God” and the manner in which “any / preacher's son enchants” — these elements in a poem written by a queer poet can’t be read without recognizing the tension between Christianity and queerness, a question that has been unresolved since the codification of Christianity by Paul of Tarsus.
Like a mantis in a K-Swiss box, this poem can be viewed from many, many angles; each one will introduce a new facet into your understanding of what it’s about. It’s a wild thing, perfectly evolved, and beautiful to behold.
Come get more of that beauty on Tuesday, June 18 at 8:30pm. Register here: bit.ly/WTUIJun2024
Zorak and I thank you for reading. (Damn it. I almost made it through.)
This poem is a wicked delight of compression. At the outset, we see it’s a family that grows its own cabbages, yet the boy has already positioned himself somewhere far away, psychically. He’s very aware of the brand of sneakers he has.
That awareness of his difference gets us ready for him to notice the deception of the mantis, and his attraction to the deception, to the mantis’s apparently devoted but really rebellious stance before a power figure. A seductive transgression.
“…still in deceptive devotion.
Spike-lined
limbs fold to an
unruly God, how any
preacher's son enchants.”
This is quite a “wow” poem. Looking forward to the reading! Thanks for this enticing introduction.