Mapping "I Don't Want to Admit" by Emma Bolden

from Gettysburg Review, a poesy

Hello, friends.

I live in the camp that knows Emma Bolden never misses, so when she shared a recent poem in the last issue of Gettysburg Review (RIP), I knew I wanted to map it for Essay Atlas. And you might be saying, but this is for essays, well, the poem is an essay, and the essay is a poem. And listen, my below explanation of “I Don’t Want to Admit” does not hold a ton of logic (even to me) but I’m dusting off my mind and there’s energy here even if there isn’t a ton of sense-making. It’s a ramble gamble.

Here is the poesy, “I Don’t Want to Admit”

Here are the annotations on the page before I tried to remove all the little doors in the hallway of my brain (amidst the mold and fuzz of postpartum) to attempt an essay atlas cipher for this poesy. It looks chaotic because it is, and it will be.

Here is most of the map (there’s one more page). Please ignore pink squiggles by Petty.

I found myself reading this poesy over and over again when Emma posted it to Instagram. It was like being in a confession booth and not feeling the shadow on the other side of the screen. Confession, to me, feels embarrassing. I don’t know where to put my hands, I could, after, tell you every detail of the wood paneling with precision as if my body has disconnected from my mind (looking and articulating at once feels impossible to me, and yet Emma), and the air is always a tinge different inside the box than outside, it lacks neutrality. There’s a charge, but it’s sweaty.

This poesy is also clammy.

On first read, I became attached to the prefix un- in the first line, “unmarried, unchildrened.” There are so many words that Bolden could have used here, but she chose un-, saying what these women (like her speaker) are not, before telling us anything else. Prefix, (strangely, perhaps or perhaps by Bolden magic) can mean before / attached (which fits the idea of the line). It can mean before hand (which made my brain jump immediately into “hand in marriage”). It can mean “to place at the beginning”—and what does it mean to be told not this from the start of something? Not this. You are what you are not, actually. un- as the opposition of “to be?” An undoing before a doing. A without before with. And I love starting with this un- because it’s anticipatory. We’re waiting for something.

There’s an itch in this un- double of the first line related to the line from the friend, “once / always” which seems an oxymoron to un-. un- is not (not once, not always) and yet the starkness between un- and once/always feels like it has a lot of murkiness between. Someone might be once married, for example. In my notes I wrote, “is there such a thing as a slant oxymoron?” Emma Bolden would know, or she invented it.

I’m spending so much time here on these two lines because everything calls back to this, to what might at first seem contradictory, but is in fact AND in the form of ampersands. They’re used throughout the first half of the poesy—they end mid-poesy with the question wondered through Emily Dickinson on “universal feelings,” in fact the exact middle of the poesy is “universal feelings”—eight lines in and eight lines out. It moves from the ampersand sections (“in my” / I / “about my” / me) to lacking ampersand when we move toward the universal (“one feels” / “one watches”).

The poesy is not contradictions, it’s a list—too, as well, also, “all the ways,” “all the words,” in addition to, synonyms, nouns and verbs, more. (Which she told us in the first line, “like me”—women who are ALSO.

When I realized this (thank you ampersands!), I could move through the keenest of needles that is Emma Bolden’s eye stitch. Why I love her work so much is that it’s so particular, it’s got the most minuscule of machinery.

The slant rhyming, the alliteration, using the mother poet or “unmarried, unchildrened” Emily Dickinson (the inundation of the narrative misnomer that she was a “lonely spinster”), the metaphor of the clock: biological clock, “slivered second,” watch, watching, “regular as a clock,” the body / spirit separation which merges only in the line, “the kneelers push pain into your knees”—all the non-bodied words to represent the body (how it appears / is watched, the question of a self at all in relation to body / spirit.

&&&&& THEN, THEN, THEN, the inclusion of “Dare you see a Soul” with the line, “At the white heat” in the potion of soul / body / self questioning—the articulation of “solid at the center” next to “might have said, might have written” (is any of it solid other than the un- of the speaker), and the idea that handwriting is a revelation of change. The entrance of “temptation” (Genesis?) followed by “look at looking as a sin” vs. “most human part of nature” (is this an Eve redemption arc?—biological clock as punishment anyone? being watched as punishment? watching as punishment? VIEWING THE SELF—the very ability of it as punishment?).

At the point of the line, “Light to heat to ashes,” (callback to the Dickinson line), I am simply the bottom of a cigarette tray. Sprinkle whatever cinders into my brain gray and let me burn out.

The poesy is so perfect, such a little capsule. “THE LIST OF THINGS ONE FEELS & THEN THE THINGS ONE FEELS ABOUT THE THINGS ONE FEELS.”

And you cannot tell me that this last line, “The gorgeous little triggers every day fingers with its pains” does not IMMEDIATELY make you scream aloud in its somehow exact rendition of the mental visual of “articulated like a spine.” I can’t tell you why, but the folds of my brain are HUMMING with those two lines. This is PLAY, this is what PLAYFUL looks like on the page.

I’ve been flayed. Whatever is at the center, Bolden can have it. I’ll confess it all.

Below are a list of things I thought were contradictory in the poem before I realized they were &&&&&. And the fact that the poesy says “unmarried, unchildrened” without the ampersand—are you kidding me? Ingenious—a list through and through. We have the invisible & (the comma between two un’s-) before the pile of & & & &, before the universal which we learn is never universal because the combination of body / spirit / self is impossibly ununiversal—we are “unmoored,” and the closest thing to solid is the tint of a self in the “store window,” the drifting shadow of the “still pond,” the blurry reflection of the “scoop of spoon,” AND/OR the “surface” self, which distorts any definition, which is all “synonym,” “nouns & verbs,” in which we can see exactly and unexactly what we want of ourselves depending on the moment, the light, the “slivered second.”

No one, and I mean no one, does it like Emma Bolden.

self / mirror

don’t want to admit / articulate

disappointed / disappointment

once / always

self / universal

body / spirit

look / looking / watch / watching

flesh / unmoored

fingers / float

sin / nature / temptation

nouns / verbs

If you loved this poesy, you should consider buying Emma’s book, The Tiger and the Cage, and following her (& Gristle) on Twitter.