{"id":16210,"date":"2020-08-01T00:00:57","date_gmt":"2020-08-01T05:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/?p=16210"},"modified":"2020-07-31T23:50:32","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T04:50:32","slug":"praying-naked-poems-by-katie-condon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/archives\/16210","title":{"rendered":"Praying Naked: Poems by Katie Condon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Praying Naked\u00a0<\/em>(Ohio State University Press, March 2020)
\nA Conversational Review by Joanna Currey and Chris Ketchum<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chris Ketchum:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

If there\u2019s a single, unifying feature of Praying Naked<\/em>, it is Katie Condon\u2019s depiction of openness and possibility. Her debut collection of poetry celebrates women\u2019s choices, regardless of the stereotypes associated with those choices, no matter which side of the ideological aisle would rebuke them.<\/p>\n

A stunning example is \u201cAt Poetry Readings I\u2019m Always Drunk,\u201d which reads like ars poetica<\/em>: \u201cI put on lipstick & ride my bike to the reading for the erotic juxtaposition,\u201d Condon writes. \u201cI have conversations and pretend I smoke cigarettes by smoking them.\u201d By blending two poles of a dialectic\u2014sacred and profane, innocence and experience, slang and jargon\u2014Condon introduces \u201cthe erotic juxtaposition\u201d as a hermeneutic for the collection, a nod to her speaker\u2019s Whitmanesque declarations and contradictions. \u201cAt Poetry Readings\u201d is an ode to self-consciousness, describing the speaker\u2019s academic and social posturing. Condon recognizes this uncertainty, associated with amateur artists and the culturally uninitiated, as the stuff of great poetry: \u201cSometimes, the poems aren\u2019t afraid of mystery \/ & people get dense with quiet.\u201d Here, she speaks to several features of her own work\u2014if the poem isn\u2019t afraid of mystery, the speaker, reader, and author shouldn\u2019t be, either. And response to that mystery can be simultaneously profound and confused: \u201cdense\u201d as in slow-thinking, but also contemplating a difficult idea. Condon\u2019s speaker, somewhere between literati and layperson, uses language that combines two antithetical elements of her own voice and experience.<\/p>\n

Condon often aims her wit and irreverence at poetry\u2019s idea of itself\u2014its self-seriousness and stoicism. She has a talent for cutting canonical poets down to size, ranging from Sappho to Ezra Pound to Flannery O\u2019Connor. Poems like \u201cI\u2019m a Kick-Ass Woman\u201d jab at literary culture with puns, idioms, and sexual humor: \u201cListen: you can\u2019t have passion \/ <\/em>without ass. <\/em>Or Parnassus. <\/em>Make way for my poetic ass, \/ as essential & enduring as your thesaurus \/ but sexier. I\u2019d tattoo the Cantos <\/em>on my ass \/ if it would make it less boring.\u201d Condon forces the idea of poetry to expand\u2014poetry is the subject of ridicule, but also its medium. Poems are equally fields for criticism and self-criticism, as are the characters who occupy them. By mixing slang and allusion, religion and vulgarity, Condon presents a speaker in the midst of grappling with her multitudes and contrasts.<\/p>\n

Of course, you can\u2019t have an erotic juxtaposition without love, sex, and desire. The most exhilarating conflict in Praying Naked <\/em>is the speaker\u2019s effort to define her role in sexual power dynamics. Numerous poems develop a personal feminism (or an adjacent -ism) that doesn\u2019t preclude Condon\u2019s speaker from relishing the feeling of being desired\u2014as the author puts it in \u201cGiving Myself Advice,\u201d \u201cKatie, get off your ass & be somebody \/ somebody would like to fuck. \/ This does not make you an object\u2014it makes you \/ Desire itself!\u201d The collection is packed with similar self-talk, in which the speaker reassures herself that her choices aren\u2019t necessarily opposed to feminism, but engender a different, sex-positive feminism that permits a woman to embrace her own \u201cdesire to be desired.\u201d This is especially clear in \u201cTo the woman who accused me of not being a feminist, I\u2019m sorry,\u201d when the speaker argues women \u201care subject to \/ & act upon the same ugly desires \/ that fuel the men who\u2019ve used us.\u201d Poems in Praying Naked <\/em>feature workaday controversies\u2014men who keep their girlfriends secret at the bar. Slut-shaming notes scrawled in bathroom stalls. Subjects, scenes, and observations that allow Condon to lean into the murky territory around desire.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Joanna Currey: <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The books of the Bible\u2019s New Testament were first written in Koine Greek, a dialect of Ancient Greek. Of the four primary Ancient Greek terms translated to English as \u201clove\u201d\u2014ag\u00e1pe, \u00e9ros, phil\u00eda, and storg\u0113\u2014eros is by far the variety of love most commonly associated with volatility; tension and release. So when you pointed to \u201cthe erotic juxtaposition\u201d as a hermeneutic for the collection I thought, yes, of course<\/em>. The simultaneously signaled experience and innocence of putting on lipstick and riding a bike in \u201cAt Poetry Readings I\u2019m Always Drunk\u201d performs a certain palatable archetype of femininity: a woman both sophisticated and whimsical, alluring and non-threatening. In the poem Condon writes, \u201cI rise from my chair with Holly Golightly-type laughter & grace \/ & I hope I am being sexualized by everyone.\u201d Condon\u2019s speaker has perfectly formulated this juxtaposition, this tension, for maximum elicitation of eros\u2014which is to say, it\u2019s a tension that elicits more tension.<\/p>\n

However, the night doesn\u2019t end on notes of satisfaction and high self-esteem. The one who controls the tension holds the power. And holding the power is ultimately a lonely, loveless position to be in.<\/p>\n

So it makes sense that the exhilarating struggle with sexual power dynamics you identify in the collection would extend to God, Christianity\u2019s foremost symbol of patriarchal power (notably, in poems like \u201cPraying Naked\u201d and \u201cOde to Gabriella,\u201d the power struggle seems absent in instances of queer desire). It also makes sense that, in a collection called Praying Naked, <\/em>the tension between sacred and profane\/profanity, sacrament and sex, consecrated and crass, is the engine that drives the book from cover to cover. They\u2019re not separate symbol systems, but rather mutually dependent, inseparable\u2014\u201ckoine\u201d translates to \u201ccommon\u201d or \u201cshared,\u201d meaning the Christian sacred texts of the New Testament were written in the common language of the people at the time.<\/p>\n

As wryly shocking as this sacred\/sex tension can be (looking at you, \u201cHymn,\u201d a poem that juxtaposes somber lyricism with the refrain, \u201cpenis dick cock balls<\/em>\u201d), it\u2019s not without ample precedent in Catholic writing and tradition. The Spanish nun Saint Teresa of \u00c1vila wrote about divine ecstasy, spiritual marriage, and the mystical eroticism of the Old Testament book Song of Songs.<\/em> The story of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (referenced in the collection\u2019s poem \u201cAfter All, Saint Catherine Is My Namesake\u201d) recounts a virgin martyr who, after failing to die by torture and starvation, refuses to marry her persecutor, emperor Maxentius. Instead, she declares that Jesus Christ is her spouse and she\u2019s consecrated her virginity to him. The Catholic-born poet John Donne\u2019s famous \u201cHoly Sonnet 14\u201d opens with the line, \u201cBatter my heart, three-personed God\u201d and ends with the lines, \u201cTake me to you, imprison me, for I, \/ Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, \/ Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.\u201d In short, people have imagined, claimed, and canonized sexual relationships with God for a very long time.<\/p>\n

In the poem, \u201cOn the seventh day God says, What you\u2019ve got is virgin charm & a knife in your pocket.<\/em>\u201d (innocence\/experience again!) Condon rewrites Genesis 3:16, a verse in God\u2019s voice in which he\u2019s telling Eve what cursed, postlapsarian life will look like for women. But instead of, \u201cYour desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you\u201d Condon\u2019s God says, \u201cYour longing will be for me, & I will dominate you,<\/em>\u201d blurring the line between God and human male sexual partner. The funny, surprising response on the next line, \u201c& I\u2019m like, Nope!\u201d <\/em>belies the emotional toll this power dynamic takes. A few pages later, in the titular poem, the speaker wonders if the reason she let a friend of a friend get \u201chandsy\u201d was her \u201cown desire to be desired, since if a man \/ wants me, I know I have at least a little worth left.\u201d Then, at the end of the poem, \u201cLord, if you will not let me exist \/ without shame at least leave me while I whisper \/\/ over my blessed mother\u2019s naked body \/ the words you said would save me.\u201d Not holding power is lonely and loveless too. And the only share of power Condon\u2019s speaker can attempt to take when it comes to God is withholding belief in him, or at least withholding belief in his power.<\/p>\n

Unlike Donne, Condon\u2019s speaker is not sold on the idea of being ravished or dominated by God, but she\u2019s also not sure she has a choice. Throughout these poems, she longs to be both powerful and vulnerable, desired and loved. But if God is a man and men are God, how can she ever balance this tension, this eros? How can she navigate sexual power dynamics in a way that is ultimately sustainable and life-affirming rather than unsatisfying, shaming, and demeaning?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

CK: <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

John Donne reminds me of William Blake, another poet and Christian with an adverse relationship to the Anglican Church. Like Condon, Blake\u2019s Songs of Innocence and Experience <\/em>have fun pushing back against the strictures of organized religion, to which Blake was famously hostile. In \u201cThe Little Vagabond,\u201d Blake imagines what it would be like if you could drink beer in church: \u201cAnd God, like a father, rejoicing to see \/ His children as pleasant and happy as He, \/ Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the barrel, \/ But kiss him, and give him both drink and apparel.\u201d The anti-clerical mischief in these lines reads like an ancestor of Condon\u2019s disavowal of religion and its limitations on personal freedom.<\/p>\n

Like you\u2019ve said, some of Condon\u2019s funniest lines wisecrack at God and his alleged authority. Praying Naked <\/em>also displays the speaker\u2019s power through form, repeating elements that break a typical convention of the poem\u2019s established structure. \u201cOde to Gabriella,\u201d \u201cTo Every Woman Who\u2019s Been Kept a Secret,\u201d and other poems use a uniform stanzaic structure (e.g., couplets or tercets), only to interrupt that regularity with a single line. Frequently, these lines directly address a woman in the poem: \u201cGabriella, you are beautiful.\u201d By stripping the gloss of language, the rhetorical boundary between poem and world falls away\u2014we\u2019re witnessing an intimacy.<\/p>\n

Poetry as an institution, with its canon, rules, and tradition, resembles the church. By making her own rules of poetic form, Condon sticks it to authority and the idea of institutions as a whole. One of the most tried-and-true methods for rejecting authority and its jurisdiction over the subject is by speaking its taboos aloud. In addition to religious and sexual taboos, Condon writes against some of the poetic taboos of Modernism enumerated in Ezra Pound\u2019s essay, \u201cA Retrospect.\u201d The section entitled \u201cA Few Don\u2019ts\u201d instructs, \u201cDon\u2019t use such an expression as \u2018dim lands of peace<\/em>…\u2019 It comes from the writer\u2019s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate <\/em>symbol.\u201d<\/p>\n

Condon\u2019s like, \u201cNope!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cGetting Through Monday,\u201d a depressive anti-ode to the labor of art-making, the speaker meditates on the creation of symbols:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

. . . I watch construction workers <\/em><\/p>\n

move across the roof they\u2019re building <\/em><\/p>\n

& consider how this scene could stand for time\u2014 <\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

how each shingle is a year in our lives & each nail <\/em><\/p>\n

something beautiful passing through it, <\/em><\/p>\n

anchoring us to the scaffolding (which is memory)<\/em><\/p>\n

& reminding us that we have no choice <\/em><\/p>\n

but to be here until the rain<\/em><\/p>\n

soaks us weary & we fall, leaving only<\/em><\/p>\n

dust (which is the soul) & heaps of concrete.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Explicit reference to the hidden mechanisms of metaphor feels like a rejection of the rules that empower particular institutions\u2014poetry and its obscurantism, religion and its chastity. The speaker (and author!) is tired of pretending she isn\u2019t intentionally weaving image and narrative to manipulate the reader\u2019s emotional and semiotic associations. Condon throws back the curtain on metaphor, inviting us into her writing process, to share a degree of power she has as god of her own poem.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

JC: <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Speaking of taboos, sticking it to authority, and throwing back curtains, I want to talk about the cover art. Anyone familiar with Katie Condon\u2019s social media presence will know she was unequivocally elated when Dorielle Caimi\u2019s 2012 oil painting, Until Proven Innocent<\/em>, was confirmed as the cover for Praying Naked<\/em>. Much is noteworthy about the painting, but I think the most interesting thing about it is also the first thing you notice: it features a realistic naked woman painted realistically.<\/p>\n

The subject, like Condon herself, is a white woman with brown hair and brown eyes. Her posture is a bit slumped. She has a few hairs out of place. Her breasts look like everyday breasts and\u2014my favorite part\u2014the light sunburn reddening her neck and chest negates what appears to be a tank top or one-piece bathing suit. Her left hand holds the tail of a diamondback rattlesnake, simultaneously evoking Eve and a Pentecostal snake handler. She stares at the viewer, who has, perhaps, just walked in on her. Her right hand is held up in a gesture of innocence and de-escalation. But her face doesn\u2019t signal apology, fear, or shame. Rather, affront. Consternation. Perhaps even disapproval, as if to ask the viewer, \u201cWhat are you<\/em> looking at?\u201d<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re familiar with Katie Condon\u2019s social media presence, you also know that Instagram algorithms and\/or employees censored photos of this book cover multiple times, evoking Condon\u2019s indignance (dare I say, holy female anger<\/em>?) and many reposts of the image.<\/p>\n

It would be easy to say that Praying Naked<\/em> carries this attitude from beginning to end\u2014to say that these poems all depict a woman who refuses to accept censorship, and, more importantly, shame. And yes, there are wonderful poems like the Whitmanian \u201cKatie Condon, an American, One of the Roughs, a Kosmos in the Flesh\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m a Kick-Ass Woman\u201d that resound with self-declaration and self-celebration. There are poems where Condon\u2019s speaker\u00a0 insists on being large and blatant, insists on the goodness of her own sexuality, where she follows the mother\u2019s advice in the collection\u2019s penultimate poem, \u201cPracticing Digressions\u201d: \u201cYou are a woman. Praise \/ yourself.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

But Praying Naked<\/em> resists becoming a self-love meme or empowerment manifesto. Instead, it reflects the stark oscillations many women I know, including myself, can experience within a day\u2014going from feeling big, beautiful, and legitimate to small and unworthy. In \u201cDriving, 4 a.m.,\u201d a grief-drenched poem situated in a grief-drenched section of the book, Condon writes, \u201cIt\u2019s been so long since I\u2019ve understood the world \/ as a place I deserve to be alive in.\u201d The opening poem, \u201cOrigin,\u201d births us into the rest of the collection with the lines, \u201cI am born \/ from grieving. I am \/\/ as afraid as you.\u201d Praying Naked<\/em> shows us the triumph and <\/em>the pain. It accounts for the arduous labor of becoming a woman who believes her existence justifies itself.<\/p>\n

Condon\u2019s speaker is real, and she is as touched by the world and weather she lives in as the woman with the sunburnt chest in Caimi\u2019s painting. Like periods and leg hair, women\u2019s sexuality and desire are simply part of us, in all their diverse and sometimes messy manifestations. Removing the lenses and filters that shield us from other people\u2019s potential disgust and disapproval is scary business. But we mustn\u2019t continue to play along with the harmful myth that so many aspects of women\u2019s reality are gross secrets. The fear is worth facing to arrive at the moments where we can say, Here I am, unmitigated. I\u2019m a kick-ass woman. I praise myself.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

CK:\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes! Portraying women realistically, as Caimi has, is part and parcel of Praying Naked<\/em>. Those visual details you mentioned, where the world has made its impression on the subject, account for my favorite part of the painting, too\u2014the woman\u2019s hands. Short, almost stubby fingers, broad palms, and skin slightly wrinkled around the second joint of her fingers, as though dried or callused by manual labor. It offers a counterpoint to the black-gloved, \u201cHolly Golightly-type,\u201d a hand with a cigarette holder balanced on her thumb and forefingers.<\/p>\n

The snake, the nudity, and the raised eyebrow ask us to entertain the more weathered aspects of her appearance not in opposition to her sexuality, but as part of her appeal. Condon\u2019s writing demands that we apprehend all those qualities at once, without grouping traits in masculine\/feminine binaries. Sexuality doesn\u2019t have to match only with elegance, coyness, confidence, and privacy\u2014there\u2019s room for a more capacious sexuality that incorporates female desire, self-consciousness, fantasy, boredom, bombast, and pride. Sex as it is honestly experienced, in all its less-than-perfect breadth.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

JC:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

One of my clearest memories of learning how I should relate to my period as a young teenager was watching the movie Superbad <\/em>in which Jonah Hill\u2019s character grinds with a woman at a party, then realizes he has period blood on his pants. His response is to begin gagging and retching, and the partygoers\u2014women included\u2014tease him and laugh at him. Leading up to the 2016 election, my childhood neighbor, a long-standing Republican who has always been kind and generous toward me, had nothing to say about Trump\u2019s appearance or agreeability, but referred to Clinton as a \u201cfat bitch\u201d in front of me. A few years later, I found myself at a dinner table explaining to my friend\u2019s dad why it wasn\u2019t gross for his niece (who wasn\u2019t there and who I\u2019ve never met) to choose not to shave her legs\u2014even though<\/em>, as he brought up, her leg hair is thick and dark.<\/p>\n

I have memories of my father and brothers giving me unsolicited opinions on my clothing, hair, makeup, piercings, and more without asking what I thought about their appearances in return. My mother and my mother\u2019s mother are profoundly resilient women who are widely respected and admired in their communities, and for as long as I can remember, I\u2019ve listened to them deflect compliments and criticize their bodies. I remember being a teenager and mentally going through the list, from head to toe, of everything I would need to change about my body before I\u2019d be comfortable letting a future partner see me naked.<\/p>\n

We all have pain to bring to the table\u2014complicated pain attached to our complicated backgrounds and identities. And focusing on, celebrating, and ultimately attempting to normalize a realistic woman portrayed realistically is not a new or revolutionary idea to me, especially if that woman is white and cisgender as I am, and therefore automatically closer to mainstream American society\u2019s narrow ideals. And yet, when I first read Praying Naked<\/em>, I had to reckon with the cognitive dissonance between what I believe intellectually about the book and my ingrained biases around aesthetics of womanhood. Like Condon\u2019s speaker, I also have to reckon with the dissonance between what I believe intellectually about myself and my ingrained sense of deficiency and shame. Until celebrating realistic womanhood in all its diverse and \u201cunseemly\u201d dimensions is familiar in practice, not just in theory, I think Praying Naked <\/em>is not only an act of speaking out by default, but an act of vulnerability, courage, and healing.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Joanna Currey is from Virginia. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vanderbilt University, and previously earned her BA in English and Poetry Writing from the University of Virginia where she wrote mostly about plants, bodies, family, and religion. Joanna works as a gardener, and her writing has appeared in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Nimrod International Journal<\/em>, and Alaska Quarterly Review<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Chris Ketchum is a poet from northern Idaho. He is an MFA candidate at Vanderbilt University, where he has served as a poetry editor for Nashville Review. <\/em>His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Five Points<\/em>, New Ohio Review, Tar River Poetry<\/em>, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Praying Naked\u00a0(Ohio State University Press, March 2020) A Conversational Review by Joanna Currey and Chris Ketchum   Chris Ketchum: If there\u2019s a single, unifying feature of Praying Naked, it is Katie Condon\u2019s depiction of openness and possibility. Her debut collection of poetry celebrates women\u2019s choices, regardless of the stereotypes associated with those choices, no matter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2211,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[65],"tags":[55],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-4ds","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16210"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2211"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16210"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16389,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16210\/revisions\/16389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}