LINE LEVEL #13
Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts: an excerpt of a poem, followed by a contributor’s note, followed by Acevedo’s own exploration into the poet’s world of language. Guided by a curiosity that yields learning, we are invited to consider historical context, stylistic influences, and more, all the way down to the level of the line. This month, Acevedo discusses “Kissing Booth,” from Fabulosa (JackLeg Press, 2024) by Karen Rigby.
Kissing Booth
It’s $1 for the pageant queen
in pedal pushers. Free if it’s me
because what’s a lyric
about middle suburbia
without a kiss under stars
punched like a broderie anglaise?
There’s never a line for girls
in emerald green glasses,
to paraphrase Dorothy Parker,
but it only takes one yes.
It’s you I want to crash
into, and your zipper
I’d like to untooth.
Here we are inside that kitschy
charity holdover like a barrel
falling over Niagara.
This flimsy, violet curtain’s
better than chiseling my name
under yours, or pretending
I never dreamt about fly-papering
each other. Even a comic strip
Olive Oyl leaned in her booth,
but I haven’t got a signboard.
No bullet of Bésame lipstick
in Victory Red. Here,
where firs darken the midway,
it’s a fin de siècle
with no emergency brake.
I’d live everything again
to touch your face.
Contributor’s Note // Karen Rigby
I’ve always been drawn to unusual objects in my poems. A fairground kissing booth—which must by now seem like time-traveling to an earlier twentieth-century—sets the stage.
Using two columns, whose lines waterfall into each other, seems like a fitting way to evoke a pair of lovers, both in terms of their separateness, and the frisson that is generated by their proximity. There’s not a great deal of white space between them. Just enough to make the lines distinct, and legible from each other. Just enough to want, instinctively, to slide the off-kilter right side of the poem into place.
The columns result in a few felicities, too, such as allowing the verb “crash” to fall “into,” and the “barrel” to suspend itself in mid-air for a moment, before “falling over Niagara.” Reigning in the individual line lengths, so as to fit the visual scaffolding, was also my way of creating a container to contrast against the poem’s freewheeling sensibility.
Craft Lessons from Poets of Color // Joanna Acevedo
Karen Rigby unlocks an essential feature in the most memorable kinds of poetry with “Kissing Booth,” because the poem is built around a deeply recognizable impulse—desire. Between the lines, which Rigby herself rightly describes as a “waterfall,” the real meat is to be found, the desperation and comedy of adolescent fantasy, wrapped up in a call-and-response between the different sides of the self, with a rising pitch of anxiety that soon reaches not a shriek, but perhaps even a screen. Rigby’s poem captures noise and light and color with its movement, and the form opens all kinds of conversation, the will-they-won’t-they of teenagedom shivering in each line and becoming a cacophony of nervous and desperate and joyous and panicked voices, humming and breathing and hoping all at once.
The work that feels most familiar as kin to this poem, for me, is not actually a poem, but Charles Burns’ series of graphic novels, Black Hole. The series depicts a community in which teens are afflicted with an illness, sexually transmitted, which causes horrible mutations, and as they continue to spread the disease, their world falls into chaos. The comic uses the mutations as a metaphor for sexual awakening, as the various characters try to transition to adulthood.
Visual references don’t always match well to poetry, but in this case, the themes are deeply connected. Rigby’s poem is evocative and innovative in the same way that Burns’ illustrations are, because she builds an urgency and necessity into the writing, a kind of manic momentum which starts with a very loose association of “pageant queen,” and zooms inward until we end with the hyper-specific “I’d live everything again / to touch your face.” The speaker in this poem isn’t concrete. Rigby seems to be speaking to adolescence itself. But this ending, which abruptly stops us in our tracks, is so successful because of the way it drops all of the accoutrements, all the metaphors and lyrical language, and gives us a double espresso shot of emotion, tied in with a physical sensation, showing how powerful these small moments can really be.
I mention Black Hole because it does the same trick—creating a kind of ominous landscape before settling into the stories of a few characters and ending with the focus on one specific story. The way Rigby’s poem escalates is a kind of communication of its own, because the two columns play off of each other. Narrative is paused. Rigby disrupts the experience of reading, allowing for a slower and more focused experience.
As writers, we are always trying to find ways to change the reader’s reaction to our work, and RIgby has found a smart solution. The way language and form bounce off of each other in these columns is clever and well-crafted. The poem is a great example of the way form can make us look at commonplace objects and symbols with a fresh set of poetic eyes. Form remains the final uncharted territory and there is much to be learned here as we go out into the world and learn, write, experiment, and hopefully, discover, as Rigby has here.
Further reading:
This contrapuntal by Jenna Lanzaro is another good example of a poem which uses columns: https://nightheronbarks.com/spring-2022/jenna-lanzaro/
Karen Rigby is the author of Fabulosa (JackLeg Press), which is one of Ms. Magazine’s Best Poetry of ’23-’24 selections, and Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press). A National Endowment for the Arts literature fellow, her poems have been published in journals such as The London Magazine, Bennington Review, The Oxonian Review, and Australian Book Review. She lives in Arizona. Learn more at https://www.karenrigby.com
Joanna Acevedo
Joanna Acevedo is the Editor in Chief of Frontier Poetry. She is the author of three books and two chapbooks, and her writing in multiple genres can be found across the web and in print, most recently (or forthcoming) in The North American Review, Hunger Mountain, and Cream City Review. Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes, she teaches workshops and creates resources for emerging writers on numerous platforms, receiving her MFA from NYU in 2021. She also holds degrees from Bard College and the New School. To learn more about her and her work, please visit her at https://www.joannaacevedo.net/.
