I Eric America

“we may notice the profound and exhausting connections between the eternal and the everyday. We can unnumb and feel the world, that which joys us and maims us, and perceive our interconnected lives as they are lived.”

Catastrophe with a capital “C” gives birth in Diane Raptosh’s latest book of poems, I Eric America. The first section begins with a quote by the esteemed Polish poet and writer Olga Tokarczuk: “A key, a cell phone, a piece of paper and a pen. And one of my gray hairs, whose atoms preserve the memory of the origins of life, of the cosmic Catastrophe that gave the world its beginning.” In more than 40 brilliantly innovative sonnets, Raptosh makes the connection between personal and national trauma. A family is shattered. A nation is rocked. In the process, she names names, assumes a role, and points to the broken parts of a damaged collective body. 

As a major theme, the relationship between the public, personal, and political is explored through a mythic narrative stretching the limits of language. The first example is in the book’s title in which the proper noun, Eric, acts as a verb in the present tense. We also may notice “Eric” existing within the word “America,” all of which raises a few questions such as: How does one “Eric” a country? What is being done to America in this application of the verb, and who (to the poet) is Eric?

Eric is derived from Old Norse words for “sole ruler” or “eternal ruler.” Because it is a common name, most of us will meet or know an Eric or two in our lifetime. Raptosh’s brother, Eric, was the sole survivor of a plane crash in 2018, rendering him paralyzed from the waist down. The timing and aftermath of the accident overlapped with the escalating political, racial, and pandemic trauma taking place in America and around the world. Raptosh’s poems live at ground zero. What has happened? What’s happening? How does one possibly bear the weight of it?

For Raptosh, poetry is a mode of inquiry. In a personal statement on the website of the College of Idaho where Raptosh teaches, she describes the purpose of writing as “a means to revise social, cultural, and aesthetic norms…every poem [is] an opportunity to reconceive the world.” 

In one of the unnamed sonnets beginning “Eric is a typically masculine name”, Raptosh goes deep into the lyric to express parallel universes. “Eric is a superfund site of creaturely pain /…I hear America clanging, the various Erics there are / America means the eternal state of what never quite came”.

Another poem makes the nation and the traumatized person one and the same:

“America is the nation-expression of 

a severely traumatized person. Which 

makes me a human hair trigger. I am made

into my brother Eric, caught between 

Jedi torso and nerve-wracked numbness

boothed in the lower half of the body. Yes,

we’re merely a swarm to thin before Musk 

and Bezos jet their glitz-pilgrims to Mars—

the Artemis lunar landing, host of a layover

hitched to the red trajectory. I fear these pretty  

much tetchy jottings will really tick off my hair.

Psst Eric: Let me un-die. Let me din and naiad

ideas that flipper in Earth-joy. Ooh let me retire

from nation re-rigging until the ends of my name.” 

Raptosh makes Eric into every man in America, and in turn, every American man into Eric, everyone’s brother. Subsequently, a “sistering” of America would respond to a long and disastrous history of a brothering of America—from good old boys to men at war, the failures of patriarchy, misogyny, supremacy, ecological ruin for profit, and a whole slew of power transgressions. In mapping out the connections between sister, brother, and country, the poet hints at the potential to counteract the traditions of dominant patriarchal structures.

As one who relegates aesthetic norms, Raptosh accesses the deepest levels of psychological engagement thus eliciting a powerful emotional response. Another way to say this is that the weirdness works. From “blue nonets,” “corm and dung,” “techy jottings,” and “billionauts,” to “a tizzy of flagellants and glitz-pilgrims,” Raptosh’s lines are hotwired, igniting an engine without a key. Or permission.     

Raptosh skillfully liberates language from its usual roles and functions by turning nouns and adjectives into verbs. What it does for her imagery is incredibly innovative and compelling. In one poem she briefly steps out of the narrative to explain that she “keep[s] verbing nouns / to re-border people and places— / to form a new now when time comes unnumbed.” 

Addressing both the state of the world and the suffering closest to her, Raptosh brilliantly evokes a “new now” and begins to give it language. We get verbs out of “donkey” and “nutmeg.” Something or someone may be “Ave Maria’d” or “curlicue mons’d.” The effect is somewhat disorienting—words like "werewolf" and "ovum" transform into verbs. However, it thrills to see nouns doing so much more of the work here. Adjectives also are occasionally “verbified” resulting in truly striking poems that brilliant our brains.

Raptosh is a poet who reminds us how poetry can awaken us. “Oh, wow!” moments appear on every page as people, pop music, vocabulary, turns, and plays on words ignite the lines. In one sonnet made up of questions without question marks, each compact line in just four to nine words presents a provocative prompt.

“Why didn’t the Vikings colonize America

Is Eric a nation within a nation

Is the U.S. a mannequin of unfelt grief

Are America’s pronouns I my mine

Is Eric secretly cheeking his meds

Is America a race of re-namers

Is America clans of deer atop mountains of vowels

Is America about to make an announcement

Is Eric basically everyone’s kin

Is America’s main entrée meanness

Is America’s epithet crime syndicate

Is America brought to you by the look of Christ

Is Eric’s narrative parable

Is Christ’s face principally female”

Without punctuation or enjambment, the list builds naturally yet rapidly. By avoiding declarative end-stopped lines the poet invites everyone into the narrative.

The book closes by switching to the less traditional 16-line sonnet. “Sixteenets with Notes App” begins with an epigraph by William Blake: “[B]ind to labours / of day & night the myriads of Eternity.” The poem splices together seemingly random thoughts and events captured on an iPhone app. From the way deer “twitch into their bodies,” to listening to a Beck song (“Cellphone’s Dead”), to Eric’s dwindling GoFundMe account ($14.24), Raptosh’s whirling universe expands.

Looking back to the title, we may notice that by verbifying Eric, Raptosh is doing the labor to reanimate her brother in an ever-changing universe. She may want to just sit and “riverine,” but the poet instead tries to attend to him. “My brother / and I share a butte-shaped interior. The city lost / out to the nation state. / As I have tried to steady / America, ends keep surging.” It is—it must be—a labor of love. 

From sister to citizen, women in all their roles are navigating a critical time in history. No one is immune to the uncertainty and unpredictability present in today's world. Consider how most Americans are just one serious illness (or one tragic plane crash) away from bankruptcy, a concern often raised in discussions around healthcare costs.

Survival may wipe you out. So, what does survival look like on a global scale?

“America is a person,” Raptosh quotes Joy Harjo in the book’s introduction. Whether we are stand-ins for Eric or a sister, mother, or lover of Eric, we may relate to Raptosh’s unyielding vision. At the very least, we may notice the profound and exhausting connections between the eternal and the everyday. We can unnumb and feel the world, that which joys us and maims us, and perceive our interconnected lives as they are lived.