levelheaded: An Expanse of Open or Cleared Ground

We could come up with a bunch of hypothetical reasons why the “I” of Lauren Nicole Nixon’s “An Expanse of Open or Cleared Ground” is sometimes capital and at other times lowercase. Mmmmmm, yasss, mmm (this is our scholarly pontification voice), the first instance of the pronoun “i” is linked to the verb “forget,” hence suggesting the speaker’s loss of self-identity, whereas the second and third instances in which the pronoun appears, these times marked by capital letters, the speaker is in the act of realizing her selfhood. Mmmm, yasss, yasss…

Okay, back to our regular voice now. While donning the professor cap is fun, and often yields guesswork as valid as any, what is most appealing about this poem is the possibility that its inconsistencies weren’t part of the poet’s master plan. This poem feels organic, in opposition to the every-popular term well-crafted. Sure, there are moments we can point to when Nixon winks at us (“honey” and “the thick / of things”; the homonym “two” echoing in “too much longer”), but mostly the poem is a human pouring out rather than a mechanical packaging.

Examining the poem’s structure reinforces our notion that it was self-generative. The “or” of line two ushers in the “Or” at the start of the next line. The word “and” gets repeated in line seven, as does “Planting” at the start of lines ten and eleven. In the next pair of lines, “and” appears four more times, steadily moving the poem along before it overflows with energy on “(Honey honey honey).”

The repetition of the word “honey” injects the poem with urgency. She has to tell you right now! Spoken parenthetically, the pet name welcomes us into the speaker’s private life, causing us to have a stronger emotional reaction to what follows. But part of us hopes—part of us is lead to believe—the author may not have been thinking of these tricks of the trade. While the poem’s final command is an age-old instruction, it’s never been said exactly like this before.

– The Editors