levelheaded: Recreating A Miraculous Object

The first line of Janaka Stucky’s “Recreating A Miraculous Object” is strange. Read one way, it’s inarguable (the speaker has lived through every war that has occurred during his or her lifetime). Read another way, this line is impossible (in the speaker’s lifetime, he or she has lived through every war that has ever occurred in the history of time). With its first and second-person pronouns, the poem as a whole feels deeply personal. But that “I” could just as easily by any of us (“Like everyone I am”) and you could be, you guessed it, you!

In this way the poem is simultaneously an expression of the bond between two specific people, and a bond that the speaker feels he or she shares with humanity. In an even broader sense, the poem acknowledges that there is common energy that runs through all things—through fire, teeth, an axe, or your hands.

With its spare lines, “Recreating A Miraculous Object” relies on white space as much as words to supply the poem with its emotional heft. As we consider each breathy phrase, Stucky’s simple diction is made strange. Take for instance the following: “You see that axe that axe / Is me.” In the first of these two lines we “see that axe” twice, and the second time around it has been reshaped by its first appearance. A line later, the speaker identifies him or herself by being itself (“Is me”).

In a sense, this is a powerful poem about the invincibility of the self—the human body being mere matter that cannot be created or destroyed but may change states. But to reduce it to that would to miss the poem’s essence. This is a poem that is as mystical and inexplicable—as miraculous—as white snow falling over battlefields, as living through every war ever and then knowing another.

– The Editors