IMAGE COURTESY PERSEA BOOKS
Memphis-based poet Caki Wilkinson recently released her third poetry collection, The Survival Expo (Persea Books). The slim volume, between its robin’s egg blue and orange cover, contains pure magic. How else to describe an object that can instantly transport a reader somewhere else — the back row of seats in a high school classroom, the line at the gates of Graceland, or the curb outside the Royal Valet? The Survival Expo is a passport to another place, yes, but even more so, to another state of mind. The tension of a particularly fraught family gathering, a supermarket in Tennessee, Turtletown, a scuffed counter with its sign: WE WASH AND PRESS AMERICAN FLAGS FOR FREE!
Wilkinson’s poems read like the most magnificent or cutting note to have ever been passed in a high school study hall, which isn’t to say that they’re elementary. Rather, they’re relatable, accessible, even as they also hint at worlds and dreams beyond themselves.
Here, There, and Everywhere
PHOTO COURTESY PERSEA BOOKS
Caki Wilkinson
Wilkinson’s new collection feels like Tennessee — it encompasses the rural and the urban, the New Weird South and the magnolias and diners and faded flags of the Old. The poet positions herself on the border between these two worlds, issuing off-kilter commentary on both.
That perspective from the border is well earned. Wilkinson has lived in each of Tennessee’s three major sections, in both rural and urban settings. “I’m a Tennessean,” she explains. “I was born in Murfreesboro, I lived for several years in Knoxville, and then my family moved to Sewanee over in Middle Tennessee.” After high school, she moved to Memphis to attend Rhodes College, where she returned as an English professor and creative writing director in 2012. “I’ve logged a whole bunch of years in Memphis at this point. I realized recently that I’ve lived in Memphis more total years than I’ve lived anywhere else in Tennessee. I really feel like a Memphian now.”
When the time to make that choice came, poetry was already there waiting in the wings.
Wilkinson’s interest in poetry dates to before her time as a Memphian. “I trace it back to kids’ poetry. I liked the way that poetry stuck in my brain. I liked the wordplay,” she remembers, citing Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, and other “rhymey poetry” as her entrée into the world of verse and meter. But, as children do, she drifted away from poetry for a time. Until, that is, her interest was renewed in high school.
“I think this is true for so many writers — I had a really good freshman year English teacher,” Wilkinson muses. He showed her classics like Walt Whitman alongside twentieth-century poets such as the Beats, expanding her knowledge of the form beyond the “rhymey” poetry she so adored in childhood. So, for a time, she split her attention between poetry and basketball, her other passion.
“It was pretty much the center of my extracurricular life,” she says of the sport. Wilkinson played basketball through high school and was even recruited to play for Rhodes, though she withdrew from the team before the first season began. “I started trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to be besides basketball.”
When the time to make that choice came, poetry was already there waiting in the wings.
Circles, Wynona Stone, and the Road to the Expo
After graduating from Rhodes College, Wilkinson earned an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati. She published her first collection, Circles Where the Head Should Be, in 2011. Her work has also been featured in the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. But it’s her sophomore collection, The Wynona Stone Poems (Persea Books, 2015), that helps pave the path to The Survival Expo.
Wilkinson says some critics have called The Wynona Stone Poems a “novel in verse.” But, as she says, “There’s not really a plot other than the passing of time.” The aptly named collection follows the character Wynona Stone through various stages of her life, creating that illusion of plot. She continues: “I have always really loved poems that make use of fictional elements — that have plot, or that have characters — and that’s not completely in step with what’s happening in the larger poetic landscape right now.”
So, when it was time to again consider putting together a new collection, in true artist fashion, Wilkinson wanted to move in a new direction and explore other modes of storytelling. Wynona Stone was character-driven, so she wanted her next effort to be more of a traditional collection, a “mixed bag.” That’s how she got to The Survival Expo.
My Poetic Mixtape
I always describe putting a collection together as it’s kind of like making a mixtape,” Wilkinson says after I ask her about the placement of “Local Woman Makes a Casserole” and “Mansplaining Oracle,” two seemingly complementary poems on facing pages. “The fact that they follow each other is absolutely deliberate,” she says. “That’s part of that mixtape stuff — thinking about how the poem that follows another can either subtly comment on a poem or magnify something that’s introduced. I definitely thought about those two as being kind of cousins.”
“But I found myself understanding the impulse, if not the way that they acted on the impulse. So I found myself thinking, ‘Okay, what do you do when you’re afraid for the future? Do you look at oracles? Do you build a bunker?’”
“Local Woman” and “Mansplaining Oracle” have similar subject matter, but one is cluttered with the bric-a-brac of everyday life, while the other is a soothsayer’s spell. In The Survival Expo, Wilkinson oscillates between modes of viewing the future. There are signposts of the mundane world, names of small towns, newspaper headlines, and scraps of radio broadcasts. But there are also the series of “oracle” poems, delving into fortune telling and foresight. And of course, there’s Hope.
The collection brims with such examples of tension between closely tied objects, like celestial bodies in orbit, conjuring up tides in each other. Familial ties, cousins in particular, are a recurring motif. Our understanding of the present, and thus our visions of the future, may be irreconcilably different from those of our family, despite a shared past.
“I wasn’t really sure what kept drawing me back,” Wilkinson says of her Hope character, the fictional cousin of The Survival Expo’s speaker. Though Wilkinson had set out to write a different kind of poem — short, musical — she found herself writing more narrative, voice-driven poems about Hope, a character familiar with risk, with the wrong side of the tracks. “It had to do with this particular kind of familial relationship, in this case these two cousins that were close when they were growing up and then there’s this kind of divergent life path,” Wilkinson explains. “I know personally that that is something I’ve thought about a lot. Where do you start to split from your extended family?”
The issue, Wilkinson muses, is also one of privilege and the opportunities opened up by it. “My parents were the only people from both of their families to go to college,” she says, “and because of that I had a head start on a lot of things.”
Surviving the Survival Expo
The collection’s titular poem recounts the time Wilkinson accompanied a colleague to a survival expo at the Agricenter. Her colleague was doing research for a project, so the two professors wandered among the displays of knives, MREs, and metal shelters. Wilkinson says the experience left her with a strange feeling as she pondered the drive that motivates the doomsday preppers in attendance at the expo.
“I found myself also thinking about the way that so much of that is driven by fear,” she says. “It’s an illogical manifestation of that fear. ‘Okay, I feel completely anxious about my place in the world, so my response is to build an underground bunker.’
“But I found myself understanding the impulse, if not the way that they acted on the impulse. So I found myself thinking, ‘Okay, what do you do when you’re afraid for the future? Do you look at oracles? Do you build a bunker?’
“What is the response for the uncertainty and angst of our moment?”
