West Branch guest editor Joy Priest selects poem for special feature

I’m proud to share that the award-winning writer Joy Priest—a fellow Louisvillian and dear colleague—has selected one of my poems to publish in a special feature of West Branch.

The poem, “when we are found we will be fused,” is the opening piece in my manuscript, Wrecks, a manuscript inspired by the great auk, a flightless seabird that was driven to extinction in the mid-1800s. Another poem from this manuscript was published in Bennington Review a few years back.

This poem is unique, however, in that it is the first published piece to feature a character I call “witch-auk.” Witch-auk is the extinct great auk reincarnated as the witch that some of her last captors believed her to be. The story of this auk, captured in the St. Kilda archipelago in 1840, was the original inspiration for the entire book, and still haunts me. The three sailors who detained her were subsequently caught in a terrible storm, and over the course of three days gradually became convinced that the auk was a witch and was in fact causing the storm. They killed her in order to bring it to an end.

In this moment, the great auk occupied an uncanny space between human and not-human, and I became interested in the dynamics of this space. Wrecks explores the simultaneous humanization and dehumanization that took place during this and other encounters with the auk, and explores the broader implications of this hierarchical gesture—how it is used to justify mass extinction and environmental destruction, and also how it drives the dehumanization, colonization, persecution, and genocide of other human beings.

There are about a dozen poems featuring witch-auk over the course of Wrecks, which I now consider a completed manuscript and will be submitting to book contests this fall. She is a character that has become surprisingly and powerfully dear to me, and I’m so grateful for the early expressions of interest and support for the poem—and for her—that I’ve seen on Twitter.

The Great Auk

Witch-auk is an anthropomorphic projection. The anthropomorphic can blind us to the unique qualities of a living being by projecting human values and qualities upon it. But it can also be a space for radical empathy. I believe it can blur the line between the human and nonhuman such that the categories begin to reveal themselves for the constructions that they are.

Gregory Bateson writes that the difference between two beings cannot be located in either of them, nor in the space between them. It is an abstraction. Those beings that fall into the “uncanny valley” elicit our discomfort because of the difference between them and the predefined categories they fail to fit. But in witch-auk, I wanted to create an embodiment of that difference—and a celebration of it. I wanted to create a site in which the grief for the loss of a species could be located, if only for a moment, in which the great auk could claim that very difference as the source of her agency.

Witch-auk is not the great auk. She is not a witch, she is not human, she is not me. She is herself, a singularity. She resists categorization, and therefore resists hierarchy.

At least, that is my hope.

I hope, too, that you enjoy the poem, and please reach out if you’d like to chat about posthumanism, animal studies, the uncanny, and other related topics. Thank you for reading!