Contributor’s Marginalia: Rebecca Morgan Frank on “Completion of the Jackson Ferry Shot Tower” by Corrie Williamson

I’ve always loved the term “word-music,” because to me it encompasses what I love most in poetry, the way the music of words can carry us with its tune, linking our bodies to the poem while the words by nature ground their own music in the cerebral work of meaning and persuasion. When word-music works, we cannot imagine any other words, any clearer or more complete image, any other song. When it works, there is that sense I get of falling into poetry, as if lured by the Sirens, but given all of the tools to navigate my way through the poem.

How could I not fall into those first lines of Corrie Williamson’s “Completion of the Jackson Ferry Shot Tower,” with its rich word-music? After letting myself get swept up in the momentum of the poem for a few reads, I find myself wanting to track her path, to see how she has swept me so effortlessly through the poem, as if I am the shot. So here I am, weighing in like a sports commentator:

Freefall perfects the form. A fire

Williamson has slipped five “f” sounds in here, she’s really done it! But here I am wondering, suspended in the suspense of how freefall perfects form, for I have not yet having looked up “shot tower.” I read on.

roars at the tower’s height, turns

Oh, tricky poet, we’ve also had four “r”s up there and this descends us right into roar, which echoes in “tower,” which morphs into “turn,” doubling the t and the r!

lead molten, moon-faced. It slips

Ahh, yes, it seems we had a turn at “turns.” Of course we leave those sounds behind and slide right into lead, molten, moonfaced, luxuriating in the repeated “l”s and heavier “m”s, as the words stay weighted in the echo of the “n” in “turns.” And then enters the “s’ sound, joining the “l”– see how she’s gliding along and now I see the shot, for the image has cleverly been given form in the act of its own creation.

through copper sieve, each drop
pulled into sphere by descent

And here there is a clear sonic break with “through copper,” and then she pops us across the enacted “drop,” tying it in sound back to “copper” while we’re being pulled right into “pulled” with those “p” sounds. Those opposite actions create a wonderful tension, but we’re already moving forward, propelling through the motions as the “s” spirals us right into that descent from sphere.

I’ll stop sports commentating here, as I’m already dizzy and spinning with delight, annotating the poem out of pure need, as if I were one of my students sent to analyze the sounds for my homework. At this point, we’ve had four couplets that bring us in free fall down toward earth. Now, at this midway point in the poem, the sounds slow down, the images grow concrete, earth-bound. The shot has landed.

And then comes the poem’s darker turn, to the next flight of the shot, its path toward death “through the breath & blood.” At first, the shot has no agency, plummeting as it has in creation. But then it “navigate[s] the flesh” and “drag[s] back to earth its native ore.” The paradox has landed fully: the shot is returned to earth, with an illusion of wholeness and return, but this has happened through the act of destruction, the original destruction of the earth, the destruction of a life.

The poem has ended, shooting me right back to the beginning to read it again and again.