Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Commodore
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1974
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2011053346
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PS3623.A86885
Personal name heading:
Waters, Jacqueline, 1974-
Associated country:
United States
Located: New Jersey
Birth date: 1974
Field of activity: Poetry
Profession or occupation:
Poets
Found in: One sleeps the other doesn't, 2011: ECIP t.p. (Jacqueline
Waters)
A minute without danger, ©2001: title page (Jacqueline
Waters) rear cover (poetry)
Email from pub., Aug. 8, 2011 (b. 1974)
Boston review, via WWW, April 19, 2016: Poet's sampler:
Jacqueline Waters, published February 1, 2002
(Jacqueline Waters is a young poet from New Jersey)
Associated language:
eng
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born 1974.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet and editor. Physiocrats, editor.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poetry to periodicals, including Chicago Review, 6×6, Poker, Dreamboat, Fanzine, No: A Journal of the Arts, Realpoetik, Boston Review, Poetry Project Newsletter, Harper’s, Little Star, and American Reader.
SIDELIGHTS
New Jersey poet Jacqueline Waters has published three collections of poetry and two chapbooks, The Garden of Eden a College, 2004, and The Saw That Talked, 2011. She also has poetry in various literary publications, such as Chicago Review, Harper’s, Little Star, and American Reader. Waters is editor of the pamphlet press, Physiocrats. In Boston Review, Charles North found Waters’ work “highly accomplished and highly intelligent. I also find them in large part mysterious.” Waters’ first collection, A Minute without Danger, published in 2001, balances humor and kindness, and offers a payoff for readers who pay close attention. A Publishers Weekly reviewer highlighted Waters’ sophisticated page-length lyrics and ability to make “the first person at once immediate and strange.”
One Sleeps the Other Doesn't
Waters’ next collection, the 2011, One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t, addresses themes of vigilance and distraction, conviction and trepidation, as poems struggle to stay awake when they would rather be asleep, all the while trying to learn something and feeling the presence of others. In Publishers Weekly, a writer said the book “is nothing if not challenging, and her challenges never arrive without pleasure,” adding that Waters “does not make all her answers easy to find.”
Noting the tendency of the poems to evoke hybrids, binaries, oppositions, and paired alternatives, Evan White noted online at iO Poetry: “What the poems enact, however, is not the assembly of strict dichotomies but an often virtuosic display of simultaneous poetic impulses. Waters’ writing is insistently and reflexively analytical; it is also structured by affecting and highly original narrative moments and images.”
Commodore
The 2017 Commodore with drawings by Selina Reber is Waters’ third collection that ventures into hierarchy, nostalgia, sentiment, and cultivation. Seeing Waters address forms, color, ambiguity, and existential themes in her poems, Thomas Cook remarked on the 4squarereview website: “The brain, or the consciousness on the pages of Waters’ collection Commodore, has trouble holding on to things because it’s not things that she sees. She sees forms. The poems in Commodore are concerned more with the shape of a movement than what moves. Waters’ poems aren’t abstract, though. They look at what’s essential.” Cook added: “Waters reveals the fun of looking, of seeing the world in all its strangenesses and affinities.”
According to a writer in Publishers Weekly, Waters’ poems are wide-ranging in form and approach and that “The performativity of the language comes through most visibly in the lineation, with its oddly timed pauses.” In the end, said the writer, Waters evokes a sense of unease from multiple texts, voices, and personae.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, December 17, 2001, review of A Minute without Danger, p. 86; December 19, 2011, review of One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t, p. 31; November 20, 2017, review of Commodore, p. 72.
ONLINE
4squarereview, https://www.4squarereview.com/ (December 1, 2017), Thomas Cook, review of Commodore.
Boston Review, http://bostonreview.net/ (February 1, 2002), Charles North, author profile.
iO Poetry, http://iopoetry.org/ (February 15, 2012), Evan White, review of One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t.
February 01, 2002
Poetry
Poet's Sampler: Jacqueline Waters
Introduced by Charles North
Jacqueline Waters
Jacqueline Waters is a young poet from New Jersey who has published very little at a time when it seems every young poet has accumulated, via electronic and other means, at least a Selected Poems by age thirty. I find her poems both ...highly accomplished and highly intelligent. I also find them in large part mysterious. Often starting off in medias res, they are framed as narratives complete with weather, significant surroundings, conflicts, crises—but almost instantly they shift gears, then shift again, so that it is clear that the narrative flavor is just that, and that the poems have to do with other things, in particular, the flow of consciousness (including its weather, stumbling blocks, break-ins, etc.). If high wires and modesty can be said to coexist, to me her poetry is a modest high-wire act whose magic lies in the apparent effortlessness of abrupt transition, not merely from one setting to another but from one sort of poetic attention to another, almost always convincingly.
Jacqueline Waters is the author of Commodore and One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t, both from Ugly Duckling Presse, and A Minute without Danger (Adventures in Poetry). More recent work has appeared in Chicago Review, Dreamboat, Fanzine, Harper's, Little Star and The American Reader.
Commodore
Publishers Weekly. 264.47 (Nov. 20, 2017): p72+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Commodore
Jacqueline Waters. Ugly Duckling, $15 trade paper (88p) ISBN 978-1-937027-91-9
Wide-ranging in form and approach, this sly third collection from Waters (One Sleeps the Other Doesn't) interrogates the reciprocal relationship between inner speech and language as a mode of social communication. "You want to feel like a voice is talking to you," Waters writes, subtly gesturing at the circumstances of the work's composition process. She elaborates in an extended sequence: "I/ remember that much// coming forward to speak/ in the tiny conference center, my voice/ long since behind me." Waters suggests that voice is a social construct--that is only possible within a culture, yet resides within individuals even in the most solitary moments. This larger philosophical concern shapes the style of the poems, as the speaker's interior monologues often read as a performance of ideals--of voice, identity, and narrative--that have been internalized. The performativity of the language comes through most visibly in the lineation, with its oddly timed pauses, evoking a sense of unease in a psyche populated by so many texts, voices, and personae. This internalization of a culture's rhetoric is inevitably political; as Waters writes, "Look good and talk good, without seeming contrived about it, while/ knowing that love devalues itself in proportion to how well you/ police yourself to get it." (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Commodore." Publishers Weekly, 20 Nov. 2017, p. 72+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517262080/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dec07103. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517262080
One Sleeps the Other Doesn't
Publishers Weekly. 258.51 (Dec. 19, 2011): p31+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
One Sleeps the Other Doesn't
Jacqueline Waters. Ugly Duckling (SPD, dist.), $15 trade paper (104p)ISBN 978-1-933254-83-8
Waters's second full-length is nothing if not challenging, and her challenges never arrive without pleasure. Faux-naif musings on speech and selfhood ("Who is/ they.) They are the/ same they always are") abut appalled slices of political satire ("Sometimes strip mining feels lovable") and independently beautiful details. All three sorts of language take their place within an almost cubist frame of skewed arguments, repurposed narrative, and meta-literary reflection. "How close to instinct is the Romantic project?" Waters asks. "Is it/ merely pleasing, the assuaging of space-sharing?" Some of her multipage projects ("Guard of an Eaten Collage: A Guard: I") hang together largely on the basis of abstract approaches, but others have stable, nearly journalistic, subjects, and comic ones, too: the Pennsylvania headquarters for Groundhog Day becomes the site for the leadoff poem, while dialogue between "Jacqueline" and a skeptical interlocutor called Lampwick ("Lampwick this is not what you are looking for/or it is and you are totally embarrassed") recurs throughout "The Garden of Eden a College." That's "college," not "collage," though some pages, with their estrangements and jump cuts, suggest collage elements, too. Waters (A Minute Without Danger) does not make all her answers easy to find; her work could become the object of the year for alert readers willing to return to the same text again and again. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"One Sleeps the Other Doesn't." Publishers Weekly, 19 Dec. 2011, p. 31+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A275920592/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bf673f5e. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A275920592
A Minute Without Danger. (Off the Grid)
Publishers Weekly. 248.51 (Dec. 17, 2001): p86.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Jacqueline Waters. Adventures in Poetry (SPD, dist.), $10 paper (64p) ISBN 0-9706250-3-0
Somewhere between Some Trees-era John Ashbery and Ange Mlinko, Waters's poised page-length lyrics pull off the difficult trick of making the first person at once immediate and strange: "Odd I had to learn to act natural/ To look as innocent as a beaker/ though less rigid or reproducible." While things seem to be happening, fully spelled-out narratives are hard to come by, though most readers will be content to follow the speaker in "Seeking the oddly beautiful crimp/In the sinister code/to decipher it out of existence." This book comes very close.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Minute Without Danger. (Off the Grid)." Publishers Weekly, 17 Dec. 2001, p. 86. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A81110500/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3137aacc. Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A81110500
COMMODORE by Jacqueline Waters drawings by Selina Reber Ugly Duckling Presse , 88 pages, December 1, 2017
COMMODORE
by Jacqueline Waters
drawings by Selina Reber
Ugly Duckling Presse, 88 pages, December 1, 2017
REVIEWED BY THOMAS COOK
If you walked past the speaker of a Jacqueline Waters poem at an airport, or in front of the dairy, or on an actual cloud, she may not see you, regardless of your hair color. In “‘I’m Entitled to My Opinion,’” a prose poem of four paragraphs spread over as many pages, Waters writes “Blond people are invisible to you, so you have to be extremely careful not to ignore them completely. It’s as if there’s nothing for your brain to hold.” The brain, or the consciousness on the pages of Waters’ collection Commodore, has trouble holding on to things because it's not things that she sees. She see forms. The poems in Commodore are concerned more with the shape of a movement than what moves. Waters' poems aren't abstract, though. They look at what's essential.
Commodore contains several modes. In short, lyric poems like “A Child to the State,” Waters often uses aphoristic expressions to set up an ambiguous and playful atmosphere. “Whatever you care for you diminish,” she writes. In other words, approaching things in the world is dangerous. But it’s not dangerous because we’re truly capable of changing or diminishing the things of the world. It’s dangerous because a world of forms is chameleonic, because its forms morph with the passing of time, or the longer we look:
Facts remain the same, changing with the day
While what is true of one repeats
By turning true of another.
Later in the same poem, Waters cites clouds as an example of this phenomenon: “Take inventive forms like clouds / Owing the world a form.”
This introduction to Commodore may make Waters sound like more of a mystic than she is. Though poems like “A Child to the State” and “Stiff Hedge” (“It is your right to be lost / in your experience”) directly engage existential themes, Waters enjoys coupling philosophical observations with humor and the banal. In, “If I Get Taken Away or Like Snatched,” the speaker considers a potato and a Post-it left on her kitchen counter. The Post-it indicates there are yet more potatoes in the garage, and the speaker considers her reply before, it seems, she realizes she’s alone: “I don’t answer, so no one does.”
Reading Waters is most rewarding when she turns over an idea, typically regarding the shape of an action, like allowing someone to squeeze by you in an airplane seat, for example. In “Others Need to Get in Your Row,” Waters writes, “For an ordinary person, everything is temporary.” The poem moves from “dry shampoo” to polar bears crashing through ice while trying to kill fake fish (“So the development of humility begins / with a strangely lavish / waste of forces”).
Each at first seemingly dissonant inclusion in the poem begins to resonate with the compactness and discomfort of airplane rows. “I’m not going anywhere I’m just standing,” Waters writes in the next moment, “between two recycling bins getting rained on.” When we arrive in the actual row at the end of the poem, and the question of whether to pull in one’s legs or “stand and hover” crosses the speakers mind, the poem returns to its most probing register. Is all that we’ve just read parsing “the difference between / mere succession and real causation”? Can we truly know, ultimately, if we
fell down from the push
fell down
a moment after the push?
Commodore also inhabits recognizably American culture. “Candor,” a poem divided into sections by an arbitrary sequence of dates (3/2011, 4/2011, 5/2011), considers Gerard Hopkins, ShopRite bags, and YouTube, taking pleasure in the use of phrases like “don’t get it twisted” without losing the preoccupation with forms: “In this river is a time of change / shape-shifting / ankle-touching.”
One of the most impressive achievements in Commodore is that we grow convinced by how the speaker sees the world: a field of forms always transforming. In “Scissor Half,” Waters writes “Really I’ve got to find a place / to lie down and go to work,” and we’re left thinking about the shape of that action. What kind of a place is that? It’s a delightfully conflicting desire, and toward the end of the book Waters turns increasingly self-reflexive about the book’s themes. In “Protocol,” she describes reading another book, and her experience bleeds into the poem’s metaphor:
I enjoy reading this book about giant waves
Penetrating so many secrets we’ve no breath left for the unknowable
The cold can balanced
on the half-ajar door
In “The End,” she reflects “They say the bomb of your central question / will tick inside the head / of your reader,” and this is precisely what the book has been constructing. Surrounding all of this apprehension of forms is a question about the nature of reality, how we have to gather it into meaning despite being just one form among many; we are like Waters' poems: “You’re lucky / you’re my book,” she tells us in “It Isn’t Easy.” “You are sick / of motioning / so you probably won’t / wave me over anymore.”
This of course isn’t true, because I would wave Waters and this book over whenever I wanted to make my world strange in the most fruitful way, whenever I wanted to see the table or the vase, my water glass or paper weight or cold can in and of themselves. Waters reveals the fun of looking, of seeing the world in all its strangenesses and affinities. The final poem “All Ears” is one of the long and rangy variety that turns over thought so well, and I feel I’m seeing as much as I am reading “Centered in the display of pens / is a small pad / stuck to the rack for testing.” After I'm taught to see more clearly by reading these poems, my attention on the world shows it to be “Generally squiggles, occasionally / the well-formed word.”
Commodore
Jacqueline Waters
Ugly Duckling Presse (Dec 1, 2017)
Softcover $15.00 (88pp)
978-1-937027-91-9
Jacqueline Waters is practiced at the velvet glove-iron fist approach to poetry, at times finessing or obscuring the poem’s impact so that when it lands, the force is staggering. Her poetry has appeared in Harper’s, Chicago Review, The American Reader, and other publications. She is the author of two other collections: One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t and A Minute without Danger.
Don’t Be Upset If You Don’t Hear from Me
Ranchers lease land from the government
At very low rates
That do not make up for the money spent by the government
To manage the land for the ranchers
Each rancher goes to sleep with a blanket
It doesn’t stop there
Ranchers get sex in places we don’t know about
The sex doesn’t stop there
Ranchers were so mad about 200 coyotes loose in their area
So the government said OK we’ll shoot them from helicopters
When the coyotes died it was OK
Because animals die all the time they are used to it
You like this cake I’ll cut you a slice
A sliver
It’s just a worthless sliver
If it were me I would be more circumspect about it
I would be less going on about it
I’d tear its branches off and act like I hadn’t thought about it
Decorate the tree half and shove it out there to sit
Reviewed by Matt Sutherland
January/February 2018
REVIEW OF JACQUELINE WATERS’ ONE SLEEPS THE OTHER DOESN’T
Posted: February 15th, 2012 ˑ Filled under: Issue 4 ˑ Comments Closed
Review of One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t, by Jacqueline Waters
Ugly Duckling Presse 2011, 105 pages $15.00
By Evan White
Jacqueline Waters describes her second full-length collection, One Sleeps The Other Doesn’t in the following way: “Some of the poems are asleep, some try to stay awake long enough to learn something and a few employ a strategy of excessive concern with the process of their own production.” Of course, we shouldn’t take this as a direct avowal of authorial intent. I am interested, though, by the statement’s fusion of figurative language (in particular “asleep” and “awake”) and clinical precision (as in “a strategy of excessive concern with the process of their own production.”) Waters’ poetry, too, speaks through hybrid registers. And of course the book’s title suggests an interest in binaries, oppositions, or paired alternatives. What the poems enact, however, is not the assembly of strict dichotomies but an often virtuosic display of simultaneous poetic impulses. Waters’ writing is insistently and reflexively analytical; it is also structured by affecting and highly original narrative moments and images.
The book’s second poem, “Phil—”, is a twenty-four page riff of associations and meditations surrounding the titular harried groundhog/seasonal media fetish. The opening lines establish the poem’s favored method of presenting its images with accompanying interpretations. Here, a framing shot from a film is described alongside a rumination on film’s tendency to mask the conditions of its own production:
As a movie it asks
we look at a grave
read a headstone, notice a man
tending to the overturned earth
atop an adjacent plot
not
calculate the tightness of the shot
ask if the filmer had a permit, or if Woodstock, Illinois
was used again
as a stand-in for Punxsutawney…
The gothic loneliness and bracing believability of the graveyard image invite us directly into an invented and contingent world, but we are mildly chastised for not attending to the material building blocks that make the whole production possible and actual. This happens a lot in One Sleeps: the visual and absorptive pleasures of poetry are offered and then snatched away by a demystifying commentary.
From here, “Phil—” unfolds a sprawling, first-person, non-linear narrative surrounding the oracular rodent and the voyeuristic, strangely menacing, and finally inscrutable human communities that endow him with special meaning. Some pages in, Waters reflects, “—if I’m still worried the Inner Circle / eats Punxsutawney Phil / each August at the Groundhog barbecue / stag, with roasted corn and homemade lager / then I don’t hope to atone nor regain an event I attended / a place I was / for a moment: my day, its night.” Here and throughout the collection, any literal, “real-world” reading of Waters’ huge tableaus is both partially invited and ultimately blocked by the frequent use of opaque and indiscernible narrative elements. And yet there is an elusive rightness and satisfaction in the crucial transition, in the lines quoted above, from the outlandish speculation about “Phil’s” unhappy fate at the hands of his human overseers to the sudden and clearly sincere concern with notions of culpability and “atonement”. This is representative, I think, of how Waters’ recurring personae and central images work not as elements of recognizable settings but as invitations to join in the poems’ sometimes comic, sometimes weighty reflections on perception, subjectivity, and responsibility.
“Phil—” and similarly expansive dramatic monologues comprise the first two-thirds or so of the collection. In the final section, these large structures give way to a series of short lyrics in which Waters’ attention begins to edge away from the political and towards the individual, without ever leaving the former entirely behind. In “Narcissulogy,” a man sees his reflection not in a body of water but in the face of a woman, by way of the sentiments he projects:
hovering over her he felt: it’s frankly possible
she’s too aware
of what she might be thinking:
not she as a private individual
but as an army with no particular
priority of operations
In Waters’ postmodernist Narcissus parable, the apparently “personal” boundaries drawn around sexuality actually reflect the social production of selfhood. Here is another case of temporary refuge in the affective and the lyrical being briefly glimpsed—i.e., “hovering over her he felt”—then immediately subverted by a kind of anxiously heightened self-awareness. (Notice the parallel here to Waters’ subterfuge of film’s reifying habits in “Phil—”. Just as the “she” of “Narcissulogy” cannot represent merely the stability of “a private individual”, the cinematic image of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania is pressured by the speaker’s awareness of its potential real-world counterpart, “Woodstock, Illinois”.)
If I have so far under-emphasized Waters’ prosodic and musical facilities, this is only because in One Sleeps‘ they are in general means to the work’s philosophical ends. That being said, many of Waters’ most memorable sentiments seem to be driven by, rather than embroidered with, a finely tuned instinct for sound and association. Take the opening stanzas of “Aptecon”, which contain a lovely Stevens-esque note of patrician joviality:
Useless to trouble orioles
their long golden bores
staged in pouts to persevere
through a load of singsong, most severe…
Even the dump
hates to accept these things
Not by the hour, the day
eyes the second hand hacking its way
through sounded air
There is a very basic beauty here in the outlandish diction, and in a book of epically-proportioned free verse the deft yet breezy handling of the end rhymes is almost startling. Yet even here, any attempt to indulge in unproblematically pleasurable reading is checked. Readerly indulgences this mode of verse might otherwise invite are identified and “exposed” by skeptical or acerbic cues: “a load of singsong”, “Even the dump”, “staged”, “pouts”, and so on.
What Waters communicates with these dual gestures—affirmation and negation; presentation and deconstruction—is, I think, a sense of poetry’s responsibility to be aware of its own constructedness. The drowsy pleasures of beautiful verse aren’t completely negated, but they’re always accompanied by a critical and skeptical alertness. One hand always knows what the other is doing: all the poems sleep, and all of them don’t.