The Poem as a Spell in EP Jenkins’ Rituals (Broken Sleep Books) by Katy Mack

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his book The Disappearance of Rituals argues that as a society our sense of community has been eroded. Part of this phenomenon is that we have lost sight of our ancient rituals — rituals that ‘stabilise life’ and allow for communal expression. These ancient rituals take many forms, performance, movement, sound and an engagement with the natural world. Language has a role in these rituals, but it is not the only factor – it is simply one among a range of different forms of communication. 

E P Jenkins’s debut collection Rituals from Broken Sleep Books explores many ritualistic activities. Though most are the rituals of the everyday and the domestic — reading a book, walking the dog, gardening and knitting all appear, and reappear, throughout — within these ritual acts, magic transformation occurs.  

In ‘Descaling’, the mundane chore of descaling the kettle transforms into an unexpected magical ritual. The poem begins with the ‘[H]assle free’ and ‘cheap’ cure for limescale — leaving a slice of lemon in the kettle overnight. Yet, as night draws in, the water starts to ‘hum’ and boil in the unplugged kettle, much like the brew in a witch’s cauldron. Jenkins makes us aware that a shift has taken place in the kettle water, not just between the states of cold and hot, but also in its movement from inanimate to animate — and with this movement the water starts to make a sound, to sing. The word hum, repeated throughout the poem, becomes a kind of incantation:

            humming while it 

hums it 

hums 

it 

          did you 

unplug it first? 

What is being summoned through this repetition is the word’s sonic quality. ‘Hum’ starts to move too, tumbling down the page — flaking off and floating, like limescale in a kettle. For Jenkins, this everyday ritual has enacted a spell and, we are told, that witches – the witch being a figure who guides us through this collection, reappearing throughout – will ‘hum for their tea’. The poem too, Jenkins implies, has the capacity to ‘hum’ and, in so doing, it too becomes a sphere where a spell can take place, where a transformation may occur.

The potential of poetry to act as a forum for ritual and spell-making is a preoccupation of Rituals. Throughout the collection, words, or a short sequence of words, often take over whole pages, in a form which verges on a kind of concrete poem. These pieces are then dispersed throughout, alongside photographs and drawings, to form a fragmented extended poem. Taken individually, sequences like ‘J    U    I    C    E /from/a’ are hard to follow. But a reading of these fragments that seeks to project any kind of stable meaning, is not the kind of reading that Jenkins’s work invites. Instead, these sequences read like experiments or spells, words become material objects that are collected like ingredients for a potion — when they encounter each other on the page they become charged. Words in these sequences are stretched or manipulated into different shapes; they dance, diagonally or vertically, across the page. What is being, very successfully, probed at here is language’s flexibility, its capacity to function as a material object and as a kind of performance or moving image, darting across. If the poem is a spell, then language is the material through which the spell is enacted.  

Elsewhere, spells and hexes make more direct appearances. In ‘Hex via Scarf — a Magikal Knitting Pattern’ the poem’s long lines mimic the act of knitting, tracking back and forth over the page. The speaker’s thoughts are dispersed like a series of threads throughout, and the poem is loosely held together by the recurring knitting pattern with interrupts at various points, ‘k2tog, k2, yo, k1, yo’, keeping the momentum moving forward. But reading the poem in a linear fashion, from A to B, is only one way to engage with it. Another lies in the patterns and connections woven into the poem’s fabric. There are sonic connections between words in the rhymes between ‘head’ and ‘bed’, ‘eye’ and ‘try’ and the half-rhyme of ‘sheep’ and ‘grief’. Associations also occur in the images between, for example, the scarf, the ‘red line mouth around her neck’ and the ‘infinite loop’. An impression is being created through this poem, and many others in the collection, of the poem as a kind of knotted web, where words and thoughts sometimes become, momentarily, enmeshed. What is important, Jenkins seems to imply, is that we are willing to suspend a reading of the poem that anchors it to any preconceived, linear interpretation. Just as the witch who casts the spell must stop ‘holding on to all this grief’ and instead be alert to the fact that ‘cowl sounds an awful lot like scowl’. So too must the reader cast aside preconceived notions and enter the poem own its own terms — alert to its capacity to make unexpected connections associations. That is how, Jenkins implies, the spell is cast.

Knitting, casting spells and writing poems are all acts of transformation. They are also acts which transfer from an individual to a collective, a wider community. The poems in this collection all reach beyond an understanding of language as merely words on a page, instead words are also presented as soundscapes, objects, and performances. Much like the witches shopping list that goes through a washing-machine spin in ‘Buying Second-hand Furniture’, language must also be mulched and broken down in order to be reconstructed, so as to become ‘strings of pearl’. The poems throughout Jenkins’s collection are playful, open spaces. Like Han’s description of rituals as communal experiences, Jenkins invites the reader into the community that the poems create, we are a part of its process of meaning-making. All that is required, is that we encounter the poem as we do a ritual, with curiosity and a particular kind of directed attention. But also, that we are willing to suspend disbelief and take a leap of faith into the world of the poem. That is, after all, how the magic is summoned.