On the Surface Flashing

By Alexis Multer White

If I were a statue
I’d be Venus de Milo— the shape of your loss in my invisible arms.
– Alexis White
The above poem was written by a talented young NW poet who died in 2012 after completing her Fine Arts degree from Oregon State University. This artist, my daughter Alexis, grew up in Oregon where you can find wild rivers, rocky shores of the Northwest coast, magical mountains, and high desert country. Her writing was affected by these places of pristine beauty. Interested in ecofeminism, Alexis saw the environment and the female body as intertwined, and because of this she wanted to try to give a voice to that which she felt had been silenced: “because nature and the body are often rendered voiceless, my poetry deals with the tension between what can and cannot be said. I see this as what is spoken, and what cannot be said in words but lies all around and braided within the message.” Many of Alexis’s poems give voice to women who have been muted through trauma. She believed that trauma has a way of physically silencing the body, and recovery from trauma creates its own language. This is apparent in the narrative sequence from “Letters from Nantucket” and the “Newfoundland Women” where she adapts the persona of women who speak but are aware of the inadequacy of their words. Alexis imagined how it was to be in another’s body and mind in another time and place, giving these women a unique voice.
Alexis had always been creative and imaginative, kind and true. As a child she was able to discuss deep feelings with empathetic awareness of how others must feel. In a passage partially used by Mark Hallman in the book “The Boy Behind the Mask,” at age 11 she wrote “I remember kids, ignorant hateful kids, would make fun of him. It cut through my heart like an icy dagger, to hear their cold, gossipy giggles... Perhaps ignorance was our biggest enemy...remember that a person’s true beauty is not on the outside, but within the heart.” This was the very sweet and wise soul her father and I knew. This is the imperfect, perfect child we loved and still love.
If not for illness I am sure she would have continued to write and teach, and be successful at both. Her loss still leaves us with more questions than answers. Death when unexpected always moves faster than the human heart beats, and the mind accepts. She once wrote “Time is a fickle god, her temples being not on some high mountain or sacred grove, but everywhere in pillars of stone and the cells of my cheek, the places of kings and my lover’s sleeping breath. How does a thing that nurtures us damn us as well?” I wish I could go back in time and rewrite the history of her life, but we can never go back, as she well knew. Her beautiful, deep loving
soul now resonates in her poetry. This is what she has left us, this and memories of an extraordinary child whom we, as her parents, love beyond all reason and time. Her father and I would like to share her work, and see her words in the world. We know that is what she wanted most of all.
– Mary White; fall 2021
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Dedication

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alexis Multer White
• Release date: Sep 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005587758

Alexis Multer White

Alexis White (1985-2012) was a native of Portland, Oregon. She received her undergraduate degree from Carleton,College and her MFA in poetry from Oregon State University and her work has been featured in multiple literary reviews, journals, and magazines."When I write, I always write from a sense of place-from the landscape of the Pacific Northwest where I grew up, and from the landscape of my body as a woman. I see the environment and the body as inexorably intertwined, and the most important thing I can do as a writer is try to give voice to those two places that society has often silenced." (Alexis White, Blood Orange Review, 2012)

Book preview

Introduction

Notes from the author

My poetry hangs on the tension between what can and cannot be said-messages are continuously lost, washed away, and buried. The silences, disconnects and vacancies might take the form of letters lost in the waves, a woman’s view of her own body as a vacant house or the paving over of a city’s buried past. As I state in my opening poem, Empty, empty spaces are what interest me, silence more than words. Myth examines how language distorts the reality of rape, and On the Surface, Flashing shows how war has destroyed the possibility of intimacy between a young couple. Yet, ironically, it is the awareness of these silences and miscommunications that can make our connection with others more meaningful. Physical and psychological trauma renders the body speechless, and so recovery from this trauma gives birth to language. Think of Ovid’s Philomela, tongue cut out but still waving tapestries that tell her tale: the recounting of the self becomes the origin of art.

– Alexis White

Foreword

On Wednesday afternoons for nearly a year, I met with Alexis in my office to look down into the limpid worlds of her poems. I was her thesis advisor, but I never felt I was teaching her so much as witnessing an expansion of sympathetic vision and verbal mastery. Week after week she would come to my office with poems not merely revised, but re-envisioned. New poems, often written in compelling personae, seemed to arrive a cluster at a time. These sometimes evolved into sequences, such as Letters from Nantucket, which gives voice to a diverse cast of whaling widows, from unlettered to highly literate, all responding to missives that arrive like a tiny resurrection once a year… Each voice was so gripping and believable that it felt as if Alexis had time-traveled back to eavesdrop on their thoughts. I have rarely worked with a poet whose expansion into mastery matched hers.

After her death, these breathtaking poems were vessels of her voice. To pay tribute to her and to soothe our grief, we printed the final poem in her manuscript, Letters from Nantucket, Reprise, as a letter-pressed broadside. Over the course of a day, her friends and fellow writers dropped by the studio to hand set a line or two in tiny letters of lead. My heart broke as I set the haunting lines, No more letters now/those slim white fields where I looked for thee. But