Author Note: Lauren Peat
As part of our Author Notes series, Lauren Peat talks about digging deep into the past for her poems “Afterlight” and “Sati,” which appeared in The Ex-Puritan Issue 44, Winter 2019.
I’ve always been envious of people with especially impermeable memories—people who are able to recall, say, the softly-revolving mobile that hung over their crib at the age of two. (My paternal grandmother once claimed she could remember being held up in the womb.) Comparatively speaking, my powers of recollection were a little late to the party. Of the memories that I’m sure were not just subsequently recounted to me, one of my earliest dates from the year I turned six; this was the departure point for the poem “Afterlight.” One night, awake well past my bedtime, I became seized with something approaching existential dread: the thought that I was already six years old, and it would be only another six years before I turned twelve … wasn’t it just going by so quickly? I worked myself up into a cold sweat about it, I kid you not. (I was quite a precocious child.) It was a more recent bout of sleeplessness that triggered the first draft of the poem, and then, of course, the many drafts to follow—all of which were an attempt to capture the grievous, double-edged feeling that my six-year-old self encountered that night: panic at having been plunged into an awareness of the passage of time, alongside the dense, thick buoyancy peculiar to insomnia—that sensation of being unmoored and unable to place oneself within time.
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I arrived at the memory recounted in “Sati”—also one of my earliest, perhaps the earliest—somewhat more obliquely. Around the time of writing the poem, I had begun to take a deeper interest in mindfulness, and particularly Buddhism. The title was derived from some of my reading on the subject—sati being the first of Buddhism’s Seven Factors of Enlightenment. (The word is derived from the Pali, as well as the Sanskrit, smṛti, which curiously meant ‘to remember.’) I suppose this reading came to project itself onto another kind of meditation: my musing aplenty on the often discomforting realities of living in a body. On a more practical level, the embryo of the poem really was an impromptu study of my roommate’s succulent plant, which eventually became bound up with the idea—as the succulent suggested to me then—of plant life’s inviolable “present.” Or rather: its inviolable ability to be present. (A reality largely inaccessible to us humans, waterlogged with memory and anticipation as we are.) Why learning to tie my shoelaces, specifically? I’m not quite sure—though I do think that this early experience of discomfort resonates in my mind more clearly, or less confusedly, than do my contemporary experiences of it. More often than not, poems reveal themselves to me unpredictably and mercurially; for whatever reason, then, this poem’s returning to a first impression (or even “imprint”) of bodily unease made intuitive sense. I tend to believe that poetry is informed by detours much more than it is by destinations. In the case of “Sati,” the detour felt both circuitous and unflinchingly direct: my fleshing out what it might mean to “sit with” a human body, and so sit with its many coincidences and incarnations.
Lauren Peat was raised in the English Midlands and the various boroughs of Toronto. A teacher, translator, and occasional lyricist, she holds an MFA in poetry from Boston University. Her work was mostly recently featured in AL VIF, an art installation at Boston's Faneuil Hall, and is forthcoming in the anthology If You're Not Happy Now (Broadstone Books).
