V: Judith Vollmer

House Spiders

I think I was lucky with Henry Vaughan for V, but there were no living ‘V’ poets on my shelves. I suppose the most famous modern ‘V’ poet is Ocean Vuong, whose work I have a complex relationship with, in the sense that I don’t really like it, but I also don’t really like the high-handed sneering and weird backlash that seems to have formed against him in certain sections of the poetry world after his huge success. Actually, I guess I don’t really have a ‘complex relationship’ with the work at all, then, do I? ‘It’s ok to not like stuff, but don’t be a dick about it’, I guess. Anyway. Here’s Judith Vollmer, an American poet I found online who I know nothing else about other than that I was drawn to this poem about house spiders.

You can read the poem here: House Spiders by Judith Vollmer - Poems | Academy of American Poets

House Spiders

Streetlights out again I’m walking in the dark
lugging groceries up the steps to the porch
whose yellow bulb is about to go too, when a single 
familiar strand intersects my face,
the filament slides across my glasses which seem suddenly
perfectly clean, fresh, and my whole tired day slows down

I think I’m most drawn to the strangeness in this first stanza. The first three lines set up a speaker experiencing some very ordinary and mundane irritations. The stakes are very low, but ultimately, I think, relatable – the slight sigh in “streetlights out again”, with that “again” setting up a minor complaint about societal neglect, which exacerbates the slight difficulty of a necessary chore, ‘lugging’ those groceries, which then in turns reminds her of a more personal, domestic neglect in that she hasn’t got round to changing her own porch light bulb either. The world here isn’t exactly a hostile place, and the problems aren’t exactly life-threatening, but I’m interested in the world-weary mundanity of a world that is perhaps just indifferent and slightly difficult to navigate.

Then, weirder, the ‘house spiders’ of the title precipitate a change – the strand of a spider web on the porch landing across the speaker’s face *should* be a fourth minor irritation, and it’s of the same kind of low-stakes calibre of the others, but in fact the language here makes it oddly positive. The ‘filament’ of web (which nicely echoes and contrasts the broken and exhausted filaments of the electric lights) is cleansing rather than irritating, and its wipe across the speaker’s glasses brings freshness to the ‘tired day’.

                   walking into such a giant thread
is a surprise every time,
though I never kill them, I carry them outside
on plastic lids or open books, they live
so plainly and eat the mosquitoes.

So in the interaction with the house spider’s web, and the strangeness of the action which is both ‘familiar’ and comment but also ‘a surprise every time’, we get to see what kind of person the speaker is. I like the odd justification for never killing the spiders – one a fairly common one which is that spiders are useful because kill other pests, but also, more interestingly, that “they live/so plainly”. So there’s something to be admired in the ‘living plainly’? So much so that it gives the spiders a stay of execution? I suppose what Vollmer is setting up subtly is that the speaker herself lives plainly – all she’s doing is bringing groceries home – so there’s a kind of fellow-feeling in the plain living of the house spider too? Or maybe it’s that the speaker, with her minor irritations during the act of plain living, is setting up the spiders’ plainness as something she herself aspires to.

                Distant cousins
to the scorpion, mine are pale & small,
dark & discreet. More like the one
who lived in the corner of the old farm kitchen
under the ivy vase and behind the single
candle-pot—black with curved
crotchety legs.

More detail here, and again, I think I like the odd directions that Vollmer is taking us in. Why the details about the spiders’ kinship with scorpions? Is that again part of why she doesn’t kill them, or is this a new train of thought? The speaker seems to be arguing that they are *like* scorpions but some how less intense – so is it the idea that they are like a much more deadly creature, but more ‘discreet’ and therefore more acceptable to live with?

And what’s this specific memory doing? It’s *very* specific, for a gambit that really only amounts to “these spiders remind me of another specific spider I once knew”. It doesn’t seem to me to be a reference to any specific well-known spiders in literature(!), so I suppose we’re supposed to take this as a memory specific to the speaker. Perhaps what we’ve got here is another reason why she feels a kind of kinship with these spiders, why their webs landing on her face don’t bother her and why she doesn’t kill them. This specific spider, from the farmhouse the speaker presumably used to live in, is described with the kind of loving detail you’d reserve for a more expected fixture in the home, like a pet. I do like those ‘crotchety’ legs – the double meaning of that ‘crotchety’ conveying some affection, I think, in describing the spider as grumpy, but also of course the crotchet as a musical note resembling a spider leg.

     Maya, weaver of illusions,
     how is it we trust the web, the nest,
     the roof over our heads, we trust the stars
     our guardians who gave us our alphabet?
     We trust the turtle’s shell because
     it, too, says house and how can we read
     the footprints of birds on shoreline sand,
     & October twigs that fall to the ground
     in patterns that match the shell & stars?

I think this part of the poem is the bit where I decided I wanted to look at it in more detail. Vollmer is separating it out on the page by indenting it, so she’s indicating maybe that this section goes off somewhere new, but I think we’d have got that anyway with the quite drastic change in tone and register. We’ve had quite an ordinary, anecdotal poem so far, with nothing out of the ordinary or particularly elevated happening, and the language of the poem has reflected this. Now we have a turn to the mythical, and an apostrophic switch in address to “Maya, weaver of illusions”.

I had to look this up – so apologies if I’m not getting all of the nuances. It seemed pretty clear to me that Vollmer was referring to some kind of spidery mythology, since spiders do tend to make appearances in all kinds of myths from all sorts of different traditions – I was thinking of something similar to Arachne from Greek myth or Anansi from West African folklore. I didn’t know that Maya (or Mahamaya) is the weaver of illusions in Hinduism, with the idea that she is the goddess of mythology itself, weaving veils of story and illusion across material reality. So the poem has leapt somewhere spiritual from our mundane moment of bringing groceries home.

The spider web falling on the speaker’s glasses, then, seems to have swept a kind of veil away from her sight and forced her to confront questions about the nature of reality – it’s as though the broken streetlights and dimmed porch bulb’s failure to illuminate the world in front of her has allowed in a different kind of search for illumination. Blake would like this – the glasses have become the doors of perception being cleansed by an agent of nature. So what is being asked here? Why are the questions about trust?

This part feels almost like a prayer. There’s a ‘we’ that seems to include all of creation, and as the speaker arrives home she gives thanks to the other concepts of home that Maya has weaved for us – the ‘roof’, the ‘web’ and the ‘nest’, as well as the ‘turtle’s shell’ – even in the acknowledgment that we don’t know how we can ‘trust’ them.

I was also intrigued by that idea that the stars “gave us our alphabet” – again, I didn’t really know this, but there are some theories that the shapes of letters in early alphabet systems did come from, or emerge alongside, efforts to map the patterns of stars in the sky. I don’t know how valid those theories are, but they’re quite cool, I think. I suppose it makes sense that early humans would see the stars in the sky as a kind of site of divine communication, and then try to replicate that?

And then thirdly the speaker mentions the things that appear to us in nature and suggest patterns and meanings, but which we *haven’t* deciphered yet – twigs, birds’ footprints.

There’s an interesting idea in all of this about what humans do in our recognition of patterns and extrapolations of meaning from the natural world, then. In some cases we seem confident that we have cracked it – the stars are our gods, protecting us like a roof. The turtle’s shell is a home. But in other cases, we can see there are patterns but we can’t decipher them.

In all of this, we seem to have a speaker who is giving thanks to a divine consciousness, marvelling at our own capacity to understand the messages of the university and then also asking it to shed light on even more meaning.

I feel less and less like
a single self, more like
a weaver, myself, spelling out
formulae from what’s given
and from words.

What’s Vollmer doing at the end here? It’s definitely a neat conclusion, and we’ve gone back now away from the indented exhortation to Maya into the real world. But the speaker seems to have changed, or at least had a clarifying moment. The weaving of the spider has allowed her to briefly question the way meaning is weaved through the world through divine nature, and now the speaker feels part of that herself. There is transcendence here – if our roofs are the same as birds’ nests, spiders’ webs and turtles’ shells, then we are all one. And that means we ourselves are part of the weaving of meaning through the world. The moment with the spider web, a random encounter – ‘what’s given’ – has sparked the weaving of the poem ‘from words’. The entirety of nature and existence is one giant meaning-making project, and the poet has been reminded of her ability to contribute to this.