Jackfish and walleye circle like clouds as he strains
the silt floor of his pool, a lost lure in his lip,
Five of Diamonds, River Runt, Lazy Ike,
or a simple spoon, feeding
a slow disease of rust through his body's quiet armour.
Kin to caviar, he's an oily mudfish. Inedible.
Indelible. Ancient grunt of sea
in a warm prairie river, prehistory a third eye in his head.
He rests, and time passes as water and sand
through the long throat of him, in a hiss, as thoughts
of food. We take our guilts
to his valley and dump them in,
give him quicksilver to corrode his fins, weed killer,
gas oil mix, wrap him in poison arms.
Our bottom feeder,
sin-eater.
On an afternoon mean as a hook we hauled him
up to his nightmare of us and laughed
at his ugliness, soft sucker mouth opening,
closing on air that must have felt like ground glass,
left him to die with disdain
for what we could not consume.
And when he began to heave and thrash over yards of rock
to the water's edge and, unbelievably, in,
we couldn't hold him though we were teenaged
and bigger than everything. Could not contain
the old current he had for a mind, its pull,
and his body a muscle called river, called spawn.
Karen Solie’s poem “Sturgeon” invites us to consider the power lurking beneath the surface of those things we might dismiss or even find repulsive.
- Read the poem aloud to yourself, noting the different kinds of sentences (long and short; simple, compound, and complex; fragments) Karen Solie uses in this poem. Which lines are easier to read than others? Are there any places where you find yourself running out of breath or getting tired? How could you work around (or with) these challenges in your recitation?
- Consider the use of the first-person plural pronoun “we” in this poem. It appears once in the first stanza, and several times in the second. Does the pronoun designate the same group of people in the second stanza as it did in the first? What makes you think so?
- At the end of the first stanza, a sentence fragment over two short lines offers a succinct summation of the sturgeon’s role in the human world: “Our bottom feeder, / sin-eater.” One of these terms is commonly used to talk about the sturgeon as a species, while the other is typically used to talk about a kind of person, meaning its use here is metaphorical. Look up these two terms. How do their definitions help you understand the poem’s conception of the sturgeon?
- Solie introduces a contradiction towards the end of “Sturgeon,” where the speaker and her friends “couldn’t hold him [the sturgeon] though we were teenaged / and bigger than everything.” How do you interpret these lines? How would you characterize the tone here?
- The poet uses several metaphors to draw a link between the sturgeon and the passage of time. In the first stanza, for example, she describes the sturgeon as “Ancient grunt of sea / in a warm prairie river, prehistory a third eye in his head.” Find other such phrasings in the poem. What do you think the poet is trying to say about this animal and time? How does this compare to the characterization of the different “we”s in the poem?
Writing activity: Pick an animal you (or others) find disgusting or off-putting. Write a poem about this animal. As a nod to Solie, introduce one or more humans (yourself or others) into the poem. See how they interact with your chosen animal.
Useful Links
Listen to Karen Solie read (and talk about) her poem “Sturgeon”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0Yl1dNCpn8
Karen Solie, "Sturgeon," from Short Haul Engine. Brick Books, 2001. Copyright Ⓒ Karen Solie. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.