Elizabeth Lee Steere
University of Georgia
The Very List: Catalog Structure in the Poetry of C. D. Wright
The titles of C. D. Wright’s poems in the 2002 compilation volume Steal Away reflect the poet’s predilection for cataloging and lists. Wright assigns numbers to groups of poems, such as the “Handfishing Retablos #1-#4,” and the “Girlfriend Poems 1-10.” Likewise, when Wright contributed an essay on poetry to the collection By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry, she titled her piece “69 Hidebound Opinions, Propositions, and Several Asides from a Manila Folder Concerning the Stuff of Poetry,” and created a numbered inventory of comments on the nature of poetry. As opinion number 29, Wright suggests that a poet
“must maintain a vigilant sense of when to leave off. When to skip. When to depart. Abjure. Leap. When to let inferences fly . . . It is the quality of omission and suppression I believe which determines the quality and degree of a reader’s participating in the telling—what is latent in the work that the reader alone can render active and integral to it.” (Wright “Hidebound” 387)
To achieve this desired result, Wright often structures her poems themselves as lists, a format that eschews extraneous words, phrases, or explanations. This technique in poetry is not new; Walt Whitman was famous for his “catalogues,” and critics have compared the two poets, noting that Wright’s “long lines and polyphonic voices resemble Whitman, Stanford, and Williams, but have the physicality and openness that is uniquely Wright’s own” (Colburn 207).
At first, the cataloguing technique Wright employs may seem counterproductive to her goal of succinctness, since a list by definition must be a series of names or words, often of a considerable number. However, critics have observed that “Wright’s work succeeds so beautifully because of what she leaves out . . . her best work, her most vital work is free of unnecessary connective devices” (Pfefferle 226). Wright sometimes outlines a narrative by highlighting only the most crucial details in a series, a technique she calls “shining the particulars” (Kirsch 33). Wright is also very innovative in the structure of her catalogues; she creates “lists” of every imaginable shape and form and seamlessly combines the familiar list format with her original, unfamiliar poetic techniques. However, some critics object to Wright’s self-called “hybridity of structure and genre” (Colburn 208). Adam Kirsch protests what he views as Wright’s technique of “deliberate withholding of the whole story, this placing of the reader at a disadvantage” (Kirsch 34). He describes her catalogs as being “like pieces from different jigsaw puzzles all mixed up” (Kirsch 33). Kirsch labels Wright a “discourteous poet,” because in her poetry, he believes that “[t]he implied reader does not need to be invited or seduced into the poem; his presence is assumed, or ignored [and] no effort is made to avoid confusion about the subject or situation of the poem; confusion may actually be invited” (Kirsch 33). Jenny Goodman disagrees, noting that “[i]f judgmental poets and critics are to be jarred by the combination of formal experimentation, personal subject matter and tone . . . other readers are to be greeted like old friends” (Goodman 53). Despite Kirsch’s contentions, there are numerous ways in which, even in the impersonal genre of the catalog, Wright invites active participation from her readers, allowing them to fill in the gaps of her “silences” and to fit together the “puzzle pieces” to which Kirsch objects. The regulated, formal structure of lists belies the very human and interactive nature of Wright’s list poems.
In her 1991 poem “Remarks On Color,” Wright adapts the list format to create a sense of warmth and familiarity. The poem begins by listing descriptions of different scenes or objects for each numbered line, such as “1. highway patched with blacktop, service station at the crossroads” (1), “3. A fully grown man” (3), and “4. Filthy toilets” (4). These lines are reminiscent of childhood games like “Car Bingo,” or “I Spy,” which are played by checking off certain items seen during a trip in order to pass the time while traveling. The easy conventionality of this structure invites the reader to join in the game and recollect popboxes, grown men, and service stations from past personal trips. The nature of the poem changes slightly at the line, “4. Filthy toilets, just hold it a little while longer” (4). The checklist now has a narrator making direct commentary about it, and the reader is invited into a deeper level of interaction with both the heretofore unseen narrator and also with the other people and places described in the list. The reader becomes part of the poem, a non-native who listens to a would-be tour guide point out personal landmarks and tell stories about them as they travel the highway. The narrator’s tone is conversational and familiar, and presumes a rapport with the reader by interjecting apparent non sequiturs into the text of the poem.
The use of this technique contradicts Kirsch’s criticism that Wright “ignores” her reader (Kirsch 33), and exemplifies Goodman’s sense that “the intimacy of Wright’s poetry . . . surely invites readers to identify with her experience and to understand their own… anew through her poetry’s transformations” (Goodman 53). The lines “20. E-Z on E-Z off” (20) and “21. out of wedlock, wedlocked” (21) are not apropos of the lines before or after them, but they are referred to so off-handedly that there is a sense there must be a history behind them. Perhaps these words are part of an in-joke between the author and the reader; the reader is likely to have picked up on an earlier in-joke when the narrator says she must “run on to Rhonda” (18) and then offers the famous song lyrics, “help me Rhonda help help me Rhonda” (19). The narrator’s voice and attitude suggest that he or she might be speaking these poems out loud, which further defamiliarizes the checklist format by humanizing it. When spoken or called out loud, a formal, numbered checklist may often receive its own commentary from the speaker, but such commentary itself is rarely written down. By including these trivialities and digressions within the poem, Wright places the listener, and therefore the reader, in an active role, creating a conversation between friends. Thus, the poem subverts its own form; lists are generally straightforward, pithy, and convey little emotion. At first glance, this piece does not even look like a poem, since poetry is rarely confined to such strict, linear numbering, but ultimately this numbering becomes a kind of comforting consistency within the poem, connecting unexpected and unpredictable lines together. The format of the numbered lists reins in the tangential comments and provides a focus and structure for a poem containing advice, philosophy, vivid descriptions of people and places, riddles, queries and commentary.
Another poem that fuses cataloging with commentary is “Why Ralph Refuses to Dance.” The opening line claims, “He would have to put out his smoke,” (1) and every other odd line thereafter makes comparable declarations, such as “His ice would melt. He’d lose his seat” (3). This list is familiar and easily recognizable: it is a list of excuses, the “con” column of a Pro/Con list. The reader is invited to imagine Ralph ticking each criterion off on his fingers as he haltingly outlines why he chooses to remain a wallflower. The poem’s wording suggests that perhaps Ralph hesitates between lines as he desperately seeks to inflate his own list, groping for just one more reason, no matter how ridiculous—such as “He would begin to smell of baby shrimp”—that will explain his rationale completely and invite no further inquiries (19). However, the poem is complicated by its alternating even lines, which depict Ralph’s erratic, often disturbing inner monologue. Without these lines, the poem could seem simplistic, even comical, but the dark edge to Ralph’s personal thoughts creates an uneasy, asymmetrical balance within the poem. The “list” half of the poem represents Ralph’s outer composure, rationality, and attempts at decorum. He is in a social situation, so he attempts to abide by society’s given rules; his reasons are related methodically, rhythmically, and demonstrate an attempt to salvage his dignity by causing as little embarrassment to everyone as possible. As he rationalizes, Ralph’s words follow the rules of English grammar and punctuation, but his inner monologue has no such constraints. In Ralph’s own mind, his words run together, are uninhibited by proper sentence structure, unbound by the burden of logic, or the courtesy of explication. The structure of “Ralph” works because the mind does not naturally create analytical, coherent “lists,” but rather functions organically, producing unfiltered thoughts that later must be “polished” for the consideration of society, even if this changes their essential meaning and function. Wright imposes the format of the list to show the discrepancies between what people think and what they say; she demonstrates how even the most ghoulish or offensive thoughts are rendered more palatable and digestible by introducing elements of order and rules.
A familiar type of list to the average reader would be the “to-do list,” and Wright creates a radically different spin on this list in her poem “Living.” The poem reads as though it might be prefaced with a “note to self,” since its contents and tone are intensely personal. The reader is made to feel almost as if he is intruding, reading private papers or a personal diary. The writer of this piece has held nothing back; she reveals the guilt she feels about her actions toward her high school boyfriend, she schedules an AIDS test and a Pap smear, and she admits that she must “practice” to maintain the love for her partner. Many of the entries are also written in a kind of personal code that only the author would understand: “If this is Wednesday, mail B her flyers and K her shirts” (3). The reader does not immediately recognize who B and K might be, but the use of personal shorthand for close family and friends is readily recognizable. Acquaintances of less significance are, almost counterintuitively, allowed more space, their names spelled out more fully, as in “Moss” or “Pete.” By using the “to-do list” format, Wright creates a poem that feels excruciatingly personal for both the reader and the writer. The poem begins, “If this is Wednesday, write Lazartigues, return library books, / pick up passport form, cancel the paper? (1-2). These lines are so manifestly trivial and mundane that it seems strange to read them in a book of poetry. It is this dichotomy that makes Wright’s technique in this poem so unexpected and human. Like “Remarks on Color,” this poem fluctuates between immanently recognizable lines, like “Phone hardware to see if radon test arrived” (38) and obscure, personal insights, such as “no matter where I call home anymore, fell like a boat under / the trees” (57-58). Although the writer has no directly apparent audience, she humors herself with personally gratifying jokes, as evidenced in the phrase, “Because because because of the horrible things we do,” a parody of a familiar line from The Wizard of Oz. The writer of this list also “plans” actions that most people would not; she even notes that she will “Make time pass in line at/ the P.O. imagining man in front of me butt naked” (44-45). By choosing to deviate and conform the average to-do list in a number of ways, Wright creates “high art” from the banal.
C. D. Wright accomplishes an exceedingly difficult task in her “list” poems; she adopts a limiting form, but explores limitless possibilities of language, structure, and diction within it. Wright is constantly seeking “to challenge poetry and language itself to be as expansive as possible” (Colburn 208), and she has been lauded for “expanding and stylistically blur[ring] the lines between poetry and prose” (Goodman 41). Wright uses an economy of words, so in each “list,” every word, with its denotations and its connotations, is singularly chosen for its contribution to the effectiveness of the poem. Wright also considers the pauses and silences between these words to be of “high poetic value,” so she welcomes the reader to speculate on the items that are left off of her lists (Wright “Hidebound” 389). Wright’s unusual use of formalized classification and inventory may be unfamiliar to her reader in the context of poetry, but as experiments, they prove successful, because the list form itself is so readily familiar. Thus, the purpose of Wright’s catalogs is not, as Adam Kirsch presumes, to revel in “novelty and complexity,” or to invite confusion in the reader (Kirsch 33). Instead, Wright communicates by seizing upon the preconceptions associated with her chosen format and utilizes these expectations to enhance her readers’ understanding. As Jenny Goodman points out, Wright’s voice is not meant to reverberate as the “descendant of high modernism scorning her unschooled readers. She belongs to the everyday world and finds an array of artistic resources in it” (Goodman 47). Her ordering, archiving, and cataloguing of words combine the blasé nature of checklists, charts, and to-do lists with the artistic sensibility of poetics. In doing so, Wright defamiliarizes the familiar without obfuscation; her work is accessible to her audience precisely because of its grounding in the quotidian nature of the list.
Works Cited:
Colburn, Nadia Herman. “About C. D. Wright.” Ploughshares 28.4. (Winter 2002-03): 204-09.
Goodman, Jenny. “Politics and the Personal Lyric in the Poetry of Joy Harjo and C. D. Wright.” MELUS 19.2. (Summer 1994): 35-56.
Kirsch, Adam. “Discourtesies.” The New Republic (October 21, 2002): 32-36.
Pfefferle, W. T. Poets on Place: Interviews and Tales from the Road. Logan: Utah State UP, 2005.
Wright, C[arolyne] D. “69 Hidebound Opinions, Propositions, and Several Asides from a Manila Folder Concerning the Stuff of Poetry.” By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry. St Paul: Graywolf P, 2000. Ed. Molly McQuade. 380-97.
---. Steal Away: Selected and New Poems. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon P, 2002.
---. “Provisional Remarks On Being/ A Poet/ Of Arkansas.” Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics. Ed. Peter Baker. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. 163-66.
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Elizabeth Lee Steere earned her Bachelor of Arts in English from Wake Forest University and later received a Master of Education in Language Arts and a Master of Arts in English Literature from North Carolina State University. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in English at the University of Georgia.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Friday, November 09, 2007
"Difficult Praise"
Difficult Praise: A Conversation After Robert Pinsky's "In Praise of Difficult Poetry"
This featured section of Reconfigurations presents a collaborative experiment via a Wiki (courtesy of pbWiki).
In April, 2007, during the first days of this journal's emergence, Robert Pinsky's "In Praise of Difficulty Poetry" appeared in Slate. The timing was apt and fortuitous, given the guidelines that were already circulating, calling for work for Reconfigurations, Volume One: Contingency.
Meanwhile, on the UB Poetics Listserv, a brisk conversation began in reply to Pinsky's essay. Six of the various folks who posted to that thread agreed to continue the discussion here: http://exqui-wiki-site.pbwiki.com/.
We hope you may find some pleasure in our difficulty.
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Contributors: Catherine Daly, Halvard Johnson, Ruth Lepson, Tom W. Lewis, Thomas Savage, Gabrielle Welford.
Curator: whow.
This featured section of Reconfigurations presents a collaborative experiment via a Wiki (courtesy of pbWiki).
In April, 2007, during the first days of this journal's emergence, Robert Pinsky's "In Praise of Difficulty Poetry" appeared in Slate. The timing was apt and fortuitous, given the guidelines that were already circulating, calling for work for Reconfigurations, Volume One: Contingency.
Meanwhile, on the UB Poetics Listserv, a brisk conversation began in reply to Pinsky's essay. Six of the various folks who posted to that thread agreed to continue the discussion here: http://exqui-wiki-site.pbwiki.com/.
We hope you may find some pleasure in our difficulty.
_____
Contributors: Catherine Daly, Halvard Johnson, Ruth Lepson, Tom W. Lewis, Thomas Savage, Gabrielle Welford.
Curator: whow.
Mario Hibert with Kent Johnson
Mario Hibert
Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Spaces Only Poetry Can Fill: An Interview with Kent Johnson
* * *
Translated versions of this interview are forthcoming in Ajfelov Most (Bosnia) and in Mar con Soroche (Bolivia/Chile).
* * *
Mario Hibert: Could you please demystify and explain alleged criminal act that is attached to you and your work in light of the reception of the controversial book Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, explaining the hoax labeled scandalous in American literary circles? . . . (for the sake of those here who are not familiar with “the story”)?
Kent Johnson: It’s from a number of years ago, and there have been quite a few developments since, but the following overview of the background—the opening of an article originally published in The Nation magazine—provides the nuts and bolts of the matter. I’ll quote an unusually extended chunk here for Balkan readers, since most will not be familiar with the basis for the controversy. The article, in fact, which I consider to be one of the most insightful reflections on the work, is by Forrest Gander, with whom you have recently become good friends, Mario, after the two of you spent time together in Sarajevo . . . so I guess it’s apropos to quote it in that regard, too:
* * *
“Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada is the most controversial poetry book since Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Lingua Franca devoted a special section to it. The Boston Review hosted a forum of responses to it. The American Poetry Review featured an insert of Yasusada's poems preceded by a portrait of the writer. On August 9, 1997, Asahi Shinbun, Japan's leading newspaper, published a front-page story on Yasusada. Poems and letters from the book have appeared in major literary journals in the United States, England, Australia, Russia, Spain, Israel and Italy.
And yet Araki Yasusada—the diarist from Hiroshima, the Zennist, the member of a prominent literary group called Layered Clouds, the Jack Spicer afficionado conversant in French and English, the family man whose family was devastated by the nuclear blast, the writer whose moving poems, letters and notes comprise the text of Doubled Flowering, this Araki Yasusada—apparently never existed. The translator and critic Eliot Weinberger suggested as much in the Village Voice, writing on "witness poetry," which he decries as "a set of biographical criteria that favors verifiable experience over imagination." Lingua Franca and others followed suit in publishing articles about the hoax. Wesleyan University Press, which had been interested in printing the Yasusada volume, dropped the idea.
No one has yet claimed to have written the book, despite suspicions that the Yasusada materials were generated by Kent Johnson—a professor at Highland Community College in Freeport, Illinois, and the self-proclaimed literary executor of Yasusada's main "translator" (whose reality is also dubious). Critic Marjorie Perloff charged in the Boston Review that Johnson is the author, although he denies it. The time for a hoaxster's revelation would seem to have come and gone; but Yasusada's work is more than a mere hoax, even if his biography is.
Most of the individual poems were published in respected journals (including Grand Street and Conjunctions), their fictional authorship undiscovered, as the work of Hiroshima survivor Araki Yasusada. Along with Yasusada's own purported writings, there are numerous footnotes, scholarly commentaries and references that weave, in the manner of Woody Allen's Zelig, documentary facts into Yasusada's putative biography (for instance, references to actual Japanese poets, literary groups and affairs in Hiroshima). While there seem to be enough anachronisms (a reference to scuba-diving gear, for example, in a poem dated before the invention of such) and outright mistakes (a Japanese woman given a name that would only be used by a man) to suggest that something is awry, the general impression given is one of scholarly thoroughness and detail. As a result, many editors published Yasusada believing that he was, indeed, a Japanese poet and nuclear bomb survivor. Many of them have been quite angry to learn that they were taken in by an elaborate fiction. Some have suggested that no one who has not experienced an event as cataclysmic as the bombing of Hiroshima has the right to "pretend" to have done so, that such a pretense demeans the people who truly suffered there.
But before we launch into that furiously raging debate, let's consider the work itself, which, until questions concerning its authorship waxed full, provoked only wide-ranging international praise. The book's introductory note serves to identify the bulk of the text as translations made by three Japanese scholars of Yasusada's recently discovered notebooks. The ensuing assemblage of diary entries, Zen exercises, English class assignments, letters and drafts of poems coheres loosely around themes of loss and authorship [ . . . ].”
* * *
Anyway, that’s more or less the back-story. No one has yet stepped forward to claim ownership of the work, and no one ever will.
MH: Your radical and moreover successful criticism of the ideology of authorship, name branding and cultural industry reveals an engaged artistic subversion of literary political correctness. How do you perceive cultural exploitation of differences on the global scale? To what extent can the work of art adjust its subversive tendencies in regard to the contemporary globalized milieu of commodification of everything, from identity to culture?
KJ: This is a very challenging question, and I’m not sure I can answer it satisfactorily. Since the topic has been raised, and to give myself something of a handle, let me try to speak to the issues you ask about—or at least a subset of them—from my position as caretaker of the Yasusada writings . . .
The Yasusada writing emerged in the mid to late 1990s, at the end of the apogee of multiculturalism and post-colonialist studies in the US academy and elsewhere. It thus came in for strong attack from certain writers, who saw the work as an appropriation of ethnic and cultural otherness, a hijacking of “identity.” I was assumed early on to be the “culprit” and had a number of very personal slurs directed against me. A group of well-known Asian-American poets, for example, published a polemic in a leading magazine, asserting that Yasusada was nothing but an example of “yellow face” opportunism and that I was a racist. Charles Bernstein, the most notorious representative of US Language poetry, a long-time prominent academic, delivered an address at the Modern Language Association, and his thesis was that Yasusada constituted an instance of “White Male Rage” (though he has never published this paper).
These would be just a couple of early examples—there were many other attacks, and they haven’t stopped, actually. More recently, for instance, Yunte Huang, a prominent figure in post-colonial studies, has published an essay that purports to show, via a tortured reading of Gayatri Spivak, that Yasusada is something along the lines of Bernstein’s characterization, and The Believer magazine, a very popular national publication, published a long screed full of livid, libelous remarks on my person, written, oddly enough, by one of the country’s best-known film critics. So it’s been very interesting, this aspect of the reaction . . .
And what makes it all so interesting to me is that the work itself—an attempt to empathically imagine a complex, decidedly non-stereotypical life—is so obviously the opposite of anything that could be construed as racist. The work as a whole, rather, speaks in part to the ways in which essentialist constructions of “otherness” that are based on superficial ethnic parameters risk debasement of deeper commonality, risk promotion of a sublimated and insidious exoticness of, precisely, others. I don’t think I have to tell you, a citizen of Bosnia, how onerous such ideology can become, when taken to its limits and flipped over onto its reverse face . . . Unfortunately, in my country, the kinds of “politically correct” constructions you refer to are key to an academic industry that has brought considerable career perks to a whole layer of critics and poets. So it’s understandable, on a certain level, that there has been this visceral reaction: for Yasusada (even if he is a contradictory figure who bears some likeness, in various of his traits, with any number of post-war Japanese artists and intellectuals!) is not “really Japanese,” you see. And those American intellectuals who have a stake in controlling who can speak and from what subject position want to maintain some control, some authority, over their “Japan.” As if our two cultures were not in fundamental, over-determined ways long interfaced, fused, even, by deeper history . . . Not to mention by the Bomb, a still-looming event that implicates us all and transcends any racial or national distinctions proper . . .
Well, so I don’t know if I’m getting at your question, but I’d say that, yes, one of the tasks of such “scandalous” poetic fiction may be to show that this au courant, paternalistic, self-serving “commodification of identity and culture,” as you put it, is subliminally driven, really, by elements of the very psychological animus and prejudice it claims to abhor. Racism is a complicated thing. And its interpolations can get refracted, in fascinating ways, within ideological formations that claim to oppose it. Though as I’ve said on many occasions, Doubled Flowering was not guided, at its heart, by any attempt to show this sublimated complicity . . . Nor was it intended to be any kind of ethically unproblematic text.
MH: But what is right with the deconstruction of the authorship and wrong with the ideology of the deconstruction? Would you agree with the rationale by which models of transpersonal authorship, hyperauthorship, hypernym could be perceived as a mode of safeguarding the ethical foundations of writing?
KJ: Not so much a mode of safeguarding as one of discovering ethical foundations. I would not claim to know, with any degree of certainty, what those ethical foundations are. But I’m convinced that if poets are to be any part of that process of discovery, the process will crucially involve taking some counterintuitive and unpopular leaps beyond the conventions of literary identity, poetic private property, and cultural benefit.
As to the first part of the question, I certainly wouldn’t say there is anything wrong with deconstruction in principle. Some of the insights were wonderful. And deconstruction’s theoretical habitus, as it were, enabled some strange, often inspiring prose. Yes, the anti-historical bent of the approach, particularly in its American version, was a now-embarrassing drawback, I’d say, but this has been compensated for in other theoretical frames that borrowed from it: New Historicism, or Feminist Criticism, say. No big deal.
But the models of authorial experiment you mention (transpersonal authorship, hyperauthorship, hypernym) I wouldn’t so much see as “deconstructive” in nature. To the contrary, I’d argue that these are constructive in essence: new authorships are brought into being! Now, it’s certainly possible to intuit, in such gestures, deconstructions of the narratives of legal, empirical authorship—of the kind of tired, two-dimensioned relationship, that is, between text and subject such standard modes enact. But this doesn’t mean there is some exclusive or required method to pursue: a single writer can easily, and simultaneously, engage various kinds of authorial production and position, ranging from commonplace attribution to imaginary agency, alternating or combining them in variegated ways—and such combinatory effects can prove to be very interesting, even (as you put it) “ethically” provocative and generative of new, unsuspected modes.
The problem, as I’ve often said, is that so-called experimental poets (at least in the English-language realm) seem by and large blind to the creative and political possibilities transpersonal modes afford. Paradoxical as it may sound, “avant-garde” poets today largely buy into a thoroughly standard view of poetry’s generic nature, accepting that reified forms of ascription are more or less natural and given, that paratextual codes and structures are fixed, neutral markers that lie outside of Poetry proper, beyond the vocation’s potential aesthetic and cultural functions. I reject that. It’s a quasi-willful false consciousness that puts limits on the imagination’s terrain. And the imagination has no need or desire to be bound by any institutional claim.
MH: You also write short reports, cover stories from abroad, cross-disciplinary poetic forms that got me thinking it could maybe stand for distrust in verse and its ability to communicate with broader context (audience). But does this maybe show that we have lost confidence in imagination, on what happens in between unuttered spaces between the text and the reader, spaces only poetry can fill?
KJ: Well, on the simplest level, I engage various forms as a writer who is trying, awkwardly, to find his way. So I try out different things.
But your question is an interesting one, inasmuch as it implicitly raises an issue about the nature and potential of the poet’s task. Here, as well, in regard to genre distinctions, I feel the heteronymic impulse has much to offer, in that a questioning of authorial function also necessarily questions the properties and functions of artistic classification, its restrictions and the meanings of those: clearly, the Author’s name, the empirical, legal stamp of property, deeply underwrites horizons of generic propriety that the culture wishes to specify, enshrine, and reproduce.
Well, it’s an involved topic for sure, but here is something relevant to the issue, perhaps, that I proposed in another interview, with the critic and poet Bill Freind. It refers to Mikhail Epstein, actually, a thinker I know you studied extensively in graduate school, in Bosnia. The comment is in the context of a discussion on those alternative modes of authorship which poetry has barely begun to explore:
“I believe there will be, in this future and broad-based "refusal to be regimented from the outside," a more subtle and fluid relationship with poetic identity as legally and culturally, even biologically, circumscribed. And in this resistance to regimentation, the circulation of created, fully-realized hyperauthorships will become a vibrant and branching and authentic utopian space, with schools and collaborations, journals and sub-genres, critical forays and epistolary crossings. I think that readers will flock to this apocryphal space and jump in, grateful to abide in mystery and to pursue the traces, clues, and revelations its authors leave behind. Poets both real and not real will move in shimmering ways back and forth between realms and across times. Cross-disciplinary forms and genres unimaginable at present will flower forth. It will be a "wavy" zone impossible to appropriate or to discipline, because authorship in this topography will not have a discrete location or body; it will be continuum-like, a wave, to draw from [Mikhail] Epstein again, going across times, places, and personalities.”
Later in that interview I acknowledge that this is, obviously, very utopian in its projections, and that if such a parallel economy of writing were to develop, it would be over considerable time, and collectively enabled. But that it would have profound reverberations, aesthetically and even politically, of this I am quite confident.
MH: To what extent is contemporary American literature open for the writers from abroad?
KJ: Not very. It’s something of a scandal, really, the minor, subaltern position to which the art of translation has been relegated in current U.S. culture. Eliot Weinberger, one of our top writers and translators, has written on this, showing, through a careful analysis of U.S. poetic publications of the past decade, that only a tiny percentage of published poetry by mainstream houses is from abroad. An even tinier percentage, of course, is ever noticed in the venues that review poetry.
The great cultures, as is well known, the great golden ages of all cultures, are ages of prolific translation and cross-cultural imitation. Well, I suppose it only follows, syllogistically, so to speak, that a culture in late stages of atavistic imperial violence would not attach very much significance to literary translation . . .
That said, what is truly a remarkable scandal is that the avant wing of U.S. poetry, which considers itself so progressive, even radical in spirit, is so-little involved in translation. With some notable exceptions, very few of its poets—the older Language poets or their younger heirs—seriously engage the practice. Ron Silliman, for example, a leading Language poet and a blogger of great prolificacy, virtually never mentions works, either historical or contemporary, from non-English languages. A sign of the times, I’d propose.
MH: Your books are published by independent U.S. publishers. Is that your choice or the consequence of your style, your poetic that has intention to disturb, provoke, and invoke civil resistance?
KJ: A bit of both. One feeds the other. Independent, small press publication can give the poet a certain freedom to take off in unsanctioned, improper directions . . . But it’s the price of such freedom that when one does this, when certain lines of protocol are crossed, that is, one isolates oneself even further from the mainstream, whether in its traditional or avant-garde versions. So it’s a feedback loop.
Though I’ve been fortunate that my work—as author, translator, or caretaker—has been generously discussed and taught, I’m now at the point where there is no way I’d ever get published by the official venues, even those that are now publishing Language and post-avant formalist poetry—in many ways (though with, again, exceptions of note) some of the most politically safe, least “civil resistance”-like poetry being written today, actually.
Well, it’s my hope and faith that such separation from the centers of approbation is a good thing.
MH: Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War is directly related to atrocities in Iraq but it also challenges those literary circles showing little or no interest to engage “spirits” in articulating truths about the U.S. hegemony. Your irony, criticism and anger emphasize apathy, cynicism and absurdity in which contemporary progressive industry of culture nicely wallows. With Yasusada, you’re questioning the very ethics of writing, ownership and cultural production that could be seen as kind of self-differentiation quite diverse from Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz, which is constructed in extremely raw, open, direct and unambiguous ways. How do you comment on such shift in strategy and tactic in your writing, from representing (questioning?) to revealing (answering?)?
KJ: Well, it’s important not to confuse authorships here. Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz is by me, whoever that may be. Doubled Flowering and Also with My Throat I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords are by Tosa Motokiyu, an anonymous author whose work has been entrusted to me as executor. But you know, it’s curious: The Yasusada corpus, with (as you nicely put it) its “questioning of the very ethics of writing,” has probably had a greater impact on the politics of U.S. poetry than LPAA. In many ways, then (and its Hiroshima subtext aside), it has been a very political work, even though it wasn’t really intended as such.
This difference you draw between representing/questioning and revealing/answering is very interesting to me. I need more time to think about that, if you’ll forgive me. I guess I would wonder where, in poetry, answers stop and questions begin, and vice versa. I mean, I wonder if we can, in a political poetry, for example, that would matter, ever distinguish these terms. Would we want to?
MH: Forrest Gander, in article you quoted from, describes your poetics as political and poetical act of empathy, writing that succeeds in imagining the other. Of course it is a radically different approach from today's US national discourse. Can subaltern, non-Author-centered writing be heard in today's world?
KJ: I think the impact of Yasusada proves that it can be. The Yasusada work has been 'subversive' precisely because it rejects protocols and decorums of attribution the official literary culture demands. It refuses to be classified and ranked and filed away through the normative channels of the po-biz economy. It's a kind of counterfeit, if you will, that exists not for profit, but for the sake of an unhindred, apocryphal existence. Not exactly the fashion these days, but it's clear, I think fair to say, that the work continues to touch an unexamined, collective nerve.
MH: If simulacrum stands for the victim (sensitive Hiroshima survivor) and authenticity for the savior (self-righteous American poet after Iraq) would it be enough to outdo Adorno’s famous verdict?
KJ: Well, but Mario, remember that Adorno went on to qualify his aphoristic dictum. What he later said, and I quote him in LPAA, is this: “I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric . . . [but] literature must resist this verdict.” I agree with him, in principle. To the statement I would choose to add that poetry must now write against and into itself, resist itself, as it were, always seeking, in so doing, new and unsuspected paths of truth telling. No, the “lyric” is more necessary than ever, I believe. May it now become more and more unhinged from the Romantic function of The Poet, which goes on stamping out, at great velocity, safely categorized Authors from its “traditional” and “innovative” molds.
MH: How come you ended up in Bosnia and Herzegovina this spring at the poetry festival “Sarajevo Poetry Days”? You were supposed to read at the American corner, sponsored jointly by a U.S. Embassy and host country library. What about reception of your work there? Did you collect some interesting stories for your next coming projects? How do you like Bosnia?
KJ: Oh, I think I want to retire in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Sarajevo, or Mostar, or magical little Pocitelli. I fell in love with your country. And I couldn’t have hoped to have been treated more warmly than I was at the conference. I did meet some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever encountered. We had a good time, didn’t we? I’m writing up some notational impressions of the trip, to be published in some near future, I hope. Forrest is doing the same.
How did I come to go there? Well, it was mainly because of the great poet Semezdin Memehdinovic and the former war photographer Pedja Kojovic, who are publishing a book of my work in translation with their new press, Eiffel’s Bridge. I owe a lot to those guys. Anyway, I know that they were the ones to suggest me to you folks at the Sarajevo Poetry Days.
The American Embassy, I guess, was not so thrilled. Apparently, Forrest and I are—in the four decades-plus of the conference’s history—the first invited poets from the U.S. to be denied travel funds by the Embassy in Sarajevo. They were under a budget crunch, they said, and didn’t have enough money for two plane tickets. Which may be true, of course . . . It’s entirely possible that the occupation of Iraq has drained the cultural coffers of American Embassies around the world!
Thank you so much, Mario, for your very thoughtful and challenging questions.
MH: And my thanks to you, Kent.
_____
Mario Hibert is a librarian in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. A poet and widely published film critic, his first book of poetry, Judas's Toys, was just awarded Bosnia's Federal Ministry Foundation Prize, and will appear soon.
Translations from Kent Johnson's book Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War (Effing Press, 2005) have appeared or are forthcoming (as book collections or in selected forms) in a dozen countries. Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, a book of new and
selected poems, will be published by Shearsman, in the UK.
Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
Spaces Only Poetry Can Fill: An Interview with Kent Johnson
* * *
Translated versions of this interview are forthcoming in Ajfelov Most (Bosnia) and in Mar con Soroche (Bolivia/Chile).
* * *
Mario Hibert: Could you please demystify and explain alleged criminal act that is attached to you and your work in light of the reception of the controversial book Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, explaining the hoax labeled scandalous in American literary circles? . . . (for the sake of those here who are not familiar with “the story”)?
Kent Johnson: It’s from a number of years ago, and there have been quite a few developments since, but the following overview of the background—the opening of an article originally published in The Nation magazine—provides the nuts and bolts of the matter. I’ll quote an unusually extended chunk here for Balkan readers, since most will not be familiar with the basis for the controversy. The article, in fact, which I consider to be one of the most insightful reflections on the work, is by Forrest Gander, with whom you have recently become good friends, Mario, after the two of you spent time together in Sarajevo . . . so I guess it’s apropos to quote it in that regard, too:
* * *
“Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada is the most controversial poetry book since Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Lingua Franca devoted a special section to it. The Boston Review hosted a forum of responses to it. The American Poetry Review featured an insert of Yasusada's poems preceded by a portrait of the writer. On August 9, 1997, Asahi Shinbun, Japan's leading newspaper, published a front-page story on Yasusada. Poems and letters from the book have appeared in major literary journals in the United States, England, Australia, Russia, Spain, Israel and Italy.
And yet Araki Yasusada—the diarist from Hiroshima, the Zennist, the member of a prominent literary group called Layered Clouds, the Jack Spicer afficionado conversant in French and English, the family man whose family was devastated by the nuclear blast, the writer whose moving poems, letters and notes comprise the text of Doubled Flowering, this Araki Yasusada—apparently never existed. The translator and critic Eliot Weinberger suggested as much in the Village Voice, writing on "witness poetry," which he decries as "a set of biographical criteria that favors verifiable experience over imagination." Lingua Franca and others followed suit in publishing articles about the hoax. Wesleyan University Press, which had been interested in printing the Yasusada volume, dropped the idea.
No one has yet claimed to have written the book, despite suspicions that the Yasusada materials were generated by Kent Johnson—a professor at Highland Community College in Freeport, Illinois, and the self-proclaimed literary executor of Yasusada's main "translator" (whose reality is also dubious). Critic Marjorie Perloff charged in the Boston Review that Johnson is the author, although he denies it. The time for a hoaxster's revelation would seem to have come and gone; but Yasusada's work is more than a mere hoax, even if his biography is.
Most of the individual poems were published in respected journals (including Grand Street and Conjunctions), their fictional authorship undiscovered, as the work of Hiroshima survivor Araki Yasusada. Along with Yasusada's own purported writings, there are numerous footnotes, scholarly commentaries and references that weave, in the manner of Woody Allen's Zelig, documentary facts into Yasusada's putative biography (for instance, references to actual Japanese poets, literary groups and affairs in Hiroshima). While there seem to be enough anachronisms (a reference to scuba-diving gear, for example, in a poem dated before the invention of such) and outright mistakes (a Japanese woman given a name that would only be used by a man) to suggest that something is awry, the general impression given is one of scholarly thoroughness and detail. As a result, many editors published Yasusada believing that he was, indeed, a Japanese poet and nuclear bomb survivor. Many of them have been quite angry to learn that they were taken in by an elaborate fiction. Some have suggested that no one who has not experienced an event as cataclysmic as the bombing of Hiroshima has the right to "pretend" to have done so, that such a pretense demeans the people who truly suffered there.
But before we launch into that furiously raging debate, let's consider the work itself, which, until questions concerning its authorship waxed full, provoked only wide-ranging international praise. The book's introductory note serves to identify the bulk of the text as translations made by three Japanese scholars of Yasusada's recently discovered notebooks. The ensuing assemblage of diary entries, Zen exercises, English class assignments, letters and drafts of poems coheres loosely around themes of loss and authorship [ . . . ].”
* * *
Anyway, that’s more or less the back-story. No one has yet stepped forward to claim ownership of the work, and no one ever will.
MH: Your radical and moreover successful criticism of the ideology of authorship, name branding and cultural industry reveals an engaged artistic subversion of literary political correctness. How do you perceive cultural exploitation of differences on the global scale? To what extent can the work of art adjust its subversive tendencies in regard to the contemporary globalized milieu of commodification of everything, from identity to culture?
KJ: This is a very challenging question, and I’m not sure I can answer it satisfactorily. Since the topic has been raised, and to give myself something of a handle, let me try to speak to the issues you ask about—or at least a subset of them—from my position as caretaker of the Yasusada writings . . .
The Yasusada writing emerged in the mid to late 1990s, at the end of the apogee of multiculturalism and post-colonialist studies in the US academy and elsewhere. It thus came in for strong attack from certain writers, who saw the work as an appropriation of ethnic and cultural otherness, a hijacking of “identity.” I was assumed early on to be the “culprit” and had a number of very personal slurs directed against me. A group of well-known Asian-American poets, for example, published a polemic in a leading magazine, asserting that Yasusada was nothing but an example of “yellow face” opportunism and that I was a racist. Charles Bernstein, the most notorious representative of US Language poetry, a long-time prominent academic, delivered an address at the Modern Language Association, and his thesis was that Yasusada constituted an instance of “White Male Rage” (though he has never published this paper).
These would be just a couple of early examples—there were many other attacks, and they haven’t stopped, actually. More recently, for instance, Yunte Huang, a prominent figure in post-colonial studies, has published an essay that purports to show, via a tortured reading of Gayatri Spivak, that Yasusada is something along the lines of Bernstein’s characterization, and The Believer magazine, a very popular national publication, published a long screed full of livid, libelous remarks on my person, written, oddly enough, by one of the country’s best-known film critics. So it’s been very interesting, this aspect of the reaction . . .
And what makes it all so interesting to me is that the work itself—an attempt to empathically imagine a complex, decidedly non-stereotypical life—is so obviously the opposite of anything that could be construed as racist. The work as a whole, rather, speaks in part to the ways in which essentialist constructions of “otherness” that are based on superficial ethnic parameters risk debasement of deeper commonality, risk promotion of a sublimated and insidious exoticness of, precisely, others. I don’t think I have to tell you, a citizen of Bosnia, how onerous such ideology can become, when taken to its limits and flipped over onto its reverse face . . . Unfortunately, in my country, the kinds of “politically correct” constructions you refer to are key to an academic industry that has brought considerable career perks to a whole layer of critics and poets. So it’s understandable, on a certain level, that there has been this visceral reaction: for Yasusada (even if he is a contradictory figure who bears some likeness, in various of his traits, with any number of post-war Japanese artists and intellectuals!) is not “really Japanese,” you see. And those American intellectuals who have a stake in controlling who can speak and from what subject position want to maintain some control, some authority, over their “Japan.” As if our two cultures were not in fundamental, over-determined ways long interfaced, fused, even, by deeper history . . . Not to mention by the Bomb, a still-looming event that implicates us all and transcends any racial or national distinctions proper . . .
Well, so I don’t know if I’m getting at your question, but I’d say that, yes, one of the tasks of such “scandalous” poetic fiction may be to show that this au courant, paternalistic, self-serving “commodification of identity and culture,” as you put it, is subliminally driven, really, by elements of the very psychological animus and prejudice it claims to abhor. Racism is a complicated thing. And its interpolations can get refracted, in fascinating ways, within ideological formations that claim to oppose it. Though as I’ve said on many occasions, Doubled Flowering was not guided, at its heart, by any attempt to show this sublimated complicity . . . Nor was it intended to be any kind of ethically unproblematic text.
MH: But what is right with the deconstruction of the authorship and wrong with the ideology of the deconstruction? Would you agree with the rationale by which models of transpersonal authorship, hyperauthorship, hypernym could be perceived as a mode of safeguarding the ethical foundations of writing?
KJ: Not so much a mode of safeguarding as one of discovering ethical foundations. I would not claim to know, with any degree of certainty, what those ethical foundations are. But I’m convinced that if poets are to be any part of that process of discovery, the process will crucially involve taking some counterintuitive and unpopular leaps beyond the conventions of literary identity, poetic private property, and cultural benefit.
As to the first part of the question, I certainly wouldn’t say there is anything wrong with deconstruction in principle. Some of the insights were wonderful. And deconstruction’s theoretical habitus, as it were, enabled some strange, often inspiring prose. Yes, the anti-historical bent of the approach, particularly in its American version, was a now-embarrassing drawback, I’d say, but this has been compensated for in other theoretical frames that borrowed from it: New Historicism, or Feminist Criticism, say. No big deal.
But the models of authorial experiment you mention (transpersonal authorship, hyperauthorship, hypernym) I wouldn’t so much see as “deconstructive” in nature. To the contrary, I’d argue that these are constructive in essence: new authorships are brought into being! Now, it’s certainly possible to intuit, in such gestures, deconstructions of the narratives of legal, empirical authorship—of the kind of tired, two-dimensioned relationship, that is, between text and subject such standard modes enact. But this doesn’t mean there is some exclusive or required method to pursue: a single writer can easily, and simultaneously, engage various kinds of authorial production and position, ranging from commonplace attribution to imaginary agency, alternating or combining them in variegated ways—and such combinatory effects can prove to be very interesting, even (as you put it) “ethically” provocative and generative of new, unsuspected modes.
The problem, as I’ve often said, is that so-called experimental poets (at least in the English-language realm) seem by and large blind to the creative and political possibilities transpersonal modes afford. Paradoxical as it may sound, “avant-garde” poets today largely buy into a thoroughly standard view of poetry’s generic nature, accepting that reified forms of ascription are more or less natural and given, that paratextual codes and structures are fixed, neutral markers that lie outside of Poetry proper, beyond the vocation’s potential aesthetic and cultural functions. I reject that. It’s a quasi-willful false consciousness that puts limits on the imagination’s terrain. And the imagination has no need or desire to be bound by any institutional claim.
MH: You also write short reports, cover stories from abroad, cross-disciplinary poetic forms that got me thinking it could maybe stand for distrust in verse and its ability to communicate with broader context (audience). But does this maybe show that we have lost confidence in imagination, on what happens in between unuttered spaces between the text and the reader, spaces only poetry can fill?
KJ: Well, on the simplest level, I engage various forms as a writer who is trying, awkwardly, to find his way. So I try out different things.
But your question is an interesting one, inasmuch as it implicitly raises an issue about the nature and potential of the poet’s task. Here, as well, in regard to genre distinctions, I feel the heteronymic impulse has much to offer, in that a questioning of authorial function also necessarily questions the properties and functions of artistic classification, its restrictions and the meanings of those: clearly, the Author’s name, the empirical, legal stamp of property, deeply underwrites horizons of generic propriety that the culture wishes to specify, enshrine, and reproduce.
Well, it’s an involved topic for sure, but here is something relevant to the issue, perhaps, that I proposed in another interview, with the critic and poet Bill Freind. It refers to Mikhail Epstein, actually, a thinker I know you studied extensively in graduate school, in Bosnia. The comment is in the context of a discussion on those alternative modes of authorship which poetry has barely begun to explore:
“I believe there will be, in this future and broad-based "refusal to be regimented from the outside," a more subtle and fluid relationship with poetic identity as legally and culturally, even biologically, circumscribed. And in this resistance to regimentation, the circulation of created, fully-realized hyperauthorships will become a vibrant and branching and authentic utopian space, with schools and collaborations, journals and sub-genres, critical forays and epistolary crossings. I think that readers will flock to this apocryphal space and jump in, grateful to abide in mystery and to pursue the traces, clues, and revelations its authors leave behind. Poets both real and not real will move in shimmering ways back and forth between realms and across times. Cross-disciplinary forms and genres unimaginable at present will flower forth. It will be a "wavy" zone impossible to appropriate or to discipline, because authorship in this topography will not have a discrete location or body; it will be continuum-like, a wave, to draw from [Mikhail] Epstein again, going across times, places, and personalities.”
Later in that interview I acknowledge that this is, obviously, very utopian in its projections, and that if such a parallel economy of writing were to develop, it would be over considerable time, and collectively enabled. But that it would have profound reverberations, aesthetically and even politically, of this I am quite confident.
MH: To what extent is contemporary American literature open for the writers from abroad?
KJ: Not very. It’s something of a scandal, really, the minor, subaltern position to which the art of translation has been relegated in current U.S. culture. Eliot Weinberger, one of our top writers and translators, has written on this, showing, through a careful analysis of U.S. poetic publications of the past decade, that only a tiny percentage of published poetry by mainstream houses is from abroad. An even tinier percentage, of course, is ever noticed in the venues that review poetry.
The great cultures, as is well known, the great golden ages of all cultures, are ages of prolific translation and cross-cultural imitation. Well, I suppose it only follows, syllogistically, so to speak, that a culture in late stages of atavistic imperial violence would not attach very much significance to literary translation . . .
That said, what is truly a remarkable scandal is that the avant wing of U.S. poetry, which considers itself so progressive, even radical in spirit, is so-little involved in translation. With some notable exceptions, very few of its poets—the older Language poets or their younger heirs—seriously engage the practice. Ron Silliman, for example, a leading Language poet and a blogger of great prolificacy, virtually never mentions works, either historical or contemporary, from non-English languages. A sign of the times, I’d propose.
MH: Your books are published by independent U.S. publishers. Is that your choice or the consequence of your style, your poetic that has intention to disturb, provoke, and invoke civil resistance?
KJ: A bit of both. One feeds the other. Independent, small press publication can give the poet a certain freedom to take off in unsanctioned, improper directions . . . But it’s the price of such freedom that when one does this, when certain lines of protocol are crossed, that is, one isolates oneself even further from the mainstream, whether in its traditional or avant-garde versions. So it’s a feedback loop.
Though I’ve been fortunate that my work—as author, translator, or caretaker—has been generously discussed and taught, I’m now at the point where there is no way I’d ever get published by the official venues, even those that are now publishing Language and post-avant formalist poetry—in many ways (though with, again, exceptions of note) some of the most politically safe, least “civil resistance”-like poetry being written today, actually.
Well, it’s my hope and faith that such separation from the centers of approbation is a good thing.
MH: Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War is directly related to atrocities in Iraq but it also challenges those literary circles showing little or no interest to engage “spirits” in articulating truths about the U.S. hegemony. Your irony, criticism and anger emphasize apathy, cynicism and absurdity in which contemporary progressive industry of culture nicely wallows. With Yasusada, you’re questioning the very ethics of writing, ownership and cultural production that could be seen as kind of self-differentiation quite diverse from Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz, which is constructed in extremely raw, open, direct and unambiguous ways. How do you comment on such shift in strategy and tactic in your writing, from representing (questioning?) to revealing (answering?)?
KJ: Well, it’s important not to confuse authorships here. Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz is by me, whoever that may be. Doubled Flowering and Also with My Throat I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords are by Tosa Motokiyu, an anonymous author whose work has been entrusted to me as executor. But you know, it’s curious: The Yasusada corpus, with (as you nicely put it) its “questioning of the very ethics of writing,” has probably had a greater impact on the politics of U.S. poetry than LPAA. In many ways, then (and its Hiroshima subtext aside), it has been a very political work, even though it wasn’t really intended as such.
This difference you draw between representing/questioning and revealing/answering is very interesting to me. I need more time to think about that, if you’ll forgive me. I guess I would wonder where, in poetry, answers stop and questions begin, and vice versa. I mean, I wonder if we can, in a political poetry, for example, that would matter, ever distinguish these terms. Would we want to?
MH: Forrest Gander, in article you quoted from, describes your poetics as political and poetical act of empathy, writing that succeeds in imagining the other. Of course it is a radically different approach from today's US national discourse. Can subaltern, non-Author-centered writing be heard in today's world?
KJ: I think the impact of Yasusada proves that it can be. The Yasusada work has been 'subversive' precisely because it rejects protocols and decorums of attribution the official literary culture demands. It refuses to be classified and ranked and filed away through the normative channels of the po-biz economy. It's a kind of counterfeit, if you will, that exists not for profit, but for the sake of an unhindred, apocryphal existence. Not exactly the fashion these days, but it's clear, I think fair to say, that the work continues to touch an unexamined, collective nerve.
MH: If simulacrum stands for the victim (sensitive Hiroshima survivor) and authenticity for the savior (self-righteous American poet after Iraq) would it be enough to outdo Adorno’s famous verdict?
KJ: Well, but Mario, remember that Adorno went on to qualify his aphoristic dictum. What he later said, and I quote him in LPAA, is this: “I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric . . . [but] literature must resist this verdict.” I agree with him, in principle. To the statement I would choose to add that poetry must now write against and into itself, resist itself, as it were, always seeking, in so doing, new and unsuspected paths of truth telling. No, the “lyric” is more necessary than ever, I believe. May it now become more and more unhinged from the Romantic function of The Poet, which goes on stamping out, at great velocity, safely categorized Authors from its “traditional” and “innovative” molds.
MH: How come you ended up in Bosnia and Herzegovina this spring at the poetry festival “Sarajevo Poetry Days”? You were supposed to read at the American corner, sponsored jointly by a U.S. Embassy and host country library. What about reception of your work there? Did you collect some interesting stories for your next coming projects? How do you like Bosnia?
KJ: Oh, I think I want to retire in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Sarajevo, or Mostar, or magical little Pocitelli. I fell in love with your country. And I couldn’t have hoped to have been treated more warmly than I was at the conference. I did meet some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever encountered. We had a good time, didn’t we? I’m writing up some notational impressions of the trip, to be published in some near future, I hope. Forrest is doing the same.
How did I come to go there? Well, it was mainly because of the great poet Semezdin Memehdinovic and the former war photographer Pedja Kojovic, who are publishing a book of my work in translation with their new press, Eiffel’s Bridge. I owe a lot to those guys. Anyway, I know that they were the ones to suggest me to you folks at the Sarajevo Poetry Days.
The American Embassy, I guess, was not so thrilled. Apparently, Forrest and I are—in the four decades-plus of the conference’s history—the first invited poets from the U.S. to be denied travel funds by the Embassy in Sarajevo. They were under a budget crunch, they said, and didn’t have enough money for two plane tickets. Which may be true, of course . . . It’s entirely possible that the occupation of Iraq has drained the cultural coffers of American Embassies around the world!
Thank you so much, Mario, for your very thoughtful and challenging questions.
MH: And my thanks to you, Kent.
_____
Mario Hibert is a librarian in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. A poet and widely published film critic, his first book of poetry, Judas's Toys, was just awarded Bosnia's Federal Ministry Foundation Prize, and will appear soon.
Translations from Kent Johnson's book Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War (Effing Press, 2005) have appeared or are forthcoming (as book collections or in selected forms) in a dozen countries. Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, a book of new and
selected poems, will be published by Shearsman, in the UK.
Kelly Moffett with Mary Ann Samyn
Kelly Moffett
Kentucky Wesleyan College
Hunkering Down and Looking Up: Mary Ann Samyn’s Lyric Experience
* * *
Mary Ann Samyn is the author of four collections of poetry: Rooms by the Sea, Captivity Narrative, Inside the Yellow Dress, Purr, and a recently completed collection, Incredibly Small and Impossibly Lovely. Her poetry has been called “dazzling . . . the poetry hovers between irony and true despair . . . hip, elegant, sorrowful, witty, and new” by Lynn Emanuel; and representative of “the texture and shape of the world” by D. A. Powell. Currently, Samyn teaches in the MFA program at West Virginia University and directs the Far Field Retreat for Writers.
In this interview, Samyn discusses her experience with language, her thoughts on lyric poetry, and her approach on the compositional process. The interview was done via email over the course of three weeks.
* * *
KM: How does (or should) a lyric poem behave?
MAS: Well, I'm not sure that it should behave! But as to how it does, I guess I'd say the more lyric a poem, the more it feels, to me, subterranean. A digging down. Or, a staying down. When I write, I frequently tell myself to stay down. Stay with it. The emotion. It’s like tunneling. I go by feel. If I look up—like a prairie dog—then I record the looking up. Then, I hunker down again.
KM: When you “look up” from the emotion, is that when you allow yourself to become more self-reflective as in: “this is, after all, a poem I am writing”?
MAS: Wow, that’s a hard question, because I’m always aware that I’m writing a poem, which is a strangeness. In fact, that’s why I try simply to record the smallest things as accurately as possible. The shift of a mood, for instance. A poem is a made thing, and yet I hope mine, though well-constructed, carefully crafted, aren’t perfect. I guess I’d like to think of my work as handmade. And, in some ways, hand-me-down. I try to keep the process as non-poetic as possible. Not special. If I look up, literally, metaphorically, then I try to include that, so the poem is not streamlined or cleaned up or too perfect, all of which lead, for me, to inaccuracy.
I guess, too, that my reaction would be not “this is, after all, a poem I am writing” with the emphasis on the act of writing, the making of poetry, but more with the emphasis on the “I”—this is, after all, coming from me. So it better sound like me, whether I’m looking up or hunkering down—or doing a little of this and a little of that, which is probably most likely.
KM: Gregory Orr wrote recently in The Writer’s Chronicle: “Poets write to help themselves. They are knocked off balance by some intensity, and they write to right themselves. They write out of that existential jeopardy Emily Dickinson describes so well:
“I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch—
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.”
I know you have been influenced by both Orr and Dickinson. How do you feel about Orr’s assessment about the poem and about a poet’s key reason to write?
MAS: Not only have I been influenced by Greg as his student and as a reader of his work, but I also spent a semester as his student assistant. During that time, I typed up some of his journals, so I’m very familiar with his thinking about order and disorder, about poetry as an ordering mechanism—though ‘mechanism’ is probably more my kind of word than his. So, yes, I think I agree, in principle, though I don’t know if I consciously consider poetry in these terms—perhaps, of course, because I’ve internalized them so thoroughly that I don’t need to think about it, per se.
I definitely think poetry is a good place to explore your extremity—positive or negative, or, more likely, somewhere in between—those times of bittersweet intensity. But I’ve never felt ‘righted’ by a poem unless I also felt that it was a good poem! Otherwise, I’d just feel worse. I guess poetry is such a daily habit for me—not necessarily writing it, but thinking about it, reading it, responding to students’ work, etc.—that it’s hard to isolate the reasons I go to poetry. Nothing doesn’t belong there, so the off balance moments and the re-balanced moments and the balancing-just-fine-thanks moments loop together over and over for me and poetry is part of that entire process, even the going along happily part.
That said, I do love the Dickinson poem Greg quotes. Especially the word “plank,” which is quite a nice little group of consonants: it sounds like it could hit you over the head!
KM: How you respond to the word “plank” fascinates me. Is this how you typically respond to language? Do you hear words and/or experience them as a sensation in this way? Is your relationship with words this tactile?
MAS: Yes, actually. Words feel very physical to me. They have heft and dimension. Some sparkle or glint. Some have a little catch in them, a spot where I get caught for a moment, as on a fence. I feel similarly about punctuation and can and do spend a lot of time thinking about the merits of a particular comma. The subtlest shifts mean so much.
KM: How does visual art figure into your creative process? I know you are influenced by Eva Hesse, for example, but how so?
MAS: First, I just have to say that “How So” is a very good title! Can I use that?
Okay, now, about visual art: yes, I have thought about it a lot, done some visual art (badly) as a kind of free-writing, and basically longed to wear one of my father’s old shirts—inside out and backwards—as a smock.
What I’ve loved particularly about sculpture is my own longing to touch it. Paintings, too, I guess, if the paint itself is interesting enough. Dimensional enough.
And of course we’re not supposed to do that. Stay back, an alarm will sound, etc. But we want to, anyway, don’t we?
I want to write poems like that. Something to touch. Or, as though reading it was like feeling a breeze against your skin.
I’m very drawn to Hesse’s pieces in that sort of transition from wall to not-wall. 1965. The pieces that hang yet come toward the viewer via a gear or cord or etc. I’m thinking “Eighter from Decauter” and “Up the Down Road,” “An Ear in a Pond” and “Ringaround Arosie.” I don’t think I’ve said this before—at least not out loud—but these pieces always remind me of going to a fair, the midway, “step right up and try your luck.”
—That’s another good title! This is a very helpful interview!
Anyway, as you can see, art gets me thinking and feeling. A good combination for me, for poetry. Also, in the case of Hesse anyway, the non-narrative quality of the work is very allowing. She made ‘the lyric moment’ (which is a weird phrase that I hear too often, really, and it’s getting dulled from use). It’s good to study that, in whatever form: poetry or movies or sculpture.
Speaking of movies, last night, I watched American Beauty, which I’d not seen before because I’m not really a movie person (too much plot!). But one of my students, a wonderful writer, told me that if every person could be ‘explained’ by just one movie, this would be her movie. After I watched it, I knew what she meant. The movie did lyric very well. It also did dialogue and setting and plot twists and all that other movie-stuff. But I was struck by some small moments: Annette Bening’s character, for example, standing in front of vertical blinds (the kind with textured fabric on them) that she’s just pulled mostly closed. That moment: the blinds closed but not (this always happens, doesn’t it? . . . they need to be snapped back into formation . . . ), the character just about to sink into crying, the house gone cold and impersonal . . . that could have been the whole movie for me. I felt about that scene the same way I feel about Hesse’s work or about poems that I love: this is accuracy.
KM: The accuracy you speak of, the lyrical moment of Annette Bening’s character and the cold house, feels like your poetry. Your poems contain a sense of longing as they move through mental states within a domestic world. I’ve often identified your subject as a search for spiritual and mental understanding, and that that understanding comes through as mostly domestic moments, like a husband improving a wife’s photograph, a man stopping by the side of a road to pick some flowers, a woman opening a box to see her saint statue safely arrived. Is it okay for me to assume spiritual and mental understanding as your subject?
MAS: You began your email by saying that you didn’t yet have a question, then wrote awhile about ‘not-poetry’ things and then realized you had written your way into a question. I’d say that answers—and enacts—the question about spiritual seeking! And yes, that is my subject and it’s probably everyone’s, in the broadest sense, and what you did in your email, the process you went through, is pretty much my process. I just try to record the moment, or the day, or the week. The span of time isn’t important. The paying attention is. Whatever I’ve paid attention to, I’ve done so for some reason. And whatever I’ve missed, I’ve missed. I have this idea, which I mostly believe, that things are on track. The noticing and the not-noticing are both happening in a helpful way. For me, this is spirituality. That sense of ongoing-ness and going forward-ness. Sometimes it seems I’m realizing things at a rapid pace; other times, not so much. I tend, like most people, I guess, to be a mix of patience and impatience. The longing you sense in my poems is part of that dynamic.
KM: Your first collection, Rooms by the Sea, contains more narrative verse than your second collection, Inside the Yellow Dress and onward. Would you say your development as a poet has been a movement toward being more of a lyric artist, and was this an intentional progression?
MAS: I don’t think the progression has been intentional. In general, I want the next thing and I don’t like to cling (or like to think that I cling) to too much mastery, so this has kept me on the move. Always, I’m trying for accuracy: a poem that reflects how I think/talk, that captures the complexity of being Mary Ann, which is really all I can be/do. I don’t want to go back to my earlier self or earlier poems. Some of those concerns are, of course, on a continuous loop—isn’t it this way for everyone?—but I’d like to think that I’m bringing a differently complex self to the page. Also, I’d be bored if I had to write those same poems. In fact, if I think I know where a poem is going, I usually stop writing it. Similarly, when I teach, I don’t enjoy teaching the same classes, the same way, over and over. Some people think of that as a relief: less prep. But if I’m bored, then my teaching is not going to be very good. I’m always looking for a new angle, another way in, a discovery.
KM: As a past student of Charles Wright, I wonder if landscape (conceptually or physically) is an issue for you when you approach a poem. Does landscape, say, figure into the performance of your language on the page? I mean, I know you say you hear the words and know where they need to be placed, but do you see them as well? Are they painted, as a landscape, into place?
MAS: It’s interesting that you ask about landscape because, in the past, I wouldn’t have said that I’m a writer of place—mostly because my poems tend to be located in the same place—me!—and thus I don’t think of them as having geographic origins or concerns. But it turns out they do. I’m very attached, more and more in fact, to my home state, Michigan, and I’ve come to realize that I feel most like myself when I’m there. You’ve suggested, if I remember correctly, that maybe if I lived there, my longing for it would go away—along with some of my poetic energy. I don’t think this is true; I’ve got lots of longing! On the other hand, I’m also not in a position to test the theory. So, that’s one kind of landscape, or two, I guess: the landscape that takes the shape called Mary Ann against the physical backdrop called Michigan.
As for the page as a landscape, I think I’ve tended to consider it more like a room. So, more with a sense of its boundaries/edges. And the words as occupying that room. But, really, that was an idea I was taken with several years ago (even during grad school, which is a while ago now). Currently, I’m not actively aware of thinking of the page in this way. It may be, though, that I’ve just internalized this notion so thoroughly that I don’t need to register it anymore. Or, perhaps more accurately, that my childhood love of dolls and dollhouses has continued on without the need for the actual things.
And yes, I guess I would say that I hear and see the language as it comes to the page. There’s really no not-crazy-sounding way to talk about this, unfortunately. I guess I’ll just say that I have a strong sense of the page and feel lucky for that.
KM: Do you carry a favorite word around with you?
MAS: I don’t know if I carry around a single word so much as a phrase. Recently, “take that,” a phrase that has more than one possible inflection/situational use. I like that. And I used it as a title because it’s sufficiently open, not pre-determined. An opposite example might be something like “high wind advisory,” which has been issued for West Virginia tomorrow. The University, I’m not sure why, has sent faculty an announcement about this impending “weather event,” and some advice. I think the memo is a found poem, but beyond that I couldn’t/wouldn’t use the phrase “high wind advisory” as a title. It’s too easily metaphoric. I might be able to work it in a poem, but that sort of language would take over as a title.
KM: Can you speak a little about your current manuscript, Impossibly Small and Incredibly Lovely? I’ve found it contains some of your strongest work. How is it different from Purr, your last book? What is the ‘project’ of Impossibly Small, if you consider it to have a project?
MAS: I hope the new manuscript does not have a project. Or, that it’s my same old project: emotional accuracy. Which sounds clunky and awful and not like a book anyone would want to read.
I write poem by poem (and within poems: line by line). Even if I have a group of poems that might seem to go together, I try very hard to let that happen without forcing, to step aside as much as possible. I’d much rather write and write and write and then look up to see “oh, 10 nice poems!” . . . or something like that. It’s hard enough already, isn’t it?
That said, I hope this new work is even more ‘shot through’ than what I’ve done before. By that I mean, shot through me. Clean. Clear. Fierce. Vulnerable. Essential. Kind, too. That word comes to mind even though perhaps it seems odd. I’m going to trust it, though, and let it do a little work in this paragraph. Surely a word like kind knows better than I . . .
KM: Any advice for fledgling poets?
MAS: Take good care.
_____
Kelly Moffett directs the creative writing program at Kentucky Wesleyan College. Her poetry has appeared or will appear in Barrelhouse Magazine, The Laurel Review, Phoebe: Gender and Cultural Critique, among others. Her book, Waiting for a Warm Body to Fill It, will be released in April 2008 through Cinnamon Press.
Kentucky Wesleyan College
Hunkering Down and Looking Up: Mary Ann Samyn’s Lyric Experience
* * *
Mary Ann Samyn is the author of four collections of poetry: Rooms by the Sea, Captivity Narrative, Inside the Yellow Dress, Purr, and a recently completed collection, Incredibly Small and Impossibly Lovely. Her poetry has been called “dazzling . . . the poetry hovers between irony and true despair . . . hip, elegant, sorrowful, witty, and new” by Lynn Emanuel; and representative of “the texture and shape of the world” by D. A. Powell. Currently, Samyn teaches in the MFA program at West Virginia University and directs the Far Field Retreat for Writers.
In this interview, Samyn discusses her experience with language, her thoughts on lyric poetry, and her approach on the compositional process. The interview was done via email over the course of three weeks.
* * *
KM: How does (or should) a lyric poem behave?
MAS: Well, I'm not sure that it should behave! But as to how it does, I guess I'd say the more lyric a poem, the more it feels, to me, subterranean. A digging down. Or, a staying down. When I write, I frequently tell myself to stay down. Stay with it. The emotion. It’s like tunneling. I go by feel. If I look up—like a prairie dog—then I record the looking up. Then, I hunker down again.
KM: When you “look up” from the emotion, is that when you allow yourself to become more self-reflective as in: “this is, after all, a poem I am writing”?
MAS: Wow, that’s a hard question, because I’m always aware that I’m writing a poem, which is a strangeness. In fact, that’s why I try simply to record the smallest things as accurately as possible. The shift of a mood, for instance. A poem is a made thing, and yet I hope mine, though well-constructed, carefully crafted, aren’t perfect. I guess I’d like to think of my work as handmade. And, in some ways, hand-me-down. I try to keep the process as non-poetic as possible. Not special. If I look up, literally, metaphorically, then I try to include that, so the poem is not streamlined or cleaned up or too perfect, all of which lead, for me, to inaccuracy.
I guess, too, that my reaction would be not “this is, after all, a poem I am writing” with the emphasis on the act of writing, the making of poetry, but more with the emphasis on the “I”—this is, after all, coming from me. So it better sound like me, whether I’m looking up or hunkering down—or doing a little of this and a little of that, which is probably most likely.
KM: Gregory Orr wrote recently in The Writer’s Chronicle: “Poets write to help themselves. They are knocked off balance by some intensity, and they write to right themselves. They write out of that existential jeopardy Emily Dickinson describes so well:
“I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea.
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch—
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.”
I know you have been influenced by both Orr and Dickinson. How do you feel about Orr’s assessment about the poem and about a poet’s key reason to write?
MAS: Not only have I been influenced by Greg as his student and as a reader of his work, but I also spent a semester as his student assistant. During that time, I typed up some of his journals, so I’m very familiar with his thinking about order and disorder, about poetry as an ordering mechanism—though ‘mechanism’ is probably more my kind of word than his. So, yes, I think I agree, in principle, though I don’t know if I consciously consider poetry in these terms—perhaps, of course, because I’ve internalized them so thoroughly that I don’t need to think about it, per se.
I definitely think poetry is a good place to explore your extremity—positive or negative, or, more likely, somewhere in between—those times of bittersweet intensity. But I’ve never felt ‘righted’ by a poem unless I also felt that it was a good poem! Otherwise, I’d just feel worse. I guess poetry is such a daily habit for me—not necessarily writing it, but thinking about it, reading it, responding to students’ work, etc.—that it’s hard to isolate the reasons I go to poetry. Nothing doesn’t belong there, so the off balance moments and the re-balanced moments and the balancing-just-fine-thanks moments loop together over and over for me and poetry is part of that entire process, even the going along happily part.
That said, I do love the Dickinson poem Greg quotes. Especially the word “plank,” which is quite a nice little group of consonants: it sounds like it could hit you over the head!
KM: How you respond to the word “plank” fascinates me. Is this how you typically respond to language? Do you hear words and/or experience them as a sensation in this way? Is your relationship with words this tactile?
MAS: Yes, actually. Words feel very physical to me. They have heft and dimension. Some sparkle or glint. Some have a little catch in them, a spot where I get caught for a moment, as on a fence. I feel similarly about punctuation and can and do spend a lot of time thinking about the merits of a particular comma. The subtlest shifts mean so much.
KM: How does visual art figure into your creative process? I know you are influenced by Eva Hesse, for example, but how so?
MAS: First, I just have to say that “How So” is a very good title! Can I use that?
Okay, now, about visual art: yes, I have thought about it a lot, done some visual art (badly) as a kind of free-writing, and basically longed to wear one of my father’s old shirts—inside out and backwards—as a smock.
What I’ve loved particularly about sculpture is my own longing to touch it. Paintings, too, I guess, if the paint itself is interesting enough. Dimensional enough.
And of course we’re not supposed to do that. Stay back, an alarm will sound, etc. But we want to, anyway, don’t we?
I want to write poems like that. Something to touch. Or, as though reading it was like feeling a breeze against your skin.
I’m very drawn to Hesse’s pieces in that sort of transition from wall to not-wall. 1965. The pieces that hang yet come toward the viewer via a gear or cord or etc. I’m thinking “Eighter from Decauter” and “Up the Down Road,” “An Ear in a Pond” and “Ringaround Arosie.” I don’t think I’ve said this before—at least not out loud—but these pieces always remind me of going to a fair, the midway, “step right up and try your luck.”
—That’s another good title! This is a very helpful interview!
Anyway, as you can see, art gets me thinking and feeling. A good combination for me, for poetry. Also, in the case of Hesse anyway, the non-narrative quality of the work is very allowing. She made ‘the lyric moment’ (which is a weird phrase that I hear too often, really, and it’s getting dulled from use). It’s good to study that, in whatever form: poetry or movies or sculpture.
Speaking of movies, last night, I watched American Beauty, which I’d not seen before because I’m not really a movie person (too much plot!). But one of my students, a wonderful writer, told me that if every person could be ‘explained’ by just one movie, this would be her movie. After I watched it, I knew what she meant. The movie did lyric very well. It also did dialogue and setting and plot twists and all that other movie-stuff. But I was struck by some small moments: Annette Bening’s character, for example, standing in front of vertical blinds (the kind with textured fabric on them) that she’s just pulled mostly closed. That moment: the blinds closed but not (this always happens, doesn’t it? . . . they need to be snapped back into formation . . . ), the character just about to sink into crying, the house gone cold and impersonal . . . that could have been the whole movie for me. I felt about that scene the same way I feel about Hesse’s work or about poems that I love: this is accuracy.
KM: The accuracy you speak of, the lyrical moment of Annette Bening’s character and the cold house, feels like your poetry. Your poems contain a sense of longing as they move through mental states within a domestic world. I’ve often identified your subject as a search for spiritual and mental understanding, and that that understanding comes through as mostly domestic moments, like a husband improving a wife’s photograph, a man stopping by the side of a road to pick some flowers, a woman opening a box to see her saint statue safely arrived. Is it okay for me to assume spiritual and mental understanding as your subject?
MAS: You began your email by saying that you didn’t yet have a question, then wrote awhile about ‘not-poetry’ things and then realized you had written your way into a question. I’d say that answers—and enacts—the question about spiritual seeking! And yes, that is my subject and it’s probably everyone’s, in the broadest sense, and what you did in your email, the process you went through, is pretty much my process. I just try to record the moment, or the day, or the week. The span of time isn’t important. The paying attention is. Whatever I’ve paid attention to, I’ve done so for some reason. And whatever I’ve missed, I’ve missed. I have this idea, which I mostly believe, that things are on track. The noticing and the not-noticing are both happening in a helpful way. For me, this is spirituality. That sense of ongoing-ness and going forward-ness. Sometimes it seems I’m realizing things at a rapid pace; other times, not so much. I tend, like most people, I guess, to be a mix of patience and impatience. The longing you sense in my poems is part of that dynamic.
KM: Your first collection, Rooms by the Sea, contains more narrative verse than your second collection, Inside the Yellow Dress and onward. Would you say your development as a poet has been a movement toward being more of a lyric artist, and was this an intentional progression?
MAS: I don’t think the progression has been intentional. In general, I want the next thing and I don’t like to cling (or like to think that I cling) to too much mastery, so this has kept me on the move. Always, I’m trying for accuracy: a poem that reflects how I think/talk, that captures the complexity of being Mary Ann, which is really all I can be/do. I don’t want to go back to my earlier self or earlier poems. Some of those concerns are, of course, on a continuous loop—isn’t it this way for everyone?—but I’d like to think that I’m bringing a differently complex self to the page. Also, I’d be bored if I had to write those same poems. In fact, if I think I know where a poem is going, I usually stop writing it. Similarly, when I teach, I don’t enjoy teaching the same classes, the same way, over and over. Some people think of that as a relief: less prep. But if I’m bored, then my teaching is not going to be very good. I’m always looking for a new angle, another way in, a discovery.
KM: As a past student of Charles Wright, I wonder if landscape (conceptually or physically) is an issue for you when you approach a poem. Does landscape, say, figure into the performance of your language on the page? I mean, I know you say you hear the words and know where they need to be placed, but do you see them as well? Are they painted, as a landscape, into place?
MAS: It’s interesting that you ask about landscape because, in the past, I wouldn’t have said that I’m a writer of place—mostly because my poems tend to be located in the same place—me!—and thus I don’t think of them as having geographic origins or concerns. But it turns out they do. I’m very attached, more and more in fact, to my home state, Michigan, and I’ve come to realize that I feel most like myself when I’m there. You’ve suggested, if I remember correctly, that maybe if I lived there, my longing for it would go away—along with some of my poetic energy. I don’t think this is true; I’ve got lots of longing! On the other hand, I’m also not in a position to test the theory. So, that’s one kind of landscape, or two, I guess: the landscape that takes the shape called Mary Ann against the physical backdrop called Michigan.
As for the page as a landscape, I think I’ve tended to consider it more like a room. So, more with a sense of its boundaries/edges. And the words as occupying that room. But, really, that was an idea I was taken with several years ago (even during grad school, which is a while ago now). Currently, I’m not actively aware of thinking of the page in this way. It may be, though, that I’ve just internalized this notion so thoroughly that I don’t need to register it anymore. Or, perhaps more accurately, that my childhood love of dolls and dollhouses has continued on without the need for the actual things.
And yes, I guess I would say that I hear and see the language as it comes to the page. There’s really no not-crazy-sounding way to talk about this, unfortunately. I guess I’ll just say that I have a strong sense of the page and feel lucky for that.
KM: Do you carry a favorite word around with you?
MAS: I don’t know if I carry around a single word so much as a phrase. Recently, “take that,” a phrase that has more than one possible inflection/situational use. I like that. And I used it as a title because it’s sufficiently open, not pre-determined. An opposite example might be something like “high wind advisory,” which has been issued for West Virginia tomorrow. The University, I’m not sure why, has sent faculty an announcement about this impending “weather event,” and some advice. I think the memo is a found poem, but beyond that I couldn’t/wouldn’t use the phrase “high wind advisory” as a title. It’s too easily metaphoric. I might be able to work it in a poem, but that sort of language would take over as a title.
KM: Can you speak a little about your current manuscript, Impossibly Small and Incredibly Lovely? I’ve found it contains some of your strongest work. How is it different from Purr, your last book? What is the ‘project’ of Impossibly Small, if you consider it to have a project?
MAS: I hope the new manuscript does not have a project. Or, that it’s my same old project: emotional accuracy. Which sounds clunky and awful and not like a book anyone would want to read.
I write poem by poem (and within poems: line by line). Even if I have a group of poems that might seem to go together, I try very hard to let that happen without forcing, to step aside as much as possible. I’d much rather write and write and write and then look up to see “oh, 10 nice poems!” . . . or something like that. It’s hard enough already, isn’t it?
That said, I hope this new work is even more ‘shot through’ than what I’ve done before. By that I mean, shot through me. Clean. Clear. Fierce. Vulnerable. Essential. Kind, too. That word comes to mind even though perhaps it seems odd. I’m going to trust it, though, and let it do a little work in this paragraph. Surely a word like kind knows better than I . . .
KM: Any advice for fledgling poets?
MAS: Take good care.
_____
Kelly Moffett directs the creative writing program at Kentucky Wesleyan College. Her poetry has appeared or will appear in Barrelhouse Magazine, The Laurel Review, Phoebe: Gender and Cultural Critique, among others. Her book, Waiting for a Warm Body to Fill It, will be released in April 2008 through Cinnamon Press.
Francis Raven with Rae Armantrout
Francis Raven
An Interview with Rae Armantrout
How did you become a poet?
I think I became a poet partly at least because my mother read poetry to me when I was small. We had a sort of children’s encyclopedia set called Childcraft which included two volumes of poetry. There was Lewis Carroll, if course, but also Emily Dickinson—seen as nature poet. The sound of poetry got into me. Probably I equated it with love. That may not explain it, of course. I read many of those same poems to my son when he was small and they didn’t seem to make much impression on him. It’s also true that, when I was in college, poetry was better respected, less marginalized, hotter than it is now.
Who were your mentors or influences?
I suppose I’ll have to start with my mother, since she read to me. When I was in college, I took a course from Denise Levertov. In that class, I met Ron Silliman’s first wife, Rochelle Nameroff, and through her I met Ron. Ron had read more extensively and seriously than I had so he was both a peer and an influence. Then, of course, I was influenced by the writing of Williams, Dickinson, Creeley, Oppen, and Niedecker.
How do you individuate poems?
That’s a good question. Intuitively, I suppose. A poem generally condenses out of the notes I take over the course of a couple of weeks. What I’m seeing, hearing, reading, and watching over the course of that time goes into the notebook. Then I look over my notes and decide what goes with what, how things might relate. My poems generally have parts or section, as you know. The poetry is, more than anything else, in the way these sections relate to one another. That’s how the poems individuate.
What’s your working strategy? When do you write? How often? On a computer?
Whenever something strikes me I jot it down in the notebook I tend to carry around. I look over my notes and organize them, turn them into poems, in the morning. I’ll work on something, typically, for a couple of weeks. When I’ve finished it, I’ll give myself a week or so off to recoup, then start again. I don’t write on a computer but I do revise on one.
Are there any current trends in poetry you’re especially excited about?
It’s hard for me to isolate trends. I wish I could. The poets who interest me now are pretty diverse. A couple of young poets I’m interested in are Graham Foust and Catherine Wagner. What Foust is doing with the minimalist lyric blows me away. Wagner is outrageous and surprising in ways that appeal to me. I’m also interested by Andrew Joron’s work, partly because of the way he uses science. His work is spacey in both possible senses (or maybe there are three possible senses) of the term. Linh Dinh’s writing interests me because of the way he’s able to capture the strangeness of American culture from an immigrant viewpoint. But those four writers are certainly quite different. They don’t represent a trend. I should say, too, that many of my old friends, including Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, and Ron Siliman, continue to do very exciting work.
What are you working on right now?
I’ve finished a manuscript called Next Life and I’m working on a new batch of poems which may or may not end up being called Versed.
There are many scientific facts in your work. How do you go about doing this research? Is it systematic or do you just go through subjects you’re interested in?
Well, it certainly isn’t systematic. (You should see my office.) I’ve always been interested in science. My mother was a fundamentalist and I started reading Darwin when I was a teenager as a way to begin to get out from under that. Over the last decade, I’ve tended to read books and articles written for lay people about quantum mechanics, cosmology, and cognitive science. Of course, a lot of people do this. Books like Brian Greene’s and Stephen Hawking’s become best sellers. I try to somehow imagine the psychological and emotional ramifications or contexts of the information I’m (more or less) taking in. That’s what gets into the poems.
How do you use sub-lexicons?
I’m not sure what sub-lexicons are. Does that mean specialized vocabularies from different disciplines or the dialects of subaltern groups? In any case, I like to see what happens when I pick out phrases from one context and drop them into another.
How should science and poetry interact?
I find that thinking about contemporary science takes us to the border of what we imagine we know—which is a good place for poetry to be. Science generally ignores poetry, of course. But science, like all human communication, depends on metaphors. I sometimes think scientists would do well to study poetry to become more conscious of the way metaphors work.
How will language poetry be remembered?
I feel like everything I might say about language poetry is always already a cliché. I could say that language poetry either problematizes or frees up (both?) the relation of part to whole in a poem.
What category would you put your poetry in?
No thanks.
How has teaching changed your poetry?
I don’t know because I’ve pretty much always taught so there’s no control group of poems I wrote when I wasn’t a teacher. Sometimes I get exasperated by the absurdities of grading or writing comments on student poems. The poems “My Problem” (from Made to Seem) and “Form” (from Up to Speed) use that exasperation as part of their material. Teaching doesn’t enter directly into my writing very often though. If I were in a different line of work, I’d probably get better sub-lexicons from my job experience. I like the way Kit Robinson makes use of his work in the computer industry in his poems.
How much should a poet write?
I hate to speak for other people. I do find that the more we write, the more we repeat ourselves.
Do you have any advice for younger poets?
Oh dear. Eat your vegetables? Avoid avian flu? Read a lot. Give money to Small Press Distribution. Appreciate the friendships you form with other poets. They can last a lifetime.
What makes you laugh?
I’m like most people. I laugh at the Daly Show and South Park. I used to laugh at Monty Python. I whistle past the graveyard and laugh at my fears in (some of) my poems.
What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever had?
When I was 24, I think, I was a topless dancer for one strange afternoon in a bar for noncommissioned officers at a marine base. I got into an argument with a customer and got fired.
_____
Francis Raven, http://ravensaesthetica.blogspot.com/.
An Interview with Rae Armantrout
How did you become a poet?
I think I became a poet partly at least because my mother read poetry to me when I was small. We had a sort of children’s encyclopedia set called Childcraft which included two volumes of poetry. There was Lewis Carroll, if course, but also Emily Dickinson—seen as nature poet. The sound of poetry got into me. Probably I equated it with love. That may not explain it, of course. I read many of those same poems to my son when he was small and they didn’t seem to make much impression on him. It’s also true that, when I was in college, poetry was better respected, less marginalized, hotter than it is now.
Who were your mentors or influences?
I suppose I’ll have to start with my mother, since she read to me. When I was in college, I took a course from Denise Levertov. In that class, I met Ron Silliman’s first wife, Rochelle Nameroff, and through her I met Ron. Ron had read more extensively and seriously than I had so he was both a peer and an influence. Then, of course, I was influenced by the writing of Williams, Dickinson, Creeley, Oppen, and Niedecker.
How do you individuate poems?
That’s a good question. Intuitively, I suppose. A poem generally condenses out of the notes I take over the course of a couple of weeks. What I’m seeing, hearing, reading, and watching over the course of that time goes into the notebook. Then I look over my notes and decide what goes with what, how things might relate. My poems generally have parts or section, as you know. The poetry is, more than anything else, in the way these sections relate to one another. That’s how the poems individuate.
What’s your working strategy? When do you write? How often? On a computer?
Whenever something strikes me I jot it down in the notebook I tend to carry around. I look over my notes and organize them, turn them into poems, in the morning. I’ll work on something, typically, for a couple of weeks. When I’ve finished it, I’ll give myself a week or so off to recoup, then start again. I don’t write on a computer but I do revise on one.
Are there any current trends in poetry you’re especially excited about?
It’s hard for me to isolate trends. I wish I could. The poets who interest me now are pretty diverse. A couple of young poets I’m interested in are Graham Foust and Catherine Wagner. What Foust is doing with the minimalist lyric blows me away. Wagner is outrageous and surprising in ways that appeal to me. I’m also interested by Andrew Joron’s work, partly because of the way he uses science. His work is spacey in both possible senses (or maybe there are three possible senses) of the term. Linh Dinh’s writing interests me because of the way he’s able to capture the strangeness of American culture from an immigrant viewpoint. But those four writers are certainly quite different. They don’t represent a trend. I should say, too, that many of my old friends, including Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, and Ron Siliman, continue to do very exciting work.
What are you working on right now?
I’ve finished a manuscript called Next Life and I’m working on a new batch of poems which may or may not end up being called Versed.
There are many scientific facts in your work. How do you go about doing this research? Is it systematic or do you just go through subjects you’re interested in?
Well, it certainly isn’t systematic. (You should see my office.) I’ve always been interested in science. My mother was a fundamentalist and I started reading Darwin when I was a teenager as a way to begin to get out from under that. Over the last decade, I’ve tended to read books and articles written for lay people about quantum mechanics, cosmology, and cognitive science. Of course, a lot of people do this. Books like Brian Greene’s and Stephen Hawking’s become best sellers. I try to somehow imagine the psychological and emotional ramifications or contexts of the information I’m (more or less) taking in. That’s what gets into the poems.
How do you use sub-lexicons?
I’m not sure what sub-lexicons are. Does that mean specialized vocabularies from different disciplines or the dialects of subaltern groups? In any case, I like to see what happens when I pick out phrases from one context and drop them into another.
How should science and poetry interact?
I find that thinking about contemporary science takes us to the border of what we imagine we know—which is a good place for poetry to be. Science generally ignores poetry, of course. But science, like all human communication, depends on metaphors. I sometimes think scientists would do well to study poetry to become more conscious of the way metaphors work.
How will language poetry be remembered?
I feel like everything I might say about language poetry is always already a cliché. I could say that language poetry either problematizes or frees up (both?) the relation of part to whole in a poem.
What category would you put your poetry in?
No thanks.
How has teaching changed your poetry?
I don’t know because I’ve pretty much always taught so there’s no control group of poems I wrote when I wasn’t a teacher. Sometimes I get exasperated by the absurdities of grading or writing comments on student poems. The poems “My Problem” (from Made to Seem) and “Form” (from Up to Speed) use that exasperation as part of their material. Teaching doesn’t enter directly into my writing very often though. If I were in a different line of work, I’d probably get better sub-lexicons from my job experience. I like the way Kit Robinson makes use of his work in the computer industry in his poems.
How much should a poet write?
I hate to speak for other people. I do find that the more we write, the more we repeat ourselves.
Do you have any advice for younger poets?
Oh dear. Eat your vegetables? Avoid avian flu? Read a lot. Give money to Small Press Distribution. Appreciate the friendships you form with other poets. They can last a lifetime.
What makes you laugh?
I’m like most people. I laugh at the Daly Show and South Park. I used to laugh at Monty Python. I whistle past the graveyard and laugh at my fears in (some of) my poems.
What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever had?
When I was 24, I think, I was a topless dancer for one strange afternoon in a bar for noncommissioned officers at a marine base. I got into an argument with a customer and got fired.
_____
Francis Raven, http://ravensaesthetica.blogspot.com/.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
John M. Bennett, "chIRping"
John M. Bennett
Ohio State University
chIRping
gi ant s lumber gu // the f ran tic b ir ds
erine the rive r st // he crust in g at my e
Ax mAILed yr xtiAN // yr ,FINal bLAST ,ne
,nUMb fLAG ,DEad // an fOg eXpell ,like tr
at me I gAgged my // sACKs or lUNg sPOOns
OU wERe lINt I neig // fLOOd sUGar you de
,cROWder than ,nap // tion HIll ,DEep nug
hAT CRUst .oscILLa // PED the bLISTer in yr
GUTs in the fORk a // HED .an dEEPer tHAn
PLOYed like wAFFle // sLEEve an sOtted y
or ,gNAsh yr legs // preceDENT you BLUst
OUT lickED beyWEen // fLOPping at tHE gATe
at cr is ping f a ke t all s // all t he synt
ye an g listen to // sh my thr oat l is t
_____
John M. Bennett has published over 300 books and chapbooks, among the most recent are LA M AL and BACKWORDS. He published LOST AND FOUND TIMES for 30 years, and is Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at Ohio State University.
Ohio State University
chIRping
gi ant s lumber gu // the f ran tic b ir ds
erine the rive r st // he crust in g at my e
Ax mAILed yr xtiAN // yr ,FINal bLAST ,ne
,nUMb fLAG ,DEad // an fOg eXpell ,like tr
at me I gAgged my // sACKs or lUNg sPOOns
OU wERe lINt I neig // fLOOd sUGar you de
,cROWder than ,nap // tion HIll ,DEep nug
hAT CRUst .oscILLa // PED the bLISTer in yr
GUTs in the fORk a // HED .an dEEPer tHAn
PLOYed like wAFFle // sLEEve an sOtted y
or ,gNAsh yr legs // preceDENT you BLUst
OUT lickED beyWEen // fLOPping at tHE gATe
at cr is ping f a ke t all s // all t he synt
ye an g listen to // sh my thr oat l is t
_____
John M. Bennett has published over 300 books and chapbooks, among the most recent are LA M AL and BACKWORDS. He published LOST AND FOUND TIMES for 30 years, and is Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at Ohio State University.
Charles Bernstein, "Taches Blanches"
Charles Bernstein
University of Pennsylvania
Great Moments in Taches Blanches
“Freedom is never free”
[One July, it was 1997, a small group, convened by Emmanuel Hoquard, met at the Centre de Poésie & Traductions at Fondation Royaumont, near Paris, to play the “blank spots” game (le gam taches blanches). If the game of blank spots were a betting game it would go like this: “I'll see your nothing and raise you nothing.” Parent figure: “I didn’t raise you to say things like that.” Parent figure: “Leave them alone & they’ll come home, wagging their tales behind them.” I present here one of my contributions to the Royaumont meeting.]
1. Jimmy Stewart is Tache Blanc in Blank Check, un film de Jean-Jacques Lecercle.
2. “I have lost my notes but maybe I will find them during my nap.”
3. Staedtler “Mars Plastic” Eraser (Cf.: Rauschenberg¹s erased DeKooning, c. 1954).
4. Lascaux sans image.
5. THE GLARE OF THE BLANK (the tear of the ... )
6. Don’t blink.
7. Blink.
8. She shot me point blank.
She shot me at point blank range.
I got shot at point blank range.
9. Johnny must have slipped me a Mickey because the next thing I knew everything started to go blank and I found myself on the floor next to the coach and she was saying to me: “[Quote removed by Tom Raworth for further study]”
10. ( )
11. (
12. ).
13. There’s no blank like the present.
14. .
DRAWING A BLANK
IT’S NO LONGER BLANK
15. Blank Stare.
16. The anoriginal space between versions (translation & source, text & performance, cup & lip) is the grace of blankness.
17. This section intentionally left blank.
18. “Never give a sucker an even blank.”
19. “Don’t blank on it.”
20. “Don’t blank out on me. Not now.”
20a. Her glance pierced me like blanks firing on an icy precipice.
21. Goffmann¹s “disattend track” (Frame Analysis).
22. In the blank of an eye.
23. Drawing a blank (II):
24. “The gap I mean.”
25. MIND THE GAP.
26. The gap in agape.
27. “Rob sees red when Laura goes blond.”
28. The savage wilderness of the desert.
29. All problems of language are problems of translation.
30. “Running on empty.”
31. Arakawa/Gins: “Forming Blank” (tube / twisted tube / . . . . . . . ).
31. Fill in the blank: ______, ________, _______.
31. Blanched but not bowed.
31. Waldrop’s paradox : The only one who can judge the translation knows both languages and so can¹t judge it.
31. “DU CALME:
Poetry makes nothing happen”
(Rogélio Lopez Cuenca).
31. Poetry fakes nothing actually.
31.
31.
_____
Charles Bernstein’s recent books include Girly Man, With Strings, and My Way: Speeches and Poems, from the University of Chicago Press, Shadowtime from Green Integer, and Republics of Reality: Poems 1975-1995 from Sun & Moon Press. He is codirector of PennSound (writing.upenn.edu/pennsound) and is Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. More info at epc.buffalo.edu.
University of Pennsylvania
Great Moments in Taches Blanches
“Freedom is never free”
[One July, it was 1997, a small group, convened by Emmanuel Hoquard, met at the Centre de Poésie & Traductions at Fondation Royaumont, near Paris, to play the “blank spots” game (le gam taches blanches). If the game of blank spots were a betting game it would go like this: “I'll see your nothing and raise you nothing.” Parent figure: “I didn’t raise you to say things like that.” Parent figure: “Leave them alone & they’ll come home, wagging their tales behind them.” I present here one of my contributions to the Royaumont meeting.]
1. Jimmy Stewart is Tache Blanc in Blank Check, un film de Jean-Jacques Lecercle.
2. “I have lost my notes but maybe I will find them during my nap.”
3. Staedtler “Mars Plastic” Eraser (Cf.: Rauschenberg¹s erased DeKooning, c. 1954).
4. Lascaux sans image.
5. THE GLARE OF THE BLANK (the tear of the ... )
6. Don’t blink.
7. Blink.
8. She shot me point blank.
She shot me at point blank range.
I got shot at point blank range.
9. Johnny must have slipped me a Mickey because the next thing I knew everything started to go blank and I found myself on the floor next to the coach and she was saying to me: “[Quote removed by Tom Raworth for further study]”
10. ( )
11. (
12. ).
13. There’s no blank like the present.
14. .
DRAWING A BLANK
IT’S NO LONGER BLANK
15. Blank Stare.
16. The anoriginal space between versions (translation & source, text & performance, cup & lip) is the grace of blankness.
17. This section intentionally left blank.
18. “Never give a sucker an even blank.”
19. “Don’t blank on it.”
20. “Don’t blank out on me. Not now.”
20a. Her glance pierced me like blanks firing on an icy precipice.
21. Goffmann¹s “disattend track” (Frame Analysis).
22. In the blank of an eye.
23. Drawing a blank (II):
24. “The gap I mean.”
25. MIND THE GAP.
26. The gap in agape.
27. “Rob sees red when Laura goes blond.”
28. The savage wilderness of the desert.
29. All problems of language are problems of translation.
30. “Running on empty.”
31. Arakawa/Gins: “Forming Blank” (tube / twisted tube / . . . . . . . ).
31. Fill in the blank: ______, ________, _______.
31. Blanched but not bowed.
31. Waldrop’s paradox : The only one who can judge the translation knows both languages and so can¹t judge it.
31. “DU CALME:
Poetry makes nothing happen”
(Rogélio Lopez Cuenca).
31. Poetry fakes nothing actually.
31.
31.
_____
Charles Bernstein’s recent books include Girly Man, With Strings, and My Way: Speeches and Poems, from the University of Chicago Press, Shadowtime from Green Integer, and Republics of Reality: Poems 1975-1995 from Sun & Moon Press. He is codirector of PennSound (writing.upenn.edu/pennsound) and is Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. More info at epc.buffalo.edu.
Ann Cefola, "Aspiration" & "Shelter Island"
Ann Cefola
Aspiration
Summer.
Catbirds stop and tilt their slick black heads, look me
in the eye, muscular, too bold, gray.
Totem of translation.
The mocker’s inbred cousin sings like twisting bottle caps,
nails on blackboards, bug in the throat.
Has it got my tongue?
No:
The poet from Arles.
For her, I spend hours in my New Cassell’s from high school,
so overused its cover dropped off, creamy shell-less pages,
my fingers their spine.
Summer.
Humidity white against green, air that resists breath.
Cicadas take off heavily.
I step on one who curses me like an old man.
I try to right another. But I am dying, it protests and spins.
Rattle of garden trucks: Labriola, Belantoni, Forgionne.
Mowing basketweave patterns.
Sprinklers throw streams like harp strings,
angular yellow arms darkening road in half-circles.
Sober quiet of small houses.
Night, the Hopper-like yellow next door.
Dryer scents unable to compete with honeysuckle unseen.
On Grand Boulevard, language of deep treads and unyielding concrete.
Black clouds, rains and fast floods.
Swaths of Texas-like storms flying northeast, people on highways five hours.
Weatherman: Don’t take anything with ‘river’ in it.
Hutchinson, Saw Mill, Bronx. Sprain Brook.
Aspirer.
*
Inside, with my dictionary, I search for words like a foray into our cedar closet—
my-mother-in-law’s fur hats scattered on the floor, husband’s old suits like executives
flattened and pressed into silence—
Ramasser
collect
gather
scrape together
take up
pick up
My mother’s organdy dress, blue rose print, spaghetti straps, wasp-waist.
Souvenirs
remembrance
recollection
memory
remind
memento
keepsake
My crinkled black leather jacket. Unwanted loafers.
Rafrachir
cool
refresh
restore
renew
rub up
crop ends of
trim.
Boxes hold me as I stretch past woolens and plastic garment bags,
reaching for what? Certain I’ll know when I see it.
Clothes of people dead or close to dying:
Many are saved, few kept.
What will fit?
*
The poet and I circled the poetry island at the bookstore on 42nd.
Small talk of poets cherished and met ‘til I
admitted despair at not having a book,
and she exploded like Hera,
spoke so fast I could only translate the fury.
The book—my book—I must and would have one.
I laughed my American best, noted she had three already
and started to call her Déesse.
And so, once again, I slide bulk white envelopes across the counter,
that at least the clerk stamps First Class.
The poet’s work; my own.
Like putting children on a train and surrounding them
in prayer as heavy steel wheels speed and glide down parallel tracks.
Your traveling mercies.
*
Summer of cysts: The man pulling my breast,
withdrawing a needle, sponging off chlorhexidine.
He shows me what’s extracted from deep inside.
We look, fascinated, at the needle’s gold liquid he tilts like a jeweler.
A radiologist once advised against this—There’s blood, she said.
Today I would tell her, There’s always a little blood.
These cells want their wholeness seen, the poet from Provence
wants us to see the calcification of the Isle Maïre.
And what I squeeze out from within, my own surgeon, blood,
gold rolling back and forth, an odd luminosity like low sun
at summer’s end, the cicada’s undulating lullabye,
unfathomable as the architecture of a gray feathered wing.
Catbird, these garments I choose for you:
Gather. Remind. Renew.
_____
Shelter Island
Painting. What I do out of some sense of—not the bud—but the root.
That runs away, whose pigment dissolves.
My eyes, fingers on Braille.
I board the bus on Lex to visit Betty—neither godmother, aunt:
she who watched me sprout to shoot to what at 25?
Almost bloom.
Her low 30s bungalow on the water, coolly dark inside,
filled with art by her 90+ mother who, having lost sight, paints
ocean black, sky green and moon red.
Small framed pictures that already see another world.
(Cathedral)
Alone in my art teacher’s home I stand, 23, in the cavernous studio,
empty of students, floor freshly sanded, shellacked,
wall of window onto lawn.
Lured by the garden, I watercolor, dip brush in pigment and watch it spread against paper
textured white, uncontrollable colors I allow to merge.
Impatient to see anything take shape.
Colors running away.
Art an imitation of life. No, dear Greek, art pumps blue in my veins,
art the principality I came from, long journey equipping me
only to know its inflection, dialect, trade.
On the creamy page, once freed,
day lilies. Iris. Delphinium.
(Prairie)
Down south a wedding: My tribe who smiles before we meet—
Sulie Marie, Hoyt Cleveland and Glenn Wren.
My cousin Allan the Cherokee.
Driving Texas to Kansas, Uncle Ben leaves his blinker on
Ben more a twin to Aunt Allie—squinting eyes laughter swallows.
Ben’s wife, Josie, like the shapeshift of a hedgehog.
Arriving at Shawnee Mission, the one-story ranch, they urge me to nap.
Obedient Southern Belle, I strip to my slip and lie surrounded by wheat, corn and
care of three old people tending the next generation like a flame.
Breeze blows sheer curtains out a dry yard.
Next door, Uncle Ben describes ketching a spider.
Aunt Josie, in an apron, pours tea.
My growing body washes ashore, a small shell.
Before life speeds up like a centrifuge, I am
16. In my underwear. Floating in the heartland on waves of white chenille.
(Island)
After long bus ride out, my square window on marshy backyard. Dog barking.
Dinner on back porch. Next day I head to beach, settle on a low white clapboard house
and begin to fill the undefinable blue of day—sea wall separating sand from yard,
worn wood held by piles, four angled planks.
The black pigment my grandmother forbade I lay under for shade. Yard’s dry-rust grass,
trees and hills teal green. Water sapphire, beach with detritus of dirt
and seaweed a gray tide line. Spiky purple plant at the planks’ feet,
licked by salt air, reaching for sun, strokes rising like fireworks.
Not the delicate spaces my grandmother left in landscapes,
first pencil sketch then patient layering of color. No,
my brush mops up tint that merges, pools and runs like a river. My spine
straight as that weed in the thirsty breeze, where tide rises,
withdraws and leaves treasures, far from monochromatic house and storm cellar,
from sea wall bolstered like a dam about to break: Everything I’ve escaped. Oh my
gracious cousins, rule-bound grandmother and you, Betty, we’ve all built
walls against the flood crest. Run out and returned like tides.
Crouching in sand, breathing in salt air, talking to each hue, I find a landscape within
my authentic home: spiked lavender, lulling tide, rich black loam.
_____
Ann Cefola, http://annogram.blogspot.com/
Aspiration
Summer.
Catbirds stop and tilt their slick black heads, look me
in the eye, muscular, too bold, gray.
Totem of translation.
The mocker’s inbred cousin sings like twisting bottle caps,
nails on blackboards, bug in the throat.
Has it got my tongue?
No:
The poet from Arles.
For her, I spend hours in my New Cassell’s from high school,
so overused its cover dropped off, creamy shell-less pages,
my fingers their spine.
Summer.
Humidity white against green, air that resists breath.
Cicadas take off heavily.
I step on one who curses me like an old man.
I try to right another. But I am dying, it protests and spins.
Rattle of garden trucks: Labriola, Belantoni, Forgionne.
Mowing basketweave patterns.
Sprinklers throw streams like harp strings,
angular yellow arms darkening road in half-circles.
Sober quiet of small houses.
Night, the Hopper-like yellow next door.
Dryer scents unable to compete with honeysuckle unseen.
On Grand Boulevard, language of deep treads and unyielding concrete.
Black clouds, rains and fast floods.
Swaths of Texas-like storms flying northeast, people on highways five hours.
Weatherman: Don’t take anything with ‘river’ in it.
Hutchinson, Saw Mill, Bronx. Sprain Brook.
Aspirer.
*
Inside, with my dictionary, I search for words like a foray into our cedar closet—
my-mother-in-law’s fur hats scattered on the floor, husband’s old suits like executives
flattened and pressed into silence—
Ramasser
collect
gather
scrape together
take up
pick up
My mother’s organdy dress, blue rose print, spaghetti straps, wasp-waist.
Souvenirs
remembrance
recollection
memory
remind
memento
keepsake
My crinkled black leather jacket. Unwanted loafers.
Rafrachir
cool
refresh
restore
renew
rub up
crop ends of
trim.
Boxes hold me as I stretch past woolens and plastic garment bags,
reaching for what? Certain I’ll know when I see it.
Clothes of people dead or close to dying:
Many are saved, few kept.
What will fit?
*
The poet and I circled the poetry island at the bookstore on 42nd.
Small talk of poets cherished and met ‘til I
admitted despair at not having a book,
and she exploded like Hera,
spoke so fast I could only translate the fury.
The book—my book—I must and would have one.
I laughed my American best, noted she had three already
and started to call her Déesse.
And so, once again, I slide bulk white envelopes across the counter,
that at least the clerk stamps First Class.
The poet’s work; my own.
Like putting children on a train and surrounding them
in prayer as heavy steel wheels speed and glide down parallel tracks.
Your traveling mercies.
*
Summer of cysts: The man pulling my breast,
withdrawing a needle, sponging off chlorhexidine.
He shows me what’s extracted from deep inside.
We look, fascinated, at the needle’s gold liquid he tilts like a jeweler.
A radiologist once advised against this—There’s blood, she said.
Today I would tell her, There’s always a little blood.
These cells want their wholeness seen, the poet from Provence
wants us to see the calcification of the Isle Maïre.
And what I squeeze out from within, my own surgeon, blood,
gold rolling back and forth, an odd luminosity like low sun
at summer’s end, the cicada’s undulating lullabye,
unfathomable as the architecture of a gray feathered wing.
Catbird, these garments I choose for you:
Gather. Remind. Renew.
_____
Shelter Island
Painting. What I do out of some sense of—not the bud—but the root.
That runs away, whose pigment dissolves.
My eyes, fingers on Braille.
I board the bus on Lex to visit Betty—neither godmother, aunt:
she who watched me sprout to shoot to what at 25?
Almost bloom.
Her low 30s bungalow on the water, coolly dark inside,
filled with art by her 90+ mother who, having lost sight, paints
ocean black, sky green and moon red.
Small framed pictures that already see another world.
(Cathedral)
Alone in my art teacher’s home I stand, 23, in the cavernous studio,
empty of students, floor freshly sanded, shellacked,
wall of window onto lawn.
Lured by the garden, I watercolor, dip brush in pigment and watch it spread against paper
textured white, uncontrollable colors I allow to merge.
Impatient to see anything take shape.
Colors running away.
Art an imitation of life. No, dear Greek, art pumps blue in my veins,
art the principality I came from, long journey equipping me
only to know its inflection, dialect, trade.
On the creamy page, once freed,
day lilies. Iris. Delphinium.
(Prairie)
Down south a wedding: My tribe who smiles before we meet—
Sulie Marie, Hoyt Cleveland and Glenn Wren.
My cousin Allan the Cherokee.
Driving Texas to Kansas, Uncle Ben leaves his blinker on
Ben more a twin to Aunt Allie—squinting eyes laughter swallows.
Ben’s wife, Josie, like the shapeshift of a hedgehog.
Arriving at Shawnee Mission, the one-story ranch, they urge me to nap.
Obedient Southern Belle, I strip to my slip and lie surrounded by wheat, corn and
care of three old people tending the next generation like a flame.
Breeze blows sheer curtains out a dry yard.
Next door, Uncle Ben describes ketching a spider.
Aunt Josie, in an apron, pours tea.
My growing body washes ashore, a small shell.
Before life speeds up like a centrifuge, I am
16. In my underwear. Floating in the heartland on waves of white chenille.
(Island)
After long bus ride out, my square window on marshy backyard. Dog barking.
Dinner on back porch. Next day I head to beach, settle on a low white clapboard house
and begin to fill the undefinable blue of day—sea wall separating sand from yard,
worn wood held by piles, four angled planks.
The black pigment my grandmother forbade I lay under for shade. Yard’s dry-rust grass,
trees and hills teal green. Water sapphire, beach with detritus of dirt
and seaweed a gray tide line. Spiky purple plant at the planks’ feet,
licked by salt air, reaching for sun, strokes rising like fireworks.
Not the delicate spaces my grandmother left in landscapes,
first pencil sketch then patient layering of color. No,
my brush mops up tint that merges, pools and runs like a river. My spine
straight as that weed in the thirsty breeze, where tide rises,
withdraws and leaves treasures, far from monochromatic house and storm cellar,
from sea wall bolstered like a dam about to break: Everything I’ve escaped. Oh my
gracious cousins, rule-bound grandmother and you, Betty, we’ve all built
walls against the flood crest. Run out and returned like tides.
Crouching in sand, breathing in salt air, talking to each hue, I find a landscape within
my authentic home: spiked lavender, lulling tide, rich black loam.
_____
Ann Cefola, http://annogram.blogspot.com/
Vernon Frazer, "Front Line" & "Vehement Treaties"
Vernon Frazer
Front Line Action
Splendiferous entreaties
hobnailed at incarceration’s behest
queases lunchtime savagery
with cold omnibus flutes
& a rebus attuned to accordions
booted and re-till gurgitation
becomes a metric procedure
offered as pederastic dentistry
serving fossils for the mind
a ledger of biased scrutiny
tilting mills in the overturning wind
effluvial photogravure a consonant
burning independent from its rotors
or foetal gyration articulated
under the verisimilitude of pom-pom trees
horned with legible vendors
lapsing the cornucopia’s verb form
to frontal indenture as mental urge
seized its cache for vagrant dollars
wishing for tissued formats
under the chromatic veils
throttling the chests of unwanted entities
treasured for their tenuous doubloons
and shuffle board revival entries
scuffling in the arid sun
admixture ruffling clarified beatings
insomniac mantras lift the blackened sky
rendering the railway seating
naked as a blue caboose
under the weight of a sailing crib
wailing caterwaul sanctuaries
curbside bibs outnumbered & rank
as true thirst on a camel’s laundromat
extending first rights to the privileged
wary of unbidden gifts
the taste of horses in their mouths
a wooden memory lasting as plastic
where former beauty fails its ploy
for a cacophonous coarse inaction
better dreaded than forced
the diaphanous spread of eagled mentors
winging their statements forth with
canticle leaflets proclaiming past destinies
from an orthopedic perspective
mired in plastic casualties
_____
Vehement Treaties
Chamomile torso vouchers
indenture under time. Duress emblazons
its sublime appeal in chrome.
A climbing intonation extracted the time
when feelings once counted
as alphabet. Splenetics praising
incumbents collapse the mountebank
down the motor hall. Enamored,
the crawling incipients gather splendorous
treaties, hedging their best. All the rest
took amber sealant. Convection
scourges west to the recipient’s horizon,
where low ceilings become a glue.
The tender flume enlightens fabric animosity.
A statuary quest conceals the frights
dextrose confers on ample fragments,
no course undue. A reference cruises
across the weight of ladder camps
bellowing hoarse reprieves to
its lattermost rotation, where devices
clamp vectors. Slashes cross the pit
where conundrums go to puzzlement
befit the punishment’s line, at best
a wafer scoundrel. A more abundant
concourse grapes their arbor
amid bevel tests. The zeal sealants
varicose as saturation pointers
trained to gray matador tablets
flail the ledge before carnal pursuit
engenders them. Fancifully blended
anchovies intent ultraviolet lampoons.
Urban legends posing against the strata
forklift dividends. To melodies ringing
ancient vendor data held against
velcro, scofflaws tick amulet crossings
against the tirades of a loose amusement.
_____
Vernon Frazer has published eight books of poetry and three books of fiction. His work has appeared in Big Bridge, Drunken Boat, First Intensity, Jack Magazine, Lost and Found Times, Mad Hatters Review, Moria, Miami SunPost, Otloiths, Prague Literary Review, Sidereality, Xstream and many other literary magazines. His web site is http://vernonfrazer.com. His most recent works are the long-poems "Holiday Idylling," "Avenue Noir," and IMPROVISATIONS, the now-completed work that he introduced in his 2001 reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. Frazer is married and lives in South Florida.
Front Line Action
Splendiferous entreaties
hobnailed at incarceration’s behest
queases lunchtime savagery
with cold omnibus flutes
& a rebus attuned to accordions
booted and re-till gurgitation
becomes a metric procedure
offered as pederastic dentistry
serving fossils for the mind
a ledger of biased scrutiny
tilting mills in the overturning wind
effluvial photogravure a consonant
burning independent from its rotors
or foetal gyration articulated
under the verisimilitude of pom-pom trees
horned with legible vendors
lapsing the cornucopia’s verb form
to frontal indenture as mental urge
seized its cache for vagrant dollars
wishing for tissued formats
under the chromatic veils
throttling the chests of unwanted entities
treasured for their tenuous doubloons
and shuffle board revival entries
scuffling in the arid sun
admixture ruffling clarified beatings
insomniac mantras lift the blackened sky
rendering the railway seating
naked as a blue caboose
under the weight of a sailing crib
wailing caterwaul sanctuaries
curbside bibs outnumbered & rank
as true thirst on a camel’s laundromat
extending first rights to the privileged
wary of unbidden gifts
the taste of horses in their mouths
a wooden memory lasting as plastic
where former beauty fails its ploy
for a cacophonous coarse inaction
better dreaded than forced
the diaphanous spread of eagled mentors
winging their statements forth with
canticle leaflets proclaiming past destinies
from an orthopedic perspective
mired in plastic casualties
_____
Vehement Treaties
Chamomile torso vouchers
indenture under time. Duress emblazons
its sublime appeal in chrome.
A climbing intonation extracted the time
when feelings once counted
as alphabet. Splenetics praising
incumbents collapse the mountebank
down the motor hall. Enamored,
the crawling incipients gather splendorous
treaties, hedging their best. All the rest
took amber sealant. Convection
scourges west to the recipient’s horizon,
where low ceilings become a glue.
The tender flume enlightens fabric animosity.
A statuary quest conceals the frights
dextrose confers on ample fragments,
no course undue. A reference cruises
across the weight of ladder camps
bellowing hoarse reprieves to
its lattermost rotation, where devices
clamp vectors. Slashes cross the pit
where conundrums go to puzzlement
befit the punishment’s line, at best
a wafer scoundrel. A more abundant
concourse grapes their arbor
amid bevel tests. The zeal sealants
varicose as saturation pointers
trained to gray matador tablets
flail the ledge before carnal pursuit
engenders them. Fancifully blended
anchovies intent ultraviolet lampoons.
Urban legends posing against the strata
forklift dividends. To melodies ringing
ancient vendor data held against
velcro, scofflaws tick amulet crossings
against the tirades of a loose amusement.
_____
Vernon Frazer has published eight books of poetry and three books of fiction. His work has appeared in Big Bridge, Drunken Boat, First Intensity, Jack Magazine, Lost and Found Times, Mad Hatters Review, Moria, Miami SunPost, Otloiths, Prague Literary Review, Sidereality, Xstream and many other literary magazines. His web site is http://vernonfrazer.com. His most recent works are the long-poems "Holiday Idylling," "Avenue Noir," and IMPROVISATIONS, the now-completed work that he introduced in his 2001 reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. Frazer is married and lives in South Florida.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Giles Goodland, "The Poet"
Giles Goodland
The Poet
The poet comes home
and his three-year-old son runs at him
with a monster-mask of his own construction.
The poet considers whether he should
congratulate his child or run like hell.
The poet walks into the kitchen
to witness his daughter fall from the high-chair
onto the wooden floor
and for the next hour there is no conversation.
The poet realises his mistake,
makes an excuse and leaves.
This mask the poet purchased earlier
appeared to contain a skull:
you put it inside your head and it made you.
The poet cries out cloud, it made you cry
something on the news.
The poet’s son leaps up, he wants
to cook everything, it should be
given as many seconds as can be numbered.
The poet thinks if we were actors
we might be really bad ones, yesterday
he fluffed so many lines he felt like
a thistle pouring whiteness across his family.
Somewhere she is in a poem
rubbing her eyes. It’s hardly even morning yet.
It will be hours before she starts looking for the poet.
The poet writes a poem in which the narrator
steps out and congresses with ropes of rainwater.
He claims he made a new sun yesterday
that casts no shadow. You can
swim in it and not burn. He calls it
language, and it has never set.
The first thing the poet forgets is his skin.
Softly but continuously language is describing
to the poet why it should go on, but the more
it talks the fewer words it has left.
The poet listens to the pages emptying
and is followed by a verb of motion.
His cat has been missing for several decades now.
The road he did not take negates the poem.
It is so bright and open,
an inviting street-lit yellow cupped forever
in the palm of his mind.
The poet laughs and cuddles in his sleep
a razor blade and a tin of flowers.
_____
Giles Goodland’s last book was Capital (Salt, 2006). Before that was A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001). He lives in London and works as a lexicographer.
The Poet
The poet comes home
and his three-year-old son runs at him
with a monster-mask of his own construction.
The poet considers whether he should
congratulate his child or run like hell.
The poet walks into the kitchen
to witness his daughter fall from the high-chair
onto the wooden floor
and for the next hour there is no conversation.
The poet realises his mistake,
makes an excuse and leaves.
This mask the poet purchased earlier
appeared to contain a skull:
you put it inside your head and it made you.
The poet cries out cloud, it made you cry
something on the news.
The poet’s son leaps up, he wants
to cook everything, it should be
given as many seconds as can be numbered.
The poet thinks if we were actors
we might be really bad ones, yesterday
he fluffed so many lines he felt like
a thistle pouring whiteness across his family.
Somewhere she is in a poem
rubbing her eyes. It’s hardly even morning yet.
It will be hours before she starts looking for the poet.
The poet writes a poem in which the narrator
steps out and congresses with ropes of rainwater.
He claims he made a new sun yesterday
that casts no shadow. You can
swim in it and not burn. He calls it
language, and it has never set.
The first thing the poet forgets is his skin.
Softly but continuously language is describing
to the poet why it should go on, but the more
it talks the fewer words it has left.
The poet listens to the pages emptying
and is followed by a verb of motion.
His cat has been missing for several decades now.
The road he did not take negates the poem.
It is so bright and open,
an inviting street-lit yellow cupped forever
in the palm of his mind.
The poet laughs and cuddles in his sleep
a razor blade and a tin of flowers.
_____
Giles Goodland’s last book was Capital (Salt, 2006). Before that was A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001). He lives in London and works as a lexicographer.
John Mack, "White Lines"
John Mack
White Lines
With the lady of Ise I might have ridden small boats
That row the waves, and avoided the tangles of this sea.
---
Like jade may you be invariably firm and tender; like a bracelet may there be no break between before and after.
The things have no intrinsic value. They are meant to signify.
---
Fireflies pierce the curtained window,
the dragon song turns pale,
Phoenix airs in thinning mist turn
the dwarf pines darker green, the court bamboo
tinkles, look—she is moving in pieces like a heron,
her pendant robe stirring the jade dust.
_____
White Lines
With the lady of Ise I might have ridden small boats
That row the waves, and avoided the tangles of this sea.
---
Like jade may you be invariably firm and tender; like a bracelet may there be no break between before and after.
The things have no intrinsic value. They are meant to signify.
---
Fireflies pierce the curtained window,
the dragon song turns pale,
Phoenix airs in thinning mist turn
the dwarf pines darker green, the court bamboo
tinkles, look—she is moving in pieces like a heron,
her pendant robe stirring the jade dust.
_____
Marjorie Maddox, "Articulate" & other poems
Marjorie Maddox
Lock Haven University
“We Want Your Poems on Small Penises,”
the respected journal obediently
displays without pun or prejudice
in its sub-standard two-inch column
shrunk to allow room for the nine-character
web address. “Nom de plumes
accepted.” “Payment for the brave
in copies of others’ complaints
of long-term inadequacy.”
We want your poems on small breasts,
on lack of climax, loss of libido,
inability to find a lover
last seen in the vicinity
of 5th and High. We want your
vanishing limbs, truncated torsos,
eyes collapsing into REM,
fingers without their prints,
tongues tied up in the inevitable,
hearts unable to thump that unsolicited SOS
sent last May without an SASE
and no contest fee—
all in iambic pentameter,
double-spaced in type size Extra Large,
an easy read, quick enough
for a scan on the metro, for that spasm of relief
on the john, between the rejections
and the unworthy innuendos, after the idea expanding
unnecessarily into the rest of your life.
_____
Abstract
After the Jackson Pollack movie
where Ed Harris won’t stop jabbing
that paintbrush and voice
into my non-cinematic air,
I want to make something big
and screaming.
My friend says I need a wife for that.
My husband agrees, complains he’s one,
but still brings me sandwiches
when I type shut the door,
whispering little words
too small for canvas.
At night, after the children
cry their separation fears,
we watch thrillers on a screen
the size of Pollack’s visions,
high-definition substituted for paint.
What can be super-imposed on this life
I love and flee from to re-create
the concrete, the already-here,
flat and fading on these walls
big enough for the expressionist,
for me?
_____
Cocktail Party Conversation
“Oh,” they say to those
Ohio-born, before they saunter off for more
caviar at that lace-draped table
where Bostonians cluster
in correct company. Three steps backwards
as neat as a coy cat’s retreat. A yawn
elegantly disguised.
Don’t cry little Buckeyes,
dabbing your Midwestern eyes
with the linen; don’t stab the brie
or sink the soufflé, however surreptitiously.
Revenge can have its label “sweet”;
we give it away: our past and pastures
rolling far from flat expectations.
Of course, land furrows its peace
into our creations, into syllables
rooted in where we’ve grown.
But always there’s the surprise
of the hill, the garrulous hand-shaking city,
the wide-mouthed moon shocked
over the corn’s simple locks.
In your staid silence,
Oh-You-From-Other-States,
we serenade, scribble lyrics ferociously,
we nod across the perfectly set table
to say in our broadcasting dialect
to those less fortunate, “Oh,”
“Hi,” “Oh.”
_____
Articulate
I’m not; all fine-toed thought
tip-tripping on this gang-plank of tongue,
clumsy and cumbersome in the outside air
of others’ ears and expectations,
all incubation of consonants off-limits,
sounds’ syllables looking silly,
without a line to dry on.
What a mess of metaphors the mouth makes!
It’s the pen that injects
tap dance, the click-clack of keys
that decodes the meaning.
Outside the letters, I’m incognito:
a suburbanite. Two toddlers.
A mouthful of stumbling practicality.
You won’t see me
till I write.
_____
Professor of English at LHU, Marjorie Maddox has published 8 poetry books and over 280 poems, stories, and essays in journals and anthologies. Co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and author of two forthcoming children’s books, she is the recipient of numerous awards. Her short story collection was a Katherine Anne Porter Award finalist.
Lock Haven University
“We Want Your Poems on Small Penises,”
the respected journal obediently
displays without pun or prejudice
in its sub-standard two-inch column
shrunk to allow room for the nine-character
web address. “Nom de plumes
accepted.” “Payment for the brave
in copies of others’ complaints
of long-term inadequacy.”
We want your poems on small breasts,
on lack of climax, loss of libido,
inability to find a lover
last seen in the vicinity
of 5th and High. We want your
vanishing limbs, truncated torsos,
eyes collapsing into REM,
fingers without their prints,
tongues tied up in the inevitable,
hearts unable to thump that unsolicited SOS
sent last May without an SASE
and no contest fee—
all in iambic pentameter,
double-spaced in type size Extra Large,
an easy read, quick enough
for a scan on the metro, for that spasm of relief
on the john, between the rejections
and the unworthy innuendos, after the idea expanding
unnecessarily into the rest of your life.
_____
Abstract
After the Jackson Pollack movie
where Ed Harris won’t stop jabbing
that paintbrush and voice
into my non-cinematic air,
I want to make something big
and screaming.
My friend says I need a wife for that.
My husband agrees, complains he’s one,
but still brings me sandwiches
when I type shut the door,
whispering little words
too small for canvas.
At night, after the children
cry their separation fears,
we watch thrillers on a screen
the size of Pollack’s visions,
high-definition substituted for paint.
What can be super-imposed on this life
I love and flee from to re-create
the concrete, the already-here,
flat and fading on these walls
big enough for the expressionist,
for me?
_____
Cocktail Party Conversation
“Oh,” they say to those
Ohio-born, before they saunter off for more
caviar at that lace-draped table
where Bostonians cluster
in correct company. Three steps backwards
as neat as a coy cat’s retreat. A yawn
elegantly disguised.
Don’t cry little Buckeyes,
dabbing your Midwestern eyes
with the linen; don’t stab the brie
or sink the soufflé, however surreptitiously.
Revenge can have its label “sweet”;
we give it away: our past and pastures
rolling far from flat expectations.
Of course, land furrows its peace
into our creations, into syllables
rooted in where we’ve grown.
But always there’s the surprise
of the hill, the garrulous hand-shaking city,
the wide-mouthed moon shocked
over the corn’s simple locks.
In your staid silence,
Oh-You-From-Other-States,
we serenade, scribble lyrics ferociously,
we nod across the perfectly set table
to say in our broadcasting dialect
to those less fortunate, “Oh,”
“Hi,” “Oh.”
_____
Articulate
I’m not; all fine-toed thought
tip-tripping on this gang-plank of tongue,
clumsy and cumbersome in the outside air
of others’ ears and expectations,
all incubation of consonants off-limits,
sounds’ syllables looking silly,
without a line to dry on.
What a mess of metaphors the mouth makes!
It’s the pen that injects
tap dance, the click-clack of keys
that decodes the meaning.
Outside the letters, I’m incognito:
a suburbanite. Two toddlers.
A mouthful of stumbling practicality.
You won’t see me
till I write.
_____
Professor of English at LHU, Marjorie Maddox has published 8 poetry books and over 280 poems, stories, and essays in journals and anthologies. Co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and author of two forthcoming children’s books, she is the recipient of numerous awards. Her short story collection was a Katherine Anne Porter Award finalist.
Peter Manson, "Sigh," "The Flowers," & "Saint"
Peter Manson
translations from Mallarmé
Sigh
My soul, calm sister, climbs towards your brow
where a freckled autumn dreams,
towards the vagrant sky of your angelic eye
as, faithful in a melancholic garden,
a jet of white water sighs towards the Blue!
towards October’s tender, pure, pale Blue
that mirrors infinite languor in great pools
and allows, on dead water where lion-coloured leaves
vagrant in wind dig their own cold furrow,
the yellow sun to prolong itself in a ray.
_____
The Flowers
On the first day, long ago, you broke
off from the golden landslides of old azure
and from the eternal snow of stars, great calices
for the still young earth, a virgin of disasters,
fauve gladiolus, with the thin-necked swans,
and the divine laurel of exiled souls
vermilion as the pure toe of the seraphim
flushed with the modesty of walked-on dawns,
the hyacinth, the lovely, glinting myrtle
and, like a woman’s flesh, the cruel
rose, Hérodiade flower of the bright garden,
watered by a wild and radiant blood!
You made the sobbing whiteness of the lily
that, brushing on the rolling sea of sighs,
through the blue incense of the pale horizon
dreamily rises towards the weeping moon!
Hosanna on the lute and in the censers,
Our Lady, hosanna of the garden and our limbo!
Ending the echo through celestial evenings,
ecstatic glances, scintillating haloes!
O Mother who created in your strong, just breast
calices weighing the future phial
of giant flowers against balsamic Death
for the tired poet whom life etiolates.
_____
Saint
Concealing at the window-pane
the old, ungilding sandalwood
of her viol that once
sparkled with flute or mandola
is the pale saint displaying
the old, unfolding book
of the Magnificat that once
streamed into Vespers and Compline:
at this monstrance window
brushed by a harp the Angel
made from its evening flight
for the delicate phalanx
of the finger that, without sandalwood
or the old book, she posits
on the instrumental plumage,
musician of the silence.
_____
Peter Manson lives in Glasgow, Scotland. His books include For the Good of Liars (Barque Press), Adjunct: an Undigest (Edinburgh Review), and Before and After Mallarmé (Survivors’ Press). His website, Freebase Accordion, is at www.petermanson.com
translations from Mallarmé
Sigh
My soul, calm sister, climbs towards your brow
where a freckled autumn dreams,
towards the vagrant sky of your angelic eye
as, faithful in a melancholic garden,
a jet of white water sighs towards the Blue!
towards October’s tender, pure, pale Blue
that mirrors infinite languor in great pools
and allows, on dead water where lion-coloured leaves
vagrant in wind dig their own cold furrow,
the yellow sun to prolong itself in a ray.
_____
The Flowers
On the first day, long ago, you broke
off from the golden landslides of old azure
and from the eternal snow of stars, great calices
for the still young earth, a virgin of disasters,
fauve gladiolus, with the thin-necked swans,
and the divine laurel of exiled souls
vermilion as the pure toe of the seraphim
flushed with the modesty of walked-on dawns,
the hyacinth, the lovely, glinting myrtle
and, like a woman’s flesh, the cruel
rose, Hérodiade flower of the bright garden,
watered by a wild and radiant blood!
You made the sobbing whiteness of the lily
that, brushing on the rolling sea of sighs,
through the blue incense of the pale horizon
dreamily rises towards the weeping moon!
Hosanna on the lute and in the censers,
Our Lady, hosanna of the garden and our limbo!
Ending the echo through celestial evenings,
ecstatic glances, scintillating haloes!
O Mother who created in your strong, just breast
calices weighing the future phial
of giant flowers against balsamic Death
for the tired poet whom life etiolates.
_____
Saint
Concealing at the window-pane
the old, ungilding sandalwood
of her viol that once
sparkled with flute or mandola
is the pale saint displaying
the old, unfolding book
of the Magnificat that once
streamed into Vespers and Compline:
at this monstrance window
brushed by a harp the Angel
made from its evening flight
for the delicate phalanx
of the finger that, without sandalwood
or the old book, she posits
on the instrumental plumage,
musician of the silence.
_____
Peter Manson lives in Glasgow, Scotland. His books include For the Good of Liars (Barque Press), Adjunct: an Undigest (Edinburgh Review), and Before and After Mallarmé (Survivors’ Press). His website, Freebase Accordion, is at www.petermanson.com
Christina Mengert, "Morning Marks" & "Per Aspera"
Christina Mengert
Morning Marks
A constellation of the body woken spread out so many
points the light looks back on fondly open it
open it we’re looking for something anything
familiar we take our bodies to bed and inspect them
for bugs then matter even the window
doesn’t want us standing talking at it making it make
squares having felt itself boundless and pressing
_____
Per Aspera Ad Astra
If one perceives the figure in the distance as distant
already, the eye is too far in
the figure lost but desperately sending
for to be with, to span, bring with to have moved through violence
and achieve this beautiful contained
it is a condition of destruction the figure, not still a figure
will learn having reached its light here having burned
_____
Christina Mengert holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. Her poems and reviews have been published in Web Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, The New Review of Literature, Parcel, and Aufgabe. She currently lives and teaches in Denver, Colorado.
Morning Marks
A constellation of the body woken spread out so many
points the light looks back on fondly open it
open it we’re looking for something anything
familiar we take our bodies to bed and inspect them
for bugs then matter even the window
doesn’t want us standing talking at it making it make
squares having felt itself boundless and pressing
_____
Per Aspera Ad Astra
If one perceives the figure in the distance as distant
already, the eye is too far in
the figure lost but desperately sending
for to be with, to span, bring with to have moved through violence
and achieve this beautiful contained
it is a condition of destruction the figure, not still a figure
will learn having reached its light here having burned
_____
Christina Mengert holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver and an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. Her poems and reviews have been published in Web Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, The New Review of Literature, Parcel, and Aufgabe. She currently lives and teaches in Denver, Colorado.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Andrew H. Banecker, "Capital"
Andrew H. Banecker
Capital
For twelve dollars, you can buy a Cambodian boy for an hour.
He’d learned this a few months ago while watching a Dateline special on sex tourism. Never had it seemed applicable to any facet of his existence until tonight, when Steve Herman watched his date order her third martini. After the second, he’d asked the waitress to bring him the drink menu. Not, as he’d said at the time, so that he could peruse the various offerings unique to the Cracked Mirror—his Coors Light still taking up most of the glass—but so he could view the damage done to his bank account.
For twelve dollars, you can buy a bottle of Australian Chiraz, and still have enough for an impulse buy at the counter.
He’d had his reservations about the place the minute his date brought it up on the phone. “I read about it in The Nashville Scene,” she said. “It looks swanky.”
Furthering his suspicion was its location—in the Hillsboro Village section of town, between $40,000-a-year schools, Belmont and Vanderbilt. He’d pegged Lori—or was it Lauren. Laura?—for the kind of girl you’d have to impress, but that was based solely on her looks. She was impossibly gorgeous, sipping a vodka tonic—bought by a winking kid with a sparse goatee indicative of a fake ID expensive enough to convince the bouncer—through the stirring straw, and wincing at the taste. When she’d pushed the drink away, the kid took offense.
When she pushed the kid away, Steve intervened. That was how he got her number. He’d just come from an unfortunate interview with The Tennessean for a job in the mail room, and was wearing a suit bought from the Men’s Wearhouse that resembled the navy Hugo Boss, striped vertically with a subtle, almost undetectable light blue his father owned. That was how he got her number. Her friends were in the bathroom. That was how he got her number.
For twelve dollars, you can hire a band of migrant workers to till your land until daybreak.
He’d borrowed his father’s car to pick her up. A ’98 Honda Accord, though with the V6 leather package. His father had recently had it waxed, and the interior detailed, so it smelled of artificial new car smell and Armor-All. There was more than enough gas in the tank to get where he needed to go.
For twelve dollars, you can feed a small African village through a Christian charity.
He was wearing the same suit, but with a different tie—a black silk his father was given from a Dali museum in Roma. On the back, stitched into the tag, read, “St. Georges et le Dragon. Image d’une sculpture de Salvador Dali.” An hour before he left, he stood in front of the mirror, reciting that line, careful to remember the proper inflection on each word from the time he’d heard his father say it to an associate. He imagined his date remarking on the intricate stitch work, capturing the featureless saint, on horseback, lance in hand. He imagined her peering closer, seeing the inlaid soft watches and melting clocks hidden between the statues. He would tell her The Persistence of Memory is his favorite painting. She would peer closer.
For twelve dollars, you could buy one eighth of that tie.
She ordered first. A Rose Martini. The very name confused Steve, but he assumed it was named after the owner, or something unique to the bartender—she looked too young to be a Rose, but you never knew. He hardly looked like a Steve. More of a Chris, or Ben. His date began to talk about classes. She went to Belmont for their program in music business. “I’m hoping to get an internship with Sony or BMG this summer,” she said. “But it’s so competitive.”
Steve nodded and smiled. He made a mental picture of the necklace she was wearing—a simple gold chain with a diamond in gold setting, serving as a weighted plum bob splitting the symmetry of her breasts. As she brushed a few strands away from his vision, he made sure to look up into her eyes before enough time had passed to force an accusation of leering. “It’s my grandmother’s engagement ring,” she said. “My mother had it made into a necklace.”
Steve smiled. “It suits you.” Steve immediately regretted his choice of words, but once they were out there, he could do nothing but wait for a response. It suits you? What kind of a thing is that to say to a date? That sounds like something his Uncle Murray would say to him while trying on pants as a child. Something his Great Aunt Rita would tell him if he’d been complaining about a hair cut that was slightly too short for his liking. It suits you? Regardless, it looked as if Lori—Steve was pretty sure that was her name—hadn’t even heard him. Her gaze distracted by the triangular glass being walked to the table—a slightly pink liquid with something floating in it. A single rose, no stem.
For twelve dollars, you can see a five-year-old eat an equal number of worms at recess.
“Isn’t this just to die for?” she said. She took a small sip, draining nearly a third of the glass. She winced slightly at the taste, and coughed after she’d swallowed, just as she’d done with the vodka tonic on the night they met. This time she didn’t push the drink away.
Steve glanced around the periphery of his table, and suddenly felt underdressed. Sure, his suit resembled his father’s Hugo Boss, but it was picked off a clearance rack and tailored by a man who probably felt his obvious comb-over made him look ten years younger. The only thing he had that came close to Italian craftsmanship was purchased at a museum gift shop by his Great Aunt Rita while she was with her church group on a day tour of Rome. And he’d had to borrow it from his father. He had no business being in a martini bar like this. Or any martini bar, for that matter. He was Steve Herman, son of a Murfreesboro accountant. His degree came from Middle Tennessee State University.
For twelve dollars, you can buy a degree from Middle Tennessee State University.
He began to sweat. Not the attractive musk a man gets from chopping wood. No, it was the nervous type, the type that bleeds through clothes. The type that forms on his nose and forces him into the unenviable quagmire of letting it fall off the tip, or wiping it with the sleeve of his jacket. Steve excused himself to the restroom.
“What are you doing here?” he whispered to his reflection, softly enough so the bathroom attendant wouldn’t be alerted. He took a breath to gather himself in, but in an instant was flush with questions. Why did you think you could handle this night? This girl? You’ve been out of school for six months, and you can’t even get mail room work? What kind of drink has a rose floating in it? What kind of bar has a bathroom attendant? Why did you think you could impress her with a gift shop tie and clearance rack suit bought from a man who squinted like he was suffering from a slowly detaching retina?
The bathroom attendant asked him if he needed a towel, or some cologne. He called Steve, “Sir.” Realizing he’d have to tip the man if he accepted, Steve mumbled something incoherent, and rushed out of the bathroom.
For twelve dollars, you can use the bathroom six times and not feel bad about how much you tip.
Looking at the drink menu, Steve had to refrain himself from letting loose a stream of obscenities that would make a longshoreman blush. His vocal chords obeyed. His eyes, however, were stuck on the price list, unable to move from the number directly to the right of the words: Rose Martini.
For twelve dollars, Your Highness can buy two ounces of pink grapefruit juice, one ounce of vodka, and a mother fucking rose floating on the whole damned thing.
“Steve?” his date said, momentarily wrenching his eyes from the page. “Do you want one?”
Steve’s eyes were drawn to something else. A fluorescent blue drink with a green glow stick for a stirrer. That bitch. In the bathroom not two minutes, and Little Miss Princess over there’s ordering another God-damned drink!
“You’ve got to try this,” she said, raising her glass toward the waitress and motioning for two.
For twelve dollars, you can buy a Cambodian boy for an hour.
For twelve more, you can hunt him for sport.
As he drove his date back to her apartment in silence, Steve had to use all the resolve he had not to steer his car into every tree they passed. Who is she to order four martinis and not even think about reaching for the check? Little Miss Wonderful is going into the music business. Well la tee da. Look at her, looking out the window and smiling like an idiot. Thinks she’s better than everyone because she goes to martini bars, wears heirlooms turned into necklaces, and pushes away perfectly good guys who offer to buy her a drink just because it makes her gag? Well, what makes her so special? Who is she that she can turn guys upside down and shake out their wallets over frou frou drinks with God-damned roses in them. What the hell has she got that’s so—
“Would you like to come in?” she said.
“Sure.”
For fifty-seven dollars and seventy-seven cents—plus tip—you can buy a Rose Martini, three Electric Blue Lemonade Martinis, and one Coors Light.
_____
Capital
For twelve dollars, you can buy a Cambodian boy for an hour.
He’d learned this a few months ago while watching a Dateline special on sex tourism. Never had it seemed applicable to any facet of his existence until tonight, when Steve Herman watched his date order her third martini. After the second, he’d asked the waitress to bring him the drink menu. Not, as he’d said at the time, so that he could peruse the various offerings unique to the Cracked Mirror—his Coors Light still taking up most of the glass—but so he could view the damage done to his bank account.
For twelve dollars, you can buy a bottle of Australian Chiraz, and still have enough for an impulse buy at the counter.
He’d had his reservations about the place the minute his date brought it up on the phone. “I read about it in The Nashville Scene,” she said. “It looks swanky.”
Furthering his suspicion was its location—in the Hillsboro Village section of town, between $40,000-a-year schools, Belmont and Vanderbilt. He’d pegged Lori—or was it Lauren. Laura?—for the kind of girl you’d have to impress, but that was based solely on her looks. She was impossibly gorgeous, sipping a vodka tonic—bought by a winking kid with a sparse goatee indicative of a fake ID expensive enough to convince the bouncer—through the stirring straw, and wincing at the taste. When she’d pushed the drink away, the kid took offense.
When she pushed the kid away, Steve intervened. That was how he got her number. He’d just come from an unfortunate interview with The Tennessean for a job in the mail room, and was wearing a suit bought from the Men’s Wearhouse that resembled the navy Hugo Boss, striped vertically with a subtle, almost undetectable light blue his father owned. That was how he got her number. Her friends were in the bathroom. That was how he got her number.
For twelve dollars, you can hire a band of migrant workers to till your land until daybreak.
He’d borrowed his father’s car to pick her up. A ’98 Honda Accord, though with the V6 leather package. His father had recently had it waxed, and the interior detailed, so it smelled of artificial new car smell and Armor-All. There was more than enough gas in the tank to get where he needed to go.
For twelve dollars, you can feed a small African village through a Christian charity.
He was wearing the same suit, but with a different tie—a black silk his father was given from a Dali museum in Roma. On the back, stitched into the tag, read, “St. Georges et le Dragon. Image d’une sculpture de Salvador Dali.” An hour before he left, he stood in front of the mirror, reciting that line, careful to remember the proper inflection on each word from the time he’d heard his father say it to an associate. He imagined his date remarking on the intricate stitch work, capturing the featureless saint, on horseback, lance in hand. He imagined her peering closer, seeing the inlaid soft watches and melting clocks hidden between the statues. He would tell her The Persistence of Memory is his favorite painting. She would peer closer.
For twelve dollars, you could buy one eighth of that tie.
She ordered first. A Rose Martini. The very name confused Steve, but he assumed it was named after the owner, or something unique to the bartender—she looked too young to be a Rose, but you never knew. He hardly looked like a Steve. More of a Chris, or Ben. His date began to talk about classes. She went to Belmont for their program in music business. “I’m hoping to get an internship with Sony or BMG this summer,” she said. “But it’s so competitive.”
Steve nodded and smiled. He made a mental picture of the necklace she was wearing—a simple gold chain with a diamond in gold setting, serving as a weighted plum bob splitting the symmetry of her breasts. As she brushed a few strands away from his vision, he made sure to look up into her eyes before enough time had passed to force an accusation of leering. “It’s my grandmother’s engagement ring,” she said. “My mother had it made into a necklace.”
Steve smiled. “It suits you.” Steve immediately regretted his choice of words, but once they were out there, he could do nothing but wait for a response. It suits you? What kind of a thing is that to say to a date? That sounds like something his Uncle Murray would say to him while trying on pants as a child. Something his Great Aunt Rita would tell him if he’d been complaining about a hair cut that was slightly too short for his liking. It suits you? Regardless, it looked as if Lori—Steve was pretty sure that was her name—hadn’t even heard him. Her gaze distracted by the triangular glass being walked to the table—a slightly pink liquid with something floating in it. A single rose, no stem.
For twelve dollars, you can see a five-year-old eat an equal number of worms at recess.
“Isn’t this just to die for?” she said. She took a small sip, draining nearly a third of the glass. She winced slightly at the taste, and coughed after she’d swallowed, just as she’d done with the vodka tonic on the night they met. This time she didn’t push the drink away.
Steve glanced around the periphery of his table, and suddenly felt underdressed. Sure, his suit resembled his father’s Hugo Boss, but it was picked off a clearance rack and tailored by a man who probably felt his obvious comb-over made him look ten years younger. The only thing he had that came close to Italian craftsmanship was purchased at a museum gift shop by his Great Aunt Rita while she was with her church group on a day tour of Rome. And he’d had to borrow it from his father. He had no business being in a martini bar like this. Or any martini bar, for that matter. He was Steve Herman, son of a Murfreesboro accountant. His degree came from Middle Tennessee State University.
For twelve dollars, you can buy a degree from Middle Tennessee State University.
He began to sweat. Not the attractive musk a man gets from chopping wood. No, it was the nervous type, the type that bleeds through clothes. The type that forms on his nose and forces him into the unenviable quagmire of letting it fall off the tip, or wiping it with the sleeve of his jacket. Steve excused himself to the restroom.
“What are you doing here?” he whispered to his reflection, softly enough so the bathroom attendant wouldn’t be alerted. He took a breath to gather himself in, but in an instant was flush with questions. Why did you think you could handle this night? This girl? You’ve been out of school for six months, and you can’t even get mail room work? What kind of drink has a rose floating in it? What kind of bar has a bathroom attendant? Why did you think you could impress her with a gift shop tie and clearance rack suit bought from a man who squinted like he was suffering from a slowly detaching retina?
The bathroom attendant asked him if he needed a towel, or some cologne. He called Steve, “Sir.” Realizing he’d have to tip the man if he accepted, Steve mumbled something incoherent, and rushed out of the bathroom.
For twelve dollars, you can use the bathroom six times and not feel bad about how much you tip.
Looking at the drink menu, Steve had to refrain himself from letting loose a stream of obscenities that would make a longshoreman blush. His vocal chords obeyed. His eyes, however, were stuck on the price list, unable to move from the number directly to the right of the words: Rose Martini.
For twelve dollars, Your Highness can buy two ounces of pink grapefruit juice, one ounce of vodka, and a mother fucking rose floating on the whole damned thing.
“Steve?” his date said, momentarily wrenching his eyes from the page. “Do you want one?”
Steve’s eyes were drawn to something else. A fluorescent blue drink with a green glow stick for a stirrer. That bitch. In the bathroom not two minutes, and Little Miss Princess over there’s ordering another God-damned drink!
“You’ve got to try this,” she said, raising her glass toward the waitress and motioning for two.
For twelve dollars, you can buy a Cambodian boy for an hour.
For twelve more, you can hunt him for sport.
As he drove his date back to her apartment in silence, Steve had to use all the resolve he had not to steer his car into every tree they passed. Who is she to order four martinis and not even think about reaching for the check? Little Miss Wonderful is going into the music business. Well la tee da. Look at her, looking out the window and smiling like an idiot. Thinks she’s better than everyone because she goes to martini bars, wears heirlooms turned into necklaces, and pushes away perfectly good guys who offer to buy her a drink just because it makes her gag? Well, what makes her so special? Who is she that she can turn guys upside down and shake out their wallets over frou frou drinks with God-damned roses in them. What the hell has she got that’s so—
“Would you like to come in?” she said.
“Sure.”
For fifty-seven dollars and seventy-seven cents—plus tip—you can buy a Rose Martini, three Electric Blue Lemonade Martinis, and one Coors Light.
_____
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