Deborah Ager's Blog, page 2

Our God is a Consuming Fire: Fourteen Reflections on Joanna Pearson’s “The Arsonists in Love”

Contributor’s Marginalia: Benjamin Myers on “The Arsonists in Love” by Joanna Pearson

1.

If Joanna Pearson’s poem had a theme song, it would be Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” which I listened to for almost twenty hours straight, locked in my bedroom at sixteen, staring at the flimsy brown wood paneling between the posters on my wall, after my first girlfriend dumped me, but which I also still think is a superb song.

2.

This poem takes off with a conflagration of sound: “We lusted after luster, lit our fill.” The alliteration calls to mind the first lick of flame as a fire begins. The movement from low vowels to high is a kind of igniting whoosh that gives the poem energetic propulsion. The vowels and consonants continue to crackle and pop with heat throughout the rest of the poem, creating a sustained onomatopoeia, a technique sometimes utilized in poems about jazz or about modern machinery, but used with startling originality to conjure up a fire in Pearson’s poem. This is a poem for reading aloud, for recitation late, late in the night when you sit in the circle of the last people to leave the party.

3.

In high school, I had a friend whose favorite party trick was to spray his jeans with hairspray and light them on fire. He particularly liked to light his crotch. I can still smell the sweet hairspray turning to acrid flame, see the stone-washed marbling take flame and oddly illuminate his torso and face. We all knew it must be a metaphor for something. I don’t know where that friend is now.

4.

Fourteen lines of ten syllables each gives the sonnet such a boxy look, which is absolutely perfect for this house on fire. Pearson’s assonances are like tongues of flame arching out from windows and cracks in the siding. I love to watch this poem burn.

5.

The English sonnet is often referred to as the “Shakespearean sonnet,” but the form was actually first used by Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey. Still, we call it the “Shakespearean sonnet.” Surrey got screwed.

6.

I love a good line break. I have heard that term challenged, the idea being that, in carefully constructed poetry, we don’t “break” a line but rather end it fittingly, either with or against the syntax. But witness this: “as if we could make love / destroy itself.” That line is beautifully broken.

7.

There is, perhaps, a bit of Gerard Manly Hopkins behind this poem. I think, naturally, of “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.”

8.

I’m drawn to the image of the lintels cracking like wishbones. There is something very compelling about the tension between the warm, homey connotations of Thanksgiving dinner and the destructiveness of the criminal act at the heart of the poem. Unless, of course, your family Thanksgivings already bordered on, or descended into, criminal acts. Then I suppose rather than interestingly tense, the image is more simply apropos. Either way it is a heck of an image.

9.

While I’m on the topic of imagery, I’d like to say something about the ending of the poem. It’s splendid the way Pearson draws the reader into the imaginative action of the poem, asking the reader to help imagine a form for the “blotting shape” that looms above her characters. The image is somehow both vivid and ambiguous, and that ambiguity gives the poem a sort of open-endedness that is perhaps rare in sonnets. You might even say that Pearson solves a significant problem in postmodern formalist poetics here, managing to give the sonnet form its particular kind of closure and yet maintain postmodern resistance to closure. That all sounds rather academic, but the upshot is that the end of the poem is all the more moving for the way it tugs us, like a difficult relationship, back and forth between a sense of ending and a sense of going on.

10.

This according to Thomas Merton’s The Wisdom of the Desert: “Abbot Lot came to Abbot Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not be totally changed into fire?”

11.

Sometimes it scares me how much I love my wife. I would burn a house down if she needed me to.

12.

Even if it is a less arduous task to rhyme the Shakespearean (or, shall I say, Surrean) sonnet than it is to rhyme its more ornate and Italianate cousin, the Petrarchan sonnet, it is still no small feat. Pearson achieves the rhyme scheme of the sonnet with grace, particularly with rhymes like “joist” with “rejoiced” and “cracked” with “act.” Such rhymes keep the form tight aurally but surprise the eye, another form of tension in this carefully fraught poem.

13.

“It was a flagrant act / to burn the place we lived. . . .” Brilliant diction! (flagrant from the Latin, flagare, “to burn”).

14.

“Love, love will tear us apart . . . again. . . .”

—Benjamin Myers

Benjamin Myers’ latest book is Lapse Americana (NYQ Books, 2013), and he won the 2011 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry for his first book, Elegy for Trains (Village Books Press, 2010). Besides 32 Poems, his work may be read in Poetry Northwest, Measure, The New York Quarterly, Devil’s Lake, and many other journals. His poem, “Spook House,” was recently featured on Verse Daily, and several of his poems have been featured in the Everyday Poems newsletter. He frequently reviews books of contemporary poetry and books on poetics for World Literature Today. A native of central Oklahoma, he was educated at the University of the Ozarks and at Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently the Crouch-Mathis Associate Professor of Literature at Oklahoma Baptist University.

Weekly Prose Feature: “A Collaborative Interview on Collaborations, Part 2”

On April 19, we featured the first installment of this ongoing interview series; for part two, we’ve asked a variety of types of collaborators to chime in on our questions:

Poets Maureen Alsop and Joshua Gottlieb-Miller have an ongoing call-and-response poem collaboration.
Visual artist Kathy Barry and poet Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman met while both in residency at the Vermont Studio Center and collaborated both in person and long distance from their respective homes in Auckland, New Zealand and New York City; a selection of their work can be found in Threaded .
Poets (not to mention mother and son) Marie Harris and Sebastian Matthews began their project, Bruised Heart, after Sebastian and his family were in a car accident in August 2011.
Poets Ryan Teitman and Marcus Wicker have co-written a number of poems; read a selection in Pinwheel.

QUESTION 1: How does one start a collaborative project?

Maureen Alsop: At the beginning.

Joshua Gottlieb-Miller: That’s a trick question, right? But of course, one must start a collaborative project, even if it takes two to etc. etc. I’ve always found there’s nothing better than persistence, guidelines, and trust in your partner’s differences. Unless you’re willing to not get in the way of the other person’s interests and style, the collaboration will never really start.

Kathy Barry: I had been invited to contribute a practitioner’s profile to an Auckland-based publication with the option for collaboration. I asked Jocelyn to collaborate with me as I had admired her poetry on residency and thought that our work shared certain qualities. Fortunately we were able to meet in New York to start the collaboration before I returned to New Zealand so the whole project didn’t happen via computer.

Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman: I think it starts with some spark of curiosity about the other artist’s work. Kathy and I met at the Vermont Studio Center in the summer of 2012. I was interested in her drawings and creative process, which includes meditation, so when she approached me about a collaborative project, I agreed.

Marie Harris: In the months that followed the accident, Sebastian crafted a series of poems and collages chronicling the experience from his vantage; and I made my poems. For a while it seemed these were two separate endeavors. But as time passed and as I read his work, I began to realize that the accident had caused long-suppressed issues to boil up; I needed to initiate a ‘conversation,’ both with him and with myself. Sebastian had chosen a format for his explicitly “accident” poems (which included accompanying photo-montages) and a slightly different format for his “Dear Virgo” poems which served as a sort of commentary on the other series. I found this an intriguing approach and began to realize that I could write my ICU poems in one voice, and make the “Dear Scorpio” poems in another (in my case, a younger self speaking to the older self), thereby giving me the framework in which to describe the immediate trauma and also address the aforementioned “issues.” And, because I haven’t a visual art bone in my body, I gladly relinquished the collage work to Sebastian, doing nothing more than supplying him with images (culled from the photos his stepfather took at the hospital and from photos and documents from his baby book) that he was free to use or not as he chose.

The resulting poems are not meant to be read one-to-one, but encountered as one might eavesdrop on a conversation overheard between two people in whom the reader might recognize kindred spirits, shared experiences. And I see them as two halves of a whole book.

Sebastian Matthews: I wrote these two sets of poems each as part of the on-line collaborative project The Grind. My mom also wrote many of her poems during these one-month “grinds.” This kind of daily writing allowed for the work to come out relatively free of self-consciousness. I just wrote the poems, and made the photomontages, as part of a morning practice. I let them pile up in a file.

The hard part, and the creatively engaging part, has been placing my poems alongside—in conversation with—my mother’s work. And then working on photomontages for her poems. My mom and I have always offered feedback on each other’s work; we’ve been doing it since I was a teen and she let me join her at Jean Pedrick’s Skimmilk Farm workshops. But this has deepened our creative connection, I think. We’ve both been forced to push ourselves outside our comfort zones.

Ryan Teitman: Distance was one of the things that spurred us. I was in Berkeley, Marcus was in Provincetown. Writing poems together through email was a way to keep in touch, both as friends and as poets.

Marcus Wicker: Really the project began as a way to keep in touch and continue learning from one another beyond graduate school. After three close and productive years together at Indiana University Ryan took a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and I found myself on the other side of the country at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. I won’t speak for Ryan, but I was between projects—revising my first collection and trying to write new things, which mostly felt like B-sides of the work in Maybe the Saddest Thing. I needed to get out of my own way, delve in new modes, and our collaborative efforts allowed me to do so in a pressure-free way. We started a few lines at a time via email and liberally. Sometimes I’d write a couplet and Ryan would send back three or I’d pen four lines and he’d shoot back one. I get a sense that our drafting process changed with our day-to-day workload.

QUESTION 2: How does one know it’s done? Do you set parameters at the beginning or does it fizzle out?

MA: We know it’s done because we like it. Yes, we set a framework initially and follow the Minotaur through the maze.

JGM: I rarely set parameters for ending collaborations. I see collaboration as inherently generative: you trust that your partner will make better what you make, so you are free to create. Parameters for the beginnings of poems help create common ground, since style/voice/whatever really does distinguish down to each word who’s contributing what. Bad poems fizzle out. Good poems end. (Though one is not always the good poet who saw it was done first.)

KB: Meeting our initial deadline left us with a sense of untapped possibilities, of not having finished what we might do together.

JCW: Kathy and I are still in the midst of collaboration, and, so far, we haven’t set parameters other than meeting a deadline.

MH: There’s a difference between a poem or poems that are actually written collab-oratively (as in a renga or on the Exquisite Corpse model) and a collaborative project. Bruised Hearts is an example of the latter. We knew when this project was done because we established numbers for the poems in each of our sections. Sebastian and I have commented on and critiqued each other’s work for years.

RT: We had the good fortune of our collaborative work being slowed by good news. My first book was picked up by BOA Editions and Marcus won the National Poetry Series. We had first book concerns to tend to, so the collaboration got pushed to the back burner.

MW: A good deal of our poems were born from one-upmanship. I’m thinking of one poem in particular, “A Game of Chicken,” where Ryan changed the tone of a perfectly chiseled, solemn opening (in my head, at least) with three questions. To “get him back” I sent back four questions and he replied with another before shifting gears as if to say “uncle.” I suppose we let the process dictate how and where to end a poem.

QUESTION 3: Talk a little bit about the etiquette of authorship. If you’re both writing poems, do you seek publication together or separately?

MA: Together, with our collaborative poems. We share the submission process.

JGM: I’m worried more about the etiquette of collaboration. In this project we work on the same poems together. It’s important that we respect each other enough to push the work as hard as it will go, and to pull back when the other person has a clear priority in the poem (almost like running track or swimming laps, or being on a basketball team with someone who can’t miss. Feed them the ball!)

The poems sort themselves out the same way, in terms of publishing: I tend to send out the ones I like more, and Maureen tends to send out the ones she likes more, we each stay in the loop about what’s been submitted where.

I think it’s trickier with poems written in response. How could you not send those out as your own individual poems, but wouldn’t you want to reference somehow their creation as part of a larger project?

RT: We’re both listed as authors on our journal publications. Marcus has been the mastermind of the submission process.

MW: Always together. We shoot for one singular voice in each piece. From draft to final product, who wrote what is sometimes unrecognizable.

QUESTION 4: How does collaboration help you in your own work?

MA: It pushes me between down times (& up times).

JGM: I’d kind of scared myself away from the lyric in graduate school. Seeing other approaches to poetry work so beautifully is easy enough as a reader, but actually participating in other approaches allows me to experiment far more freely. Paradoxically, it also makes me much more conscious of my more conservative impulses (towards some story structure), and when those impulses are appropriate/constructive (constructive in the generative sense).

KB: Jocelyn’s ekphrastic poems unlock interesting new ways to think about and experience my drawings. They bring about a merging of our individual sensibilities, which I imagine will be generative for future work.

JCW: The invitation to live in the world of Kathy’s drawings allows my mind to travel to unfamiliar landscapes that stir my sensibility and thoughts in a manner that is new and welcome to me. Kathy introduced the collaboration during a time when I struggled with health issues and was exhausted. As I sit with her work, the process of writing is both creative and healing. Her sensitivity to line, light, shadow, and pattern creates a spacious feeling which allows me to reach past the limits of my conscious experience.

RT: It really shows where your strengths and weaknesses are. I recently got stuck on a poem and thought: “How would Marcus handle this poem?” And I was able to take the poem in a new direction. That was much easier to do because we had worked together collaboratively. It’s like having another poet’s set of tools to borrow.

MW: When I’m at my desk alone and venturing into unfamiliar territory—I’m talking tone and form—there’s always a chance I’ll stuff a draft in a drawer too soon, because initially, the process can feel painfully uncomfortable. When working with a poet as good as Ryan you learn new and interesting ways to see a poem through to that final punctuation mark. After the third or fourth piece we co-wrote, I was willing to try anything in my own work.

QUESTION 5: Why do a collaboration?

MA: It’s surprising, a process of growth and trust.

 

JGM: I like to help make art that surprises me.

JCW: I think there are many reasons to collaborate. When you feel caught in a particular pattern of thought or feeling, introducing a new artistic energy may steer your imagination towards an unexpected place that brightens your art and yourself. Collaboration holds the potential to expand your perspective and your work.

KB: There’s a social aspect of collaboration that’s appealing also. Both artists and writers generally work alone, unlike the other creative industries: music, theatre, dance… So, to share one’s process, or to engage discrete practices in a conversation, is a welcome opportunity. Likewise, the various industries can be insular, so to work with someone from another field seems expansive, and a way to build communities. Also, because VSC hosts both artists and poets, our collaboration seems like an appropriate outcome to that particular residency experience.

MH: As a poet I have collaborated with a number of artists, most of them painters, sculptors and musicians. That sort of cross-pollination has had its own interesting rewards and surprising results. I’ve never been part of a translation project, itself a very particular form of collaboration, nor have I suggested any sort of collaboration to another poet until now.

So the current project—BRUISED HEARTS—which I’ve embarked upon with my son, the poet Sebastian Matthews, is an entirely new adventure for me. It had its genesis in a shared crisis: Sebastian and his family were nearly killed in a head-on collision. His wife and son were taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, while he was helicoptered to a trauma center two hours away. And it was there that I spent the next 10 days (while his wife’s family tended to her) coping with the fear, distress, pain, bureaucracy, incompetence and grace that make up the experience of an emergency and its aftermath.

SM: That this collaboration comes out of such a calamity, such trauma . . . well, it’s hard to believe I was able to write about the event at all, or that Marie could find a way to write from her vantage. I’m glad we did, though—glad that we pushed through and worked on this project together. The whole process has been cathartic, healing. It’s been almost two years since the accident, and it feels as though making this work together has helped me move out of that stuck place. I have grown into a new post-accident life in part because of this collaboration.

RT: It lets you write with a new voice, one that isn’t entirely your own. And writing with a talented friend is a reward too.

MW: To prove that poets don’t have trust issues. I’m kidding. Because it’s fun and challenging, both.

QUESTION 6: What is your definition of collaboration?

MA: Co = collective, company; Lab= eLABorative, as in a lab to experiment; Tion= action

JGM: Anything where an artist’s contribution surprises the other artist who’s working on the same thing.

KB: Collaboration holds the potential to work beyond one’s existing boundaries, to work across disciplines and to cross-pollinate ideas, it necessitates letting go and being open.

JCW: A collaboration is a mutual agreement to share work, energy, experience, and ideas to create something new.

 

SM: For me, collaboration keeps the creative process—the writing life—dynamic and fluid. It gets me out of my own little world (headspace, attitude, bias) and challenges me to fuse my ideas and images with others. It also deepens friendships (if all goes well!) and radicalizes the writing act by creating a co-authorship. All good things in my book.

RT: Driving a car with two steering wheels.

MW: I don’t have a concrete definition but for me its equal parts trust and troubleshooting.

QUESTION 7: As a poet or artist, how and when do you collaborate with other poets?

MA: When ever the opportunity arises, it’s a 3-D conversation, a meeting of time and space. Josh and I met at the Reno airport.

JGM: Whenever they want to and I respect their work. It helps if they’re interested in something completely different, some other music or style, so that it’s collaboration and not just mimicry of the same noise.

RT: When you have something to say that can’t be said by your voice alone.

MW: Joint readings are a good opportunity to soak-in and compliment other poets’ work. Sometimes that means harnessing levity following a smart but guarded set. Or tapping into a fellow readers’ triumphs and offering up a poem or presence that shares a kindred experience. As far as writing goes, I’d like to think I’m a pretty monogamous collaborator.

 

QUESTION 8: What was your best collab? What made it successful?

MA: Our body of work to date, the fact we keep going. It makes one feel like the journey of writing is worthwhile.

JGM: There’s a poem we worked on that has some references to Israel. For me this is a Jewish poem. Maureen put a Mary right in the title, though. I’m still not sure either of us knows fully what that poem is for the other. The poem bends and is stronger for it.

JCW: This is the first collaboration I’ve done with an artist.

KB: And this is the first time I’ve collaborated with a poet.

RT: I don’t know if it’s necessarily our “best” collaboration, but my favorite is the poem “Ode to Miss Donnatella Moss.” It combines our love of history with our love of television (specifically The West Wing). Plus, it’s a lot of fun to read together.

MW: A poem called “New City Ghazal,” for a number of reasons; but mostly because we challenged each other to work our names into the poem and did.

QUESTION 9: Worst? In hindsight, what about it made it so bad?

MA: Things don’t work in collaboratives if personalities are too dominating or large. Josh & I have not experienced much failure as we don’t focus on failure, allow ourselves to get too stuck, or hold lofty expectations over one another’s heads.

JGM: Sometimes the last one in the series. These poems only work if you don’t force them too. It’s like you and your collaborator are in a venn diagram, and you’re constantly edging the poem towards the middle of the diagram. Then you find something that’s kind of already there and you think that’s great. Then it’s just there and it isn’t going anywhere. After that you move on quick.

RT: I don’t know what our worst was. We’ve definitely had collaborative poems that haven’t worked out, but I think they failed for the same reasons that any poem fails, not necessarily because the poem had two poets.

MW: We wrote a poem about NCIS. You read that right. Just because we love the show doesn’t mean other people should care. And that’s all I have to say about that.

QUESTION 10: Was there any pressure to perform?

MA: No performance pressure, and sometimes more risks than in my own writing. True exposure without vulnerability is how I’d define our collaborative relationship.

JGM: Yes. Why else would you want to collaborate with someone?

JCW: The only pressure I recall is a deadline we had to meet several months ago. Otherwise, we’ve been going at our own pace.

RT: I actually found there to be less pressure. If I got stuck, I passed the poem off to Marcus, and he usually came back with something amazing. Having a great poet to work with means you’ve got support.

MW: Yes and no for the same reason. Because Ryan is a hell of a poet whom I admire and trust with my work.

QUESTION 11: Did you offer feedback or critique of other collaborator’s work? Did they to you?

MA: Not really. We also branched out with a photographer, Sparky Campanella, at one juncture. In that process our collaboratives were responsive parallels.

JGM: The most real kind of feedback or critique: continuing to collaborate with someone.

I think we all want to be influenced, and we go looking for influences. The right ones. I’m more intrigued by how my poetry can appear to mutate under the light of someone else’s work—that recessive quality was there all along.

KB: I would say that the entire process of collaboration involves an ongoing feeding-back and discussion about our work.

JCW: Kathy lives in Auckland, and I live in New York. Every couple of months, we have a Skype conversation to discuss ideas about our collaboration and update each other on our current work. Sometimes I offer my response to her new work and sometimes she responds to one of my poems.

RT: We went through a pretty significant editing process of each of our poems, so both of us got our commentary in, which made the poems much stronger in the end.

MW: Of course. Through track changes via Microsoft Word.

↔

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of two books of poetry, Apparition Wren, and most recently, Mantic. Visit her online at www.maureenalsop.com.







Joshua Gottlieb-Miller’s work has appeared in Blackbird, A Poetry Congeries, The Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, Linebreak,  Indiana Review, where he was awarded the 2012 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and elsewhere. Most recently he was a MacDowell Fellow.







Kathy Barry is a visual artist who lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand. In 2012 she was the McCahon House artist-in-residence, followed by a 3-month residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been exhibited in dealer and public galleries, and artists’ project-spaces across New Zealand. She teaches contextual studies and drawing at MIT in South Auckland. Visit her website at www.kathybarry.co.nz.







Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman is author of Lure (Poetry Society of America 2009). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Jet Fuel Review, Jubilat, Threaded, among other journals, and she’s received grants from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs and the Vermont Studio Center. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University and now writes and teaches yoga in New York City.







Marie Harris, NH Poet Laureate 1999–2004, co-produced the first-ever gathering of state poets laureate. 
She has served as writer-in-residence at elementary and secondary schools throughout New England, 
written freelance articles for publications including the NY Times, the Boston Globe, NH Sunday News, 
and Corvette Fever. Harris is the author of four books of poetry—the most recent of which is
 Your Sun, Manny: A Prose Poem Memoir—and is the editor of several poetry anthologies.







Sebastian Matthews is the author of a memoir and two books of poems. He teaches undergraduate creative writing at Warren Wilson College and serves on the faculty of the Low-Residency MFA at Queens University, Charlotte. He is working on a novel.







Ryan Teitman is the author of Litany for the City, chosen by Jane Hirshfield for the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and published by BOA Editions. His poems have appeared in The Journal, Ninth Letter, The Southern Review, and other magazines. He was formerly a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and is currently the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College.







Marcus Wicker is the author of Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial), selected by D.A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, his poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Third Coast, and Ninth Letter, among other journals. Marcus is assistant professor of English at University of Southern Indiana and poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review.

Each Friday we will publish a new essay, review, or interview for the 32 Poems Weekly Prose Feature, edited by Emilia Phillips. If you have any questions or comments about the series, please contact Emilia at emiliaphillips@32poems.com.

Spells Realized

Contributor’s Marginalia: Alexandra van de Kamp on “The Tin Man Full of Bees” by Sarah Crossland

“―Helping the little lady along are you, my fine gentlemen? Well stay away from her, or I’ll stuff a mattress with you! And you, I’ll make you into a beehive.” –The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz

 There are few Americans who haven’t seen the Wizard of Oz and been entranced by its caravansary of memorable characters. Although the Scarecrow was Dorothy’s presumable favorite of the group of friends she finds on her way to Oz, the Tin Man holds a special place in the film’s dream-laden plot because of his missing heart and endearing, stilted dance.

The movie is also famous for having been plagued with setbacks during production. Buddy Ebsen, not Jack Haley, was the original Tin Man, but the tin-colored make up used on him contained aluminum dust that ended up coating his lungs. One day, finding himself unable to breathe, he was rushed to the hospital. He was immediately replaced by Haley, with no excuse ever publicly given for why the role had been re-cast (and the aluminum dust replaced with a less lethal aluminum paste). It seems being a tin man has its hazards. Sarah Crossland’s poem takes as its premise the idea that the potential threat issued above by the Wicked Witch of the West (“I’ll make you into a beehive”) comes to pass for the Tin Man. Thus, this poem begins with a spell realized, an alternative plot followed through, and Crossland evokes this spell viscerally on the page in clipped, whirring stanzas packed with music.

The opening stanza of “The Tin Man Full of Bees” immediately snagged me with its texture and density of sound: “The spell erupts in wings—/glass-backed, a crownish/vellum, veins that tickle/ as they climb their way.” I like the idea of a spell “erupting,” as if the poem were a volcanic force, and there is a compressed tension within each of the poem’s stanzas to back up this first impression. The poets I am often drawn to are the ones that trust music, allow the sounds of words to guide them, even to think for them, and Crossland is just such a poet—unafraid to be entranced by the music in her own poems, so we get densely-packed examples of assonance and consonance. The wings are “glass-backed” and the “vellum” of these wings trigger “veins that tickle.” And what does “glass-backed” mean exactly? The assonance of the “a” here lulls the reader into believing the logical pairing of these two words is matter-of-fact, inevitable, yet it remains slightly elusive. The image suggests the thin, easily shattered texture of glass, or the transparency of windows, but it is a textured glass as in “a crownish vellum”—a thin parchment with a raised surface to it (“vellum” comes from the Old French vellin (from veel or veal) since the thin paper was originally made from calf skin). With that use of “crownish,” one also is led to think of the spiked form of a king or queen’s crown, or its ornate, jeweled surface. In just a few words, Crossland has created a multi-faceted, intriguing image. And the transition from “vellum” to “veins” renders the spell intimately physical; the reader is left to think of the inner-itch of those glass-backed wings “as they climb their way.”

Vigorous word choice abounds in this poem and fuels its motion, pushing its mini-plot forward. The bees are “chevrons” that “charge…motor-fuzzed, from the heart” and the internal rhyme meshes ideas intimately together when the Tin Man laments his condition and wishes he “were made/of meat instead of metal.” Crossland chooses apt imagery to make her point, such as the idea of bees as “chevrons.” The military insignia or “v-shape” this word implies mimics well the stripes of bees and how they, themselves, are members of an intricate hierarchy, assigned their roles and tasks. Moreover, with word choice such as “motor-fuzzed,” the textured presence of these bees inside the Tin Man is clearly articulated. As I read, I can sense the motion of these bees, their staggered dispersal throughout the Tin Man’s body. Is he being internally re-written as they move within him, a palimpsest the bees’ wings print their moving weight upon? While moving through the poem, I find myself wanting to dream along with these clipped, fast-paced stanzas and add my own musings to them.

And these stanzas seem hive-like—their shape one of a pruned, disciplined spinning. Crossland relishes her line breaks and treats many of them as little cliff-hangers, building mystery, speed and suspense into her poem. I often find that poets with an ear for music rarely neglect the opportunity a line break offers them. Crossland writes with a nervy sense for how to use the white space of the page. In the third stanza, we have the line: “I once loved a forest girl/who kissed me with a twister,” and the reader is left, momentarily, to ponder the twister as background to this girl and her kiss. (The gray, spiraling funnel of the tornado as background in The Wizard of Oz is well-stamped on my childhood imagination.) But with the next line, we read “in her lips,” and the twister morphs into an internal one—what the girl carries inside her and bestows upon those she encounters. Here, the Tin Man confesses that the kiss felt “Counter-/clockwise, the opposite/of time. I am a hive.” The repetition of the long “i” sound in “wise,” “time” and “hive” stitches these words tightly together and begins to suggest that a kiss could be “the opposite of time,” its own spell of sorts. Such tense music and suspense at the ends of lines energizes the poem and helps create a spinning, even careening sensation as the reader finds his or her assumptions periodically upended. Another “cliffhanger” occurs later in the fourth stanza: “Their stripes/the color of a morning/fruit that sings as its citrus/bites.” Thus, the bees’ stripes are not just the color of “a morning” as the reader might be led to first believe, but the color of “a morning/fruit” that sings and bites. Almost like mini-page turners, these line breaks ask the reader to read on—to “turn the page” in poetic terms by finding the resolution of the image on the next line. This clever, thoughtful use of line breaks builds a nervous energy into the poem and propels the reader forward, as if Crossland wanted to re-enact on the page a hive of image and sound.

Crossland’s rich and textured use of sounds continues throughout the poem, and you wonder, as the reader, if the ‘s” in “sings” helped her finds the “s” sound and image in “citrus” and if the “i” in “bites” led her to “strikes,” and then to “out my pipe.” The poem is dreaming its own dream now—thinking in sounds, as all my favorite poems do. The closing line of the poem, “in the hum I come alive,” offers an ambiguous sense of closure, since the reader sees that this spell offers the Tin Man not only suffering, bees that “gnaw and strike,” but also a vivacity, an astringent vibrant taste of life. The physical “hum” of the hive awakens him to both pain and to a renewed alertness. In the film, the Tin Man is given a ticking clock for a heart, but here, in this plot, an internal, “motor-fuzzed” eruption is bestowed upon him, a “tickle” in his veins and a citrus that bites and sings. The reader is left to ponder which was the better, more potent result in the end—perhaps this more uneasy version of the heart, this uncontrollable, hypnotic hum Crossland invokes on the page.

—Alexandra van de Kamp

Alexandra van de Kamp lives in Stony Brook, NY, with her husband and is a lecturer at Stony Brook University. She has been previously published in journals such as: Court Green, Salt Hill, Crab Orchard Review, Washington Square, River Styx, Meridian, The Denver Quarterly, The Prose-Poem Project and Connecticut Review. New work is forthcoming in Thrush Poetry Journal and The Cincinnati Review. A full-length collection of poems, The Park of Upside-Down Chairs, was published by CW Books (WordTech Press, 2010), and her most recent chapbook, Dear Jean Seberg (2011), won the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. Recent poems have been featured on VerseDaily,  and she is currently at work on a second book entitled “Kiss/Hierarchy.”  For six years she lived in Madrid, Spain, where she co-founded and edited the bilingual journal, Terra Incognita. You may see more of her poetry and prose at her website: www.alexandravandekamp.com.

Weekly Prose Feature: “Subject to Distortions: An Interview with Amy Beeder” by Emilia Phillips

Amy Beeder is the author of Burn the Field (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006) and Now Make An Altar (2012). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, AGNI, and other journals. She lives in Albuquerque and has taught poetry at the University of New Mexico and Taos Summer Writers Conference. She has received the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Bread Loaf Scholarship, a Witness Emerging Writers Award, and a James Merrill Residency. She has worked as a freelance reporter, a political asylum specialist, a high-school teacher in West Africa, and an election and human rights observer in Haiti and Suriname.

Emilia Phillips: Your poems in Now Make an Altar always excite me initially with their subject, second with diction and sonics, and third, and perhaps most importantly, with syntax and form. One poem can sustain a great deal of maneuvering, from short subject-verb-noun constructions to complicated sentences that unpack and nuance their meaning through successive clauses; from fragments to catalogues; questions to one-word imperatives. For readers to get a sense of this, here’s an excerpt from “Country Life”:

They came for land. For hog-high wheat to Dixon, Weeping

        Water, Garland Falls;

came to Midland hamlets, made their farms from bogs & marshes,

fens & bottomland: immigrants from Krakow, Darkov, Laśko

who fled famine, coming wars or the Eastern factories, left

city rivers thick with indigo & slaughter’s crimson, tenement

air: TB & boiled tubers, fled the bellows & gutter cast, sawdust

        & accident;

left forever what Riis called the strip of smoke colored sky so that

their children’s children might grow up corn-fed, reverent,

thrifty; that they might join 4-H & raise lambs, might

crochet & macramé; might play the clarinet or their fathers’

        accordions, always

optimistic despite the blizzards & drought, locust & blight.

Where there’s space to push the earth aside: that’s the place

to raise a child—

There’s so much tension between your sentences and the way they carry themselves over the page. In “Country Life,” in particular, “They came for land” gives us the scope of the poem, the frame, whereas the long, semi-coloned sentence fills in the details within that frame and begins to identify what’s at stake. The sentence provides a texture, a sweeping movement that mimics the immigration of the people and the subsequent evolution of their culture. In that way, your form and syntax provide us with, what I’d call, physical information—an experiential understanding of what’s happening.

I imagine this takes many drafts to get right. Would you mind speaking to your drafting process, especially in relation to finding the appropriate and propulsive syntax for your poems?

Amy Beeder: You’re right that “Country Life” went through many drafts, more than usual. I wanted it to sound (as you said) both “sweeping” (fled famine, coming wars) and very particular (the reference to Riis, macramé, etc.). I also wanted it to seem not just layered but crowded, somehow; I imagined the masses of people disembarking at Ellis Island and, later in the poem, more contemporary images of confusion or chaos. It turned out that was difficult to do and still maintain clarity and movement. One thing I finally did in the section that you mention was to use a kind of “ladder” of repeated and/or similar sounding verbs : came/came/made/fled/left/fled/left. I thought short verbs might unobtrusively both ground and clarify the poem and push it forward.

As far as syntax and my drafting process, generally I am only thinking about whether the poem “sounds right” to me. Of course this doesn’t just involve purely sonic elements but constant arrangement and rearrangement: giving some phases more weight than others, repetition, dividing the subject or verb to create tension; choosing an imperative or interrogative. Still it’s something done by ear and not with a very conscious consideration of syntax, if that makes sense. In The Art of Syntax Ellen Bryant Voigt describes variance of syntactical patterns as being “like the engine of a train . . . pushing some of its boxcars and pulling others.” It’s a splendid metaphor, and useful: especially for students whose eyes tend to glaze over when you start using words like “elided,” or “subordinating pronoun.” And who can blame them?

EP: What you said about a poem “sounding right” leads me to think about the relational tension between tonal levels in Now Make an Altar. Despite their clarity, your poems devise a lush language-scape, even when you primarily use idiomatic diction; that said, you’re not shy of combining this with superannuated interjections like “O,” Latinate or archaic words, King Jamesian turns of phrase (“askew in the bow’s pitch Lord”), and outside/found texts—sometimes all in one poem. Some poets would say that “sounding right” in a poem means sounding conversational; others balk and insist that poetry deserves the best language the brain can buy. I often find that these individuals have different language backgrounds: the first, perhaps, in a community where interpersonal interaction and communication is the fundamental vehicle for language; the second, however, might have first encountered language in a stylized ritual or religious context. For me, your poems negotiate with and within both of these tonal modes. Would you be able to talk about some of your first experiences with language and/or the writers and texts that might have shaped your orientation(s) toward language?

AB: That’s a fascinating question and one I’m not I sure can answer satisfactorily. But here goes: According to family lore I read early, (my mother was a first-grade teacher with strong opinions about children learning to read early and about the evils of television), and before I could read would obsessively turn the pages of books or magazines and “pretend” to read, often aloud. I don’t think that’s unusual; both my daughters did the same thing, and I think a lot of children do. Neither I nor my daughters encountered much language in a religious context, but I wonder if enough extra emphasis on text early on might count as a stylized or even ritual encounter. I know I was always encouraged to read stuff (Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot) that was clearly beyond my level, and so learned to enjoy texts/words/phrases without completely understanding them. When I saw “Under Milkwood” in middle school I didn’t get it, but I loved it. I think phrases from that play, the rhythm of Dylan’s language, would have stayed with me even if I hadn’t reread it many times. Nabokov had a similar influence. That kind of thing may account for some of the sound over sense in my work.

As far as more conversational (or narrative?) modes: my father is a wonderful storyteller. A number of my poems are based on his stories: “Black House,” “Photograph in a Montana Bar,” “The Book of Lost Railroad Photographs,” etc. Those poems always depart considerably from the original story, but then my father’s stories always changed, too: they were exaggerated, details were added and subtracted, new characters (complete with accents) were introduced. My poem “Train” refers to his story of a runaway train in Cheyenne in 1950. The train is the central image, but really the poem is about how histories always change, not just through re-telling by others, but even in the teller’s mind, perception and memory. Just for fun, I called my Dad today and asked him to tell me the runaway train story again. Sure enough there were new details, including the expression “in the big hold” which I surely would have used in the poem if he’d said it before.

Where was I going with this? Maybe that even conversation, story-telling and conversational poetry are subject to their own stylizations and distortions.

EP: Many of your poems enact some sort of process of making: a fire in “The Charges Are Stalking & Arson,” a sale in “Harold von Braunhut, Distributor of Sea Monkeys, Promises Instant Life,” folk art in “Darger’s Colors,” etc. By taking on the idea or process of making, does a poet automatically engage in ars poetica?

AB: Sure, any kind of “making” in a poem will suggest ars poetica to some readers, and I’m one of them. When Dana Levin taught (all too briefly) at UNM, I had my students read her poem “In Honor of Xipe.” I read it at least in part as an ars poetica, and suggested that to my students. Later when Dana visited my class and someone brought that up, she was surprised; she never thought of it as one. But does that mean it’s not? I think whether a poem engages in ars poetica is as much up to the reader as the poet. (Having said that, I considered “The Charges Are Stalking and Arson” and “Harold von Braunhut” as ars poetica(s), but not “Darger’s Colors.” Which is pretty odd because Darger is the truly ekphrastic one).

EP: I once had a professor tell me that if I was ever stuck in a poem to address a specific person. His suggestion was that an addressee would orient the poem toward its stakes. Because the collection harbors the trope of making, you often employ the imperative and, therefore, take on an implied or overt “you.” How does direction/insistence as well as an addressee guide your writing process?

AB: That’s funny, because I once had a poetry professor tell me to avoid second-person address at all costs. Obviously I didn’t take his advice. It’s always come naturally to me. I like the urgency, the insistence, as you call it. I agree with your professor that it’s a useful way to find the heart of your poem or stir things up at least, or change the tone. But for me I think also it’s a way to “revise” life, redress and revisit, apologize to or mourn people, or tell them off. Although for me “you,” does occasionally mean me, most often it’s a very specific person, who then of course may shift or bifurcate as the poem develops. The whole poem and the addressee may change but that initial energy/urge hopefully remains.

EP: I’m interested if, when revising, you ever feel that that initial energy/urge has changed. Do you let the poem go where it’s headed? Scrap it? Return a few drafts? Start over?

AB: Any of the above can happen. I do always try to let the poem go where it’s headed, because for me the subject and direction of the poem often change, even dramatically, without the poem losing what I think of as its essential energy. And I try to follow my ear: I agree with Richard Hugo that it’s usually a disaster to try and “push words around” to say what you want; rather, they should push you around. (Still I always try to keep an early draft, just in case). Rarely do I totally scrap a poem. If I can’t make it work I just leave it in a file called “Rough,” and revisit it occasionally; sometimes I’ve come back to those poems and have suddenly been able to make them work. What I’d call “starting over” usually involves a change in point of view and/or or a significant structural (stanza, line length) change. Or the poem’s “meaning” changes entirely, becomes something I didn’t see before, surprises me.

EP: What’s the first and last poem of Now Make an Altar that you wrote? How did those poems open up the collection, shape it, and then complete it for you?

AB: The first poems I wrote were the “letter” poems: H, D, and X; I think X was the very first. I was reading a book on the history of the Latin alphabet and was fascinated by how letters developed and changed, by their Greek, Etruscan and Phoenician origins, etc., but even more by the theory that some shapes of letters may have had had meanings. Does “X” come from the Phoenician “samekh” (fish) because it looks like bones? Does “D” come from a door (an open tent flap), or the shape of a breast? For me this came down to the basic question of how language carries meaning.

I suppose those poems might have shaped the manuscript because so many of the other poems address that same question. How do we “make” things out of marks on a page, or speech? I don’t think the poem “Unstack the Dams Now Make an Altar” was the very last poem I wrote, but it was near the end, and in a way speaks to same idea. When we were very young, my brother and I used to play by trying to conjure things up in the ravine behind our house (I’m not sure what we expected to see: protective spirits, fairies, the rumored ravine-dwelling ghost?) with potions, patterns of mud and sticks, and sacrifices—usually of Barbie Dolls. There’s still something about writing poetry that reminds me a little of that play. Weird, huh?

EP: The idea of the poet being at play is both an image of joy and desperation—and entirely accurate. I once had a student ask a poet with whom my class was Skyping if he’d ever burst into tears while writing a poem. The poet responded that he hadn’t but had burst out laughing. I think students and beginning poets initially have the notion that writing poetry has to be a torturous, heart-wrenching affair; I’ve found, however, that I experience the breadth of “real life” emotions while writing, including levity. What are the dangers, if any, risked by a poet who takes their writing and process too seriously?

AB: Ah, the beginning student who wants it to be torture! Fun. That usually passes. Usually. I do get impatient with the professionals who still introduce their poems with assurances of how serious the following poem is, how important, how sacred, how transformative, how inspired by the muse. The dangers risked by that? Sounding boring and pretentious.

Not that I have anything against introducing poems, especially at readings, where the audience can’t necessarily reread the work right away. I do that a lot. But intros should be informative, grounding, helpful in terms of placing the audience, not telling them how impressed they should be.

EP: To some degree, it seems that being a poet these days is as much about visibility (where one teaches, what contests one’s won, etcetera) as craft. What’s your conception of the ideal life of a poet?

AB: Warning: this is a very personal issue for me. Though I have been extremely lucky with publications, I am an outsider in PoBiz. I don’t have an MFA, “only” an MA in literature. I have never held a tenured position; the years I taught at UNM I was adjunct. In fact, until I won The Nation/Discovery, I taught freshman comp and technical writing. That speaks to your point about visibility: winning that prize suddenly qualified me to teach poetry (!), albeit at about one-eighth of what tenured professors got to teach the same class. In the end my publications and student evaluations meant absolutely nothing to the UNM English Department. For years I taught for disgracefully low wages because I thought somehow as a poet I had to be associated with a University. Now I write freelance three hours a day in a field unrelated to poetry and make more money than I did teaching. I work on my third book and another collaborative project, fix up my house, and hang with my daughters. So for me the ideal life of a poet is what I have right now (or would be if I just had another hour or two every day to write poetry).

EP: Would you mind talking a little bit about your experience living abroad as a human rights observer in Haiti and Suriname and a high school teacher in West Africa? Were you writing poetry during that time? In those locales, did you encounter poetry?

AB: I never wrote poetry when I lived abroad. I did keep copious journals. Now I write poetry and never anything journal-y. All the places I lived abroad (except for France) were all, for various reasons, pretty extreme on a daily basis, and I think I wrote because I didn’t want to forget anything that happened—but still I should have written more. Suriname in particular is a blur. I’ve never thought much before about whether I encountered poetry in those locales. But now that you mention it, I think about how my Mauritanian family, my students, my neighbors, people I lived with for almost three years, really lived language. Griots would visit: chant, sing, pray, tell family histories; everyone in my family spoke Fulani, French, Arabic and at least some Soninke, Wolof and English. My Lycee students were the best language learners I’ve ever seen: they could watch the weekly (always foreign) movie at the outdoor theater and pick up 20 or 30 English or Chinese words or phrases without even trying. And then make puns and plays and games out of them. Everything endlessly repeated and changed. Poetry? Everything a joke. My family taught me Fulani and claimed to want to teach me Arabic, but then only taught me the most obscene Arabic phrases. I miss them.

EP: I’ve often heard the complaint that poets who teach in academic don’t live in “the real world.” This seems to me a criticism of integrity and authority. Should poets seek to retreat from academia and po-biz once and a while? Does it depend on the poet?

AB: I’d never say academia isn’t “real world” It’s its own real world. Teaching, and administration, if you do them right, are very hard work. And if University departments are rife with sometimes exaggerated drama and intrigue, so are many offices, and, I assume, factories, restaurants, etc.

That said, it might be interesting to see more poetry by people who don’t work in academia all Just for variety. Right now I’m thinking of two very idiosyncratic poets: Atsuro Riley and Hailey Leighthauser, both of whose work make me sit up and take notice right away because it was just so weird and exciting. Neither of them has every worked in academia and I don’t think either has an MFA.

EP: I’m fascinated by the action that one can “live language” because it also implies its opposite—not living language—or, at the very least, degrees of it. It seems like Westerners, particularly Americans, see “language,” artful and meaningful communication, to formal and/or important occasions and spaces (like poetry) and, instead, see information as the medium through which we communicate on a daily basis.

Do you feel that the English language’s potential isn’t realized by most Westerners, particularly Americans? How so? Is it possible to teach the appreciation and practice of artful and meaningful language use on a daily basis?

AB: I really hesitated before writing that phrase “lived language.” Of course everyone who speaks, reads or hears, lives language. I guess what I meant was what I saw as a level of comfort (and just pure delight) with spoken language in particular. My students in Kaedi never missed a chance to talk in class, give their opinions, or (brilliantly, damn them) mimic me. Naturally this made classes chaotic, but when I hit upon the idea of letting them do doing “plays” (short dialogues in English) in front of the class, things improved.

Yet speaking in front of the class is the very last thing most American students want to do. Some will take a failing grade rather than do it.

. . . Off the subject again. Yes, I do think the possibilities of English are not realized by most Americans, but that’s probably true of almost every language almost everywhere. As you said, it’s become dominated by “communication.”

EP: Have you done any translation? If so, would you mind telling us a little bit about the process? Do you think that poets who speak other languages have an obligation to translate poetry into English?

AB: I’ve wanted to do translation, but, no, I haven’t. One issue for me is that the other languages I speak or once spoke I didn’t learn in a classroom, so my speech is far better than my writing or reading. That’s true even with French.

An obligation to translate? I guess I don’t feel one because I know there are people so much more qualified. Though I would love to translate Pulaar/Fulani poetry or stories, just because they’re so cool and there probably aren’t that many in English, I would need a lot of help to do it.

EP: As poets, we’re aware of the possibilities of language but we are also aware about language’s limitations. Is there a subject, image, or idea that you’ve never been able to express or fear you will never be able to express? What keeps you writing even though your medium isn’t perfect?

AB: Words always fall short. Like most writers, there are things I don’t write about directly but are always there; after awhile you realize this perpetual raging subtext is one engine of your work. Dylan Thomas said the “best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the words of the poem so that the something that is not the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.” Or, to take the other view that experience is what “fails,” Gunter Kunerts: “That’s why I write; to bear the world as it crumbles . . . ”

Matthew Olzmann*: Frank O’Hara once said, “Only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American Poets, are better than the movies.” If you were to write a similar list, what poets would you include?

AB: After mulling this over for a few days, I decided not to give a list of names. They would be probably known to many of your readers anyway. (Sorry, Matt!) Of course there are poets I admire, poets whose books I buy, etc. But I think what I like best about American poetry right now-and why it’s usually better than the movies- is that I keep finding (in all kinds of journals) amazing poems by people I’ve never heard of.  I love it.

EP: Now, Amy, provide us with a question for the next interview.

AB: As a poet, who was your important teacher?

 

↔

Emilia Phillips is the prose editor of 32 Poems.

*As a part of our interview series, we ask each interviewee to provide us with a question for the next interview. To view Matthew Olzmann’s interview, go to May 31st’s Weekly Prose Feature: “Usually a Window, But Occasionally a Stage: An Interview with Matthew Olzmann”

Each Friday we will publish a new essay, review, or interview for the 32 Poems Weekly Prose Feature, edited by Emilia Phillips. If you have any questions or comments about the series, please contact Emilia at emiliaphillips@32poems.com.

A Rabbit’s Foot

Contributor’s Marginalia: Amit Majmudar on “Fly” by Richie Hofman

There’s a “20 under 40” list The New Yorker has for novelists, but if there were a “15 under 30” list for poets, Richie Hofmann would be on it. It seems the Poetry Foundation agrees with me on that.

“Fly” begins in Pliny and ends in love. Not a bad natural history for a poem.

The compound Epcot-center eye of the fly is the perfect rabbit’s foot against blindness. I would keep a cockroach against death.

The title, “Fly,” refers both to the insect—and the “flighty” lover. Daphne flies from Apollo. Tempus—fidgets—

Verse itself is an “elaborate ritual” against the fleetingness of utterance. Hoffman is capable of elaborate rituals indeed: cf. his poem “Illustration from Parsifal” in The New Criterion, which is a preternaturally perfect example of anagrammatic rhyme. Formal flexibility is a greater virtue than formal ease. Hoffmann displays both in his rapidly growing body of work.

—Amit Majmudar

Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist who lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and twin sons. His poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Best American Poetry anthology (2007, 2012), The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-2012, Poetry Magazine, Granta, Poetry Daily and several other venues, including the 11th edition of the Norton Introduction to Literature. This is his third appearance in an issue of 32 Poems. His first poetry collection, 0′, 0′, was released by Northwestern in 2009 and was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Faber First Book Award. His second poetry collection, Heaven and Earth, was selected by A. E. Stallings for the 2011 Donald Justice Prize. He blogs for the Kenyon Review and is also a critically acclaimed novelist. Visit www.amitmajmudar.com for details.

32 Poems 11.1 On its Way to Fine Mailboxes Everywhere

The latest 32 Poems shipped yesterday, so American subscribers should start checking their mailboxes the first of next week. In this number we feature new poems from Chad Davidson, Anna Journey, Amit Majmudar, Caki Wilkinson and nearly two-dozen other poets as fine as you’ll find anywhere. The issue has been a joy to put together and we can’t to share with readers. Let us know what you think, and of course if you don’t yet have a subscription, now’s the time to remedy that. Follow this link to get your copy on its way.

In the meantime here’s a sneak peek to whet your appetite:

The Art of Reading

by Rebecca Morgan Frank

Candlepin, lynchpin, safety pin become

death by fire, hanging, stabbing. Cocktail

becomes the plumage of a male bird

staring me down in the dirt. Napkin

is a sleeping cousin drooling on my bed:

it’s noon. Heaven-sent, you smell like

the gods. A word can sock you with a kick,

mock you in a turtleneck, hiding its intent.

Barely. Comedy is two-faced, watching.

Come on, give it a try. Hot dog? Wild

flower? Everything is sweaty and dancing

when you bring back the inanimate.

Looking into its violent core, dormant

but burning to be read wrong, read right.

Weekly Prose Feature: “Usually a Window, But Occasionally a Stage: An Interview with Matthew Olzmann” by Emilia Phillips

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Mezzanines (Alice James Books). His poems have appeared in New England Review, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Inch, Gulf Coast and elsewhere. With Ross White, he coedited Another and Another: An Anthology from the Grind Daily Writing Series. He’s received fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, the Kresge Arts Foundation, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Currently, he teaches in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College and is the poetry editor of The Collagist.

Emilia Phillips: First of all, I’d like to praise your uncanny ability in panning for gold when it comes to finding subject matter—a skill that also insists some pretty killer titles as well, like “Man Robs Liquor Store, Leaves Resume” and “NASA Video Transmission Picked Up By Baby Monitor.” How do you locate what you’re going to write about? Do you keep a journal of interesting things? Do you immediately set out on the poem or do these subjects stick with you for a while before you write? Or do you make it all up?

Matthew Olzmann: Thanks, Emilia. I try not to be afraid of my own bad ideas, and let’s face it: both of those poems had the potential to be big failures. While I’m equally likely to “make it all up”—and I often do—these titles, in both instances, were initially triggered by actual “news” stories, and the lines that followed those titles were mostly speculation, invention, and answers to questions I asked myself about some imagined situation.

The challenge in that type of writing is to transcend the bombast of the tabloid-headline-esque title, to build upon the novelty of that opening moment, and to create something that somehow builds upon that initial moment of surprise. When I say, “I try not to be afraid of my own bad ideas,” that’s because I’ve written poems that begin in a similar fashion, but they go nowhere. Actually, that’s usually what happens, but I keep writing them; in fact, I’m excited to write them. I’m drawn to the odd, freak-show moments of American life, and if something surprises me or puzzles me or leaves me feeling the slightest bit of awe—an event, image, or a piece of language—that’s a place or a subject that is often roiling with possibilities.

So, I guess the answer to part one of this question is: a lot of trial and error. I try to write about things especially when I’m not sure if I’ll be able to actually turn them into poems. And often I can’t, but if I write enough of them, a couple might make it through the gap. Sometimes, when I’m lucky, I’ll have a plan when I sit down. But most often, it’s more of a notion, a single image, a word. Then a lot of making things up. A lot of guessing. A lot of questions that begin with “what if . . . ”

I usually don’t keep a journal of ideas or notes because I try to write everyday. This pretty much wipes out the reservoir of backup ideas, thus rendering the journal a little bit useless. But this also frees you to relentlessly attempt the absurd. When you’ve got nothing in front of you but a blank page (and the terror that it will stay blank), you’re willing to try to write about anything, no matter how odd, or how strange.

EP: Your poems, for me, insist their entireties, their unabridged arcs. It’s impossible to locate pith and difficult to quote only a couple of lines at a time as they often function dependently on one another for narrative, syntax, nuance, or gravity. When you do arrive at a gesture of statement or commentary, it alloys the abstract with image, eschews platitudes or takes them to task as in “The Man Who Looks Lost as He Stands in the Sympathy Card Section of Hallmark” where we have a speaker who addresses a/the poet in the second person:

       you want to place a hand on his shoulder, say,

It’ll be okay. But you don’t.

Because you also look like a crumbling statue

narrowed by rain, because you too have been abandoned

by language and what’s there to speak of or write

among so many words. There are not enough words

to say, Someone is gone and in their place

is a blue sound that only fits inside

an urn which you’ll drag to the mountains

or empty in an ocean with the hope

that the tide will deliver a message

that you never could. Because even those words

would end like a shipwreck at the bottom

of clear water.

Words fail us, especially those in such bromides that appear on greeting cards. How do you overcome words’ ineptitudes, especially when taking on subjects with gravitas like death or hunger? When writing, do you ever feel that you’re working with subpar materials (the English language)?

MO: While it may seem contradictory, we often turn to poetry specifically because words fail us. There are limitations to language, things we can’t express adequately and things we can’t express at all. So we turn to metaphor; we turn to poetry. The poem, when it works, doesn’t just declare an emotion, it makes that emotion tangible; it allows us to actually understand that experience with greater speed and clarity. An elegy, for example, doesn’t merely say, “I’m sad,” or “I have lost someone.” The job of the elegy isn’t to simply “announce” grief, but to make it palpable so that we can comprehend its depth and magnitude. This is the paradox: the “subpar materials” are the tools of this trade exactly because they are subpar. So we try to combine them to make something new, hoping that the new expression will work more effectively. We don’t have a word to sufficiently and accurately express longing, or loss, or desire, or any of the countless and subtle variations within those emotions. If we had such a word, we would repeat it over and over, without end. In the absence of such a word, we try to “overcome words’ ineptitudes” through metaphor, through figurative gestures that stumble toward making these abstractions less abstract. For me, it’s impossible not to feel the insufficiency of language when trying to build something new out of it. However, those same flawed building blocks simultaneously leave me awestruck and stunned. Maybe Jack Gilbert says it best in opening lines of “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”:

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,

and frightening that it does not quite.

EP: Seeing your answer, I return to this moment in “A River, Briefly Parallel to an Eight-Lane Super Highway”:

Some would correct me here, say:

No, that’s not a “river,” but a “stream” or a “brook.”

But the river doesn’t care about its name,

it would never correct you

Here, you seem to take on two issues: first, the limitation of language, specifically of the words “river,” “stream,” and “brook” in describing the body of water; and, two, a potential challenge to your precision. Since many of us are products of workshop, I can’t help but wonder if we, as readers, have been rewired to automatically look for fault in what we read. What are your thoughts on this? Do you feel any obligation to head off this kind of criticism and, if so, how would you go about doing this? Any advice for us on how we should approach reading?

MO: I think there’s some truth to the idea that the context in which we view something might impact how we view it. Maybe we’ll experience a poem differently if we first encounter it in a magazine rather than in a classroom. However, my first reaction as a reader isn’t a critical one in terms of “these parts aren’t working correctly,” but an emotional one: I am filled with joy, saddened or bored. This in itself, can also be a form of critique, I imagine. But in general, the reader in me is very different from the writer in me. I came to the writing of poetry, only after developing a love for the reading of poetry. I had to train myself, later, to unite these different impulses—to read as a writer—and that was the main reason I went back to school after years away from it; I wanted to learn how that emotional reaction I have as a reader is produced by very specific strategies employed by the writer. Even now, in my most critical moments, I think I tend to approach good writing with a sense of awe. And in my most analytical readings of a poem, I’m rarely trying to find the flaws of a piece but simply struggling to understand how the various mechanical elements contained in that piece work together (or don’t) in order to create a particular response in the reader. I don’t think there’s a rule for how people should read. We all read different things for different reasons and therefore have unique expectations of the experience. We want it to entertain or teach us something. We want to escape from our lives for a moment, or we long to learn the names of trees. But I hope as writers, we occasionally remember the reverence we had for books before we set out to write them.

EP: Incredible answer, Matt, and I think your stance of generosity in reading and toward the readers’ needs also reveals itself in your use of tone. Your poems have a tonal generosity: they don’t stagnate emotionally but, rather, continually develop and ebb so that in a single poem, like “For a Recently Discovered Shipwreck at the Bottom of Lake Michigan,” a long poem in the form of an epistolary apostrophe, we encounter the absurd, the meditative, the unsettling, hilarious, and devastating. A sample:

April 6th, 2010

Dear Shipwreck,

So what’s it feel like to have everything inside you still “intact”? That’s what I want to feel like. But I’ve actually never felt my “insides” at all—I think they’re positioned in a way that keeps them from banging around. When I was small I would jump up and down for hours trying to make them Rattle. Nothing. I am an empty rattle.

P.S. Please write back.

 

May 9th, 2010

Dear Shipwreck/Dear Metaphor for God,

I was thinking of Bashō today, and I wrote you the following poem:

O, Shipwreck, untouched by moonlight,

molested by billions

of writhing quagga mussels.

What do you think? Is “moonlight” too heavy-handed? Not believable enough? Let me know your thoughts . . .

 

June 29th, 2010

Dear Mister-Too-Good-to-Write-Anyone-Back,

Fuck you, boat. I don’t care if you didn’t like that poem. That’s no excuse for ignoring my letters. I will say this real slowly for you:

Write. Me. Back. You. Dick.

The tour de force of your poems resides not within the intensification of one flat concern but in the tension between many, sometimes conflicted, concerns. I often leave your poems feeling as if you haven’t prescribed an emotion for me, as so many poets try to do, but rather have introduced a nucleus of questions, swirling with positive and negative charges.

How conscious are you of tone when you’re writing the initial draft and then revising? Do you find it easy to vary tone if you work on a poem over a long period of time?

MO: I’m semi-conscious of tone when writing a first draft, and very conscious of it when revising. Tone being the speaker’s attitude toward the subject matter of course informs the reader’s relationship toward the subject matter as well. Ellen Bryant Voigt says that tone is “what the dog registers when you talk to him sternly or playfully: the form of the emotion behind / within the words. It’s also what can allow an obscenity to pass for an endearment, or a term of affection to become suddenly an insult.” In an initial draft, I’m not always aware of the numerous factors that can shape that “emotion behind / within the words.” I’m only aware of the words themselves. In terms of later adjustments and creating tonal variation: I haven’t found any specific formula for how long I need to work on a poem to get these things right. In general, it’s easier for me to revise if I haven’t looked at the poem for a little while. Sometimes that means a couple of days. Sometimes it might be a few years. The challenge in revising is to achieve an outsider’s level of impartiality. You’re trying to read your poems objectively while essentially guessing how a reader (other than yourself) will experience what’s been written. Then you make (what you hope will be) the proper alterations.

EP: I’ve often found that students have a hard time at first removing themselves from the poem to create that kind of “outsider’s level of impartiality” that you mention. As a mentor or teacher, how do you help a student get to that level? Do you have specific exercises or advice that you give them? When and how did you first get there?

MO: That’s something that I’m still working toward, but, to some degree, that perspective—that particular brand of objectivity—comes from reading a lot. As a writer, you might be able to make a reasonable guess as to how a reader will respond to a poem or part of a poem, because you remember how you (as a reader) have responded to similar strategies, moments, and elements in poems you’ve read. We know the impact of words only because they’ve impacted us. Frequently, students who are new to poetry haven’t read much poetry. So what we try to do is get them reading and show them how to learn from those readings. You try to simplify, to look at one device, craft element or strategy at a time, and then help them articulate how whatever effect they’re drawn toward has been achieved in the poem that we’re studying.

EP: Are there any particular writers that you return to if you’re stuck on a poem or a project? If so, what about their writing motivates you?

MO: Not really. That happens more organically and randomly for me. Every once in a while, I’ll read a poem that will offer a solution to something I’m working on, and there’s a rotating ensemble of several dozen poets I find myself constantly rereading in general, but there’s not one particular poet I’ll turn to when I’m trying to “fix” a poem. Usually, when I get stuck, I prefer to simply pace back in forth in the hallway, letting the frustration build until it turns into despair. Or I’ll stubbornly type the same line over and over, deleting it over and over. In terms of reading when I reach an impasse, I like to read the newspaper, essays, or some other nonfiction to pull me out of the poem and back to the world. As far as poems go, those are moments when I like to read poems that are new to me rather than those that are familiar. So I might turn to a favorite magazine or journal. There are too many too name, but New England Review, Indiana Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, and APR are a few that have long been favorites of mine.

EP: When I first began working for a literary journal and started reading submissions, I saw trends and flux in subject matter, approaches, form, and craft. When a new Discovery Channel special premiered, its subject would appear more frequently; for a few months, I’d see an outrageous number of ghazals. In all of these instances, I said to myself, “I don’t have to write this kind of poem.”

As the poetry editor of The Collagist, do you notice trends in submissions? Do you ever respond to these trends in your own work by either taking them on, to task, or by walking away from them?

MO: I definitely notice trends in subject matter, and I’ve started to think that this is a healthy and natural effect of artists being engaged with the world they live in. We respond to what we’re witnessing, experiencing and wondering about. If there’s a huge event—an oil spill, a flood, a national tragedy—a few months later there will be poems addressing that or triggered by that. It’s not always an avalanche of one poet after another turning in similar poems, but if you’re reading hundreds or thousands of poems, you definitely can hear the echoes. And yes, even TV shows appear in those currents.

I don’t consciously try to respond to those trends, nor do I try to avoid them. Besides, in the moment of writing something, it’s impossible to tell what common subject you might be writing into. Some of these subjects that surface in clusters are actually kind of odd and fleeting; one month we might get ten poems about zombies, but none for months before or after that. Writing is a solitary act, and who knows what other people are writing when you’re sitting alone with your paper and pen?

EP: What do you believe are the obligations of poets for mentoring young writers in the classroom, through organizations like Kundiman, or one-on-one?

MO: It’s hard to answer this because it seems to vary so much from poet to poet, teacher to teacher. Poets have different strengths, experiences, and interests and should bring all of that to the classroom. When I think of my own teachers, each of them had something very different to offer, and they each had different methods for sharing those gifts. Some helped me gain or develop one particular skill (for example: showing me how to think associatively, how to edit a line, or how to make the poems I was reading more relevant to my own writing). Others simply introduced me to the books I needed to be reading at a particular time. Others showed me what it means to be a citizen of a writing community.

Likewise, with organizations—there’s a tremendous diversity of goals, opportunities and possibilities from one to the next. Kundiman has a very specific mission: it’s invested in mentoring an emerging generation of Asian American writers and supporting their stories. Part of how it mentors that group is by creating and making accessible a community that isn’t always possible for its participants. The first time I went to their retreat was in 2006. Previously, I had few experiences with being around other Asian American writers. There were maybe three other Asian American writers that I knew in all of Michigan. I was twenty-nine years old, and finally finishing my undergraduate degree, and I had been in very few classes that discussed any Asian American authors. At the same time, I was working on poems about mixed race identity in Detroit, and feeling isolated in relation to this topic, and unsure how to tell the stories I wanted to tell. Kundiman helped me crack out of the shell of a localized and isolated environment, meet other writers with similar concerns, and become part of a larger conversation. There’s a community there that I feel very invested in that I wasn’t able to find or enter previously.

EP: Your wife Vievee Francis is also a poet. Would you mind talking about how your work may influence one another? How you share work? Collaborate?

MO: We don’t necessarily collaborate, but we’re definitely involved in each others’ work. We read to each other. We comment on drafts of new poems. But this isn’t in an every-night-is-writing-workshop kind of way. It’s more like being a fan and just listening to the poems of someone you admire. We’re definitely each others’ fans and biggest supporters.

Dana Levin*: What’s behind the curtain?

MO: From my personal experience with curtains: usually a window, but occasionally a stage.

EP: Now, provide a question for our next interview.

MO: Frank O’Hara once said, “Only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American Poets, are better than the movies.” If you were to write a similar list, what poets would you include?

↔

Emilia Phillips is the prose editor of 32 Poems.

*As a part of our interview series, we ask each interviewee to provide us with a question for the next interview. To view Dana Levin’s interview, go to May 24th’s Weekly Prose Feature: “‘Invention Aids Understanding’: An Interview with Dana Levin”

Each Friday we will publish a new essay, review, or interview for the 32 Poems Weekly Prose Feature, edited by Emilia Phillips. If you have any questions or comments about the series, please contact Emilia at emiliaphillips@32poems.com.

Weekly Prose Feature: “‘Invention Aids Understanding’: An Interview with Dana Levin” by Emilia Phillips

Dana Levin is the author of In the Surgical Theatre, Wedding Day, and Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” Levin’s poetry and essays have appeared recently in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, APR, Agni, and Poetry. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations, Levin teaches at Santa Fe University of Art and Design in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Emilia Phillips: Let’s start at the surface and work our way deeper. Your poems constantly reinvent themselves on the page. In just three short poems in Sky Burial, we move from the irregular, “Cathartes Aura,” that tends to privilege single lines over stanzas, into the long-lined, left-aligned stanza sections of “Letter to GC” to the terraced three- or two-lined stanzas of “Pure Land.” Any time that I see your name on a journal, my first thought is: “I want to see what her poem(s) look like!”

Will you speak to your consideration of and attention to form during the drafting process? On average, how much maneuvering do you do of words/lines before it looks right to you?

Dana Levin: Oh I spend an alarming amount of time moving lines and enjambments and indentations around; it’s my primary OCD behavior. 90% of it is an attempt to capture the pace and volume of the speaking voice speaking the line or stanza, as I hear it in my head (poetry’s strange synesthesia!). This includes trying to mimic dramatic unfoldment, via line length and line break. But sometimes visual considerations come into play. I have an aversion to blocks of text (except in the case of the prose poem); I like to read and write poems where script tangos with white space, where silence and the invisible can thrum under or beside the spoken and the seen.

EP: Would you mind likewise talking about your use of the em dash? It may be, I think, somewhat in vogue, if punctuation can be “in vogue” (Thanks, Emily), but it may be that, for some poets, it’s mutated from a tool in the bag to a tick of the hand. When I encounter a dash in your work, I never feel that it’s out of place, distracting, or showy. As an example, here’s a section of “Sibylline.”

               Noon—

which is what a god can offer

               a petitioning crowd

that is crying,

               I want to wake up, I don’t want to wake up—

               —wake up wake up—

Come to me and step behind me,

               put your thumbs gently to the back of my neck—

               Make my mouth move—

               O voice of a different timbre—

For me, the em dash provides a visual semblance to many of the subjects you take on, all of which possess a sense of liminality: death, possession, violence, belief.

DL: Liminality, yes. It even looks liminal: line between this and that, above and below―

Y’know, the reality is that I feel the dash: it vibrates somewhere between the comma and the period—faster than the former, more open than the latter, carrying a little bit of effect from both. It’s the punctuation of urgency, hysteria, questing, seeking through confusion—the fraught pause on the diving board before the plunge. I love how it can propel the reader into white space! Like pushing you off a cliff! Poet as murderer!

EP: Despite the fact that Sky Burial takes on these “ubertopics” like death and spirituality—or, as you say in “Auger,” “danger and wonder”—the poems are incredibly physical. We have visceral moments like the opening of “In Honor of Xipe”:

Slicked

               with a birther’s goo, it

               gleams up green from the ground—

Little blade.

Counterbalanced with a more abstract moment in “Five Skull Diadem”:

They weren’t really gods, they were

               “emanations.”

Your choice to cloud up with the monstrous ones

               if the gentlest ones didn’t

               inspire

your plasmatic breath, your mental

               exhalations.

The long line/short line combination, however, creates a sort of breathing effect, a kind of in-and-out movement that rivals a description of breathing. Can language provide us with something physical, even if it’s not describing something physical? If so, how?

DL: Absolutely. In a poem, if you accept line length and line break as script for movement, you can do a kind of dance. I sometimes do a little chair dance in class when teaching poems, swaying or Martha Grahaming my arms to the flow-n-stop of lines (my students think I’m an idiot)

EP: Have you ever felt like you haven’t left a particular collection or like you’re not finished with a subject, even after a collection is published?

DL: Hmmmm. It’s more on the level of individual poems. Like, Oh! If only I could have included this poem in book X! But in general, when a book is published, I consider it done, with all its flaws and my residual misgivings. I won’t be going back to old work when I’m 70 and massively revising it. On that path madness lies.

EP: Is there a subject that you’ve been craving to write about but haven’t been able to or have done so unsuccessfully? Are there subjects you feel you can never touch?

DL: The new ms. I’m working on is presenting such challenges, from poem to poem. I’d been craving to write about End Times and I am getting my wish, via poems about technology and mutation and appetite and Apocalypse, environmental destruction. Now the challenge is hope. Where is hope? How do you write about it without engaging the sappy? I may not be able, tempermentally, to crack this one.

EP: Have you ever regretted publishing a poem?

DL: Only in that I submitted one too soon (a retrospective feeling)

EP: Do you ever find yourself breaking down a poem for parts, taking out sections and placing them into other poems?

DL: All the time. I cannibalize, frankensteinify. “You have changed the assignment to Swirl,” Brenda Hillman says. Maximum flexibility as stay against irrational attachment (oh my god, how Buddhistic)

EP: Someone once told me that “Buddhism is bad for poetry” I think because there’s a tendency in some self-identified Buddhist’s work to engage in the mysticism of the mundane and a kind of complacency with one’s own understanding. Some readers may find this work boring, inconsequential, disconnected, or indulgent. That said, your poems never drift in that direction; they’re intense, wild, and complicated. Would you mind talking about your connection to Buddhism, in life and your work, particularly Sky Burial, as well as its dynamism in guiding some of your concerns?

DL: Perhaps we should say “poetry is bad for Buddhism”! In terms of the kinds of poems you describe.

I’d like to spend a little time on this question. Most Buddhistic poetry in America is inspired by the Zen tradition. Zen philosophy promotes radical simplicity: poems of this type sometimes forget the “radical” part, which can indeed lead to some snoozy work. Gary Snyder often accessed this radical nature; the classic Haiku poets certainly do, as does a lot of the work of Arthur Sze.

The Buddhism I study and practice (in the most fumbling way) is Tibetan, which is a very different animal: wild and complicated, to use your phrasing. For one, Tibetan Buddhism is a hybrid religion, incorporating many shamanic aspects of the religion, Bon, indigenous to that part of the Himalayas. Like the Catholics absorbing Celtic rite and cosmology into their evangelizing in the now British Isles, the Buddhist teachers who arrived in Tibet from India and Afghanistan met the locals where they practiced. Shamanic practice is quite physical and cosmologically brutal: demons, gods, body mortification, intoxication, skull, blood and bone work. I am always amazed by how an entire people were converted by these teachers into a realization that the demons and gods they worshipped were figments of mind, of Buddha nature. In this respect, Tibetan Buddhism aligns well with Jungian conceptions of the nature of psyche, something in which I was well-versed before Tibetan Buddhism entered my life. Unlike Zen, Tibetan Buddhist meditation is linked to visualization: of gods, of mandalas. As a very visual poet, this resonated with me as a general practice; so many of my poems begin with image-fascination.

The tantra of Vajrayana, the Diamond or Thunderbolt way, was of immense aid as I experienced the deaths of my parents and sister in 2002-06. Like lightning striking, Vajrayana really wants you to get impermanence: our essential, inescapable condition. The body, in meditation, is subjected to the most violent and shocking rituals: chopping up your body to feed to demons as primary act of compassion; chopping off your own head to create a skull-cup in which you transform the poisons of your mind. Tantric adepts meditated in cemeteries and in charnel grounds, wore aprons of bones, made ritual trumpets out of bones of the thigh. Vajrayana’s violent refusal to fetishize self and its corporality―the violent turn away from sentimentalizing loss―spoke to many of the particular intensities I harbor, made more acute by the family deaths and the overwhelming character of my grief during that time period.

EP: Because Sky Burial alludes to the deaths of your parents and sister—inherently personal subject matter—I wondered after reading it, as I often do when I know or expect a poet is taking personal narratives or circumstances, if you’ve ever had a poem rewrite a memory—or, at least, if you suspect that that’s the case—where the poem acts as a kind of palimpsest on top of the original text of experience.

DL: Poetry is a fictive art. I will change factual detail, if it will aid the poem, when writing through personal event and relationships. While I’ve never confused what actually happened with what I invent as poetic drama, invention aids understanding and integration of actual events.

EP: Have you ever received any critique or feedback that your subject matter wasn’t “feminine” enough? What kind of expectations do you think the average reader has for female poets, if any?

DL: Hmmm, interesting. When Louise Gluck called me in 1999 to congratulate me on the Honickman Prize for In the Surgical Theatre (which she had judged), she said, “So you’re a woman! We couldn’t tell―Dana can be a man’s name―and there were no clues from the work.” She seemed to view this as a virtue. I took it as compliment, but it left me uneasy, prodding questions on which I still meditate: what is “women’s poetry”? What is “feminine”? No one, to my ken, has ever accused my work as not being “feminine” enough, but I do sometimes wonder if I walk through a no-person’s land of ambiguity in terms of readers or critics wanting to categorize my writing: I am not overtly feminist on the page, I don’t have children, I am not married, the domestic, coupled and vaginal life is not of much interest to me, in terms of poetic inspiration. And why should such be “women’s” subject matter, just because we have vaginas? Biological and social determinism still festers under our ideas about women and art (and politics, and economics, and―fill in ten blanks). My gaze is usually soul and psyche-ward, which is an essentially genderless territory.

EP: As a teacher, how much and when do you tell students about a poet’s background or life circumstances when looking at a poem? Do you think that, as a culture, we are too focused or not focused enough on the poet when we read a poem?

DL: I teach undergrads mostly, so biographical and historical context is of supreme importance in terms of getting students interested in poetry and poets. That said, I always remind my students that poetry is fictive, to beware assuming all poems are autobiographical in fact and feeling, or that there’s a deterministic relationship between historical and cultural context and the poem at hand.

In terms of our critical culture, especially when it comes to book reviewing, there’s a tendency to focus on the “about” at the expense of craft. I understand why―to spend a lot of time on poetic craft is to narrow the range of potential readership and understanding of the work under review―but it’s an impoverishment. The best kinds of reviews, to me, educate as well as evaluate.

EP: How do you balance poetry and the business of poetry?

DL: To me, this is a question about self-addiction and practicality. For the former, Buddhism and general self-interrogation comes in handy. For the latter, all public activity has a biz component; to expect poetry to be exempt is to be naïve. I’m pretty pragmatic.

Curtis Bauer*: Do you find yourself returning to any particular subject matter across your writing career? Why do you think that is?

DL: Body and soul, ad nauseum. It’s our essential problem.

EP: Now, Dana, provide us with a question to ask our next interviewee.

DL: What’s behind the curtain?

↔

Emilia Phillips is the prose editor of 32 Poems.

*As a part of our interview series, we ask each interviewee to provide us with a question for the next interview. To view Curtis Bauer’s interview, go to May 3rd’s Weekly Prose Feature: “The Written Line Perceived as a Drawing: An Interview with Curtis Bauer”

Each Friday we will publish a new essay, review, or interview for the 32 Poems Weekly Prose Feature, edited by Emilia Phillips. If you have any questions or comments about the series, please contact Emilia at emiliaphillips@32poems.com.

Weekly Prose Feature: “A Review of Rousing the Machinery by Catherine MacDonald” by Adam Tavel

Rousing the Machinery won the 2012 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize with The University of Arkansas Press, and rightly so, for Catherine MacDonald’s debut collection embodies craft, cohesion, and emotional sincerity in poems free of the preciousness and precociousness that so often mar first books. Rooted in the elemental struggles of poverty, incarceration, failed romance, generation gaps, motherhood, identity, and neglected histories both personal and public, MacDonald’s work confronts the hardscrabble truths of working-class America. And yet, this catalog of survival fails to adequately capture the grit and gusto of Rousing the Machinery, since it so often transcends the material circumstances of its personal narratives to achieve a unity and boldness of spirit that bears scars and dreams alike.

The titles alone in Rousing the Machinery speak to the personal, familial, and sociological struggles that dominate its poems: “Notes on Prison,” “Patron Saint of the Toothache,” “Estranged Labor,” and “How to Leave Home” all appear in the book’s first of three sections. A conjurer of rust and ruin, MacDonald frequently turns her gaze to America’s bleakest corners to search out any thread or wisp or rumor worthy of salvage. In “Grace,” the collection’s opener, MacDonald makes a muscular melody from such shards:

In this raw corner of a no-rank town, rusting

swing sets wobble under the weight of fierce

children as thunderstorm torrents ride pin-

straight alleys down the backsides

of backyards. When they think no one

is looking, my brothers pee on the alley

storm-grates…

The imaginative particulars of this rough-and-tumble realm reinforce the tidal forces of home, memory, and longing: St. Pauli Girl, The Rifleman, an alcoholic father’s Chevrolet Impala, homemade Halloween costumes, a dingy sippy cup faded with age.

The book’s middle section inhabits a calmer domestic realm, as the joys, anxieties, and pangs of motherhood increasingly dominate MacDonald’s subject matter and themes. Though shorter than the other sections in Rousing the Machinery, we see MacDonald’s voice at its most lyrical and contemplative here in a string of narratives that exhibit a deftness of tone and pacing. “Leda at Work in the World,” “Appetite,” “Sweet Box,” and the longer sequence “Some Mothers Ask” explore the boundaries of parental protection, the limits of innocence, and the myriad ways in which our world strains the tethers between mother and son. We also encounter the collection’s title poem, a diptych of loose sonnets that invoke and beseech the spirit of William Blake. Its rich diction, taut concision, and kinetic syntax show MacDonald at her best:

Rousing the Machinery

        The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

i.

Observe the perpetual boy, as one

with the pop-eyed crowd. He’s come

to see the King’s menagerie: camel, bear,

leopard, lion, tyger: stripe over stripe,

swinging its heavy head with each sullen

step. He notes the fixed pit of its pupil,

the eyes’ bulge and slow blink. Who will extol

this captive, pacing the round tower room?

Who will grind its bones for luck, pluck

stiff whiskers for a paintbrush, rend fat

for an aphrodisiac? Who will inhale

scent of musk, tang of urine soaked

in stone, sing, Marvelous, its assets?

A boy.

ii.

This morning in Raleigh’s exurban flank,

I watch the bad boys of Selma

Alternative High School craft paper wasps.

They loft them across the bedlam

of the classroom to where the tyger, perfect-

bound, sleeps in my hands. With a stroke,

a stroke, a stroke, the machinery is roused

and in the corner of the classroom,

above our heads, gangly wasps disgorge wood

to make paper. Watch: the miracle

occurs in a vessel, an enclosure, in a lidded pot

on a hot stove, in a woman’s body

where a child grows, or in the insect

jaw, ganglia, and lobe.

For all of its proletarian blues and maternal yearning, however, Rousing the Machinery remains a nuanced and capacious book, studded with overt and covert allusions to a vast constellation of artists—from Jefferson to Degas to Akhmatova to Frederick Douglass to Morris Rosenfield, among a host of others. Indeed, one of MacDonald’s prevailing themes reinforces the notion that our inner lives—half remembered, half invented, brimming with nostalgic totems—have the power to revise, redeem, and at times remake the world, or at the very least our understanding of the world. Later poems, such as “Azores Time,” “Teaching Myself to Sew,” and “Sing Whatever Is Well Made” broach more political subject matter that offers welcome counterpoint to the book’s largely confessional preoccupations, and perhaps foreshadow the ambitiousness we can expect from MacDonald in her future work.

A handful of flatly prosaic poems in Rousing the Machinery suffer from a lack of editorial control, such as the rambling “At the Registry of Regrets,” which attempts to gain too much mileage from its conceit: “May, the pretzel shop lady, tells me stories, / which are not unlike the pretzels / we bake, wrap, and sell at the mall…” Moreover, “Wasps in the Kitchen” never moves beyond the mere situation its title describes, and becomes a quaint exercise in anthropomorphizing a drone and queen. We encounter another stalled effort in “Empire and the Evangelical Sublime,” which juxtaposes a moment of introspection with a fragmentary reference to colonial smallpox in 1587, and the cluttered result fails to do justice to either impulse. It’s remarkable for a reader to count a first book’s failures on one hand, however, and it speaks to MacDonald’s talents that these missteps remain episodic and innocuous.

The front flap of Rousing the Machinery announces that its contents “detail the passages of an ordinary life.” This pithy summary correctly places MacDonald’s work in the tradition of Bishop and Levine while simultaneously attracting readers grown weary of contemporary poetry’s tendency to avoid direct confrontations with experience. Nevertheless, such sentiments seem reductive for this reviewer, as they fail to represent the range and tenderness of MacDonald’s poems, as well as her brave ambition to, in the words of Adrienne Rich, dive into the wreck. Indeed, MacDonald dares her open heart in these pages, and her clear, rising voice shines in this tenacious debut.

—Adam Tavel

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Adam Tavel received the 2010 Robert Frost Award, and his forthcoming collections are The Fawn Abyss (Salmon, 2014) and Red Flag Up (Kattywompus, 2013), a chapbook. His recent poems appear or will soon appear in Quarterly West, The Massachusetts Review, Passages North, West Branch, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. Tavel is an associate professor of English at Wor-Wic Community College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Each Friday we will publish a new essay, review, or interview for the 32 Poems Weekly Prose Feature, edited by Emilia Phillips. If you have any questions or comments about the series, please contact Emilia at emiliaphillips@32poems.com.

Weekly Prose Feature: “The Written Line Perceived as a Drawing: An Interview with Curtis Bauer” by Emilia Phillips, featuring an excerpt from THE REAL CAUSE FOR YOUR ABSENCE (C&R Press, 2013)

A native of Iowa, Curtis Bauer was raised a son of farmers and artists and has lived in England, Mexico, Spain, and the Eastern and Southwest United States. He is the author of three poetry collections: his first, Fence Line (2004), won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize; Spanish Sketchbook (2012) is a bilingual English/Spanish collection published in Spain; and The Real Cause for Your Absence (2013). Bauer is also a translator of poetry and prose from the Spanish, his publications including Talisman (Editorial Anantes, 2012), by José de María Romero Barea, Eros Is More (Alice James Books, 2014), by Juan Antonio González Iglesias, as well as individual poems and prose from numerous Spanish and South American writers. He is the publisher and editor of Q Ave Press Chapbooks, the Spanish Translations Editor for From the Fishouse, Assistant Editor, and “Emerging Spanish Poets” Series Editor for Vaso Roto Ediciones. He teaches Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. For more information, go to curtisbauer.net.

Emilia Phillips: Zbigniew Herbert wrote, “The most beautiful is the object / which does not exist.” Because of the title, I was primed to look for absence in your collection, an action that, in effect, insists absence as a kind of presence, something almost tangible, the ghost of a form. In the same way that a space where a tooth once was retains a tooth’s shape when framed by other teeth, your collection is full of imagistic negatives that hold the shape of something more solid: shadows, snow, memory. Poetry, with its white spaces and breaks, can provide a formal semblance for absence. It strikes me, however, that many of the poems—with their large or single stanza forms or long lines—insist themselves as a presence, a solid state in counterbalance to what’s missing. In “Still Life with a Man Falling Through It,” made up of long-lined couplets, we see a character on a ladder “slip, tilt, plunge to the ground” as if it’s “a stunt requiring a man to cling to what was not / there.” In some ways, does the poem become what was not there? How does poetry act as a kind of understudy to an absent person, object, or idea?

Curtis Bauer: Writing in general, and the poem in particular, is a way for me to stave off absence, loss. I am writing to someone who is not present in my immediate life, so I’m surrounded by absence. I grew up with absence, people I loved being away, and many of my closest friendships, those people I talk to about the world, are with people not in my immediate proximity. Even my marriage to a woman I’ve been with for close to twenty years has been made up of long periods of absence. Absence is such a strange word: it identifies what is not present, but should be. I suppose “Still Life with a Man Falling Through It,” attempts to fill in for what the character has lost—his footing on the ladder, the ladder itself, ultimately his life—as well as what the woman in the poem eventually loses—her man. So there is a literal absence alluded to in the poem, which I’m very interested in, but there’s also the perceived absence of being unable to get something or someone back. And yet we tell stories, recall moments in which that other is once again present. A poem calls those moments back, brings them back to life for me. This gets complicated when you consider this recovery through the lens of Herbert’s quote: there is a danger of sentimentality in recalling and reviving an experience or a relationship that has been lost; it becomes more beautiful, more precious than the actual. I hope not to do that.

EP: I don’t think you do! Even at their most tender and elegiac, your poems resist lyric stasis. For me, sentimentality thrives on stagnation like a scum on a pool of water. When I read a poem like “Drawing of a Boy Forgetting” or “Becoming a Crow,” I have the feeling of being inside a long hall with an open door on each end, the wind rushing through. The arc of a poem, any great poem, is an act of leaving, of moving from an entrance to an exit, even if the point of the poem is to return to the subject—to, as you said, “bring them back to life.” Is it difficult to leave certain poems, to finish them, because of attachment to a subject or idea?

CB: At the moment, I can’t think of a poem that was difficult to leave or finish due to the subject or idea alone. Poems are hard to write for many reasons: I have the most difficulty with poems I don’t think capture the idea or essence of the subject I’m writing about. I’m honest with myself when it comes to writing. I throw away or abandon quite a bit of work that does not satisfy me. I’ll write in a notebook or in a letter to a friend about something, and continue to write about it, in different incarnations of different poems most likely, until I feel like I get it right. Maybe that’s the wrong way of going about it, but that’s how it works for me.

EP: Assuming that some of your poems are based on personal experiences (and correct me here if I’m wrong), do you ever find yourself rewriting a memory for the sake of poem and, in doing so, perhaps rewrite the memory so that you suspect yourself for no longer accurately remembering what actually happened but for remembering what happened in the poem instead?

CB: Wow, that’s interesting. Especially because I’m trying to imagine what poems of mine may have led you to this question. All poems are based on personal experiences in one way or another, aren’t they? Just as a photographer experiences what she observes and captures in an image, I think a poet can have an experience of someone or something through observation, even if it is at a distance. It’s our ability…maybe I should just speak for myself…my wiring in how I see the world that causes me to empathize to the point of actually feeling like I’ve taken on a life. Those observations influence how I see, how I move on to observe other things. I believe that we can acquire memories of experiences that we haven’t actually had. I heard a lot of stories growing up, saw a lot of photographs of people I didn’t know, but somehow I have the impression that I knew them, that I actually had an experience with them. Maybe some would call that a lie, but I don’t; it’s an experience that I carry with me, that grows in my memory. I think of “Whiteout,” for example, which came from a picture a friend sent me one winter, a winter that wasn’t at all cold in Texas, but looking at that blizzard blur made me cold, made me think of growing up cold and freezing during winters in Iowa. So I remember the cold there, and I remember the view of snow and drifts and whiteout conditions from my grandfather’s house, but the rest of that poem is a composite of stories and experiences, some of which maybe happened, but most of them didn’t. At least not to me.

EP: What you said about your emotional hardwiring fascinates me, particularly in a discussion about “Whiteout,” a poem in which the we go from knowing nothing (“You are suddenly in a life, not knowing which / way your face is facing in the white before you.”) to discovering context, following association toward the harrowing image of the grandfather’s horse “frozen in the middle of the pasture, its eyes / suddenly glass” and landing on that redoubtable ending when the grandfather says, the horse “forgot what standing meant, / and sometimes when you forget you fall.”

For me, “Looking at 12 White Things,” which appears earlier in the collection, provides so much insight on how you’re able to move through poems. It’s like a primer for reading the rest of the book, though likewise a deft poem itself. For our readers, I’ll provide an excerpt:

                    Space is

a thing—the thingness, the gap

it creates. What lay beyond

the space, but a button I can’t fit

to a shirt (attached to a notch

of fabric from the shirt I wore

yesterday). The hand that ripped it

off was white, too, but it won’t stay

stuck to the paper sheet. I write

white hand and the letters form

the word that becomes the thing

Here we have a kind of alchemical recreation of experience: the substance is broken down into words and, if at the right temperature and stirred in the right way, those words cook into substance again—experience—and the experience occurs in an emotional/empathetic space. I’m able to join you there as a reader because the emotional/empathetic space feigns physical space through the poem’s form. While I wouldn’t identify you as a formal poet, your attention to line breaks, in particular, play toward the dynamism of emotion, space, and experience, imagined or remembered.

In this passage, the breaks act as a kind of imagistic cue or emphasis: “the gap” and “a notch,” supported by a break, behave like what they are; “the space” physically lays beyond “What lay beyond”; “to a shirt” literally “can’t fit” on the previous line; “off” is literally ripped off of “The hand that ripped it”; and “the letters form” the next line. I see this sort of attention paid to the line throughout The Real Cause For Your Absence. Will you speak to how you find what one could call “the mood of the line”? Is it based on sonics/rhythm? The sentence? Emotion? And how do you know when the breaks are right for what you’re trying to convey, what kind of space you want to create, in the poem?

CB: I like the idea of the “mood of the line” but I have no idea how to answer this question. Maybe I’m not so good at identifying moods until I’m in the midst of one. But how do I get there? I usually get into a mood through talking, so in the case of poems, through writing in response to something seen, heard, touched . . . Perhaps your question is one about process. I’m fascinated by process, by figuring out how things work. Many writers I love and respect are not, and they don’t want to talk about it; they’d rather talk about the final product, but that makes me think of a comic strip my father used to have hanging in his studio, a strip about how to draw a Dick Tracy comic, I think it was. As I recall, the first frame had a few circles for heads; the next had some stick-like lines for arms, bodies and legs; the third frame was the perfectly drawn and colored, the completed comic strip. There’s mystery in process that can never be explained, but it’s important for me to approximate mine in order to know how I can remind myself when I forget…a bit like that horse, I suppose. So I write in a notebook, as I mentioned before, and I write and I write.

First there are ideas: I suppose that refers to the sentence you mentioned, and those are driven by emotions—what causes me to write about something to begin with, some kind of emotional response, or lack of response. Those initial ideas quickly become secondary, however; then the complexities of language—semantics, sounds, grammar—take over. I like to play with multiple meanings—I think of the poem “Drawings” for example, which is an exploration of meaning and emotion and a gesture at a notation of diversity in the most basic sense. My interest and joy in the multiple also comes out in my enjambed lines; I love how a line is a unit of meaning; knowing this can make sentences all the more interesting, because there are many possibilities for not only meaning, but also rhythm and sound inside that sentence. This pleasure and play can be dangerous of course. I think it was Heather McHugh who warned me against an enamoration (I’m sure she didn’t use that word . . . does it even exist?) with the enjambed line. It’s easy to get carried away and break a line for a quick thrill, shock or surprise. This is where sonics, prosody and rhythm come in. I have to thank the gods for Sarah Lawrence College because that’s where my ear for an evenly cadenced and sturdy line was formed by Thomas Lux; that’s where I studied prosody with Suzanne Hoover; and that’s also where I met most of my friends and readers, two in particular—Ross Gay and Patrick Rosal—have taught me a lot about music and rhythm over the years.

A few of the poems in this book are in blank verse, but that’s not at all common for me. I do scan lines when I’m revising, and that also helps me understand line length. My gut reaction to your question about knowing when the breaks are right for what I want to convey is to say that I’m lucky. I don’t believe that, though. I arrive at my lines like a painter might in a drawing, through sketching and discovering what functions for the subject; or like someone going for a long walk, taking steps to figure out what the cadence, the pace needs to be in order to arrive from point A to point B. But that’s the start; I think knowing what works doesn’t come until the final stages of composition, in those final revisions when all the elements are nearly aligned. I keep revising until they are right.

EP: The Dick Tracy comic reminds me of that moment in the book, in “Still Life With a Bed In the Middle,” in which the speaker’s wife writes on his back: “the letter Q boils between my shoulder blades.” An element of language becomes a visual element, an image. The Q’s almost like the circle for a head in the initial stages of a sketch. Since you mention that you think of drafting a poem in much the same way that a painter approaches a piece through sketching, and since there’s several poems about drawings and sketches in the collection, I wondered if you work in visual art in addition to poetry. If so, please tell us a little bit about it. If not, what attracts you to writing about visual art and its process?

CB: I wish I could use the present tense here, but I haven’t painted for years. I used to, though, and I have paintings and sketchbooks and drawings around the house. I draw, too, but I can’t say I’m as dedicated to my drawings as I am to writing. That said, I’m attracted to visual art and process partly because I grew up with it: my father and step-mother are painters, so when I would see them as a kid that was the world they inhabited, and though I didn’t know it, I became adept at inhabiting different worlds—at that time those worlds were the farms where my mother, step-father and grandparents lived, and the studio, towns and cities where my father and step-mother lived. I should also say that there were paintings and drawings hanging in my mom’s house, too, which were like windows into these other places. I remember three pieces in particular she kept after the divorce, and they hung outside the upstairs bathroom—I spent a lot of time waiting outside that bathroom, and because they were there, I would get lost in thinking about the stories they were telling, the fine details in the foreground and background, as well as the naked bodies. I knew they were special, but I had no conception of the fact that they were 19th Century classical engravings, that this was art. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to have that kind of education until much much later. I thought everyone had paintings and drawings in their rooms, and that everyone went to museums and galleries. So that part of my life coupled with a physical connection to the land definitely influenced me.

All this to say that I think about drawing and painting all the time. I said before that I’m not as dedicated to drawing as I am to writing, but in the moments since I said that I’ve been thinking that I disagree. I’m reminded of Robert Walser’s microscripts, Walter Benjamin’s notebooks and letters, and that spectacular book of correspondence between John Berger and John Christie, I Send You This Cadmium Red: all of them have handwriting that is nearly incomprehensible, but spectacular as art. My handwriting isn’t the greatest, and I’ve had friends tell me that they can’t read the letters or postcards that I send them, but I believe the written line could be perceived as a drawing. When you dwell with drawings some narrative, some image, some lyric is revealed over time. Maybe this sounds like an apology or excuse for sloppiness, but I don’t see it that way: I love letters, as I’ve mentioned, but I continue to savor the notes my friends Elaine, Ross and Sebastian scrawl to me long after the “news” they want to relate has passed.

One final note relating to process. Painters and writers have a lot in common in terms of practice. Alberto Giacometti’s paintings and drawings, for example, are a result of his relentless revisions, his need to blend, cover up, layer, use a mistake to his advantage and perhaps most important, his attempt to capture the mystery of what was in front of him and translate what he saw into a series of lines on the canvas or paper. I find his work fascinating and have learned a lot from studying his work.

EP: How aware are you of how a poem looks on the page? Do you have pet peeves about design and presentation of poetry?

CB: I’m very much aware of how the poem occupies the page, which means that I also think about emptiness, white space. I don’t approach a poem thinking that I’m going to spread it all across the page, with long lines like “To A Woman Standing In A Doorway Watching The Rain” or “Colony Collapse Disorder”; instead, I arrive at it through writing and revising the poem. When I see poems like those, I know that I need to read them differently. There’s a reason they appear in space the way they do. If I have any pet peeve about presentation of poetry, it’s that I can’t identify the reason behind the presentation, or I can’t even approximate it. I don’t have to understand it completely, but I’d like to think I at least have an idea of what’s going on.

EP: How long did it take you to write the collection? On average, how long does a poem take you? How quick do you jump into revising after the initial draft?

CB: I’ve been writing the book since before my first collection came out in 2004. Well, I’ve been writing the poems for this book since then, but this book, the idea of this incarnation came about a couple of years ago when I was up at the Vermont Studio Center.

I wish I could say that a poem takes a specific amount of time, or that I spend X number of hours on a poem. I used to write and complete poems really quickly, but I’ve slowed down. As I’ve mentioned, I write in a notebook. When I’m stuck, or when I feel like I’m repeating myself, or when I see something either in a book or in the world that reminds me of something I’ve written, I’ll go back to what I’ve written. I know it’s not the most efficient way of writing, but I do that until I find that fixation, that kernel for a poem that I can’t set aside. Once I find that I work on the poem steadily until I can’t do anything else. That might be anywhere from a few days to a week. Before I’d send that poem out then; now I hold on to it, put it in a folder on my computer and return to it a month or so later. If the poem still holds that initial energy I know I’m close to being done with it.

EP: You’re a translator of Spanish poets. Can you describe a little bit about what you’ve worked on and what you may be working on now? Do you think your work with translation influences your own poems? If so, how?

CB: I have translated prose, too: a short story and a novel excerpt by José Manuel Fajardo, short stories by the Argentinian writer Leopoldo Brizuela, and others…but I mainly translate poetry, I guess. I translated a book of poems by the Spanish poet Juan Antonio González Iglesias, and Alice James Books will put that out in 2014; another book of my translations of José de María Romero Barea’s poems was published in Spain last fall; and I’ve completed another book by a Mexican poet that’s floating around out in the world. I’ve also translated individual poems—and continue to do so—by a number of other Spanish poets for the From The Fishouse website, for which I’m the Spanish Translations Editor. Right now I’m working on books by Jorge Gimeno, Carlos Pardo and Luis Muñoz, all three Spanish poets who are in their 40s and have been huge influences on the emerging poets of Spain. I’m translating their work while also putting together an anthology of emerging Spanish poets.

This whole translation endeavor is another full time activity, one that often eats into my own writing time. I do it, however, because I think it’s important for poets in the US to be aware of what our contemporaries in other countries are writing. Ask anyone to name a poet from Spain and he’ll say Lorca or Machado, maybe Cernuda. Great, but what about the poets Pere Gimferrer, Miguel Ullán, Jaime Gil de Biedma and Olvido García Valdés, to name only a few who have been instrumental poets for the emerging generation of Spanish poets? And who are our contemporaries, that group of poets who in the US would be in MFA programs or teaching in them? In addition to the ones I’ve already mentioned, a good sample would be Mariano Peyrou, Lorenzo Plana, Elena Medel, Julieta Valero, Ada Salas, Juan Andrés García Román, Andrés Navarro… I should stop there, but I could go on, of course.

Finally, my work is most definitely influenced by translation. I’m a better reader, of course, and listener; my ear is tuned into different sounds and rhythms, and there are different linguistic and syntactical surprises in many of these poets that I think stick somewhere in my head, and if I’m lucky it breaks loose when I sit down to write my own poems. So being a translator has provided me with a flexibility in my own syntax, since both languages have different syntactical structures, and that has enriched the way I write in English, but also how I translate. Another thing that happens that happens to me when I translate, even when I’m listening to conversations in English, is that I often misunderstand. In fact, I’m in a fairly constant state of confusion. Since learning Spanish my language usage has changed:, I confuse prepositions, use words differently, write sentences with huge digressions. I used to get really worried about this, but I’ve grown to enjoy my confusion. Learn from it.

EP: How do you think American poets should involve themselves in the international poetry community, outside of working as a translator: hosting readings, traveling, teaching the work of non-American poets? When there’s so much work being produced in the United States each year, how do we get a handle on our own country’s poetry and have the time to seek out the work of other countries? What, in your opinion, does Spanish-language poetry provide that’s missing in our own poetry culture?

CB: One of the easiest ways is reading the work of poets from around the world. There are quite a few great anthologies out there that can open doors for those who can’t read the work in the original language. One of the first ones I read from cover to cover was Simic and Strand’s Another Republic. I still read through that anthology; that’s where I met Fernando Pessoa, Jean Follain, Nicanor Parra, Yannis Ritsos, Czeslaw Milosz…and so many other poets who have been influential on my own work. There’s McClatchy’s Vintage Anthology of World Poetry, too, which is also great. But there are so many other anthologies now that offer introductions to younger generations of writers. And if people disagree with that statement, I encourage them to put together a new one; that’s how it works, right? Also, there are great web and print journals, Words Without Borders and A Public Space to name only two. The point is, world literature is available to readers in the US. So why don’t we read contemporary or emerging poets from other countries? Because we haven’t been told that we should, perhaps? Because, as you say, we don’t have the time to do this and get a handle on what’s being written in our own country? I think this last one is an easy excuse. I have to make time to read, and I have the responsibility as a writer and teacher to expose myself to as much as possible. I can’t read everything, but I can try.

Reading poets, writers from other countries, we can learn a lot about our own poetics, as well as about what’s going on in the literary and social communities outside our borders. I was lucky to have teachers nudge me toward global writers, and I teach this work in my classes when I can, whether they are lit courses, creative writing or composition classes (I haven’t taught composition for a while now, but I used to teach Hikmet’s poem “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” in my Comp 1 and Comp 2 classes). We can use literature in translation to discuss about just about anything. Not everyone can take a trip to Spain or Vietnam or the Philippines to attend a poetry reading or buy books by foreign authors in the original language, but reading and talking about poems from some other place can relocate us, move us out of our little world for a while. Also bringing international writers to campus or communities isn’t so difficult. I used to do some translation work for the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa; every fall they have about 30 writers from all over the world in residency and part of their residency is to give readings and lectures. We’d never be able to afford to bring in writers from Venezuela or Belorussia to Texas Tech, but through the IWP we have.

I travel to Spain quite a bit, and a few years ago the publisher of From the Fishouse, an audio archive of emerging poets, asked me to take a recorder along with me and try to record some emerging Spanish poets. This is a whole other question I suppose, but I mention it because it wasn’t so difficult to find the more than 50 poets I’ve recorded so far, to find public readings or bookstores where I could buy books of poetry and literary journals. A little curiosity goes a long way. And what does Spanish-language poetry provide that’s missing in our own poetry culture? Good question. The simplest response is that poetry from other places offers distinct perspectives on social, political and cultural subjects. One of the things I’ve learned from living abroad is that looking at the US from the outside helps me better understand what’s happening in the US that I might often overlook: the outsider sees and fixates on different details; has distinct poetic orientations and uses them differently; and then there’s the simple surprise that comes from reading in a different language.

EP: Gerald Stern says that you’re “one of the most tender new poets.” That said, I wouldn’t call it tenderness, exactly. I’d call it—if I’m allowed to nuance Gerald Stern’s—is sincerity.

I think we confuse sincerity too often with sentimentality, a mistake that’s perhaps inflated trust in what Hoagland calls “the skittery poem of the moment.” For me, however, sincerity isn’t a cloying certitude, like a fundamentalist belief. Instead, it’s a willingness to follow the subject without knowing where it will take you, to admit that, as poets, we don’t have total control over a poem or that there may be no resolution to the tensions that are found there. I think of Dickinson saying, “I am afraid to own a Body — / I am afraid to own a soul”—what a simple and yet severe admission! But that’s Dickinson writing as Dickinson. Perhaps it’s easier to be sincere when we write as “ourselves.” Let’s look at a section of your poem “Becoming a Crow”:

I’m learning to squat and cackle

at the men on the street. This one

with the hat stares and smokes.

I’m learning to read the fear in his body.

My brothers tell me I was a fool,

But so is everyone else.

They watch the man on a ladder,

the jet trails,

the boy burning a doll with a match.

It’s part of, they bark, your nature.

Though the poem acts through an extended metaphor, there’s sincerity here in addressing human nature, as well as the body. The crows are a vehicle for your concerns drive. How do you balance conceit with sincerity?

CB: I like how you distinguish sentimentality from sincerity, and I think you’re dead on—at least in terms of how I write poems—about that willingness to follow the subject without knowing where it will take me. My biggest failures come about when I start writing with something specific in mind, with an idea of what the poem is going to be like when it’s done. One would think that I’d learn my lesson, but I still try to do that. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve started poems knowing that I’m going to follow some received form, but I think that’s different. You’re talking about the direction a poem heads inside the form, the frame of the poem, right?

I like surprise, and I like to discover ideas and images I hadn’t been thinking about through the process of writing. Stafford talks about that, and Strand, and so many writers I admire work this way, discovering what they want to say through the writing of the poem. This can be applied to the poem you just quoted as well, and it’s important you mention Stern. Not because of what he says about me, but what he has taught me. He’s a bird lover if ever there was one, but his poems also masterfully balance their conceit in an honest way. He isn’t afraid of exposing himself, his emotions, confusion and anger. One can understand how loving and angry and relentless he is by reading his poems.

I wonder if I’m talking around the answer to this question. I just read an interview J.D. McClatchy did with Charles Wright for The Paris Review in which Wright talks about how he writes from what he observes, unlike Strand, who writes from ideas. I’m like Wright in that sense; I look outside, and “Becoming A Crow” was an exercise in looking. Maybe “lesson” is a better way of putting it; I’ve learned a lot from crows, but not in the attempt to observe the crows that would fly over my house in Iowa City every afternoon, but as a consideration of apartness, being on the periphery. Crows seem to possess some knowledge I want to tap into. But it comes at a price.

David Wojahn*: What is the single aspect of contemporary poetry which most frustrates or infuriates you?

CB: I’m not sure how to answer that. My first inclination is to say that I’m frustrated by the fact that there is so much out there that I haven’t had the opportunity to read, but that has more to do with my deficiencies than anything in contemporary American poetry. But in addition to that, I think I’m frustrated by a lot of poetry that doesn’t take itself seriously. Or the poets who write it, I guess. There’s this tendency toward the flippant that I find annoying. But I don’t want to generalize. That isn’t all contemporary American poetry, just some that I’ve seen, that I start to read and then get annoyed because I’ve wasted my time with it.

EP: Now, Curtis, provide us with a question for our next interviewee.

CB: Do you find yourself returning to any particular subject matter across your writing career? Why do you think that is?

*As a part of our interview series, we ask each interviewee to provide us with a question for the next interview. David Wojahn’s interview has yet to be published, however, but we’ll let you know as soon as it goes live.

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An excerpt from The Real Cause for Your Absence (C&R Press, 2013) by Curtis Bauer, courtesy of the author and the press.

Looking at 12 White Things

I forget to count the ticket stub

in my back pocket. A paperclip.

An envelope folded twelve times

to fit on the 4th row. A space

between the 2nd and 4th. Space is

a thing—the thingness, the gap

it creates. What lay beyond

the space, but a button I can’t fit

to a shirt (attached to a notch

of fabric from the shirt I wore

yesterday). The hand that ripped it

off was white, too, but it won’t stay

stuck to the paper sheet. I write

white hand and the letters form

the word that becomes the thing.

And while I’m cheating color,

lamp, though it’s on the red table.

I write edge of letter though

the rest is coffee stained, and covered

with books. I have no white books,

so I write no white book and try

to get away with it. I own

an ink rag that’s slowly turning blue.

A used stamp I’ve pealed off

an envelope. There’s the dull sheen

on a needle threaded with red string.

If only I could put that sheen in there.

And the noise we call white, how

to put that on the page so when you

look at it, you don’t hear me drowned out.

 

The Real Cause for Your Absence

In the afternoon the river thawed

and not one ice plate remained—

you could sit on the bank and watch

the flow float seed pods and tampon

boxes out of town, as if it were

a road you could stand beside

with your thumb out. Or skip a stone

from a pile the strange neighbor

boy mounded at your feet again.

This year, when the milk cartons

bobbed and twirled on the current,

the grocer seemed a little smaller

and our child gave her pocket stones

back to the riverbed. Suddenly tired,

the greasy mechanic had to look away

from the weasel dipping in and out

of the oak leaves lilting and twirling

in a mid-stream pool. Like last year,

like every year, the days were still

short and dropped their thick dark

hard like a wool quilt over the water.

The whole town went likewise to bed.

Not one lamp burned, which could have

given us a reason to stay. For a while

our bed felt perfect—firm, warm,

occupied—until the water drew our noise

from the windows and we followed—

You went upstream. I climbed down.

 

While Reading I Think About Drawing

Flowers grow inside my wife—

red, pink, white petunias, poppies and lilacs—the petals

dry on the stems of her ribs.

Every morning is a new year here.

I’m waiting for the jittery red and blue birds I have never seen

before tonight to fall asleep.

My grandfather used to say, If swallows rest before

midnight the stars will shine until dawn, but

that’s not written in any book.

The landscape of Atxondo is like a memory of lost birds and fitful sleep,

and waiting wide awake for the first glimmers of a red dawn.

Listen

to the chimney swifts.

They don’t know how to be dishonest.

Or to the dogs playing with water.

These mountains make me a new man.

I still learn from the cherry trees, the barbed wire

stretching up the hill, and the grass blades lapping

on a rock, and that space between each blade.

 

Seeing a Tan Woman’s Face, Late Winter

It’s January, New York, so she must be

back from somewhere nicer than here, but

sometimes I’ll think about the big picture,

about my skin and perspective. I wonder

when I started to lie, when I began to trip

up and push all the verbs and nouns down

deep and flatten them out. I wonder where

green went, where joyous left tan and orange

and soft, smooth, yellowish coffee color

left my hand, and these blue eyes turned

their sight on some little grass blade and to

the mirror and my ruddy face. This morning

on my way to the airport, a woman on Lexington

with flowers, she’s not just a woman, excuse me,

but she’s not Sybil either because she wants to live

and she’s beautiful and the flowers are white lilies

that make me think of spring, humming diesel engines

doing laps around fields and soil ready for planting,

ready for blooms, ready to germinate what touches it

and I want that it to be my hands, my eyes and why

do I have to think she looks like she can’t afford those

cut flowers and now that I’m a thousand miles away

I see the flowers but not the hands, I can hear

the paper crinkle though I was in a car and speeding

and I want to hear her breath because it’s even,

like the ambulance siren passing on the left

the taxi doesn’t move over to let pass. The man

in the back is on a gurney and I hope he has

just had a long night at work and is tired,

so the sweat on his forehead and spittle

dribble at his mouth is natural and could be

a perfect reflection of me, right now seeing her.

 

Experienced Worker, Employment Wanted

I watch the dead gather on the sidewalks

from my car. Every Friday I remind

the garbage man of his promises. I talk

to the old women stranded on the street

corners, pick up their teeth when they fall

from their mouths; I know how to wait

for traffic to thin, for the Dutch bakers

to throw out their scraps and the butcher

to kill a hog. I should add that I am multi-

lingual and the translator of last squeals:

in this instance it means the pig is confused.

I understand pigs; they don’t like confusion.

I dig back yard crypts, line them with pine

paneling and shelves; I stock them with wine

and fine cheeses. I’d like to add spoons,

guitars and cellos, but music sounds off

when it’s tarnished and warped. Still, I will

teach myself to play these instruments.

I am not honest. I bake stale bread for the starving

swallows shivering in the cold air. They are nervous

little birds, always afraid. I know their history:

a man threw a torch down the chimney of their temple

because he wanted to see fire fly. It flew as it burned

an arc in the tails of swallows small enough to fit

in the palm of his hand. Their song repeats,

repeats this memory—they keen for their brothers

and sisters when pecking crumbs from my palm.

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Emilia Phillips is the prose editor of 32 Poems.

Each Friday we will publish a new essay, review, or interview for the 32 Poems Weekly Prose Feature, edited by Emilia Phillips. If you have any questions or comments about the series, please contact Emilia at emiliaphillips@32poems.com.