Deborah Ager's Blog, page 6

Poetry Month, Day Three: Nick McRae Recommends Birmingham Poetry Review

When David asked me if there were any journals, presses, reading series, or other such venues for poetry that I might want to praise and share with our readers here on the 32 Poems blog, I had to do a lot of hard thinking.

For about half a second. Maximum.

For me, maybe the most exciting time of the year is that day in early spring when I open my mailbox and find, nestled among the Ohio Democratic Party leaflets and coupon booklets addressed to CURRENT RESIDENT, the newest issue of Birmingham Poetry Review. Don’t let my jokey tone obscure the fact that I really mean that. BPR was one of the first journals I ever submitted my work to, and it was the first journal ever to return work to me with an honest-to-God handwritten note penciled in the margins. That was huge for me. It put a human face (well, hand, but you know what I mean) on the world of literary publishing that felt, at the time, like somewhere a scared kid like me couldn’t possibly be welcome. It was the first time anyone outside of my very small undergraduate writing community at the University of West Georgia had ever seen enough value in my poems to reach out and tell me they thought I was onto something.

Though BPR’s look and masthead have changed a lot in the years since then, that personal touch has remained. Adam Vines, the current editor, always takes the time to build relationships with his contributors and to encourage good poetry wherever he sees it. Anyone who has had the pleasure to meet him in person knows that he’s a kind and caring man with a palpable love for writers and writing, and that love absolutely shows on the pages of BPR. In the latest issue, #40, you can feel an exciting sense of community in the way the poems speak to one another. Community, but not homogeneity. For example, anyone who knows my work very well knows that I have a deep love for the sonnet, and there are plenty of sonnets in BPR #40, but there are also prose poems, sprawling free-verse lines, translations, playful sound games, and a whole lot of other stuff. And so far, just about every poem has knocked me flat.

When I first discovered Birmingham Poetry Review, it was a great little journal, humble and somewhat old-fashioned in appearance—which I loved—and bursting at the seams with the kind of poems I wished I could write, and over the years I have watched that little journal transform from my pet favorite into a slick, professional, world-class poetry venue. There’s no journal I would recommend more highly. Well, there’s 32 Poems. But you’re already reading 32 Poems, aren’t you? That’s what I thought. Go subscribe to BPR. It’s $5.00 a year. Yes, you read that right. Now go do it.

—Nick McRae

*Throughout Poetry Month 32 Poems would like to use this space to praise the presses, journals, and readings series that bring  poetry to us in a special way. Our hope is that we can point new fans in their direction and publicly thank editors and curators for their work. Check in with us again tomorrow for another poet’s recommendation.

↔

Nick McRae is the author of The Name Museum and the chapbooks Mountain Redemption and Moravia. He is the editor of Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets. His poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Measure, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. This summer Nick will join the staff of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Poetry Month, Day Three: Nick McRae recommends Birmingham Poetry Review

When David asked me if there were any journals, presses, reading series, or other such venues for poetry that I might want to praise and share with our readers here on the 32 Poems blog, I had to do a lot of hard thinking.

For about half a second. Maximum.

For me, maybe the most exciting time of the year is that day in early spring when I open my mailbox and find, nestled among the Ohio Democratic Party leaflets and coupon booklets addressed to CURRENT RESIDENT, the newest issue of Birmingham Poetry Review. Don’t let my jokey tone obscure the fact that I really mean that. BPR was one of the first journals I ever submitted my work to, and it was the first journal ever to return work to me with an honest-to-God handwritten note penciled in the margins. That was huge for me. It put a human face (well, hand, but you know what I mean) on the world of literary publishing that felt, at the time, like somewhere a scared kid like me couldn’t possibly be welcome. It was the first time anyone outside of my very small undergraduate writing community at the University of West Georgia had ever seen enough value in my poems to reach out and tell me they thought I was onto something.

Though BPR’s look and masthead have changed a lot in the years since then, that personal touch has remained. Adam Vines, the current editor, always takes the time to build relationships with his contributors and to encourage good poetry wherever he sees it. Anyone who has had the pleasure to meet him in person knows that he’s a kind and caring man with a palpable love for writers and writing, and that love absolutely shows on the pages of BPR. In the latest issue, #40, you can feel an exciting sense of community in the way the poems speak to one another. Community, but not homogeneity. For example, anyone who knows my work very well knows that I have a deep love for the sonnet, and there are plenty of sonnets in BPR #40, but there are also prose poems, sprawling free-verse lines, translations, playful sound games, and a whole lot of other stuff. And so far, just about every poem has knocked me flat.

When I first discovered Birmingham Poetry Review, it was a great little journal, humble and somewhat old-fashioned in appearance—which I loved—and bursting at the seams with the kind of poems I wished I could write, and over the years I have watched that little journal transform from my pet favorite into a slick, professional, world-class poetry venue. There’s no journal I would recommend more highly. Well, there’s 32 Poems. But you’re already reading 32 Poems, aren’t you? That’s what I thought. Go subscribe to BPR. It’s $5.00 a year. Yes, you read that right. Now go do it.

—Nick McRae

*Throughout Poetry Month 32 Poems would like to use this space to praise the presses, journals, and readings series that bring  poetry to us in a special way. Our hope is that we can point new fans in their direction and publicly thank editors and curators for their work. Check in with us again tomorrow for another poet’s recommendation.

↔

Nick McRae is the author of The Name Museum and the chapbooks Mountain Redemption and Moravia. He is the editor of Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets. His poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Measure, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. This summer Nick will join the staff of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Poetry Month, Day Two: Lisa Russ Spaar recommends On the Seawall

A poetry website I visit unfailingly is Ron Slate’s On the Seawall (http://www.ronslate.com/). The site serves as a homepage for Slate, who is a gifted poet, but is devoted primarily to his discerning, elegant, forthright reviews of new work by others. His far-reaching and aesthetically diverse tastes have acquainted me with many poets, fiction writers, artists, and critics I would not have otherwise encountered. He periodically invites other writers to recommend new books in a kind of round-up, and in this way creates a space that feels generative and full of dialogue.

On the Seawall was launched in August 2007, on Slate’s 57th birthday. Slate tells me that he intended at first “to blog in the stricter sense – that is, to post comments regularly and generate conversation. But I discovered that I had little to say and no desire to obligate myself to say it every day. Writing about books, however, gives me enough space and time to understand the shape of my response. A book of poems (or any artwork) tries to create a place for experience. My job is to discover the place and describe the source of my pleasure as specifically as I can. William Meredith said, ‘One cannot review a bad book without showing off.’ A writer should be wary of conforming to his own tastes, so I cover a range of poetry (and other genres). I’m not interested in devoting energy to work that fails to stimulate or provoke me just to tweak someone’s nose. The Seawall is an American poets’ site—but its impulse is cross-genre and global. To admire is tantamount to being influenced—and since I take much out of my fiction and non-fiction reading, I assume other poets do, too. In sum: I maintain The Seawall to keep in touch with people, to enjoy our communal literary life, to bring accomplished writing to the attention of my following, and to elevate my pulse.”

Slate is himself the author of two superb books of poems, The Great Wave (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) and The Incentive of the Maggot (2005, Mariner Books). Here are the closing stanzas of Slate’s “The Great Wave”:

I had a dream—high-water marks on the side

of my house, the aftermath of a deluge

rising from a spring in the cellar.

I didn’t realize the floodwaters would recede

with the violence of their rising, fishing boats

torn from moorings, dome of the mosque collapsed.

You who savor the scent of the linden

live in a small world, and I also speak

from a cramped provisional space.

On the stacked ship they videotaped

as they passed, then circled back to pluck

a single man from floating debris—

I witnessed this alone on a glowing screen,

I couldn’t lift an almond to my mouth,

I was a fallow field ruined by brackish flood,

but I would choose the wave over the wind,

I would swamp your world with wreckage,

I would hold fast to you, and you would be saved.

© Ron Slate.

Slate’s site feels like a lifeline to me, and there isn’t anything he’s written—poem, review, essay—that I wouldn’t be interested in and grateful for reading.

—Lisa Russ Spaar

(Note: Portions of this entry appeared first in The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry © by Lisa Russ Spaar, Drunken Boat Media, 2013)

Lisa Russ Spaar’s most recent books are Vanitas, Rough (Persea Books, 2012) and The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (Drunken Boat Media, 2013). Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Weinstein Poetry Award, a Rona Jaffee Award for Emerging Women Writers, and the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry. She teaches at the University of Virginia.

*Throughout Poetry Month 32 Poems would like to use this space to praise the presses, journals, and readings series that bring  poetry to us in a special way. Our hope is that we can point new fans in their direction and publicly thank editors and curators for their work. Check in with us again tomorrow for another poet’s recommendation.

Poetry Month, Day One: George David Clark recommends the FIELD Translation Series

This year to celebrate Poetry Month 32 Poems has asked some of our favorite poets to recommend venues that are hosting particularly interesting projects in the genre. Over the next 30 days we would like to use this space to praise the presses, journals, and readings series that have brought  poetry to us in a special way. Our hope is that we can point new fans in their direction and publicly thank these editors and curators for their work.

To kick us off, I’d like share a few words about the FIELD Translation Series, a project I first came across in the form of Charles Wright’s translation of Montale’s La Bufera while I was an undergraduate.  In the following years I found my way to Miroslav Holub, Dino Campana, Vasko Popa, Inge Pederson, and Yannis Ritsos through FIELD translations, but it wasn’t until this fall when I began preparing a course on European Poetry of the 20th Century that I really began to appreciate the significance of what David Young and David Walker (the editors of Oberlin College Press, which hosts FIELD and the FIELD Translation Series) have given us. I quite frankly can’t imagine teaching such a course without their books.

Wright’s Montale, the first volume of poetry I read in translation, opened Europe to me, and in many ways I feel I owe my love of Celan, Alberti, Mandelstam, Transtromer, and so many others to the power of that book. Although those authors come to English from other presses, other series, it was the extraordinary persuasiveness of Wright’s translations that made me vulnerable to the world of poetry beyond my home language. And ultimately that’s why the FIELD Translation Series has been so important: the giftedness and care of its translators. That, and the editors’ insistence that translation should be thought of as creative activity in its own right.

David Young has written that “a lyric poet engaged in translation is intent on capturing in the language he most cares about a prize object that is supposed to be the private property of another language.” As I try to summarize the series I keep coming back to that idea of a gift bestowed by translation on English. The FIELD translators (a list that includes such notables as Charles Simic, Marilyn Nelsen, and David Young himself) have shown such tenderness to their sources that we can’t help but read these poems as gifts that honor the originals as well.

—George David Clark

*Check back tomorrow for a recommendation from Lisa Russ Spaar.

What Heart-Rifle Hybrids Have to Teach Us

Contributor’s Marginalia: Rosalie Moffett on “Winchester .351 High-Power Self-Loading Rifle” by Alexandra Teague

If our biological machinery were to become technical machinery, what other transformations would take place? What if, uncommonly, people were born with a congenital condition wherein their heart was some part rifle? What if love, that untenable abstraction, were honed to a measurable caliber, and that caliber was .351? What would we begin to understand about our longing, about what we’re looking for when we go out into the world, heart in hand?

I dig the way Alexandra Teague goes about these questions. The dream (“of a heart with all sights / attached”) seems, at first, a way for the poem to try on the clothes of transformation. But with that initial costume change, everything begins to tremble and slip identities. The cougar, normally the predator, becomes the prey in the scope of the Winchester. But prey is hunted, is overcome by the stronger, smarter, more powerful animal—that’s the romanticism of guns and gun catalogs, of sport. But here, the cougar is not chased—he comes and lingers. And the person presumed to be behind the gun—his tender skin, his silly thin-fingered hands, who wouldn’t stand a chance in the elements except for his handsome Winchester and his leather, fur-lined coat and hat—this is the predator.

When I got to the question “Who wouldn’t lose / this skin for an instant of lightning?” I felt the seduction of the technical, the beauty of that machinery that makes lightning, that shoots through steel, and felt it all the more because it is held up to the backdrop of the cliff, the wind, the animal. Does it matter which of them is waiting for transformation, which is lured by it, which is destroyed by it? Can we tell which is which? As the poem grows out of the narrow situation we first saw (someone hunting a cougar) that ‘who’ begins to encompass us as readers, to net us in the question “Who hasn’t gone / to a ledge like this and waited?”

Because of course, this isn’t cougars and guns, really. This is love, that old hunt, and we are netted in it, entrapped by it the way that the poem crept around behind us and pulled us in, led us to our own ledge. One of the most beautiful things about this as a love poem, to me, is the kind of attraction being examined here. It’s not the familiar draw of the speaker to an other. Instead, it’s the desire to believe we might have something inside us—“a heart with all sights / attached… / that can shoot through steel”—that, like a rifle, might protects us, give us the upper hand, even, when we go out in the in the world. A heart that evens out the relationship we have with the wilder, the stronger, more magnificent thing—the love we could let transform or destroy us.

The sonnet, an elegant work of mechanics in its own right, ends on a moment of gun-heart fusion that neither denies nor affirms our dream of safety: “the heart reloads even as it recoils.” Have we bagged something? Or are we reeling backwards on a narrow cliff? Is it the same thing? Perhaps it is.

—Rosalie Moffett

Rosalie Moffett was the winner of a 2012 “Discovery” / Boston Review prize. Her work has appeared or will in The Believer, Field, and Tin House among others. Originally from Eastern Washington, she is finishing her MFA at Purdue and will begin a Stegner Fellowship in the fall.

Weekly Prose Feature: “Tame Form + Wild Content: An Interview with Tomás Q. Morín” by Emilia Phillips

Tomás Q. Morín is the winner of the 2012 APR/Honickman First Book Prize for his collection A Larger Country. He is co-editor with Mari L’Esperance of the anthology, Coming Close: 40 Essays on Philip Levine. His poems have appeared in Slate, Threepenny Review, Boulevard, New England Review, and Narrative.

Emilia Phillips: “O keep me perpetual Muse, ears roaring with many things,” writes Roethke, an invocation that’s apt for the voices that surge in and out of A Larger Country. Miłosz’s in (perhaps buried in) the poet’s garden, “held close by last season’s tomatoes”; Miklós Radnóti receives a poem in dedication; and, in a cento, we encounter lines borrowed from Donne, Lorca, Mandelstam, Pessoa, Ritsos, and others. Will you speak on how your poems engage with other poets’ work and your motives in doing so? How soon after reading a poet you love do you find yourself responding to elements of their work?

Tomás Q. Morín: I adore that Roethke quote. In all honesty, I can’t help but have the voices of other writers come in and out of my poems. They’re my extended literary family; Donne, Babel, Hemingway, Dickinson… They’re my literary aunts and uncles. Ignoring them would be bad manners, especially when I feel like their work has spoken to me first. It’s best not to ignore your literary elders because let’s face it, they don’t have to talk to us, especially to young writers like me who are still learning their chops. It’s a privilege, really, to be reading something like “Big Two-Hearted River” and suddenly feel like a melody is being suggested to you, a rhythm that you can alter and make your own and take into a poem. I pray moments like that never stop happening to me.

EP: While much of A Larger Country is set in the first person, I never feel bombarded by the Ego. Rather, the first person acts as a kind of mask that I, as a reader, wear to encounter the environs of the poems. This morning, I read an article about a brain-to-brain Internet interface that allows test rats, miles apart from one another, to collaborate cognitively on simple tests for reward. In some ways, I see poetry as a kind of brain-to-brain interface between the speaker/poet and the reader. There may be no cheese at the end of the maze, but if we’ve encountered a good poem, we feel as if we’ve been rewarded. Do you feel as if your poems are a kind of cognitive collaboration between yourself and the reader? How so?

TQM: Those poor rats! While I’m sure the knowledge gained from that experiment is useful to us, it’s such a waste of a rat’s time when no doubt they’d rather be burrowing or cleaning their cheeks in a field we haven’t spoiled yet. Sorry, I digress. You asked whether I see my poems as a cognitive collaboration between the reader and myself: the answer is No. I do, however, hope there is a cognitive collaboration between the poem and the reader. By the time the poem has left me and made its way into the pages of a magazine or a book, it has its own life and while yes, it’s true that I made that poem, I tried to make it so that if I fell off the face of the planet tomorrow, my little poems would survive my passing and keep shaking hands and making friends, or enemies as it were, in spite of my absence. I think my poems are far more interesting than me. They can carry a tune and I can’t. They’re funnier and smarter, as well. Heck, I’d even say the best ones are better looking than me, what with all their handsome symmetry and chiseled lines. I kid, but in all seriousness, the poems are constructed so that they can engage the reader’s mind and ear and inner eye. If I do my job well enough, then I can disappear.

EP: Bachelard wrote that “To read poetry is essentially to daydream.” I’d stretch this further and say that the initial drafting a poem, in its exuberance and mental consumptive quality, is also like daydreaming. Charles Wright speaks of how, when a poet reads his own poem, the poet “becomes / That poem himself / For a little while.” But then comes revision, when we’re told to step out the poem. A Larger Country gives a faint impression of unworldliness—associative and sometimes fantastical—and yet they’re technically adept, with slant rhymes and duplicitous line breaks. The third section is made up of “North Farm,” a series of sonnets. How do you retain the wildness of the first draft, its sense of spontaneity, through rounds of revision? Do you have a sense of form at the beginning?

TQM: When I was drafting the poems in this book, 4-8 years ago, my process was much different than it is now. Today, I would revise a new poem as each new line was written, not moving on to the next line until the prior line was done. This was not the case when I wrote the poems of A Larger Country, with the exception of “Our Prophets.” All the other poems were drafted quickly and then I went through countless drafts until I arrived at a final version. My goal was always to keep the strangeness of the poems in focus by using as a backdrop tried-and-true forms (sonnet, sestina, rhymes) that would hopefully anchor the reader. The way I figured it, tame form + wild content = a poem I hope a lot of readers can handle.

EP: A couple poems in the collection are ekphrastic poems—“Presidential Portrait” and “Winter.” One could even argue that a poem like “Twenty-First Century Exhibit” is an speculative ekphrasis, almost magical realism. How do you start an ekphrastic poem? At what point in the writing process does the ekphrastic subject become more than a simple description and become a poem?

TQM: I can’t speak for others, but for myself if I’m just simply describing the artwork I’m writing about I’ll chunk the draft and start over. I have to enter the art and engage with it mentally before writing anything otherwise it’ll just be false start after false start. So, that’s how I start. If I can start in this way and already have an idea about the art or maybe the art has provoked a question I can’t quite answer yet, then there’s a chance that during the drafting the poem will come to life. You can never really tell though until the end when you step back to see what you’ve made.

EP: I’d like to argue that ekphrasis can also apply to political poems as politics often have an air of production. Many of the poems of A Larger Country seem to have a political undercurrent, some like “Presidential Portrait” and “The Home Front” more blatant than others. What do you believe is poetry’s role in addressing the political? Must political poems, like ekphrastic poems, go beyond reportage and simple description?

TQM: Let me quote a poet far smarter than I am about this. When asked during an interview for Partisan Review about the relationship between poetry and politics, Zbigniew Herbert responded: “It is vanity to think that one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.” I love this. Barometers are incredibly important tools that can tell you a storm is coming and its time to take shelter. Even so, no one ever chides the barometer for creating the tornado or for not making it dissipate. Yet, some people expect artists to change history. While a poem can’t change the world, it sure has the potential to touch and transform a person who one day might. Now that power can’t be underestimated.

EP: You teach writing and literature at Texas State University. How does your work in the classroom influence your writing? Do students ever trigger new ideas for you?

TQM: Sure, all the time. Since I teach every class using a discussion-based format, the questions that arise about whatever we’re reading sometimes lead to poems. What I find is that sometimes the imaginative side of my brain is better at answering a question in the form of a poem as opposed to in a conversation or in an essay. And of course sometimes the result is simply more questions, which is fine by me. I also love the enthusiasm of my students. Ditto for their sense of wonder. For them someone like Miroslav Holub or Nelly Sachs are still unknown writers, which is a treat for me because I get to watch my students engage the works of poets new to them in ways I might not have considered.

EP: Do you remember your first attempts at writing, on the page or otherwise? Do you think that those moments influence your writing today?

TQM: The first poems I wrote were for high school assignments. Back then before I knew anything about publications, awards, or grants, I just wrote for me and it was fun. I went away from that for a while in graduate school when I tried to write the poems I thought others wanted to read. It took some time before I found my voice and began writing instead the poems I wanted to read every time I opened a journal or a book.

EP: What are you working on right now? Are there any dream projects you’d like to take on one day?

TQM: This summer I hope to look at the order of my second collection of poems and try to figure all that out. I’m fairly certain which poems will be in the book, I just don’t know yet what story I want them to tell. Other than that, I’m just looking forward to the next poem. And the one after that.

EP: What (or who) are you most excited about in contemporary poetry?

TQM: What I’m most excited about with regards to contemporary poetry is the diversity of voices and styles. This is great news for the reader because she has so many options to choose from, to find the poetry or poetries that speak most to her taste and interests. Contemporary American poetry is a 24 hour buffet serving everyone all day any time.

As for who I’m excited about right now, there are so many new voices that are doing good work. Traci Brimhall, for one. Her imagination is terrific. It’s wild and crazy-funky. I trust it completely and would follow it anywhere on the page. Dave Lucas and Melissa Stein both have a texture to their music that I love. The sound of their poems is rough, and blue, yet always delivered with elegance. I want to hear more of it because I can’t get enough.

Sebastian Matthews*: I’m curious when and how much you think about the point of view of the poem you’re working on. Do you say, “I’m going to try a second person address for this poem,” or do you find yourself switching from “I” to “you” halfway through the composition process?

TQM: I think about point of view a lot. Usually, though, if a first draft is flowing smoothly, I won’t notice that the point of view is all wrong until that draft is done and I have a chance to step back and look at it objectively. At that point, I can usually tell that the point of view is wrong quickly. It’s like listening to a band one of whose players is in the wrong key. It jumps out at you immediately.

EP: Now, Tomás, provide us with a question to ask the next interviewee.

TQM: Since poetry long ago first appeared on the scene as the one and only written genre, it has given up ground to fiction, plays, history, etc. Are there any poets who you feel are taking back some of that ceded ground and reclaiming it for poetry?

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. On February 22nd, we published an “An Interview with Sebastian Matthews” by Justin Bigos.

In the Know

Contributor’s Marginalia: Alexandra Teague on “Noir” by Kathleen Winters

Kathleen Winters’ “Noir” initially charmed me with its fantastic humor and sly revisioning of the oh-so-classic story of the Fall. I’ve been drawn for years to feminist takes on myths and fairytales—think Anne Sexton’s Transformations or Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife—and how could I not fall for a hardboiled-slang-talking Eve?

Clever. Slyly brilliant, actually.

By taking on the style of Noir (which is, after all, a genre often described as being defined by its style), Winters’ Eve reveals the Fall from Eden as the original Noir script. Rather than beginning after World War II, the fallen, cynical world of Noir was already there with history’s first femme fatale. And how could she help being the femme fatale? It’s the woman’s role in Noir—in Raymond Chandler’s words, “the world gone wrong” in which Noir characters exist. Just as all the animals in the garden “knew the score,” the reader is invited to see that this is how it is, has always been, was at the moment of—but intriguingly also even before—the Fall. Knowledge—the central, cursed acquisition of the Fall—what Eve shouldn’t seek—is played up beautifully and deconstructed in Winters’ wordplay. “Rat knew / Gnu knew.” Who knows what? What are free will and predestination here? What is knowledge in a world where “Gnu” and “knew” echo off one another, and everyone knows the “score” from the second line?

Even Eve’s initial creation is tinged with Noir: Snake calls Eve an “ignorant bimbo,” “expendable,” and then—so crucially and cleverly—“a rib.” Ending the list and the line, Adam’s “rib” from which Eve is created becomes just another piece of hardboiled slang, revealing God’s work, the very creation of woman-kind, as stacked against her from a start. She’s never been more than a pawn—“ribbed up,” in Noir talk, meaning “set up / arranged for.”

Who can Eve trust in a world like this? Snake is a reptile—and then we’re left hanging—to come down on the humorous but telling “was a pigeon, too.” Snake the informer. Snake the duplicitous animal who is and is not what he seems. In Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City, Mark Bould writes of the “coincidences, hidden interrelations, unclear and confused motives [that] abound” in Noir. And in Winter’s brief poem, we get both the sense that this is all pre-determined / part of the score, or the script, and that the language and characters are duplicitously trying to confuse / complicate. “Gnu/knew,” “reptile/pigeon” (one literal, the other, of course, pure Noir idiom), and the animals themselves given the knowledge that in a non-inverted world, we might think would belong to the humans. Where is Adam? Apparently not one of the animals in the know: the man about to be entrapped by the femme in her fatal error.

Carefully laid rhymes play a key role in drawing out these confusions—in creating, linguistically, “hidden interrelations” between the poems’ statements. After three repetitions of “knew” we end the first sentence (in the midst of line 5) with “do.” The key choice—“what to do”—echoing off the knowing/knew that has preceded. And after this caesura, we get the “whisper” and “lisp” of Snake whispering off one another before “rib” ends that sonic run. And then we get two short sentences in a row that return to the initial rhyme: “he / Was a pigeon, too” followed by the wonderful, coy and telling, final line “What could I do?” Of course there’s nothing Eve can do but bite the apple. The rhyme has determined this. The very nature of Noir has determined this: the Garden, from the start, shot in stark blacks and whites (which become, I would argue, in Winters’ interestingly colorless poem, the strokes of fairly simple language and the reliance on the flat tone and hardboiled slang). And of course the poem becomes commentary on story, too; we all know the story of the Fall, so any telling now has to be already tinged with where it goes. We can’t return to innocence any more than Eve can avoid that apple: that ultimate heist.

—Alexandra Teague

Alexandra Teague is the author of Mortal Geography, winner of Persea’s 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2010 California Book Award, and The Wise and Foolish Builders (forthcoming from Persea in 2015). Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Gulf Coast, ZYZZYVA, New England Review, and The Southern Review. She is Assistant Professor of Poetry at University of Idaho and an editor for Broadsided Press. Her poems “Winchester .351 High-Power Self-Loading Rifle” and “The Thirteen Club” appeared with Kathleen Winter’s “Noir” in 32 Poems 10.2.

Weekly Prose Feature: “The Time Was Neither Wrong Nor Right” by Tory Adkisson

It’s not really novel to claim that Robert Frost wrote one of the very first poems that captured my imagination. “The Road Not Taken” might be the most frequently taught poem in the United States, and certainly the notions of chance and fate, the idea of life being a series of well-trodden or relatively unexplored possibilities appealed to my lonely, hormonally-inflected eighth grade mind. However the Frost poem that resonated with me most was one we didn’t cover in class; it was a poem that seemed to speak to me in a way that felt fundamentally true and yet also mysterious, like the first time I heard music coming from the car radio. The poem was “Acquainted with the Night.”

*

Many of my friends, out of necessity, are daytime people. They wake up to shards of sunlight stabbing through the window blinds, complain (mostly light-heartedly) about working nine-to-five jobs that keep them away from their writing, and go to bed when the clock still reads P.M. In contrast to their example, I feel like a rare breed: a poet who does almost all of his writing after midnight. This is the privilege of being a graduate student, of having an irregular schedule that only requires me to teach two classes twice a week, both in the afternoon.

There are definite drawbacks to this kind of lifestyle—money being one of them—and though there’s a very high likelihood I’ll soon be abandoning my current doctoral studies for regular employment, I am grateful to have this time, this night time, to work. Ironically, poetry isn’t the reason I stay up late—it simply evolved to be the reason. Before I found the words to write, acquainting myself with the night allowed me to be much more than a poet: a thinking person.

*

My mother remembers me being a garrulous boy or at least articulate enough to earn the title “Little Professor” from her and her friends. I see my childhood differently; I remember being very introverted. The loud chatter of my elementary school classmates, the hollow whistle of the desert winds, the occasional shatter of dishes that accompanied my parents’ many fights—all the anxiety caused by these daily occurrences vanished into the dark. Every voice, including my own.

*

Though acquainting myself with the night, with silence, with letting my mind wander gave me comfort, sleep caused me tremendous anxiety. I was afraid to let my consciousness slip away, especially after my kitten, Blue, died one night while we sat on the floor, watching TV. I thought that he was sleeping until my mother found us in the morning, and set me straight. I was afraid that if I closed my eyes too long, that I would die too. Even though night released me from the outside world, my mind hardly ever stopped buzzing with worries until those worries finally melted away into crickets and coyote howls.

*

There was something pleasurable about the night, how its privacies filled my restive body during sleepovers. I loved sleepovers because they made sleep less mysterious, less scary, because I got to observe how it affected other people. Fingers and toes twitched, small mouths let out little snores, audible whispers, bodies suddenly jolted up only to crumple back down into unconsciousness. Watching my friends while they were sleeping pushed me out of my body, gave me a sense that I could have whatever kind of relationship I wanted with them. I could project whatever narrative I wanted.

Of course, now I recognize this behavior—which saw me test the depths of my friends’ sleep by tugging at their limbs to see if they’d wake—as dysfunctional, a byproduct of prepubescent desire to possess, and be possessed by, their bodies. It wasn’t just me, though; it became a game some of us played together that started off innocently until we would fake sleeping. Our little smirks, our inability to keep our eyes closed the whole time, gave us away. The game we played wasn’t sexual—it couldn’t be, not yet. It was a game of performance and discovering, of acquainting ourselves with each other’s bodies.

*

Being acquainted with the night doesn’t mean I know the night at all. I might think I know it, but really, I’m only aware that it inhabits the world around me when I prefer to be awake. In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m only ever acquainted with people, with places, and with poetry. I have trouble being intimate with people on any level. Sometimes I still have trouble sleeping.

I think reading and writing helps me balance the distance and proximity I share with other people, with the world. Between the oblique and the uncomfortably personal. Reading and writing serve the same function. It helps to test my own twitching limbs, to see if I’m still sleeping or just pretending not to be awake.

—Tory Adkisson

 

Tory Adkisson grew up between the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, Linebreak, Colorado Review, Best New Poets 2012, Mid-American Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University and is in the process of sending out his first full-length manuscript.

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. 

Getting Over Particle Physics at Badaling

Contributor’s Marginalia: Kathryn Nuernberger on “At Badaling” by Matthew Thorburn

For reasons involving Plato, Breton, Coleridge, and the year in college I spent getting high and cultivating my beginner’s mind, I am suspicious of metaphors. I have said this before, in a poetry workshop, for example, and there is always a long silence afterwards, as if we are watching my transgression fall into a black hole.

Within his dialogues, Plato proposes “all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers” (The Republic, Book X). He’s worried about the passions poems stir. I’m worried about how far we already are from every drachma we would touch and every smith or philosopher we would know. I’m worried about how electrons are streaming through us, so our bodies are remade at a rate unimaginably faster than once every seven years. I’m worried about how the Pauli exclusion principle prevents electrons from touching, so the sense we can sense at all is a mystery or an illusion. I’m worried that particle physics is a metaphor for my passions, so you can’t believe a word of my science.

In Matthew Thorburn’s poem, “At Badaling,”

The sun bears climb a jungle

gym of rusty pipes

in a cracked concrete pit.

They rise above tumbleweeds

of hair. Their dingy fur hangs

loose as old brown dressing

gowns. They have no names.

I’m worried about the bears.

I saw a sun bear in a zoo once. It was strange how it paced back and forth relentlessly on a log the length of my desk. I wished it would look at us, but it would only look to the end of its log. My husband worked as a zookeeper in medium-hoofed stock, so he could explain this was a kind of madness lonely and under-stimulated animals suffer in captivity. And now the zoo was nothing but the elephant pushing his forehead into a fake rock cliff, watching his own trunk swing a metronome for as long as I could stand to watch and then after. It was a single sea lion swimming and swimming the same elliptical track of tank. I used to love going to the zoo because each animal was a metaphor for an ecosystem I could only imagine and alternative perceptions of reality I could only imagine imagining.

The IUCN lists the sun bear as a vulnerable species. Development and deforestation has made a patchwork of their range in southeast Asia. It is suspected in the past three bear generations their population has declined by 30%. I’m worried that Thorbun’s bears are not even bears at all, but metaphors for a speaker’s passions

…in the shadow

of the Great Wall. Angry,

bigger, a bit holier than thou –

And I’m worried that the speaker is not anyone at all, just a metaphor for me and how I sometimes think outrage is superior to appreciation.

I am suspicious of metaphors because I want to perceive sun bears as they are, because if I can do that, it will be a metaphor for how I can also perceive juniper berries and honky tonk and tuna salad and my husband’s sweet face without it streaming or excluding away. It will mean that even though words themselves are metaphors for what cannot be said, a poet can say it anyway. He can say,

…I felt the hot blush

of embarrassment at how

fun it is to throw cucumbers

to half-blind bears and see

them snapped up in mid-air

and when I touch the page, the cucumbers are there and so are the bears and so is the crisp, green happiness of that moment I never felt until Matthew Thorburn wrote I did.

—Kathryn Nuernberger

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of Rag and Bone, which won the 2010 Elixir Press Prize. She is an associate professor of English at University of Central Missouri, where she also serves as Poetry Editor for Pleiades. New poems have recently appeared in West Branch, Nimrod, and at Versedaily.com. Her poem, “Birds of Ohio,” appears with Matthew Thorburn’s “At Badaling” in 32 Poems 10.2.

The Next Big Thing Interview: Caki Wilkinson

By now, most of us have come across an interview or two from the ongoing series called “The Next Big Thing.” Over the last few weeks, I’ve been tagged by two poets I admire very much, Dan O’Brien and Malachi Black, both of whom are 32 Poems contributors with forthcoming poetry collections. I hope you’ll check out their interviews—and more importantly, their poems, some of which can be found here and here. Below, I’ve done my best to answer the questions, and I’ve tagged poets Carrie Jerrell, Laura Eve Engel, and Gibson Fay-LeBlanc for next week.

QUESTIONS

1. What is the working title of the book?

Welcome to Wynona. I’m pretty sure I’ll end up changing it though.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

I had just wrapped up my first collection, Circles Where the Head Should Be, and I was at a loss as to what to do next. I wrote a poem that featured a woman who would later become known as Wynona Stone. I liked her, so I wrote another and then another. By then I was starting to understand her better, and little by little a world grew up around her. I kept thinking, okay, that was fun, time to move on, but I couldn’t stay away from Wynona for long.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry.

4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

This is a tough one. There are quite a few characters, including Wynona, the local weatherman (with whom Wynona is romantically involved), various members of Wynona’s family (the Stones), and a handful of secondary characters. For Wynona I imagine someone like Greta Gerwig, but a bit older and more of a spaz. For the weatherman, I’m thinking John C. Reilly. That said, the cast might be better served by the puppets from Crank Yankers. 

5. What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

“Wynona is having trouble broaching.” This is also a refrain in three of the poems.

6. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I started it in 2009 and I’m still fiddling with it, though I’m working on some new stuff as well. So: four years and counting.

7. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I was reading a lot of fiction when I started this project. Prior to this, I’d been in school and on a pretty strict diet of poetry. Suddenly I just went crazy reading fiction, mostly contemporary stuff—Aimee Bender, Padgett Powell, Jennifer Egan—but also Flannery O’Connor and Sherwood Anderson.

8. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Poems that feature basketball games, bikini waxes, the tri-state’s largest ball of twine, soap operas, and a dead woman named Nancy.

9. My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:

Carrie Jerrell, Laura Eve Engel, and Gibson Fay-LeBlanc.

↔

Caki Wilkinson is the author of the poetry collection Circles Where the Head Should Be (UNT, 2011), which won the 2010 Vassar Miller Prize.