Jose Angel Araguz's Blog, page 14

community feature: CavanKerry Press

[image error]This particular community feature post is inspired by a recent development: I’m happy to share that I’ve been named as a member of the Board of Governors for CavanKerry Press! I’m excited to join as a new board member, along with Cornelius Eady, and help develop the already dynamic CavanKerry Press community.  Special thanks to Gabriel Cleveland and Dimitri Reyes for their enthusiasm and support in bringing me on board!

In a phone conversation with Joan Cusack Handler, publisher and senior editor of CavanKerry Press, I learned about the different ways in which the press is creating community, including sharing some of their anthologies for free online during the month of April. Both volumes of The Waiting Room Reader as well as the Words to Keep You Company anthology are being made available as free PDFs on the CavanKerry website. Writers in these anthologies include Ross Gay, PaulA Neves, Maxine Kumin, Tina Kelley, Kevin Carey, Vincent Toro, and Linda Pastan among others.

[image error]Below, I share a sample poem from The Waiting Room Reader II, “The Inheritance” by Myra Shapiro. What moves me most about this poem is how it enters into an elegiac conversation in an unexpected way. The first four lines present the logic of grapefruit-as-talking-baby doll, and then builds from there back into the reality of the moment. This quick invocation of the mother in four lines sets up the rest of the poem in which human presence is acknowledged as being available to us in the actions and habits we learn from our parents. The short lines and images allow the meditation to develop in a way that continues to be surprising precisely by not trying to be. The facts of the speaker’s experience are laid out clearly, and what makes them surprising is the juxtaposition of phrase and image. The speaker moves from the hypothetical “Mama” of the opening lines, to her own mother, to being a mother herself. Here, we see the generations pass, each different yet similar, and each evoking the next in the poem. One returns to the title’s idea of “inheritance” and sees it expanded beyond the material meaning, the speaker realizing their own inheritance in the patterns of everyday life.

Myra Shapiro

The Inheritance

Just a grapefruit

but it never fails

to make the word Mama

when I cut it,

store the half uneaten

flat against the plate,

pink meat down

so that tomorrow

when I eat it it’s as juicy

as today. Washing fruit

she taught us but never this.

She just did it. Saved

the fruit against the plate.

As I do. As I saw it done

in my daughter’s house this morning.

*

Check out more from these anthologies and learn more about CavanKerry Press here.

new publication: Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy

[image error]Just a quick post to share about the release of a new anthology: Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy edited by Simmons Buntin, Elizabeth Dodd, and Derek Sheffield and published by Trinity University Press. My own poem, “American Studies” is included along with work by Jericho Brown, Victoria Chang, Camille T. Dungy, Tarfia Faizullah, Blas Falconer, Kimiko Hahn, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, Linda Hogan, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Naomi Shihab Nye, Elena Passarello, Gary Soto, Pete Souza, Arthur Sze, and Kim Stafford among others. I am grateful to the editors for the work put into not only this anthology, but also the work they have been doing through their editorship over at Terrain.org where some of these pieces were originally published.

More on this anthology:

“Dear America reflects the evolution of a moral panic that has emerged in the nation. More importantly, it is a timely congress of the personal and the political, a clarion call to find common ground and conflict resolution, all with a particular focus on the environment, social justice, and climate change. The diverse collection features personal essays, narrative journalism, poetry, and visual art from more than 130 contributors–many pieces never before published–all literary reactions to the times we live in, with a focus on civic action and social change as we approach future elections.”

To celebrate the release of this anthology, Terrain.org has organized a Dear America Virtual Town Hall event series—the first to be conducted on Earth Day. Find out more about this event here.

My poem “American Studies” (below) was written shortly after the 2016 election. I was living in Cincinnati, Ohio at the time, in my last year of a PhD. I would go on to defend my dissertation on Trump’s inauguration day and walk out of said defense to find a pro-Trump rally happening on the university campus, complete with “Build the Wall” signs and a man (not a student) walking around armed with semi-automatic weapons. I share these details to provide context for the charged air that the poem was created in. An air of fear and despair, an air of survival. As a person from a marginalized community, I’ve been in survival mode all of my life, so it wasn’t that any of what I felt was new. What was new and dismaying was how overt intolerance had become, on campus, across the country, and also how shocked non-marginalized people were at the time. My hope is that through works like this anthology we continue to give voice and archive what it is like to survive.

José Angel Araguz

American Studies

November 22, 2016

My wife tells me of reading the Dear

America books as a child, those stories told

via the diaries of young women who lived

during difficult times in American history. In these

stories filled with suffering were the facts behind

the suffering. Her favorite involved the RMS Titanic,

the unsinkable ship that sank. I ask if

trying to imagine what it looked like was

what captivated, and she says no, says only

one book led to another, until she realized

she could never see it nor accept it.

                          ~

After the election, my friend explains he feels

he could manage here, but not his children.

He explains he spoke to their school director,

who comforted by talking about police presence. But

if there’s police, he asks, before anything happens,

what will happen when something does? American algebra:

Everything is x until proven y. Dear America,

if x represents what my friend feels thinking

about the police, what language do you imagine

he worries his children speaking publicly, and what

language are we speaking now? Show your work.

                          ~

Another friend writes: Here’s a verse I think

about a lot: And maybe the mirror of

the world will clear once again*. She shares

she’s been sick since the election, as I’ve

been. I imagine our voices trying to commiserate

between coughs. In physics, energy can neither be

created nor destroyed. What American physics happens here

as I read and hear her voice behind

the verse she sent? Are you, dear America,

afraid as I am that our faces will

no longer be there when the mirror clears?

* Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Copies of Dear America can be purchased here.

new publication: The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext!

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Just a quick post to share the release of the latest BreakBeat Poets anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext edited by Felicia Chavez, José Olivarez, and Willie Perdomo and published by Haymarket Books. Super-excited to share news of this release – in part because my own poem “La Llorona Watches the Movie Troy” is featured in its pages alongside the work of a phenomenal community of poets including Sara Borjas, Javier Zamora, Denice Frohman, Peggy Robles Alvarado, John Murillo, Janel Pineda, Juan J. Morales, Benjamin Garcia, Jasminne Mendez, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Yesenia Montilla among so many stellar writers.

I’m also excited and grateful to the editors for creating a space representative and celebratory of Latinx poetry in its multitudes. In these pages are the stories and aesthetics of “an array of nationalities, genders, sexualities, races, and writing styles, staking a claim to our cultural and civic space.” I am proud to be a part of this event and look forward to the anthology’s success and impact.

In the spirit of celebration, I am sharing mine own contribution, “La Llorona Watches the Movie Troy” below. I spoke with a friend recently about what this specific poem being included means to me. This poem was one of the last ones revised in time to make it into my second full length collection, Small Fires (FutureCycle Press). So close it was to the then deadline that I never got a chance to send it out. One of four poems about La Llorona in that book, this poem had me exploring what it would be like to have her speak. The first draft was written the summer of 2004 when I lived in a house without electricity in Corpus Christi. Because it was summer in South Texas, I tried to stay out at the dollar movies for as long as I could. I ended up watching a lot movies on repeat, in particular Troy and Spiderman 2 (my book Everything We Think We Hear has the piece born from watching Spidey a bunch).

The first draft was very much heavy-handed and primarily focused as a statement against George W. Bush’s presidency and invasion of Iraq. That draft lived dated and lost for a good number of years. When it came time to work on Small Fires and its tetralogy of Llorona poems, this one came back to mind as being in conversation with that book’s statements of identity and conflicted nationalities. Letting La Llorona speak and harangue America via the actors of the movie still feels right. That the editors of this anthology saw fit to include this poem in an anthology full of similar conversations also feels right.

*

José Angel Araguz

La Llorona Watches the movie ‘Troy’

 

She watches Brad Pitt leap, then land a stab

like a hammer blow down, spends time taking in

the bronze skin of the actors, the way the say ‘grass’

like ‘toss,’ ¡Todo British! She snags popcorn

by the handful watching the gods

be shrugged off by warriors. During the scene

where the Greeks scurry from the Trojan horse,

their shadows fingers pulling at string

and unraveling the night, her breath is sand

and crackling flame. When they run towards fire

in the desert, towards collapsing roofs

and digitized screaming, the montage

of faces, of bodies pushing against each other

has her whispering to no one in particular:

¡Mira Baghdad, mira Juarez! And no one

in particular hears her over the Dolby

of swords being unsheathed. She begins to hum,

letting her voice hit the same notes

as the opera singer overlaid during the carnage.

Should anyone look over, they’d see

the silhouette of a woman in the third row

treating the forty-foot screen like an altar.

When, after seeing the toppling of statues

and the scavenging through offerings

to Apollo, sun god, the one who sees everything,

the aged and fallen king staggers in defeat

and cries out: Have you no honor!

Have you no honor!, she gasps and nods,

as if watching a telenovela unfold

according to how she would want it. Truth is,

she has seen this all before, has drowned

the brown bodies, has plucked gold coins

from river water before any boatman

could make his way to her. She knows

the blonde and blue-eyed have arrived

to play both hero and love interest again,

that though Helen here is a vagabond Marilyn,

she used to have un poquito de chile

in her blood, y un puñado de lodo

 in her heart. That’s why it’s a woman

who says: If killing is your only talent,

then it is your curse, and says it

like one slapping their hand against the river,

a sting in their hands for a while. Truth is,

there will always be a Brad to leap, and hit hard,

the thud through the speakers like a heartbeat.

*

Copies of The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext can be purchased from Haymarket Books.

 

microreview: Word Has It by Ruth Danon

review by José Angel Araguz

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One of the things I admire about Ruth Danon’s Word Has It (Nirala Publications) is how the collection brings together via short lyrics and prose poem sequences a vibe of being a spy of language. I say “spy” and mean specifically a sensibility able to evoke the range of curiosity, intrigue, and vigilance that is associated with the heightened awareness one might associate with a spy. In “Floridian,” for example, we have the following lines:

Unseasonable chill in the palms.

Fronds I mean, and also the cold

fingertips that touch them.

Here, the wordplay that occurs across the punctuation and line break on “palms” of the first line, and the addition and jolt of the second line’s “Fronds” emphasizes both the human and plant double meaning in the words as well as the speaker’s awareness of this connection. It’s a pun of sorts rendered in a tone that is intriguing, as the formulation of “Fronds I mean, and also” have an air of nervousness as the lines continue back to the original human sensory association of “cold / fingertips.” This back and forth of sensory and conceptual perception is engaging for the way it creates an air of heightened awareness which has us in a different place than expected given the title “Floridian.”

This engagement with the unexpected continues throughout the book. In “Domestic,” there are three moments that riff on the concept of a shot of whiskey around which the poem is developed. Here are the opening lines:

“Shot of whiskey,” she thought, from

nowhere, not because she ever drank

the stuff, but because it seemed the kind

of random association one might have at

the end of a long day.

These lines are effective in the way they intellectualize associations around taking a shot, using phrases like “drank / the stuff” and “the end of a long day” to ground the poem in a heightened sense of the familiar. This familiarity is then riffed against in moments like the following:

“Shot through with light,”

was an expression she liked. Radiance or

the idea of glowing from within seemed

a worthy aspiration.

Here, the word “shot” from the start of the poem is repeated but changed from noun to verb. This change evokes the sensibility of the “she” being described who has gone from the poem’s opening “random association” to this aspirational one. It is a moment of hope, in a way, where the interrogative tone is left for a moment. This moment is short-lived, however, as the poem quickly narrates how “Unruly she was,” and then takes us to the ending where “She looked ahead, steady / on her feet, or so she thought.” The charm of this poem is how the established heightened awareness takes the idea of a shot of whiskey at the start and through the poem’s development gestures towards inebriation as a state of being due to overthinking.

There’s a moment in the sequence “Divination” that presents an encapsulated version of this idea of heightened awareness:

Consider now that the birds scrawl their

messages and you are too far from the sky to

read their words.

What then?

It is in asking “What then?” after the logic of birds scrawling messages we can’t read that the heart of the collection pulses. The human spying we do of language, so to speak, is frustrating work. At the end of the day, we don’t know the world through words, we know only words and persist with our vague sense of the world. The act of writing in Word Has It is imbued with a charge of responsibility and need despite this frustration, however. In “Birding” (below), the poem’s play and progression of thought show how much can be seen in light of having our “stupid eyes closed.”

*

Ruth Danon

Birding

So listen, let me confess, I do not live in a world

that lends itself easily to description or evocation

or adoration. In my ordinary life I face one brick

wall on one side and another brick wall on the

other. I do not even have words to distinguish

one brick wall from another and if there are

windows in yet another wall they give over to a

wall on the far side of any small opening. I envy

those who stand quietly on shores and watch

plovers. I do not know what a plover looks like

and I do not know if it makes a sound. The word

contains the word “lover,” and also the word

“over” and that is yet another brick wall. I

believe in the power of birds, but I do not know,

not for a minute, how to describe their quivering

hearts or their flights or the mad plunge of

herons into salty marshes. A little while ago I

washed my face in clear water. I plunged right in,

my stupid eyes closed.

*

To learn more about Ruth Danon’s work, visit her site.

Copies of Word Has It can be purchased via SPD.

poetryamano project: july 2017

This week I’m sharing another installment archiving my Instagram poetry project entitled @poetryamano (poetry by hand). This account focuses on sharing poems written by hand, either in longhand or through more experimental forms such as erasures/blackout poems and found poems.

Below are highlights from July 2017. This month found me going further with erasures. Along with working out of a true crime book, the last one is drawn from a book by Yasunari Kawabata.

Be sure to check out the previous installments of the archive – and if you’re on Instagram, follow @poetryamano for the full happenings.

Enjoy these forays into variations on the short lyric!

[image error]An erasure that reads: “The news of lightning. No front-page its arch-rival.”
[image error]An erasure that reads: “during the latter part of a few melodramas perception.”
[image error]An erasure that reads: “like weaving a tapestry until the woven piece is finished the small, seemingly insignificant pieces complete with fingerprints”
[image error]An erasure that reads: “an ambitious practice employing each word as a chisel, able to adapt instantly to any changes”
[image error]An erasure that reads: “surrender as a cloud-strewn sunset”
[image error]An erasure that reads: “some outstanding poison or drug that cryptic remark.”
[image error]An erasure that reads: “doubt and conviction based on the turn of a card”
[image error]An erasure that reads: “grasshoppers, remember tonight’s written in green by you”

microreview: Cenote City by Monique Quintana

review by José Angel Araguz

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Monique Quintana’s debut novel, Cenote City (Clash Books), is a stellar addition to the Latinx storytelling tradition of texts born out of exploring the intersections where folklore, politics, cultura, and literature meet. Told through fable-like short chapters, Cenote City presents the story of Lune whose mother, Marcrina, cannot stop crying to the point that she has become a tourist attraction, relegated to the nearby cenote, a natural pit or sinkhole that contains groundwater. In the character Marcrina, one can see a variation of the folklore figure of La Llorona (whose own tale has her become a ghost forever crying by the side of rivers after drowning her own children as an act of revenge due to her husband’s infidelity). Quintana draws from this connection and creates a character imbued with a similar sense of sorrow and mortality. What distinguishes Quintana’s Marcrina is the empathetic role she plays in the lives of the community of Cenote City as a deliverer of stillborns. Mediating the humanity of this motherhood experience in one role and serving as a human avatar of endless sorrow in another, Marcrina stands as a symbol of resiliency and depth against The Generales, the police force entity of Cenote City.

Marcrina is just one of a number of characters that inhabit the world of Cenote City; others include a clown able to make children disappear, and a “tiny coven,” one of whom’s members is able to set up a mannequin’s hair into a beehive style and then cast a spell that makes bees appear from it. With radical poetic impulses and flourishes reminiscent of Arthur Rimbaud, Quintana moves the narrative along mainly through the impressions evoked from images and the inner world of her characters. This approach allows her to make full use of the rasquachismo aesthetic, a Chicano sensibility that works to “[transform] social and economic instabilities into a style and a postitive creative attitude.” This aesthetic makes use of collage and places at the forefront the struggle of the oppressed. As a form of storytelling, rasquachismo offers Quintana the use of fruitful and evocative juxtaposition. While this approach at times leads to a dense prose style, the risk is ultimately worth it for how engrossing and captivating the reading experience becomes.

An example of what I mean can be seen in “The Daffodil Dress” (below). In this chapter, readers are presented with a memory of Lune finding Marcrina floating in a pool of water as well as the ensuing panic and recovery. One choice use of juxtaposition occurs around the images of insects coming out of the mother’s mouth. Having insects stand as words in the text lends the narrative a startling new understanding of language. Even when Lune cannot hear what her mother and father say between them, the presence of words is seen as alive and restless.

*

Monique Quintana

The Daffodil Dress

The spring after Lune’s father left them, she found her mother in the backyard of their house, floating in a plastic baby pool, her dress blooming around her body like a daffodil. Lune had been to a birthday party in Storylandia. She began to scream and tried to pull her mother out of the water. The warmth of the water was a shock to her hands and it soaked her party dress, making the skin on her legs burn and itch. She clawed at her own skin with her nails, painted pink by her mother with care. If the clouds could bear witness to that afternoon, they would say that Lune was a swirl of ribbons and brown skin, her kneecaps scraped by the sea of grass, bluish green and bleating, not willing to give up their secrets.

Lune’s screams were loud enough to bring the neighbors, to bring the ambulance, to bring the police, to bring Lune’s father. The paramedic, a young woman with slanted eyes and bright hair administered CPR, while the next-door-neighbor clung to Lune in the sway of bodies, and Lune held her hands in a fist, ready to curse anyone who would let her mother die. The red haired woman hovered over Lune’s mother like she was a kite, blowing the air, willing her to live. Lune’s mother had full round breasts buried under the daffodil dress, and her hair was matted to her mouth like clods of dirt. Lune thought she could see insects fly from her mother’s mouth and ears, when her father appeared and knelt beside her mother and the paramedics. The paramedic’s hands were shaking on Marcrina’s face when Marcrina began to cough up water, the baby pool tipped over and made a bigger pool in the grass, barely touching Lune’s toes again, the tight leather straps of her sandals burning her ankles. She clawed at her own ankles, pulling the sandals off her feet.

Lune thought that her mother had been dead and had been revived because her father had returned to them. There was a tourniquet wrapped around Marcrina’s arm and a stethescope placed at the rise and fall of her breast. Lune thought that her mother’s dying would make her skin turn blue, but it remained as brown as ever, and the daffodil of her dress lay shaking on her hips and her breasts. The paramedics tried to make Lune’s mother go to the hospital, but her father wouldn’t let them take her. He undressed her in the warm glow of the bathroom, the light of the ceiling, making new daffodils on her body. Lune saw her father put her mother in the bathwater, saw him pull her hair away from her face, her shoulder blades shuddered at the touch of the water. Lune could hear them whispering to each other and those whispers became the things that flew out of her mother’s mouth like insects. She tried to make out the lines of the wings and the plump black segments of their bodies, but the insects were hazy and only the buzz of letters could be recognized. No full words. Just moving mouths and shoulder blades and the slow crashing of bathtub water.

After he helped put her mother to bed, Lune’s father heated up cold cocido in a pot and they ate together in their kitchen nook. Lune’s father put his wife’s insects in his mouth and ate them. He ate the secrets and Lune and her father ate the soup together, and they were happy that she wasn’t dead.

*

To learn more about Monique Quintana’s work, visit her site.

Also worth checking out: Blood Moon Blog, where Quintana writes about Latinx literature.

Copies of Cenote City can be purchased from Clash Books.

new interview

Just a quick post to share a recent interview up on Grist: a journal of the literary arts!

Special thanks to poet friend, John Sibley Williams, for asking such insightful questions and to Grist for helping us find a home for the exchange.

Happy gristing!

José

 

microreview: Slingshot by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

review by José Angel Araguz

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There’s a moment toward the end of the sequence “a machine of mahogany and bronze I” in Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s debut poetry collection Slingshot (Nightboat Books) where, in the aftermath of a protest demonstration broken up by police brutality, the speaker is asked “You heard about the storm comin’?” which prompts them to meditate on:

The same storm slicing

through every inch of armor

my binder becoming more unbearable as the sun sets.

Yes. I knew about the storm coming.

This admission coming when it does at a moment of reflection and recovery is charged with an awareness that the literal storm of the poem runs parallel to the metaphorical storm of the political moment they are living in. The articulation of this awareness, here and elsewhere, is tinged not with resignation but resolve. This mix of awareness and resolve runs through this collection in stunning and complicated ways.

Whether awareness and resolve play out in expressions of self-presence, as in “false sonnet embroidered w/ four loko empties” which opens the collection and whose ending states: “I’m a full grown / whatever-the-fuck, and I will devour any / attempt to subdue me with monstrous animality,” or in poems troubling current staples of pop culture (as in the poems “a review of Hamilton: An American Musical” and “chewbacca was the blackest part of The Force Awakens“), Johnson enacts a lyric presence that engages through juxtaposition of tone and phrasing. In “chewbacca,” for example, the speaker riffs on the Star Wars mythos, braiding in commentary about race like “When we colonize the stars, everyone will be beige, / white folks sometimes say, or orange” and placing them next to others like “Chewbacca was the blackest part of The Force / Awakens. Always moaning & never understood. Always hunted & never going home.” This braiding makes the speculative nature of science fiction all the more human while also interrogating the implications of George Lucas’ vision. The projection of blackness onto the Chewbacca narrative, which is one of survival, parallels that of the speaker who shares at the end, “…I am just too tired. Too vengeful to go anywhere anymore.” This statement’s honesty is a surprise as it comes at the end of a poem that strips away much of the fiction of the film in order to get at the deeper implications for the speaker.

Awareness and resolve in the service of self-revelation, ultimately, is where Slingshot lives. My sense, though, is that Johnson would have readers be mindful of the difference between self-revelation and traditional ideas of confession in poetry. While the poems evoke the trials and tribulations of sex work and the intersections of being black, disabled, femme, and genderqueer, these poems work toward a visceral clarity. Rather than hold the reader’s hand and explain the complexities of the world they’re drawn from, these poems present themselves on their own terms and trust the reader to keep up. It is in this aspect that the poems point back to the title, in a way, each one a stone shot out to strike at the consciousness who hears it.

To return to the sequence “a machine of mahogany and bronze I”: The line “we will hold the line as a practice of freedom” is said by the speaker mid-protest. This collection shows Johnson holding the poetic line in a myriad of ways that open up the nuances of awareness and resolve. In the poem below, “jersey fems in the philly zoo,” this work is done through image and imagination, each surrealistic turn interrupted by a harsh reality. By the end, it’s clear that fear is one of the many things Johnson holds the line against.

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

jersey fems in the philly zoo

a flamingo knows,

even without pink lipstick,

fem is a feeling.

black boots. Raritan

tap water memories flow.

murderous brown geese

fly from Johnson Park,

arrive, then turn up their beaks

‘fuck dis sposta be?’

they inquire. I

find cover in the leopard

print fem next to me

because here, always

someone’s looking, someone’s stares

caught in plexiglass

refracting the light

in your life. no. it’s not you.

they look to consume.

especially spring,

and when the ice cream melts

before it’s lapped up.

Philadelphia

is lilac and lightning strike

before a great storm.

electric strangers

cuff biceps unexpected

back draws straight — horror.

they look to consume.

they desire to control.

predatory birds;

eagles, owls, all.

swooping down with catching claws,

no glass to hide you.

I want my armor

an exoskeleton, tough

hewn of crushed velvet

bristling with defense

a kevlar of tenderness

enveloping me.

this is what happens

when the tree blooms: the axeman

runs to chop it down.

this is what happens

when creatures meant for the deep

somehow crawl ashore:

they will be lapped up

by the hot eyes of the sea

pulled tight by strange hands

knives licking their necks

the scent of wisteria

fireworks: flash/bang.

flash fire, roll flame

clip wings from those who maim us

declaw them all, bare.

maybe they will burn

corralled, while lights dance in sky.

steaming macho ash.

and if they must live

then make me invisible.

hide me. erase me.

*

To learn more about Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s work, visit their site.

To read an interview with Johnson where they discuss the poem above and Slingshot in general, go here.

Copies of Slingshot can be purchased from Nightboat Books.

José & the unintended hiatus + interview

First and foremost, apologies for the radio silence. Totally unintended. A lot of life has happened, good and bad. It has been strange not being here in this space. I look forward to doing a bit more now that I’m getting life in order. I’ve got a few reviews in the works as well as some posts.

For now, please check out this interview at Mass Poetry where I talk about my latest collection, An Empty Pot’s Darkness, as well as disclose my love for Netflix’s The Witcher.

Más soon!

José

into the octaves part three

[image error]This post is the third and last of a short series of posts discussing some of the thinking and inspirations behind my latest poetry collection, An Empty Pot’s Darkness (Airlie Press), which is available on SPD (check out the first post here and the second here).

For this final post, I’m sharing a sequence that did not make it into the book. It’s a sequence strictly written around the life of E. A. Robinson, with some braiding of my own narrative in there. I share them, flaws and all, in the spirit of craft lessons as well as a kind of fan fiction among poets.

On the craft side, one can see the moves I was trying out. The word “untriangulated” comes into play, for example. There are distinct syllabic patterns throughout these as well. As for fan fiction, I do borrow from Robinson’s own mythic Tilbury town and mention a number of his characters. Even if you haven’t read his poems, however, there is at least a sense of a lonely dude being written about.

This last bit might be at the heart of both these posts and my book. Facing and acknowledging the loneliness that the death of others leaves us in. And also the loneliness of mortality, of living on. In conversation with a friend, I surprised myself by calling this my most vulnerable book, mainly due to how stripped the poems are, eight lines per page, no title even. Whatever flaws in the lyrics below, what I hope comes through is the effort to push beyond sentimentality into clear sentiment and human gesture. Ultimately, in lyric poetry, and especially when it comes to elegiac material, human gesture is what we’re after.

Octaves for E. A. Robinson

His medicine was stronger than any

supplied to him.  It waited for him to sit

alone, and drew from him its strength the way

the sun and moon divide the sky, pulling

the light between.  The days of sun would burn.

The days of moon returned to count the hours,

the body for him especially a thing

irreparable: grit turned on itself.

*

He stood with them in the moonlight as though

walking on air – that’s how it comes to me

at least, this poet of images like rare and vague

Bible curses slipped through codes and tongues,

and only registered by some to have

a cursing power.  Many read his words

and puzzled, but never called it puzzle: the air

in which they read, the moonlight he stood in.

*

No readings, talks or lectures: no voice, then,

one would think, reading on the poet.

Time was always set aside for words,

for words and drink.  He drank the words, the words

drank him.  His writing like water passing

from one glass to another, the same volume

kept, the same clear substance moving.

A restlessness you could almost see.

*

I walk the city where you stumbled, stumble

myself a few  times. I do not have

your untriangulated stars only

a vague idea where they are. The lights

I walk under are different from the ones

that lit your way. You stumbled in the dark.

I am blinded on my way between

the page and working for the page, the stars.

*

They dropped names into a hat

and picked yours out. The winner

was from Arlington, so there

your middle name. The words came

slowly. Whatever the sun

did to the sand, whatever

filled the air that day: laughter,

broken waves: each has named you.

*

You gave them drink, Win,

gave them Tilbury,

the house on the hill,

the mill and no one

there anymore, gave

Flood and Stark, Bright tore

down the slaughterhouse,

you did not give, Win.

*

Had I your nerve South Texas

would be riddled out, riddled

with faces over bottles,

riddled with birds, wingspans wide

as palm trees. I’d follow down

each crack on the face the Sphinx

sits there holding, be part of

the wearing wind howling through.

*

Black diphtheria: two words

to end a life your mother’s

body left for her sons to

care after to carry out

past the porch where the preacher

prayed at a distance down to

where two brothers dug and you

clung to life you’re supposed to

*

you loved your brother’s wife like

Lancelot loved Guinevere

you fell into your stories

drank Tilbury dry drank Flood

would’ve drunk the moon could you

see straight into yourself as

the bullet through the head which

has not landed since it shot

*

just a person in the crowd

or in Hood’s sketch a man too

busy reading to look up

every curve and shade around

the pages made them seem set

for flight but not yet one more

turn of phrase what sentence then

for the silence you’re drawn in?

*

Copies of An Empty Pot’s Darkness can be purchased from SPD and Airlie Press.