Jose Angel Araguz's Blog, page 31

a robert okaji triptych

Mirror – Robert Okaji

The attraction is not

unexpected. We see

what is placed

before us, not

what may be.

The mirror is empty

until approached.

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[image error]This week’s poems were originally published as part of the Origami Poems Project who create free, downloadable microchaps. “Mirror” and “Earth” (below) come from You Break What Falls, and “Sheng-yu’s Lament” (also below) comes from No Eye But the Moon’s: Adaptations from the Chinese. Both microchaps are availabe for free on Okaji’s Origami Poems author page.

What I enjoy about “Mirror” is how it engages the symbol of a mirror lyrically, so that the metaphysical connotations don’t weigh the poem down. Instead, the short lyric passes as quickly as a reflection, while its insights linger like light.

A similar engine is at the heart of “Earth.” Both poems deal with human presence and their implications. Where one fills the “empty” mirror, one “breaks” the earth by being here. It feels natural to pair these poems because each takes the reader into a meditative state with koan-like directness.

Earth – Robert Okaji

Tremor and

stone

beset upon the calm.

Now water

lines the road’s

bed, and we see

no means to pass.

Even so

you break what falls.

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[image error]To complement these two poems, I present this third poem, “Sheng-yu’s Lament,” an adaptation from the Chinese. Okaji states in the microchap that he calls it an adaptation rather than translations “because I neither read nor speak Chinese, and have used transliterations to produce these versions.”

Reading below, one can easily that part of what is brought into the adaptation process is Okaji’s lyric sensibility. One can see the handling and navigating of the older poet’s meaning done with reverence not rivalry. Bringing these poems together, one can see how in this poem by another poet we return to “earth” and “mirror,” and can glimpse a bit of what these words might further mean for Okaji as well as ourselves.

Sheng-yu’s Lament

(after Mei Yao-ch’en)

–adapted by Robert Okaji

First heaven took my wife,

and now, my son.

These eyes will never dry

and my heart slowly turns to ash.

Rain seeps far into the earth

like a pearl droped into the sea.

Swim deep and you’ll see the pearl,

dig in the earth and you’ll find water.

But when people return to the source,

we know they’re gone forever.

I touch my empty chest and ask, who

is that withered ghost in the mirror?

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Be sure to check out Robert Okaji’s blog, O at the Edges, to learn more about his work.

Happy triptyching!

Jose

new microreview & interview at the CR blog!

[image error]Just a quick post to share my latest and last microreview & interview for the Cincinnati Review blog!

This time around I spend time with Jennifer Givhan’s Landscape With Headless Mama (Pleiades Press).

I’ve had a blast writing for the CR blog and plan to continue the microreview & interviews here on the Influence (check out the Submissions tab for more details).

See you Friday!

José

some influence & book news!

influence news

This month marks five years of blogging on The Friday Influence! Over the years, this space has been a great source of community for me. Thank you to all of you who stop by regularly or just pop in at random looking for a poem. I continue learning much from interacting with you, either in the comments or elsewhere, including my Instagram poetry project poetryamano.

As the Influence enters its fifth year, I’d like to go further and reach out to readers and fellow writers in the hopes of having the blog be a bit more interactive. Above, you’ll see that there is a new “Submissions” tab with information on current calls. You’ll see that there are two specific calls, one for those interested in participating in a microreview & interview, and one for a montly haiku/tanka feature.

For the haiku/tanka feature, I’d like to do a monthly post of a variety of haiku and tanka, in whatever variations you are inspired to write. From traditional, nature-centered three line poems, to one line haiku, prose haiku or tanka, or even a blackout / erasure haiku or tanka. Check the Submissions tab for how to send your words and images.

book news

[image error]In other news, we’re about a month away from the release of my next book, Small Fires, which will be published by FutureCycle Press. As a bit of a preview, I am sharing the artwork that will be incorporated into the final cover, an ink painting by Andrea Schreiber.

This painting was inspired by the poem “Luchadores” (originally published in Waxwing) which I share below. Thank you all again for a great five years and stay tuned for the release of Small Fires in May!

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Luchadores

after Cathy Park Hong

They were the only men in the house,

and stood firm, one hand raised

saying farewell, the other idle.

I’d make each bed, wash dishes,

set chairs back in place, then dig

under the sink where their masked faces

waited to be pulled out. I fought

with them all afternoon, took turns

playing villain, playing good,

letting each one win, then starting

over. The light in the garage apartment

turned all summer, flickered

light and dark across the floor

as on the leaves outside.

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Happy anniversarying!

José

 

new prose poems & #poetsofinstagram news!

Just a quick post to announce the release of the latest issue of Pretty Owl Poetry which features three prose poems of mine from a new project. This issue includes stellar work from Ellen McGrath Smith, Chelsea Tadeyeske, and Trish Hopkinson among other great contributions.

Special thanks to Kelly Lorraine Andrews, Gordan Buchan, and everyone at POP for including me in such a great issue!

Check out the issue here.

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Also: The latest and last interview in my #poetsofinstagram series is up now at the Cincinnati Review blog! This time around John Carroll of @makeblackoutpoetry talks about his history with blackout poetry and the hope it inspires in him and others.

I had a lot of fun with these interviews and am considering continuing them on this blog. Stay tuned!

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See you Friday!

José

fallacying with susan lewis

[image error]In my recent microreview & interview of Susan Lewis’ Heisenberg’s Salon (BlazeVox [books]), I discuss the ways in which the poems in the collection engage with the uncertainty principle and its take on the relation between position and momentum. My own crude, working definition of the concept takes me back to my reading into Zen, ideas like how we are always in motion; how all we have is the present; and the contradictory thought that there is no now because the now that is now…is different from the now now.

Luckily, Lewis’ book delivers insights via strong prose poems and not half-remembered readings

new #poetsofinstagram interview!

Just a quick post to share my latest interview in my #poetsofinstagram series over at the Cincinnati Review blog! Read it here.

This time around @colette.lh shares some of her stunning work as well as insights into what motivates and inspires her writing.

Be sure to check out my own @poetryamano account, a poetry project focused on poems made by hand. I’ve been working a lot with erasures recently!

See you Friday!

José

microreview & interview: Susan Lewis’ Heisenberg’s Salon

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review by José Angel Araguz

Drawing inspiration from German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which “states that the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa,” Susan Lewis’ latest collection, Heisenberg’s Salon (BlazeVOX [books]), presents a prose poem collection that evokes the form’s surrealist traditions while expanding on its logic-making means.

One can see this idea of position and momentum reformulated in poetic terms in these lines from the title poem:

Every time she turned her back, the apartment rearranged itself. Each version created a home for another way of life.

From there, the reader follows the main character adapting to her constantly rearranging apartment, curling up and reading Victorian fiction when she “[discovers] the couch under the picture window,” and setting the next meal when “the dining table was there instead.” In a similar manner, the reader of this collection adapts to each poem’s engagement with and rearrangement of familiar linguistic territory. The aptly named “Indeterminacy” is a good example of adapting to rearrangement:

Indeterminacy

It was time for something, although she could not for the life of her imagine what. So she assumed her post on the stoop & waited for the future to declare itself. A tattered bird of dubious provenance landed on the banister & inspected her with his ancient gaze. She exhaled with emphasis, but otherwise managed to keep her preconceptions to herself. The old fellow cocked his head & screeched. Terrific, she said. How am I supposed to know if you’re the one I’m waiting for? Terrific, he squawked. How am I supposed to know if you’re the one I’m waiting for? I get it, she said, bravely extending her arm. I get it, he echoed, latching on with admirable decision. It was the last conversation they ever had.

Here, the first half of the poem positions two characters in places of waiting. There is a push and pull between interiority and meaning at work; because “she could not for the life of her imagine what” it was time for (keyword here being imagine, an act of interiority), she is forced to look outside herself. Thus positioned, the conversation that takes place in the second half of the poem works as momentum, giving the scene the urgency of question and response. The phrasing of a “tattered bird” also leaves things ambiguous; one can envision a parrot playing out the conversation that follows, merely echoing the other character. And yet, the choice to not be specific about the kind of bird it is leaves room for the fantastical. From this uncertainty, the imagining the other character was incapable of on her own becomes an outer moment of imagination via this “conversation” with the bird.

This transformation via uncertainty plays out for the reader much like the conversation plays out for the characters, strictly in the moment, in the rush as the pieces of the poem come together. There is a thrill in this kind of poetry that speaks of a sensibility awake to the materials at the core a poem, how to get the “tattered bird” of familiar language to say something new. As plot requires conflict, these poems point to lyricism as its pulse.

One of the ambitions of this collection is learning how to be awake to this lyric pulse. The reading act is itself a combination of position and momentum, holding words still in the mind while moving towards the sense implied. In a way, the reader of Heisenberg’s Salon is in the same position as the boy of “One Day” (below) who finds himself literally embodying change, watching the world evolve as the poem develops. Certainty and uncertainty, this collection posits, both happen suddenly and simultaneously. As in the uncertainty principle, one is reckoning with ideas of position and momentum in these poems. Yet, because they are poems – poems whose essence can only be located within the act of reading and being heard, thus, in motion – the interplay leads the reader to a fruitful uncertainty, and, one could say, a lyric certainty.

One Day

grass started growing form the young man’s chest. Everybody changes, said his mother, surreptitiously dabbing at her eyes. But the boy, who was wise beyond his years, felt delicate roots tickling his sternum & knew it was a matter of time before they’d probe his lungs & entwine his heart, crowding the space it needed to expand & contract in its steadfast commitment to preserving his options. As the weeks passed, graceful green strands sprung from his armpits, between his legs, & even, in the finest possible wisps, from his upper lip. One morning he awoke from a luxurious dream of water glossing boulders as smooth & warm as flesh to find a starry sprinkle of tiny yellow blossoms adorning his burgeoning tufts. He had only to be still & tiger swallowtails floated around him, sipping his nectar. Unable to deny the inexorable slowing of his breath, he was content to observe himself contemplate the ramifications of his personal evolution without emitting a watt of excess heat or other sign of agitation.

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[image error]Influence Question: How does this collection reflect your relationships/history with the prose poem? What writers have influenced your sense of sentence and story?

Susan Lewis: I love the prose poem! Brevity and density are its challenge and its promise. To paraphrase Whitman, it contains multitudes — like the power to embrace or eschew narrative, meter, syntax, and even the sentence itself.

I began working with the more narratively driven poems in Heisenberg’s Salon as a kind of emotional and intellectual R & R after being immersed in another collection of prose poems (currently called Zoom) which are far more abstract, fragmented, and entangled on the lexical meta-level. This was not my first time exploring this sub-genre: my book, How to be Another, gathered a group of tale-like creatures in the section called e.g. (reflecting my notion that narrative proffers examples, rather than, say, arguments, restatements, or prescriptions — like the other poems assembled under the headings vis, i.e., and Rx).

The rhythms, architecture, and verbal texture of these poems, however, are quite different than those earlier pieces. And my critique of categories, boundaries, and borders has intensified (in the geopolitical context as well). A fish confined to a small container stays a small fish. The same can be said for a psyche. Any insistence on us vs them deprives ‘us’ of the (sometimes challenging) benefit of ‘their’ company and perspective. For this book, I found a kind of metaphorical support for this principle of inclusivity in quantum indeterminacy.

My love of the prose poem dates back to my introduction (thanks to my friend and mentor Chuck Wachtel) to Julio Cortázar’s seminal The Lines of the Hand, and Russell Edson’s Dinner Time, both of which can be relied upon, in a pinch, as complete guides to writing of any kind — be it short story, novel, or poem. (Which is to inveigh, once again, against the unhelpful constraints of such categories).

Cortázar’s other very short works, like many in Cronopios and Famas, and all of Edson’s oeuvre, have wormed their way into my sense of timing and ‘turn.’ Their compressed journeys draw an arc from premise, to ramification and extrapolation, to conclusion — which in different pieces might be more or less conclusive, and more or less shocking, or absurd. They model a kind of imaginative and investigatory digging — deeper, absolutely, but also laterally, towards new terrain — which ends up yielding a skewed and oddly clearer view of their starting positions.

The poems in Heisenberg are also deeply indebted to the work of Lydia Davis and James Tate, both of whom transform the ordinary into the extraordinary by penetrating, judicious, and genuinely inspired elisions, containments, and departures. And Kafka looms over all of us who touch on the surreal in the hope of exposing the tragic absurdity of the real.

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Special thanks to Susan Lewis for participating! Find out more about her work at her site. Heisenberg’s Salon can be purchased from BlazeVOX [books].

being more with w. todd kaneko

[image error]This week I’m featuring a poem from W. Todd Kaneko’s powerful book The Dead Wrestler Elegies. Kaneko’s project – which takes the lives and deaths of famous wrestlers and weaves them across narratives of marriage, father/son relationships, and masculinity – conducts the kind of emotional and intellectual algebra that opens up worlds to its readers. The facts of a personal life lived are set against the facts of the mythic lives of wrestlers, each side richer for the connections made.

This week’s poem, “Be More Like Sputnik Monroe,” is a good example of what the book is able to do at its best. Springing off the braggadocio of the epigraph, the speaker goes into a personal narrative that deftly juxtaposes memory and description. As the poem progresses, Monroe is further and further established as a larger-than-life character, “a bad Elvis” who “mixed it up everywhere.” This narrative contrasts that of the speaker and their father who “shook [their] fists as [Monroe] broke rules / against guys who were easier to cheer.” These lines present an interesting dynamic: while Monroe’s star quality is based on bullying and swagger, the father and son, rather than feel emboldened by what Monroe represents, feel themselves at odds.

This moment is also where the poem begins its turn towards acknowledging the complicated nature of what wrestlers like Monroe imply about masculinity. What keeps the father and son on the side of “guys who were easier to cheer,” also keeps the father from fighting in the scene later in the poem. While this decision of conscience stays true to the fist-shaking disapproval of Monroe’s narrative earlier in the poem, the cost of this decision leaves the father at a distance from both the mother and the epigraph’s tone. Raising a fist, either in protest or to fight, remains a moral act for the father, a fact that grounds the speaker’s meditation at the end while leaving him to find his own answers. One returns to the phrasing of the title and wrestles with it as the speaker might: as a statement at turns troubling and searching.

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Be More Like Sputnik Monroe – W. Todd Kaneko

It’s hard to be humble when you’re 235 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal with a body women love and men fear. — Sputnik Monroe

When my father died, he left me a trove

of video tapes, a warped memorial

for those men he watched with my mother

before she left for parts unknown,

for those fights he relived once he was laid

off from the plane yards. We watched

men like Sputnik Monroe bleed the hard way,

shook our fists as he broke rules

against guys who were easier to cheer.

He was a bad Elvis, greased-back

hair with a shock of white, Sputnik Monroe

mixed it up everywhere, a rodeo

fistfight, a henhouse tornado. My mother

picked a fight in an Idaho truck stop

once, stabbed a man’s chest with her middle

finger, then stepped to one side

so my father could fight him in the parking lot.

Afterwards, my mother was silent

all the way back to Seattle, her disgust

with him — the way he wrapped his arm

around her shoulder, guided her to the car,

and sped back to the freeway — hanging

between them from that point forward.

Sputnik Monroe clobbered men

wherever he went, sneered at those fists

raised against him in Memphis.

Some nights, as my wife sleeps upstairs,

I watch my father’s video tapes and

imagine what I would have done that day

if I knew that my marriage depended

on what I did with my hands.

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Happy wrestling!

José

new poem up at tahoma literary review!

Just a quick post to share the release of the latest issue of Tahoma Literary Review which includes my poem “A Mu’allaqa for Clifton Avenue!”

This issue is available for free PDF download through the next week here.

This particular poem is a longer one for me, and engages the spirit of the Arabic poetry form “mu’allaqa” in order to express a statement of life, place, and time.

Special thanks to Kelly Davio & everyone at TLR for providing a home for this piece!

See you Friday!

José

new poems & column!

Just a quick post to announce the release of the latest issue of Apple Valley Review which includes my two poems “Small Talk” and “Waiting!”

This issue also includes great work by Amorak Huey and Sandra Kohler among others.

Check the issue out here.

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I also wrote a bit about how introversion & extraversion relate to poetry in my latest What’s Poetry Got to Do With It? column for the Cincinnati Review blog. Check out how Emily Dickinson is even more complicated that you thought