The Best American Poetry

"Brilliant & bright": A Conversation with Scholar-Practitioner Nick Courtright [by Kristina Marie Darling]

"It has been an honor and a privilege to join in this weeklong celebration of Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry.  Today, I hope you will enjoy this feature of poetry and scholarship by TQ contributor Nick Courtright.  As a editor that prides herself on a commitment to rigorous critical discourse and innovative writing, I'm thrilled to offer this conversation across the boundaries of genre and discipline."--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly. 

Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light, and Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist.  He is the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, he lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel. 

A Conversation with Scholar-Practitioner Nick Courtright 

Kristina Marie Darling:  In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also a gifted literary critic, with recent essays published or forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and more.  What has your practice as a literary critic opened up within your poetry? 

Nick Courtright:  I think it’s freed me to be more merciful in terms of what my poetry can mean. My critical approach revolves around the embrace of the most expansive interpretive range possible, one that takes into account the words, the history, the context, the whole bubbling heap of bad or wrong interpretations inflected by one’s own personal biases, etc. Because I take that tack in my critical appraisal of the meanings of others’ poems, I have to be generous in terms of what my own poems can mean. So although at this stage of my poetry career I’ve moved away from vagueness and abstraction, and try to paint very clear images, arguments, and narratives into my poetry, I really love for the overall takeaway of a poem to be ambiguous. I want the poems to be non-committal about whether their speaker is a hero or a villain, for example.

KMD:  In the spirit of the excerpt featured here, entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence,” I’d love to hear more about your literary and artistic influences.  What poets shaped your approach to craft and thematics? 

NC:  My earlier influences were of the Bidart, Blake, Bly, Lorca angle, with a love for odd images and confounding syntax and a pursuit of the ineffable. And in my latest poetry collection The Forgotten World I was thinking a lot about Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong and others who just write with aching beauty about difficult personal journeys. But lately I’ve found myself most drawn to narrative directness and the comic, so I’ve been reading more George Bilgere, Mary Biddinger, Anders Carson Wee, and Emilia Phillips, for example. Highly recommend all of those—brilliant and bright. And enjoyable! All of those poets surprise me constantly, and like all great writers, they mess with other writers, transforming other writers’ aesthetics and subject matter. It's impossible and pointless (and less fun) to resist.

KMD:  I’d love to chat about the extent to which poetry and criticism overlap and intersect.  To what extent do you see poetry as an act of reading and response, a deconstruction of work that’s come before your own?   

NC:  I think all poetry is shaped by its precursors, whether hundreds of years earlier or the new release dog-eared on the bedside table. “Nothing new under the sun,” etc. But despite the derivative nature of all works of art, there’s much play at the boundary in which one’s own consciousness—itself shaped by the explosions of stars and deoxyribonucleic acid and junk streaming on Netflix—can contribute something at least with the illusion of newness. Even if it’s all just the shuffling of a preordained deck of cards, we can be surprised when we end up for four aces one right after another, and the more open we are to the alchemy of one’s own artistic collision with history.

Poet Spotlight: Kelly Weber [by Emma Bolden]

Kelly Weber's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, The Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University, where she served as an intern with Colorado Review. She lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.

A Conversation with Kelly Weber 

Emma Bolden:  Your debut full-length collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Can you tell us a bit about it? 

Kelly Weber:  I’m so excited for this collection to be making its way into the world. We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place considers asexuality, aromanticism, and the male gaze broadly through the prism of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. So a lot of the book is about myth-making and finding the lyric space and language for my experience of asexuality and aromanticism. Some of the poems are variations on prose poem sonnet forms in order to consider and question inherited poetic traditions (and assumptions) of eros and its containers. They’re poems that are heavily concerned with place, particularly the kinds of rural areas I grew up in as a queer person.

EB:  One of the things I admire most about your work is the way that you work with form and structure: prose poems with virgules, lines broken internally with white space, placement on the page. How do you approach form and structure in your work?

KW:  Thank you so much for saying that! When I approach structure for a poem, part of my process for finding the right form is playing with visual arrangements that excite me. Sometimes a poem that just isn’t “going” in the revision process unlocks when I start pushing it around the page in new ways—the poem begins to “move” and breathe differently and the ideas change when I try out caesura, or shift from traditional lines to a prose poem with virgules, or use any other form idea that I think is fun to play with. The poem may not stay in that form, but I always learn something in the process. Sometimes the key is just trying out different forms to unlock the poem’s rhythm. Form can be a way to find pulse. Changes in punctuation, breath, and visual arrangement on the page can make the small but ultimate difference to surprise me and, I think, surprise the poem out into the open, finally. More experimental forms also feel like less pressure than really traditional-looking sonnets or villanelles, for example. Creating my own form rules clears the room out—so to speak—so it’s just me and the poem learning the dance together.

EB:  What’s the best and worst advice you’ve been given as a writer?

KW:  Such a hard question! I think all writing advice I’ve been given comes from a good place, but I ultimately learned a lot by determining which advice wasn’t right for me. I think the advice to know the purpose and function of every single part of your and your book is well-meaning, but I think that can reduce some of the mystery. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received came out of a roundtable conversation with some other writers and a visiting lecturer several years ago, when this subject came up. We were talking about the common advice that, as a writer, you’re supposed to know how to justify every single choice you make in a poem and understand everything happening in a poem and a book. And basically the conversation became about debunking that—that, in fact, there’s no way to understand everything happening in a book or poem, and in fact part of the pleasure of poetry is its mystery. Like another incredible writer, Kristin McIntyre, has said—sometimes we don’t know exactly what is happening in our poems, but we know it’s poetry. There’s a lot to be said for instinct. Dan Beachy-Quick talks about finding the formal logic of the poem while also not really knowing that or focusing on that while in the writing of the poem itself (that’s such a terrible paraphrase—sorry, Dan!), and I think that’s become such a part of my poetics. You don’t have to know everything of how one of your poems is working. Sometimes it just clicks in mysterious ways. You feel it in your body like weather. Even if you’re an expert in craft and critical analysis, I think it’s important for all of us to find the areas of mystery we can’t fully explain in our own poems and books—it’s how we know the poem is an alive thing.

EB:  As an asexual writer myself, I feel that your work is an important and vital addition to asexual literature. I’d love to hear your thoughts about asexual and aro/ace representation, in your own work and/or in literature more generally.

KW: Thank you so much! That means a lot to me! I think the biggest thing for me in my own work is that my poems come out of just one person’s experience. Everyone who’s ace or aro has their own unique, individual experience, so my poems reflect what it’s like for me to be ace, but others who are ace may have very different experiences from this. When I started to write poems about being queer, I had kind of a tough time finding other books of poems about asexuality. What representation there is (in poetry and beyond) is still systemically, predominantly white (and cis, and able-bodied, and thin-bodied, and neuroconforming / neurotypical, and other privileged identities) and dominated by white voices, like me—I have a ton of privilege and I’ve benefited from it. We need to improve that in our field and beyond, big time. We need a much more diverse variety of voices for true representation.

Outside of poetry, there are a couple great books out right now that I think have brought the topic and experiences of asexuality into wider conversations: Angela Chen’s Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex and Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality. I hope asexuality continues to enter the discourse more.

EB:  What are you working on now?

KW:  Currently I’m working on and thinking about poems that engage with the people dear to me whom I love platonically—family and chosen family and the many beloveds in my life. I’m also thinking a lot about my gender identity as a nonbinary person and the communities I’m so grateful to be a part of. I’m thinking about spaces for queer joy, including—sometimes—the body.

EB: What are you reading right now?

KW:  I’m currently reading the anthologies Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics and Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. I also just started The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Iliana Rocha’s just stunning new book from Tupelo. I got to hear her read some of it a few weeks ago for an offsite AWP reading and it’s incredible. Highly recommend all three books, especially for National Poetry Month.

_________________________________________

A Portfolio of Poetry by Kelly Weber

INSTEAD OF ANOTHER X-RAY

 

let your hands pull my ribs back today.

Not light dividing bone from the softer shadows

but your voice slitting me 

from pelvis to chin, hiding among the hollows

feather after feather

like the yellow flower my mother painted

floating above the blue hills 

while I slept under morphine, winter cloud.

Once I cared for an ashbed full of animal skeletons,

my throat swallowing fistful after fistful of glass.

All the fossils soft enough

to still be marrow instead of rock.

When I cradle the skull of the mare

again, you kneel beside me, both of us holding

the twelve-million-year old body 

giving birth to a stillborn foal cupped in her hips. 

One hoof pressed against the absence

her heart makes. Morning pinks

the plains ice. You bury the birds in my pelvis

and say my name. 

Our bones remember water. Each day

I negotiate another way to live. 

 

_______________________________________________________

 

PORTRAIT OF CRIB WITH COYOTE SKULL INSIDE

 

1.

 

Because again the bar with steer horns 

mounted above the bottles and mirror, ranchers with barb-

scarred knuckles clutching glasses

of whiskey, their dark lapels 

gathered like ravens at their throats. 

Because snow gathering in my mouth

from the street, forsythia caught behind my teeth.

Because my legs in tights, because fox and rabbit

sewn with sawdust and posed in pursuit around the room,

because my friend photographing flowers in her hair

and titling it theft—petal, long strand—

because the smell of aftershave and cigarette leaning forward,
someone pressing their breath to the back of my neck,

someone’s brother or someone’s father or someone’s son,

a door made of wrists I have chewed my way through—

 

2.

 

Because again the eyes of my mother

in the doe I approach in the woods. 

My arm around her neck

pressing her long face soft as rust 

against my cheek. Because once I used her hand mirror

to peer between my legs, pearls

studding the folds of pink lace

around the glass.

Like the flies that scripture her tongue

when I find her, hooves dangling off the flatbed.

Because my hands trying to lift the body

heavy as a child. Because for any hoofed thing 

life must be a balance of panic and poise,

stillness before buckle into snow. Because it is my hand

on the knife, sawing hide from muscle and undoing

mother, your spine.

 

_______________________________________________________

 

QUEERPLATONIC: ALL ASPENS SHARE A HEART SYSTEM

 

But what are my lungs if not your hands buried in my chest? We sleep

in the mountain’s shadow, curled beneath a blanket of horsehair

 

and stars, kissed with kerosene and dust. Winds trembling daughter

aspens. If your father knew to call this queer, would he break

 

a wall or into a mouthful of snow? I watch dawn take the peak

from our cabin window, char forged to lake’s rippled ache, our blood

 

still learning to breathe up here, pink grafting granite to black sky, stars. You

rise from the bed we share as friends and run before me, fog a cradle of antlers.

 

If I press your small palm against my side to feel the frantic pulse,

frost will gather on your fingers like a window shocked warm.

 

If I erode my breath into praise, I can call this a kind of faith.

_____________________________________________

It is not faith, how a mountain gives up its winter

 

but the shock of killing warmth, fire hungering the lungs of birds.

If you press a palm to tundra, each blade can take a hundred years to pulse

 

back. My immunosuppressed body catches and lets go of each bright fracture.

Tell me how our blood locks across distances, hips a canyon of hard stars. Tell me 

 

how I can’t even say I love you, my girl-mouth a wire in the dark. 

I know how to starve for someone’s touch. You once scooped a bird that hit the wall,

 

your fingers so slender I saw red light through skin. You folded its trembling 

in your hands and snapped its neck. We used to dance in the horse barn. You

 

gripping my wrists in the old smell of animal sweat. 

I’ve risked sharing my breath with you.

 

_______________________________________________________

 

ENDINGS TO POEMS ABOUT GRIEF I CANNOT BEGIN

 

because in the months without touch

there was nothing but missing you, friend, nothing

but ache to hold you, but menstruating thick as candle wax,

but how you said my name

like the opposite of infection and T cell blooming,

us talking each other through each month with our faces pixeled 

into wound, how I couldn’t bear to let myself love you

—skin-hungry and unjawed as a snake—

and you loved me anyway.

 

*

how she licked her fawn’s ear in dawn ash, how leaf-shaped soot

from the forest fire struck me right here in the sternum, where your arm

grafts my chest to you.

 

*

both of us counting all our losses in our uncut hair.

 

*

when the midwives open us, do they hold the grief in our hips

as gently as we do for each other?

 

*

I am that animal

dragging herself to the warm weight of friends

like you, how my chest is a pneumatic hive of breath and blood honey

rhyming matchstick with marrow and forest burned

with the small of my back, a place for you to cry.

 

*

we have loved each other so many years

and still we are learning the language to say I

invite you in, I trust with my sinew, womb, collar

—o star harness. you can always come home to this

perishing light though it is.

 

*

the disaster we took as future, as some time

has been unfurling its radiant ruin all along

beside us, all along our now kindling hoofs in my lungs, 

thirst in the prickly pear spines we mistook for nipples.

 

*

quiet as a bone

you take my hand.

 

*

because if lightning gathers above us on horseback 

we are supposed to climb off the mares’ warm bodies

and let the bolts strike them instead. because sometimes

we have no choice but to ground ourselves, to love ourselves enough 

to love someone else. because we can rest our breath in each other

and trust the light that comes in all its fierce untethering.

 

*

—but instead, for you, just because you’re blueing a little today

I’d cut my mouth on wind

blowing the bluestem flat in snow,

sever my tongue and press it against your jaw

to fever down the words, press a steaming mug

into your palms. snow into a womb, hold bruise

-eyed chicks in my mouth for you. make a nest for our bodies

of steel and paper, tight as a knife

in a jealous boy’s pocket.

 

*

after I bled into a woman’s hands,

I sent you a card of a pressed yucca blossom

because I knew you were hurting, because I wanted you to know

you were loved. if you cup my shoulder, I will warm your palm 

like a blue glass candle. I will keep finding ways to love you, 

to beg more time of this sky stained with the lungs of birds

bending hunger to absent meridian, all these cicadas’ desperate faith 

singing such unmiraculous extinction.

 

*

ash falling into your lungs, another medical bill in your hands. 

I just

want to cover you.

 

*

the drawing of a trachea I made in health class, the body a loop 

of graphite on butcher paper, the salmon-spill of belly

sketched rough but steady, the way my mother taught me:

one continuous line, an attention that, nonetheless, will not save us.

 

*

and I

keep measuring the time that is left by the length

of your ribs, by each year I have learned to open myself

more to you. the shelter we make of each other.

 

_______________________________________________________

 

ON BEING THE QUEER PERSON I WAS ALWAYS AFRAID I’D BE

 

when you breathe on the bed next to me

I remember when I went searching for wild foxes

 

because I didn’t want to keep holding your name under my tongue

until it killed me. Because I tried so hard not to love you, let you love me

 

but like the skinned heifer that fell off the back of the truck

that the flies found in the middle of the road near my house

 

I was zipped into such a sequined blood-humming

for you. You, hematite mercy in me

 

a lodestone I can find any time

I lose my way. This poem a home I’ve tried to make for you

 

the way I hold everything soft in my belly,

every highway where barbed wire stitches the winter clouds shut

 

looping across my hips, knees, sacrum. If you open your eyes

if you take my wrist’s pulse between your fingers, 

 

the canyon’s frozen river will bloom purple lupine

right out of the ice, each valve in my chest a place you can hide

 

your unholiest prayers. You give me back to myself, make me

what I am, the way breath and flesh join at the sternum. Why

 

is it so hard just to say it, just to choir our tongues into words

all the fathers in our lives never wanted us

 

to learn? Before I met you, a woman accused me of my mouth

before I knew what it meant, before I knew if I wanted

 

to be her or be close to her, or that I was ace. And the rarest of times since

I thought I felt something for a girl, I learned to hold my breath

 

for you. Because it would’ve been easier just to stop my mouth

the way I stopped my hands from tightening your black peacoat

 

around you when it snowed around us in that mountain city,

when you told me your list of your dead you carry, and I 

 

didn’t pull you into a hug so tight it crushed your paper coffee cup between us—

but now you say it and press your palms to my sick belly, the x-rays

 

of my gut looping up past my heart, the needle bruises in my thighs

where I have to wound myself every other week to stay alive.

 

I couldn’t find any foxes because they all died of mange. 

So call this what it is—how you move toward me

 

first, how you say it when I can’t. Lace your fingers with mine across my navel—

call this a cauterized moon, the place where I separated from my mother’s body

 

to find yours. Call this belief blush and maxilla, index of fevers, call it fossil

that remembers water enough to be soft. Call it vein

 

encrypted with your voice, rhapsody of ghost, call it how I’ll always come find

you, call it so loud we can’t hear all the people grafting scripture to the air

 

against the local Pride club hosting a drag show to beat cancer. Call it

my immune system turning your hands gliding over me

 

to cloud shadow. Call it how language lives in a warm place inside you

and you invite me there. Because to be loved 

 

by someone’s throat is to let the wind take you to your knees, to worry 

you’re enough to depend upon. The heart an animal staggering away from the road

 

to the field of snow. Call her name and see how fast she can run

to your side. If you—if we—want to. If we let each other in. If stay. If we say it

 

there’s no going back. If your cheekbones are telephone wires splitting dawn

into stanzas of birds. If you open their singing inside me.

 

If you hold me here, one hand on my clavicle, against the cold,

if we can hug each other through the ribs like it’s enough.

 

 

 

Kelly Weber's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, The Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University, where she served as an intern with Colorado Review. She lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.

A Conversation with Kelly Weber 

Emma Bolden:  Your debut full-length collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Can you tell us a bit about it? 

Kelly Weber:  I’m so excited for this collection to be making its way into the world. We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place considers asexuality, aromanticism, and the male gaze broadly through the prism of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. So a lot of the book is about myth-making and finding the lyric space and language for my experience of asexuality and aromanticism. Some of the poems are variations on prose poem sonnet forms in order to consider and question inherited poetic traditions (and assumptions) of eros and its containers. They’re poems that are heavily concerned with place, particularly the kinds of rural areas I grew up in as a queer person.

EB:  One of the things I admire most about your work is the way that you work with form and structure: prose poems with virgules, lines broken internally with white space, placement on the page. How do you approach form and structure in your work?

KW:  Thank you so much for saying that! When I approach structure for a poem, part of my process for finding the right form is playing with visual arrangements that excite me. Sometimes a poem that just isn’t “going” in the revision process unlocks when I start pushing it around the page in new ways—the poem begins to “move” and breathe differently and the ideas change when I try out caesura, or shift from traditional lines to a prose poem with virgules, or use any other form idea that I think is fun to play with. The poem may not stay in that form, but I always learn something in the process. Sometimes the key is just trying out different forms to unlock the poem’s rhythm. Form can be a way to find pulse. Changes in punctuation, breath, and visual arrangement on the page can make the small but ultimate difference to surprise me and, I think, surprise the poem out into the open, finally. More experimental forms also feel like less pressure than really traditional-looking sonnets or villanelles, for example. Creating my own form rules clears the room out—so to speak—so it’s just me and the poem learning the dance together.

EB:  What’s the best and worst advice you’ve been given as a writer?

KW:  Such a hard question! I think all writing advice I’ve been given comes from a good place, but I ultimately learned a lot by determining which advice wasn’t right for me. I think the advice to know the purpose and function of every single part of your and your book is well-meaning, but I think that can reduce some of the mystery. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received came out of a roundtable conversation with some other writers and a visiting lecturer several years ago, when this subject came up. We were talking about the common advice that, as a writer, you’re supposed to know how to justify every single choice you make in a poem and understand everything happening in a poem and a book. And basically the conversation became about debunking that—that, in fact, there’s no way to understand everything happening in a book or poem, and in fact part of the pleasure of poetry is its mystery. Like another incredible writer, Kristin McIntyre, has said—sometimes we don’t know exactly what is happening in our poems, but we know it’s poetry. There’s a lot to be said for instinct. Dan Beachy-Quick talks about finding the formal logic of the poem while also not really knowing that or focusing on that while in the writing of the poem itself (that’s such a terrible paraphrase—sorry, Dan!), and I think that’s become such a part of my poetics. You don’t have to know everything of how one of your poems is working. Sometimes it just clicks in mysterious ways. You feel it in your body like weather. Even if you’re an expert in craft and critical analysis, I think it’s important for all of us to find the areas of mystery we can’t fully explain in our own poems and books—it’s how we know the poem is an alive thing.

EB:  As an asexual writer myself, I feel that your work is an important and vital addition to asexual literature. I’d love to hear your thoughts about asexual and aro/ace representation, in your own work and/or in literature more generally.

KW: Thank you so much! That means a lot to me! I think the biggest thing for me in my own work is that my poems come out of just one person’s experience. Everyone who’s ace or aro has their own unique, individual experience, so my poems reflect what it’s like for me to be ace, but others who are ace may have very different experiences from this. When I started to write poems about being queer, I had kind of a tough time finding other books of poems about asexuality. What representation there is (in poetry and beyond) is still systemically, predominantly white (and cis, and able-bodied, and thin-bodied, and neuroconforming / neurotypical, and other privileged identities) and dominated by white voices, like me—I have a ton of privilege and I’ve benefited from it. We need to improve that in our field and beyond, big time. We need a much more diverse variety of voices for true representation.

Outside of poetry, there are a couple great books out right now that I think have brought the topic and experiences of asexuality into wider conversations: Angela Chen’s Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex and Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality. I hope asexuality continues to enter the discourse more.

EB:  What are you working on now?

KW:  Currently I’m working on and thinking about poems that engage with the people dear to me whom I love platonically—family and chosen family and the many beloveds in my life. I’m also thinking a lot about my gender identity as a nonbinary person and the communities I’m so grateful to be a part of. I’m thinking about spaces for queer joy, including—sometimes—the body.

EB: What are you reading right now?

KW:  I’m currently reading the anthologies Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics and Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. I also just started The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Iliana Rocha’s just stunning new book from Tupelo. I got to hear her read some of it a few weeks ago for an offsite AWP reading and it’s incredible. Highly recommend all three books, especially for National Poetry Month.

_________________________________________

A Portfolio of Poetry by Kelly Weber

INSTEAD OF ANOTHER X-RAY

 

let your hands pull my ribs back today.

Not light dividing bone from the softer shadows

but your voice slitting me 

from pelvis to chin, hiding among the hollows

feather after feather

like the yellow flower my mother painted

floating above the blue hills 

while I slept under morphine, winter cloud.

Once I cared for an ashbed full of animal skeletons,

my throat swallowing fistful after fistful of glass.

All the fossils soft enough

to still be marrow instead of rock.

When I cradle the skull of the mare

again, you kneel beside me, both of us holding

the twelve-million-year old body 

giving birth to a stillborn foal cupped in her hips. 

One hoof pressed against the absence

her heart makes. Morning pinks

the plains ice. You bury the birds in my pelvis

and say my name. 

Our bones remember water. Each day

I negotiate another way to live. 

 

_______________________________________________________

 

PORTRAIT OF CRIB WITH COYOTE SKULL INSIDE

 

1.

 

Because again the bar with steer horns 

mounted above the bottles and mirror, ranchers with barb-

scarred knuckles clutching glasses

of whiskey, their dark lapels 

gathered like ravens at their throats. 

Because snow gathering in my mouth

from the street, forsythia caught behind my teeth.

Because my legs in tights, because fox and rabbit

sewn with sawdust and posed in pursuit around the room,

because my friend photographing flowers in her hair

and titling it theft—petal, long strand—

because the smell of aftershave and cigarette leaning forward,
someone pressing their breath to the back of my neck,

someone’s brother or someone’s father or someone’s son,

a door made of wrists I have chewed my way through—

 

2.

 

Because again the eyes of my mother

in the doe I approach in the woods. 

My arm around her neck

pressing her long face soft as rust 

against my cheek. Because once I used her hand mirror

to peer between my legs, pearls

studding the folds of pink lace

around the glass.

Like the flies that scripture her tongue

when I find her, hooves dangling off the flatbed.

Because my hands trying to lift the body

heavy as a child. Because for any hoofed thing 

life must be a balance of panic and poise,

stillness before buckle into snow. Because it is my hand

on the knife, sawing hide from muscle and undoing

mother, your spine.

 

_______________________________________________________

 

QUEERPLATONIC: ALL ASPENS SHARE A HEART SYSTEM

 

But what are my lungs if not your hands buried in my chest? We sleep

in the mountain’s shadow, curled beneath a blanket of horsehair

 

and stars, kissed with kerosene and dust. Winds trembling daughter

aspens. If your father knew to call this queer, would he break

 

a wall or into a mouthful of snow? I watch dawn take the peak

from our cabin window, char forged to lake’s rippled ache, our blood

 

still learning to breathe up here, pink grafting granite to black sky, stars. You

rise from the bed we share as friends and run before me, fog a cradle of antlers.

 

If I press your small palm against my side to feel the frantic pulse,

frost will gather on your fingers like a window shocked warm.

 

If I erode my breath into praise, I can call this a kind of faith.

_____________________________________________

It is not faith, how a mountain gives up its winter

 

but the shock of killing warmth, fire hungering the lungs of birds.

If you press a palm to tundra, each blade can take a hundred years to pulse

 

back. My immunosuppressed body catches and lets go of each bright fracture.

Tell me how our blood locks across distances, hips a canyon of hard stars. Tell me 

 

how I can’t even say I love you, my girl-mouth a wire in the dark. 

I know how to starve for someone’s touch. You once scooped a bird that hit the wall,

 

your fingers so slender I saw red light through skin. You folded its trembling 

in your hands and snapped its neck. We used to dance in the horse barn. You

 

gripping my wrists in the old smell of animal sweat. 

I’ve risked sharing my breath with you.

 

_______________________________________________________

 

ENDINGS TO POEMS ABOUT GRIEF I CANNOT BEGIN

 

because in the months without touch

there was nothing but missing you, friend, nothing

but ache to hold you, but menstruating thick as candle wax,

but how you said my name

like the opposite of infection and T cell blooming,

us talking each other through each month with our faces pixeled 

into wound, how I couldn’t bear to let myself love you

—skin-hungry and unjawed as a snake—

and you loved me anyway.

 

*

how she licked her fawn’s ear in dawn ash, how leaf-shaped soot

from the forest fire struck me right here in the sternum, where your arm

grafts my chest to you.

 

*

both of us counting all our losses in our uncut hair.

 

*

when the midwives open us, do they hold the grief in our hips

as gently as we do for each other?

 

*

I am that animal

dragging herself to the warm weight of friends

like you, how my chest is a pneumatic hive of breath and blood honey

rhyming matchstick with marrow and forest burned

with the small of my back, a place for you to cry.

 

*

we have loved each other so many years

and still we are learning the language to say I

invite you in, I trust with my sinew, womb, collar

—o star harness. you can always come home to this

perishing light though it is.

 

*

the disaster we took as future, as some time

has been unfurling its radiant ruin all along

beside us, all along our now kindling hoofs in my lungs, 

thirst in the prickly pear spines we mistook for nipples.

 

*

quiet as a bone

you take my hand.

 

*

because if lightning gathers above us on horseback 

we are supposed to climb off the mares’ warm bodies

and let the bolts strike them instead. because sometimes

we have no choice but to ground ourselves, to love ourselves enough 

to love someone else. because we can rest our breath in each other

and trust the light that comes in all its fierce untethering.

 

*

—but instead, for you, just because you’re blueing a little today

I’d cut my mouth on wind

blowing the bluestem flat in snow,

sever my tongue and press it against your jaw

to fever down the words, press a steaming mug

into your palms. snow into a womb, hold bruise

-eyed chicks in my mouth for you. make a nest for our bodies

of steel and paper, tight as a knife

in a jealous boy’s pocket.

 

*

after I bled into a woman’s hands,

I sent you a card of a pressed yucca blossom

because I knew you were hurting, because I wanted you to know

you were loved. if you cup my shoulder, I will warm your palm 

like a blue glass candle. I will keep finding ways to love you, 

to beg more time of this sky stained with the lungs of birds

bending hunger to absent meridian, all these cicadas’ desperate faith 

singing such unmiraculous extinction.

 

*

ash falling into your lungs, another medical bill in your hands. 

I just

want to cover you.

 

*

the drawing of a trachea I made in health class, the body a loop 

of graphite on butcher paper, the salmon-spill of belly

sketched rough but steady, the way my mother taught me:

one continuous line, an attention that, nonetheless, will not save us.

 

*

and I

keep measuring the time that is left by the length

of your ribs, by each year I have learned to open myself

more to you. the shelter we make of each other.

 

_______________________________________________________

 

ON BEING THE QUEER PERSON I WAS ALWAYS AFRAID I’D BE

 

when you breathe on the bed next to me

I remember when I went searching for wild foxes

 

because I didn’t want to keep holding your name under my tongue

until it killed me. Because I tried so hard not to love you, let you love me

 

but like the skinned heifer that fell off the back of the truck

that the flies found in the middle of the road near my house

 

I was zipped into such a sequined blood-humming

for you. You, hematite mercy in me

 

a lodestone I can find any time

I lose my way. This poem a home I’ve tried to make for you

 

the way I hold everything soft in my belly,

every highway where barbed wire stitches the winter clouds shut

 

looping across my hips, knees, sacrum. If you open your eyes

if you take my wrist’s pulse between your fingers, 

 

the canyon’s frozen river will bloom purple lupine

right out of the ice, each valve in my chest a place you can hide

 

your unholiest prayers. You give me back to myself, make me

what I am, the way breath and flesh join at the sternum. Why

 

is it so hard just to say it, just to choir our tongues into words

all the fathers in our lives never wanted us

 

to learn? Before I met you, a woman accused me of my mouth

before I knew what it meant, before I knew if I wanted

 

to be her or be close to her, or that I was ace. And the rarest of times since

I thought I felt something for a girl, I learned to hold my breath

 

for you. Because it would’ve been easier just to stop my mouth

the way I stopped my hands from tightening your black peacoat

 

around you when it snowed around us in that mountain city,

when you told me your list of your dead you carry, and I 

 

didn’t pull you into a hug so tight it crushed your paper coffee cup between us—

but now you say it and press your palms to my sick belly, the x-rays

 

of my gut looping up past my heart, the needle bruises in my thighs

where I have to wound myself every other week to stay alive.

 

I couldn’t find any foxes because they all died of mange. 

So call this what it is—how you move toward me

 

first, how you say it when I can’t. Lace your fingers with mine across my navel—

call this a cauterized moon, the place where I separated from my mother’s body

 

to find yours. Call this belief blush and maxilla, index of fevers, call it fossil

that remembers water enough to be soft. Call it vein

 

encrypted with your voice, rhapsody of ghost, call it how I’ll always come find

you, call it so loud we can’t hear all the people grafting scripture to the air

 

against the local Pride club hosting a drag show to beat cancer. Call it

my immune system turning your hands gliding over me

 

to cloud shadow. Call it how language lives in a warm place inside you

and you invite me there. Because to be loved 

 

by someone’s throat is to let the wind take you to your knees, to worry 

you’re enough to depend upon. The heart an animal staggering away from the road

 

to the field of snow. Call her name and see how fast she can run

to your side. If you—if we—want to. If we let each other in. If stay. If we say it

 

there’s no going back. If your cheekbones are telephone wires splitting dawn

into stanzas of birds. If you open their singing inside me.

 

If you hold me here, one hand on my clavicle, against the cold,

if we can hug each other through the ribs like it’s enough.

 

 

 

Alexey Tsvetkov: In Memoriam [by Andrey Gritsman]

“I am here together with myself and alone”

The great Russian poet Alexey Tsvetkov just passed away (February 1947- May 12, 2022).

He is a world-class poet, a world poet who happened to write in Russian.

Tsvetkov created his own poetic language, unrepeatable, addictive. Once started, a poem or a book could not be put down. One read to the end possessed by its magic. His incredible play, not of words, but of thoughts and images, bewitched the reader, as did his humor.

Alexey told us: whenever I write, I always write about death. The poet puts what’s created along with what is unsayable into metaphorical form. That is the power of poetry by Tsvetkov: he always writes about what is most important, what is deepest and darkest, presented metaphorically with an amazing mastery of words and meanings. His style of recital  I would characterize as toreutic, precise, cadential, and, on the other hand, paradoxically close to a natural speech, personal verbal communication.

Born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, formerly the Austro-Hungarian empire, Tsvetkov was educated in Odessa and Moscow. In Moscow together with other famous poets (Soprovsky, Gandlevsky, Kenzheev) he founded legendary underground poetry group Moscow Time. He emigrated to USA in 1975 after his arrest in Moscow and forced move to the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhya. He was awarded PhD degree in Slavic Studies from University of Michigan. 

Tsvetkov spent many years in Europe working as a journalist for the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe (Munich and Prague, 1989-2004). He anchored the RFE/RL Russian Service programs The Seventh Continent and The Atlantic Diary.  He lived his last years in New York City among his poet friends. Supporting himself as a freelance journalist and essayist, he produced a large body of original, unique and very popular poetry. He read his poems at the Cornelia Street Café, Russian Samovar, Columbia University and other venues. In 2018 he moved to Israel, where he died.

Tsvetkov was an individual of very broad erudition, rough on the surface, very kind, with stunning sharp sense of humor. His poems in English are most unusual:  cadential, almost syllabo-tonic, very tight. But it looked very natural - the same poet, writing in a different language.

He was the author of ten books of poetry and translated Shakespeare’s Hamlet. His heritage will be studied and it will take a long time to look into layers of Tsvetkov’s art and thought.

Alexey Tsvetkov

the quiet ones

in a recurring dream i find myself
stuck in a tiny town a green and neat
affair the locals scarce and studiously silent
for the most part avoid me and stay indoors
although i dwell among them i assume
myself to be a thing apart the town
is strangely shorn of outskirts there's a river
flowing from north to south and the main street
cutting across with a bridge in the middle
yet both are terminated in oblivion

beset by this conundrum i've come up
with a hypothesis perhaps the locals
are candidates to be born on earth that never
made up their minds about the matter shaped
in human form already but afraid
to take the plunge hedging their bets and this
is what the actual limbo is like the river
forever runs on the road likewise but both
resolve themselves into the void the locals
would find it pointless to wake up their green
and tidy town remains the same no matter
whichever side of the retina it's on
the quiet ones within their silent walls
what do they want of us they share no subject
with us to serve them as a starting point
for striking up a palaver

it looks
like a half-way house perhaps a railway station
but with the waiting crowd resigned to the tracks
having been dismantled so that no train will ever
stop here they look alive but never having
been actually exiled to our vale of grief
there is no way for them to share our joy
the only thing they envy us in earnest
is death denied to the unborn it is
a mystery for them and a temptation
and i remaining stubbornly asleep
fall into a confusion like a rabbit
teasing a python on the eve of being
consumed by the above and peeking under
death's skirts then part of me awakens i
recall the other's name but hush it up

 

Andrey Gritsman

In Memory of Alexey Tsvetkov

What can be said about unsayable?
Poet departs with all his belongings.
To say nothing: it is unbearable.
On tree of life - invisible markings.

His airborne light verbs, evasive,
Escapable, straight and relentless.
Who knows what one is capable
Of, while alive and restless.

What is left now: only new language
Speaking in tongues, and no sound.
He rests in peace, his last message
Only by those can be found

Only by those, who departed
Crossing the line into darkness
Keeping belongings in heart and
Calling him: the answer is silence.

Editor Spotlight: Hasanthika Sirisena [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Hasanthika Sirisena work has been anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017), in Every Day People: The Color of Life(Atria Books, 2018), and twice named a notable story by Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. She is currently faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Susquehanna University and she is acting editor at West Branch magazine. Her books include the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and the forthcoming essay collection Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University 2021). 

Kristina Marie Darling:  You are an accomplished cross-disciplinary practitioner, whose work exists in spite of and beyond the categories of writing and art.  How did you first become interested in creating cross-disciplinary work?   

Hasanthika Sirisena:  I started drawing when I was very young. I never thought of myself as very smart and I struggled with English and with writing. Drawing allowed me to have confidence and gave me a means of articulating myself. I went on to study fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago and, in fact, have a BFA so I have a long and deep training in visual media. I really only started writing in my early thirties and for a little while I stopped drawing. Cross-disciplinary and hybrid work has allowed me to merge these two identities. 

KMD:  Tell me some of the ways that cross-disciplinary work is or can be politically charged.   

HS:  Cross-disciplinary work often asks us to think about and rethink our assumptions of form. For example, I’m currently reading Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson’s The Trojan Woman, A Comic.  I was delighted when the book arrived and was the size and heft of a children’s book. The translation itself rethinks what it means to actually make a translation. The opening references James Baldwin and Joan Didion (and probably a few other writers I missed.) I can’t read Greek but I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by assuming that the original play doesn’t allude to Baldwin much less quote Didion. The playfulness here—with the boundaries and capaciousness of language and intent—force me to confront how we decide who gets to make art and the audiences they make art for. 

But it’s the images themselves that are extraordinary. The images stand in for the actor and ask us to meditate on what an illustration—either drawn or acted—actually is.  How does an illustration contain force and agency? All this for a work that is also a profoundly antiwar message.  

Honestly, just asking us to stop and think and deliberate is a political act.  

KMD:  I’d love to hear about one piece from TQ that you selected or curated that stayed with you.  What made it memorable?   

HS:  Well, I wasn’t the one who selected Sarah Minor’s “A Poetry Comic” in Issue 25 but I’m deeply in love with it. Everything is so expertly rendered, from the quality, and energy, of the line drawings to the beauty of the language. I feel I could stare forever into the flames of “Photos from a fight appear to capture two people in love” panel. 

Laci Mosier is a former student of mine and I want to plug her collages (also in Issue 25). She is dedicated to the physical process of cutting, slicing, tearing—as opposed to computer generated collages—and I loved the physicality, humor, and deep intelligence of her work. (Quick note: I also do a lot of digital drawing and painting so I’m not at all against that.)  

KMD:  What advice do you have for poets who are interested in creating hybrid or cross-disciplinary work, who excel at writing but perhaps don’t have the technical facility with film, collage, or visual mediums?   

"Crimson is the Color of Shame": a Poetry Challenge [by Clark Thomas]

Crimson is the Color of Shame
-- for David Lehman

The demand on young Jews
to be less visibly and confidently Jews
is the price of social toleration
which found its most recent iteration
in the Harvard Crimson
editorial endorsing the Philistines vs Samson,
that is, the boycott movement against Israel
which is a big and ugly deal
according to Einat Wilf, in a sound-
ly argued essay. She calls it (BDS) the “pound
of flesh,” echoing The Merchant of Venice,
reminding us of a perpetual menace,
the attempt to intimidate the Jews
into being less Jewy, a typical political ruse.

-- Clark Thomas

"I wrote this poem at David Lehman's invitation in an attempt to refute his statement that 'political poems are usually successful neither as poems nor as political maneuvers.'"  -- C.T.

David Lehman replies: "Clark Thomas wrote to me that he would take up the 'poetry challenge' implicit in my arguing that political poetry is a doomed and often self-defeating proposition. While I applaud his use of rhyme, and the way he condenses an intelligent and ambitious essay into the box of a sonnet, I am far from confident that the result is more than a superior letter to the editor.  What do readers think?"

"Where's that map of the Middle East?" -- God

from Einat Wilf, "The BDS Pound of Flesh" in Tablet
<<<
When I attended college in the United States in the mid-1990s, liberal, left-wing Jews could comfortably be pro-Israel and even active in AIPAC without any fear of repercussions or social pressure to hand over a pound of flesh. That changed with the emergence of J Street, IfNotNow, and Jewish Voice for Peace, until we arrived at the present condition, in which a Jewish student who does not show herself to be an ally of Students for Justice in Palestine, or does not agree that “Zionism equals racism,” or that Zionism is a form of apartheid, and Nazism, and white supremacy, and whatever other supreme evil will be identified next, cannot be considered a good Jew. This escalation in anti-Israel activism among some young Jews no longer seemed like a natural and excusable choice shaped by different generational circumstances, but the result of a relentless campaign of bullying.

Over the last several months, as a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., I taught a course called “Zionism and Anti-Zionism.” In the many hours I spent discussing student life with students and faculty alike, it became apparent that the anti-Zionist activism on campus—the college version of the pound of flesh dynamic—was not primarily a form of social protest or political expression, but a form of bullying. The anti-Zionist activists, like classic bullies, deliberately targeted the real and perceived frailties of their Jewish peers—fear or shame in the expression of one’s Jewish identity, with its calls to Jewish solidarity and deep connection to a faraway foreign country.

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been one of the most effective expressions of the pound of flesh bullying tactic, inviting young Jews to participate in the cause of “social justice” only to ultimately demand the mutilation of their Jewish identity. BDS has demanded that diaspora Jews not only criticize Israeli government actions, but sever their connections with Israel completely. >>> -- Einat Wilf, "The BDS Pound of Flesh" in Tablet, May 10, 2022

See also https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/is-anti-zionism-anti-semitism in which Isaac tries to out-argue the head of the antri-defamation league on the subject. The best line is  "Give me a -- Isaac" -- where the speaker's frustration is conveyed beautifully. The reader supplies the missing word, "break."

On No Tokens, with Hannah Beresford [by Lauren Hilger]

A Conversation with Poetry Co-Editor Hannah Beresford

 

Lauren Hilger: What is your earliest memory of working with NT poems? 

 

Hannah Beresford: My first submission period with NT, I printed all of the submissions. It was so extra. T Kira literally said, “This is so extra.” What experience I had of an editorial nature was in workshops, and I’d only been in workshops where we distributed hard copies and marked them up by hand. I didn’t know how to get in that mode, to really sink into a poem, through a computer screen. I still feel that way, but am learning restraint. 

 

I am often surprised by how much being an editor–getting behind the scenes of submittable–does not buffer me from the anxiety of submitting, even despite my better judgment. There is so much work we love and have to pass on. Every journal says that, but it really is true! And yet, when those rejects come in my inbox, I lose that context–I feel small again. Does being an editor help you field the trials of being a poet? And if so, help, tell me how!

 

LH: Hah! I have a perverse love for the admin of submitting. I try to maintain the same amount of submissions out at any time. I'm always shocked to receive a personal note or nice rejection, though. It's the moment that breaks (with a human chord) the robotic process I want it to be.

LH: How do you feel about the old adage that one has to read the lit mag before submitting?

 

HB: Sure! In a yes or no sense. Is it a venue for my work, or maybe not so much? If you’re unsure, what have you to lose (unless they charge submission fees)? But, I wouldn’t advise writing toward an aesthetic with a particular venue in mind.

 

LH: I’m wondering, how do you recognize in your own reading that you are gravitating toward a poem? 

 

HB: This is usually a sensory response. My reading or mind’s eye is saturated by a color. That leaves the most lasting impression on me. Then, I experience the poem and its color in a tactile or corporeal way. The metronomic organs have a lot to do with how I experience creative work. Breath, heart rate. And secondarily, the reactive organs. A poem that stays in my mind hasn’t transcended for me. I had a student who would yell “goosies!” when she loved a poem in workshop. We talk about that a lot—whatever you call it. Goosebumps, most often. I don’t know what it is from a scientific standpoint, but when I feel that, I think it’s a response without an outlet. Maybe because it’s a response to something imaginary, or maybe because it’s a response that feels indeterminable, unresolvable. Empathy is unresolvable. Anxiety, fear, desire. Poetry is corporeal, at its genesis, poetry is an art form of and through the body. We experience it mostly on the page now. Maybe I like a poem that knows its roots are in bodies. For a moment it activates and occupies me from some ancient lineage. I’m a grounding rod, and then it’s gone again. Then, right there, is a particular weightlessness. Maybe the relief of feeling hyper-embodied registers like an instant disembodiment. The poem is super-humanizing, then exalting. Yeah, goosies!

 

LH: How soon do you know a piece is asking for you to take it seriously? 

 

HB: In short, it’s a matter of subversion. When a piece continually defies my expectation, I feel most provided for. I hardly ever want to know where I’m going. I want to surrender to the lead, but predictabilities will keep me engaging with the work in a mechanical way. I don’t think a reader can help that; when you see tracks, you follow them. When I feel sure that I can’t get where the piece is going any faster than it will take me there, I’ll resign to the line, or the word, or the page. I want to be humbled, to feel overthrown. 

[No Tokens Issue 9 Cover: Erika Diehl, 2018, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, shot with a Fuji x100]

 

HB: What is a first poem that moved you, and how has your reception changed over the years? 

 

LH:  Bruce Weigl’s "What Saves Us" felt like it had slipped some message under the door for me. As a Catholic kid reading this poem, I kind of fell asleep midway through and thought "yea yea yea okay I know where we're going with this." The end then knocked me out. It still does, in fact, I never remember the end when I bring this poem to mind. I remember the girl, her skirt, the religiosity, but I forget what made me love it: that spooky, unanswerable end!

 

Tell me, how does working as an editor across genre and collections aid in your curating of individual poems as units?

 

HB: I know it isn’t fashionable to prescribe to genre, and I get that. I’m on board. I don’t think there are genre specific limitations. But it would be untrue to say that there are not strengths specific to the differences between how I experience most poems and most prose. (Here, I am permitting an assumption that, more often than not, a prose work exceeds a poetical work in length or volume or time attended to it, per unit.) For example: I love a poem that knows where its ground is but levitates above it. I love that tension, I love that defiance. There is definition, a contour, in the refusal to anchor. To what extent is that kind of suspension above, or resistance to, a grounding plane sustainable in book-length prose? I won’t answer that question. I don’t know! Anything can be done. So, to your question, the more I read and edit and learn across genres, the more I look at a poem and think: here’s an opportunity! I can be pressed to spend more time in this, I can be asked more easily to re-read, I can have more questions in the end. I’m here for it—give me stratums, and coding, and metaphor, give me words to learn and research to be done. A treasure hunt, a Russian doll, the onion—all the clichés. Someone has committed, there’s time to be spent!

 

As an addendum here, it would be negligent to disregard sonics. To me, the sonic quality of a piece overlays or underpins any and every other decision the writer makes. It is a constant accompaniment. It informs everything, but it precludes nothing. Should prose by its nature, regardless of volume or length, be held to any lesser standard of intentionality of sonics than poetry is? Intentionality is key. Should all prose be harmonious, undulating, lyrical, sonorous, or hypotactic? Should all poetry? I want to feel assured that the sonics of a work were a choice; purposeful. Discordance can inform or reinforce meaning or character. Redundancy, imbalance—too. And sometimes, yes, musicality is affecting.

HB: You and I have talked a lot over the years about poetry’s reception in the popular-ish culture. This AWP we talked more specifically about poetry’s reception in the literary culture. If you could speak to any one misconception or have any one thing known about poetry–whether to the greater public, or even amongst writers–what would it be?

 

LH: Poetry threatens everything I think I know sometimes too! And that's okay! Something I say at the beginning of every new class I teach is "you don't have to apologize for not knowing anything about poetry, not being a poet, or hating poetry. You don't have to apologize for being a poet. There is no difference! We're all encountering it together!"

 

How have you sensed NT has evolved or changed? 

 

HB: Maybe it is not so much that we have changed, but our opportunities have broadened. In the beginning, I felt a strong sense of joining the collective of a brilliant masthead. Of course, that is still true—the honor of my life. But more and more, I see NT becoming something of its own as well. More folks have heard of NT and so our slush is more and more dynamic and, honestly, stacked. It’s hit after hit. Our reach as a journal exceeds our individual orbits more and more. There are so many talented people out there. I feel lucky that NT is on the radar of all of our submitters, and more of them every year.

 

What did you expect when you came on board with NT at its very inception? What did NT mean to you then, and what does it mean to you now?

 

LH: I met our founding EIC T Kira at MacDowell and first heard about the magazine over breakfast one morning. After I was offered the position, I remember hoping she'd trust me and that I could do a good job. Almost a decade in, I still want to just do as much as I can. Learning from and connecting with contributors means everything to me. 

 

What is your hope for NT's future?

 

HB: I love the young writers and poets prizes so much. I feel like that’s where my heart is. The young poets blew us away! I’d love to see NT grow more on a community level; programming and initiatives that extend beyond the literary world. An inclusive point of accessibility for reading and writing.

[No Tokens cakes along with Poetry Co-Editors Lauren Hilger & Hannah Beresford]

 

On Games [by Lauren Hilger]

In writing poetry, I’ve found that occupying three different positions is important: cold editor, kind tutor, and just a writer. In looking at my poems as a cold editor, I’m impartial, ruthless, determined. Cold editor is necessary at the end but not before. That role can’t be assumed too soon. Before then, if I’m writing but stuck, holding back, or can’t get where I want by my current methods, I require the kind tutor, and have to act as one to myself and my writing. The kind tutor role offers opportunity through games; yes it's still me looking at the same drafts but changing perspective points out different routes, and doesn’t take it so seriously. 

When I think about doing the crossword, for instance, it never feels like my brain’s time-off so much as part of my brain resting, perhaps, while another tests itself. Trying games with your drafts or to generate writing is a way to see if something unexpected can open up. Braiding what you know with what you don’t. In play, a lot will be addressed. As such, today, I offer five votes for games:

1. Lower the stakes: If you’ve taken a class with me you’ve heard this. Beyond being my thesis as a teacher, I take this stance toward poems. I don’t think pressure allows me to write my best work. If I intend to write something meaningful or “good” the stakes can feel immobilizing. Frankly, it doesn’t matter if I've played this game before, it works. If I say to myself “this is an experiment; none of this will be seen; it doesn't matter; anything you do here is a win” I feel I can write more bravely. If I get there in the end, I don’t mind that I have to trick myself. Here, give this one a try: set a timer for two minutes and give yourself this constraint – try to write monosyllabically. It may be bad but that’s fine. Only up from here. You may find new ways to say what you mean. And I love low, brute words. We have the rest of our life for high Latinate multisyllabic choices. I like that this game forces us to regress verbally. Try it and get back to me. 

[Keats on light and shade]

2. Adding light to shade. A game: set a timer. For five minutes you have to address an individual, could be anyone, but write to them as if you are in the best mood possible. As if you’re feeling incredibly positive. What if you gave yourself this constraint every day for a week? Sometimes I feel like only what’s broken my heart is worthy of my words, so this exercise reminds me I can still write in a way that fights that. Even if you try to write only the good, the shade (what hurts) is still present, so see how much light you can get in.

3. Throw it away. Nothing’s that precious. No one has to see the pages you write from these games. It’s important to be reminded of that. Sometimes a piece can look too done too soon. These practices remind us that it’s beneficial to toss a lot and keep what matters. 

4. Just set a timer. Listen, it’s amazing what you can do in three minutes. This may not sound novel but I’m ALWAYS surprised by how long this amount of time can feel. I can never tell it’s that short. What this teaches me is I still have time to write even if I’m exhausted at the end of the day. Only thing is you can’t stop typing or moving your pen. Try to keep going. It’s brief! 

5. Reconsider Productivity: My earliest memories are of playing house, Jersey Shore arcade games, frog bog, carnival games, video games, and art was a game then too. We know play is important for developing brains – we are searching for limits as children. We learn to trust things if we see it isn’t so bad first, and games can teach us losing isn’t the end of the world. We could use that same attitude toward our work. A game: set a timer for two minutes and free write. Once it goes off, spend equal time writing without using any adjectives or adverbs. Timer goes off: now try to include a color in every line. The same color. Lastly, free write again with no constraints. How did it feel to go back to writing without any rules? How did the free writes vary? Did they feel different from one another? Which felt more free, the first or the last? All right, let’s say you got a few lines you can work with here, you won. If you hate what you wrote, guess what? You had to write through what’s obvious and boring first to get anywhere else. You’re a step closer. 

On Reverence [by Lauren Hilger]

[a conversation with short story writer and playwright, Abuchi Modilim]

LH: I’ve been thinking about reverence and how to define it for myself. What makes you reverent of some writers (beyond just admiring their work?)

AM: I think reverence should be a personal thing. I revere writers who support emerging writers. I revere writers with great personalities too but the former is what I find most interesting. 

LH: The writers I revere most, I feel like are excavating me from something very dull that keeps me from really seeing. Sometimes that dullness is just getting wrapped up in the day – a lot ushers past me unobserved. If I give myself ten minutes to read a hero, I notice how much I’m ignoring! 

[Esiaba Irobi]

AM: "How much I'm ignoring." It is the phrase. No writer is completely free of this. When I’m not writing, I go back to E. C. Osondu and Wole Soyinka. I like how E.C. Osondu writes. Effortlessly. His writing screams freedom. I read Chigozie Obioma, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Okey Ndibe, Chika Unigwe, Esiaba Irobi, I can't exhaust the names. But undoubtedly, I have read E. C. Osondu more. Wole Soyinka's play 'The Lion And The Jewel' taught me the craft of playwriting. His characters are real. The originality of his poetic dialogue is incomparable. Who are the writers you go back to?

[Lauren, with her copy]

LH: Right now we’re back with Pizarnik, Tranströmer, and Zbigniew Herbert. Do you think you write for the kind of reader you are? 

[Pizarnik's books are treasures]

AM: I write what I would love to read. And I don't have specific readers in mind when I am writing. Writing a good story or play is my foremost obligation when I sit to write. I focus on the form, and not intention. You write for your kind of readers? 

LH: I think I’m writing with the idea of telling a secret, whoever is receiving that is beyond me. What do you find mysterious or unknowable about your own work? Does that change per genre you’re working in?

AM: This question reminded me about the writing workshop facilitated by J.K Anowe at the University of Nigeria. He had asked us to study our writing to find out the spectacular thing about it that we don't know. It was that day that I discovered that I often have a weird character in my writing. I was surprised. I was never aware until after that workshop. And this does not change per genre. You would see this character in my short stories and plays. 

LH: Do you tend to consider your audience as your contemporaries, or do you think about the future? 

AM: First, I consider my contemporaries. I also think about how my work would carry on into the future but I don't let it bother me. Great works would live after the writer is gone. It is not the writer who decides that. The works of William Shakespeare who died in 1616 are still being taught in universities around the world. I use him for this example because of the era in which he wrote. I am sure he was not writing for us then but we are reading him today. 

[The Tragedy of Macbeth, 2021]

 

LH: How did your genres come to you?

AM: The genres I now write short stories and plays came naturally to me. I didn't force them. I wrote poems in my early days of writing. I stopped writing poems to focus on short stories and plays. I don't chew my fingers when I sit and face the screen of my laptop to write a short story or play. And I am currently working on a full-length play that will be published in 2023. Although now, I write poems once in a while and luckily for me good journals accept them. I had entered for Jack Grapes Poetry Prize in 2021 and made the semi-finalist list. 

I think the literary writer is first a poet. It doesn't matter if they are writing poetry or not. Whichever language the writer chooses to write with, reflects poetry. Have you written other genres before? 

LH: I started as a fiction writer and took a long time to admit I was a poet. I was most afraid and most affected by poetry. There’s no turning around now though, I want to stay here.

Abuchi Modilim is an Igbo-born storyteller and playwright. He is the winner of the 2021 Arojah Students Playwriting Prize. And the curator of Enyo: An Anthology of Contemporary African Plays. His writing has appeared in No Tokens Journal, Jellyfish Review, Kalahari Review, Abandon Journal, Samjoko Magazine, and is forthcoming in Native Skin, the State University of New York Praxis: Journal of Gender and Cultural Critiques, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions. Currently, he is studying English and literary studies with a minor in Theatre and film studies, at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

On the Juicy Tube [by Lauren Hilger]

Today I offer a meditation on the 2000s cultural power icon: Lancôme’s Juicy Tube. A generation's foray to makeup. Let’s consider together an object that stands as a symbol, an antique, a kind of doorway.

[From every conceivable angle, it was just lip gloss.]

In high school, a friend bestowed upon me two gifts, a Juicy Tube in the color “clear sheer” alongside the MAC single pan eyeshadow “pink haze.” I took this as a gift that said, “here you'll need these.” A license of another kind. Upon acquiring I wondered, actually, what was the Juicy Tube’s reason to be? It seemed just what it was, a juicy tube. But it required a new category; it wasn’t chapstick or lipstick, those were two things I could wrap my head around. 

[The precursor]

It was a lacquer I found mysterious. For one, it lost all pigment once applied. For two, when would you need it? Surely not when you’d pull for chapstick. In addition, the Juicy Tube cost 16 US dollars, expensive then and now especially compared to the Lip Smackers that preceded them in our collective consciousness. Lip Smackers offered scents (flavors?) like vanilla frosting, blue raspberry, and a shocking pink cotton candy, appealing to children. 

 

[Another loved object]

In fact, my prized possession had hitherto been a gumball machine made to dispense jelly beans. Like Lip Smackers, jelly beans were a collection you consumed, kind of plastic, colorful, also sold at the mall. Juicy Tube marketed with no such no food flavoring. It had the aesthetic of an ice cube. 

[I wasn’t kidding.]

“The glistening hi-shine of Juicy Tubes,” my friend offers, when I ask what topic she’d like for me to write about as a guest author on the Best American Poetry blog. “Loved Juicy Tubes. Nothing like ‘em.” 

All to say, the Juicy Tube linked being a kid to something I didn’t yet recognize. “Thelyphthoric” is a term I try to think through in my second book Morality Play (out soon from Poetry Northwest!) I certainly do not believe it’s as simple as “fashion magazines and pop stars were corrupting young girls!” but there was something sinister in the open-mouthed ads. Something cold, intimidating. I remember applying my Juicy Tube meticulously in algebra until my teacher slammed his palm on the table and shouted “HILGER” to make me stop. Is this the only memory I have of math that year? Of course I was mortified but, truly, I didn’t think of it as putting on makeup during class. I didn’t think of it as anything yet.  

It was the novelty of something new and strange. High school can usher in an era of heightened insecurity, a lot of tears, a lot of struggling. For your author it certainly did. Maybe the Juicy Tube represented something so vapid and icy and untouchably beautiful that I could access that too. Adult in my mind, I carried around a real beauty brand in the pocket of my long, long jeans. I wore it to declare my connection with Britney checking her lip gloss in Crossroads. I wore it along with the brows of Edith Piaf, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo.

In other words, it marked a moment – it spoke to something larger than I was. It offered assurance. It now lives eternal in the flash of printed photos from disposable cameras. 

[shades of sheer]

I loved the Juicy Tube for being a signifier, ultimately, of innocence. Equally, I loved it for its minimalist claims – it did just what it said on the tin. Should you be selling a lip product in 2022’s beauty space and want to succeed amidst a saturation of high-quality indie lines from all over the world, celebrity brands, luxury makeup, your lip gloss better tout benefits. We’re talking plumping lip oils infused with vitamins and collagen. To really make a mark they need to be hydrating, vegan, cruelty free, sustainably created, ethically sourced, etc. Application should be effortless, should feel like nothing, be lightweight, easy to wear. Juicy Tubes, hate to say it, were the least comfortable option we had. Sticky, viscous, obvious. If a breeze blew a strand of hair toward your mouth you’d never recover. Were the early 2000s Juicy Tube a brand new product, would it find relevance today? It has since been brought back, pitched as an object of nostalgia. But what’s replaced it? To your author, nothing.

On Memorization [by Lauren Hilger]

As I write to you, in the year 2022, we don’t have to memorize much: GPS leads the way, phone numbers are saved, and devices alert us of birthdays. Say what you will about attention spans, how we are faster and less focused than any other era in history, how we value what’s brief and easy, ever and anon. You still have choices! You can try to memorize a poem today. 

Reading your poems aloud is a powerful editing tool – trying to memorize, I’ve found, is even stronger. You get to ask yourself, what lines are not worth learning by heart? What’s gotta go? I’m no actor used to memorizing scripts, and I know there are as many ways to read a poem as there are infinite individual learning styles, but I’ll share what’s worked for me! 

1. Record yourself. Having a recording playing through headphones is my favorite way to learn a set for a reading. I also want to pay attention to my speech patterns and accent. Sure, in listening to yourself, you can realize the way you say “egg” or “coffee” is insufferable but trying to work through that, to actually hear what you sound like can be useful. And examining your voice paired with the poem helps certain lines stick.
2. Writing it out by hand and in your handwriting. I think of this act as bringing the poem to another place and hopefully deepening the poem-shaped rut in the brain. Seeing the lines in your hand takes them out of a font used for daily communication, a font you might subconsciously associate with details meant only to be taken in short term. 
3. Moods. As I’m writing this, a friend texts me his poem, line after line, as he is practicing retrieving it without peeking. Relaxed, at ease, talking to friends – that’s where your brain exists at times, and you’ll want to bring the poem to that mental space too. Having experienced knowing that poem there in that mindset, not just a stressed study mode, can help you access it later on.
4. Print! If I can offer any practical advice, just have a printed back up with you. None’s the wiser if you glance down. Truly no one will care or notice. Or bring your book, should you have one![waiting for a train with poems]
   
5. Listen. I spent my youth taking out poetry recordings housed by NJ’s Park Ridge library and the greater Bergen County system of libraries. These were (ahem) CDs, and I always was working on one commuting by train. That connection felt profound from go: hearing poets make bad jokes between poems, mess up their lines, take their time drawing out words, listening to where they stay quiet, their silence, felt like the most precious time spent. And today, as then, I’m grateful for others who offer their work to me as a performance. I always feel humbled and moved by it. [this was a giant case for three CDs]
6. Learn other poets’ poems. What can this practice offer you? Learning other poets’ poems alleviates some pressure I feel to create, and practicing someone else’s work still feels like I’m training my ear. Memorizing poems I love has helped me answer questions like: Where did this poet go that might have been edited out? What risks did they actually take? Does the first line really matter? In fact, learning poems in some ways feels, to me, like memorizing just the first line. That first line brings everything else forth. You learn one line that reminds you of the next. Then the next feeds the next and all the rest.
7. Have no end goal. What is it that’s so hard about memorizing a poem without meter or rhyme? Is it too close to language we don’t normally interrogate, the language we don’t look at directly but know as a tool? And what if you’re almost there but keep losing the thread at the same line? Or what about when it’s just not working and you never get a line to stick? To this poet, it doesn’t matter. It’s the trying that teaches and in trying, you get to dwell.

"Fireflies in Tights": On Balanchine's Agon [by Eden Elieff]

Ed note: This is part two of a series. Find part one here. sdl

Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams in "Agon""The New York Public Library Digital Collections, 1957.

Agon. What the hell was that? The program revealed that agon is a Greek word, meaning contest. Okay, but how do you pronounce it? Short a like apple? Or long a like acorn? It didn’t dawn on me that agon is cousin to agony: short a then.

This scene began NYCB’s week-long Ravinia residency:

The stage is bare, devoid of even a minimalist Godot-style tree. Four men in white Fruit of the Loom T-shirts and black tights appear. They walk upstage, place themselves equidistantly from each other with their backs to the audience, their curved arms extended downward— an image of grace. They pivot in unison to face us. Before the music starts, they move as a unit, doing simple steps at first—walking, feet angling inward and then out. They, not the orchestra, begin the piece.

A few counts later, the musicians blare a brass fanfare. The men engage in familiar steps, a plié, feet in first position. They strut across the stage in lockstep to the music’s rhythm. But immediately, Balanchine inverts the classical lines. The feet turn inward. Legs extend off-balance. Chests protrude beyond “elegance.” Heels flex upward on the floor, anchoring the leg. Arms swing casually. We’re in “West Side Story” territory, which also premiered in 1957.

Two minutes later, eight women in “practice clothes” uniform—pink tights, black leotard—enter. The urgent music borders on angry. They attack the beats, matching the tone of the music, and explode in jumps and turns, as if on a trampoline, sometimes in unison and sometimes following each other a count or two later: a visual fugue. Always moving, they create a stream of patterns: architecture in motion. Balanchine’s choreography unspools seamlessly, insistently, to the music’s flow.

The ballet continues for eleven more movements—trios, solos, full ensemble, and most famously, a male-female duet—and reveal shapes, patterns, and a kinetic dynamism I’d never seen before. There are no explicit guideposts that help you absorb the ever-churning complexity of the rhythm, tempo, and musical phrases these dancers literally embody. You can’t anticipate the progression of synthesized sight and sound, the amalgam of the past with an unchartered present, of this blend of grace and angularity. I could see the ballet a hundred times and still not understand how the dancers mastered its rhythm, still incapable of internalizing the choreography’s trajectory. The dancers are fireflies in tights. And all I wanted to do was catch them.

                                                            *

So what was the contest? Were the dancers really antagonists? Or were they protagonists, a group of equals exploring this new world? Balanchine was recasting old forms and contexts into an avant-garde vocabulary, but was he framing them as adversaries, as the title suggests? Don’t think so. This was a friendly face-off, an invitation to discover that evolutions embody the sources from which they emerge. The “contest” between eras is implied, inherent in the choreography’s unfolding. The ballet’s plotlessness might feel revolutionary. But for me, “Agon” declares that the imagination’s ability to transform the dimensionless medium of sound into a three-dimensional locomotive, is the greatest ballet plot of all.

Yet there is a basic scheme.  Several of the twelve sections are based, loosely, on 17^th century French court dances: the branle, galliard, and saraband. Balanchine called the other sections after the number of dancers in them.

The late Arthur Mitchell, who originated the pas de deux, revealed that it was the first section Balanchine choreographed. Thus it was the ballet’s centerpiece, though chronologically, it was the penultimate section—the climax of the preceding ones. And you wouldn’t be wrong to see a sexual context here. The choreography’s six minutes involve an intimacy that ranges from a simulation of court dancing—slow, processional movement—to serpentine entanglements that look lifted from the Kama Sutra. Sometimes there’s not much “dancing” at all, if dancing is continuous movement. Rather, there’s a blossoming of consecutive poses that suggest images on Greek amphora or the mirror images of Rorschach tests.

But in 1957, the choreography was almost beside the point. Arthur Mitchell was black. His partner, Diana Adams, was white. Interracial marriage was not legal throughout the US. It took a full decade later for Loving v. Virginia to settle the matter. Yet Mitchell and Adams enacted this choreographic coupling as if the only thing missing was the certificate.

Ultimately, if there are opposing energies here, it’s the failure of words to convey the full impact of this visceral, ephemeral experience, which, as we’re verbal creatures, is indeed a kind of agony: Dance, kaleidoscopic in form, always resists our ability to communicate its spell. Three-dimensional movement doesn’t readily translate into the abstraction of language. So, are all ballets agons? Maybe Balanchine in his sly way trying to make a universal statement about his art.

                                                            ##

Ed note: Here is former NYCB principal dancer Maria Kowroski on Balanchine’s AGON

This season, the NYCB is celebrating the 1972 Stravinsky festival with a series of special performances. Find the schedule and buy your tickets here. 

"She couldn't sleep for a week." Celebrating the Fifty Year Anniversary of the New York City Ballet Stravinsky Festival [by Eden Elieff]

Ed note: This is part one of a two-part series. Watch this space for part two, which will post next week. sdl

Lincoln Kirstein (left) and George Balanchine drink a toast to Igor Stravinsky on the closing night of the 1972 Stravinsky Festival. Balanchine ordered 40 crates of vodka to be distributed to the public to mark the occasion. Photo © Martha Swope, NYPL

This year marks the golden anniversary of the New York City Ballet’s historic Stravinsky Festival. The celebration was conceived and directed by NYCB choreographer George Balanchine to pay tribute to Igor Stravinsky a year after the composer's death, at 89. The festival began on Sunday, June 18, 1972, the day after what would have been the composer’s 90^th birthday, and concluded a week later.

Balanchine, born in 1904, and his compatriot Stravinsky, in 1882, were what you might call “evolutionaries.” The twentieth century was their runway. They took off at the dawn of the era, taking with them the established traditions of their respective art forms to new destinations. From their native Russia, they landed in New York and Los Angeles, and over decades, transformed and expanded the formal and expressive vocabularies of their genres to create what we call Modernism. (Interestingly, James Joyce, born the same year as Stravinsky, did the same for literature.)

While Stravinsky composed music for ballets before Balanchine emerged as a choreographer, they eventually collaborated, to create one of the most productive and dynamic artistic partnerships of the twentieth century. Their synergy gave the world sound and sights not seen nor heard before.

The ’72 Stravinsky Festival began with a brass fanfare the composer wrote for the company upon its move to Lincoln Center, in 1964. Balanchine followed up with a speech from the stage. The week-long tribute concluded with a community toast to Stravinsky: For the occasion, Balanchine ordered 40 cases of vodka and distributed shots to the audience. The composer’s widow Vera was there as the guest of honor.

It’s not a stretch to say that between those two Sundays, the most extraordinary week in American ballet history transpired. All the music was composed by Stravinsky. And the sheer numbers of the festival were astounding:

• 30 ballets, 20 of which were world premieres—with none repeating on any night
• 7 choreographers
• 4 pieces performed without dancers, some with a chorus and vocal soloists

Several of those premieres are now staples of the company’s repertory.

Scheduled for the festival’s penultimate night were the Balanchine-Stravinsky Greek ballets: “Apollo,” “Agon,” and Orpheus.” “Apollo” was the very first ballet of their collaboration, premiering in 1928 with the Ballet Russes, and is the oldest ballet in the NYCB repertory. “Agon,” for me, was the apogee of their partnership. Premiering in 1957, it had the power and boldness to claim the stature of The Iconic Ballet of the 20^th century. “Agon” electrified me when I saw it at the age of 15, where afterwards, colors were brighter, sounds, clearer, hormones wilder. The former ballet critic of The New Yorker, Arlene Croce, revealed she couldn’t sleep for a week after seeing the work for the first time. Clearly, I was on to something.                                                           

Just before my high school sophomore year, our family of six moved from the South Side of Chicago to a three-story house a block from Lake Michigan in the North Shore suburbs, after a kid held a gun to my mother’s head. It was a crushing dislocation that exacerbated long-simmering family tensions. And I was lost and lonely in these manorial enclaves, carrying the shame of an immigrant who didn’t know the local culture, mores, or territory. Yet our house was only a few miles—a fifteen-minute bike ride—from Ravinia, the oldest outdoor summer performing arts festival in the country. Ravinia primarily featured music but plays and ballets filled out the roster. I had younger twin sisters, and though we all took ballet lessons, the youngest twin was the more talented and serious dancer. To supplement our lessons, we went to as many performances as we could. Which meant waiting until companies from New York toured Chicago. Our city was pretty much a ballet desert.

So when the New York City Ballet was scheduled for a full week residency at Ravinia in the late summer after our move, I looked forward to the visit as if the cavalry were coming to redeem my misery. It was 1971, the year before the Stravinsky Festival, the era of company greats Patricia McBride, Edward Villella, Kay Mazzo, and Peter Martins.

From the very first moment, the company fulfilled my expectations if not my desperate hope for transcendence. “Agon” began the residency that Sunday night. It would transform my life.

                                                            ##

Eden Elieff, a native Chicagoan, lives in Dallas with her husband and has taught both fiction and nonfiction with Writing Workshops Dallas as well as with several high schools in both cities. Twice a Pushcart nominee, Eden has published work in both genres in various literary magazines, such as The Mississippi Review, Minerva Rising, The Sycamore Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Crab Orchard Review, as well as the Dallas Morning News. She received her MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College.

Diary as Form, or a Case for Hybrid Genres [by Megin Jimenez]

In one of her brilliant essays, poet and novelist Fanny Howe proposes the diary as the ultimate subversive genre: anarchic, directionless, unconcerned with narrative or context. (I believe it's in the collection The Wedding Dress, I will insert the quote when I'm near the book.) 

Not every diarist is writing for a reader other than herself, but there is something curious in that activity: manifesting thought through writing - what does that change inside the self? In her journals (published in 2008), Susan Sontag justified reading a lover's diary by saying one keeps a diary, in part, in to have it read secretly by one's lover... She describes her self as expressed in the journal:

“Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.

"The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it."

I have been taken with reading writers' journals for the past few years, not only for the glimpse it offers at their lives and inner thoughts, but for the unparalleled reading experience they offer. This isn't the case for any diary or journal, I don't mean the day-to-day notes and records, but rather the writer "thinking out loud".

It's that place between fiction and poetry, which I find myself writing in, as well (prose poems, or collections of sentences) - the skeleton of the sentence bearing the luscious flesh of poetry. Plot is not a loss, rather, there's a sense that the pressure, the drive for a tidy beginning-middle-end is removed. There's time to hang out with a thought, or a paragraph, without rushing to find out what happens. The structure, while remaining prose, can bear a poetic approach to language, where the language is the happening itself, rather than a vehicle for getting the reader from point A to point B. (Aside on the prose poem: I heard Russell Edson, prince of the prose poem, refer to contemporary poets' fascination with form as a distraction. Writing the poem, reading the poem in relation to its form is ultimately a distraction from the language.)

I recently re-read the first volume of The Diary of Anais Nin and found myself taking it slow, in a really good way, in a poetry sort of way. There was movement, events happening, descriptions of people, but I did not exercise my irritating habit of rushing through, as I do too often when reading fiction.  This time I noticed much more her own awareness of The Diary as its own sort of writing. She describes it variously as her vice, her greatest pleasure, the place for writing all. She took passages out of it to use in her fiction (at that point House of Incest and Winter of Artifice), which she saw as a surrealist, or mytho-poetic distillation of her experience. Everyone important to her (Henry Miller, her analyst Otto Rank) discourages her from writing in the diary and urges her to use that energy instead for her external work, her self in the world, her fiction. It's interesting that the diary remains her best known and most read work. It's important to note that she didn't see it as a private record of her life, she saw it as a lifelong project. She had someone transcribing previous volumes (at least during Volume 1), often let people read from it and saw it published in her lifetime.

I've read some of Nin's fiction (A Spy in the House of Love and Winter of Artifice) and was not too crazy about it. Her dramatic ("poetic" is her word) approach, her attempt at a surrealist space make the prose feel dated, almost prim (despite being about sex), in a way the writing in the diary never is. The writing in the diary is philosophical, witty, vivid, and sometimes simply beautiful. Take, for example, this description of June Miller (Henry Miller's wife), which is a kind of prose poem itself: 

“It was not only that June had the body of the women who climbed every night upon the stage of music halls and gradually undressed, but that it was impossible to situate her in any other atmosphere. The luxuriance of the flesh, its vivid tones, the fevered eyes and the weight of the voice, its huskiness, became instantly conjugated with sensual love. Other women lost this erotic phosphorescence as soon as they abandoned their role of dance-hall hostesses. But June’s night life was internal, it glowed from within her and it came, in part, from her treating every encounter as either intimate, or to be forgotten. It was as if, before every man, she lighted within herself the lamp lighted by waiting mistresses or wives at the end of the day, only they were her eyes, and it was her face which became like a poem’s bedchamber, tapestried with twilight and velvet. As it glowed from within her, it could appear in totally unexpected places, early in the morning, in a neglected café, on a park bench, on a rainy morning in front of a hospital or a morgue, anywhere. It was always the soft light kept through the centuries for the moment of pleasure.”

How amazing is "the lamp lighted by waiting mistresses or wives at the end of the day”? I also love how "a neglected café, on a park bench, on a rainy morning in front of a hospital or a morgue" conjures Paris so quickly, in this condensed way.

There seems to be something gendered about this (there's something gendered in the word "diary", even), and I hesitate to say too much about it for fear of getting mired in the Gender Question Quagmire... But my sense, at least with Nin, is that the reason the diary could contain all (that is, her best writing), was because it could contain both personal and public self, personal and public writer. As we know, this has always been a difficult juggling act for women artists, who have historically either felt forced to choose the domestic, the internal over the public "artist's life" or have sacrificed sanity, sobriety, children, respectability, to live out their creative self. What struck me about Nin is that she cherishes the domestic and maternal parts of herself, she doesn't apologize for them. (She sees the establishment of a beautiful environment -- a home or a garden -- as one of her accomplishments, and values her maternal care of Henry Miller and other artists (Artaud, etc.). By maternal I mean caring for them financially, physically (feeding, clothing) and as editor (whereas I would have sent his sorry ass back to New York).) Perhaps ideas about fiction at that time (a manifestation of the male, public self in the world) did not have the space for her particular voice and talent, hence the freedom and fantastic writing in the diary.

Violette Leduc is another writer I would place in this category, and who is woefully under-read. Dalkey Archive, which is a wonderful press, has published a lot of her work in translation into English. (She is best
known for authoring Thérèse and Isabelle, which was turned into a sexy lesbian schoolgirl movie in 1968.) Her books are not diaries, they are more like memoirs, but they have the same feeling of the writer set free. The reader is also set free from holding the breath for the plot to reveal itself, and can instead enjoy the astounding language, the extended thought.

Here is a taste, this is from La Bâtarde (1964), a memoir of her childhood raised by her mother and grandmother, a recurring theme is being a "bastard", the illegitimate child of an aristocrat father she never met. She is describing her relationship with her mother, intertwined with her birth (originally in French, translation by Derek Coltman):

"Let’s go back again, open your belly and take me back. You have told me so often about the misery of dragging around looking for a room, of not being able to find one because your waist was no longer slim. Let us suffer together once more. I wish I had never been that thing, a fetus. Always present, awake inside you. It was inside your belly that I lived your shame in those days, your sorrows. You sometimes say I hate you. Love has innumerable names. You live in me as I lived in you then. I saw you naked, I watched your most intimate ablutions. No mother can ever have been more abstract than you are. Your skin, your legs, your back when I wash you, the kiss I ask you for in the morning have no reality. How am I to make contact with you? Clouds, elm trees, wild rosebushes are matters of indifference to you. Don’t die as long as I am still alive. Let’s go back again, carry me as you carried me then, let’s be afraid together of the rats you had to step over in the passage to your room. Your blood, Mother, the blood trickling as far as the staircase when I came out of you, the blood streaming from someone dying. The instruments, the forceps. I was your prisoner just as you were mine. Forgotten, abandoned beside the stream made by your blood when I arrived. It’s normal enough, you were dying. It was a long time before they washed the mess off me. But the people who pointed their fingers at you, the people who refused you a bed before I was born, stayed glued to my skin.” 

***

That's all I got for now. Thank you for reading. The copy editor in me begs your patience for any awkward phrasing or punctuation errors in any posts -- I have tried to stay true to the blogging tradition and written in the moment! Thanks again to Stacey and David for letting me share a few thoughts on BAP.

from the archive; first published March 3, 2012

In Appreciation of William Matthews [by Peter Fortunato]

Bill Matthews was born on Armistice Day 1942 and died of a heart attack a day after his fifth-fiifth birthday on November 12, 1997.  We asked the poet and artist Peter Fortunato to pick a poem by Bill and talk a little about it and him. Peter picked "What You Need," from Bill's first book, whose opening lines illustrate the logic of metaphor in Matthews's poetry. The self one would like to cast off, as a snake discards his skin, becomes "that old ring in the tub."  Here is the poem and Peter's note. See, too, Edward Byrne's essay on Matthews's Search Party. -- DL

 

What You Need

 

Suppose you want to leave your life,

that old ring in the tub,

behind?

 

It closes cozily

as a clerk's hand,

a coin with fingers.

 

You hate it

the same way the drunken son

loves Mother.

 

You will need pain

heaving under you

like frost ruining the new road.

 

-- William Mathews (from his first book, Ruining the New Road)

 

Remembering William Matthews

              A few years ago at the Provincetown Public Library I was surprised to find withdrawn from circulation Search Party: The Collected Poems of William Matthews.  I bought it, a hardbound copy, for two dollars.  On leafing through its crisp pages I discovered that the last time a reader had checked it out, according to the library receipt tucked a third of the way through, was back in 2004, shortly after the collection was published.

             Inevitably, I was given to musing on fame and the fickleness of fashion.Throughout his professional life Bill was a prominent figure on the American poetry scene, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995 and the Ruth Lilly Award from the Modern Poetry Association in 1997.  As a teacher he made a huge impact on his students, as a friend he was beloved, and after his death, an anthology of poems in his honor appeared.  It glitters with reminiscences and tears. Yet I wonder: is he forgotten today? Bill’s poems, always leavened with wit, are often self-analytical and have little to do with the identity politics prevalent among today’s younger poets.

            As I read Search Party, savoring again poems I have known and taught, discovering others to admire, I started recollecting Bill’s role in my early career as a poet.  He was at Cornell as an assistant professor during my undergraduate time there, 1968 to 1972.  While I never took a course with him, I was among a circle of students including those in Cornell’s rather new M.F.A. program who gravitated to him.  He was the first poet whom I knew close-up, and when his first book was published in 1970— Ruining the New Road—I bought it and practically memorized it. 

            Although Bill didn’t get tenure at Cornell, his years there are among the most exciting I remember.  The visiting writers series he organized and hosted brought James Wright, Diane Wakowski, Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, and John Logan to campus.  Some of them participated in a weekend long poetry festival that included wonderful conversations in the evenings at Bill’s farmhouse.  His longtime friend, the novelist Russell Banks, was also on the scene: as young men in Chapel Hill they’d begun the magazine Lillibulero, an example of the real lives and work of writers.

            While reading Search Party, which spans Bill’s too short, intense life, the man and my acquaintance with him came back vividly. I absorbed much from him about metaphor and the power of images to communicate paradox. Consider the final stanza of “What You Need,” which resonates enigmatically with the title and poem’s first humorous lines.

            The most important effect Bill had on me was through his poems, and it’s in his poetry that any reader can find him.

Peter Fortunato’s most recent book is the novel Carnevale. He is an editor at Cayuga Lake Books.

Mary Jo Salter Presents "The Death of Argos," a Sonnet Sequence by Nicholas Pierce (Day 10)

Mary Jo Salter (photo right) concludes two weeks of presenting “The Death of Argos” by Nicholas Pierce.

What new thing can be done with old forms like the sonnet?  One answer comes from a new poet.  In Nicholas Pierce’s first book, In Transit, he invents an especially devilish rhyme scheme for an eleven-sonnet sequence, “The Death of Argos.”  The sequence is also an elegant narrative, an affecting love story set in contemporary Greece, while calling up The Odyssey. Inspired by a blank verse sonnet sequence by the late Claudia Emerson, which unspools as two tercets, a central couplet, and two more tercets, Pierce goes Emerson one better by rhyming aba, bdb, bb, dbd, ebe, every time.  Yes, that’s six b’s per fourteen lines. And a rhyming couplet “turn” in the dead center, another radical move. -- MJS

The epilogue brings Pierce’s eleven-sonnet sequence to a ramifying close. In it, the poet’s lover—and we readers—can be seen as both scarred and “kissed” by experience.  

1.

A few key seconds haven’t yet come back,
if they ever were recorded. Who can say
why the dogs didn’t, finally, attack,

much less what would’ve happened if they did?
On foot, defenseless, we were easy prey
to start with—then my cousin and I slid

into a ditch, scrambling to get away.
The footage skips ahead when I replay

this moment, picking back up with his leg
already broken and the dogs at bay—
or nowhere to be seen, at least. Less vague

is what came afterward: the brief but none-
too-gentle ambulance ride, the X-ray
revealing that the break was a clean one.

2.

The incident put me in mind of S.,
whom I’d been trying not to think about
for a few months, not wanting to address

how cruel I’d been when I abruptly stopped
texting and calling her back; stopped without
so much as an excuse, letting her opt

both of us out. Of course, our falling out
wasn’t what I reflected on en route

to the hospital. Rather, it was her own
encounter with a dog, which left no doubt
a deeper scar than the two running down

her chin, down from the edges of her smile.
She told me that she didn’t run or shout;
was, when the pit bull lunged, still in denial.

3.

Still in shock, sleep all but impossible,
I read the journal from my trip to Greece
after returning from the hospital;

read long into the night, about the night
when, meeting for a drink, we found release
from loneliness; about how S., despite

knowing me all of an hour, felt at ease
enough to share how many surgeries

she’d had to have in the last year, her face
still not quite hers; about the binding lease
that forced her to recover in the place

next door to where the pit bull went on living;
about its owner, who refused her pleas
to see the dog put down; about surviving.

4.

May 28th—Watching from the top deck
as Paros shrinks on the horizon, then,
in an instant, vanishes; as each new speck

becomes an island, looms, recedes from view.
On my way back to Athens, once again
on my own, though we plan to rendezvous,

and I, just as soon as she gets in.
It’s strange how quickly things can happen when

abroad, that we could meet and fall in love
(is there a faster-acting medicine?)
on the same day; that I, at this remove,

perhaps because of it, could know we had.
Stranger still, that the scarring on her chin
should be what drew me to her, though I’m glad

5.

it did. We met on a bus taking her
to Naousa (rhymes with “wowza”), where I’d been
the day before, and taking me, as per

my host’s advice, to drafty Golden Beach.
We chatted till she disembarked, within
those few short minutes managing to reach

the same conclusion. With this very pen,
on a scrap of paper torn from this Moleskin,

she jotted down her number. Pausing here,
I flipped to the back pocket, where the ten
digits had lived for almost half a year;

though I had no intention, not that night,
of calling her, no clue how I’d begin
to explain myself. “I’m sorry” sounded trite.

6.

Memories of the trip came flooding back:
I rendezvoused with S. in Nafplio
after the ferry ride, first losing track

of time, then of myself, as I explored
her body with my own, getting to know
each corner more each night, what she adored

and didn’t, taking things both fast and slow.
I learned, as well, where she was born (Bordeaux)

and worked (at a high school in Athens), that
she taught biology and had done so
in Cairo during the youth coup d’état—

but not her age. I never learned her age,
which was, since she had both an olive glow
and graying hair, impossible to gauge.

7.

June 3rd—This morning I was moved to tears
by a brief passage in the Odyssey,
in which Odysseus, some twenty years

after he sailed for Troy, comes home to find
his old dog Argos cast out like debris
on a dunghill, by freeloaders inclined

to think this king disguised as nobody
had died an early death somewhere at sea.

I read it on the bus to Corinth, S.
asleep on my left shoulder, probably
for one of the last times, as we have less

than two whole days together, till my flight
departs from Athens and this fantasy
concludes—as I don’t think we’ll reunite.

8.

“Did Argos see the true Odysseus
or recognize beneath his beggar’s clothes
the man he used to be, was previous

to leaving Ithaca?” I asked myself
while flipping through the epic, as the rose-
red light of dawn enveloped the bookshelf.

My hope was that the passage would disclose—
I don’t know what. An answer, I suppose.

What fell out, rather, was a Polaroid
I’d put there for safe keeping, one of those
I’d taken while in Greece, of a deep void

near Corinth, a canal that ran as far
as S. and I—while standing on our toes—
could see, which even then recalled a scar.

9.

Early that morning, I got on the road
to see my cousin, straining to recall,
while driving, that lost moment, to decode

a scrambled memory (if there was one)
of our assailants and the sudden fall
that fractured time before it broke his bone.

Again, I saw two shadows—that was all—
come crashing through the nonexistent wall

around their yard, the wall we hoped was there,
and then keep running, with intent to maul
or kill or both, giving us such a scare

that we could do little but retreat—retreat
into a ditch as deep as we were tall
and, on a dark night, painfully discreet.

10.

Those few key seconds never did come back,
not on the drive there, nor in the time since—
time that I’ve wasted trying to unpack

that night, believing (wanting to believe
yet in the end unable to convince
myself) that if I simply could retrieve

the missing footage, I’d find evidence
that no such thing as a coincidence

existed, that there was a reason why
I’d had my own near-death experience
just three months after learning, by and by,

how S. had come to have her scars, and thus
that we were meant to meet, that providence
had shone its light on, of all people, us.

EPILOGUE

One memory that has come back, and does
so often, is of the stray dogs we met
at that canal near Corinth, where, because

we’d missed our bus and had some time to kill,
we took turns photographing the sunset
dissolving in the water like a pill.

It was at the station, though, when we were set
to leave, that the odd couple—a briquette-

black mastiff and his wiry, pint-sized friend—
entered the picture. Both affectionate
and filthy, they proceeded to offend

most everyone there, all except for S.,
who seemed, for one brief moment, to forget
her scars, letting each dog give her a kiss.

Nicholas Pierce is pursuing a Ph.D. in Poetry at the University of Utah. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, and Subtropics, among other journals. His first book, In Transit, won the 2021 New Criterion Poetry Prize. “The Death of Argos” appeared in that volume, published by Criterion Book

Mary Jo Salter Presents "The Death of Argos," a Sonnet Sequence by Nicholas Pierce (Day 1)

For the next two weeks, Monday through Friday, we will be publishing daily, piece by piece, the sonnet sequence “The Death of Argos” by Nicholas Pierce (Photo), presented below by Mary Jo Salter.

What new thing can be done with old forms like the sonnet?  One answer comes from a new poet.  In his first book, In Transit, Nicholas Pierce invents an especially devilish rhyme scheme for an eleven-sonnet sequence, “The Death of Argos.”  The sequence is also an elegant narrative, an affecting love story set in contemporary Greece, while calling up The Odyssey. Inspired by a blank verse sonnet sequence by the late Claudia Emerson, which unspools as two tercets, a central couplet, and two more tercets, Pierce goes Emerson one better by rhyming  aba, cbc, bb, dbd, ebe. Yes, that’s six b’s per fourteen lines. And a rhyming couplet “turn” in the dead center, another radical move.  -- MJS

Here's the first mysterious sonnet, in which the speaker assembles a memory of being attacked by dogs. We’ll be adding the second sonnet the next day, and so on, until the final day. 

1.

A few key seconds haven’t yet come back,
if they ever were recorded. Who can say
why the dogs didn’t, finally, attack,

much less what would’ve happened if they did?
On foot, defenseless, we were easy prey
to start with—then my cousin and I slid

into a ditch, scrambling to get away.
The footage skips ahead when I replay

this moment, picking back up with his leg
already broken and the dogs at bay—
or nowhere to be seen, at least. Less vague

is what came afterward: the brief but none-
too-gentle ambulance ride, the X-ray
revealing that the break was a clean one.

Nicholas Pierce is pursuing a Ph.D. in Poetry at the University of Utah. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, and Subtropics, among other journals. His first book, In Transit, won the 2021 New Criterion Poetry Prize. “The Death of Argos” appeared in that volume, published by Criterion Books.

Click here for the full poem as posted on March 4, 2022.
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2022/03/mary-jo-salter-presents-the-death-of-argos-a-sonnet-sequence-by-nicholas-pierce-day-10.html

“Grand Illusion”: Why and How it Matters [by Bruce Kawin]

Ed note: The last time I taught a graduate literature seminar, only two of fifteen students had seen Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, one of the most celebrated of all American movies. To help remedy this unfortunate situation, I am hoping to run columns on the blog about some of the greatest old movies that college students owe it to themselves to see. I asked Bruce Kawin, longtime professor of English and film studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder, to write about Grand Illusion, the great movie set in a World War I prisoner-of-war camp. The stars include Jean Gabin, Marcel Dalio, Pierre Fresnay, and Erich von Stroheim. Grand Illusion establishes the conventions – such as the attempted escapes, the complicated relation of captor to captive, the home-spun varsity show put on by the prisoners -- that animate many subsequent POW movies, from Stalag 17 to The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Great Escape. -- DL

See It for the Way It Matters

In the title of Jean Renoir’s 1937 movie Grand Illusion (La Grande illusion), “grande” can mean “great” or “big.”  The illusion is huge and has aspects of nobility, the old ways, the high walls that kept commoners out, the train that ran on the rails of history and tradition, the Rolls that rolled over you. People kill each other over the illusion, set up systems as large as governments by it, cover the ground with it.  The illusion is great or grand in that it involves social and economic classes, national boundaries and identities, control and surveillance -- the whole gamut of experience.  

But whether it’s big like a fence or great like a tower, and whether or not it’s noble, what is it?  What illusion is so comprehensive that individuals and countries can (or must) live by it?  In Renoir’s movie, we encounter multiple mirages: the illusion of class, the illusion that war is grand, the illusion that the earth is divided into political units. That war is of value. That an international nobility has not vanished along with its values and value.  Class, war, and the artificial divisions that estrange us to the point of murder:  these are the falsehoods we elevate into principles and masks. 

Once it has established all this, Grand Illusion is about removing those masks.  Circumstances force or allow the characters to unmask, to act the way they finally are. The characters are divided by World War I, for they fight on opposing sides, but it is also the war that brings them together. Most of the action takes place in German prison camps.  The soldiers, the guards, and the commanding officers are divided by language, and they speak in many languages.  They are divided by class, so that the "high" plot concerns two officers from the upper classes, one French (Pierre Fresnay) and one German (Erich von Stroheim as the prison commander), while the "low" plot concerns a working-class Catholic (Jean Gabin) and a rich Jew (Marcel Dalio), who also are officers but of lower rank. 

The two higher-ranking officers see each other as equals and come from much the same social place. The major characters cross these dividers, reach across them to each other, proving as deep as real people and far more complicated than the single-motivation figures often found in run-of-the-mill movies.  As a viewer, you can’t take anything for granted in this picture.  The aristocratic opponents become friends—until the ancient code that unites them butts against the prisoner’s code of working together to escape. When the highborn French officer follows the code of the soldier, the prison commander, following the code of the officer, is forced to shoot him—a defining example of tragedy. 

And when the fugitive soldiers, the working-class Catholic and the Jew with a rich family, begin to fight on the road, they become more nearly complete as individuals and as members of social groups, as inseparable and yet as different as the two noble officers.  When the escapees meet a German mother and her daughter, who house them for a time, Protestants join the Catholic and the Jew.  And a mature woman (Dita Parlo) joins the tale.  A genuinely moving international love story ensues.

This is a movie that treats important issues with intelligence, honesty, range, and care.  It was one of the films that convinced many people that movies could be serious, significant, and artistic—with as much to say, to reveal, as some books or paintings. And it did all this by being a movie:  the camera that moves down the tables and groups, the soundtrack that crashes together “foreign” languages, the design of the dark stone prison and the single geranium, and most definitively the final scene’s image of a snow-covered mountain on which no political borderline can be seen, but which the two escaping soldiers cross into freedom—crossing a line that is an illusion.  The line is there in the political sense, a reality, but it is also an abstraction, a line that to all appearances isn’t there.  The camera sees the snow.

-- Bruce Kawin

The Poet's Notebook [by Andrew McCarron]

REVIEW OF KYTHE HELLER’S FIREBIRD

 

Last August, I read Kythe Heller’s new book-length poem, Firebird (Arrowsmith Press, 2020), in a single sitting. Inspired by Sufi mysticism and by traumatic and kairotic events from her own life, the poem performs a theology of transformation in which purgative fires of struggle and pain become a path to awaken on. Pain in the poem isn’t something to be forgotten once things get better, or an illness to be narcotized, nor is it an occasion for poeticized identity narcissism. Pain becomes a site of grace, a pyre in which holy flames burn silence into song, madness into mysticism, body into spirit, and self into community.

The poem began as a series of notebook jottings. Kythe explained her process in an email:

I think of notebooks expansively, not only as a conventional and necessary literary practice on the page but also as an initiatory practice -- translating dreams and actual events and insights, into scraps of images, films, sounds, song, ritual, shared dreams or poems with which people can experiment and live new realities together. Over the course of several years of intensive spiritual practice, while writing Firebird, I also started a collective of artists and creatives, first in NYC and then in Cambridge, MA, eventually called VISION LAB, and some of the original material for Firebird came out of these living experimental notebooks. I was writing and then we also started to act out these dreams together, which led to more writing. The work became a book and then a set of fluid performance ritual pieces, living poems, performance scores or inhabited, experimental poems, like a living notebook of new forms.

As the title suggests, the poem’s element is fire, both in its destructive and transformative capacities. The flames surround, engulf, and transform a feminine subject who takes on several related identities: a teenage runaway, a burning girl, a feral child living in society’s margins, and a mystic-poet. The storylines of these individuals come in and out of focus -- at times existing as parallel novels in miniature and other times merging into the fold of a single story. The 64-page poem, which has an experimental quality due to frequent shifts between verse and prose, expressive uses of punctuation, ambulatory perspectives, and incantatory rhythms, is divided into five interlocking sections, with each section building on the resonances of the sections that precede it: “The Burning Girl”; “Mattress Under The Overpass”; “The Spirit Neither Sorts Nor Separates”; “Runaway”; “That Heart.” Whether the mysterious subjects who breathe, burn, and “become” across the five sections are different people, the same person, the poet herself, or even the reader remains unclear at first. The shifting pronouns (I, she, you) create a shared experience of brokenness and becoming familiar to seekers who walk down the spiritual path. 

The poem invites the reader into its life, mining experience for shared magma: “The body of eyes everywhere a joyful sobbing: everywhere a crackling wash of cries where the glowing coals emerge / just at the center of the fluff of ash and blackened fabric--” Like Eliot’s Quartets, Firebird doesn’t present “the lifetime of one man only.” I felt this to be true when I first read the poem last summer and even more so when I reread it this past week. Like her mentor and friend Fanny Howe, Kythe’s poetry performs mystical theology in a language of experimental poetics that invites the reader in. Both writers seek to say something barely communicable but commonly experienced by spiritually oriented people, which, according to Paul Tillich, is potentially everyone. 

A burning girl haunts the poem, setting its pages ablaze. She sits at the center of the work in a circle of flames. At first, the girl’s obsession with fire is emblematic of a self-destructive impulse, a promethean urge destructively rendered: “But how could I open the door / while she stood there burning?” the poet asks. The burning girl, a possible Jungian shadow, shows up at her door demanding entry. “I stood at the door of my life / but she was already there,” reads the opening couplet. “Her skin swollen. / And in her eyes / pain like a flower opening its body forever.” By the poem’s second page, it becomes clear that the poet and burning girl are the same person. Like the Gerasene Demoniac described in the gospels, the poet seems to be recalling a time when her self-unity was fragmented by the trauma of abuse, neglect, and social estrangement. Fire becomes an object of seduction for the girl. It calls to her like flames call to a pyromaniac. 

The burning girl is depicted at first as problematic, uncontainable, dangerous. Who’s more feared than a fire-obsessed, self-harming woman with wild hair living in the woods on the outskirts of town? The poem touches on this in an interpolative moment: “There were fire marshals signaling. This is illegal, they said. With enormous effort, I prevented myself thinking the thing inside the match that wanted out. And then, because I had to, because the fire could not be prevented, I wrote this.” As Jungians know, the key to our evolutionary growth as people can often be found in the bewildering symbols and plotlines that populate our fantasies and nightmares. Everything is meaningful.  

Fire becomes a meaningful site for transformation through the poem. The firebird is the phoenix, the immortal bird from Greek mythology that cyclically regenerates from the ashes of the fires that consume it. The subject of the poem is transformed through a process of negation that, like death by fire, is brutal and unspeakable in its infernal erasures. Birth names are burned away (“...She wanted meaning. / And her given name sounded fake, like a porn star”), previous selves and their aspirations are burned away (“to burn away what she was, what she meant / to become--”), suffering and desire are burned away (“Look inside the mattress, the suffering / burns. The desire / to heal again through suffering burns”), possessions are left behind (“Leave all that is mine on the street again”), and the body and its sensations are immolated as well (“Joy or anguish, to be born in fire, in the elemental moment, to feel the flames coursing over my bones, caressing every cell with light / until at last the fire bent down low over / the rib cage, / and reaching, reached in”). What remains is the beating heart of who we are at the level of shared spirit (“Never knowing the difference / between your own heart pumping 1,640 beats a minute / and the heart of the world into which you fly / What trust”). The turbulence and pain of the past aren’t disavowed. They become a path that culminates in compassion and moral clarity.   

Like many poetic works that engage the immaterial world, the experience of Firebird doesn’t easily lend itself to the prodding and summations of literary criticism. The poem performs its purpose in its own apophatic terms when read or performed. Perhaps this is why it has been performed as a musical album in collaboration with the composer/musicians Andrew Stauffer and Nicholas Denton Protsack of Sounds Like Things, as well as four short video poems, in collaboration with talented video and movement artists Anya Yermakova, Grace Jackson, and Marizo Siller, among others.

When our society talks about positive change on an individual level, it’s often couched in material terms. We talk about changing our careers, our life partners, our scenery, our cognitive, affective & narrative patterns, and our brain chemistry. Firebird enacts a different sort of change, a change of spirit that renders everything we’ve lost, all our scars, all our shocked silences, and all the times we’ve been alone in the darkening wood – into a meaningful process. It’s a process through which we can find our hearts “melted into the form of liquid pearl.” Even if we remain exiled from the homes of our birth, there’s nothing in our lives that can’t help us find a final home in the capacities of our heart. The final line of Firebird asks, “In that heart, what point is there in dying or being born again?”  

Flying Into the Unpredictable: Publishing During a Pandemic [by J. Chester Johnson]

(ed note: We checked in with J. Chester Johnson to find out how he's fared over the course of the last 18 plus months with the publication of his timely Damaged Heritage. Here's his update. sdl)
My latest nonfiction book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation (publisher: Pegasus; distributed by Simon & Schuster), was released on May 5, 2020 in the midst of a raging covid pandemic that relentlessly and unmercifully brutalized New York City. Those of us who reside in the City and who could do so clung to the interiors of our homes, going outdoors with much fear and trembling.

Into this environment, Damaged Heritage had been published. In turn, a book launch, scheduled for the New York City Harvard Club, was kyboshed, and both my agent and publisher told me to “cool” my expectations on book sales, for Damaged Heritage would be flying into the unpredictable, but clearly adverse headwinds of covid with bookstores everywhere then being shuttered for indefinite periods of time. So, I then chalked up my new book as just one more learning experience to be encased among others that friends and relatives suggest should make me stronger; however, I was getting too old to make much use of such learning experiences. . .I thought.

Nonetheless, there were obviously new paths to be conquered in response to the pandemic. Zoom-type presentations and book plates replaced traveling for in-person gatherings and face-to-face signing of personal inscriptions. On-line interviews then prevailed. At the same time, accommodations were now made possible as a result of new ways of reaching the public. For instance, on Sunday, June 28^th, 2020, I conducted a zoom appearance at 8:30AM before a congregation of the Episcopal Diocese of Florida that lasted an hour; just three hours later, I made another zoom presentation on the book before the Washington National Cathedral in the District of Columbia.

Such a tandem would not have been possible in the absence of zoom or its equivalent. Indeed, I’ve already given nearly 90 presentations, including interviews, on Damaged Heritage. I found that zooms allowed me to reach more people and to participate in more places. Moreover, podcasts represented not an insignificant part of the book marketing effort. Zoom-type appearances will undoubtedly be with us for future “book tours”. One cannot predict an experience like the covid pandemic affecting the way future practices will be conducted; however, speaking as one, I found the results from new approaches of marketing books often quite effective and satisfying.

Damaged Heritage had three, main messages. First, it told of a terribly murderous massacre of African-American sharecroppers and their family members – known as the Elaine Race Massacre – on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River Delta; too few people knew anything about this event, which was conceivably the worst attack against African-Americans in our country’s history. Second, the new book told of my maturation process in discovering that my favored grandfather participated in the Massacre; in addition, notwithstanding my having grown up in a racist family in the very racist region of the Massacre, the process also led this erstwhile white Southerner to the embracement of both Black liberation and a progressive, structural format for racial reconciliation between Blacks and whites.

Third, Damaged Heritage tells the story of racial reconciliation and deep friendship that developed between Sheila Walker and me for seven years and extended to family members on both sides. Sheila was a descendent of victims of the Massacre, granduncles who were shot numerous times by white posses and left for dead, but survived. For several years, Sheila and I talked publicly in numerous forums about our reconciliation. She died in March of this year, and I was requested by her family to give the eulogy.

The torture and murder of George Floyd occurred only three weeks following the release of Damaged Heritage. I simply had no idea how much the racial reconciliation and deep friendship that existed between an African-American woman (Sheila Walker) and a white man who grew up in the South along the Mississippi River (namely, me), as described in this book, would resonate with people following the death of George Floyd that resulted in public outpouring of grief and horror by both Blacks and so many whites, together with consequential confrontations between citizens and law enforcement, including, on occasion, federal troops. Sheila and my racial reconciliation and friendship, combined with the disclosure of this unknown event, the purposefully hidden story of the Elaine Race Massacre, seemed to galvanize readers to Damaged Heritage.

For example, in late July, 2020, two months following release of the book, I was informed by my publisher that Damaged Heritage stood at #3 on a significant Amazon Best Seller list for books sold through Kindle. More recently, I found that the book had been included in Goodreads’ multi-year list of Best Nonfiction Books of Horrifying Events, alongside The Diary of Anne Frank, Hersey’s Hiroshima, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago – admittedly, my book is down the list, but nevertheless on the list.

The ole saw that “timing is everything” has its use, but I prefer to believe and adhere to a terse epigram I discovered that had been written cryptically in small, printed letters and incongruously on the gray walls of a New York City latrine located in a writers’ hangout: “Just keep writing”. Part of this book had been written as far back as 2013; filling in the blank spaces between the lip and the cup meant years. One shall never know, and one should never guess. Just keep writing.                                                                                                                                  

Chester Johnson is a poet and nonfiction writer. In addition to Damaged Heritage, he has written three, other books, recently published: St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems, Now And Then: Selected Longer Poems, and Auden, the Psalms, and Me. Find out more about Chester Johnson here.

The End of Summer--Tutti Frutti Tarts [by Barbara Hamby]

Summer is ending, but the impulse to pile on the fruit is almost irresistible. For Labor Day I made a Lemon Mascarpone tart with a combination of plums, blueberries, raspberries, and cherries. Right away the Italian description "tutti frutti" came to mind. It translates as "all the fruits." I didn't manage to do that, but I did my best. 

A week later for my friend Elizabeth's birthday, I made Patricia Wells' Lemon Lover's Tart, because lemon is her favorite. I've made this tart over and over, but I've never made this Tutti Frutti version. I also wanted to try out my tartlet tins.

The pandemic has made all kinds of obsessions seem less weird. I'm studying French and Italian on Duolingo, talking things over with my little cat Patsy, and all summer I made fruit tarts. Oh, I also wrote a lot of poems. I call that a good summer. Thanks for sharing it with me. -- Barbara Hamby

McClure Kick Blues [by Vincent Katz]

Tomorrow, at the California Shakespeare Theater, in Orinda, California, there will be a memorial to poet, playwright and thinker Michael McClure, who passed away in May of 2020. Along with Diane di Prima, of all the great poets we have lost in the past few years, Michael for me defines an era. It’s funny to think of it now, but it’s McClure and di Prima who somehow stand for a whole experiment in poetry and living that remains vital to me, and I imagine always will. I think it is partially the integration of their poetry with a way of thinking about living that is the key to their vitality.

In his introduction to the first edition of Ghost Tantras, published by City Lights in 1964, McClure wrote:

I WAS HERE AND I LIKED IT!

It was all O.K.

I suffered.

There were scents, and flowers, and textures, beautiful women.

I was a handsome man. I invented love.

I radiated genius for those who saw me with loving eyes.

I was happy — I laughed and cried. Constantly new

sights and sounds. I trembled and sweated

at the sight of beauty. I laughed at strong

things because I loved them — wanting to kick them in

and make freedom. When I go I’M GONE.

Don’t resurrect me

or the duplicates of my atoms.

It was perfect !

I am sheer spirit.

Tomorrow, poets, musicians, publishers, friends will celebrate this poet who some link to Shelley and Lawrence, and who I see as a human being able to intuit his living on earth in relation to all other living beings, and simultaneously to flesh that out in relation to the beauty, and sometimes terror, he sensed in the arts of painting, music, dance, theater. He wanted to reach most of all, to reach out, to resist, to feel the softness of the couch beneath his lover and himself, the dissolving of inside and out, the hummingbird, the bombs falling on Cambodia, consciousness creating and destroying itself each instant.

                     

As a kind of parting gift, Michael left us Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems, published this year by City Lights. Editor Garrett Caples’ account of how the book was put together makes clear both McClure’s fastidiousness when it came to form and his openness to such questions as sequencing and grouping poems. A sequence of four “Death Poems” in a section called “MORTALITIES” evinces one of the most joyful attitudes toward death I’ve seen in poetry, something perhaps not surprising to readers of McClure, but still a fantastic thing to have:

                                                            TO GROW OLD IS A JOY PRECEDING THE BIG ONE.

                                                                            Death is a dark chocolate cake,

                                                                      sweet, and filled with deep blue tortures.

Remember Michael tomorrow, remember joy, remember poetry.