The Best American Poetry

"A desire to capture events": Nick Courtright & Cynthia Good in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

I'm excited to introduce this conversation between Cynthia Good and Nick Courtright, who I've paired because of their shared investment in travel, documentary poetics, and entrepreneurship in literature and the arts.  Here, they discuss their latest collections, as well as the intersection of lived experience, craft, and the business of writing.  

Cynthia Good is an award-winning poet, journalist, and former TV news anchor. She has written six books including Vaccinating Your Child, which won the Georgia Author of the Year award. She has launched two magazines, Atlanta Woman and the nationally distributed PINK magazine for women in business. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Adanna Journal, Awakenings, Book of Matches, Brickplight, Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, Cutthroat, Free State Review, Full Bleed, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hole in the Head Review, Main Street Rag, Maudlin House Review, MudRoom, Outrider Press, OyeDrum Magazine, The Penmen Review, Pensive Journal, Persimmon Tree, Pier-Glass Poetry, Pink Panther Magazine, Poydras, South Shore Review, The Ravens Perch, Reed Magazine, Tall Grass, Terminus Magazine, They Call Us, and Voices de la Luna and Willows Wept Review, Semi-Finalist: The Word Works 2021, among others. Her debut poetry collection is available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press. 

Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light and Punchline, and he serves as 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, Nick lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel.

 

Cynthia Good: Why were you moved to focus on place, and what places in particular, since it is a bit mysterious in some of your beautiful poems?

Nick Courtright: I was drawn to place because the otherworldliness—and normalcy—of non-America called for a deeper exploration. I’m very aware of how fortunate I am to have seen a lot of the world, and what I found there was not just a bunch of tourist sites, but a reminder that the lives of others are just as rich and nuanced—and perhaps even more so—than ours in America, even though in America we tend to have a rather flat impression of the rest of the world.

Poet Spotlight: Shane McCrae [by Kristina Marie Darling]

I'm thrilled to introduce this new poem by celebrated writer Shane McCrae.  As a longtime admirer of McCrae's work, I never cease to be amazed by his ability to bear the distinctive lineation of Frank O'Hara and the cadences of classic New York School poetry into new and unforeseen sociopolitical territory.  

Poet Shane McCrae grew up in Texas and California. The first in his family to graduate from college, McCrae earned a BA at Linfield College, an MA at the University of Iowa, an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a JD at Harvard Law School.
 
McCrae is the author of several poetry collections, including Mule(2011); Blood (2013); The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Gilded Auction Block (2019). His work has also been featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler, and his honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

--Kristina Marie Darling 

A New Poem by Shane McCrae

"Intellect, anxiety, philosophy, history, art": Rachel Abramowitz and Tina Cane in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

It is a pleasure to introduce this conversation by two outstanding and generous literary citizens:  Tina Cane and Rachel Abramowitz.  In both writers' bodies of work, we see a poetics powered by community, enriched by conversation and emboldened by dialogue across genres and mediums.  

Rachel Abramowitz is also the author The Birthday of the Dead, which just launched from Conduit Editions, as well as the chapbooks The Puzzle Monster, winner of the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun prize (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in 2022), and Gut Lust, the winner of the 2019 Burnside Review prize (Burnside Review Press, 2020). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Tin House Online, The Threepenny Review, Seneca Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Oxonian Review, POOL, jubilat, Sprung Formal, Transom, Colorado Review, and others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Oxford, and has taught English Literature at Barnard College in New York. 

Tina Cane was born in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC in 1969 and grew up in the city’s East and West Village. She attended the University of Vermont, the Sorbonne and completed her master’s degree in French Literature at ​the University of Paris X-Nanterre and Middlebury College.  She is the founder and director of Writers-in-the Schools, RI, for which she works as a visiting poet. Over the past twenty-five years, Tina has taught French, English, and creative writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island.  Her poems and translations have appeared ​in numerous publications, including Spinning Jenny, The Literary  Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, Poem-a-Day.  Her work,The Fifth Thought, was the 2008 Other Painters Press chapbook winner. Her books include The Fifth Thought,Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, and Body of Work. Tina was the 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and their three children. In 2020, Cane was named a poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Tina is also the creator/curator of the distance reading series, ​Poetry is Bread.  Alma Presses Play, Tina's debut novel-in-verse for young adults readers, will be released in September 2021 with Penguin/ Random House Books.

Tina Cane: There's a poem I keep returning to called "Vantablack" from your new collection, The Birthday of the Dead. It's named for that blackest shade of paint ever made, but manages to encapsulate the book's exploration of how, in your words, "any human interaction" with the natural world "turns out  to be devastating in unexpected ways." The thrust of this observation pervades your book, which is a place where "the forest fills and unfills, drops itself down root tubes and turns to dark lace." Where does this vision of our relationship with nature spring from? How would you characterize your relationship with the natural world?

Poet Spotlight: Cole Swensen [by Kristina Marie Darling]

It's truly an honor to introduce this new work by acclaimed poet Cole Swensen.  Here, she offers a complex and gorgeously lyrical phenomenology of perception, deftly interrogating the ways that language shapes one's experience of the senses and the world around us.  In Swensen's newest work, the unique artistic opportunities of poetry - performative language, metaphor, and the image - are brought to bear on these philosophical questions with incredible skill.  It is the associative logic that Swensen implements that allows her to present inquiries into the nature of language and perception in a visceral way. Indeed, "New Green" involves and implicates the reader in the speaker's efforts to understand - and delineate - a clearer boundary between self and world.  This is a stunning addition to an already accomplished body of work.  

Cole Swensen is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently On Walking On (Nightboat, 2017), Gave (Omnidawn, 2017), and Landscapes on a Train(Nightboat 2015), and a volume of critical essays. Her poetic collections turn around specific research projects, including ones on public parks, visual art, illuminated manuscripts, and ghosts. Her work has won the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid and the founding editor of La Presse Poetry (www.lapressepoetry.com). She teaches at Brown University.

New Green by Cole Swensen 

What is the unseen, and how do we see it before it emerges? That is the nature of earliest things, and you try to observe what comes first—a blade of grass, a livening of the moss, an outbreak of leaf—looking out the window and then walking outside in search of emergence. It really does have a different color—which is also what’s puzzling your child as she runs out of the house holding up a crayon, asking “What does New Green mean? Haven’t all colors been around forever?” And I think of the translation that I’ve just finished for a catalogue in which the artist, among a list of colors, included verd, which turned out to be old French for vert, and, sure enough, Old English has grene, but despite this clear illustration, the child refuses to believe that it’s possible to invent a new color simply by inventing a new word.

"The real movement is through ideas": Beth McDermott & Maya Sonenberg in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

In writings on her time as editor of The Dial, Marianne Moore coined the term "conversity" to describe the inherently dialogic nature of poetry.  In that spirit, I'm pleased to present the following conversation between two contemporary writers who are both intriguing in their critiques of traditional genre categories:  Maya Sonenberg, a masterful storyteller, who frequently places the tools of poetry in the service of narrative, and Beth McDermott, whose ekphrastic poems often apply performative language and lyricism to the task of engaging with, and thinking through, the questions posed by works of visual art.  As this conversation unfolds, McDermott and Sonenberg consider such compelling topics as the gender politics of judgment, the relationship between writing and family, and the interplay of innovative writerly technique and the deeply personal.  

Maya Sonenberg (above left) grew up in New York City and lived in Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, California, Oregon, and Paris, France before settling in Seattle, where she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Washington.  Her newest collection of short stories, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters has received the Sullivan Prize and will be published by the University of Notre Dame press in August 2022. Her previous collections are Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature) and Voices from the Blue Hotel. Other fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Web Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, New Ohio Review, The Literarian, Hotel Amerika, and numerous other places.

Beth McDermott’s poetry appears in Pine Row, Tupelo Quarterly, Terrain.org, and Southern Humanities Review. Reviews and criticism about art and ecology appear in American Book Review, After the Art, Kenyon Review Online, and The Trumpeter. She’s an Assistant Professor of English at the University of St. Francis and recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award, an Illinois Speaks Micro-Grant, and first place in the Regional Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest.  Her first book, Figure 1, just launched from Pine Row Press. 

Beth McDermott: We both write about parenting. In a couple of my poems, i.e. “Judgment” or “Getting Ready,” I consider what it means to be judged as a parent. I see common feelings among my speakers and your character in “Painting Time,” for example. In that story, written from the second person point of view, we get the partner’s perspective of the “she,” who has spent most of her time as a parent looking for time to paint. How does the choice of that viewpoint speak to what it means to be a “bad mother”? 

Maya Sonenberg: When I started writing “Painting Time,” I gave myself the challenge of using second person point of view, which I had never really done before, not that type of second person anyway where a narrator addresses one of the characters, rather than one character addressing another. I think I chose to address the husband/father as the “you” for a couple of reasons. The woman in that story is working so hard at being a “good” mother that she fears/feels she’s become a “bad” artist, and I wanted to see this struggle from the outside, through her spouse’s eyes but without the potential solipsism of the first person point of view. I hope the reader can see that he doesn’t think she’s a bad artist or a bad mother; she has internalized those judgments. However, while he’s extremely sympathetic towards her plight, and in fact tries to do whatever he can to help, he’s ultimately completely clueless about what she’s going through and also sort of jealous of her connection to the children. I carefully chose to present the male characters in this story and in “Hunters and Gatherers” in as sympathetic a light as I could muster to highlight the fact that misogyny, sexism, and expectations around motherhood are systemic rather than the actions or beliefs of isolated “bad” men.

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.

_________________________________________

 

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.

_________________________________________

 

"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.

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?   

Poet Spotlight: Jenny Grassl [by Kristina Marie Darling]

"It is an honor and privilege to celebrate Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry, and to highlight some of our extraordinary contributors.  Please enjoy this feature on poet and visual artist Jenny Grassl, whose interdisciplinary practice reflects TQ's commitment to bridging the gap between literature and the fine arts."--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly 

Jenny Grassl's poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Laurel Review, Green Mountains Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ocean State Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, and other journals. Her work was published in a National Poetry Month feature of Iowa Review. Her manuscript DEER WOMAN IN THE DINING ROOM was selected as a runner-up for the Tupelo Press July open reading in 2021. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A Conversation with Poet & Visual Artist Jenny Grassl 

Kristina Marie Darling:  The poems featured here use the page as a canvas, a visual field.  In a world of left-margined poems, I find this approach bold, effective, and refreshing.  What advice do you have for poets who hesitate or struggle to take risks with form, to use white space as a unit of composition?  

Jenny Grassl: This is a great topic. I would say start by realizing that a block of left-margined poem stanzas or text is like a monument in a landscape. Often, its effect is to overpower that landscape, and overcome any evidence of the void. A poem that uses the whole page IS the landscape, and engages with the void. Get wandering, and start the journey. Push form to push content. Of course some poems work best in the traditional way.  

There exist great experiments with form in poetry. I am not sure how they lost relevance to so many of today's poets. I am thinking of Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, John Ashbery, Tom Clark with Lewis Warsh, and Anne Waldman, among others. I was exposed to their work early on, and assumed I had permission to compose a page creatively. Lewis was my earliest mentor.

KMD:  In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also known as a visual artist.  What has your cross-disciplinary practice, and your background in the fine arts, opened up within your poetry? 

JG: In visual art, working with form/content tension while seeking beauty, constantly re-defines beauty. This has had real consequences for my poetry. 

Many issues are the same in both poetry and art: gesture, conflict, philosophy, story, emotion, social history, image, and patterning. Not least is celebrating the medium. Poetry that foregrounds language functions for me the way painterly painting does. However, I do not mean the conceptual language of Language poets. I prefer something more sensual. The medium reveals content, and is not subservient to it. Collage and layering as expressions of language have become more important in my poetry through visual work. And, indeed, the image—I build my poems with images.  

KMD:  Tell me about your text-based visual artworks and collages.  

JG: In digital collages, I work back and forth with elements and fragments of photographs, paintings, drawings, bits of nature, and typography. The shape is panoramic, yet I think of them as interior landscapes. I am interested in how the 

wide view might investigate something personal— making maps of consciousness.

In the paintings I focus on automatic writing. I paint, scramble, and layer the words so the meaning is obscured, while still existing with integrity within the work. Each letter is part of an automatic poem. Because the words are concealed, the painting becomes a texture of pure language. 

KMD:  What can poets learn from visual artists?  

JG: Visual artists play, visually. This is not to say that is all they do. Of course there is work and rework. Poets have the same possibility.   

Figure/ground relationships are important to visual artists, and can be for poets, in their use of text in white space. Creating positive and negative space, the tension of beauty emerges. This is not merely formal. We can also learn from painters and sculptors who honor their mediums. Language is actually as much of the body as of the mind.

KMD:  In your poetry, the silences and ruptures are nearly as charged as the words themselves.  Can you speak to the power of silence and the unsaid in poetry? 

JG: Silence and rupture exist in a woman's life in the shadow of monuments.

Break apart a tightly bound form and new possibilities are created. Sometimes this is urgent and disorderly—graffiti on the monuments, or a toppling. Often a phantom text emerges. Silence always visits the page. The question is how is it shaped or left to wander. What does it mean? In visual art the color red creates the after image of green. The darkness of text creates an aura of light but also the void. 

KMD:  What else are you working on?  What can readers look forward to?

Poet Spotlight: Cynthia Dewi Oka [by Wendy Chen]

"It is an honor and privilege to celebrate Tupelo Quarterly at The Best American Poetry and spotlight some of our extraordinary contributors.  Please enjoy this interview with Cynthia Dewi Oka, curated by TQ Managing Editor Wendy Chen".--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly  

Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her experimental poem, Future Revisions, was exhibited at the Rail Park billboard in Philadelphia in summer 2021. An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, and Voices of Our Nations (VONA). For fifteen years, Cynthia worked as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser in social movements for gender, racial, economic, and migrant justice. Her fourth poetry collection, A Tinderbox in Three Acts, is a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay and is forthcoming in fall 2022 from BOA Editions.

 

Wendy Chen: Congratulations on the upcoming publication of your fourth poetry collection A Tinderbox in Three Acts this fall as the next BOA Blessing the Boats Selections title! Has the way you put together poetry collections changed over the years?

Cynthia Dewi Oka: Thank you so much! I think the way I put together collections has changed from project to project, depending on the conditions of my writing life. Until very recently, I’ve always had to write around my primary responsibilities as a working mother. For instance, the poems in both Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Dinah Press, 2012; revised edition, Thread Makes Blanket, 2016) and Salvage (Northwestern University Press, 2017) were written in pre-dawn hours, which were the only time I could be alone and focus on poetry without interruption. With Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021), I had a bit more spaciousness because my son was older, and I could enforce fiercer boundaries around my writing time as an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. I still had to work full time to support my family but at least I didn’t have to worry about debt because the program fully funded my studies with the Holden Fellowship. That was such a gift. I also researched and completed the first draft of A Tinderbox in Three Acts during that period. 

WC: Are there any particularly formative experiences to your identity as a writer? 

CDO: Teaching myself English by trial-and-error as a ten-year-old because the ESL program at my new school in Canada could not accommodate an Indonesian speaker was the most formative experience for me as a writer. I basically read everything in the school library with the help of a little electronic dictionary. It was helpful in terms of vocabulary, but I had to learn grammar by visually noting syntactical patterns in the texts, and then trying them out myself by writing short stories. Indonesian does not have tenses, so learning the nuances of time in relation to action in English was a bit like learning a new physics. Of course, I never encountered characters “like” me or contexts “like” the one I came from, but that has always been my reality, even when I lived in Indonesia because my family is Chinese Indonesian and under the New Order regime, most public expressions of Chinese culture and identity were outlawed. It’s wonderful, of course, to feel recognized by a text, but to me, experiencing difference and becoming aware of a wider range of human possibilities (and limitations) has always been the primary joy of literature. I didn’t, however, learn to speak English comfortably until I started listening to hip hop in my early teens. Before that, English just kind of sounded and felt like running water to me. The sonic patterning to rhythm, lexical play, and the enunciative and emotive qualities of speech as art in hip hop made it much more familiar to how I physically experienced my native tongue. Later, I taught myself poetry in a similar way, by reading widely – not just formally, but internationally beyond the American poetry echo chamber – and experimenting with syntactical, visual, and sonic patterns. 

WC: What is your revision process like? When do you know when a poem is “done’? 

Poet Spotlight: Brenna Womer [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Brenna Womer is a prose writer and poet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition as well as serves as an associate editor of Passages North. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, Pleiades, and elsewhere, and she is the author of honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018).

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Artist’s Statement

I think utilizing the craft of textual difficulty, in its limitless forms, is essential for contemporary poets and prose writers. Obviously, stream-of-consciousness has been a part of the mainstream for some time now and paved the way for writers like myself who intend for the aesthetics of some pieces to weigh as heavily as the text itself. In my piece “Hypochondria, or The Disease,” I rely on the difficulty of the formatting to evoke a sense of anxiety in the reader as they decipher some of my personal experiences with debilitating mental illness; the reader has to work a bit harder for the narrative. I’ve been told the piece is frustrating and exhausting, which isn’t language typically attributed to successful work, but in the case of this particular piece as well as some of my other creative nonfiction and poetry, it’s exactly the point. I like to think of it as an exercise in empathy.

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A Folio of New Writing by Brenna Womer

company

 

put on a show
for me
he asks
while I ride
on top
and wonder
what it is
he thinks
I’m doing
now
does he
think I mash
my own breasts
and pinch
nipples hard
and red and
raw at home
alone
with my dogs
watching
he asks
tell me what
you really want
tell me where
you want it
but I want
to go back
to the couch
and eat
my cold
bagel but
I know he
has to
come before
I get
my everything
toasted
with plain
cream cheese

______________________________________

tenure

 

I trade my body for good company       or company     more often than not           but professor doesn’t see me in the hallway               copy room             elevator           parking lot doesn’t see me      if my tit’s not in his mouth     when his red stag isn’t dribble down my chin    and sticky     to the leather of his couch like my grandparents’ couch        the family I don’t call family because         they only love me during second service       vacation bible school          bless this food and the women who prepared it a family by any other name         is a sexual history an untethered novelty             so I ask him about his parents but of course            they’re dead of course         because professor is so many years of being             a white man in this world               in this grad-student pussy             is sixty-five years of asking       let’s go to the bedroom    

     and I am forty fewer of   okay

___________________________________

 

slow burn

 

my age always closer to the scotch in his glass       
we slow-dance     
next to the pool table
he asks me follow but I   
can’t didn’t don’t   
know how and his arms are rigid and his hand
too firm at my waist his fingers
like a trowel in my stubborn soil but he keeps
his eyes closed because it doesn’t need to be me       
“me and mrs jones” and my uncooperative           body           always taking up more space than
it should
                 he asks again just follow damnit       but I’m drunk on light beer and can’t make any more
or less of myself            and I know he has a wife at home       that they sleep in separate beds and her name is Gretchen    but I’m in a sundress and a fresh twenty-one while his cheek is
whisker-burn against my own                                         like my father’s when he used to kiss me
goodnight

_______________________________________

Thanks to The Rumpus, where these poems first appeared.  

Poet Spotlight: Laurie Sheck [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Born and raised in the Bronx, poet Laurie Sheck was educated at the University of Iowa. She has published several collections of poetry, including Captivity (2007); The Willow Grove (1996), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Amaranth (1981). Her poems often use myths as frames within which to explore ideas of motion and stillness, consciousness and the body. In a 2002 interview, speaking to the attentiveness, rather than narrative, that drives her work, Sheck noted, “if you create a world on the page in which things that seem not to hold together can interact with each other, they can hold, and part of what’s holding, part of what’s interesting, is the way that things don’t directly hook up.”

Her 500-page hybrid novel, A Monster’s Notes (2009), uses prose fragments and deletions, letters, and embedded texts to reimagine the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “As Sheck demonstrates, the lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein's monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space,” observes novelist and editor Ed Park in a review for the Los Angeles Times.

Sheck’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her poems have won several Pushcart Prizes and have been included in Best American Poetry. Sheck edited the anthology Poem a Day, Volume 2 (2003).

Sheck has taught at Princeton University and the New School. She lives in New York City.

_________________________________________

On Textual Difficulty

Toward the end of Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Idiot, there is a scene of astonishing and transgressive beauty—the frightened, epileptic Prince Myshkin holds the murderer Rogozhin in his arms, stroking and comforting him, as they pass the night only a few feet from the bed where Rogozhin has left Nastasya’s dead body. Myshkin is horrified by Rogozhin, so much so that after that night he will never speak again. But he understands in the deepest parts of his being that if he turns from Rogozhin he is turning from everything human, suffering, radiant, ambiguous, complex.

What is termed “textual difficulty” seems to me nothing less than the attempt to be faithful to the ambiguities, extremities, and textures of experience and of language itself.

What Dostoevsky knew: nothing is more radical, more strange, than reality. Facts are astonishments. The mind seeks to briefly capture and wonder at, interrogate, what it senses. Angles into the real. A fragility of holding.

Unsettled. Volatile. Unstable.

“The artist knows there is nothing stable under heaven.” (James Baldwin).

I am moved by the unstable text. The precarious, the marginal, the de-centered, is also strong.

___________________________________________

An Introductory Note

The hybrid works I have been writing over the past decade involve interactions with one or two source texts and a large body of factual material. A Monster’s Notes involves itself with Frankenstein, the Shelleys, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and facts from a wide array of areas from robotics and genetic engineering to space travel. Island of the Mad interacts with Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, while also carrying out an investigation of Dostoevsky’s biography and the city of Venice and the Venetian plague of 1575. The following excerpt is taken from a new hybrid work in progress. The speaker is a cyborg who has been part of an experiment being carried out at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics and Bio-engineering. He has secretly left the laboratory, taking with him a stack of papers and documents. In his hiding place in a toolshed on the outskirts of Geneva, he reads through the stacks of files he stole. In the three short sections below he recounts his experiences and thoughts to an orphaned boy who has fallen into a coma.

___________________________________________

A Folio of New Writing by Laurie Sheck 

 

 

The more I read the less fixed and defined the world became.

In time we might not even have bodies. We would merge with cyberspace and no longer be creatures of earth.

In the dimness of the toolshed the words kept moving through me: “Like data seamlessly transferred between computers, we will find our consciousness distributed over many locations”…. “one piece of our mind here, another there, our essences will travel the information networks at will.”

And:

“Like organisms in gentle tide pools that migrate over time to freezing oceans or steaming jungles, our descendants will venture forth to leave behind this narrow realm we consider reality.”

When I first started reading, I only wanted to get some sense of what I am, what had been done to me. My origins and history. A few glimpses into the ideas that brought me into being. But now it was as if everything around me was slowly dissolving—and I was part of that dissolving. As if the mind is trapped and lonely in the body. And the earth in its own way lost and lonely, a temporary waystation.

Outside the toolshed a soft rain was falling. I had read for many hours, it was almost morning. I put away the papers. Tried to sleep.

 _______________________________________

The papers I’d taken from the laboratory were mostly incomplete and often confusing—research studies with missing pages, disordered footnotes, clipped passages, working drafts, post-it notes in nearly-indecipherable handwriting. Each night I lifted them out of the folders. I read about the brain, and about intelligent machines, data compression, informational interfaces. About how Karl Capek coined the word “robot” from the Czech word for hard, menial labor. I learned about embodied computers, cyberspace, dislocation, fears of weakness, isolation, confinement. Intense fear of the other. Norbert Wiener believed the boundaries of the human are constructed rather than given. And Gregory Bateson asked, “Is a blind man’s cane part of a blind man?” I read about disrupted categories, flows of information, neural feedback, the erasure of the distinction between inanimate and animate. About how new kinds of bodies lead to new thoughts. Sometimes several pages were only lists of titles: The Human Use of Human Beings; Posthuman Bodies; The Origins of Feedback Control; Theories and Applications of Cellular Automata; The Reinvention of Nature.

After a while, the more I read, the more an eerie feeling crept over me—I had been born at the edge of something dying. My existence signaled a world where the distinction between human and machine, animate and inanimate, owner and thing, was coming to an end. I was a death-knell but maybe also a kind of unsettling beginning.

I read on about dynamic systems and “the worlds which are possible answers to a limited set of questions,” but all the while something in me was increasingly uneasy—unseen, wary, almost invisible.

So much of what I knew of myself was excluded from the history I was seeing, a history I was assumed to be part of. There was no place for who I really am.

One night after many hours of reading I fell into a leaden sleep. Very soon I was dreaming of Laika, a street dog from Moscow, the first dog sent into space. She had been chosen because given her life on the streets had proved her resourceful and strong. Her training involved weeks of confinement inside a small, cramped capsule with no room to even turn around. On the day the space craft launched, she was sent into orbit in chains beside her bowl of gel-like food, her heart rate rising to 240 beats per minute, her breath rate quadrupling. Soon she was orbiting the earth, but the capsule’s heat shield suddenly failed and she died within five hours.

But that night in my dream she hadn’t died. All these years she had been orbiting after all, cordoned off from every living thing, her eyes turned to the stars and meteors coming and going in the slit of the capsule’s small window, her bowl empty, her brittle legs chained and withered.    

I lowered my eyes and extended my hand very slowly and quietly, being careful not to startle or scare her, thinking I would show her she wasn’t alone, would undo the chains, give her food and water, stroke her. But when I looked up again she was gone, the space craft was empty.                                                  

________________________________________

Each night I returned to the toolshed. Thought about Laika, about Muska who trained beside her but crumbled under the strain, and Albina who had completed a shorter mission months before and so was “kept on the ground out of respect.” And each night I continued to read, taking in the many facts from the stolen folders. So many pages full of strange and interesting things. The first spider web spun in outer space was in 1973. The first spider web in space was spun there in 1973. Synthetic biology is “the design and construction of new biological parts and devices, and the re-design of natural biological systems for useful purposes.” “By combining advances in DNA sequencing with the principles of modern engineering, scientists can design new organisms that produce biofuels and the precursors of medicinal drugs.” Yuri Gagarin, the first human to enter outer space, was the son of a bricklayer and milkmaid in the village of Klushino, Russia. In 1968 he died in a mysterious plane crash on a routine training flight near Kirzhach. Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Klein coined the term “cyborg” in a 1960 paper on space travel—it referred to “an enhanced human being who could survive in extraterrestrial environments.” Neil Harbisson is the world’s first legally recognized cyborg— an antenna implanted in his skull enhances his perception of light and color. On their 1968 voyage to the moon, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders saw the distant glow of earthrise. Haruki Murakami wrote, “Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness? Why do people have to be this lonely?” The astronaut James Irwin said when he looked down on earth from space it seemed “fragile, delicate.” Murakami wrote, “I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping.” Each night as I read my eyes grew blurry but I kept going. Sometimes I stopped and listened to the rain, wished I could disappear inside it. But always I turned back to the folders. If I read long enough, maybe I would come to some hint of who I was or why I was a failed experiment. “Pure humanity has always only been an illusion.” “The cyborg does not have to be frightening or problematic. It does not have to be monstrous or deformed.” There were cyborgs whose bodies were lethal weapons, cyborgs who saw through walls, cyborgs with self-healing, sterilized blood. But the more I read something in me darkened, though I couldn’t say quite why.

Poet Spotlight: Elizabeth Powell [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Elizabeth Powell is the author of The Republic of Self, a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was a 2016 New Yorker Books We Love, a Small Press Best Seller, and won the 2015 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, selected by Maureen Seaton. Her novel Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, will be released in Spring 2019. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, Ecotone, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Sugarhouse Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Johnson State College. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

A Process Note

All poetry is physics, is a theology of being and thingyness, is transformative narrative. I am attracted to hybrid form as a way to push the imagination into new ways of thinking and seeing. The imagination is what helps to express what is difficult or unseen and begin to understand how its creative stance can revolt against status quo of American consumerism. There is a strong link between social justice and experimental prose and the hybrid lyric essay/poem because the power of the imaginative/spiritual/dream propulsion of writing is beginning to move us away from the old ways of seeing that no longer serve. The creative force is that which has the power to free. My lyric hybrid novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” explores how that redemptive idea interfaces with and investigates the consumerism and desire so rampant in American culture. I employ a pastiche of forms from disparate places such as a JCrew catalogue to the Book of Common Prayer. The book looks, in part, at the intersections of conservative evangelical misogyny, the new cult of domesticity (that is fashioned, in part, out of the idea of retro), and the social drive of the American advertisement and consumer system of belief.  My book thinks about creative force as prophecy, as the muse of history, as spiritual guide, as metaphor, as structural device, and, ultimately, as resistance.
__________________________________________________

A Folio of New Writing by Elizabeth Powell 

AUTOCORRECTING THE LYRIC I

 

I keep autocorrecting myself. I don’t want to autocorrect myself. I autocorrect when I don’t want to autocorrect. It disturbs the fusion of my interior monologue. I cannot keep up with how fast things are changing. If I use autocorrect I am more suitable for you to see. I am dressed. I am not as naked as my fast typing might insist.

Autocorrection is a kind of conspiracy theory of reality based on the probability of words and un-nimble fingers. Thought is more easily rendered when you autocorrect, so it is said. But I know I am made from a God that makes homemade bread in the desert, even if He doesn’t have yeast. I am not made of touchscreen typing, though it is didactic consideration. My fusion is a kind of Cupertino, inserted into the narrative even though it was never meant to be there. Yet, autocorrection is supposed reduce the probability I am wrong to you in the way Cary Grant never seems wrong to anyone.

When I autocorrect myself, it is better than back when I merely erased myself. There are many ways of erasure: deletion, drunk and disorderly, disintegration. Acting is a favored mode, and that’s why I like theater, drama, monologue. I’ve had practice passing as a Jew and passing as a WASP because my math teacher explained that I am what used to be called in New York, a Mic-Moc, though I am not Irish. I have become kind of good at doing this passing, though the one identity is always trying to autocorrect the other. Can you guess which parent of mine is a Jew? A Gentile?

Let’s say I’m fusion of cold borscht and finger sandwiches on white. I’m matzo ball Jew Bagel and thrifty Campbell’s soup with dried parsley don’t worry about me luncheon. I’m noodle kugel and I’m turkey divan casserole. I’m Bubbeleh and I’m Dearie. I’m Ma and I’m Mummy. I’m the Episcojew, and I am strong and not strong! I have a family tartan and a silence in the Vilnius ghetto. I cannot be buried in the holy land, but I cannot be cremated. I am passing and have passed, heard the murmurs   of lovely   & also…Dirty Jews, Fucking Gentiles. I have paid close attention to speech and learned how to autocorrect instantly. As quickly as fire, which used to follow me around like a strange cat. Fire on the Amtrak from DC to NYC, fire in the living room burning the shag rug, Fire on the Mountain at the Dead Shows.

Now, I just keep turning my words into something else beside fire like someone with a personality disorder trying to make everything look good! It is humbling and uncool, but I keep trying to fill in the blank of myself with words that keep changing. It is better, the Boston Brahmins say, to have a history not a past, so when I speak in the “I’ it must be my Jewish side, when I say that I am a vaudeville act in a quiet New England house. I’m the Daughter of the American Revolution in third class steerage.

I’m the debutante in the Pogrom. I’m a morpher like autocorrection. I have tried to make myself acceptable to both sides. Literally.

I am an Elizabeth…I autocorrect into an   electric   elsewhere

I am also Ann                And   Another

Powell to     Power   to Pose  

In Hebrew my name would be Bathsheba Bat Label

Bathsheba    becomes      Banshee, Battery

Also, I am delighted: Cary Grant was Jewish & Cary Grant was Church of England. He was perhaps the

Poet Spotlight: Veronica Golos [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Veronica Golos is the author of three poetry books, Rootwork: Lost Writings of John Brown and Mary Day Brown (3: A Taos Press), Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press, 2011), winner of the 2011 New Mexico Book Award, poems from which are translated into Arabic by poet Nizar Sartawi, and A Bell Buried Deep (Storyline Press, 2004), co-winner of the 16th Annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Edward Hirsch, and adapted for stage and performed at Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, CA. Golos has lectured at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, Hunter College, Julliard School of Music, Regis University, University of New Mexico, Dine Technical College, Kansas State University, and Colorado State University; she is co-editor of the Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, former Poetry Editor for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and core faculty at Tupelo Press's Writers Conferences. She lives in Taos, New Mexico with her husband, David Pérez.
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Artist Statement

What is "difficulty" in a poem? And to whom is it difficult? And why? The debates over what is Feminist poetry for example, underscore a question: Is there a feminine voice? And if so, is it one relegated only to the female? IN my own work, I have the female voice, that is, poems clearly in the voice of a women, to be one that may be, I hope, perceived as universal, as well as particular. I model this thinking based on comments made by Toni Morrison. In my newest collection, GIRL, I find that both the text, content, and texture of the poems create in many readers a disturbance. That creates both link and space between the poet and the reader. It creates movement. Ultimately, what we mean to do, I think, is the "break the ice" that surrounds the reader, and, the poet.

____________________________________

Poem     because

her mother inscribes          an open=eyed Braille         with her slap slap slap                                   

the girl           never                          cries   refusing                                     

            her secret     to her chest

like the Spartan boy                        and his fox

 

inside her     in the hold

of her mute                           never  

 

the blue-black                      of the slap

face arms her back

 

invisible                                that ink

 

^^^

 

sometimes in the summer she heard singing

            dense music peeling from the bark of trees

                        who sang? wind like weeping. whose?

                                    a wild sound roiling

                                                into the lovely ears of the girl: "live, yes, live."

 

^^^

 The dark god has stuffed my mouth with silk -- Vikas Menon

 

Poet Spotlight: Karla Kelsey [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Karla Kelsey is the author of four books: Knowledge Forms the Aviary; Iteration Nets; A Conjoined Book; and Of Sphere. With Aaron McCollough she edits Split-Level Texts and with Poupeh Missaghi she edits Matters of Feminist Practice. Her website is www.karlakelsey.com.

______________________________________

Difficulty: A Spillage

To honor being’s complexity requires, of necessity, a fray along the edges of the known, a jostling of the lens of representation, a discharge of difficulty. Difficulty: resistance, a refusal to compress or cauterize excess according to received form. Or according to received relation, knowledge, sensation, thought, utterance. Because in what overflows the easily recognizable body, object of thought or material we find vivacity, living tissue, incandescence powering syllable, word, sentence, line, text. And thus to reinvent what has been given, to make and be made new, to bathe in the thrill of what transpires beyond ease.

_______________________________________

A Folio of Poems by Karla Kelsey

THRALL

Enthralled     to the buzz of neon we yield to instruction     we stare
at the gallery’s sole object     a red square of light projected     on the wall
source invisible. We     yield, I yield inhaling 1-2-3-4-5     exhaling 1-2-3-4-

5 mind sky-blank and     you, you stand beside me     a solid object,
steadfast in Yves Klein Blue.     If you yield I do not know because      
surrender is     individual     is sole     my body, my I, my     mind, my

me abandoned to mystic red, scarlet red, coquelicot red and I     cock-lee-co      
I red-corn-rose     I wild-poppy-poppy, do you     pulse with this, you, next
to me, you blue, you     International Klein Blue?     The square pulses

me poppy     source invisible, with the same     questionable status of
objects revealed     many years ago by a boardwalk     psychic     off-season
air crystalizing     just before snow.     Holding up the nine of swords

she had said     this is you as you believe yourself     to be, facedown and    
pierced     by these swords. But notice the flat sea, the rising sun     and so
pull     will you pull-pull     who will pull-pull     tucking a greasy strand

of hair under a purple     turban, yes, she wore a purple satin     turban    
those swords from your back? Whetted blades     hilts of hammered gold    
the psychic said     cigarette, sweatshirt with rhinestone-studded cat my time

us nearly     up     they need to come out. The cat’s emerald eyes     flash      
in candle light.     Petals crumple     in the bud     then bloom, showy    
before flattening and   radiate out a perfect red disk before falling away.

____________________________________________

The swords had     needed, I     need, needed     need mystic     scarlet  
coquelicot     red corn roses coursing through my body seeding, blooming,
tissue-heads     shuddering in     wind. I need because       under fabrics and

plastics we are exposed, vulnerable to     impression and it is exhausting    
this pretense     otherwise, exhausting to wake early, make coffee, shower,
dress     advance into the day with formal hello and     yesyes as if the moment

wasn’t all around us vibrating     green and     shimmering and     spitting
gravel     like sparks, like stars.     As if we didn’t ourselves vibrate     star    
spark. And after noon the vibration   becomes inner violin, tremolo up to

a high pitch, tremolo down and at night the sea, violet     lashing     lashing    
leather     wealing skin. And the wounds     singing     until the salve of
sleep, mugwort and     sage, ravensara dabbed on in dream.     Or here

before the gallery’s red square of     light, stigmata vision, biochemical    
aria     of photons through pupils igniting     photoreceptors at the backs
of eyes.     Pulse triggered along the optic nerve neurons fire and     fire

a sensation of     color simulating the body where the swords had been
until     one day     the plant body     awakens     to stigmata     not wounds
but pollen collectors, little flicking tongues     glandular tissues emanating

viscid secretion as, for example, in the orchid     the offering of orchids on
each side of     dying. Their bright     mouths and soft     exhalations sticky
with ontological     clarity. Here in the gallery the body pours with stained-

glass     light       and I vibrate, you vibrate     I-you vibrate, our photo-
receptors discharging nerve impulses such that Monet’s   Les Coquelicots
or Poppies     Blooming, 1873     flashes onto the screen     of my mind.

___________________________________________________________

Red square of light     a breezy day     the bank of poppies like stigmata
blotted     a boy in a sailor hat and a woman in blue     woad blue or indigo
blue     not International Klein Blue, but yet she is     your mother, perhaps

she had once been     brighter, and the small boy, the small boy     was
you. You     prior to full expression, prior to     standing here in the gallery    
next to me in the twenty-first century, the small cake of     ultramarine    

lodged inside your abdomen not yet     awakened     you and your mother
walk     broken brushwork and     divided light.     You walk     in
1873, in Argenteuil, suburb of     Paris, an agréable petite     ville     despite the

tanneries, silk mills, ironworks, gypsum mines producing     plaster of Paris.    
Producing statuettes.     Enormous iron forms.     You and your mother    
Camille Doncieux, impressionist muse with     halfmoons of dusk below her

eyes, she is so Camille     such a Camelia     imported half-rose this Camille    
Léonie Doncieux, Camille Donciex Monet, Camille     Monet, Madame C.
the First.     You and your mother walk     or are pushed by incline and

wind     and even this       pushing     is gentle, easy, in     Argenteuil     1873,
Are-jaunt-oy, Argent-euil, from argento, silver     silvery, shiny     gleaming    
surface of the Sein and from     -ialo, clearing, glade, place of     silver, place

of     shine quickly rebuilt after the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War.     Just
fifteen minutes from     Gare Saint-Lazare, the Sein     widening to permit
regattas, banks forming a graceful     promenade where mother in her hat    

where you with your small dog take each day     the air. Argenteuil’s decline
in agriculture a pity, yes a     pity but     wonderous the advancement of    
industry, modernity     say the painters, say     not only Monet but Sisely,

Renoir, Manet, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Degas, and Cézanne lighting     their    
cigars in the     shine, adjusting the brim of your mother’s hat so that her
face     dapples, her petit fils, her pink dress     dapples and     large stone

houses, gardens, are to be had for a     song. Monet will paint 180 canvases    
here     immortalizing sailboats and regattas, train trestles and     towpaths,
gardens and     factories, picnics, idylls     Camille-Camille     wanderings.

Poet Spotlight: Vi Khi Nao [by Kristina Marie Darling]

VI KHI NAO is the author of Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018) and Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014.  Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.
________________________________________

On Textual Difficulty

Textual difficulty allows me to take wit to the next level of the linguistic playing field. Textual difficulty can also make one’s work more disruptive and when done right, more electrifying and sharp. I love and I try to condition the materiality of humanity’s mundane emotions so they align homosexually with my love affair with tenderness. Sometimes they express themselves non-linearly, awkwardly, and playfully on the page and I let them be so. They may look difficult, but they are not really. Humor is important to me. No one in the heteronormative culture wants amnesia, but amnesia exists when obvious connections appear to be absence, thus provoking humor. More known for my Sapphic writing, some of these poems here take a homosexual detour, provoking some comedic heterosexuality that resembles more loosely to a lemonade stand. This is where sometimes my writing stands: at the intersection between amnesia & wit.

_______________________________________

A Folio of Poems by Vi Khi Nao

G O O D  M A R R I A G E S  S H O U L D  L I V E  O N I C E

Slender glacier teases the innocent husband

To hand over his wife, the ice tray.

The icy husband resists

Of course, he resists

The wife, divided and compartmentalized

Sometimes the husband notices a pool by his side

Love is confusing: indeed, when husband can't gather wife together

On Sunday and on thirsty days

Husband places three quarters of wife in a glass

No one believes in singing with divided tears

A choir is required, and then a drink to quench the thirst of voices

Husband can't believe that wife

Can hold a mosquito that long

He can brush away her subconscious

By draining her of her liquid free will

Sometimes volition doesn't belong to husband entirely

Sometimes wife can be thick, like jello

Even solid objects can be unfaithful.

_______________________________________________

T R A N S C R I P T S A F T E R E M P T I N E S S : O N

I N C U B A T I O N A N D R A P T U R E [i]

This sparkle, after the great forfeiture, fathered vacuity. Her mounting nerves at a loss.

After the fright, seizure in prolonged tenderness.

Our desires—she clamps in her private closet for me.

Below the orchard: an unwieldy climate, burdened with crystal. Extra-large to counter the atmosphere of dampness—a lover’s heart, feasibly—never comfortable about releasing fear.

Her offspring unbuttons fragrance of verdant madness, hung to the tributary by a cedar tree.

If a sapling has to die, why not for bereaved moonlight? Its happiness, muted by light.

Abandoned in a rental car, love would fade, jokingly; not really.

 

* * *

It’s possible to surrender now, after the body resists rapture.

But a blouse forgives—

while waiting for spring to arrive—Her ears close their doors, patiently delaying the echoes from departing the room—as

A river, not yet employed by the Milky Way, steps into the body of another river—

To change the discourse of time

But hunger, doubt, emptiness—these all travel flippantly, casually without lovers

Stabbing their backs

* * *

 

The summers came and departed. Leaving verdant holes in the sweaters of winter

Kiss me in the afternoon and I will tell you everything

Not shattered nor shamed by flight of resistance

Our enemies dressed in rice noodles deliver on a moped

To incubate is not easy, it’s easier to watch the eggs cross the street than the chickens

Every step counts, despite what the statistics of hit & run tell us

Don’t be deceived by the fake changes we see & report

We all throw our children into the garbage bins because we know they have a high tolerance for insomnia

So stab the night if you want; it won’t get you very far.

 

[i] Ayumi Malhotra, Mia: “Notes from the Birth Year: On Gestation and Becoming”: https://www.poetrynw.org/mia-ayumi-malhotra-two-poems/

____________________________________

T H E   A F T E R N O O N                                O N   I M P U L S E  

 

Just before morning closes                                Her deformed smile

Your hands dismiss                                           Respiratory foams

Razored on the edge                                        Your face

Couldn’t resonate with me                                So let us be foes in the aftershave

Poet Spotlight: Allison Benis White [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Allison Benis White is the author of Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry. Her first book, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. Her next book, The Wendys, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2020. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

_____________________________________

On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty

In her introduction to her novel Sula, Toni Morrison writes, “Outlaw women are fascinating—not always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men.” To be an “outlaw woman” on the page, to create a disruptive, ungovernable, or unclassifiable text, is vital to my poetics, as it serves to ensure an intellectual and aesthetic freedom outside the binary, the linear, the traditional. “The duty of the writer,” Solmaz Sharif writes, “is to remind us that we die. And that we aren’t dead yet.” This is a tall order, which often requires a new kind of language, syntax, form, and/or approach. The outlaw or difficult text asks the reader to give themselves briefly to an unfamiliar world, to a particular mouth and mind, to another human being who will die but is not dead yet.

______________________________________

A Folio of Poems by Allison Benis White

DARLING

Come back, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy.

—J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

________________________________________                                    

“And Wendy fluttered to the ground with an arrow in her breast.”

       Maybe this is the dream

                                                   of the dead bathed in milk—

                                                                                                                                                               

so many red feathers

 

in my mind. I remember being alive  

         as a child—on a towel in the grass,

                                                                                   

                             from a white plastic kettle,

 

                                                       I poured air into a cup,   two cups.

 

 

 

           What else still     but to imagine heat, sugar, death.

                                                                                                           We drank nothing

 

                                                                     and it was good.    

___________________________________________

“‘A lady to take care of us at last,’ said one of the twins, ‘and you have killed her.’”

 

 

   Smoothing the brain,

                                       holding a knife   to build another

 

                 mother. Like a house in the trees,

                                                       I wanted to believe in God

                                                                                                           to be safe

                                                                                         and have somewhere to go.

 

We are all the same   and inconsolable, legs twitching                               

                                                                 during the nightmare.     Please wake me up,

 

                                 press one finger between my eyes

                                                                                             like a doorbell.

__________________________________________

Poet Spotlight: Julia Story [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Julia Story​ is the author of ​Post Moxie​ (Sarabande Books), the chapbook ​The Trapdoor​ (dancing girl press), and the chapbook ​Julie the Astonishing​ (forthcoming in March 2019 from Sixth Finch Books). She is a 2016 recipient of a Pushcart Prize and her recent work can be read in ​Sixth Finch, Tinderbox​, and ​Tupelo Quarterly​. She is a Midwesterner who now resides in Massachusetts.
________________________________________

A Brief Statement about Textual Difficulty

The poems I am working on now are based on the life of Christina the Astonishing, the 12th-century saint who came back to life at her own funeral and then spent the rest of her days living in trees and towers, as she had rejected heaven and had chosen instead to return to earth for a life of suffering. As I write these poems, some of which are her (the “her” is a character called Julie rather than Christina) letters to Jesus about her chosen life on earth, I find them getting smaller and smaller--the poems themselves are small, but the images too diminish as Julie spends her life erasing herself, or as already erased. Living on the edges of things and people, her experiences (and even her prayers) can be best documented in fragments.

_________________________________________ 

A Folio of Poems by Julia Story 

Poems from ​Julie the Astonishing

 

How She Would Return from the Dead.

The body brought out like empty wood,
silent as a dark whale in dark water.

The body a citadel in trees: getting there was
land-swimming, pushing aside loneliness,

a white man in rubber boots and all
his little dogs, the sun flashing in and out

like god’s face upon the water before
the invention of cardboard and radio

transmissions. And then the second before
she knew she was going to give it all up—

everything, all of it, until she was walking
down the road in the dark with lungs full

of the scattered, old-fashioned promises
of beginning again—the house

of her body would light up, the feet
marching as they had been instructed to do.

________________________________

My fugue state, but brittle.
Pieces of me broke off,

each one a little you.
That night we washed our

socks together in the hotel
sink then watched an old

Murder She Wrote.​ A blank
face as white as breaths on

the screen. I wept because
I knew it was my face.

Then together we went
into the painting of the ocean.

_______________________________

We approach the defunct
nudist colony.

Worn chorus of evening
doves, no naked folks.

Every moment
an ossuary.

I’m a body.
You are dead

like the invisible
nudes. But you

walk with me.
The moon

mothered in clouds.

______________________________

As you know, I am no one’s
bride. And yet I belong to you

and you are like me, a suit
of armor made of mercury.

The creatures lilt and gambol
when they sense our hovering.

I am a wraparound porch
bound to my own heart

and you an afternoon
filled with street corners.

_________________________________

The smaller I am, the easier it is
for people to dream of me.

I go into their heads like a seed,
planting my tiny doorway

and crudely through it come
these awful resurrections.

They gave me a homestead by a little lake,
rustling itself in the breeze.

But the land rustled up three corpses
by the end of winter.

How industrious this sadness is,
making its ramp into me every day.

Building its house and also its saw,
its level, its nails, and whatever

substance makes these walls.

Poet Spotlight: Terese Svoboda [by Kristina Marie Darling]

A Guggenheim fellow, Terese Svoboda is most recently the author of Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship, her seventh book of poetry, and Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet. She has also published six novels, a memoir, and a book of translations from Nuer, a South Sudanese language. Great American Desert, a book of stories, is forthcoming March 2019.
_________________________________

A Process Note

I don't see my poetry as difficult, I see it as playful. The mind wants to play. It wants, in its aesthetic experience, to return to a work of art and retrieve something more from it at every contact. Otherwise it will discard that glittering toy, bored. I'm currently playing with plays, getting on and off the stage of poetry. I'm also interested in technical language, and its poetics. Everything has already been written – or else nothing has been written, each moment its own possible play of sound and sense.
_________________________________

On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty

Poetry that requires interpretation is perhaps a show of dominance: you have to know so much in order to appreciate my work, e.g., Eliot and Pound. Enter Hope Mirrlees, her long poem “Paris” published by Virginia Woolf four years before “The Wasteland,” critiqued by TLS as “spluttering and incoherent statement displayed with various tricks of type...It is certainly not a “Poem.”

Verlaine’s bed-time…Alchemy
Absynthe,
Algerian tobacco,
Talk, talk, talk,
Manuring the white violets of the moon.

Here was a woman who knew six languages by the time she was twenty, including Zulu, friend of Stein, Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and of course Eliot, and she lived with a classics scholar. She was not lacking in cultural references. More contemporary evidence of different political and aesthetic pressures that have affected what is considered acceptable as experiment is the erasure of radical poetry of the 20s and 30s, with the conservative 50's and 60's emphasis on sunsets and in formal structure. 

_________________________________________

A Folio of Poems by Terese Svoboda

Out of Ringing Ears

Renegade automated car says it can get us back
[automated voice: get us back]
Where?

Slip of paper crushed
still warm
thigh-curved from its sleep-upon
says

Called Forth ring ring no sympathy
the better the sooner get back

Whose renegade scalp do you see taken
in a world of get back?
The tonic someone (No, we have not met)

the invisible people on stage
clothes on hangers
the gin [the automated voice: get back]

well-dressed vs. ill-dressed she said
and Not this time beat time

[schottische] slow polka to you

and over the table, the bedspread
                               under which a house hides
the chair-rung entrance
and the costume
I wore her clothes all my life even now her blouse curses me from the closet
Pretend! Limp possum at the vet's 

The chorus needs feeding
The chorus has broken the toilet
The chorus on its hind legs
The chorus, its back to Greece 

Water deliciously advances
voices over it [stage mis-direction] under it
A canon signals The End
ring, ring [automated voice]

________________________________

Sandwich

Across the stage of the plains interstate inter state interstate dell and dell and plains, there is a scene where they run out of gas.

You — in the white shirt —

I'm just as scenic. Listen: There was a tremendous knocking.

Knock, knock. No joke?

They put him in a closet.

Not a dell.

They put him in a closet and the door, hung wrong, had a gap at the bottom where you could shove a whole sandwich through, though the bread got a little dirty. As for thirst, I don't know. No light of course except through the gap so the sandwich came in dark and dirty.

Whispering voices from the phone.

Can you get it?

There was a tremendous knocking across the plains, sometimes as if on a windowpane. Sometimes enough to break it, or else from below.

You don't know that.

It's a kind of knowing, just like the knocking you say you heard just after they ran out of gas. And who is the they anyway? The usual suspects, M and F, old while you're not and because of that, always running out of gas.

They wished there were windows. There were sandwiches they made for themselves, they didn't shove them all.

You need a window left open if it's going to rain. But that means mud will be tracked in by the gas-less, earning alienation. The door won't open.

Time gaps while they run away like that, after someone else finds him in the closet. Maybe the someone went looking for a coat, a winter coat that he thought he had hung in there. Pee-You.

M and F forgot their homemade sandwiches and they ran out of gas.

How do you know?

Someone called. Someone said Look in the closet.

It was you.

I was wearing a white shirt, easy to spot. I didn't need a coat.

They walked a long way before anyone picked them up, and it never stopped raining. The dell came up while they were walking. A farmer in the dell. A big Ford truck with 4WD.

Interstate.

No trace of footsteps because of the rain.

Interstate gets into the car like a hum. You would think they were fleeing the site but no, they just ran out of gas.

What if guilt is free like the falling of rain? Instead of cooped up in a closet? He was crying.

I'm not related. I'm not the last or the late. I'm not — really. I say: there was a scene and someone went inside but whether —

A white shirt is easy enough to spot. Dirt just falls on it.

There was a tremendous knocking.

_____________________________________

Shame Helps

A sudden not-breeze fills the air.
Two men dressed in corduroy approach, one pulling a boat.
A boat of agony.
Heigh-ho. Greeting. Greeting.
Fleeting smile, both. The word smile left on the faces of the Fourth Wall.

How to read that?
The optic nerve gets it up.
What has been done weighs the Heigh.
The smarter of the men has a dollar hanging from a pocket.
Acquisitive or generous?
Balance implies a man out of sight removing his shoes.
Why a man is the question.
The philosopher in the second row wants to punch the usher.
Such restraint stupefies the audience into paradoxical sleep:
they stop worrying but their eyeballs still roll.

And if the heavens help with a hole in the roof above the lights: drip, drip,
the two men look to the exit, shamed, unwilling to follow one or the other without a speech.
Let us bury Caesar.
I hope we find some sand.
Creepy, the way birds in stillness sing.

______________________________

Fusion Construction

 

The sun shows off--
                                    pocket it.

You saw electrons bloom on a newsreel,
let's have a timeline.

                                                Six men
show, a nice number for progress
but which wears the dress?
            (he's got courage like Turing)           

                        They build its basket but
fuel must eat something:
time, this time.
            Big logs

are lifted, an animatronics
of change, a mechanical buffalo

—nice Handel, hear it under
the voiceover?--but Babel bubbles up

e.g. irrational fear, unwarranted
code, another country's
                                                penis.

Change requires copulation,
nakedness, pleasure.

Eat
the coxcomb and the sun will not rise.

______________________________________

What? is your line

I think I'm panicking
I think I'm panicking
etc.
crying practice

windowless

quick, a dream:
one of you holds the other
What? is your line
the gun is fake but you need a license

Miss Vulgarity comes forward in
a lack-of-bathing-suit competition

a different voice speaking “I”
to an “audience”

rants: and you and you and you
and it wasn't like that

brief interview with an innocent bystander
before the lover slash narrator finds his way over

an absent Noah leaves the room

floating along and then the queen says
women were at best queens then
WE

the chorus   too loud
but that is opinion
answers back: the building is burning

insert choreography
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage

but I or you end up in a boat
racing   it's a matter of race

____________________________________

1718 – Nantucket Beach

Poet Spotlight: Traci Brimhall [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Traci Brimhall is the author of three collections of poetry: Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her next collection, a hybrid of essays and poems, Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2020. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014.  She’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.

A Process Note

The selection below is from my most recent collection, Saudade (Copper Canyon, 2017). They are verse plays spoken by a chorus of ageless girls and appear spread out in the book across multiple personas. They’re supposed to function sort of like a Greek chorus and some of them were once written as poems in a single voice but got broken into this community voice. I’m interested in the ways oral storytelling are narratives that can be reshaped or lost and how poetry is often so focused on the singular “I”. My books so often engage the mythic, and myths seem to me to be collaboratively composed as allegories for the social and cultural moment.

Formally, I think it’s difficult only in that it is unexpected. And because it is formally odd, I try and make its content a bit more clear at times. Although I want to challenge a reader at times, I also want to be generous with them. I love them, though it’s fair to say my love isn’t always easy. The form also allows me a different form of maximalism. In workshops, rejections, and reviews of my books I’ve been criticized for being, essentially, too much. I know I’m a poet (and person) of excess. The verse play lets me take up lots of visual space and extend the line beyond even the lengths I usually allow myself. I think female poets have traditionally been celebrated for being concise and controlled, and I feel downright naughty for trying to spread across both margins.

_________________________________________________

In Which the Chorus Describes Cafuné on the Eve of the Passion  

 

Maria Helena:

The night in costumes, in church bells, in pews sucking on free salted caramels.

 

Maria Thereza:

In the general’s breath before he pinches the child's jaw open and spits in her mouth.

 

Maria Helena:

We did nothing to stop it. Why would we? We only witness, record, recite.

 

Maria Thereza:

Besides, no one else tried to stop history from making itself on stage. Everyone fantasized a different present.

 

Maria de Lourdes:

In the pews, the unrepentant traced their hands onto hymnal pages. Behind the curtain, the toothless, the leprous, burying themselves in scherzo and nude boas.

 

Maria Thereza:

Jesus makes it to stage but forgets his lines, the new Passion simmers in the journalist, the priest, the poet watching the dictator's parade from an unlit room, composing meager epics and running the planchette across the letters written on the wall:

 

Maria Madalena:

Will we survive?

 

Maria Aparecida:

Of course not.

 

Maria Madalena:

Will the country?

 

Maria Aparecida:

Ask again later.

 

Maria Madalena:

Is God's love absolute?

Maria Aparecida:

Nana, nenê.

Maria de Lourdes:

The night is ripping its dress to bind soldiers' wounds. It's painting the church with the blood on the torturer’s floor.

 

Maria Helena:

It’s nailing together the gallows.

 

Maria Thereza:

It’s combing men's hair with its fingers, singing,
o nenê dorme no chão, and measuring their necks.

__________________________________________

In Which the Chorus Explains What Was Stolen in 1966