This week we welcome Mindy Aloff as our guest author. Mindy's essays, reviews, and interviews on dancing, literature, film, and other cultural subjects have appeared in many periodicals in the U.S. and Europe, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, and The Wall Street Journal. Her collection of poems, Night Lights, with drawings by Patt Wagoner, was published in 1979 by Vi Gale's Prescott Street Press. Other books include Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation (Disney Editions) and Leaps in the Dark: Art and the World by Agnes de Mille (University Press of Florida). A former student of Nancy Willard, William Gifford, and Irving Feldman, she teaches dance criticism and history and the personal essay at Barnard College.
Welcome, Mindy.
In other news . . .
For the month of October 2014, Coldfront Magazine will run a series of essays about the work and life of poet Paul Violi, whose last book, The Tame Magpiewas released earlier this year. Steven Karl, Coldfront's features editor, is looking for work focused on Violi's poetry, poetics, and/or scholarship (this could encompass a single book/poem or multiple volumes). He's also hoping that those who knew Paul will submitpersonal narratives, antidotes, and pieces about Paul's influence as a writer, teacher, and human being. Send your work as a doc attachment to Steven directly at sr.karl@gmail.com with Celebrate Paul Violias the subject line.
Word over all, beautiful as the sky! Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost; That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world: ... For my enemy is dead — a man divine as myself is dead; I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin — I draw near; I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 4:05 PM David Lehman wrote:
The Best Things in Life Are Free
Casting Robert Morse as Bert Cooper, the firm’s senior partner, was an inspired move from the start. In the early 1960s Morse played J. Pierrepont Finch on Broadway in the Pulitzer-winning production of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. He rises from window-washer to chairman of the board in record time. It was the breakout hit of Morse’s career; it got him a Tony in 1962 and he reprised the role in the 1967 movie. Frank Loesser wrote the score, and Morse got to sing “The Company Way,” “The Brotherhood of Man,” the Groundhog fight song in a duet with Rudy Vallee, and the paean to self-love, “I Believe in You.”
So here he is, all these years later, playing the eccentric chief of the agency, who adores Ayn Rand, abstract art, and Japanese manners. He sports a natty bow-tie and well-tailored suits and makes you take off your shoes when you enter his domain. He is a detached figure but ready with the zinger when needed – as when he chews out Don for failing to take advantage of the media exposure when interviewed for the Wall Street Journal or when he intercepts the check that Lane made out to himself, forging Don’s signature. Among his more heroic moments was when Pete Campbell, righteously indignant, exposes Don as a counterfeit, an identity thief in the old-fashioned sense. Bert Cooper says, and I’m paraphrasing, so what. This is America.
Well, Robert Morse turned 83 years old on May 18, and on May 25, Bertram Cooper left the firm, the cast, the show, the planet, after uttering the one word “Bravo!” when Neil Armstrong gets out of the space capsule, takes his first step on the moon, and utters his winning line: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Bert expires and there is an announcement and the season is about to end, the managerial conflicts straightened out, the future of the firm secured by Roger Sterling’s brains and will, and Peggy’s presentation has won the new account (“Family Supper at Burger Chef”), and Ted will be coming back to New York because Don is leveling with him, mano a mano, and the deal is going to make all the partners rich, and Don is going back to his office when he hears a familiar voice calling his name.
“Bert?”
And standing there is Bert, or rather Robert Morse, the old song-and-dance man with the gleam in his eyes, singing the verse and then the refrain of “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” He does a nimble soft shoe, and dancing secretaries in mini-skirts join him on the floor. And with the air of having imparted words of valedictory wisdom, a blessing and a piece of advice, he sings, “The moon belongs to everyone, / The best things in life are free," exiting into his office.
And that’s how it ends, with Don alone at his secretary’s vacant desk. A very satisfying last shot, I felt, and not only because of my weakness for Depression Era songs. My mother used to sing this one, and the lines are perfectly apt for an episode organized around televised images of the moon-landing. The last words Roger says to Bert come from another song from that era, Irving Berlin’s “Let’s have another cup of coffee / and let’s have another piece of pie.” With his fear of failure coming to the fore, Roger mutters to Don that his last words to Bert were from a silly old song. He doesn’t specify which, but it is enough to give the hallucination a rational or Freudian explanation. But the beauty of the scene is its farewell grace – the sight of Robert Morse still hoofing and singing like his boyish old self. We’ll miss you, Bobby, but the show must go on.
At a time when the name Sterling is besmirched by the octogenarian owner of a basketball team, it is nice to see Roger Sterling pull a rabbit out of the hat and arrange for 51% of the firm to be bought by McCann, Ericson. Theoretically the acquisition will allow Sterling, Cooper to govern itself entirely, though that is not always how mergers and acquisitions work out in practice. This means that Don gets to keep his job and Roger gets to be president. Jim Cutler had sought to engineer a palace coup, with Don’s dismissal the first order of business, but in the end even he votes for the deal, which promises to make each partner a millionaire, in certain cases several times over. Joan is giddy with delight. Pete can hardly contain himself. When Jim Cutler’s hand belatedly goes up, he gets a quizzical look from Roger. “It’s a lot of money,” Jim says in his pitch-perfect deadpan.
To this white male it is heartening to be reminded that not all the dummies are men. Every once in a while, a woman comes along to drive a tractor in the office and sever an executive’s foot. So it’s pleasant when Meredith reveals herself as not just a gigglehead but a sentimental gigglehead. When she delivers bad news to Don, she jumps him. ”I know you’re feeling vulnerable, but I am your strength,” she says. Kudos to the writer of that line. “Tell me what I can do,” she adds, and Don's answer is a model of efficiency. “You can get my attorney on the phone, and we can’t do this” -- "this" meaning sex. I love it that in complying she says, “not right now.”
The most sophisticated of aviation projects is on everyone’s mind on July 20, 1969, which makes it a perfect day for Ted to take a couple of clients up in his plane, cut the engine, and frighten them half out of their wits. An inner voice in me says, “serves ‘em right,” though I have nothing against these particular Sunkist execs. We never find out what has made Ted not only moody and melancholy but morbid and evidently even on the verge of suicide in the existential manner that Albert Camus wrote about. Why, wherefore, and what's to come for Ted -- this is a story line we can anticipate. We can be pretty sure, too, that Nick, the handyman who has given Peggy his number, will return when the show picks up next year. And maybe Peggy will have more confidence, be less brittle, though it seems to be her destiny that each achievement is eclipsed by some greater event, as winning the Burger Chef business pales in significance to what happens in the partners' meeting. And, of course, there’s Sally to look forward to. The changes are coming fast. She is now a lifeguard who wears lipstick on her way to the pool, a stargazer in the backyard who kisses the son of Betty’s college chum and then, when the boy is summoned back into the house, smokes a cigarette in the exact pose of her mother. I don’t think she is going to Woodstock or to a major anti-war demonstration in Washington in the fall, but you never know. Betty’s friend declares that Sally looks just like her mother did in her freshman year at Bryn Mawr. Does that mean there is not one Don but two in her future?
Lines I wrote down:
“Pete’s pregnant, he has to do what we want” (Don).
“You’re just a bully and a drunk, a football player in a suit” (Jim Cutler on Don).
“No one has ever come back from a leave. Not even Napoleon. He staged a coup but ended up on that island” (Bert)
“Every time an old man talks about Napoleon you know they’re going to die” (Roger).
“That’s a very sensitive piece of horseflesh” (Pete on Don).
“He’s a pain in the ass” (Bert).
“I’ll have the obituary ready in an hour” (Joan).
On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 6:21 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:
Dear David,
Delightful to read your take on the (halftime) season finale of Mad Men. As you know, the network decreed that this final portion of the series must be broken into two, seven episode halves, stretched across two seasons. And we’re seven episodes in. Therefore, we now face a dreary, Mad Menless interval of, how long, a year? in which to get cocktails and snacks from the kitchen till M.M. is on again, possibly gaining (in my case) 20 or more lbs before the show resumes. Sigh. Lead me to the ruffled potato chips, gimlets and cheesy poufs…
To begin with the episode’s close: I loved your description of that surprising song and dance performed (posthumously) by Bert and his bevy of fetching secretaries. As you put it “…the beauty of the scene is its farewell grace.” Indeed! Yes, firm founder Bert, capitalist extraordinaire, descends from heaven attended by a chorus of pretty amanuensis angels, singing about how the best things in life are free, right before the curtain falls on the episode (Bert’s curtain having already descended.) This after Bert having said in a previous scene, “Bravo!” which turns out to be his last utterance while alive. So it seems that Bert has presciently said “Bravo,” applauding his own lovely performance in the final scene! All this creates countless echoes, as you point out, reverberating back through Robert Morse’s career history and his character’s history across the run of the show so far. Pulling that unprecedented Dennis Potter (of TheSinging Detective fame) move of having Bert burst into an old timey song (albeit a newly dead Bert in an advisory visitation aimed directly at the show’s protagonist) was, for me, genius.
Home and family lost, found, exiled and reconfigured seemed to thematically dominate this episode, these being chief among the show’s recurrent obsessions. The title “Waterloo” (the big defeat which led to Napolean’s exile) was but one of a cascade of loss of home/exile references. Others might include the following. Don seemingly loses Megan for good, as she’s decided she does not want him to join her in California after all. Do you think she will change her mind next season? Betty’s family is temporarily enlarged by the clan of her college chum taking up residence as houseguests, creating a new, larger “blended” family (to whom Betty is about to serve, in one lightning fast shot, a huge platter of rubbery looking fried eggs. The eggs unsettlingly resemble a pile of eyeballs a la St. Lucy. Or are they a fertility symbol? Will Betty become pregnant by current hubby Henry next season?)
Julio, chubby young son of Peggy’s tenant, is moving to Newark, thus losing his home away from home in Peggy’s apartment, to which he is ever escaping for popsicles, TV, solace, etc., AND his home in NY.The little boy weeps in her arms, sobbing that his mother doesn’t love him. Peggy tears up too, maybe thinking in part of the baby she gave away years ago. Was it a boy or a girl? Where is its home now? Will her son or daughter’s adoptive parents seek her out next season? (The open adoption movement gets going around 1970, so the infallible internet tells me.) Roger’s fragmented family is watching the moon landing, like everyone else in the episode. Wearing a toy space helmet, Roger’s grandkid Ellery looks dazed, having lost his mother to the clutches of an upstate commune. We get images from multiple wavery black and white TVs of the Apollo 11 astronauts, far from their home planet, setting boot on the moon. The family of McCann, Erikson is apparently going to marry into and blend with the family of Sterling, Cooper. The agency loses its founder/ “father,” Bert, who finds a home in heaven among talented, glamorous secretaries, as previously mentioned. Roger Sterling becomes the new Sterling Cooper “dad,” patriarch in Bert’s stead. Ted is pressured into relocating (again) for the good of the Sterling Cooper family. So he’s coming “home.” Is he returning to Peggy’s embrace? Or will he find her in the arms of the beefcakey home improvement handyman who was manfully repairing her apartment ceiling?
In a tiny odd detail, did you sense any echo of Othello when ditsy secretary Meredith makes a play for Don after tearfully informing him he’s been fired? He gently rebuffs her advance and hands her his handkerchief to dry her eyes. She pulls herself together and attempts to return his hanky (disappointingly for her, sans panky) but he doesn’t take it back, so she leaves with it. The handkerchief gambit reminded me faintly of the role of the stolen handkerchief as false evidence of infidelity, and its fatal results, in Shakespeare’s play.
Next season (since we have PLENTY of time to speculate, David) what would you like to see happen on Mad Men? Here’s my rather unimaginative shortlist:
*Ginsberg’s return
*more Joan
*Sally has sex
*Roger falls in love
*Trudy remarries
*Bert’s ghost returns for an encore from time to time, delivering a musical number aimed straight at Don when he needs it (corny, I know, and excessive, but I can’t help it.)
One day last week I spent the afternoon with my colleague Luke Malaise, downtown maven of the marvelously new and ugly. Wearing a black shirt buttoned to the top without a tie in his case, and sporting a black Underarmor t-shirt in mine, we were strolling along Horatio Street thinking about death in the afternoon. Check that. Scratch "strolling," substitute the hipper "hoofing." And along comes our friend Sal Marada, a person of smoke, with whom we like to associate becuse it gives us cachet and separates us as "punks" from the "punks" who are "punks" in the dreary old-fashioned sense of immature youngsters who need a good whack in the backside from father figures who aren't decked out in aprons like milquetoast Jim Backus in "Rebel without a Cause." We have no cause, either, just like Brando and Dean, but we are punks not because we are young and presumptuous and getting ready to be slugged by a tall Irish cop who says, "I've frisked a hundred young punks like him, he's clean," en route to geting shot at a Bronx restaurant that serves the best veal in New York. No way, Giuseppe. We are punks in the classy sense of being declasse rockers who rock like Johnny Rotten or even better the vicious kid named Sid for whom we feel a plaque at the Chelsea Hotel is in order, and you may wonder why there has been no reference to music in this piece when ostensibly I am the music critic and that is because we were hoofing down Hudson Street and whom should we run into but David Lehman wearing a gray Cavanagh fedora that I am sure he bought at Housing Works, a tweed sports coat (Paul Stuart), a J. Press shirt (red and blue checks), burgundy silk tie (Dior), and black loafers (Prada) and we decided hey this guy is fucking not hip! We are hip and he likes "Blue Moon" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "Too Marvelous for Words" and "Isn't it Romantic?" and "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" (which we believe should be reserved strictly for Margaret Thatcher) and "Change Partners" and "Begin the Beguine" and "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top" and even worse "Ol' Man River," which has been something of a joke, a racist joke for decades, no matter what Paul Robeson may think, and that gave us an idea. Why don't we write a book called "Punks of New York": about the three of us plus certified hipsters of our choosing? Like why Paul McCartney ("simply having wonderful Christmas time") could never be hop or punk, while Lou Reed is effortlessly both even when dead. When we brought the idea to a publisher, she said "you need a thesis" so Luke thought quickly. "OK," he said. "Our thesis is that we who are hip in a punk way, or punk in a hip way, but not definitely not in a hippy way, are deep down the least hip kids in the high school of our lives," and the publisher ate it up, and then we smoked this blunt that Sal gave Luke, had a couple slices of pizza in a place only four other people know about, and I sat down to write about the noise scene in New York today compared to the noise of the five other cities worth talking about, Los Angeles, Tokyo, the London of the clubs, the Paris of the Seine, and the rows of linden trees you walk under in Berlin. Meanwhile the suckers from the New York Times keep writing about who is hip and who isn't, not realizing that writing about who is hip and who isn't is the first sign that you isn't. -- SFJ
One thing that baffles me is the people who say they believe everything happens for a reason, but do not find the thought paralyzing. When something “character building” happens in my life, I want to believe there’s a reason for it too. It’s not that I don’t understand the impulse. But I do ultimately find the thought paralyzing.
It’s paralyzing to consider what the reason is, for example. This amounts to me trying to understand the mind of God or the ways of the universe or what the computerized simulation game controller is expecting of me or whatever. I mean, that’s what the people who say this mean, right? They are suggesting there is a divinity and that divinity has a plan and that plan involves every detail of every day of every person’s life. That every second or nanosecond every particle in existence is moving exactly where it should be. Yikes. It clearly begs the question of our freedom of choice. Strangely, then, those same people who say everything happens for a reason will also tell you that your choices are yours to make and that they have consequences both on this side of and beyond the grave. I’m not sure how they find the two thoughts compatible.
Nor am I sure how they think they know what happens beyond the grave. Again, I understand that there seems to us to be a life force coursing through us, something ineffable, and that because we are moving about inside our individual consciousnesses we feel certain they must remain intact somehow, somewhere once we die. I do understand the impulse to believe these things. But the fact is that no one really knows.
I was raised Lutheran: baptized, confirmed, an acolyte, and so on. By sixteen, however, I was asking, “So how do we know everything happens for a reason? How do we know what happens when we die?” In college, I minored in religion and took a year-long course in the Traditions of Western Christianity. We read Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, Augustine, Paul Tillich, Karl Bultmann, Mary Daly, and so on. I studied Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism – dharma, anatta, and so on, and the more I read, the more it became apparent these were all theories. No one knows.
At the end of the day, to me, what suggests something greater is at work here is my empirical experience of the world. At the risk of sounding like an apologist for Intelligent Design (which should NOT be taught in public schools where evolution SHOULD be taught), there does seem to be a design that I experience in a mystical sense. The poem that best captures this sense is my favorite Robert Frost poem, his sonnet “Design”:
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth-- Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth-- A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?-- If design govern in a thing so small.
In Frost, design is very real, but it is not particularly comforting. “What but design of darkness to appall?” The design Frost sees in this poem is dark and horrifying, even if it serves as a contrast by which we can see good.
Ultimately, I’m not sure why people find the idea of design comforting. What do we know of the designer? That he or she or they or it allows natural disasters and disease and suffering? There is something truly frightening in the idea of design. Whether we are trapped in a Matrix, a computer-simulated game, a postlapsarian Judeo-Christian world, or whatever, we are trapped within certain natural laws that govern this place, and some of those laws are brutal. Don’t get me wrong. Planet Earth is a beautiful place, and I am very happy to have the opportunity to be here. The design I see is awe-inspiring at times, has a sense of humor at others, but sometimes, its capacity for cruelty is not exactly reassuring. Here’s hoping that’s for a reason.
Daughters of Zeus, you know what man's life is, How brief, and yet how long the while— Its epics, falls of sparrows; its tragedies Half farces and half vile; How every hero's sword at last grows brittle, How his dream fades, and night comes in a little— And you smile.
All else turns vanity: but yours the day Of little things, that grow not less. Our moments fly—enough if on their way You lent them loveliness. Alone of gods, you lie not; yours no Heaven That totters in the clouds—what you have given, We possess.
In March, when the umpteenth blizzard graced the ground of New York City with another wallop of snow, who could have imagined this much green: Never mind the blossoming colors in all variations of tint and hue, and poets, spouses of poets, and lovers of poems on foot for the Poetry Society of America’s annual benefit walk through the New York Botanical Gardens (click through thumbnails for full sized images):
Our “first course” was the Summer Exhibition, Groundbreakers: Great American Gardens in the Early 20th Century and The Extraordinary Women Who Designed Them. (On view til Sept 7, and a “must-see.”)
Punctuating the walk are large placards with poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (curated by Eavan Boland) – teeming with references to plants and flowers. Who (other than a botanist) could know the names of so many different plants? I was thrown back to my early twenties when I discovered Millay’s great gift for summoning nature to fashion her exquisite poems.
After the walk, we had late-day drinks on the terrace of the Stone Mill, beside the water rushing over the rocks and ducks straining to paddle upstream.
While seated at round tables for dinner inside the Stone Mill, we honored Jill Bialosky, the beloved poetry editor (and poet, novelist, and memoirist).
Jill is also an upstream swimmer with her long list of poets whose work she has ushered into print, making our lives more livable and with pleasures of the enduring kind, not unlike the walk through the blossoming flowers with poetry in mind.
We were already feeling our good luck when something round and dense, with dark chocolate was served. In the end, as if to underscore the whole delightful evening, Jill read one of her recent poems:
The Lucky Ones
by Jill Bialosky
We were in the twilight of our lives. Our labor suddenly realized in the crowns of marigolds, blue eyes of the hydrangeas, smell of lavender, and late bloom of the hosta’s erect purple flower with its marvel of thick green leaves. Each year we trimmed back and the garden grew more lustrous and untamable as if the eternal woods and animals asleep at night in its beds were claiming it back. The water in the pool shimmered an icy Tuscan blue.
When we arrived we swam until the stress from the grueling life in the city released our bodies. Later we sat under the umbrella and watched a garden snake slip into the water, careful not to startle its fight-or-flight response. Its barbed-wire coil. Comet of danger, serpent of the water, how long we had thwarted the venom of its secrets, its lures and seductions. It swam by arching then releasing its slithery mercurial form.
Through the lanky trees we heard the excited cries of the neighbor’s children, ours, the boy of our late youth, of our happiness and our struggles, the boy who made us whole and broken, was in his room perhaps dreaming of a girl and sleeping the log and restful sleep of a teenager. It was a miracle, our ignorance. It was grace incarnate, how we never knew.
reprinted from The Kenyon Review,
Spring, 2014. Volume XXXVI, Number 2
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Gail Segal is a poet and a filmmaker. Her most recent chapbook, “The Discreet Charm of Prime Numbers,” was published in 2013 by Finishing Line Press. “Meanwhile, in Turkey,” a documentary short is circulating at festivals and her most recent film, “Filigrane,” is in post-production. She teaches in the Graduate Division of Film and Television at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
As we say farewell to Maya Angelou we should also note the genesis of the book she is most well known for, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
The line is of course from the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” from Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899):
Sympathy
I know what the caged bird feels. Ah me, when the sun is bright on the upland slopes, when the wind blows soft through the springing grass and the river floats like a sheet of glass, when the first bird sings and the first bud ops, and the faint perfume from its chalice steals. I know what the caged bird feels.
I know why the caged bird beats his wing till its blood is red on the cruel bars, for he must fly back to his perch and cling when he fain would be on the bow aswing. And the blood still throbs in the old, old scars and they pulse again with a keener sting. I know why he beats his wing.
I know why the caged bird sings. Ah, me, when its wings are bruised and its bosom sore. It beats its bars and would be free. It’s not a carol of joy or glee, but a prayer that it sends from its heart’s deep core, a plea that upward to heaven it flings. I know why the caged bird sings.
Dunbar’s wife, the poet Alice Dunbar, wrote in 1914 that the cage was suggested to him by “the iron grating of the book stacks in the Library of Congress,”which
suggested to him the bars of the bird's cage. June and July days are hot. All out of doors called and the trees of the shaded streets of Washington were tantalizingly suggestive of his beloved streams and fields. The torrid sun poured its rays down into the courtyard of the library and heated the iron grilling of the book stacks until they were like prison bars in more senses than one. The dry dust of the dry books (ironic incongruity!—a poet shut up in an iron cage with medical works), rasped sharply in his hot throat, and he understood how the bird felt when it beat its wings against its cage.[1]
The genesis of the line in a library is appropriate: in the nineteenth century, the poetic trope of the caged bird singing was quite well known. American poets who used the line include Lydia Sigourney, in a stanza from “Morn and Even” (from Pocahontas and Other Poems, 1841):
Morn to the watcher by the sick man's bed! The slow, slow clock tells out the welcome hour, And to the air he springs with buoyant tread; The poor caged bird sings sweet in lady's bower; The farmer, watchful lest the skies may lower, Thrusts his sharp sickle mid the bearded grain; While sportive voices, strong in childhood's power, With merry music wake the village plain, And toil comes forth refresh’d, and age is young again.
The New England novelist and poet Sarah Orne Jewett used the phrase as the title of an overtly feminist poem; “A Caged Bird” (1887), begins thus:
High at the window in her cage The old canary flits and sings, Nor sees across the curtain pass The shadow of a swallow’s wings.
A poor deceit and copy, this, Of larger lives that mark their span, Unreckoning of wider worlds Or gifts that Heaven keeps for man….[2]
Other minor nineteenth century poets who published poems entitled “The Caged Bird” include Charles Dibdin, William Lisle Bowles, James Benjamin Kenyon, Adelaide Stout, and Esther T. Housh. The poet John Lofland, known as “The Milford Bard,” was satirized by an unknown poet in 1839 (“Wholesome Advice”) after landing in jail for intemperance: “He practiced at the bar so long, / That bars are used to check him / The caged bird sings a pretty song, / Although his friends forsake him.” American poets William Reed Huntington and Henry Frank used the phrase “caged bird sings” in poems.
And of course, famously, Lord Byron uses the phrase “caged bird” in Canto IV of Don Juan:
Don Juan in his feminine disguise, With all the damsels in their long array, Had bow’d themselves before th’ imperial eyes, And at the usual signal ta’en their way Back to their chambers, those long galleries In the seraglio, where the ladies lay Their delicate limbs; a thousand bosoms there Beating for love, as the caged bird’s for air.
While the trope of the “caged bird” was common in the nineteenth century, the works of Dunbar and Angelou have now perhaps permanently associated the phrase “caged bird sings” with the experience of the African American poet.
Hollis Robbins is Chair of the Humanities Department at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. Robbins holds a PhD in English from Princeton University (2003), an MPP from Harvard University (1990), and a BA in the Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins (1983). She has edited four books on nineteenth-century African American literature, most recently the Penguin edition of Frances E.W. Harper’s 1892 novel Iola Leroy. Her poetry has been published in The Cortland Review, Mezzo Cammin, Per Contra, Boston Literary Magazine, and Connotation Press. She is currently writing a book on the African American sonnet tradition.
I loathe the attitude of martyrdom I see in some women and in myself. I remember seeing a video of Axl Rose back in the day wearing a tee shirt with the word MARTYR and a slash mark through the word. I wanted one. Women especially have handed down from generation to generation a tendency to martyrdom because they were forced into that position by society for so long. As we all know, men controlled politics and medicine and law and business and schools and churches and the police and the army, and so women had the private domain, but they had to hide their true opinions even there, to use roundabout ways to assert themselves and their decisions about the household and child rearing and finances for the home and family. And it is taking generation upon generation of women realizing the importance of asserting themselves straightforwardly, with the confidence and authority they have earned through years of hard work – hell, simply through being real, live human beings who therefore get a say -- to rid women of this problem of martyrdom.
I think of all the heroines of literature I love who commit suicide: Dido, Antigone, Jocasta, Juliet, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Lily Bart, Bertha Rochester, Hedda Gabler, Edna Pontellier. Why do we have to kill off our heroines, and worse yet, by suicide? I floated the idea of Medea as a feminist character when I taught the play once, and the notion did not sit well with much of the class because she kills her children in her vendetta against her husband, whose new lover she also murders. But she does not commit suicide in the face of being terribly wronged. I remember wondering in that class whether I prefer the women of literature who are fighters and survivors more than the women who choose death over the difficulties of their lives.
I’ve been pleased in recent years to meet some young women in their twenties who “get” these things about the past and their representations in literature. It can be disheartening to read student papers suggesting that feminism is no longer needed and then to read in the newspaper about the issues women are facing from insurance not covering birth control to “slut” shaming to lack of equal pay to mandatory vaginal ultrasounds and on and on. But some young women seem to understand that they don’t feel as good about themselves as they might in a better society. They are able to identify the problems with that society and to explain their positions to people who think feminism is no longer necessary. And they do just that. It’s heartening to me to meet these young women. I am grateful to them for carrying the torch. I want to share a poem by Warsan Shire that one of these students introduced me to. That this poem moves this student demonstrates to me that she understands on a poignant level the problems women face still today, and kudos to Warsan Shire for writing such a beautiful poem:
for women who are “difficult” to love by Warsan Shire
you are a horse running alone and he tries to tame you compares you to an impossible highway to a burning house says you are blinding him that he could never leave you forget you want anything but you you dizzy him, you are unbearable every woman before or after you is doused in your name you fill his mouth his teeth ache with memory of taste his body just a long shadow seeking yours but you are always too intense frightening in the way you want him unashamed and sacrificial he tells you that no man can live up to the one who lives in your head and you tried to change didn't you? closed your mouth more tried to be softer prettier less volatile, less awake but even when sleeping you could feel him travelling away from you in his dreams so what did you want to do love split his head open? you can't make homes out of human beings someone should have already told you that and if he wants to leave then let him leave you are terrifying and strange and beautiful something not everyone knows how to love.
In my younger days I worked as a house painter. When I told the general contractor I was done with a job, he’d walk around the site with the client to make a list of odds and ends I’d missed: A window with trim that needed another coat. A few drops of paint spilled in the kitchen pantry. On a construction site that little document's called a “punch list,” because it makes you want to punch the person who wrote it. It’s very annoying to work hard on something and think you’re finished just to have someone tell you, “Nope. Not quite yet.”
Now that I’m a writer it’s no less annoying; when I hand my work over I don’t want to hear, “I think there are some things we need to fix.” I want my editor to say, “I couldn’t wait for email; I had to call to tell you this is the most remarkable piece of writing I’ve seen in thirty years in the business. It’s going straight to the printer.”
Fortunately that’s never happened; I doubt I'd survive the shock. Revising one’s work is an unavoidable part of the game. Every writer knows this—from the award-winning novelist to someone in a first poetry workshop at the local adult education center. Some people who’ve never tried to practice the craft think that writers…well…just sit down and write.
Nothing could be further from the truth. There are manuscript museums with drafts from literary giants like Mark Twain, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and many others. Some of the texts are virtually covered with ink—scribbles, crossed-out words, circles around sentences and paragraphs that get moved, semi-legible notes scrawled in the margins and so on.
The challenge is to revise and rewrite long after the original excitement over the piece has faded, and to create a finished product that—in spite of all the tinkering—evokes that same sense of excitement and discovery in the reader. To accomplish this magic feat takes determination that borders on the pathological, like some guy in Moose Udder, Maine who builds a fifty-foot Elvis sculpture with empty Red Bull cans.
If you’re holed up in your room, staring at your computer screen, resolutely building an Elvis of your own, I salute you. If you've ever gotten so sick of working on a particular project you couldn’t bear to even look at it for a week, or a month or a year, but one day you sighed, cracked your knuckles and hauled yourself off the sofa to start that fourth draft, I salute you.
Years ago when writers started asking for my advice, I always gave pep talks. I don’t do that anymore. Now if someone sings the blues to me about how hard it is to write, or makes excuses for why they don’t have time, I just nod. “I hear you,” I say. “Writing is really difficult. It’s so difficult that if you can live without it you probably should.”
The late, great Gore Vidal put it a bit less gently. An interviewer once asked what he’d say to writers who struggle with the craft.
“What would I say?” he asked, as if astonished by the question. “I’d say, ‘F— off; there too many of you already…’”
Famously, Billy Collins in his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” laments that all students want to do “is tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it.” He’s not indicting the students so much as the teachers who taught them this practice. But what is a teacher of an introductory poetry class to do when students say of Collins’ controversial poem “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes” that Collins clearly doesn’t like Dickinson’s poetry, for example? I have been teaching college literature and writing since 1999, and it becomes more and more the case that students think that a piece of literature can mean anything they want it to mean. They feel this way especially about poetry because, perhaps, poetry is the genre they struggle with the most.
In the backlash to New Criticism’s focus on discerning authorial intention, critics and poetry teachers began to suggest through Reader Response theory that it’s not just the author’s intent that matters, but also the reader’s experience of meaning. I agree with Reader Response. In my opinion, a reader may bring a different identity to the poem she reads and see things in it that the author did not necessarily intend to put there – things that are nonetheless there and valid.
For example, I just taught Death of a Salesman, and I drew attention during class discussion to what a sad sack Willy Loman is for remaining so long in his delusional worldview that he is becoming literally unhinged. A student offered up that he admires Willy’s optimism because for every ninety-nine optimists who fail, there will be one who achieves great things for himself and society. This comment was made by a particularly strong student, and I thought it was a good point. As long as this student realizes, and I think he does, that Arthur Miller presents a scathing indictment of the American tendency to live with our heads in the clouds and not face and deal with the truth, I think it’s fine for him to admire Willy’s optimism. But often these applications of personal belief to what a story or play or poem is “getting at” result in misreading that goes further and further afield the more “evidence” for the opinion that is proffered.
I actively tried to counter this trend a couple semesters ago by bringing in Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz.” I had noticed over the years that there is always a contingency of students who see suggestions that the father abuses the son in this poem, so I thought the poem would provide a good opportunity for me to demonstrate why poetry does not mean anything you want it to mean. If we carefully examine the poem as a class, went my logic, they will see that it’s predominantly a fond memory being recounted. The class discussion proved disastrous. Perhaps I let the contingency who saw abuse in the poem talk a little too long before leading the class through what the poem was actually suggesting, but I ended up with essays saying “In my opinion, a poem can mean many things, and in my opinion, ‘My Papa’s Waltz’ shows an abusive, alcoholic father mistreating his son while a passive mother looks on.”
On his blog, poet Edward Byrne discusses this same phenomenon in his classroom in relation to “My Papa’s Waltz” and notes “In the era this poem was authored, the late-1940s, readers would not have shared the same sensibilities about these issues that contemporary readers exhibit. Certainly, the definition of child abuse would not have been as broad as that expressed by my students, and a man returning home with whiskey on his breath after a day of work would not immediately raise great concern since it would not have been very unusual.”
And that’s part of the problem. Many students don’t have a strong sense of history. Most things we read are either “relatable” or “elitist,” and elitist pretty much means “not easy to relate to.” It can be not easy to relate to because it uses big words, is too long, houses complex concepts, is from another historical time period and so is too foreign, but any of the above disqualifies it as a likable poem. One of the most important things I learned as a student was to consider the historical context of everything I read. It’s automatic now: What year was it written? Where? What was going on in that country at the time? What was the author’s attitude toward the subjects he or she treats in her piece?
But historical understanding is not the only problem here. There’s also the popularity of relativism. Perhaps because we have (thankfully) become more inclusive and welcoming to diversity in our circles, we tend to be more potently aware that there are multiple ways of looking at any one thing. Different people have different things to bring to the table, most assuredly. But that doesn’t mean that Collins doesn’t respect Dickinson’s poetry or that “My Papa’s Waltz” is about a memory of abuse. I try to explain to classes that some readings of poems are indeed better than others, and they think I’m just being a hard ass. And maybe I am. I feel the twenty plus years I’ve spent reading and writing and studying with masters have honed my skills as a reader in ways someone just starting out hasn’t had the opportunity to develop yet. Some of the students consistently blow me away with their acumen and highly perceptive reading skills. But they, too, serve as reminders that “we” are on the same page. I’m always trying to strike a balance between letting students discover what a poem means on their own and making sure absurd readings are not being considered correct. It’s definitely a balancing act.
There is a woman on TV and I care about what she’s selling. Pets are involved, wildlife, maybe the earth. In any event we’re moments away
from something. A red steam engine pumps under my sternum, drives me to a black sand beach where I return washed-up jellyfish to the water
and at five o’clock drink the sun under the ocean. This lady, this lady on TV I am sad with her. I am going to send her saffron bulbs and tiny cymbals
with instructions on how to play them. Everything can lead to everyone doing nothing. I spent too much on this TV. It’s huge and so
quality. Just look at that picture. Look at this lady, she’s on the verge of tears. We’re all on the verge of tears, but look at hers, racing slalom down her nose.
I just returned from a weekend visit with our two sons who live in Brooklyn. On first glance I'm one of those tourists New Yorkers disdain, looking around, taking notes and pictures, slowing down sidewalk traffic. But If they look close they see that I'm not just a tourist. I'm an ethnographer of green space and ideas. What catches my attention mostly is ways this great world city has become more sustainable in the forty years I've been coming there. I'm willing to stretch the meaning of sustainability and for that I'll look in the urban nooks and the crannies for garden spaces, in the bars and restaurants for local and organic products, for small public arts projects along the street, and this time I had some interesting observations. Here are a few notes from my visit:
The Whitney Biennial
Biennials are always a crap shoot, but this time there were two instillations that caught my ears and eye.
In the stairwell from floor to floor there were a set of speakers by Charlemagne Palestine adorned with dirty recycled stuffed animals broadcasting a durge ("sparse, repetitive, ritualistic...") which had been recorded in the stairway itself. It sounded like monks. It sounded like a basement prayer meeting in Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD.
Then there was this great video piece about a commercial an artist named David Robbins made and broadcast on local Milwaukee public access TV. It was a guy sitting at this recycled "open air writing desk" talking as people gathered and drifted away. I liked the desk, which was reconstructed in the Whitney Gallery. I particularly liked his tag line: "The renewable wilderness is within," which became my mantra as I walked the city's streets for four days.
I was glad to see the museum recycling its programs, and, when they move downtown to a new building I understand this one will be recycled as well. I left the Whitney feeling renewed and sustained for my weekend in NYC.
Citi Bike
Citi Bike
This was my maiden voyage but I hope not my last. We rented bikes in Fort Greene and rode to Williamsburg. It was very pleasant and maybe only a little more expensive than a cab for three. (One son had his own bike.) There was a dedicated bike path for part of the way, and I wondered if Citi Bike survives whether it will actually drive some of the design of streetscapes and infrastructure in the future. It's hard to understand some of the cultural complaints against Citi Bike, and I'm glad it exists. It calms things down. As for profitability, no one expects the sewer system to make money, and the government subsidizes it. Why not green transportation?
Farming in Brooklyn
The North Brooklyn Farm
The Williamsburg one-acre vacant lot meets all the criteria of a park: people seem to congregate there, there are colorful plantings, public art, interesting spaces to sit (including a tee pee). There's also an impressive raised-bed garden and a farm stand on-site. I talked for a while to one of the creators of the project, a bearded young man thinning the radishes, and he said they hope to maintain the space until the inevitable high rise rises. He says they hope to expand the idea into vacant lots all over the city, and are even pushing for tax breaks for lot owners who allow use. One of my favorite discoveries was the what I'll call "the brick ruin playground," about forty feet of low exposed brick foundation where kids piled loose bricks like legos. As play ground equipment, it's low cost and 100% recycling!
Organic Beer
Organic beer
I'm an IPA fan, and when I found Peak organic beer at a bar on Bedford in Williamsburg I settled in to let a Saturday afternoon rain squall pass. Peak's an organic brewery from Maine and it doesn't make it to South Carolina.
Murals
These aren't "green," but they do keep questions about how unsustainable our economic system appears to be (as outlined in Thomas Picketty's Capital in the 21st Century) before the larger public. There are a large number of these political murals around town right now. I saw one on a riverside building as I rode the train from Manhattan back to Brooklyn crossing the Manhattan Bridge, "The French Aristocracy Never Saw it Coming Either," and another large mural on Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene used artwork to make a point: "Achtung baby, here comes the next Great Depression."
www.greatwallofbrooklyn.org
Trees+Fences+Little Benches
Trees+Fences+Little Benches
This project is all along Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene, little metal fences, some with benches on top of them securing tree squares. The sign explains the project. I sat on many of these, as did scores of locals. Sustainable rest. Sustainable hanging out.
John Lane is Professor of English and environmental studies at Wofford College where he also directs the Goodall Center for Environmental Studies. He is the author of 12 books of poetry and prose, including Abandoned Quarry: New & Selected Poems published by Mercer University Press in 2011 and chosen as the SIBA (Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Poetry Book of the Year. His latest prose books are My Paddle to the Sea (The University of Georgia Press, 2011) and Begin with Rock, End With Water (Mercer University Press, 2012).
I hope your boyfriend dumps you around the same time I get famous. While I am off blowing my MacArthur on deluxe espressos and rent in the East Village.
I hope that my being famous brings this poem to you, which is why I’ve written it, every poem.
Between recently moving to the country after twenty-three years of city apartment living and teaching a course last semester called Great Themes in Literature: Nature and the Environment, I’ve become a bit of an eco-nut in recent months, and at long last I’ve come to appreciate literature that has to do with nature. In one of the pieces we read for class, Luther Standing Bear discusses a particularly wise “old Lakota”: “He knew that man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too.”
Although there are plenty of ways to stay connected with nature living in a city, I didn’t really take advantage of parks, the beach, and rooftop gardens as often as I could have. I found myself wondering if, in all my years in Chicago, Saint Louis, and New York, I had come to respect humans less as a result of being as utterly out of touch with nature as I was. The more I considered the possibility, the more I thought perhaps all these years I’ve had great respect for the individuals I come into contact with but not enough respect for humanity as a whole. In those years of city living I developed the very attitude of “us” versus “them” that we all abhor so in Washington D.C. “We” are the solution to the issues the world faces, went my thinking, and the rest of the people out there who have different opinions and ideas are the problem.
One of the poems we read in the nature literature course last semester was William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us”:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; --
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
“Little we see in Nature that is ours.” Does it matter if climate change is caused by humans? Not as much as it matters that we do everything we can to improve our treatment of the planet. If the process of decreasing oil dependency manages to slow the current trajectory of the planet heating up, kudos to us. What’s clear is that profit for the present should not trump our children’s future relationship to the planet’s natural resources.
Perhaps the old Lakota was right: We’ve spent too much time out of touch with the land and now have less concern for fellow and future humans. In our obsession with “getting and spending,” we have given our hearts away. Nature “moves us not.” We aren’t letting ourselves feel the urgency of respecting nature now. At least I wasn’t. Not enough.
You’re tired of subdividing everything, breaking down the whole so you can better understand the whole — no one cares about the whole because no one can handle the whole. You are not a person but a series of quarks, each tendon only a fraction of energy. And now that you’ve realized this you’ve become a slave to the business of asphyxiating quarks so that eventually you can get to nothing. You’re thinking everyone could handle you best if you were nothing.
I’m a William Carlos Williams fan. “This Is Just to Say” is a favorite; “Danse Russe” is another. There’s much to love about his body of work as a whole. But the poem I most enjoy teaching today’s female college students is “The Young Housewife”:
The Young Housewife
William Carlos Williams
At ten AM the young housewife moves about in negligee behind the wooden walls of her husband’s house. I pass solitary in my car.
Then again she comes to the curb to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands shy, uncorseted, tucking in stray ends of hair, and I compare her to a fallen leaf.
The noiseless wheels of my car rush with a crackling sound over dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
At first, the students notice the young housewife’s vulnerability going out of doors “uncorseted.” The student readers, young themselves, identify with her ducking outside without getting fully dressed – to grab the newspaper, to grab yesterday’s mail, to let a friend in. “I’ve done that before,” they say. Eventually, one of the women will notice, “That’s kind of sinister the way he’s leering at her. Is he casing her house?” “Why does the speaker compare her to a fallen leaf?” I ask. The students arrive at the conclusion that the speaker sees her as “fallen” or guilty, and he finds it seductive. I let them in on the poem’s suggestion of the young housewife having an affair with a delivery man -- “the ice-man, fish-man.” We discuss whether the speaker is projecting this idea onto this woman for his own reasons, or if the poem is, that is, the poet? We discuss “the male gaze.” And when I finally note the “dried leaves” being crushed beneath the wheels of his car after he’s compared her to a fallen leaf, the room erupts in disgust. “What a creep!” one student pipes up. “Stalker!” another cries.
I remember being a thin, fairly attractive young woman. I remember how self-loathingly, painfully self conscious I was because of it. Everywhere I went, I felt eyes on me. Every guy I met, I wondered if he viewed me in a sexual way, or to what extent he did. Sometimes I wanted to rip their throats out. It felt inescapable, paranoia-inducing. It was rare I could relax and just be myself without worrying about how I was being perceived.
Although I was a child of the seventies, raised during second wave feminism, I grew up in the suburbs where traditional gender roles were imbedded deep in my psyche at home, in school, at church. These roles were so pervasive I couldn’t see them. Beneath the surface, a boiling anger set in. One of the predominant reasons for my anger was that society had told me two stories growing up. One: You can be anything you want to be. Two: You should be a womanly woman while you do it. There doesn’t seem to be a conflict there, but what I discovered was the gap between theory and practice. It was confusing, contradictory, impossible even to perform the gender roles expected of me AND to be great at whatever I wanted to be when I grew up -- that is, if I valued happiness at all.
For example, I worked at a high powered law firm in Chicago as support staff in my early twenties while I decided if I wanted to be a lawyer or professor. I was quick to notice that some of the highest billing attorneys in the firm were women, but none of them were partners. But more importantly, everyone in the firm considered them awful bitches. It’s lonely at the top indeed – especially if you’re a woman. Was that what I wanted to claw and scratch my way into?
In my early thirties, I went through a phase in which I was severely depressed and was prescribed medication that caused weight gain. In the matter of three months, I gained about thirty pounds. I was mortified. I rarely ate. I starved myself and dreamt about food, but the weight kept piling on. I had to buy new clothes.
Eventually, I healed emotionally. The depression passed. Eventually, I met my current husband and moved to New York. I finished my graduate schooling. And at some point along the way, I realized, “Wow, I’m actually comfortable in my own skin.” I’ve been overweight for eleven years now, and I’ve never been happier.
Some of this happiness comes from getting older, I’m sure. And some of it comes from happiness in my relationship and happiness in my job. But some of it, I maintain, comes from no longer assuming men are thinking of me sexually. Now, they are listening to what I have to say. I’m forty-two now, which lends a gal some authority. But I’ve personally found not being distractingly attractive anymore to be priceless. Sure, I have days where I wish I were thinner. But generally speaking, I’m far more comfortable without huge doses of the male gaze eating up my airspace. It’s troubling to me the extent to which we condone the creep in the car lurking about the young housewife’s home.
This is my sixth and final posting for the APIA Poetry and Interview Series. I am grateful to the Best American Poetry for offering this platform on your blog—thank you. I am ending with Tarfia Faizullah, a fast-rising star and author of Seam (Southern Illinois University Press), a devastating book, one I’ve read many times though it’s still hot off the presses.
Tarfia will be reading in New York City with me, along with two of this week's featured APIA poets, Cathy Linh Che and R.A. Villanueva, this Friday, May 30th, 8PM at the Asian American Writers Workshop (110-112 W 27th Street, Suite 600) as part of a debut piñata ball. This reading/dance party will serve as my book release launch for Mad Honey Symposium—it’s a celebration of Cathy Linh Che’s Split, Tarfia Faizullah’s Seam, and R.A. Villanueva’s Reliquaria, all collections published this year, the year of the horse. If you’re in New York City, be sure to make it out! There will be piñatas, dancing, snacks, beautiful people, and celebration. 8PM at Asian American Writers Workshop. Tarfia is traveling for this, so don’t miss it! Details and information for tickets (it’s free) are here.
Tarfia Faizullah is the Pushcart Prize winning author of Seam (SIU 2014), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems appear in Oxford American, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2013, and elsewhere. Honors include scholarships from Kundiman, the Fulbright Foundation, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Vermont Studio Center. She is the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry at University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program.
The following poem, “Register of Eliminated Villages”, exemplifies how Faizullah manipulates lines of verse so that her language expunges the boundaries of time. More than this, “Register of Eliminated Villages” speaks of a gaping absence, the result of violence—a violence of omission that begins right from its unsettling epigraph. The scaffolding in this poem is unique—in the opening, the speaker declares: “my life is beginning/without me”. In the wakefulness of a long night, in the intimate space of being next to a lover, the speaker experiences a kind of return—time and space wavers between her present self and her inchoate self. And it is this inchoate self that re-experiences the intimate space of her parents: “Mother turns to Father//in the cold room they share,/offers her hands to his spine.” The simultaneity of the speaker’s mother and the speaker in these private spaces is remarkable for its seamlessness, for the way it mirrors and doubles—the reader actually experiences both moments not as separate moments but as the same moment—at the same time.
The poem turns, also, to the simultaneity of recorded history and unrecorded absence: “Frontline only counted each/town destroyed: three/hundred ninety-seven of them.//Who counts dolls, hand-/stitched, facedown in dirt?” The poet goes on to list: cadaver, bone, belongings, pots, the amputated hands of thieves—the human experiences, lost objects that were not recorded. 397 towns: 397 is the number that prevents the speaker from sleeping. 397 is the number that tells no stories, that erases the stories. In effect, the presence of the speaker’s manifold selves in this poem stands in for absence of another kind. The speaker keeps counting—into her own memory, the pages of the Qu’ran, loops back to the moment between her mother and father, and indeed, we are roused to the fact that “the register,/I know, is real and beautiful”, as experienced and embodied in the doubling of time, the presence of absence. Tarfia Faizullah’s poems are as indelible as they are brutal, and they interrogate our own conceptions of history and the present. Get your copy of Seamhere.
Register of Eliminated Villages
“I have a register which lists 397 eliminated villages, Kurdish villages in
Northern Iraq…it’s a very decorative, pretty thing…”
–Kanan Makiya, Frontline, 2002
Somewhere in this insomniac night
my life is beginning
without me. In Northern Iraq,
it is high noon, the sun there
perched over fields shriven
with lilies, the petals of orange
poppies red with a light
that a gauze of gray sparrows
glides through over sheaves
of bone too stubborn to burn,
all that is left of those razed
towns. Mother turns to Father
in the cold room they share,
offers her hands to his spine.
I curl inside her, a silver
bangle illuminated by candle’s
flame. I curl beside you, lay
my head close to the vellum
of your smooth back, try
again to sleep. Count to 1,000,
you suggest. Count to two.
Three. As someone must count
hacked date trees, hollowed
hills paved into gardens, though
the scholar on tonight’s
Frontline only counted each
town destroyed: three
hundred ninety-seven of them.
Who counts dolls, hand-
stitched, facedown in dirt?
Count to five. Six. Count
cadaver, bone, belongings: pots,
spun from red clay. Who
will count the amputated
hands of thieves? Mother
presses a hand to me. Inside
her, I thrash, a stalk of wheat
blistered by storm. Sleep comes,
brief as it is bright. I startle
awake, turn to you. The register,
I know, is real and beautiful,
filled with the names of the dead,
strokes of sharp pencil etched
elegantly into thick pages. Father
presses an ear to Mother’s
belly. I am wide awake. Count
to seven. Eight. Nine. You
murmur, turn to me. Someone
must be counting hours
spent weaving lace the color
of moonlight for a young girl’s
dowry. I do not have
the right to count hours,
girls, dowries—only the skin-
thin pages of the Qur’an
I once cut a hollow into, condoms
I stored there, cigarettes.
Count each minute I waited
for my parents to fall
asleep. Count nights I sat alone
on the curb, held smoke
inside my mouth, released
whorls of it into the air.
Father leaves Mother asleep
on her side, the crocus
of my fetus nestled inside her.
I draw the thin sheet
over us. Father reaches
for the Qur’an, thumbs through
page after illuminated page,
runs a fingertip beneath
each line of verse, looks everywhere
for the promise of my name.
first published in Passages North
Interview
Who are you? What are you all about?
A changeling. I don’t always know, but sometimes I feel close. Some days, comic books and smoothies and loud music. Others, stacks of poems and the silences of rooms I pass through briefly.
Tell me about your current or most recent project. How did you transform it from its genesis to its current form?
I’m working on a second manuscript, Register of Eliminated Villages. I followed the threads of the first few poems. They wandered off into other poems, other worlds that terrify and thrill me. At the moment, it’s an unwieldy stack of 95 pages that begins with Dissociation and ends with Discipline.
Tell me what you get excited about, in terms of your poetry and your work. What have you discovered in the process of shaping and forming your manuscript(s)? What has shaped, challenged, or invigorated your poetic practice?
I’m excited about the ways in which poems can be simultaneously clear and mysterious. How they can linger, swerve, dissipate, crash, soften. How they can be wild within formal constraints. How they can be both ancient and new.
Poets outside the West don't seem as concerned about whether poetry is dead or not. They know they can be imprisoned for writing poetry because they can save others from participating in a machine that ensures our self-destruction. We live in a world of drones, privacy violations, and attempts to minimize the rights of others. What invigorates my practice is the awareness that we are all in danger of being endangered and in danger of losing empathy for each other and ourselves. I still believe that poems are many-roomed buildings where we can share our vulnerabilities vividly.
Who are your influences? If you could map a poetic lineage, how would it look? Or the opposite: whose work do you admire and come back to, but contrasts from your own work?
My poetic lineage is as varied as it is broad, and crosses the borders of many cultures. It also depends on what I’m mulling over or whose poems are on my radar. Co-editing the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press with Jamaal May always gives me the chance to encounter new voices for the first time, and running poetry workshops with high schoolers gives me the chance to revisit the magic of dog-eared poems.
Vievee Francis’s new poem in Poetry Magazine just blows me away with its splendor and audacity, and this week, I’ve been mesmerized with the spare precision of landays, a twenty syllable Afghan folk poem. Here’s an example of one that knocked the wind out of me with its terrifying reminder of our current moment, and how despite—or because of it—love flourishes. “Embrace me in a suicide vest/but don’t say I won’t give you a kiss.”
What is one thing that you desire to say as a poet, but haven’t said yet? What does the future hold for you, if you could hold it?
Forgive.
Sometimes the future holds on too much to the past. Sometimes the future holds itself and waits for me to get there.
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark
