The Best American Poetry

Tales of the Seventies: The Screaming Poet and the Wrestling Shrink [by Alan Ziegler]

    Winter, 1971-72. My early days trying to be a poet. I am living with my parents and working the lobster shift—usually by myself—on the decollating machine at the Consolidated Computer Company on West 34th Street, in the era of keypunch card input. Multiple-copies of reports are printed on large, sprocketed sheets, separated by carbon paper, which my machine removes.

    The faster I run the machine, the more time I have to input one-line poems on keypunch cards and hunt for uncancelled postage stamps on incoming packages; the faster I run the machine, the more likely it is to jam, consigning me to messy hand-decollating.

  

    One night, after a binge of reckless machining, I’m an ink-stained wretch on the Long Island Railroad. The train teems with teens and early-twenties coming from a rock concert, laughing and whooping. Not long ago I might have been among them; now I just want them to keep their youth to themselves.

    In a real dark night of the soul, it is always the 3:10 a.m. to Babylon.

    And here comes the high school valedictorian—a PhD candidate at Harvard—wearing a three-piece suit, carrying a leather briefcase. He joins me and says that earlier he delivered a paper at an academic conference.

    “What was the topic?” I ask, and my ears—numbed from hours at the machine—hear him reply, “Kinesthetics.”

    “You went into physiology?”

    “No, Kant’s Aesthetics,” he enunciates slowly, and sneaks a glance at my stained work clothes. I tell him about my job and my poetry workshop, adding that I am applying to graduate school. He asks about my girlfriend of six years, and I just shake my head. Truth is, I haven’t applied to graduate school or started sending out poems, or gone on a date in weeks.

    A couple of days later, I am excited when someone in my workshop tells me about her friend Jeremy, a Jungian analyst who lowers his rates for artists. “If nothing else, you could mine your dreams for poetry.”

    Jeremy’s office is on Fifth Avenue near 11th Street, the heart of Jungian country. He is in his mid-thirties, with curly, longish dark hair, wearing dark green corduroy pants and a black turtleneck. Jeremy asks me a few questions, ending with “What are you afraid of?” I shock myself with the answer: “I’m afraid I am going to start twitching, like my father.” He agrees to take me on at a highly reduced rate, then mentions that our sessions will be interrupted in a month by a trip to Zurich to meet with his mentor.

    Jung. Zurich. Fifth Avenue. Dreams. Oh, how the words roll off my young-poet tongue.

    Perhaps to please Jeremy, I start having more interesting dreams:

    I am a shrimp in lobster sauce, which fills the Fillmore East lobby on Second Avenue. Two of the other shrimps are engaged in deep conversation. I recognize one as the rock critic for The Village Voice. I am envious of the shrimp talking to him.

    I am in hell, protesting that I have been unfairly placed here. I am assigned to give a talk on misery, and am in a panic because I feel inadequate to the task.

    I open an industrial-sized freezer. There’s something wrapped in tin foil. I unwrap it. It is me.

    I am a guest on The Tonight Show, and I am killing. I ad-lib one line that brings the house down, and has Johnny Carson banging on his desk for mercy: “You could get a job as a store display in a jello factory.”

    My writing cupboard is newly stocked with surrealistic images that I cook into my poems, and I start to feel better about myself. The 3:10 a.m. to Babylon becomes a moving Yaddo. I miss Jeremy the two weeks he is in Zurich, but enjoy saying, “My Jungian analyst is in Zurich with his mentor.”

    Our mutual friend invites me to a party, warning me that Jeremy might be there. The party is loud and crowded, with people dancing to Motown in one room and mingling in another. As I stand in the hallway between the two rooms, trying to impress a woman with my life as a working-class poet, Jeremy—hair unkempt, wearing a flowered shirt—dances by, lips in a pout and fists circling in a “do the monkey” motion. “Hey,” Jeremy says as he shimmies by.

    “Who is that?” the woman asks.

    “That’s my Jungian analyst,” I answer with pride. “His mentor is in Zurich.”

    The next week, at the end of our session, Jeremy asks me to move from the couch to the chair for a few minutes, he has something to tell me. I am afraid the ride is over; I’m not crazy or interesting enough.

    “I am ending my practice, as it is now,” Jeremy declares solemnly. He has been going through some heavy changes personally and professionally. He can’t, in good faith, continue to do Jungian analysis. “I’ve rented a loft on Spring Street, and I am changing to primal scream therapy.”

    Jeremy offers to refer me to another Jungian, or I can make the change with him. In college, I was intrigued by primal scream and other fringe treatments. A motto of the left is “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” and many believe that the likes of Arthur Janov and R.D. Laing are part of the solution. I am not active politically, so this would make me less of a problem. I can have interesting dreams on my own, but I need help to scream.

    “I’m with you,” I declare. “What does your mentor in Zurich think about this?”

    “He thinks I’m crazy,” Jeremy says. I wait for him to smile but he doesn’t.

    Two weeks later I have my first session in Jeremy’s Spring Street loft, with peeling walls, no couch, no desk. A large portion of the floor is covered with a tattered wrestling mat, pillows scattered around. “Lie down, get comfortable,” Jeremy says, and we begin our transition from talk therapy to pre-talk therapy.

    Jeremy sits next to me in the lotus position, and I turn sideways to face him, head pedestalled on my hand. We talk for a while about my dreams, then Jeremy asks me to lie flat on my back and make various noises. “Good, now let the pillows have it.” I punch the pillows around but feel limp and spiritless at the end of the session. “It’ll take some getting used to,” Jeremy says, his hand on my shoulder.

    After a few sessions, I am screaming my head off and beating the crap out of the pillows. I am on the cutting edge. Spring Street. Primal Scream. I can’t wait for Jeremy to guide me back to infancy so I can curdle my blood with transcendent shrieks.

    At one session, while lying on the mat for the ever-briefer talk segment, I mention my difficulty expressing anger.

    “Let’s wrestle,” Jeremy says.

     “Let’s what?”

    “Wrestle. Let’s see what happens.”

    Jeremy is two inches shorter than I but powerfully built, muscles rippling through his T-shirt. I am a runner, in every sense of the word. But I am also a gamer. “OK,” I say.

    Jeremy reaches his arms around my chest and rolls me over. I halfheartedly fight back and am surprised that I am able to spin Jeremy around. But each time Jeremy is relocated, he regains control. Jeremy is toying with me, and I feel silly but don’t know what to do. After all, Jeremy is my primal scream nee Jungian therapist on the cutting edge on Spring Street.

    Jeremy shoves me off balance and pins my right wrist with his left knee. Just as Jeremy’s right knee approaches my left wrist, I realize that he is going to hold me down until I scream bloody hell. I picture myself frozen in tin foil. I remember Babes beating up that kid in third grade. I’m with my grandfather in shul. I am in free-fall to the cradle. I bolt.

    My surge turns Jeremy over and I pounce on top of him. Jeremy smiles and motions surrender. My adrenalin gauge zags toward empty, and I flop onto my back, breathing heavily but deeply.

    “Why didn’t you fight back sooner?” Jeremy asks.

    “Because only a sadist would hurt someone who doesn’t fight back.”

    “How badly did you really think you could get hurt? And how did you know you couldn’t win?”

    “I get it. I should send those poems out, ask those women out, apply to graduate schools.” I am pumped, my elation gauge zigs, but quickly zags back when I realize, “Someone else might have really hurt me.”

    Jeremy tilts his head forward.

    “I guess I have to know when to take risks,” I say.

    Jeremy grins and says he’ll see me next week.

    At the start of the next session, Jeremy tells me of another change in his practice. “It’s really hard to do this, one-to-one, in New York City.” Jeremy has bought a rundown house in the country. His clients will come for marathon group sessions. They will paint, do carpentry, and cook. Janov meets Laing.

    I tell Jeremy I’ll think about it, and we shake hands. But I have gotten as close to the edge as I can for now, and I can’t risk falling off. I go back to dreaming on my own, letting out an occasional muffled scream into my pillow.

from the work-in-progress Based on a True Life: A Memoir in Pieces

What Has Happened to "The New Republic"

From The New Republic (February 2015) -- first issue since the putsch that cleared out the editorial offices:

<<<

Judged purely aesthetically, the monuments of Paris looked far better with Nazi flags flying from them than they do with Je Suis Charlie lit up on them. Is that offensive? Not to me it's not.

-- Geoff Dyer (page 60)

>>>

Shame on you, asshole. -- DL

Dean Delivered [by Catherine Woodard]

 

Michael Jordan with Coach Dean Smith

The obituaries of legendary University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith have heralded his civil rights activism and team-above-self philosophy as much as his basketball legacy. President Barack Obama honored Smith with the Medal of Freedom in 2013   as a leader who transcended his sport. This week, I asked the motley crew at my middle-aged, co-ed basketball game, to pause in respect. I wore black socks and black headband to mourn, and a Carolina blue shirt to celebrate the life that shaped my values and ethics as much as any member of my biological family. For once in my life, I could stand at the three-point line and feel like Michael Jordan – who called Smith “more than a coach…a mentor, my teacher, my second father.” I raised my index finger and pointed downcourt, the way Smith taught players to thank teammates for an assist.

In my close extended family in the tobacco belt of North Carolina, Dean Smith was a deity. He echoed what they taught me about loyalty, humility and hard work. Coach –there was only one for my kin – connected me to my father who struggled with depression and alcoholism. None of that changed when I played for UNC rival Wake Forest in college. My junior year, in March, my father killed himself with a shotgun. For the rest of that season and many after, Coach Smith signaled from the sidelines all that my father wanted for me. 

 At 56, I’ve not got a lot of game left, but I still have a lot of Dean, on and off the court. Or at least I hope so.

 

Finding the Net

 

I could count on my father,

closed down, bed bound,

for Carolina basketball.

 

He would come out

for supper, snacks,

our Boys in Blue.

 

Dean Smith delivered.

Forty minutes of family,

triumph, selfless defense,

 

four corners of calm.

I seldom saw the bourbon

or pills. I watched perfect

 

pass after perfect pass

trounce the devils.

And my father fade.

 

I will find the open man.

 

 

In Third Grade My Father Loves Me Best When I

 

Watch hoops with him

            I can stay up late if I nap after school. The nap is my idea.

            I know why Coach Smith is the Dean of college basketball.

 

Open the 1957 scrapbook 

             When our Tarheels beat Wilt the Stilt for the National 

             Championship, the year before I was born.

 

Talk politics

             I know the Constitution is a do-over of some Articles

             Confederation. I can name the Supreme Court.

 

Ask about Washington, D.C.

             The trip he shook hands with Sam Rayburn, the big boss

              of a House, but not the White one.

 

Understand football

             How guards and tackles protect quarterbacks.

             That safeties must save the day.

 

Laugh with him about playing God

             of the Grapevine in Glendale. His younger cousins

             were angels. Fetched grape juice, Ritz crackers.

 

(poems from a work in progress, For Opening the Mouth of the Dead)

 

Catherine Woodard helped return Poetry in Motion to NYC’s subways and is on the board of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in CNN online, Painted Bride Quarterly, RHINO and other publications. She is a former journalist who lives and plays basketball in NYC. 

 

The First Class with Paul Violi [by Alexandra Bennett]

Is it possible to know someone you’ve never met, someone who has been completely invisible to you in the flesh but has marked your life in an indelible way? This is my question in regards to the poet Paul Violi, a man I’ve never seen in person but one I’ve come to know through his Selected Poems and the descriptive, warm, and love-inducing stories shared by others who knew him for a long time or perhaps only shared a moment in his presence.

            By the time I arrived in New York City, Paul had already passed away. I was studying in The New School’s MFA program, and his name was frequently heard throughout the writing classes and at poetry readings. Mysterious to me then, the goal soon became to figure out who he was as a writer and person, about his teaching style, and the way he viewed the world through an “an ever-widening hour, / where fountains in the rain / half frozen, half music, / shine with a dim dream of the sun.”

Many have written about Paul’s unusual influence; their stories are posted on this blog, and others are embedded in various writings. Memories of Paul circle around themes of gratitude, warmth, and sheer amazement at the poet’s unique capabilities. Those who sat in Paul’s classes tell of his intense focus during conversations, his generosity as both a sincere listener and a speaker who elicited “clarity drawn from darkness / song from thought.” One young man, who knew Paul only through writing, recounts how he reached out to the poet about a possible collaboration. Paul responded to his inquiry and suggested that the two have dinner. He later sent him several of his books, all in the spirit of goodwill and connection. I’m thinking of these lines from “One for the Monk of Montaudon:”

For it’s a pure and simple joy
to eat and drink with those I love,
to stay late and celebrate a few certainties
while confusion and scorn
and a few other crazy, weather-beaten guests
continue to roll across the cold floors

I love this idea of sharing a meal to fight back some of life’s crazy. It seems to be an authentic and real solution, to break bread and enjoy one another’s company amidst all our joys and difficulties. Yet, it also seems to be a rare thing in today’s world.

This was Paul’s mode of operation, though. He found happiness in connecting with others. Earlier in “One for the Monk of Montaudon,” the poet explains:

And I’m glad of a chance to meet people,
like Miss Ohio
(“five foot nine, eyes that shine”),
if for no other reason than the pleasure of shaking hands or the                  opportunity
of leaning into the distances
while a strand of smoke lingers, and rises,
and turns like an unheard but legible desire.

 In these moments we lean into the distances with Paul. We meet others; we meet him. His scenes help us gain a tiny eye and an enlarged heart for what’s going on around us, the people whose lives are intersecting with our own.

Whether on a construction site, in a Nigerian village, or somewhere in his own thoughts, the poet’s life serves as an example of joie de vivre. In another posted tribute (there are dozens), one reader tells about the time Paul ran into the freezing North Sea wearing only his underpants, simply because the water was there and he was alive. This reminds me of his vibrant poems from Harmatan, which relay Paul’s experiences in Nigeria while serving in the Peace Corps.His work, life amongst the people, and keen observations come marching before us, instructing us to hop on the motorcycle behind him as two packs of wild dogs attack from the bush, “leaping over the handlebars, / all fangs and spit flying in strands”. There’s an intense uncertainty here, “alarm still ringing in your head,” and we question how the poet will navigate the rest of our ride.

As we think of poems, like “Index,” we see the writer splurging on language, venturing into what interests him most, things he's appreciating in the moment, the paths he questions, and even items that some of us might initially consider dull. For Paul, all of life was a poem waiting in the wings, a chance to put thoughts to paper, to expand his understanding through iterations and imaginings. Selected Poems is a memorial of the poet’s mind in motion, one that bares its musings – all of the things that can happen in an hour, the loves and losses, the knowable observations, and the darker uncertainties. His lines can bring us back to the surface, as they prompt, “Is life all you know?” Such questions remind us to breathe, to think beyond our ever-present worries. And we need these reminders, especially when we find ourselves disavowing our life’s work three times in the same day (see “Index” again).

Continuing to turn pages in Selected Poems, we see just how seriously Paul took the poetic possibilities within any situation. Poem after poem demonstrate his deep curiosity of small moments in time. It’s as if an idea twitches ever so slightly, and then the poet traces the thread, nourishing additional thoughts and fictional exploration. He takes it into something much larger and more imaginative.

So what has the poet-scholar taught us on our first day of class? If we’re willing participants, we see that there is always something on the other side. Violi left the door open for connection and further questioning. The hour widens as we sit with him, contemplating both light and weighty things, all of which seem weightier by the end of our time together.

Selected Poems will continue to transmit the teacher’s voice. I’m reminded that “it’s a good day / when the wind is pure sensation” and I can stretch out with the writing before me, meeting the poet who hummed each line, breathed each thought. At the beginning of his day, I can almost see Paul stepping out of his house in Putnam Valley, his teacher’s bag full of students’ papers and his comments. It’s early in the morning. He puts one foot past the threshold and calls forth any new or unusual thing. He’s asking someone or something to cross his path, to make itself known in a small or quiet way, and he’s smirking ever so slightly.  

This week we celebrate Paul Violi’s life as a friend, poet, and teacher. On behalf of David Lehman and The New School’s Writing Program, we invite you to attend a special night honoring the poet. Please join us this Wednesday, February 11 at 6:30pm at The New School’s Wollman Hall (65 W. 11^th Street). Find more information here. 

Alex Bennett received her MFA from The New School in 2013. Her work has appeared in the Sosland Journal, The Best American Poetry Blog, the New School Writing Program blog, Insights Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at Parsons. 

Using Tarot to Understand Literature as States of Consciousness [by Benebell Wen]

(Ed note: This week we will feature posts by Benebell Wen, whose Holistic Tarot: An Integrative Approach to Using Tarot for Personal Growth has just been published by North Atlantic Books. Find out more about Benebell here. sdh)

Beyond its interpretation of success, achievement, and validation of the ego, Key 19, The Sun card in tarot is symbolic of the individual external life. It is the state of consciousness. Meanwhile Key 18, The Moon is symbolic of the dichotomy between that externalized life and the spiritual internal. The Moon reflects the tension of that duality existing within every one of us. It is our subconscious.

Regressing backward to Key 17, The Star, the cards begin to talk about the varying states of human consciousness, synthesizing the messages of both the Sun and the Moon. These cards might serve as metaphors for literature as states of consciousness.

In prose, there is nonfiction, let’s say creative nonfiction for our discussion purposes, and fiction. Creative nonfiction helps us form a bridge between the physical world and the human consciousness. It is what we are aware of; it is full cognition and action; it is our filtered intellections and emotions. It is often our Sun card.

Fiction is the bridge between the consciousness and the soul. It engages our subconscious. It is our astral body moving about and expressing its observations. It is often the unintentional cognition and action, the unchecked, unfiltered intellections and emotions that speak to our truths, but we have put them in fiction form because we are not yet ready to tackle those truths in a nonfiction, conscious form. It is The Moon.

Poetry is ritualized language for tapping into the personal unconscious, and it forms the bridge between our personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is the essence of the godhead beneath the surface of nonfiction and fiction. The poet is the angel depicted on The Star card.

The Star card is about hope, inspiration, and spiritual abundance. Its Saturn planetary governance infuses the card with an aura of wisdom, but also of hardship and suffering. The Uranus influence conveys the poet’s eccentricity and genius. Incidentally, Uranus is associated with arts and literature.

To understand the collective unconscious, one must first speak its language, and that language is poetry. Myths are our metaphors for expressing the collective unconscious. Tarot works as a divination tool because it uses myths, our metaphors, to help us access that unconscious. Tarot works because like the Iliad, it is poetry. To read and write poetry is to reveal the unconscious. Poetry itself is literary divination.

Matt Hart's heartfelt Review of Paul Violi

From Matt Hart’s review of Paul Violi’s Overnight in ColdFrontMag:

<<
Violi has a penchant for creating works which WOBBLE back and forth between being formal-ish, language-game type poems and snapshots of language forms not ordinarily considered poetry at all. For example, in addition to the three "Acknowledgments" poems in Overnight, there’s also the hilarious "Counterman" which is a sort of Abbot and Costello-ish "who’s on first" routine consisting of sandwich orders given and taken at a deli counter, "Finish These Sentences" which is a list of interrupted sentences that need to be finished (endlessly by the reader), and the marvelously cagey "I.D. Or, Mistaken Identities" -- which is essentially eleven "who am I" style riddles. Here, each riddle/section of the poem is a deliberately ambiguous and wildly uttered monologue of clues about its unnamed speaker – ostensibly some famous figure from history or culture – which ends with the question "Who am I?" Here’s number three:

For handing over Philologus
To the widow of the man
I’d commanded him to murder
(She then made him slice off bits
Of his own flesh, roast them
And eat them)——For this,
Plutarch commended me
For at least one act
Of understanding and decency.

Who am I?
>>>

Ed, note: For more of the review, click here. Answer to the brainteaser will be given after a twenty-four grace period in which guesses ranging from Macbeth to Coriolanus will be entetained. There's a clue in that sentence, but you'd need to be either Zorba the Greek or the Mighty Quinn to puzzle it out.

Dylan Sings to God [by Lawrence J. Epstein]

This post is dedicated to the great David Lehman.

In his latest album, Shadows in The Night, Bob Dylan sings ten songs to God. For Dylan, singing is the most authentic form of prayer. The songs aren’t his own but come from the Great American Songbook as filtered through Frank Sinatra’s inimitable voice. Why not Dylan’s own songs? And, if not his songs, why Sinatra’s?

To answer these questions, it is crucial to understand Dylan’s aim in the album. Dylan was after an album of allegorical love songs. This tradition started for him with “Visions of Johanna.” In that song Dylan is with the earthly Louise while yearning for the spiritual Johanna. The exact nature of Johanna's Godliness is not clear in the song. She could be God as represented by a female, or a metaphor as in the "Song of Songs" tradition, or one aspect of God, or a private way that Dylan experiences God.  It is very likely that Robert Graves’ book The White Goddess influenced Dylan. That complex book is about a muse, a White Goddess, who was a single Goddess behind the various mythological goddesses. In his book Graves argues that “pure” poetry is linked to the White Goddess. That is, however Dylan formed the idea, he sometimes appears to be singing to a woman but in reality is singing also or exclusively to God. Other examples of his allegorical love songs include “Shelter From the Storm” and "Red River Shore."

Therefore, while it’s easy to hear the songs on Shadows in The Night as standard love songs, they are more resonant, closer to Dylan’s intentions, if they are heard as songs to a feminine representation of God.

That in part explains the use of Frank Sinatra’s songs. Sinatra provides a perfect counterpoint to the idea of woman as God because Sinatra could uniquely deliver love songs. That is, his songs were sung to woman as woman. Dylan takes these great love songs and uses them in a new way, expanding them, not just reinterpreting their sound but also their meaning.

Interpreted in this way, the Sinatra songs of romantic longing remain intact but suddenly also include a desperate plea, an intense spiritual longing. These are not the songs of Dylan on a spiritual quest or Dylan in the rapture of religious embrace. These are the songs of a lost God, of Dylan wondering why God has gone. A shadow in the night is a darker shade of what is already dark. These songs long for an absent God.

The album operates by looking at all angles of this longing. In “I’m a Fool to Want You” Dylan berates himself for even wanting God. In “Stay With Me,” just the opposite is true because “every path leads to Thee.” Dylan wants God to be near. “Autumn Leaves” sounds like a whole new song on the album. In “Why Try to Change Me Now,” Dylan begs God to accept him as he is: “Don’t you remember? I was always your clown.” It almost sounds as though Dylan wrote those lyrics. In “Where Are You” Dylan longs for the absent God.

There’s a crucial insight about belief in these songs. Religious belief is dynamic. It changes over time. Dylan believed, but God has abandoned him. And that’s why Dylan is not singing his own songs. The otherness of the songs is a metaphor for the distance he feels from God. He can’t even pray with his own words.

The real brilliance of the album’s song choices stems from the notion that God’s relationship with Dylan is exactly like the relationship between romantic partners. Such a relationship can change over time. Feelings can get close and then sometimes retreat. And so in singing to a gone God, it makes good sense to sing love songs of longing for reconciliation.

Dylan’s is a perfect voice for these songs. As many listeners have noted, his voice sounds fresh and clear. He doesn’t just sing; he begs. There is a plea in every song offered by a voice that has lived. It is a voice weighted down by the accumulated strains of life.

And then there’s “That Lucky Old Sun,” the final song on the album. Dylan sometimes ends an album with a hint about his future direction. If so, it is a sad direction home. In the song, Dylan is envious of the sun because it can “roll around Heaven all day.” The way Dylan sings it, it is a song of someone weary of life, someone who desires death. And yet his is a voice that won’t be stilled. His feet still move on to the next stop on the tour.  

This is simply an incredible album.

Tonight: Friends, Poets, Gastrolaters Gather at Poets House

Tonight at Poets House you can enjoy an evening of friendship-in-poetry celebrating the sumptuous art of fine dining with poets Frank Bidart, Eleanor Chai, Daniel Halpern, Sharon Olds, former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, and Kevin Young.

The evening will begin at Poets House with effervescent toasts amidst an intimate exhibition of holiday cards created by poets, followed by a walk to Danny Meyer's lauded North End Grill for a meal designed by Chef Eric Korsh. Wine pairings by celebrated importer Neal Rosenthal add sensory stimulus to this tantalizing literary and culinary evening.

- Find out more here.

We'll be there! Return for a full report on the evening and follow live tweets by Kristen Batemen @bestampo (You can follow follow Kristen @KristenVBateman )

-- sdh

The Mitten Clip Mutiny [ by Charles Coe]

It was only a glove. A single child’s glove lying in the middle of the sidewalk. But it sent me rocketing more than fifty years into the past, to a winter in the early 60's and my family’s kitchen. Mother was stirring a pot of soup when I walked in to confess that I’d lost yet another glove—the second of the winter.

I was an absent-minded kid (not much has changed), constantly losing track of gloves, glasses, hats, you name it. (Everything but books. I could tell you exactly where any of the two or three books I was reading at the moment happened to be.) Money was tight in our family; buying another pair of gloves wasn’t going to keep food off the table, but still it was another thing item for a struggling family’s budget. Mother put down the soup spoon . “Maybe we should get you some mitten clips.” But I shook my head. “I’m not wearing mitten clips. Mitten clips are for babies.”

I was a very well-behaved as a child. Never got in fights, played hooky, or talked back to my parents. But here I was, committing an act of mutiny. I usually stayed under the radar of the jerkier kids, but I knew that if I showed up at school with mitten clips I might as well have written “Tease Me” on my forehead with a laundry marker. So I took my stand: No Mitten Clips. I think she might have seen some of this in my face. She just sighed and turned back to her pot of soup. “When your father gets home he’ll take you out to pick up a new pair.”

Some people have a hard time dealing with the pressures of parenthood; it doesn’t take much to bring them to a boil and turn a child into collateral damage in their lonely war with the world. I once saw a woman in a mall food court screaming at a kid whose great sin had been to knock over a cup of soda. The child just sat with head down as the woman ranted and angrily swabbed the table with a fistful of paper napkins. My mother had her own share of personal demons and I was never sure when one would come up for air, but this time things worked out okay.

I hope the parent of the kid who dropped that glove on the sidewalk can shrug it off as well. Ruffle the kid’s hair, maybe make a little joke that ends with a hug.

After all, it was only a glove.

Poets and Tarot [by Benebell Wen]

This week we will feature posts by Benebell Wen, whose Holistic Tarot: An Integrative Approach to Using Tarot for Personal Growth has just been published by North Atlantic Books. Find out more about Benebell here. 

  
Among the personal effects of poet and Nobel Prize winner William Butler Yeats was a pack of tarot cards. By most accounts Yeats was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn*, an occult secret society that practiced ceremonial magic. As it was, the Hermetic Order considered tarot divination to be one of the foundational studies that the society’s initiates learned (the others being astrology and theurgy).

While other notable members of the Golden Dawn, namely A. E. Waite and illustrator Pamela Colman Smith, were conceiving the tarot deck now known as the Rider-Waite (or Rider-Waite-Smith) deck, it is said that Yeats was an advisor to Pamela Smith on the mystic symbolism to be incorporated into Waite’s new deck. So poetry and poets have influenced the tarot and its symbology as much as the deck of cards has influenced and inspired poets and their poetry.

The title of Yeat’s autobiographical work The Trembling of the Veil hints at the poet’s association with the Rider-Waite tarot. The veil is a notable Hermetic reference, which has also been used by A. E. Waite in his book on tarot The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. Part I of the book is titled “The Veil and its Symbols” and Part II, “The Doctrine Behind the Veil.” What’s more, in the Introduction to Pictorial, Waite writes, “The pathology of the poet says the ‘undevout astronomer is mad.’” (He takes the quote from William Herschel, a musician, mathematician and astronomer.) The more one digs, the more patterns are found.

For the poets who look to poetry as evidence, look to Yeats’s “The Tower.”

…Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;

And when that ancient ruffian's turn was on

He so bewitched the cards under his thumb

That all but the one card became

A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,

And that he changed into a hare.

Hanrahan rose in frenzy there

And followed up those baying creatures towards –

To start, the thematic references to pride and ego throughout are the ascribed meanings to the tarot card Key 16, named The Tower, which is also the title of Yeats’s poem. As for what that “one card” was, I suspect the title offers some indication. The fellow Hanrahan has been interpreted by many to be a representation of The Fool, significant because the progression of the Major Arcana cards in the tarot has been referred to as “the Fool’s journey.”

…Before that ruin came, for centuries,

Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the knees

Or shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,

And certain men-at-arms there were

Whose images, in the Great Memory stored,

Come with loud cry and panting breast

To break upon a sleeper's rest

While their great wooden dice beat on the board.

The foregoing stanza describes The Tower card: the ruin, the rough men-at-arms, narrow stairs, and the general imagery reminiscent of the Tower of Babel, which is often the depiction on The Tower card in tarot. As for the “Great Memory stored,” it could be speculated that it is a reference to the card that follows Key 16, The Tower, which is Key 17, The Star. The Star card is associated with depicting the varying states of human consciousness and the unconscious, with the Great Memory a metaphor for the collective unconscious, which is a concept deeply rooted in ceremonial magic and the traditions of the Golden Dawn, which Yeats was purported to be part of (though the Golden Dawn do not use the actual term “collective unconscious,” and ascribe a different designation for the concept).

T.S. Eliot. Source: Public Domain

Tarot may be one of the lesser known muses of poets past. Take T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” for instance.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,  

Had a bad cold, nevertheless  

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,  

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,  

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,  

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)  

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,  

The lady of situations.  

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,  

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,  

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,  

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find  

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

In that stanza, Eliot makes reference to several cards in the tarot deck. Some speculate that the drowned Phoenician Sailor is the Ten of Swords and the Lady of the Rocks is the Queen of Cups. There is then the Three of Wands (“man with the three staves”), The Wheel of Fortune (“the Wheel”), the Six of Pentacles (“the one-eyed merchant”), and The Hanged Man. “Fear death by water,” writes Eliot. The Hanged Man is ruled astrologically by Neptune and is governed by the element Water.

 
If the tarot cards are to be interpreted, they may suggest pending doom and misfortune, empathy felt for that downfall, a period of waiting and yearning for validation, the karmic turns of the samsara wheel, and the ultimate benevolence--self-sacrifice and prophesy. The tarot reading sets the tone for the progression of Eliot’s poem.

Richard Palmer, a prolific contemporary poet and master tarot practitioner says that in the union of the tarot and poetry, the poetic voice is joined with the voice of the universe, our words with the ancient symbols, which is the language of the cosmic soul. Together, tarot and poetry “weave a song of mystery, meaning, beauty, and love upon the unfolding tapestry of Time,” as he eloquently put it. Palmer’s poetry, some of the most brilliant of his works showcased in The Traveler (Writers Club Press, 2002), among his other collections, demonstrate the richness of poems conceived from a poet-mind that has been influenced by the tarot. Likewise, his tarot books, such as Tarot: Voice of the Inner Light (Custom Book Publishing, 2008) exudes a depth and breadth to tarot interpretive work that surpasses other practitioners, precisely because of his poet-mind approach.

It is no surprise that poets might gravitate toward the tarot for inspiration. Poetry calls upon our mythologies as metaphors of otherwise hidden truths, and the notion of revealing what has been hidden is a fascination of, I dare say, all poets. And what is the occult? The occult is but the study of that which has been hidden from view. So it would be of little surprise that poets and occult secret societies might be bedfellows. Tomorrow, I hope to explore the idea of mythology and metaphor further, in particular how the tarot is itself a book of poetry, and even more significantly, poetry for poets.

========

* Notwithstanding Yeats, other acclaimed poets and writers that were known members of the Golden Dawn were Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, Sax Rohmer, author of the ever lovely Fu Manchu series, Scottish poet and writer William Sharp, who also wrote under the pseudonym Fiona MacLeod, writer Arthur Machen, who Stephen King has called perhaps the best writer of horror in the English language, Arnold Bennett, Algernon Blackwood, Gustav Meyrink, John Todhunter, Violet Tweedale, and Charles Williams, to name a few. 

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

Wednesday, February 11, 2015, 6:30-8:00 PM: Celebrate Paul Violi

 Book launch and reading from Paul Violi’s Selected Poems: 1970-2007 (Gingko Press), edited by Charles North and Tony Towle.

Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang College
65 West 11th Street Room B500, New York, NY 10003

Hosted by Laura Cronk and David Lehman, of the New School MFA Writing Program. Lehman and Cronk will join Charles North, and Tony Towle, editors of the Selected Poems, in reading from the new book. The winners of the first four Paul Violi poetry competitions -- Alex Crowley, Justin Sherwood, Alexandra Bennett, and Carson Donnelly – will also read. 

Paul Violi, one of the major New York School poets of his generation, was celebrated for his inventive wit, his ability to find the poetic resonance of nonpoetic language, and his ability to get serious ideas across without didactic earnestness. An inspiring poet and beloved instructor, he wrote more than a dozen collections of poetry, including Waterworks (1972); In Baltic Circles (1973, 2011); Harmatan (1977), which was based on his experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria; the groundbreaking Splurge (1982); Likewise(1988); The Curious Builder (1993); Breakers: Selected Poems (2000); and Overnight (2007).

Find more information here. 

Find out about the Paul Violi prize here. 

-- sdh

 

Meet the Press: Karen Schubert in Conversation with Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, Editor of Accents Publishing

KS: Accents is a great name for a press. What does the name mean to you?

KSK: Ah, well. That is quite personal, actually. Before there was Accents Publishing, there was (and still is) the Accents radio show. I speak English with a foreign accent; I will always have it, since I was born in Bulgaria and lived there until age 24. So I was to be on the radio, and I thought that since I couldn’t get rid of my accent, I could at least try to really own it. You know what software designers say—it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. So, on the first episode of Accents, I publicly announced that I love accents so much that I developed a fake foreign accent to use on the radio! That was in January 2009. A year later, in January 2010, Accents Publishing was formed, and I never considered another name.

KS: Tell us about Accents Publishing’s newest title, Mother, Loose by Brandel France de Bravo.

KSK: Mother, Loose is the winner of our 2014 chapbook contest. Brandel’s manuscript was selected as the Judge’s Choice by Patty Paine. Let me quote a sentence from her intro: “These jewel-like poems—both in their precision and beauty—are as dazzling and intelligent as they are entrancing and enthralling.” I am in complete agreement with Patty’s words, although I feel that some of the brilliance of the book is probably lost on me, because it works with childhood rhymes and tales that I am not as intimately familiar with as someone who grew up in the United States would be. But I still love the work! I was proofreading (again!) the typeset book last week and (again!) kept gasping at the beauty and the depth of the poetry. But don’t take my word for it; let me offer you a poem:

I Regret to Inform You

I regret knowing, the way it changes
everything and nothing. I regret
cell death and its absence. I regret I am
the person you think I am. I regret
the days turned years waiting
and the luminous arriving
always eclipsed. I regret having
no sense of humor, feeling like Haiti
when I’m Liechtenstein, just as tiny but,
thanks for asking, fine. I regret
showing you what I am unable to see,
my wattled profile, baldly appraising gaze.
I regret leaving the back door open
and I regret closing it. I regret the odor
of obligation, being the small hair
that will not budge and the tongue
that must protest it. I regret
the tumor’s intelligence, the way
it dodges the needle, pretends
to swallow poison. I regret this broken
mask and I regret your looking.
I regret waiting until now
to wait on you, not anointing your feet
with oil sooner. I regret the raspberries
I failed to feed you with a spoon.
I regret that after our meal
I will be left to clear the table. 

KS: That’s a great poem. So many shifts and so much at stake.
It’s interesting that you and Patty Paine are both poets and editors of presses and living in countries you didn’t grow up in. Poetry seems particularly challenging to translate or comprehend, more embedded with connotated meaning and conflation of tradition.

Over the holidays I began reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, and just read the passage about the Turkish journalist living in exile in Germany who begins writing poetry. He’s aware that his poetry is understood by the other ex-pat Turks, but not by the Germans, and he seems to feel a kind of wall of silence around him in Germany.

Does poetry and publishing poetry serve to deepen your connection to your chosen community? Or does it remind you that there are an infinite number of details to learn about an adopted culture and language?

KSK: I feel a lot more fortunate than Orhan Pamuk’s character. I write poems in English for the English-speaking readers, I write in Bulgarian for the Bulgarian audience. I translate everything I can between the two languages. There are some occasions, very irritating, when I write something that is both untranslatable and written in the “wrong” language. For example I have poems in English that address life experiences that are understandable only to a Bulgarian audience and not as relevant to the American reader. Luckily, many Bulgarians know English, my own language and poetry community. A friend summed it up once as he was introducing me to someone : “This is Katerina Stoykova. She is a poet, but you haven’t heard of her because she lives in America.” Things changed for me, though, because during 2012 and 2013, I edited and (largely) translated an anthology of Bulgarian poetry. This project put me in contact with hundreds of authors, I became closely familiar with what Bulgarian poets write at the moment, and in the process, I established new friendships. I think the most productive way to feel connected to a community is to work to serve it, to give of yourself. Along these lines, yes, publishing absolutely deepens my connection to my chosen community.
But (call me a Gemini) I want to serve both the Bulgarian and the American literary communities. I want to help them be relevant to one another, and at this point, I don’t want to choose one over the other. I can’t.

KS: Your own book How God Punishes has just won a prestigious Bulgarian award. Congratulations! Tell us about that book, and the award.

KSK: How God Punishes was published in June, 2014 by a new, boutique press called ICU. This is a book about truth-telling, regret and ego, and it walks the reader through poems about several stages of personal development. It’s organized in seven parts and an epilogue. The tone is self-ironic. All poems are untitled, and each refers back to the title of the book. I have the poems in English as well, and I hope in 2015 to be able to finish the manuscript in English.

For the past twenty years, Bulgarian publishing house Zhanet 45 has been sponsoring the Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Award. It is considered the most prestigious annual poetry prize, and a jury selects the winner(s) and distributes the monetary award of 10000 leva.

I was overjoyed to see How God Punishes among the finalists, and then winning really made my year. The first place was split between my book and Poems by Vasil Balev. I was happy for myself, my book and my publisher. I don’t live in Bulgaria and cannot connect to the Bulgarian audience on a regular basis, so winning gave my book a level of publicity that I couldn’t possibly have achieved on my own.

KS: Accents Publishing released 8 titles in 2014. What are their commonalities?

KSK: I’ve always thought that our books differ quite a bit from one another, but now that I’ve really thought about your question, I have to say that they have a lot in common.

Two of these are anthologies, which reflect the personal tastes of their editors. All the rest of the books are poetry collections that carry a single, clear and well-explored theme. Beloved Kentucky poet Jane Gentry, whom we lost in 2014, says that all poems want to tell a story, and I agree with her. I think many poetry books are in fact short story collections. Each of the books we’ve published this year operates much like a linked short story collection. For each book you can immediately describe in several sentences what it is about, at least on the surface.

For example, Square Feet by Lori A. May explores the marriage and domestic life of a childless couple.  Pendulum by Eric Scott Sutherland focuses on the social issues of poverty and homelessness in the setting of a downtown public library. And Childhood by Emily R. Grosholz explores adopting and parenting of young children. Incidentally, Childhood is our first and only (so far) book that includes color images. Several paintings by Parisian painter Lucy Vines interact with Emily’s poems and, IMHO, make for a richer experience for the reader.

KS: The covers are impressive, as well. What goes into creating a cover composition?

KSK: We all have different tastes in art, and even what we call art differs from person to person. When we were creating the concept of Accents Publishing, one my guiding principles was to build a press that I would want to be published by—a press that is compassionate to its author. It is important to me that the authors we publish like (if not love) their covers, so we work with them. They have input on the images we select, and our designer takes over from that point on to build a complete cover that says “This is an Accents book.”

KS: Tell us about your current project translating Bulgarian poets.

KSK: Ah! Well, this was a totally spur-of-the-moment idea that just took over me, and I announced it publicly before I could talk myself out of it. What can I say—I love translating poetry. I think it teaches me a lot—about language, about my own personal tastes, about culture, about poetry in general. I do it almost daily anyway. I translate poems by Bulgarian poets and then submit them to magazines for publication. A few get picked up, but as you know, submitting and publishing is a time- and effort-consuming endeavor. I decided that I’d rather spend my energy and time on selecting and translating the poems and posting them on my own blog. So far it’s been a total blast. I pasted a little calendar on my wall and started scratching off each day I’ve posted a translation. So far—12 days—I have 100% coverage! I think keeping the translations together on a blog makes reading them a more special experience—something like an evolving online anthology of translations. I did edit and publish an anthology of Bulgarian poetry already, for which I translated 29 of the 32 included authors. It was an extraordinary amount of work, my most difficult project to date. It took two years, one of which was consumed almost entirely by translating and editing the translations. This time I want to take a more fun and leisurely approach to translating Bulgarian poetry and making it available for English-speaking readers. If anyone is interested in reading the blog, here is a link:  http://katerinaklemer.com/ownaccent/

KS: Do you think American readers have a good amount of access to work in translation?

KSK: I’m not sure. The decision on what gets translated is a function of many variables. Some are political, some financial, some a matter of taste. But I feel that Americans read less translated poetry than they actually have available. For example, during the first several years of hosting the Accents radio show, I asked each guest to spend some time talking about a foreign poet—a poet who is not American or writes in a language other than English. The guest was supposed to mention someone they admire, read a poem and say a few words about why they like this particular poet. After the first several months of doing this, I had to explicitly ask guests to avoid mentioning Anna Akhmatova and Pablo Neruda, because they were very nearly the only ones selected. Many guests even declined to participate in the segment because they weren’t sure whom to pick. Eventually I stopped doing this segment.
I think that university libraries have a lot of translated poetry books that one can look through. Small presses take chances on anthologies with contemporary translated poetry. My mentor Molly Peacock once said, “There is nothing more exciting than the work of your peers.” Poets who work outside the US are also your peers—see what they write! 

KS: Let’s get the conversation started. Name five poetry books in translation American readers should read this year.

KSK: I don’t dare tell the American readers what they should read. I’m afraid I’m neither that well-read, nor sophisticated. That said, I can mention the five poetry books in translation that have been personally important to me and have inspired me to either translate or to publish translations. In alphabetical order, these are:

Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women (Zephyr Press, 2006) By Ch'oe Sung-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yon-ju. Translated  from Korean by Don Mee Choi.

Cry of a Former Dog (Ivy Press, 2000) By Konstantin Pavlov Translated from Bulgarian by Ludmilla G. Popova-Wightman

Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James Books, 2011) By Amal al-Jubouri. Translated from Arabic by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Husam Qaisi. Foreward by Alicia Ostriker.

Homage to the Lame Wolf: Selected Poems (Oberlin College Press, 1987) By Vasko Popa. Translated from Serbian by Charles Simic.

Talking to My Body (Copper Canyon Press, 1996) By Anna Swir. Translated from Polish by Czeslaw Milosz

Every one of these books has given me something to aspire to and has shown me what is possible. I admire every one of these poets, translators and publishers.

KS: Thank you!

Two more questions before I let you go: Tell us about Proud Citizen. And also, what is the Lexington-Louisville area doing so right that fosters such a dynamic literary arts community?

KSK: Proud Citizen is a feature-length narrative film, shot almost entirely in Lexington, Kentucky, with a local cast. It is a film about human connections, forgiveness, friendship and family. It is a very writerly film, because it tells the story of a playwright’s visit to Lexington, and the lead actress recites about a dozen poems as voiceovers. Now, I happen to be the lead actress and these happen to be my poems, so that makes the film so much more personal. Film Director Thom Southerland had a vision of creating a film that shows Kentucky through the eyes of a visitor. He invited me to work with him, and we jointly developed the story. Being able to participate in this kind of project gave me the opportunity to be creative in a different way and showed me the true creative power of collaboration. It has been an unbelievably awesome experience that I will cherish for as long as I’m able to remember. Since July, 2014, the film has been screening at festivals and has even won a few awards. If you are curious to see a trailer and further information, please take a look at our website: http://proudcitizenthemovie.com/

Literary life in the Lexington/Louisville area is thriving, and everyone seems to be enjoying it! Neil Chethik, Executive Director of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, was first to claim Kentucky as the Literary Arts Capital of Mid-America, and now other voices are joining the chorus. We have so much to be proud of and to celebrate—award-winning writers, innovative literary presses, institutions, organizations, reading series, universities, MFA programs, enrichment grants, conferences, adoring audiences. So we have the infrastructure and a critical mass of intelligent people who are devoted to the arts. I think that to a large extent, the impetus for this creative boom is the literary community itself enjoying the realization of its own potential. Certain things have no substitutes and cannot be funded—true friendships and the sincere support that writers give to one another, the genuine care and interest they show for each other’s work. During my radio show, I ask all my guests who teach creative writing what the most important thing they teach their students is. I’ll give you the answer from writer Brian Leung, who at the time taught at The University of Louisville. He said, 

I teach my students that their interest in their pursuit in their writing and publishing is necessarily coequal to their interest in serving and assisting other writers. And that can manifest itself in varieties of ways .... There are a lot of ways that I teach them to be of service to other writers … anything to encourage the idea that the creative writing enterprise is not just about serving one’s creative ego.  

(The complete sound clip can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/accents-publishing/brian-leung-writer). And I think this is what seems to be happening in Kentucky on a larger scale than ever before. It is a beautiful moment, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer is the author of several poetry books in English and Bulgarian, most recently The Porcupine of Mind (Broadstone Books, 2012, in English) and How God Punishes (ICU, 2014, in Bulgarian), which won the Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Prize. She is the editor of The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry (Accents Publishing, 2014), for which she also translated the works of 29 of the 32 included authors. She hosts Accents – a radio show for literature, art and culture on WRFL in Lexington, Kentucky. In January 2010, Katerina launched the independent literary press Accents Publishing. Katerina co-wrote the independent feature film Proud Citizen, directed by Thom Southerland, and acted in the lead role.

Karen Schubert's most recent chapbook, I Left My Wings on a Chair, wasa Wick Poetry Center Winner (Kent State Press, 2014). Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, diode poetry journal, and Extract(s) anthology. Awards include a 2013 residency at Headlands Center for the Arts and 2014 Pushcart Prize nomination. She is a founding member of Literally Youngstown, a center for the literary arts.

Poetry from Scotland 3: Robin Robertson [by Robyn Marsack]

The Shelter

I should never have stayed here
in this cold shieling
once the storm had passed
and the rain had finally eased.

I could make out shapes
inside, the occasional sound:
a muffled crying
which I took for wind in the trees;
a wasp,
stuttering there at the windowsill.
I listened. What looked like
a small red coat
was dripping from its wire hanger.

There was a shift and rustle
coming from the bucket in the corner
by the door;I found, inside,
a crumpled fist of balled-up paper, slowly
uncrinkling.

On the hearth, just legible
in the warm ash, my name and dates,
and above that, in a shard
of mirror left in the frame,
I caught sight of myself, wearing
something like a black brooch at the neck.
Then I looked more closely
and saw what it was.

from Sailing the Forest: selected poems (London: Picador / New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014) 

 

Robin Robertson, editor and publisher, is one of a gifted generation of Scottish poets now in their fifties.He lives in London, but grew up on the north-east coast of Scotland, and something of its glinting granite and cold seas underlies his poetry.

Mark Doty has referred to Robertson’s ‘rich and briny atmospheres, the burr and bristle of a fine ear, an eye restless for exact and searing detail’ – all of which are evident in ‘The Shelter’ – urging readers to explore the ‘dark and lustrous landscapes’ of his poems.

Robertson’s recurrent persona is that of a displaced man: undone by sexual relationships, and often lost in a haunted landscape. He uses classical and Scottish myths of change and shape-shifting to powerful, sensuous effect, and I recommend ‘The Flaying of Marsyas’ and ‘At Roane Head’ as compelling examples. Robertson's collaborations with musicians, and his translations, have reinforced his attention to the precise shape of a line, to the detonating effect of one unusual word.

He has won a number of prizes for his collections, including the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Find out more about Robin Robertson’s poetry here. 

and hear him read at:
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/robin-robertson

First Lines of Mystery Novels [by Lawrence J. Epstein]

There are readers, and, I suspect, editors and agents who see the first line of a mystery metaphorically, as an anecdote is used. The line is both different from other lines but emblematic of them just as an anecdote is a unique experience in a person’s life but ironically also revealing of the whole life. A great first line uses language in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, with a sense of rhythm much in the same way that a song’s lines might. And, like a reverberating line from a Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen song, a first line can be aphoristic and therefore memorable.

A great first line sets up the whole story or novel. Consider this opening line from Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” The story, not routinely listed as one of his mystery stories, is an extraordinary study of the motive and strategy of a murder. Here is the line: “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.” Look at what this line contains. It has both of the principal characters in the story, the narrator and the tragically misnamed Fortunato. It contains the speaker’s motive: revenge. And it has anticipation through unanswered questions: what will the revenge be? What was the insult that triggered the desire for revenge? We learn the chilling answer to the first question; the second remains a mystery.

A mystery in part provides the intellectual pleasure of a puzzle, but much more importantly it provides an exploration of issues involving our own life and inevitable death. All this has to be contained in a single line. No wonder some writers agonize so painfully over that line.

Of course, it is agonizingly difficult for a writer to construct a first line that contains all of these elements. So most first lines settle on their most crucial task, which is getting us to read the next line. Consider the first line of Ken Follett’s The Key to Rebecca: “The last camel died at noon.” As a perfect title does, a good first line provides readers with a picture. We can see that camel dying. We have a sense of the setting. There’s a lot of information in those six words. Consider the single word “last.” It’s a crucial word, for camels provide transportation. If the last one has died, will a character or characters be stranded?

Many popular first lines overwhelm us with charm or bowl us over with the power of their imagery and language. Consider, for example, the well-known first line from James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss: "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon." Now, that’s a line.

My favorite Dashiell Hammett first line is this famous one from Red Harvest: “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.” The first-person narration Hammett uses, so typical of hardboiled detective fiction, eventually brings us right into the face of the violence. The use of first person prevents us from moving further back from the violence. Hammett’s slang, often borrowed from the underworld, is used by people like prisoners who want to create a special code so as to give themselves power when in fact they are subservient to the prison authorities and, for them and all the rest of us, to the society and world in which we live. Hammett’s detective, the unnamed Continental Op, can size people up quickly using almost a shorthand. First lines need to have a fast delivery.

Here, randomly are other great first lines:

From Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye: "The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers"

From James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice:“They threw me off the hay truck about noon.”

From Richard Stark’s The Mourner: “When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away.”

Please feel free to comment on your favorite first lines.

Gender, Genre, & Hybridity: A Conversation Between Kristina Marie Darling & Molly Gaudry

Kristina Marie Darling: I have always admired the way that your texts exist in spite of, beyond, and against traditional genre categories. Your work has the denseness and lyricism of poetry, with gorgeous and fractured narratives surfacing and resurfacing. In many ways, you question genre boundaries while appropriating the conventions of existing literary genres, a project that's wonderfully ironic and subversive. To what extent do you see genre categories as gendered? Are there larger power structures in the literary community, and in the academy, that dictate genre boundaries? Is writing against them and beyond them a feminist act?

Molly Gaudry: I’m wrapping up my coursework now as a PhD candidate at the University of Utah, where I’ve been spending a lot of time interrogating everything I thought I knew about genre. Is it multi-genre or mixed genre? Are these different from hybrid texts? Or non-genre texts? Do generic boundaries even exist, and, if so, where do they most rigidly appear and why? Is a crossover an invasion, a breach, a misstep, a test? Is it always transgressive? Or is it an attempt to erase, blur, break down walls? To what extent can the common reader learn to accept and appreciate that these boundaries and borderlines are, and have always been, invisible? I am struggling to answer these questions for myself.

I read something interesting recently in an anthropology essay about liminality. “Vermin” was used as a metaphor for boundary crossers. Rats and other critters that sneak into our homes, where they don’t belong, have breached the social contract. They are pests that must be taken care of, must be returned to their place. I’ve been thinking about this a lot with regard to so many invisible boundaries socially constructed around us. The metaphor works for just about any marginalized individual, group, or social structure that attempts to move. I’ve only just begun to wonder about the broad-spectrum potential of what more play in literature might mean, what might come of more widespread generic boundary crossing, because if we can learn to be more willing to allow these shapes and forms to shift and mutate then perhaps we’ll be less rigid in other areas of our lives, too.

I’d like to continue to talk about "feminist acts.” When did you first begin to recognize, in your own work, your feminist investments?

KMD: I definitely agree that writing against genre embodies many forms of resistance, since it is often those in power who delineate genre categories. And it's frightening how these generic categories shape cultural production and the ways that we inhabit language.

I first began to recognize my feminist investments as an M.A. candidate in continental philosophy at the University of Missouri. Many of my colleagues were working within the analytic tradition, and their work drew heavily from logic and the sciences. I was immediately struck by the strict genre conventions that bound their work, and as a result, their thinking, and what was possible within their writing. Research papers always came in preferably five sections, with a clearly worded claim, a tripartite argument, and extensive footnotes. Either that, or the papers didn't make it to conferences, didn't get published, and couldn't be used as writing samples. I admired the mental discipline of these philosophers, but it was difficult not to notice one thing: out of twenty or so students in my year, I was one of two women enrolled in the program. It became cognizant of the fact that one must have access to training, and forms of writing, in order to take part in this particular conversation. And women were frequently denied access to those academic forms of writing, and the training needed to inhabit them with confidence.

In part as a result of my work in philosophy at the University of Missouri, I became interested in rendering these academic forms of writing more inclusive. My work often takes the form of footnotes, appendices, and indices, which are often filled with decidedly non-academic content (including autobiographical writing, aestheticized language, etc.). It seemed problematic to me that these academic forms of writing privilege what have always been hailed as masculine values: logic, rationality, and a scientific mindset. In many ways, my work is a small effort to carve a space for the feminine within academic forms of writing.

MG: I’m really interested in your desire to carve space for the feminine within academic forms of writing. I like to think that my own writing is “feminine,” and I feel that it is (in a Marguerite Durasian kind of way, which is quite complicated and problematic in many ways). Still, I would like to have a better idea of what I actually mean when I say, or feel, that the “feminine” is part of my overall project. I love how you say that you’re claiming the spaces of footnotes, appendices, and indices, and feminizing these constructs. I wonder how you feel about the body of the work, traditionally privileged as the primary space of the text. How important is it to you to claim it for yourself? Or, conversely, to what extent would you want to reject it? What does it mean to you to rethink and reenvision these secondary spaces, like footnotes, which traditionally function to support the primary text, or even tertiary spaces, like appendices and indices?

KMD:  That’s a great question.  For me, the desire to privilege the body of the work over marginalia reflects many of the implicit hierarchies within language.  I’m very interested in what happens when the hierarchies are reversed, when the margins become the main text.  In this sense, I suppose I am claiming the main text for myself, but in other ways, I’m trying to redefine what we think of as the main text, to shift the reader’s attention to things that currently only occupy the periphery of their field of vision.

Some readers could certainly see this use of form as a feminist statement about women’s voices being pushed to the margins, but I’m more intrigued by what is possible within those marginal spaces.  When the individual subject is (socially and formally) marginalized, they have nothing left to lose, and there is a kind of freedom in that.  They are not burdened by the pressures of inhabiting the main text, as they do not have to create a narrative arc, a logical sequence of events, or speak in a way that we recognize as legible.  For me, this reversal of main text and marginal text affords the possibility of working outside of accepted ideas about logic, coherence, and narrative structures.  It is a subversion of not only hierarchies imposed upon language and various types of cultural texts, but it is a subversion of reason itself. I think this is why I’m so drawn to academic forms of writing.  They represent our definitions of logic and legibility, but also the structures of power and authority, and the social inequities, that our ideas about reason give rise to.  

With that in mind, I'd love to hear more about the relationship between your life as an academic and your wonderfully experimental work. In what ways do your scholarly interests intersect with your creative work? To what extent do you find your creative work resisting, or reacting against, aspects of academic culture? I'm thinking of the strange genres one must learn and make oneself fit into (like the job letter), as well as the connection (even though we all try to deny it) between these academic genres and structures of power and authority....

MG: I love what you said there about being intrigued by what is possible within marginal spaces and not being burdened by the pressures of inhabiting the main text. There really is a freedom in that, isn’t there?

I’m about to begin my last-ever semester of being a full-time student. I’ll be taking Lance Olsen’s Experimental Forms, and I’ll be sitting in on Melanie Rae Thon’s Narrative Theory and Practice. Both of these professors used the word “liminality” in their syllabus, and between now and the end of the semester I hope to have a much stronger grasp on what this means and how it might be applied to the literature I’m most drawn to as a reader, and how it applies to my own work, which I hesitate to call “experimental.” It’s interesting, actually: before the PhD, I would have used the word “experimental” quite freely, but I’m a lot more cautious with it now. This is a result of Michael Mejia’s fiction workshop, during which I began to wonder to what extent we might generally think of “innovation” as the goal or successful outcome of “experiment” (and perhaps it is the experiment, then, that is our most valuable practice). I’m not sure, though, that I’m ready to call my own work experimental (and if it’s not an experiment, then it’s not by this logic innovative), because although it may look illegible on the page, it still privileges characters’ psychological logic-making abilities, and, as a result, it is concerned with overall legibility and accessibility. In short, I write novels. I inhabit the main text. I work hard to create narrative arcs and characters with deep psychologies. All I am doing is reshaping the novel form, which is nothing new, if we consider the novel’s history to be monstrous and all-devouring, and so to turn to poetic forms that predate novels and recall even older traditions seems in some ways backward-looking as opposed to forward-looking. I don’t know. What do you think?

KMD:  I'm fascinated by your definition of the experiment as a text which strives for innovation.  So much of the time texts are lauded as experimental when they simply reproduce familiar structures of thinking and writing.  But I think that there's more to innovation than just the text.  For me, part of innovation is the relationship a text creates between the artist and his or her audience.  Many of the books that I consider the most innovative, or the most experimental, imagine the story, or the poem, or the novel as a collaborative endeavor, in which the reader participates actively in the process of creating meaning from the work.  This collaborative relationship between reader and writer, text and audience is something that the Lit Pub represents for me (and of course, your novels represent this as well).  I think that your work is especially fascinating in that it prompts us to re-imagine the boundaries between text and reader, and between self and other.  The text, or the magazine, or the press, represents not just a message or an overarching narrative, but a community.  This is innovative, in my opinion, because it privileges process over product, allowing one to exist in a constant state of becoming.  

In this respect, I think that we have a lot in common as publishers and cultural producers.  I see my small press, Noctuary Press, not as a group of texts, or a project with an overarching message, but rather, as a forum for a dialogue.  Noctuary Press is a starting point, a touchstone for conversations about what constitutes genre, the dangers of genre categories, and the gender politics inherent in our definitions of genre.  I love being surprised by reviewers' interpretations of Noctuary Press books, as well as creative responses and collaborations that our books have given rise to.  Pank Magazine published a wonderful creative engagement with Carol Guess's F IN, a review by J/J Hastain, which is a wonderfully innovative text in its own right.  And I'm always happy to hear about our texts being taught in creative writing classes.

With that in mind, I'd love to hear more about your work with the Lit Pub.  How did you envision your contribution to the publishing landscape initially?  How did this vision change shape after you had started publishing?  

MG: I’m interested in what you say about the relationship between writer, text, and audience. I’m thinking of Iser’s field of play, and where we as authors attempt to position readers, from page to page, or even from line to line, particularly with ergodic texts like yours, privileging rhetorical metalepsis, paratext, and even parody (or reclamation) of paratextual spaces. And texts that, in both of our cases, play with readers’ desires to fill in narrative gaps, what’s left untold and unsaid (and where, and why). So even as focalization may not be first and foremost on my creative agenda, it’s definitely there in the process of struggling with the creation of a text that problematizes both overreading and underreading, even as I (think I) privilege voice.

As for Noctuary Press and Lit Pub — actually, let me just jump in here first and further praise j/j hastain as an inspired writer and critic — I see Lit Pub, as you see Noctuary, as a starting point. Where you say Noctuary offers up a starting point for dialogue, I add that Lit Pub is a starting point for authors, a launching pad for careers on the rise, a place for mostly first books to emerge. Previous titles do influence what the catalog has room for in the future, which means I’m always looking for something new, something the catalog doesn’t yet offer. In this way, there is room for dialogues about the texts, but what those conversations may be surprise even me from book to book, author to author.

Actually, this brings up another point I’d like to talk about — you are a powerhouse in terms of your own academic and creative achievements alone, but add to these your literary citizenship, your press’s and authors’ contributions to the contemporary literary scene, and the countless awards, residencies, and fellowships you’ve earned, and I have to ask you a question I’ve often been asked: How do you do it all? And a followup I’m rarely asked: How do you balance your public and personal lives?

KMD:  Thank you for your kind words about my work and Noctuary…  It definitely means a lot coming from a writer as accomplished as you!  I think your questions are great, too, and professionalization is something that definitely doesn’t get talked about enough in graduate school.  

I do get asked from time to time how I’m able to go to residencies, publish books, etc., especially at a relatively young age.  My answer tends to be very anti-climatic and unpopular. Most graduate students enter an MFA or a PhD program and feel an intense pressure to professionalize once they start the program.  But I started sending out work when I was in eighteen years old, and started applying for residencies and fellowships when I was an undergraduate. In retrospect, this was a good thing to do, because once I entered a graduate program, I didn’t have to learn the forms of academic and professional writing (like artist statements, cover letters, and project proposals). I already had application materials ready to go.  Now applying for residencies, fellowships, and other opportunities seems manageable, since it’s a fairly familiar process.  The practice I had early in my career really helped.  

But this doesn’t mean that I’m a good planner, or that I look ahead.  I took a poetry workshop when I was an undergraduate at Washington University and it just ran away with me.  I loved everything about it and couldn’t wait to be part of the poetry community.  I wanted to start reviewing books, going to residencies, and meeting other poets right away. I’m still very engaged in the literary community, and it’s out of sheer love for what I do every day.  And how many doctors and stock brokers can say that?     

In terms of balancing personal and professional lives, I don’t think the two can really be separated.  Many professional opportunities have led to great friendships.  For example, I met Carol Guess when I was promoting my book, Melancholia, and now consider her a friend and terrific mentor.  I met my friend and collaborator, Max Avi Kaplan, at a residency at Vermont Studio Center (something that I saw as a purely professional opportunity at the time).  I really believe that if you love what you do, you will love the people you encounter, so it’s never really been a challenge to balance personal and professional lives.  I do wish, though, that I had a few more hours in every day.

While we’re on the subject of literature and community…  I’ve always seen you as someone who is an exemplary literary citizen, contributing exciting work while giving back to others and supporting projects you believe in in multiple ways (publishing, promoting, collaborating).  How did literary citizenship begin for you?  How did you see yourself in relation to a larger community when you began writing, and how did that relationship you envisioned change over time?  

MG: That’s a really nice way to look at the intersection between the professional and personal. As for my own literary citizenship, it really came into focus for me in 2008, when I read Blake Butler’s blog post, “Where did Lucy purchase her new vagina?” Overlooking the problematic title, I offer that the post itself is a call to action, a list of to-dos anyone can do. I’m not sure if I was already editing online journals before that post, but I know I felt empowered when I read it, and I always trace my own service back to Blake’s. He served as a model for me, back in 2008, and inspired my own writing and my ideas of why I should be engaged with others’ writing.

And, to answer your question: when I first began writing (as a creative writing major at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, the nation’s only public K-12 school of the arts), I wasn’t even thinking about publication, for instance. Even as I made my way into an undergraduate English major, I was pretty intensely focused on the work (arrogantly so, at that), and I’m not sure I even knew a larger “writing community” existed. I probably had some conception of the “publishing industry” existing solely of Cheever types, and that, if lucky, maybe a young writer would get a story in The New Yorker followed by a Random House book deal. It really wasn’t until after my early interactions with Blake and others in the online community that my perception of what writers, and writing, and publishing could be — truly, an interconnected network of readers and writers of all ages everywhere exemplifying the best attributes of the spirit of from-the-ground-up, community-focused, Internet-enabled grassroots culture-shifting movements.

Ready To Serve: Black Eyed Peas & Supportive Colleagues As Emotional Mise En Place [by Lindsay Daigle]

(Ed note: This is the third post in our Ready to Serve series. You can find previous posts here. sdh)

Eleven Madison Park

In 2009, my Saturdays began like this— I’m bobbypinning my hair into a bun, tying my tie around my neck, positioning my Relais & Chateaux pin on my vest. My cuff links I borrowed from the woman next to me who is tucking a green collared shirt into her suit pants. In this locker room, there are other women around me doing the same. Some are buttoning chef coats and slipping their feet into Crocs. Others are sharing hairspray and shoe polish, pocketing wine keys, unwrapping freshly dry-cleaned suit jackets. It is 3:30pm. Most of us woke up only an hour ago.

Anyone who has worked in the hospitality industry knows the special energy reserve tapping that is preparing for a dinner shift. And anyone who has worked in a 4-star restaurant in New York City knows just how intricate this preparation is. The perfect pleats in one’s tailored pants represent sharp and accessible menu/wine/spirit/area history/etc. knowledge. The shiny finger-print-free Alessi crumber, the pocket-sized torchon, purse hooks, and several black Pilot G-2 .07 pens… stand for all the bits of the emotional, mental, and physical groundwork necessary for a successful night in the dining room. In culinary kitchen terms, we call this preparation mise en place – “putting everything in its right place.”

In the women’s locker room at Eleven Madison Park, we put our gear and uniforms in their right places. But the emotional groundwork was a bit more complicated to lay (as it inevitably is anywhere). 

This level of fine dining comes with its own unique set of extremely high standards. Management, of course, expects a great deal from their dining room staff – dedication, knowledge, positivity, character. And guests do too. At EMP, we took pride in creating truly comfortable and comforting experiences for our guests. We wanted them to feel as though they were coming home for dinner. We always strived to – as the large poster in the EMP kitchen says – “MAKE IT NICE,” no matter what it took. (This is one reason for pristine uniforms and precise service points— If everything has a particular place, the guest doesn’t need to worry that anything might be out of place.)

 And although it was our guests and our managers who motivated the service staff’s level of excellence, everyone who worked at EMP was there because they first held themselves accountable for greatness, because they were solid and honorable. It was important to us to always open-hand serve, to be able to explain the origin of a Pimm’s Cup, to be able to say “yes” to any request, to never skip a beat. We wanted to make it nice. All told, that’s a lot of pressure, especially when you’re trying not to disappoint yourself.

So how does one negotiate this emotional mise en place before a shift? How many inches from the edge of the table should the base of the bread plate rest? (i.e. “table”/”bread plate” = “heart”/”soul”?)

In 2009, for us, it was the Black Eyed Peas.

I got a feeling… One of us starts singing. …that tonight’s gonna be a good night. The rest of us chime in with the ooo-hoo’s. We’re all smiling because we mean it. We’re in this together. We’re there because we believe in what we’re doing, and because we happen to be surrounded by a bunch of people who have become our best friends. Our “anthem” is a sort of plea, an attempt at convincing ourselves that tonight truly will be great – even though this is really exhausting work we’re doing. It doesn’t take a lot of convincing though when we realize our emotional mise en place has already been prepared for us simply through the nature of the business. EMP attracts remarkable staff who put each other first before anything, who support each other like collar stays.

In his bestseller, Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, Danny Meyer (founder of EMP) says, “Well before our staff members can extend any kind of meaningful hospitality to our guests, they need to first understand the primary importance of being on each other’s side. Mutual respect and trust are the most powerful tools for building an energetic, motivated, winning team in any field.” I’m not sure Danny had it in mind that his staff would translate “mutual respect and trust” into an all-out a cappella Black Eyed Peas locker room dance party. I think he’d be pleased though, because everything is, in fact, in its right place.

Lindsay Daigle is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, where she also teaches undergraduate writing and literature. She holds an MFA from The New School. She’s interested in the poetics of place, space, and melancholy; the ekphrastic process; as well as the intersections between creative writing and composition pedagogies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barn Owl Review, Quarterly West, The Laurel Review, and elsewhere. 

Review of Julie Babcock's Autoplay [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Julie Babcock's stunning first collection of poems, Autoplay, offers spare, carefully crafted lyrics that are as familiar as they are uncanny.  By invoking the seemingly tame imagery of Midwestern cities, the poems in this striking collection lull the reader into a sense of complacency, only to skillfully undermine this expectation that they will encounter a familiar narrative.  As the book unfolds, Babcock excavates violence, discontent, and enchantment from beneath an unremarkable exterior—marked by "the green hills of the gold course," "baby-sitters," and "breath against the mirror"—restoring a sense of both danger and wonder to everyday life.  In doing so, Babock offers the reader a perfect matching of form and content, particularly as her stylistic dexterity illuminates and complicates the content of the work itself.

With that in mind, Babcock's use of received literary forms to deliver unexpected content is particularly impressive.  She draws a parallel between inherited modes of writing (of which couplets, tercets, and quatrains are only a few examples) and the Midwestern cultural landscape, suggesting that both have been made to seem inhospitable to creative endeavors, but can give rise to stunning imaginative work if we allow them to.  She writes in "Ohio Apologia,"

A twin can never divide her wealth.

I planned to go where I'd never melt
into a mold of virgin or slut. 
I wanted to love you to love myself. 

I crossed the rivers with my bag of stealth
my story line revised and trussed,
but a twin can never divide her wealth.

Here Babcock simultaneously inhabits a traditional literary form and received ideas about femininity, suggesting that one can work within these bits of inherited culture to expand what is possible within them.  In much the same way that the speaker herself is "twinned," her story line is "revised and trussed," suggesting the inherent instability of both literary traditions and narratives of identity.  Autoplay is filled with beautifully crafted poems like this one, which offer a carefully constructed relationship between style and content. 

Along these lines, I found Babcock's use of domestic imagery compelling and provocative, especially as she suggest the violence inherent in being confined to a given place.  She creates a wonderful tension between the confines of formal poetry and the volatility of the images contained within these formally pristine edifices, suggesting the inevitable discontent with one's origins.  Consider "Autoplay,"

I am the baby-sitter.  She
is snuggled so close
we might be one.
We hear a noise
and flee the house.
"We're safe," I say, as we jump
on the outdoor trampoline.
Double somersaults
of fear... 

For Babcock, a particular place entails not just mere surroundings, but specific gender roles, modes of communication, and narratives of identity.  In much the same way that the speakers' voices are contained within neatly presented tercets, couplets, and pantoums, the violence inherent in narratives of place is also subsumed within these orderly forms.  What's fascinating about this tension between style and content is the way that Babcock subtly suggests that conflict, and contradiction, can reside beneath a seemingly un-rippled surface.  Like many of the poems in Autoplay, this piece is as beautifully crafted as it is self-aware.  This is a stunning debut, and Babcock is a poet to watch. 

Poetic Delirium [by Alan Ziegler]

    Good writings happen to those who wait. Children’s author Enid Blyton told Peter McKellar—who was doing research on the imagination—that she has “merely to open the sluice gates.” With her portable typewriter on her knee, she waits with a blank mind: “The story is enacted in my mind’s eye almost as if I had a private cinema screen there . . . I am in the happy position of being able to write a story and read it for the first time . . . Sometimes a character makes a joke . . . and I think, ‘Well, I couldn’t have thought of that myself in a hundred years!’ And then I think, ‘Well, who did think of it then?’”

    The answer, of course, is: she did.

    Sometimes you don’t even need to wait at your keyboard. Rather than putting nose to the grindstone, you merely need the fortitude to put nose to the pillow: Mayakovsky tried for two days to come up with an image “to describe the tenderness a lonely man feels for his only love.” He went to bed on the third night with a headache. During the night he “leapt out of bed half-awake” with the image of how much a crippled soldier “cherishes his one leg.” In the dim light of a match, he wrote on a cigarette packet: “his one leg.” When morning came, Mayakovsky puzzled for two hours over the phrase, wondering “how it had got there.”

    The answer, again, is: he put it there.

    Unconscious material can rise to the top even when you are not waiting or sleeping, like an evasive song lyric or the dog’s name in the Thin Man movies (I’ll spare you: It was Asta). Mental knots often loosen spontaneously when you step away from the task. I was grappling with the title of a story, and the best I could come up with was “God’s Work,” which was close but no cigar—it didn’t illuminate the entryway into the story. I closed the file on my computer, and, while checking the five-day weather forecast for a place I was to visit in six days, it came to me: “God’s Will.” Cigar.

    Writers spend countless hours looking for the precise word, the transcendent image, the felicitous turn of narrative. And doesn’t it feel good when these things just come to us? The rub is that the chance of a spontaneous solution (while asleep or awake) can be in direct proportion to the amount of conscious work we have been doing. In getting your writing to soar, there is no such thing as a free launch.

    The surrealists’ notion that art and literature stem directly from the unconscious is quite appealing: just remove the lid of conscious effort and let your “automatic” pilot take over. For me, Vicente Huidobro was closer to the mark when he wrote about reason’s role in organizing poetic delirium: “If reason and imagination do not work in unison, one or both will suffocate.”

    Baudelaire writes about “genius” as being childhood recaptured with “the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” And Max Jacob states it eloquently: “Lyricism belongs to the unconscious, but an unconscious under supervision.”

    With the unconscious doing so much of the work, the least we can do is supervise.

    The admixture of hard work (laboring over one’s writing) and dream work (reveling in poetic delirium) may sound contradictory, as does much advice you hear about writing. It serves well to embrace these contradictions in the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” (A note of caution: Fitzgerald wrote this in an essay titled “The Crack-Up.”)

adapted from The Writing Workshop Note Book

Dismantling Categories of Thought: A Conversation Between Kristina Marie Darling & Sarah Vap

KMD:  I've truly enjoyed reading all three of your books, and was intrigued by the dream-like quality of the poems in Arco Iris.  They seem at once ethereal and carefully grounded in concrete imagery, rendering everyday things (like coffee, used electronics, and the sky above) suddenly and wonderfully strange.  Along these lines, many of the poems take place in an unnamed tropical location, which for the reader, is both anywhere and nowhere, a tangible place place and a psychological one. With that in mind, I'd love to hear your thoughts about the relationship between travel, the literary arts, and the human psyche.  What does travel make possible within your writing practice?  And within conscious experience? 

SV: That's interesting. I don't think of Arco Iris as dreamlike or unspecific. It's actually named a few times as South America-- many regions in South America-- a continent my partner and I traveled for a few months about nine years ago. The book is, in my experience of it and my intentions for it, a kind of anti travel-poetry. Or a rejection of the trope of travel (especially of the white traveler going to a brown place to have a "writing experience" or to buy themselves an authentic transformational experience or etc.). It is a book in which I can't write or think myself out of a scenario in which my movement in the world (as a white American, especially) is not complicit with neoliberal violence and/or globalism and its many layers and types and shades of (economic, racial, political, physical...) violences. I wonder if the ethereal experience you had of it was what I felt to be the spellcasting of capitalism--you try to say something against capitalism, it is immediately appropriated as a product of capitalism (and neutralized?), ad infinitum. 

But along those lines, after having read your Music for another life and Vow-- I'd love to ask--what do the ethereal, the dreamlike, the bride, and the book mean for you in those collections? And perhaps related, do you understand or do you think through your work on a book-by-book level, or a poem-by-poem level, or as a group of books together, or...? 

KMD:  That's a great question.  I've always thought of reading as a kind of travel, in which one is carried from consciousness as we know it into a kind of dream state.  For me, the physical object of the book facilitates this transformation, this dreaming as much as the work itself. 

As much as I hate to admit it, it all begins (for me at least) with the book's cover, as well as its size, texture, the way it feels in the hand.  It is for this reason that I love to be very involved in the design of my books.  When Max Avi Kaplan and I co-wrote Music for another life, we actually typeset the entire book, designed the cover, and selected the cover image from within the collaboration, presenting it to the publisher as a finished, fully-realized product.  

My approach to the book as a physical object emerges, in a lot of ways, from my approach to poetry manuscripts.  For me, each manuscript is really one long poem, an entire world unto itself.  With both Vow and Music for another life, the book as object was merely an extension of the project, the world I had envisioned within the text itself.  I think that we tend to overlook the many ways that poetry is physical, that writing and even publishing are embodied acts.  

With that in mind, I'd love to hear more about your process, since your books always read as fully realized, cohesive worlds, the kind I strive for (and at times fall short of creating) in my own work.  I'm intrigued by the relationship between the individual poem and the larger manuscript.  How do you negotiate the poem and the project, the larger vision?  Is it possible to have one without the other?  Lastly, how does a given project or manuscript begin for you?  

SV: When I was first writing things for the world to see (by which I mean: in my MFA program), I thought on a poem by poem, or even line by line, or word by word level. At this point I think I might feel how you do-- that my books are equivalents of long poems, or, more to the point, are a single word-centered project versus a "collection of poems." I think the word "poetry" is the best thing to call what I am writing these days maybe only because it's not anything else. (Not a story, not an essay, not an article, not straight scholarship, not journalism, not....). I admire that poetry can hold so much, is being asked to hold so much, and that it seems to be easy for it. I am extremely interested in what is often called hybrid or conceptual within the outstandingly elastic abilities of poetry-- these efforts that pose a challenge to the other categories of writing (scholarship, journalism, coding, etc.), asking them to also expand their abilities and considerations and concerns and ways. To democratize, as I believe you said in another interview. 

I'd love to hear you speak more about the democratization of writing (scholarly writing about writing), if you're so inclined. I'm also like to know how the instinct to democratize enters your work/career/etc. (Mirzoeff's phrase: "democratizing democracy" is something I've thought a lot about.)

KMD:  I love this question.  Most of my poems are a (very small) effort to make academic forms of writing more inclusive.  Scholarship in the most traditional sense is frequently predicated on acts of exclusion, since most of us can name many things that don't fit within an academic essay:  personal experience, aestheticized language, an interrogation of received forms of discourse, experimentation, and the list goes on.  In my opinion, many of these things that are excluded from academic writing appear much more often in contemporary women's writing.  It is most commonly women's writing that is othered, excluded as non-academic, even irrational.  I'm deeply invested in creating a way of using academic forms that is not hostile to women, but rather, allows lived experience, poetic language, and experimentation to compliment and complicate what we think of as rational discourse.  In my new book, Fortress, especially, I drew from academic texts like Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, and presented much of the work in footnotes, but my own experience proved central to the discussions of empathy in the book.  I think that academic writing is often very personal, whether we like to admit it or not.  For me, it's more productive to acknowledge and deal with the ways that different categories of writing, different types of language blur together, rather than trying to maintain a false semblance of clear boundaries.   

This interest in democratizing academic writing has shaped most of my career choices, as you suggest in your very perceptive question.  I'm active in the small press as a volunteer editor, and have a small press, Noctuary Press.  With Noctuary, I try to carve a space for texts that don't fit within the traditional modes of dissemenation, distribution, or even established submission categories.  I hope that by publishing uncategorizable texts, I'm playing a small part in expanding what is possible within our thinking about what a text, publisher, or book object can be.  

I think that my interest in democratizing academic writing is one of the many reasons I'm so drawn to The End of the Sentimental Journey.  It's also beautifully crafted, witty, lively, and engaging.  I teach the book in my poetry workshop and my students find it wonderfully refreshing.  They often express their surprise that critical writing can be as much fun as poetry, as beautifully written, and as innovative in style.  To what extent did you see this creative approach to literary scholarship as a feminist act?  How does gender shape the ways that we inhabit academic forms of writing? Is academic writing (and the interrogation of academic forms) linked to larger issues of social justice for you as writer? 

SV: I think dismantling anything at all, these days, is my first instinct toward social justice or feminism. I'm also interested in the building--but, cyclical nature of my brain etc.--I've been in dismantle mode for a long time and therefore the dismantling of categories of thought, of writing, of understanding, of power--that is all I seem to want to do. Academic writing is ripe, ripe for implosion and expansion. There is no reason why it shouldn't do more than it does, and do it in more kinds of ways, and there is every reason why it should. Academia, if it is to remain relevant, simply put: needs greater inclusion of women, people of color, queer people, people from different socioeconomic experiences, and people from more parts of the world. This is a longish way of saying that to stay relevant academia needs also to be/think less white, less rich, less male, less heteronormative. Obviously, obviously: what is "academic," what is considered worthy of our study, should be vast and dangerous and offensive, and the language we use to speak about it should not be tamed, not be simply rule-following, and not be simply traditional. If academia can't accommodate this kind of inquiry then it's no longer relevant--just wealthy and self-congratulatory. (Thus, yes, End of the Sentimental Journey-- and everything else I'm reading and working on these days.) This is part of what is interesting to me about the recent wave of creative writing PhD programs-- I have a lot of faith in creative writers' potentials to contaminate academia.

That said, I think journalism and investigative reporting and history, or what we've been calling journalism and investigative reporting and history for a while, are also areas that feel like ours for the taking. Call it documentary, call it political, call it hybrid, call it researched, call it academic-- I've been reading almost exclusively poetry that is engaged with social justice issues of there here and now, and social justice issues as they have resonated historically. And by social justice issues I mean race. I mean gender. I mean capitalism. I mean war machines. I mean oceans dying. I am reading everything I can find in this vein (and there is a lot). Personally, I think these are exciting dismantlings and exciting times for writing (but really bad times for most other things). I can't wait to get old and see all the crazy-good shit this next generation is going to do, but also I don't want to rush it because probably the world is going to end in environmental disaster.

Speaking of which: what crazy-good shit are you working on right now?

KMD:   Speaking of feminism, expansion, and social justice...  I'm working on a feminist response to/erasure of/reframing of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.  The book is a collaboration with visual artist, photographer, and costumer Max Avi Kaplan.  The fragmented, elliptical poems in the manuscript recast the narrative from Lo's perspective.  As we worked on the book, Max and I also became very interested in themes of disembodiment within Lolita.  More often than not, the reader is given only tiny fragments of Lolita, never the full person.  We are presented with "a honey colored limb," "knobby knees," a pair of sunglasses.  Max's magnificent photographs present their female subject in small fragments, frequently showing her hands trying to escape from rooms, unlocking doors, or dialing a rotary phone.  We wanted to call attention to the way Lolita is frequently disembodied, fragmented within the book, but also to empower Lolita, giving voice to a character who is frequently spoken for (in much the same way as Petrarch's Laura).  The book, In love with the ghost, is forthcoming from Negative Capability Press in 2015.  I hope you'll check it out.  

And I'd love to hear about your current projects as well.  What can readers look forward to?

SV: I'm working on a few things-- the final revisions of Viability, coming out in 2015 with Penguin; and I've been working on something I imagine will take me years to finish that takes as its center, well, I guess I'm not sure how to talk about it yet-- it's in that long, silently-loud part of becoming something. I'm neck-deep in a few things, I guess. And reading and reading and reading. Researching fetus images in literature and visual art-- so if you know of any....