The Best American Poetry

"Signs of the Times" by David Lehman [reviewed by Merle Rubin}

A favorable review will warm an author's heart even if he becomes aware of it some twenty-eight years -- to the day -- after it was published.

De Man's Deconstruction [in the Christian Science Monitor, July 9, 1991]

Signs of the Times by David Lehman

Reviewed by Merle Rubin. Merle Rubin regularly reviews literature and contemporary fiction for the Monitor.

LONG before the scandalous revelations about Paul de Man's wartime writings for the pro-Nazi press came to light, deconstruction - the school of literary criticism most closely identified with him - was a hotly controversial topic inside and outside academe.

Proliferating in the hothouse climate of graduate-school literature departments in the 1970s, deconstruction had spread far beyond academia by the end of the 1980s. It has become the word of moment - in David Lehman's phrase, a sign of the times - applied to everything from new fads in clothing and architecture to the questionable tactics of Wall Street junk-bond dealers. David Lehman, a poet, mystery writer, journalist, and graduate school veteran who covered the de Man story for Newsweek, offers "debunking" as a rough-and-ready synonym for deconstruction.

In "Signs of the Times," his spirited, immensely readable guide to "Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man," Lehman also provides a far more complete summary of deconstruction's salient points: First, there's the assumption (derived from linguistic studies earlier this century) of an unbridgeable gap between signs (words) and the things they are supposed to signify. This leads to the supposition that language has a life of its own: It determines what we think and how we see, and not the other way around. We are its prisoners, unable to do without it or get around it. Therefore, when we read a text - be it a sonnet by Shakespeare or an ad for margarine, the United States Constitution or a Gothic romance - we are justified only in watching what the words are getting up to: Any effort to evaluate literary merit or discover the author's intended meaning is a pointless exercise.

For all the panache he displays in unmasking the pretensions of deconstructionists, Lehman is not entirely hostile to deconstruction. Nor is he the kind of writer who glibly dismisses what he fails to understand. His discussion of deconstruction in particular - and of literary criticism in general - is lively and well-informed. He even makes a good case for the value of "soft core" deconstruction as distinct from the "hard core" variety: The former is free-spirited, playful, creative, open-ended; the latter is a pseudo-religious cult that thinks it has all the answers and brooks no rival schools.

If the first half of Lehman's book is a shrewd, enlightening, witty, often entertaining look at the academic politics of literary criticism, the second half has the dramatic impact of a suspense novel. The deconstructionists' hubristic dismissal of biography and history met its nemesis in the form of incontrovertible biographical and historical facts. De Man, a Yale professor regarded by his colleagues and students as the most honest, intellectually rigorous, and disinterested of scholars, was discovered to have concealed the facts about his past. The silence he maintained to his death in 1983 was as disturbing as the transgressions themselves.

Ironically, it was a young Belgian graduate student - an admirer of de Man's work looking for more of the master's writings - who came across de Man's youthful contributions to Belgian collaborationist newspapers. The story came out in 1987, four years after de Man's death. De Man's colleague, Derrida, to his credit, advised full disclosure and publication of these wartime writings. But the elaborate contortions into which he and other die-hard deconstructionists twisted themselves to make excuses for de Man's pro-Nazi writings and his concealment of his past constitute what really amounts to a third scandal.

For a two-year period ending in November 1942, the young (20- and 21-year-old) Belgian-born deconstructionist-to-be contributed some 180 articles on literary and cultural topics, mostly to the French-language collaborationist newspaper Le Soir (popularly dubbed "Le Soir Vol," that is, "the stolen evening"), after the occupying Nazis took it over six months before de Man signed on to write for them) and for a pro-Nazi Flemish-language paper. As Lehman points out, these articles were written at a time when the outcome of the war was in doubt, when the Nazis were out to win the "hearts and minds" of conquered Europeans, and when European Jews were being fired from their jobs, deprived of their property, and sent off to concentration camps. Set in the context of history, de Man's pompous pronouncements on the "centrality" of Hitlerian thought in European culture and the "marginality" and second-rate nature of Jewish contributions are hardly difficult to interpret.

Some of de Man's defenders, however, as Lehman shows, came up with some ingenious - and utterly implausible - defenses: De Man may have meant his articles to be read ironically, they claimed. Since de Man never discussed his wartime activities (beyond allowing people to mistakenly assume he had been involved in the Resistance), his former colleagues were left to ponder whether young de Man had written these pro-Nazi pieces out of genuine conviction or mere opportunism. Colleagues like Geoffrey Hartman (a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany) had little doubt that de Man's wartime writings were morally wrong. But Hartman and others saw in de Man's later deconstructionist writings a kind of "atonement: a way of dissolving his former smug certainties in a thoroughgoing outlook of skepticism."

More strident - and bizarre - defenses took the line that "journalists" and others now condemning de Man for his past were themselves in the position of Nazis condemning Jews! But, in the final analysis, it is very hard not to agree with Lehman's conclusion: "[F]or a thinker ... whose hard-core brand of deconstruction stressed the 'indeterminacy' of texts - surely there was some relation between the texts he was intent on forgetting [his collaborationist articles] and the texts in which he campaigned to forget the 'author,' his 'ideas,' and his conscious 'meaning.' Deconstruction had long given people pause because it makes no provision for moral action and dismisses the historical dimension in literature. These omissions seemed all the more disquieting, and perhaps the more intelligible, in the light of the de Man disclosures." Beneath the dispassionate, disinterested tone that magisterially commends tradition on the one hand, post-modernity on the other, one senses the same motivating force: opportunism.
>>>

https://www.csmonitor.com/1991/0709/09132.html

Meet the Press: Press 53 & Patricia Colleen Murphy’s Bully Love

Dante Di Stefano: How did Press 53 come into being?

Kevin Morgan Watson: Up until 9/11, I was a writer of short fiction and some poetry, and was having some success publishing my work. After 9/11, the stress of being a full-time student—finally earning my BA in English—and being a full-time employee in the airline industry, with a wife and three small children at home, writing became impossible. To find peace, I began editing for other writers and teaching workshops. I found that I enjoyed this process and that I was pretty good at it, so after I lost my job in March 2004, I decided to start a small publishing company to have something creative to do until I found a real job. I opened Press 53 in October 2005 and by March 2006 it was clear that publishing was my real job.

DD: What changes in poetry publishing have been most notable for you since the press began in 2005?

KMW: I talked with my poetry series editor, Tom Lombardo, about this recently. Around the turn of the century (2000), there were only ten low-residency MFA programs, and today there are close to fifty, so there are a lot more poets with advanced degrees looking for work and looking to be published. Also, online journals were few and not taken seriously by many writers. The poetry community was vast but places to publish were limited. Today, almost every literary journal and magazine has an online presence. Places to submit poetry have grown wildly, and most magazines now accept simultaneous submissions. At our quarterly online journal, Prime Number Magazine, our submission periods run quarterly and we’ll easily receive more than 400 submissions for poetry. If our guest editors aren’t quick to read and respond, they can miss out on fifty to seventy poems that were accepted by other magazines or journals. As for publishing poetry books, we can’t publish all the fine collections that come our way, and where we used to publish five or six poetry collections a year, we are now publishing ten to twelve. That could be attributed to our growth at Press 53, but it is also an indication of how many people are writing and reading poetry.

 DD: What do Press 53 poetry collections have in common?

 KMW: We have eclectic tastes but one common thread is that the poetry we publish is accessible. We stay away from abstract, experimental poetry and anything overtly religious or political. An occasional poem in the collection crossing these lines is fine, but stay too long and you won’t make the cut.

DD: There’s an interesting line in your bio: “Kevin has earned awards for his own writing in both short fiction and poetry, but he no longer writes for publication.” How has the decision not to write for publication affected your writing life and your work as a publisher?

KMW: My decision to no longer write for publication came by default. I tend to run on one track all the time, so when I entered the publishing world, it became my focus. I still make notes or toy around with an idea for a story or poem, but it’s only for my own enjoyment. I rarely write anything down. I used to constantly think about writing, fleshing out story or poem ideas, piecing together the puzzle, but after almost fifteen years of editing and publishing, it’s hard to believe I was ever that person. I was a writer for most of my life, but the “writer me” is either gone or waiting for another lifestyle shift. I’m not sure which, but I do think the writer in me will only return if I make the decision to step away from the publishing business.

DD: What is something that most poets might not know, but should, about the work of small press editors?

KMW: In the small press world there are no deadlines, only undeadlines. For every project you complete another one has taken its place. They just keep coming. You’d better love editing, because that’s all your going to be doing; that and writing press releases, managing a website, overseeing layout and design work (if you are not doing it yourself), handling sales in-house and at conferences, managing inventory, doing the bookkeeping, and wishing you could read more for pleasure.

DD: Could you introduce Patricia Colleen Murphy and Bully Love?

KMW: Patricia won the 2019 Press 53 Award for Poetry, our annual poetry manuscript competition that is judged by our poetry series editor Tom Lombardo (Tom Lombardo Poetry Selections). Tom reads every manuscript that comes in, which was 414 for the 2019 competition, and he is the only judge. Patricia teaches at Arizona State University and is the founding editor of Superstition Review, and she has been a joy to work with. But since Tom selected Bully Love, I would like for Tom to make that introduction.

Tom Lombardo: There were two things that won the Press 53 Award in Poetry this year for Patricia Colleen Murphy: her series of hiking poems and her series of elegies. All of her other poems were very good, and they carried her submission into the final eight, then the final three. The hiking poems and the elegies were my “gut feeling” poems that surpassed all other submissions. My decision came, as it usually does, at the ninth reading of the finalists. The collection that continues to unfold its arms to me generally surpasses all the finalists. Murphy’s poems in Bully Love are grounded in the senses, and that appeals to me as an editor. Metaphor, synesthesia, metonymy, and irony come forth via sensory experiences. Level of energy of the writing and the figuration remains high throughout. I was lifted from the literal on each page. Patricia’s poems are landscape-driven—from southwestern Ohio to the southwest U.S. Her poems expose their bleak fertility and their bleak desolation and turn them into metaphors for her life.

DD: Trish, the title of your new collection comes from the last line of your poem, “Day Trip, Cave Creek Guided Tours.” The poem is about a guided tour through the Sonoran Desert with a group including “five women breaking / the monotony of mid-careers” and “three portly men in from Denver.” The poem ends with the following lines:

        Our wonderfully conditioned
        and well-mannered horses nod
        across state trust land, their noses
        quietly suffering our pats of bully love.

This poem ably deploys some of the key tropes that run through the collection: the desert, travel, love, and a kind of suffocating middle-class conformity to be railed against. Could you talk about some of these through lines? 

Patricia Colleen Murphy: I spent 22 years in Ohio. I moved to Arizona when I was 22 years old to get my MFA in poetry at Arizona State. I moved also to escape many things: family dysfunction, snow, loneliness, and what I perceived as failure. 

Arizona didn’t welcome me at first. I struggled with not only the landscape but also with the culture. It was harsh. It also seemed for sale. So much of the landscape and the history was offered up for the amusement of people who had no intention of engaging with it in any real way. 

In this poem the horses represent that lack of connection; that lack of humanity. We pat the horses but we do nothing to understand them, to care for them, to sustain them or promote them. That image of the nose pat represents the offering of self-serving or insincere affection based on a selfish desire for personal excitement. 

That was something I suffered as a child from my mother, who was capable of showing me love only when it served a need of her own. 

I should say I have always adored horses. They recur many times in these poems as a reverent image. But for me there is something striking about selling this cowboy experience to people whose only goal is to be consumers of a culture they never intend to understand. 

DD: Your incredible first poetry book, Hemming Flames, centers around the trauma caused by severe family disfunction (mental illness, abuse, attempted suicide). Bully Love still expertly contemplates the lingering affects of those traumas, but the emphasis in this collection shifts to an exploration of self against the backdrop of Arizona and the American West. You frequently return to the death of your parents, and your partner John’s parents throughout the book. John’s presence is much more significant in Bully Love than it was in Hemming Flames. Hemming Flames was also much more allusive, in terms of its direct evocation of figures like John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and so on. These are some of the differences I noticed between the two collections. Could you elaborate on these differences and talk about the differences between having a first and a second book published?

PCM: Bully Love was written first, but Hemming Flames found a publisher first. So in Bully Love you’re reading earlier poems. It probably took my parents dying for me to feel free to explore the more significant depths of the suicide attempts, the alcoholism, the abuse you read about in Hemming Flames. The poems in Bully Love are younger, more tender, more open. 

In terms of the publishing experiences, there were significant differences and similarities. The editors of Hemming Flames did not want me to change a word, but the series editor Tom Lombardo for Bully Love had a strong hand and guided me through some revisions I could not have made without his insight. He was incredibly generous throughout the process. He pushed me to cut broken parts that I was hanging onto for sentimental reasons. He pushed me to develop themes I felt were clear but were not. I am grateful for his energy and insight. 

As far as similarities go, both releases were very quick. Under six months. I have seen many colleagues wait two years so while I’m grateful for the speed, I also scrambled in some ways to get the book ready and to set up readings and reviews and interviews. Most outlets want six months in advance so by the time the proofs were ready I was already two months out. 

DD: When I was reading Bully Love, I kept on thinking of two quotes that align with, and move in counterpoint to, your collection. The first one is from a Cid Corman poem: “It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father?” (You could substitute “mother” or “family” for “father.”) The second quote is from an old Paris Review interview with Stanley Kunitz: “All poems are love poems.” (I would like to believe this quote is true, but I’m not sure.) I was wondering if you would riff on these two quotes a bit?

PCM: Ah yes, the Kunitz quote is a favorite, but of course we can substitute “love” for other words like death or birth or family. I do feel that when a poet devotes the energy to a subject even that devotion is an act of love. It’s a generous act: to point the mind’s eye onto a subject long enough to make art from it. I talk to my students sometimes about “dropping the M-bomb,” meaning that as soon as you put a mother in a poem you have added not only your own layer of experience, but you are tapping into the reader’s most intimate emotions. There are some poems in this collection that draw on that energy. 

DD: Your dogs make several appearances throughout the book. They offer one of several different types of love examined throughout the collection. How has being a dog owner influenced your poetry? What is your favorite dog poem?

PCM: I was never a dog person, and my first dog came when I was 32 years old. That was Buckeye, who was a gift from John’s mom Betty. Betty died in September of 2005 and then in January 2006 Buckeye drowned in our pool after I left the house for less than an hour. I came home and found him and fished him out. It felt like such a symbol of being completely alone.  

We mourned Buckeye in ways we could not mourn Betty, though we felt her lack in our lives more profoundly than any other lack. She lived with us for two years when she was very ill and she got us Buckeye as an anniversary gift. My dogs have been a joy but also a challenge. That’s why they enter the poems, I guess, because they force me to face fears and failures. 

I can’t recall a favorite poem about a dog, but the essay “Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard is one of the most poignant pieces of writing about many things, dogs included, and I share it with students all the time. Beard truly captures the depth of comfort, companionship, and intimacy we have with our pets. Her old collie is dying at the same time she is suffering several other unspeakable losses. 

DD: You are a prolific traveler. Could you list the top five places you’ve visited? 

PCM: Galapagos
           Kilimanjaro
           Cadaques
           Los Roques
           Buenos Aires

DD: What travel destination has most impacted your work as a poet? 

PCM: I might have to say Thailand. Two of my most weighty poems are about Bangkok and Phuket. 

DD: Where would you like to visit that you haven’t yet?

PCM: I really want to go to Morocco. We tried in December but couldn’t put the pieces together. Other top destinations are Malaysia, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Chile. 

John is really hot to go to Georgia. We are leaving now for Finland, Latvia. Lithuania, Estonia, and Ukraine. 

DD: What are you working on now?

PCM: A memoir and another collection of poetry. It really helps me to move back and forth between prose and poetry. 

DD: What are you reading now?

PCM: I have several going right now. Karen Brennan’s short story collection Monsters. Sally Ball’s poetry collection Hold Sway. James Comey’s memoir A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. And Adam Johnson’s novel The Orphan Master’s Son.

DD: I’d like to end with one of my favorite poems in the collection, “The Same River Twice.” Could you introduce this poem? (Say whatever you want related to its composition, etc)

PCM: This poem underwent a major revision thanks to Tom Lombardo, who had a wonderful influence on the entire collection, and who pushed me to explore several themes more deeply. Here I examine the turn when a relationship moves from new and thrilling to safe and comfortable. And for me all those terms are good terms. 

The poem started as a more abstract examination of our love. Tom pushed me to take it to image. Coffee time is a sacred time in our house. And we take the ritual with us wherever we go. More deeply I feel so grateful that our values align so closely. It is hard for me to imagine being with a partner who held vastly different beliefs about the universe. 

John and I have been together for 25 years. When I first met him, I truly fell for him (I fell in love) and part of it had to do with how far out of my comfort zone he pushed me. Now he is my comfort zone! Truly. And what a gift. What a gift those years are. 

Of course, the title comes from Heraclitus, who said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” I am grateful for the flow of our relationship and the intersections of our lives. I’m grateful that we have grown and changed and that we have done it together. 

            The Same River Twice

            Mornings, we like to kiss then pour coffee.
            When we met, he was studying fluvial

            geomorphology—the way rivers transport
            sediments. He tied flies under a hot halo of light.

            When we hiked he explained rock formations.
            Now there are several things besides love.

            Two dogs who curl on couches with ears
            fanned out like chenille throws. A city

            full of climate-change deniers. Evenings,
            it takes several hours reading in chairs

            for us to feel human. We fall asleep at 8 p.m.
            Mornings, we like to kiss then pour coffee.

---

Kevin Morgan Watson founded Press 53 in October 2005, and in 2010, with award-winning author Clifford Garstang, Kevin co-founded Prime Number Magazine. As a publisher, he has worked with writers ranging from first-time published authors to winners of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. Kevin has earned awards for his own writing in both short fiction and poetry, but he no longer writes for publication. He also serves as an advisor for student adaptation of short fiction to screenplays with the screenwriting faculty at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, School of Filmmaking in Winston-Salem, NC. 

 

Tom Lombardo, of Atlanta, Georgia, is editor of Tom Lombardo Poetry Selections, a Press 53 imprint. Tom actively reads journals, magazines, ezines, and anthologies in search of poets to bring to Press 53 by way of his poetry series. Tom is a widely published and respected poet, and is a graduate of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. His mission is to bring 4-6 poetry collections to Press 53 each year. He has published two collections of his own poetry: What Bends Us Blue (WordTech, 2013) and The Name of This Game (Kattywompus Press, 2014). In 2008, Tom edited and published After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (Sante Lucia Books), which features 152 poems by 115 poets from 15 countries.

Patricia Colleen Murphy won the 2019 Press 53 Award for Poetry with her collection Bully Love, published by Press 53 as a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection. She founded Superstition Review at Arizona State University, where she teaches creative writing and magazine production. Her collection Hemming Flames (Utah State University Press) won the 2016 May Swenson Poetry Award, judged by Stephen Dunn, and the 2017 Milt Kessler Poetry Award. A chapter from her memoir-in-progress was published as a chapbook by New Orleans Review. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, and American Poetry Review, and has received awards from Gulf Coast andBellevue Literary Review, among others. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). 

 

 

 

"One Hundred Autobiographies": a starred review in PW

<<<
One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir

David Lehman. Cornell Univ, $22.95 (248p) ISBN 978-1-5017-4645-1

Poet and critic Lehman (Poems in the Manner of...), who was treated for bladder cancer in 2014, brilliantly captures the despair, uncertainty, and anger he felt in these 100 short reflections on life, death, and writing. Likening his ordeal to the plot of a novel, he declares, “the road connecting memory and desire is not linear... one lesson of any brush with death is that time is finite.” He muses on why he writes: “I write to assert my will to live. To prove I exist.” Throughout, he reflects on literature and pop culture figures to tell his story: arriving at the hospital for treatment wearing his fedora, Lehman recalls the movie Some Came Running and Dean Martin’s hat, “which he wears even in bed, even in a hospital bed.” After reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lehman ponders the concept of evil: “the real question is not whether you believe in god as such but whether you believe there is such a thing as evil.” In his final reflection, being in excellent health—though, like many cancer patients, he acknowledges that this might just be a reprieve—he advises that “even on bad days, there are pleasant hours,” and “it is amazing how much pain the body can withstand.” Lehman’s exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain. (Oct.)
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https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-5017-4645-1

On James Tate's Last Poems [by Matthew Zapruder]

James Tate's posthumous collection of prose poems, "The Government Lake," is officially published by Ecco Press on July 2, 2019. It is a terrific book. I asked Matthew Zapruder to say a few words about it. Take it away, Matthew. -- DL

<<<
It feels so strange to hold Jim’s last book of poems in my hands. I remember standing in the poetry section of the erstwhile Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, in the spring of 1994, holding his Selected Poems. I had been admitted to the MFA program at UMass Amherst, and though I knew Tate’s name, I don’t believe I had ever read any of his poetry. I opened the book (the very same copy which I ended up buying a few minutes later, and which I am now holding), randomly, to page 96, and read a poem with the intriguing and unlikely title “The Distant Orgasm.” 

In retrospect it turns out this was an odd choice, because it’s a kind of collage-y shaggy dog narrative that is not at all characteristic of Tate’s poetry. But I liked it so much; it was weird and funny and honest, and I particularly loved how he spent a long time describing, as he was about to step over the threshold of his apartment and into the hallway, his foot:

the foot is becoming

aware of something

the awareness moves

up the ankle

into the calves

the knees and into the thighs

the thighs say

this neighbor of mine

is not dying

no she is not dying

 

At that moment I probably felt a lot like that foot, gradually becoming aware of something that I would come to feel a lot more of over the many years of reading Jim’s poems. Let’s call it life in all its goofy sublimity, its horrible hilarity, its pathetic surrealism, its grandiose ridiculousness. 

After buying that Selected Poems and reading it, I made my decision to study with Jim and colleagues at UMass. It helped that I was going back to the same area where I had studied as an undergraduate, which made leaving my beloved Bay Area a little less of a blow. I also bought books by Dara Wier and Agha Shahid Ali, and read them with great amazement, too. Look at all the things you can do in a poem! Who knew? Not me. I went there and studied and it changed me forever, and I have often looked back with the most immense gratitude for those teachers and my life as a poet. 

I write a little more about this wonderful book, The Government Lake, as well as Jim as a teacher,  for the Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/07/james-tates-last-last-poems/ — and about one of my favorite poems from the book, “The Argonaut,” at the Library of Congress website: https://www.loc.gov/poetry/poetry-of-america/american-identity/matthewzapruder-jamestate.html 

Even though I gave this book a lot of thought already, I was not prepared to hold an actual copy in my hands. It feels quite final. I have the poems, but I still miss Jim a lot, and always will. No one meant more to me as a poet than he did, and no poet did more to change my life. The jacket is a beautiful red, and the art is a perfectly strange and gorgeous rooster by the marvelous Pablo Amargo. It’s a great book if you know Jim’s work, and if you don’t, you can begin here and work your way backwards or any way you want. You too will be changed for the better -- forever.  

-- Matthew Zapruder 
>>>

Lunching with Elaine Equi [by David Lehman]

Sometimes, when lunching alone, I bring Elaine Equi along for company,
rereading Ripple Effect sipping a cup of strong black coffee and slipping
into the room where Fairfield Porter paints the light, and solitude
rhymes with altitude, attitude, multitude, lassitude, and beatitude.
That’s how I see and hear things, too. And the music is “John Coltrane’s
Central Park West,” where Elaine names the tenor saxophonist playing
“if [she] were having an affair / with myself as a married man.” Now if
we’re talking shop I’d have to pause here to talk about the line-breaks
because her rhythms her timing depend on them and the rhythm
and wit of her poems is their greatness, often achieved in short lines,
bite-size bits, though her prose poems are pretty amazing, too, such as
“Ultra Confessional” (the shoplifting stage follows the age of living in
“Victorian  novels on the verge of swooning”) and “Found in Translation,”
which praises not only “whatever cannot be killed by the translator”
but all translations, even bad ones, because reading itself
is a version of translation, a chain of logic leading to the epiphany
that “it would be great to learn French in order to read
William Carlos Williams.” The “perversely patriotic” narrator
of one of Elaine’s poems liked S & M before terrorism killed it
on the evening news. I know what she means but share her confidence
that new sources of inspiration will continue to show up
as two beautiful hookers helping her decide what to wear.

Meet the Press: PANK Books—A Conversation with Jessica Fischoff

Dante Di Stefano: You have an exquisite poem called “My Body is a Library” published in Diode, that ends with the following stanza:

 

        I’ve renamed every flower
        For the women who came before me
        I’ve rewired the plane, redrawn the key
        And untied the ribbon from my neck
        Without dropping my head at my feet.
        If all it takes to lose myself is burning the history that
        Brought me here, then hand me the match.
        A story beginning with self-immolation
        Doesn’t always end in ashes.

Reading these lines, I was struck by how they parallel the PANK mission to publish poetry from “a place inhabited by contradiction, quirk and startling anomaly, where the known is made and unmade, and where unimagined futures are born.” Could you begin the interview by riffing on that mission and your own words?

Jessica Fischoff: I think PANK’s mission statement really encapsulates itself. I’m not sure I could phrase it any better, but I can say the raw spaces writers allow themselves to access when creating is the place I aim to put myself in with my own work.

DD: How did PANK Books come into being?

JF: In 2016 John Gosslee started PANK Books to publish diverse and important full and short length books that deserved attention. In conceptualizing the press aspect of PANK it was important to him that all books the press published had the full support of all of the editors regardless of which editor brought the book to the press. As of 2019, Chris Campanioni, Maya Marshal, and Ashley M. Jones have all chosen books for publication alongside John Gosslee.

DD: Tell us about the books in the PANK catalog.

JF: PANK Books has a very strong eight title catalog of little and big books that range in orientation, voice, craft, and genre. The main thread of our books is that they are inclusive in their support of all marginalized voices. We’ve published new writers, veteran writers, and in 2019 we published a book by a writer who had never published a creative work. We’re always reading, we’re always interested in publishing work we know is important to read.

DD: What are some of the unique opportunities and challenges for women-run presses?

JF: I’d like to answer with questions I ask myself, and that any editor and writer should ask themselves at least once.

How does the curation of a publication change amongst editors of different genders and backgrounds?

Do women editors read differently than editors who are not women?

Do different topics and styles of writing resonate with me differently than non-female editor counterparts, or does it come down to my personal taste?

How do I know whether what I’m publishing and how I’m managing as an editor is because I am a woman, or because I’m drawn to certain writing styles and management techniques?

How much of the writing I’m drawn to is because I am a woman and how much is because I am myself?

At the end of it, I think the personal inclination towards any kind of specific work is likely based on who we are as individuals first.

DD: Tell us about some of the forthcoming titles from PANK Books.

JF: We’ve slated a number of publications as 2020 releases. The titles include short essays, choreo-poems, and a book that plays with the incorporation of music as text. Our book contest runs through September 1st, and we’re selecting potential full-length manuscripts in poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and little books for publication alongside the contest winners. Our judges are press authors and our Reviews Editor. The winning authors will judge next year’s contest, which keeps the thread of our mission in the PANK family.

DD: How has being a cellist influenced your work as a writer and editor?

JF: I’ve played in a number of indie bands over many years, and collaborated with other musicians, practiced, recorded, scheduled tours, promoted, and designed albums. The processes mirror managing a publication and press. I work with people to produce something beautiful and creative, something I am excited to share with the world, something I love. 

As a writer, I think musically. I read everything out loud and listen to the rhythm. I admit I tap my foot to some lines to hear the beat. Music influenced the way I write, where the line breaks, where the rhythm rests, and the arc, and turn.

DD: Could you end the interview by giving us a poem from a PANK poet?

JF: I’ve picked two poems I love.

        Regala un huevo con una mano y con la otra, mata la gallina

                 By Steve Castro

        Some people are encyclopedias.
        I’m more like the ashes after a book
        is burned. Every burned tome dissap-
        pears. The Apples will also vanish.
        If the sun that devours books
        got caught in a gargantuan
        Library of Congress mousetrap
        and died with a broken neck as a result,
        then I would bury the sun in the cemetery
        reserved for vanishing apples and book ashes.
        My father once stole the spotlight
        and ended up doing two months in jail.
        My papá is malo. He’s the type
        to give you an egg with one hand
        and kill the chicken with the other.

        YOU’RE ONLY HUMAN WHEN SOMEONE IS LOOKING
                By Joanna C. Valente

        Some of the women in town
        thought Mary ought to be punished.
        Her belly grew to a hearse.
        She prayed for a sailboat
        to carry her uterus on a milk sea.
        Dragonflies swarmed her flamingo-pink
        plumage. She watched
        boys shred guitars. May
        the distortion mince all
        the tired women
        inside her. A doctor suggested
        lime in tea—an exorcise. May she
        shoot wind to hear grass buzz,
        to know which she is sprouting
        inside her.

---

Jessica Fischoff is the Editor of [PANK] and author of the upcoming little book of poems, The Desperate Measure of Undoing (Across the Margin, 2019). She has a degree in English and Journalism from University of Iowa, where she studied the lyric essay under the mentorship of John D’Agata and went onto the Creative Nonfiction MFA program at The University of Pittsburgh where she served as an Editorial Assistant at Creative Nonfiction and began to write poetry under Dawn Lundy Martin, and Ben Lerner. Her writing appears in Diode Poetry Journal, Fjords Review and The Southampton Review.

Jessica's little book, The Desperate Measure of Undoing (ATM 2019) is available for preorder.

[PANK]

Grace Cavalieri Reviews "Playlist"

Grace Cavalieri reviews Playlist by David Lehman. University of Pittsburgh Press. 64 pages.

<<<
Lehman, already at the forefront of our literary culture, writes a music retrospective inspired by his friend, the late great poet A.R. Ammons. In 1965, Ammons’ book Tape for the Turn of the Year premiered poems written on a cash-register tape. In these, he gave us permission “to say and du anything.” And so, Lehman does — chronicling jazz icons of the 40s 50s 60s — as well as film/TV stars. This book will break your heart for all that’s passed, and especially how tenderly Lehman revives it.

By identifying song and singer, Lehman traces this country’s cultural story and tells us what the past is worth, and why. And this is where you fall in love…the poet’s personal involvement…where he was the night of…what he was drinking…how he felt…not reminiscences, nothing so cheap as that, but actual shards piecing his own life together through music, day by calendar day.

What is the central issue of any book- length poem? With Ammons, it was claiming his right as poet. With Lehman, it’s a true devotion to the meaning and spirit of that great human endeavor, jazz — as well as classic pop culture. Lehman is knowledgeable about music’s traditional story, and he takes it out of the corner, away from music connoisseurs, to animate it for all readers. The passion and strength of the poet shape stories of singers and musicians, at times making song out of words. The writing fluidly connects 72 pieces, and the accumulation demonstrates the soul of innovation: i.e., film and music now become poetry. A man, obedient to “The Stars,” revels at the intricate beauty that’s given him such lifelong pleasure.

12/3/17

When I listened to “Ralph’s New Blues”

(Modern Jazz Quartet) the epiphany was

the music that remained when the melody

was removed — even for such as I who

can’t think of a better way to say

our love is here to stay than the song.

>>>

from

from "April 2019 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews" by Grace Cavalieri in Washington Independent Review of Books

• Grace Cavalieri
• April 11, 2019

I Will Wear My Wounds in Chapters: Six Chapbooks

To Those Who Were Our First Gods
Nickole Brown
Rattle, 2018

Nickole Brown’s To Those Who Were Our First Gods explores the profound links between human beings and our animal kin. In language both colloquial and lyrically charged, Brown examines how predation and kindness play out on “this whole stubborn, / beautiful, fucked-up planet,” which is spinning toward ecological doom, pocked (at least, in America) by chain-stores and fostering “this clocked-in, bottled, florescent-lit existence.” In “A Prayer to Talk to Animals” Brown articulates the central impulse of the chapbook:

                        …Oh, forgive me, Lord,
    how human I’ve become, busy clicking
    what I like, busy pushing
    my cuticles back and back to expose
    all ten pale, useless moons.  Would you let me
    tell your creatures how sorry
    I am, let them know exactly
    what we’ve done? Am I not an animal
    too? If so, Lord, make me one again.
    Give me back my dirty claws and blood-warm
    horns, braid back those long-
    frayed endings of every nerve tingling
    with all I thought I had to do today.

To Those Who Were Our First Gods focuses on more than what we’ve lost by estranging ourselves from the natural world; it upholds and elegizes “that iridescent song,” “the soft and liquid cathedral” of the animal’s body, which, more often than not, ends up wrapped in a black bag and thrown away. Reading Brown’s poetry reminds one that to be an animal is to be alive in desire and suffering.

Traveling Cluster: Poems in Italy
David Giannini
New Feral Press, 2018

Traveling Cluster, David Giannini’s latest chapbook, is an incandescent travelogue, an homage to Italian culture,
a love note to Italy itself. Giannini details his travels through Rome, Florence, Venice, Tuscany, Umbria and elsewhere, while paying tribute to the likes of Michelangelo, Dante Alighieri, and Federico Fellini. Giannini’s masterful craftmanship, his humor, and his varied formal approaches make this chapbook a journey as enjoyable as the one the poet took himself. Traveling Cluster always remains cognizant of the English fascination with Italia; Byron, Shelley, and Shakespeare all receive mentions. “In Verona” affords one such instance:

    As if Shakespeare
    could turn in
    his grave after
    Giampiero
    our guide
    tells of Juliet’s
    balcony and her
    statue removed
    from the courtyard
    because thousands
    of tourist hands
    cracked
                    its bronze
    breasts
    by rubbing them
    “for luck in love”
    and I wonder
    does anybody
    care who
    now visits
    her perch and
    house walls
    fucked
    by graffiti.

Giannini quotes Anna Akhmatova early on in this chapbook: “Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.” How fortunate that the poems in Traveling Cluster allow one an immediate return to such a dream.

The Body as Passage
Nathan C. Lipps
Open Palm Print, 2019

Reading Nathan Lipps’s The Body as Passage calls to mind lines from Robert Bly’s translation of Goethe’s “The Holy Longing”: “I praise what’s truly alive, / What longs to be burned to death.” Lipps stacks and splinters images in a devotional poetry that seethes with life and longing. Grief, loss, and a reaching toward the sacred braid throughout the simple want at the center of these well-made poems. Lipps charts a certain type of spiritual loneliness against a stark midwestern backdrop—ruined barns amidst acres overgrown with black locust trees. The first poem of The Body as Passage, “Before Death,” exemplifies the strengths of the collection as a whole:

    A bird in the kitchen
    this morning.
    It was enough.
    A song among tangerine bowls.
    Near the open window
    atop the butcher-block table—
    grapefruit, 
                     a spoon.
                                    Unequivocal.
    Peering out into darkness.
    For Sunrise. 
    Knowing 
    it will blind.

    Too much.
                         Hallelujah. 
    Even the seeds.

Like many of Lipps’s other poems, “Before Death” proceeds austerely, with a quiet confidence, toward the ineffable. This chapbook, the first book by Lipps, surely presages strong work to come.

[GATES]
Sahar Muradi
Black Lawrence Press, 2017

Sahar Muradi’s [GATES] elegantly engages the dislocations inherent in language, war, and illness. Muradi’s chapbook deftly renders the fractured ruminations of a young person coming to terms with her father’s cancer and America’s war against her ancestral homeland. As the chapbook’s title suggests, each poem is a threshold, a point of departure, which is also a point of entry. The first poem of the book illustrates well this liminality:  

 

    The one that belonged to her
    The one where the light hit for the first time
    The one between our houses
    The one I crawled through to sleep on his chest
    The one the dog squeezed through
    The one at three over the candle and cake
    The one at three at the checkpoint
    The one between the earth and the sky, the refrigerator with wings
    The one where he met us after one year and was a stranger
    The one at the park, the one at Up Park, the one at Down Park
    The one that pierced my face and they pointed and laughed
    The one that took them away from me in a tube and sent them back to me tired
    The one he went through, hairs shooting out
    The one she went through, blood turning up
    The one we all went through to get to the blinking lights with the cherries
    The ones we put up when she was born
    The ones we passed to leave for good
    The ones we paid quarters to get through
    The one they learned the names of Presidents for
    The ones they needed social security numbers for
    The one I touched in the dark of my room
    The ones we couldn’t talk about, ever
    The one we had to close behind us to stay in, to keep neat, to not be tempted
    The one we tried to jump and failed
    The one he jumped and wasn’t forgiven
    The ones in the books that made animals of us
    The ones that told us who we weren’t
    The ones that hurt, that swung and cut and rattled long after they left
    The ones that kept flowers
    The one I went through to go north, to go abroad, to go east, to find my cardinal ways
    The one she went through too tired to find her way
    The one they have chosen to give them purpose
    The different one I have chosen
    The one I haven’t yet found
    The one I am looking through now with the narrow slots and passages unseen                                                                               

Here, as elsewhere in [GATES], Muradi combines a finely-attuned imagistic imagination with a bighearted embrace of the ordinary. Sahar Muradi writes as original and as compassionate a poetry as one would expect from a poet who proclaims: “I will wear my wounds in chapters.”

Spoiled Meat
Nicole Santalucia
Headmistress Press, 2018

Nicole Santalucia’s Spoiled Meat capers along the interstates and through the one-horse towns of central Pennsylvania, past and present. Santalucia’s antic foulmouthed lyric engagements with everyday life foreground the madcap and the astonishing; as she writes in “Barefooted Lesbians”: “Just yesterday I fell in love, I fell on the sidewalk, / I fell into a pile of jackknives.” Spoiled Meat explores the homophobia and the misogyny graffitied everywhere across the suburban and rural landscapes these poems render so well. Oftentimes, the poems address how violence intersects with misogyny and homophobia. “Supermarket Blowout” provides a characteristic example of this intersection in its final lines:

    The corn in aisle nine pops
    when you pay
    with your NRA Visa.
    In the gun-shaped produce section
    there’s a raffle for the 20-gauge-melon-
    pump-action with a 26-inch barrel.
    To enter, all you have to do
    is show up and say, I hate gays.

Santalucia’s response to this hatred is a surreal, slapstick, and, ultimately, vivifying humor. Don’t be afraid to walk barefoot across the cornhusks, shotgun shells, and chicken wing bones that litter the floor of these poems; the trek will provide you with many consolations, not the least of which is a good old-fashioned belly laugh in the face of the pure products of America as they continue to go crazy.

And God Created Women
Connie Voisine
Bull City Press, 2018

In the poem, “Via Dolorosa,” Connie Voisine writes: “What I took to be a ticket / turned out to be some kind of evil sprite / who might fill my mouth with cement…” And God Created Women levitates throughout, in just this way, between menace and magic. Voisine’s ultimate subject is the beleaguered and blessed self; as Voisine notes in “Self-Portrait as Sphinx”: “…Strewn is me, / not human, not any one thing, who must / accept the awful answer…” The poems in And God Created Women are barbed and beautiful, twisting with an ache that renders them unforgettable. The best poem in the collection, “(Her) Middle Ages,” consists of stutter steps, snippets of conversations, non sequiturs, and sentence fragments that accrue into an overwhelmingly powerful examination of the bonds between mothers and daughters; the poem begins: “I know men who would // rape you. That’s why. // As long as the sea is wild.”  Voisine’s poems pierce and rend; And God Created Women is the kind of chapbook that will wound you into remembering it.

---

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). 

For Prose Writers Who Want to Write Poetry: A Reading List [by Terese Svoboda]

Prose writers make sparks through character and plot, endlessly blackening the page from one margin to the other. But there are some who recognize that sometimes emotion needs to breath. I like to point those prosestitutes (as Walcott used to call them) toward the prosy end of poetry. These poems present the idea of word choice and white space as muscle, poems that are not just the co-opted regulation subject-verb-object but also are not dauntingly complex syntactically. Seemingly. Five books of poetry for fiction writers who really want to jettison their agents and struggle in the poet's pure genre:

The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky. How to take prose lines and hold them in poetic tension.

Childhood of an Equestrian by Russell Edson. Master of the funny dialogue prose poem.

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich. Have you read it lately? It's so clear it burns. It also teaches line break strategy plus advocacy.

The Movie At the End of the World by Tom McGrath. Blacklisted but a poet with a breath like Whitman who takes history and America head on.

All-Night Lingo Tango by Barbara Hamby.  A funny mix of high and pop cultural references turned into formally strict, lyrically extravagant poems. Shows how form can be your friend.

A Kickstarter Worth Supporting: For Walt Whitman’s birthday: War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by Binh Danh & Robert Schultz

Our great national poet’s concerns during the Civil War apply with striking relevance in our own moment of war and dividedness. Whitman’s humane example and his central trope—the leaves of grass as sign of democracy and renewal—rebuke directly the White Nationalists who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Blood and Soil.” For Whitman, American blood in American soil was not a tribal claim, and for him “the land entire” was the most fitting memorial to the war dead, “South or North, ours all”:  ". . . [T]he land entire [is] saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw . . .."

In War Memoranda, forthcoming in May in time for the bicentennial celebration of Whitman’s birth, Binh Danh’s photographs of Civil War memorial sites, using the nineteenth-century cyanotype process, evoke at once the past and present. And Robert Schultz’s chlorophyll prints offer portraits of Whitman and Civil War soldiers embodied in the flesh of leaves, physically enacting the central trope of Leaves of Grass—especially when the leaf used has been plucked from a “witness tree” known to have stood on a battlefield during the war. This book of art, poetry, and comment includes a generous selection of Whitman’s poetry and prose, 51 photographs, with essays by poets David Lehman and Stanley Plumly and by scholars Barbara Bair (Library of Congress) and Molly Rogers (author of Delia’s Tears). War Memoranda will be printed in a fine art edition limited to 500 copies and is available for pre-order through a Kickstarter campaign that will end April 2, 2019. Signed copies and original artworks by Danh and Schultz are available as premiums. For more information use the search link http://kck.st/2DvOExn or go to Kickstarter.com and search “War Memoranda.”

-- sdl

Poet Spotlight: Brenna Womer [by Kristina Marie Darling]

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

___________________________________________________

Artist’s Statement

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

____________________________________________________

A Folio of New Writing by Brenna Womer

company

 

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

______________________________________

tenure

 

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

     and I am forty fewer of   okay

___________________________________

 

slow burn

 

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

_______________________________________

Thanks to The Rumpus, where these poems first appeared.  

Poet Spotlight: Laurie Sheck [by Kristina Marie Darling]

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

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

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

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

_________________________________________

On Textual Difficulty

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

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

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

Unsettled. Volatile. Unstable.

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

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

___________________________________________

An Introductory Note

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

___________________________________________

A Folio of New Writing by Laurie Sheck 

 

 

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

 _______________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

________________________________________

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

Poet Spotlight: Elizabeth Powell [by Kristina Marie Darling]

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

A Process Note

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

AUTOCORRECTING THE LYRIC I

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am an Elizabeth…I autocorrect into an   electric   elsewhere

I am also Ann                And   Another

Powell to     Power   to Pose  

In Hebrew my name would be Bathsheba Bat Label

Bathsheba    becomes      Banshee, Battery

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

Poet Spotlight: Veronica Golos [by Kristina Marie Darling]

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

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

____________________________________

Poem     because

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

the girl           never                          cries   refusing                                     

            her secret     to her chest

like the Spartan boy                        and his fox

 

inside her     in the hold

of her mute                           never  

 

the blue-black                      of the slap

face arms her back

 

invisible                                that ink

 

^^^

 

sometimes in the summer she heard singing

            dense music peeling from the bark of trees

                        who sang? wind like weeping. whose?

                                    a wild sound roiling

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

 

^^^

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

 

Poet Spotlight: Karla Kelsey [by Kristina Marie Darling]

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

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Difficulty: A Spillage

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

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A Folio of Poems by Karla Kelsey

THRALL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___________________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Textual Difficulty

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

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A Folio of Poems by Vi Khi Nao

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

Slender glacier teases the innocent husband

To hand over his wife, the ice tray.

The icy husband resists

Of course, he resists

The wife, divided and compartmentalized

Sometimes the husband notices a pool by his side

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

On Sunday and on thirsty days

Husband places three quarters of wife in a glass

No one believes in singing with divided tears

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

Husband can't believe that wife

Can hold a mosquito that long

He can brush away her subconscious

By draining her of her liquid free will

Sometimes volition doesn't belong to husband entirely

Sometimes wife can be thick, like jello

Even solid objects can be unfaithful.

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

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

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

After the fright, seizure in prolonged tenderness.

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

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

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

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

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

 

* * *

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

But a blouse forgives—

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

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

To change the discourse of time

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

Stabbing their backs

* * *

 

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

Kiss me in the afternoon and I will tell you everything

Not shattered nor shamed by flight of resistance

Our enemies dressed in rice noodles deliver on a moped

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Just before morning closes                                Her deformed smile

Your hands dismiss                                           Respiratory foams

Razored on the edge                                        Your face

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

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

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

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On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty

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

______________________________________

A Folio of Poems by Allison Benis White

DARLING

Come back, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy.

—J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

________________________________________                                    

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

       Maybe this is the dream

                                                   of the dead bathed in milk—

                                                                                                                                                               

so many red feathers

 

in my mind. I remember being alive  

         as a child—on a towel in the grass,

                                                                                   

                             from a white plastic kettle,

 

                                                       I poured air into a cup,   two cups.

 

 

 

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

                                                                                                           We drank nothing

 

                                                                     and it was good.    

___________________________________________

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

 

 

   Smoothing the brain,

                                       holding a knife   to build another

 

                 mother. Like a house in the trees,

                                                       I wanted to believe in God

                                                                                                           to be safe

                                                                                         and have somewhere to go.

 

We are all the same   and inconsolable, legs twitching                               

                                                                 during the nightmare.     Please wake me up,

 

                                 press one finger between my eyes

                                                                                             like a doorbell.

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Meet the Press: Headmistress Press: An Interview with Mary Meriam

N.B. The following responses by Mary Meriam are a kind of tonal cento in the spirit of Nicole Santalucia’s newest chapbook, Spoiled Meat. To read a more forthright appraisal of Santalucia’s new work, look at the generous recommendation Meriam offered on the February 2019 Reading List over at Poetry’s Harriet blog. Also, check out Santalucia’s chapbook here. While you’re there, you might acquaint yourself with the many finely written chapbooks available in the Headmistress catalog. ~Dante Di Stefano

 

How did Headmistress Press come into being?

Some bitch like me sets the fire, cranks the heat, makes an online journal of lesbian poetry and art, Lavender Review, swallows the flare.

The flower pots and lesbian poems blaze one little fire at a time. Books sprout from Headmistress Press, thanks to some bitch Risa Denenberg taking care of the practical side.

Could you talk a bit about your catalog? What do Headmistress books have in common?

Yellow fires and red fires and cover art by lesbian artists, 52 books that are on fire. Pick the best chicken hut, make the best gas station, send them through the post office, and the readers: all on fire. 

Tell us about your Lesbian Poet Trading Cards.

When the train passes through this neighborhood of flames, Rita Mae Reese knocks over the bitch who lit the first match. Her fire burns in the Chicago Tribune. Pretty soon Kathleen Rooney swirls in flames: Call attention to lacunae in the traditional literary canon and the clouds shrivel up. Dry out and put a face on the absences that exist in many readers’ knowledge. Drop like dog shit and provide another strategy to fight the invisibility that is often all too prevalent in the assembly of both anthologies of past writers and the tables of contents of current literary journals, as when editors say things to the effect of “we wanted to publish more work by (insert under-represented group here), we just couldn't find any.” 

You’ve published two books under the Sally Jane Books imprint. Could you tell us about these titles?

To the sides of the streets and highways, where heroin addicts are left for dead, we start a wild and free imprint, where farmers grow lettuce, we trade sheep, text and art in exciting, fun, and innovative shoelaces and guns. 

What else is on the horizon for Headmistress Press?

2019 AWP Book Fair in Portland.

What is one thing American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

Some bitch like me. 

Nicole Santalucia’s Spoiled Meat won your most recent Charlotte Mew chapbook contest. Would you tell us about the contest and about Santalucia’s book? 

Spoiled Meat is a foul-mouthed rural fantasy, allegory, satire. It’s rage against the world’s waste, sickness, horror, corruption, injustice. It’s a witch’s hell-call for change. Some bitch Santalucia recounts the apocalypse with authority, takes the blame, makes the change. 

Could you end the interview with a poem from Spoiled Meat?

Here’s the bitch-action I nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

 

            Pennsylvania on Fire 

            Some bitch like me sets the fire, 
            cranks the heat, burns the toast, swallows 
            the flare. 

            The flower pots and front lawns blaze 
            one little fire at a time. Flames sprout 
            from the gardens on Hanover Street. 
            Yellow fires and red fires and motherfuckers 
            drive trucks that are on fire. The chicken hut, 
            gas station, post office, and the neighbors: all on fire. 

            When the train passes through this neighborhood of flames 
            a gust of wind knocks over the bitch who lit the first match. 
            Her fire burns on fear. Pretty soon the black sky 
            swirls in flames and the clouds shrivel up, 
            dry out, and drop like dog shit
            to the sides of the streets and highways
            where heroin addicts are left for dead, where farmers
            grow lettuce and trade sheep for shoelaces and guns,
            where starving cows are auctioned and eaten alive, and the people 

            confuse women for beef and love for needles. 

 

            From Spoiled Meat by Nicole Santalucia

---

Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press, edits Lavender Review (lesbian poetry and art), and is a professor in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas-Monticello. Her newest collection, My Girl's Green Jacket, is reviewed at Entropy and Lambda Literary. A new poem appears in the February issue of Poetry.  

Poet Spotlight: Julia Story [by Kristina Marie Darling]

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

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

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A Folio of Poems by Julia Story 

Poems from ​Julie the Astonishing

 

How She Would Return from the Dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

each one a little you.
That night we washed our

socks together in the hotel
sink then watched an old

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

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

Then together we went
into the painting of the ocean.

_______________________________

We approach the defunct
nudist colony.

Worn chorus of evening
doves, no naked folks.

Every moment
an ossuary.

I’m a body.
You are dead

like the invisible
nudes. But you

walk with me.
The moon

mothered in clouds.

______________________________

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

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

The creatures lilt and gambol
when they sense our hovering.

I am a wraparound porch
bound to my own heart

and you an afternoon
filled with street corners.

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

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

and crudely through it come
these awful resurrections.

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

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

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

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

substance makes these walls.

Poet Spotlight: Terese Svoboda [by Kristina Marie Darling]

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

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

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

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

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

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A Folio of Poems by Terese Svoboda

Out of Ringing Ears

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

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

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

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

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

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

[schottische] slow polka to you

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

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

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

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Sandwich

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

You — in the white shirt —

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

Knock, knock. No joke?

They put him in a closet.

Not a dell.

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

Whispering voices from the phone.

Can you get it?

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

You don't know that.

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

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

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

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

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

How do you know?

Someone called. Someone said Look in the closet.

It was you.

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

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

Interstate.

No trace of footsteps because of the rain.

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

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

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

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

There was a tremendous knocking.

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Shame Helps

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

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

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

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Fusion Construction

 

The sun shows off--
                                    pocket it.

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

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

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

are lifted, an animatronics
of change, a mechanical buffalo

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

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

Change requires copulation,
nakedness, pleasure.

Eat
the coxcomb and the sun will not rise.

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What? is your line

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

windowless

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

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

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

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

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

an absent Noah leaves the room

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

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

insert choreography
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage

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

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1718 – Nantucket Beach