Lawrence Joseph interviewed the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai for The Paris Review, Spring 1992. Amichai was born in Germany in 1924. With his family he fled from Hitler in 1936, emigrating to Palestine with his orthodox Jewish family. He fought form the British in World War II, for the Haganah uderground in 1948, and for the Iarseli army in 1956 and 1973.
"I really have the feeling that I am the result and very contents of the twentieth century," he tells Larry Joseph.
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I was [raaised a Zionist], but my family’s Zionism wasn’t ideological in any intellectual sense. It was the Zionism of religious orthodoxy, a practical Zionism—going to Palestine. For my parents, going to Palestine was typically romantic, motivated in part by their sense of Orthodoxy and in part by the longing to be in their own country. I had cousins who may have seen Zionism in utopian socialist terms, though my parents did not. There was, of course, zealous anti-Semitism before Hitler, which also had something to do with my family’s going to Palestine. Some people think that anti-Semitism didn’t really exist in Germany until 1933. I certainly don’t want to take anything away from Hitler’s guilt, but the anti-Semitism I grew up with predated Hitler. We were called names. We had stones thrown at us. And, yes, this created real sorrow. We defended ourselves as well as we could. Funny thing, the common name we were called was Isaac—the way Muslims are called Ali or Mohammed. They’d call out, Isaac, go back to Palestine, leave our home, go to your place. They threw stones at us and shouted, Go to Palestine. Then in Palestine we were told to leave Palestine—history juxtaposed can be very ironic. But I do remember in 1933 when the Nazis came into power the anti-Semitism had been religiously based. Then it became political and economic. Before that the two hadn’t merged—there was a kind of horrible limbo—but you could feel what was happening. I remember my parents telling me to keep away from the military parades, not to become mesmerized by the music and marching. I was also told—Würzburg was a very Catholic town—to keep away from the Catholic processions on certain feast days. All Saints’ Day, I remember in particular. The processions were very somber, very German in a way, with students, priests and nuns carrying banners and holy icons and figures. Once—I was nine or ten—I was watching a Catholic procession because I liked its colorfulness and pageantry. Since I was Orthodox I was wearing a yarmulke. Suddenly, someone hit me in the face and shouted, 'You dirty little Jew, take your skullcap off!' >>>
Memorial Day for the War Dead
Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000)
Memorial day for the war dead. Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you. Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.
Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”
No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.
Memorial day. Bitter salt is dressed up
as a little girl with flowers.
The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
for the marching together of the living and the dead.
Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
like stepping over broken glass.
The flautist's mouth will stay like that for many days.
A dead soldier swims above little heads
with the swimming movements of the dead,
with the ancient error the dead have
about the place of the living water.
A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
A shopwindow is decorated with
dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages:
Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.
A great and royal animal is dying
all through the night under the jasmine
tree with a constant stare at the world.
A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”
From Amen by Yehuda Amichai, published by Harper & Row. Copyright © 1977 Yehuda Amichai.
Frank O'Hara (right) with the painter Larry Rivers, with whom he collaborated on "Stones."
In 2010, at the Philoctetes Center in New York City, Michael Braziller moderated a dialogue between Mark Doty and David Lehman regarding the poetry of Frank O'Hara, who influenced both of us tremendously. The evening in question was November 11, 2010.
It's no secret that literary people and humanists are reluctant to take an unpopular position that deviates from the party line. So it is noteworthy when someone pops off, refusing to yield to the forces of self-censorship. An enterprising editor named Elizabeth Ellen [left], the poet and writer who runs Hobart magazine, undertook an e-mail correspondence with Alex Perez, a former professional baseball player who attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. As Perez explains it: "I couldn’t see—forget hit—a 95 mile per hour fastball, and so it was over. My dream of being the next Alex Rodriguez was wiped away, so I decided to give the writing life a shot—maybe I could be the Cuban-American Ray Carver." Think about it: the American dream reconfigured as the metamorphosis of Alex Rodriguez into Raymond Carver! That rates a wow.
Even someone who had never heard of either the magazine, its editor, or the subject of the interview, could not help taking notice of “Alex Perez on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, baseball, growing up Cuban-American in Miami & saying goodbye to the literary community”. Perez has little good to say about MFA programs and the whole so-called "literary community" -- "community" joining "iconic" as an over-used word that has shed its meaning.
Perez [right] is a very outspoken fellow, and both he and his editor are courageous, for it is entirely predictable that individuals outraged by his views have denounced them and derograted him vehemently. Here's how Jonny Diamond sees it, pulling no punches: "With encouragement from Ellen, Perez rehashes numerous timeworn clichés about the artistic cowardice of the literary establishment—its elitism, its careerism, its overwhelming whiteness, its simultaneous disgust with and fetishizing of the working class—and sounds like just another caffeinated undergrad reheating yesterday’s manifesto." The staff of the magazine resigned over what Diamond characterizes as a "tedious anti-woke" rant. This event, too, is eye-raising. One wonders whether the tactic of mass resignation or the threat of revolt has run out of gas. (Its precedents include incidents at the New York Times and The New York Review of Books, both of which fired or forced the resignation of a prominent editor because of staff complaints.) "Your editor published something you didn't like, and you resigned? Is that what they taught you in journalism school?"
Not everyone joined in the chorus of boos. Meghan Daum [left, author of The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through The New Culture Wars, wrote a piece under the heading: "Who Killed Creative Writing? Thoughts on Alex Perez, Hobart magazine, and price of literary citizenship." Daum's sense of humor rose to the occasion. "To be honest," she writes, "my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional trying to hold onto relevance in an increasingly winner-take-all economy, there’s something about watching extremely online people have noisy meltdowns that makes me feel like I’m inhaling my own body odor. But some of the stuff Perez was saying was not only true; it was, for lack of a better term, extra-true. It was true on a molecular level. It was true in a way that made you not only nod in agreement but almost physically shudder in recognition." For example, "I’ve come to see the MFA in writing as the educational equivalent of a draft dodge.” That, too, rates a wow.
Here's a very brief portion of Elizabeth Ellen's interview with Alex Perez (pub date: September 29, 2022). Perez is the speaker.
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The literary world is so bland because of the ideological uniformity of the scene. As I’ve said throughout, most writers are seemingly aligned with progressive orthodoxy and wokeness. I say seemingly because a lot of writers reach out to me in private—like you did—who haven’t bought in but are afraid to speak out publicly. So what you have are writers who are woke and others pretending to be woke out of fear and the result is a scene that is totally flattened aesthetically. Isn’t it weird that most writers sound like operatives for the Democratic Party? Do they want to be the press secretary for Joe Biden or do they want to be writers? Do you have to wear a pussy hat and pray to RBG and idolize little doctor Fauci if you want to be a writer? I’m not saying writers need to be rightwing, but it’s strange that most writers present as Democrats.
This restrictive culture that demands ideological uniformity creates a scene in which writers trade relevance and ambition for “literary community.” If you’re not a good, little woke writer who dons the pussy hat you won’t be part of the “literary community” and lose out on publishing your flash fiction about hating America in Ploughshares or a webzine read by fifteen pussy hat wearers. What’s wild is how writers with zero readership micromanage their careers! Tweeting all the Democratic Party talking points. Supporting the correct politicians. Hating the designated “bad” people. These unknown writers watching what they say and doing all this work—for no payment! —and no one even reads them! The mainstream literary world operates this way, as does the indie scene. Everyone a good, little striver, striving for scraps.
The crazy unedited shit we want to read doesn’t exist because writers are now some of the most self-conscious and self-censorious people on the planet. They can’t say anything we’ve said in this interview. They can never have the fun we’re having here. As the man said: Sad! All this to say that, yes, the literary world left me behind, but now I’ve transcended the literary world. This interview, as a matter of fact, feels like my swan song. My final goodbye to the “literary community.”
>>>
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“My family left Cuba, left everything behind to come to America, and I was afraid of some of the most mediocre people on the planet. I was deeply ashamed. … I remained a pussy until 2017, when Hurricane Irma, a category five monster of a storm, was set to destroy Miami. A day before impact, I was sitting at Starbucks with a buddy, and said, “If we get through this one, I’m going to write whatever the fuck I want from now on.” The fear of the storm coincided with the peak of my shame, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. Irma ended up missing Miami, but something had changed. I dropped the agent soon after and started writing political/cultural stuff; I started writing about all the stuff I was secretly talking about with friends. My first published piece of cultural commentary, an essay about Philip Roth and American manhood, appeared in Tablet Magazine. I’ve been doing it ever since. This is how I make a living now. It’s very nice to get paid to write, I must say. I highly recommend it.”>>>
For the rest of the interview, click here.
https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/alex-perez-on-the-iowa-s-writers-workshop-baseball-and-growing-up-cuban-american-in-america
Note: On Elizabeth Ellen's home page we're told that "In 2014, Ellen authored a controversial essay for which she was removed from an anthology of ‘provocative women writers’ to be published by Black Lawrence Press. Upon Ellen's public removal from the anthology, several other prominent female writers pulled their names and contributions from the anthology in support of Ellen, including Roxane Gay, Cheryl Strayed, Laura van den Berg, Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter, xTx, Mary Miller and Jac Jemc." Ellen wrote a letter that she knew would prove controversial, saying "I refuse to be afraid of my fellow women. Of entering into a discourse with them for fear I will say something they don’t like. That’s not what our moms marched for. It’s certainly not what mine marched for. Let’s remember this." As a result of the letter, the press dropped a story by Ellen that they had accepted for publication. The editors thought Ellen's letter was "provocative," a no-no, so they canceled a story on a totally unrelated theme. Here's what Brett Ortler wrote on the controversy for The Nervous Breakdown.
DL
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David Shapiro: Today I was thinking that the only time the Beatles sang a Broadway song was when they recorded "Till There Was You" from Meredith Wilson's "The Music Man," and then a few thoughts occurred to me about poetry readings.
[DL: Tell me.]
As a violinist I can't imagine reading the score alone, though it gives great pleasure, and I associate poetry as a sister art. Most of us think Homer was a singing bard, Sappho had a lyre she discusses, and the poems of the Bible are sung by those like my grandfather, the chazzan [cantor]. The good cantor [was] so moving that Cossacks are said to have stopped and not killed that day. I learned so much from Stevens' exorbitantly slow gray voice. I ended a love affair with Roethke when he grunted drunk at the Y.
[Did you imitate Stevens?]
It's true I loved to imitate each poet I loved.
If I loved them, I loved their voice.
When Ashbery read 'The Skaters" whole. . .
[When was that, David?]
In 1964. It was amazing, David. Every word was right.
[Where was this?]
In New York. At the end Allen Ginsberg tried to recruit him for some political action and John said "I'm a political exile."
I knew that any Dylan Thomas saxophone in me had died and was reborn.
Horowitz admitted he exaggerated for his audience. Do you mind?
[Do you still hate poetry reading?]
I hate poetry readings, they are the worst thing in nature, but they are not in nature. Lowell sd he changed for Ginsberg--well, it was still RL.
Would you like to hear Trakl read or Rilke?
Those who heard (like Marianne Moore) Meyer Schapiro's lectures were listening to a god's golden sound. When Paul Robeson spoke, when Gielgud read Shakespeare, when Celan reads Todtfugue,we stop breathing. It is bad poems you hate and minor performers, but to hear Shakespeare do the Ghost I would give up the ghost. Forget Allen and what can be comical pathos. Forget the imitators. Get the old Caedmans and listen to that essential science of sound that Keats mentions.
O imagine Donne reading Donne. I would be undone. If a poet bores you, just wake up and look for another voice. Lovers know that the voice is a sexual organ (see Jewish law). If your love's voice doesn't please you, you are already divorced. If an architect's drawings are better than his house, you have made an ontological mistake.
Chekhov on the page, Vanya say, lies inert.
Alive in sound, he is the greatest writer.
My mother said, If you have a good speaking voice, you will have a good singing voice.
Many poems grow from music, the best are already music. Even this topic makes me happy. What is better than Sappho? Catullus? No, Sappho as she once may have been heard.Pound I can mock, not Anne Porter at 95 reading a poem about her son. [Fairfield Porter's portrait of his wife Anne appears on the left.]
[I love that poem.]
There is a poem that reduces us to tears and wonder without school. Of course, I am one who believes you can speak between poems. Of reading twice, my wife says: Oh no, that poet is horrible enough and now we must hear him twice. But privately, I recite my favorites over and over like a song.
Most poetry readings are bad, but so are most paintings and dances.
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-- David Shapiro
from the archive; first posted August 23, 2009
I'm excited to introduce this conversation between Cynthia Good and Nick Courtright, who I've paired because of their shared investment in travel, documentary poetics, and entrepreneurship in literature and the arts. Here, they discuss their latest collections, as well as the intersection of lived experience, craft, and the business of writing.
Cynthia Good is an award-winning poet, journalist, and former TV news anchor. She has written six books including Vaccinating Your Child, which won the Georgia Author of the Year award. She has launched two magazines, Atlanta Woman and the nationally distributed PINK magazine for women in business. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Adanna Journal, Awakenings, Book of Matches, Brickplight, Bridgewater International Poetry Festival, Cutthroat, Free State Review, Full Bleed, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hole in the Head Review, Main Street Rag, Maudlin House Review, MudRoom, Outrider Press, OyeDrum Magazine, The Penmen Review, Pensive Journal, Persimmon Tree, Pier-Glass Poetry, Pink Panther Magazine, Poydras, South Shore Review, The Ravens Perch, Reed Magazine, Tall Grass, Terminus Magazine, They Call Us, and Voices de la Luna and Willows Wept Review, Semi-Finalist: The Word Works 2021, among others. Her debut poetry collection is available for pre-order from Finishing Line Press.
Nick Courtright: I was drawn to place because the otherworldliness—and normalcy—of non-America called for a deeper exploration. I’m very aware of how fortunate I am to have seen a lot of the world, and what I found there was not just a bunch of tourist sites, but a reminder that the lives of others are just as rich and nuanced—and perhaps even more so—than ours in America, even though in America we tend to have a rather flat impression of the rest of the world.
It is a pleasure to introduce this conversation by two outstanding and generous literary citizens: Tina Cane and Rachel Abramowitz. In both writers' bodies of work, we see a poetics powered by community, enriched by conversation and emboldened by dialogue across genres and mediums.
Rachel Abramowitz is also the author The Birthday of the Dead, which just launched from Conduit Editions, as well as the chapbooks The Puzzle Monster, winner of the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun prize (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in 2022), and Gut Lust, the winner of the 2019 Burnside Review prize (Burnside Review Press, 2020). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Tin House Online, The Threepenny Review, Seneca Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Oxonian Review, POOL, jubilat, Sprung Formal, Transom, Colorado Review, and others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Oxford, and has taught English Literature at Barnard College in New York.
Tina Cane was born in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC in 1969 and grew up in the city’s East and West Village. She attended the University of Vermont, the Sorbonne and completed her master’s degree in French Literature at the University of Paris X-Nanterre and Middlebury College. She is the founder and director of Writers-in-the Schools, RI, for which she works as a visiting poet. Over the past twenty-five years, Tina has taught French, English, and creative writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island. Her poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including Spinning Jenny, The Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, Poem-a-Day. Her work,The Fifth Thought, was the 2008 Other Painters Press chapbook winner. Her books include The Fifth Thought,Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, and Body of Work. Tina was the 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and their three children. In 2020, Cane was named a poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Tina is also the creator/curator of the distance reading series, Poetry is Bread. Alma Presses Play, Tina's debut novel-in-verse for young adults readers, will be released in September 2021 with Penguin/ Random House Books.
Tina Cane: There's a poem I keep returning to called "Vantablack" from your new collection, The Birthday of the Dead. It's named for that blackest shade of paint ever made, but manages to encapsulate the book's exploration of how, in your words, "any human interaction" with the natural world "turns out to be devastating in unexpected ways." The thrust of this observation pervades your book, which is a place where "the forest fills and unfills, drops itself down root tubes and turns to dark lace." Where does this vision of our relationship with nature spring from? How would you characterize your relationship with the natural world?
In writings on her time as editor of The Dial, Marianne Moore coined the term "conversity" to describe the inherently dialogic nature of poetry. In that spirit, I'm pleased to present the following conversation between two contemporary writers who are both intriguing in their critiques of traditional genre categories: Maya Sonenberg, a masterful storyteller, who frequently places the tools of poetry in the service of narrative, and Beth McDermott, whose ekphrastic poems often apply performative language and lyricism to the task of engaging with, and thinking through, the questions posed by works of visual art. As this conversation unfolds, McDermott and Sonenberg consider such compelling topics as the gender politics of judgment, the relationship between writing and family, and the interplay of innovative writerly technique and the deeply personal.
Maya Sonenberg (above left) grew up in New York City and lived in Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, California, Oregon, and Paris, France before settling in Seattle, where she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Washington. Her newest collection of short stories, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters has received the Sullivan Prize and will be published by the University of Notre Dame press in August 2022. Her previous collections are Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature) and Voices from the Blue Hotel. Other fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Web Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, New Ohio Review, The Literarian, Hotel Amerika, and numerous other places.
Beth McDermott’s poetry appears in Pine Row, Tupelo Quarterly, Terrain.org, and Southern Humanities Review. Reviews and criticism about art and ecology appear in American Book Review, After the Art, Kenyon Review Online, and The Trumpeter. She’s an Assistant Professor of English at the University of St. Francis and recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award, an Illinois Speaks Micro-Grant, and first place in the Regional Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest. Her first book, Figure 1, just launched from Pine Row Press.
Beth McDermott: We both write about parenting. In a couple of my poems, i.e. “Judgment” or “Getting Ready,” I consider what it means to be judged as a parent. I see common feelings among my speakers and your character in “Painting Time,” for example. In that story, written from the second person point of view, we get the partner’s perspective of the “she,” who has spent most of her time as a parent looking for time to paint. How does the choice of that viewpoint speak to what it means to be a “bad mother”?
Maya Sonenberg: When I started writing “Painting Time,” I gave myself the challenge of using second person point of view, which I had never really done before, not that type of second person anyway where a narrator addresses one of the characters, rather than one character addressing another. I think I chose to address the husband/father as the “you” for a couple of reasons. The woman in that story is working so hard at being a “good” mother that she fears/feels she’s become a “bad” artist, and I wanted to see this struggle from the outside, through her spouse’s eyes but without the potential solipsism of the first person point of view. I hope the reader can see that he doesn’t think she’s a bad artist or a bad mother; she has internalized those judgments. However, while he’s extremely sympathetic towards her plight, and in fact tries to do whatever he can to help, he’s ultimately completely clueless about what she’s going through and also sort of jealous of her connection to the children. I carefully chose to present the male characters in this story and in “Hunters and Gatherers” in as sympathetic a light as I could muster to highlight the fact that misogyny, sexism, and expectations around motherhood are systemic rather than the actions or beliefs of isolated “bad” men.
Where else but in Asbury Park, New Jersey, would we find the prototypical Ashbery Amusement Park? The "Haight-Ashbury" ride has been compared to a cyclone with a mentally challenging multi-level polyphonous vocabulary, for richer or poorer, for better or verse, bringing candles to the cathedral of esthetic bliss, indifferent to political debate. The soundrack consists of Buxtehude, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Prokofiev, and hard-to-spell types like Penderecki and Schnittke. There's also a library, a collage gallery, and a Firesign Theater.
I interviewed John Ashbery more than once. Sometimes it was for a newspaper or magazine. Later, when I hosted “poetry forums” at the New School, at which the visitor would read for thirty minutes and then take questions from the moderator for an equal amount of time, John appeared in our series maybe half a dozen times.
In a public setting, he was a fun interview but not an easy one. He could, keeping a straight face, make me and the audience laugh. "Jack Benny was my role model," he confided. John was shy, guarded, even sometimes suspicious, and I would endeavor to reorient the conversation after one of his spontaneous witticisms brought us to a cul de sac. Sometimes he delivered a brilliant line in the most off-the-cuff manner. Always cordial, John was happiest when the ordeal was over and we could repair to Cafe Loup for martinis.
Nicole Santalucia and Dante Distefano are working on a book of "Dear John" letters they are writing. I offered to introduce such a book with a list of questions to ask JA now that he can no longer dodge them. Here's what I came up with:
Ask JA
Ask JA about rejections.
Ask JA whether anyone still calls him JA.
Ask JA whether anyone still calls him “Ashes” (Deerfield).
Ask JA whether he feels an affinity with others who have the initials JA, such as Joan Allen, who played Pat Nixon in Oliver Stone’s movie, and John Anderson, who ran for president in 1980, or John Adams who writes operas, and Jane Austen, who wrote great novels, and Joan of Arc, who saved France.
Ask JA for his frank opinion of Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I know I’m not supposed to like but I like it anyway.
Ask JA whether he feels an affinity with other Leos born on July 28 such as Jacqueline Kennedy, Marcel Duchamp, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Ask JA whether he, a southpaw, admires other lefthanders such as Sandy Koufax and Whitey Ford.
Ask JA about 1938 when he was eleven. Ask him if life then seemed “more real,” for the satisfaction of hearing him say “stop asking me all those biographer questions.”
Tell JA about the copyeditor of The Last Avant-Garde who said Ashbery is a homophobe.
Ask JA what if anything he remembers about “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” which we watched on TV in 1976.
Tell JA about the student who said “the more I understand John Ashbery, the less I understand his poetry.”
Ask JA if “understanding” is the booby prize.
Ask JA whether he can smoke in heaven and does he still favor unfiltered Gitanes?
Tell JA about Ashberyland, the amusement park in southern California, and the comic-strip character named Ashbery.
Dear John, I always enjoyed giving you good news and the latest po-biz gossip during a late morning phone call.
Tell JA that Nicole and Dante are writing him “Dear John” letters.
Dear JA, They love you, and isn’t it wonderful?
Ask JA about the game of word association in which each of us has to respond to “fear,” “near,” “queer,” “mere,” and “rear,” each a typo for “John.”
Dear JA, Is the secret of “The Skaters” that you were homesick for your boyhood, boring though it was at the time, full of snow and the loneliness of your diary?
Ask JA about the train ride to Chicago.
Dear JA, If you meet Nicole and Dante on Tuesday, Delmore Schwartz will come along for the ride.
Dear JA, did Norman Mailer’s ghost visit your rooms at Dunster House in your junior year at Harvard?
Dear John, What’s your opinion of “dear John” letters? As a genre, I mean?
Ask JA how he knew that Eurydice would have disappeared even if Orpheus didn’t turn around.
Ask JA why he likes Freud’s titles – “The Problem of Anxiety,” “Civilization and Its Discontents” – though you know he will dodge the question.
Ask JA if life is but a dream.
Ask JA whether his favorite stock is still Tootsie Roll, as he told me it was in 1988 or ’89 but has since denied it.
Ask JA what he really thinks.
-- David Lehman
Recently, I had the pleasure of reading a delightful collection of micro-fictions/prose poems: The House of Grana Padano by Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman. I have to confess that I was hesitant to open the book because I rarely enjoy reading collaborations. In my opinion they often read as inside jokes or private dialogs between two writers in which one riffs on the style and quirks of the other. But The House of Grana Padano proved to be an exception. It reads as if Meg and Jeff are one writer. Somehow, they composed seamlessly together. I wondered as I read it: are their sensibilities, artistry, and voices that similar? I thought I’d ask them about the process that brought this book into being.
NA: How did the book come about?
JF: Meg and I came together initially at a YouTube reading for Lit Youngstown. We were both fans of each other’s writing but had never met in person. We had exchanged some emails before the reading, but then after the event, we began meeting every Tuesday on Zoom. The darkness and loneliness of the pandemic created a real need in both of us to reach out, and our Zoom sessions were so energetic and lively. The book idea emerged spontaneously from these sessions. Meg brought it up, but I jumped on it. We had already been doing prompts together, and then almost spontaneously and unconsciously, we stepped into a story and began riffing off each other as we had done in our conversations. From there, we came up with various methods and approaches for working on pieces. At some point, we realized we were on our way to a book with six or seven different thematic threads.
NA: What are the best and/or the hardest aspects of composing with another prose poet or writer of micro fiction?
MP: Our book emerged out of playfulness and the need for something joyful. Things seemed to come easily. It was as if Jeff, and I had known each other all our lives, and the more we talked, the more we had in common. We trusted each other almost immediately and while writing, we always said “yes” to whatever creative ideas or images emerged in the initial writing phase. We would just keep writing, building on what each of us wrote, trying to see where our poems or micros might go. Our two voices never merged, but instead created a dynamic tension in the pieces. We revised every piece together. The hardest part might have been cutting pieces we really loved from the book, because they just didn’t fit. There are still one or two pieces we wish we hadn’t had to cut. Working with each other has been inspiring for our individual work as well. We were two strangers at the beginning, and now we’re brother and sister.
NA: I’d love it if you each picked a prose poem and commented on its evolution.
JF:
The Salesman Gets a Suit
My father walks into a clothing store. “Sell me a suit,” he says to a thin bald-headed man. Without even looking, the bald-headed man pulls a blue silk suit off the rack. “This suit is made for you,” he says holding the hanger in his right hand and letting the pants legs drape over his arm. “Just feel it.” My father brushes it gently with his fingers as though smoothing out the curls of his own hair. “I’m a salesman too,” he says. “I knew it,” the bald-headed man says. “I could tell the minute you entered the store.” The suit is shiny like the lobby in a posh hotel, shiny like a brand new Cadillac parked in the car dealer’s window. My father takes it into the dressing room, and when he comes out, the suit swells with his plump belly. The sleeves of the jacket swallow his hands. The pants legs sweep the floor. He looks short and fat, lost in cloth. “This suit makes you look like a whole new man, like someone ready to make a killing,” the bald-headed man says and leads him to the mirror. In the mirror, the suit shapes itself to his body, fits him to a tee. In the mirror, he’s as graceful as a shadow, as light on his feet as a cool breeze rustling his pants legs. He leans forward as if telling the suit a secret. He smiles, and the suit smiles back.
From The House of Grana Padano
Initially published in On the Seawall
I wrote “The Salesman Gets a Suit” to accompany Meg’s “My Mother the Realtor.” We both had parents who were in sales. This piece, like so many in the book, weaves a line between prose poem and micro. In the “Salesman Gets a Suit,” the salesman and his son enter a store that sells men’s suits. The store salesman spots them and begins pitching the father on a very expensive suit, and the father, though the suit clearly doesn’t fit him, buys it because he’s charmed by the store salesman. I did witness something like this when I was fifteen. But my father was buying an overcoat, not a suit. He was a very good salesman, but an easy target for flattery. The experience is transformed through the lens of a tale. The store salesman is like a sorcerer weaving a spell over the father, and the mirror is a magic mirror in which the suit suddenly fits perfectly and in which the father looks years younger. He smiles into the mirror, “and the suit smiles back.” The piece is a lyricized narrative that derives its power from images, associations, and rhythmic intensity.
MP:
Fatherless Daughters
In Springtime, abandoned daughters burst like myopic butterflies with binoculars attached to their faces while they try to identify their absent fathers, who zip through the clouds like geese, but they’re not geese, and they have no sense of direction. “Can you see me down here, Dad?” one abandoned daughter trills, while one father zigzags ever closer to the sun. “It’s hurting my eyes,” he yells waving his pale wings like flags. Another abandoned daughter spots a cloud in the shape of her father. “He wasn’t much of a father,” she says. “He’s better as a cloud.” Another daughter shouts, “Heads up!” as her father falls from the sky headlong into the crowd of abandoned daughters. The other fathers cringe and avoid looking down. “They’re out to get us,” they say. “They want money or hugs or something.” The daughters, tired of treading air, fling themselves toward their fathers, eager to bring one home, even if he’s someone else’s father, even if he never earns another dime, even if he sheds all his feathers—but the fathers prove illusive, no longer really fathers.
From The House of Grana Padano
Initially published in Plume
I grew up without a father and write about it a lot. Working with Jeff got me very excited about writing poems and stories informed by tales and fables. I wrote “Fatherless Daughters” in response to one of his pieces. I saw it almost like a painting in my mind with fathers floating in the sky and abandoned daughters below hoping to catch one. The piece creates an emotional landscape, a metaphorical reality that is somehow true to my own experience. It is darkly funny and perversely sad. Jeff and I share that sensibility, so it was easy for him to contribute. “Fatherless Daughters” is driven by images. The daughters in the piece are bereft. They want to know why the fathers have abandoned them, and though the fathers prove to be illusive, each of them is still hoping that one will fall to earth so she can claim him. I was trying to get a different angle on a story that is actually quite commonplace. The daughters are alert to finding their fathers, while simultaneously aware that the fathers aren’t real.
JEFF FRIEDMAN is the author of ten books of poems and mini stories, including The House of Grana Padano cowritten with Meg Pokrass (Pelekinesis, 2022); The Marksman (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020); and Floating Tales (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017); Friedman’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Poetry International, New England Review, The Antioch Review, and The New Republic. He has also been published in Alcatraz: An International Anthology of the Short Form (fall 2022), Awake: New Prose Poetry From the US, UK, and Australia (fall 2022), Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Jewish Poets, Flash Fiction Funny, Best Microfiction 2021 and 2022 and many other anthologies. Friedman has received numerous awards and prizes including a National Endowment Literature Translation Fellowship in 2016 and two individual Artist Grants from New Hampshire Arts Council. https://poetjefffriedman.com
MEG POKRASS is the author of 10 flash fiction books, including The House of Grana Padano (co-written with Jeff Friedman, Pelekinesis 2022), Spinning to Mars (2021) and The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down (Etruscan Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in over 1,000 literary journals including Electric Literature, American Journal of Poetry, McSweeney’s, Smokelong, Five Points. She has been anthologized in 3 Norton flash fiction anthologies: Flash Fiction International (2015), New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (2018), and the forthcoming Flash Fiction America. Meg’s flash fiction has been widely anthologized, appearing in The Best Small Fictions 2018, 2019, and 2022, Wigleaf Top 50, and the forthcoming Alcatraz: An International Anthology of the Short Form (Gazebo Books). She is the Founding Editor of Best Microfiction and New Flash Fiction Review. She has won the Blue Light Book award in 2021 and 2016. She lives in Inverness Scotland and wears too many hats. http://www.megpokrass.com
Kelly Weber's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, The Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University, where she served as an intern with Colorado Review. She lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.
Emma Bolden: Your debut full-length collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Can you tell us a bit about it?
Kelly Weber: I’m so excited for this collection to be making its way into the world. We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place considers asexuality, aromanticism, and the male gaze broadly through the prism of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. So a lot of the book is about myth-making and finding the lyric space and language for my experience of asexuality and aromanticism. Some of the poems are variations on prose poem sonnet forms in order to consider and question inherited poetic traditions (and assumptions) of eros and its containers. They’re poems that are heavily concerned with place, particularly the kinds of rural areas I grew up in as a queer person.
EB: One of the things I admire most about your work is the way that you work with form and structure: prose poems with virgules, lines broken internally with white space, placement on the page. How do you approach form and structure in your work?
KW: Thank you so much for saying that! When I approach structure for a poem, part of my process for finding the right form is playing with visual arrangements that excite me. Sometimes a poem that just isn’t “going” in the revision process unlocks when I start pushing it around the page in new ways—the poem begins to “move” and breathe differently and the ideas change when I try out caesura, or shift from traditional lines to a prose poem with virgules, or use any other form idea that I think is fun to play with. The poem may not stay in that form, but I always learn something in the process. Sometimes the key is just trying out different forms to unlock the poem’s rhythm. Form can be a way to find pulse. Changes in punctuation, breath, and visual arrangement on the page can make the small but ultimate difference to surprise me and, I think, surprise the poem out into the open, finally. More experimental forms also feel like less pressure than really traditional-looking sonnets or villanelles, for example. Creating my own form rules clears the room out—so to speak—so it’s just me and the poem learning the dance together.
EB: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve been given as a writer?
KW: Such a hard question! I think all writing advice I’ve been given comes from a good place, but I ultimately learned a lot by determining which advice wasn’t right for me. I think the advice to know the purpose and function of every single part of your and your book is well-meaning, but I think that can reduce some of the mystery. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received came out of a roundtable conversation with some other writers and a visiting lecturer several years ago, when this subject came up. We were talking about the common advice that, as a writer, you’re supposed to know how to justify every single choice you make in a poem and understand everything happening in a poem and a book. And basically the conversation became about debunking that—that, in fact, there’s no way to understand everything happening in a book or poem, and in fact part of the pleasure of poetry is its mystery. Like another incredible writer, Kristin McIntyre, has said—sometimes we don’t know exactly what is happening in our poems, but we know it’s poetry. There’s a lot to be said for instinct. Dan Beachy-Quick talks about finding the formal logic of the poem while also not really knowing that or focusing on that while in the writing of the poem itself (that’s such a terrible paraphrase—sorry, Dan!), and I think that’s become such a part of my poetics. You don’t have to know everything of how one of your poems is working. Sometimes it just clicks in mysterious ways. You feel it in your body like weather. Even if you’re an expert in craft and critical analysis, I think it’s important for all of us to find the areas of mystery we can’t fully explain in our own poems and books—it’s how we know the poem is an alive thing.
EB: As an asexual writer myself, I feel that your work is an important and vital addition to asexual literature. I’d love to hear your thoughts about asexual and aro/ace representation, in your own work and/or in literature more generally.
KW: Thank you so much! That means a lot to me! I think the biggest thing for me in my own work is that my poems come out of just one person’s experience. Everyone who’s ace or aro has their own unique, individual experience, so my poems reflect what it’s like for me to be ace, but others who are ace may have very different experiences from this. When I started to write poems about being queer, I had kind of a tough time finding other books of poems about asexuality. What representation there is (in poetry and beyond) is still systemically, predominantly white (and cis, and able-bodied, and thin-bodied, and neuroconforming / neurotypical, and other privileged identities) and dominated by white voices, like me—I have a ton of privilege and I’ve benefited from it. We need to improve that in our field and beyond, big time. We need a much more diverse variety of voices for true representation.
Outside of poetry, there are a couple great books out right now that I think have brought the topic and experiences of asexuality into wider conversations: Angela Chen’s Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex and Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality. I hope asexuality continues to enter the discourse more.
EB: What are you working on now?
KW: Currently I’m working on and thinking about poems that engage with the people dear to me whom I love platonically—family and chosen family and the many beloveds in my life. I’m also thinking a lot about my gender identity as a nonbinary person and the communities I’m so grateful to be a part of. I’m thinking about spaces for queer joy, including—sometimes—the body.
EB: What are you reading right now?
KW: I’m currently reading the anthologies Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics and Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. I also just started The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Iliana Rocha’s just stunning new book from Tupelo. I got to hear her read some of it a few weeks ago for an offsite AWP reading and it’s incredible. Highly recommend all three books, especially for National Poetry Month.
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Continue reading "Poet Spotlight: Kelly Weber [by Emma Bolden]" »
Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light, and Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist. He is the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, he lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel.
Kristina Marie Darling: In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also a gifted literary critic, with recent essays published or forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and more. What has your practice as a literary critic opened up within your poetry?
Nick Courtright: I think it’s freed me to be more merciful in terms of what my poetry can mean. My critical approach revolves around the embrace of the most expansive interpretive range possible, one that takes into account the words, the history, the context, the whole bubbling heap of bad or wrong interpretations inflected by one’s own personal biases, etc. Because I take that tack in my critical appraisal of the meanings of others’ poems, I have to be generous in terms of what my own poems can mean. So although at this stage of my poetry career I’ve moved away from vagueness and abstraction, and try to paint very clear images, arguments, and narratives into my poetry, I really love for the overall takeaway of a poem to be ambiguous. I want the poems to be non-committal about whether their speaker is a hero or a villain, for example.
KMD: In the spirit of the excerpt featured here, entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence,” I’d love to hear more about your literary and artistic influences. What poets shaped your approach to craft and thematics?
NC: My earlier influences were of the Bidart, Blake, Bly, Lorca angle, with a love for odd images and confounding syntax and a pursuit of the ineffable. And in my latest poetry collection The Forgotten World I was thinking a lot about Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong and others who just write with aching beauty about difficult personal journeys. But lately I’ve found myself most drawn to narrative directness and the comic, so I’ve been reading more George Bilgere, Mary Biddinger, Anders Carson Wee, and Emilia Phillips, for example. Highly recommend all of those—brilliant and bright. And enjoyable! All of those poets surprise me constantly, and like all great writers, they mess with other writers, transforming other writers’ aesthetics and subject matter. It's impossible and pointless (and less fun) to resist.
KMD: I’d love to chat about the extent to which poetry and criticism overlap and intersect. To what extent do you see poetry as an act of reading and response, a deconstruction of work that’s come before your own?
NC: I think all poetry is shaped by its precursors, whether hundreds of years earlier or the new release dog-eared on the bedside table. “Nothing new under the sun,” etc. But despite the derivative nature of all works of art, there’s much play at the boundary in which one’s own consciousness—itself shaped by the explosions of stars and deoxyribonucleic acid and junk streaming on Netflix—can contribute something at least with the illusion of newness. Even if it’s all just the shuffling of a preordained deck of cards, we can be surprised when we end up for four aces one right after another, and the more open we are to the alchemy of one’s own artistic collision with history.
Hasanthika Sirisena work has been anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017), in Every Day People: The Color of Life(Atria Books, 2018), and twice named a notable story by Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. She is currently faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Susquehanna University and she is acting editor at West Branch magazine. Her books include the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and the forthcoming essay collection Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University 2021).
Kristina Marie Darling: You are an accomplished cross-disciplinary practitioner, whose work exists in spite of and beyond the categories of writing and art. How did you first become interested in creating cross-disciplinary work?
Hasanthika Sirisena: I started drawing when I was very young. I never thought of myself as very smart and I struggled with English and with writing. Drawing allowed me to have confidence and gave me a means of articulating myself. I went on to study fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago and, in fact, have a BFA so I have a long and deep training in visual media. I really only started writing in my early thirties and for a little while I stopped drawing. Cross-disciplinary and hybrid work has allowed me to merge these two identities.
KMD: Tell me some of the ways that cross-disciplinary work is or can be politically charged.
HS: Cross-disciplinary work often asks us to think about and rethink our assumptions of form. For example, I’m currently reading Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson’s The Trojan Woman, A Comic. I was delighted when the book arrived and was the size and heft of a children’s book. The translation itself rethinks what it means to actually make a translation. The opening references James Baldwin and Joan Didion (and probably a few other writers I missed.) I can’t read Greek but I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by assuming that the original play doesn’t allude to Baldwin much less quote Didion. The playfulness here—with the boundaries and capaciousness of language and intent—force me to confront how we decide who gets to make art and the audiences they make art for.
But it’s the images themselves that are extraordinary. The images stand in for the actor and ask us to meditate on what an illustration—either drawn or acted—actually is. How does an illustration contain force and agency? All this for a work that is also a profoundly antiwar message.
Honestly, just asking us to stop and think and deliberate is a political act.
KMD: I’d love to hear about one piece from TQ that you selected or curated that stayed with you. What made it memorable?
HS: Well, I wasn’t the one who selected Sarah Minor’s “A Poetry Comic” in Issue 25 but I’m deeply in love with it. Everything is so expertly rendered, from the quality, and energy, of the line drawings to the beauty of the language. I feel I could stare forever into the flames of “Photos from a fight appear to capture two people in love” panel.
Laci Mosier is a former student of mine and I want to plug her collages (also in Issue 25). She is dedicated to the physical process of cutting, slicing, tearing—as opposed to computer generated collages—and I loved the physicality, humor, and deep intelligence of her work. (Quick note: I also do a lot of digital drawing and painting so I’m not at all against that.)
KMD: What advice do you have for poets who are interested in creating hybrid or cross-disciplinary work, who excel at writing but perhaps don’t have the technical facility with film, collage, or visual mediums?
Continue reading "Editor Spotlight: Hasanthika Sirisena [by Kristina Marie Darling]" »
Jenny Grassl's poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Laurel Review, Green Mountains Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ocean State Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, and other journals. Her work was published in a National Poetry Month feature of Iowa Review. Her manuscript DEER WOMAN IN THE DINING ROOM was selected as a runner-up for the Tupelo Press July open reading in 2021. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Kristina Marie Darling: The poems featured here use the page as a canvas, a visual field. In a world of left-margined poems, I find this approach bold, effective, and refreshing. What advice do you have for poets who hesitate or struggle to take risks with form, to use white space as a unit of composition?
Jenny Grassl: This is a great topic. I would say start by realizing that a block of left-margined poem stanzas or text is like a monument in a landscape. Often, its effect is to overpower that landscape, and overcome any evidence of the void. A poem that uses the whole page IS the landscape, and engages with the void. Get wandering, and start the journey. Push form to push content. Of course some poems work best in the traditional way.
There exist great experiments with form in poetry. I am not sure how they lost relevance to so many of today's poets. I am thinking of Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, John Ashbery, Tom Clark with Lewis Warsh, and Anne Waldman, among others. I was exposed to their work early on, and assumed I had permission to compose a page creatively. Lewis was my earliest mentor.
KMD: In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also known as a visual artist. What has your cross-disciplinary practice, and your background in the fine arts, opened up within your poetry?
JG: In visual art, working with form/content tension while seeking beauty, constantly re-defines beauty. This has had real consequences for my poetry.
Many issues are the same in both poetry and art: gesture, conflict, philosophy, story, emotion, social history, image, and patterning. Not least is celebrating the medium. Poetry that foregrounds language functions for me the way painterly painting does. However, I do not mean the conceptual language of Language poets. I prefer something more sensual. The medium reveals content, and is not subservient to it. Collage and layering as expressions of language have become more important in my poetry through visual work. And, indeed, the image—I build my poems with images.
KMD: Tell me about your text-based visual artworks and collages.
JG: In digital collages, I work back and forth with elements and fragments of photographs, paintings, drawings, bits of nature, and typography. The shape is panoramic, yet I think of them as interior landscapes. I am interested in how the
wide view might investigate something personal— making maps of consciousness.
In the paintings I focus on automatic writing. I paint, scramble, and layer the words so the meaning is obscured, while still existing with integrity within the work. Each letter is part of an automatic poem. Because the words are concealed, the painting becomes a texture of pure language.
KMD: What can poets learn from visual artists?
JG: Visual artists play, visually. This is not to say that is all they do. Of course there is work and rework. Poets have the same possibility.
Figure/ground relationships are important to visual artists, and can be for poets, in their use of text in white space. Creating positive and negative space, the tension of beauty emerges. This is not merely formal. We can also learn from painters and sculptors who honor their mediums. Language is actually as much of the body as of the mind.
KMD: In your poetry, the silences and ruptures are nearly as charged as the words themselves. Can you speak to the power of silence and the unsaid in poetry?
JG: Silence and rupture exist in a woman's life in the shadow of monuments.
Break apart a tightly bound form and new possibilities are created. Sometimes this is urgent and disorderly—graffiti on the monuments, or a toppling. Often a phantom text emerges. Silence always visits the page. The question is how is it shaped or left to wander. What does it mean? In visual art the color red creates the after image of green. The darkness of text creates an aura of light but also the void.
KMD: What else are you working on? What can readers look forward to?
Continue reading "Poet Spotlight: Jenny Grassl [by Kristina Marie Darling]" »
Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her experimental poem, Future Revisions, was exhibited at the Rail Park billboard in Philadelphia in summer 2021. An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, and Voices of Our Nations (VONA). For fifteen years, Cynthia worked as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser in social movements for gender, racial, economic, and migrant justice. Her fourth poetry collection, A Tinderbox in Three Acts, is a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay and is forthcoming in fall 2022 from BOA Editions.
Wendy Chen: Congratulations on the upcoming publication of your fourth poetry collection A Tinderbox in Three Acts this fall as the next BOA Blessing the Boats Selections title! Has the way you put together poetry collections changed over the years?
Cynthia Dewi Oka: Thank you so much! I think the way I put together collections has changed from project to project, depending on the conditions of my writing life. Until very recently, I’ve always had to write around my primary responsibilities as a working mother. For instance, the poems in both Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Dinah Press, 2012; revised edition, Thread Makes Blanket, 2016) and Salvage (Northwestern University Press, 2017) were written in pre-dawn hours, which were the only time I could be alone and focus on poetry without interruption. With Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021), I had a bit more spaciousness because my son was older, and I could enforce fiercer boundaries around my writing time as an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. I still had to work full time to support my family but at least I didn’t have to worry about debt because the program fully funded my studies with the Holden Fellowship. That was such a gift. I also researched and completed the first draft of A Tinderbox in Three Acts during that period.
WC: Are there any particularly formative experiences to your identity as a writer?
CDO: Teaching myself English by trial-and-error as a ten-year-old because the ESL program at my new school in Canada could not accommodate an Indonesian speaker was the most formative experience for me as a writer. I basically read everything in the school library with the help of a little electronic dictionary. It was helpful in terms of vocabulary, but I had to learn grammar by visually noting syntactical patterns in the texts, and then trying them out myself by writing short stories. Indonesian does not have tenses, so learning the nuances of time in relation to action in English was a bit like learning a new physics. Of course, I never encountered characters “like” me or contexts “like” the one I came from, but that has always been my reality, even when I lived in Indonesia because my family is Chinese Indonesian and under the New Order regime, most public expressions of Chinese culture and identity were outlawed. It’s wonderful, of course, to feel recognized by a text, but to me, experiencing difference and becoming aware of a wider range of human possibilities (and limitations) has always been the primary joy of literature. I didn’t, however, learn to speak English comfortably until I started listening to hip hop in my early teens. Before that, English just kind of sounded and felt like running water to me. The sonic patterning to rhythm, lexical play, and the enunciative and emotive qualities of speech as art in hip hop made it much more familiar to how I physically experienced my native tongue. Later, I taught myself poetry in a similar way, by reading widely – not just formally, but internationally beyond the American poetry echo chamber – and experimenting with syntactical, visual, and sonic patterns.
WC: What is your revision process like? When do you know when a poem is “done’?
Continue reading "Poet Spotlight: Cynthia Dewi Oka [by Wendy Chen]" »
AR: How did you become a poet? What is your process?
DD: First, of course, I was named after a poet. The Commedia played an important role in my family history. My great grandfather brought a copy of it with him when he came to America from Sicily. Poetry was a constant, if muted, presence throughout my childhood. My grandmother loved Frost and Sandberg and Millay. I she would occasionally recite the poems she’d memorized in grade school (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fog,” “First Fig”). My father, who was a postal worker, loved Emily Dickinson, so her books were always around, and I read her at an early age. We also had The Iliad, The Odyssey, Don Quixote (I remember reading the poems in the preface to the novel at an early age), The Aeneid, El Cid. My mother, who was a stay-at-home mom and then a secretary when I was growing up, was a great reader too. Both of my parents were extremely religious Roman Catholics (my mother converted from Southern Baptist to Catholic), so there was the poetry of the Bible as well, especially The Book of Job, The Psalms, The Book of Proverbs, The Song of Songs.
I’ve always loved reading, and from grade school on I kept a journal. When I was eighteen, I read Allen Ginsberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Gerard Manley Hopkins for the first time. That trio of poets made me want to write poetry. I continued to write because I fell so in love with poetry in all its varied forms, and writing it helped me (continues to help me) to be a better reader of it. My writing life will always be subordinate to my reading life.
My process varies from poem to poem, but for the most part now, I come up with an idea, a phrase, a title for
a poem and when I have time, I sit down and write a draft. For most poems, a draft will take about two hours to write and I’m reading aloud and revising as I write. Sometimes, I might begin a poem during my lunch break (I work as a high school English teacher) and then finish it after the last bell rings and before I pick up my daughter from daycare. Then, I might go back to it after the children are asleep or in the morning before work. Usually, I take a poem as far as I can within a few days, reading it aloud and revising it as necessary. Then, I set it aside, and either send it out to magazines or just let it breathe in a word document (I mostly write on the computer). Sometimes, there might be minor revisions from that point until it is published in a book. And even after that, there are lingering questions. For example, in the poem that starts this interview, I’m not happy with the rhythm of the line: “my dear little one. Teach me what the fire.” I think it might be better to change the sentence structure of the poem so that the line reads: “Teach me, my dear little one, what the fire…” If I’m ever lucky enough to have a Selected or Collected poems, I might make that change, but I’m also aware of many poets (Auden comes to mind) who tinkered too much with old poems. I’m no Auden, of course, but I understand the impulse toward endless refinement, and how corrosive that impulse can be.
AR: Your poems take on various forms. Which forms are you most comfortable working with? Do you choose form before writing the poem, or does the poem dictate the form?
DD: Like many contemporary American poets, I write countless sonnets. I’ve written much of my poetry in ten-syllable lines, sometimes in a kind of Miltonic blank verse, but often just letting the rhythms ride (and writhe) against the syllabic constraints. I’ve written prose poetry consistently throughout the years, inspired by David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, which has been one of the most important, and most often revisited, anthologies in my reading life. Nin, I’d argue, is the greatest living practitioner of the American prose poem. It’s a form I love to read and think about. For about a year, I’ve been writing in a stanzaic nonce pattern I’m calling “stepped septasyllabic cinquains.”
DD: Like many contemporary American poets, I write countless sonnets. I’ve written much of my poetry in ten-syllable lines, sometimes in a kind of Miltonic blank verse, but often just letting the rhythms ride (and writhe) against the syllabic constraints. I’ve written prose poetry consistently throughout the years, inspired by David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, which has been one of the most important, and most often revisited, anthologies in my reading life. Nin, I’d argue, is the greatest living practitioner of the American prose poem. It’s a form I love to read and think about. For about a year, I’ve been writing in a stanzaic nonce pattern I’m calling “stepped septasyllabic cinquains.”
NA: Thanks for your kind words! I am blushing! Can you give an example of your stanzaic nonce pattern poems?
DD: It’s a fancy way of describing seven syllable per line, five line stanzas, written in a recurring zigzag pattern. Here’s a few stanza from MIDWHISTLE, where I’m invoking William Heyen and ruminating on his Whitmanian and Dickinsonian pedigree:
Sing for us, the dragonfly
in the arc of an anthem,
the bumblebee zigzagging
the sidelines of an empire.
I praise your Lord Dragonfly,
Bill, & praise the ambition
it must take to un-Amherst
a clover & a bee from
the funerals in a brain,
from the prairie and its yawp.
NA: I am so impressed. You are a master of many forms!
DD: I don’t think I’ve mastered many forms, but I have certainly tried to (with varying degrees of success). I’ve written hundreds of failed villanelles, thousands of botched haiku, fifty or so unremarkable sestinas, and a rusty old red wheelbarrow full of ballads, triolets, rondeaus, bops, kwansabas, pantoums, haibun, ghazals, abecedarians, and so on. I have one sestina in Lullaby, and one kwansaba suite and one abecedarian in my second book, but I haven’t mastered any of those forms. Nevertheless, I enjoy working in those forms, especially when I’m thinking about a poem that I love written in that form. It’s so impressive to me when a contemporary poet writes in one of these inherited forms in a way that expands the structure and strengthens the tradition. I think with wonder and admiration of how a poem like Tim Seibles’s “All the Time Blues Villanelle” can go toe to toe with “The Waking” and “One Art” and “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night.”
Sometimes, I choose the form before writing the poem. That approach doesn’t often result in a poem I’m willing to send out into the world. I’ll write a sestina, but it will feel forced or academic or less immediately resonant than I want it to be or it’s just not making sense in the way I’d like it to make sense, so I’ll set it aside and never think of it again. Most often though, the form will suggest itself organically as I’m writing. At some point, maybe even within the first few words, I’ll see that this poem wants to effloresce into a sonnet, or this is a prose poem, or this demands quatrains. Then, I will work toward the form by accretion and improvisation and revision-in-the-moment.
My three books of poetry also use form as an organizing principle. Sonnets thread through the books as do prose poems and other poetic structures in much the same way that themes and tropes thread the collections, providing order amid a species of repetition.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.
Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains.
Nin Andrews’ lucky numbers are nine and seven. Nine, she says, is navy blue. Seven is red, Victory Red, like her mother’s lipstick when she was a child.
A Conversation with Poetry Co-Editor Hannah Beresford
Lauren Hilger: What is your earliest memory of working with NT poems?
Hannah Beresford: My first submission period with NT, I printed all of the submissions. It was so extra. T Kira literally said, “This is so extra.” What experience I had of an editorial nature was in workshops, and I’d only been in workshops where we distributed hard copies and marked them up by hand. I didn’t know how to get in that mode, to really sink into a poem, through a computer screen. I still feel that way, but am learning restraint.
I am often surprised by how much being an editor–getting behind the scenes of submittable–does not buffer me from the anxiety of submitting, even despite my better judgment. There is so much work we love and have to pass on. Every journal says that, but it really is true! And yet, when those rejects come in my inbox, I lose that context–I feel small again. Does being an editor help you field the trials of being a poet? And if so, help, tell me how!
LH: Hah! I have a perverse love for the admin of submitting. I try to maintain the same amount of submissions out at any time. I'm always shocked to receive a personal note or nice rejection, though. It's the moment that breaks (with a human chord) the robotic process I want it to be.
LH: How do you feel about the old adage that one has to read the lit mag before submitting?
HB: Sure! In a yes or no sense. Is it a venue for my work, or maybe not so much? If you’re unsure, what have you to lose (unless they charge submission fees)? But, I wouldn’t advise writing toward an aesthetic with a particular venue in mind.
LH: I’m wondering, how do you recognize in your own reading that you are gravitating toward a poem?
HB: This is usually a sensory response. My reading or mind’s eye is saturated by a color. That leaves the most lasting impression on me. Then, I experience the poem and its color in a tactile or corporeal way. The metronomic organs have a lot to do with how I experience creative work. Breath, heart rate. And secondarily, the reactive organs. A poem that stays in my mind hasn’t transcended for me. I had a student who would yell “goosies!” when she loved a poem in workshop. We talk about that a lot—whatever you call it. Goosebumps, most often. I don’t know what it is from a scientific standpoint, but when I feel that, I think it’s a response without an outlet. Maybe because it’s a response to something imaginary, or maybe because it’s a response that feels indeterminable, unresolvable. Empathy is unresolvable. Anxiety, fear, desire. Poetry is corporeal, at its genesis, poetry is an art form of and through the body. We experience it mostly on the page now. Maybe I like a poem that knows its roots are in bodies. For a moment it activates and occupies me from some ancient lineage. I’m a grounding rod, and then it’s gone again. Then, right there, is a particular weightlessness. Maybe the relief of feeling hyper-embodied registers like an instant disembodiment. The poem is super-humanizing, then exalting. Yeah, goosies!
LH: How soon do you know a piece is asking for you to take it seriously?
HB: In short, it’s a matter of subversion. When a piece continually defies my expectation, I feel most provided for. I hardly ever want to know where I’m going. I want to surrender to the lead, but predictabilities will keep me engaging with the work in a mechanical way. I don’t think a reader can help that; when you see tracks, you follow them. When I feel sure that I can’t get where the piece is going any faster than it will take me there, I’ll resign to the line, or the word, or the page. I want to be humbled, to feel overthrown.
[No Tokens Issue 9 Cover: Erika Diehl, 2018, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, shot with a Fuji x100]
HB: What is a first poem that moved you, and how has your reception changed over the years?
LH: Bruce Weigl’s "What Saves Us" felt like it had slipped some message under the door for me. As a Catholic kid reading this poem, I kind of fell asleep midway through and thought "yea yea yea okay I know where we're going with this." The end then knocked me out. It still does, in fact, I never remember the end when I bring this poem to mind. I remember the girl, her skirt, the religiosity, but I forget what made me love it: that spooky, unanswerable end!
Tell me, how does working as an editor across genre and collections aid in your curating of individual poems as units?
HB: I know it isn’t fashionable to prescribe to genre, and I get that. I’m on board. I don’t think there are genre specific limitations. But it would be untrue to say that there are not strengths specific to the differences between how I experience most poems and most prose. (Here, I am permitting an assumption that, more often than not, a prose work exceeds a poetical work in length or volume or time attended to it, per unit.) For example: I love a poem that knows where its ground is but levitates above it. I love that tension, I love that defiance. There is definition, a contour, in the refusal to anchor. To what extent is that kind of suspension above, or resistance to, a grounding plane sustainable in book-length prose? I won’t answer that question. I don’t know! Anything can be done. So, to your question, the more I read and edit and learn across genres, the more I look at a poem and think: here’s an opportunity! I can be pressed to spend more time in this, I can be asked more easily to re-read, I can have more questions in the end. I’m here for it—give me stratums, and coding, and metaphor, give me words to learn and research to be done. A treasure hunt, a Russian doll, the onion—all the clichés. Someone has committed, there’s time to be spent!
As an addendum here, it would be negligent to disregard sonics. To me, the sonic quality of a piece overlays or underpins any and every other decision the writer makes. It is a constant accompaniment. It informs everything, but it precludes nothing. Should prose by its nature, regardless of volume or length, be held to any lesser standard of intentionality of sonics than poetry is? Intentionality is key. Should all prose be harmonious, undulating, lyrical, sonorous, or hypotactic? Should all poetry? I want to feel assured that the sonics of a work were a choice; purposeful. Discordance can inform or reinforce meaning or character. Redundancy, imbalance—too. And sometimes, yes, musicality is affecting.
HB: You and I have talked a lot over the years about poetry’s reception in the popular-ish culture. This AWP we talked more specifically about poetry’s reception in the literary culture. If you could speak to any one misconception or have any one thing known about poetry–whether to the greater public, or even amongst writers–what would it be?
LH: Poetry threatens everything I think I know sometimes too! And that's okay! Something I say at the beginning of every new class I teach is "you don't have to apologize for not knowing anything about poetry, not being a poet, or hating poetry. You don't have to apologize for being a poet. There is no difference! We're all encountering it together!"
How have you sensed NT has evolved or changed?
HB: Maybe it is not so much that we have changed, but our opportunities have broadened. In the beginning, I felt a strong sense of joining the collective of a brilliant masthead. Of course, that is still true—the honor of my life. But more and more, I see NT becoming something of its own as well. More folks have heard of NT and so our slush is more and more dynamic and, honestly, stacked. It’s hit after hit. Our reach as a journal exceeds our individual orbits more and more. There are so many talented people out there. I feel lucky that NT is on the radar of all of our submitters, and more of them every year.
What did you expect when you came on board with NT at its very inception? What did NT mean to you then, and what does it mean to you now?
LH: I met our founding EIC T Kira at MacDowell and first heard about the magazine over breakfast one morning. After I was offered the position, I remember hoping she'd trust me and that I could do a good job. Almost a decade in, I still want to just do as much as I can. Learning from and connecting with contributors means everything to me.
What is your hope for NT's future?
HB: I love the young writers and poets prizes so much. I feel like that’s where my heart is. The young poets blew us away! I’d love to see NT grow more on a community level; programming and initiatives that extend beyond the literary world. An inclusive point of accessibility for reading and writing.
[No Tokens cakes along with Poetry Co-Editors Lauren Hilger & Hannah Beresford]
[a conversation with short story writer and playwright, Abuchi Modilim]
LH: I’ve been thinking about reverence and how to define it for myself. What makes you reverent of some writers (beyond just admiring their work?)
AM: I think reverence should be a personal thing. I revere writers who support emerging writers. I revere writers with great personalities too but the former is what I find most interesting.
LH: The writers I revere most, I feel like are excavating me from something very dull that keeps me from really seeing. Sometimes that dullness is just getting wrapped up in the day – a lot ushers past me unobserved. If I give myself ten minutes to read a hero, I notice how much I’m ignoring!
[Esiaba Irobi]
AM: "How much I'm ignoring." It is the phrase. No writer is completely free of this. When I’m not writing, I go back to E. C. Osondu and Wole Soyinka. I like how E.C. Osondu writes. Effortlessly. His writing screams freedom. I read Chigozie Obioma, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Okey Ndibe, Chika Unigwe, Esiaba Irobi, I can't exhaust the names. But undoubtedly, I have read E. C. Osondu more. Wole Soyinka's play 'The Lion And The Jewel' taught me the craft of playwriting. His characters are real. The originality of his poetic dialogue is incomparable. Who are the writers you go back to?
[Lauren, with her copy]
LH: Right now we’re back with Pizarnik, Tranströmer, and Zbigniew Herbert. Do you think you write for the kind of reader you are?
[Pizarnik's books are treasures]
AM: I write what I would love to read. And I don't have specific readers in mind when I am writing. Writing a good story or play is my foremost obligation when I sit to write. I focus on the form, and not intention. You write for your kind of readers?
LH: I think I’m writing with the idea of telling a secret, whoever is receiving that is beyond me. What do you find mysterious or unknowable about your own work? Does that change per genre you’re working in?
AM: This question reminded me about the writing workshop facilitated by J.K Anowe at the University of Nigeria. He had asked us to study our writing to find out the spectacular thing about it that we don't know. It was that day that I discovered that I often have a weird character in my writing. I was surprised. I was never aware until after that workshop. And this does not change per genre. You would see this character in my short stories and plays.
LH: Do you tend to consider your audience as your contemporaries, or do you think about the future?
AM: First, I consider my contemporaries. I also think about how my work would carry on into the future but I don't let it bother me. Great works would live after the writer is gone. It is not the writer who decides that. The works of William Shakespeare who died in 1616 are still being taught in universities around the world. I use him for this example because of the era in which he wrote. I am sure he was not writing for us then but we are reading him today.
[The Tragedy of Macbeth, 2021]
LH: How did your genres come to you?
AM: The genres I now write short stories and plays came naturally to me. I didn't force them. I wrote poems in my early days of writing. I stopped writing poems to focus on short stories and plays. I don't chew my fingers when I sit and face the screen of my laptop to write a short story or play. And I am currently working on a full-length play that will be published in 2023. Although now, I write poems once in a while and luckily for me good journals accept them. I had entered for Jack Grapes Poetry Prize in 2021 and made the semi-finalist list.
I think the literary writer is first a poet. It doesn't matter if they are writing poetry or not. Whichever language the writer chooses to write with, reflects poetry. Have you written other genres before?
LH: I started as a fiction writer and took a long time to admit I was a poet. I was most afraid and most affected by poetry. There’s no turning around now though, I want to stay here.
Abuchi Modilim is an Igbo-born storyteller and playwright. He is the winner of the 2021 Arojah Students Playwriting Prize. And the curator of Enyo: An Anthology of Contemporary African Plays. His writing has appeared in No Tokens Journal, Jellyfish Review, Kalahari Review, Abandon Journal, Samjoko Magazine, and is forthcoming in Native Skin, the State University of New York Praxis: Journal of Gender and Cultural Critiques, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions. Currently, he is studying English and literary studies with a minor in Theatre and film studies, at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
NA: You said in the first part of this interview series that you collaborate with your wife on community poetry projects through the Tioga Arts Council in upstate New York, which she runs. And that you two have curated ekphrastic and reverse ekphrastic exhibits. I’d love to see a sample of what that exhibit looks like?
DD: In our most recent exhibit, which was funded by a grant from the Poetry Foundation, we gave poems to
local artists and had the artists paint, sculpt, or collage a response to the poetry. The poets featured were you, David Lehman, Richard Blanco, Eloisa Amezcua, Christine Kitano, Nicole Santalucia, H.L. Hix, William Heyen, María Isabel Álvarez, Faisal Mohyuddin, Christian Teresi, Leah Umansky, Nicole Santalucia, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Joe Weil, and a few others. My wife also made broadsides of the poem and artwork. We had local elementary school children respond to lines from the poems, as well, and we hung their crayoned responses in the children’s gallery, which is attached to the main gallery at Tioga Arts Council. Posted on the right is Richard Blanco’s “Cloud Anthem” from his most recent collection. The collage/painting was done by the artist, Andrea Kelleher.
NA: You collaborate with other poets, recently with Nicole Santalucia on a collection of Ashbery poems. And I heard that this book, Generations, inspired you to write a long poem in response to William Heyen. I wondered if you could talk a little about those projects and/or poems?
DD: Nicole and I have been collaborating on our Ashbery book for over two years now; the book is a series of epistolary prose poems addressed to John Ashbery. The poems began as letters to each other mediated by the figure of John Ashbery. I’m not sure what the final shape of this project will be, but I’ve enjoyed working on it with Nicole, who is such a dear friend and such a wonderful poet. I feel that I’m always learning from her, and she’s so funny, in her work and in real life. I’m so lucky to have her as a friend (and her wife Deanna Dorangrichia, who is an amazing artist). These friendships were given to me by poetry.
I also wrote a long poem titled MIDWHISTLE, written in stepped septasyllabic cinquains and addressed to Bill Heyen and to my son, Dante Jr., who was unborn when I wrote it. I think it’s safe to say this is the first long poem written simultaneously to an octogenarian and to a fetus.
I’ve always wanted to write a long poem. As an undergraduate I read and admired A.R. Ammons’s Garbage and Tape for the Turn of the Year, Williams’s Paterson, and Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares. I’ve tried on many occasions to write my way into a book-length poem, but I could never find a way. Then, I read David Lehman’s Playlist (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) and reading that book started me thinking of the long poem again. Reading Bill Heyen’s long poem, To William Merwin (Mammoth Books, 2007), along with the impending birth of my son and my deep engagement with Heyen’s oeuvre, precipitated the initial outpouring, which became MIDWHISTLE.
Thanks to Sean Bishop and Ron Wallace, the University of Wisconsin Press picked up MIDWHISTLE and it will come out in spring 2023 as part of the Wisconsin Poetry Series. I’m excited to see this book come into the world along with the other collections that will be published in the series during 2022-2023: American Sex Tape by Jameka Williams, Shopping or The End of Time by Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Betsy Sholl’s As if a Song Could Save You, Joshua Burton’s Grace Engine, and Celeste Lipkes’s Radium Girl.
NA: A lot of poets have a favorite poem to read from their books. Maybe I should call it—their favorite read-aloud poem. Do you have one from this book? Or maybe just a poem to close with here? With a short opening commentary on how it came to be?
DD: I like this one. The title is a gentle half-parody of those long expository James Wright titles that I love (and that he modelled on Li Bai’s titles). The title does describe the genesis of the poem. I had been reading the Merwin translations and watching a television show about the arctic expedition and this poem came from there. The diastole and systole of this poem expresses everything I want to say, and keep trying to say, and haven’t quite figured out how to say, in all my poems.
Poem for My Two-Year-Old Daughter After Reading W.S. Merwin’s Translations of Musō Soseki and Spending a Few Hours Meditating on the Ill-Fated 1845 British Arctic Expedition of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror
I’ve also made friends with wisteria
and the cattail light of morning. Come sleep
inside a bottled ship’s rigging. Be glad
you’re loved without longitude, forever.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.
Nicole Santalucia is the author of Because I Did Not Die and Driving Yourself to Jail in July. She teaches poetry at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and brings poetry workshops into the Cumberland County Prison.
Adrian Matejka has been named editor of POETRY magazine. Born in Nuremberg, Germany, Matejka grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was named Poet Laureate of Indiana for 2018–19
Here's the official announcement:
Back in 2014, we posted Erin Belieu's conversation with Adrian:
So this is turning out to be the most fun ever. How do I get my own radio show? If I got to spend my days just asking people I like ridiculous questions I could die perfectly happy.
Speaking of people I like immensely, today we have Adrian Matejka. Adrian is a newer friend. I met him along with his wife, the poet Stacey Lynn Brown (more about her tomorrow), last year at the Miami Book Festival. Do you ever meet people and have that HUGELY affectionate reaction to them in seconds? I developed a crush on both of them equally and instantaneously.
We were trapped with a motley collection of wet poets in a semi-busted restaurant (Miami’s twice-daily monsoon having driven us inside indiscriminately), and I started having that awkward, “introvert trapped in an extrovert’s body” reaction I have that rarely goes well for me socially.
But some part of my mind was also paying attention to who Adrian Matejka actually is. Having been in the po bidness a long time, I find it very revealing to watch how poets react to suddenly being anointed the Baskin Robbins flavor of the year. Because poetry, as Hayden Carruth once said to me, is a looooong distance race.
At that time, I knew Adrian’s most recent book, The Big Smoke, which had most well deservedly caused an admiring ruckus in the poetry universe. The Big Smoke, focusing on the life of the boxer Jack Johnson, is indeed a first class book, with The Boston Globe declaring that Adrian’s poems illuminate the heavyweight champion’s life “so boldly” that “one almost wants to duck.” The previous evening Adrian had been one of the featured readers for the book festival which meant being in some fancy company, and there was sunshine aplenty available to him in the flattery being dished up hot by his throng of admirers.
Which is to say, sitting at the dinner, I wasn’t going to be caught off guard if Adrian turned out to be full of beans. Even the best of us can end up accidentally drinking our own Kool Aid when the shots are free.
But I am happy to report that Adrian, besides being a crazy gifted writer, is an entirely bean-free human being!
This is not a man who has any interest in having the UV rays blown up his backside. Adrian is open, funny, smart, down-to-earth, interesting and most importantly, interested. I left the dinner dearly wishing we lived nearer each other.
Here’s what we talked about yesterday. Matejka's lines are bold:
************************************************************************************
EB: The titles of your three excellent poetry collections, Mixology, The Devil’s Garden, and The Big Smoke, suggest you are a person with a large number of vices. Do you drink and smoke a lot? Do you recommend this to other writers looking to improve their poetry practice? It seems like it’s worked well for you.
Also, as self-proclaimed mixologist, please share with us your favorite cocktail recipe. We’re counting on your expertise.
AM: What's sad about this is I never realized I was putting my business on the street through my titles! Yes. I used to drink and smoke with vigor and sometimes it was attached to writing. But mostly it was attached to playing pool or avoiding writing, which are both sometimes more enjoyable than the act of writing can be.
I was a bartender for a while, too, back in the 90s when you could still fog up public places with secondhand smoke. I started questioning all of my behavior when I was at work one day and there was an old timer sitting at the bar, eating a salad with French dressing, and he would take a drag off of his cigarette between bites of iceberg lettuce. It was an intricate study in vice.
I'm going to admit now that I was a terrible bartender. I couldn't make anything past a Tom Collins. At the bar where I worked, it was more likely that a fight would break out than someone would order anything more complex than a Long Island Iced Tea. And I could pour a mean Miller Lite.
The crazy thing is I wasn't even thinking about mixing drinks when I titled Mixology. It was one of those great moments in the echo chamber of my own cracked-outness. I was thinking of the art of DJing and the art of being of mixed races—there should be a degree conferred for making it through these things. I thought I had come up with something revolutionary until I did a title check online and found all of pages of cocktail recipe books. That's when those sad trombones played and I made myself a drink.
So I don't have a good recipe, but Stacey does. She makes a malicious mojito. You should ask her about it.
EB: Ah yes, fighting. Good segue. In this trilogy of debauchery you’ve created, the most recent book The Big Smoke, which was nominated for (insert all major prizes, including the Pillsbury Bake Off and Fields Medal for mathematics), centers on the life of the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson.
Beyond your innate licentiousness, Adrian, what attracted you to Johnson’s story very particularly? And more importantly, why not a UFC fighter? Wouldn’t that be more relevant to kids these days? Do you see yourself doing a sequence of poems in the voice of Tito Ortiz or Fedor Emelianenko?
AM: First, thanks for the kind words. It's been a wild ride for this book, to say the least. Jack Johnson is such a compelling figure for me because he is different from me in almost every way other than the gambling and carousing. That most definitely includes his fight game.
I'm a complete lightweight when it comes to brawling in the real world. I lost a fight in 3rd grade when this guy punched me in the nose. I was standing in the pocket, wailing away. I was a boxing fan back then, too, so I was talking trash while I was punching him. But as soon as he hit me in the nose, I was like, "It's cool. You win." Other than a few bar scuffles, I haven't been beyond posturing and pushing since then. So the opportunity to study Jack Johnson became an opportunity to explore a kind of courage—or maybe, just an absence of fear—that I haven't had since I was a kid.
Boxing is an action that's more like dancing than hand-to-hand combat. MMA is the opposite of that for me. The beauty in the motions leading up to and following the punches in boxing is largely absent in MMA because the dimensions of the fights are different. All of the contact in boxing happens vertically and above the waist, so there's a premium put on maximizing range and motion from the waist up when throwing punches. MMA allows for all dimensions, so fighters get arm barred on the mat and things like that. The action is horizontal and vertical.
You are right that most American audiences are more interested in MMA, especially since there are so few American title-holders in boxing. But what's missing—at least from a poetry standpoint—is history. Boxing is ingrained in all of our histories, regardless of nationality, race, or culture. It was on once someone figured out a fist could be as much of a weapon as a rock. Can you imagine what the first person to take an uppercut must have felt like? It was probably like that scene from Friday with Debo. Now that I think about it, the guy who punched me in the nose in 3rd grade was about the same size as Debo.
There is no doubt in my mind that you've been in some brawls, Erin. When was the last time you got in a fight? Have you ever written about that experience?
EB: Yeah, I took a decent uppercut in 8th grade. Before that, I was identified as a jock and was taller than most kids for a brief, shining moment in grade school. I was never required to prove myself much on the playground. The tough girls frequently considered punching me for my smart mouth, but they weren’t certain that I couldn't handle myself.
Then one day getting off the bus in junior high, a girl named Marcia--who I discovered 20 years later was angry at me because she had a closeted lesbian crush on my best friend Teri--picked up my trombone case and clocked me upside the jaw with it.
Talk about injury to the insult of playing trombone for 7 years. But I look back on it now and feel terrible for her. That must have really sucked for her, being in love with Teri and not feeling she could tell anyone. I hold no grudges.
But I am glad you’re leaving the MMA to me as I have my heart set on writing poems from the point-of-view of Aleks Emelianenko's brilliantly awful tattoo; you know, the giant one on his back where the Grim Reaper is cuddling a baby? Very promising, I think.
This conversation reminds me of the homosexual panic often visited upon straight guys watching MMA fights, which makes me think of the heterosexual panic visited upon straight male poets when considering the idea of dating a female poet. You, on the other hand, are married to a beautiful woman (the aforementioned Stacey Lynn Brown) who’s also a terrific poet.
Don’t you worry that she’s stealing all the poetry juju out of your house? How do you guys negotiate the unavoidable dark energy of competition when making art right next to one another?
AM: Aleks Emelianenko's tattoo is straight out of Sons of Anarchy, so that makes me happy. You should definitely write that persona poem. Especially since Emelianenko is 6'6, which would make his tattoo the size of a small child. Make it happen!
I'm sorry to hear about the trombone to the face, though. It's not like those cases are light to begin with. I'm going to say it: playing trombone is pretty awkward in most ways unless you're J.J. Johnson or someone like that.
Of course, I played the French horn and that's a whole other level of band-geekdom. At least the trombone has an occasional solo. The French horn just makes those long honking sounds in the background. And there's the matter of how you have to mute the thing. I used to get cracked on all the time about that. By trombone players, no less. That's one of the reasons writing is so great—there's no one there to see what you have to do to mute things.
Way back when I was in workshop, my friends and I had two rules: don't date anyone in workshop and don't date a memoirist. We didn't have a contingency for hanging out with a poet from another place. We were very regional. When Stacey and I got together, I knew we would get along socially, but I wasn't sure how things would work in relation to writing. We had very different introductions to and educations in poetry. We're the same age, but she was in graduate school while I was on the five-year plan in undergrad and then I took 3 years off before graduate school. So by the time we met, she had been thinking about poetry in a very complex and imaginative way while I was just figuring out what I wanted a poem to be.
I've benefited from her sophistication over the years, though I'm not so sure I have been all that helpful to her. I generally stay on my poetic grind—always writing even when most of the verse is terrible—while Stacey has a more metaphysical approach to the text. The two approaches don't often line up and I think that is one of the reasons things have worked well for us. Also, we have different aesthetic needs and different poetic neurosis. Which helps us to look for poems in different places, I think.
The one time there was overlap happened back when we lived in Oregon. Stacey went into a KFC to get something to drink while I waited in the car. The next thing you know, KRS-One was in the drive through, ordering a bucket of extra crispy and 8 biscuits. I heard him through the loudspeaker of the drive through before I saw him. He was in this green van with gold 5-star rims. Stacey was bugging out when she back to the car and the first thing she said after confirming it was KRS-One was something to the effect of "I call this for a poem." What? Now, this is when I was working on Mixology, which is full of hip hop culture. In my mind, seeing KRS-One at the KFC was a natural fit for my project. She called it, though, so I was out of luck.
I can't be the only person something like this has happened to, though. Have you ever had a squatter's rights conflict with someone over a poem subject?
EB: Dude, pretty boy bikers would pee their pants if confronted by the raw magnificence of baby-holding Grim Reaper. That’s some real deal, Russian prison artwork he’s sporting, after doing a stretch for armed robbery. IN RUSSIA.
Also, don’t try and sell me on the equality of the French horn’s dorkiness. My older brother played French horn specifically to avoid having the family spit valve passed down to him.
Second also, yes, my partner Adam has recently starting stealing poems out of the house again. He’d been writing prose for a while, but recently turned back to the superior genre. I’m very careful not to point out anything good that he might swipe. He’s ruthless. No moral compass whatsoever.
Final question: don’t think too hard, but give me three books that are helpful to an emerging poet. Or three movies. Or three albums (do albums still exist?).
AM: Someplace in Russia, the man who inked Emelianenko's back tattoo is nodding along with you. The guy who plays Jax Teller is nodding, too.
Erin, that's a brutal question to end with. How about 1 of each?
1) Lunch Poems, Frank O'Hara. Every beginning poet should read the gorgeous book that's been imitated more often in the past 10 years than any other collection.
2) Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch. An African American samurai who reads Mary Shelley? Old mobsters talking about Flava Flav and rapping “Cold Lampin’”? Jarmusch shows anything is possible in film and in poetry if you get after it.
3) Maggot Brain, Funkadelic. It’s impossible to look at the world or language the same after listening to Eddie Hazel on the title track.
EB: Perfect! And two out of those three would have been serious contenders for my list, too (Lunch Poems and Maggot Brain). I don’t know that Jarmusch film but intend to Netflix it this evening.
Thank you so much, Adrian Matejka, for this very edifying conversation.
My goal is to get you and Stacey down to Tallahassee to eat wings at my place while we watch a UFC fight. I used to watch them at Hooters with my friend Jared, but I felt like the co director of VIDA hanging out at Hooters sends the wrong message (though they really do have decent wings and the best televisions).
from the archive; first posted September 10, 2014
In the spirited commentary inspired by Katha Pollitt's post, "Complain, Complain: Poems About Writing Poetry" [when we posted it in 2009], David Shapiro wrote, "Since I almost never agree with her, I want to say I utterly agreed with Helen V once when she said poets when they write about poetry aren't doing something strange or self-reflexive, because for them poetry is their life."
To which Judy Prince asked: "Has Helen Vendler said anything else that you liked?" David considered saying nothing but then dashed off this appraisal of the venerable Harvard professor:
<<
On Helen Vendler
I could take the fifth. I'm tilted -- she reviewed Ron P[adgett's] and my anthology of New York Poets and announced that we were cheerful Chaucerians. Pas mal.
She somewhere wrote, and I heard in a lecture, that Howard Nemerov, old friend and poor poet, was more philosophical than Frank O'Hara, who was a child when he thought ("like Byron," one of the great wits of his century.) Anyway, she thought my book "To an Idea" about my mother's early death was just words connected to other words and forthrightly remarked that she had a hard time with comedy, satire, surrealism.
Koch said to me: What's left? Rational Tragedy? Cato by Addison?
I don't believe that Shakespeare's sonnets have the key words that she finds.
Paranomasia, yes, but no secret rules.
Yes, I do like a sentence in her long poems of Stevens where she says something like: the blackbirds are forms of language. And she's good on subjunctives.
Her contemporary taste is that of an amateur.
I told my class once that if they simply turned every negative to a positive in her [writing] and vice versa they would come up with some interesting assertions.
Almost every poet she likes today is mediocre. She is best on Herbert and Keats.
"A Wall" is a poem of mine about her or around. She deposed Delmore S[chwartz] in a crank's way. And said his best poems were only one page long. She should stick to the one page Odes of Keats. She is a decent "reader" when the material is not so fresh as to be difficult or new (she doesn't seem to have the French tradition at her fingertips, unfortunately) or even revolutionary. She told me she was always liking Ashbery's poetry, but he himself used to say to me how wonderful it was that she changed her mind [from her initial disapproval]. She also has no sense of Joyce, Lawrence, Hardy and the prose tradition. No sense of the Chinese, Russian, German or other traditions. Not a professional musician, she can't discriminate the "science of sound." She has discovered no one and she is not a great "scholar" in the line of Jakobson.
I also believe she has no sense of the theater and the poetics of Shakespeare or Chekhov or the Greeks. She IS enthusiastic about well-known poets and Jorie G. and Heaney, a Nobel Prize winner, and other honored poets. She may have a vivid politics, but I have heard nothing publicly about that. She is not a "public intellectual." Like the crank Logan, she is too proud of her style and opinions. She is, I would add, nothing but opinions and a smooth stylist of the old school. No sense of social thickness, except in some early essays on A. Rich. Still hasn't written on Koch or any of the more radical poets. She does smooth out Ashbery and sees his topoi, but she probably doesn't read Roussel fluently or Rimbaud, great influences on John A. Imagine her thoughts on the late Merce Cunningham or on John Cage!
-- David Shapiro
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from the archive; August 9, 2009
NA: Your recent book, Lullaby with Incendiary Device, is part of a triptych, or one of three books under one cover. How do you like being published alongside Harvey Hix and William Heyen?
DD: I love it. Etruscan Press does such high-quality publishing work. Their books are beautifully made and thoughtfully chosen. The support of Phil Brady and Bob Mooney has meant more to me than I can properly articulate. The dedicated staff at the press are paragons of professionalism, especially Pamela Turchin and Bill Schneider, who organize and run much of the daily operations.
It’s an honor to have my book joined to the books of Harvey Hix and William Heyen. I hope that more publishers follow this tripartite publishing model. Heyen and Hix are poets I deeply admire, both for their bodies of work and for how they have constructed their lives in poetry. Both men embody a poetic stance I aspire to emulate: engaged, attentive, protean, ambitious, empathetic, and endlessly curious.
Harvey’s book How It Is that We continues his interrogation and deconstruction of the sonnet form, while nimbly moving among the detritus of 21st century discourses, texts, and personae. Reading it is like looking at starlight through a field of orbiting wreckage. I feel adrift and then suddenly I’m jolted into a new way of seeing.
Bill Heyen’s The Nazi Patrol continues his project of bearing witness to the Shoah through the poison orchards of the present. Here, he employs his single-line couplets to great effect. There’s something so compulsively readable in this collection, a raw velocity that feels like a kind of falling.
Harvey and Bill have written enough for five or six lifetimes between the two of them. The amazing thing to me about the prodigious output of both men is the exceedingly high quality of the work.
If you are reading this conversation and you haven’t read Hix, I’d suggest my favorite books by him: Rain Inscription (Etuscan Press, 2017) and Perfect Hell (Gibbs Smith, 1996). I’d also suggest his remarkable translation of the Gospels and Christian apocrypha, The Gospel according to H.L. Hix (Broadstone Books, 2020).
I’d recommend Heyen’s Shoah Train (Etruscan Press, 2003) and The Cabin: Journal 1968-1984 (H_NGM_N BKS, 2012). Heyen’s journals are an incredible document. I think Phil Brady described them as the work of a 20th century Samuel Pepys. In one entry, Heyen will be having a martini with Anne Sexton. In the next, he’ll be wondering if the garbagemen took his golfclubs. He chronicles all the important events of his family life, and of his life in poetry, against the backdrop of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the moon landing, the Vietnam War, and on and on.
AR: I recently listened to your conversation with Dr. Philip Brady about the collaborative project Sign and Breath. You read an incredible poem, “My Favorite Things,” which you had just written the day before. It made me curious to know where you find your inspiration? Do you strike proverbial gold with most of the poems you write?
DD: I find inspiration from my daily life, from my family, from my friends, from my memories, from things that I see when I’m walking the dog, from my job, from music, from movies and television, from art, and, most of all, from my reading life.
I’ve spent many years writing and reading poetry daily. Now, I write now when the mood strikes me and when circumstances permit. Like most poets, I have left years and years and thousands and thousands of bad poems in my wake. I think of all the marble composition notebooks, floppy disks, and old laptops full of my embarrassingly bad poems gone to rest in some landfill somewhere. I am grateful for all those years of woodshedding that brought me to where I am today. Still, I go through periods where nothing that I write works out the way I’d hoped, but I never feel frustrated. Writing is always a joy and a pleasure and a privilege that I don’t take for granted. I am ambitious with my poetry. I want to write great poetry, but for me it’s not so much about striking gold. It’s more about living a life of poetry. At the end of the preface for Generations, Phil Brady quotes a letter from Harvey Hix that reads: “To live by poetry. Which of course I want to read in more than one sense: live robustly and fully by means of poetry; order one’s life according to values derived from poetry; live in proximity to poetry.” To live by poetry. That’s all I want.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.
Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains.
Nin Andrews grew up in a cardboard box, painted red and white to look like a typical brick house in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
