Review of Strategies Against Extinction by Michael Nye
January 7, 2013 | review

Michael Nye. Strategies Against Extinction. Plano, TX: Queen’s Ferry Press, 2012. 238 pp. $14.95, paper.

Andre Dubus was happy when his one novel, The Lieutenant (1967), went out of print. He excelled within the short-fiction form: his collections had thematic glue despite the individuality of particular stories. Typically, the emotional current of great short fiction is inversely related to its word count, and Michael Nye’s debut collection, Strategies Against Extinction, does not simply introduce the reader to roughly a dozen separate lives; it reaches emotional depths not often touched in the short form.

Like Dubus’s work, Nye’s collection is careful without being reserved, mature without being telegraphed. Set in 1952,“The Re-Creationist” dramatizes a man employed as the last re-creationist in Major League Baseball. Don is fed game results through a Western Union ticker, and recreates the drama of Pittsburgh Pirates games on the radio, using “a xylophone hammer, ruler, and a block of wood.” A prerecorded “soundtrack of crowd noise” complements his imitations. He must constantly be ready to “throw in” some story, some movement. Don learns he will be fired at the end of the season, and fabricates a Pirate victory over the Reds. Don’s decision to make a more palatable conclusion for his son Timothy is consistent with his desire to remake the real world.

In “Projection,” a small-town film projectionist falls for a bored college student. Monica soon realizes that Philip is a convenient screen for her real problems. His plan for a wild night with plastic explosives shocks her: “No one actually did such horrible, stupid things.” Nye’s collection reveals what happens when characters actually do make such unlikely decisions: momentary choices that derail established lives. In “A Fully Imagined World,” Kyle has a chance encounter with a former lover while taking his daughter to Cincinnati’s Natural History Museum. Nine years removed, the memory of their one-night stand “had become a physical ache, a dream he could call up and see and touch.” Serena, still beautiful, does not remember Kyle. Disappointed, he sulks, and loses track of his daughter. She is found, but the feeling hits the reader with equal force: how often do we put so much capital in a transient memory?

Henry, the narrator of “Keep,” struggles to understand what control even means. After his mother’s death, Henry allows his mentally ill, thirty-seven-year-old brother, Kevin, to live at his home. His wife hates the idea, and does not hide her displeasure. Nye holds the reader’s emotions in his literary hands in the story’s penultimate act, as Kevin makes a rash decision that puts more than only his life at risk. The decision to end a story collection with the longest tale—“Keep” is a novella—is not a new one, but Nye is a meticulous storyteller, so the reader was already hoping for an extended tale. Yet completion of “Keep” will likely send readers back through the entirety of Strategies Against Extinction to savor Nye’s glimpses of what “is raw, jarring, unexpected, sometimes trashy, sometimes luminous,” as the collection’s epigraph, from Joyce Carol Oates, defines realism. A good short-story collection will leave a reader with a handful of narratives worth remembering; a great short-story collection, like Nye’s, will leave a reader with lives worth remembering.

Review of Signs & Wonders by Charles Martin
January 7, 2013 | review

Charles Martin. Signs & Wonders. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. 96 pp. $30.00, cloth.

The poems in Charles Martin’s new collection, Signs & Wonders, speak with the voice of a tipsy father-in-law—jolly, solicitous, and prone to oddly charming rants. It’s a pleasant way to squander a few hours. Martin, an award-winning translator and poet, has indulged in a few of the privileges of renown without allowing himself the worst. How many tenured poets, primping their laurels, overflow volumes with joyless poem-slurry, intoning for all the captive strivers every memory, whinge, and bad dream over decades of a mutually humiliating dotage? Martin, at least, is not among them. Though he doesn’t mind the sound of his voice, he’s got manners enough to keep things entertaining.

He is unselfish in other ways as well. Of sixty-five pages, he dedicates twelve to translations or versions of other artists’ work, including a treatment of Ovid’s valediction to his Tristia: “Books are well made when fortune’s favor pours / down on their authors—as it won’t on yours.” His rendering of Pessoa’s much badly-translated “Autopsychography” is snappy and elegant, and his caption to Alfred Kubin’s painting “The Foreboding” makes the sort of puncture wound left only by good epigrams:

What dark form has awoken
over the sleeping village
in the early morning chill?
It will have no rest until
below lie only broken
bodies among the pillage.

Martin salts this collection of mostly longer poems with a handful of short pieces. Like most class clowns, he can be bashful about his feelings, but the jokes in Signs & Wonders are far less potent than the elegies. In avuncular poems like “Theory Victorious” and “Who Knows What’s Best?” Martin lets his whimsies grow lecturesome. In the latter, a deft trio of triolets, Martin’s accomplishment is not so much political insight as personal restraint. (In few other poems does he so palpably resist using broken or procrustean rhymes. Elsewhere one cringes to hear such rhymes as “Face the wall” with “Provisional- /ity,” “Heimat” with “I’m at,” and “poison” with “noose en- /circling.”) The poem is a riff on George W. Bush’s memorable declaration “I am the decider and I decide what’s best.” Martin presents this claim as not just petulant but insidious, with mentions of bombings, torture, and imprisonment. Although the subject matter is serious, the poem’s real meaning—as with most political poetry today—is the poet’s own cleverness. Quips such as “The ones we bomb to liberate / have really got an attitude” provoke no feeling and permit no discovery.

The poems of this sort, though, are blessedly few. Delightful as Martin’s wit can be, his poems are most accomplished when he forgets he’s holding forth. In the translations, he allows the original speakers to opine while doing his own work quietly. The charge thus conducted is usually greater than when Martin tries to generate his own. And in odd moments, between laughter and punch-line, he lets the raised eyebrow drop. The sonnet “To Himself,” glows with skill but never dazzles. No syntactical mousetraps snap. The feminine endings nod with uncertainty fitting in a poem about the lives we fail to live:

Those other lives, our creations,
Weightless themselves, oppress us until we falter;
So, weakened by their effortless evasions,
We learn this late that the only way to alter
That situation is to leave off pursuing,
And try to begin to do what we are doing.

Martin finds stillness again in the lee of the second section with “The Twentieth Century in Photographs.” That era’s unsurpassed crimes have inspired many a poet to set in verse his mediocre passion. But in the sober quatrains of this poem, Martin performs something like ekphrasis, examining the official documents of one atrocity. He treats his subjects with care and mostly refrains from interpretation. Instead he names what can’t be said:

Impossible to read
These inexpressive faces and recover
The thoughts of those who have been so long dead,

Who died, in fact, before the photographer
Had time to fix them in his clear solution.

Martin’s best stuff comes like the famous lines from old verse dramas, in moments of digression. Many poems in Signs & Wonders ramble over several pages, and though they have their swamps and forests, some open—if only briefly—onto clearings of surprising grace. “East Side, West Side,” a two-part poem in loose alcaics and sapphics, wanders for quite a while through descriptions of art and posture before producing a handful of exquisite stanzas, near but not quite at the end. These lines alone don’t add up to a poem, and they probably couldn’t have come without the rest. Maybe this is all right. Poetry is a tradition of surviving fragments. Almost all poems, good or otherwise, get obliterated. For a poet like Martin, who’s spent decades with antiquity’s splendid leftovers, the goal is not to write no bad lines, but rather to write a few that might be worthy of the ages. His subject is the ample, if provisional, world of daily life:

Yet it’s elegiac, this summer party,
for, though the (mostly) young are clearly taken
with one another and their situation,
none has yet noticed

how very cool the colors of the room are
in the fading light, and how the wind that’s just
stirred the lacy curtains has somehow also
lengthened the shadows.

All too soon, that moment of watches glanced at,
looks exchanged; of thanking the host and hostess,
as with a show of genuine reluctance
guests make their exit.

Old Pretty
January 7, 2013 | fiction

2012 Fiction Contest Winner, judged by Christopher Coake

 

The Pasadena city pool, once the gilded lagoon of an orange-juice heir, was set back from the street in a grove of citrus trees and cleaned by a cripple who’d been shot in Vietnam. On afternoons when our mother lay blank-faced in bed with the radio up, smoking mechanically in her tangle of sheets, I took my sister swimming. I made ketchup sandwiches and pulled bath-towels from the tray of the birdcage and walked Dodie four blocks through Old Town to the pool. Mom hated going because it meant passing the tiki lounge where she’d first met our father, back when she, Miss Ukelele 1965, sang hula songs by the aquarium and he was an out-of-work actor tending bar in a hibiscus bowtie. That summer, the sight of the bamboo door—along with the taste of ketchup, the smell of chlorine, and the birdseed skittering from our towels onto the hot squares of cement below—was folded into the memory of my father, who was somewhere in Texas with his new wife.

He’d left a few months before, in the spring, and afterwards a strange thing started happening to Dodie. Whenever she scratched her head or pulled the plastic band from her ponytail, her hair fell out in fine, filament-white bursts. Soon I was finding clumps around the bathtub drain, in static tantrums on the pillowcase. After we went swimming I’d comb her hair, and the soupy tangles seemed to melt right off into my hands. When I knocked on the bathroom door and told Mom about it, all she said was turn off this television! Only we didn’t have a television then, and she was just sitting there on the toilet, staring intently at the handtowels, ash curling down to her thumb.

By August, Dodie was completely bald.

I tried to call Dad in Texas, but all I got was a cranky jangle from the phone company: “We’re sorry. The number you have dialed…” I stood there in the kitchen, watching green maggots snout around the trash.

“Is he there?” Dodie asked. “Can I talk to him?”

The last time we saw Dad, he came over with two Dixie cups of ice cream and sat on the back steps with us. He told us he was going away for a while, but if we ever got sad or missed him, we could just tap our shoulder and he’d be there. In spirit, was how he said it. Like a ghost? Dodie asked. But how can you be a ghost if you’re not dead? I was mad because the ice cream he brought us had nuts in it, and I hated nuts, and since it was Saturday I wanted to go feed a can of peaches to Mrs. Wicker’s tortoise. But it looked like Dodie was going to cry, so I just sat there and chewed the wooden spoon until my tongue started bleeding and I had to stick it in the runny rum raisin to make it numb.

I hung up the phone and ran my hand over Dodie’s head,which looked pale and powdery, like a macadamia. “He’s auditioning for a movie,” I said. “A big one. But he’ll call us back.”

Down the hall, Mom was still in bed, swaddled in her hunting-horse duvet and talking to Mr. Yehudi, the name she’d given to the cartoon man on the pickle jar, where she used to keep her tips but now stored her pills. I shook her ankle and told her someone had to do something already. I pictured us all trooping into Dr. Legault’s; I wondered for a moment if they’d give Dodie a shot in her head, right behind the ear, then let her pick out a lollipop—which were always stale anyway, and always lemon. Dodie, meanwhile, wandered in and stood in front of the vanity. She clipped on a pair of long, shimmery gold earrings and twirled around until they chimed.

Mom wobbled up on her elbows, scowling. “You look like a cocker spaniel.”

“Arf!” Dodie said.

So Mom stumbled into a dress, went out for an hour, and came back with a box. Dodie parted the tissue and blinked at the wig inside. It was gray.

“But… it’s an old lady’s wig,” I said.

Mom’s nostrils flared. “I spent thirty goddamn dollars on it!”

Dodie tried it on. “I think I look pretty?”

I could smell Mom next to me, swaying and leaning against the table, fumbling in her boxy purse for a cigarette. “Fuckface,” I said under my breath, only she heard me, and slapped me upside the head. Hard.

With my cheek fizzing-hot and neon scribbles in my eyes, I ran to the bathroom and broke a tin of soap against the wall, then lay on the floor with my face to the tile, where Mom might find me and think I was dead. I heard her door slam and bedsprings squeak. Then my sister was standing over me, asking if we could go swimming. Not now! I wanted to yell. I’m dead, you dummy! Instead I kept my eyes closed and body still. She left some cookies by my head and tiptoed away, but the dog knocked in and gobbled them up. I waited there with slobber all over my ear, listening to the radio lament through the wall, but it seemed no one was coming for me, so I got up and went to find Dodie.

She was waiting for me in her bathing suit and wig and jelly sandals. “Now?” she asked, following me into the kitchen, coughing against my arm as I squeezed a bottle of Mom’s Jergens lotion into the sink and refilled it with Elmer’s glue. She hugged her towel to her chest. Her starchy, rat-colored curls tickled my elbow and made me shudder.

“In a minute,” I said. “Hey. You know what you should wear today?”

I dug through the pile of dress-up clothes in our room and found a costume from my Old-Fashioned birthday party, where we’d eaten cornbread and played jacks and made dolls from clothespins. I dressed Dodie in a gingham smock, prairie boots, and a papier-mâché bonnet, which I fastened over her wig. “Now try to walk a little crippled,” I said. “Like the man at the pool.”

She practiced her limp, circling stump-footed around the rug, squinting through a pair of reading glasses. “Hear ye, hear ye!” she cried. She thought all old people were British.

Dad said that in theater school he learned to do a British accent by stuffing a wad of toilet paper between his gums and his lip. He used to show us at the table during Parcheesi games, shredding his napkin and bucking out his teeth: “Allo, guvnah! ’Ear ye, ’ear ye, whot whot!” We laughed, screaming at the fangs of soggy paper flapping from his mouth. I wondered where he was now, what he was doing at that very moment. I imagined him wearing spurs. I imagined him staring out at a desert canyon, thumbs hooked into his vest. Only the canyon was a flat, Pepto-pink cartoon, a Looney Tunes land of teetering boulders, pin-chinned cliffs, and a garish, amoebic sun. Sometimes on Saturdays, after feeding the tortoise, Mrs. Wicker would let us watch TV. How far, I asked her, was Texas? I pictured Dad clanking down a rubbery corkscrewed highway, past tumbleweeds wearing sombreros. Far enough, she said, handing us a plate of saltines, each dressed with a square of cheese and a hot dog slice. Too many snakes and black people anyway! I didn’t say anything to that. I hadn’t even met my stepmother. All I knew was her name, Arloueen. Dad said she had a chinchilla and gave people manicures, but I didn’t tell that to Mom.

On our way to the pool, Dodie and I stopped in front of the tiki lounge. The bamboo door was propped open with a mop-bucket, and cool air was pumping out, misting the plastic palm fronds. We stepped inside. It was dark after the street, like we were up in the middle of the night. I saw thick-pile carpet, grenadine-red, and brittle ceramic parrots swinging from the ceiling. An aquarium buzzed against the far wall, laced with algae and occupied by one ponderous, whiskery fish, who burped lazily along the bottom. The room had a dank, sad clay-smell, with traces of butter and burned steak and old drugstore perfume. A man in an apron came out from behind the bar, wiping the foam from his knuckles.

“Girls?” he said. “Are you looking for someone?”

“My dad’s Steve,” I told him. “Do you know his number in Texas?”

Dodie presented him with one of her deflated yellow floaties, then tried to pull it on over her sleeve. “Don’t,” I hissed, snatching it away and hiding it in my armpit.

“You need to have a grown-up with you,” he said. “You know that, right?”

“But she’s my grandma,” I said. “She’s like a hundred!”

Dodie wasn’t even limping, though, or doing her accent. “Look!” she squealed, galloping towards the aquarium. “Fishy!”

The man just shook his head. “I don’t know any Steve, honey.” He gave us each a toothpick umbrella and ushered us out on the sidewalk.

I was so mad I couldn’t even look at Dodie. I stomped down the pavement, my flip-flops winging up bits of litter and concrete. Dodie twirled the toothpick over her head and sang, “Bumbershoot, my bumbershoot,” which was what Mom had always called umbrellas. Mine wouldn’t even open. I threw it in the street.

When we got to the pool, I felt like everyone was watching us. Dodie tried to grab my hand but I shook her away. I blew up the floaties, my breath coming in angry huffs, then handed them over without even looking and jumped in the water. In the deep end, one boy was hanging off the diving board. He was all ribs and teeth, splashing the other kids with his feet. “Hey, is that your sister?” he sneered, doing chin-ups on his despicably straw-thin arms, as if that wasn’t easy for anyone in the water. I looked back and saw Dodie wading slowly into the pool, one step at a time, her floaties up to her armpits, her wig slightly askew. I didn’t know what to say, so just swam away.

I heard her call my name but I didn’t look over. I kicked myself underwater and held my breath all the way to the aluminum ladder, which rattled as I scampered out. Shivering, I hid behind the orange trees, hunched over the cold, mildewed ruffles of my bathing suit. I watched as Dodie paddled around in the shallow end, the wig sliding back to her ears. The other children gaped and snickered, until one, the boy from the diving board, chopped his way through the water and yanked it off. The kids shrieked even louder, slapping and kicking to get away from it. I saw the wig bob away, gather water, and sink mournfully to the tiled steps. Dodie just swam in lost circles, crying and tapping her shoulder.

There was a bit of chaos then, as kids splashed and hopped and hooted, and bewildered parents looked up, sun-drunk, from their wrinkled magazines. The cripple, meanwhile, fished the wig out with a blue net and turned it over on the pavement. It lay there like a possum. “Where’s your mother?” he asked, kneeling into the puddle, reaching his hand out to Dodie. “Your pop?”

I was terrified someone would point me out, so I turned and ran, hobbling over the bark bits underfoot, sick with the smell of chlorine and rotten orange peel. I ran all the way back home, barefoot and stringy-haired, then collapsed on the back steps, my heart walloping. Through an open window I heard Mom’s radio playing love songs in the swelter. I gagged and gagged but nothing came up, just the burn of ketchup in the back of my throat.

A few minutes later I saw her—trudging across the lawn in her prairie boots and bathing suit, her towel over her shoulders like a shawl, the wig dripping from a plastic bag. She stopped in front of me. Her scalp had turned pink and rashy in the sun. I wanted to hug her, but instead I blinked in the heat, waiting for her to say something.

She didn’t. She just stabbed me in the knee with her toothpick umbrella. I gasped, watching blood bubble up between the hairs. Then she marched right past me, up the steps and into the cool gloom of the house, the wig leaving a trail of water on the floor. I limped after her, ow-ow-owing down the hall to Mom’s room. “Don’t tell on me!” I pleaded. “Come on, Dodie!” I stopped, though, when I saw what she saw.

Mom was sitting up in bed, her face and hands covered with a layer of crackling, translucent scales. “What happened to me?” she whispered. “What’s wrong?”

Dodie and I climbed up in the bed beside her. The glue around her eyes popped and split as she tried not to cry, as she opened and closed her hands in horrified wonder. In the slant of late afternoon light, her face glowed like the waxy rind of an apple. My sister reached out and peeled a flake from her chin. I did the same. Slowly Mom lay back on the pillow with its mustardy stains of sweat, her lashes gummed up and twitching. Dodie and I each took a cheek, an eye, collecting the wisps in our palms. My knee left dots of blood on the duvet.

“How did I get like this? Girls?”

We didn’t say anything, just worked quietly down her throat and arms. I remembered back to a few summers ago, the Fourth of July: it was just getting dark outside, and black barbecue char fell through the air, and you could hear the marching bands down at the Rose Bowl, the snarl of trumpets and clatter of drums. Dodie and I ran around the lawn, waving our sparklers, until I tripped over a hose. I remembered running inside with a burned hand and seeing them through a half-open door, kissing at the kitchen table. He drank a bottle of beer. She wore an impractical dress. I wanted to ask for a band-aid, a baggie of ice cubes, a kiss. But I couldn’t. I could only stand there just outside the room. Come here, old pretty, he whispered, his hand tangled up in her hair. He wore a Styrofoam boater and a stars-and-stripes dickie made from cardboard. Come here. She just laughed and curled up in his lap, with blissful wet eyes and red cheeks and lips bruised from biting.

The Blurred Line
January 7, 2013 | art_feature

Art as a means of escape into the existence of the self, the non-existence. Art as enhanced raw mediums. Art as repetition and balance by a mind that dives deep into the subconscious.

Succubi and Sword
Succubi and Sword, 36 in. x 48 in., acrylic, nail polish, collage
Bull #2
Bull #2, 14 in. x 24 in., bone, .22lr (carved via dremel)
Skullfish
Skullfish, 24 in. x 10 in., ink

I approach varied mediums with one method in which repetition, balance, and unity enact creation and development. Characters inform one another to create greater forms, patterns, and evolve as a whole. Although I often use characters repeatedly, they fluctuate in style, motif, meaning, and execution. Through personal subliminal exploration, my work reveals the blurred line between imagination and reality, animal and human, life and death.

Temple
Temple, 48 in. x 36 in., acrylic, nail polish, collage
Breath
Breath, 72 in. x 34 in., acrylic, nail polish, collage
Samo Lives Exhibition - Our Lady
Samo Lives Exhibition - Our Lady, 10 ft. x 8 ft., acrylic, collage
Red/White
Red/White, 60 in. x 84 in., acrylic

 

Oh Niagara!
January 7, 2013 | nonfiction

2012 Nonfiction Contest Winner, judged by Sonya Huber

It’s August 2011, and the stock market has plummeted so much it makes my father say, “These are not normal times.”

It’s two months after New York State has legalized gay marriage, and it’s three days after both of my parents high-fived a recently married lesbian couple on a boat out to Singer Castle while crossing Alexander Bay. It’s just me and the folks, which wasn’t always a comfortable dynamic, but seeing as I’m almost thirty, and their youngest child, we’re getting there. In high school I resented my brother for leaving the house, leaving me alone with my parents, but now I feel lucky that I have a relationship with them separate of him. We have a funny dynamic just the three of us, and the awkwardness of it feels right.

I have never been to Niagara Falls before and I feel the anticipation of it, the greatness of it, and the Americana of it. I imagine Niagara flowing red, white, and blue, the ripples of water mimicking a flag in the wind as we speed down US Highway 81 South. Mom lets me sit in the front seat because of my long history of carsickness. I’m drinking chocolate milk and dramatically tossing in my seat trying to get comfortable. Dad lets me change the radio station after every other song. Eventually we find Elvis and both sing as loudly as possible, which makes Mom happy but annoyed. Mom and I make crazed statements about how we would love to drive for at least ten more hours very sarcastically, which eventually becomes “ISN’T THIS FUN!?” repeated in loud shrieking voices, which makes Dad laugh.

When I hang out with my parents I’m reminded I’m a child, or that I was one. I act childish despite my age, and despite how I act I’m sometimes treated like a child, not cruelly but rather out of habit. I complain more openly about temperatures, food, wanting to do things my way. They respond with eye rolls, and exasperation, as they should. If I try to add to factual conversations, my parents doubt my sources, my logic; sometimes my statements go unheard just because I’m the baby, and was always less knowledgeable. This is exacerbated by my current life choices. I’m back in school, and on my final year of pursuing an impractical degree in creative writing, a lifelong dream in a family of supportive scientists. I’m painfully single. On this trip I’ve been sleeping in the same hotel room as my parents, they’re in one bed, and I’m in the other. My father snores loudly, and my mother passive-aggressively coughs to try to wake him. I can’t sleep with this dynamic.

 

Two nights ago, in a hotel room further upstate, I couldn’t sleep and I started crying quietly. Tears streamed into my pillow as I lay on my back and tried to even out my breathing so no one suspected. I hadn’t imagined myself at twenty-eight years old sleeping in the same room as my parents on family vacations. I thought by now I’d have my own hotel room, with my own family in it. But I don’t. I thought I’d be enough of a grown-up to afford my own hotel room but I’m not. I make about a thousand dollars a month teaching English at a state university and have barely any savings. My heart quickened and I realized signs of a panic attack so I got up to try to break my circular thought patterns. In the bathroom I found blood in my underwear.

I thought of my niece and nephew. The last time I was in Upstate New York my nephew hadn’t even been conceived. I remember my sister-in-law’s face flush with joy.

“We’re trying again. Well, we’re not, not trying,” she had said as my niece napped in the hotel bathroom in a travel Pack ’n Play.

I can’t imagine myself as a parent and I can’t imagine myself married. It’s like a sunspot forms over my brain and everything goes white when I try.

*     *     *

After driving all day we get to Niagara just before sundown. We park the car and walk over the bridge to Goat Island.

Niagara is home to the most powerful falls in North America. The water flows south from Lake Erie through water-hollowed stone gorges, careening down the falls and eventually landing in Lake Ontario. Green is everywhere on Goat Island. Even the water is a famous green, the scientific explanation being “rock dust” and salts. The air is thick with water and hot with August. Sweat drips down our backs as we approach the Canadian falls.

The twin cities of Niagara, Ontario, and Niagara, New York, sit facing one another separated by the Niagara River Gorge and Goat Island (which falls on the American side). The Porter brothers bought the American Falls in 1805 from the State of New York at a public auction and built a mill. Augustus Porter obtained exclusive ownership of Goat Island in 1815 and gave partial ownership to his brother Peter.

The Porter brothers left Goat Island undeveloped probably more by chance than due to any bleeding-heart conservationist ideals. They famously lost their bid to have the Erie Canal run through their properties, which completely destroyed their business model for the falls. Plaques all over Goat Island herald the brothers for understanding and respecting the magic of Niagara; none of them talk about how they wanted to blast through the gorge walls and direct the Erie Canal traffic directly through it.

 

The noise of the falls fills up the air, and the mists off the falls are cool and smell slightly rotten, like most freshwater. The sheer size and power is mesmerizing, and the closer I walk, I notice Mom’s hair is sticking up. I point at her.

“Your hair,” I say. She points back.

“Yours too!” Then we both laugh at Dad who is taking photos, not realizing his cowlick is standing straight up.

“What!?” He turns, and then: “Oh, it’s electric!” he cries, holding his hands out and jerking them violently, pretending to get shocked. The electricity off the falls is so powerful that even through the mist every tourist has hairs that stick up except the pack of Buddhist monks who have shaved heads. They move quietly among us in their red robes like spiritual mimes, waving at children and grinning for photos. A few sit cross-legged in the blooming marigold patch while others dance with children on the lawn.

In order to reach nirvana one must eliminate the suffering inherent in life. What causes suffering according to Buddhism? Desire. Stop wanting, and then and only then do you realize how complete your life is. Your life becomes less about what you want, and more about what you already have. If I stop wanting what I want, I’ll be closer to nirvana, to complete happiness. I have to stop asking for love, stop asking for a family, and then I’ll be happy. But then I think about the Porter brothers and if they had never wanted Niagara, never wanted Goat Island. Maybe the only reason the monks are able to visit Niagara is because the Porter brothers led lives ruled by desire.

*     *     *

As it gets dark we walk to the American Falls, and I am reminded of a few months earlier, April: me and my two best friends posed on a rock in the middle of a stream in front of a man-made waterfall. We’re at a wedding venue in our hometown, Durham, North Carolina. Jenna is in a wedding gown, and Cristina and I are posed among other girls wearing knee-length green bridesmaid dresses. Jenna is marrying her long-time boyfriend Shawn. He stands along the railing watching his wife and her bridesmaids pose. Jenna and Shawn have had their break-ups, relationship-ending fights, and when Jenna wanted Shawn to move to North Carolina, he refused for two years and she waited him out. I was happy for them, I am happy for them, but as I sat at the head table while other bridesmaids sat across from their respective husbands and boyfriends, I couldn’t help but feel alone.

Jenna asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding when she visited me in New Mexico. We were walking along a path down by the Rio Grande when she said, “I was hoping you would be one of my bridesmaids.”

“You’re not like me,” Jenna had said, kicking some leaves on the trail. “You’re not gonna go down the aisle until everything is perfect.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll be your bridesmaid.”

The small waterfalls before the American Falls are called The Bridal Veil, and as we walk past them, a couple veers off the path. Through the trees, lit by the park lights, I see them kissing in the woods.

*     *     *

There are geographical places we have collectively deemed “romantic,” and like Paris and Venice, Niagara is on that list. Known for its honeymoon crowd, Niagara boasts its romantic mythology around town with restaurants, hotels, and wine tours. Some sources claim Niagara is on a similar geographic latitude as Bordeaux, France, and Napa Valley, which allows for deep, rich, lush wines. Others tell the story of Napoleon’s brother, Jerome Bonaparte, bringing his new bride to Niagara, creating the tradition of honeymooning there. Niagara’s tourism website states 50,000 honeymooners per year flock to Niagara. If that’s correct, that means on any given day there are probably at least one hundred and fifty newlyweds visiting the park.

At dinner, a couple sits nearby us. Two men, one slightly older, spiky gray hair, and a younger man, cargo shorts, tattoos, a hot-pink polo. The bill arrives and cargo shorts excuses himself to hit the bathroom. Spiky hair pays the bill, and wanders out of the restaurant and down the street. Cargo shorts returns in a panic. Have we seen his husband? They’re newlyweds. We point outside where his husband stands under a streetlight. Thank God! he mouths to us, and heads out the door. The local papers herald Niagara as being the classic honeymoon spot of old, and the new honeymoon spot for gay couples. Celebrate your rights at Niagara! they trumpet. All brunch spots serve later than usual to accommodate sleepy lovers, and checkout times are somewhat negotiable just in case one is up all night making love. Most rooms give complimentary small bottles of champagne. In the paper, there’s a list of gay-friendly hotels and venues for ceremonies. There are still no churches in Niagara, New York, that will marry a same-sex couple, but there are many gay-friendly chapels. On July 25th, 2011 at the brink of the American Falls, a mass LGBTQ wedding was held, with free cake and champagne.

My parents have been married thirty-seven years and just last year, through a series of miscommunications, my mom got on a ferryboat and left my dad on an island. They still have moments where they lose each other. I try not to think too hard about their marriage because, like any, it’s laced with love and moments of real and intense strife. But as their child, I always focus on the strife; I worry about it.

I want to ask my parents if they’ve ever seriously considered a divorce, or if one has cheated on the other, but there are certain questions I cannot bring myself to ask. I have a feeling the answer to both questions might be yes, but I cannot imagine my parents without each other despite the fact that they often don’t get along. My brother and I have observed that there are so many years of hardened resentment between them, so much pain, so much anger, and that they don’t have things in common anymore. They are at home alone, together, in the same house, but separate rooms. Maybe what I really have to wrestle with is the idea that this is normal, not scary, and in love there are no guarantees. Maybe it hurts because I’ve had to expand my understanding of what’s actually, really, always on the table in any long-term relationship.

When I came home from college my first semester, I noticed that my father was sleeping in the back bedroom of our house, and my bathroom was full of his things, his razors, his shaving cream, his back balms, and horse-hair brushes. I pretended not to notice. But I was desperately afraid I was quietly observing what I feared to have been true all along about my parents: that they don’t know how to be together, or that being together means also having to be apart from one another in specific ways that I had never considered before.

*     *     *

We head back into Niagara Park after dinner to catch Friday-night fireworks over the falls. Couples come out in droves. They hold hands, blocking the paths, and at night it’s worse. There’s two of each couple, the couple itself, and its deformed monster-shaped shadow that moves over the pavement paths and metal bridges. By the American Falls, people are shoving, pushing to get photos of loved ones among the fireworks that keep bursting into the sky. A man holds up his Chinese takeout box and chopsticks while his lover gleefully photographs him against the rapids. They fall into a sloppy smooch post-photo. Another couple is leaning over the rail side-by-side, playfully pushing each other. Two middle-aged white women kiss on the lips while holding a camera at arm’s length. An older couple, a man and woman, both with silver hair, ask for their photo to be taken by a stranger as they put their arms around each other.

I ask my mom to take a photo of me. In the photo, I am alone in front of a dark crowd save for one big red firework bursting in the sky above me, and Niagara River, which muscles behind me. My parents don’t ask for a photo of themselves, but earlier by the Canadian Horseshoe Falls I insisted on one, and the timid way my father peeks out from behind my mother with his hand on her shoulder seems to say a lot about where they are in their relationship. No longer fiercely attached like the younger couples that can’t stand being apart, they are casually connected with a kind of incuriosity, which makes room for other things in the photo, like the falls behind them. They no longer want to be the only thing in the photo.

I think about relationships. I think about the way the water at Niagara eventually wears down the limestone until nothing is left. In 50,000 years, they predict there will be no falls. In 50,000 years, who knows where marriage will be. I think about my mom and dad, how they wear on each other, how they scrape against one another. I don’t want to scrape, but I also don’t want to be alone. Maybe abrasions are natural. Two things can’t be in the same place at once without friction, without a reaction.

As we walk along the river at night, I ask a question of both my parents.

“What if you were a settler in the 1800s and you came upon the falls?”

“Can you imagine!?” Mom shivers.

“When you hear that noise,” my father says as he points to the sky and we all listen to the shushing of the falls, “you know to jump out of the boat.”

“But how would you know if you’ve never heard the noise before?” I press.

“Some things you don’t learn, you just know,” Dad says, and Mom nods quietly beside him.

*     *     *

About forty people a year plunge to their deaths at Niagara. The Canadian Falls are statistically less deadly than the American, although from looks alone, the Horseshoe Falls are much bigger, and appear more threatening. The churning, churning, churning seems to be the threat on the Canadian side. One woman who went over had eyewitnesses claim she was alive on impact. The pull of the falls made it appear like she was swimming. The undertow of the Canadian Falls has spit people out before, and some have survived. It’s the jagged rocks at the end of the American Falls that make the shorter plunge more deadly.

Public records date people going over both the Canadian and American Falls as early as 1829. Niagara has always been a daredevil’s playground. Over twelve people have gone over the falls for show. People in metal barrels, in wooden barrels, encased in rubber balls, ill-fashioned extra-flotation-outfitted boats, kayaks. One man strapped a bunch of floats to his body encased in fishing net; another went over the falls on a Jet Ski in 1990 to raise awareness for homelessness, but his parachute wasn’t properly attached to his body, and he plunged to his death. There is also a log of objects that have gone over the falls, including a cat named Lagara secured in a barrel in 1901, salmon, aluminum fishing boats, schooners, and disoriented water birds during foggy conditions.

Since 1850, over 4,000 bodies have been found in Niagara River: not all dead, but those that are, more often than not, have plunged to their deaths on purpose. In 2003 a man named Kirk Jones famously attempted suicide but survived, and gave conflicting interviews to reporters all over the country claiming he was pulling a stunt, then later confessed he was struggling with lifelong depression. There is no museum or plaque on site in Niagara State Park that talks about the history of plunges. The community of Niagara fears the press storm of each fall, and doesn’t want any random visitor to get an idea they can’t survive. Local editorials rant about the suicides and how unfair it is that people use the falls for that reason, but the fact remains that Niagara is counted on top-ten suicide-location lists both nationally and world-wide. Niagara shares these lists with other American tourist spots like California’s Golden Gate Bridge, or Cold Springs Canyon Arch Bridge, or Nevada’s Las Vegas strip, where people check into hotel rooms amidst the chaos to take their own lives. Niagara’s shadowy doppelganger to the west seems to be Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which has been noted for a spike in Native American teenage suicides. Niagara has been listed as high as number three and as low as number ten depending on data pivots. I wonder if the sheer volume of suicides in one geographic location makes it feel like a less lonely spot to die, if there might be comfort in that kind of company in a final moment. We have culturally, historically, statistically marked spots on a map where suicides should occur, places for self-inflicted death. Niagara Falls happens to be one of those places. Part of the beauty of Niagara is the power it has, and with that kind of power come people who don’t want to just admire it, but feel it, submit to it.

My great-grandfather, Samuel Richardson, my father’s grandfather, was found hanging in his own dairy barn three hundred miles north of Niagara Falls ninety-eight years ago. He was forty-six years old. There are two stories that are told about this. The first is that he was murdered, hung, by dairy companies that didn’t want my great-grandfather to continue organizing local farmers and unionizing them. The other is that he committed suicide. If he committed suicide, it’s because he fell in love with a woman who was not my great-grandmother, or so I’m told. My grandfather, Nilie Richardson, found him. He was only nine years old at the time. He was asked to fetch Samuel for dinner. I imagine him walking into the barn and calling my great-grandfather’s name a few times before he hears the beam creak.

 

I worry that this sadness runs in my family. I worry that I won’t find someone who cares about me more than I care about myself, and maybe the truth is I don’t care about myself very much.

 

I have a memory of asking my father if he ever thought about killing himself as he tucked me into bed. I must have been about eight years old. He didn’t blink; he said he had, but that he’d miss everything, and he wanted to know what happened next in his life, like a movie.

“Don’t you want to see the movie of your life?” he said, completely earnestly. When I nodded, he kissed me on the forehead and pulled the covers up around my chin. I still think about that concept, “the movie of my life,” when I feel hopeless.

 

Three days after our stay at Niagara, my father emails my mother and me an article. A Japanese exchange student, Ayano Tokumasu, has fallen over the Canadian Falls. Surveillance cameras caught her grainy image climbing onto the railing, straddling it for a photo, and at around 8:30pm, she stands up, loses her balance, and falls out of view.

How Stupid! my father has written as a caption to the article.

The movie of Ayano’s life has ended at Niagara, but, as the Buddhists believe, maybe she’ll get another chance to reckon with Niagara in her next life. Maybe she’s been fighting the power of Niagara for many lives already.

*     *     *

On the morning of our last day in Niagara, I read my parents their horoscopes over breakfast. My father the Leo will have something amazing happen to him. My mother the Scorpio will have to battle her judgmental ego. Mom asks me if certain signs are supposed to be together. I tell her Scorpios and Leos aren’t considered a natural astrological match.

“But you guys are really defying the odds,” I say with a smirk.

Dad puts his arm around Mom.

“Sort of,” he says, and they both laugh.

There are no bones about my parents’ bickering and sometimes fundamental disagreements, but they are together, a unit; they’ve weathered storms, sometimes the storms of each other. If my parents ever truly loved anyone aside from the other, it wasn’t enough to break them apart completely, and that matters. If they’ve ever wanted to leave, they never did, and that matters. My parents take vacations together, read to each other, and I’ve never seen them eat silently. They always have something to say to one another after thirty-seven years of marriage, and that matters.

In boxes of old family pictures there are some of my grandfather, Nilie Richardson, standing with a beautiful woman in front of cars, in fur coats, on the beach, in cow fields, her dresses whipping around her. My grandfather dated this woman for ten years. No one knows her name. I’m told she was a doctor, and that no one knows why they never married, but one day my grandfather ended it, and within the year, he met my grandmother and married her. When I was younger, more jealous, more fierce and strict about what I thought of as love, I wondered why my grandmother would have allowed those photos to remain. I’m older and I can see now that this was a part of my grandfather’s life that my grandmother couldn’t deny whether the photos were there or not. He once loved someone else. He made a life with my grandmother. Those things exist separately together.

I think about how we build lives with people, how we love those people differently than others. The project of marriage isn’t exactly set up for romance; it’s about endurance, longevity, compromise, understanding, and one can have all of those things without romantic love. If I try to be really honest with myself, I’m certain my parents are not soulmates, and there are probably better partners for them out there—an intense personality who’s a better listener for Mom, a playful optimist for Dad—but that’s a game I play on bad days. On good ones I think about laws of physics and how it’s a natural law that particle matter wants to become one, merge together, and I’m convinced my parents share particles that bind them indefinitely through shared experiences, daily routines, but, maybe, not love.

A year before traveling to Niagara, I sat at a bar with a colleague. The woman who took our drink orders had slept with my friend’s husband.

“Oh. Did you want to go somewhere else?” I asked, kind of shocked.

“Why bother? I want to stare at her,” she had answered. So we did. She got pregnant for the third time shortly after our drinks.

In the past three years, the majority of the people I’ve had relationships with have been married, or in long-term relationships. After sleeping with someone who was cohabitating with someone else, I was then asked to house-sit, where I slept in their bed; I was paid to. I fed their mutual pets, I watered their mutual plants. I was tasked to care for their things, their life, and in the back of my mind, I wondered if I was caring for the life they’d built together by coming between them. Creating a crisis that could bring them closer in the end. I was still an outsider. Once, sitting next to a married man, I felt my mouth fill up with saliva. Later, in bed, I kissed all his fingers, including the one with his wedding ring on it. A man with a very serious girlfriend bought me drinks, took my number, exchanged emails with me before telling me we could never meet in person again and he didn’t mean to start something he couldn’t exactly finish. I’ve become the relationship tester. I work alone. I test the love of others and try to detect something within myself. I don’t know if I’m doing this because I’m trying to see what’s really possible between two people—testing it—or if I’m trying to punish those that really believe in a one true love, or punish myself for wanting to believe in it. Maybe I want to prove to myself that this is normal because it’s what I know.

*     *     *

After breakfast, my parents and I are standing in line for the Cave of Winds Walk Niagara attraction. The Cave of Winds Walk has been an attraction since 1929 when an elevator was built into the gorge walls of the American Falls. The attraction takes tourists to man-made decks at the foot of the American Falls.

In the 1953 film Niagara starring Marilyn Monroe, The Cave of Winds Walk is featured at the climax of the film. In the film, a newlywed couple attempts to honeymoon in a cabin next to an older couple celebrating a wedding anniversary. Soon it’s revealed that the wife of the older couple (Marilyn) is having an affair, and hopes to kill her husband by plotting to have someone push him into the rapids of the American Falls. The newlyweds huddle together, fearing one day they might become as mad, cruel, and unloving as this other couple. The stench from the older couple’s troubles permeates the film, spreading, causing a convoluted tragedy where the seasoned couple uses the newlyweds to deceive and punish one another. The promotional photos from the film were the very snapshots of Marilyn Monroe that Andy Warhol used for his famous silkscreen of her face. The original movie poster claims, “Marilyn Monroe and Niagara, a raging torrent of emotion that even nature can’t control!” Marilyn had her own troubles with romantic love, and after her death being declared a “probable suicide” in 1962, it’s haunting to think about her walking the very path my parents and I stand on. Marilyn Monroe in many ways embodies the duplicity of Niagara: the search for romantic love and eventually the desperation to end that search.

My parents and I have put on giant yellow trash-bag-like slickers for the attraction we’re in line for. Dad and I squirm in our ponchos. Mom stands primly dwarfed by hers. Across from the line we stand in is a bronze statue of Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla that sits twenty feet high on a forked path. One direction leads to the American Falls, the other to the Canadian.

On the plaque at Tesla’s feet, I read that Nikola Tesla and I were born one hundred and fifty-five years and one day apart.

Tesla was an inventor, a mechanical and electrical engineer. His most famous work was with electricity, and his contributions to science allow us to harness the power of Niagara. Tesla was an eccentric who suffered from his own genius. He would wake in the night with visions of inventions complete with dimensions. Tesla has touched millions with his scientific work, and in as few as two hundred years, it will probably be more relevant, more useful than the institution of marriage.

Mom and I watch children and teenagers climb up onto Tesla’s lap for photos and then, almost on cue, a married couple enters the park and breezes past Tesla flanked by wedding photographers. The bride is smiling in white, the groom goofy in gray. I can feel us all rooting for them before we enter the attraction.

We take the elevator down one hundred and seventy-three feet to the Cave of Winds Walk. Our guide tells us the elevator shaft was hand-carved for fear that explosives would rupture the gorge walls.

“They would have,” my father responds immediately. The guide shrugs. Once down, we walk through a cement tunnel past people who are completely soaked from their experience waiting for elevators back up. The required sandals are squishy but firm on the slick pavement. Dad puts his yellow poncho hood up and ties it just below his bottom lip in a perfect bow, making only a small part of his face open to the misty gusts. His nose (distinctly large and French) and moustache are the most prominent. He always jokes that it’s petite while touching it gingerly. Once as a counter to this, I pointed out that the opposite side of his wineglass was greasy from his nose touching it every time he took a sip. He laughed genuinely while holding his glass up to the light.

On the decks we admire the sharp rocks at the bottom of the American Falls.

“I can see now why no one survives the American Falls,” Dad says, grinning devilishly. He points to a gray jagged pile of stones lying prostrate in the white water. As we walk up the steps, the spray from the falls covers us and I feel cleansed. Newly married couples struggle up and down the deck, laughing. One can’t leave the Cave of Winds without ascending to the hurricane deck. This is the closest to the falls, complete with one section where water pours torrentially onto the deck. The night before, Mom and I had looked down to see people rummaging in yellow ponchos like slow-moving ghosts. Most women sidestep the hurricane deck’s wettest spots. Mom and other brides avoid the falls and watch as their men and children take the American Falls head-on. Dad beckons me over to the torrential downpour.

“At least thirty seconds, kid,” he says, grinning. We shuffle over.

“WHOOO YEAH!” Dad cries out as the stuff hits our faces. I laugh at the excitement of it. It feels cold and wet, hard, but soft. The moment challenges our bodies as we move underneath the force of it. I can see my father out of the corner of my eye, and I feel connected to him as we submit, in our own way, to the falls. Mom is smiling at us and she touches my back affectionately when we approach her, dripping and wild-eyed. As we’re exiting the hurricane deck, a young couple reaches it.

“I don’t want to get too wet,” the woman says as her husband eggs her on.

“Honey, it’s freakin’ Niagara. Whether you like it or not, you’re already wet!”

 

That same day, in the Syracuse airport, my parents and I wait for separate planes together. They are going home to North Carolina, and I am going to New York City to visit friends.

I watch my mom’s hands as she fiddles with her purse. On her right hand she wears an old-fashioned sapphire-and-diamond ring that my father gave to her on her birthday. When my parents were first married my father couldn’t afford an engagement ring so he promised her one day he would get her something fantastic when he could afford it. This ring is the belated engagement band. He purchased it for her in London, England, after she admired it in an antique shop on a family vacation. None of us knew he had gone back to get it for her. Later that year, on her birthday, when he produced the jewelry box we were all surprised to recognize the ring from the shop. I was only ten years old, but I remember this exchange between my parents. My mother’s genuine surprise, the slight tremble that ran through her, and then how she grabbed my father, and French-kissed him at the dinner table in front of my brother and me. This was shocking. I remember feeling jealous that my parents were so together in that moment. Maybe for the first time, I realized there was an additional layer of knowing that I could not wriggle between, could not understand, could not be a part of, and its origin lay beyond me. I still wonder who might be my eventual partner, who will surprise me even after years of togetherness, or if the surprise is that I will be alone.

My parents were married in 1974 in a small stone church in southern Virginia. Cows that grazed the field outside the church poked their heads through the church windows, mooing in approval during the ceremony. My mom wore a daisy crown atop long blonde curls, my father a powder-blue leisure suit and giant sideburns. They were too poor to honeymoon at the time, but when they got back to their hotel room that evening, my father and mother sat outside with Cokes and MoonPies from the hotel vending machine and contemplated the rest of their lives together.

My parents are individuals, and I have individual relationships with them, but I’m a direct result of the ways in which they’ve agreed to be together, and there’s pain and beauty in that.

I ask my mom to watch my bag while I go to the bathroom. I’m taking my time at the sink washing and lathering my hands up; I’m dawdling, not on purpose, but I’m slightly aware I’m taking too long. When I emerge my mother is at my gate with my suitcase, panicked and shaking her head at the flight attendants, then pointing to me. She’s held the plane for me.

I walk past Dad who gives me a hug and a kiss, telling me, “Have fun, kid, and you gave your mother a heart attack.” I know that this is part of my charm and frustration for him. I know he wants to hug me and shake me at the same time.

“I would have made it,” I say under my breath. The attendants watch as I approach Mom who gives me a look I’ve seen many times. The you’re killing me, but I love you, you helpless thing look.

“I would have made it,” I tell her as I hug her.

“I love you,” she says and kisses my mouth. I walk down the long corridor to the plane without looking back. I sit down and buckle my seat belt and look over the cold metal wing of the plane. I probably wouldn’t have made it. I should have just said, thank you.

In vacuo, Universal Studios
January 7, 2013 | poetry

2012 Poetry Contest Winner, judged by G.C. Waldrep

We begin in line. We end there.

In the gentle shuffle forward

of our incumbent spell.

We find the school of attention

in the school of boredom,

the danse ennui in the study

of shoes. In the queue,

time moves through a half-solid.

Air is just a fraction

away from liquid. We’re all drowning,

slowly. Especially

in Florida. In my father’s temple,

in the heat, a vein is swollen—

Lethe in my flower… In the fadeless garden…

If we could look inside the living

mind, I imagine versions

of ourselves, minuscule and impure,

in a gridlock on the interstate.

This we call memory—

and then forget.

Each time we open the mind,

it dies like a movie

astronaut in a holey spacesuit.

Here, we measure time

in bodies. (My father sweats

through his clothes.)

I lean into the metal

railing, and the heat it holds

enters into me

like information,

burning. Body after body,

we could keep on going—

beyond this moment we’ve existed in

here, past the line

and my father’s old silence,

arriving at his new:

the sequence

of personless photos, mountains

in a war-country he sends

without caption. From these, I get:

“Love exists at terminus;

meaning, in vacuo.”

An Interview with William Logan
January 1, 2013 | blog news

A noted teacher and poetry critic, William Logan is the author of numerous poetry collections—most recently, Madame X and an edition of John Townsend Trowbridge’s Guy Vernon, both released in 2012. William’s poem “Winter Before Winter” is featured in issue 37.1 of The Journal. Recently, he spoke with Associate Poetry Editor Jenna Kilic about stanzaic form in free-verse poetry, the role of reading in writing, and his own growing interest in his childhood experiences.

Jenna Kilic: In “Winter Before Winter,” your couplets connect thought to thought or observation to observation, building an argument; they also isolate and therefore augment a series of beautiful images. When you write, how do you conceive the stanzaic organization? How did you see the couplets working here?

William Logan: Dividing free verse into regular stanzas is fairly recent in American poetry—I suspect we owe Stevens that debt. When I was young, tercets and quatrains were common. I long felt that quatrains possessed a grave formality, while tercets absorbed a certain jaggedness of logic in their forward rush. Perhaps I’ve favored those forms too much, but I like the play of sentence against line, line against stanza. I like the astringency of couplets, their sharp-minded melodrama of form; but if overused they empty out everything they touch. Many poets now work in one-line stanzas. There I stop. I’d like to think that the poem conceives its own stanza, but that’s just romance.

JK: I’ve had contentious conversations with other poets about what constitutes a “poem.” Some think a poem is whatever you call a poem. I’ve argued that if you define it as everything you define it as nothing. Since we’ve blurred the lines between genres, how do we now define the term “poem”?

WL: That’s like trying to hit a moving target with a shoe, and not a very good shoe. Why believe that a poem is, say, the “best words in the best order,” if lovely poems by Williams have not-so-good words in not-so-good order? (Unless the argument is circular, a good poem automatically having best words in best order.) Any definition sufficient to corral the varieties of poetry would be ridiculously vague or longer than a Russian novel. I like a definition that doesn’t legislate or criminalize. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott suggested that the poet “does one thing only, he imagines poetically.” That will do.

JK: In Madame X, “Along the Autumn River” addresses the loss of fishing commerce and nature in your boyhood town of Westport Point, Massachusetts. I’ve had similar observations about losses in my hometown and on the river on which I grew up. What is your connection to this town and why does it mean more, say, than other places you’ve lived?

WL: For decades I wrote almost nothing about my childhood, because it seemed as dull, as profitless, as unpromising as most childhoods. Only in the past few books have I had cause to reconsider. My father was a salesman for Alcoa, and in 1955 we moved to Westport Point so he could work out of the Providence office. Westport is a village hard by the Rhode Island border. It had some small manufacturers in the nineteenth century (part of the northern reaches of town is still called Westport Factory), but the Point survived mainly on whaling and fishing. I went to first and second grade in a two-room schoolhouse—the last names of my classmates (Tripp, Macomber) could be found in the census records a century or more before. It was a quiet, unpretentious place; and we were allowed to roam without restraint. The bachelor who lived behind us down the hill suffered our visits with extraordinary grace. When he later murdered a man over the salvage of a boat, my father flew back to serve as a character witness at his trial. By then we lived in Pittsburgh, but we returned summers until I was fourteen. I realize now that what I took for granted has almost vanished from American life. The town hasn’t changed much, but the locals can’t afford the houses unless they inherit.

JK: Many of your poems might be considered erudite, and I’m astounded by how well-researched they are. How do you write the historical poems? Does the desire to write a poem fuel your research, or do you acquire the necessary knowledge and then decide to write the poem?

WL: I hope I’m too wayward to have a method. I’m willing to chase facts if facts are required. On rare occasions, my stray reading has tossed up a topic, though I’ve read hundreds of memoirs and books of letters without an end in view—if that’s a method, it’s singularly unproductive. The letters between the Custers in Madame X and the letter from Charles Dodgson in Sullen Weedy Lakes are based on real letters, with only the adjustments the syllabic form demanded. For the long poems “Keats in India” in Vain Empires and “The Underground” in Sullen Weedy Lakes, I read, then read more. The Keats poem was based on travelers’ journals; it steals a few images from Bishop Heber. “The Underground” required at least paltry knowledge of the intricacies of Victorian banking and the causes of the Crimean War. I’m sure some of the facts in my poems are just imagination, and some of the imagination plain fact.

JK: What advice do you have for poets graduating from MFA programs?

WL: Eat cheaply. Buy more books than you can read. Read more than you buy. Brush your teeth.

JK: Movies. You’ve watched so many, and you seem to love westerns and Japanese films. What is it about these genres? Do you find similarities in your preference for movies and your preference for poems?

WL: No doubt I watched movies on the little Magnavox my parents owned in the fifties, but what I remember are evenings they took us to the Westport drive-in. I used to see 150 or more new movies a year—now it’s barely one a week. I loathe pretentiousness, artiness (I’m not a big Godard fan), and virtually any American movie made in the fifties—all that unbearable social conscience—honorable ideas, but too much hectoring. I loved Bergman when I was young; now I’d rather see Preston Sturges, Ozu, Kurosawa, with a few bad thrillers thrown in. Like Wittgenstein, I find that movies offer escape without regret (he preferred westerns)—unless the movie is awful, of course, as so many are. Bad thrillers excepted.

If my love of movies bears any relation to my love of poems, someone will have to explain it to me.