Special Features
Matthew Buckley Smith. Dirge for an Imaginary World. San Jose, CA: Able Muse Press, 2012. 80 pp. $16.95, paper.
After the decades of foofaraw, after the histrionic wailing and the gnashing of teeth, let us be honest. American poetry is not, after all, dead. Yes, it contains a great deal of necrotic tissue in it, but a pulse persists. Our poetry remains vital not only in the work of our many distinguished elder statesmen, like Walcott and Wilbur, but also in the work of youngish and younger poets like Bill Coyle, Morri Creech, Stephen Kampa, Adam Kirsch, A.E. Stallings, Natasha Trethewey, Caki Wilkinson, and Greg Williamson. All of these poets are, at their best, astoundingly good, jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly good, and there are many more who are deserving of notice. And then, let us not forget that Claudia Emerson, Joseph Harrison, Mary Jo Salter, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Rosanna Warren, and Franz Wright, among others, are all, as of this writing, under sixty, and are all writing brilliantly. Yes, we live, after all, in an age of great bounty. In the midst of the riotous city, of the obstreperous hordes swarming the streets, the sumptuous banquet of good poetry has gone on, unperturbed, and we should be grateful.
Of course, for all the excellence, for all the wheat, there is a great deal more chaff, as is always the case, and, due to the proliferation of writing programs and journals, the evidence of that chaff is more apparent now than in ages past, is, in fact, to some degree institutionalized at this point. But the sins of bad writing are, more or less, the same as they ever were, and primary among them is the sin of pride, which is another name for certainty, which is another name for complacency. So many writers, who would mock the worst of the Victorians for thoughtlessly wrenching their every notion into blank verse, will themselves thoughtlessly allow their own notions to slouch into a free verse more accurately called “non-verse,” taking for granted that metrical poetry, or even more loosely formal poetry, is not the kind of thing one does anymore. Id est: bad poets are forever taking form for granted. As Pound said, “Meter must mean,” and that is true, whether one writes in a regular meter or in free verse. Indeed, the practitioners of non-verse are those who forget that, in Pound’s command to “Make it new,” the word, “it,” has an antecedent. Novelty is not the end of poetry.
But the best response to bad writing is silence, so let us shift our topic. Among the excellent youngish and younger poets of our time, one notices, in general, a tendency toward playfulness. This playfulness—a kind of tombstone-jumping irony in the manner Calvino ascribes to Cavalcanti—serves most often as a fake ID to allow great moral seriousness to sneak into the dance-club. It is an excellent technique, but one must acknowledge it is not the only technique. What our poetry has been missing for some time is a sterner voice, a severer vision, willing to risk being uncool, willing to risk the buffoonery of brooding in order to speak gravely of grave matters. Such a voice, such a vision does not forbid humor, but its humor is darker, heavier, bitterer than the lissome jokes and puns we more often encounter. Bill Coyle’s outstanding debut, The God of This World to His Prophet, moves in the direction of such a voice and such a vision, but we get the thing full-on in Matthew Buckley Smith’s debut collection, Dirge for an Imaginary World.
Smith’s book is stark. Its vision is, most often, severe in the manner of George Meredith’s masterpiece, Modern Love. Of course, there are also traces of Swift, of Baudelaire, of Housman, of Larkin. It is the kind of poetry written by a man of serious mind, refusing complacency, refusing the cuddly lies of comfort, and walking into the dark night’s storm, clear-eyed, in pursuit of the meaning of his existence. Carrie Jerrell, in her blurb, quite rightly notes the similarity between Smith’s poems and those of Thomas Hardy, as both poets trade in an austere and merciless beauty. Indeed, Smith is one of those rare poets, like Hardy, who can break your heart in all the ways you didn’t know you wanted it to be broken. Poem after poem says the things that we would say if we were more honest, and says those honest things the way we would say them if we were more artful. But, unlike Hardy, who could rely on a chilly pastoral mode to dramatize his characters’ inner suffering, Smith, being a poet of our own age, cannot turn to brumal heaths and beautifully drear landscapes but must, instead, show the heartbroken and lost of our own time as they are, wandering through city streets and suburban bars, lacking even the dignity of suffering picturesquely.
Youth
I miss believing that I’ll never die,
Or is it that there won’t be a tomorrow?
Both lines work out about the same: deny
The day you’ll have to pay back what you borrow.
It used to be I never went to bed
A second night with any girl I found.
No breakfast in those days—a smoke instead,
Then out the door before she came around.
Last night I passed a toppled garbage bin,
Its liner sagging with a rat’s remains.
He sank a little when I squinted in
And seemed embarrassed by his greedy pains.
And so much like a man, the way he sat
Still in his death, and so much like a rat.
This is devastating poetry, devastating. Smith refuses to indulge in idealizing his past, refuses to be transported by the sweet incense of memory into a transcendent and deathless realm, though he “miss[es]” the ability to do so. The speaker recognizes the appeal of that vision, but he cannot allow himself to indulge in it, because that vision is a lie. Instead, the poem, which is the book’s first, opens by bluntly asserting the speaker’s idealism has passed, and by subtly asserting that this speaker is, in consequence, aware of his own mortality, of his confinement within the prison of Time. How many poets luxuriate in the plush sensuality of their pasts, never reaching the detachment or self-awareness Smith reaches in his first line! How many poets wrap themselves in their idealism like a Snuggy™! Not Smith: the sonnet suggests that the big fun of youth, the trysts and the self-destructive habits, the pursuit of lubricious escape worshiped by our culture, is akin to the rat feeding on filth.
Why is the rat in the dumpster dead? If we take the entire image of the rat as functionally metaphorical, we find the dumpster is the vehicle for Time, a grim enough vision, but we also find that the dead rat is the figure for the speaker, suggestive of the spiritual death accompanying such a hedonistic past. But the poem is not so easy. The simile of the couplet acknowledges the comparison’s failure: the speaker is not actually dead like the rat; rather, the speaker must go on living, having endured the death of idealism, the death of which disallows the certain correlation of one thing with another. Indeed, the simile must fail, as correspondences fail, if we are to believe Rimbaud’s revelations leading up to his famous Le musique savant manque à notre désir. Ah, the speaker cannot even accept the cold comfort of ultimate despair, which would come with accepting that he himself is adequately represented by the dead rat. This is honesty. This is the “little ease” described by Camus in The Fall, that device of torture in which one, being enclosed, can neither stand up straight nor sit entirely down, and in which one must forever contort one’s self into a different state of discomfort. The poem refuses idealism, and it refuses despair. The poem, at last, refuses certainty, because certainty is, for Smith, the great lie. In fact, we might say that certainty itself is the “imaginary world” of the book’s title. Poem after poem strips away the veneer of certainty and strives to see things as they are. Of course, such a seeing is, the book reminds us, impossible, and this impossibility is at the book’s thematic core.
But, whenever poetry’s involved, a discussion of theme must lead to a discussion of style. We might begin by saying that Dirge for an Imaginary World contains no free verse, that it contains a wide variety of forms, including sonnets; ballad stanzas; heroic couplets; sestets; rhymed quatrains in trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter; poems in mixed meters; blank verse; Sapphics; hemistichs; et cetera. The variety of forms within the book, however, is not a sign of Smith’s formal mastery; what is a sign of Smith’s formal mastery is that each form means, that each poem’s form significantly interacts with its content. How? Most often, as the poem’s content strips away the lies of certainty, as the content rubbles the foundations of each imaginary world, the form, ironically, is building a new imaginary world, a new shape, a new myth, with the perfection of the form’s exactitudes corresponding to the perfection of the lie that is certainty. In short, Smith’s forms function by illustrating the subjective self’s inability to transcend itself or enter into things as they are, the inability of the I to be certain, even of uncertainty. If the book is a “dirge,” a formal work of music, it is a work of art, an imaginary world, lamenting the passing of another imaginary world, and Smith’s is the vision that refuses to forget it is a vision, that scrutinizes its seeing even as it sees, that mistrusts itself as much as it mistrusts the idealism it sees through.
For complacent readers, the appearance of traditional forms may signal some kind of old-fashioned stuffiness, a square-ness, a lack of familiarity with “what’s going on” in poetry. Nonsense. Smith’s poems do what good poems do with forms: they make their forms integral. If the poems are not faddish, or en vogue, it is only because good poetry is rarely faddish, or en vogue; it is always difficult, because it is always faithful to life, and the world, especially in our time, has little use for difficulty or fidelity, easy and promiscuous entertainments being constantly available. Happily, good readers have already recognized Smith’s achievements. Here is his “Nowhere,” which Kevin Young selected for the Best American Poetry 2011:
Nowhere
i.m. Steve Sigur
The sprinkler system wakes up on the hour,
Casting its vacant arcs across the lawn.
All night its clockwork tends to every flower
Bedded down here to bury roots and spawn,
While nowhere in particular my friend,
Who just last week lay mumbling on a cot,
Is dead, is nothing time or work can mend,
Though his machinery remains to rot
As I walk late at night across a campus
Hundreds of miles away, which is to say
As near to him as anywhere, and tempus
Fugit no less irreparabile
From me than from the blossoms here and there
Who do not know their lot, and do not care.
You’ll note this poem includes a glance at the famous passage from the Georgica of Vergil: Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore, or, “But it flees in the meanwhile; time flees irretrievably, while we wander in circles, captive in our love of the singular.” The realization, reached through this allusion, is brutal. For all our self-knowledge, we come to the same end as the “blossoms” and the people who don’t pursue knowledge and just don’t care. The noble Roman and the barbarian die the same death. This is a particularly brutal realization for writer-types, who want to think that we are better off for all our learning, for our reading Vergil, for our studying Latin, for our writing whatever it is we write. Perhaps we are, but Smith refuses to congratulate himself for reading poetry, or for writing poetry. The poem can’t settle for the certainty, so rampant in the poetry world, that everyone should read poetry, and should write poetry, and that poetry makes us better people, as if browsing a book of sonnets could wash us clean of sin. Is it really any solace to Vergil to know that a writer, 2000 years later, is quoting a fragment of a work few read, even fewer in its own language? Did it change his fate, spare his suffering, that he was the greatest poet of the world’s greatest empire? Probably not. Vergil, the man, is dead, though his gifts remain.
As for that, there is quite a bit in Dirge for an Imaginary World that has a chance to remain, if not in the political treatises so often being passed off as anthologies these days, at least in the hearts of its readers. Poems like “The Ascetic Speaks of Heaven,” “Meaning,” “A Lesson,” “A Pledge,” “Juglans Nigra,” “Late Aubade,” “At the Spring Ballet Exams,” and, my personal favorite, “Diary,” are nearly perfect, and one has no sooner read them than one seems, almost, to have memorized them. Smith’s poems, at their best, are rich in the complexity that rewards careful and repeated reading, but they are also pleasurable, available, at least in part, on the first read. They are poems of what Allen Tate called “knowledge carried to the heart,” poems written with the entirety of the human apparatus, and, while the poems’ distinctly grave vision and voice, coupled with their dexterous technique, may initially seem abrasive in their divergence from the more familiar and jubilant manner, they should earn Smith a place at the banquet with our best young poets, where, amid the brilliance and headiness, the need will arise, at the end of the night, for a sober, steady-handed poet to drive everyone home.
Will Schutt. Westerly. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. 80 pp. $18.00, paper.
This year’s Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize went to Will Schutt for Westerly, a collection of poems that meditate on travel and mortality, on being led and pushed to and from the West. Schutt engages memory and its fallibilities, the elegy and possibilities that must come with it. The speaker takes the reader on travels from a small town in Rhode Island, to Wisconsin, to the West Coast, and to Italy.
He sets the tone of the collection with the opening poem, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” balancing the intellectual with pop culture, giving weight to the historical patter of Billy Joel as he invokes de Sade, foreshadowing loss amidst a pleasant summer scene. In “Rock Maple, White Pine,” he writes “Part of you is thinking this early / why ravel means entangle and disentangle // at the same time, as if the interrogative / mood were the only concept // hanging about to hold the hour still.” This is what Schutt gives us throughout the collection—poems that entangle and disentangle at the same time. He teasingly complicates and simplifies in the same sentences, kindly asking the reader to consider the speaker’s observations and declarations. In the unrhymed sonnet “A Kind of Poetry,” Schutt writes “Sometimes you turn to poetry / the way you turn to another country. / […] / You notice things you wouldn’t / otherwise. You notice things.” He then does exactly that in the elegantly translated mid-century Italian poems that make up the second section.
In “Crenellated Playroom,” his most heartbreaking poem and the longest in the collection, Schutt elegizes a dear friend who died young, whose “midlife crisis / peaked in prep school.” She is the embodiment of youth and maturity, living and elegy. In the poem, as her health fails, Laura’s personality is vibrant; she is those contradictions embodied. As Schutt writes, “—At her sickest, whittled down to brutal / humor only have-nots possess, grand dame / receiving guests in bed, Laura would say, / ‘That coat’s not really your color’ or ‘I hope / she’s not at my funeral.’” She is the juxtaposition of the serious intellectual and the democratic humorist.
In Westerly, Schutt takes up estrangement. It finds its way into poems about family and fatherhood, about travel, growing up, and loss. As Carl Phillips writes in his introduction to the collection, “we become more estranged, it seems, not only from others but from ourselves—who we were, who we remember being, or what we think we remember, which is different from knowing.” In the ekphrastic poem, “Postcard of Peter Lorre Embracing Lotte Lenya, 1929,” Schutt sees in the image his “young father…[laying] the groundwork for divorce.”
Schutt is at his best when his poems are at once intimate and confessional, traditional and restrained. His work is personal and public, domestic and international. Even in death, the poems are full of life. He examines, then peels layers back slowly, revealing—in stunning and accessible language—complicated and difficult truths.
Douglas Watson. The Era of Not Quite. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd, 2013. 147 pp. $14.00, paper.
If, as the book Hal Walker returns to the library in the opening scene of “The Era of Not Quite” suggests, the Era of Not Quite has been “running continuously since the dawn of human history,” it would explain a lot. In fact, it would explain everything: from unrequited love to a man’s brain in the street. For what it means to live in the Era of Not Quite is to reach for a thing, and not quite seize it. And then to keep reaching.
Watson is a very smart writer, and unlike many uses of that word—“smart”—in this context, I mean it here as a compliment, not a way to dismiss a work as technically clever but lacking heart or sincerity. Watson’s thoughts on this tension illustrate his sensibility as a writer: “I do think heart, or ‘heart,’ is important to my fiction—or any good fiction. Of course, you need blood too, or ‘blood.’ Can’t have one without the other. The mysterious stuff of life, in other words.”
Thus, on one hand, The Era of Not Quite is a stunning example of Barthes’ notion of the “writerly text,” a text that challenges the reader by constantly calling attention to its constructed nature (think Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”). Some of the greatest pleasures of Watson’s collection are the jokes he plays on the reader. For example, there are two distinct characters named “Douglas Watson” in The Era of Not Quite, and in the middle of the book, there is a…story? (one wonders what exactly to call it) titled “Special Advertising Section,” in which the marketing division of the Estate of Douglas Watson apologizes for the fact that The Era of Not Quite is not a novel.
On the other hand, because everything in the collection is in tension with its opposite—especially play and sincerity—this is a book in which literary criticism literally kills and the clever theories of music critics lead one narrator to complain, “Talk about missing the point.” This is because for Watson, the smart stuff isn’t about technical or philosophical bravado—it’s about fun. When I asked him about maintaining this tricky balance in his work, he called in an answer from Playland: “Well, the best way to strike a balance is to stand on two feet. If you stand on just the play foot, you’ll fall over into Playland. And if you stand on just the sincerity foot, you’ll tip over and be completely lost in Sincerityland, which is an even worse place to be than Playland, believe me.” Then suddenly he was serious: “My mother, who loved words and was better at them than I am, once approvingly quoted someone—I don’t remember who—as saying that anyone who thought words were mainly for communication was a fool. I’m paraphrasing. The best thing to do with words was have fun with them, the person said. Maybe it was even a quote on the Scrabble box, for all I can remember. My mom and I played a lot of Scrabble, and I’m happy to say that she won more than her share of our games, even toward the end when she was really very sick and didn’t have much energy.”
Watson isn’t much of a self-promoter, and he’s a fairly private person. He was open, though, about the way his mother’s recent death inevitably affected many of the stories in the collection: “I wrote The Era of Not Quite at a time when I was confronting death and loss and grief for the first time—I mean in a big way, in my immediate family. So I didn’t have patience for the small stuff. You know: ‘Bill drank a glass of milk. It made him think of milk paint. He’d been wanting to change the color of his living-room walls, but the question was, Which color was the right one?’ What I would say to Bill is, Who cares? Don’t you know you’re going to die? Get outside and get some exercise or something.”
This urgency pervades all of the stories in The Era of Not Quite. Most are quite short, and if the main character isn’t dead by the end, it’s probably because they’re talking right at you (one of the best pieces in the collection, “What I Did on My Summer Vacation,” is a dramatic monologue delivered from a cynical teacher to her alternately inattentive and smart-alecky students). Some of the stories read like fables and accordingly cut right to the chase: “Long ago, when fate governed the lives of mortals, there was a lad whose lot in life was to love a girl whose lot in life was to be abducted by a fearsome dragon.” Note: if you’re a bit put off by characters named “lad,” “girl” or “boy,” don’t be. For here, appearing where it shouldn’t, is my thesis, in two parts: 1) you can’t forget that a character in a book by Douglas Watson is just a character in a book by Douglas Watson, and 2) you’ll care about that character anyway.
The best way to test this thesis is to read “Wolves,” previously published in The Journal Issue 35.1, a story that uses structural innovation for profound emotional impact. The story left me so stunned, I had to ask Watson about its genesis. He said, “I wrote ‘Wolves’ in the year after my mother died, so there’s a direct tie-in. But I just wrote the thing—for a workshop I was in, actually—and then other people pointed out that I was dealing in symbols. Rather heavy-handed ones at that. And I said, Huh, you’re right. But I’d had no idea. But I mean, there’s music, there’s a church, there’s a library. None of them provides any comfort or any answers. And then the wolves come at you. That’s what it’s like to lose your mother.”
At the same time, Watson emphasizes that the story isn’t autobiography: “The autobiographical stuff might partly explain how I came to write it, but the story is not a coded message whose true subject is me. A story can mean many things to many people, and that is one reason I prefer fiction to nonfiction. And books to life.”
Of course I’d be remiss not to remind you that there are twenty-two more stories like “Wolves” waiting for you—wolf-like—in Watson’s collection. For like his character Jacob Livesey, the experimental composer, Watson’s best stuff “evoke[s] the twin longings that t[ear], although not asunder, the inner lives of many of his contemporaries: the desire for repetition” (that’s “heart,” the stuff you nod over, weeping) “and the hunger for something—anything—new” (and that’s play).
Enjoy.
Michelle Chan Brown. Double Agent. Tucson, AZ: Kore Press, 2012. 80 pp. $14.00, paper.
Michelle Chan Brown’s mischievous debut, Double Agent, clears a wider space for both spying (loosely defined) and expatriation in poetry. Old tensions make their appearances—strained relationships, illicit love affairs—along with a menagerie of devices from slant rhyme to aggressively enjambed free verse. Yet the book’s foreignness is unavoidable. Set in a version of the Eastern bloc, Brown’s speaker guides readers on a sort of participant-observer tour where language and vision become alien.
While travel is a familiar topic, Brown makes it unfamiliar with terse, streetwise paranoia, as if Pynchon were made to write with a telegraph. Even in the table of contents, the reader is introduced to an amorphous hostility with titles like “Semi-Domesticated Arsonist” and “The Newlywed’s Guide to Hunting.” And the poems themselves brim with the cold surrealism of espionage. In “Enemy,” she claims, “Genial. Harmless as a new hat. / That is the way of plagues.” One feels the line becoming a contested boundary, a space for gamesmanship and deceit. But while some poets get drunk on these sorts of hijinks, the reader questions neither Brown’s cleverness nor her seriousness. In the same poem: “They’ll eat off the family tree. / History told them: no one ever starved / for love. The mother darned / old flags for their cadavers.”
Danger suffuses the poems’ imagery as well. One senses a sardonic version of T.S. Eliot in “Open House,” where Brown chillingly puns on the crowd: “They are pillars of society. Hence the faces of stone.” And here, she confronts paranoia embodied:
My mother was afraid of her fingers.
She squirreled them in the dry crevices
of the furniture. Desiccate there, little liars,
she’d croon, rocking herself into her fear….
Threats loom in and out in the forms of a hypnotist, lovers, even (seriously) rabbits. And though these threats seem to emanate, as the setting might suggest, from a Cold War ambiance, the book treats the setting not as an engine for dried-up politicking, but for aesthetic exploration. In the first of the “Autobiography” series, the speaker watches “The windmills hum their song / through the nuclear plants. A time, / a time for kindling.” Elsewhere, “The potatoes’ eye-sockets disapprove of her dye job.”
But beyond all else, Brown’s capacity for whimsy and spontaneity makes these poems memorable. One always senses wryness at the margins, a resistance against the poems’ bent for bleakness. Lines like “Our talk was small enough for the laden table” suggest a sort of high-society Dick Tracy. In the sassy and heartbreaking “Pleasuring the Enemy,” she writes, “You give a leather mask a real personality. I feel / the edge of every bad-sex dream / knifing its merry way under my eyelids.” Too often in poetry, such bold posturing sounds desperate. Here, though, the speaker’s bravado reveals the sadness surrounding her, the fears she has learned to live with.
And those moments of oblique vulnerability lead, unmistakably, to compassion. She offers these beautiful lines from the end of “Shipwreck”:
We were used to solitude. Some of us
had worked the mills, where skylights cracked
and loaned us stars. We learned to relish
the ownership of hours. Our sheets
acceded to the torpor. If you must
call it sickness—the sea colonized us.
Below muslin, our heartbeats thrilled,
lazy as laps. Breezes licked our faces flat.
If we wept, we wept soundless as sand.
What wave would betray our trust?
Caesuras resolve to an uninterrupted line as alliteration emerges and end-stops become insistent. The utterance, as if realizing its own entanglement in punctuation, gives up its declarations for a question. Here and elsewhere, the speaker opens herself to clarity, so when cleverness and confidence return, they feel different—more complicated.
As with any distinctive voice, the possibility for cloying the reader is virtually unavoidable, and there are one or two poems the collection could thrive without. But taken as a whole, Double Agent successfully rides its formal flexibility and vocal daring from beginning to end. The title, of course, prefaces the intrigue found in the subject matter, but it also points to the spying found here and in all good poetry: excitement both in what is revealed and how that revelation happens.
Alan Shapiro. Night of the Republic. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. 92 pp. $21.00, cloth.
The most memorable exhibit at the 2003 Venice Biennial was an installation by Mladen Stilinović titled “Dictionary of Pain.” Stilinović had removed a hundred or more individual pages from an English dictionary and framed them on two rows of columns in a large warehouse. On every framed page the definition of each word was neatly whited out and replaced by the single hand-printed word: “pain.” It was a simple concept, and maybe even a cheap one, but the work’s force was cumulative. Walking the length of the warehouse and seeing all those pages—all those meanings erased, all that minuscule labor, all that evidence—gave one comfort, as if pain could take objective representation. The installation’s formulaic blandness seemed apt for recording the unspeakable.
Something like this starts to happen around twenty pages into Alan Shapiro’s new book of poems, Night of the Republic. Shapiro’s eleventh, the collection takes as its subject matter not everyday life as we experience it, but rather the settings that support this life. These settings, and the parts they comprise, tend to be invisible until broken or abandoned. They are abandoned here by everyone but the unselfed speaker who visits them at night. Over the first thirty-two pages, no human beings appear, aside from a single dozing clerk. Two of the book’s four sections are called “Night of the Republic,” and these comprise tender, tedious portraits of mundane locales all seeming to exist in the same small city in the same long night.
Shapiro writes mostly in short lines without regular meter or rhyme, though consonance and internal rhyme leave some passages pleasantly clotted. The fourth section is composed in very loose blank verse, but the form of any individual poem in the book is unremarkable. Reading poems in order—“Gas Station Restroom,” “Car Dealership at 3 a.m.,” “Supermarket,” “Park Bench”—can start to impose a sublime sort of boredom. These poems are baldly impersonal, but unlike “conceptual poetry,” of which Kenneth Goldsmith says, “The idea becomes a machine that makes the text,” the exercises in Night of the Republic reveal a deep and thoughtful rigor.
As if in correspondence to the deserted places Shapiro describes, the poems’ minor words —articles, pronouns, prepositions—gain foreground as he guides the reader through his visions. Here are the first several lines of “Car Dealership at 3 a.m.”:
Over the lot a sodium aura
within which
above the new cars sprays
of denser many-colored brightnesses
are rising and falling in a time lapse
of a luminous and ghostly
garden forever flourishing
up out of its own decay.
Any spiritual promise is fixed to earth by clumps of stubborn connective speech: “within which / above,” “up out of its.” Language in these poems mimics subject matter: rich at times but always of the world.
Going from poem to poem in the titular sections feels at times like moving through rooms of an empty house. The suspicion that one is alone grows to certainty and then gives way to lonesome curiosity. As with Invisible Cities—Calvino’s novel-in-street-plans—these installments reveal a formal consistency. One comes to understand them as a kind of lipogram, in which the missing element is human presence. “Downtown Strip Club” begins, “Its night is all day long,” six words that close off hope for a lively scene. These poems restore a little blood flow to our ready-to-hand use of daily stuff. “Funeral Home,” the last poem in the first “Night of the Republic,” concludes with an enumeration of the furniture in the empty parlor:
on the spotless breakfront
and between the chairs
and couches and on either
side of the doorways to the
family room, the chapel,
and the roped-off staircase
which if not for the rope
could be a staircase in an inn
made to look like a home
made to look like a mansion
where no one lives.
This stepwise postlude to a room’s things calls to mind the children’s book Goodnight Moon, but that likeness only makes the passage more unsettling. All the shapes that frame the world we take for granted—even in mourning—grow through Night of the Republic ever less always-already there.
After the first section’s long, unpopulated night, the book’s first use of the word “I” is both comforting and jarring. “Galaxy Formation,” as the second section is called, begins with the strongest single poem in Night of the Republic. The book’s power comes mostly from accumulated meaning, but one can imagine “Triumph” surviving extraction for an anthology. “I saw him as I drove by,” Shapiro begins, “I don’t have to tell you what he looked like.” A description of a stranger’s public suffering, the poem has some of the plainness of speech one finds in work by Carl Dennis or even Billy Collins. Here, though, the narrator offers no avuncular wisdom, no crinkly-eyed solace. Shapiro is crisper and a little crueler than either of these poets. In exchange for warmth lost we get clarity:
But whatever I did or didn’t do
I did it to forget that
either way
he was the one asleep on the sidewalk,
I was the one borne along in the car
that might as well have been a chariot
of empathy, a chariot
the crowd cheers
even as it weeps
for the captured elephant too wide
to squeeze through
the triumphal arch
and draw home
to bed my sweet
sensitive Caesar of a soul.
That most of the other poems in Night of the Republic are forgettable does not make the book a failure. The emptiness with which Shapiro views both populated and unpopulated zones of the republic lends his poems a compassion unavailable to more tender-hearted poets. With unblinking attention he observes a flustered woman holding up the line at the gas station, “scavenging through receipts / pens tissues / and prescriptions.” He overhears a lady on her cell phone in a bar, her voice “tense with what it’s trying not to sound like, saying, ‘Honey, listen to me, honey. Honey. Honey. I am not your mother.’” In a chilling but unfocused poem about the young bride of a death-camp commandant, he notes with calm “our ignorance about the many ways / there are to suffer,” never stepping forth to offer a lesson or a judgment.
The last section of the book is a series of riffs on images that hold what seems to be personal meaning to Shapiro. After the expansiveness of the preceding three sections, these poems feel a bit dinky. Still, at ninety-two pages, Night of the Republic provides more fine poetry than some new-and-selecteds. It seems right to conclude by mentioning the last poem of the second titular section, the only one of its cohort not to take a location as its subject. “The Public” numbers two sentences in all, one short, one long. The second is an epic simile that tries to draw into light the shadow that trails every citizen of a republic. Homer assigns to his great subject, war, two contrasting epithets. Sometimes he calls it “man-wasting war,” and sometimes he calls it “war where men win glory.” But it is always both. For one man to taste victory, another has to die. Shapiro’s subject is less violent, but not maybe not any less grim. His is a book about comfort, the slightly boring comfort of civilized life, the reverse of which is a desolation that is––he suggests––just as ubiquitous. Defining the title of his poem, “The Public,” Shapiro shrugs knowingly: “The no one of it / is everywhere.”
Larissa Szporluk is the author of five books of poetry—most recently Traffic with Macbeth (2011). An associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University, Szporluk has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poem “Startle Pattern” appeared in the Spring issue (37.2) of The Journal. Recently, Szporluk spoke with Associate Art Editor Janelle DolRayne regarding the origins of “Startle Pattern,” the roles that narrative and image play within her poetry, and both the unique challenges and opportunities that depression can provide in the landscape of an author’s work.
Janelle DolRayne: I’m glad we get to talk about “Startle Pattern” since it encompasses so much of what I admire about your work. The poem starts at a place of renewal/birth and conceptualizes and mythologizes from that place. Where did this poem begin for you?
Larissa Szporluk: “Startle Pattern” was inspired by a fascinating criminal studies book called Eraser Killers that covers some of the most famous cases of homicides committed by, well, mostly husbands who wanted to “start over” and, being demented and cruel, preferred murder to divorce. Eraser-killing involves making the person disappear completely, which I suppose is part of the “fun.” The Peterson case was so haunting that I still can’t shake it. “Startle Pattern” is just a poetic retelling of the pivotal moment—the case began to unfold once Laci’s fetus washed up on shore. She was nine months pregnant when killed and the fetus did, in fact, emerge from the uterus posthumously. It’s an image beyond myth, beyond all that we’ve read and been told.
JDR: It is an extremely unsettling image. In your eyes, how does the image surpass myth?
LS: I suppose the image surpasses myth by the fact of being real. And, being real, the image has no agenda other than to have happened. There is no comfort, no message, no “purpose” to a dead fetus rising out of an isolated uterus at the bottom of the sea, and yet, because we are instructed by tales of resurrection—the phoenix, Christ, etc.—we want so badly for reality to be positive. We want the miracle of the little boy surfacing alive. We want him to stand trial against his father. We want the triumph, and we’re never going to get it. Perhaps that unrequited yearning for the impossible contributes to the image’s power as well. It’s a distorted renewal/birth but ultimately sad and empty. The distortion isn’t thrilling or instructive. It just is.
JDR: Your poems are extremely intimate. As a reader, I always feel positioned within the mind and body of the poem, never on the periphery. They have an extremely strong internal motion, even when you are writing about and/or through a character. How do you see the relationship and positioning between speaker and reader in your poems?
LS: Once upon a time, I would have said that there is no relationship, that speaker and reader are more or less merged in my mind when I’m writing. I used to write for a reader who was essentially an aspect of the speaker. Now it’s more complicated. After finishing a very difficult prose project, one that involved a total separation of reader and speaker, I doubt I’ll be able to get that unification back. My sense of the reader now is as a cold, faraway planet that I must somehow try to entice. The strong internal motion that you mention depends on the reader being in the know, being attached, even being dragged in some cases. It’s an aggressive stance, I would say, and, yes, intimate too but not always consensual.
JDR: Do you mind talking a little about the prose poem project and your plans for it? Specifically, why did it call for a total separation of reader and speaker?
LS: It’s funny that you say “prose poem project” because that’s what I’m on the verge of writing now. The project I referred to earlier was a prose fiction project (I hesitate to say “novel”) that has been a disaster, of which I’ll spare you the details and head straight to the question.
Trying to write popular fiction (attending to plot, character, pacing, etc.) is such an intricate, mechanical process that there is no room for indulgence. I found myself basking in narrative details that were of no importance whatsoever—in retrospect, they were grotesque in their gratuitousness. Upon learning that all my efforts had no value, well, you can imagine. Ouch. It was a slap to the soul. Poetry, mine anyway, has always lived in that indulgence; my prose dies in it.
I signed up for the Tupelo 30/30 that begins June 1st and involves writing a new poem every day for that month. I plan to apply this separation strategy to short prose poems. My imagined reader, as separate as they come, is a cold-blooded, poetry-hating grouch.
JDR: In your work, you recreate myth by responding to mythology such as The Adventures of Pinocchio, the biblical Fall, and Macbeth. How responsible do you feel to the original myth when recreating it? How do you see the relationship between old and new mythology in your work?
LS: The Pinocchio poems tried to stay true to the original story and aimed merely to accentuate the images that I found to be most poignant. I would never try that again. It was discouraging because only too late in the project did I realize that I was being a pest and, by then, I had already spent a couple years on the poems and was under pressure to publish a book to get tenure, etc., so there really was no turning back.
I’m not ashamed of the poems but of the impulse. There was no need for that story to be picked at; the poignancy is blatant. But I did come away with a lesson: image is empty without narrative. It’s the difference in power between a blue goat and the blue goat. Which is more interesting?
JDR: At first, I had my mind made up about my answer: the blue goat. But then I thought that a blue goat indicates that the speaker is creating a world in which blue goats are common, which excites me. But I suppose that is an argument for creating narratives within images as well, so I’m going to stick with my first answer: the blue goat.
But thanks for sharing that lesson with us. I’m curious: how has your relationship with image-driven poetry changed since learning this lesson? Both the reading and writing of poetry? Does it still have a place for you?
LS: I’m a lot less patient now. I’m more frightened. I wish it were the opposite, that aging had made me more patient and secure. Unfortunately, it didn’t go that way. I’m paranoid about superficiality, and if an image doesn’t grind or pierce immediately, I dismiss it. As mentioned above, I understand the role of narrative more, so I work to inject the weight of story into nearly every image—key word: “work.” Writing imagistic poetry has become more difficult, more laborious, because “story” has to be created before the language work can begin.
Also, because of the fear. It’s like I know there’s a deeper poem in any given gathering of words, and I’m afraid of not getting there because the only access to it is through abuse—beating and squeezing those words until they actually mean something. Now, of course, that’s perverse, but that’s how it’s been.
Even “Startle Pattern,” which was working from a true story and therefore required little imagination on my part, had to be reconfigured a thousand times, and I’m still not pleased. The ending is a little too gentle. I didn’t get “under” the comber. He’s just a prop.
JDR: From what I understand, you split your time between northern Ohio and northern Italy. There are traces of Italy in The Wind, Master Cherry, The Wind and of Ohio in Traffic with Macbeth. How do these two places enter into your work and process?
LS: I haven’t really begun to explore the impact of northern Italy yet. The Italian influence in Master Cherry was connected to Lombardy, where my husband’s family is from and which is uncannily like northwest Ohio. When they moved to Domodossola in 2006 (a small city in the Lepontine alps), my first thought was: I want to die here. Maybe that’s just middle-age sentiment, but it’s also a beautiful feeling to go running around feeling so happy that you want to die.
I don’t feel that way in Ohio. They’re geographic opposites. Here (I’m in Domodossola right now), there is no horizon. Everything is vertical. The only way out is up. Whereas in northwest Ohio, you’re hard-pressed to find a bump. Everywhere you go, it all comes with you, and it never ends. I like the two extremes. They’re emotional platforms.
I tell students who are depressed or having the “block” that depression has its own music. They should write no matter what and not think they have to be “high” to write good poems. Philip Larkin’s “High Windows” comes from a deep, flat place. He’s brooding and the brooding gives way to a kind of mental chutes-and-ladders. Depressed, he has to create all those altitudes in order to move the poem along. When the poet is already “up,” the poem can be restricted by a reluctance to descend. There is something courageous about flatness, strange as it sounds.
JDR: Not strange at all! I moved to Ohio after growing up in the Rockies and spending time in California, so this really resonates. I think the difficult part is to find a way to begin out of flatness. You can’t rely on gravity to take you somewhere. How do you manage to ignore the difficulties of flatness and to build altitudes in your poems out of flatness?
LS: But you can rely on gravity—you can keep going down. That’s the only benefit of depression—you’re closer to the depths. I’m not talking about mystical meditation-induced depths. I’m talking about mentally disturbed ones. That’s where the energy is to build the altitudes you’re talking about; put simply, you scare yourself out of the flatness!
OK, now it’s getting convoluted. I’ll start over: You’re in the flatness. Your mind is flat. You’re precisely numb with your own ennui. It’s only in that state that you feel the pull from below, a kind of Swedenborgian lower spirit telling you that you’re nothing, you’re a loser, you’re hopeless. So you agree. And when you agree, you’re pulled even further into a whirlpool of suicidal whisperings and bad feelings. And then—there it is—you either do yourself in or you become a hero.
Of course, we’re talking about writing a poem, right? So what is your “weapon?” Words, of course, and suddenly the words come to your rescue, and they’re loaded with God or whatever feels almighty to you, and they’re strong because, no, you’re not going to surrender to the lower spirits. It’s too easy to just crumble and self-annihilate, too easy and stupid, so the energy starts building, the will to live returns, and the rhythms start climbing and pulling you up and up. Pretty soon, you’re not only out of hell but beyond the flatness and getting so high now that not even the words can keep up and, as in the Larkin poem, the image steps in, the deep image that represents the narrative you’ve just been through—high windows—salvation of the highest kind, relief in endlessness, the summit.
Unfortunately, this psychodrama is both necessary for the poem and exhausting for the poet. I no longer believe that the altitudes live in the words alone. The psychotic spirit (or the lucky, healthy one) has to tryst first with itself and then with the language in order to make everything rise.
Steven D. Schroeder is the author of two poetry collections: Torched Verse Ends (2009) and The Royal Nonesuch (forthcoming 2013). His poetry is available from New England Review, Pleiades, Verse, and Indiana Review. He edits the online poetry journal Anti- and works as a certified professional resume writer. Recently, Associate Poetry Editor Matt Sumpter spoke with Schroeder about his pop culture influences, his use of poetic line and line breaks, and his editorial preferences.
Matt Sumpter: One of the most memorable things about your poem “X” (featured in The Journal issue 37.2) is how it navigates its subject matter at different depths. The poem wryly acknowledges that, yes, it is a poem about comic book/television/movie characters but refuses to settle for that. The tension between superficiality and poetic insight seems like an important one to navigate when writing about pop culture. Is that what drew you to this topic, or was it something else? Do you often find yourself drawn to pop culture?…
Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections Tsim Tsum (2009) and The Babies (2004), which was the premier winner of the Saturnalia Book Prize. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Glenn Schaeffer Foundation. Widely anthologized, her poems, stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Believer, American Short Fiction, The Harvard Review, Lana Turner, and elsewhere. She currently teaches writing workshops in the Athens, Georgia community. In a recent interview with Associate Poetry Editor Shelley Wong, Mark spoke about her love of fairy tales, form versus content, and whether the characters from Tsim Tsum will reappear in upcoming projects.
Shelley Wong: Thank you for being a part of The Journal. Is “The Seventh Wife” part of a new project centered on Osbert? Or is this piece part of a series with separate characters?
Sabrina Orah Mark: “The Seventh Wife” is part of a new collection of short fictions (in progress), tentatively called “Everything Was Beautiful & Nothing Hurt.” Osbert only appears once. In this way, he is a man in a jar. Other characters who appear throughout the collection (so far): Beadlebaum (a bully), a husband named Poems, a sister called Mumford, a good stepmother, Zawacki (a taxman who is part man part stick-figure), and a very nervous family (The Horowitzs). There are others, but they are shy about appearing in interviews.…
Natalie Shapero received her MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University and afterwards attended law school at The University of Chicago. She is currently a Kenyon Review Fellow. Her work has been published in Poetry, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, The Progressive, Redivider, and elsewhere. Shapero’s first book, No Object, was published by Saturnalia Books earlier this year. She recently spoke with Associate Poetry Editor Jenna Kilic about her new book, writing poetry while in law school, the themes and concerns of her writing, and advice for current MFA students.
Jenna Kilic: In your new book, No Object, your long poem “Hot (Normal)” takes its title from a washing machine cycle. In what other ways do you discover poetry in quotidian things?
Natalie Shapero: Any object emblazoned with text has to be, in some way, talking. With that washing machine, the HOT (NORMAL) washing machine, I had a sense, whenever I trucked to the basement to do my laundry, that it was screwing with me. You know, telling me to my face I was hot and then, as soon as I turned my back, dismissively turning to the dryer to register how actually nonplussed it was: “eh, normal.” I imagined it as a dude going through a kind of slick routine, trotting out some effusive rhetoric to get his date undressed. Can I really blame it, though? It is a washing machine, after all—its purpose in life is to get the clothes.…
Ira Sukrungruang is the author of the memoir Talk Thai: Adventures of Buddhist Boy and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is also the co-editor of What Are You Looking At: The First Fat Fiction Anthology and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology. His essays, stories, and poems have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Bellingham Review, North American Review, Isotope, Crab Orchard Review, Post Road, and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of South Florida and is editor of Sweet: A Literary Confection. Sukrungruang recently spoke with Nonfiction Editor Silas Hansen about his writing practices, writing in more than one genre, and what he looks for as an editor.
Silas Hansen: I was first introduced to your work when you read from Talk Thai: Adventures of Buddhist Boy at Ohio State, not long after it was published. Since then, I’ve read several of your essays, which sometimes—but not always—deal with similar subject matter about your family, your Thai heritage, and growing up in the Midwest. I even recently re-read a flash essay of yours, “Chop Suey,” from Brevity 19, and was—as I always am while reading flash nonfiction, and yours in particular—awed by your ability to write something so short that carries that much weight. Could you tell me a little bit about how you approach writing in these different forms and lengths? How does your writing process differ for a flash piece vs. a longer essay vs. a book-length memoir?
Ira Sukrungruang: First, thanks, Silas for your kind words. I’m always intrigued by a writer’s process. There are writers who guard their process like locked gems, writers like James Tate, for example, whom I had the pleasure to listen to a few years ago. When asked about his process, he couldn’t/didn’t answer the question in a coherent manner, as if giving word to his process would be like giving a thief the keys to a convertible. I respect that, though. It furthers that mythos that writing just happens, that it suddenly appears. It’s how we like to think Chopin composed his music. There are also writers like Ron Carlson or Robert Olen Butler who take us through every decision they make as writers. We get a glimpse into the writer’s mind as he writes a story, essay, poem. We get to see the product take shape step-by-step.…
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a professor of English at SUNY Fredonia, where she teaches creative writing and environmental literature, and is the author of three poetry collections: Lucky Fish (2011), At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), and Miracle Fruit (2003). For her work, she has received several honors and awards, including the Tupelo Press Prize, the Balcones Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The editors of The Journal are pleased to announce that Nezhukumatathil is serving as this year’s poetry judge for our second-annual genre contest, which will be open for submissions on April 1, 2013. Recently, she spoke with The Ohio State University MFA student David Winter about her own poetic origins, her interest in science and fable, and her balancing act between writing and motherhood.
David Winter: I’m struck by the playfulness and accessibility of your poems. As a reader, I often feel that you invite me to experience amazement and bewilderment in ways I don’t expect. What do you do to keep the experience of poetry—for yourself and your readers—new?
Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Thanks so much. I guess the easy (but true!) answer is that I myself have a short attention span and even though I think the cardinal sin of the poet is to bore the reader, the truth is I don’t want to bore myself. Even if I’m writing about a town or, say, a reptile I adore—I very much am always looking for ways to surprise myself and try to “make it new.” And to do that, I read and read and turn ideas over in my head or in a notebook for weeks or months at a time before I ever begin the “making” or drafting of a poem.
I’ve had to work like this since I became a mother. Gone was the real strict writing schedule like I had pre-toddlers, and usually I don’t know from day to day when exactly I’ll be able to wade my way through Legos and little cars over to my writing desk. But what helps tremendously is having a journal with scraps and starts of dozens of ideas or lines or metaphors, so I never have to start from “scratch.”
DW: I am sincerely impressed by anyone who manages to parent and write at all. There are several poems in Lucky Fish that deal with pregnancy and motherhood, and I read in another interview that you’re working on a book of poems for young people. Could you talk a little bit about how motherhood may have influenced or informed your work?
AN: I love that you asked this very good question, but it’s hard for me to come up with a solid answer because my oldest son is five and my youngest is two-and-a-half. For me, motherhood has been a joyfully slippery whirl—I feel like each day has its own specific answer, so I’ll leave it to others down the road if they want to draw comparisons to my earlier poems. But I can say that when I sit at my desk to write, there is a sense of urgency and a deeper sense of gratitude and celebration for this planet and its inhabitants. I know that my heartbeat is closer to the surface of my skin, so news about hate and violence affects me more than ever before, and I can’t help but feel sometimes that the only way I can push back against all this darkness in the world is to find ways to record instances of delight and beauty on this planet for my sons.
DW: You are a tenured professor, but I understand that you have also worked extensively with younger writers outside of academia. My own writing students have often shown me new ways of reading familiar texts and new ways of understanding my own poems. Has teaching influenced your approach to writing?
AN: Oh, most definitely! For me they are one in the same in that when I first came to poetry in college, I was also reading extensively outside of class, trying to play catch-up with my very well-read peers. In effect, I was teaching myself first, for example, how to write a sestina or villanelle, so that I could come back to workshop the next week and feel confident enough to contribute to class discussion about a classmate’s sestina when, at the time, I had only just recently taught myself how to write one.
And I always remind my students that “poems are not frogs.” That is, we’re not going to dissect them until all that is left are some unappetizing bits of skin and bone, and yet we need to at the very least check the poem’s heartbeat, see if it is as healthy as it can be, and, of course, along the way, recognize that there are several versions of what it even means to be “healthy,” to extend that froggy metaphor.
DW: I love this metaphor of the poem as a living thing that should be kept healthy rather than violently dissected. I think that many of us have trouble treating our own poems that way, even when we are able to be humane or holistic in our criticism of others’ work. Do you have any advice about revision?
AN: Ah, revision—that’s the fun part of writing for me actually. Now the drafting process is very unglamorous for me—lots of self-doubt, stops and starts, fussing over lines, stress-eating gummy bears (I’m only half-kidding)—but I think you have to push through distraction and just get it on the page, even if it means wading through the mucky swamp of doubt.
I never know when I’m going to be able to return to the desk again. At the risk of being a tad melodramatic, I confess that at the end of every draft, I’m actually physically tired, spent. But I love and live for revision! Love it. That’s where the making and shaping joy and play and music-popping-crackle metaphor-magic and the snapping off line breaks happens for me. I think that helps keep my students in check when at first they may resist looking over their poems again. I ask/tease/shame them: How can you NOT love revising poems? That’s where the magic happens!
As for specific advice—I usually start with examining the openings and closings of the poem: the first line of the poem should hook just under your skin to keep you wanting, really wanting, to read on. The last line should feel as if the hook were either yanked out or gently removed. Either way, it should smart.
DW: Both folklore and science permeate your writing, not only as content but also as formal influences. In Lucky Fish, for instance, you structure one poem as a set of magical amulets and another as a natural history, while a third seems to combine the language of an exhibition with a fable. How do science and superstition feed into your creativity, and how do they help you to make sense of the world or move through it?
AN: Great question. Myth, folklore, science, natural history—these are the subjects of books that I was drawn to for as long as I can remember. Sure, as a little girl, I devoured the usual Amelia Bedelia and Beverly Cleary books, but it was actually books on minerals and birds or shell guides that most often filled my library book bag. I also teach environmental literature, and these days I read as many science and natural history books as I possibly can, so my vocabulary and the structure of how I organize my writing has long been in place before I ever knew what it was to write a poem or essay.
I learned how to make sense of the world and my little heartbreaks and desires through a language of science and fable. It was the only way that I could find to marry all the wonder and beauty and danger that I witness in this world—though I will happily say that, when I use the diction and structure of myth and fable, I try to make it very obvious. And when I reference something from the natural world, the reader can be assured that much care has gone into researching that little factoid (like interviewing a marine biologist in person at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to learn about the exact pulse of a moon jelly, for example)—that all scientific details in my poems and essays are true and not me just waving my poetic license around.
DW: I loved what you said about “a language of science and fable” being the only way that you could marry your different experiences of the world. But a lot of people think of science and fable as being opposed to each other. For instance, part of the disagreement in our current debate over global warming is between those who base their views on scientific evidence and people whose views are shaped by very literal interpretations of scriptural stories. While I think the marriage of these two elements in your work is extremely attractive, I also wonder if you have any thoughts on this perceived conflict between science and fable?
AN: It’s such a personal thing for everyone, so I can only speak to where I’m coming from on this, but the language of science and fable in my poems is basically how I truly perceive the world. Everything from my faith and my deepest reservoirs, where love and fear and desire and spirituality reside, are all located in the tough fibers of my heart. I can’t explain any of those “big subjects” in my poems (or even in life!) by way of science or fable, but I know and believe them to be True with a capital T. How does all this fit then into my writing? I love how poet Galway Kinnell describes how Walt Whitman himself had “negative capability”:
“…a certain shapelessness of personality, a peculiar power to obliterate himself and flow into some other being and speak it from within… A transaction seems to occur: Whitman gives whatever he flows into a presence in human consciousness, and in return, this other thing or creature gives Whitman a situation and vocabulary which enables him to see and articulate his own being in a new way.”
Isn’t that so beautiful? I think the ability to have a situation and a specific vocabulary to create a new world on the page is true to some extent for most writers, isn’t it?
DW: What is a recent book that excited you? What books have you returned to again and again?
AN: What’s recently floored me was Sharon Olds’s newest collection, Stag’s Leap, and Tarfia Faizullah’s Seam, a first book that just won the Crab Orchard Prize. I return to any of Lucille Clifton’s poems again and again. Her Collected Poems from BOA sits on my writing desk right now. I always return to D’Aulaires’s Book of Greek Myths—I’ve been in love with the delicate colored pencil illustrations since I was seven or eight, and I’m not embarrassed to say that volume still brings me great joy.
DW: Thanks so much for taking the time to answer these questions. It’s been a real pleasure to learn a little more about the roots of your poetics and the person behind the poems. In closing, I wonder if you would leave us with a few words about what first drew you to poetry? Do you remember writing your first poem or a particular moment when you first knew you were a poet?
AN: Growing up as one of the only Asian-Americans in most of my school always set me apart, always observing. But my parents fostered a sense of being grateful and amazed and wanting to always be curious about the world and its inhabitants, so I never truly felt alone. I can remember my father taking me and my younger sister on a hike in the mountains that form one edge of a ring around the Phoenix suburbs, pointing out the names of each of the various cacti and desert flowers that we encountered. We’d stop and find quartz crystals or geodes hidden on the trails: such treasures! Saguaro, ocotillo, yellowbell, shrubby bulbines, chuparosa—just try to say those names out loud without smiling. So there was never a light bulb moment for me in terms of figuring out who I was. Rather, it was in college, right inside Ohio State’s Denney Hall, where I learned there was a whole craft and study of how to clearly and musically communicate and record the world around me.
In many ways, even though I’ve just recently been promoted to full professor here at SUNY-Fredonia, I hope that I never ever stop being curious and feeling like a student on this planet. There are always insect wings and jellyfish bells to marvel over. I still need to learn the color names of glaciers—so much bounty and life that I want to record on the page.
Corey Van Landingham completed her MFA at Purdue University, where she was a poetry editor at Sycamore Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2012, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Third Coast, and elsewhere. Van Landingham’s book Antidote won the 2012 OSU Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. Recently, she spoke with poetry editor Michael Marberry about her prize-winning manuscript and the challenge and excitement surrounding the construction of a first book.
Michael Marberry: First things first: Congratulations on winning this year’s Wheeler Prize for Poetry, awarded by The Ohio State University Press and The Journal! This is your first poetry collection, correct? Having spoken with the judge (Kathy Fagan), I know that this year’s decision was a very difficult one, as we received well over 500 manuscript submissions. What was it like to receive the good news from Kathy that you’d won the Wheeler Prize?
Corey Van Landingham: Thank you so much, Michael! This is indeed my first collection and, hopefully, not my last. As for the phone call with Kathy, it was, of course, the best phone call of my life. As soon as she said who she was, I started sweating profusely. She said her name might not mean anything to me, and I wanted to say, “Your name means everything to me!” I have no idea what I actually said to her, only that she was so kind that I was in tears and, honest to goodness, had my hand over my heart the whole conversation. After we hung up, I made the requisite phone calls, continued sweating, brushed my hair and my teeth, and blasted “A Milli” by Lil Wayne because, apparently, that seemed appropriate at the time.
What I’m trying to say is that I was so incredibly happy and honored that I had no idea what to do with myself. I am in love with Rebecca Hazelton’s gorgeous book Fair Copy, last year’s Wheeler Prize winner, and I couldn’t be happier and more humbled to be in her company at OSU Press.
MM: I’m sure that I’m not just speaking for myself when I say that titling a book seems impossibly difficult. (I have trouble giving titles to individual poems, let alone to an entire collection!) Your book is entitled Antidote, which is also the title of one of the poems therein. How did you decide on this particular manuscript title? What does the title mean to you? How do you see the title working in unison with or in tension against the poems in the collection?
CVL: Yes, this whole business is impossibly difficult. I have always struggled with titles. I think maybe one of my titles received the go-ahead during my MFA workshops, and titling my manuscript was grueling. Long titles have always captivated me—I love their inherent poetry, their rhythm, their complication—and I tried to emulate these titles that I so admired. It wasn’t until The Great Title Breakdown of 2012, as I now call it, that I realized perhaps a long, abstract title wasn’t quite right for my book. All this happened while I was in Vermont at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and I must have bugged the hell out of my dear friend Brittany Cavallaro, as I rattled off title after title to her for days.
As soon as I wrote down the word “Antidote,” however, something felt right. The strange thing is that it comes from a phrase that didn’t feel particularly representative of the book: “The antidote to all those pills she was taking.” But the more I thought about the idea of an antidote, how it conjures up danger and the sinister in its unmentioned nod to poison, the interesting wording of an antidote being given against something, the more I liked it.
I actually wrote the poem “Antidote” after I found the title, and it helped solidify the various tensions the title holds for me: poetry as a possible antidote to mourning; poetry as an impossible antidote to mourning; the fact that nothing can be given against lost love or guilt or death or the myriad other incurable afflictions that we face. For a book that has so many various tones and speakers trying to approach valediction through different forms, Antidote felt like it encompassed all of them, as if each “I,” “you,” “she,” “he,” and “we” was an attempted antidote against the feeling of futility.
MM: Tell me a bit about how the manuscript came together—i.e. how you selected which poems to include, how you decided on the overall organization, etc. What sort of guidance did you receive during the process of putting together the manuscript? In retrospect, was there a specific piece of advice that you received that stands out as particularly instructive, helpful, or formative for creating your book? Were there other poetry collections that influenced the construction of your own collection?
CVL: My incredible mentor at Purdue University, Donald Platt, was invaluable in the process of putting together this manuscript. One evening, we met on campus with all the poems that I wanted to include and, one by one, spread them out on a long conference table. At the time, the manuscript had three sections, and my homework was to have picked the poems that I wanted to begin and end each section. From there, we built each section from each end, moving slowly toward the middle. The physical process of standing up and seeing each poem together, of reading aloud last lines and seeing the different formal patterns of each poem next to each other helped immensely.
After I removed the sections, though, I still saw the manuscripts as being in parts—mainly because of having three poems titled “To Have & To Hold,” three poems titled “Valediction Lessons,” and three elegies. The entire time that I was working on putting together the manuscript, I wanted to avoid its becoming a project book. Don’t get me wrong: I think those can be beautiful and luminous and quite valuable. But I didn’t want it to be a dead father book or a breakup book or a surrealist self-meditation book; I wanted it to be all those things. The simultaneity and multiplicity of themes kept me interested, kept me motivated, and prevented me (I hope!) from writing the same poem again and again. But, in a way, this made the entire process of choosing poems more difficult. In the end, it came down to pairing and contrasting tonal registers and, I’ll admit, trying not to have too many couplets together. Poems that could not go into the book: anything too hopeful, anything without a fairly strong speaker or lyric voice, and anything that strayed too far from landscape or place.
I gave myself the task of reading a lot of first books by women poets, and I know that many of them have been quite influential—especially Anna Journey’s If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, Nicky Beer’s The Diminishing House, Traci Brimhall’s Rookery, Arda Collins’s It Is Daylight, and Mary Szybist’s Granted. Though it’s not a first book, the most important book for me while writing and organizing my own book has been Joanna Klink’s Raptus, though I’m sad now that I can’t have a Kiki Smith drawing as cover-art. Have you read Raptus? Go buy it. Klink is a genius when it comes to creating a collection of poetry. (You’re welcome!)
MM: Last question: What advice would you give to other poets putting together that first book manuscript?
CVL: When approaching the manuscript, allow yourself the same strangeness, intuition, danger, magic, and otherness that goes into writing a poem. Remember that you are a poet, not an architect. It should be fun. You should stand up while organizing it. You should drink wine. And you shouldn’t just do what anyone else tells you to do.
Holly Goddard Jones. The Next Time You See Me. New York: Touchstone Books, 2013. 384 pp. $24.99, cloth.
It’s nearly impossible to talk about the writing of Holly Goddard Jones without expounding upon the virtuosity of her prose. Given how she traffics so easily between interiority and action, perception and power, a critic might be tempted to stage a review of her new novel, The Next Time You See Me, as a sort of writer’s workshop on how to best use exposition and what it means to reveal a character’s personality while simultaneously increasing their mystery and allure.
Stylistically—and it must be conceded that this represents a coarse, cut-out dichotomy—writers thrive in one territory or the other: either the writer relishes in the Why of the Interior, whereby the evaluation of how a character is capable of what he or she ultimately does trumps the actual deed or misprision (Perhaps Roth, Paul Auster, or even William James could be positioned here); or the writer invests themselves in a clear and present Testimony of Events, whereby the author entrusts the reader’s imagination to speculate and attach possible motives to a corresponding action or exchange of dialogue (I think of Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Hemingway). Again, rather than pigeonhole any specific author’s work, this binary aims to invite discussion and highlight the fact that Holly Goddard Jones seems to blend the two for optimum effect. Not only does the accuracy of her insight dazzle us with how she’s able to peer through everyday interactions into the deeper truths and contradictions of personality, she deftly maneuvers through the pivotal, high-stakes scenes where the major threads of her novel’s world come to a head.
Of course, these types of considerations would lead audiences to believe that Goddard Jones is a sort of writer’s writer, a literary aficionado’s delight not meant for enjoyment by the general public, but this would be an incredible misstep given how eminently readable this book is. Staged, in a sense, like a mystery or thriller, The Next Time You See Me focuses on the events surrounding the murder of Ronnie Eastman and the discovery of her remains. Indeed, if The Next Time You See Me could be used to instruct creative writing students in anything, it would be how to successfully withhold information without unfairly manipulating the reader. Though we learn very late in the novel the actual details surrounding Ronnie’s death, the revelation only confirms facts we’ve safely assumed early on in the book. What we learn isn’t the murderer’s identity, but how such a thing was possible, even inevitable, and it takes exactly three hundred and thirty pages to establish this. So, yes, you can call Holly Goddard Jones a writer’s writer and lecture about her work in creative writing classrooms, but you won’t be doing so at the expense of her readership.
As events unfold and the citizens of Roma began to wonder how such a “crazy killer” could live so unassumingly among them in their town, the reader realizes that the murderer can do so because he is a product of this community. Roma—though a fictional construction—resembles many Kentucky towns. As a native Kentuckian, I can attest to this town’s rigid social stratification. No, it doesn’t take much wealth to put you at the top of the pyramid in such a small economy, especially in the early ’90s in which this novel takes place, but if you exist on the other side of the fence—the son or daughter of a factory worker or laborer—certain opportunities begin to close their doors on you pretty quickly and, once they start, they never stop.
Perhaps, this is why Wyatt Powell—at least to this reviewer—shines brightest among the catalogue of personalities we encounter. No character—aside from Emily Houchens (a socially challenged thirteen-year-old who fantasizes about the boy who is the cruelest to her)—garners as much sympathy as this overweight underachiever. By the time we encounter Wyatt, he’s all but resigned himself to his lonely skillet breakfasts, and his dog, Boss, is his only comfort. As he meets Sarah and embarks upon the first reciprocated romantic relationship of his adult life, we find ourselves cheering for him despite the darker portents we suspect.
In Burning Down the House, Charles Baxter wrote that the task of fiction is “…to expose elements that are kept secret in a personality, so that the mask over that personality (or any system) falls either temporarily or permanently… [allowing] something of value to come up.” No statement could better assess the accomplishment of The Next Time You See Me and its approach toward the citizens of Roma. Though the masks come off from a half-dozen or so characters, the preponderance of these revelations remain private and contained, and hardly anyone comes completely clean, even to him- or herself. The bratty, yet intelligent Chris Shelton does begin to see that he has some attraction toward the geeky and sequestered Emily and that this affinity has amplified his gross mistreatment of her, but he will continue to suppress this attraction because she’s socially unacceptable as a romantic partner. Likewise, Tony (the cop assigned to Ronnie’s disappearance) does engage in an illicit affair with Ronnie’s sister, Susanna, but does so more out of convenience than to reciprocate Susanna’s genuine attraction to him, leaving her on an awkward precipice as the events of the novel close. In this way, Holly Goddard Jones manages to reveal characters while maintaining Roma’s status quo. Despite all that she drags out of the shadows, the lights in this narrow stretch of Kentucky remain pretty dim. As a writer you have to admire the vision and fidelity to life; as a reader you have to appreciate the ride.
Larissa Szporluk. Traffic with Macbeth. North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press, 2011. 59 pp. $16.95, paper.
Traffic with Macbeth is Szporluk’s fifth book, a collection of thirty-six poems broken into four parts, that ruminates on the murkier side of Shakespeare’s tragic general and the dissemination of grayness that saturates not only an implied Elizabethan world, but the banality of the everyday. That triteness and ashen despondency, however, is made extraordinary through the clipped lyric movements and eternal pondering that Szporluk’s poems pose. Transformation remains ever apparent in even the darkest moments of civilization, however encompassing or singular that bleakness may be for Szporluk’s subjects.
Frustration encapsulates the speaker in “Rainmaker” as he tackles his own shortcomings—the disappointment of not fulfilling the purpose of his very existence. “I call your name, rain, / and I fail. I fail and I fail and I fail.” The mythology of the rainmaker, the consistency and dependability of his own magic becomes, as Szporluk continues, “so chalked with loss / that it could be the bastard / of an answered prayer.” In the preceding monologue, “Harpy,” the siren encounters her own lack of mysticism and loss of power. Once a trait that was the ruin of men and the death of fleets, her voice now “choke[s] up / a dark mouse / with no skin / and wait[s] long / for the space / in [her] chest / to re-fist.” It is these moments of a first-realized immortality, the mundaneness of magic or fabled sensuality, or their very departure that produce a disturbing fog around our understanding of myth and tragedy, or at least those cemented in the glory of maxim and creation.
The collection spins a more widely lateral move with the speaker in “Sea Lettuce” commenting on the universal loss of not only loved ones, but the myth of love and its so-believed compulsory and ever-present ties:
How easily our loved ones
leave us, speeding into sunsets,
maiming us with absence.
Sailboats, pelicans—
beyond us they don’t miss us.
Is sympathy a medicine?
in this green lobotomy,
Mrs. Lettuce, will you listen?
An eagerness, a desperate imploring for humane connection and confirmation of existence—Mrs. Lettuce, will you listen?—meets, again, the reality of falsehood. This ironic composition, the reality of falsehood, aligns with Szporluk’s treatment of the steadfastness of story. Nothing, not even the grand statue of myth and myth-creating characters, however they may appear cemented in the permanence of tradition, solidly exists. These Elizabethan figures, rather, remain fluid and grievous so that this rare exposure of the defeated players and motifs speaks seamlessly to the corrupt Macbeth—the signification of declining order.
Szporluk’s collection grasps the lost, and perhaps unseen, visages of the solemn creatures of literary and mythical history. “We are tied to love and hate— / same track, same train,” the speaker in “Rogue’s March” states, and as the title of the collection suggests, we are in traffic with fraudulence and corruption—a state of being that Szporluk captures with a calmness that makes doom eerily enchanting.
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.
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.
Joe Oestreich. Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2012. 304 pp. $16.95, paper.
Getting Noticed
Joe Oestreich begins his new rock memoir Hitless Wonder with the lesson of waiting: “Wait to get noticed. Wait to get signed. Wait to get famous.” By the end of the book, however, “waiting” for Oestreich and his band Watershed takes on a different finish. As a rock memoir, Hitless Wonder rubs shoulders with rockumentaries like Anvil! The Story of Anvil and even Rob Reiner’s mockumentary This is Spinal Tap. However, Hitless Wonder plunges headlong into the ultra-gritty physical and mental terrains that come with building and sustaining a rock band primarily fueled by intangible rewards. Watershed’s doggedly loyal “superfans” often travel long distances for a show, and Oestreich never underestimates the motivating power of “drinking a lot and sleeping late and wallowing in the kind of behavior that’s frowned upon in everyday life.”
Hitless Wonder pulls back the curtain on Watershed’s struggles with everything from hunger, hangovers, and manhandling amps to long-distance relationships, negotiating record deals, and the knotty dynamics of touring into middle-age. Oestreich toggles between self-deprecating humor and transparency as he records his transition from a young, ambitious singer and bass player to an equally driven but older veteran of Watershed: “I wanted to look like Tom Petersson on the Cheap Trick In Color album cover: all hair and aviator glasses on a Fatboy chopper. But locked in the bathroom, armed with two mirrors so I could measure the full 360-degrees of my male-pattern baldness, I looked like Phil fucking Collins.” But while Oestreich jokingly longs for a rock-and-roll exterior, he also lets us see the internal workings of his ego. Standing on the streets of Manhattan after cutting a deal with Epic Records, Oestreich reflects on his desire for stardom:
I was momentarily hit with the same jealousy that had spiked the last three years as Colin, Biggie, Herb, and I watched our friends graduate from college to adult-size paychecks. My insides tightened. My mental defenses stiffened, constricting a layer of armor that shielded my ego from the sight of other people’s success. I wanted to fire back at those Brothers Brooks, at those Taylors Ann – to shout into the Manhattan morning, Listen up, you Nouveau-Yorker yuppie fucks. You should all be jealous of me.
But Oestreich undergoes a number of transformations throughout Hitless Wonder. In the bathroom of a Toledo club called Frankie’s, Oestreich confronts the reality of aging alongside an ever-morphing music scene when he recalls having Wallflower Child tattooed on his shoulder. Wallflower Child, a popular song written by Oestreich, acts as an important line to separate his style from Colin’s, Watershed’s other singer and Oestreich’s lifelong friend. However, as Oestreich ages, he looks into the mirror and sees a distorted version of his past and rock and roll: “The tattoo has faded in the sixteen years since Speck inked it, and the letters have gone blurry. It looks like it says CAULIFLOWER CHILI […] Over the sink someone has written WATERSHED ROCKS! Underneath, somebody else—surely one of the emo kids—has responded with, WHAT IS ROCK?”
Questions about Watershed’s future linger as Oestreich’s transition into writing collides with the tour near the end of the memoir. Oestreich continually explores his motivations for continuing to play in a band increasingly faced with small-scale shows, new waves of music built on “bleeping” and “blooping,” and his burgeoning career as a writer and professor. After abandoning university life as an undergraduate to pursue music, Oestreich later returns to school to expand his creativity and studio energy into an MFA in creative writing and a teaching position at Coastal Carolina University. Compared to a lifestyle of touring and performing on stage, the institutional qualities of a professorship seemingly stand in opposition to Oestreich’s identity as a musician: office hours, meetings, lectures, and conferences. And yet, we see traits of a writer and professor in Oestreich during Watershed’s recording sessions. The studio becomes a classroom where Oestreich learns to edit, to give and accept constructive criticism, and to patiently pick apart songs like an essay in order to rebuild them stronger.
By the end of Hitless Wonder, success becomes difficult to measure, and instead of waiting to get noticed, signed, and famous, Watershed relaxes into the next opportunity to pile into the van one more time and play to a loyal following. The reportage alone keeps the memoir moving steadily along through the entertaining and unpredictable gauntlet of rock and roll. Through Oestreich, we experience the unease of sleeping on the floor of a speeding van, knowing a sudden stop will result in decapitation by guitar amp. We share the thrill of big-time music producers ordering the entire left side of a menu in an upscale Manhattan restaurant. We feel the frustration of broken-down vans, unpaid shows, tightfisted bartenders, disinterested record execs, and crowds who protest by throwing batteries. We relive the experiences of too many PBRs and picking at deli trays. We wait with Watershed as fans chant “Wa-ter-shed!” And we weigh the significance of playing one crowded arena versus several modest clubs and dive bars, questioning alongside Oestreich: Is it worth it? Band members and ex-band members will surely find familiar ground in Hitless Wonder, but the memoir offers much more than minor league rock. Oestreich layers in family, his youth in the suburbs, the bond between Watershed’s members, and his relationship with his wife from day one, all while grappling with success, disappointment, and reconciling the two creative worlds of music and writing.
Zach Savich. The Firestorm. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011. 96 pp. $15.95, paper.
In keeping with its title, Zach Savich’s The Firestorm evokes a sense of uncontrollable movement. These poems are built around the sudden imposition of stray ideas—a vaunted desire for grace, for example, or the hopeful purity of eunuchs—and the ability to weave them into a poem’s structure. Whether moving from a man “running from firefighters” with “half of his face bloody” to the lyrical dissection of a doorknob, or from a friend “trying to assemble a full / deck from only cards he finds on the street” to a woman’s abortion experience, Savich’s third collection reads like a litany of wild associations, like verse that can’t dismiss anything as ancillary.
Despite all these imaginative leaps, however, the poems in this book rest upon an undercurrent of poetry as process, the sense that “all we’ve ever done is variously revise / Leaves of Grass.” Offered almost as counterpoint to the rapid-fire movement of each piece’s narrative, metaphors often tend toward the flatter end of the presentational register, even highlighting their pared down arrangement as sort of matter-of-fact observations, forgoing the simile by stating “two tomatoes on the table” simply “were a bulbous bird.”
Importantly, this penchant for objective inventory does little to disrupt the collection’s artistic pyrotechnics; rather, Savich provides just enough dissonance through catalog to accentuate bolder moments in the work. Aware of a piece’s constructed nature, yet still somehow desirous of an unnameable “truth,” Savich describes his “dream of the sublime” as:
A birdhouse of xylophone slats—
Sawn so the tiny eggs in it
Shine when Mad Vlad pumps it
Conducting traffic—captivates
Because next he could make it a bludgeon.
While perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek in their interpretations of “terrible beauty,” Savich’s poems still seem genuinely interested in experiences that dwarf human consciousness. Sometimes, these experiences appear physical and everyday, like “how the first swimmers / must have felt” after attaching a ladder to a tree. Sometimes, however, they reside in the act of writing itself.
Savich’s third collection operates under the assumption that all one can do is search, to keep moving. As Savich puts it, one may “have been told the correct usage of hopefully” but must still insist on a different interpretation. Admittedly, at times, the pyrotechnics can seem unnecessary. “Riddle,” for example—set up as a kind of mock dramatis personae for a play that doesn’t exist—might seem antagonistic, simply refusing to meet the reader halfway. Still, these moments are few and far between. Mostly, these poems stick to an unapologetically rapid pace while questioning their own internal mechanisms. In other words, Savich forgets whether he is “pulling the curtain open or closed,” trading the importance of an answer in exchange for its constant pursuit.
Gregory Fraser. Answering the Ruins. Chicago, IL: TriQuarterly Books, 2008. 76 pp. $14.95, paper.
In this powerful and fluent second book, Gregory Fraser takes on the imposing task of “answering” ruins both ancient and contemporary, from the Eternal City to Ground Zero. In doing so, Fraser demonstrates a striking ability to weave together seemingly unrelated themes and images, drawing new connections and often dropping in mythical or literary allusions in order to deepen the resonance of his poems’ subjects. The sweeping “Hephaestus Calls My Brother Home,” a heart-wrenching account of the death of the poet’s brother, as well as the poem which lends the collection its title, fully embodies Fraser’s intelligence and range. In rich, aurally pleasing language, Fraser’s poem traverses time and setting, offering Greek gods nestled in nature and hovering beside hospital beds. (Fraser’s first collection, Strange Pietà, winner of the Walt McDonald prize, introduced us to the poet’s brother Jonathan, born with spina bifida, who lived into adulthood, years beyond what his doctors had led family to expect.)
In “Poem for First Fathers,” the poet again connects distant deities to a powerful familial love: “since your child is now a ball of winter, / a miniature Mars. That’s when you want war / with that deadbeat in the heavens.” Fraser watches his child suffer an illness, railing at a deity he simultaneously doubts and despises, awed and troubled by a world where one so innocent can feel such pain. This poem, like much of the rest of the collection, expresses the poet’s distress at the state of the world and the chaos and tragedy of everyday life.
The ruins answered by these poems are not only those of crumbled stone and metal, but the shambles of what the poet views as a damaged world. Though his reference to Mars is to the planet, the mention of war reminds us that it is the Roman god’s domain; through such references, the poet draws lines that span millennia, his knowledge of the classics a substantial resource that enriches his approach to contemporary subjects.
Answering the Ruins is, at times, a response to all that is ancient, but Fraser also answers ruins closer to home, especially in the haunting “Cheat.” The poem explores the heavy guilt the speaker battles after his wife has detected and punished the plagiarism of a student who, they come to fear, was killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center. The student, whose “sense of entitlement” irritated the speaker and his wife, begins as a rule-breaker served well by justice but transforms into a poor kid who was treated, perhaps, too harshly: “He did have a pleasant smile, and was his crime / really such a disgrace? We watched the clock, / kept ears pricked over toast and coffee, // until he nearly became the son we never had, / whose memory needed tending.” More directly stated than most of Fraser’s work, this poem evokes real sorrow by linking an everyday lapse to a major historical event.
Fraser’s insights often derive from a single, ordinary moment, as in “Hold,” which, as the title suggests, deals with the modern inconvenience of being put on hold when making a phone call. Here, the poet is self-aware, conscious of how his grand, wandering thoughts may carry an understated absurdity. In skillful tercets, the speaker lingers on the word “hold” and its various meanings before ironically rejoicing at the actual human on the other end of the line: “All day, you have been bounced from Hold / to Hold, and now they’ve come at last— / the words for which you’ve waited // what seems like your whole life: / Good afternoon, this is Tina. With whom / do I have the pleasure of speaking?” Fraser finds wonder in even the most mundane of human experiences.
His frequent allusions remind us that human history repeats itself and that we can find some solace and solidarity in the fact that our tragedies are not totally unique, but are shared limitlessly across the great expanse of time and space. Fraser’s knack for crafting complex, sweeping poems in rich language makes Answering the Ruins a masterful and moving second book.