Special Features

Review of Hitless Wonder by Joe Oestreich
October 1, 2012 | review

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.

 

Review of The Firestorm by Zach Savich
October 1, 2012 | review

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.

 

Review of Answering the Ruins by Gregory Fraser
October 1, 2012 | review

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.

 

Review of Divine Margins by Peter Cooley
October 1, 2012 | review

Peter Cooley. Divine Margins. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009. 72 pp. $15.95, paper.

Peter Cooley’s latest book, Divine Margins, is a series of heartfelt ruminations during and following the year his parents died. At times, the book reads as a collection of aubades, where each morning provides the terrible and wonderful chance to conjure up the luminous memories of the past, and where the morning light is the liminal space in which the dead still populate the memories of the living. As the author says to his mother,

Mother, your voice: there is no word for how it wounds me.
It comes back as that silence you picked up the phone with always,
hesitant, plangent, dawn lifting back the night.
Mother, your voice, I only have it at first light.

—“Triptych: center panel always still unfinished” (12)

It is this liminal space that Cooley haltingly enters: a parent himself, he knows that someday he too shall be in the place of his own dead parents. As he tries to orient himself following his parents’ deaths, it is his own role as a parent that he returns to as he tries to make sense of his new world. As he writes about his own impending old age,

You are the person come to clean my room,
you are whichever of my three children
open the drawer here where this poem will go
in a few minutes when I’ve had my say.

—“One Certain Thing” (63)

The world of his poems is a world in which he both reaches back to a childhood when language seemed unable to express his full desires, and it is a world which provides a plenitude that he trips over as an adult. In many of the poems, he has to move beyond language to record the world around him, relying only on their sounds and shadows. What emerges is a world in which the television blares alongside references to Shakespeare and the persons of the New Testament. Other times, the only ways of connecting with the dead are through the routine of daily life and all its details. As he tries to re-create the comfort of his childhood, he writes of a trip to the supermarket,

Cream of wheat, brown sugar, I drop them into my cart,
no one but you knowing how little I’ve become,
readers, how little I need now since Mother’s gone.
Breakfast at the beginning, supper for the end of life.

—“Little Quartet for my Mother” (19)

It is in these moments we grasp the starkness Cooley does not have the language to tackle head-on.

Caught in the margin between parents who have disappeared and a family that he has created, Peter Cooley uses this space to probe how the living deal with memory and the future. The book is divided into four sections. The first deals with the immediate aftermath of the death of both his parents. The second section moves away from the raw emotion and takes on a more meditative tone as it views his world through the lens of various archetypes and through received stories, such as religious stories, trying to make sense of what he has experienced. The third section is a short prose section that compares a visit to the zoo as an adult to one when he was a little boy. He remembers this as the time he first became a poet. The fourth section then returns, refreshed, to look once more at the deaths that have led him to write this book of poetry. In all, the arc is of one who re-emerges, from the initial trauma to its distancing, to the ability to reflect upon it and put it into art and to see this as a universal human tendency.

There are a few—precious few!—moments where Cooley pushes through to something beyond a melancholic, ruminative voice. In “All My Tests Negative” he says,

I need a miracle before I sleep tonight!
This is what I get: high noon, grace the light
standing between parked cars, the hospital parking lot,
all my tests negative, here between the black limo
trussed up to impress in milky leathers … (45)

But this energy does not last, to the book’s benefit. This is a book of endings, and a book of morning light, the voice being one of the poet looking out, barely awake, moving in grief like a person underwater and uncaffeinated. It’s a meditative journey. Poems like “All My Tests Negative” hint at moments when Cooley might turn to engage with the others living around him, but these are largely unformed moments that only exist in the right now; this book’s strengths are the length and depth with which it plumbs the numbness, disorientation, lethargy and confusion of trauma, loneliness and grief, which Cooley does marvelously.

 

Review of What’s This, Bombardier? by Ryan Flaherty
October 1, 2012 | review

Ryan Flaherty. What’s This, Bombardier? Warrensburg, MO: Pleiades Press, 2011. $16.95, paper.

Ryan Flaherty’s What’s This, Bombardier? takes its title from the poem “Questions of Apropos,” in which the speaker dissects the physical and metaphorical constructions of an object simply called “thing.” The identity of this “thing,” beyond the abstract label Flaherty lends it, never becomes clear, despite the numerous demands asked of it, despite even the titular and final question:

Is it a basis of intelligence or just a molecular quirk
drawing me to the edge, my fingers going numb

from holding this “thing” over the opened cargo doors,
and I am holding what, exactly, bombardier?

Throughout the collection, this “thing” defies definition. While in the above example the “thing” seems ostensibly some bomb about to be dropped, at other moments it resists even that type of implication, remaining simply “a thing-sized / ‘thing’” (“Loops to Sequester the ‘Thing’”).

Reviewing a work which deals in the dissection of a foggy “thing” proves difficult. How does one avoid the pitfall of baggy abstractions? What’s the thing, finally, about the “thing”? However, Flaherty situates his general signifier in lush linguistic territory. “Essay on Not Knowing What I Mean by ‘Thing,’” for instance, starts with another interrogation of “thing” (“‘thing’ of my assembled evidence, ‘thing’ I measure against, ‘thing’ I am in possession of”). It continues, though, with exotic images like “scarves no longer attached to necks and snakes wind-whipped through no-man’s-land.” In other words, while the author’s “thing” darts and weaves to evade pinpointing, the careful construction of the surrounding language helps to render each mention of it strangely unique.

Flaherty’s book, though, is not all about the “thing,” which one might argue borders on a kind of pretentiousness or at least preciousness. In other poems, he exhibits a keen eye for the epigrammatic—that mainstay of the poetic idiom. In “Canticle Against the Canticle,” for example, the speaker explains that “[t]here is a certain shame necessary / to living well.” Later in the same poem, he desires “to be a prolonged / re-enactment of the Alamo,” while forgetting himself in “reshuffling the blocks // of dark.” These unexpectedly sharp and uncanny insights do all the work of the classic poetry of melancholia. Baudelaire would be proud. What’s more, one sheds the nagging vagueness of that “thing” and obliquely gains some understanding of it.

The speaker in What’s This, Bombardier? seems less concerned with the actual identity of the “thing” and more with the search surrounding it. For Flaherty, carrying that thing about means a “steady, livable, uranium life”—one of uncertainty and the inevitable vagaries of meaning. These poems gracefully accept that no answer exists to the constant questions of the analytical mind, that “the water is moving at least two ways at once” (“Notes on the Prefix ‘un’”). Flaherty’s unyoked, vaporous “thing” even seems acutely aware of its own instability and unnamable nature—if it could speak, that is. Better, the speaker appears self-conscious of his own inability to stop questioning. “In my defense,” he declares in “The Assembly, an Overview,” “I can’t put it down without turning to fragment.”

Finally, any haziness in What’s This, Bombardier? seems not so much imprecise poetics as a necessary component to the search for meaning at the heart of most any good poem.

 

Review of The San Simeon Zebras by C.J. Sage
October 1, 2012 | review

C. J. Sage. The San Simeon Zebras. Knockeven, Ireland: Salmon Poetry, 2010. 72 pp. $21.95, paper.

I’m generally not a fan of tightly themed collections. I don’t want to read, say, fifty poems about pyramids. This is because, turned inward on subject, a poet can become a tiresome one- (or   two-) trick pony. Thankfully, this is not the case with C.J. Sage’s newest book, The San Simeon Zebras.

While most of the book’s poems can be said to be “about” animals, the animals are vehicles of their messages as much as any human persona might be. In an era marked by increasingly surreal violence, Sage clearly understands what Abraham Lincoln did—that our relationships with animals reveal our humanity.

There’s a fierce connectivity in these poems. Though I’ve never met Sage and don’t profess to know her religious views, I’ve gleaned from our editor/writer relationship (my manuscript won the 2010 book prize at Sage’s press) that she is an outspoken champion of animal rights. This voice parlays spiritually in her poems, as in “Memorandum on Human Being”:

I’ve heard
that fish hold a slippery secret: don’t think

there is a lasting flesh. The lines of lips
and their hooks will part—there is always
this promise of When.

Like Bishop before her, Sage marries image and theme to unanticipated end. As Bishop’s fish is long-suffering relic let go, Sage’s is sage messenger of a covenant that the speaker and the speech are united but for a finite time.

Similar issues of connection (and missed connection) abound in this collection. In “Ostriches” (lest we bury our heads in the sand) the speaker laments:

I wasn’t here yet, and so knew nothing of breaking.
How I’d have to bust out of my shell,
kick the egg walls in toward the dust nest,
go it alone, dig myself up out of that crater,
and live the dry life—

The opening poem, “Landscapes with Elephant Seals and Umbrellas,” explores the fragility of contact:

In the city I once saw a herd
of quick umbrellas open all at once—
all the owners purposely not touching—
[…]
Rarely, one of them brushes another.

as well as the hope that the innocent among us might reestablish that link:

To either side of the rows they make
lined up along each other there is a mile
of empty beach. Only a child makes use of it.

These poems cause us to feel things in new ways, and—warning—the emotions aren’t always comfortable. The poem “Field Notes,” for example, cinematically depicts a single buffalo’s demise by lions, and the players (“The hunters” and “one buffalo [who] strides into the water / to lick the victim’s wounds / [she kisses them] awhile”) could be a metaphor for any social scenario in which people compete for resources emotional and physical.

Sage’s poems use the imperative to bridge the strangeness and highlight the beauty in our interspecies interactions. In “How to Hold a Hummingbird,” directions such as “Understand why, for her, the mouth is most important” also call us to “Draw a warm bath—wrap her / like a canna leaf—she loves that.” “Sonnet for Carryhouse and Keeper” depicts man’s devotion to his pet, even as he figures God-like in her world: “his breath would set small clouds into her glass.”

In other poems, the language matches the motif, taking on a distinctly Biblical assignment:

“Donkey”

Giver of ears
to kings and fools,
long-faced, desert-drifted
carrier of saints and baggage,
[…]
o wooly, cross-backed wanderer
we keep corralled, o dove-
gray guide and deliverer
of goods, you take our hay and keep us.

The redemptive power of animals rests in the interplay between humans and beasts, and it’s never lost on the reader that humans are themselves not exempted animals, even as the speaker in “A Wilderness” acknowledges “There is a wilderness in me.”

While the occasional didactic statement creeps in, as in “Sea Canaries”: “Here is where they belong, / all right, / and here is where I leave them,” when it does it’s quickly redeemed by thoughtful lyricism: “To bate the brink / of bygone beauty, I bring no bait.” Such carefully packed sound catapults Sage to the head of the wordsmith line.  Here are linguistically rich and evenly crafted pieces that feel fully vested (only one poem, “Aubade,” doesn’t seem to fit thematically). The rhyme in “For Food,” for example, tethers us to its urgency and beauty:

on the drive home, orange and aglow,
see a thousand rows of spiny safflower heads!—
how they keep the local farm afire.

Who needs the opiate of poppies!
The rage of radish blossoms
fills a plate with flame.

The cumulative effect of long vowels in “home/aglow/rows/local/opiate” and “rage/plate/flame” becomes as meditative as the author’s vision. Sage’s finely tuned ear is stamped on powerful endings like the one in “Goat”:

We leave our gardens unattended, our backs
to both your province and your teeth,

our pant legs at your feet.
The bulk of you is not your horns;
your sum is in your hunger.

There is a hunger in these poems, a longing for salvation, compassion, and equality for the inhabitants of Earth. And though the final gesture is a despairing one (“I was born into captivity and I will leave a captive of this world”), the sum of Sage’s collection hinges on faith of “a living sign” that “men would find their way.” Indeed, these poems provide the guide.

 

Interview with Lia Purpura
October 1, 2012 | interview

Because the Essay Can Do So Much

Recognized for her richly poetic digressions yet startling precision, Lia Purpura doesn’t disappoint in her most recent collection of essays, A Rough Likeness. It’s an exciting excursion from one essay to the next as Purpura’s meditations move from the quest for meaning to the very act of meaning-making. I raced to get a copy of A Rough Likeness and slowed down while reading it only to savor the strange and inevitable beauty of the language. Marked with images both sparkling and haunting, these essays dwell in the mystery of nearly forgotten histories, shards of stories, beach glass, memories. Purpura writes “Without a story, the fragments won’t settle,” and while her essays demonstrate the veracity of this statement, outside of them some things are settled: Lia Purpura’s essays are fiercely elegant yet filled to the brim with guilty pleasures.

As satisfying as the book is, I was also interested in getting a few other things settled, particularly regarding her writing process and the creative choices that she made while putting this collection together.

Kathleen Blackburn: In your essay, “The Lustres,” you write “One summer night, when I was six and put to bed while the sun still shone and the game in the street went on without me, I thought to myself, framing it up, ‘the world is going on without me.’” You go on to describe the playful way you re-imagined the world, and the words that make it up, as a child. How early did your work as a writer begin?

Lia Purpura: I suppose it’s exactly impulses like this one you mention that started me off—the intensity of that dreamy space-before-sleep, those moments that feel real enough to hold, meeting up with language . . . at some point, the impulse becomes one of preserving moments and not just experiencing them . . . if inclined to words, one discovers that words help, the matching of words to moments becomes a habit, then a habit became a practice.

KB: What are some of your regular writing practices?

LP: Pretty simple: I sit down to it daily. Read. Write. Look out the window. Collect things during the day. Within that frame of commitment, anything can happen. The particular bends and folds and moves and breath marks are probably too idiosyncratic to go into. “I sit down to it daily” means unless life blows things up. Which happens.

KB: Do you typically begin a piece with a word, an image, or a feeling?

LP: I’d have to smack down the notion of “typical”—all of these options you offer are possibilities, though the moment of launch is shimmeringly mysterious at heart. Knowing what starts you up shouldn’t in any way suggest that you then go about tracking that thing/moment/word/procedure, hoping for it to replicate itself. You can set up conditions (quiet, or music, no answering the phone, not checking your email . . .) but being open to a range of entry-points is probably most freeing. I guess “beginning” is a cross between intense discipline and wild acceptance.

KB: Since that evening described in “The Lustres,” you’ve done a lot to shape the world of literary nonfiction, particularly regarding the personal essay. What first prompted you to write essays?

LP: For a short while, when I was first pregnant with our son, it became difficult to write poems, and just to keeping moving, I wrote brief prose sketches. Really, it was a very primitive endeavor—I just looked out the window and wrote what I saw, which often matched up with back-of-the-head thoughts—those roving, hovering notions that are ripe for the picking but need some kind of occasion, something as small as a blowing leaf, to help anchor or snag them. Soon, the state I was in, “with child” as they say, became a natural part of some of these meditations, and I once again felt whole as a writer, able to work from a core that poetry, at that time, wasn’t touching. As soon as the sentence and prose rhythms reconstituted me, the feel for poems came back, and I’ve been writing both simultaneously, ever since.

KB: What feels different or similar to you about writing poems vs. essays?

LP: It’s a kind of sprint-vs.-long-distance thing. Some bodies need both. Others prefer to specialize.

KB: A Rough Likeness opens playfully with “On Coming Back as a Buzzard” in which you take on the persona of, as the title suggests, a buzzard, though you admit that “coming back as a buzzard, has not much to do with buzzards at all.” The essays that follow investigate the “leftovers,” the “something” that lies outside of story. Thus, the essays feel connected; yet, many of them appeared as stand-alone pieces. When did you begin to envision the collection that became A Rough Likeness?

LP: I don’t envision a collection; it’s more that I track certain impulses, pig-after-a-truffle style, find a scent and dig there. Usually one essay seeds the next, or suggests a kindred impulse. So to me, the essays in a collection are intent on ways of seeing and I kind of go on faith that the cohering eye, the central mind of the writer is what holds them together, allows them to function as a coral reef almost—a collection of individual beings also dependent on each other and their collectivity for overall sustenance and health.

KB: Do you complete a singular piece before moving to the next?

LP: I usually have a few pieces going at once, so I can incline toward one or the other, depending how I feel when I wake up in the morning.

KB: Several of the pieces appeared in journals long before they were published this year. Did you revise them in the meantime?

LP: Some were minimally fussed with for publication in Rough Likeness, but by the time I send out a piece, it’s pretty much finished. Sometimes I find an imprecision or a tense that’s flabby or more likely, that I’ve overwritten a thought, and repeated myself and am able to cut back on an effusion.

KB: Do your feelings toward a piece of writing change over time?

LP: As with friends, one can feel inexplicably close to some essays right from the start—who knows why. It’s an immediate draw to their energy, pace, an inquisitiveness of the particularly warm or relentless or deft variety. Usually, for me, the mysterious attachment is a lasting thing, and essays that gave and fed at one time continue to do so.

KB: Your work has been praised for its lyric movement and moments of surprise. Philip Lopate stated that you are “at the forefront of the New Essay.” Where do you see yourself in the larger framework of literary essays?

LP: There has been, recently, a lot of talk about the “renaissance of the essay.” I haven’t really made a practice of tracking the rise and fall of genres, nor do I believe that one genre is ever really in ascendancy or despairing decline. Talk about any kind of surge in vital artistic forms is exciting—it means people are reading with an eye to what a form can do, how it can be expanded and shaped and made to reflect reality, how it can imagine into new ways of being. Rediscovering the essay—considering it anew, hearing beyond anxious childhood associations with the form—all these responses on the part of readers are incredibly healthy. Perhaps the interest in the essay reflects readers’ desire to engage with an intimate form of idea-making that isn’t necessarily memoir-bound. The essay, after all, can do so much . . .

KB: And you find memoir more restrictive?

LP: No, it’s not that. It certainly doesn’t have to be. I just tend to angle away from trends and general procedures—I was rarely able to enjoy or be freed by classroom exercises, for example. I marvel at the utterly fresh work students produce in response to impromptu suggestions and exercises . . . but I couldn’t rally to the occasion; everything I did under such circumstances felt contrived.

KB: Have you ever considered writing a full-length memoir?

LP: Nope. I’m pretty convinced that writers deal with “telling their story” in ways that suit them temperamentally. I’m not really given to the memoir as practiced by the telling of life events, thus the essay, for me, allows for “spots of time” (Wordsworth’s phrase)—those deeply fertile moments that impress on the imagination seem to illustrate my sensibility best.

KB: What do you think is the distinction between memoir and a collection of personal essays?

LP: Well, some collections of autobiographical essays present stand-alone pieces that when read together offer a full view of a life or a life’s issue. A full-length memoir often moves along like a novel, providing all the resting points and chronologies/arcs found in a work of fiction. Essays, as I practice them, are way more about ideas and language, regaining moments that are really hard to pin, the shape and music of a sentence—I’m after a feel for the life in and behind the words, just not in a narrative way. More in the way a poem means and communicates.

KB: What do you consider a lyric essay?

LP: Okay, let me start big here. Both the poetic line and the prose sentence are musical units. Musical units of thought. The writing I’m most drawn to has lyrical qualities, but I’d define that quality broadly. I guess, to me, “lyrical” writing lifts off the page in some playful, curiously angled way . . . some way that’s defined by a writer’s sensibility itself, and thus takes on a living, aural quality. Here’s the thing: I don’t really use the term “lyrical essay.” I really prefer just “essay” to describe what it is I’m up to. The tradition is long and honorable and I don’t feel the need to nichify. To call something a “lyric” essay, from the perspective of a writer, feels . . . presumptuous somehow.

KB: Often, your writing brings to mind notions of risk, of testing what the essay can do: the essays leap from one form to another, from the advice column, to the meditative. They include full-length quotes from Shakespeare and Whitman. They somersault between the meaning and connotations of words like Vienna and shit. The pieces feel playful, mischievous even. Will you talk a little bit about the idea of risk and how it applies to your writing process?

LP: It’s way less a matter of testing what the essay can do, from a kind of externalized perspective (i.e. being aware of being risky), and much more about trying to find what each piece wants to do, and having to make the form to both hold and express that new thing I’m clueless about at the outset. Inevitably, the stuff readers often cite as “risky” doesn’t strike me that way at all. What’s really risky, I think, for all writers, is staying with a sensation or image or idea that you have no words for at all and are certain is way bigger than you are. Being up against a thing—a sensation, an idea, a whole project unfolding—that you just aren’t at all sure you can make, a thought you aren’t at all sure you can realize (or one that you won’t realize as vital when it’s there in front of you!) is the big, long-term, committed risk of writing.

KB: Several of the essays are openly aware of the thinking process. For example, in “Against ‘Gunmetal’” you illustrate your search for the right term for the sky’s darkening: “The sky turns, toward or into. The sky now. The sky is—what is the shade, gradient, hue, tint I’m seeing?” This awareness seems inherent to the essay’s quest for meaning, or quest to make meaning. Do you feel that this kind of awareness is essential to the personal essay?

LP: For me, the essay is a place where one can maintain a sense of presence. I want the thought itself there, which of course is an element that one has to balance by acts of conscious shaping, or all would be a blathering early draft. I like most the look of things that maintain some of the marks of their maker—pots, clothing, food—things that hold within themselves the trail back to the creator. Smudges of a certain sort. Fingerprints, breath. Precision, machine-tooled writing, writing that gets the job done, doesn’t allow for a little dirt under its nails . . . that’s not what I’m after and that’s not what feels most achingly human.

KB: Have you felt this way from the beginning or has it taken time to trust the marks of your own making?

LP: The most powerful thing one can teach is that art takes time. It takes a long time to develop a relationship with the practice and the work and to come to understand the language that exists between you and your work, to clarify why something feels new or doesn’t, what it actually feels like to work your way into a language for something that previously didn’t offer itself in language. It’s so much less about “revising” than it is about “learning how to work.” You have to love this kind of work to write. That sounds obvious, but I’ve often wanted to ask people, students, other writers “do you love (i.e. want to wrangle with) what you do? Do you want to be doing this?”

KB: You mentioned earlier that when you revisit a piece you sometimes find that you have “overwritten” a thought. How do you distinguish between clutter and allowing for some dirt under the nails?

LP: Again, this is a matter of sitting-with, day after day, figuring out what kind of balances you want, in terms of lengths of sentences, depth and intensity of descriptions, all other gestures . . . all of which requires a lot of “what if” questioning and curiosity and reading to identify in your own words.

KB: “There Are Things Awry Here” opens with “I found a perimeter, thank God, and I’m walking . . . I am here (quick check: yes, panting and sweaty) but it feels like nowhere, is so without character that the character I am hardly registers at all. So I’ll get to work, in the way I know how.” The essay springs to life in the moment of this walk the way a conversation during a walk might; yet—I assume—you didn’t write it while walking. At least, you didn’t necessarily revise it then. What is your revision process? Do your pieces change much from the initial draft to the final? In other words, how do you refine your pieces while still protecting the integrity of that spur-of-the-moment quality?

LP: I’m usually aware of trying to clarify and deepen, not so much “refine” or even “revise”—each version feels very much like “writing” to me, and not much like “revising.” Of course, radical things can happen, whole chunks, limbs, archipelagoes can fall off or drift away in later versions. I do a lot of work while walking. I bring a pad and pen . . . our dog is so accustomed to my stopping in mid-stride to jot stuff that she now just sits down as soon as she sees the pad come out of my pocket.

KB: Instead of revising something old/already written, you consider each draft fresh writing?

LP: More or less. I have a lousy memory in general, so pieces I sit down to each morning, though I may have worked them over the previous day, tend to feel always-new. Similarly, I’m terrible with jokes, but can hear the same one told ten times because I never remember the punch line. Weaknesses are blessings.

KB: Do you think there is a danger in distinguishing between “writing” and “revising”?

LP: It might be helpful to think of “revising” as a more mechanical set of acts: have I repeated myself in this paragraph, or on pages three and five? Have I used this word fifteen times? Those are important questions and allow for a different part of the brain to make its important contributions.

KB: You teach in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program. What advice do you give your students regarding revision?

LP: To train for patience and to listen for opportunities that they haven’t taken yet (which is different than thinking you “need more description in spot x or y”), to listen for openings and for rich and shimmering lines that might have gotten truncated or written over. I think it’s critically important to ask a lot of “what if” questions of yourself as you’re writing. Too often a younger writer (or one who may not be young but is fairly new to writing) wants to fix or add to, and isn’t behaving curiously, isn’t approaching the page with a sense of adventure, with the spirit of and desire for experimentation. With that rare combo of patience and urgency. Asking “what if” as in “what if I did x” keeps open that sense of surprise, as well as the possibility that the foray may need to be scrapped altogether. Wanting to write—to actively be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reading after fact and reason, to use Keats’s definition of Negative Capability—is different than “wanting to get the piece written” or, god help us, published.

KB: Where do you think the temptation to just get a piece written comes from?

LP: Perhaps when one has a sense of the kind of work it takes to write and is daunted by the time and open-endedness of the endeavor and chooses a route that’s smoother, quicker, and offers more of a guarantee for shared understanding with a reader (and this applies to highly abstract language as well, not just “easy” prose). Clichés are a comfort. Abstraction’s another comfort.

KB: How do you respond to student anxiety about getting published?

LP: I think anxious people deserve honest confirmation: the issue of wondering whether or not you’ll be able to share your work with readers, wanting to be read and thus deeply seen, wanting to make something of worth—all of this is fraught with anxiety and desire and hope. I commiserate. Commiseration helps, I think.

KB: Are there specific familiar anxieties that visit during your creative process?

LP: Mostly the issue of time. Having enough open, extended time, not devaluing (accepting) smaller and imperfect increments of time.

KB: In “Jump” you describe yourself as a “passerby, secret entertainer of edges and precipices.” The pieces in this collection are preoccupied with the spaces of time between event, fragments, partialities, what lies between the “folds.” The “something, but not the story.” What questions do you ask yourself that lead to this kind of exploration?

LP: You know, one’s own sensibility is a mystery. I think I’ve left the questions in, so in a very practical way, the best response to your inquiry here could likely be found in the essays themselves. If you mean something more like “what is the impulse behind those questions?” I’d be in wobbly territory if I chanced a response—I’d be, in other words, making stuff up to secure a proper-seeming, well-considered and controlled set of reasons. One that would lead readers to think I understand certain attractions. And I don’t. So I don’t want to suggest that anyone else should understand their core impulses, or assume another’s procedure (mine included!) is authoritative . . .

KB: Do you seek feedback on your work from other writers?

LP: I have a few true-north types to whom I send work when I need some clear-eyed commentary or when I feel I can’t go any further without having some basic responses to basic questions. It’s important to know your own methods and be responsive to those. Some people send stuff off to readers the minute they complete a first draft; others wait a long while, to establish a sense of closeness to the piece before entertaining too many voices and opinions. I keep my advice-seeking pretty local and spare.

KB: Are there particular landscapes or settings that you find especially conducive to your creative process?

LP: Here, too, I’m pretty simple. I write best in a quiet room. My quiet room, and by quiet I mean with ambient neighborhood and house sounds all around. No music, just regular life. Hotel rooms are okay sometimes, but any productivity there is usually born of attempts to fight the ugliness of those chain hotel landscapes and my own sense of displacement, and make some kind of livable space for eye and heart.

KB: You just won a Guggenheim—congratulations! What’s next for you?

LP: I’m drawn to ruined things, compromised land, to the stories buried or hidden within those places, to trying to make some kind of sense of how we move through environments that are devastatingly ugly and overbuilt and not spiritually sustaining. I’m interested in finding language for sensations and states of being that I, as of now, have no language for. The drive I feel most urgently: to look hard at that which has been ruined, to look at the systems I/we all participate in, light these realities up, and speak to what might be done, to what remystifying, resacrilizing (to borrow the excellent terms of friends) might look like.

A Rough Likeness is available in paperback from Sarabande Books for $15.95.

 

 

Interview with Antonio Elefano
October 1, 2012 | interview

Antonio Elefano is a fiction writer/playwright/attorney living in Houston, TX. He received his JD from Yale Law School in 2005 and his MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University in 2011. He has been published in 236 and is currently a Writing Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston. His story “Italy” appears in this issue of The Journal. Recently associate fiction editor J. Preston Witt talked to Antonio about “Italy,” writing, and Lorrie Moore-induced shame.

Antonio Elefano Author Photo
Photo credit: www.mg-photography.com

J. Preston Witt: Why do you write? In other words, why not spend your time running marathons, drinking beer, and watching HBO?

Antonio Elefano: I do it for the money and the acclaim.

Actually, I write because I can’t not write. Even when I was in law school, I spent a lot of time convincing professors to accept novellas and plays instead of research papers because I needed to justify all the time away from casebooks. In the freshman writing class I teach, I begin with this David Hare quote: “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” I can’t say it better than that.

JPW: What is the most important piece of fiction you’ve ever read?

AE: I’m going to cheat and give you two answers. The summer before my sophomore year of high school I read A Tale of Two Cities. I hated it until about two thirds of the way in, when all the plots started tying together. I couldn’t put it down. I remember finishing around four in the morning and feeling devastated but at the same time thrilled to discover that a book could do that.

My current favorite book is Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America. She’s the author I want to be when I grow up. I taught one of her stories at the end of my Advanced Fiction course just in case anyone was getting too big of an ego. “You think you’re good? Read this.” This is what I pull off the shelf whenever I want to feel like a piece of garbage.

JPW: How do you approach the stories you write?

a. Like little life rafts.
b. Like working out the abdominals.
c. Like helping sick children and recycling.
d. Like making a nice dinner for a friend.
e. Like telling a good friend that you slept with his wife.

AE: Definitely (e). When I read the scenario, I smiled and thought: I’d write that as a comedy for sure. For me, all truly funny stories come from a place of extreme discomfort. I remember sitting in a mall in Boston a few months ago, and this man approached and asked if I’d like to hear his theories on God. I know what you’re thinking: who says yes to this guy?

I do. I’m such a lazy researcher I just sit on benches and wait for stories to come to me. “Yes, please show me what’s in that little pamphlet you’ve got . . . What was that? . . . God has a wife? Good for him! Now, he can stop picking on virgins . . . You want to show me a video on your portable DVD player? Sure, fire it up! . . . What’s that now? You’d like me to go where? . . . Yeah, I think my wife is getting out of the shoe store, so—”

JPW: To some, the art of fiction is professional lying. Yet for centuries people have looked to authors as guides toward elucidating and complicating truths about human existence. Thoughts?

AE: Someone once asked me at a picnic why I bother with this fiction nonsense when there are so many “real” stories worth telling. And my answer to that is: The Sun Also Rises is real. And “Bullet in the Brain” and “The Bear Came over the Mountain” are real. It doesn’t matter that the characters don’t exist in actual life; they exist for me. I know them. I connect to them. And, most importantly, these are the stories that never fail to stir something in my heart and mind. There’s nothing more real, more substantial and lasting, than that.

JPW: Where did your story “Italy” come from?

AE: I was on a trip with my family. I don’t write traditional journals because they’re never very interesting (“Dear Diary, what a day!”), but I want to preserve the experience. So I make up a character and write my accounts through his or her eyes. At the time, I was still working as a corporate attorney, so that’s probably why the narrator’s voice is so persnickety. To answer your question then: “Italy” started in Italy. And it actually became the centerpiece of my MFA application.

JPW: Instead of a record in a diary, you made the memory into something that feels truer.

AE: I think so. I could go home every day and write an account of what happened here and there, but an accumulation of facts doesn’t really do justice to the experience. For me, that trip will always be remembered through the prism of this story. Because of that, those places and the feelings they conjured stay vivid and alive.

JPW: It seems that you recognize a relationship between memory and creativity. How long after an experience do you find yourself writing about it?

AE: It normally takes some time before a given memory becomes a story. I can tell it’s “ready” when it’s persisted long enough and I can’t get it out of my head. It normally starts with something very small—an image or a sound. And then I’ll build a character and an entire plot just to make sense of that image or sound. It’s very circuitous, I suppose.

JPW: How would you prefer to die?

a. Parachute malfunction.
b. Drowning in a rogue wave of hot caramel.
c. Black hole spaghettification.
d. Like Mel Gibson in Braveheart.
e. Peacefully in your sleep.

AE: I’m tempted to choose (b) because it reminds me of the dessert menu at Applebee’s: Death by Chocolate, Strawberry Sin, Statutory Rape Crisp. But I’m going to be boring and say (e). My day-to-day life is pretty dull. A happy Friday night is dinner out, followed by an hour of grocery shopping. Even my dreams are banal. I wake up in the morning, turn to my wife, and say, “I had the worst dream. I was going to the hardware store to get a hammer.”

“And?”

“And I got a hammer.”

“Then what?”

“I came home. That’s it.”

Blinking eyes. Mild concern that I’ve chosen storytelling for a living. “Go back to sleep, dear.”

My theory is that I get all the outrageous stuff out in my writing, so there’s nothing left for either my conscious or unconscious mind. (Either that, or I’m dead inside.)

JPW: Death, shame, and stories have a fascinating relationship, especially in your work. Is shame an interesting concept for you?

AE: I’m Filipino and was raised Catholic, so shame and I are old friends. I also write comedy from time to time, and shame is almost always at the center of that, too. There was a time when I did feel ashamed to call myself a writer. At my old law firm, when someone would hear about my little hobby, I’d always act very casual. “It’s just something fun I do on the side.” It’s taken some time, but that part of who I am is no longer something I distance myself from. It’s brought me too much happiness and too much perspective. To answer your question more directly, I’m no longer ashamed to say I’m a writer but will probably be writing about shame in some capacity for the rest of my life.

JPW: Shame is that all-encompassing feeling we get when we have no way to properly atone for some fault. Shame seems to be of particular importance to your story “Italy.”

AE: You’re right that shame is very much at the center of “Italy.” The narrator, like any author, is telling a story but the story is telling him something, too, and it’s not very nice. The entire account represents a lot of things for him, but I think most of all—it’s an apology.

JPW: There are a number of similarities between how you tackle shame, and the strategies Lorrie Moore uses to address shame in her stories. There’s a dance between regret, fear, and humor that happens in both of your prose. Just yesterday I re-read Moore’s short story from Birds of America, “People Like That are the Only People Here.” Normally, great writing inspires me to write. Moore’s writing leaves me delighted, but sedated, like a fudge cake. Frequently I return to my own work after Moore feeling ashamed: ashamed about the stories I can’t tell, ashamed at own ignorance, ashamed at the people I won’t become. I’m not sure there is a question here.

AE: First of all, thank you for putting Lorrie Moore and me in the same sentence. Second, “People Like That are the Only People Here” is the story I was referring to earlier, the one that just fills me with awe and self-loathing. One of my best students was having the same feelings of crippling inadequacy after reading a Tobias Wolff novel (Wolff is one of my favorites as well). And this is what I told him: “We’ll never out-Moore Moore or out-Wolff Wolff.  We can merely bask in their brilliance and try to be the best version of whatever it is we are.”

 

Interview with Zach Falcon
October 1, 2012 | interview

Zach Falcon’s stories have appeared in the Sycamore Review, the Bear Deluxe Magazine, and the Bridport Prize Anthology. Born and raised in Alaska, he now lives in Maine. Associate fiction editor Brett Beach talked to Zach recently about Alaska, wild salmon, and his story “The Times of Danil Garland,” which appears in this issue of The Journal.

Zach Falcon Author Photo

Brett Beach: You currently live in Maine, but your fiction takes place in Alaska. How do these two settings affect your work?

Zach Falcon: I was born and raised in Alaska, and spent most of my life there. Where I live now reminds me a great deal of my hometown. Maine and Alaska share many similarities of landscape and life. At the same time, Maine is removed enough from my experience to allow me space to remain intent on the unique aspects of Alaska that fascinate me. Maine largely dulls my homesickness, while still leaving me a small sharp edge to work with.

BB: Is Alaska ever more than just the setting for a story?

ZF: I would be hesitant to deploy Alaska as a mere backdrop for a story that could just as easily occur elsewhere. Instead, I am interested in stories where the characters and setting are inextricably linked and necessary to each other. One of the challenges I find in writing about Alaska is making the setting quieter, turning down its usual volume, and recording it as a place where people shop for groceries, have mortgages, and work in office jobs. Being Alaskan is significant and meaningful for people living such seemingly unheroic indoor lives, too.

BB: What was the initial spark for “The Times of Danil Garland”?

ZF: The scent of a fillet of king salmon. It is always best to buy wild-caught fish.

BB: In writing the story, where did you find yourself caught up?

ZF: The greatest challenge was releasing my stranglehold on narrative. I have generally felt more comfortable writing when cause and effect are explicit and logical. When everything necessarily clicks into the proper place. Of course, the danger of such over-resolved writing is that it can become all gears and no clock face. After drafting a series of increasingly dreadful clockwork stories, I set myself the challenge of writing without bossing the narrative. This story emerged.

BB: How long did you work on the story, and what were the challenges or pleasures in revision and editing?

ZF: The story came very quickly, which rarely happens for me. The main project of revision was reading it aloud over and over and attempting to reign in sentences that favored the ear over the eye.

BB: What is some writing advice that’s always stuck with you?

ZF: “If what you are writing doesn’t make you nervous, it’s probably not worth doing.” —Francine Prose

BB: What are you at work on now?

ZF: I’m thigh-deep in the cold stream of a novel, eyeing the far bank with the usual mix of hope and despair.

 

Interview with Amy Bernhard
October 1, 2012 | interview

Amy Bernhard is a student in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her essays appear or are forthcoming in The Colorado Review and Waccamaw. Her essay “Discovery” appears in this issue of The Journal. Nonfiction editor Silas Hansen talks with Amy about nonfiction, fonts, and guilty-pleasure reads.

Amy Bernhard Author Photo

Silas Hansen: If you could have brunch with any three writers, living or dead, who would it be? And what would you serve?

Amy Bernhard: Oh man . . . such a hard question! I’ll go with Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and David Sedaris. And I’m a horrible cook, so I’d have to take everybody out to eat!

SH: What book on your bookshelf are you a little ashamed to admit is there?

AB: I’m not necessarily ashamed of this book, but Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland because when I turned eighteen I got an emo line from that book tatted on my ankle, and now whenever people ask me about it I feel the shame all over again.

SH: I hear you’re teaching creative writing this semester—with that in mind, what three quirky topics would you like to see your students write essays about?

AB: Students, extra credit if you see this! Buffy The Vampire Slayer, school cafeterias, and the Iowa State Fair.

SH: I know most writers have strong feelings about the fonts they use—what’s your choice, and what do you think that says about you?

AB: I always use Times New Roman. Nearly all my past teachers required us to write our papers in Times New, and being a creature of habit it’s a pattern I haven’t been able to break. I like it because it’s loyal and unassuming.

SH: Best book of creative nonfiction you’ve read this year?

AB: Over winter break I read Firebird by Mark Doty and loved it loved it loved it. Other highlights include Plaintext by Nancy Mairs and Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help (it’s marketed as fiction, but to me reads more like memoir).

 

Review of The Cosmic Purr by Aaron Poochigian
October 1, 2012 | review

Aaron Poochigian. The Cosmic Purr. San Jose, CA: Able Muse Press, 2012. 59 pp. $16.95, paper.

Formal verse today often looks like the spoils of a hunt for the quirkiest subject matter. All the starchy rhyme and meter complement—it is supposed—the untamed subject like a tuxedo on a stand-up comic. And like the entertainment at an award ceremony, these poems mostly disappoint. By lending their zany tedium a finished sound, the form preserves them, sometimes long enough to get them lodged cozily in anthologies. And such tomes, one gathers, are mostly what they’re written for.

The poems in Aaron Poochigian’s The Cosmic Purr, though playful and formally skillful, are of another kind entirely. Poochigian takes little seriously, least of all himself, but his clowning has the dignity of bald despair. When his poems are silly, they’re silly in the way Kees’ were, or Auden’s. Here he is, shrugging consolation in “Reunion Show”:

The blasphemy we hurled
against the world
back then
was out of season.
Now we have damned good reason
To smash things up like ruined men.

And here he lends some sweetness to a one-night stand in “After Bar”:

If the pad was a horror of crumbling plaster
the dimmer respectfully whisked it from sight,
and the windows were pictures some pointillist master
had stippled with infinite twinges of light.

With fewer than sixty pages of poems, The Cosmic Purr makes one wish more poets would spare us their seam-bursting volumes of corpulent blather. All he has to say Poochigian says briefly and well. His topics are varied, but the book is far from a miscellany. The poems speak mostly of marriage and birth and death and thoughts of these. And these are plenty, spoken as they are in a voice like a drunk starlet’s designated driver.

In “The Stage Designer,” as in many poems, the speaker accepts his peripheral role with a good humor that can’t laugh off his loneliness: “And off they drove back to their own routines / and I to mine, and life may well be better / without the drama, the big ugly scenes.” Poochigian’s lyrics have little of the dizzy solipsism so common among those who sing of losing love. The pathos in these poems is no less full for being mingled with self-mockery.

Poochigian is a classicist who has previously published many translations of old Greek poets. A few sharp fragments of Sappho appear in The Cosmic Purr, and he gives us a handful of other shards from myth and antiquity. The expectation one has when meeting Greek myth in contemporary poetry is of brassy deconstruction. Not here. Poochigian’s ancients breathe real air but remain what they are: noble, terrible, and coarse in ways no longer available to us. The speakers’ weary restraint in “The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis” conceals a bleakness one encounters seldom now, even among the irreligious. As the goddesses bicker over their prize, the mortal women take some small comfort:

But we the drab mothers, the wedding-planners,
stood aloof and shrugged at their bad manners.
The world turned upside-down: though bound for Hades,
we snubbed Heaven’s Empress and the fancy ladies.
Gods were like mortals, mortals like the gods—
we paid them back in condescending nods.

No answers, no solutions, only passing consolations fill these poems. Poochigian is willing to play the fool for a laugh, as in “Places, Places”: “What lines, what cues, what songs? They have equipped me / only with rapier and mustachios.” But there’s no forgetting what his pratfalls are diversions from.

Toward the end of the book, a longish poem called “Antiphon” strikes the ear as a warning, however wryly uttered. In this account, Antiphon is a poet, and his new work is titled, “Horribler, Horribler.” The jeremiad concludes, tremulously, with advice to “Be wise, my comrades, gird / your loins, dig trenches and expect the worst. / It’s late now, and there’s nothing we can do.” Funny as this is, it ought to send a shudder of embarrassment through anyone who’s penned a rant on modern culture. Poochigian knows well what such poetry has to say, but he knows even better how little it’s heard. “Antiphon” ends with a startling picture of joy:

And as the crowd went on by fits and starts
catcalling and extolling Antiphon
a goatherd and a flute-girl (two sweethearts
who never would be rich or mean much harm)
yawned in the face of stylized despair
and, slipping off behind his master’s farm,
lay in a hayloft and were happy there.

By giving up his seriousness, the poet approaches grace.

The poems that dip from lightness into pain do so with clarity. The two quatrains of “The Parlor” make their insistent rhyme in plain speech—unpretentious, unforgiving. No resolution is possible for mass murder, and Poochigian provides none: “Our women—raped not just by anyone. / We never called the couch an ottoman.” Though the event to which the poem refers is unmistakable, the perpetrators are not honored with a name. And names are the only lasting solace in this collection. Immortality through words is an old hope (my wife claims it’s the oldest) and the book’s epigraph is Sappho’s vindication: “I declare / that later on / even in an age unlike our own, / someone will remember who we are.” So we do.

The best poems in The Cosmic Purr look after their subjects with an old friend’s gentle irony. In “Death and the Matron,” the book’s last poem, an actress prolongs her death scene with Zenoic stamina: “God bless the lady—she will go down talking / as if each passage were the last, / a swan singing a filibuster.” Poochigian performs his tricks not for the applause but to keep the  whole party going a little longer. To put off the night’s inevitable end. In this slim first collection, too many poems to name are enviably, sickeningly good, but among them is surely “The Vigil,” an elegy no sooner read than known by heart:

Because he was as hard to handle
as truth, which we equate to light,
go somewhere dark and light a candle
for Alan Sullivan tonight.

 

Review of The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands by Nick Flynn
July 29, 2012 | review

Nick Flynn. The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011. 94 pp. $15.95, hardcover.

Like much of Nick Flynn’s work, his newest poetry collection serves as a book of witness. The title is quite telling. With it, we have the idea of a volunteer: those who offer to fight, and the captured who are asked to divulge information. Here, Flynn deals with subject matter similar to his most recent memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb (W.W. Norton, 2010), which chronicles the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib prison, the approaching birth of his daughter, and the struggle to understand his role as a father. As in the memoir, the speaker in The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands feels an obligation to protest the atrocities of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. The book is a compilation of voices, sometimes taking the form of dense prose poems, sometimes decidedly lyric and ethereal. Flynn’s characters are the tortured, the torturers, those in power, and those who observe from a seemingly safe distance. It is interesting to see how such similar subjects are treated in two different mediums by the same author.  As both a poet and a memoirist, Flynn’s main goal is to speak for those who cannot.

Much of the book is concerned with the idea of failure, which is particularly present in the first few poems. In “haiku (failed),” Flynn writes, “We are all god’s children / we are all gods, we walk the earth.” Yes, we may be gods who have the power to wage war, to commit great harm, but we are failed gods if we must walk. Earlier in the poem, Flynn establishes there is a “thin thread that holds us here, tethered / or maybe tied, together.” This “thin thread” ties us to the world and to each other. In the poem, Flynn muses on what the thin thread could be called, “telephone? horizon? song?” What else ties us to each other— our humanity? A soul? Later, the poem discusses the idea that humanity is connected, and that inside each of us is a ship with two sails, ready to move off “out of sight.” If humanity is connected, then the torturer and the tortured are two similar beings. If the ship within us can set sail at any moment, our existence on earth is tenuous and given to failure. The poem, too, is a failure. It’s called a haiku though it looks like a prose poem. It looks like a prose poem but there are line breaks indicated by slashes. This form is repeated often, and honors the dichotomy between power and powerlessness Flynn successfully creates.

The second poem is a longer, sectioned piece titled “fire.” It’s a persona poem written in the voice of a soldier addressing his captain. In it, he tells a story through a series of flashbacks “as if it were a confession.” He is haunted by the molestation and burning of children, by the fires he intentionally set which he calls “little flare-/ ups, flash fires.” This phrase also serves as a metaphor for the poems in this collection. Searing in their intensity, they are often tightly-wound and economical. If the poems were a meal they’d be rations. The reader must consume only a little at a time, lest one fill too quickly. The concerns of this book are so raw, so demonic, Flynn’s characters must do their telling in small doses. For example, in the poem “air,” we are given just a series of words:

maybe our bodies are no more than jars
meant to hold what we name everything

airplane photograph leash glove & song
it all pours in with each breath.

Obviously, Flynn is referring to 9/11 and the offenses committed at Abu Ghraib prison. Because they are events steeped in the minds of conscious readers, he need only mention a few key words to put us in the right frame of mind. The words are rather ordinary, but together they echo contemporary events.

Flynn’s concern with war and religion is overtly evident, but in this collection he’s also fascinated with pop culture, the body as a vessel, and with the elements: fire, air, earth, and water. To burn, to strangle, to bury, to drown, all are methods of torture used. No dirty deed escapes Flynn’s eagle eye.

Often, Flynn uses the vernacular of nursery rhymes to discuss the subjects of war and 9/11, such as in “e. corpse”:

look: this little piggy ate

roast beef, this little piggy ate
none (this can’t be
right). Thursday’s child is
bound to crash, Friday’s child is ashes

ash…

He employs this medium not for the usual purpose of making the subject’s bitter medicine easier to swallow, but rather to point out that these wars have forever marred any subsequent generation. Yes, there is milk to drink, the poems seem to say, but the milk is pink. There’s blood in the milk.

By using pop culture references, Flynn tries to lighten the mood. Into the tapestry of war, Flynn weaves phrases from songs by the Kinks, Modest Mouse, and Arcade Fire. He juxtaposes ideas from Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon, the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, poetry from Bishop, Crane, Kinnell, and Whitman with the testimonies of Abu Ghraib detainees. In the same way opposites are mirrored throughout the book, these references serve to marry the contemporary with history. In the prose poem, “the baffled king composing hallelujah,” he writes:

…Krishna, trying / to convince Arjuna of the righteousness of / battle, boiled it down to eleven words / —We’ll never untangle the circumstances that brought us / to this moment… / We created a wasteland (bye-bye) / & called it peace.

The reader is left to wonder what lessons can be learned, what is doomed to repeat itself.

While the book’s concerns are decidedly public, they are also made deeply personal. The idea of the body as vessel is begun in the first poem and followed throughout the book. In “pulse (hidden bird),” the speaker states, “lurking inside us is / a child, a real child, running with both / hands in the air, as if escaping a prison, laughing.” The body is a receptacle for the soul’s light, for all that is good in us, but it also serves as a bottle for a ship, a jar, jailor and cage. A vessel can create a sense of safety, but here that is often a false notion.

The prose poem “forgetting something,” which appears in the second section, has garnered much attention since it was published first by The Boston Review, then chosen as poets.org’s poem-of-the-day. It, too, is a persona poem in the voice of a soldier. In it, the soldier dreams of going home to his beloved:

…when—if—we see each other / again, the first thing we should do is… / …tie our hands to something… / …otherwise they (wild birds) / might startle us / awake…./ …First thing we should do / if we see each other again is to make / a cage of our bodies—inside we can place / whatever still shines.

From the detailed confessions of torture given in this poem, one can glean that after war, not much if anything, is left of value to place in the body’s cage.

Nick Flynn’s poetic touch is light as a feather on the wrist. But if his poems were kisses, they’d bruise. The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands spotlights the horrors of war, but also the fact that no one escapes. This book is filled with songs of the broken and of those who do the breaking. It is not for the weak-stomached, the prudish, or those whose wish to remain ignorant.

Review of White Papers by Martha Collins
July 29, 2012 | review

Martha Collins. White Papers. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2012. 80 pp. $15.95, paperback.

Writing Somewhat More Free

“As I learn from you,/I guess you learn from me—/although you’re older—and white—/
and somewhat more free.”
from Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B”

In his essay “A Mystifying Silence: Big and Black” (APR, Sept/Oct 2007), Major Jackson exhorts his white counterparts to “begin to pen a body of poems that go beyond our fears and surface projections of each other to a fuller account of the challenges and reaches of an ever-evolving democracy.” Martha Collins’ White Papers is, in part, response to Jackson’s call. This series of numbered, untitled poems charts the intersection of Collins’ personal life with issues of race and equality, beginning with the précis of a “white paper” written in her youth: “Because a few years after Brown v. Board of Education I wrote a paper / that took the position Yes but not yet.” The forty-three poems or “papers” that fill this collection follow her—and our—education in and about a world of white privilege. Collins deftly lifts and prods, unearthing suspicions, stereotypes, and powerplays that have existed through centuries of systematic racial oppression. Her focus on race in America, nurtured in her semi-biographical Blue Front (Graywolf), now opens into a growing awareness of her place in the racial context of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Only in the last few pages, in a tiny section entitled “November 4, 2008,” does the Civil Rights Movement surface, and with it the changes that led to what, in Collins’ childhood, would have seemed an impossibility: the election of an African-American president. The poems move linearly but seem to flow backwards to that final moment, to the “learning this un / learning untying the knot” leading to the final revision: “Yes Yes.” White Papers investigates the ever-evolving racial relations experienced by one white writer in an ever-evolving democracy, steeped in its history of white brutality and exclusion.

While Collins’ poems work individually, the book functions as a poetic slideshow, covering vast distances across American space and time: from the white section of a small Midwestern town, to the home of an African-American scholar in Cambridge, MA, to the seat of US government; from the first frontier of colonial New England to the post-Civil War South. This is not, however, a book embroiled in the legacy of a racist, divided South (although it includes poems that tackle violent incidents such as those surrounding the White Tree in Jena, Mississippi). Her perspective is one of growing up in an almost exclusively white area. She writes out of an experience in which ideas of superiority are inviolable; in which the Other is viewed a mysterious or suspect anomaly; in which, in an enveloping whiteness, the Other is known to exist yet individual and story seem to disappear: “Nor, I think, did my parents hear stories of southern chain/gangs and other post-Reconstruction re-enslavements.” This history is one in which ignorance and segregation are perpetrators of American racism (as compared to learned hatred). Collins exposes sins of omission, the ability to submerge questions of race where “my parents lived in not-quite-all-whiteness,” the cool “logic” of Plessy v. Ferguson reflected in the documentation of white distance.

White Papers catalogues which ingredients go into the pot when children of any color (in Collins’ case, white) form ideas about their racial identity. How race was understood in Collins’ childhood (assuming children learn about race differently today) is forefront:

They lived in the colored
section of town, as if the White
Pages map had been crayoned,
little squares, inside the lines

The phrase “in the colored section of town” repeats in other poems, clearly etched in early consciousness. Clipped syntax and thought mimics a state of feeling over reason, childishness over adulthood. White Papers blends her memories with American history, even when dealing with a relatively recent past (“November 4, 2008”). In that one section titled only by date, the book reaches its apex, transforming truncated line and syntax into fluid energy. She describes Obama’s election and inauguration:

On his way to the Capitol largely built by slaves
who baked bricks, cut, laid stone—
on his way
to stand before the Mall where slaves were held
in pens and sold—
on his way to the White
House partly built by slaves, where another
resident, after his Proclamation, wrote:
If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong

Collins moves from invocation of Abraham Lincoln to invocation of Martin Luther King, Jr:

One hundred years later King said
Now is the time    We can never
be satisfied as long as he

dreamed:   every valley
exalted all these years until
not an end they said  a beginning

In these lines, Collins encapsulates a final victory and astonishment; she celebrates the achievement of personal history and political moment. Her repetition of Yes is a breath of relief; however, on the heels of poems tracing the depth of family and country’s participation in racism, the final affirmative serves to bolster and push against the great weight of what precedes it.

Review of Doppleganged by Fritz Ward
April 13, 2012 | review uncategorized

Fritz Ward. Dopplegänged. Lawrence, KS: Blue Hour Press, 2011. 44 pp. $10.00, paper.

Each poem in Fritz Ward’s debut chapbook, Dopplegänged, includes a reflection or refraction of the personal: a sometimes physical, sometimes metaphysical double. Andrew Webber, appropriately, finds a particularly German tradition for the literary apparitions of the dopplegänger, but does not end his categorization at simply the autoscopic action. The dopplegänger is typically male or masculine, usually nefarious, and absolutely “displacing”: there is no longer an original individual, no possibility to be unique. Ward’s idiosyncratic play with that malleable concept is a perfect choice for poetic investigations of language and identity.

Ward’s treatment of the dopplegänger is different than Søren Kierkegaard’s usage of the pseudonymic narrator. The dopplegänger trope allows Ward to live in double worlds, to offer the “multiple exposure” of the collection’s first poem. Ward shifts between prose poems and lineated pieces, and this first prose poem ends with a crisp sentence: “He stood there, shirtless—a camera at arm’s length, snapping himself at half.” The image is a nice introduction to the strangeness that follows. In “The Dopplegänger as Buddhist Trucker,” Ward creates a smooth, almost placid tone:

 When the feathers separate
 from the body, he remembers
 how important his arm seemed
 when he couldn’t move it,
 and how, slowly, the trailer tipped
 its glow of Florida oranges
 onto the searing asphalt—
 the interstate suddenly ripe
 with bruised citrus, accidental
 zest, pulp and shattered glass.

Even the delivery of these images feels extra-corporeal, as if the narrator is both absent and present in the moment, aware and detached. When we later hear the narrator say “Here’s the first person, no strings / attached,” we know he is lying, that duplicitous dopplegänger framing his moment in terms best suited toward his meaning.

That meaning, or focus, becomes clear a few poems into the collection: love. This is no ordinary romanticism. Ward extends his penchant for play to this emotion, and the choice is very successful. “Parenthetical Match” is clever, both in delivery and content. From the desire to “meet in secret,” to the anaphoric doubles in the center of the poem, to the concluding lines, Ward is most in his element when he lets his words spin:

 It’s all thresh
 and no hold. Come,
 let’s bind ourselves
 together—like a book
 our parents dream
 of burning.

The play continues in “The Dopplegänger’s Descant.” “Now teach me how to undress in a poem,” the narrator asks, before moving to the duality of the dopplegänger:

   You should stare
 and I should star. Yes, stare close

 enough and I’m a lily that lends
 to unending bending. I’ve never been won,

 but one that is too.

Besides the love poems in the collection, Ward wanders into film, a medium absolutely suited to the dopplegänger. The action of viewing, the reversal of image from reel to mind, fits the title of the collection, the noun made verb: dopplegänged. Ward presents a drive-in, where “the screen is silver and immeasurable,” and “like us, the villains / are poorly lit. But we nibble, we gnaw, / we lick what we like.” In another poem, John Wayne’s “grit scours / the tongue in the sweat lodge of my mouth” and “One deep / breath from his solar plexus / is the nexus of excess.” The poem is titled “The Dopplegänger’s John Wayne,” and the next poem admits the dopplegänger might be “just his stand-in.”

Ward’s love poems and letters coalesce with his filmic approach, and for the result, think David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Lost Highway. “Dear Cannibal Quivering with Lipstick and Moonlight” has a great title, but Ward still works for his images: “I stayed . . . to watch your soft hands flutter and flay / the green skin of the mango, its glistening flesh exposed, / alone on the white cutting board.” Ward’s wit is amply delivered in his ear for the texture of sound.
So what do dopplegängers and epistolary prose poems that conclude “love is merely a suggestion” have in common? That question needs further clarification. Ward’s dopplegänger opens so many poetic possibilities. Is this a double of the author, the narrator of the entire collection, or the narrator of individual poems? When the narrator states, in “The Dopplegänger at the Drive-In,” to “just up and fuck me, / I’ll mime the rest of my lines,” assumed gender becomes unclear. Such a move might be appropriate for a literature of the dopplegänger. Susan Yi Sencindiver’s contention feels appropriate here: “the dopplegänger decisively decenters the subject by subverting the logic of identity, [so] it cannot be presumed that gendered identity remains miraculously intact.” Words might connote masculine or feminine concepts, but letters are without sex. Ward’s collection decenters the reader, too, though his dynamic words make that displacement enjoyable.

Review of Oblations by Nick Ripatrazone
April 13, 2012 | review

Nick Ripatrazone. Oblations. Boston: Gold Wake Press, 2011. Paper, 92 pp., $14.00.

Oblations is Nick Ripatrazone’s first book, a collection of sixty-one prose poems. The choice of form is a mild surprise. Ripatrazone enjoyed some early success writing short fiction, placing stark, tightly-written stories in a number of magazines, most notably Esquire and Kenyon Review. This year, though, he earned a Pushcart Prize nomination as a poet, for “Expo ’70: Ice Bag,” which appeared in Apple Valley Review. Oblations, then, is a marriage of these two talents, the gift of narrative control and the urge to render it in precise, striking language.

The title poem serves as a prelude. From there, the book has a five-part structure, with a dozen poems each devoted to Barns, Baseball, Miscellanea, Work, and Parishes. Each of the Barn poems begins in the same manner, with a description of the structure and the people who own it. Take, for instance, “Barn: Howell”: “Autumn clapboard. Rafters paled from swallows. New roof, 1978./Susan and Helen Howell, sisters.” He then sketches in a curio-sized narrative of each, spiced with physical details like the foods a wife in one poem craved while pregnant, but ultimately unfolding into some small drama. The adopted child in “Barn: McDonoghue” loves onion and potato pirogues, covered with pepper and imagines meeting her birth mother, who lives in Mexico. She wonders if they speak English in Mexico and, “Are words really necessary?” The selections here draw on brief, often discreet glimpses. In “Barn: Pierce,” a girl watches her father with her lips pressed close to the curtain, repeating advice he’s given her; a daughter in “Barn: Davidson” remembers seeing her parents kissing behind the barn like teenagers. The details here are particular and memorable, and the section ends just before the conceit grows too familiar.

The baseball poems are a riskier venture, a dozen portraits of players from the dead-ball era (roughly 1900-1919). We are given a series of seemingly random traits to open, sometimes about the player in question – Box Joseph’s physical stature; Gray Whitney’s hair – and others about those near and dear to the player. King Dolan’s “father was the Sheriff of Essex County, New York.” Lehn Wallace had a tall wife, who grew strawberries. Whatever the opening note, a flood of detail follows, some related to the game, though the finest work is dedicated to the players’ personal lives. “Box Joseph,” we learn, “had a son. Said it was with one woman, then with another. His mother sat him down with the pastor and they made a list.” William Williams “spoke to the crowd during games. Never discussed baseball. Kept a letter in his back pocket. Fumbled a catch each Wednesday in March during 1911.” The era Ripatrazone evokes is often viewed as a more deliberate, strategic period in baseball history. Some might call it dull, with its reliance on place hitting and base running, rather than the spectacle of the home run, but Ripatrazone’s sketches here of players from the era are rich and varied, like latter-day nods to Spoon River.

Miscellanea is the least cohesive section of the book, though the work there is no less finely wrought. The speaker in “The Toboggan Party” observes a friend’s boots from the ground, while doing push ups, and notes that they are, “brown leather bleached beige from salting.” The husband in “Montoya” remarks that “a lack of photographs is a lack of love.” And a man who was fished from a river by three boys occasions the remark that the “initial identity of a catch is usually unclear.” The section’s diffuse feel, though, makes it seem more of an interlude than anything else.

Oblations closes with sections entitled Work and Parishes, respectively. The pieces in Work are brief and exact. They cover tasks are varied as teaching, herding, landscaping, milling and sugaring (the last two are Ripatrazone’s own formulations). But the parish selections are standouts, and rightly so: an oblation is essentially a humble offering to God. “St. Jude” targets the parish thrift shop and gives us a clerk named Shelly Yates who “claimed she could thumb a sheen of sweat off Graham Greene’s face on the back row of book covers.” In “St. Ladislaus,” we learn of Father North, who started out as a Lutheran minister before converting to Catholicism, and who brought his family – wife and children – with him. His parishioners, it turns out, care less about the strength of his faith than the chance to see “a muted argument with his wife in the parking lot,” or the chance to see the priest hold his wife’s hand.

There are some missteps to account for in Oblations; many poems begin in a similar, fragmentary manner, enough to occasionally create a sense of sameness. The staccato cadence Ripatrazone favors can be distracting at times, as in the case of these lines from “Infected”: “That was 1987, in Laredo. In front of the mechanic’s shop. One of the mechanics cut hair in the back. In a room behind the cars. Away from the oil but you could still smell it.” Understand, though, that these are minor quarrels, and that, on balance, Oblations is a strong and assured debut. “I always thought that language was the test of residency,” Ripatrazone writes in “Séance,” “say a word and speak a world.” Nick Ripatrazone’s cragged, angular language marks him out as a resident of the same world inhabited by writers like Edgar Lee Masters, Sam Shepard and Jim Harrison, a world we as readers don’t get to visit quite often enough.

Review of Sky Burial by Dana Levin
April 13, 2012 | review uncategorized

Dana Levin. Sky Burial. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2011. 75 pp. $15.00, paper.

When the language of an exterior source usurps poetic meditation, the writing risks diffusion into ephemera. Some poets, however, assimilate into their verse this massa intermedia—an anatomical term for a functionless gray mass within the brain, used here to describe language dormant in its original context—so as to invigorate the writing, through adjacency, toward synaptic electricity. Dana Levin’s Sky Burial, with an aberrant prosody and form, uses transplant-language to create a pneumatic mutant of a voice, enrapturous as strange.

A “chorus comes roaring out of her / single mouth,” writes Levin in “Sibylline,” and although the allusion casts the poet as a kind of sibyl, perhaps she is less oracle than oracular medium and each poem, a quantum thereof. That’s not to say Levin meek or that she submits entirely to some external force, rather she asserts herself as the origin of the collection’s reckonings—most palpably with death which, stubborn and protean, invades the personal narratives of the poems, the consciousness, often leaving a speaker “Lost in the mind’s / imprisoned winds, its many-headed forms.”

Perhaps it is this multiplicity of the self that allows the myths of Xipe Totec, the Aztec god of Spring, and the Buddhist text, “Tsong Khapa’s Praise of the Inner Yama,” to speak for or with the speakers’ experiences, making the old relevant and the immediate entrenched in time and therefore, context. Consider the opening of “Refuge Field” in which the image making reflects the vicissitude captured between two voices:

 You have installed a voice that can soothe you: agents
   of the eaten flesh, every body

   a cocoon of change—

  Puparium. The garden
   a birthing house, sarcophagidae—

Here again is death, but its origin is life. “O voice of a different timbre—,” one bows and ushers in another at the end of “Sibylline,” and though it might be said that the birth of one voice is the death of another, the Buddhist-influenced movements suggest rebirth of what’s lost—persons, civilizations, possessions—even if through poetry, the body in which all is re-manifest.

But the poems of Sky Burial are less elegies than tender autopsies in which Levin searches not for the cause of death but rather of life, the meaning of being the ritualizer instead of the ritualized. In this, the collection does not presume to reveal the ineffable but how to survive, transcend its silences.

“What is a body but a bag of alms,” asks the speaker in “Cathartes Aura,” and though what’s offered is sent, as the collection’s title suggests, in two metaphorical directions at once—skyward and into the earth—Levin offers all of it to the reader, in language that is succulent and invasive, following her own imperative: “Build it from rot.”

Interview with G.C. Waldrep
April 13, 2012 | interview

G.C. Waldrep will serve as final judge for The Journal’s inaugural poetry contest. His most recent collections are Archicembalo (Tupelo, 2009), winner of the Dorset Prize, and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2011), a collaboration with John Gallaher, as well as a chapbook, St. Laszlo Hotel, from Projective Industries. Other recent work appears in recent or forthcoming issues of Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, Threepenny Review, Boulevard, The Nation, Harper’s, New American Writing, and Best American Poetry 2010. A past National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature, Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, PA, where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

NM: You’ve recently become the editor of West Branch. Congratulations! Let’s say, as many physicists have proposed, that time is simultaneous. You have three submissions left in your submission manager inbox: Elizabeth Bishop has sent you “In the Waiting Room,” Langston Hughes has sent you “Let America Be America Again,” and Walt Whitman has sent you “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” You have room for only one in the issue. Which do you publish, and why?

GCW: “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Because we will have already waited long enough, and this is one of those poems that actually lets America be America again, for a little while.

NM: William Carlos Williams said (to paraphrase) that a poem is a machine made of words. If the perfect poem were a Rube Goldberg device, what would it look like?

GCW: It would be invisible, and we would want to sleep with it, only we wouldn’t know how.

NM: Your own word-machines (of the non-Goldberg variety) come in all sorts of shapes and sizes—from small sonnet-like blocks to prose forms to large and sweeping type-scapes that utilize white space in interesting ways. At what point in the process of writing a poem do you typically decide on the shape it will take (or at what point does the shape present itself), and how do you know when you’ve found the proper shape for a given poem?

GCW: Almost immediately, i.e. within the first 2-3 lines (if lines they be). Form is never more than an extension of content, to quote the famous Creeley-Levertov exchange. It is intuitive, for me. On the rare occasion that there seems to be a jarring, that is unworkable, match of form and impulse, I either switch gears mid-composition, or else I abandon the poem. Major formal shifts in revision are not my forte! (Although I much admire poets for whom this is the case.) It’s easier for me to start a new poem.

NM: Last year, BOA Editions published Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, a collection of poems you wrote collaboratively with John Gallaher. It’s a fascinating book; I personally would like to see more poets taking on collaborative projects. If you had the opportunity to read a book written collaboratively by any two poets, living or deceased, who would you like to see team up, and why?

GCW: Oooh, that’s a good question—if also, of course, an unanswerable one. Let’s say Darwish & Hopkins, only this time, they get to write in French. William Logan will critique the results. From Magadan.

NM: These days, with the Supreme Court deliberating the Affordable Care Act, constitutionality is something on many Americans’ minds. If you had to rewrite the U.S. Constitution in the form of a single haiku, how would it read?

GCW: You can’t force me to commit prescriptive form in public, Nick. You know that.

NM: Speaking of form, you stated in a recent interview in Hayden’s Ferry Review that you see spirituality manifesting itself in your work through the form of the hymn as well as through allusions to Christian scriptures. I’m quite interested in the different ways contemporary poets address questions of faith and religious tradition—certainly through form and allusion, but also by way of directly addressing the experience of living within the context of a religious community or heritage. One of my favorite poems in your collection Disclamor is “Feeding the Pear,” in which the speaker, while attending a musical performance at a church, is handed in a pear and, in a wonderfully strange moment, asked to feed it. The speaker finds himself at a loss. The uncertainty in the poem brings to mind some other contemporary poetry that investigates faith and doubt—Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets and Questions for Ecclesiastes or Andrew Hudgins’ The Never-Ending, for example. Do you, as a devout person of faith, see your work as a part of the contemporary conversation about faith and doubt, and if so, how do you understand your work in that context?

GCW: That’s a good question. One aspect of my own personal faith journey is that I have never been afflicted with doubt as to the principles of my faith and calling. Self-doubt, yes: and doubt of others, and of the church: to varying degrees at all times. But of the central tenets of my faith, no. This has been a gift, one I am unworthy of and that surprises me every time I’m led to consider it.

That said, I think one could make the argument that my poems take part in that conversation. They experiment with doubt in ways that I do not, on occasion. (I watch from a distance and cheer them on.) Many of the poems in Disclamor, for instance, keep picking away at the scab that is the Cain & Abel narrative (although I wasn’t aware of how strong a thread that was in the collection until I was revising the manuscript for publication).

“Feeding the Pear” is a dream-poem, one of those rare (for me) poems that arrived fully-fledged as a dream transcription. (“What Lived in Our Mouths” is another one, from Disclamor.) Most of these, when they do come, I discard, as psychological flotsam. “Feeding the Pear” hit a sweet spot.

NM: Every so often, someone publicly declares poetry to be dead. If you had to point to one recently-published poetry collection as definitive proof that poetry is still very much alive, which would it be, and why?

GCW: All of them? Because it’s the sum total of poetic production at any given moment that proves the art’s vitality, in any sociological sense. (And it wouldn’t matter that you were recommending all recent poetry titles to “someone,” because “someone” clearly isn’t reading contemporary poetry anyway…or s/he would not make such a ridiculous comment.)

The poetry-is-dead argument is interesting in that it locates the vitality of poetry in a historical experience to which the speaker has access via pedagogy, in and through the past. In other words, it’s as much or more about nostalgia (specifically, one’s lost youth) as it is about poems.

NM: I, too, sense an exciting electricity in the air. I encounter new, vital poems on a near-daily basis. All good poems are different, of course, and good in different ways, but I’d be interested to know what it is that you hope to see or experience, generally speaking, when you encounter a new poem. In other words, what excites you most about the poems you love? In poetry workshops and writing groups, poets often discuss innovations in form, freshness of language, unexpectedness in narrative and lyricism, emotional impact, and on and on. Would you point to any particular aspect of the poems you love that seems, for you, to be the locus of what is compelling or exciting in a really good poem?

GCW: First and foremost I want fresh language, deployed in surprising ways. Without that, it’s hard even to get my attention. (I blame teaching, editing, and the general noise of American culture.) Without freshness of language, how can “emotional impact” even register?

The problem with narrative/confessional poetry is that it loads all its eggs in a single basket, that is, the intrinsic interest of the event being narrated. If it’s not that interesting, the poem fails. Actual artistry and vision can make even the most pedestrian narrative interesting (one hopes).

One area of contemporary poetics that surprises me—in a bad way—is what I’ve heard called Eighth-Wave UMass Neo-Surrealism: the plasticized raft of poems that body forth by way of surprising/absurd flat statement followed by surprising/absurd flat statement, until they exhaust themselves. In part this stems from the cultural and pedagogical impact of poets like James Tate, Dean Young, and Tomasz Salamun. In part it stems from any praxis that makes something difficult look not only easy, but fun. The younger poets who do this in the most interesting ways, to me—Christopher DeWeese in his first collection, Heather Christle in the first half of her new Wesleyan book—have deeper architectures and aspirations in view, around which the seemingly arbitrary flat statements that comprise the poems constellate. There is a meta-cohesion to the voice, to the array of underlying concerns.

But I still think everybody needs to grapple more with Geoffrey Hill, and read more Notley and Darwish. These are textures and poetics that demand more of us: as poets, as readers, as humans.

NM: Lastly, and perhaps most importantly: Sappho, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Emily Dickinson walk into a bar. What happens next?

GCW: I wouldn’t know, because I don’t walk into bars, so I’d have no way of verifying the results. As a thought experiment, though, it might be more interesting to have Sappho, Goethe, and Dickinson walk into Wallace Stevens. (You can figure him as a bar-shaped Stevens, if you like.) What color will the dog be?

Interview with Rebecca Hazelton
April 13, 2012 | interview

Rebecca Hazelton attended The University of Notre Dame for her MFA in poetry, and completed her PhD at Florida State University. She completed a fellowship year as the Jay C. and Ruth Hall Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Creative Writing Institute, and also received a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center.  She teaches creative writing at Beloit College. She won The Discovery/Boston Review Prize in 2012.Her book, Fair Copy, The Ohio State University Press/The Journal Book Award and is forthcoming in the fall. Recently our poetry editor, Tory Adkisson, talked to Rebecca about Fair Copy, getting a first book of poetry published, and what poets need to know about the process.

Tory Adkisson: Your book is titled Fair Copy. Where does the title come from?

Rebecca Hazelton: The title comes from a number of places. The most straightforward understanding of a “fair copy” is a neat version of a corrected draft. But there’s also the idea of a “fair” copy as an approximate copy, which seemed an attractive title for a work that uses Dickinson as a jumping off point. When you’re working off lines from your poetic great-great-grandmother, it doesn’t hurt to give yourself a little leeway. Thematically, the book itself questions whether or not we can tell if a love is genuine, if happiness is authentic, and whether that difference matters if the “fake” is indistinguishable from the real. Our notion of “true” love is an idealized one, and our actual relationships are approximations of that ideal. At the same time, those ideal relationships, because they are abstractions, are really only approximations of the possible.

There is also the sense of fair as in justice, fairness. I’m using lines by Dickinson to spin out entirely new poems, some of which are in direct opposition to the argument of hers, and others which are completely independent in terms of content—is that a fair thing to do, to borrow from and then abandon, to pick a fight with one’s literary forbearers? To the extent that my personal life influences and informs my work, is my writing fair to those people in my past and present? My writing may stem from my experiences, but in my portrayal of those moments of time I reinvent the past, just as we reinvent our experiences in our memory, which is by design inaccurate, elided, and often self-serving. It’s hardly a true copy, and so the question is, can it be a just one? Are we being just to ourselves, to the past, and those in our past when we tell the story of our lives?

TA: Can you tell us a little bit about how the manuscript came together, and how you selected the poems for it?

RH: I was working on my prelims for my PhD and I kept avoiding reading Dickinson. Instead, I read authors like Lucy Brock Broido and Alice Fulton, who are very much influenced by her poetics. I knew I liked Dickinson, but I also found her impenetrable and vexing. I had been fooling around with abecedarians some, inspired by Karl Elder’s, and I liked the way the form acted as an engine for my words, my lines propelled by the foreknowledge of the letter I’d work with next. Acrostics, cousins to the abecedarian, always held a little of the schoolroom air to me, or of childhood Valentines in 2nd grade. I was curious to see if I could use the form to express more serious themes. On a lark, I decided to acrostic one of Dickinson’s first lines, just to see what would happen. I wrote a substantially longer poem than I was used to writing. I decided to see how many I could do, and as I had recently turned 29, a cusp year, I thought I’d divide the total number of Dickinson’s collected poems with my age. It came to just over sixty, I think, and I thought that would be a good size for a book. I thought this laughingly, really, I didn’t think I’d do it. And I did stall out after fifty-four, along with a couple of misfires that didn’t make the cut. In that sense, there was no selection, aside for a few that didn’t seem to work with the manuscript as a whole.

TA: How would you describe the character of the book? What unites it or binds it together?

RH: I think it’s a very deceptive book. It has a Victorian quality to it, and I mean Victorian in the popular sense, all covered up, afraid to show an ankle. But under that prim façade, many of the poems are quite sensual or sexual, and very much ill at ease with that carnality. The poems, especially when they are investigating our relationship to the past, to our past selves, grapple with regret and with nostalgia. I want to articulate those feelings of nostalgia, of homesickness, when the past self is irretrievable, or unrecognizable, or even unlikeable.

TA: Are there any poetry collections you used as a model or as inspiration when you put together your manuscript?

RH: I’m reading this question as asking me about ordering or structure, and my answer is perhaps an unhelpful one. I find the structure of poetry books to be mysterious, and even when I can identify structure in other texts, doing so for my own work is very challenging. There were several different iterations of order, suggesting gently different narratives. In its final ordering, the first section is about a lost love, the second about the self in relation to the past and to the future, and the last about a new love and the fear that love engenders, the finality of marriage, and the beauty in that too. At least, that’s how I see the book’s arc, but that may be a singular interpretation. As for models, no, not really specific ones, no doubt to my detriment.

TA: What are five recent books of poetry you would recommend to our readers?

RH: I’m going to interpret “recent” with some latitude here, because I think everyone should read Inger Christen’s alphabet. It’s amazing, political and ecologically minded without being didactic, structurally mind-bending, sincere and touching. I’m currently reading One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t by Jacqueline Waters, which I think is so great. I am continuing my fictional love affair with Jenny Boully by reading not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, which is just a wild book, one of those genre benders, dream benders, valentine-to-the-subconscious sorts of books that is hard to describe. I’ve seen the manuscript for Sandra Simond’s Mother was a Tragic Girl and I can tell you it’s a knockout. I am still in love with D.A. Powell’s Chronic so much that I don’t know if I have room left in my heart for his new book, because my heart is so very, very small.

TA: What advice do you have for poets putting together their first book manuscript?

RH: Just the usual, I suppose. Cultivate friends with good eyes, who will tell you when you are being full of yourself and in love with your own cleverness. That’s probably good advice for life in general, too. People who praise you unconditionally want something. That’s terrible, isn’t it? But really, what good comes from a voice telling you what you want to hear? That’s how you end up buying ill-fitting clothes and makeup that makes you look orange.

Having screened for contests, I do think it’s true, unfortunately, that presentation matters. I don’t mean expensive paper, and I never even bothered with a cover letter (though perhaps that was bad?). But make your book look like a book, your formatting easy on the eyes, your table of contents in reasonable shape. It is easy for someone to form an opinion about your work before they even read it, especially when screeners are going through so many manuscripts. When I was screening, I had such a hard time saying no. I’d just agonize, because I knew my book was also out there, going through the same thing, and I wanted everyone to get their chance. I don’t think that’s the norm, though – I wasn’t very efficient.

And it’s said by everyone, but don’t give up. The day before I got the news I told my husband that I was going to shelve the book. I’d threatened to do so before, but this time I was serious. I felt like it was just going to be a finalist forever, and I was starting to feel sick about it. Like it was hurting me mentally and it might be healthier to move on.

Review of Mending by Sallie Bingham
February 25, 2012 | review

In Mending (Sarabande Books, $23.00), the new collection of short stories by Sallie Bingham, the title story opens with a character “on Fifth Avenue in the middle fall.” The character notes that the apartment buildings “stand like pyramids in the sunlight.” Everything sparkles and seems new, but our character doesn’t quite realize she’s an outsider. She only realizes she’s different, and that her life is unsettled: “I was nineteen,” she tells us. “Too old to be educated, too young to be employed.” And so we first encounter the characters that populate Mending, and we’re introduced to the vulnerability that comes from residing in an unsettled space.

The stories in the collection were created over a period of nearly fifty years (three stories come from The Touching Hand, published in 1967), and the extended time span is easily palpable to the reader. The nostalgic atmosphere doesn’t lean too heavily on period details either; in “Winter Term,” the reader hardly needs the anachronistic card catalog to clue him in to the fact that this world has passed. The language ripens and blooms with the sentiments of another time: “Hal remembered how surprised he had been when they first danced together and she had pulled close; the action did not suit the mild, high-necked dress she was wearing, or even the coolness of her cheek.” This kind of fiction seems rare these days, indeed. The combination of the wistful implications of what has passed and the varied, sometimes exotic settings remind the reader of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American or The End of the Affair. Though delicate, the sensibility of Mending doesn’t come off as prudish. We never feel as if the world of fifty years ago lacks the sordid side of humanity, but the nostalgia conjured in these pages never appears without a profound sense of loss, as explicitly detailed in “Selling the Farm:” “The long rolling cornfield that had bristled with dry stalks at this time of year had been leveled. The bulldozers, having finished their work for the day, were drawn up in a row, bright yellow and massive along the side of the old tenant’s cottage. It was falling down.”

Bingham’s characters often find themselves caught between the real and the imagined. In “Anywhere You Send Me,” a woman greets the reader with the first line: “They came before I was ready, but how could I ever have been ready?” We then discover that she’s waiting to receive a family of Haitian refugees whom she has agreed to host; we know at once that she could have been better prepared, but never prepared enough. This play between what we expect and what we receive returns time and again throughout this collection and scores one of its major conflicts. We plan for something, and the planning is important and necessary, yes, but it’s not ever going to supply adequate preparation for the all the slings and arrows we encounter in daily life. Nor does it seem to inform the personal connections that Bingham’s characters just miss between one another, as when the refugee family comes across the grave of their benefactor’s murdered daughter, and they begin to suspect the true source of their hostess’s benefaction. The impetus for her generous act obviously lies somewhere within her tragic past, and yet whenever the chance surfaces to achieve a visceral, human connection, the protagonist retreats and her defenses go back up as when she speaks: “By the time we drove them back to their house for lunch, I’d entered that numb shade where I’d lived for two years.”

In the same way that Bingham’s characters don’t quiet realize that they’re just missing each other, they also don’t seem to realize that they were outsiders until they’ve been assimilated. In fact, the epiphanal realizations, such as those in “Mending” and in “Found,” serve more to relate than to estrange, but in a Groucho Marx kind of way, where the self-realization carries with it a clearer and more somber sense of the world. For example, in “Found,” a diplomat and his family are sent to live in post World War II France. The children must attend the local schools: “’You are all citizens of the world, now,’ their mother had announced.” The reader gets quickly keyed into the pain this unmooring causes; the main character, a young girl, is mocked at school and is abandoned by her driver while at the dentist. She realizes she doesn’t belong in France and that she doesn’t understand, but again, the realization anchors her as she taps into her own strength and determination: “I will stubbornly stay until I find all the words and all the connections and all the rules of the game.” When she tells us: “I will stay here until I understand,” we know she’s going to be okay. It is precisely this acknowledgement of not understanding her outside world that convinces us that she is aware enough to learn what she needs to fully be part of her new life.

Similarly, when our original character returns to New York after an absence, she tells us that “the pyramids on Fifth Avenue were no longer shining. The gutters were running with filth and melted snow.” It seems paradoxical that this scene should inspire hope, but it does. It signals the birth of an awareness, of a transformation into something both worldly and resilient. These transformations make Bingham’s characters human, likeable, and compelling, and her skillfully rendered settings evoke a time that has only just passed. We are swept along in the setting, in the story. It is only later, after we have finished reading, that we realize how much these characters will linger with us.