PAUSE: Primal School Is Busy Rewilding

Friends and readers: thanks for all your support of Primal School and the written interviews I've been posting on here. With the help of friends and fellow poets I've been working to build a different kind of blog that continues to brings the best of poets' voices, but does so along with stories, lessons and other musings that will connect even more people with the power of poetry in these challenging times. I've been exploring the possibility of doing this via video or podcast, but the tactical and logistical wrangling and brainstorming have compelled me to hit pause on this for a while. If there's one thing I have learned in the last year from my various encounters in poetry, it's the willingness to be changed. And to be unafraid to initiate change. And to do so always in a spirit of openness and wonder. 

The classroom is still here. I'll see you when I return. Thanks again for being my community. - Hannah 

The Lessons of History, Re-Envisioning Our Language, and the Mysteries of Life and Death: Tod Marshall on His Poem "Birthday Poem"

I thought Primal School must be doing something right when I got an email from Washington State Poet Laureate Tod Marshall expressing his support for the blog and offering to connect. What I didn't expect was to receive an envelope in the mail about a week later with  Range of the Possible, a compilation of Tod's own interviews with contemporary poets from Li-Young Lee to Yusef Komunyakaa. Generosity of this kind might very well be part of his incredibly full job description as the appointed ambassador of poetry in our home state. But when I wrote to him with some of my thoughts on the challenges facing poetry in our communities, his response, which startled me with its simplicity and is also captured in this interview, seemed to cut right through the fear and rancor and divisiveness facing our country to something far more essential. Even while noting fiercely (as he does here) the importance of understanding our present problems in historic terms, "I believe, truly believe, that art and kindness are why we exist," he wrote. Everything else, as they say, is technical. — HLJ   

===

BIRTHDAY POEM

My mother turned 60 this week,

deep in that stretch where anything

can happen (her mother died at 57).

I'm 42, and Dante's dark forest, well,

let's just say it continues to thicken,

and I know what you spiritual people

are thinking, muttering koans under

your ginger tea breath: it can happen

anytime, anywhere, to anyone, and

that's why the moon doesn't cling

as it slides across the sky. Fine.

Last fall, hiking near Priest Lake,

I came across a teenage boy covered

with blood, sobbing. He held

a compound bow with pulleys

that looked like they could move the horizon

or at least hurl a razor-edged arrow

a couple hundred feet through the breast

and heart of a skinny doe and out again

and into the shoulder of a five-month fawn that

still quivered. Cedar scales

covered the forest floor, a mossy quilt

to hush the pain, and so we pulled

on the shaft, but it was stuck in bone,

and the fawn mewled, moaned, kicked

thin legs, black hooves like chips of coal.

I told the kid to find a big rock. Quick. He did

and held it toward me, somehow confused, and I

tried to smash the skull but missed once,

shattering the eye socket and breaking the jaw,

before ending the pain and walking away among massive trees

that held the sound in the harsh ridges of bark.

Jesus, Mom, I'd meant to write a Happy Birthday poem.

When I'd gone a hundred yards,

the quiet beneath the looming cedars

was the quiet I felt as a child in your arms.

You were a little bit older than that kid. This

is the best that I can do. Above the ancient grove,

tamaracks lit the hillside in an explosive gold

glowing toward dusk. Close your eyes.

You can see them. Keep them closed.

We'll all blow together and make a wish.

===

A standout feature of this poem for me is its irony, beginning as a meditation on your mother turning 60 but then veering off into a reckoning with death, since birthdays are generally celebratory affairs. What began this poem for you?

It actually began as a sort of parody poem. I was thinking about poems such as William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark,”Robert Wrigley’s “Highway 12, Just East of Paradise, Idaho,” and Marvin Bell’s “If Jane Were With Me”, or the “roadkill/mercy killing poem” and how the dynamics of all three of those poems might connect to masculinity. I think I might have written the deer killing moment first, and then stepped back and said, “Wait, what else is going on here?” I’m also very interested in critical moments of decision: the smaller choices we make and the crucibles on which those choices turn. The poem has numerous moments of choice — the decision to fire the arrow at the deer; the decision to have a child at a young age; the decision to bludgeon the fawn to death. Stafford’s poem, of course, is one of literature’s most haunting explorations of that inhabited moment of choice: “I thought hard for us all — my only swerving — / then pushed her over the edge into the river.”

Such decisions being moments where we can’t afford to “swerve.” I appreciated the tongue-in-cheek jab at New Age spiritualists in lines 6-11, giving the reader a glimpse into that Dantean consciousness you set up just before it. Seems a kind of rejection of the whole notion of peaceful non-attachment regarding death.

Well, that non-attachment is something I long for and dream of (which, of course, is exactly not how that non-attachment is brought about).  I’m a hopelessly failed spiritualist and Zen practitioner. The world is too full of sharp teeth, I guess, and I’ve been bitten by them as well as bared my own at others more often than I care to admit.   

Of course I can’t resist the urge to note that your name “Tod” is the German word for death.

Das ist Todt. Yup. The poem “Fuck Up,” a little later on in Bugle, is supposed to echo back to the death in “Birthday Poem.” From the moment we enter screaming into the world we’re already on our way to that whimpering exit. I just heard Tim O’Brien read at Gonzaga the other night, and he put it succinctly: “This is not a game with survivors.” But yes, imagistic echoes, proliferating motifs and echoey constructs throughout a book of poems are all of tremendous importance to me. It’s all there, from the substance abuse to information “leaking” to the life/death and creation/destruction dynamic. And at one point in the writing, I got the sense that the core of the book would revolve around the idea of how we construct myth/reify language in a post-apocalyptic setting. There are still traces of that in several of the poems — and I left them in there because that’s pretty much what we’re always up to. I just finished an amazing book by Victor Klemper; it’s one of those books that I’m embarrassed I didn't read earlier in life. It’s called The Language of the Third Reich. As a Jew living in Nazi Germany he was writing about the degradation of language; how words are drained of meaning or vampired (if that can be a verb) into empty vessels. To my mind, that degradation is the opposite of the work of poetry, and it’s unfortunately far too prevalent in the history of the last hundred years.

A kind evasiveness or lack of clarity perhaps, or doublespeak, if we were to take things Orwellian with that vampiring of the language. But returning us to your poem…some striking images from the hike at Priest Lake: the boy you encountered on the trail, the mortally wounded fawn, the “mossy quilt to hush the pain.” Did you give much thought to rhythm and meter at this poem’s writing? And how about the poem’s form? 

Musicality in poetry is very important to me.  So although I didn’t pursue any specific metrical shapes — unlike many of the other sonnets in Bugle, the book it appears in — I wanted to create a rich texture in terms of sound, especially during that moment of grotesquery. The poem starts out in a sort of chatty fashion and then builds to its music, I think.

Felt that in the reading. I’m interested in the mercy given to the fawn and how it becomes a kind of armature for the moving statement towards the poem’s end, by which time it’s addressed to your mother. The hint may be in those glowing tamaracks you end with, but I’m looking at the surprising lines, “You were a little bit older than that kid. This / is the best that I can do.” – what’s happening there? 

Well I think that my initial impulse was to end on the violence, but I couldn’t think of how to do that, so instead I thought back to the frame of the poem — the figurative violence of how painful and challenging it must have been (as well as beautiful and fulfilling) for my mother to go from being a teenaged girl in high school to a woman responsible for another young life — I’m feeling this viscerally right now; this fall, my parents will celebrate their 50th anniversary, and I’ll be celebrating my 50th birthday. Anyhow, she must have felt heavily the chances of failure in protecting that young life, in spite of knowing she would give it her best. A terrifying transition in my mind. So I guess that’s how things tied together for me. “The best that I can do” — you can’t have any celebration of life without death lurking in the background — harkens toward the poem’s closure. The ending for me has always been very difficult to read (I’ve re-read the poem with my mother in the house and it’s hard not to lose it). Oh for the retreat to that sweet moment of unawareness nestled in your mother’s arms (however terrified every new mother must be).

Tod's process: "I love our woods and rivers and mountains, and I try to spend lots of time wandering around in them.

My fishing buddy Ryan Hardesty took this photo. I love how small I look behind the mid-stream rock,

upriver around a bend, wondering what might be there (a pursuit I suppose not terribly unlike the search for art)."

In your interview with Humanities Washington you described poetry’s ambiguity as being highly necessary in a culture that’s uncomfortable with mystery and not “having the answers.” How would you suggest that poets approach their writing and practice of poetry in uncertain times? 

Well in the time since you put this question to me, the world has become much more uncomfortable and much more uncertain. Every day we see our President acting out in a manner ranging from indecorous to outlandish to completely barbaric. Any news which isn’t favorable to this administration is regarded as “fake news,” imperiling our freedom of the press. I could go on and on. It’s a horrific moment in history when such devastation, especially toward the most vulnerable members of our society, can be perpetrated by a kleptocratic plutocracy intent on…okay, I have to stop and take a breath to focus on your question. But first let me recommend Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny, a powerful little pamphlet that offers twenty ways to politically engage in times like this. All of his titles are excellent. I’m rarely ahead of the curve on things, but I bought On Tyranny  when it first came out because I happened to be immersed in Snyder’s other writings. It’s since become a NYT bestseller, but I agree with what he says in the book, which is that it’s very important to get news from print sources. Web media can be okay, but the nature of the medium and its kinship with spectacle can make internet news much more prone to misinformation. It’s also important to practice corporeal politics: citizenship done right is getting our bodies out there and showing what we value.

Why such a focus on the news? Poetry is, of course, news that stays news. I think we should be reading widely in history and politics, philosophy and theology; we should all be trying to discover a “new” poet (new to each of us) every month and revel in that discovery for what it is: a new voice in one’s life. We should look to the work of poets in other cultures and and countries where the situation is historically more repressive than our own — Hikmet and Milosz and Akhmatova and Radnoti and so many others, as well as poets in our own tradition — June Jordan and Audre Lorde and Muriel Rukeyser — for whom social justice was a primary concern.

Anyhow, my main point is that the ambiguity, the grayness or confusion that is often stimulated by a poem or painting or sculpture, or any work of art — couldn’t be farther from the obfuscation that the Trump administration is engaged in. Poems invite us into mystery, into unknowing, and they do so in an attempt to enlarge our worlds rather than shrink them.  As far as how poets approach their writing in “uncertain times” — I think that we have to look to the past both for the lessons that history can teach us about meglamaniacal authoritarianism, and  how writers of the past have cultivated their art as a mode of resistance.

Thanks for the book rec – a timely and totally necessary read.On to standard questions: what advice would you offer to poets writing and practicing without the MFA/advanced writing degree? (Actually, one thing I’ve noticed is that there’s a lot of good general advice about how to improve one’s writing, but not much specific advice on how to revise a poem, so something along those lines would be very helpful). 

Sure. I think that the hardest part of revision connects to the root of the word — to re-envision a poemis tough, especially once we get the poem typed out all pretty on the page. So, I delay that “typing out” step as long as possible. I try instead to rewrite the poem at least once by hand (shaping those words and scribbling out blunders, the routes that are perhaps too facile and easily drawn and aren’t the best for the poem). Once the poem is typed out it seems to become more fixed, static. Of course, lots of poets type their poems out on a computer or typewriter and make wonderful works; I just think that they need to be especially cautious of the poem “feeling done” before it actually is.

Another tidbit: be patient with the poem. I always try to let a few months go by before I transfer it from notebook (written by hand) to laptop (a typed version). I think that gives me some semblance of distance, which always helps the poem.  More nuts and bolts: query each word, each adjective, each verb, each noun. Are they necessary? Are they precise? Musically integral? And the order that I’ve listed those three things are not necessarily an order of value — music probably supersedes all (to my thinking anyway). 

If you could assign some “homework” to our online classroom of readers (it can be anything: a writing exercise, a craft book to read, a collection of poems to read, a link to an article).

How about something of all three:  I love Jane Hirshfield’s work, and her book Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the Worldis a great new collection of essays on poetry. Robert Hass’s Twentieth Century Pleasuresmay be my all-time favorite. Also grooving on the poems of Jamaal May right now — he’s got a great voice with a powerful weave of image and music. Radnoti’s poems have also been on my mind a lot. I like to reread Adrienne Rich’s speech on “Claiming an Education” every few months. 

And here’s an exercise, with thanks to Chris Howell: choose a language that you don’t know— French, Spanish, Greek, Slovene (it’s up to you but I’d avoid pictograph languages such as Chinese or Japanese). Then find the work of a famous poet writing in that language — if it’s French, then you could look at Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Nerval, or a host of other poets; it’s it’s Greek, then Cavafy, Seferis, Sappho, or something ancient; if it’s German, Rilke, Trakl.  Choose one poem of 12-20 lines by the poet.DO NOT READ A TRANSLATION OF THE POEMinto English. Now, attempt to write a translation of that poem based solely on your reaction to the sound qualities of the original. Do this without looking up any words to translate. Instead you should try to follow syntactical patterns, formal constructs, and any other rhythmical devices that you feel relevant. The idea here is to use the imagination rather than the predeterminations of language logic, to let your mind loose from making sense of the original so you can see where the rhythms take you. After you’re complete (and ONLY after) you are done with your “translation,” you can have a look at at the English translation of the poem you’ve just worked with.

Staple together copies of the poem in the original language, your own “translation,” and the actual translation (three different poems).

For extra credit you can also turn in a translation of a poem from a language that you do know. Everyone MUST do the exercise above, but you can do an actual translation of another poem if you like (to boost your participation mark)!

An intimidating exercise which sounds incredibly fun. I’m going for it. Now tell us a poem you love, and tell us why you love it.  

Robert Hass has been my favorite poet for a long, long time. I first read his poems in 1990, I think, and Praiseis a book to which I often return. There are anthology pieces in there, a delicious sense of sound, powerful poems on human frailty, philosophy, and the intersection of art and life. Human Wishes  is equally wonderful, if maybe not quite as taut as a collection.  Anyhow, the poem that I want to mention is “Faint Music.”It’s from Sun Under Wood, also a fine collection, and a virtuoso performance in syntax and sound. The poem is about grace and language and so many other things. I’m always a little stunned that Hass is so adept at translating haiku, and rendering devastating punchy images, as well as giving us sprawling poems in a wide range of voice such as this one. 

Bonus question for Tod, per the poem’s last line and since your birthday's coming up: as a poet and human, tell us one wish.

That we get to redo the Presidential election? Or how about this: that each of us is able to tap into that highly poetic capacity to deeply listen to each other rather than to the propaganda of those who want to divide us.    

===

TOD MARSHALLwas born in Buffalo, New York and grew up in Wichita, Kansas. He studied English and philosophy at Siena Heights University, holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University, and earned his PhD from The University of Kansas. Tod directs the writing concentration and coordinates the visiting writers series at Gonzaga University where he is the Robert K. and Ann J. Powers Endowed Professor in the Humanities. He enjoys backpacking and fishing and spends about a month of every year out of a tent. He currently serves as the 2016-2018 Washington State Poet Laureate. You can keep up with him on Twitter: @wapoetlaureate

Experience and The Imagination, Metaphor as Survival, and Healthy States of Flow: Patricia Colleen Murphy on Her Poem "How The Body Moves"

Patricia Colleen Murphy

If genuine healing from a difficult and traumatic past takes place in the soul and subconscious (and not the support of the world around us), it would seem that  Patricia Colleen Murphy has dedicated her path in poetry to exactly that, lifting others up the whole way. The founding editor of Superstition Review at Arizona State University won the May Swenson Poetry Award for her book Hemming Flames, a copy of which she sent to me on my request. I was opened completely by the book's rawness, an admixture of crushingly difficult memories paired with the complexities of hard-won wisdom. Here is a poet moving personal and confessional writing forward with unflinching earnestness, all the while nurturing and promoting writers into their own humanity and resilience. In every way she strikes me as such a model for writers, from her poem's empathic resonances to the way she lives her life. — HLJ 

===

HOW THE BODY MOVES 

Melanie, the Siamese,
on the front porch with baby me.
In pictures, the two of us
are almost the same size.
Later my mother
bought Persians, bred them,
used the money for jewelry,
cigarettes, Drambouie.
The first time a litter came
she sent me searching the house
to find and clean the afterbirth.
I found the babies limp,
smothered in their sleep.
Only twenty more miles.
I am 15. My uncle is driving.
My mother has fled again in her
Oldsmobile, heading for Palo Alto.
We were fighting. She took
all the pills she could find.
My uncle sighs, repeats that
his mother died giving birth to him.
One tenth her weight, he came
screaming from her pelvis on the
coldest Minnesota day in history.
The freeway slips under us like night.
From here I think the hills are
impoverished sisters huddled for warmth
under green mohair blankets.
Seventeen of them: stomach to knee,
buttock to backbone.
We glide past their ankles.
Once I dreamt I was nine months pregnant.
When I went to the bathroom
the baby slipped out like a miraculous
bowel movement. She had blond hair,
and a T-shirt that said French Countryside.
A neighbor saw the birth through the window.
He smiled, continued mowing the back field,
and I hung a bell.

===

A bit of a confession to start us off; I wanted to discuss this poem partly for selfish reasons: reading HEMMING FLAMES was a deeply relational experience for me, as someone who grew up with domestic violence and also had a tough relationship with her mother. This poem stood out to me because it seems to be reckoning with other themes such as aging and death. What began it for you?  

Thanks for sharing that with me. It's meaningful to hear how others are affected by the work. I am going to admit to you that I wrote this poem 20 years ago, as part of my MFA thesis in 1996. So this poem started when I was in my early twenties trying to come to terms with my estrangement from my mother. You'll note it has perhaps a more tender, contemplative tone than others in the collection; perhaps more hopeful even.  

At the time I wrote it my mother was still alive but I had not spoken to her for a long time. It was necessary but sad to keep that distance. The estrangement lasted about eight years.

I hope it isn't too challenging to discuss a poem you wrote such a long while ago. Perhaps tell us a bit about the poem’s title and how you came to it. The piece on its face doesn’t seem only to be about movement per se, the way a body for instance moves through space (“Only twenty more miles…”), and it seems there’s a different kind of movement happening here.  Is there some other change in the reader or speaker that you intended in writing this?

It's refreshing to look at the old work, so thank you. The title, like a lot of phrases in the book, is meant to be ironic. These are bodies that are not moving, really. They are stagnant. They are desperate. They are acted upon instead of acting. Even in motion they are motionless. So the title could also be "How the Body Does Not Move." But I wanted that tension between the directive “How” and the aimlessness in the poem. I remember my mentor Beckian Fritz Goldberg commenting that many of my titles start with the word "How," which is a little joke I play, as a way of pretending there’s agency where there is none. 

And yes living with my mother meant constantly searching. Oh my goodness, and also constantly acting. Right now I’m reading The Tao of Humiliation by Lee Upton and just highlighted the line,  “By the time I was thirteen I learned to smile often—to reassure my mother that I wasn’t being harmed by her sadness.”

Adding that to my list. I'm caught by this idea of agency as illusion, something that we cling to in the vast game of pretend/hide-and-go-seek that happens in families rocked by trauma or abuse. The enactment of that denial in a poem is a bit of a feat. 

I like your phrase "enactment of denial." Denial is hard to write because if its layers. And perhaps that's a reason it took me so long to finish this book. There is the quotidian image hovering just over the traumatic image. And how to balance them so that the work is neither maudlin nor solipsistic? That is really hard. I had a lot of false starts that were surely both.

Every wounded child is also the "victim of a victim," and I appreciated that your collection as a whole explores that side of the relationship with your mother as well. Your work is characterized as surreal – I work with surrealism in my own writing, and the struggle is how to go there without turning silly or otherwise expelling the reader from the poem. Here you’ve got  the hills over the highway turning into “impoverished sisters” huddled under “green mohair blankets”, and a deeply mysterious birth image at the end. What was happening for you there?

Ah you make good points about surrealism turning either silly or inaccessible. Poets cut their teeth on those mistakes! I know I did. In this poem and in this book, the surrealism is synonymous with the escapism it took to survive. It's the same imagination it takes to live through something you don't think you'll get through.

I have a line in another poem in this book, "misting the ferns with a mental mister," and that's the best explanation I can give you about how these surrealist flourishes work in the poems. It's coping through metaphor. Through imagination. Through being someone and somewhere else.

So well said; I'm just looking at that poem again and noting the denialism inherent in the title there too, Magritte’s image of that famous pipe with the line "This Is Not a Pipe." I also want to dig a little deeper there on how you cut your teeth -- was it just through practice and trial and error, or did you have models?

Yes, I forgot the title that started the poem just now when I quoted that line, but it's a perfect example. Magritte's title for that painting is "The Treachery of Images." We can apply that to the surrealism in my work, if you like. I may be showing you something, but it's simply an image and not the experience itself. You'll need to figure out what it means to you, how it relates to your life.

I did have models. I keep a reading journal where I gather a lot of moments that affected me deeply, and I study the journal before I compose to get into that headspace.

I should also say I have an undergraduate degree in French, so I have read so many of the French surrealists in the original and that’s becomes one of my ways of seeing and speaking.

And then there are some clear American influences as well: James Tate, Russell Edson, Charles Simic; Beckian of course. And Marianne Boruch. 

There was also a lot of trial and error!

That representative approach is a tough pill to swallow for the literalists out there, but it's something I try to remind myself when I'm showing up to a poem I can't grasp with my reason alone, that there is a world beyond this world that the poet is inviting me to enter with my own set of experiences and memories.

I heard Terrance Hayes say "I keep one foot in experience and one in imagination." 

Perfect. 

Yes he is. [Laughter]  

You’ve spoken elsewhere of John Berryman’s influence, whose story is familiar to many. And it seems you’ve grappled with the worst darknesses of the psyche, some of which seem unimaginable (I'm thinking of the younger Trish having to parent herself and rescue her mother from repeated suicide attempts). Children inherit those wounds from their parents and then have to find ways to carry them if not heal from them. What role if any has poetry played in that process for you?

Well the Hayes quote helps me answer that! Poetry lets me straddle reality and fantasy (and when I say fantasy, for me it really means the ideal life I wish I’d had). It has allowed me to do that in two ways, reading and writing. I was writing and publishing poems about my family starting in middle school. It helped me process what was happening. And reading always helped me too, not just for the escapism it provided but also for the intellectual stimulation and the "break" from my own thoughts.

I think about the concept of "flow" and how helpful it is to be there. I think that's a state that people are trying to enter in all kinds of ways (healthy or unhealthy), and I'm lucky that I like to enter flow through either language or exercise. I can totally lose myself for hours at a time when I write, read, run, ride, or swim.

What a true blessing to not have to be needed in impossible ways. What a thrill to be in a positive headspace.

"This is the Gila Trail at South Mountain Park, where I like to run and play."

"These are my three Vizslas. Penny is 9, Rooster is 11, and Nutmeg is 6 months."

I read a lot of Jungian depth psychology – James Hillman, James Hollis – and it strikes me just how easy it is, in the quest to reclaim one's selfhood from deep wounds, to descend into those unhealthy patterns you mentioned like addiction or other forms of escape. The only way to break from our old lives and stories, of course, is to opt for new ones entirely, which with the help of art it seems you've done.

I like that phrase, "quest to reclaim selfhood." And I think about people who ask about the confessional nature of the book, asking, "Were you afraid what your family would think?" And I respond with, "Were they afraid what I would think when they were making selfish choices?"

I mean there was some extremely bad behavior – and oh, lots of gaslighting. If I've tried to break from my own early life, it's by being transparent and honest and helpful and empathetic.

Though I will say to you that I come from a place of huge privilege. Everyone in my family had a genius level IQ. My mom graduated from Stanford with degrees in Political Science and International Relations in 1961. We had smart conversations in the home; that is, when we weren't begging folks to take their meds. 

How such suffering can still be steeped in privilege is something I think much of our current discourse tends to ignore with its focus privilege as a racialized white monolith. The gaslighting that's prevalent in families also seems to be showing up a lot in the wider culture these days. Poetry and art are perhaps just one means of bringing that compassion and empathy you describe.  

Onward to standard questions: Could you give us three things a writer can do, on a daily or weekly basis, to educate themselves on craft in a manner comparable to an MFA education?

1. Form a writer’s group. Whether it’s online or in person, sharing your work with others can be motivational and can help you create and revise.

2. Read and review books. You can keep a word document with these reviews if you don’t want to share them, but other authors really appreciate reviews on Goodreads or Amazon. Be a good literary citizen and share your thoughts on contemporary writing.

3. Reach out to established poets. If you read a book or a poem in a journal that moves you, email the author and let them know.

Do you have any homework to assign our readers?

Yes, here's some homework: an exercise I call FIVE WAYS.

I have many revision “games” to play with poems. I do this after a poem has existed for a while, and it’s time to make sure it’s as good as it can me. For the FIVE WAYS activity, take a poem that has been in the drawer for a while. First, remove the line breaks in your poem so that it reads as one big paragraph. Then put the line breaks back in FIVE WAYS. Does you poem want to be in couplets? In all one stanza? Does it like enjambment? End-stopped lines? Let your poem tell you what it needs by rearranging and re-reading and re-seeing it in five different ways.

Share a poem you love with our readers and tell us why you love it.

I love Daniel Borzutzky’s "The Broken Testimony", from his collection The Performance of Becoming Human. He manages to be political and personal, predicting  "the best dictators don't kill their subjects rather they make their subjects kill each other." It’s a great study in both composition and form that invites the reader to write and to scavenge. 

===

Patricia Colleen Murphy founded Superstition Review at Arizona State University, where she teaches creative writing and magazine production. Her book Hemming Flames (Utah State University Press, 2016) won the May Swenson Poetry Award judged by Stephen Dunn. A chapter from her memoir in progress was published as a chapbook by New Orleans Review. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, and American Poetry Review, and most recently in Black Warrior Review, North American Review, Smartish Pace, Burnside Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, Hobart, decomP, Midway Journal, Armchair/Shotgun, and Natural Bridge. She lives in Phoenix, AZ.

The Definition of Home, Keeping the Poem In the Poem, and Knowing What Moves You: Keegan Lester on His Poem “A Topography of This Place”

Keegan Lester

The first time I ever met Keegan Lester I was a daunted rural visitor to New York in the crushing heat of a mid-July. The impromptu tour he gave me of his favorite haunts near Columbia University (his MFA alma mater), was an unexpected gift – and the introduction to a poet whose work, perhaps more than that of any poet I’d met, mirrors his character: fierce in its insistence on gentleness, conscientious through its softspokenness, and present and alive to the world. These things made me all the gladder that Keegan’s first book of poems, this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all I had, so I drew it, had recently won the Slope Editions Book Prize ( available for pre-order here and due for release in the coming month). In the spirit of the new year and with Keegan’s encouragement, I’m introducing multimedia to the Primal School blog with these videos he recorded. In them he discusses his love of home as an idea as well as a place we choose -- the notion that “home”, no matter how small, can be a conduit for storytelling, for sharing, and for exploring those sadnesses, elations and struggles which make people more aware of their alikeness in a time of bitter polarization and difference. I personally feel lucky to have been a recipient of his “ocean’s newfound kindness.” – HLJ 

===

Keegan Lester reads his poem "A Topography of This Place".

THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THIS PLACE 

The ocean stopped being cruel
so the sailors went home.
No one jumped from cliffs anymore.
People stopped painting and photographing the ocean
because the sentiment felt too close to a Hallmark card.
Everyone had treasure because
it was easy to find,
thus the stock market crashed.
Then the housing bubble burst
mostly not due to the ocean,
though one could speculate pirates
were going out of business and defaulting on loans.
When I say speculate, I mean I was reading
the small words that crawl at the bottom
of the newscast, but I was only half paying attention
because Erin Burnett was speaking
and she’s the most real part of this poem.
I’m speaking in metaphor of course.
The end of the world is coming
seagulls whispered to the fish
they could not eat due to their fear
of the ocean’s newfound kindness.
One of my professors spoke today.
She hates personification, treasure and linear meaning.
She hates poems not written by dead people.
She hates the ocean’s newfound kindness,
she wrote it on my poem.
Not everything can be ghosts and pirates, she says.
But that’s why I live here.
My rhododendron has never crumpled in the summer.

===

This poem seems especially relevant in our present cultural moment. Tell us what began it.

"It's a love poem to West Virginia..." Why it's important to entertain and write for others, and drop your ego from your work. 

---

“I’m speaking in metaphor, of course.” This poem is a string of them. Unpack a couple of them for us? (I am personally curious about Erin Burnett as well. And “the ocean’s newfound kindness.”)

A life lesson is embedded in each image: like choosing the sources of our inspiration, even if it takes a shift in perspective about what home is and means. The role of selective rule-breaking.   

---

What is the “place” of the poem’s title? (It’s the place where ghosts and pirates live, right? How is it “This Place” instead of just any place?)

"Every love poem comes from a specific interrogation of an idea; an idea which comes from a specific language, a specific place." 

---

Tell us a bit about how you wrote and revised this poem. (And how you write and revise your poems generally).

“Don’t revise the poem out of the poem.” 

---

In your view, what purpose does poetry serve in the world?      

A poem here is an attempt by the writer to understand something...then be a force of its own in the world which can preserve family stories and collapse false or misleading cultural narratives. 

---

What advice would you offer to poets writing and practicing without the MFA/advanced writing degree? 

“Find what you love, something that catches your eye and moves you, and then do it…do it every day, and know that it’s going to take time to get to where you want.” 

---

Assign some “homework” to our online classroom of readers.   

Write a persona poem that draws from a place as far outside of your experience as possible then see what happens. 

---

Tell us just one poem you love, and why you love it.  

Here are three: 

The first time I heard Nikki Giovanni reading "Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We're Going to Mars)” in a non-fiction class in undergrad, I knew instantly that I wanted to do what she was doing in that poem. Prior to that I didn’t know that contemporary poetry could be capable of such power. I enrolled in a poetry class after that and never looked back. 

Jason Bredle’s poem "On the Way to the 53-B District Court of Livingston County, October 1, 1999” was a huge turning point in my poetry. I remember being in my thesis meeting and telling my advisors, “I didn’t know you were allowed to write like this.” This poem, from his book Standing in Line for the Beast, helped me see that in poetry there’s nothing that isn’t allowed. We can write our own rules so long as the poem moves someone. 

In my opinion Richard Siken’s “Scheherazade” from his collection Crush is the most perfect love poem ever written. The entire collection is brilliant and extremely helpful for poets looking to expand their poetry skills, especially in regards to pacing, use of white space, prosody, and just working with images at the line level.  

Give us an image of something that creatively inspires you.  

Keegan's poetic inspiration: his best friends, Crich and Courtney.

These are two of my closest friends in the world, Crich and Courtney, in Crich’s living room in Morgantown, West Virginia. Lex, the gigantic puppy, is on the sofa.

When I’m in town I always help Crich walk Lex around a gorgeous neighborhood called South Park, discussing house design and other topics as we go. Crich has broken so many intellectual and aesthetic barriers for me, helping me see the world more clearly, most especially through film and design. I've taught him about contemporary poetry and we’ve been close friends for over a decade. We talk to each other in a language that I don't use with anyone else, unfortunately, which can be a lonely space to occupy. I think I often go to that place in my writing. So much of this room is where I live in my head.

In this photo there are many of these high aesthetic moves in evidence, from the Cunard poster in the background to the Sheraton Sofa to Crich’s Billy Reid sweater. None of it is pretentious. And each one has some kind of a cut-back to a story or revelation for me, some kind of vital experience. The sofa for instance was originally Crich’s grandmother’s, and it was in her house, and he brought it with him all the way from Louisiana. And he has this wonderful picture of the two of them, I believe in his dining room, sitting in that couch. 

Crich and I share a notion of wanting to preserve, cherish and curate certain kinds of nostalgic moments. And I think we are also both sensitive to the idea that everything we inherit, both physically and spiritually, from our families haunts us in some way.

===

Keegan Lester is the winner of the 2016 Slope Editions Book Prize, selected by Mary Ruefle, for his collection this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had, so i drew it. He is an American poet splitting time between New York City and Morgantown, West Virginia. His work is published in or forthcoming from Boston Review, Atlas Review, Powder Keg, BOAAT, The Journal, Phantom, Tinderbox, CutBank, and Sixth Finch, among others, and has been featured on NPR, The New School Writing Blog, and Coldfront. He is the co-founder and poetry editor for the journal Souvenir Lit. You can follow him on Twitter @keeganmlester or on Instagram @kml2157. His book is currently available for preorder here.

Standards of Beauty, Decolonizing Our Language, and Poetry as a Dialogue With Our Contemporaries: Katelyn Durst on Her Poem "Curl"

Katelyn DurstIn this season of tumult and deep psychic unrest for our country, it hardly seems a coincidence that I'd been pondering bringing in new interviews with poets whose work is inseparable from their activism. Incidentally I'd also been aiming to feature younger voices. By the time of our interview, Katelyn Durst  had impressed me not just with her poems of struggle and identity and longing and resilience, but her highly visible and participatory commitment to the social justice that inflames her writing. From a distance of months – I'd interviewed Katelyn back in August – it occured to me while putting together this post that "Curl" is not merely a poem about race or identity, but love. Self-love of the kind Katelyn embodies here, a kind that is so easy to forget in times such as this: just one gift of the many which poets can offer as utterances of comfort in a hurting world. – HLJ

===

So you and I first met at Grunewald Guild back in May, and I was sitting with you in the lounge area by the kitchen, and you read me this poem and I remember thinking, “this girl is fearless.” Tell me a bit about this piece – what began it for you and how you wrote it.

It’s so great to hear that, because the truth is I often feel afraid. This poem came out of a homework assignment that was given to an international baccalaureate (IB) 11th grade English class I was TA-ing for this school year. The teacher assigned the poem "Girl" by Jamaica Kincaid, and the poem really resonated with me, with its fractured repetition. If there’s one thing people talk to me a lot about, it’s my hair. So I went home and wrote down the things I remembered people saying to me about it – as it turns out, they were overwhelmingly negative and hurtful things – and wrote them verbatim into what eventually became this poem. 

===

CURL

Straighten your hair just once. Blow dry it or somethin’ and it will be down to your shoulders. Fix your hair. Tie back your hair. Wear a hat over your hair. I knew that was you because of your big hair. Your hair looks like the Medusa’s snakes. Why do you have just one dread lock? Can you go back and look in the mirror. Sit still while I’m braiding your hair. Sit in this chair so I can see the top of your head. Sit outside so that your hair doesn’t get all over the kitchen floor. How do you make black hair look so nice? You should straighten it. Texturize it. Don’t brush it. Brush it with just your brown fingers. You need to buy an actual brush and a comb. Your hair is so dry it would soak up a whole tub of moisturizer. Your hair is so big. Wow, your hair is so beautiful. Can I touch your hair? Have you ever washed your hair? Is that your real hair? Can you do that to my hair? You should straighten your hair. The back of your head is a kitchen. Twist out your hair by sectioning out single sections and twisting small parts of hair together, like a two-strand braid. Make the twists stretch around your head andwear a silk cap at night to help your kitchen from getting poof or static. Long bouncy curls are cute. I saw a guy who had hair like you, so I assumed he was homeless. Men don’t like curls; they don’t want their hands to get stuck when they run their fingers in your hair. Straighten your hair. Natural is the new black, get your weave here. Put flowers in your hair. This hay will never come out of your hair. You have paint in your hair. That braid makes you look like Pocahontas. Cornrows make you look like a boy. Long braids and gym shorts make you look like a boy. Put curlers in your hair to get a more succinct pattern. Bantu knots. Sculpted Afro. Jerry curls. Did you wake up like that? The less black you look, the less likely you are to questioned by police. Don’t put wool hats on your hair, it will mess up your kitchen. How to get your most defined Wash N Go. How to make DIY Clay Wash. How to make natural, black, curly hair look elegant: Pin it up. What’s wrong with your hair? Why does your hair stick up like that? Your hair looks like a lion’s mane. Are you from Africa? Are you from India? What are you? You look like you just got here. I can’t wait to get home and see your beautiful curls...Daddy. Here is a link to several different wigs you should try. It will make you look much prettier. Straighten your hair. Just get your hair wet so it doesn’t look so dry. Is that a stick in your hair? Do you have green beetles in your hair like Bob Marley did? What kind of hairstyle is that? The straighter your hair, the more likely you are to succeed. So, just sit still. Let this heat press away your curls, your kitchen, your blackness. Let it warm you like the love you are sure to soon have. 

=== 

It’s funny that you mention Kincaid, as a friend just gave me a copy of her book A Small Place, and Kincaid has been on my mind. "Curl" is a longer poem and has an almost obsessive quality to it. Since there’s no other way to say it: that’s a lot of hurtful statements. What’s more is that it strikes me that not all the statements are negative on their face.  

I love A Small Place and got to explore misplaced identities in Kincaid’s writing, and so she’s played a pretty significant role on my development as a writer.

With “Curl”, I wanted a longer piece that built on itself into a kind of litany of words and phrases that emphasize the ludicrousness and hurtfulness of some of the things people have said to me in the past. While writing it I realized I was also touching on how those things are bound up with our culture’s consumerism and its unreasonable standards of beauty. For me, race is always going to enter the picture, a black woman who keeps her hair natural and gets constant criticism or input on how she should wear it. Though it’s not all negative statements that I remember: the note from my dad was something I’d found as an adult in a baby box my parents saved, and it really struck my heart and I’ve carried with me. In writing this poem I had to include some positive things as well, because I wanted to remind myself and my readers that the loving and supportive things people say to us and which make us feel valued and beautiful are worth their weight in gold. We should never forget them.  

I’m loving that play of contrasts, and how this poem has multiple speakers in it even as it builds thematically into an interrogation of identity and belonging. There's that word “microagression”, the term we use for statements directed at people of color that aren’t malicious but are still hurtful.  

It’s nothing other than a microaggression to have people say things like “May I touch your hair”, “Could you do that to my hair”, “Is that your real hair”, or “What hairstyle is that?”

And of course having someone just reach out and touch your hair is a deep wounding for so many blacks. Back in high school I remember watching this documentary called  Cold Water, and there was a scene in it where two young women (both women of color) were discussing the affection and connection inherent in the gesture of playing with someone’s hair. But there’s this other story around the touching of hair as a kind of violation. With this poem I feel as if you’re speaking to both those truths, as if you’re arguing with yourself.

I’ve never seen Cold Water, but it sounds interesting – there's definitely a disconnect between touching someone's hair out of earned intimacy or affection versus touching someone's hair because you can't believe it's real or you’re simply curious what it feels like. It's the difference in loving and exoticizing. On the one hand you have someone touching you out of regard and tenderness, and on the other someone who has no connection with you just wants to touch your hair because it's a strange new fruit. It’s almost like at the zoo where there are signs that say not to feed the animals but people do it anyway.

Wow, what an analogy. Worse than a museum artifact. 

A notable feature of this poem is its absence of line breaks; you just poured the length of it into one long paragraph. Was that its original form?

That was its original form. And I must say that my other poem, "Girl”, was written as a prose poem also – I just felt it was the appropriate form for this piece. I was interested in bringing home the full scope of these different statements, presenting them in a way that was perhaps a bit “anti-poem”, that is, really having others read the poem without line breaks or anything fancy and to take the words unfiltered and for what they are. I didn't really feel that this poem had enough connection to "Girl" to warrant a response to Jamaica Kincaid's own “Girl", though I may do that in the future. I’ve recently read the “mirror poems” of Sharon Olds and other poets, where they write a poem as a response to another poet. I really like that idea because it reminds me how our work is an ongoing dialogue with those around us. I’ve loved the times I have shared “Curl” with people who recognized it as having been derived from Kincaid’s “Girl”. And so it definitely has a strong shared existence.

Reading anything interesting these days besides Kincaid? Any thoughts on how your reading inspires your writing?  

I’m always reading something interesting. I’ve been loving Rupi Kaur a lot these days. Her Milk & Honey  inspires to me to be a truth-teller and to keep singing my song in those moments when I feel most silenced. I also enjoy Anis Mojani – his new book The Pocketknife Bible  is an insight into the life a child who’s growing up and learning how to trust himself through painful and complex struggles of identity and belonging. I'm also reading Rising Strong  by Brene Brown. I think all these texts inspire me to actually say what I want to say, to not be afraid, and to face life’s fear and pain and beauty through my reading and writing. Especially through poetry.

Your background is of relevance here, so let's talk about that. You were adopted and are multiracial. The closing lines of your poem speak to your "blackness" – race is a recurring them in your poems. 

Race comes through a lot, and especially here, as in "the less black you look, the less likely you are to get questioned by the police", or "the straighter your hair, the more likely you are to succeed". I also had some fun in playing with the word “kitchen”, a term that describes the back of your head where the hair is curliest or the hardest to brush. I want to make sure readers don't think that the term is only a metaphor, though it could easily be just that, and I did grow up having my hair braided by a white mother inside our kitchen. When I talk about straightening away your kitchen and your blackness, what I’m really interested in is the decolonizing of that word. I’m calling into question the belief that once you straighten your hair, everything in your world will be right and that people will actually love you. The last couple sentences are what I want to haunt people with: “Let this heat press away your curls, your kitchen, your blackness. Let it warm you like the love you are sure to soon have.” A lot of individuals still buy into that falsehood and it’s been the source of trauma across the black community as a whole. Somehow, having "straight/nice" hair has come to be associated with having a better education and more economic status. To this day it’s hard for me to feel confident about my hair in job interviews because I don't want people to be like “woah, her hair is crazy,” but I also don't want people to be like “whah, your hair is crazy, can I touch it?” (Sarcasm, but for real!) So the poem was actually birthed out of a series of comments made by my black co-workers who were encouraging me to straighten my hair. I must have heard that suggestion at least seven times within a two-week period. And I hear these things from white, black and all people, all the time. I'm not sure which of these is the most hurtful.

A friend and I used to talk a lot about this topic of racial self-hatred – those dealing with it would not frame it as self-hatred per se but self-preservation; as simply "I'm doing whatever I have to do to get a leg up." But that leg up is in the wider context of a culture that won’t embrace you as you are. I keep thinking of James Baldwin: "You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you, because if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you’re in trouble."  

You do a lot of work with teens and in particular with teens who live in poverty. Tell us a little about that.  

I’ve been working with inner city youth and vulnerable youth populations for the last six years. I believe God gave me this desire to work with urban youth, and I’ve had incredible opportunities to partner with the most visionary youth I can imagine, all across the country from Chicago to LA to Seattle to Denver, and soon-to-be Flint! I enjoy working with non-profits who value community development and raising up youth with strong, positive identities and self-worth. Currently I’m working on a grant for a project that through a series of art installations promotes positive perceptions of youth of color, a kind of "social advertisement" by youth in the neighborhood of Rainier Beach in Seattle. I’m also doing poetry therapy with students around violence and normalized trauma in their communities due to the war on black bodies, especially on the young. The team I’ve been working with is loosely affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement while also taking it further to create a new movement called "My Life Matters." The purpose of this language is to reinforce these young peoples’ identities, empower them to share their stories, and help them fight injustice in their communities in a real and meaningful way.

"This painting is by my grandfather Harold Hunsecker who was a Mennonite preacher and owner of a paint store. He did not title it, but I just learned that he had painted the piece after a heart attack. It reminds me to seek beauty and greatness in my struggles and turn that into art."

No doubt you collect a ton of ideas for your writing by doing this work. Maybe tell us a little about your poetry education – where it’s been, where it’s going. What advice would you offer to poets who are writing poetry on their own?

I started writing songs at a young age, in middle and early high school, as a way of coping with depression. Then in middle school, I wrote an essay for what I thought was just an essay prompt titled " If The Capitol Walls Could Speak". Our seventh grade teacher entered these essays in the Daughters of Revolution essay writing contest and my essay ended up winning locally in the county, state and region. It went on to be one of the top 10 nationally. Then in high school I took a creative writing class and loved it so much I kept writing and eventually had a piece published in Teen Inc my senior year of high school. I didn't know that creative writing was a profession until I was about 20 and took classes at a community college under a few wonderful mentors. I often considered doing social work because I’d worked with urban communities and loved that. But I didn’t want to do work that wasn't creative. So I stuck with poetry and it stuck with me, and I fell in love with it and continue to be awed by it. I studied creative writing and art as an undergrad; now I’m earning my master's in urban studies and community arts. The degree program is based on trauma-informed arts creation, with the purpose of transforming urban and displaced communities into hope havens that are equipped for resiliency. I’m incredibly excited to be using my background in poetry and art in this way.

The advice I have for others is to keep on writing, even when it’s difficult. I recently came out of a season where I was dealing with anxiety and didn't write for almost a year. Now I’m writing quite often. Do whatever it takes to stay inspired: surround yourself with your favorite quotes and books and objects; put stickies on your mirror and in your car or on your bike that remind you of the creative energy you possess and can offer in the future as a gift to others. Get together with friends who are creative and/or passionate about writing and encourage each other to pursue your individual goals. Set strong deadlines; gather over good food and submit to your favorite publications. Celebrate each other’s successes. Read poems together that inspire you to wonder and go outside and adventure and love. 

Is there any “homework” you’d like to assign our readers?  

I'd like for readers to write a self-portrait poem that is a response to something that is going on in their lives or in the wider world, using this poem as a guide or perhaps a mirror. When writing a self-portrait poem, consider who you most truly are in this instance and dive wholeheartedly into what that means. Strive for simplicity in language and image and see what happens.

Readers can send their poems to me at katelyn.durst[at]gmail.com and I will send readers a poem back of my own self-portrait.

Share a poem you love, and tell us why you love it.

You know, I have to go with this older yet very rich poem that I often return to. It’s "Eating Poetry" by Mark Strand. I love the lines, "There is no happiness like mine, I have been eating poetry." To me this poem is not just about devouring a poem you love and staying in love with that thing. It’s also about the beauty in the process of reading and performing poetry, how it transforms and heals us so that we can become wild and embodied in the way we’re meant to be. When Strand talks about “romping with joy in the bookish dark”, I think about my struggles with anxiety, depression, PTSD. And I think about poetry. It's like when you’re sitting in a theater and someone kills the lights, and for a while you’re sitting in darkness but then the movie begins, with music and people laughing and learning to love, and you realize that you’re not so alone after all.

===

KATELYN DURST is a poet, community artist, creative activist, teacher and youth worker. She has worked within urban youth development and urban community development for ten years in cities such as Chicago, Denver,DC, LA, Seattle and Flint (MI). A current artist-in-residence at Flint Public Art Project, she has taught poetry for six years and conducted poetry therapy workshops at a youth psychiatric hospital and Freedom Schools, a workshop focused on healing from the unjust deaths of youth of color. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Controlled Burn, The Lightkeeper, Deep Fried Poetry, The Offbeat, Teen Ink, New Poetry Magazine and Tayo Literary Magazine. In her spare time, Katelyn rides her bicycle named Ebony Jade, bakes gluten-free pastries, and dreams of her next adventure of becoming an urban beekeeper. She is pursuing a master’s degree in Urban Studies and Community Arts from Eastern University.

Life's Great Lies, Thought Made Flesh, and the Ritual Possibilities of Form: Joseph Fasano on His Poem "Hermitage"

Joseph Fasano

When I initially contacted  Joseph Fasano  for an interview in late July, I had several poems in mind as possibilities to discuss. But when he suggested "Hermitage" I felt in that choice something of a predestiny; it was the first poem of his I had ever read, and when we had our interview I was reminded what about it had so commanded my attention and drawn me to all of his work: lines of unusual breath and music, cultivated from language of the kind his teacher Mark Strand described as "so forceful and identifiable that you read [these poets] not to verify the meaning or truthfulness of your own experience of the world, but simply to saturate yourself with their particular voices." Rilke's "inner wilderness", twined with Fasano's bracing intelligence, were strongly in evidence throughout this exchange. — HLJ 

===

It strikes me that the subject on which this poem turns consists in its final two lines: "the great lie // of your one sweet life", that thing at the poem's opening that was once "too much." The speaker's address to a "you", the reader, seems to presuppose that at one time or another everyone will have to reckon with such a lie in their own lives. So let's begin there and work our way backwards…tell us a little about the great lie that began this piece. 

All I know is that it's different for everybody, that great lie. It's a platitude to say that we all lie to ourselves in some way to live. Maybe we tell ourselves things are fine when they're not. Maybe we need to believe they're not fine when they are. In any case, of course it's true that a certain falseness in the way we live might protect us from a radical truth we're not ready for. Maybe we need an actual, practical change in our living situation. Maybe we need a change in our way of seeing things. Whatever the case may be, it's terrifying to face the nakedness of a new truth–or perhaps I should say an old truth, an ancient truth that has been living inside us – especially when we hardly have a language to talk about that truth.

I see this poem as the speaker's way of beginning to say 'yes' to certain things that he had previously rejected–things perhaps in himself, things perhaps in the world. But what interests me most is the silence after the last line. It's clear to me that the speaker of this poem has yet to find a language in which to say that 'yes,' in which to live it to its fullest. I see the final question as both confident and desperate: What would you have done? What should I do? Everything we say asserts our deepest beliefs, even when we're unaware of those beliefs. But what happens when those beliefs change, radically and even perhaps without our knowing? What steps forward to fill the new silence of our lives then?  

===

HERMITAGE

It’s true there were times when it was too much
and I slipped off in the first light or its last hour
and drove up through the crooked way of the valley

and swam out to those ruins on an island.
Blackbirds were the only music in the spruces,
and the stars, as they faded out, offered themselves to me

like glasses of water ringing by the empty linens of the dead.
When Delilah watched the dark hair of her lover
tumble, she did not shatter. When Abraham

relented, he did not relent.
Still, I would tell you of the humbling and the waking.
I would tell you of the wild hours of surrender,

when the river stripped the cove’s stones
from the margin and the blackbirds built
their strict songs in the high

pines, when the great nests swayed the lattice
of the branches, the moon’s brute music
touching them with fire.

And you, there, stranger in the sway
of it, what would you have done
there, in the ruins, when they rose

from you, when the burning wings
ascended, when the old ghosts
shook the music from your branches and the great lie

of your one sweet life was lifted?

===

Your answer puts me in mind of Rilke's letters and his call to "live the questions." New truths are borne on changes whether we dial them into our lives or not, and those truths usually call on us to assume a new identity. But that earlier phrase in the poem, "...empty linens of the dead", already signaled to me early on that this is not a poem about death or loss but resurrection.

Tell me a bit about Delilah and Abraham. Why these two Biblical characters in particular, and these particular paradoxes? How do they serve counterpoint to the "wild hours of surrender" that follow?

Abraham says 'yes' understanding neither the command nor his answer. Bob Dylan has a good way of putting this:  "God said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son.' Abe says, 'Where you want this killin' done?'" I skipped some lines there, but the point is essentially the same as Kierkegaard's:  Abraham's 'yes' is an inexplicable leap of faith. Now, you can get yourself into all sorts of moral problems here. The world has plenty of people right now running around saying 'yes' to their God's imperative to kill, but that's not what I'm getting at in this case. I think the poem is concerned with the metaphorical significance of Abraham's sacrifice: the notion that each of us has one great thing he or she has to lose before he or she can inherit the world. And to say it's a metaphor is not to strip it of its visceral reality. Metaphors are not abstract. They are the real flavor of human blood on the tongue when someone bites his lip and tries to leap over the abyss between one thing and another. They are the taste of our song. As for Delilah, well, there's another image of loss, but it's also an image of betrayal. Delilah reveals the secret of Samson's strength, his hair that he has grown in devotion to his God, and her betrayal deprives him of it. Again, though, here I was probably thinking of a betrayal within the self. Just as Abraham has to sacrifice something (of himself) to inherit the world, each of us must betray something in himself to find the weakness where a secret might be spoken.

In our recent email exchange you mentioned this particular poem being a transition point for you both in style and outlook – how did that come about?

By force. Life happens and you hope something is wise enough in you to adjust. It remains to be seen with me (ha).

You seem to be in possession though of a highly distinct bank of words and images that seem rather constant: “strangers”, “drifters”, the dead, fire and water, celestial bodies, familial archetypes, landscape features such as rivers and valleys, etc. In past interviews and elsewhere, you’ve drawn on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, namely that a word’s meaning is its use in a given context. Why is this idea so important to poetry? And to your own poetry? How does it reside in this particular poem (and others you’ve written)?

Frost says somewhere that a poet's voice is mostly his tone, his attitude toward things. Is he reverent? Placid? Ironic? Of course there are variations within a voice, but I think that's mostly the way it is. Just as important, though, is his reservoir of images. What kind of thing is he attracted to, and why? I could say that the natural world (a term we could unpack indefinitely) has always been my "Hermitage," but that wouldn't really explain anything, and I doubt it would be interesting to anyone. A poem might concern itself with certain images that the poet loves, or sees, or is haunted by, but I think it had better make those images resonate with a reader who doesn't necessarily love or see or consider herself haunted by them. This is why I always talk about the archetype, which for the sake of a discussion about poetry I'll say is an image that resonates across individuals and cultures. That's quite a leap of faith, but there we come to Abraham again. What's the poem if not such a radical leap, a blade honed for the sacrifice, asking for more?

So I'm looking now at the poem’s fifth stanza. I know enough about wildlife that I couldn't help noticing your inversion of fact with those red-winged blackbirds (I'm always astonished by their harsh songs, too, though my husband likens them to the sound of cameras going off). They typically live in marshy lowland areas, and so it’s fascinating that you have them building “strict songs in the high pines”, the point at which fire enters the poem. What’s happening there?

Yes, blackbirds live mostly in the low growth of open fields. I grew up in Goshen, New York, and across the road from my home there was such a place, and blackbirds filled it with their little geometric songs, saying something about the order and the chaos in things that I'll probably never be able to understand. Also, when they're spooked and they rise up, baring that little blood-red secret on their shoulders – that's the stuff I love. So why are they there in the high pines in this poem? Something seems a little out of joint, doesn't it? People used to believe in omens like this. They are rising up, rising through those pines. A place of transition is not a place to live indefinitely. I think that's true of the rising blackbirds in this poem and the speaker who sees them. Also, blackbirds of this kind are most often solitary. And yet here they seem very plural. It's a gathering, somehow, of little solitary ghosts.

At the level of this poem’s drafting and composition, was it “received” all at once or did it require a lot of rework and revision? You've got a pattern of tercets broken at the end by a single line. How did you arrive at that structure?

If I remember correctly, the poem happened somewhat feverishly, meaning I had a draft of it in a few sleepless days, for better or worse. It originally had a final line tacked on after that question (I won't tell), and good ol' Abraham had to come in with his knife and cut it out. Here I should say that Abraham clearly lives in at least two very good poet friends of mine who saw the poem for what it was.

Don't we need them, always. And I love the poems that just present themselves to us that way. 

It seems vital at any stage for every poet to find the style and language that will give definition to his or her experience. Still, when had our meeting we were talking about Louise Glück, who pointed out that those "habits of syntax, vocabulary, and rhythmic pattern that distinguish a collection or poet are at once useful in the moment and dangerous to repeat." (“Arson”, which appeared in Print Oriented Bastards, is a poem of yours I also adore, and seemed to me to bear striking similarities to this one). What habits show up in your own writing and how do you write against them?

Syntactically those poems are related, without doubt, but I just wasn't done with the form. I use "form" loosely here, but I mean it. In our workshop-oriented culture, so many writers are terrified of repeating themselves even to the smallest degree. I get that. I teach workshops and I've taken them. I have nothing against them. Yes, we should all have that healthy fear, especially in a culture that commodifies sameness. And yet we should also beware of a culture, even a poetic culture, that commodifies novelty. If a form is valid (and who decides that but the reader?), it says something about the structure of who we are, as individuals and as a culture. Maybe we're talking about any number of inherited forms–a sonnet, say, or a villanelle–each of which might resonate more at a given cultural moment. But we can also be talking about forms of syntax, forms that a poet might feel have not been exhausted by one exploration. Of course he can lie to himself in saying that it's not exhausted, but I hope that's not what I've done.  I just try to work out the poem. Yes, we should be afraid of sameness, but I have always believed that poetry can be, among other things, a space to find the rituals that will bring us close to whatever it is we need to approach. And the nature of ritual is repetition. And if the ritual is a good one, well, every revelation will be new.  In any case, the forms that matter to us are not molds into which we pour the changing content of our selves.  We are the forms and their changes.

Amen to that – we do live in a ritual-deprived culture, and no doubt individualism as an ethos has some part to play in that obsession with originality. 

Emblematic of Fasano's process: "Audubon's 'Virginia Partridge with Red-Shouldered Hawk' is an image of what haunts me into song."

What I've always admired in your poems is your ability to make language commensurate and equal to your subjects in largeness, and I’ve noted how often people refer to your work as “beautiful” or “stunning.” I think Jack Gilbert said in one of his interviews how beauty is a perfectly worthy function of poetry but hardly the point, poetry being a form (at least to him) that also concerns itself with ideas meant to provoke thought and reflection. Where would you say your own work falls, along these lines?

Here I should make it clear that I'm talking about what I would want my work to do, not what I think it's done, but I'll say that I admire the kind of poetry that (simply, seemingly naively) does not find "ideas" and "lyrical beauty" mutually exclusive. Why do we say they are? Are we saying reason is ugly? Are we saying beauty is useless? These are complicated questions. Of course there is a difference between the syntax and rhythm of logical ideation and, say, a song about a beautiful woman pumping water from a well. Have a friend pick a random book from your shelves and read it to you from behind a closed door, so that you can hear only the muffled rhythm, not the words. I guarantee you'd be able to tell if it's fiction, poetry, or the Federalist Papers. So these distinctions are all very valid, of course, and I think they're informed by cultural norms and innate structures.

I studied philosophy as an undergraduate, and whenever I pick up a book it's just as likely to be Wittgenstein's Lectures on Mathematics as it is to be Jack Gilbert's poems, and all I can say is that I admire the kind of poetry that finds a way to think with the body. I'm thinking of Rilke's Duino Elegies, for example, or Larry Levis' longer poems that seem to effortlessly marry the meditative and lyrical impulses. See, the problem is when I say "meditative" or "lyrical" I'm already defining a norm, raising expectations about "beauty" and "truth," which just requires further unpacking. But if I did that we'd really discover the difference between philosophy (albeit the armchair variety) and poetry, wouldn't we? In any case, it would be nice if Keats' "beauty is truth" satisfied everyone, but it doesn't. But look, those very lines of Keats', as beautiful as they are, have now "provoked [us] into thought and reflection," haven't they? And can't we then clearly be moved by the "stunning" lyricism of that Ode while also being moved to meditation? In Keats' terms, we're "teased" both into and "...out of thought.” I've always admired the kind of poetry that, to put it poorly, makes thought visceral. Whitman says it best here:  "I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, / And you must not be abased to the other." 

People seem to have a conception of a beauty that excludes the mind. At least in my own experience – beauty in Gilbert's world meant something different, perhaps – and that returns us to Wittgenstein's problem. 

Gilbert was a classicist with a Romantic's soul.

Agreed.

He wanted to be stone but he was fire.

He definitely thinks with the body in his poems. 

And that tension makes for some great poems.

How do title your poems?

In one word? After. I never write a title at the top of the page before I begin (well, maybe I'll have one I mind, especially if it gives information necessary to the poem, but I tuck it away somewhere, because it has a way of nailing down the poem before it finds itself.)  As for "Hermitage," believe it or not, this is a "real" place (don't get me started on that word), a little ruined place on a small island that was once part of a monastery. I can't tell where it is, of course, but it's there. It's so very there.

The island is such a popular fixture of the imagination, perhaps because of its innate solitude and offer of refuge. I'll just say that when I encounter an island in a piece of literature, I always feel something in me pulling itself down into the grass.

Tell me a bit about your poetry education. And is there any advice you would offer to poets writing and practicing without an MFA or other degree in creative writing?  

For many years I dreamed of studying physics and mathematics, and during my first year and a half at Harvard I was in the astrophysics program. Long story short: I believed in that kind of vastness, that kind of mystery, but it took me a hell of a long time to realize I was fighting the way I really wanted (needed?) to explore such things. (Another "great lie"?)  I've spoken elsewhere about how reading Wittgenstein liberated me; hearing that the "meaning of a word is its use in the language" was one way for me to change my epistemological perspective. Suddenly I wasn't trying to use language to poke through the 'veil' of things, so to speak, into some external, independent reality, but rather to consider itself and its structures and what it says about who we are. I began to see that our being limited by the categories of our perception does not compromise the vastness of who we are.

That sounds terribly grandiose, but I remember it being a formative time for me. I teach in the MFA program I attended, so of course I believe in communities like that, but I also believe passionately in the old platitude: there's no right way to do it. As for practical advice, I'd encourage young writers to reach out to writers they admire. I know not everyone is able to respond, but those correspondences can be tremendously inspiring. Also, trust me, the term "literary establishment" has just as much accuracy – no more, no less – than a term like "liberal media."  The refreshing truth is that the poetry community in this country is often as close to a meritocracy as might be possible; it's tempting to think of editors and such as some sort of cabal organized against the 'outsider,' but in my experience people are always hungry for fresh, interesting work. If you get a rejection (every writer until the end of his career will get them), it might be because someone didn't read your work closely, but it might also be because the poem is not resonating. All the old advice is truth: read everything. Work on that damned poem until it banishes you.

I think the only key is to decide what kind of community you want, if any. If you're a Hermitage writer, you'll have to find it. If you're a weekend workshop writer, there are so many amazing things like that. And, in my experience, these needs change. Berryman says somewhere that in the end it's just about how much the writer wanted it. That's only partly true, of course, because he or she needs a lot of circumstantial stuff to work out, but I'd echo that the drive has to be there. How about another platitude: trust yourself. That's a must.

Is there any "homework" you'd like to assign our readers?

Sure, these are fun. I'll make one up right now:  Start writing a poem that begins in contact with a wild animal. Perhaps such a contact happened in your life, or perhaps you've imagined it. But in any case try to know as much about that animal as you can:  how it smells, what season it drops its young in, how long it lives, what it eats and what eats it. Begin writing the poem and let it drift to some very different subject matter, preferably a dynamic between the speaker and another person. Overwrite it. Make it long. Let it be. When you've come to the last line go back to the beginning and take the animal out, wherever it appears, leaving only its scent. I mean this:  leave the scent of that animal, without naming it, in the rest of the poem, which you'll now have to revise and stitch up and see into a new form. I promise you the poem, which is notionally "about" something else, will have a strange energy to it. The animal will be gone. But the wildness will be there.

Tell us a poem you love and why you love it.

I'm overwhelmed, as always, by having to pick one. But since we've been talking about Jack Gilbert, I'll mention one of my current favorites of his, "Me and Capablanca". Gilbert says somewhere that America, in particular, has the poems of youth and even the poems of old age, but it does not have the poems of adulthood. It's helpful for me to think about what that might mean, and why it might be so. Gilbert's poem takes as its reference the great Cuban chess player Jose Raul Capablanca, and it becomes a meditation on one of those great problems of our lives. And, as always with Gilbert, the poem is a bit sexy. Here it is:

ME AND CAPABLANCA
Jack Gilbert

The sultry first night of July, he on the bed
reading one of Chandler’s lesser novels.
What he should be doing is in the other room.
Today he began carrying wood up from the valley,
already starting on winter. He closes the book
and goes naked into the pitch pines and the last
half-hour of the dark. Rain makes a sound
on the birches and butternut tree. There is not
enough time left to use it for dissatisfaction.
Often it is hard to know when the middle game
is over and the end game beginning, the pure part
that is made more of craft than it is of magic.

===

JOSEPH FASANO  is the author of three books of poetry: Vincent  (Cider Press, 2015); Inheritance  (2014); and Fugue for Other Hands  (2013), which won the Cider Press Review Book Award and was nominated for the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet."  His honors include the RATTLE Poetry Prize and three Pushcart Prize nominations, and his work has been anthologized in Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Any Occasion (Abrams, 2015) and The Aeolian Harp (Glass Lyre Press, 2016).  His writing has appeared in The Yale Review, Blackbird, The Southern Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Verse Daily, American Poets, and other publications.  He teaches at Columbia University and Manhattanville College.

Poetry as Activism, The Rhetoric of Empathy, and The Breaking of Beliefs: Emily K. Michael on Her Poem "A Phenomenology of Blindness"

Emily K. Michael

When  Emily K. Michael approached Primal School about a possible interview back in May, saying that she was interested in “the tension between performance and page, and the presence of other voices (human and non-human),” I was intrigued and embarked on a lightning tour of the work of hers that was available on the web. In her eye for the world’s beauty as well as her candor in speaking about her life as a blind person, I sensed the stirrings of a rich conversation. I suggested we talk about her poem “A Phenomenology of Blindness” (originally published in Rogue Agent), with its implicit advocacy and benign but frank exploration of  prejudice. I felt committed to exploring thoroughly the machinations of the poem’s central idea and was grateful for Emily’s willingness to go there with me. Discussing her work, Emerson's words came to mind: “It is not meter, but a meter-making argument that makes a poem, a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.” — HLJ 

===

I don’t normally begin interviews by asking poets about their titles, but I’d like to begin there because of the truth claim inherent in this poem’s title. The poem is intended to be a “phenomenology.” How did the poem and idea arrive? 

I suspect that this poem has been a long time coming. It responds to the intense curiosity that I often sense in others, even when it's not directly expressed. People hear that I'm blind or see me traveling with my guide dog or stopping to read the braille on the elevator, and they start firing off questions: "Is it like this? Is it like that? I bet it's like this!" So, when a colleague of mine said she was having trouble writing a blind character, I sat down and wrote this poem.

I wanted to say, "Look, it's not like any of these things." Because others’ speculation and theorizing is done in my absence — or it's done as if I'm not standing there…when I am. Whether it's a portrayal of disability in the media or an actual stranger confronting me at the coffeeshop, nondisabled people seem to take hold of stories of disability without asking us what's really going on.

"Phenomenology" seemed like the right name for a catalog of experiences that weren't what blindness is at all. And that's how the poem helped me to say that blindness isn't all of these things, but it also isn't One Thing. It isn't one story. It's this wild unruly mosaic that's part of my life.

===

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF BLINDNESS

It’s not like walking through life with your glasses off.
I mean, sometimes we wear glasses, but they’re different 
from yours. Thicker, broader, darker. And they don’t
work the quotidian miracle of correctable vision. 

It’s not like getting your eyes dilated once a year, staggering
out to the car under those stiff black shades with the sharp edges,
tearing up beneath the merciless sun and wondering how you’ll manage
the drive home. Damn, someone just texted you and you can’t read your phone.

It’s not like groping in the dark when you come home late
and you can’t find your keys because you and your girlfriends
had too many pomegranate martinis. I know it was a birthday, 
but if you could think clearly, you’d know where your keys are. 

It’s not like leaving the nail salon after a pedicure, shuffling forward 
in disposable flip-flops, doing everything you can not to chip that
gorgeous raspberry shimmer polish. It’s not like that at all. 

It’s not like feeling faint because you forgot to eat lunch — you were
working so hard you couldn’t even stop for a granola bar, so you 
cling to your colleague’s arm as he guides you outside. It’s nice 
to have support, you think, nice to know he doesn’t mind helping. 

It’s not convenient, popular, or cumbersome. It’s not a filter
that you can slide over the world, not a stylish coat hanging
in your closet. I, too, am waiting for winter because I love
wearing my coats — peacoats, swing coats, blazers. I have 
so many! It’s just that blindness isn’t one of them. 

===

The mosaic you describe being unique to you, not this monolithic concept of "all blind people". I also like the sound of "phenomenology" because it suggests that it’s a philosophical way of feeling around a topic and exploring it through one’s experience.

Yes. That's why the poem explores so many ways of putting blindness ON the body — shuffling feet, bleary eyes, feeling faint.

Including that last bit about the coats; if we were to treat blindness as accessory. I love this poem’s rhetorical strategy in how its speaker attempts to define blindness by negation, saying “here’s what blindness is NOT.” There’s something wonderfully defiant to me about that and I felt that defiance also in your other poem “Crushed”, out in Wordgathering. Written from a similar place?  

Absolutely! And "Crushed" was actually written about an interaction I had with a professor (I was the student), but in that poem, I played with the characterization. I wondered whether people would assume it was a student because the other person confronts the speaker in a nervy, fidgety way. But it was actually a professor who confronted me. That's one aspect of poetry I love: bending the literal truth to get at some greater truth. It doesn't matter who caused the poem, really, because when it comes to disability, I can see patterns of reaction in others.

With "Crushed" I was exploring the confessional nature of others' comments. I opened with some of that Catholic confessional language (I grew up Catholic and so borrowed a little from that). By telling me about her girl-crush on Helen Keller and her dabbling in Braille, the other character was revealing something that I presumably needed to know. As with “A Phenomenology of Blindness,” I was responding to others' assessments of my condition.

In both poems, there's a pushing back against the expected, the docile blind character, the convenient image of Helen Keller. I quite admire Keller, but she was not nearly as tame as she is rendered in the popular imagination. I wanted to push back, but I didn't want to be hostile. Snarky, yes, but not violent or rude.

Poetry is such a great mode for that pushing back. I'm Asian, and it's like someone meeting a Chinese writer and saying "I read Amy Tan", when there's this whole other universe of Asian writers out there. 

Exactly! And people seem proud to say things like that. Or perhaps they're so excited to connect that they don't hear how off-putting such comments can be.

That latter part is so true. They are so desperate to connect, and in some ways you have to honor that too, but it doesn't change the fact of the disappointment and hurt. 

Like the other day, I was buying groceries, and the cashier said, "Oh your guide dog is so cute! I've always wanted to learn braille!" My first response (which I did not say) was, "So learn it." But instead, I said, "Yeah, it's not that hard, just a lot of patterns."

It gets me thinking how all of us have been in that awkward position in one way or another; trying to show empathy and failing hard, and I think that's what makes this poem so resonant. I’ve been reading your blog, and you recently wrote an incredible post about fear and how it hides behind pity or concern (which is not the same thing as empathy). Could you tell us about that distinction? You write: “When I walk into a room, when I order coffee, when I purchase a pair of earrings, I am working in the shadow of powerful narratives history has built against me.”

I think the difference between fear/pity and empathy is a willingness to be vulnerable, which may seem counter-intuitive. When someone is afraid of disability, and I represent that disability, they're going to try to get away from me as fast as possible. If they can't get away, they're going to try and control the situation — whether that means talking over me, helping me in a way I don't need, or telling others how to feel about me. Pity is another form of taking control. If a person pities me, they don't have to be on my level. They can look down on my life, and call this superiority "compassion."

Empathy is a willingness to go there with someone. It's the willingness to say, "This scares the crap out of me, but I'm going to sit here and let you tell me what it's really like…even if that reality is just as scary as I thought it would be." When someone is empathetic, they aren't trying to talk over me or silence me. They're not afraid to stand next to me and ask questions.

Empathy is really what helps me tolerate the intrusive curiosities of strangers, because sometimes a stupid question is a person trying to figure things out. So if I can be patient and hear them out, maybe they're willing to hear me out.

All it takes is someone saying, "Hi. So I see you're different than me. What's it like to be you?" I really bow to that. 

But make no mistake: it's easier for others to think my life is tragic. Because if it's not, then THEIR lives might be tragic! Oh goodness, if we can't just see who's pathetic at a distance, then we could ALL be pathetic at any moment! 

Exactly. 

And I don't expect everyone to know everything. But I do expect courtesy and respect.

It's a lot simpler than people make it. I was recently at a gathering of people with L'Arche, a Catholic organization for people with developmental disabilities. One evening they had this talent show. Everyone was amazing. The array of abilities and gifts; I should NOT have been surprised at all, but I was, and really had to look at that.

Right? It’s like another poem I have brewing… I was walking up to my classroom one morning when I saw a newly blind man training with his white cane. My class is on this floor where they house a rehabilitation wing for blind and visually impaired people. I knew he was a newbie because he moved so slowly and seemed terribly cautious. Looking down at the ground, shuffling forward…it really broke my heart to see him that way. It occurred to me that he was living out his blindness as he’d been taught from all the tragic stories of blindness in our culture; that he thought it had to be this way for him. I wanted so badly to stand at the end of the hall and cheer him on. I wanted to write about it. But then I thought, am I adding yet another sad blind guy to the roster of pathetic blind characters?

That's always the challenge: can my poetry take these circumstances and stories and make them different, deeper, newer? Can I open a little side curtain for the reader and show them something unexpected? I don't like the idea of going totally whimsical with poetry (Carroll’s "Jabberwocky" drives me nuts). I want to take the real world and slant it just a bit. 

It’s complicated, the way we inhabit our bodies according to how our culture says we should and how it treats members of the group you identify with. It may be inappropriate to bring it up, but I am seeing a lot of parallels between some of the issues raised here and the war on black bodies. I didn't even know about “stereotype threat”, that there was a name for this until recently. These are patterns we live out even if they're unintentional.

There are definite parallels between disability and race. And parallels between disability and fat activism. I follow a lot of fat activist bloggers because the intersection between body politics and disability is so rich!

There's a place for play in poetry, but there's also a place for ideas that challenge us to change our relationship with the world around us. Poetry lets us challenge these patterns.

How did you come upon this poem’s form, with its uneven numbers of lines from stanza to stanza? Did you do much playing with it? 

Sometimes I start writing with a form in mind, but with this one, I just started typing. I liked the idea of making it free verse since it's a poem about defying expectations. I liked the general shape of the poem: a verbal pattern but not a visual pattern. I also began this poem by thinking of it as a performance piece. When read aloud, a lot of the sounds come off the page in a really cool way. Even as I was rereading it, I noticed different vowels repeating in each stanza. It's hard now to remember whether I did that on purpose: perhaps it just arose out of the poem's strong voice.

The initial repetitions  "It's not…, it's not…" are almost like a refrain, as if to say, "Oh my goodness, I'm so sick of answering this question!" But the exasperation doesn't overpower the poem's mood. I didn't want to write a bitter blindness poem. You lose your readers very quickly when you go to the bitter place. I wanted readers to stay with me until the surprise at the end. 

I also wanted to write something where the surprise ending would give the reader a burst of energy – the kind of energy that sends you back up to the top of the poem to read it through another time.

I recently wrote a poem in much the same way – free-verse yet reaching for that musicality in a way that seems natural. Do you read your stuff out loud when you're writing and revising? 

Lately I have been doing a lot more reading aloud. Last November, I did my first public reading of my work, and it was incredible to hear how much performance shaped the poems. To notice how I stumbled on certain words or how other lines really worked. It's funny how we obsess over technical definitions, but at the end of the day, all we can say is, yes that poem worked.

So now I read aloud. And I have a few trusted friends who listen to my work. They force me to read it to them.

A few journals have asked me to provide recordings of my work read aloud. So that's another fun way to see whether the poem works.

It's so cool that you have a circle who loves your work and bugs you for more poems. And I definitely felt that burst of energy you describe at the end of this poem.

If I could also ask you about the names of things. A friend some time ago corrected me about that difference in language: a person living with disability, vs "disabled persons" vs. someone who’s a “disability sufferer"; the last of these of course being unacceptable. Have you tackled this topic yet in a poem? I feel you may be trying to go there, with this piece and some of the others you've written.

I do feel the tension between my activist (prose) self and my poetic self. I've been trying to reconcile the two with these recent poems. I don't think people want poems that preach, and I don't think I want to write them.

But I choose the term "blind" deliberately: in all my bios, I'm a "blind poet, musician, and writing instructor." I thought about leaving the blind out, but then I thought, maybe people will think I"m ashamed of it? So I put "blind" in. But I'm not totally blind. I'm legally blind — a very unpoetic term.

As far as disability goes, it's a word I'm not afraid of, but other people are. Generally nondisabled people are schooled to use person-first language (so I'd be a "writer who is blind" as opposed to a "blind writer"). But I feel this is clunky and hedgy — like we're afraid of contamination by association.

Generally people use "disabled people" when they consider disability a social and political experience — as well as a personal experience. It's the term most activists use. It's the term I use.

The other term I hear a lot is "low vision" but I don't like that either. Blindness is a culture; "low vision" is a condition. And I'm much more interested in the cultural aspects of disability.

This is helpful to me, thank you.

There's a sense with the average nondisabled person that we should try to minimize or hide our disabilities — as if their discomfort is our discomfort. That's another reason I write as a blind poet; I want people to know that I'm bringing blindness forward. I'm not ashamed. It's a part of who I am. It's something that belongs in poetry — not as a novelty but as a reality.

The walls between us are high. And yet it's writing from a place of difference that helps to bring down those walls.

Yes. And a poem is a lot smaller than a real blind person. So maybe someone will read the poem, feel a sense of connection, and be willing to approach a real disabled person. 

Beautifully put.

 Caroline Casey, an Irish blind social entrepreneur who trekked solo across Southern India on the back of an elephant in 2001.
Maybe tell us a bit about your poetry education — how you came to poetry, etc. What advice would you offer to poets writing and practicing without the MFA?

Well, as it happens, I don't have an MFA!

I can't exactly recall how I came to poetry. I know a lot of poets remember that fateful day when they took down the dusty volume of Robert Frost and fell in love, but I don't remember that. I spent a lot of time singing hymns as a child, and I was in a few musicals. I remember loving the witty show tune lyrics,  and I remember how I never struggled to understand Shakespeare. I also remember being bothered when I heard poetry that had inconsistent meter —  if someone was reading a greeting card or a poem they'd written where the rhythms didn't follow the set pattern.

I took an AP Literature course in high school, and we read mostly poetry. I loved analyzing it and I loved the sounds. Then in college, I took a medieval literature course and a linguistics course where we had to break poems down in terms of their sounds. I was in heaven. But I still wasn't writing much poetry.

I mean, I would write a poem and put it away. I wasn't going back and revising my work. It wasn't till I graduated with my MA in English that I started writing and actually revising — and then submitting my work. It's like I needed all that time to be steeped in poetry without actually working on it, does that make sense?

As far as a poet's education, I think poets need to spend time with their favorite poets, just reading and thinking. But I also think poets need the names for things: for example, you don't have to know the difference between slant rhyme and off-rhyme, but you do need to see the difference. You need to be able to recognize that different strategies are being applied.

Because I teach freshman writing, I've had a solid grounding in rhetorical grammar (not traditional grammar). And that has had an incredible influence on my poetry. So I think poets need a working knowledge of the language they're writing in – not memorizing obsessive rules but reading about how their language fits together.

Being a teacher of rhetoric has also helped me to understand a poem's motivation better. What is the poem going to say? What will an audience think at line 3, line 6, line 8? Where is the poem speaking from? I often use poems to teach audience awareness and expectations — even in nonfiction courses.

The best book I've read on poetry in the past year has been Stephen Dobyns's Next Word, Better Word. It's dense, but it's so rich! He really makes the poet accountable for their form and their content.

I agree. Rhetoric for me has almost been the more useful tool in writing poems than other topics, because it deals with psychology, and poems are agents of emotion.  

Plus classes on poetry are often imbalanced. Either they're obsessed with shock and novelty or they're obsessed with the canon.

Any words on novelty/obscurity versus accessibility in poetry?

I've never enjoyed obscurity for its own sake. And perhaps because I'm often a novelty for others (the only blind teacher, the only blind student, the first blind person they've ever met), I grow tired of superficial novelty as well. My favorite poets tend to write in accessible language about complicated things. I return again and again to poets like Rilke, Seamus Heaney, Edna St. Vincent Millay. None of them needed hundreds of footnotes, but their poems still give and give and give. So when I write a poem that is more down-to-earth, I don't see it as an intellectual compromise. If it's a good poem, it will have a lot to offer. I also put a lot of energy into the form, because the form is just as much a part of the poem as its content.

There's an excellent poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay called "Oh, Oh, You Will Be Sorry For That Word.” It’s a sonnet in which the speaker is irate that her partner sees her as a decorative object rather than a smart woman. But as the poem moves down the page, the speaker's anger cools. We know it cools because Millay stops using exclamation marks and starts using periods. The punctuation helps change the poem's mood. Just that tiny punctuation! That kind of technique blows me away. That's the attention to detail I aim for in my own work. It's poetic magic, you know? The average reader is not going to point out the change in punctuation but they will feel the effect. That's the kind of poetry I want to write.

The reader doesn't know what hit 'em. 

Yes. And I don't like poems that lock the reader out or make fun of the reader. That kind of poetry feels gross, like a betrayal of the reader's trust in the poet. I want to be the kind of poet who stays beside the reader and says, "I'm with you. Trust me to take you through this." I believe it's that kind of trust between creators and audiences that leads to transformation. 

Amen and amen and amen. Oh, wow. Is there any “homework” you’d like to assign our readers? (it can be anything: a writing exercise, a craft book to read, a collection of poems to read, a link to an article. Though you've practically assigned me a ton of homework already just by having this conversation.

One of the best books I've read is John Felstiner's Can Poetry Save the Earth? As I read it, I kept stopping to write poems in the style of each poet he profiles. The book is accessible and inviting. So I'd say, go read that!

But also just be in the world. Nothing is too great or too small for a poem. There are so many weird moments I've experienced that have come out as poems even years later. Don't hold on to the specific details: hold on to the emotional truth. That's what the poem wants to teach. So, as Rilke says, don't look at your life and say, "I don't have anything to write about." Look at your life and say, "What can I write about?" 

And lastly, don't be afraid to share you work with people you love. In the past few years, I've started writing poems for people – poems that I actually gave to them, even though they may have been drafts at the time. Your work needs to be in the world, even if that world is just your circle of friends and family. You need to know that your poetry matters, or else, why write it? Believe that it matters.

Yes! Okay, last one! Tell us a poem you love, and why you love it.

Here is one by Rilke.

I AM, YOU ANXIOUS ONE

I am, you anxious one. Don't you hear me
surging against you with all my senses?
My feelings, which have found wings, circle
like white birds around your face.
And my soul — can't you see it there
standing before you in a robe of silence?
Doesn't my springtime prayer
ripen in your eyes as on a tree?
If you are the dreamer, I am your dream.
But if you choose to be awake, I am your will
and become the matter of all majesty
and round to perfect stillness like a star
over the far-off city of time.

                                    From The Book of Hours

                                    Trans. from the German by Edward Snow

I love the lusciousness of these images, and I love that I really don't know what Rilke is talking about — in definite terms. I know the feeling he is describing, the longing, the coming-together and pulling-apart. This is a poem that I return to because it fills me with wonder.

It's beautiful abstraction, but at the same time, there are fleeting images I can grab onto — the white wings, the rounded star.

He certainly wrote of nature and the body in a way that exalted both.  

Poets have to suspend that need to classify everything and tuck it away in its proper place. Poetry is a kind of emulsion — everything has to stay suspended until you figure out what you're doing. And this poem embodies that emulsion: that tension between what we know and what we dream.

===

EMILY K. MICHAEL is a blind poet, musician, and writing instructor from Jacksonville, FL. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Wordgathering, The Hopper, Artemis Journal, The Deaf Poets Society, Compose Journal, The Fem, Rogue Agent, Disability Rhetoric, Breath & Shadow, Bridge Eight, Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, I Am Subject Stories, BREVITY’s Nonfiction Blog, and Mosaics (Vol. 2). Her manuscript Natural Compliance won Honorable Mention inThe Hopper’s Prize for Young Poets. Emily’s work centers on the themes of ecology, disability, feminism, and music. She develops grammar workshops for multilingual learners and participates in local writing festivals. Find her on Twitter (@ModwynEarendel) and at her blog, On the Blink. 

The Missteps of the Father, Tercets vs. Couplets, and Why Community Is Important for Writers: Gary Dop on His Poem "Little Girl, Little Lion"

Gary Dop. Photo credit: Parker Michels-Boyce

I have the folks at  Rain Taxi to thank for introducing me to Gary Dop, who after shaking hands said “yes” to an interview, told me about his poetry, and within minutes had charmed me into buying a copy of his book, Father, Child, Water ( Red Hen Press, 2015). As I was interviewing him, I saw how this was so. In Gary’s searching poems about fatherhood, masculinity, and history, I found the same warm, vulnerable human pulse that had thudded through our first conversation. For the speaker’s refusal to let himself off easy, for its equal parts introspection, tenderness and grappling with hazard, “Little Girl, Little Lion” is a poem for anyone who’s ever loved a child. In our unedited conversation, the child inside of Gary was also on full display: he aimed to work in the words “Tupperware," “Braunschweiger,” and “Portuguese Man-of-War”, then did so with finesse. – HLJ 

===

Throughout your book  FATHER, CHILD, WATER there’s the theme of parenthood, but also this wider lens on your family’s history, the world’s wars, things such as your father’s passion for hunting. Violence, or at least the possibility of violence, seems to loom over even your most playful poems. I think that’s especially true here – the poem’s last line landed cold in my spine.   

This might surprise you, but the themes of violence and the darkness in the humor weren't apparent to me in the composition phase. 

On one level, I could understand that these things were happening along the way, but I didn't recognize that I was returning to them (or that they were returning to me). My life has been a regular interaction with fear and uncertainty, and the final line of the poem is a reminder of that. I remember being struck by the final line, not knowing how to make sense of it when I wrote it, knowing that it mattered as a larger statement about my daughter (the poem is born of a real experience), and about all daughters, and about me and other fathers. Humor for me has always been a way to connect with people, but when I turn to writing, I think it also became a way to say, "I, too, feel shaken in the world. I, too, need to connect with others who will not hurt me, who want to walk together.”

===

LITTLE GIRL, LITTLE LION 

From the stool above our soaking dishes, she proclaims,
I can never be a poet, like it’s written on a sacred stone

In her identity’s medieval cathedral. I am her father.
She does not turn to me. Why? I ask, pulling wrinkled hands

out of the suds we share. The blue glass she’s holding slips
under the water to a hollow clank. Touching her wet elbows, 

I hear, Daddy, girls can’t be poets. I’ve never thought
about how my daughter mirrors herself in Mommy 

who doesn’t write. I say the right things, pull her away
from the sink to the floor, and bend to look in her

searching eyes, brown like her mother’s. They ask, Are you
sure? I rush away to find Bishop, Rich, Sexton, Dickinson – 

any girl on the shelves above Where the Wild Things Are.
Showing her the stack, she pulls out Plath and opens to

“Daddy.”  I snatch the book back like it’s rat poison.
Again, I can’t be trusted. Can I be trusted? How can I 

wrecking-ball the commandments she’s constructed? I read
the opening stanza which ends in a sneeze, 

and she’s satisfied. More Sylvia later, I say. Oh Darling,
you’ll be whatever you need to be, and if it’s Poet, 

the world will learn to welcome your wild words, cathedrals
will crumble, stars supernova, and nothing 

that pretends will remain – but your words are water,
your life a metaphor only you complete. I say all this, 

our backs resting against the cold oven. 

===

Something you said in an interview with RKVRY Quarterly, and which I loved as a statement of your poetic purpose: “I want a poem that helps me open my eyes, helps keep me awake, and helps me stave off the waking sleep that flesh is heir to.” Here in this poem is a situation with your daughter that I as a reader feel deeply, one in which I am made to participate in that “staying awake.” Tell us a bit more about that experience? The poem does a pretty good job of giving us the narrative, but perhaps a few words about how it became urgent for you in the telling?  

So the event "Dad, I can't ever be a poet" happened. Her statement shook me. I couldn't make sense of it. So much of what a child says we place into a box of understanding out of which we recycle a response, but this made no sense. She followed up with her reasoning, and I tried to prove, by bringing her the books, that she could be a poet. And, believe it or not, she did open to Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” in my ear-marked copy of Ariel. This was a gift of a moment, no doubt.

The end of the poem means different things to different people I've talked to, but for me it's the important reminder that all of the wonderful things that the speaker has said to the daughter are not her life already lived. They are a potential that must also wrestle with the oven, and its escape from the pains of life...including the missteps of the father: me. Ugh.

I think that's what strikes me about the ending. The italicized words in this poem – the speaker’s reassurances – are what we as parents say to encourage our children; the reality is that potent feeling of the speaker’s complicity in the patriarchy (which, as it’s argued, brought about the death of someone like Plath). 

The title of this poem is honestly so striking and so heartfelt that I nearly wish you’d titled your book with it. How did you arrive at it? 

Perhaps I should have titled the book “Little Girl, Little Lion.” I think it was one of the choices I considered, but it was too close to the title of a better book: Phil Levine’s They Feed The Lion. My book already has enough trouble with its nod to Moby Dick on the cover (ha). The poem had several other titles, none of which had a triumphant quality, and that’s what I like about the poem's title. It makes the little girl into royalty: fierce, animal royalty. As I recall, I changed it to its current title just before sending it to South Dakota Review, where it found its first home in their lovely 50th anniversary issue.    

Structurally I’m also curious about the pattern of couplets that is suddenly broken by that single haunting last line. Was this its original form, or did you come upon this structure in revision?

Yes. I think my feelings of being an outsider in my life, living all over, walking unlikely paths, feeling rootless, is exponentially more significant to me as a parent. I’m all too aware that every good choice is tinged with danger and possibly upholding a system that hurts the people I love most. Reality is humbling in that way. 

To the couplets, I looked back at the earlier drafts, and I was fascinated to see that my earliest saved version, which might not be the earliest draft, is in four-lined stanzas, quatrains. The draft after that was in tercets, three-lined stanzas, and the final version found itself in couplets. The couplet contains a great deal of certainty and strength, but the lone line at the close, while it can be strong as well, also is daring, risky, and potentially weak.

So this poem definitely saw an evolution. Thanks by the way for going back and looking at your drafts. Also interesting that you frame the differences in that way — in this situation, the form would seem to make sense for the poem’s subject: a father and a daughter; an attachment that must ultimately be broken. 

Why did you have to remind me that the attachment has to be broken?!

I think of the heroic couplet as a closing punch, and I think of lines in 2s and 4s as expressing confidence. I prefer tercets. And yeah, I really like your notion that the line breaks emphasize the attachment and potential detachment. Okay, I admit it, the detachment is inevitable, but I like "potential detachment" more.    

And what do tercets wind up feeling like for you? 

I trust the uncertainty of a tercet. They’re odd in their oddly numeric way. I especially like them when they flow into the next stanza and don't end on a period. I love enjambment. I think I ended up going back into my book when it was nearly completed to change a few of the poems out of a tercet structure just so my book wasn't dominated with them. I don't even know how many poems in the book ended up as primarily written in tercets. That was probably an insecure choice on my part...I was afraid of how it might look. Silly me.

Emblematic of Gary’s process: “My sister-in-law got this statue for me in Antigua and it sits in my office. This figure sitting hunched with his head in his hands could be weeping or laughing or praying or desperate to shut out the world or meditating or thinking, but regardless, the posture is inward, and the body is strong.”

Great honesty and I find that decision fascinating. I was just interviewing Joseph Fasano on Monday and we were discussing habits of rhythm, word choice, structure, etc. One could argue in their defense as stylistic trademarks. Or that they are dangerous and should be watched for.

Yes, and as I see it, if the writer is selected and promoted by the gatekeepers, the choice is the writer’s trademark. If she's not chosen, it's a habit.

Because who says who gets “selected”, right?  

It's an odd, uneven system, no doubt. I know some people who are gatekeepers — high level publishers, etc. — and some of them are wonderful people deeply burdened by the responsibility and difficulty of walking the lines that society presents. Some are not wonderful people, of course.

Most writers feel they are outside of the game. This is far more common than feeling as if we're inside the game. And it may also be healthier if we're able to keep our outsider feelings from depressing us.  

Some people will look at me as a college writing professor with a decent first book and say, "He's inside. He's X. He's established. He's X," but I almost always feel like I’m trying to belong to something too, and in moments of clarity, I know that the thing I am trying to belong to isn't real. It's not a human thing. It's a system. The part I really want is human connection. 

The thing I need and no gatekeeper can legislate is meaningful human interaction. I'm not against the people I see as “inside” the system or more established inside the system. I am a flawed part of the whole thing, as we all are. It doesn't do much good to really believe in the “us and them” model. It does a lot better to believe in our local communities and the people we connect with who are open and trying to care for others through their art (some of these people are highly decorated folks, and some are the old guy at the senior center who wants to show you his poems about fire trucks).

I often feel frustrated that I didn't have certain experiences (didn't go to Iowa or NYU, never lived in New York), but that's usually undergirded by a false sense of what it means to be a writer. I think it's the duty of the better angels of the establishment, the prize winners and gatekeepers, to find a way for their voices to continually combat the divide between those who get the sexy book deal and those who don't. Some of them get stuck protecting their tier and lifting each other up, which can reinforce the great divide or the illusion of the great divide.    

Such truth. Perhaps tell us a little bit about your other work as a playwright. What influence if any does it have on how you show up to your poetry? 

I wrote plays (bad ones) before I studied poetry, and I write better plays now, at least I hope I do. Unlike many writers, when I write poetry or whatever, I think about audience very early in the process. I've often heard writers say that they don't think about what people think or want until late in revision, if at all. I think that's nuts. I don't think it's wrong, but I can't understand it for myself. As an actor and performer, I haven't been able to get out of my head the notion of the relationship between the writer and reader/audience.

Obviously I have a good number of poems that are persona poems – poems that take on a character's point of view — and many of these are simply poetry-crafted monologues, but in all my poems, I'm regularly imagining sharing with an audience. In fact, one of my final phases in editing happens the first time I read the poem in public. I almost always hear two or three little things that I haven't been able to hear in my revision process. The clarity in these stage moments can be electrifying.   

Maybe tell us a little about your poetry education. And what advice would you offer to poets writing and practicing without the MFA?  

I have an MA in English (which gave me a nice background in literature to undergird my writing life), and an MFA in writing (primarily focused in poetry).

In my thinking, the most important thing for someone who’s not taking the traditional academic route to writing (which is only one path), is to find a community (a small group is enough and maybe best) of people like yourself who can process the journey with you. It doesn't matter if you all write at the same level or if one person is more serious than the others; it matters that you take each other seriously. These are people you can share your successes and failures with. Getting better at craft is the easy part (time, reading, adding workshops if you can, practice, practice, practice), but the most often neglected part is the psychological and emotional journey of being a flawed human trying to believe in yourself on the journey, a journey which often doesn't know how to believe in you. You need people who can walk along the path with you. I think these people don't always have to be other writers. Probably they should be other kinds of artists, and it can be really good if they're serious about writing, as well.

The MFA's best attribute is providing community and encouragement...the learning of craft also happens, but that’s possible in many ways other than the MFA, so those without the MFA track need to focus first on the community and then on the nuts and bolts — which also matter, of course. We best survive the long, lonely journey of the artist in supportive communities.

Your answer really flies against the rugged individualist view that the writer is ultimately on his or her own. 

The discipline is ultimately individualized, but the rest need not be.  My hunch about you is that one of the significant reasons you’re doing interviews for Primal School is not only that you value sharing writers with the world, but that you also need meaningful interactions with others.  

I couldn't disagree with that. It’s one good reason to attend events like AWP, or to be in other spaces where networking is going on. Though some of that networking is happening from a place of need. Any words on that topic?

We make it all quite ugly when we use words like “networking.” At least I think that's an ugly word: it feels devoid of humanity. There's a big difference between genuinely connecting with someone and capturing a person’s value as if they’re a Pokémon character gathered for your fight. I like real people. I like people who want to be better than they are and who know that other people are valuable.

Sometimes when people have a lot of success — you see some of these folks at AWP — they forget that their success is an opportunity for them to bless the people who value them. Even the neediest person in these odd situations should be treated with respect. And I think it's quite okay to be highly needy at moments in life.

Everyone's been there once. 

Yes, if someone with success is annoyed by the lowly people who are hoping to gain something by knowing them, they've lost the better perspective. This doesn’t mean that they have to give everyone their time and that they can’t be forgiven their worst moments, but it does suggest a responsibility. Of course, it's equally dangerous, I think, to criticize those who have success simply because we’ve noticed a moment of irresponsibility. There's too much of that going on as well.  

And that comes from a pretty shadowy place, often one of jealousy. 

Yes. In fact, I think there's more jealousy (I'm highly guilty of this) than disdain from on high.  

Although Pulitzer winners are all losers, right?

Ha. Is there any “homework” you’d like to assign our readers?

I have a practical exercise and an exercise that was born in my brain while we've been chatting. Okay, so the practical: Find a poem you love; read it five times out loud, then take five verbs out of the poem and compose a draft of a new poem.  When you revise, you can only keep two of the verbs, but don’t decide on the two that remain until you're ready to revise. If you need more guidance for the draft, write the draft with the five verbs about a moment in which someone — perhaps you — lost something. You don't have to use this last portion if the verbs send you in a specific direction. Also, this goes without saying, but don't write something exactly like the poem you originally read. And if you're daring, send me a copy of the poem once you've polished it up over a few months. I'd love to read it: garydop@gmail.com 

The other homework: talk to someone you trust about a goal for your writing, a dream for your writing, an emotional obstacle to your writing, and a next step to walk forward with your writing.

Share a poem you love, and tell us why you love it. 

I have been reading Yeats' poem "A Prayer for Old Age" several times a week since May, and I can't get enough of it. I am regularly wrestling with the tension between what my spirit (an abstraction I can live with in all its muddiness) communicates and what my mind knows. I have learned and want to model a weighty suspicion of my reasoning, my thoughts in “the mind alone.” I could spend hours talking about this poem…the second stanzas consuming question and the closing prayer to seem foolish and passionate. 

A PRAYER FOR OLD AGE

William Butler Yeats

God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;

From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
O what am I that I should not seem
For the song's sake a fool?

I pray — for word is out
And prayer comes round again —
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man. 

This poem is so very Gary, from what little I know of him so far. 

If I can write a poem half as good in my lifetime, it'll be a good life.  

===

GARY DOP  lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains with his wife, three daughters, and their dog, Mississippi. Dop is a poet, playwright, performer, and professor at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA. His first book of poems, Father, Child, Water  was a bestselling title with Red Hen Press in 2015. Dop’s work regularly finds a home in magazines throughout the country, including North American Review, New Letters, Sugar House Review, Blackbird, and South Dakota Review. 

Life's Wrecked Railings, Being a Ruthless Reviser, and Finding Light in the Barrenness: Lauren Camp on Her Poem "Rail Runner Express Crash on I-25 South of Santa Fe"

Lauren Camp. Photo Credit: Anna Yarrow

AWP 2016 was my sudden and massive induction into a community of poets I'd never read and knew I needed to be reading. I was drawn in this way to Lauren Camp for many reasons: her attunement to the world's problems, her love for bringing poetry to older and younger communities outside of the academic universe, and her belief in poetry as something that isn't static on the page but dynamic and carried by all. I returned home, read her collection  The Dailiness  two times through, and took months to follow up with her about an interview in part because there were so many poems in it that spoke to me, and with an immediacy that made me care. I'm looking forward to spending time with  One Hundred Hungers,  her latest book. And check out her radio work with Audio Saucepan, as well as her recording and discussion of Jack Gilbert's "Failing and Flying" at  the Sundress Publications blog. – HLJ

===

My first reaction to this poem was to feel as if you’d just confessed something intensely private to me, as if over late-night drinks at the kitchen table.

That’s a wonderful reaction, and oh lord, why am I always confessing things? Lately, I’ve been writing about politics by writing about what I want to turn away from.

In my poems, I commingle analytical thought and optimism. I always want (somehow) to reach the beautiful—and if not a beautiful resolution, at least an emotionally responsive (and therefore beautiful) poem.

===

RAIL RUNNER EXPRESS CRASH ON I-25 SOUTH OF SANTA FE 

One summer day, I witnessed the murder
of speed and money, a train
and armored car twined beneath a pockmarked sun.

I missed the tire squeal, but sat
In the nervous framework of vehicles
that bloomed down the Interstate. An ambulance
 
had been dispatched. We all gawked
as an EMT tended the scrapes and whispers
flung against the road – in this same threadbare spot
 
where a gasoline truck toppled, then exploded
several months before, metal
melting to its unsuspecting driver.
 
Even now I fear the whack, the severed bodies
swallowing thready air.
 
How much easier it is to be looking over
what has rolled over through light fragmented
on the underside of someone else’s car.
 
We continue driving forward, frantically strategizing
details and errands until we meet tomorrow’s headline. 
 
But this is my bend in the road,
my wrecked railing.
 
A personality test defines me as lemon-sour
so I take the test again, changing answers.
 
Forgive me.
 
This time it calls me blue
And I become a river of blue, flowing back and forth
on the Interstate in my beat-up Subaru,
 
never putting my compassion down,
never leaving the road with my imperfect eyes. 

===

The voice in this poem, who/what is it? And was there a triggering experience that began this piece?

In an early draft, “Rail Runner Express Crash” encompassed some of the wider world’s problems, including a train crash in DC and terrorism in Tehran and Paris. I referred to this as “other peoples’ worlds,” a term I soon deleted. But perhaps writing that is what led me to focus the lens closer in.

I began the poem in June 2009, following a horrendous year of economic uncertainty (I know I was not alone in this). I'd been making my living as a visual artist for more than 12 years, and suddenly that was no longer an option. People weren’t interested in art. They needed to pay rent and put gas in their cars. They needed sustenance of the most basic kind, and art was too big a luxury to even consider.

So I was entering the job market, a place I hadn’t been in a long time. I was working through strategies for my future. Hence, the personality test. Which job would suit me, now that I could no longer do what I had done for so long? Rather pathetic about it all, I was convinced I had no skills to offer. Truly it was “my bend in the road.”

A situation in the present moment – an accident on the freeway – is sketched here in sharp sensory detail. There’s also a reference to the past, with the gasoline truck that exploded. The violence of these images, did they signify anything larger for you in the writing than an experience of moving past a scene as an outsider?

Everything seemed tinged with danger at that time. It’s surprising to me that you say “as an outsider", I wouldn’t have identified it that way. Yes, I was outside of the accidents, but hardly down the road from my home. When I moved to the high desert 22 years ago, it felt unlike any other place I’d been. I felt connected to the earth, to the space around me. I didn’t feel ownership, but rather, a reverence. When something awful happens so close to where I lay my head each night, it unnerves me. And it unnerved me at a time I was already way out of balance. It wasn’t just an accident; I had to engage with it.

That imperative feels pretty central to the poem, but especially in that bodily felt line “Even now I fear the whack, the severed bodies / swallowing thready air.” There's a paradox – the gawking at violence, the desire to look – against the temptation to "[look] over what has rolled over.” I love the surprise too in how you end the thought about driving forward…“until we meet tomorrow’s headline.” (I'd expected the word ‘deadline.’) But the world’s headline of suffering is really unavoidable, isn’t it?

I was determined to keep that extreme reaction in the poem. It wasn’t part of the first two drafts, but then I went there — into the darkest, worst hole of what could happen. In the version in which I introduced it, I added the line, “I am making this up, / launching into unbelievable tragedy.” But I quickly took that out, because it didn’t matter.

With each draft, I considered deleting the fear, but each time it stayed verbatim as I’d first written it. It seemed overdone, but it was no more inflated and reactionary than how I’d been dealing with my personal situation.

I began to come out of my little, dark shell of worry a bit. Whenever I was in the car, the radio kept talking to me, telling me all the suffering I wasn’t suffering. I could see around me that others were doing far worse. I wasn’t likely to end up sleeping the winter in a tent on the Plaza, freezing to death. Something would be okay. Maybe everything.

The rhetorical turn in this poem for me is when you mention this is your “bend in the road,” your “wrecked railing.” Here the speaker owns up to her personal agency,  contrasted with the “we” in the previous stanza. What’s she owning up to?

What felt like a wrecked life, maybe. For the duration of the economic crisis, I couldn’t figure out who I was, what I was supposed to be. Change is so damn hard, Hannah, and yet the changes that came from that time turned out to be positive and necessary. They gave my life deeper meaning. I moved out of the realm of “self” into voluntary service and external reach as a teacher, and found it suited me brilliantly.

Five years before the first draft of this poem, I could sense an impending shift in my visual art, but couldn’t figure where to point my scope. I expected to stay within the realm of art making, and was surprised that writing took such firm hold, pulling me fully away.

And then we reach what I feel to be the apex of the poem which is the personality test. What is happening there, and why does the speaker follow it with an appeal for forgiveness?

I took the personality test to help me figure out what I was suited to do for employment. I expected the test to clarify a direction. Only, I didn’t like the results. And I was clever enough to understand how to manipulate the test. I was desperate for a solution that I wanted, a career that I wanted.

So, having cheated on the test, I needed forgiveness—but not just for the test itself. Perhaps also for holding tight to whatever dark spirit had inhabited me, whatever cheating I was doing of my future and myself.

Why does the speaker become blue? Why the color blue? (Maggie Nelson’s marvelous book, Bluets, comes to mind, though I'm sure you've got your own take on the shade).

As a visual artist, I always avoided the color blue. It was too settled for me, too calm. I craved rust-orange in each piece, even just a highlight of it. I wanted some fire in the work. But for once—in the taking of the test and in my response to the turmoil in life—blue seemed the right color. I was grateful to be labeled as blue, because it had the ability to define the tranquil and composed me I wanted to be.

Emblematic of Lauren's process: "The most barren place I've ever been, and perhaps in a way, one of the more exhilarating: the Bisti Badlands at the northwest corner of New Mexico. This landscape reminds me of how little needs to exist to create tremendous power."

Maybe tell us a little about your poetry education. And what advice would you offer to poets writing and practicing without the MFA?

I am proudly self-taught. I have read an insane amount of poetry over the last dozen years. I read three to five books a week and a number of poems online each day. That sounds astronomical, even to me. I host a radio show that incorporates contemporary poetry, so I’m always scanning for exhilarating poems. And then I have to read these aloud, which forces me to embody them. There’s a tremendous lesson in that effort each time. 

I don’t want to write like anyone else. I’m very anti-derivative, but I want to know what’s possible.  If one writer shows me a door I didn’t know existed, I can go through that door and find another door on my own, and see where that will take me. Show me a line break that cracks open my heart. I’ll cheer for you. Show me a new perspective, a way to tell a story—or not tell a story. I read to discover anything that doubles or triples possibilities, anything that acts like a wishbone.

I try things out in my own writing. I have no qualms about crossing out half the poem and re-integrating a new perspective. As a visual artist, I worked with fabric, but I think my main technique was collage. Revising a poem is in my cells. I was cutting and pasting scraps from my mother’s Ladies Home Journal (over her protestations) as a child, just to make something visual. I still thrill in the process.

I don’t have an evil inner critic. I don’t think about audience for anything I create—at least, not at first. I think about what I want of the work. Is it good enough to satisfy me? (Rarely.) So I go back into it. I read the poem aloud. I let it sit, silently by itself for a while. I ignore it. I forget it. I come back to it, and am ruthless, dispassionate. This goes; this stays. Revision is a kind of conceiving. I am adding life. I am building a strangeness, a disturbance, a beauty, a magnificent thumping to the piece, a scar, a hallway, a space for the thought or image to matter. Can I do these things…? Umm, perhaps. I’m willing to try.

I’ve also had some solid “educational” grounding: classes in oral interpretation in graduate school. Audio Saucepan, the radio show I host. Some dramatization work with a local theater group. Lots of readings. All the times I've curated an issue for a journal, presented at a conference, took my place at the front of a classroom. Also, for the last few years, I’ve been a teaching artist for Poetry Out Loud, the national program encouraging high school students to recite poetry. I had no one to encourage a love of poetry in me at that age; I’m determined to do this for the youth I encounter.

Anything involving youth and literature is a fabulous way to give back. Any “homework” you’d like to assign our readers?

Hand over a poem you feel is finished (or nearly finished, or that you’re stuck on) to a friend or spouse. Do not read it to her first. Do not tell her anything about it. Ask the person to read it aloud to you. Listen to where the poem flows, or where it is choppy. Listen to any difficulties the reader has. Make notes on parts you don’t quite like. What sounds weird to you? Why did she say this word this way? Why is she stumbling there?

That reading will give you new ears for the poem. Let your concerns and any confusion help guide you in revising the work.

===

LAUREN CAMP is the author of three books, most recently One Hundred Hungers,  winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press, 2016). Her poems appear in New England Review, Linebreak, Beloit Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Other honors include the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize, an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award, and a Black Earth Institute Fellowship. She produces and hosts “Audio Saucepan” on Santa Fe Public Radio. www.laurencamp.com.

"Is-ness", Throwing Sonic Daggers, and the Nature of Power: Phillip B. Williams on His Poem "Of the Question of the Self and How It Never Quite Gets Answered"

Phillip B. Williams. Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

I first met Phillip B Williams at the Best New Poetsreading at AWP 2015 in Minneapolis, after being moved immensely by his poem “Do-rag”. It’s a pleasure to interview him for the blog over a year later, having seen the release of his book  Thief in the Interior, which could not be timelier reading in the wake of recent police violence in this country’s ongoing war on black bodies. With this poem, Phillip explores the workings of a mutable and constantly uncertain identity. Emotive as well as smart, probing as well as generous, the language in his poems carries both music and the invitation for the reader to look and think deeply. This one of Phillip’s is previously unpublished, and I thank him for entrusting me with it. — HLJ 

===

Reading this poem puts me in mind of the Talib Kweli line you quote in your book  Thief in the Interior: “But I never write to remain silent.” There’s a recurrence in your work of this theme of silence, from silence as coping mechanism (“If I don’t speak then maybe I won’t die”), to the silencing of the other (“no one listens”). How does this particular poem of yours connect to that silence?

I think in this poem silence operates as both an identifying marker for the powerless but also an omen; the quiet before the storm, so to speak. There’s a kind of puppetry that happens when power is wielded in the way this poem is critiquing. But what happens when the puppet decides to speak for itself and to act on its own accord? What happens when the puppet behaves outside its true nature and acts fully human, rage and all?

===

OF THE QUESTION OF THE SELF AND HOW IT NEVER QUITE GETS ANSWERED

In the poem, figure A is distilled to shadow and floor-looking.

Figure B musics crane-necked, anticipatory for the nih-nih.

I’ve always been a sucker for nomenclature.

The many ways I nigger without knowing.

I’m so Black I’m somebody’s mama sewing

her eyes to the ground. Shamecracked. Akimbo in exclusive gaze.

Lawd, Lawd, Lawd—who is I talking to and where is I? One must

prepare to be seen at all times astounded into erasure, ill-imagined.

Some of us eat watermelon in the closet, breath fermenting

and vulpine, to be able to, at all, eat without being eaten.

Safe in the umbra room dancing ensues, uncaricatured O.

Figure B sniffs figure A. Figure A is hips and textile. Puppet-pulled.

History yawns from the Os of likely weapons, a viper in the shade.

I know because in me the dark is alive and the dark makes plans.

===

Tell us what inspired the poem. How did it first arrive for you?

This poem is from a prompt that poet Carl Phillips created during the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop this past June. I won’t say what the rules are, but this poem follows those rules precisely. It is rare when I am inspired by a prompt, but Phillips’s are so unique and focused on structure rather than topic/theme that I felt freed from a lot of faulty expectations.  I wasn’t told what to write, but rather how to write, and that makes a big difference.

The idea came from an incident where a poet read a poem with a white male speaker who objectified a Black woman and intended it to be complimentary. This speaker had also asked questions about race that were, in their formation, already ill-informed. I wanted to explore that moment when power pretends to be imagination and the artist (failingly) attempts to transform the painful status quo into something unique and useful.

I’m interested in your pseudo-scientific labeling of the self into two conflicting entities in this poem, Figures A and B. One lives in shame and recoil; the other in noise and externality. What were you driving at with these two figures? 

Figure A is the one defined, quieted, silenced, objectified, and whose silence enables and solidifies the power of figure B who is the puppeteer, oppressor, and story-teller. Figure B tells all the lies, and figure A is the page onto which figure B’s torpid imagination expresses itself. This is why figure A’s eyes are to the ground and the figure’s eroticized body is described as being “hips and textile.” The latter is a word that evokes touch, because certain forms of touch can feel like an invasion.

But somewhere in all of this, the speaker is both figure A and figure B, the manipulated AND the manipulator who is not certain exactly how their “I-ness,” their ontological placement in the poem (the nature of its very being), operates. With whom can and does the speaker identify? What does it mean to the sense of self that the answer is “both”?

Isn’t that the truth for so many individuals, to constantly be asking who they are in their relation to power when the answer depends on the situation. With this poem you take the splicing, dicing and reduction one step further, with the talk of being a “sucker for nomenclature.” You drop the n-bomb as a verb, and you totally go there with the full morass of racialized expressions. Is this speaker at all “shamecracked?”

The speaker is, if anything at all, in a state of is-ness, of I-ness that is constantly in flux. It’s not so much the question of “who am I”, or the “to be” verb stranded in the ether, as it is identity blossoming in spite of constant shifts in power depending on who “I” is at any given moment. Figure A is racialized, other, and female/woman-gender. Figure B is written in a kind of echo of the white male speaker from that poem I heard at that reading. I don’t understand everything about this speaker, but it seems as though they exist to comment on is-ness while demonstrating their own placement in the configuration.

The image of “eating watermelon in the closet” comes from Petey Greene, a two-time Emmy award winner who was a radio and TV talk-show host in DC. The point of including that in the poem is to comment on shame and the need to break away from it. The speaker is pointing toward that, even as figure B’s behavior increases the feeling of shame. Whether the speaker feels shame or not is up for argument, but I think it is safe to say that by the end of the poem the speaker has made their own determination.

A feature of this poem for me is that the lines seem held together more powerfully by music than continuity in thought process. How did that come about? 

It’s really the power of the prompt. My poetics, if I can call what I do “poetics,” leans on image and sound. Because I often and openly reject a more regular meter, I have to constantly figure out how to make what I say go in and out of iambs, trochees, etc. There are plenty of regular moments, but I love to break them up with syncopated ones. Being allowed to write about whatever I want but having a structural constraint like, say, a poem needing to have a turn every other stanza, makes so much possible.

I can feel the high stakes in this poem most powerfully in the last few lines, with the additional letter “O” and the hidden viper. But is the surprise in the last line that it conflates the viper with the speaker. I sense as if the speaker is taking their power back with that third entity, the “O.” There’s the uncaricatured O of dancing and ecstasy. And then there’s the O that’s the threat of death. 

Right, the O is both the mouth in pleasure, in joy uncaricatured, meaning not expressed to entertain others by behaving stereotypically. This is not minstrelsy. And the last O, of a mouth that is ready to snap back, to fight back, a crosshair with fangs. This is very much about taking back power and refusing to give power to those who mean us harm. One day, it will be safe to dance and enjoy life without someone turning that joy into something grotesque. Too frequently we have to deal with people pathologizing our lives only to later on take what they’ve made to seem “crazy” and claim it as their own. So these two Os answer the question “What does it mean to not have joy misread as violent or subhuman on our bodies?” The answer is freedom and fearlessness.

There’s a deliciously limber quality to your syntax. As you make a poem, how do you choose your words, play with their music? And how to you play with the tension between music and sense?

So much of that is educated intuition. I read so much poetry, and so many essays on craft, that I pick up on these kinds of things more than if I were actively running through drills of craft elements. What I can say that might be more useful is that regularity bores me, so I tend to lean away from it without trying. If something starts to feel bouncy or an image feels too expected, I defy that movement.

Phillip's process: an image of a Monarch butterfly, taken at Bread Loaf a few years ago.

For many people, the power of poetry is the ability to memorize a poem. Readers feel as though they can participate more if they can engage with the poem without the page being present, and that rhyme/meter assist with that memorization. I don’t care if people memorize my poems or not, and actually prefer that  they return to the page to engage with my work. I want my poems to be experiences that trigger thinking and feeling more than singing along, and though both are possible, I’ve found in my relatively small circle that folks have a poem memorized without having an understanding of the nuances of the poem itself, completely missing prosodic elements that I find are my favorite and the most revealing parts of a poem. 

I want the way the poem is expressed on the page to be the foremost focus. This isn’t to say that this is the only way to enjoy a poem, just the way I want my poems primarily to exist. If people find a poem easy to memorize, I prefer that to be secondary.

As far as playing with the tension between music and sense, sound itself is a sense element, one that I’d argue is impossible to turn off. So much of what we hear is taken for granted. I enjoy what I’ve been told is a “primal” element of poetry, and that is alliteration and consonance. These things add texture to a poem, help to express emotional states of panic, harshness, desperation, etc. They are typically sharper to the ear, so in a poem with images that are themselves full of blades, why not throw daggers sonically?

The same with any poem with any other such objects in it, absolutely.

Now if you ask me this tomorrow my answer will surely be different. I do a lot of things in all of my poems. This is just one tendency I’ve found.

When did you know this particular poem was finished?

There was nothing else that I wanted for the poem and, more importantly, I don’t think the poem is demanding anything more from me. That doesn’t mean it is “finished,” but that it is in stasis. I could easily want to edit it next month. In its current form, though, it speaks in this way and I think that is fine.

Maybe tell us a little about your poetry education. And what advice would you offer to poets writing and practicing without the MFA?

I got my MFA in Writing from Washington University in St. Louis. Before then I attended different writing residencies where I met other poets, various prose writers, and teachers. The majority of the people I met and with whom I continue to talk poetry came from those places. So, Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, Furious Flower, and later on The New Harmony Writers Workshopall helped me to build a writing family.

Going where writers already are was really helpful to me. 

Any “homework” you’d like to assign our readers?  

The way I like to offer book suggestions is by offering a pair of books to be read together in the following order: Mother Loveby Rita Dove, and Blues Triumphantby Jonterri Gadson. Questions to ask are how both poets render motherhood and selfhood in these poems. I would also suggest taking one poem from both collections and writing a poem that puts the speakers of the poems in conversation with one another. This is not solely to think about voice/persona, but to also consider form. How does form reflect something interior about the speaker, and how can that be experimented with in this assignment?

Share with us a poem you love, and tell us why you love it.

I really enjoy the repetition and vulnerability in Robert Duncan’s “My Mother Would be a Falconress.”

===

PHILLIP B. WILLIAMSis a Chicago, Illinois native. He is the author of the book of poemsThief in the Interior(Alice James Books, 2016). He received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. Phillip received his MFA in Writing from the Washington University in St. Louis. He is the Co-editor in Chief of the online journalVinyl,was the Emory University Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry for 2015-2016, and will be visiting professor in English at Bennington College for 2016-2017. 

Choices and Traumas, the Single-Stanza Poem, and the Ghosts We Carry: Joanna C. Valente on Her Poem "Marys of the Sea"

Joanna C. Valente

“People aren’t comfortable with being proven wrong, or realizing that a great person can say things that aren’t always right,”  Joanna C. Valente  said to me during a warm-up Google chat prior to our interview. The topic of our conversation: the idea of “safe spaces” for marginalized groups or victims of trauma. Such spaces are great in theory but practically impossible, she argued, because they negate the possibility that victims can also make mistakes. I’d found this judicious view of human nature rare, but there it was. “I’m in favor of neutral spaces over safe ones,” Joanna said. “Put people in a room together and allow them to respectfully disagree. The result won’t always be ‘safe,’ but at least people are talking.” I’d like to think of poetry as this kind of room for important conversations, and here is a writer who’s using hers. – HLJ

===

As someone who loves the idea of a life before and after this one, I found a lot to appreciate about this section of  Marys of the Sea. But because it's a long/book-length work, could you give us a bit of context, maybe tell us more about the work as a whole? 

The book is based on my sexual assault and subsequent abortion (I became pregnant after it happened). I began writing it about two years afterwards, and so the experience was still fresh in my memory though I’d managed to gain some perspective on it. I wrote it through the personae of Mary, mother of Jesus, and of Mary Magdalene -- partly because I wanted to explore the idea that women are rarely seen both as maternal figures and as sexual beings. But because I’d attended a Catholic school for 14 years, the two women were characters I’d been obsessed with and kept returning to.

The story of mother Mary is strange in that she becomes pregnant without her knowledge or consent, which always troubled me. After going through my experience with the assault, I couldn't help thinking back to the creation story of Jesus, what it says about the denial of women’s ownership over their bodies throughout history. These poems became a way of reclaiming my body and mind through that season of hopelessness and powerlessness. And I should add that the persona helped me write about my experience more objectively, which then made it more enjoyable because I wasn't simply myself, and easier because I didn’t have to be me, if that makes sense.

===

MARYS OF THE SEA, PART V

            Looking for voices on paper

            feel red all over his gummy mouth

            starts to take form in my belly

            hunger stops when grief replaces

            my stomach lining two bodies

            in one body sprouting brambles

            & birds in my ears becoming deaf

            to one history becoming two

            histories two souls repeating

            the lives of all the souls before this

            one there was poetry before this

            life lodged between both of us

            without the dead I would lonely

            be in eastern standard time

            when I didn't change my name

            two bodies need two names

            & how does abandon form

            in building how does a human

            form in another human give

            away another human to no one

            sorceress tongue spews

            spells for dead hands to throttle

            what I could not inverting

            empty on its head X-ray of terror

            there were no repeated lives

===

I love this reclamation of not only your life and body but of the Mary story itself, and how the mask a poet puts on can lend necessary distance while having a transfiguring effect on such a painful experience. So tell us a bit more about this particular section of the poem: the poem’s speaker, and what I understand as this relationship between two entities, two souls. I’m particularly intrigued by the part about “one history becoming two // histories two souls repeating // the lives of all the souls before this.”  

Ah, yes. So this poem is the title poem of the book, where a lot of the different threads come together. The speaker here is mother Mary – not the one who gives birth to Christ, but a different Mary, a Mary who’s a woman reflecting on her abortion, what it means to be pregnant, to not simply be an individual any longer, but a host to a soul or entity that is not you and yet is part of you. The idea to me of having a family has always been objectively strange, because historically, people have had families with goals of legacy in mind, of continuing their name and history -- values which always been important in patriarchal societies. 

The central obsession of this work is the idea that Mary’s personal and family history is now fusing with that of another. What does it mean to be part of a history? Can you really break free of a history you no longer embrace or identify with, or do those histories insist on just repeating themselves?

Some of the recent science has suggested the possibility that trauma can be passed down in our DNA, and that also made me wonder about all of the pain our ancestors suffered – whether we somehow instinctively remember it. 

I think that we do remember those things. I think that ghosts, whether they inhabit human forms or memories that haunt us, are all around us and affect us at every moment. We’re never truly alone; can never quite get away from what identifies us. For me, that's being a woman who grew up in New York City during a time when it was uncomfortable to come out as queer, when the default mode of living was to please everyone around me. I grew up in a very repressed culture (being Greek Orthodox and having been taught to fear God, sex, or just about anything related to sexuality). My parents were from the Bronx, both of them having been raised by immigrant parents who were very fearful and superstitious. Those superstitions impacted my childhood a whole two generations after my family arrived in this country. I really believed I would go to hell if I lied to my parents, for instance.

What you just said suddenly explains the line, "without the dead I would be lonely."  

Yes. I think humans have always been obsessed with the dead. My family comes from the Mediterranean, and death and ghosts are everywhere in Greek and Italian culture and myth. When I was growing up my grandmother would tell me about her dreams, and her dreams often involved her dead relatives. Eventually, such dreams began occurring to me. 

As humans we’re also often obsessed with what we don't have, whether those things are dead or simply beyond our attaining them. It's comforting, in a weird way, to dream of what you don't have, or of those people whom you cannot "have." 

Death not just in the literal but also in the metaphorical sense has a strong hold over our lives, I’d agree. 

And that circles back to the abortion, when I began romanticizing my unborn child, to mourn that child. And in doing that I began to imagine him or her as being in a sense godly, a creature that was and is a part of me, even in death.

The child to me was and is genderless, which is also why the child is referenced using both gendered pronouns throughout the book.

In this section, the child is a "he." And it strikes me that someone coming to this poem without foreknowledge or context could read it as a love poem – which in a way, it is. 

It is, in a large way, because it's both a love and hate poem to the child; and not just to the child, but also to the speaker's body. The speaker could give birth but also bear death. (And the death, however much it’s the product of the woman’s victimization, is still a choice). This child provided both unconditional love (which the speaker longs to feel), and also a scary reality the speaker isn't prepared for. 

In this poem, I chose for the child to be masculine in order to mimic the Mother Mary and Jesus narrative. Still, there’s the inescapable fact that Mary, in all senses of the word, did not consent. God chose her, but did she choose God?  We don't ever really know. She "accepts" her fate, but did she have a choice?

Reading it again, I see how you're wrestling with that in this poem, especially with the part about abandoning a human form to "no one." It's a crisis of faith, and an immense one. 

Tell me more about the poem's form? (Not having read the rest of it). And its lack of punctuation? Did you do much revising of this particular section?  

So the poem's form is unusual for me, in that I’m normally a fan of having a lot of breathing room on the page. But in this case I’ve chosen to do the opposite, with one large stanza, partly to invoke the anxiety and intense feeling conveyed by Mary.

I’m going for a similar effect with the lack of punctuation, because these thoughts and hurried and rushed, as if the speaker were thinking them to herself, or trying to justify or  rationalize her reasoning to someone else, or to herself. To be honest I didn't revise this section that much – I revised a lot of the other poems in the collection significantly (and straight up just took poems out), but this poem had been with me for a while.

I know that feeling. So, your poems carry a deep sense of that inner life I think every poet seeks to access when we write, even if we're dealing with the external world. You're a student of the Tarot. Its call to look inward, its use of image and archetype – what role do these things play in your poetry? 

A huge one, even when I’m not writing about the Tarot. It’s one key way I function, by looking inward as a way to deal with traumas and weaknesses, which are really necessary stops on the path to fulfillment and a better understanding of your life and world.

In my poetry, it's how I understand my world, but also a key part of how I organize a narrative, even if it’s an ambiguous one, because the Tarot is also about the stories we tell ourselves.

Gustav Klimt's "Hope II": "I love any art successfully contains all of life, death, and beauty – and Klimt does this well."

And the variable and nuanced interpretations of a given narrative or image that is common to all poems. Have your poems been characterized by others as "dark"? What is your response?  

Always! They always are, to the point that I joke about it. I usually take being labeled as dark as a compliment, because it probably means I’m pushing boundaries with some of my ideas and making people uncomfortable in the process. I would hope that reading my poems ignites something in people, helps them evaluate themselves and their viewpoints on subject matter that is dark, but is part of life. In that sense being labeled “dark” is the biggest compliment I can receive.

At the same time, it’s funny because those who’ve read my work and are meeting me for the first time tell me I’m a lot more cheerful than they'd imagined I would be. We poets are not as one-dimensional as our work might make us appear.

Tell us about your poetry education. Also, what advice would you offer to poets writing and practicing without the MFA?

I have BFAs in literature and creative writing – I double-majored at SUNY Purchase, then went to Sarah Lawrence College for my MFA in poetry, and so in a lot of ways I took the traditional academic route, which on the one hand I don't regret. I made a lot of friends and learned a lot about writing in a short period of time, and the doors that opened then have led me to where I am now, as an editor, writer, and teacher (I’m a mentor and professor with Brooklyn Poets, and the work has been immensely rewarding).

But I also don't think MFAs are necessary to become a successful writer. They're expensive (unless you're fully funded), as well as time-consuming. If you’re already working and supporting yourself, unless you can take time off from your career it either means you have to quit your job and move, or attend a program right out of undergrad like I did, and that’s not possible for everyone. I was lucky in that I didn't have a career or a family, but years later, I’m still saddled with loans for the rest of my life. And I was too young to understand what that meant when I chose that path.

To be completely real, I don't think I made the kinds of connections that thousands of dollars in debt should have afforded me. Like I said, I wouldn't take it back, because I made priceless friends, but I honestly felt like many of my professors weren't invested in me, and for the money they pay young writers deserve more. 

I’m not resentful, and I could have probably been a little less shy. But I do think people are getting taken advantage of financially just for "experience" and a line on their resume.

Here’s the MFA alternative: if you read a lot, and set up a workshop group, that's what a MFA is. And that's what Brooklyn Poets does in a lot of ways, which is why it’s such a pleasure for me to be part of their work.

If I lived in Brooklyn I think I’d probably take every class. Jason Koo is doing incredible things with that organization.

It's proving to the world that you don't need a fancy MFA to be considered "real.”

Do you have any “homework” you’d like to assign our readers?

I do! I love Kim Hyesoon's book, All the Garbage of the World Unite. 

I tell all of my students to read it, and to mimic her style, especially the poem "Manhole Humanity". I'm all about writing the grotesque, gross moments in our lives, whether it's about sex or the time you did something terrible, or masturbated in the bathroom at your job, or whatever. And that's the writing prompt: write a two-page poem that’s a confession with a barrage of grotesque details in it.

Nice. I'm going and doing that after we're done. What's one poem you love, and why? 

I love "The Truth the Dead Know" by Anne Sexton. I love it because it contains both narrative and lyric power to it while also being about death, about how the dead speak to us all the time. It romanticizes death, which a lot of artists do – but the fear of it is present in it, too. With this poem Sexton took some big emotional risks and made herself very vulnerable. 

With those words, "I am tired of being brave." Lastly and because I've been wanting to ask anyway, what was it like to read with Kim Addonizio last week? 

Incredible. I've loved her work for so long, and have also taught her work, and so I felt happy for a lot of reasons, but mostly to hear her read, and to have the honor to read alongside her. It was magical, really. 

===

JOANNA C. VALENTE is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (forthcoming 2016, ELJ Publications) & Xenos (forthcoming 2017, Agape Editions). She received her MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, as well as the managing editor for  Luna Luna Magazine. Some of her writing has appeared in Prelude, The Atlas Review, The Huffington Post, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. She has led workshops at Brooklyn Poets.

Words and Their Shadows, the Snaking Line, and the Tiny Blades of Language: Cortney Lamar Charleston on His Poem "I'm Not a Racist"

Cortney Lamar Charleston

Some write poetry with an eye towards beauty and their own experience, but it’s a different and very necessary kind of poet who arrives at the page with the intent to unsettle, to shake others from their sleep. From the instant I discovered him during my routine reading on the web, it was clear that Cortney Lamar Charleston is that other kind of writer – in his use of poetry both as art and as path to change, of everything from our relationships to the wider social fabric. In this time of violence against marginalized groups, it feels more important than ever to shed light on those artists who prod us awake to others’ pain, who keep us from rolling over and going back to sleep. I’m grateful to Cortney for the reminder, and for taking the time to do this interview – after just getting back from a retreat at Cave Canem, no less. – HLJ

===

I came across “I’m Not a Racist” in  One Throne and instantly appreciated the truth-telling in it, this calling out of this country’s racial reality which is frankly a situation most people in my own experience are unlikely to discuss in “polite conversation.”  

I’m really happy that you found the poem! Interestingly, I think the unlikelihood of race ever being part of polite conversation is the conceptual foundation of the entire poem. Because people try to avoid the topic completely, it leads to a lot of “mental gymnastics” aimed at skirting around the subject, but language has evolved in such a way that different words, when strung together, can mean the same thing. I can say that I’d rather avoid going to certain neighborhoods because they’re “sketchy” – or, I can say I don’t want to go to that neighborhood because it’s full of poor people or black people, or something along those lines. Either way, whether it’s explicit or implied, the meaning is the same because the word “sketchy” does not have a clean history. I pay less attention to someone’s exact words than to the shadow those words cast on me as the listener or reader.

===

I’M NOT A RACIST

                            I'm a realist: if I see a pack of hoods approaching, loitering,                                                   
acting a littering of public sidewalks, I simply 

                      move to the other

side of the street, play it safe. I keep it on me at all times,                                                                                         for safety purposes. 

                                      In the event of open fire,     

                       you'd be a hazard  I told them when I, regrettably, couldn't
                                                allow the lot of them into the party.

                 We're part of the same

political party, according to all the numbers I've seen.
When I shut the schools down, I was just

                                             doing what must be done

                                 to balance a city budget out of wack. When I put what
                                                             I found in his trunk on balance,

                  it was enough to tip the scale

towards a felony. I used to be a waiter, and they never
tipped very well in my experience.

                                 While we were placing bets,

                        I noticed him tip his hand ever so slightly and there was
                                                a  ̶̶r̶a̶c̶e̶ face card in it. He didn't seem

               like much of a bluffer, so I stood

my ground. On the grounds of merit – that's how I got
into Yale. I'm just not that into black 

                                             girls, personally. I mean, personally,

                                   I don't SEE color. I'm so sorry, I really didn't see you there.
                                                                  There they go, using that word again:

                                if they can say it, then why can't I?

I can't understand why everybody is so sensitive these days.
I admit, what I said sounded a little bit

                                             insensitive, but believe me, I'm not

                     a racist. I'm a realist: if I see a pack of hoods approaching, loitering,
                                        acting a littering of public sidewalks,

                     I simply move to the other side.

I keep it on me at all times, for purposes: in the event of a
hazard, open fire  I told them, regrettably,

                                              looking at the body splayed before me.

===

The speaker of this poem, the one who calls him- or herself a realist, is obviously blind to that shadow you mention, shut off to the gut-punch of that last line with its splayed body. I’ve since been digging up your other poems online (including “State of the Union” in  Apogee Journal, and  “Feeling Fucked Up” in the Poets Respond section of  Rattle). They all seem to be tackling some of the biggest elephants in the room. And your poems remind me of what James Baldwin said about artists being here to disturb the peace, to rattle us out of our emotional safety and comfort – which is exactly what reading this poem did for me.

First and foremost, James Baldwin was a smart man and everybody should listen and take to heart to everything he has said or written. I’m definitely a disciple (or descendant maybe?) of his in regards to disturbing the peace. I’m glad you feel it is the work of rebellion that unsettles us out of our apathy and ignorance. That’s always the goal for me. There are so many people out in the world who don’t have that luxury, who have to move through the world with great concern for the respect of the sanctity of their body and the stability of their mind, all because what was built around them wasn’t built for them, if you get what I’m saying. Because I write with genuine concern for those people, my intentions are always to provoke, my purpose being to create room for empathy.

I resonate with what you said about a world being built around some people and not for them; we need only look as far as our history to see that. Could you tell us what inspired the poem? How did it first arrive for you?

To be completely honest, I’m not sure “where” the poem came from. Sure, I’m drawing from personal experiences as well as those that I know to have happened from others, but this particular poem is still kind of a mystery to me (or a miracle). Being a poet, I guess my natural tendency is to scrutinize words and try to squeeze the intent/meaning out of them. Race is a complex construct with a consequently complex language. It is the unspeakable that also must be spoken to in order for the world as we know it to function, to the benefit of some and the detriment of others, I must add. So we code the words. And me, I get my thrill from cracking them and making things plain.

I’m noticing how you re-spin some of these oft-spoken and frustratingly daft statements pertaining to race, such as “frankly, I don’t SEE color.” Or “there they go, using that word again.” How would you describe the transformation or revelation you’re aiming for with this kind of quoting of others’ comments pertaining to race?  

As far as I know, they just say that’s calling people out. As far as revelation, I think the fact that I am using these common phrases forces readers into one of two camps who identify with one of these two statements: (1) I am harmed by this language, or (2) I use this language and do harm to others. Notice I didn’t say “to do harm”. Oftentimes, there is no inherently ill intention on the part of the speaker, but we have learned in our lives to kill one another slowly with these tiny blades of language. We have learned to behave in a way that injures others, and without looking at those words and actions, we really have no way of seeing them. In that sense, this poem is a trick mirror.

And then there’s that line that’s impossible to ignore, with its strikethrough: “I noticed him tip his hand ever so slightly and there was / a  ̶̶r̶a̶c̶e̶ face card in it.” What’s happening here? Any technical or other lessons buried in this line?  

I think the section you pulled touches on a disdain for blacks and other people of color speaking to the reality of their marginalization. The “race card” is not a tool that can be leveraged by people of color, it’s actually the other way around. It effectively silences their voices, limiting both their ability to protest and the effectiveness of whatever protests they stage. It also reminds us of the slipperiness of language and harkens back to the shadow of words I mentioned before. We can shuffle words around or refuse to speak certain things, but the shadow of what we believe is always present.

MLK and Malcolm meet: if you look closely, you can find Cortney in the middle.

This rings so true; the importance of our attention to subtext. Now let’s go broader and talk a bit about the poem’s churning line breaks. How did you work those into the poem’s structure to enact its content?

When I think of this poem’s structure, I like to describe it as “snaking.” It’s a pun for sure, alluding to the fact that something is amiss, menacing but not easily detected. With that, I chose the specific breaks I did among these winding lines to play up tension or stress on certain words or phrases, places where the reader is supposed to glance in the mirror and hopefully see themselves.

If we were to see the words we write as an exercise of power, one could take the view (as I have) that all writers are propagandists whether they think of themselves that way or not. In submitting to journals, has it been more of a challenge placing those poems of yours that carry an explicit message around race (or social justice, or any other charged topic that might potentially unsettle a reader)?   

I’ve been able to get my words out there thanks to the graciousness of a number of editors and publications, so on the surface, I should say no. But I still have that apprehension, because if I believe a poem is of publishable quality, then I have to always wonder (beyond considerations of how the poem is crafted) whether my content was off-putting to the venues where I submitted certain pieces that were turned down. There’s really no way of knowing. But I find this idea an interesting tangent to larger conversations about representation within the world of literature. The reason your question is a question, in my mind, is because editorship is still an overwhelmingly white and male exercise, and having that intersection of identities may create certain blind spots or come with certain biases, depending on one’s lived experience and political leanings. The more that begins to change (meaning the broad spectrum of gatekeepers begin to look more like the writers submitting), the more my anxiety and concern begins to dissipate.

That's a change I hope we can all advocate for. So there’s this other question about poetry as an act of witness … part of the risk in writing a poem of intense emotion is expressing what could wind up landing on the other side as a moral message. How have you navigated this challenge in this poem? In all the poems you write?

This is a tension I’m often trying to untangle in my writing. I certainly approach my writing with an idea of what is just, and wanting to push myself and the reader further in pursuit of that justness. At the same time, I don’t want to come off as preaching. I want the truth of a sermon, yes, but not at the expense of sounding as if I am somehow less fallible despite my strong sense of what is good, right or wrong. It’s a very difficult balance to find, but in my experience, having a clear concept to help channel my emotional energy in the process of writing helps to smooth out the tension. This poem itself is a great example of that. In a poem I rely on the language I hear around me to construct a new meaning, rather than devolve into passions that make it seem as if I’m screaming at the reader. I’m talking to them. They might even be talking to themselves.

Tell us a little about your poetry education. And is there any advice you'd offer to poets writing and practicing without the MFA?

My formal poetry education consists of any poetry units I’ve covered in my elementary, middle school and high school years and the wonderful instruction and guidance I’ve received as part of my Cave Canem fellowship. Beyond that, I also was part of a spoken word collective during my undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania, but my academic concentrations there were in subjects other than English and Creative Writing. In that regard I’m probably more limited in formal education compared to most. But I also think that’s a good takeaway from poets who are writing without that structured curriculum and are not pursuing a MFA. I don’t believe programs can teach you how to write or find your voice; they offer an opportunity to study the work of others, learn the mechanics of poems (which you are capable of practicing intuitively or discern on your own) and give you the time and space to produce work and collaborate with other writers.

Any “homework” you’d like to assign our readers?

Yeah, I have an assignment for people… read Ocean Vuong’s debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Like yesterday.

Yes. An incredible poet.

Also, in regards to writing, I’d say to try and write a GHAZAL, simply because it’s my favorite form, one that’s easy to understand if you’re not used to working with forms, and one that invites your musicality to be on full and beautiful display.

Tell us a poem you love, and tell us why you love it.

Nicole Sealey’s “Object Permanence” which is available online via American Poetry Review. One thing that is absolutely clear to me after intensely writing for the past two years is that putting together a good love poem is incredibly difficult to do. It may be the most difficult poem to pull off. Sealey does it beautifully. The poem is precise and leaves no waste of words. It is built in the ordinary and the images are crisp. Finally, the last three lines are absolutely gorgeous, and mark transcendence within consciousness that speaks to what love really means. This is a poem, quite frankly, I aspire to in both the literal and figurative sense.

===

CORTNEY LAMAR CHARLESTON is a Cave Canem fellow, finalist for the 2015 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize and semi-finalist for the 2016 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Beloit Poetry Journal,  Gulf Coast,  Hayden's Ferry Review,  The Iowa Review,  The Journal,  New England Review,  Pleiades,  River Styx, Spillway, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. 

Failed Equations, Line Breaks, and the Edges of Everything: Catherine Abbey Hodges on Her Poem "An Algebra of Fifty"

Catherine Abbey Hodges

Rare is the moment when a newer poet gets approached by an experienced one with the offer of a hand with their project, and so I was grateful when Catherine Abbey Hodges gave me a free copy of her book  Instead of Sadness, expressed her support for the blog, and invited me to connect. Later over a brief phone call, I learned that, like me, she'd once considered pursuing an MFA in poetry and then opted for the alternative path. I'm quite sure that no one reading her first collection would doubt that this path has served her: in poem after stunning poem, I was treated to models for my own work, a richness of music, and a depth of field that can only come from an alertness to none other than the school of life itself. – HLJ

===

First off, I just have to mention that I read your poem “An Algebra of Fifty” to my husband and he loved it, and he said also that his mother would love it – someone who went back to get her master’s degree to teach mathematics in her mid-fifties. Here's a poem about someone trying to figure it out.

Well, regards to your husband! I’m gratified that the poem spoke to him. And yes, the “someone” in the poem is indeed trying to “figure it out”, using tools and formulas that worked in the past, and finding them ineffective.

But before we go any further I should say that although most of the poems I write are fairly accessible, some remain at some level mysterious even to me. “An Algebra of Fifty” is that latter kind of poem, and so though it’s mine, I don’t know that I can speak with any certainty about its meaning or intention.  Still (and maybe in fact for that reason), I welcome the opportunity to talk about it as a way of deepening my own relationship with the piece.

===

AN ALGEBRA OF FIFTY

Out back between the marvelous

weeds and the volunteer tomatoes,

she's a windsock in mid-life's rush

hour breeze. Day shuts down

all over. One plus n equals

match strike, doorbell, hush

of the crowd. Voices through

a window across a canyon, voices

across water, crickets in the ivy.

Anise seed on the tongue – texture,

then taste. Regret – taste, then

texture. A letter being opened

in Lisbon. Or not being opened

in the next room. Not the idea of God,

after all, nor God's proximity,

but the light under a door.

The breeze picks up, makes a nest

of her hair, as she solves for n

with all she's got. Behind her, the moon

rises burly, gibbous. The edges

of everything whistle.

===

I resonate with your speaking of the poem as an artifact of mystery – I think it indicates how many poets write to explore something rather than reach firm conclusions, saying “this is how I see it". That kind of exploration can often result in a piece that isn’t going to be easy for our facile minds to understand. Who is the woman in this poem and how was she written from your life?

The woman here is disoriented and maybe even flummoxed by the failure of her life’s tried-and-true “equations” as the means to a satisfactory answer or an end-result. If one plus n equals a number, then she’ll know how to solve for n. But if one plus n = “match strike" or "anise seed” – wow, what do we do with that? Our old means of “solving” our lives, the ones we get rewarded for with good grades, jobs, promotions – well, we may reach a point when they’re not so useful. So this speaker is somewhere in the thick of her life, and finding herself unable (maybe for the first time) to figure things out, “solve” them. In fact, perhaps she’s the one, somehow, being “solved.” And as the poem ends she’s left with that gibbous moon and the edges of everything whistling. There’s the sense that maybe that’s as much as she needs…not the answers or the solutions, but the being there with the big mysteries, and giving her solution-bent brain and heart a rest.

Is the woman in the poem me? No doubt I started the poem that way. It seems to me we’re a generation (actually, a century or two) steeped in a weird, almost superstitious confidence in rational and linear thought, with a cerebral approach to all our problems. But we may, if we’re attentive and ready, come upon larger verities, ones that defy logic and are impossible to quantify. They even defy our precious words – they’re deeper than words, or on the other side of them, which puts a poet in a quandary but is also strangely liberating.  And that  takes us back to the woman in the poem, quite possibly me, who's in the process of setting down one way of moving through the world and taking up, or living into, a new one.

And I get the idea our problem-solver is summoning a kind of magic in the process of solving for the “n”: “One plus n equals match strike, doorbell, hush // of the crowd.” Then later, “voices / across water, crickets in the ivy.” These images and energies – they appear to be discrete from one other; each carrying its own meaning while remaining gorgeously opaque. Tell us a little about the spaces from which you’ve drawn them?

Such a great question, Hannah; that interests me too, and I love your phrase – “images and energies.” That feels deeply accurate. Those images and energies are layered in from far-flung times and places in my life – the voices across water, for instance, from the island of Sumatra in Indonesia where I lived with my husband and our children for eight years. And they include my mother, memories she passed on to me – the voices through the window across a canyon. She lived, as a young child, at the edge of a canyon. I never saw that home or canyon, but it’s there in my image bank, indelible. So in the center section of the poem there’s an almost lapidary thing going on – that layering.

Very rich. And I’m very interested in the “letter being opened / in Lisbon. Or not being opened // in the next room,” a phrase that straddles two stanzas. In this poem each stanza seems to function in the literal sense of the word stanza, as a kind of “room.” Did you intend it that way from the outset, or did you come upon its structure in revision?

Structure for me is definitely the product of revision. I worked on this poem for a couple of years before I sent it out, layering in and rearranging images (especially in what turned out to be the second stanza) as well as experimenting with overall form. I was happy to arrive at an incremental, steady opening out as the stanzas increase from six to seven to eight lines – for me, it works with the hope that this woman may be moving toward letting some of that solving work go. She’s trying to solve for n, but her deeper revelation is suggested by the structure. The light under a door and that burly moon in the final “room” suggest something else at work, something she doesn’t have to figure out before it’s real or true – something that may happen after the poem closes.

At this year’s AWP I attended a panel on revision and was taken by John Hoppenthaler’s notion of the poem as something that takes place on a stage. He says we might think of the page as a kind of stage, on which something has happened before the curtain opens, and where something further will happen after the curtain closes. Perhaps that thinking is useful with this poem: it intimates a shift that isn’t realized “onstage.”

As long as we’re talking about revision, I’ll also say that the poem as it appears in Instead of Sadness is a revision of the version that was published in The Southern Review  (Nov. 2009) and on Verse Daily  (Jan. 2010). I would hope that the changes reflect my growth as a poet. For one thing, in earlier versions I’d been meticulous about the words that started each line but less thoughtful about line endings. The first line of stanza 2, for example, ended with the article “a": “Voices through a / window…”. So I made a number of small but I think important revisions to line breaks to honor the value of line-end “real estate”, as poet Molly Fisk puts it.

But the biggest change was ending the poem sooner. It used to end: “The edges of / everything whistle. They almost sing.” Over time I realized that “they almost sing” lets us off a little too easy, is perhaps a little too leading. So now it’s just “the edges / of everything whistle.” The whistle around the edges does it for me. I’m happy with the mystery, the intimations.

And I hope that last line brings us back to the beginning of the third stanza and the “nots” – “not the idea of God, / after all, nor God’s proximity, / but the light under a door.” This is true to my experience of the divine, which has moved away from an idea (that of something that can be figured out, something “gettable”) to an unfolding experience of something just out of view, throwing a wild, gracious, and startling light that’s familiar and not at the same time. When I'm writing well, I'm listening and feeling for that and writing towards it.

That is so well said. On reading your book of poems, Instead of Sadness, I’m most taken with the recurrence of certain images that feel universal: the sky, the natural world, morning and night, dawn/dusk.

The natural world, its rhythms and cycles – that’s my way into almost everything. When I was growing up my parents used to stop and stare at the sky, and I thought everybody did. One of my earliest memories is of them waking me up during one of our vacations and getting me out of the car to look at a wheat field at sunrise, blowing in the wind like waves on a lake. All the ocean images in the book come from a combination of my childhood in a beach town and a month I spent alone in 2011, in another beach town, writing poems. During that month, the poems I’d already written (including “An Algebra of Fifty”) and the new ones set up a conversation with each other, and I realized that they probably belonged in one collection.

Can you tell us a little about the role of music in your life and poetry? I know you collaborate a lot with musicians, and that other kind of music is a presence I feel strongly in your poems.

I grew up with a lot of music in my home, and I married a man who did as well and who is himself a 'cellist and vocalist. Although I'm not conscious of the role of music in the first drafts of my poems, if I follow myself around in the revision process, I find myself consistently revising toward sound and meter that will support what I’m trying to get at in the poem. Again, though, it’s not particularly conscious.

Thinking of music another way, I’ll say that the publication of Instead of Sadness has brought with it some wonderful reading opportunities, and my husband Rob and I have collaborated for many of those. Marie Howe talks about the “unsayable center” of a poem. Rob and I are experimenting with trying to give that unsayable center a little more room, a little more air time, by following a set of poems with an improvisatory ‘cello response – and it’s not music as performance, but sound and music as a room, a kind of space for those poems to say or hint at something further. It’s been fun and invigorating, and we’ve had warm responses.

Catherine on her process: "For me, a poem rarely gets its start when I’m sitting at my desk. Give me something like this: tatters, a bee, a suggestive background blur (because I’m holding out against bifocals a little longer)."

That “unsayable center” surely finds other ways to be expressed, and music is such a great vector for it. You’ve succeeded in publishing and writing incredible poems without the community and support of an MFA. What advice would you offer to poets writing and practicing without the MFA?

Thanks for your kind words about my poems, Hannah. My formal education in poetry to date has pretty much consisted of five weeks spread out between 1999 and 2013. Over that time I’ve attended the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference four times, and the Blue Flower Arts workshop at the Atlantic Center for the Arts once. These are week-long conferences with intensive workshops, craft talks, and swaths of time to write. They gave me instruction and insight, reassurance, an intensely nourishing if temporary community, and a number of long-term friendships with other poets. It’s worked for me, though frankly not something I think of as a model – it’s just how my story has unfolded. But most of my life, and my growth as a poet, has happened in the time between these workshops.

My best advice is to read a lot of poems. Find poets you love. One practical way to do this is to listen to The Writer’s Almanac, or read Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. When a poem grabs you, track the poet down and read more of his or her work. Buy a collection by that poet and study it. Become an autodidact. I chose my conferences on the basis of that approach – after immersing myself in their poems, I knew I wanted to work with Jane Hirshfield and Marie Howe, for example. And of course if you do attend a workshop, maintain a few connections with other participants, keep exchanging work, try to meet up physically for other opportunities, and rejoice in the opportunities the Internet provides for such exchanges.

There’s a website for writing and critique groups called Inked Voices, which I’ve been part of for some time, and I highly recommend it to readers looking for an online community. I’ve connected with and learned from some wonderful people because of it.

Way leads on to way, right? One year – 2006, I think – I met a poet named Susan Cohen in a NVWC workshop with Stephen Dunn. We stayed in touch off and on, and Susan told me about Molly Fisk’s Poetry Boot Camp. Susan and I participated together in a Boot Camp of Molly’s one May (it’s a five-day, poem-a-day online workshop). And it was Molly who got me thinking about line endings, which many months later influenced my revision of “An Algebra of Fifty.” I recommend the experience. Molly’s a skilled guide and a fine poet.

Ten years or so after we met, Susan and I remain friends, though we live hours away from each other. In fact we’re reading together for the launch of her second collection of poems, A Different Wakeful Animal,  on June 12 in the Berkeley/Oakland area.

So exciting and I wish you lived closer so that I could attend. Any “homework” you would like to assign our classroom of readers?

Getting back to our earlier conversation about line breaks, here’s an exercise I often give my students at Porterville College, a community college in California’s San Joaquin Valley. I actually came up with it as an alternative for those who wish to write something other than a sonnet, but it yields surprising results and I've begun using it as its own assignment and playing with it myself when I feel a little stale. It’s simple:

• Choose a prose passage of six to sixteen lines. It should be a passage that interests you but not one you know well or have any kind of special commitment to. News stories, how-to articles, and things of that ilk work well. It shouldn’t be anything overtly “poetic.”

• Type it out.

• Paste it into another document, and then start breaking lines. Just have fun. Don’t think too hard about it. When you’re done, give this “poem” a title –really, it’s a found poem, isn’t it? Give it an epigraph that cites the original passage.

• Cut and paste the original again, breaking the lines in different places.
  

• Do it several more times. Experiment with stanzas. Experiment with one to three word lines (a long, skinny poem) and with lots of line length variation. Each version gets its own title. The titles should reflect the differences achieved by the line (and stanza) breaks.

When I do this with a class, I ask students to hand in the three versions they find most interesting and write up a reflection on the process, on what they view as the strengths and shortcomings of each version, and on their broader take-away about line breaks. I like the playfulness of the exercise; it involves language that you’re not invested in while giving you authority within the parameters of a specific set of words that fall in a particular order. So it’s open, yet it’s constrained – and it’s a surprisingly powerful way to learn about the relationship between lineation and meaning.

For more on lineation, there’s a good article by Rebecca Hazelton at the Poetry Foundation website, with exercises that involve working with poems rather than prose passages.

Thank you so much for all these links. Now share with us a poem you love, and tell us why you love it.

I return often to the poems of Peter Everwine, and in particular his poem “Drinking Cold Water” (first published in The New Yorker in 1972 and later in From the Meadow: Selected and New Poems from University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). The poem’s speaker addresses his grandmother, 20 years dead. It’s a relatively short poem in which, about mid-poem, he appears to himself as a boy. The spare language and perfect sounds of this haunting poem shimmer with what’s gone. It’s one of those intimate poems – an intimate subject, with details specific to a particular life – that I find myself inside. I’m the boy, the grandmother, the aging man far from his childhood roots – and I’m me, somehow addressed directly. When I read it, every time I read it, I feel something large that could be joy or could be grief, but is most certainly wonder.

===

CATHERINE ABBEY HODGES's debut book of poems is Instead of Sadness, winner of the 2015 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. Paulann Petersen says, "Catherine Abbey Hodges offers us – inside each musical line, within each vibrant trope – a luminous wisdom. Each poem gives us a world 'replenished like a well // in blues and greens and wings.'" Also author of the chapbook All the While, Catherine teaches English at Porterville College, where her students have been astonishing and inspiring her since 2001. Most days she likes to be outside before dawn, and every day she agrees with Stanley Kunitz that "to choose to live as a poet in the modern superstate is in itself a political action."

"Embiggening", What Is Less, and the Human Soul Writ Large: Matt Muth on His Poem "Learning a Foreign Language"

Yep. That's Matt Muth. And a scimitar.

My encounter with Matt Muth at AWP in Los Angeles consisted mostly of sitting across from him at the book fair and watching him repeatedly throw a ball in the air while hawking his Seattle-based publication Pacifica Literary Review. In what would eventually turn into an amusing experiment in meta-conversation, the raw transcript of my Google chat interview with him is shot through with bracketed wisecracks that belie a dead-seriousness over big ideas. Incidentally this would be my first contact with his expression “embiggening”: a word that sounds a lot like “beginning”, and a place I sense this poet returns to often when he’s not running a publication or headed to his next hockey game. “I am a monument,” he writes in a recent Facebook post, and not without irony, “to failing upward.” – HLJ 

===

Your poem "Learning a Foreign Language", recently out in RHINO, dances at the edges of everyday vocabulary. On the surface it would seem intimidating to a reader who doesn’t know what a postulate or onanism is, yet the poem as a thing is shockingly unpretentious. What triggered the writing of it?  

It basically grew out of a feeling of not being good enough for a significant other, but more specifically the feeling that when this person looked at me they were speaking a completely different language than I was when I looked at me, if that makes sense. And the poem is about that odd disconnect between who you thought you were and what you thought you were made of, compared to what an observer looks at you and sees. That was the generative emotional place of the poem.

=== 

LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

I needed to associate like with like, object
with suggestion. I needed to be trained. I taped
index cards to my possessions: the nightstand

said onanist, the toilet said equivocator; my desk
was narcissist, and the venetian blinds
were all cowards. I had some nouns, but soon

this was not enough learning: I needed adjectives,
verbs, I needed fluency. Each pair of boxer-briefs
got a false advertising patch stamped

on the codpiece; I wrote won’t block shots
on the blades of my hockey skates in lip gloss,
each new term a wine grape in my mouth —

I burned vestigial into each rib and shaved
vapid on the side of my head. I’m getting better
with practice: soon we’ll be able to communicate —

you’ll sit across from me mouthing words
and pointing, your hands their own bright
postulates, and I’ll thrill with understanding.

===

  

The poem clearly wasn't written from the sense of that "other" being a non-speaker of English, but the idea of understanding at a deeper level. But your poetry does seem to wrestle with this theme, the imprecision and inadequacy of language to express the utterances we want to map onto the world. I was just reading two other poems of yours, “Lesbians or Exchange Students” from about a year ago in Rattle, about the paradox of personal and life fulfillment…and then “What Farm Girls Know” in The Adirondack Review. Two very different poems, but which end in a way that feels familiar: with those haunting words, "...what less." Did you feel that "less-ness" at work in this poem also? What does the word "less" signify in your world? 

I think the less-ness is definitely at work here as well. A lot of my work and my ideas about the world seem to be tied in some way to representations of size or scale. I feel like the soul is large and should be written large, and when I'm at my best I'm expansive and gracious and contain multitudes, in that Whitmanian way. And so often when "less" or a lessening appears in my work, I think it's right to say that it’s trying to express a sort of defilement of man/woman's rightful place, position, and orientation in the universe. A lot of my poems just want desperately for everyone to get back to being big.

And that largeness, as opposed to the “less-ness,” is certainly not showing up here in the form of long lines or expressions of ecstasy or praise, or any other elements that could be described as Whitmanic. But tell me a little more about the defilement. Are you saying a poem for you functions to tear down walls, eradicate some kind of barrier?

It's not necessarily any one thing or any particular action, I guess, but anything that makes a human soul smaller seems kind of awful to me. Of course, those diminishing things are going to differ person to person, and that's as it should be. The tension around this idea comes in, I think, because we live in a world that demands so many compromises of ourselves and our ideas of ourselves that it becomes slightly heroic to even acknowledge that internally we can be expansive and powerful. In that sense, the barriers are internalized even if they've been imposed by the world, and they probably look different for every individual. Looking at it in terms of my life, I think there is this huge and diverse number of things and ideas fighting to make their way in the world from inside of me – and (at the risk of sounding like a narcissist), are threatened by a shrinking or lessening away from that fundamental grandeur we're all born with, that sense of the self. 

I hear you. It seems this kind of diminishment is the obsession that drives your work, or a lot of it. I've only known you a short while but you strike me as a guy who doesn’t take much of anything too seriously. Still your poems have a heft to them that shows a struggle, a thing I think poets should never shy from – a hidden well of searching, in some sense. How do you tap that? What’s your writing practice like?

I'm not sure that I do anything particularly special or noteworthy in terms of struggle or searching or anything like that. I'm actually terrible at keeping a regimen and producing day after day after day, but I have a notebook my brother got me in Venice that I've been trying to get better at filling up. One very good piece of advice someone gave me is that it's important to write without a purpose sometimes; it's easy for me to get caught up in writing POEMS rather than just writing. When I sit down with the intention of writing a POEM (in all caps, denoting a thing of great form and beauty that’ll undoubtedly bring me many accolades and huge sums of money), I have a tendency to get caught up in the ideas and structures of what a poem is, should do, and should be. And this tends to squash a lot of what makes poetry, at its best, inimitable: the sense that a poem can do anything, can realize itself in any way or shape it wants, as long as it serves the unique necessity of itself rather than an idea of what it should be. I think that getting bogged down by the histories and ideas of what a POEM should be or do often kills the very thing that makes poems so great, which is the infinite possibility of creation. And so I always try to remind myself to create for the purposes of creation alone, rather than trying to shoehorn the whole process into a set of formal constraints, or a specific idea, or an end result.

So currently the last thing I have in my notebook is the phrase "I'll make a lash of spiders/and scourge the world." Is that ever going to find its way into a poem? Probably not, but I find it amusing to imagine a whip made of spiders holding hands, and me whirling it around like some tiny lunatic, and there's value for me in writing something that is kinda stupid and makes you laugh, even if The Iowa Review would probably look down on you for doing so if they ever found out.

It does seem like a lot of material is useful even if it doesn't get used up. Those spiders bring us to this topic of truth in poetry – writing from reality versus what we might describe as “making shit up to tell the truth". How much of "Learning a Foreign Language" was based on metaphor/imagery as opposed to reality – did you actually tape index cards to your stuff (or write on “hockey skates in lip gloss," a line I love)? At what point did the facts of the poem begin to peel away from your lived experience?

I think this gets at that weird intersection of truth and metaphor that doesn't have a name as far as I know. I didn't tape index cards to my stuff or shave my head, and the truth is that I will block shots because I desperately want to be a credit to my team. But these things felt true; they reinforced that sterling ringing “yes” of the way I felt in that moment. And again, the truth was that poverty of spirit and action that was playing itself out with this person, in the way they regarded me and the totems that constitute my life. As writers I think we all understand to some degree that the objects with which we surround ourselves fulfill an important emotional function. It connotes and reflects us – both to ourselves and to those around us. And there’s a particularly destabilizing thing that happens when someone, whose esteem and favor you desperately want, looks upon the symbolic pile of things that constitutes your idea of yourself and gives it the thumbs-down. It’s a rejection of the self, but it’s also a rejection of the symbols of the self, which is particularly devastating to a writer or anyone who trades in symbols and metaphor, since writing is probably the most powerful mode of expression known to our human tribe. Which means it also insinuates that the process by which you’ve created the self is flawed, like the tools you’ve been creating yourself with are defective. And that's when you get an image in your mind of these weird ugly burrs sticking out from all over you, and all the angles are wrong, and you’re leaking, and it’s all fundamentally true: that this is exactly the way you have made yourself, when this whole time you thought you were on to something good.

There's probably a word for this phenomenon that's classy and intellectual and that all astute readers know, but I'm really none of those things and so I can't tell you what it is. 

I think what I try to do is to bend the imagination to reflect the truth of the heart/soul/feeling in the physical world somehow, so that my verbal rendering of objects or the environment begin to reflect “the order of the self” at any given time. All this seems just as true and “real” to me as, say, relating a true-to-life, Kafka-style account of waking up one morning and having my underwear insult me.

Emblematic of Matt's process: "Poetry is a torch to light the world, a manifestation of freedom, and a huge bronze lady with a spiky hat."

Love it. Looking at the levels at which a poem operates – I think we talked about the emotional vs. the intellectual already – let's go through some of the others. At the level of sound and rhythm (and as a reader I do hear them in this poem), how do you create music? Do you read aloud; do you try on words, do you break up sentences, etc? Also, how it's said that a poem should not forget the body – as in that stunning line, "each new term a wine grape in my mouth"? How do you bake such elements into the writing? 

I grew up listening to Motown and soul and got really into Tupac and West Coast rap in the 1990s (dating myself here), so I think my concerns with the rhythm and sound qualities of words derive from some of that. They're sort of my default way of ordering and recognizing the world around me, and I feel that sounds and rhythm can create pleasure and meaning (for both the reader and myself), out beyond the prescriptive definitions or ideas of the words. I don't really read aloud or have any other special technique I use other than a thesaurus; it's something that has always come naturally to me. The challenge in having that natural inclination, I think, is that at times it's very difficult for me to remember that the body has to be in there, as you've noted. 

It's easy for me to invest all the thrust and power of a poem in the words themselves, and not ground it firmly in the physicality of the place it comes from. You know those people who say they're in touch with their bodies? I'm not one of them, and it's a struggle for me to remember that the body is absolutely necessary (and even desirable) for the construction of words and emotions to begin with. And formally I tend to default to tercets or quatrains, but I'm pretty good about letting the poem find the symmetry it needs on its own. 

I'm looking now at your last line..."and I'll thrill with understanding." Could you tell us about what you think makes for a slam-dunk ending to a poem or at least try, since maybe with the ice hockey you have this down? 

I think hockey is the least likely sport in the world to produce someone with a flair for the a slam-dunk ending, but that would lead into a lecture about the ethos of hockey and that’s not what we’re here for, obviously...but for me, a good ending expands the world of the poem beyond the boundaries of the page or the screen, even the boundaries of the thoughts one happens to be accessing. I think it goes back to the idea of embiggening the poem and the poet in some ways: a good ending honors and expands the idea or emotion of the poem out beyond what it formerly was up to those final lines. In the end, those final lines must succeed in annexing or transforming that old emotional territory.

The particularity of this poem is its yearning for intimacy as its prime emotional core. In theory, the poem's ending creates that intimacy the speaker longs for with the other person by becoming fluent in this new hyper-critical language, so that he’s assessing himself in concert with the beloved's vision. Both speaker and the other have thrown themselves into it in this poem, and the ending line creates the payoff for doing so (something shared, an intimacy of language and thought, closeness, a bond). And in doing so it turns all the negative assessment towards a positive desire, while (I hope) complicating both simultaneously. So I guess a good ending both expands and hones the central concern of the poem, and, if it can flip or confuse the dynamics and logic which the poem has established for itself up to that point, all the better.

Paradox, an insanely tall order, but necessary in poetry and achievable with some awareness and practice. So, you have a MFA from the University of Washington, and you’re an editor. From where you’re sitting, any advice you can offer to the poets who are non-MFAers?  

Fundamentally, I'm not convinced that the distinction between MFA and non-MFA writers is really all that important. What an MFA basically teaches you is how to craft writing in (and often, for) a specific environment consisting of other MFA people. Non-MFA poets can be at a disadvantage when it comes to publishing in journals and such, which are primarily governed/run by MFA-type people, but only because they haven't had long-term exposure to what that particular community looks for. So if you're a non-MFA poet looking to publish, I'd suggest reading as many small and mid-tier print and online journals as possible to get a feel for what they’re looking to run. One of the keys to getting your work published is sending it to the right place, and the more knowledge you have about who's printing what styles and authors, the more success you're likely to have. The other thing I'd suggest is not giving a shit if you don't have an MFA: it doesn't make you any better or worse of a writer than someone who has one. It’s your approach to the craft that makes you better or worse. Keep working on that, and keep reading -- the only way you lose at writing is if you quit.

Zang. Lastly, tell us a poem you love. Any poem at all, and why.  

My favorite poem of all time is C.P. Cavafy's "The God Abandons Antony". It's the best poem on ambition, loss, and embiggening that I've ever read, and that I probably ever will read. For someone like me whose writing tends to intersect with those three themes a lot, there's no better example of how a poem could incorporate all those things seamlessly. I feel like I could talk about it for days without ever actually approaching what makes it so great, but one of the things that moves me every time is the generous, affirmational humanity that sits at the heart of the poem. Eventually we lose everything that's precious to us, whatever the scale is; we might as well ennoble that loss as much as we can, and that strikes me as so warm and sad at the same time, that I lose it. It's amazing, and you all should go read it.

===

MATT MUTH is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Pacifica Literary Review. He received his MFA from the University of Washington and his undergrad degree from Eastern Michigan University. He teaches English at a technical college for video game designers in Redmond WA, lives in Seattle, and will totally block shots most of the time.

Humans and Nature, Page versus Stage, and Poems as Animals: Kelly Weber on Her Poem "The Field Guide to Small Dead Things"

Kelly Weber

I was a bleary-eyed and fast-fading bookfair exhibitor on day two of AWP when Kelly Weber approached the Primal School table and nearly made me spill my coffee by mentioning “the democratization of poetry education." Two possibilities occurred to me; she’d either read my mind or my personal slogan for this blog wasn’t so unique after all – a recognition that was hugely liberating. Here's what became evident to me during our interview: her love of sound and audience and language, her patience for knowing every frontier of creative possibility in a poem’s writing, a bone-deep enjoyment of the teaching process, and perhaps above all else, her reverence for the wild world. – HLJ

===

I've been spending a bit of time with your poems and fiction and am inspired by a thematic through-line in your writing, this occupation with the natural world. In writing your poem "The Field Guide to Small Dead Things," was there a specific trigger or memory? How did this poem come to you, or how did you come to this poem?  

There’s definitely an ecological streak to my poetry and fiction. I don't write a ton of fiction because my brain seems to groove on poetry, and so even my fiction emerges with a strongly poetic bent...but the predominant theme of animals makes its way into both, certainly. Because I discovered the same wild streak surfacing repeatedly in my poems, I decided to make that the focus of my unpublished thesis collection, "The Field Guide to Small Dead Things". On a broad scale, this group of poems focuses on the day-to-day encounter of humans with animals. What small things do we humans take for granted? What power do we assume over small things like bugs or snakes that make its way into "our" spaces: homes, garages, etc.? I think there's a lot of room to look at our faults and weaknesses when meditating on an animal or wild thing, and also when we talk about our stories and interactions. That's been the broad theme of the thesis.

So with the poetry – and major thanks to Gravel  for publishing this poem – I've been submitting my work here and there. There were actually two sources of inspiration for "Field Guide”. The first was an experience I’d had as a seventh-grader when our teacher led us through the woods, over a period of months, to record what we saw. We actually got to walk in the woods behind our school, which was a nice change from being in the classroom, but at one point we hit a creek and the teacher asked everyone to jump over it. I took one look at it and thought, "Yeah...no." I can't swim, and it was winter and I was pretty sure I'd slip on the ice, so I stayed behind and just tried to jot down what I could. All these years later that incident seems so emblematic of my life: I wanted to be a bio major, but I wanted to sit and observe things more than I wanted to cross the creek.

So this incident kept resurfacing in my daily freewriting and in the notes I took here and there, and two things emerged: that image of the other students fading away from me, leaving my English/biologist-wanna-be self behind, and not knowing what to do with it beyond that. When I finally put the thesis together, I had the idea for a collection with the name "The Field Guide to Small Dead Things", but didn't have the title poem written yet. It finally occurred to me to try combining those two orphaned threads of thought, and I think it ignited them both. The poem had an end and the collection had a piece that I felt captured what I was trying to do in all the poems, which was record the small and dead or harmed and wild things in our lives – while also honoring those things through poetry and careful observation of the world around us. Which I think is its own way of honoring all life.

===

THE FIELD GUIDE TO SMALL DEAD THINGS
​
We chart our course west across field
and tail our seventh grade teacher
from brick-scalloped science room
to woods beyond the school,
spiral-bound notebooks in hand
to practice our powers
of observation: wind, weather, February sun.
 
At the chain-link fence
woven into diamonds,
he slips a key into the padlock
and unhooks the magical silver stirrup
to lead us through the border
from school to woods beyond.
We crush monochrome-crusted grass
and trace the runic grooves
of haw bark, sap asleep
as filaments in unlit bulbs.
The forest teethed with silver
and carbon, where leaves
of seasons past clot beneath our feet.
 
Ahead, the creek zinced with ice
has thawed a little, burbles
raw live iron. One by one
the teacher helps us step across.
I sway over white-ringed stones
moss-slick and treacherous
and I refuse.
The other students move on,
their blue and green coats recede
and I linger on the other side.
 
While they crouch over handprints
of mysteries, what’s crossed at night
unseen so close to learning’s doorstep,
I—as fearful
of poor grades as drowning— 
fill my notebook with everything
they don’t see, not worth noticing:
rock and clay water’s chewed away,
branch-rattled cold,
all things blued and breathing
left in quiet after children
migrate toward what’s pointed out.
Another world beneath this ochre one
lidded and stirring.
 
And by April’s time, I’ve trained this eye
with each month’s trip, each stop
at the river’s line, I’ve twirled
the pencil’s rule and covered pages
in graphite. At deadline,
I type my log of small descriptions
and names to hand
to the teacher sailing rows.
 
To our mutual amazement,
he thumbs it to reveal tables
pegged and socketed with tracks,
snapped twigs, sky deceased
the common thousands
and common millions
I recorded in wire spirals.

Window after window
opens to kestrel chests
and finches plucking seed, gold—
somehow, in creating
the field guide to small dead things
I’ve catalogued the coming of the spring.

===

I was just thinking about your other poem  “Yes” that was published in Bird’s Thumb…the one about the dragonfly. it grapples so deeply and darkly (and I think humorously) with life and death, and the human/civilized relationship to nature and the exercise of power that comes with it. In the initial writing of this poem, how did you arrive at its structure? And perhaps tell us a bit about your relationship with the poetic line.

“Yes” was actually the first poem of the collection and inspired the rest, so it's fitting that you'd mention it. Unfortunately, one way we exercise human power is by turning animals into art – whether it's a cave painting we’re making or a carving on a wooden box. So really, writing a collection about that topic just reinforces the ethical wrongness of it; continues what it rails against and ultimately suggests some failure.

The line length matches much of the collection, a lot of which has a sort of formal sound or diction, and it also matches the unit of breath the past six years of training have instilled in me. When I started out, I really loved long lines, but most of the time I couldn't make them work – people ran out of breath reading them and there was no obvious benefit like there would be to, say, Whitman's lines. Most of my lines are longer in early drafts, but I tighten them as I revise to "rough up" the language (draw greater attention to the line as a unit of meaning by itself, creating a little bit of ambiguity before moving to the next line), and to emphasize the final words of each line. So "ice," "eye," "handprints," and "burble" get highlighted, in addition to the reader having a chance to sort of process each image before moving on to the next one. In a way, the lines mirror the small boxes you might see in a logbook: image, image, and image, all set next to each other.

That's an excellent segue into my next question about how you write as a slam poet. The YouTube video recording of you reading "Attack of the 50' Uterus" had me in stitches – a very different poem from this one in both energy and tone. Do you write poems for slam differently than you write for the page? Do you separate slam poems from your other poems, or are you including them all together in this collection?

Ha, yes! I was just thinking of that, actually, because short lines are MUCH easier for breath-work when reading or performing for a slam. They make memorization easier, too, because images broken into lines or stanzas just map more easily onto the mind. But to be fair, I've only performed one poem completely memorized. Yes, my slam work is very different. I would almost consider it something entirely separate from poetry. Poetry derives from song, of course, or at least falls somewhere between everyday speech and song, but slam feels more like song to me in that I can "lay it out there", saying what I want to say directly instead of implying it. It also enables me to grab or combine multiple stories instead of focusing on a few.

One poem in my collection originated as a slam poem, but the "page" version is extremely different in that I've pared it down to just a few of the original images, with long lines and none of the original tone. I actually prefer the slam version, but the looseness and self-indulgence of the slam version didn't seem to work with either the page or the collection. Navigating "page vs. stage" is still really hard for me, and if I ever decided to write a blog, it would just be about trying to figure that out! I love slam, but in the end, a slam poem feels like "cool talk" that allows me to get intimate with the audience in ways I can’t always do with my page poems. Gosh, it's so confusing to even talk about. I've thought about trying to slam more because I love it when I'm in it, but it’s just a fact that not all of my poems would work as slam.

Kelly's work area. "Yes, a good portion of my desk is taken up by a cat cylinder."

All poetry is really connected to the body and the breath, because it's literally your breath captured as a text on the page, and it's YOUR breath putting those words out where people can hear them on stage. However, slam feels like a more direct way to do that. There's time to infer and insinuate and give people layers to ponder over in a text poem. A performed piece needs to grab an audience immediately. Imagery is my go-to for that, in addition to frequently shifting the emotional balance of a piece – from funny to serious and back. I want to get their attention, make them buy in and be surprised. That moment of surprise, or "the turn” – the VOLTA, as the Italians called it in sonnet form back in the day – is key to me in a slam piece. The breath is different, too, because I feel like I'm having a conversation with the audience but grabbing interesting words and images to do it. In a way, it's like giving a speech. People buy into the fact that you're talking to them as a person but using something that's already prepared. Spontaneous, authentic, and prepared all at once. And the breath is different because I'm nervous and have to focus on speaking slowly and in the tone that I want. The audience is only going to get this message once!

I guess when I'm playing with an idea, I give it room to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. If it's walking around on two legs, getting in my face and yanking at the end of the leash, I try it as a slam. If it's a quieter, wilder thing, working through implication, I let it be a poem. But I'm never afraid to try it multiple ways. And sometimes I just have a feeling it wouldn't work as a slam. A poem about a tree would have to be hopping around pretty energetically for me to feel like it could be a slam thing instead.

I’m laughing; this all feels so true. And thanks for throwing in that fun little term, "volta”. Seems that every poem, slam or page, lives or dies by that turn, or by multiple turns, even if the two are different species. Going back to your “Field Guide” poem, there’s a meditative quality to it, yes? And that the beating heart of it is the hiddenness of things...as in that gorgeous line, “what’s crossed at night / unseen so close to learning’s doorstep". Did you arrive at this revelatory moment in the process of writing and revising, or was it already in you from the outset? Was there an "aha" or turning point as you reflected on this memory and what it meant to you as an adult looking back on it?

Thank you for that. I think the "aha" moment was connecting it with the title and the theme of the whole collection. It allowed me to frame the poem in a way that revealed what Richard Hugo calls the "second subject" of the poem, or what it's really about. So much of the thesis is about how the structured learning that happens in conventional schooling can be so damaging not just to students, but to our environment – kids miss the wild things and learn to see only what the teacher points out, and simultaneously, wild things are destroyed for study in biology, which to me is the weirdest paradox ever. When I looked back through the rough draft of this poem, I see that line wasn't originally there.

"Aha" moments come to me when I take time away from a draft and then return to it with fresh eyes – those moments where I say, "Oh my God, that's it, THAT'S what I'm really getting at with this!" They also come from playing with sound and syllables. It’s how those lines became iambs: "what's CROSSED at NIGHT/unSEEN so CLOSE to LEARNing's DOORstep" – and paying attention to the sounds that crop up in a poem, how rhythm pulls me towards the poem's hidden heart or subject. So in this case, and I would say in almost all cases of my work, it's a moment I eventually reach. The original version, without the meshing of the title, was too static – it was obvious; I already knew I felt left behind as an English major with the biologists moving on. The title allowed me to see that the narrative truth of this moment was really deeper, and was about finding the biologist's capacity for appreciating life as an outsider.

The source for the “second subject”, by the way, is from Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town. 

It's one of my favorite books on poetry. Sound and syllable definitely carry their own answers to the mysterious questions we bring to the writing of a poem. Which also leads me to how you dig up specific words...was it Vonnegut who said that a single wrong word is like bleach in a bucket in how it can contaminate an entire manuscript? Anyway, your word choice is startling in this poem: "the creek zinced with ice"; "all things blued and breathing." Did you find these images and words any place specific? Say, do you keep a notebook? Or do they strike from elsewhere?

Ha! I'd never heard the bleach metaphor, but it's so true. I'll maybe share little on my process: when I do a rough draft, I’m pretty much going for “this happened and then this happened and this is what I'm getting at I think, um, okay I’m done." Then I go back and really start looking at the language. To do that, I usually play with SYNTAX – how I grammatically arrange what I'm saying or just play with the weirdness – right below the original typewritten draft. My stuff in the beginning tends to sound pretty prosy and loose, so first I play with diction and word choice, and then I start to "break open" the poem by just casting it in as many different sentence structures as I can – short, long, appositives, verbals, simple, complex, prepositional phrases, etc. I also try to use words as abnormal parts of speech (adjectives as nouns, for instance). Then I give the piece some sit time and return to the draft to start pulling it all together. I pick out what I feel works best for the piece, try out some phrasing to highlight the sound, and make sure everything fits together.

And then I take it out for a run.

I also brainstorm a lot of words. They could be words that are related by sound, like "eyes," "ice," and "zinc" all play with variations of the "i" sound – and also by using words incorrectly on purpose. "Zinced" can't be a past participle, something that happened or a way of describing something, but I made it that way because I wanted the woods to become an increasingly startling and alien place. Ditto with "blued." I also like to look at words I can't fit in anywhere or attach to anything specific – I get a very "blue" feeling from winter objects, but there wasn't anything specifically I could point to in this – and I try to use them to describe intangible things or things that don't belong; defamiliarize the conditions of things just enough that they’re not alien, but still weird. Which is what both a good poem and nature feel like to me. I do keep a list of interesting words in a file, and sometimes I'll use random word generators, but most of the time I build from the DNA of the poem first by just riffing on sounds and associations.

These are clearly approaches born of a love of the building blocks of language. Since we’re winding down here, let's get to the standard questions: since vulnerability after all lies at the core of good poetry...tell me one thing that scares you in the writing of a poem.

Oh, goodness. Well, I would say I'm usually scared of all the alternatives a poem COULD be. Have I really found the right form for it? Is this the poem that captures what I think this experience is? I usually remind myself that it's okay to feel this way, and it's also okay to come back to a poem or an experience again later and do something different with it. As a teacher and a writer, I say, "Take another run at it, if you want. Play with it. No worries." That helps.

Great advice. And as a teacher, any additional words you would offer to practicing poets outside of the MFA system? And is there any homework you would like to assign our readers?  

Here’s my advice: in the writing of a poem, take as many runs at an experience or subject as you want. Take as many angles and approaches as you can to the big subjects – you know the ones: the hunting trip when you had to follow the deer you wounded but failed to kill in one shot, the glimpse of your father with another woman through the window, the first time you let your hands fill with rain, that moment when you stood in your very own apartment and let your chest fill with the sensation of being just yourself, in walls that contain only you and maybe a cat and some boxes. The core stuff. The stuff you return to over and over again. 

As for homework: freewrite everything you can think of and remember or feel or wanna say about a big subject, a real subject, the one you really want to write about but are afraid you aren't ready to write, because you can't do it justice yet. That's okay. Yammer on about it for ten minutes or ten hours and then take a break, pet your cat, and forget about it. Then, after ten more minutes or hours or months, come back, and start turning it into as many different poems as you can. Think of it as that Greek god Proteus who could turn into a dolphin or a rock or a lightning bolt at any moment. Try it as a personal narrative, as a lyric, as a meditation on an object, as a third-person story, as a haiku, whatever. Just let it BE. And then when you're done, take some more time away from it. Then revisit it and see if there's anything in there you might want to turn into a poem. By then you will feel like you've really tried out a lot of different ways to turn this into a poem. Certain pieces will call to you organically for their forms, and other pieces won't, each according to their nature. And that's okay, too. But give yourself time and space to feel like you've really EXPLORED something before you make choices.

And remember: you can always come back to the poem or the raw material or experience and do something different with it in ten years. It's totally cool. You'll be a different poet and make different choices, so it'll be a different poem. That's why I always say, just blabber first. You’ve got to get your thoughts on the paper before you decide what to do with them. No censoring allowed, at least at first.

Yes! Tell us a poem you love. Any poem at all, and why.

I LOVE Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish". I think it’s been the guiding force behind a lot of my recent poems. It's a great description of a transcendent moment with an animal, and simultaneously, it presents what we were talking about earlier: a human wielding power over an animal and using that power to free it. We can honor and respect animals as fellow beings and let them go their own way. And I mean, look at her description of the fish itself. How is that not spine-melting amazing? 

===

KELLY WEBER’s fiction has appeared Rose Red Review, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in several publications, including Gravel, Avatar Review, Aleola, Bird’s Thumb, Agave, and The Judas Goat, where she has also published fiction and been the recipient of the 2012-2013 Aletha Acers Steel Burgess Poetry Prize Scholarship. Her chapbook ALL MY VALENTINE’S DAYS ARE WEIRD was recently published by Pseudo Poseur Press. In 2015, Kelly was the recipient of the Jerry Bradley Award for Creative Writing at the 36th Annual Southwest American/Popular Culture Conference, and she has served as an artist-in-residence at Cedar Point Biological Station. She has taught composition and poetry at Wayne State College. More about her work can be found at kellymweber.com.

Obsession, Writing Sequences, and Not Reading Poetry to Write Better Poetry: Niel Rosenthalis on His Poem "Placed"

Niel Rosenthalis

I recently met Niel Rosenthalis at AWP in Los Angeles at the Deadly Chaps Press booth, by chance after missing an author signing (something that seems to happen to me a lot at these kinds of events). We got to talking about poetry and agreed to keep in touch. He wrote me after the conference offering to help out with Primal School, and the more we spoke and I got to know his work, the more honored and grateful I felt for having met this force of a poet. I’ll let the interview serve as proof, but I’ll add that just this week, Niel has been offered the Third Year Fellowship in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. — HLJ

===

In your recent interview with Joanna Valente for Luna Luna, you described how in writing your first chapbook collection, TRY ME, you saw “trees, grammar, the mechanical goings-on, etc. as […] a struggle with each other.” That struggle interests me as a reader of your poems; could you tell us more about it?

In that interview I think I was making a point about how I don’t distinguish, really, between the mechanical and the natural, and how that group of nouns came from the process of writing via erasures — mostly of nonfiction books and novels. ERASURE is the practice of making a new text out of an existing one. You look at a text, say, an article or a novel, and you decide to whiten out all the words you don't want, so you're left with the words you do want – and the idea, for me, is to make a poem out of those words. Basically, it's like an enormous ready-made word bank.

In the way that I use erasure (other poets use it very differently), the poems sound the same as poems I might write without erasure.  My subjectivity shows through whatever I do. Sometimes the process exposes me to new words that excite me in a new way, and sometimes I use the words I would use anyway, but because I’m working within this formal restriction, only using the words before me, something in me is reoriented. Trees, grammar and the mechanics of the way things work form a part of my Image Bank, I guess — which I’d define as that group of images I find myself obsessed with. Every poet has an Image Bank. And out of this bank, I try to work out whatever is agitating me about my perception of experience.

So I take you keep a notebook to aid in storing that Image Bank? Or do these images come to you in your writing, like a daydream? 

Good question – I keep a notebook and write pretty often. Sometimes I sit in a public place and just observe what I see. I take notes when I'm reading poems, essays, scientific articles, books on the history of ancient Rome (or whatever it is I'm doing – I read pretty widely and sometimes deeply and sometimes not, haha). I copy down great sentences and wonder how they work — what makes them pleasurable to me, and so on. I find that I do have a set group of words that comes to me when I’m just free-writing, and so just to push myself, sometimes I'll open up a book (say a book of poems or a random nonfiction book I have laying around the house), and pick ten words that really stand out to me just because I like them. They don't have to be especially complicated, they just need to excite me. For instance, if I turn to the word bank I started recently, I see the words: extension, forward, expanse, proof, rapprochement. I don't think I finished building that bank, but sometimes when writing I say, “Okay, let me see if I can get that word into the poem because I like how it sounds.” I don't have to keep the word, but if it gets me excited on the page, it can generate a few lines that do work well (and often I'll have to go back and cut the word I pulled from the image bank because the line it was in didn't end up working). Which isn't to say the Image Bank makes or breaks a poem! What really makes a poem exciting to me is the tension in it – and poets have different ways of generating this tension. Some use really elaborate syntax, i.e. the way the words in a sentence or a line come together over time. Others simply have a funky Image Bank. Still others prioritize using the page as a kind of field, skipping around and building arrangements of words that challenge one’s sense of how one word follows another. And all poets use some combination of these three tension-generators, because syntax, word choice, and page space all can be manipulated. They form the technical stuff of which poems are made.

Affirming to know I’m not the only one who approaches writing in this way; seeing what words call to me in my reading and finding a home for them in my poems . So many poems are really just houses built of stolen lines, words, ideas… there’s nothing contraband about it when you’ve made something new out of them. And your playfulness with syntax does intrigue me, so let’s talk about “Placed.” Fascinating story behind it: you say the poem was cut from 40+ pages of observation in a time and location? Tell us about that process.

===

PLACED

An Intersection

 I was sitting at a table outside in the night. The people around me ate and drank in comfort, a few notches below bliss. What else is hammered. Watch your tone. I can’t, it’s like the back of my head.

                 One house lit-up with a birthday banner
                 in the foyer; the sneezing dogs on their
                 evening out; a semi-present wish
                 to stop all this.

Some people pose for a picture. “Wait, guys, let’s get one of us laughing at each other.” Laughter is a form of what kind of thinking. What’s worse: the people or the reclamation of want the people bring out in you.

                 I kid myself.
                 I say, “I like my sweetstop tongue.”
                 I can’t look
                 to be a part of all this.

An Exchange

On a tour of the city, I was hit by the sight of white dahlias (“Always place description in the present tense.”)

The dahlias were in a toss from last night’s flash flood. The hill they were planted on made them lean. And then I remembered what it was like to see something for the first time.

“What would it look like?”
                              — A woman with a braid down her back, to her friend at the café.

“I wanted to know what a poodle cut looks like on a person, a kind of mullet…with a tight bun at the back.”

Pausing to fill in, one said, “Well at least it will grow back,” to which (he’d missed the point) she said, “no, no, it was great, glad we did it.”

Be absorbed by minutiae.

He’s aside of this now so if he wants to leave he can leave without walking through a door.

A Separation

The couple in green sat at the table with fries, which their hands went to, then to their mouths, then down to their laps. At times one went for it while the other waited, or both went, or neither. One touched the other’s knee. The other had arms closed together and turned her head this way and that. What they were was how they were. To that end, I watched from my box. (Around me the people sat in theirs such that they could look at or to the street, where the people passed.) Pass the salt, please. One did.

===

Yes, it was a summer project I assigned myself. I went to this particular intersection in a neighborhood near me, in St. Louis, a few nights a week – usually around 8 pm. I'd sit at the corner of Euclid and Maryland avenues, and I'd observe for a few hours the comings and goings, the antics, the way people walked and talked to themselves and to each other, etc. I'd also bring books to read and I'd alternate between reading/writing in public and just observing . It was pretty free form, and so I generated I think 47 pages (Microsoft Word) material, and many more that I didn't even bother typing out. Whatever I transferred from my notebook to my computer was the initial stage of editing, and then I started playing with what I had. That summer I had decided to really put reading poetry on the backburner, and I decided to study great prose. So I had Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The American Notebook" with me (I'm named after the guy),  and he became my model for fresh, glittering, hands-in-the-earth sentences. I put a lot of pressure on whatever I write, and over time I realized that though a lot of the material I generated was kind of interesting to me, it didn't all do what I think poetry does so well. Which is to: a) use highly tensioned layered patterns in language and b) purposeful ambiguity.

By purposeful ambiguity, I mean a range of meanings available to the reader, a range that feels intentional versus, on the other hand, that not-so-fun confusion when you read a not-so-great poem where the set of possible interpretations is so wide as to be almost meaningless. The poem has to have the kind of presence and authority that makes itself meaningful. It's difficult to describe, but immediately identifiable in great poems.

For instance, in a poem I brought to workshop once, I had a yellow ribbon in it, and I wanted it to indicate the sun. But then the people in the workshop were confused by it  – “Is this  supposed to be a ribbon around a dress?” “Yellow ribbons tied to a tree,” one person said, “are symbols of war veterans coming home,  but that doesn't seem to fit this poem,” and so on... So I've learned to be precise in what I do. And precision creates stronger feeling in the reader.

About deciding to stop reading poetry — what's the story there?

Oh, well — when I came to the program, I’d been writing many poems that were — slyly or overtly — about reading and writing poetry — poems that were clearly informed by the many poets I loved and were about being in a conversation with those poets via my poems. They were about desire and so on, too, but the baroque surfaces were informed by the many ways I knew how to manipulate image and sound and gesture. You can see what I mean if you look at my poem “A Map Poem”— Joanna Valente published it in Yes, Poetry.

So, within a month of starting the program, I met with one of my teachers, and I’d said to her that I felt frustrated by my poems — that I was kind of thrashing about in a dead end. She asked me what I read besides poetry, and I was unsure what to say, because I really only read poetry. So she told me to read about subjects I was interested in (such as geography, and geology--which, I told her, I used to work on as an assistant editor in a publishing company). And so I turned away from poetry, and within a few weeks (I feel like I’m selling zit creme in an informercial here) the problem began to clear up. I’d been reading poetry nonstop for six or seven years, besides whatever I read for school, and I’d acquired a lot of know-how, definitely, but by leaving it alone for a while I could approach writing from a different headspace.

Way to tap into the whole honking universe, moving away from poetry to get back to poetry in order to produce something original. Let’s go a little further into this compression you talk about applying to whatever you write, and which is really evident here; as in "The dahlias were in a toss from last night's flash flood." How did you decide what to keep and what to cut? We might as well discuss the sequence piece of it, too – the ordering, and the fact that it's in three parts?

I first decided that I liked the material in these three particular entries ("An Intersection" was called "May 7th'" for a long time —  the other two sections were written in June I think). And then I rewrote them by hand enough times until I was satisfied with what I'd had. Rewriting by hand is useful for me because I'm less likely to let unexciting language carry over into the next draft — when I'm rewriting something, and I'm bored by it, or if it starts to feel hollow, then I know I have to change it. I consider a poem finished when I can rewrite it by hand and there isn’t anything left I want to change, because it’s tried and it feels true. For instance, in "An Intersection", the first paragraph (it's prose), initially read as follows: I was sitting at a table outside in the night. The people around me ate and drank in comfort, a few notches below bliss. What else is hammered. Watch your tone. I can’t, it’s like the back of my head. You know what a comb is, don’t you? Well, yes.

I realized, in revising, that You know what a comb is, don't you? was kind of funny, sure, but it was a step too far in complicating the idea of tone as the back of one's head (i.e. why don't you comb your tone, mister?). The second prose paragraph had another bit that was also a comic dip, but it was a little too on the nose in some way:

Some people in their twenties pose for a picture. “Wait, guys, let’s get one where we’re all laughing at each other.” The laughs are a form of what kind of thinking. Just picture them as monkeys, hairy backs and all. Funny, but you’re reducing. What’s worse: the people or the reclamation of want those people bring out in me.

When I took the 'just picture them as monkeys' bit out, the overall feeling seemed tighter, and the moment after that – 'What's worse: the people...' etc. — felt much more exciting. Delay and deferral are great when used well, but this wasn't a moment to do that —  so I cut those two sentences to jump to the more pressing point.

That's the kind of editorial work I've learned to do — to control pacing, to ask myself when something is really working. Most of this is instinctual, a muscle that needs to be exercised. And it's developed by being aware of how a reader reads (this is what a workshop can be good for, if you've got smart readers who can explain convincingly why they react the way they do.)

Sequences are great to write, and they really free you to be obsessive. I can talk about the sequence in terms of 'The Modern Lyric Sequence' which is the term critics and scholars often use — it's that kind of poem that is structured — via sections, numbered parts, asterisked parts, etc — to let the poem return to a theme, an obsession, over and over from different angles. And what it does is it frees you, the writer, to return to something that interests you without having to relay the ground work, the way you typically do at the start of a poem.

And all it takes to do a sequence, really, is to say to yourself, I'm going to stay with this one thing — this image, this theme, this particular noun — etc. Once you spend a lot of time writing about one object, like a chair, for instance, you will begin by describing the chair in ways that most people would. But if you continue doing it for long enough — say, 20 pages — you'll inevitably get to some strange language that no one else has used before. So I decided to study this intersection for a few months, at a particular time — I generated a lot of material, found some interesting moments, and just felt free to wander and observe and muse and be silly and dramatic. And then I went back to it with my scissors haha.

An obsession’s worth of cuts, for sure — and you seem to have done the same thing with one of your other sequence poems,  “A Ten-Minute Moment”. When we were talking earlier you called that poem a breakthrough. What was the breakthrough there?

Several things. The poem began as a book-length erasure of the novel Duplex by Kathryn Davis. You can use different constraints with erasure — I chose to only take one word at a time, so as to really maintain a distance from the existing text.

So I divided the Davis book into five sections and went through it, selecting words one at a time and turning them into strange and jagged and weirdly angled harsh lines. I got a fragmented and interesting sequence, but it didn't satisfy me – it didn't feel inevitable in the way it was ordered, even though many moments were interesting to me. Several poems in my first chapbook TRY ME are erasures – erasure has been a useful way for me to really be precise and controlled in my writing. I started writing around and through the fragments, and found a kind of rhythm. But I wanted to be even more rigorous. (When I add formal rules for myself, it helps me think in a new way and it challenges me to move within the bearings.) So I decided it would be six sections, not five, each section beginning with a refrain, and each section would have the same number of stanzas. And then I thought, why not see if I can make the lines long? (I'd been trying to write in long lines the year before but hadn't managed to do it to my satisfaction.) So then I turned the five-line stanzas into long couplets (the poem is also on a landscape orientation, rather than the portrait orientation which is the norm), and voila — I had a long line, and the rhythm worked even better when carried across a long horizontal. There were other aspects that felt key to me (like stretching it even further to ten sections, each to last a minute when read aloud), but the main breakthrough was that I figured something out about how to construct a poem: that it can happen over a long period of time, that I can layer formal restraints, and that I can really stay with a single speaker for a long time. It's a matter of paying attention, and, as ever, getting paid.

And that leads us me the role of rhythm in your work. I take it that like many poets, you read your lines aloud while revising?

I do read aloud while revising, and I took a class on the music of poetry here in my program, so I've learned more about why different moments in poems I love sound so appealing to me--how establishing a rhythmic norm and varying from it can make a poem emotionally effective (and affective). I'm thinking a lot these days about rhythm, and I want to be even more rhythmically persuasive in my work. Much of my work has had a staccato rhythm (which occurs because I work often with short declaratives, in order to be super controlled, and because the interesting effect, the juxtaposition, of how I write lays between lines, and so there's a quick one-two punch of sorts). But I'm also really interested in a long emphatic cadence, especially versus sharp phrasing, and I think I finally landed moments in that emphatic vein in my poem "A Ten Minute Moment".

There's a lot of work to do and I'm still learning what rhythm can do.

Returning to "Placed"...the speaker in this poem: who is it?

I'm not sure exactly who the speaker is in "Placed," aside from being an observer in an urban environment — which we all are, if we live in an urban environment.

A snap of Niel's world: "The Author is Absent" (featuring Keats, Brian Blanchfield, and David Hockney)

The poem contains elements of both lyric and narrative, so if you could define those two also and how they dance together?

I think of LYRIC as an orientation in the realm of song, of the suspension of linear thinking. (By linear thinking, I mean the everyday lines of logic, as in "I need to buy bread, so I need to have a certain amount of money, which means I need to find my purse, and bring it with me to the corner store.") And I think of NARRATIVE in the traditional sense of adherence to beginning, middle, and end, which are the terms within which writers of stories work. But narrative is everywhere, it's suggested by even the slightest detail. “I left my suede glove on the chair,” for instance, is just a single sentence, but it suggests something about being in a given place, about leaving that place to go do something else, about losing something, maybe about leaving something behind as a signal to someone (kind of like how dropping a handerchief was, at one point, an erotic gesture) and so on. And so I think of lyric as that elastic momentum in a narrative that is intent on reaching after something else.

The sections were developed independent of each other—by the time I brought them together, they were pretty much formed; I did add section titles much later, to unify them as variations on a theme. Again, a small touch—like a section title—can have substantial impact on the reader’s experience of the poem as a navigable space and making the space one that a reader wants to navigate.

So getting back to your question about lyric and narrative, in "Placed," I guess I see them doing this kind of double-helix work, of supporting each other and moving around each other in a general forward-motion. Isn't this true for so many poems? I think it is. I think what's particular to this sequence is the way the title suggests being moored in some way (I originally called the sequence “Place” but then decided that wasn't interesting enough, and “Placed,” is more suggestive), even as that sense of being in a place is never absolute — it doesn't reach into the bottom of the speaker's feet in a way that the questions around him don't not feed into his head constantly.

Those subtleties, so vital. You were telling me how one of your other poems, "Here is a Camera",  became "Here is the Camera”. 

The change from "a" to "the" was about upping that poem's claim to understanding something about the mechanics of how we perceive each other. And it's a poem that is all one sentence, even as it's a, what, 12 or so lines-long poem? Which I guess maybe was my way of claiming a single moment the way a camera does, necessarily. Or maybe a less corny reading is that the poem's more sinewy syntax shows the movement of the mind wrestling with how, in that moment that a camera captures, information becomes knowledge. The poem came in a rush and didn't need much editing.

Don't we love writing those kinds of poems, the ones that feel like they’ve been “received whole”. On to a few bread & butter questions as we wind down…any advice you’d offer to poets writing and practicing outside of the MFA system?

I resisted getting an MFA for a few years because I was reading the work of many people who had MFAs and found much of that work clear and pared, structurally sound but otherwise dull (there are thankfully also many exceptions). I did have an amazing experience at my program and upended many ideas about the kinds of poems I wanted to make, and I gained a lot of insight into how people read. I would recommend going to an MFA if you can obtain a full ride (Wash U is great because it's a small cohort where everyone is equally and fully funded) and if you like the faculty there, etc. (I’m very, very aware of the rarity of full funding, but I take fiscal viability seriously; I don't think you should go into debt for an MFA, unless you're really prepared to deal with that – and of course there are some wonderful programs, unfortunately, that aren't fully funded.) But MFA or not, the main work is for the writer to read, read, read, and develop an interest in technical matters, because that's what does the heavy lifting in all the great poems you love.

I would add that if all you typically read is poetry, try reading some non-poetry and see how it clears up many navel-gazing problems your poems might have (speaking here from personal experience). And if that's not you, and you read a healthy amount of poetry, then be sure that you’re exploring non-contemporary poetry as well. Poems exist in a tradition (there are many traditions outside of the canonical kind), and I am very aware of all the ways I grow and learn from work that’s outside of my contemporary moment. The poems of the day are produced within a recognizable world of syntactic habits, stylistic trends, and idiomatic range. Leaving the contemporary poetry world behind lets you see it for what it is, just the way that living abroad, immersed in another language, lets you hear and experience your native tongue(s) as the strange linguistic systems that they really are. Of course, poets see themselves in relationship to the history of writing in different ways, and it's up to you to figure out for yourself what that relationship is.

As food for this virtual classroom of hungry poets, got any homework you'd like to assign?

I recommend imitations. They help you examine a poem you love at the very closest levels you yourself need to know in order to write great work. Make a word-replacement imitation of a poem, say, Sylvia Plath's "Crossing the Water". (It's great and it's short, so if imitation is painful for you, this exercise won't be too painful.) Replace each of Plath’s words with one of your own—using the same part of speech. Where Plath uses a noun, put in your own noun. Where Plath uses an adjective, put in your own adjective. Where she repeats a word, you repeat a word. You don't want to insert synonyms for the words; just insert words that are the same part of speech but have a different meaning. Do this imitation work with different poets – I used to do imitations of Elizabeth Bishop poems, Rainer Maria Rilke poems (Stephen Mitchell's translations), Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, etc. I learned a lot and challenged my understanding of images, sound, and sentences in relationship to lines.

It's a lot of work to do these imitations, but they're helpful. You won't get an Original Poem (whatever that is — "to be original is not to be sourceless," said Dana Levin in an essay I read in college). But you'll learn a lot. And you can use the last line of your imitation as the first line of your own poem, just using it as a generative mechanism. And afterwards, see if you still need it. (One trick I learned over time is that when free-writing I often delete the first five or so lines because they are often just a way of warming up.)

My second suggestion is to read through Bernadette Mayer's list of writing experiments. Even if you don't do any of them, you'll find a sense (and a kick) of permission.

I somehow never came upon this list before, so, jackpot.  Thank you. And speaking of poems you love, now, tell us a poem you love. Any poem, classic or contemporary.

I love "People" by Gennady Aygi – I've only recently learned about him – a poet from the former Soviet Union; he died in 2006. It ends, "so that I knew / the patches of light on their pianos / had relatives // in hospitals and prisons." It's a visceral poem for me, about that seemingly unendingly interesting noun 'people.' Which is a group of units that go by the names of "I." You can read Sarah Valentine's translation of it in the book just published by Wave Books called Into the Snow.

===

NATHANIEL ROSENTHALIS was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware and received his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence and is about to graduate from the M.F.A. program in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, where he received the T.S. Eliot Scholarship and the Howard Nemerov Award in Poetry. More info on him can be found at nathanielrosenthalis.tumblr.com.

Poet Interviews Launching This Week at Primal School

photo by Robb North

Writers! Greetings again from Primal School, where I’m spooling up on my first clutch of interviews with poets as diverse and enlivening as my time was at AWP 2016 in Los Angeles.  In the last two weeks I’ve connected by email and phone with a number of poets across the country, traded work with others, conducted three interviews, and have just been inspired over all by the enthusiasm and response to Primal School from poets of every age, background, and level of experience. If you stopped at the Primal School and Inked Voices table in LA, thank you – and if you joined our newsletter recently or have been following the blog, I hope that the content that gets shared on here is useful in your growth and explorations in the world of poetry.

In launching this project I’ve learned a lot of things – for one, how genuinely diverse as well as huge the universe of poetry is (ignoramus that I am, I didn’t even know until AWP what a poetry comic was). The field of possibility around what makes a poem a poem seems elastic and dynamic and changing all the time, and it’s broadened my own scope in terms of thinking about what's possible in an online experiment such as this. Another surprise for me has been the level of interest in the democratization of poetry learning — a notion that I thought was somehow fringe, but which turns out to be shared and advocated for by many. Not only have those others who believe that a life of poetry and serious practice of it are entirely possible outside of the MFA system been willing to engage me when I approach them; they’ve appeared out of the woodwork to talk to me. Those people have included everyone from professors in creative writing programs to editors of literary journals to poets who have been practicing for years without a degree. The give and take of the whole process has energized me both as a blogger on this site and as a writer.

There’s another human piece to all this: in only the first month of working on Primal School I’ve been humbled by how much I have to learn from all poets, not just the poets who are known and have several books out, but anyone who loves poetry and is passionate about the craft. That is to say that whether the subject is an interview or feedback on the site, I want to hear from everyone, from the rock stars with plenty of press attention to those with only a publication credit or two to their name. This is because I think poems should be carried by all, and because no one who seeks to be the conduit for the song that is a poem should be excluded from the privilege of sharing that music because they never connected with a community that could help them grow. I’d love to help expel loneliness from the world of poetry writing as much as possible; the life of writing and publishing is tough enough without courting it.

Anyway, I’m still working to get on a schedule with posting interviews, but look for a first interview this week, with the whip-smart and talented Niel Rosenthalis. With the grace of time I hope to hit a steady biweekly rhythm. In the meanwhile, happy poetic trails, and here’s a great video of Taylor Mali, who puts the primal back into poetry like no one else I’ve heard read. Enjoy.  

On Starting Over: Welcome to Primal School

Woodshedding? Let this be your place.

Every so often, life’s rhythms take their course.

Back in May 2015, a chance encounter at Hedgebrook VORTEXT connected me with Rebecca Wallwork and her blog The MFA Project, where up until last week I’ve been contributing as an interview editor. Initially started by Rebecca as a quest to earn an MFA in creative writing without the sticker shock of a degree, the blog was my practice in talking to writers, asking for “homework assignments” on behalf of “students” who are trying to write without the structure and support of an MFA program, and mining for the writers' wisdom on the creative life. After a time, as my particular interest in poetry grew and I began exploring ways to support my own learning as a poet, Rebecca and I arrived at the clarity that I needed to launch my own project.  

And so welcome to Primal School, where the work I began at The MFA Project continues in its poetry incarnation, and if you’re visiting here because of AWP, thanks for taking time to check out a site that’s still in its infancy. I gave AWP the below description of Primal School, an abbreviated version of which will appear on their FB page:

Primal School features online interviews with established and emerging poets in which they discuss a single poem they have written, shedding light on that poet’s process and artistic vision. Inspired in part by Poetry In Person, Alexander Neubauer’s collection of Pearl London’s conversations with leading poets at the New School from the 1970s-1990s, the blog seeks to be a home on the web for students of poetry who are not affiliated with an MFA program or are otherwise self-taught. Additional content on the site includes audio clips, posts on the craft of poetry, interviews with poets about their educational journeys, reading recommendations, and their advice about the writing life.

As an online resource, Primal School’s vision is to democratize access to poetic education by bringing tools and learning opportunities to the web drawn from the MFA or writing seminar, but repackaged for a wider audience. Its mission is to spotlight poets of all backgrounds and styles, explore the inner workings of their poetic process in accessible language, and uncover the multitude of a ways a poem comes into being.  

For a more detailed (and still-evolving) overview, you can visit the site's About page.   

I'm still in the early phase of ideas with Primal School as I seek out other poets and students of poetry and ask what they would like to see offered on the blog that would be useful to them and that isn’t being done elsewhere. And as part of that process, I’ll be at tabling at the AWP Bookfair in Los Angeles March 30-April 2, 2016. If you’re at the conference and interested in what’s happening here, come by Table 116, where I’ll be camping out with Brooke McIntyre of Inked Voices, the online community for writing and critique groups.  

Whether you’re a poet who teaches or a newcomer to poetry who's looking for your tribe, I'm excited to connect with you. And thanks again for your interest.  

On Pleasure, Devotion, MFAs/PhDs, and Self-determination: an Interview with Caitlin Doyle

This interview with Caitlin is one of three posts on the site that were written for The MFA Project in fall/winter 2015, prior to the start of Primal School. 

The poetry of Caitlin Doyle has received wide praise. Michelle Aldredge of Gwarlingo says of her work: “Caitlin Doyle writes highly original poems…steeped in both meaning and musicality…Doyle’s poems are serious and complex, but also witty and playful, and it’s this tension that makes her writing so innovative.” One of the benefits of our online format is the opportunity to occasionally feature long-form interviews. I got to talk with Caitlin about her work, her MFA experience, her journey as a writer and teacher, and topics relevant to writers and poets on both sides of the MFA divide.  — Hannah

Your voice as a poet is very distinctive and I’m thinking of what sets your work apart, such as your skill with rhyme and other formal elements, and your blending of narrative and lyric modes. What do you think of the frequent criticism that MFA programs end up producing voices that sound the same?

It’s important to enter an MFA program with this central understanding: There’s a difference between challenging your aesthetic values in meaningful ways and letting your pen become a conduit for trends buzzing in the air around you. The workshop environment can sometimes spur writers, consciously or unconsciously, to seek immediate pay-offs in the form of peer approval, rather than pursuing the harder-won rewards that come with creating work that operates entirely on its own terms. Though writers have long depended on feedback from others, the idea that truly strong writing can take shape via group consensus is a potentially dangerous one for emerging writers to absorb. It’s necessary for MFA-seekers to cultivate openness, but it’s just as crucial for them to resist pressures that push them too far away from idiosyncratic self-determination.  

Which reminds me of your advice to beginning writers in your interview with Words With Writers: “Take your time to develop arduously, painstakingly, and privately, rather than throwing your writing too hastily into the universe for recognition. Be a homemade writer rather than a world-made writer—only then will the world truly want and need your work.” Can you talk more about what it means to be a “homemade writer”?

Recently, I’ve been re-reading Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England”, a poem in the voice of Daniel Dafoe’s most famous fictional character, Robinson Crusoe, who spends years shipwrecked on a tropical island. I keep coming back to the part of the poem where Crusoe recounts playing a “home-made flute” that he has crafted out of materials found on the island. Remembering the instrument, which seems to have possessed “the weirdest scale on earth,” he says:

“Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?”

I’ve always read this line as embodying an essential truth about creative work. The most powerful and lasting art has the quality of feeling “home-made” like Crusoe’s flute, built from whatever available, disparate, and often unexpected materials its maker can gather from the reality in which he or she has been “shipwrecked.” I love how Bishop’s use of a casual and tossed-off tone (“But aren’t we all?”) heightens, paradoxically, the line’s profundity. She’s talking here not just about how humans make art but also about how we create our identities, and I think this line must have been buzzing in the back of my mind when I made the statement you quoted above.

So what’s meant by “home-made writer” is one whose art arises from the materials of their particular world and imagination.

Yes. When I encouraged beginning poets to strive toward being “home-made writers,” I wanted to point to this idea: The making of strong poetry is something that ultimately happens in a private and ineffable place, an inner realm with roots that reach down to one’s earliest encounters with language. It can’t be taught in a classroom or workshop setting, though it can be recognized and encouraged there. If you want to enter that realm, you have to do these three things, on your own, with obsessively fierce devotion: read, write, and live.

You were the George Starbuck Poetry Fellow at Boston University, which means you got to study with stars like Robert Pinsky, Rosanna Warren, and Derek Walcott.            

I feel blessed to have studied in the BU program. All three professors enhanced my understanding of language’s capacities. Robert’s class illuminated the tonal complexity that a writer can achieve through blending different diction registers. He helped me develop a stronger ear for the qualities inherent in words possessing Latinate roots, usually associated with elevated diction levels, and words with Anglo-Saxon roots, commonly used in colloquial speech. Rosanna’s poetry workshop and translation seminar, two of the most unforgettable classes I’ve ever taken, emphasized the relationship between tradition and innovation.

Because Derek wanted us to experience poetry as an echoing sound-chamber, he often stressed memorization and recitation. We spent a class period chanting Thomas Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain” as a group, over and over, an experience I’ll always remember because it brought me closer to a visceral understanding of how poetry does its work within the body.

Do you have a favorite memory or experience from studying with these three figures during your MFA?

What I loved most were those moments when the trappings of typical classroom convention fell away and we glimpsed the poets behind the professors – when we felt ourselves in the presence of three people whose bone-deep passion for language comes from a place beyond what notions of schooling can fully encompass.

You returned to Boston University a few years after graduation to teach as a Lecturer in Creative Writing. In 2014, you were invited to share the stage with the program’s faculty as the Featured Poetry Alumna in the Boston University Faculty Reading. Can you reflect on some of the ways your ongoing  relationship with Boston University has impacted your trajectory as a writer?

Returning to Boston University as a Lecturer in Creative Writing proved a most revelatory experience in my life as a teacher. The freedom I was given allowed me to test out new approaches and expand my teaching in different directions. I designed a multi-genre Creative Writing course with a particular emphasis on examining the similarities between poetry and film, and I discovered that drawing parallels between the two art forms helps students unlock poems in a fresh manner. The insights I garnered that year laid the groundwork for the course I would later teach at as the Emerging Writer-In-Residence at Penn State, a class focused on the ways that poetry and film evoke meaning through the juxtaposition of carefully chosen images.

Appearing as the Featured Poetry Alumna in the Boston University Faculty Reading gave me a jolt of vital encouragement at a crucial juncture in my writing life. I felt immensely honored to receive the invitation, and the actual physical experience of sharing the stage with the faculty – speaking my poems aloud in the same auditorium where I’d attended many literary events as a student – can only be captured with one word: goosebumps.

The BU MFA Program is famously one year in length as opposed to the usual two. In an interview with The Young Arts Foundation, you said: “You work so hard in such a short period that your evolution as a writer takes on the same quality as a time-lapse video of a flower blossoming.” What are some of the benefits and/or pitfalls of a condensed single-year MFA program?

In contrast to the majority of MFA programs, which last for two or three years, the BU department packs multiple years of master’s level work into two intensive semesters. One downside of a condensed MFA experience is that it allows less time for the careful shaping of individual poems, while programs with lengthier trajectories often feature a thesis year during which students focus almost exclusively on generating and revising a full-length manuscript. Yet a rigorous, highly concentrated, and passionately charged single-year MFA program like the one at Boston University can lead you to make significant craft discoveries far sooner than you may have done in a longer program.

The fact that BU requires fewer years than other MFA programs also offers your work another kind of nourishment. Because you’re in school for a shorter period, you spend a greater amount of time living and working in the non-academic world during the early stages of your literary journey. This pushes you, at an important phase in your development, to absorb more experiences outside of academia while navigating the challenge of building a writing life beyond the classroom.

Tell us a little bit about building a writing life after receiving an MFA.

This question makes me think of the scene in The Graduate when Mr. McGuire approaches Ben, a recent college graduate, and offers him the “one word” that will help him figure out the rest of his life: Plastics. He believes that Ben will find a lucrative future if he pursues plastics as a career path. In my experience, building a life as an emerging writer in contemporary America, with or without an MFA in hand, also frequently orbits around a single word: Applications.

It’s a word that can be as uninspiring as “plastics.” Ben didn’t exactly grow up with starry-eyed dreams of the future Mr. McGuire suggests. Most poets, in the first giddy love-throes of their affair with language, don’t envision spending their prime years writing “statements of intent” and “project descriptions” on applications for fellowships, awards, scholarships, conferences, residencies, grants, and writer-in-residence positions. Yet the support offered by such opportunities can make a critical difference in a writer’s ability to place artistic considerations above practical matters for long enough to get some poems written.

Of course, there are ways a writer can build a productive creative life outside of the application-submission whirlwind and without support from literary institutions or organizations. But the nuts-and-bolts reality of obtaining time and space to do creative work, particularly for writers in the early stages, often comes down to submitting application after application and waiting for a positive response. This means cultivating a willingness to pick up and go wherever an application might land you.

And you’ve succeeded admirably on that front. Since graduating from BU, you’ve traveled around the US on numerous Writer-In-Residence teaching posts and fellowships. In an essay of yours that appeared in The Cork Literary Review, you wrote about the experience of making one’s way as a young poet in America today. Can you talk about that journey?

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve unpacked my suitcase over the past few years. I’ve lived and written in numerous places, including Michigan, Wyoming, Vermont, New Hampshire, Washington, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. There’s a thrill in tossing one’s work into the world and seeing where you might end up. I have relished the opportunity for my imagination to absorb such a breadth of landscapes, and I’m grateful for the people I’ve met along the way – writers, students, visual artists, musicians, weirdos, and word-lovers of every ilk. In between fellowship-supported writing opportunities, I’ve held a number of jobs to pay the bills. I’ve taught at the high school and university level, and I’ve worked as a copywriter, a real estate assistant, an editor, a waitress, a nanny, a web content developer, and a screenplay assistant, among other things.

To draw from the Cork Literary Review essay you mentioned, I’ll say this: On days when I feel dragged down by the uncertainty of following poetry as a calling, I remind myself of a central truth about the making of poems. The form’s general freedom from market pressures allows poets to shape their work according to motivations outside of money. To wish for the possibility of garnering significant profit from writing poems would be to willingly subject poetry to the kind of commercialization that shapes so many other aspects of public life. The fact that poets throughout history have largely had to seek financial security from means other than the writing of poems has been greatly beneficial to the art form.

You recently began your doctoral studies as an Elliston Fellow in Poetry in the University of Cincinnati PhD Program in English Literature and Creative Writing. Can you talk about the role of the PhD in relation to the MFA in the context of the contemporary literary world? What led to the decision to pursue a PhD in addition to an MFA?

Emerging writers who wish to find employment as teachers of the craft often move between various adjunct teaching positions and other temporary gigs. Frequently, they land in situations with low pay, no job security, and zero health benefits. Because of this, it has become more and more common for them to remain on an academic track beyond the MFA degree, pursuing additional master’s level work or seeking a PhD.

Book publication may expand the job options available to beginning writers, but the economic realities they face often remain arduous. Staying in school can allow them to obtain some stability away from the uncertainties of the oversaturated academic job market, while they work toward earning credentials that may ultimately enhance their future employment potential. These are the forces behind the increasing number of young writers who have chosen to pursue a PhD, usually in Literature, Creative Writing, or another related humanities field, after earning an MFA degree.

Though some of these factors shaped my own decision to pursue a PhD, what compelled me most were the specific qualities of the University of Cincinnati program. I felt drawn to the fact that the program emphasizes the traditional study of literature as much as the pursuit of creative work. Another major motivating factor in my decision to apply was the variety of graduates whose work I’ve come to know and admire over the years, including Josh Bell, Erica Dawson, Caki Wilkinson, Jaimie Poissant, and Cate Marvin. Above all, I sensed that the program’s structure would enable me to devote my most productive energies to what I care about most: the reading, writing, and teaching of poetry.

What are the most compelling reasons for a writer to pursue an MFA?

Most emerging writers in America eventually face a Shakespearian moment of sorts: To MFA or not to MFA – that is the question. The quandary is as insoluble as the one that haunted Hamlet, and it’s doubtful that even The Bard could have attempted to resolve it. I don’t believe that the pursuit of an MFA is anywhere near necessary for the production of strong writing. Talented and ambitious people throughout history produced remarkable work before the MFA era, and writers will continue to do so, with or without the degree. When it comes to actual skill and range on the page, there’s nothing an MFA will teach you that you can’t learn through impassioned reading, writing, and living.

If your goal, however, is to eventually teach writing, the degree comprises a necessary qualification for many jobs in that arena. Entering the MFA milieu also gives emerging writers a chance to connect with literary peers and mentors in enriching ways. In addition, the degree frequently increases your viability when you apply for opportunities in the writing world outside of academia, such as fellowships, conferences, writer-in-residence positions, and grants. Another significant boon of the MFA experience is that it can allow you to study directly with some of the strongest writers alive today, many of whom happen to teach in graduate programs. Though somebody’s brilliance on the page doesn’t guarantee that he or she possess equal acuity as a teacher, there’s still great value in having the chance to observe and absorb the passions of rarified literary minds.

Any drawbacks to the MFA?

Just as I don’t believe that obtaining an MFA can guarantee that a writer will produce strong work, I don’t agree with criticisms that go too far in the other direction. If an individual is truly talented, focused, and driven, studying in an MFA program isn’t likely to homogenize or ruin his or her artistic abilities.

I do think that students entering MFA programs need to be on guard against false notions about what it means to be a writer. Since the MFA system operates, for the most part, in traditional academic environments, the degree’s progression often mirrors that of other academic subjects. Novice writers can too easily develop the notion that fulfilling the degree’s requirements means that one has “mastered” the subject. Completing and excelling in graduate-level workshops and literature classes doesn’t mean that one is a good writer. It’s possible, in many instances, to do the former without achieving the latter.  

This aspect of the MFA system isn’t the fault of anyone in particular. It strikes me as a somewhat unavoidable byproduct of the relationship between the MFA system and the academic world. None of the accomplished writers who frequently teach in these programs sat down together at some point and said, “let’s propagate a system that may end up giving students a false sense of what it means to be a writer.”

Would you elaborate further on that?

In order for MFA programs to be considered degree-granting tracks within the academic world, there are certain structures, timelines, and measurable requisites that need to be met. It’s hard to evaluate literary quality in a concrete way, so what often happens is that programs end up having to place a larger emphasis on quantity than on quality. It’s common for students to be expected to produce one or more drafts per week, and then to revise the drafts in a portfolio of “finished work” at the end of a semester.

This structure establishes an aura of quantifiable productivity, but risks giving students an unrealistic sense of the kind of time and intensive labor that it takes to create good writing. It’s not a framework that allows for the type of painstakingly slow composition and re-drafting that often leads – over the course of weeks, months, and even years – to the production of a truly strong piece of writing. My worry is that the structure can lead beginning writers to believe that writing is a relatively fast and seamless process, and that a piece of work is “finished” long before they’ve tried pushing it to its fullest capacity.  

This isn’t to say that remarkable work can’t sometimes take shape quickly, but that usually only happens to writers who have already laid the groundwork through years of dogged literary labor. Here’s another way of looking at the situation: While it wouldn’t be possible to graduate from most MFA programs if you produced one or two brilliant poems in your time there, it would be possible to earn the degree if you turned in dozens of underdeveloped poems. So it’s important for students to understand that they’re enacting a somewhat artificial version of the creative process while pursuing an MFA. Otherwise, they may end up forming methods and beliefs that short-circuit their potential as writers.

What advice would you offer to poets and students of writing who aren’t part of an MFA program? How might they structure and self-direct their writing education?

I believe that there can be no meaningful writing education that isn’t essentially self-directed, so I would give the same advice to non-MFA-seekers as I would to those who have chosen to participate in the MFA system.

Fight as hard as you can to make sure that you protect your writing time from the swirl of life’s constant demands. Recognize the importance of reading trenchantly and widely. Find mentors and peers whose literary sensibilities you trust, so that you can receive (and also learn to give) fruitful artistic feedback. Participating in summer conferences, enrolling in non-degree-granting workshops, attending readings, spending time at writers’ colonies, and taking online Creative Writing classes taught by accomplished writers are some solid ways for non-MFA-seekers to start building a community. If there’s a writer you really admire, you can usually seek an opportunity to learn from that person because so many of today’s most talented literary figures teach in various short-term capacities, outside of the MFA classroom, around the country.

My other advice, when it comes to structuring your own writing education, is to follow your impulses. Pursue what gives you pleasure. There’s a poem by Yeats, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”, in which readers encounter these lines:

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds

Throughout the piece, Yeats makes clear that the airman hasn’t taken to flight because of law, duty, public admiration, or a sense of conviction about the war in which he’s immersed (“Those that I fight I do not hate” / Those that I guard I do not love”). What drives him is something stranger, less discernible, more private. I encourage all beginning writers to generate work from “a lonely impulse of delight” rather than drawing too much motivation from external forces.

I couldn’t agree with you more regarding that lonely impulse. So on to the last bit, “teach” us! Assign us some reading and/or homework, maybe a writing prompt.

Here’s a prompt that I’ve found useful in helping student writers move beyond safe material into areas of exploration that involve greater risk, emotional complexity, and self-revelation.

Read these three poems: “Desert Places” by Robert Frost, “Dinky” by Theodore Roethke, and “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me” by Delmore Schwartz. Each piece deals with the idea of confronting shadows that live within oneself.

Think about these questions and scribble your thoughts as you read:

Frost writes “I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.” What are some of the “desert places” that exist within you? How and why do they scare you?

Roethke’s Dinky is an elusive and darkly comic figure who undermines order, certainty, and happiness. The poem ends with these lines: “You’re part of him; he’s part of you / - You may be Dirty Dinky.” Are there any parts of yourself in which you can see the presence of “Dirty Dinky”?

The speaker of Delmore Schwartz’s poem describes his body as a creature separate from his inner self. In his view, the appetite-driven physical form he occupies is “an inescapable animal,” a bear who “moves where I move, distorting my gesture, / a caricature, a swollen shadow.” Do you ever feel as though you have a “heavy bear” walking beside you, an aspect of yourself that “perplexes and affronts” you with its “darkness”?

Using these three pieces as jumping-off points, draft a poem examining something about yourself that frightens and unsettles you. You’ll notice that these poets manage to explore dark inner realms without engaging in straightforward diary-like confessions. None of them say “this is what’s wrong with me” or “this is something from my past that I regret.” They use a variety of means – rich figurative language, haunting sonic effects, and complicated tonal layers, for example – to evoke the darkness rather than to spell out its sources in a direct manner. Keep that in mind as you shape your draft. The purpose of the prompt is to help you push your pen into territory that you might normally, often unconsciously, avoid when you sit down to write.

Caitlin Doyle’s poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review,The Threepenny Review, Black Warrior Review, The Cork Literary Review, and others. Her poems have also been published in various anthologies, including The Best Emerging Poets of 2013, The Southern Poetry Anthology, and Best New Poets 2009. Caitlin’s awards and fellowships include Writer-In-Residence positions at the James Merrill House and The Kerouac Project, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the Margaret Bridgman Scholarship through the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Tennessee Williams Scholarship through the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Amy Award in Poetry through Poets & Writers. She has held Writer-In-Residence teaching posts at Penn State, St. Albans School, and Interlochen Arts Academy. Caitlin received her MFA from Boston University, where she was the George Starbuck Fellow in Poetry, and she is currently pursuing her PhD as an Elliston Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cincinnati.

On Getting a Poetry MFA: an Interview with Michele Bombardier

This interview with Michele is one of three posts on the site that were written for The MFA Project in fall/winter 2015, prior to the start of Primal School. 

I first met Michele Bombardier at the recent Poets on the Coast conference with Susan Rich and Kelli Russell Agodon in La Conner, WA, an event in which time slows for art, women gather with their words, and poetry is a nymph dancing wildly on the Skagit River for three packed days. She was glowing so brightly I asked her out to lunch…and this interview happened. — Hannah

Tell us a little about your MFA experience. Specifically, let’s talk about pros and cons: what are some good reasons to pursue an MFA in creative writing? What are some of the challenges?

It was an agonizing decision. I have a perfectly good graduate degree and career, so I was not interested in an MFA to become a teacher; my goal was, and still is, to deepen my craft. I also felt the pressure of time. I am 55 years old, and even though I have been writing for a while now, I am relatively late to the party. My hope was that an MFA program would compress my learning curve to a steep incline.

The con is pretty simple: money. I have three college-age kids. We put one through, one just started, and one stopped but hopes to return. We are middle class. This is hard stuff. We ended up taking a loan against the house. Call me crazy.

If I didn’t get an MFA I would have continued doing what I have been doing for the past five years: taking classes at Hugo House, the community writing center here in Seattle, meeting with my writing groups, working with editors/teachers I’ve hired to review and critique my work, and attending conferences where I could, though those can get pretty spendy.

What advice would you offer to poets and students of writing who aren’t part of an MFA program? How might they structure and self-direct their writing education?

Find mentors. I took David Wagoner’s Master Poetry class multiple times at Hugo House and was incredibly grateful for those experiences. I’ve also studied with Tara Hardy, Kelli Russell Agodon, Gary Copeland Lilley and Wyn Cooper. I think it’s also important for writers to attend classes and form writing groups. The classes and groups come and go, but over time, you find your poet-siblings who will help raise your work. I love working with my friends Lillo Way and Ken Wagner, whom I met in David Wagoner’s course, and they still kick my poetic ass. 

What have you been up to these days, and what are you working on now? 

I’ve cut back my day job to ¾ time so I go into the office for three long days and have two glorious days dedicated to my writing, in addition to the weekends. I read an hour or so every evening and before work. I’m a recluse, a recent empty-nester and married to a professor/researcher who is always reading, and so this fits our lifestyle perfectly. I spend a solid 25 hours a week on my study of poetry, though a lot of that is also spent staring out the window.

I am reading a lot of international poets like Kamienska, Zagajewski, Swir, Milosz and some anthologies. Other new favorites are Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Ilya Kaminsky and Deborah Digges. I’m trying to write poems about my work as a therapist, but I’m easily distracted and keep writing poems about that domestic drama otherwise known as my pesky children.

Please “teach” us! Assign us some reading and/or homework, maybe a writing prompt.

Two things from my program that has rocked my world that you can easily replicate on your own:

1. Write a statement on your poetics. One full page, double spaced.

2. Make a list of 20 books of poetry that are recommended by a variety of poets/blogs/teachers. Read a book a week and then write up a 2-4 page critique addressing craft, tone, voice, arc, etc. Basically, what moved you and why.

3. After you’ve done 20 books, revisit assignment #1. Rinse and repeat.

That assignment certainly isn’t for the faint-hearted! Any parting shots?

The MFA is a great excuse to get out of social obligations. 

Michele Bombardier is a Northwest poet with nearly twenty publications in journals such as Floating Bridge, The Examined Life Journal, Freshwater and Sukoon. She is a speech-language pathologist serving persons with stroke, traumatic brain injury and autism. Michele is pursuing an MFA in poetry at Pacific University.