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We’re thrilled to announce the release of Double Clothesline, a thrilling new short story collection by Justin Bigos. A must-have for your Summer reading list — you won’t be able to put it down!
“These four finely wrought, evocative stories are packed with action, power, and heart. Justin Bigos is a fabulous writer, and Double Clothesline is a knockout collection of his work.”
— Peter Kispert, author of I Know You Know Who I Am
And so the story begins. Get your copy Here!!!!
Review by Nikki Ummel
David Greenspan’s debut collection, One Person Holds So Much Silence,explores, at its heart, the relationship between mind and body, and what happens when one- or both- fall apart. The collection opens with, “Poem for a god of my own understanding,” which situates us in the pressing needs of the collection: corporeal existence, mental illness, drug use, and the myriad ways a person can slip through society’s cracks. See how the poem starts with, “Opening my palm on a fence,” and then later, “opening / my knee on a mirror” after “the doctor / sputters up lust small / tablets.” We see the speaker’s body mirror the speaker’s mental health; both are unraveling.
The speakers of these poems struggle: addiction, mental illness, poverty. In “Skinny Fisted Sons,” the rural setting is rife with decay, alcoholism, and other “magnificent ways to die.” We see the ways that poverty kills, causing the “sons” to turn not on society, but on each other. Their life, a cycle of abuse and decay, is eating them alive. Generational trauma is present in “Skinny Fisted Sons” and can be traced throughout the collection. In “Three: The Dead,” the narrator states, “we lived with memory / we have no answers.” In the closing poem, “A Poem to Pass the Time,” the speaker relates a traumatic experience with his father. “He anesthetized our dog / beneath a pignut hickory sky / I was a child / I wanted to be / nothing.” There is no escape; to be alive is to live with memory, to live with memory is to live with trauma.
Greenspan’s collection is concerned with the ways that we, as humans, continue existing despite reason. In “Where are the worms in my mouth brother in your mouth,” the Q speaker, filling the role of therapist or doctor, asks, “How are you doing threaded together so.” Later, A responds, “Beneath my skin is a zipper. Beneath the zipper is more skin. Shapeless, without tuft of muscle, bone, organ.” The body is held together so delicately, paralleling the speaker’s mental health. “I’m sad enough / to put real thought / into how I’d kill myself…but not sad enough to do it” confesses the speaker of “I don’t like to sing about boxing but I hope you’ll understand.” There is no hope to be found in medication, which keeps the speaker “at an acceptable level of sad.” Medication becomes another source of trauma, a way for the speakers of these poems to lose themselves in escape.
Drugs appear and reappear, slipping out of the poems as quickly as they enter. In “Where are the worms in my mouth brother in your mouth,” the speaker bleakly states, “Endless reaches of lithium flavor.” Later, “I was as much as anyone. Grafted and grifted the first time she found needles. Slouching toward death, both of us.” In “Poem for Florida,” the speaker mentions “lemon bright distraction,” then, “Pills and pills.” “Palliative on Rooftop” is about a group of friends hanging out “with clonidine and gabapentin / prescribed off label.” Within these drugs is not liberation or relief, but instead, “overdoses and tumors,” the slow slide towards death. “Unspool with us,” states the speaker of “Body by Adderall.” The process of slipping through the cracks becomes communal.
This book is a coming to terms: with mental health, addiction, place, personal history. The failings and wailings of the body. The collection closes with “A Poem to Pass the Time” which poses Greenspan’s response to his traumas. “Here’s what I have… culpability of language/ a rush of pencil on paper,” and despite the claim that “the poem isn’t very kind,” there is relief in the process of creation. “I can’t understand anything / unless it’s wet with metaphor.” Poetry becomes the act of meaning-making, and in meaning, there is the shimmer of hope.
Nikki Ummel is a queer writer, editor, and educator at the University of New Orleans. Nikki has been published or is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Adroit, Hobart, The Georgia Review, and more. In 2021 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry and awarded an Academy of American Poets Award. She is currently the Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine. You can find her on the web at www.nikkiummel.com.
Rita Banerjee’s essay in three parts, “The Female Gaze,” is an excerpt from her memoir and manifesto on how young women of color keep their cool against social, sexual, and economic pressure. In her essay exploring the female gaze, female agency, and female cool, Banerjee asks:
What if women, especially women of color, were the progenitors of cool? That is, did women have to cultivate their own cool—their own sense of style, creative expression, and coldness—in order to survive patriarchy across millennia across cultures? If the male gaze aims subordinate and colonize, what does the female gaze, tempered by cool, desire? What does the female gaze cherish or hold dear? If a woman were fully aware of her gaze, would she use it to objectify and colonize, or could her gaze destabilize and decolonize?
Photo still of Zowa and Ariane, a French couple from Burning Down the Louvre (2022), a documentary film about race, tribalism, and intimacy in the United States and in France.
III. I see you seeing me
In the line outside of the Beauté Congo exhibit at the Fondation Cartier, Michael digs into me.
“Your stance, it’s always political, political, political.”
His hands make a gesture like he’s solving a Rubik’s Cube.
“You’ve got a 30,000 foot aerial view on things, Rita, you’re never are going to get your hands dirty that way.”
My lips press together into a tight smile before I speak.
“And what about your view?” I try to parry, “Is everything in the world reduced to something that’s just Oedipal? Isn’t your gaze, in essence, Freudian?”
I avoid his eyes and know that I’m not saying what I really think. I’m afraid to say what I really think in front of him. What I want to ask is: isn’t everything you talk about invariably and essentially about sex?
Michael’s eyes are two dark missiles pointed at me. He aims and doesn’t look away. Our arms race occurs in silence. The silence stretches into infinity.
He leans closer. My heart speeds.
“Exactly,” he says with a half-smile as if he can read the thoughts I am afraid to articulate.
* * *
In Town Bloody Hall, Germaine Greer engages in a battle of wills and wits with Norman Mailer as he argues that men are merely passive slaves to women, who are the ones who really hold power, in The Prisoner of Sex.
The debate takes place at NYU in 1971.
In the film, Mailer introduces Greer as the “lady writer” from “England,” although Greer is clearly exhibiting an Australian accent and despises the term “lady” to qualify anything.
Her fur stole drags on the floor as she responds to Mailer:
“I turned to the function of women vis-à-vis art as we know it. And I found that it fell into two parts. That we were either low, sloppy creatures or menials, or we were goddesses, or worse of all, we were meant to be both, which meant that we broke our hearts trying to keep our aprons clean.”
Mailer doesn’t look up, Greer doesn’t pause:
“I turned for some information to Freud. Treating Freud’s description of the artist as an ad hoc description of the psyche of the artist in our society, and not in any way as an eternal pronouncement about what art might mean. And what Freud said, of course, has irritated many artists who’ve had the misfortune to see it: He longs to attain to honor, power, riches, fame, and the love of women but he lacks the means of achieving these gratifications.”
Greer pronounces the words and the camera settles on Mailer’s worried face. The audience chuckles at his unease. She does not stop:
“As an eccentric little girl who thought it might be worthwhile, after all, to be a poet, coming across these words for the first time, was a severe check. The blandness of Freud’s assumption that the artist was a man sent me back into myself to consider whether or not the proposition was reversible. Could a female artist be driven by the desire for riches, fame, and the love of men?”
* * *
Throughout my MFA program and grad school days, I had a batik tie-dyed image of Saraswati on my bedroom wall. She was strategically placed to hover over my writing desk at all times. Because goddesses were part and parcel of the modern Bengali imagination, and because my life couldn’t get any more hippie.
Several years later, when I moved to Munich, I started to teach creative writing classes in town at a local English-language bookstore called The Munich Readery. One of the first classes I taught involved “evocative objects.”
The room was packed. With thirty students or so. I asked them to come up to the stage, one-by-one, and pick up an object from the table that they found strange and fascinating, and write a lyrical, essayistic, or narrative piece that spoke to the object or spoke from it.
Emily Phillips, an expat African-American poet and dramatist living in Munich, came up next. She took her time rummaging through the objets d’art, and chose at last a small object gleaming silver, and then sat down to write an essay about India and the recent rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi and her fears of traveling to Asia all alone. As I walked around the room and listened to her read her piece aloud, I found myself wanting to reassure her that women could not only combat the male gaze but could subvert male violence, too.
But the conviction in my voice faltered as I made my way up to her. I scanned her face and saw her eyes flash with confusion, hope, disbelief, worry, and rage. What could I say in reassurance to those eyes? Was there any society on earth worth defending that only saw women as bodies, as anonymous vessels for male enjoyment and cruelty?
“What do you have there?” I asked, avoiding her glance, and peeking over her notebook at what she held in her hand instead.
“It looks like it’s a seated woman wearing a machine gun,” Emily answered.
“A machine gun?”
“Yes,” Emily elaborated on the story of the female figure. “It looks like she’s holding a machine gun in her hand and swearing a chain of bullets.”
“Oh,” I did a slow double-take and let out a breath, “that’s Saraswati. She’s the goddess of the arts.”
* * *
In Cambridge, in August, when the sun dapples through the old lindens and wisteria and makes everything seem like a mid-summer night’s dream, Michael and I find ourselves interrupted. We are shooting a scene for our documentary film on race and racism in Paris. We are laying down the narration and plot point B for the film, when our film crew revolts.
Two members of the camera crew, two young men, both in their early twenties, take over our mics and seats. They push us out of our chairs and literally off the stage.
“You’re not commenting on the action happening on the film reel behind you,” a Harvard undergrad exclaims, fanning a hand through his dirty-blonde hair. “I mean look at the cops hitting black protestors, that’s racist, right?”
In the back of the room, behind the rolling cameras now, Michael and I watch and listen.
“I feel complicit,” says the other young bespectacled man, also with blonde hair but tinged with gray. “I feel like I’m part of some sort of psycho-sexual drama.”
My ears pricked. In the dark, Michael grips his paper coffee cup and wrings it, as if it were the neck of an undergrad.
“I mean, Rita,” the tall, blondish undergrad continues, now addressing me, “you said yourself that you’re a fan of Beauvoir. But as Michael mentioned, when one becomes a woman, one becomes both subject and object. To not recognize that one is an object would be to deny oneself the eroticism of objectification.”
Excuse me, I think, but don’t get a chance to counter before he continues.
“So we think that you and Michael should explore that space. There’s some sort of dynamic building between you. So why not go for it? Why not become a woman, Rita?”
Excuse me?
The twenty-one-year-old issues his dare and stares at me, off-screen. His more nervous and thoughtful, bespectacled friend does the same. Michael barely turns my way, but I can feel the tension radiating from every part of his body. I am surrounded by the ferocity of three male gazes: three white male gazes: three white male cis-heteronormative gazes. And all these gazes are asking me to do is become the thing I fear most: a woman.
You’re standing on my neck.
* * *
Bengali culture is full of ghosts and goddesses. Sometimes, they are even the same. Every autumn, from mid-October through February we would celebrate puja season in New Jersey. Puja, or an act of ceremonial worship, always appears to center on the honor and reverence of goddesses.
The season always began with a puja to Durga, the wife of Shiva, a woman warrior and fierce mother figure, who was the only god with enough chutzpah to defeat the buffalo-demon Mahishasura. She could do this, in part, because she was female. From the feminine, came her strength.
And her desire, too. Because Durga soon transformed into Kali, after that first death. Once she tasted violence, Kali could not get enough of it. She danced around the world naked, covered in garlands of her victims’ severed heads, hands, and other trophies of war. Only when she stepped on the body of her husband, Shiva, did her rampage stop. The wife’s foot on her husband’s body. The ultimate patriarchal mark of dishonor.
Later in November, during Navaratri, there’s the celebration of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity. At night, wax candles in copper lamps are lit to illuminate her way into each home.
And finally, in February, Saraswati, the goddess of learning, knowledge, elocution, and the arts is celebrated. She is seated beside her owl or swan. She often has a quill in her hand, or often is depicted playing the sitar.
Goddess worship is innate to Bengali culture. Bharat, itself, is often referred to as “Mother India” in many local tongues. In Hindu and Jain cultures, the cow is not holy, but she is, of course, female.
Of his kinsman, Rabindranath Tagore once wrote, “Bengali mothers don’t raise men, they raise Bengalis.” It was meant as a form of barbed criticism but was received as praise by his native audience.
Over coffee one day, my mother, Gargi, the scientist and the philosopher turns to me, “Do you know that the Sanskrit word for power is feminine?”
“You mean Shakti?” I ask, thinking the term connotes strength.
“Yes,” she answers, “shakti is power, absolute, divine. Without shakti, there is no human power. Without feminine power, there is no masculine.”
I pause and smile, “Then how do you explain the patriarchy?”
* * *
In Cambridge, the day after our shoot ends, Michael asks about the camera operators. Both men were blonde and blueish-eyed, but he inquires about the young man he knows personally. The tall one. The one who doesn’t wear glasses. The one with the roving eyes. The one who suggests the crew should step out, the cameras keep rolling, and Michael and I make out on screen. The one whose gaze cuts me like a knife.
“Do you find him beautiful?” he almost whispers. We are alone in the faculty cafeteria, staring at my computer screen. We watch the video footage from the day before as the two boys overtake us on stage.
Michael sounds thoughtful and tired.
He might as well be asking: Do you find me beautiful?
My eyes rove over his nervous hands, his cool glasses, his face. When they finally meet his, it’s a union of hazel against deep brown. He’s looking right back at me. His eyes are softer than they ever should be. They catch light. So I whisper back:
“Who says the eye loves symmetry?”
Rita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing program at the George Polk School of Communications at Long Island University Brooklyn. She is author of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing,Echo in Four Beats, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA from the University of Washington, and her work appears in Hunger Mountain, Isele, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre (2022), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays.
Review by Alan Zelenetz
I’m imagining Charles Baudelaire shaking off his signature melancholy and “viewing” his way, for a devilishly delightful hour or so, through Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine, Nick Potter’s new collection of “Comics/Poems” (as it’s category-tagged on the front cover). No question, the nineteenth-century Parisian poet savors his twenty-first-century counterpart’s synesthetic blend of sound-sense-color-image splashing rhythmically across the book’s pages. And then, just before his return to the past, that sullen Frenchman tenders a nod of approval in fraternal recognition of Potter’s artistic vision. What vision? A dark-humored, offbeat scrutiny of the confounding dread and indecisiveness, the obsessions, hesitations, and foreboding uncertainties that constitute the human experiment on this fragile laboratory planet of ours. Global spleen.
To be clear, Potter is not pretending in this collection to plumb the philosophical depths of our existence, but he certainly is leading us, like anxious surfers at the shores of Teahupoo, towards some monstrously heavy waves.
Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine opens with a pair of erudite epigraphs, mischievously misquoted so that “comics” rise to the manifest aesthetic stratosphere of “music,” “architecture” and “geometric space.” First alert, we’re to be engaged in serious business here. What follows then is, well, to call it Comics Poetry is eminently fair, but. Perhaps a tad too easy? Semantically efficient, but. A bit cautiously genre-neutral? What the product of Potter’s creative process really merits—deservedly so and not for the sake of disruption—is that we tweak tradition and stre-e-etch conventional boundaries, like “Hey, make some room there.” BGJM delivers a combo of words and pictures metaphorically akin to nuclear fusion’s release of energy – so why not just call it what it is, “Sheer Poetry” and leave it at that? Sheer poetry vested in the verbal and visual, a marvelous marriage of past traditions and present day pop culture, of classic conventions and contemporary sensibilities.
In one spot the artwork reminds us of Renaissance sketchbooks, in another of French Fauvism; look over here it’s abstract, over there, representational. At one moment words appear as the integral and distinct elements of speech and meaning that we’d expect from daughters of the alphabet, at another they spring a surprise — fracturing into separate letters consigned to corners, or peeking out from a puddle of
colors, or—in grey calligraphy against grey background— playing hide and seek with us ready or not. Some words and letterstransform themselves into lines of art, improvising as they curlicue over and across comic book panels, challenging us to join all this jazz, to enter these boxes of poetry and endeavor to make sense of what we’re reading and looking at—or what we’re viewing, to attempt a term that might or might not better focus our attention on the graphic design, the fluid blend of text and image on the page.
And the poems we view leave little room for doubt that, all influences considered, we’re not in Da Vinci’s workshop circa 1500 or the Belle Époque studio of Matisse. Why, we’re even a whole century past Krazy Kat’s first comic strip appearance. We’re in the very here and now. Yes, in our own fraught post-aughts, where Potter casts an unerring and apprehensive eye on us humans in an absurd new millennium as we sink or swim to soundtracks by FKA twigs and Phoebe Bridgers.
Welcome to a world where vacationers, “People being who they are,” casually ignore a man who catches on fire, while the one woman who does respond intentionally adds gasoline, to extinguish the man, not the flames. An absurd fable fueled with a mean moral.
In this world, the eponymous Jazz Machine of the book’s title leaves a trail of suffering, chaos, and erasure in its wake, while a building’s infrastructure, rather than providing support, bends and hobbles and collapses into rubble.
Here, guests go missing and the disappearance of “Alvin Dillinger’s Brother” is conveyed by means of a worrying Beckett-like monologue with some wordless panels, several blotted black ink stains, and omnipresent forebodings of death.
As for Domestic Objects and Phenomena? Sinister. They portend Life’s design to fill us with recurrent dread, and they include uncertain dinner plans, dying plants, hidden wires, and threats by mom to sell our creature comfort television set. The unremarkable occasion of going for a haircut becomes a “Maybe” filled with indecision, hesitation, stuttering thoughts, and Kierkegaardian angst, all packed into a grid of claustrophobic rectangular panels better suited to an Excel spreadsheet—that product of dispassionate, dreary binary digits, over and over—than to capturing the relaxed atmosphere of an everywoman enjoying a pleasant talc-scented grooming.
And, yes, in this world, water is for drowning.
Not even an “Interlude” brings relief. In scratchy black and white, it suggests storyboards for the ill-fated fetal creature in David Lynch’s underground film Erasherhead. And by book’s end, the whole earth’s ecological catalog is reduced to smoke, flood, and cyclone. Despite a momentary hint and tint of some exquisite Japanese woodcut, we face a landscape bereft of animal life and a horizon devoid of any particular promise, fading off into a colorless “Epilogue” in grey and black and white, ovoid and jagged and wormy and flinty and sad.
Many of his themes may be dark, but Potter evidently enjoys plying and playing with the tools of his trade, all those letters and lines, words and crayons and colors and grids, fashioning them into his poetry, at times creating a sort of variation on haiku form.
“WHA/ T S/ HOULD WE DO/ A BO UT D IN NER ?”
reads across four panels awash in soft lavenders and blues, the words doing double duty as both semantic and graphic elements, the pictures not just sitting there looking pretty but propelling the narrative.
“A HIDDEN / KNIFE BUTTERS / MY HAND IN /THE LEAVES”
reads another set of panels, florally decorated and channeling the brevity, lyricism, elusiveness and, yes, pressed leaves of Emily Dickinson.
True, piecing together these poems requires a bit of cryptographer’s determination, and patience, but the rewards of penetrating the space of the panels, of “reading” into the Rorschach of Potter’s imagination and solving the puzzles he proffers are payoff enough.
Sure, the world might be a dread-full place. And, of course, we readers will recognize characters and circumstances on these pages all too well, as Taylor Swift intones in another context. Who hasn’t felt fretful at times? Boxed into the corners of an existential crisis? Fearful of an uncontrollable future, whether it be minutes, or months, or a millennium away? And yet, when a true artist interprets, depicts, and shares with us that world, those feelings—well, that, that is a joy-full experience. Such is George Potter’s Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine.
Alan Zelenetz is an East Coast – based writer and educator whose most recent publication is the collection Kull the Conqueror: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus.
REVIEW BY LILLIE GARDNER
A bath can be a lot of things, and Jen Silverman holds a magnifying glass up to each of these meanings and incarnations in her gorgeously wrought poetry chapbook Bath, available May 24th from Driftwood Press. Silverman writes about baths that are baptisms, baths as floods, baths in dreams, baths of dust—all while holding the reader in literal baths of words (the poems are entitled “Bath 1,” “Bath 2,” and so on). From the opening’s pairing of a Bible quote about iniquity with a defiant “don’t fuck with me” line from Joan Crawford, Bath holds the reader in spaces that boldly confront the meanings of redemption, rebirth and love.
The chapbook consists of eleven poems that are set in cities around the world, from American towns like Iowa City and Louisville to faraway places like Cairo and Cuzco. The words stretch across time as well as space, with nods to ancient pharaohs, sacrifices and gods, and images of Egyptian stone bathtubs and the streets of Alexandria that “are sheets of dust and ochre.” Silverman’s encompassing worldview also includes the future. Characters on New Year’s Eve “set ourselves towards the people we wish we were” and one poem’s narrator dreams of “talking to children / I haven’t had.” In a particularly compelling passage in the chapbook’s final poem, Silverman describes how all times coexist, concluding with the lovely line, “and my partner is a bright horizon that has yet to arrive.”
A sacred, biblical tone permeates Silverman’s writing, particularly in “Bath 2” when the narrator waits in Cairo for a flood:
The locusts. The plagues. The pharaohs,
long-dead and staggering over the sands from beyond.
But no gods showed up to punish us.
And yet the poetry is unmistakably contemporary. Silverman’s tone is often casual, even blasé, with lines about relationships like “the sensitive ones will leave your bed and go / out into the cold, hearts bruised, and what can you do” and “Oh, he has panic attacks / all the time now.” Other moments are emotional and poignant, such as the way a father’s love for his daughter “becomes a weather-system / of love.” The poems are resplendent with powerful images, including “the wind / flakes like mica, our skins glitter, / our hair is jeweled with sand.” Silverman beautifully intertwines the moments in love and heartbreak that hold us inside them with the weight of an ancient past, revealing the fragility of humanity in between. In “Bath 2,” she writes:
We’re not so special.
Just a story so old it has escaped its meaning:
How things of one fabric fall to pieces.
The eleven “Bath” poems are divided by a contrasting poem between “Bath 6” and “Bath 7”: “The Devil Dogs My Steps, But If It Weren’t Him, It Would Just Be Someone Else,” a four-part poem about the Devil visiting the narrator with an unexpectedly nonchalant, whimsical reckoning. “The Devil peels potatoes,” begins the third section. “He’s throwing a dinner party. He / invited my landlord and all my exes.” Unusual images abound, including the Devil lingering at CVS and sitting in a hotel sauna. Throughout this poem and others in the collection, the narrator expects punishment—desires baths to wash away sins and make redemption possible—but doesn’t actively seek it out. In “Bath 4” the narrator echoes Mary Oliver with “You do not have to be good,” and “Bath 10” includes a reference to its characters’ “lack of shame,” suggesting there is not much that can be done to eradicate living with sin.
Bath is a journey of relationships ending and going, of water and dust, of the containers that hold us and release us. With stunning syntax and captivating characterizations of times and places as well as people, Silverman considers the redemption and purity that humanity aspires to, and ultimately explores what it is to be submerged in it all.
Lillie Gardner is a writer based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in the Delmarva Review, Long River Review, Sentient Media, Funny-ish.com and more. Her screenplay American Virtuosa won Outstanding Drama Pitch at the 2021 Catalyst Story Institute and was a Top 3 Finalist in the Big Break Screenwriting Contest. She reviews books for EcoLit Books and writes for Feminist Book Club.
Damien Roos, an incredible part of our PANK family, sat down to talk to David Scott Hay about his novel, The Fountain.
Intro: In David Scott Hay’s new novel, The Fountain, a water fountain at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago magically grants drinkers the ability to create exactly one masterpiece of their own, a gift that carries dire consequences. The Fountain is a mad dash, meta and epic and loud. Hay shreds fine art culture and all its pretensions, sounding the call for true artists to do the very thing they were born to do: Create.
His small press debut, The Fountain is scheduled for winter release by Whisk(e)y Tit, a publisher proudly “committed to restoring degradation and degeneracy to the literary arts”. It will also be translated and released in Russia in 2022. Order now at The Fountain | Whisk(e)y Tit (whiskeytit.com).
In this interview, we cover a range of topics such as authenticity in art, drugs as a creative crutch and Ted Lasso. Also, we drink.
Damien Roos: I decided on Yuengling Black & Tan for this interview. It’s sort of a November go-to for me. I assume you’re drinking the patented Old Fashioned you mention in your author bio?
David Scott Hay: Yes, with less of the simple syrup in this batch. I’m actually drinking it out of a Whiskey Tit glass. Swag from the publisher. Can you see the logo?
DR: Oh, that’s nice. Yes, the W logo.
DSH: When I pitched Miette, the editor of Whiskey Tit, my first line was, “If we end up working together, I’m going to get a tattoo of your logo.” And then I flew out to AWP (Association of Writers and Writers Programs) to meet her. This was just a year and a half ago, right before everything got locked down. And Miette was like, “Where’s the tattoo?” and I was like, “Where’s the book?”
DR: [laughs]
DSH: I haven’t gotten the tattoo because the book hasn’t come out yet.
DR: Well, as a read, The Fountain is the sort of book in which you can really sense the author’s glee. It seemed like you had a lot of fun writing it.
DSH: It’s funny that you say that. Lauren Groff was one of my thesis readers. She said the book felt like it was written with half-repressed glee, or something to that effect.
Yes, the book was joyfully written. I wrote it in secret, so I didn’t have any outside pressure, or whatever. At that time, I was building furniture, and Bob Bellio (the real-life protagonist in The Fountain) was across the hall creating sculptures. If I had an idea, I would write a chapter here and there, just exploring different characters. I would go 6 months without looking at the manuscript. Then I’d check out a show or something, or have an inspiring conversation, and I would go back and revisit. I’ve done a number of screenplays and plays and books, but the process always seems to be a little different every time and I think that’s what keeps me from feeling like I’m just hammering out something. Which is different than building furniture, where there’s a very linear process. You design it, you go get the wood, you bring it back, you do your rough cuts, you sand, you put it together, stain it, lacquer it, and do the final touches or whatever.
With a book, especially one that’s very scattershot, it’s like, “Okay, now I need to start connecting the dots and putting stuff together.” I finally gave some chapters to a good friend of mine and he was like, “Yeah, this is good, keep going.” And I got to a point where I realized it would take me another 10 years to finish the book. So I was like, “Oh, let’s go to grad school. I’ll already have the jump on things.” And then I went to work. Smoothed it out to where everything worked craft-wise, solved head-hopping issues and what not.
But in the initial stages, I just wrote freely. Whatever amused me and made me laugh, I wrote. There are so many inside jokes with friends of mine and snippets of song lyrics in that book. Some of my favorite opening lines from books are even buried in there. I won’t say which ones but…it just made me happy. My thesis advisor got through it and was like, “I know there are a lot of coded references in here. The ones I caught were amazing.” It really elevated the joy of it.
DR: And did you set out to do a takedown of art culture and commodification, or did the narrative just take on that message?
DSH: Narrative on this one. I was at the Museum of Contemporary Art and I swear to God, this is what happened. We’re walking along, checking out contemporary pieces. I mean, you talk about the old masters and stuff like that, “I got no beef.” But with contemporary art, I’m like, “Well, that is a big red cube, I can do that. My kid has done that…is it art?” So, it gets controversial. My whole litmus test is this: “If I can do it, it’s not art.” So, I’m looking at the red cube and going, “Well, that’s not art,” But then sometimes you get some stuff that really affects you. I saw one particular piece at the MCA, and that was kind of the inspiration for Tabitha’s piece in the book.
DR: What piece did you see that affected you?
DSH: It was a Lee Bontecou retrospective. I can’t remember a specific piece, but I know it was a combination of her mobiles and sculptural work. I don’t think I glanced at her ink work. But her mobiles… “Oh, this is actually crafted and it’s doing something and I’m physically drawn towards it. Her work was not easily dismissed.” And we continued along and came upon a water fountain with a little bubble man on it and the little dots going up for the water. You know, like the generic bubble people they use on restroom signs?
DR: Yes.
DSH: It was one of those inspirational moments. I’ve only had a handful of those, a lot of times it’s just craft and curiosity, hoping for discovery. But every now and then I get an idea that’s like, “Okay, so, what if people took a drink of water from this fountain and became these brilliant artists?” And then they had the Kiddie Art Exhibit area at the MCA too. Same thing. I saw it and was like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be funny if somebody actually created something in the Kiddie Art Exhibit area that rivaled whatever? What would that look like?” I couldn’t shake the idea.
DR: I want to talk about the water fountain. Like, the device itself. As the story goes, a drink from it grants a person the ability to create exactly one masterpiece, and then they die soon after. I read it as basically symbolic of the often destructive nature of artistic creation, the “staring into the abyss” aspect that sometimes manifests as addiction, depression, or dysfunctional living. Is my analysis on track?
DSH: Perhaps in hindsight. It was really as simple as just going off the premise. So, literally, it’s not so deep– the inspiration, after all, was the little bubble man drinking the water and a question of “What if?”. Write for story and cut for theme.
That said, it’s really a matter of authenticity. Ross Robert, who starts as a minor character and becomes a main one by the end, has a problem with being authentic with himself. And the dilemma with the water helps him realize that. His wife is like, “No, there’s no instant anything to successful art. Art has to be self-expression and it has to be authentic.” So, there’s a little bit of that whole “just add water” adage, right? Literally, just add water, Damien, and you can have an artistic masterpiece, and fame and fortune. But no, for him art is therapy and he’s working out something. He’s exploring something. And that’s what I did with The Fountain. It started off as a joke, like “What would happen?” It’s the high concept pitch, right? And then I have to argue every side; for, against, and their temptations and rationalizations.
DR: I believe one of the characters states that some artists use heroin, some are heavy drinkers etc. There’s that element of self-destruction.
DSH: All those junkies and drinkers. Yes, yes, yes. That’s the thing that makes me happy, getting to explore all these different sides of the argument. Tabby, the character you mention, came from the Midwest, never had an artistic bone in her body, drinks from the fountain, suddenly gets all this attention. Right?
DR: Yes.
DSH: This younger art critic is suddenly like her little boy toy and she’s got these art students worshipping her. She justifies it like, “Why is this any different than doing heroin or taking LSD or doing anything else? It unlocked my potential.” That’s her argument and, as a reader, you’re going to be like, “Well, yes, The Doors, I’m sure did a little of something and Johnny Cash sure did something too.” Her argument is that everybody needs a little help.
DR: Yes. I think it’s a compelling one, too. Maybe I took that thread and really ran with it in a way that you may have not even intended as an author. But that might also be because numerous pop cultural references you cite in the work would fall into that category.
DSH: And what does that say about a successful artist? They all had access. There’s no leg up. I mean, what if the Beatles hadn’t discovered drugs? And thank God Fentanyl wasn’t popular in the ’60s.
But that’s also the time, right? Hendrix was doing drugs. Everybody was doing drugs. The Stones were doing drugs. The Beatles were doing drugs. The Beatles were thugs pretending to be gentlemen. The Rolling Stones were gentlemen pretending to be thugs. It is what it is.
I mean I’ve written sober, I’ve written stoned, I’ve written drunk, I’ve written however. I’ve written while feeling sick, I’ve written sober. The difference in output is negligible. As long as I’m not assholing my way from point A to point B. But yes, you could argue it’s like a creative crutch. Right?
DR: Sure. Could be to some.
DSH: Of course, the water fountain is the ultimate crutch. The Beatles still have to sit together writing songs and they still have to figure out musical problems, even when they’re drinking or high or whatever…
DR: And they had talent, of course.
DSH: Tabby gives that as an excuse. But at the end of the day, she’s not drinking alcohol, she’s not getting high. She has no talent. No sense of craft. She took a drink of water and she made this thing. Suddenly, her whole life has changed.
And then she was unable to replicate it. It’s the Sophomore Slump at age 70. There’s that panic with her, like, “I need another drink of water.” Because in her mind, that’s what did it. She’s craving the drug for success and I guess digging deeper into the idea that some artists use drugs or stimulants or whatever as part of their process. That her rationale.
DR: I guess I’m trying to even go a little deeper into the rabbit hole with this question. But it’s not even necessarily, like, the performance enhancement aspect. That’s not even what interests me as much.
There’s the quote from Nietzsche about gazing into the abyss, and how the abyss eventually gazes back. I feel like for artists, writers and musicians, their work may take a toll mentally, spiritually, whatever, that people feel they have to alleviate chemically or something.
DSH: Are you talking about in terms of part of their process, or part of the recharge?
DR: I would say the recharge. But I guess it can spill into either category. I think for some people, like the musicians in that era that you were just discussing, it was a lifestyle thing, too.
DSH: I think for the people we referenced from the 60s drugs were certainly a part of their lifestyle. But they were still working their craft.
If you want to talk about the Eagles, or Jackson Browne, or the Laurel Canyon scene, or whatever, those guys were building a network. They were jamming with friends. They were learning. They were listening to records, trying to figure out how the fuck they did certain things.
For those guys, I think it was part of the lifestyle, maybe. Creatively, it was a baseline throughout. But those guys talked to one another, they hung out with one another, they showed each other chord progressions, they sang campfire songs. They were really in a culture that fostered creativity and sharing. And yes, I’m sure there was mutual recharging as well. There’s a lot of pressure on every level.
DR: And everyone approaches their craft differently, of course. Writers, for example, prioritize different aspects of storytelling.
DSH: Yup. People in Hollywood and MFA programs talk about, “Raise the conflict. Conflict, conflict, conflict.” And for me it’s, “No, establish the connection. Bolster the connection. Conflict doesn’t matter if there’s no connection. Don’t bother upping the stakes if there’s no connection.”
Sometimes the level of conflict I want is Ted Lasso or Peppa Pig. Which if you don’t have kids, you wouldn’t know Peppa Pig. It’s a show for very young grade schoolers featuring pigs with English accents. It’s all polite misunderstandings or things being misplaced. Sometimes that’s the level of conflict I want.
It’s a little “All right, let’s figure it out. Hey, we’re going to sing the song. Figure things out,” That’s what I want. Marvel’s like, “The known universe is going to be destroyed.” But with The Fountain it’s like, “Oh, it comes down to personal choice and whatever. I say that knowing it has apocalyptic undertones.” Do you watch Ted Lasso?
DR: Everyone’s asking that. I guess I need to get around to it.
DSH: It’s very fun. It’s very heartfelt. But the conflict is very low. It’s just navigating relationships, hurt feelings and all that. If you have the connection, you can have that low-level conflict seem big. Then any conflict, whether it’s a misunderstanding or somebody’s ignoring somebody, it gets heightened emotionally.
DR: Let’s go ahead and move to Bill Hicks, who you mention in this book. He was railing against over commodification and “brand culture” back in the 90s, when the idea of selling out was an actual problem that artists considered. This might be why I ultimately read your work as precisely the dystopian nightmare that Hicks seems to be warning us about.
DSH: I think in retrospect, that works. I don’t know. Consciously, I wasn’t trying to do it. Again, it was this kind of exploration of the premise.
DR: Retrospect would be fine. I mean, it’s a very dystopian novel for anyone who’s involved in the arts. It’s kind of frightening, right?
DSH: Well, there is the commodification of the water, of course. And the curator of the MCA doesn’t know how it works. He doesn’t even care how it works. He knows you can only get one masterpiece out of each person who drinks. He’s not curious. That’s a big Ted Lasso thing, being curious. And the curator is not. He just knows this is good for the museum and good for his pockets. And later while the character of B is presented with a great financial opportunity, any sense of selling out is completely flooded away by the freedom the windfall would provide. He’s done with his war.
In regards to Bill Hicks, I always liked his joke about Willie Nelson selling out, and he’s like, “That’s okay. He owes the IRS a $100 million. He can cash in. Willie is given a free pass because he’s Willie fucking Nelson.” I love it.
DR: So, let’s get some insight into how you craft your characters. I notice for example that the antagonist critic Duckworth shares the same affinity for antique typewriters that you express in your bio. Likewise, the loveable badass Jawbone apparently suffered a similar miter saw accident as yourself. Do you believe there are pieces of writers in all the characters they create?
DSH: Yeah. Part of it is laziness, I guess. Part of it is also that I’m a big fan of The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje. It’s such a great book. Michael Ondaatje, a not-too-shabby writer, interviews Walter Murch a few times over. It’s one of the few books I have. It’s dog-eared. I got Post-it notes everywhere in it.
A lot of writers are like, “Oh, I can’t read your book right now because I’m writing and I don’t want it to influence me.” I adopted that for a while. Walter Murch was like, “No, no, no. These are spark points.” His dad was a painter and would lay out canvas in their New York apartment hallway. So, all these people would actually step and then walk on his canvas and then he would pick up the canvas and he would paint but he would still have the footprints of people on it. He talked about spark points and was like, “When I’m editing, I watch everything, I listen to the radio. If I hear a jingle that’s got a weird rhythm, I’ll try that in the editing.” He allows his outside world to influence him in terms of art at that moment. For me, that was really freeing.
So, I was like, “Yeah, I’m going to give Jawbone my finger thing.” Because I lost the tip of my finger in a chop saw accident, right? I’m going to give her that because that’s something that happened to me. I can certainly describe how it happened. Same with the chicken fried rice incident. But the old saying is “just because it happened to you doesn’t mean it’s interesting.” So how do I make that interesting and serve my story?
So, in The Fountain, every character has something that happened to me and/or a feature I thought was interesting or I had done a deep-dive into.
DR: Well, tell me this, while we’re still on the topic of characters. I’m curious to know: Ross Robards’ character is inspired by Bob Ross, I assume?
DSH: Uh-huh.
DR: Yes. Okay. And how did that idea come about?
DSH: Twenty years ago, I saw a stand-up comic who did a bit about Bob Ross being a Vietnam Veteran with PTSD. And he did a little 3-minute bit. It wasn’t super funny. My dad’s a Vietnam Vet. But the way he did it stuck with me for so long and every time I saw Bob Ross I was waiting for him to go off his tit. And 20 years later I needed an example of a commercially successful artist for my novel. I need somebody who has done the work and been successful. Right?
DR: Yes.
DSH: And Bob Ross seemed to be the most generic successful artist. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to make him Bob Ross. It’s going to be Ross Robards. I’ll change the name into something less obvious.” Which I never did.
DR: So, you basically stuck one of those disguises on him with the glasses and the fake nose thinking we wouldn’t know the difference.
DSH: Yes, I Grouched him. So, it’s also, “Okay, that’s my character, what’s his reaction of the things that are going on? What’s his backstory? What’s his point of view?” And Ross is the commercially successful artist and fuck him for having had success. But in writing him I realized he probably has the strongest artistic point of view of anybody in there. Jawbone kind of equivocates about the water and Ross is like, “No. Art is about what comes from within, it’s about working out whatever problems you have, and it is an outlet.” I mean, he is a stronger point of view character. He doesn’t compromise his point of view about art. He digs his heels in and, actually, his point of view becomes stronger. So, that pleased me because he wasn’t becoming a joke character.
DR: Probably my favorite question The Fountain presented concerned the value of the artistic end versus the inherent worth of the artistic process. And I know it’s something that you’ve talked a little bit about. And so, basically, a drink from the fountain is like the ultimate hack for hacks, allowing anyone to produce one masterpiece before the water kills them. I’m kind of curious to hear your direct thoughts about that question too. Process versus pure end result. Can’t beauty maybe just sometimes be easy?
DSH: Yes. Beauty can be easy. Like a dandelion or rose or nature. It can stimulate afterward. But we also know that’s evolution, the green fuse, that it takes time to get to that particular point. Writing The Fountain was a process. I came up with a premise and I explored it. And I’d gone through an MFA program and bolstered my craft and really focused on how to fold the story back in so it became coherent and cohesive. Connections, right?
But, sure, art can be effortless too. I can’t imagine that Jackson Pollock towards the end of his life was really stressing over those last paintings. I mean, somebody did a Red Cube at the MCA. Not a lot of talent is involved. Still, it’s kind of under the shield of art. Right? Everything is art. It can be art. And it’s like, “Well, come on.” To me, art always needs to have a little bit of craft behind it. Even if we’re talking about a rose or a dandelion. There’s a line in Rian Hughes’ XX that gob smacked me. This SOB nailed it in one sentence: “In short, she saw that there was an art to Art, and that it was not something magical or transcendent, but a craft, and good art – the type that could really move you, that you felt with your diaphragm rather than your intellect – was simply the endgame of being very good at your craft.”
DR: I figure this is probably a good one to end on. I found it funny how Jawbone and B so often express the ultimate anxiety of any artist, the worry that they are frauds, doubting their own authenticity as artists. I wonder if this is something that you’ve felt yourself and if it’s a feeling that haunted you while writing the book.
DSH: No, no, no. Well, maybe sometimes a fraud. I did Chicago Theater and I know so many actors and playwrights I talked to had that feeling of, “I’m a fraud and they’re going to find me out because I’m not Edward Albee.” Look, there’s only one Edward Albee, there’s only one Shakespeare. And there’s only one Jackson Pollock, and there’s only one whomever, right? I’m not competing with Tom Wolfe. I’m not competing with the Met. I think some people with talent and a dollop of self-awareness have a tendency to think, “If I’m not as good as the greats, then what I have to say doesn’t have value.” Again, I’ve never had that feeling where I’ve felt like a fraud. But I’ve had that moment where people have taken me seriously and I feel a certain responsibility to seem like I know what I’m talking about. To have answers and to present them in a coherent manner.
The closest to feeling like a fraud vibe comes from working on a first draft and that a little voice telling me it’s not as strong as my last polished work. Of course, it isn’t. But that’s my biggest creative fear, I guess, or obstacle. I don’t trust the process. I’m very suspicious of it, for whatever reason. But when I do it’s a very joyful process.
I think for some reason writers, and I’m projecting of course, with any kind of self-reflection or self-awareness feel like frauds because they feel like, as I said, if I can do it, it’s not art, right? Well, I wrote a book. I spent a lot of time on it, crafting it, making myself laugh. If people react well to it and connect with it, then there’s something of merit to it. I have to believe that whatever I’m working on has something of merit that people might connect with, maybe become a spark point.
David Scott Hay is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and novelist who once lost the tip of a finger to a chop-saw in Chicago. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, son, dog, chickens and a dozen typewriters. Find him on DavidScottHay.com.
Damien Roos is an MFA candidate in Fiction at The New School, a former editorial fellow at Guernica Magazine and a reader for PANK. His work has appeared in such outlets as New South Journal, The Master’s Review and Gravel. He lives in New York City with his wife and bluenose pit bull. damienroos.com
REVIEW BY C. FRANCIS FISHER
—
The worst kind of reading can become a tussle for tyranny. It is this sort that turns people off of poetry – the feeling that the poet must shroud something important in complicated diction or syntax, dangling a carrot the reader must work to decipher. In this struggle, both author and reader vie for supremacy. The author obfuscates meaning with symbols or other poetic devices, and the reader penetrates the text, lifts its skirt, revealing its hidden meaning through analysis.
Wayne Koestenbaum’s Ultramarine, the third and final book in his trance poem trilogy, calls into question this struggle between writer and reader, or poses another question altogether. In order to read Ultramarine, one must relinquish control. These deeply personal musings are impenetrable if you try to understand every reference or connect each logical leap. Relatively early on in this 472-page tome Koestenbaum asks, “who dominates? or does / no one dominate? and is / domination not the issue?”
Koestenbaum intervenes into the question of domination by blowing it up completely. One is both completely inside the mind of the writer – as evidenced by lack of explanations, shorthand in place of names and other devices – and completely outside insofar as the text remains opaque to us – for example the first page includes a character denoted by “M” whom we will never know. In exchange for submitting to the tyranny of the text, the reader is endlessly entertained. After all, how many books ask “why isn’t smegma / more frequently discussed?”
The themes of these poems revolve around the body: sex, the performance of gender, alienation. The first poem in the book, “#1 [my prostate is a shopping mall]” leads with a paradox: “I meant to begin / in Barbra’s voice / but I’m speaking in my / own voice as Ralph Fiennes.” Here, we have a speaker who starts at the point of failure and moves in to the self as persona or performance. From the outset the idea of the atomized self so popular in Western thought is no longer tenable when a speaker declares they speak in their own voice as the voice of another. We are always already influenced by the cultures around us; there is no possibility of purity.
The poem goes on to move through a dizzying array of thoughts before landing on “her discovery / of my cock began / to equal my own / apprehension of its / rumored existence.” The alienation of the self from the body becomes clear and collides with external anxieties: in the mind of the speaker other people talking about his cock is more real than his physical cock itself. The notion of self-formation the first poem offers pivots on an idea of influence.
In “#2 [do-it-yourself-placenta],” we arrive at a completely different manner of constructing the self. Here Koestenbaum offers a self forged through otherness. He writes, “closest companion / is my cough – I hug it.” It is through defect or disability that the self recovers from the alienation the previous poem expressed. What does not work in a normative fashion announces itself, thus bringing the self into the body. Later in the poem, “the turtle beheld / [the speaker’s] inhumanity.” The animal returns the experience of the speaker back to himself, allowing him to be seen the way he feels. These explorations in the ways otherness can behold the self point to the possibility of relationality.
Throughout the text, Koestenbaum returns to the performance of gender. Early on, when the reader is learning how to approach the text, he writes,
never taught
how to shave, a lost scene –
figuring masculinity out
by myself, and I never
figured it out
Here, masculinity becomes something that must be learned–staged, repeated–rather than an innate quality. He goes on later to return to this scene:
waiting for father
to notice that it was time
for me to start shaving –
he never noticed – I wanted
him to buy me a razor
and shaving cream and teach
me how to use them
Desire meets the performance of gender. The speaker wants his father to acknowledge his burgeoning manhood and commend it by teaching him to become even more masculine. However, if we return to the previous scene, the reader already knows this recognition never happens. Thus, desire and manhood meet in a clash that emasculate the speaker, leaving him without the knowledge to perform his gender in socially normative ways.
Similar moments of confrontation and investigation pervade the text, for example “desire / intensified by talking / to my father.” The speaker sidesteps the incest taboo and Koestenbaum accentuates this reveal by breaking the line between talking and the subject, thus raising the reader’s level of surprise. Not only does Koestenbaum surprise us with content, but also with form. The text incorporates all manner of writing from dreams to factual news. It resists privileging one mode over another. Gossip, too, has a place in this world: “Peter / Hujar’s lover called me a sissy / intellectual, a dying breed.” By flattening the hierarchy between different forms of writing, Koestenbaum queers the form of the book. Further, he questions the idea of owning language. One short passage reads:
I cut hair
for the Shah of Iran,
I had an internationally
known hair salon on
Long Island, please
text me a photo of your
Vermont hot tub
This reads like found language, something said to the speaker, or overheard. By choosing not to place quotation marks around this language, Koestenbaum problematizes the notion of ownership.
Despite the self-interested nature of the journal form, this text brings in themes beyond the personal. Questions of antisemitism and the Holocaust arise throughout the text. “#8 [pumpkin childbirth]” ends “when the pustule / vanishes, a pock remains.” This seems to be a key way of understanding Koestenbaum’s project with history – that which is gone is never truly gone. Rather it leaves scars, wounds, the trace of itself on the body.
One hundred years after publication of “The Waste Land” and its ending invocation of “these fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Koestenbaum reimagines the fragment. If Eliot’s magnum opus is made up of gathered fragments compiled into a dam to protect his life from some external force, Ultramarine attempts “to assemble life from fragments.” A century on, it seems all we have is fragments. They no longer protect us from ruin, rather they are the very thing that makes up our lives.
—
C. Francis Fisher is a poet, translator, and critic based in Brooklyn. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Columbia University. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Pacifica Literary Magazine, and the Columbia Journal among other publications. Her poem, “Self-Portrait at 25” was selected as the winner for the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize for Columbia University. Currently, she works as the poetry editor for the Columbia Journal.
REVIEW BY CATHERINE IMBRIGLIO
—
In 1949, at a Berkeley symposium on poetry, the young Jack Spicer complained about the smallness of the audience for poetry. Poetry should be as entertaining as popular culture, he argued. “The truth is that pure poetry bores everybody,” he said. “It is even a bore to the poet.” Instead, according to Spicer, poets “must become singers, become entertainers.” If poetry managed to be more generally entertaining, Spicer thought, it would be less insular, it would have many more readers.
The situation for poetry hasn’t changed that much since 1949. Though in the US today there are more outlets for poetry than in Spicer’s time and many vibrant nationwide poetry communities and festivals, it’s probably a safe bet that most of the audience for poetry consists of people who write or have written poems themselves. In terms of the general US populace, poetry has sunk into a mighty insignificance. (I’d be very happy to be wrong about this.) One only needs to look at the NY Times’ list of 100 notable books of 2021 for evidence. (Two books of poetry made the list.) Or look for the poetry section in one’s favorite bookstore or local library. What’s there? (The Boston Globe, which lists 20 best poetry books for 2021, appears to be one of the few media outlets that take contemporary poetry seriously.)
If Spicer is right and entertainment is an essential factor for increasing poetry’s readership and significance, Kristin Bock’s Glass Bikini is more than up to the task. Her book is disturbingly entertaining, in a rubbernecking at the accident sort of way. The book delights in picking apart illusions of humanity’s goodness, dignity, and value, instead presenting us with a nightmarish, absurdist poetry that is as bizarre as it is horrifying. In Bock’s inside-out, upside-down, Lewis Carroll-ish scenarios, humans are the deadly accident, the catastrophe. Art is the first thing to go: the opening poem “Overcome,” with its biblical overtones, starts the book off with a whacky sense of belatedness and loss. With art gone there is little left that provides us with the inspiration for changing what got us to here. Museum galleries have empty walls. People are entertained by the degrading antics of other human beings. They piss in DuChamps missing fountain, weep “for what might have been”:
And it came to pass, art became extinct. Still, we flocked to museums and stared into barren rooms. Look! Someone would exclaim. There’s a man rolling around on the floor, acting like an unbalanced washing machine, knocking into things and coughing up wet rags. Isn’t it horrifying? Oh, yes, excruciating, someone would yell out. People whizzed in Duchamp’s missing fountain. They blew each other like whistles where L’Origine du Monde used to hang. They wept under restroom signs for what might have been. People shredded their clothes, oozed from chandeliers. … And thus began the gnashing of hair and the pulling of teeth that lasted for the rest of the unknown world.
(My ellipsis, Bock’s italics)
The poems that follow, some with ghoulish titles such as “Snuff Poem,” “Everything Coming Up Rifles,” “The Killing Show,” “Postcard from the Coffin” pull us along with their inventive, unsettling strangeness. Monsters, mannequins, dolls, robots – the almost human – populate many of the book’s poems, in competition with actual humans. (The humans are losing.) The book’s overall atmosphere is menacing and creepy, often involving the human body’s dismemberment:
No, those are not starfish scattered on the sand.
Those are hands curling in on themselves, making
little nests on the beach. Sometimes, they scuttle
away to cut off other hands.
(“The Island of Zerrissenheit”)
Along the same lines, in another poem Bock cuts up body parts to chart humanity’s eventual evolutionary demise:
Some time after the extinction of whales, babies were born in pieces. Lungs, feet, spleen all separate and in heaps. We dumped the remains of our babies in the woods, in the fields and into the seas. To our dismay, the single parts rose and animated. Heads without necks rolled around trying to connect with other parts. Hearts, arms, and tongues crept over the Earth in grotesque parades. Organs and limbs clumped together and survived for a time. …
(“How Rabbits Finally Took Over the World”)
At the same time, Glass Bikini is darkly humorous, provocatively so. (Think Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal.) The humor here is double-edged. While Bock makes it clear that humor may be one of the few psychic defenses left in times of existential crisis, she also dilutes its power by reminding us of some laughter’s underlying cruelty. In one of the poems that I see as central to her project, she stages an evolutionary reversal, with humans trying to escape back to their watery origins. The poem starts at a party, where the speaker’s mother “curls into a set of ovaries and vein-blue tubes.” The speaker picks up her mother and carries her upstairs. What follows is a laughter that is deeply disturbing:
…. I drop my mother, and everybody laughs. It’s just so funny. She slumps over and throbs in the corner. My brother slouches toward her. I try to grab him by the stumps, but they are slick from the forewaters. I keep dropping him in the rising muck. Everyone is convulsively laughing. We can’t stop. We slip, go under. It’s hilarious. All of us grabbing onto each other. All of us ill-made, laughing, and trying to get back inside.
(“Get Back”)
“Get Back”’s suggestion that humans are “ill-made” comes up in other poems. In “Belief Is a Default Setting,” newly-made human replicas “sense something ugly and festering in the heart of a friend. Where there is none.” In “Prometheus Report,” human characteristics are explained by mutations in the genes: “Do you have the M-T-H-F-R mutation? You know, the “Motherfucker” gene? You can’t detox with that one.” Such deterministic notions of genetic composition, begging the question of whether human life is worth preserving, place Bock’s work within a distinguished line of dystopian writing. Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos immediately comes to mind. (In his book, humans end up as seal-like animals, with no hands.)
A reader might understandably wonder if the book provides any relief from the near-apocalyptic visions which dominate most of Glass Bikini’s poems or if the book is a complete downer. I would say there is a modicum of relief, if one looks carefully. I’ll point out two possibilities. The first is the poem “Invitation,” where Satan is unexpectedly the hero. On Monday through Saturday, Satan takes out the garbage of the world. On Sunday, he writes a short note to the “Dayside Creatures,” a note with lovely lyric simplicity that stands out against the horrors in the surrounding poems:
I am a boy who lives in the woods.
I’ll leave the moon on
all night among the leaves.
The other poem I want to mention, “The Inside-Out,” is also lovely, though sadder and much more complicated. It could be read as a commentary on the book as a whole, in that it validates the imagination via a “dark specter” that “grows so heavy inside, it’s hard to carry around, hard to bear through the dream of the inside-out, where the wind whistles through the bones of birds choking on their own feathers….” It’s imagination, even a delusional or despairing one, that compels one to carry on with one’s life, “as if no one can see it beating you down.” The fact that such imaginative poems, however outrageous, actually exist in Glass Bikini – the book’s pages are obviously not blank, in contrast to the barren museum rooms of the book’s opening poem – gives us at least some short term hope that readers might be moved by Bock’s scathing critiques of our cultural moment. (See the poem “Pluto” for a catalogue of human miscreants.) Like the Emily Dickinson quote that Bock uses as an epigraph to one of her sections (“Tis so appalling – it exhilarates -“), this collection is unsettling, but by no means boring. It demonstrates that the comedic mixed with horror can be more scary and enthralling, more memorable, than pure solemnity.
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Catherine Imbriglio is the author of two books of poetry, Parts of the Mass (Burning Deck), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Intimacy (Center for Literary Publishing), which received the Colorado Prize in Poetry. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in After Spicer (John Vincent, ed.), American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, Conjunctions, Contemporary Literature, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Green Mountains Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, West Branch, and elsewhere. A selection of her poetry was anthologized in the Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, ed. Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press). She is a senior editor in poetry for Tupelo Quarterly.
REVIEW BY HANNAH RIFFELL
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Rohan Chhetri does not write poems for the faint of heart. Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a book divided into four parts, the first of which is titled Katabasis, a word that translates to mean a downhill retreat or a descent into the underworld. True to the word, Chethri opens with a monolithic poem that first evokes a bloody folk story before leading into sharp lament for the poet’s own deceased relatives, a transition that weaves subtle inferences of love into a framework of mortality. If the meaning of Katabasis escaped the reader, this introductory poem ought to be a clear forewarning. This physically slim volume of poetry is an emotionally demanding work of art, as Chhetri turns an unblinking eye towards the violent, death-filled nature of reality and questions how it is possible to live in harmony with and to produce poetry alongside the darkness.
“The King’s Feedery,” as the first poem, contains likewise the first lines of the collection, lines that are jarringly stark. “After the rape and the bloodbath,” writes Chhetri, setting the stage for a panoply of poems about sincere pain, but also signalling that the heart of the book extends beyond the actual rape and bloodbath. While Chhetri rarely shies away from graphic details, Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful seems more attuned to the complexities of the “after.” This is a book concerned with the process of remembering desolation and telling stories about agony.
In the first part of the book, the Katabasis section, Chhetri exposes the brutal nature of reality, dwelling on stories of war and genocide and massacres. In “Lamentation for a Failed Revolution,” Chhetri parallels the corporal and psychological effects of violence with a poetic style of disjointed lines, vivid diction, and spliced paragraphs. The images in this poem are horrific: he writes about a man with “blood sluicing down an eye” as he walks to a pharmacy, about a nurse patching together on a fifteen-year-old boy “a medieval coin-sized chunk of skin fallen off the areola,” about “paint-thick blood on the rained streets.” The poem is exhaustive, spanning five pages and nine stanzas; the story does not come quickly or easily to an end. How could it? There is a haunting character to suffering that does not end when the event itself has culminated, something that Chhetri understands keenly. “They dragged our children’s fathers down to the river/ Held them by the hair, pulled their tongues out of their mouths taut like catgut.” This is a historical trauma, one that will affect not only the tortured fathers but the children who observed and will inherit that trauma.
The poems take on a personal note in the second part, called Locus Amoenus in reference to a literary utopia, and seem to describe an intimate effort at reconciliation, as the poet shoulders the lasting legacy of generational trauma. In “Dissociative Love Poem,” he writes that “We are nothing but/ A sum of our history of shame. Grandfather rising/ from a ditch, blood-washed face bloated purple,/ Single pulse beating behind ear, left to bleed out/ By the man who married his only sister- / That’s as far as we talk about in the family.” This is the voice of a man struggling to live in a world where violence is so prevalent, even though it may not have happened to himself in particular. Even so, while Chhetri frequently writes about the violence-marred past of his grandparents and the unspoken griefs of his parents, he also alludes to a lover, who has presumably died, adding a deeply personal layer of sadness to the poems. Indeed, the third section of the book is named Erato, after the Greek muse of love poetry. In Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful, the pain is universal and unique and at all times overwhelming. And yet the words are invariably ornate and powerful, while gruesome at times, sheltered in verses that are appropriately unstructured and free-form. This is one response to tragedy: to frame the tragedy in exquisite language, thereby creating a kind of locus amoenus out of the agony. Chhetri’s poetry, however, challenges this response. Is there truly any way to shape the language of ruin into something permanently beautiful, or is the beauty only found “in transit,” the rest blemished by the reality of death?
There are brief and brilliant moments when the poems reveal a glimpse of beauty. “Bordersong” begins quaintly, deceptively so. “We lived downwind of a bakery,/ butter sesame roasted black cumin.” But it becomes clear that the loveliness of the bakery image is short-lived, as the poem spirals into despair, ending with the line “Downwind blew kerosene & ragsmoke/ in some young martyr’s evening.” It is as if the trauma is inescapable, despite the best efforts of the poet to invoke gorgeousness. Nowhere else in the book is the struggle to move beyond grief more evident, until the third-to-last poem, a pentych entitled “Recrimination Fuge” that a forward-motion is suggested, as the poet manages to refine hope through the simple process of remembering grief.
“Recrimination Fugue” arrives in the fourth and final part of the book, Grief Deer, the name of which derives from the title of one poem and is echoed in the imagery of the closing piece: The ravens calling for the wolves to split/ Open the light from the dead deer’s belly/ Jeweled in the dark purse of its pelt. It is not until this moment in “Mezza Voce” that Chhetri finally admits to the discovery of beauty in spite of horror. “We are each given heaven for brief so heavy./ We put down dance small around it.”
In the confusion of these final lines, there is of course a sense of still being lost and murmurs of woundedness, of still being hurt. But there is also, at the end of the arduous journey that is Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful, something that truly can be called beautiful, something beautiful that can perhaps be made permanent through poetry.
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A native of northern Michigan, Hannah Riffell is an upcoming graduate of Calvin University, where she is a Writing major and a member of the Arts Collective. Her poetry has been published in the on-campus creative journal Dialogue, as well as The National Writers Series Journal and the 2018 book Beyond Stewardships: New Approaches to Creation Care. In 2021, she received the Academy of American Poets University and College Prize at Calvin University. She intends to keep writing and reading poetry long after graduation.
(BPJ, 2021)
REVIEW BY LISA LOW
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Katie Farris’s A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving (A Net) is a short, powerful book chronicling the emotional voyage and struggle to survive of a woman diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer at age thirty-seven. In twenty-six poems told over thirty-seven pages (the entire chapbook can be read in a half an hour), A Net narrates a sequence of events following the announcement of breast cancer: a revelatory phone call; an MRI; getting dressed on the morning of surgery; sitting in the waiting room after surgery; looking in the mirror and seeing a monster without hair or breasts; a desire for sex during chemo; spousal tenderness; a walk in the woods; a conversation with Robert Frost; and the finding, beyond the bodily strength and support of a loving husband, of spiritual strength in Emily Dickinson. Each of the poems illustrates one facet in the complex drama of Farris’ trauma: shock, pain, grief, loneliness, terror, alienation, self-loathing, and joy. Winner of The Beloit Poetry Journal’s 2021 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize, A Net is as easy to read as a Dick and Jane book. Partly because breast cancer is a common scourge (one in eight women are diagnosed with the disease; eight in eight women fear it); partly because the book is so well written; partly because the book’s purpose is to write “love poems in a burning world,” I doubt many English-speaking humans would put the book down without first finishing it. Everything, every poem and every moment in every poem, tells the story of Farris’s cancer, making the chapbook a unified and suspenseful, hard to turn-away-from story of a person dancing as fast as she can on the head of a pin called death.
Twin American poet mentors preside over this book, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. In a “Row of Rows” Farris and her husband argue about whether Whitman or Dickinson is the greater epic poet. Farris chooses Whitman in the argument, but Dickinson is clearly the mothering rib from which Farris more naturally springs (“you, the voice, I the faithful echo,” she writes in “Emiloma.”) In the book’s last explosive elated poem—“What Would Root”—Farris finds a home in Whitman. For the most part otherwise, Farris is all Dickinson. Like Dickinson, Farris is a tiny female (“have you seen me?” Farris writes, “so skinny you could shiv me with me”) whose poetry is also “tiny.” Indeed, Farris’s poems are even shorter and slighter than Dickinson’s. “A Week Before Surgery”—which describes Farris’s mental preparation for surgery (“like Giotto’s angels,” the poem begins, “sketched from his studies / of sheep, I open the jaws of my back to the sky”)—is six lines long. “Ice for Me” is seven lines long. “The Man You Are the Boy You Are” is nine lines long.
Dickinson’s importance to Farris is apparent not only in stylistic and cultural/biological similarities (brief, hyphenated poems written by a slight, white American female on either side of the twentieth century), but in Farris’s frequent references to Dickinson. Dickinson is the subject of five of the chapbook’s twenty-six poems and she carries three of the book’s titles. Dickinson is Farris’s poetic mentor; she is her spiritual mentor as well. In “Emiloma” the breast-afflicted Farris writes, “Today I placed / your collected poems / over my breast, my heart / knocking fast / on your front cover.” In “Finishing Emily Dickinson” Farris grieves the “loss”—the coming to the end—of Dickinson, for she has finished the Collected Poems (some maybe, like Plath’s, written hastily before her death): “Oh, Emily, goodbye! / We met in April and parted in July.” But Emily is not gone, for Dickinson’s body is the steeple on Farris’s “Church of Mystery—” and the bonging tongue of her steeple-bell rings “on, beyond.”
The most common character in the book besides Farris herself (whose traumatized subjectivity is explored throughout) and Emily Dickinson, is Farris’s husband (the real life poet Ilya Kaminsky) who figures in the following poems as caretaker and lover: “Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World?,” “In the Event of My Death,” “The Man You Are the Boy You Are,” “Marriage, An Exercise,” “A Row of Rows,” “An Unexpected Turn of Events,” “If Marriage,” “I Wake to Find You,” and “Against Loss.” These love poems—mid-trauma marriage analyses—comprise a third of the book, or nine of the book’s twenty-seven poems. No sisters, brothers, mothers, or fathers wander these pages. Dickinson, Kaminsky, and Farris herself are the book’s primary characters. They alone are Farris’s guideposts; her rock-solid turn tos in a frightening world.
The poems are full of pain, but they are also funny, reveling in black humor. In “Standing in the Forest of Being Alive” Farris writes: “some of us are still putzes / in death, catching bird shit on our tombstones.” In “An Unexpected Turn of Events Midway through Chemotherapy,” Farris announces “I’d like some sex please.” In “After the Mastectomy” Farris writes, since it’s hard for a “watchtower” (a mastectomy survivor) to hide, “I go to the world with my tongue out / and my shirt unbuttoned, my keys / in the lock” wearing “a six inch scar instead of a nipple.” Funniest of all, Farris writes in “If Marriage”: “If Marriage is a series / of increasing / intimacies, a slow / sweet collapse into / oneness, I / would still beg / your forgiveness / for asking / your assistance / unwinding that pale hair / from my hemorrhoid.”
Besides being brief (a couple of poems are one sentence stretched into a skinny vertical line), the poems are characterized by occasional rhymes stacked on top of each other (attuned / soon; on / beyond; Lupron shot / in the gut; stone / palindrome) and by the knitting together of image patterns. The image of a braid as a ladder recurs. Farris’ braid, lost in chemo, is the rope she tells her husband to keep, for she will need that braid to let herself down into earth if she dies. The word “puppet” comes and goes. Pain enters Kaminsky’s face “like a hand hunting inside a puppet.” Similarly, the sky “always / has its hand in you / as if you were a puppet.” Another recurring image is of a door. In the book’s prefatory poem, “Why Write Poems in a Burning World,” Farris describes herself as stuck in a wedged-open door that is at once a barrier and a shield. The door signifies the moment of annunciation. In that moment when she learns she has breast cancer, Farris becomes trapped like a fly in amber between innocence and experience, looking by necessity into a terrifying future the end of which she cannot fully see.
A Net ends with a truly spectacular breakthrough love poem, “What Would Root.” In it Farris comes to terms with her death. “What Would Root” differs from the twenty-five poems which precede it, first, because of its length (it is five stanzas of eight unhampered lines; eight Whitmanian ego-bursts, each), and second, because of its unrestrained exuberance. The lines are longer; the emotions less bridled; and there is an acceptance of death-in-earth reminiscent of Walt Whitman who described grass as the “uncut hair of the dead” and who said “look for me under your boot soles.” As if it were an exhilarating dream, the poem describes Farris going into the woods, being among the animals, and becoming eventually a part of the woods. Twigs grow from her eyes, she lies down and feels the hairs on the back of her neck rise, and realizes for the first time they are not hairs but roots and that “everything [is] everything.” As she lies down, the roots in her skull shift “beneath her own branches” and the top of her head blows off, allowing the tentacles that come from her to root in earth and drink. In this poem Farris relaxes at last and the self affixes itself in a kind of permanence to planet Earth.
The poems hold occasional missed notes and ineffective lines, but mostly Farris captures the essence both of tenderness and terror with a few amazing deft strokes. She steps easily, poem-by-poem, from initial diagnosis; to CT scan; to pre-op prep; to surgery; to post-op doctor visit, to being stared at for breast-less-ness; to moments of comfort with the beloved; to staring at herself transformed in the mirror—hairless and without breasts; to relaxing finally in the book’s spectacular ending. Pinioned by diagnosis in a spot of time, she trains herself to live with this terrifying new reality that cannot be avoided; that must be borne and somehow survived.
To the initiating question—“Why Write Love Poems in a Burning World?”—Farris offers several answers. First, the poems express love, both for her husband and the burning world itself. (In “Against Loss,” Farris says she writes the poems to give Kaminsky memories of her and to memorialize their relationship to one another in the event of her death.) Second, the poems form an emotional “net” or hammock to hold her body as it falls. Third, they teach her how to survive, offering her a vision of “what is not hell in hell”; reminding her that the world is beautiful, whatever her condition, and that she is beautiful, despite what chemotherapy has done to her body. Finally, they leave a legacy. They mark Farris’ presence in this world and provide a boat to ferry her from it. Not unlike Emily Dickinson’s stacks of poems tied in neat ribbons left for those who came after her, these poems are Farris’s legacy, written and organized not at age fifty-five, but at age thirty-seven because that’s when the threat of death came to Farris’s body.
While modern poetry is often derided as unreadable, readability is one of A Net’s most wonderful features. The poems are metaphorically subtle and emotionally ambitious but they speak plainly. Ted Kooser writes that poetry’s highest calling is to move the reader, to change the readers’s experience of the world. A Net meets that high bar well. (My first reaction on reading the book was to tell my friends who have had breast cancer to read it, immediately!) I defy a reader to not instantly understand and be moved by the book. Ted Kooser also writes that the purpose of poems is to be read, to form bridges; soul-altering connections between poet and reader. Again, Farris’s book fits this bill well. Farris’s very purpose is to connect, probably first and foremost with her husband, knowing that her life and legacy depend upon connection, but also with the common reader. In a world where Farris is doomed to walk alone, even without the hand of her husband, she walks less alone in the presumed understanding of the reader to whom she can tell her deepest secrets and speak her most unspeakable pain.
The inscrutability of modern poetry is notorious, blocking even the most enterprising reader from entry, like a dog at the gates of hell. But Katie Farris’s A Net to Catch My Body In Its Weaving is not inscrutable. Step-by-incisive step, A Net chronicles the stages in a plot of terror until we feel first-hand what it is like to face the loss of everything one lives for: life, love, marriage, and happiness. In A Net we learn what it is like to live beneath the waving scimitar of death and to be forced into hand-to-hand combat with it. Farris comes away from her cancer diagnosis awash in a brutality, different and knowing. We come away different and knowing, too; rewarded by her strength; sunk in that terrifying claw as if it were our own.
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Lisa Elaine Low’s poetry has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, American Journal of Poetry, Evening Street Review, Free State Review, Good Works Review, Phoebe, The Potomac Review, Delmarva Review, Broken Plate, and Tusculum among other literary journals. She is co-editor with Anthony Harding of Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press in 1994). She received her doctorate in English from the University of Massachusetts and spent twenty years as an English professor, teaching at Cornell College; Colby College; and Pace University. Visit her at lisalowwrites.com.