… I worry about you, puckerdash. You were my favorite
while you lived, and now that I wait until sunset
to congratulate our fathers killed, smokes another
so pearly you lost a car accident image “node” to claw
waiting to light the candles with a triggering glare
you’re crossing the road to post and might find
a common mind eating eggs alone to survive. Empty
pockets. Back readies weekend not that personally,
a master form so long as you keep us real from
dome kin post-address play toms on lock wrestle
when I wait for bad faith morphology graphs a play …
J. Gordon Faylor, Phone and Pencil, p. 67
The cover of this new collection allows the reader to
enter the text seamlessly. Brett Goodroad’s Expressionist monotype is
reminiscent of an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting or, better, of Edvard Munch’s
famous artwork, “The Scream.” Angst is the prevalent mood, possibly,
symbolizing the human condition, itself—reflecting subjective emotion rather
than “the thing itself.” This subjective perspective is woven throughout the
text that follows the haunting cover image—including, occasional insertions of
referential elements [Gompers; Nina], radically distorting what may be the
author’s intended meaning or creating a carefully crafted, indeterminate long
poem for the reader’s emotional effect and evoked responses.
Phone and Pencil
is the most compelling full-length collection that I have read in recent years,
and J. Gordon Faylor proves himself, once again, to be a seasoned writer whose
practice has not settled into a predictable style—linguistically, in terms of
structure, or with regard to content. His brilliant 2016 novel, Registration
Caspar [Ugly Duckling Presse], is a haunting, futuristic tale of a humanoid
whose end is near. Faylor, now living on the East Coast, has been called a “Bay
Area Beckett.” In addition to writing, he is a museum curator, and, as a
publisher and editor [GaussPDF], has highlighted the experimental, often,
hybrid, work of seasoned, as well as, early-career artists. Faylor mines the
potential of the personal landscape with particular regard for understated,
respectful communication with his reader in a way that is, at once, intimate
and detached. The rare nod to the lyrical “I” or to overt statements never
detracts from the author’s resistance to the literal or the didactic, even
though political motivation is a constant undertone throughout his oeuvre.
Indeed, the expressionistic sub-text of Faylor’s new
long-poem is, itself, political, the modernist artistic movement,
Expressionism, having been a rebuke to Impressionism active on the artistic
scene in Europe, more or less, from before WW I to the start of WW II. Phone
and Pencil disrupts our understanding of what the mainstream regards as
conventional verse, employing “language games” and other innovative compositional
features in the service of what is often termed, “associative poetry,” possibly
derived from Surrealism’s “automatic writing,” but, crafted with the skills in
Faylor’s “toolkit,” an automaticity that has been refined and tempered by an
apparent intentionality that, nevertheless, preserves the experiential “flow.”
A good example of the author’s facility with quiet
referentiality is Faylor’s use of “Nina” as a repetitive element throughout the
text. Nina, the name of cartoonist, Al Hirschfeld’s, daughter, was embedded in
many of his drawings as a hidden element or concealed message, not unlike the
veiled verbal techniques employed by Faylor that, at once, hide truth and cloud
perception. These methods land Phone and Pencil squarely in the domain
of postmodern poetry that rejects grand narratives to adopt a tentative and
fractured world view. In addition to “Nina,” the collection includes several
references to [Samuel] “Gompers,” the famous British-American labor leader
active during the late 19th Century to mid-20th Century
period.
Like John Ashbery, Faylor’s occasional references to material
that the reader may be uninformed about does not interrupt focus—an effect that
is very difficult to master. Indeed, once I began reading this book, it
sustained my attention in a manner that stimulated my emotions and my
intellect. Faylor’s methods of concealment do not deceive or foreclose the
receiver [interpreter?] of the literary composition
whose effect is balanced and understated—even though I would speculate that the
author’s act of creation must have involved a fair amount of
“free-association.” Each word seems to have been carefully selected as a
stand-alone, as well as, a companion to other words and phrases. Faylor’s
expert use of monosyllabic, “hard” words exposes the hand of a mature poet,
enhanced by the characteristic that the composition is not self-conscious or
studied.
Other features of Phone and Pencil make this a singular literary experience that all readers of innovative poetry will value. Furthermore, anyone curious about experimental writing will find this volume a stellar vehicle for entering the sub-genre. This brief review is an inadequate introduction to the many techniques employed successfully to create a work that is, at once, accessible and challenging. Among these techniques are repetition; neologisms; infrequent, though, effective use of [apparently] “found” phrases bounded by quotation marks; humor; image; music; rhythm—yielding a text that is cohesive, though, non-formulaic. I am, particularly, struck by a playful conceit that enhances the depth, complexity, anticipation, & enjoyment of the experience—that many phrases and sentences appear, upon first encounter, to be sensible, yet, provide a pleasurable, “Ah, hah!” phenomenon upon realizing that veridical meaning is only apparent. Even if you are not a regular consumer of poetry, I recommend Phone and Pencil enthusiastically. This book deserves a large audience, and any new collection by Faylor is to be celebrated.
—
Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA.
Why can’t women write great American novels? What does it mean to be a woman, rewritten by the male gaze, actively striving to tell your own story, imbue your own importance, all while the American canon makes you a fragile, breakable, sexual thing? Caroline Hagood’s Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel demands much of all celebrated, American male writers. Norman Roth III, also known as “Herzog,” is a professor, Vietnam veteran, and well-known American author, visited by the ghosts of women who were the subjects of the novels he’s written.
Herzog, a white male professor and author, the spitting image of lackadaisical literary success, is introduced as a painfully honest man, who takes almost nothing seriously, especially not women. His novels on Jaqueline Kennedy and Valerie Solanas have not only received critical acclaim, but “gotten [him] laid since the 1980s. Because what is literary academia if not the overweight, ugly, balding white guy’s tenured ticket to young tail?” Herzog is a sort of caricature of a lazily patriotic, white, aging, authorially academic, lewd male American man. He speaks profoundly then immediately undermines it with a vulgar, superficial quip or lack of care.
Hagood’s feminist look at the idea of the canon, at the male American writer and erasure of female traumas and histories, is artfully done through the simultaneous retelling and condemnation of the author in one. In the format of A Christmas Carol, Herzog is visited by these women he’s subjectified to the male authorial gaze, and made silent as they retell their stories. Much of the piece feels like a class, a history lesson, but one that is so vital. frequently ignored, unseen, deprioritized. Hagood’s women retell their stories, restore their tongues into their own mouths, relieve themselves of the trauma and the triumph of living through it. We begin to hope that this sort of reckoning Herzog gets becomes an epidemic– that historical women everywhere who were made into objects just for the story will get a change to haunt the authors who imposed their gaze.
Herzog
spies on a nude neighbor, defiles women in every other sentence, burdens us
with his… personal habits, and seems
oblivious to the women he’s used to garner his awards and “get laid.” In all,
he’s a self-interested, oblivious academic who still has some profundity to
him, and in that way, he is a perfect archetype. He is not only his cruelty but
also pensive thought and understanding. In one moment he is recounting when he,
“Cut [his] hand on broken glass while sloshed, then rubbed it around on my
typewriter paper like something good would ever come of it,” and in another, he
writes, “a whole history of building empires on others’ backs. The language of
equality in our Constitution was never a promise, but just a super clever and
sneaky way of controlling the greatest number of people.” Herzog is not
unintelligent, and that perhaps, is what is most truthful about the paradox of
it all– he is bright and sexist, he is not uninformed, he is uninterested in
knowing. Hagood crafts Herzog’s character, however coarsely, into the perfect
mirror image of every man known and unknown who gained praise writing about
women who were nothing but tools.
Jackie
Kennedy is the perfect pious woman–survivor of tragedy and still standing. A
warrior written as a fragile woman made into a First Lady by her husband and
broken by the same hand. Jackie’s story is given the most time and is the most
informative, and for good reason– Jackie speaks out as a hero, the main
character, the protagonist victor, instead of the supporting actress society, and Herzog had seemingly made her.
Jackie does not start when John F. Kennedy enters her life, and though she is
changed by his death, she does not stop when he leaves. She is “already dead,”
but she continues to live, and that is her heroic story, not her downfall.
Valerie
Solanas is the woman made crazy by her story. She is the newer sort of woman,
who understands, “and yes men are also abused and have to survive it, but I’m
not qualified to write that book.” Her more modern take, her futuristic way of
being, makes her seem eccentric, but through Hagood’s intricate prose we see
that Solanas is not crazy but a visionary–a woman who speaks what she sees, a
woman who has been harmed by the male world she attempts to live in. She says,
“Nobody knows this, but to be defiled is to attend your own funeral, but you’re
on the ceiling and nobody can see you,” and its lines like these that strike us
within– Hagood speaks through the characters into women. You feel it deep
inside, and suddenly, you are Valerie or Jackie or Medusa or Philomela– Hagood
has a sneaky way of making all women one, with just a line or two. Hagood, in
contrasting Solanas and Kennedy, allows for both extremes of women– the crazy
woman and the perfect woman– and shows us how, through the very same author,
they are both inadequate, weak, fragile, sexualized in all the wrong ways. It
is not only a compelling story but a strange sort of belonging.
The piece is subversive, entertaining, and informative, in that order. Once Jackie appears, the narrative captures the reader and keeps them. Herzog, though he seems to intentionally be this way, is quite an uncomfortable and hateable character, and grinding through his introduction proves to be a challenge. The male gaze is critiqued, revised, and therefore closely examined through a sort of isolated reckoning– this book is not only a literary work, but an act of revision and restoration.
Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel reframes the ghosts of America as women, true heroes alongside valorized men, and rewrites the consistent wrongs of the canon. In short, through almost fragmented chapters, Hagood’s quirky story takes a gander at redemption– for the canon, for women, for America.
—
Dakotah Jennifer is a twenty-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. Jennifer has been published in Across the Margin, HerStry, Popsugar, The Pinch Journal, Voyage YA, Protean Mag, Apartment Poetry, Paintbucket.page, the Grief Diaries, The Confessionalist Zine, Oral Rinse Zine, and Ripple Zine. She was accepted into the Juniper Writing Workshop at Amherst, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Writing Workshops Paris with Carve Magazine for the 2021 year. She won Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award for the 2018-2019 year and The Dramatics of St. Louis Prize for the 2020- 2021 year. She has also published two chapbooks, Fog (Bloof Books) and Safe Passage (Radical Paper Press).
INTRO: Tigers is an exploration of a series of mutigenerational landscapes of the feminine–female adolescence, womanhood, motherhood, and personal revelation. Where the traditional coming of age story moves from “innocence to experience,” Tigers moves, through the excavation of trauma, addiction, recovery, adolescence, parenthood, and punk rock, from the ignorance and misunderstanding of a youth’s misbegotten “toughness,” into a turning inward toward tenderness and resilience—toward, in essence, what it really takes to be mature, “tough,” and–tigerly. With a principle focus on the dangers threatening girlhood, this book examines not merely the threat of degradation and assault, but, more deeply, the squandering of love through ignorance and inattention. Tigers here surely serve as symbols for such outward and inward threat, but also as a sign of the mature and tender maternal toughness of youth-grown-wise through trial and reclamation.
SH: There are many lush and haunting layers to this book: the tigers, the mother ghosts, the marriage fragments, the “directional headings” that orient each section. For me, they created a chorus of different voices and conversations, across time and space. They orchestrated tensions between the mundane and the sacred, the living and the dead, creatureness and humanness, predator and prey. How did you come to some of these different threads? When and how did you know they all needed to ring together in Tigers?
KY: I started the poems that make up Tigers after the birth of my firstborn and those early drafts initially wrestled with the more apparent theme of danger—especially given the formative trauma of my sister’s kidnapping and rape that I explored in my first book, Night Radio. The motif of the tiger had been a recurring dream of mine since I was in my twenties. It was about threat—yes—but more about power (in the dreams I learn to pass tiger without it pouncing and eventually I harness the animal and walk it on a leash).
At some point in the writing of the manuscript, I noticed, too, all the other wild animals populating the poems—coyote, deer, raccoon. The urban wild. Fellow feral hearts. As a parent, I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the role I played in a child’s domestication process: The ways we teach children to become social humans who don’t stick their toes in the oatmeal. My role as a parent raised questions for me about all that’s sacrificed in the process of maturation and how we spend so much of our adult lives trying to recover the wonder and wildness that we train out of children.
I could see this, too, in the poems that were related to my adolescent self—that loaded girl living in her car with her shaved head and hairy armpits. She had something to tell the mother I had become. And so the idea of tiger kept opening up for me, kept yielding meaning, but at its core is what you are pointing to: a sort of tension between the past and present, the wild and tamed, predatory and prey. The threads you mention are ways for the poems to investigate moral complexity, states like shame, grief, ferocity, and tenderness. And they’re also a way to speak to what’s hidden, or what stands behind. I was interested in exploring that feeling, the unseen, the more unruly and concealed parts of the self.
SH: On the topic of the directional headings, I love that they basically make the book a compass, something that must be navigated by circularly: East, South, West, North, Center. In that way, I felt like Tigers resisted and played with chronology in fascinating ways. Though the collection thrums forward and has momentum, it simultaneously pushes against linearity. Inside each section, we move across generations, across eras of the speaker’s childhood, coming-of-age, recovery and adulthood. Quite literally, present and past tense are packed tightly together in the poems. For me, it brought up the ways that healing, particularly through violence, addiction and patriarchy, is non-linear, intergenerational, messy. How were you thinking about chronology in writing and ordering the book? Did you produce in a similarly non-linear fashion or was there any pattern in their original creation?
KY: A central project of the book is a retrieval of the non-rational, the unbound—a part of the self that is often neglected in a world the overly values productivity. Inhabiting that space meant that many of the poems resisted notions of linearity, progress—stories that are told as a straight line moving through time.
Also, I think of that line in Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Late Victorians” where he writes: “I do not believe an old man’s pessimism is necessarily truer than a young man’s optimism simply because it comes after. There are things a young man knows that are true and are not yet in the old man’s power to recollect.” And while I’m not necessarily exploring Rodriguez’s notions of optimism and pessimism in Tigers, I’m definitely interested in what my younger self knows that my older self might be trying to reclaim. The book is very much a project of going back to find the wisdom that might’ve been concealed or overlooked. And I think of reunification and retrieval as circular processes—maybe a spiral?
I’ll say, too, that the prose poem has been a generative and spacious form, one that works against chronology, where I’ve enjoyed the ability to move more quickly between past and present, between interior and exterior, a form flexible enough to carve out the interior thoughts of the speaker along with dialogue, newspaper headlines, song lyrics, and other layers of text.
SH: Ok, not to just keep talking about the directional headings, but hey, you give a queer witch a book that is structured with feminist witchcraft and this is what you get. Clearly, I’m fascinated by the way they structure the book into five sections, each representing a cardinal direction but also an energy, a power, specifically, the powers to “know, will, dare, keep, change,” in that order. For any muggles out there, these directions are used to “cast the circle” for a ritual, to open the space. How did you come to these as the skeleton for the book? Are the poems themselves rituals, invocations or spells?
KY: Exactly—calling in the directions transports you between the worlds, between all the mundane details of daily life (the freeways, sunburns, and monthly payments) and the shadow world—the great vault, the unknown, the mystery. Most things are not as they seem. And the directional headings hopefully amplify the idea that the poems are spaces where the reader can enter and get a peek behind the veil (as I suppose all poems are on some level).
The directional headings came later in the process of structuring the book (though they were how I was taught to cast a circle back in 1999). As an organizing structure, the directions—with all the connotations associated with each element (water as emotion and intuition, for instance, and air as inspiration, thought patterns, the cerebral) really helped me order and organize the poems and conceptualize how I wanted the book to function as a whole, again resisting a linear narrative that arrives at a destination or revelation. Instead, each section, each direction, is a place for a particular kind of knowledge. Given that this book is dedicated to my daughter, I wanted it to be a, sort of, book of shadows that I could hand down to her. I wanted it to be, not necessarily instructions, but instructive, the way a spiritual text can act as a map for what’s most mysterious.
SH: Part of my fascination with how feminist witchcraft influences your work is because a central interest of Tigers is the delving into the speaker’s ancestry. We see this, in the Mother Ghosts series and beyond. Specifically, you seem to be exploring with what it means to have European ancestry, in Estonia, Hungary, and Ireland, and your investigations are matrilineal, focusing on the mothers and grandmothers who have come before. I’m so curious about this ancestor work, and how it is related to the other threads of the book, the childhood and coming-of-age stories, the tigers, the witchcraft, the marriage fragments. How did those poems come to you? Research, ritual, communication with ancestors, dreams?
KY: I can hear the stories of my mothers and grandmothers, but I have little context to comprehend what they mean. Until I cross the threshold and stand at that age, or, in this case, with a child of my own, those ancestral stories had little significance. The very first poems I wrote came after I entered motherhood. Little by little, I began to understand the strength, compromises, and failures of my own mother and grandmothers in ways that were uncomfortable and profound. Questions of what we inherit and what pass down are central to this book, and I suppose the powerlessness I felt in handing down a certain legacy of suffering to my daughter meant an exploration of ancestry. In many ways the poems came from my ability to recognize the ancestral stories I had be carrying all along in new ways.
SH: To extend the last question even more, I really appreciated the poems where you are grappling directly with whiteness and complicity with white supremacy in your family and yourself. As a fellow white poet, I believe it’s vital for us to do this work of unearthing complicity, reconnecting to ancestry lost in assimilation in our creative work, and of course, moving power and heeding the calls of BIPOC movement leaders. I’m curious how you’re thinking about contending with whiteness in the book? And is it related to how the book’s speakers are resisting other violences and oppressions?
KY: In a book so concerned with power, it makes sense that I had to at least begin the work of looking at white supremacy and, yes, my complicity in that system. In my case, the intersection between sexual violence and the fact that my father and other men in my family worked in law enforcement, the very people who brutally police and uphold the laws that protect white supremacy, seemed unavoidable. And because my father was an LA cop and because he is a man I love, I have a vantage point into that world that not everyone has. It’s a complex and fraught relationship to power, and I can only think that I would do more harm by ignoring it.
SH: The way you move between different forms on the page is refreshing and dynamic. In Tigers, there are so many different textures alongside one another: prose-block poems, poems filled with gaps and spaces that sprawl across the page, short-lined poems that pull us along slowly, and so much more. How do see these poems singing with each other? Is your generative process different for different forms?
One of my explicit experiments in Tigers was to explore forms that were different from the elliptical, image-laden poems that made up much of Night Radio. I was interested in syntax and repetition, in how to create music with the sentence. I felt drawn to the ways the prose poem contains all the stuff that makes up poetry—image, metaphor, compression, repetition—but is also interested in story-ness. I mean, these prose poems (and the prose poems I most love) still do what poetry does: they create a space for the reader to have an experience, to recover a more complex perceptive kind of knowledge. But there’s also less investment in silence, in the unsaid. And much more investment in velocity. There’s a meat & potatoes feeling to a prose poem—something substantial and filling.
SH: Okay, last question. Do you have any “ghost books” of this collection, as Maggie Nelson calls them? What texts did you “lean against”, or what minds think along with, in the creation of Tigers?
KY: Yes—I love Maggie Nelson’s notion of the “ghost books” and while I don’t think I have necessarily leaned against texts in this book in the same way Nelson describes, I love to think about the contexts out of which we write. I definitely turned to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, another text that I returned to as an older human and saw with completely different eyes. And there are many quoted lines from Tich Naht Hanh’s writing, the 90s music I grew up with–The Cramps, Bikini Kill, and PJ Harvey. There’s the oral wisdom I was raised on in twelve-step recovery meetings. And then specific texts like Michelle Tea’s essay “On Valerie Solanas” in Against Memoir and poems like Robert Hass’ “My Mother’s Nipples.”
SH: Ok, putting all those books and pieces on my to-read list. Thank you so much Kim for this stunning book!!
Shelby Handler is a queer ashkenazi writer, organizer, performer and educator living in Seattle on Dx?d?w?abš (Duwamish) and unceded Coast Salish land. Recent poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, PANK Magazine, Sugar House Review, The Journal, Gigantic Sequins and the Write Bloody anthology “We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival”, among others. Currently, they are an MFA candidate at the University of Washington.
Starting this fall, our team at PANK will begin reviewing applications for three new editorial roles:
PANK Assistant Books Editor
PANK Daily Editor
PANK Magazine Assistant Editor
We are excited to take the first steps toward continuing to grow our community of readers and editors, without whom this literary/arts publishing collective would not be possible! Please send us a CV and a brief (one or two paragraphs is fine!) description of your areas of interest, and the kind of writing and art you are interested in bringing out into the world. Tell us about your favorite writers and your favorite literary journals and small presses. Email us at pankmagazine@gmail.com with your name and the role you are applying for in the subject field. We can’t wait to learn more about you!
Assistant Books Editor – Aid in the publication process, including assisting with the selection process of submitted manuscripts, managing the flow of book publication, title marketing and distribution.
PANK Daily Editor – Helping to manage our ever growing online platform of book reviews, author interviews, craft essays and more.
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The pandemic forced us all to pause, often in solitude. An unfamiliar, uncomfortable place, even for the writer, social engagement now expected, indeed required, and distractions commonplace, writing a navigation between these, between cameos and posts and clicks of elsewhere, nowhere. Between subsisting and pursuing—or being pressured to pursue—more lucrative things, and the guilt we’re made to feel for engaging in what doesn’t readily generate—at least not initially—the only thing we’re told is of value: money.
Netflix, like most media, did its best to invigorate the stillness, force-feeding content, the play button obsolete, the right to choose under scrutiny, algorithms stifling agency, self-doubt fueling algorithms; we trust in them, a safer bet than ourselves. Suggested viewing: not a suggestion, but a necessity, an inevitability.
Season after season after original movie blare on. Every Avenger and their personal trainer will soon have their own must watch show. Streaming platforms have grown into all-powerful megaliths, cementing themselves in the stillness, feeding off our fragility. New ones have absorbed whatever was left lingering in their accessibility, fresh subscriptions and devices required. Add-ons have added to the equation, the extra dollar per-month necessary to elevate us beyond the base subscription and its subscribers. Or simply to rejoin the masses, to not be left behind. Even as in parts of the country, including my own, vaccination has led to re-openings, and maskless faces, scowls—we’ve forgotten how to smile—have returned a sense of normalcy, with variants raging in the background and fresh closures perhaps looming—we turn up the volume, scroll through our phones, try not to think about it—we find ourselves unsure. We hesitate with our greetings—a hug? Cheek kiss? Elbow? Our fragility persists. We crave the ease of our couches. Of content. Our addiction pulsates.
Like many, I retreat. And yet, it’s the stillness I seek. The now familiar discomfort I believe all of us should embrace lest we lose ourselves completely, drown in overstimulation, the ignorance it breeds; the one positive I can draw from the pandemic, its solitude, is that, to some extent, I was able to reclaim myself, forced to. Consuming has its limits. It offers temporary respite. Herein lies the illusion that allows capitalism to endure. I was able to reclaim my world shrunk to a more manageable size: a living room, bedroom, kitchen. A running track. To do what we’ve kept—increasingly—from doing: step back, sit down, and think. Think in the purest sense: about life and by extension death, which has come to sound, unfortunately, like something reserved only for the bygone romantic or emo.
No longer cast into the surging current of a dreaded, endless commute, rapt by overlong meetings and task after endless task, the need or impulse to be productive or social or sociable every second dulled, the gaps in-between widening, no longer filled as they once were, in a paradoxical attempt to rest the mind in its rapture, my innermost self resurfaced. I allowed it to, switching off screen after screen or simply growing bored of them. Books becoming better, more real, company. Welcoming stillness’ strands: boredom, absence, silence. It came in waves, the self, an oft tortuous crashing, ebbing, and flowing.
I was forced to confront it all: the smothered, bottled up, half-forgotten, and ignored, and I have strived, as a writer probably should, to document, summarily, in our age of distraction, what I have gleaned in those difficult moments. What I can only hope will help the reader and fellow thinker find their own stillness. Their own selves. Persist in this necessary state even when eruptions of thought cloud and spill. Singe, engulf, overwhelm.
Life, Calvino notes, is a contemplation of memory. Memory: an unreliable, ever-changing thing that reinvents itself in order to fit your current state physically and emotionally. Where you are in your travels. In your life’s journey.
So that painful longing you feel for someone who inflicted so much pain, who you were certain you were meant to lose; those fragments of your past that haunt you in lulls, tempting you to flood yourself with image, sound, and drink, with oblivion, to dive into motion, shake yourself free, taught, explicitly and subliminally, that a moment of contemplation is a moment lost, to consume, consume; in your dreams and nightmares, buried in your subconscious, in your primal inability to let go, to forget, once an advantage in a primal world, now a hindrance; those words you still hear spoken long ago in voices once music to your ears, now shrieks, growls, wails, poison; words and voices that suffocate, strangle, make your best attempts at soaring a slog through the mud, to which you never replied, but perhaps should have, or did, weakly, wrongly, a better response only later on your tongue, when it was too late: trust none of it. It’s all but what you—we—have been designed to fear: innumerable negatives, some of which we can name: uncertainty, disappointment. Unfulfilled goals, guilt, shame, doubt, regret … harnessing memory, corrupting it, undoing the reality it never intended to record.
This: a realization that might sooth your torment. Allow you to reinvent memory again, sculpt it into idols worth worshipping, into inspiring recollection—feed off it. Let it inform your art, made no longer for catharsis, wet with tears, aflame with anger, but with pleasure. For pleasure. For understanding, exploration, and beauty. All art should aspire to beauty: what all can behold. Into nostalgia—you gaze off, out, back.
A smile comes to your lips. You reach out to an old friend—a real friend, which means a shared past, a perhaps difficult conversation, a confrontation you avoided—nervous, throat dry.
“Of course I remember you,” they say.
They remind you of who you were. Who you are: flawed, like anyone else. Perfect in your imperfection, to tempt cliché, which hold a certain universality, timelessness. Appropriate. Loved regardless. Like anyone else: capable of being forgiven. Of forgiveness.
“Redemption.” The word rings in your ears.
Mistakes and successes alike, you now see: glittering gems.
Another realization: you will possess only very little in your lifetime. Considering the vastness of the world, the universe, which only continues to expand, and the fleetingness of your existence, there is so much more you will never have.
Here I again draw from Calvino, who I keep by my side.
Invisible cities the only ones we can now safely occupy.
Everything you possess, therefore, everything you can possess, is precious. As precious as the unpossessed and unpossessable; the grail isn’t meant to be grasped, sipped from. The Fisher King: leave him be. Let him heal his own wounds. Like El Dorado, like fame and perhaps fortune, like the edges of the universe, of consciousness: it’s meant only to be pursued.
So take hope, traveler. Continue to retreat. To seek. Lose yourself in unfamiliar, uncomfortable places. Physically: when doors open once more. Emotionally: incessantly. Continue to possess—let moments pass, become memory. Let them acquire that same sacred sheen as miracles. To choose—let memory dictate your choices. Let them be your guide, your lantern, bright with ambition. Continue to entangle yourself in your surroundings, your limbs, like your roots, those of the trees. Your limbs the skyscrapers, the satellites, the reaching, striving of all others. The present: a tangle of all the decisions everyone has ever made.
Trust yourself. Be content with yours.
—
Christopher Impiglia is a writer from Bridgehampton, NY. He also adjuncts and edits art books. He received an MFA in Fiction from The New School and an MA in Medieval History and Archaeology from the University of St Andrews. A Finalist in Nowhere Magazine’s 2020 Spring Travel Writing Prize and the 2019 Hemingway Shorts Contest his words have otherwise appeared in Columbia Journal and Entropy Magazine, among others. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @Impigliato.
I’ve been fixating on gardens recently. Maybe this is because I live in an apartment, and I’ve been spending all my time inside. Maybe I’m thinking about gardens because they remind me of my childhood, when my family lived in a house with a backyard framed in the ferocious green of mid-Atlantic weeds. Maybe I’m thinking about gardens simply because, at the time of my writing, it’s spring. It’s the time of year when life reminds us that things are still moving forward, even if we think they aren’t.
Phoebe Bridgers’ Garden Song was released in late February of 2020 as a single. Shortly after, it became Bridgers’ most popular song, soaring ahead of Motion Sickness. After the release of the album Punisher, Garden Song was buried among a series of electric and sentimental songs. But Garden Song remains important for me. It is irrevocably linked in my memory to where I was at the beginning of the pandemic.
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Garden
Song is a moody ballad. The introductory thrumming
feels like it is made to be heard from inside a house, the sole sounds emptying
into a room where one sits alone. It’s a song about the future. I started
listening to the song in the beginning of March 2020, well before we knew
things would be as they are now.
In the song, Bridgers’ narrator tells us she’s
looking to the future, to a “someday”. She’s dreaming, reflecting on the
possibilities of a particular imagined day. Bridgers pelts us with details: a
house upon a hill, a skinhead neighbor, false flowers in bed, a fire in her
youth. But the chorus is where it hits us. The chorus is where she reveals the
emotions grounding the whole piece.
There, she reveals that she is looking at
someone. This is the person she wants to share her “someday” with. She tells us
this she wants a shared future. A future with a garden. Who knows if it will
happen? Who knows how much will have been lost along the way?
There’s a certainty in that desire that is
grounding, especially when life becomes loose at its hinges. Time becomes a
detail. Instead, we are asked to look inward. Bridgers points us to an internal
clock which is significantly less meticulous. It is type of time-keeping that
has very little to do with regular rhythms. Garden Song begs the
question: Do you know what you want? It doesn’t ask how long it will take to
get there.
Wanting these days is a complicated feat for
me. It’s naïve, it’s romantic, often, it’s pathetic. I can’t help but feel as
if I’m experiencing a crisis of desire. This crisis feels reflected back at me
in the media I consume. In the books I read, disaffected narrators state the
facts of their life with no gesture towards their desires or the future. In the
news I watch, we move away from the hopefuls towards the expected. Desire loses
its currency in a world that is closing in on itself. The center, once firm,
does not hold. But desire propels us forward. Strong desires are often
indecipherable from needs.
Garden Song gives
wanting a kind of value that is, for me, hard to overstate. To want something
is to believe, however impossibly, that it might given to you. TWhen we desire
something or someone, we implicitly say that we are willing to do something to
get to the object of our desire. We admit that we have not given up. Desire is
the antithesis of the resignation I find myself wearing as an everyday garment.
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Times between when I first started listening
to Garden Song and now seems to have
passed in one fluid stroke. Like Bridgers’ narrator, I don’t know how, but I
got here. I’m here in my apartment in Connecticut, and it is spring. Every
morning at 8, the birds hum their tune at a pace paralleled in Garden Song.
Somehow, I lost winter along the way. The days are often sunny and brisk. The
trees look courtly in their coral and blush plumes.
Today, I saw the loose petals of a cherry
blossom tree scatter in the wind. I was listening to Garden Song and
thinking about how I wanted to share this memory with someone. Like Bridgers’,
I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t know if my parents
and grandparent will make it to the end of this virus. I try to keep my eyes
trained on the horizon, Bridgers’ invoking “someday”. I am trying to make space
for wanting in my life because I can’t let myself give up. I look for the
beauty provided by the earth’s movements.
I stay inside. I call my parents daily,
sometimes multiple times a day. This is the closest I’ll be to them for months.
I dig my hands into more books, into a fresh set of pencils and charcoals. I
want to read. I want to draw. I want to see beauty in life’s edges. I want to,
like Bridger, look up into the world and see a life worth living.
So, yes, I’ve been thinking about gardens, the
kinds which are starting to flourish in New England every spring. Sometimes, I
smell the fresh soil and grassy dew of gardens in my dreams. I see their colors
outside my window, where the birds have been singing into the late morning
hours. Gardens are the product of years of desire and hard work. They demand
patience and investment.
I’ve been thinking about the kind of person I
want to be. What kind of world I want to grow into, what I want my garden to look
like. Who I want to grow alongside. If you listen closely to the song, you can
hear a second voice paired softly with Bridger’s at the chorus. A voice which
amplifies her own. This voice is also thinking about the future, wondering how
we got where we are. This voice is just trying to figure it out, too.
I’d like to think that someday, I’ll have a
house with an herb patch that produces perfect pleats of hot peppers. I’m
trying to focus on the small details without paying attention to the kinds of
things that could hurt. I’m putting effort into imaging a future of gardening,
where desire rules my life in an orderly fashion. I want to believe that there
will be good things waiting for me and the people I love in a decade or two. I
have to.
The life I live after this virus – if it might
be said, however daringly, that there will be an after — will be one haunted
by all that preceded it. It will be filled with the ghosts. So, I don’t flood
my future with my mother’s face, my grandfather’s smile. I fill it with a sense
of calm possibility, the very mood brilliantly echoing throughout Garden Song. I want big bay windows and
sunlight that soaks in all the warm colors of my house. I want a family. I want
to love many people. I want a life full with all its living. I tell myself that
I know that I will get there.
Like Bridger’s declining, soft voice tells us at the end of the folksy tune: “No, I’m not afraid of hard work/And I did everything I want/I have everything I wanted.” Like Phoebe Bridgers, I concede to my desire, because I know it does something profound: it keeps me alive.
—
Ananya Kumar-Banerjee is an MPhil Candidate for World Literatures in English and a recent graduate of Yale, where they studied Ethnicity, Race & Migration. Ananya is interested in the dynamic between speculative work and contemporary narratives around reality. They are a proponent of literary romance and local public radio. When they’re not reading, you can find them listening to love songs and playing with their tuxedo cats, Patchouli and Arlo.
The
intertwining of poetry and gardens has a long history, of course, from the
pastorals of Hesiod and Virgil to Wordsworth’s daffodils to Anne Spencer’s
famous garden and Mary Oliver’s incantatory natural imagery. And it isn’t new to say that a poetry
collection is like a garden, and yet.
And yet. Laura Donnelly’s Midwest Gothic is the garden of Eden and of exile, the garden of inheritance and of renewal. Each poem in the collection shows her to be a master gardener, deftly pruning the lines, digging into the hard ground, nurturing delicate images, unearthing what’s buried, replanting seeds of hope after sorrow. Midwest Gothic is inventive, smart, poignant, delicate, sometimes bitingly funny, celebratory, sorrowful. With skill and sincerity, Donnelly deploys the garden, the world of the garden, in all directions—as metaphor and motif, image and symbol. In the gardens are the threads between generations, the living representation of her mother’s courageous act(s), the illustration of the difficulty of starting over and eventual triumphs, the image of the roots of family and also the burial of ancestors and the burial of secrets. As Donnelly writes in “Summer,” the book’s final poem, “It was all garden / and it was all not.”
For the
first section of the book, Donnelly’s first poem provides a framework and an
aim: “I will gather you back.” This first section, then, becomes an unearthing,
a recovery, a way of preserving stories and memories and establishing the
ground from which the speaker comes. These
poems meditate on inheritance—they revisit graveyards and basements, old
homesteads, tangible hand-me-downs, and her great-grandmother’s written account
of her childhood.
In the
most striking poems, Donnelly draws together the stories of her ancestors with meditative,
prayerful language and juxtapositions from the garden: death and glory, rot and
beauty, the quotidian and transcendent.
In “Alice at Five Years Old,” for example, Donnelly moves from a single
photograph of her great-grandmother’s family on their homestead to a handed-down
memory: “Someday, when the girl meets / her mother-in-law / they’ll share a
bowl of oatmeal / as if it’s the body of Christ.” The poem concludes with the contrast
of death and renewal in language with resonant, sorrowful long O sounds, an
incantation and prayer: “Hear us, oh Lord, in our longest day’s / shadow of
bones— // the delphinium grows / from her body / in a choir of indigo.” Similarly,
in “Primula vulgaris (Primrose)”—even the title drawing together contrasting
language—the speaker digs into the difficult work of gardening first, with
“compost, manure, / the pulverized feathers of chickens,” and abruptly shifts
to the difficult work of living:
Grandmother does not want to leave
her house for the nursing home.
Mother does not want to leave
her house for the divorce.
In the
next two stanzas, the speaker continues working through this cycle of death and
rebirth, a frost and roots exposed, a struggle to stay alive, the fuchsia’s
centers “bright as slits of flame.” This
poem is rooted in earth, in “blood and bone,” dwelling on this symbolic burial
of the birds’ “remains.” But just as in the paradox of that word, the poem is
insistent on remaining, on staying alive, on growing from these roots.
While
individual poems certainly stand out, the particular brilliance of this
section—and indeed the whole book—is in its careful arrangement, Just as a
gardener understands how to pair plants so that each thrives, these poems
resonate with one another, echoing refrains and images to build a story, a full
and blooming world, creating layers and depth of meaning.
The second
section digs closer to the surface with more intimate meditations on childhood,
what was observed, what images remain, what meaning to make now of what
happened then. A particularly striking
pair of poems appear almost at the midpoint of the book, “Transplanting the
Flowers” and “Garden Vernacular,” and between them, Donnelly creates a shift in
momentum. There is something like an
electric current moving between these two poems. “Transplanting the Flowers” is
a visceral reflection on the speaker’s mother, returning to her house four
months after leaving the house and the speaker’s father; in the imagery and
line breaks here, again, is an insistence on thriving in spite of it all, on
preserving the inheritance that is a source of life:
What she won’t leave behind:
a poor woman’s dowry, the
perennials
separated, transplanted,
passed down.
But the
poem’s end is uncertain; the act of transplanting—the perennials, her own
family—is filled with suffering: the spade “slices root,” rips and tears, with
an unraveling of roots like thread.
The poem
that immediately follows, however, points toward the garden, in its new
unlikely place—“strange on a city block”—thriving. There are “gloriosa daisies between cracks”
and “ferns lapping up the dusky shade.” In this poem is the transcendent moment
of hope, after all the quotidian and tedious work of living, after the
difficulty of separating, of loss. The garden, like the speaker and the reader,
find restoration and even magic in the final lines: “It was not unusual to see
bear cubs / in that garden. It was not unusual // to see that garden breathe.”
In the
third section of the book, Donnelly’s masterpiece is in choosing exactly the
right source and exactly the right method; these are “The Secret Garden Erasures.” Donnelly works with this classic of
childhood, makes this inheritance her own, releases, like her mother’s garden,
its secrets, and unearths new meaning from it.
In this section, too, are echoes of the previous sections; it becomes a
kind of mirror for the speaker, a new way to understand her history. Here, too, is a breathing garden; here, too,
are flowers named and blooming. It ends,
perfectly: “I thought / I could dig somewhere.”
The final
section of the book moves beyond the boundaries of the garden, family history, and
the speaker’s inheritance; true to the title of one poem, “Theme and
Variations,” it keeps contact with its roots, in poems like “Perennial” and “Calendula
officinalis (Marigold),” but its tendrils spread outward, in content and
form. Here, there is a pantoum, sparse
and musical couplets, layered meditations on summer, the “flesh and saturation”
of tomatoes, knives in kitchens and surgeries. And there are more directly
confessional poems, contrasting forgiveness with a “bitter twang in [her]
throat.” In an echo of “Garden
Vernacular,” the poems now, rather than the garden, tend the speaker’s family
secrets, transforming sorrow and anger into sharply drawn images and language.
Donnelly’s
book is an inheritance—of family mythology and secrets, the knowledge and language
of gardens, and musical and literary traditions. In 1972, Adrienne Rich published a review of
Eleanor Ross Taylor’s work, noting that her poems “speak of the underground
life of women…the woman-writer, the woman in the family, coping, hoarding,
preserving, observing, keeping up appearances, seeing through the myths and
hypocrisies, nursing the sick, conspiring with sister-women, possessed of a
will to survive and to see others survive.”
Donnelly has continued in this tradition, sustaining and nurturing it, and
adding her own sheer intelligence, deep reflection, delicate phrasing, sharp
imagery, and deft and resonant deployment of metaphor and motif. The poems dig deep for their thriving roots;
they do not shy away from “blood and bone” in the soil and the difficult work
of unearthing. And then, they are carefully
placed in the book’s garden plot, and both individually and together, these
poems create a flourishing, brilliant collection.
—
Sally Smits Masten’s poems have been
published in Crab Orchard Review, The Georgia Review, Smartish Pace, Northwords,
The Laurel Review, and other journals. She earned her MFA in
poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and her PhD in American
literature from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She
currently teaches at Western Governors University.
We are thrilled to introduce the first of our contest winners. Heidi Seaborn’s second collection drops on June 1st — Marilyn Monroe’s Birthday! ORDER IT HERE
An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a middle-of-the-night poetic conversation with Marilyn Monroe that explores obsessions, addictions, abuse, objectification, marriage, work, children, childlessness and death. Pressing on the themes of her acclaimed debut, Give a Girl Chaos {see what she can do}, Seaborn illuminates the biographical and emotional journey of Marilyn as intimacies whispered between two women. These are women who have lived “on the glittering edge” and know that when a third husband “draws a blank page from his typewriter,” it means she needs to go to work in a world dominated by men. In An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn is a resilient, intelligent feminist who understands how to accumulate and wield power in the 1950’s. She is also vulnerable, exploited, and broken in so many ways. We see the speaker discover Marilyn until “then she is everywhere,” a haunting presence that becomes both muse and reflection. Seaborn invites us into the poetic soul of the world’s most famous woman with poems that celebrate and mourn. An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a sequined meditation on what keeps us up at night and what fills our dreams.
Jenny Sadre-Orafai and Anne Champion’s Book of Levitations is a rare book that delivers on the promises made in the title but also delivers much more. This is a book about spells, ghosts, curses, and even instructions on how to make a voodoo doll, how to resurrect a dissected animal, or how to become a she wolf (“Remember,/you were born howling/with blood on your jowls”).
There is a lot of
significance in this collection and the atmosphere the poems create is at once
absorbing, mysterious, and enjoyable. There is an enigmatic energy at play
here, along with an underlying feminist discourse that jumps off the page from
time to time (Praise the girl that learns sewing/to
stitch herself back up”). However, the best element in
Book of Levitations is that it’s easy to read and—and this is rare for poetry
that deals with dark topics even in passing—it’s a lot of fun. Here’s “Spell for New Homes”:
“Sage, holy water, black salt—
stack these in corners, smear
them in new rooms. Tie down
letters and spoons (from people
you can’t miss back)—they
levitate on full moons.
Tell all insides of cabinets
something good, bright.
Hang one plant in each room
to clean the air.
Don’t let in guests with mud
on their shadows.”
The poems in this book often read like
rituals or invitations. They may or may not offer solutions, but at the core of
each of them are words that deliver a strong message, once that’s loud and
clear if you’re willing to listen. Sadre-Orafai
and Champion have a knack for economy of language, and they ensure that they
pack as much meaning as possible into each poem in Book of Levitations, none of which is longer than a page.
There are
some elements of cohesions that give this collection a tremendous sense of
unity. The titles are the first and most obvious one as many of them contain
the word “spell.” However, as you read, things like water and death weave in
and out of the collection. The same goes with you. Yes, there is a constant
shattering of the fourth wall here. These poems are for readers; they’re for
you. Some apply only to women, but others are clearly for everyone who reads
them. Addressing the reader, adding that you to the poems, makes them much more
personal. Yes, these poems are great and fun to read, but something about
Sadre-Orafai and Champion talking directly to you makes them linger after
turning the last page. In any case, don’t take my word for it; here’s “Spell to
Stop Harassment”:
“When he tells you to smile, baby,?
do it, but make sure it cocks like a
gun.
Make wind chimes of kitchen knives
and hang them in every doorway.
Find your sachet of baby teeth,
bury them in your cervix, and wait
for them to take root.
When you have a shiny row
of vagina fangs, fling your legs?
open like an umbrella in a thunderstorm.”
We all need a little magic in our
lives, and Sadre-Orafai and Champion
deliver plenty of it here. Read it.
—
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
A bench is a place to rest or a chapel or a home or a stage. That said, we often don’t notice because when things are normal, a bench is often just a bench. The pandemic changed that just like it changed most interactions. In Cassondra Windwalker’s The Bench, which won the 2020 Helen Kay Chapbook Contest, a bench is a stage in which we see the world, the people that inhabit it, and the new reality they inhabit.
Pandemic poetry. We knew it was coming, but we probably didn’t expect it to be as full of light and keen observations as Windwalker’s collection is. From the start, The Bench is an invitation to sit down, pay attention, and soak in the stories we’re about to witness:
“what
does a bench say
?but I know you are tired, I know
you are weak,?
rest with me.?
this testament to frailty became a
repository of strength
in the stories lived and breathed and
told?
on its sagging seat and iron arms.?
sit here and listen.?
take the stories with you when you go.”
Some of the poems here are dark.
There’s death and a nursing home, people walking with empty souls and bad
thoughts. However, there is also a strange light here. Windwalker is a superb
chronicler of everyday humanity, and in the short book we see how human
resilience shines, how we push through even when we have no guarantee that the
outcome will be positive. Luckily, sometimes that outcome is indeed positive,
and when that happens, the universe gives us one more reason to keep trying.
For example, two women sit on a bench in “small
talk,” and their silent, brief meeting has an effect on them:
“a month ago, they’d have never
acknowledged
each other, but now?
they cling to the trappings of
society.?
days spent behind doors, behind walls,
have made this brief intersection?
an oasis. the old woman clutches her
prescription
and rises, reluctant to abort this
connection.?
she waves good-bye as if they were old
friends
now, as if this moment mattered.
the woman in the sugar skull mask goes
home
to her empty apartment and does not
kill herself.”
These are poems where masks and social
distancing make appearances, but they have stories at their core, and the
humanity they communicate isn’t dampened or diminished by the awful pandemic
that frames the writing and some of the timely topics it tackles (“cops keep
killing black people, brown people”). Windwalker has trapped the atmosphere of
the early stages of the pandemic perfectly, and her words resonate with what
the situation has done to many as people are “urgent and fearful and anguished/as
they press to their task and then scurry/back to safety.”
The Bench is full of humanity. It is a
dark, heartfelt reminder of a time that’s still here, and it demands to be read
because I reminds us that, no matter what, we keep going.
—
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
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