“An angry woman remains a political act, and is sometimes a creative one as well. Rage, here, is transcended into art. It becomes constructive—clearing the way for growth. Fury is wielded as a transformative force. It burns away impediments to change. What blooms after?”
That’s the last
paragraph of the introduction actress, writer, and pornographer Stoya wrote for
Amy-Jean Muller’s Baptism by Fire, a
superb poetry collection that serves as the perfect introduction to Muller’s
work.
Short collections almost demand a concise synopsis, and Muller’s work screams courage. Her poems use vivid imagery to bring thoughts to life or to reshape the past to give it new meaning in order to be share with readers. Her life is here, and so are religion and motherhood, to name two strong cohesive elements that give the collection a sense of unity. Take, for example, the opening lines of “Choked at birth,” a poem that serves to set the atmosphere for what’s to come:
“My birth was like
a hanging;
breathless and
suspended from her tree
I was thrust from
her branches
with the chord
wrapped twice
around my neck”
Muller constantly
uses beautiful language to present ugly things, but her technique doesn’t
lessen the impact of what hides behind her words. Take “Roses,” which is
devastating and, while short, opens up a chasm in the reader’s heart that soon
fills up with pain and anger, none of which are in the poem itself in any
obvious ways:
“I met a a father
once
and he was
different from mine
when he laughed at
my jokes
looking at the buds
that grew on my chest
pushing swollen
behind the flesh
of a pink nipple
And when he handled
them like roses
His fingers grasped
my blossoms
To hear my wince
having taken a
bouquet
of petals
from flowers
that were
yet to grow”
The strength it
took to write that comes from a place constantly on display in Baptism by Fire. It’s a strength that
shines from Muller’s core, showing how she’s seen life for what it is, survived
a lot, and is ready to survive whatever else comes, with or without help. The
short lines of “Listen” are a perfect example of that strength, even if they
show vulnerability:
“Listen, I don’t
pray to God often
but when I do
the ghosts dragged
behind me
stir up to face
my reticence,
knowing nobody heard.”
Baptism by Fire
shows a maturity born of experience that is rarely found in such raw form.
Muller has deconstructed and understood the male gaze, and takes it to task
here in a poem that at first seems to be about hair. She has seen how violence
is used to cover fragile masculinity, and she attacks a “Little Man,” a “Little
Boy,” or where she talks to someone who “pretended to be a man.” She has also
seen through religion, and while it remains here as part of her thought—a scar
of indoctrination—she’s done with it: “When I left my faith on the
roadside/like those dated books from the attic…” Muller is done with religion,
with the glass ceiling, with being asked to “wear some heels to raise your
children.” However, there’s not just anger here; these poems are also a
celebration. These poems celebrate strength, intelligence, and courage. These
poems celebrate women.
In the book’s epilogue, Mueller discusses how the collection
was inspired by “symbolism and heteropatriarchal norms found in the stories of
Greek and Roman mythology.” The epilogue
quickly morphs into something akin to an academic paper on the role of women in
male-centric myths, but the beauty of it is how it surreptitiously reveals an
awesome truth: it’s easy for men to be the heroes and women to be the monsters
and temptresses, but only when men write the narrative. Baptism by Fire
subverts that narrative, and the result is a collection about power and
womanhood that dances over the corpses of those old narratives.
—
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.
Some poetry collections feel impersonal, as if the poet is on some kind of pensive examination of something and the reader is just along for the ride, a witness more than a participant in a conversation. Kim Addonizio’s Now We’re Getting Somewhere is the opposite of that. The writing in this collection is personal, but it also feels like a conversation, like Addonizio is talking to you, bringing you into her world, sharing her thoughts the way a friend would, over coffee or beer or from under their covers.
The beauty of Now We’re Getting Somewhere comes from its ugliness. I know what you’re thinking, but stay with me. Here’s the opening line of “Song for Sad Girls”: “Right now I feel like a self-cleaning microwave about to malfunction.” Bizarre. Brutal. Honest. Strangely relatable. She goes on:
“Sad girls, sad girl, you’re everywhere. Sick on the snake
oil
of romance. Blundering in and out of beds
and squabbles with roommates. Scalded by raindrops.
Hating yourselves with such pure hatred.
Loving the music that makes it worse. This is that music.”
That music, the rhythms of doubt, the strident cacophony of self-hatred, permeates the collection. Addonizio creates a world where the real is always present. Drinking, rehab, heartbreak, loneliness; they’re all here, time and again, presented in a unique voice that somehow reminds us how universal that darkness is. “I never learn from my mistakes,” says Addonizio, and neither do we, but if the result of that is personal poetry like this, then I say the best thing we can do is keeping fucking up.
There are no weak poems in Now We’re Getting Somewhere, but the segment titled Confessional Poetry could easily be called its crowning jewel. In the short lines that make up that segment, Addonizio obliterates everything about confessional writing while simultaneously offering some of her own, which goes to show that some things are inescapable: Of confessional writing, she says:
“Writing it is like firing a nail gun into the center of a
vanity mirror
or slowly shaking a souvenir snow-globe of asbestos &
shame
to quiet an imaginary baby”
The darkness in this collection is oppressive because Addonizio knows how to remind readers about bad feelings. In “Archive of Recent Uncomfortable Emotions, we get a laundry list of them: the “however much I drink I can’t pretend it’s love feeling,” the “everything I write is shit feeling,” and the “my friends are no longer my friends feeling,” hit especially hard for me, but there is something in there for everyone.
Despite that darkness, there is plenty or light. No, wait;
maybe I should say the light that can be found here is concentrated in a way
that its strength is like that of a laser beam. While there is plenty of humor
and brilliant lines, two of them will stick with readers like tiny, positive
remoras clinging to their ribs. The first comes at the end of “To the Woman
Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall”: “listen I love you joys is coming.”
Short, but sharp and meaningful. The second slice of light closes the collection,
and it packs so much that anything I said after it would be useless, so it also
closes this review. This line is for you:
“Listen: when a stranger steps into the elevator with a bouquet of white roses not meant for you,
they’re meant for you.”
—
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.
“So ashamed of our failed nation, we hide our faces behind masks,” writes Ken Chen in his elegy for a dying nation, “By the Oceans of Styx, We knelt and Wept” (Four Quartets, 91). What does it mean when a mask represents not so much a disguise, but a consensual acknowledgment of existential precarity manifesting in the form of the Nation-State subjugated by a viral pandemic? This is a core question that Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic, an extraordinary bardic chant and threnody for humanity, makes us ‘face.’ The choice to ‘face’ this question with masks on or off, the choice of kind of mask, and the choice of acknowledging that we have already, for some centuries, being living in a society of extreme masquerade is, of course, always ours.
As
the editors Kristina Marie Darling and Jeffrey Levine write in their foreword,
this has been a year when the iconography and rituals of an actual earlier cultural
artifact called ‘the Masquerade’ have returned with colossal force: “an
incoming tide of masks literally remakes
the faces of every country on earth” (Four
Quartets, ix, emphasis mine). Historically, the ‘Masquerade’ was an
eighteenth-century European entertainment that was also a tango with danger and
a memento mori, in part commercialized by the Entertainment Industry overlord
(a comparison to such a personality in our own times feels inevitable here)
John James Heidegger, who saw a ‘monetization’ opportunity (as always) in the human
penchant for crossing and re-crossing boundaries of purity and danger for the
sheer titillation and euphoria of transgressive risk-taking. ‘Masquerades’ became
popular nocturnal ‘raves’ in many
European cities, briefly but tantalizingly inverting social, sexual, class and
other hierarchies and dissolving the boundary between purity and taboo. Naturally,
what happened with the mask on had to be
left behind at the masquerade, a perfect recipe for a world turned upside down.
A
masquerade is a performance, and all performance intrinsically implies a
temporary death or at least suspended animation of the ‘person’ behind the
‘performer.’ Besides, masks are intrinsically unsettling because they are the
ultimate, uncomfortable reminder that we may never truly know who the person
next to us really is. They foreground the idea that any identity is a
performance, a kind of deceit or the potential for it. In the
eighteenth-century ‘Masquerade ball,’ ‘masking’ as pageant and entertainment entailed
not only a flagrant, exhibitionist performance of the instability of all
identities, but even a carnivalesque, theatricalized and often libidinous death
drive, a macabre one-night stand with death or dissolution. Excess and
transgressive frenzy were never far from a melancholic recognition of death as
an ‘underworld’ eternally undergirding life, of life as ashes and dust moving
toward ashes and dust. A mask is also a metaphor, and all metaphor is, of
course, an evocation of the absence of the thing being invoked. It is a
reminder of a potentially infinite abyss that could be hiding almost anything. The
early modern masquerade and today’s COVID-19 medical mask are both
representations of the open-ended implicit consensus that the coming plague
might be just around the corner, and so carpe
diem. Perhaps in this spirit, in their poem titled “During the Pandemic” Rick
Barot points out that “the canvas that was painted uniformly black could be
open-ended and be a consensus at the same time. Like a plague” (Four Quartets, 282).
Comparing
the eighteenth-century masquerade—a voluntary, often transgressive performance
of a transgressive desire for
transgressive desire—with today’s medically mandated COVID-19 mask may seem fatuous
or cruel. However, while a mask by any other name might always be a public
health contract, any mask is always a reminder of the rift between appearance
and reality as well as the hopelessly overdetermined site of simultaneous ‘open-ended’
‘consensus’ that the coming plague is indeed around the corner. The mask’s
promise might never be commensurate with its performance. So while COVID-19 masks are one performance of the
promise of good citizenship, of modern rationality, the masked look itself is
at the same time archaic and riddled with precarity masquerading as safety. Even
when the mask is epidemiological best practice, can it erase millennia of the
mythos of masking as charade and make-believe (even going back to Greek
choruses and Kabuki actors)? This begs the question of whether some Americans
have resisted wearing masks and even denied COVID-19 because they didn’t want
to be reminded of the essential hollowness of their beliefs and bets? If a carefully
orchestrated status quo—’Trump and Pence will Make America Great Again’—suddenly
begins sinking into an epistemological sinkhole called a real Pandemic
requiring real masks, if we can’t continue to believe that things are as they
seem and this is the best of all possible worlds as Voltaire’s Pangloss
insisted in Candide, what kind of
existential crisis does that land us in, and why should we allow that? Welcome
to COVID-deniers.
Poetry in the Pandemic riffs on the COVID-19 mask that so
exquisitely reinforces this existential doubt: the approach of the masked stranger
or friend signifies, paradoxically, both safety and danger, and friend or foe. In
the wake of an explosion of designs and styles in COVID-19 masks—including the
infamous and ‘humorous’ ‘death’s head’ mask, for instance—we saw ambivalent
staging of such caution always already infected with knowledge of precarity. A
death’s head, the quintessential memento mori, works precisely by chaining representation
inexorably to what’s represented, forcing sign back into symbol—the skull is death, not just its sign—but without
relinquishing the joke, the fun, of the viewer’s ambivalent reception of the
full enormity of the cruel joke. Most importantly, moreover, the precarity the
COVID-19 mask staged as well as intensified has proven unfairly and
exponentially more acute for underrepresented groups in the ‘best of all
possible worlds’ in 2020, a point we will soon return to. And it is this
plethora of meanings and messages, double-edged and relentless, that poetry in Four Quartets showcases. Poets in word
and image—revolutionaries incanting the ‘human condition’—rise in response to the
Pandemic’s terrifying reminder of the
chasm in the human experience of modernity and progress. The COVID-19 mask is a
memento mori particularly in a society where BIPOC Americans are murdered with
impunity and also fundamentally precariously situated—some masks are more
ill-fitting than others— when it comes to healthcare and all other life-saving
and life-giving resources, including the
(non-)empathy of a mad (non-)POTUS.
Almost
a century ago another bard of the human condition named T.S. Eliot wrote poems
collected into another collection named Four
Quartets. They covered many of the themes found in this present collection.
During the intervening century, the striving T. S. Eliot foresaw hasn’t brought
about the salvation and redemption he sought, unfortunately. So his successors
try again. Perhaps the editors have consciously collected here poems that
formally and thematically invoke the mask that has become the dread hallmark
sign of our Annus Mirabilis, CE 2020, or perhaps these poems have collected
together—since we, readers and writers cannot—as a cri-de-coeur of a collective
unconscious protesting an apocalypse we arrogantly fooled itself into thinking
no longer possible for our ‘advanced’ species. Nearly every poem in Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic is
an affective diptych
hinged on apparently divergent but clearly connected and in fact co-constituent
crises: the pandemic of environmentally
apocalyptic war against the planet, and the pandemic of socially apocalyptic war
against BIPOC, the poor, the chronically ill, the dispossessed, and the
disenfranchised.
One need only connect pandemics of greed and disease to see them fit together. In doing so, the poems both resurrect and challenge their apparent binary. The connections between environmental and social apocalypse are depicted, whether in disturbingly eloquent words or in the black and white photography of B. A. Van Sise in their collection The Infinite Present, a series of photos recording a Dante-esque infinity of hellish chronotopes, found also in Mary Jo Bang’s poem “The Present Now,” in which every sentence starts with “Today.” Both in Van Sise and in Bang, all those “Todays” add up to an indifferent, infernal eternity and infinity—no yesterdays or tomorrows—exactly the poetic conceit for Dante’s hell. For instance, in Sise’s photos, hell is where looming, lolling figures, damned souls, wait before closed liquor stores in gutted city neighborhoods, evoking by their frail hovering public spaces turned phantom and taken over by a sign saying “Before I Die,” or puppets eating cake at an empty “reserved” café table.
In
Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “Buffalo Prayer,” buffalo thunder through cities where
streets revert to original canyons, “wombs of cliffs” (Four Quartets 17), “with heat made hooves/ heat-hooves sure as flames/……/
more heat, more hoof, more breath/ more heart/ hoof music heats us back/……/ Buffalos/
All over the city/……./ armored military goon-squads in Bradley tanks/ roam the
night/ with orders to kill the four-hoofed creature/ but/ Buffalo are coming/ down
the Appalachia trail and Continental Divide/ grinding false patriots beneath
typhoon hooves” (Four Quartets 6-8). The alliterative thunder and pant of the verse
reminds anyone who’s traveled through the American West and Southwest exactly
what this buffalo stampede could look like and mean. Baca’s prayers include
that the time of the buffalo’s return will also be “The Time of Gardens” (Four Quartets 19), but with the Corona
virus as king, emperor (Four Quartets
17), “When the wealthy/ got on their jets and yachts and hid on their private
islands,/ gangster viruses hunted them down and took them out—/ I mean, how
radical is that, right?” (Four Quartets
20).
The
virus is indeed a gangster, but it also a part of an animistic sacred that imbues
landscape and poetry and finally stands up to viral greed and genocidal capital.
And like that animal/animus, the virus is also shape-shifting predator for
Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ narrator in “Fever” from her aptly named collection Flesh and Other Shelters: “I burn in the
frame of me, leaning against dark beams of bone/……/ I am in the teeth of my
temperature” (Four Quartets, 195).
When the king virus arrives, who then will be inside versus outside, masked versus
unmasked, self versus other, living versus dying, occupied versus alienated?
Greed and consumption would also do well to think of what they are greedily devouring.
The
enjambment of environmentally apocalyptic and socially apocalyptic pandemics is
centerstage in Denise Duhamel’s plainspoken
diagnosis of the unspeakable collusion of Late Capital and ancient prejudices to
destroy both planet and human community because with “George Floyd … the
protests began, the best minds of the next generation chanting, demanding sanity
from the worst King America who was clearly out of his mind” (Four Quartets, 262). Do, as E.M. Forster
said, “Only Connect.” Two pandemics, one crucible. A container for an evil can
itself be infected by that evil and thus in the end inseparable from it as an
image or idea; the black mask meant to contain the black plague will forever
after resurrect the memory of the black plague; effect seems amniotic in cause
because cause and effect are actually the same and also successive; so the
crowned king of Duhamel’s society bent on exterminating the ‘weak links’ (“the
terrible thump of Trump through the wall,” Four
Quartets, 261), can also be the virus with a kingly name produced by the very society fatally infected with
greed and hatred, at tireless war against nature and life in the name of ‘rational’
thought and ‘rational’ markets.
In
such a society, in the room “Where my sisters/ read the news of melting
ice-caps/ and the virus named after a crown” (J. Mae Barizo, “Sunday Women on
Malcolm X Boulevard,” Four Quartets 110) one is held down head first in learning “how
to love the cough, the test/ the social distance, the canceled prom, the empty
gym/ The steady slide into impoverishment,” as Jon Davis writes in “Ode to the
Coronavirus (Four Quartets 159). That
lesson might also hold the answer to Dora Malech’s question in “Dream
Recurring”: “This is History. Where are you supposed to be?” (Four Quartets 123).
In
Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito’s “Ghazal that Tries to Hold Still,”(Four Quartets 248) against its very
nature, the poem’s fourteener couplets end in the repetitive end-rhyme words ‘shelter’
or ‘shelters,’ giving the verse the hymnal yet balladic quality of the ancient
Arabic ‘ghazal’ that spilled worldwide—like a poetic pandemic—via Sufi mysticism,
uniting the positive affective
diptychs of spiritual ecstasy and wounded earthly love, equal hallmarks of the
form. In Brimhall and Saito’s “Ghazal,’ though, the tormented lonely cry of
‘shelter’-in-place demanded by COVID echoes the tormented crying in those other
‘shelters’ where ‘illegal aliens’ are herded by ICE before being returned to
familiar circles of familiar infernos. Their torments are not unlike those of the
‘patient’ in Maggie Queeney’s “Origin Stories of the Patient” whose “name, from
the Latin, from the French, is not rooted in pain but her ability to bear. To
endure” (Four Quartets 231).
The formal virtuosity of the poetry in Four Quartets also demands attention. A
tercet is a verse form characterized by words flowing like rolling waves. It can be hard to create a sense of
flow in three terse lines of tercet. And yet, when it is done brilliantly and
expertly, the form seems the most natural vehicle for emotion that is so
violently turbulent that it can only emerge in the tightly controlled and
sparse economy of the tercet or terza rima. Written intentionally as interactive, improvisational tercets (Four Quartets 24), Yusef Komunyaaka and Laren
McClung’s excerpt from Trading Riffs to
Slay Monsters parenthetically invokes the archetypal and foundational ‘call
and response’ poetics of African-American experience, ancestor of jazz and
hip-hop, and folds it firmly into the archaic
classicality of the tercet form. Their polyglot call and response style of
making song, making meaning, out of unspeakable horror, out of the tortures of
the master’s house, is the linguistic underground railroad for the febrile,
hybrid ‘visual’ that is the COVID mask: a polyglot, overdetermined, puffing,
laboring response to utter precarity and uncertainty. Can the unknown familiar, the unseen addressee, laboring at some other
plantation, hear me even there, and come to my rescue, even protect me? Komunyakaa
and McClung might be asking in their intentional choice of the call and
response form in responding to the grotesquerie of ‘a locked-down night sky’ (Four Quartets 36). Their choice of the tercet form reaches its
thematic and metric apogee as a vehicle for controlled violence in describing
those old ocean waves carrying enslaved humans packed like canned sardines to a
living death in a New World (Four Quartets
32 ff.). In that weave of verse they resurrect the desecrated souls of BIPOC, the ‘many thousands gone’ still mourning
the modern world birthed as blood and ejecta of colonialism and slavery, in “Look,
I am hurting to go back to 1544/ When the Portuguese struck the heart of Africa/
& prodded souls on schooners/ down in the midnight hold for weeks/ across
the Atlantic, to a New World,/ where oldest greed swallowed its own/ barbed
tail, & centuries later we are/ here to question & leech the past,/
speaking bluesy elegies to the future” (Four
Quartets 33).
This
discordant core of meter and verse mirrors masquerade as just the hobbled form
needed to ‘embody’ the history of slave trading, the middle passage, slavery,
and the world they have “now
built that is not the one man/ inherited. I mean, factory smog & filth/
yellow the horizon to reveal a broken skyline/ where birds reckon into the
wrong direction/ There’s not a prayer that can undo the scythes/ taking down
the forests, or the fires burning/ where bandicoots & kangaroos disappear
in billowing smoke” (Four Quartets, 32-33). Which has, thereafter, built the world—ours, COVID’s—where “bats fly/ into
a market & unleash nature’s wrath” (Four
Quartets 33). And the
following verses recall the
paradox of masquerade: “Don’t worry, love, there’s nothing/ in the world of
mirrors that is not you/ looking back. A sip of this or that reveals/
undying darkness we all keep hidden/ but hocus pocus can leave one bitter” (Four Quartets 34). These lines, where
the voice addresses a lover, also address or serenade a society (still loved) of
the masquerade—our own, after all—sequel to a society of the spectacle, that
has brought masking back as necessary mode and metaphor for world-splitting
crisis, the apt defining visual of a consumer capitalism built on habitual and
intrinsic deception, including the silly, designer, or even still-slipping
masks of COVID: declaration of intent to protect and potential to kill.
The motif
of call and response also appears in A. Van Jordan’s “How You Doin’?”: “Calling
and responding to this gesture/of seeing one another that, for once, won’t/ be
forgotten with the noise of the day/ So, when I think of my encounters with
others/ who are quarantined, sheltering in place/ social distancing to stay
alive, I ask them/ and —is it possible?
for the first time?/ I truly wanna know” (Four Quartets 212). Stephanie Strickland’s Jus Suum asks many of these same questions, raising a call to know
“whether they be freemen … for a single moment” (Four Quartets 45), to which “One Sentence to Save in a Cataclysm”
responds “Belief/ in/ the existence of other human/ beings as such is love” (Four
Quartets 54).
Mary Jo
Bang’s “The Present Now” is full too of anxiety for responsiveness, for
connections and contacts turning bloodless during COVID, all identities in that
poem having become proxies as in the letter ‘X,’ a placeholder for all actual
living, flesh and blood people. Only the cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio that the poet/speaker is translating retain heft,
flexibility, and animation in being not just ‘X,’ but ‘XIX’ or ‘XX’ or ‘XXXII’ or
especially ‘XXVII,’ a reminder that poetic
language and words—seen as stand-ins or symbols or representations for ‘the
thing itself,’ for the underlying Heideggerian physical world, or even as masquerades
for a supposed hard, immutable, ‘real’—maybe the only truth left in a world
where one seems to live inside an endless covering, coughing up “Keatsian
blood” (Four Quartets 61). This is a
world where enforced isolation and sensory deprivation generate language like
“I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to go out into the world without
risking death” (Four Quartets 62),
quite re-spinning Jean-Paul Sartre’s aporetic “Hell equals les autres” (62). This poet/speaker’s fallback dictum that ‘the
dead don’t suffer” itself takes on a whole new valence when the living are
buried inside COVID masks, the walls of one’s home, and the grief of seeing the
faces of one’s loved and known ones vanish, become ‘X’—‘X’ suffices because what
is identity behind a mask anyway?—is cousin to death or being in ‘Purgatorio.’ Bang’s
emphasis throughout “The Present Now” on Dante’s Purgatory XXVII—a known
disquisition on lust turning into care/love— casts new light on what COVID has
done to humanity in its advent as a new memento mori, reminding us of what
really matters: care/love above lust. In that canto, to describe that
transformation, Dante uses the metaphor of goats frisky at noon becoming pliant
and tired at sunset—goats famously being emblematic of unbridled lust suggesting
Trump is that goat, the ‘craven’ creature concerned with lust—for what’s needed
is the shepherd who offers care/love rather than lust, and instead “the country
is being run by someone so craven” (Four
Quartets 65).
Indeed, the days of COVID can be described as days
when “thoughts against thoughts in groans grind” (Four Quartets 66; from G. M. Hopkins’ “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”),
as also days when the pressure of feeling one hasn’t “gotten much work done
since, only what has to be done” (Four
Quartets 66) looms over empty/crammed hours in all their paradox
masquerading as coping. Yet, “What use to us are those meanings that don’t
reach each other?” as Lee Young-Ju writes in “Guest” (Four Quartets 182)? So Ken
Chen imagines refugee and migrant experience recently blazing across headlines
of America and the world, speckled with ash from the apocalyptic social pandemic
of hatred that necrotic political regimes have visited upon those bodies. Aptly
calling it the ‘underworld,’ the Hades of Greek mythology, Chen describes the
‘illegal’ ‘alien/a/nation’ phenomenon thus: “Each passing day, the waves of
Styx break new ground, spilling/ out/ national specters” (Four Quartets 92).
We
need masks in case they save us; we need poetry because it saves us. In the
face of the sheer enigma of the modern experience such as “We lived in giant
tin eagles we used rags/ Wrapped around human bones as torches…” (“When Our
Grandchildren Ask Us,” McCrea, FQ
85), we need poetry because COVID has proven that there are purgatories—pandemics
of disease, racism and hatred—from which only poetry will save us, as Dante, or
T.S. Eliot, whose own Four Quartets attempted
many of these enigmas more than half a century ago, knew.
Poetry in the Pandemic is about having the iconoclastic, hard-hitting conversations about class, race, age, access, and privilege that COVID-19 has summoned up in the public sphere. The various inequities that drive and design our world when it comes to safety and security for the planetary and the human have been shockingly and painfully exposed in the firestorm of this pandemic, and in this astounding, brave and brilliant collection of poems, raging dissent against systemic and brutal racism forces open the doors kept solidly shut against full disclosure of systemic and historical privilege. The mask is a perfect device to draw attention to a hidden problem; it is a symptom and representation of imminent disaster that exceeds its physical format as a covering on single, individual faces, a flagging of ever-possible and ever-present collective, aggregate catastrophe. A mask is, in other words, a sign that betokens its utter inadequacy as only a sign. This is also what COVID-19 is: a clue that something is deeply, terrifyingly wrong with what we have done to nature, scientific endeavor, internationalism, humanism and humanitarianism. Poetry is the truth that unmasks that mask, as the impassioned poets of our time show us in Four Quartets.
—
Nandini Bhattacharya is a Writer and Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her fields of expertise are South Asia Studies, Indian Cinema, Postcolonial Studies and Colonial Discourse Analysis, Women’s Studies, and Creative Writing. She has published three scholarly books on these subjects, the latest being Hindi Cinema: Repeating the Subject (Routledge 2012). Her first novel Love’s Gardenwas published in October 2020. Shorter work has been published or will be in Oyster River Pages, Sky Island Journal, the Saturday Evening Post Best Short Stories from the Great American Fiction Contest Anthology 2021, the Good Cop/Bad Cop Anthology (Flowersong Press, 2021), Funny Pearls, The Bombay Review, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, The Bangalore Review, PANK,and more. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and been accepted for residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and VONA. Her awards include first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest (2017-2018), long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize (2019 and 2020), and Honorable Mention for the Saturday Evening Post Great American Stories Contest, 2021. She’s currently working on a scholarly monograph about how colonialism and capitalism continue to shape India’s cultural production, and a second novel titled Homeland Blues, about love, caste, colorism, and violent religious fundamentalism in India, and racism and xenophobia in post-Donald Trump America. She lives outside Houston. You can find her on Amazon, Twitter; Instagram, Facebook and her Blog.
Silverfish, by Rone Shavers is an experimental novel that details a slice of life in the dystopian Incorporated States of America: a country much like our own, but one in which the corporatization of culture results in the commodification of human bodies. The central characters are Angel, a code-switching, artificial intelligence robot, and Clayton, a human “combat associate” whose job is to hunt, kill, and capitalize on “primitives,” those unaccounted-for humans who live outside of the advanced technological realm. Together they use each other’s knowledge, consciousness, language, coding, and lack thereof to achieve liberation.
Rone Shavers writes in multiple genres.
His fiction has appeared in various
journals, including Another Chicago
Magazine, Big Other, Black Warrior Review, PANK, and The Operating System. Shavers’ non-fiction essays and essay-length
reviews have appeared in such diverse publications as American Book Review, BOMB,
Electronic Book Review, Fiction Writers Review, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is
fiction and hybrid genre editor at Obsidian:
Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, and he teaches courses in
creative writing and contemporary literature at The College of Saint Rose in
Albany, New York.
In this interview, we discuss code-switching,
experiential writing, language, euphemisms, and Afrofuturism.
Naya Clark: One of the most recognizable
elements of Afrofuturism within Silverfish
is code-switching. Angel would often quote renowned Black figures and mention
of African deities are made throughout the book. Why were those added?
Rone Shavers: Well, if I had to describe myself,
that’s what I am: a code-switcher. I’m constantly code-switching—you might hear
me do it at some point during this conversation. I do that, and at other times
I do what a friend of mine, Vershawn Young, calls “code-meshing”, which is
blending different kinds of language styles together, rather than switching
from one style to another…
NC: For people that code-switch, like
you and I, it’s effortless in conversation. It just happens. When placed in an
experimental novel, how did you decide when to implement code-switching, so
that it translates accurately?
RS: One reason was sort of pragmatic,
and the other was a bit more abstract. I’ll speak about the pragmatic one
first. First off, if I’m writing from the Angel’s consciousness, from the
Angel’s point of view, and the Angel has access to all this information, then
of course, that information is going to come out in a very particular sort of
way, such as in its original form. It doesn’t have to be mediated through the
use of a standardized, proper English. If it’s all just part of an archive of
knowledge, then the Angel can simply access it as is. That said, the more
abstract reason I wrote in the way I did is that I didn’t necessarily want to
filter or translate those things that didn’t necessarily need to be translated. Code-switching normally happens when you
recognize a situation in which a thing can’t be said in any other way because
of the context in which you say it. And because code-switching is so
contextual, if you don’t get it, you won’t get it. Not unless you take the time
to figure out what it means. All to say that I want the reader to have to do a
little bit of work. That’s part of what makes the book experimental.
NC: I do appreciate that you didn’t
over-contextualize those moments. Code-switching happens randomly. It’s not
something that can be necessarily timed or described or monitored. It just
happens.
RS: Yeah, you can also say that it’s
highly referential. In fact, I’d say that in order to code-switch, you have to
first be aware of the codes. Admittedly, it’s a little cheesy of me to put it
that way but well, it’s true.
NC: On the opposite end of the spectrum, Silverfish is very technically written and matter-of-fact. Some people have compared it to Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and My Ishmael, because they both provoke the reader to go back and re-digest a cut and dry, objective point of view of the human experience. Was that intentional?
RS: Part of my intention in the book was to create these layers of references. I really enjoy the sorts of texts that you can read, re-read, go back to and read again. And where each time you read them, some new fact or tidbit comes out of it. What I am interested in is the idea of networks, networks of reference and communication, and inserting Silverfish into that network. Do you remember Willy Wonka’s everlasting gobstoppers? Sometimes what popped up in my head while writing was that I was making an everlasting gobstopper…
NC: …Layers and layers…
RS: And each one, a different flavor.
NC: I consider Silverfish a philosophical text, as it touches on many layers of
consciousness, and the concept of freedom, and the “I”. Also, as an Afrofuturistic text, how do you
think Black identity and the “Black body” ties into this subject?
RS: Blackness, Black, and the Black body
are three different things. What is Blackness? Ask 10 different people and
you’re going to have 10 different definitions. And as for the black body, well…
Wait, can you tell me the connection you made? What you saw in the book?
NC: Well, Silverfish exists in a dystopia where a fleshly human body has a
price and is a resource. I think a good example of this is the [Colin]
Kaepernick situation. When he, as a body, was an athlete, he’s useful and makes
money. But when he, as a Black person, has a statement to make, then he’s no
longer valuable.
RS: Yes, absolutely. But when is a body
not a body? It’s when the body becomes a substitute for a bigger idea. In
Kaepernick’s case, the bigger idea is police brutality against BIPOC. When he
knelt in protest against police brutality–and how ironic his kneeling now
seems, given what happened to George Floyd!–the reaction against him was so
visceral because he gave the fact of racial inequality a physical form. He made
an abstract concept concrete. And as we all know, up until his protests, his
value as a gifted athlete was his
cultural value. So, you’re right. He was just another body who was supposed to,
as race-baiting television host Laura Ingram infamously said about Lebron
James, “Shut up and dribble”, even though the sport is somewhat different…
Really, that’s one of the ways the book leans into Afrofuturism. In America,
the black body has repeatedly been used as a money-making resource. In fact,
the black body is still commodified.
I mean, if you want to consider Kaepernick’s case, then let’s be totally clear
about it. It’s not that he’s no longer valuable, it’s that he now carries a negative value. It’s the fear that he
will cost the NFL money that keeps him blacklisted. To the owner of a
professional sports team, the athlete is basically just a positive or negative
revenue asset. That’s what commodity capitalism’s all about.
NC: This reminds me of when Clayton and
the other combat associates were assigned tasks that involved thinking, using
clues, and human critical thinking abilities. It was associated with a certain
paygrade.
RS: You can see echoes of that same
idea in the Angel. Basically, as long as you are functioning like a machine or
doing a job in which a machine can one day replace you, then everybody’s calm
and everything is copacetic. But the minute you begin to question that way of
being, it’s assumed that you must be malfunctioning somehow. That you’re wrong,
off, out of your lane…
NC: In Silverfish humanity is described very objectively, similar to
Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Why
do you feel that’s the most effective way of describing the human experience?
RS: I don’t really write from an
emotional state. Emotions are so fleeting and spongy… I’m not big on evoking an
emotional response out of a reader because I don’t know who my reader is going
to be. Instead, I like to give space for the reader to have his or her or their
own emotional response. They might read the work as funny. They might read it
as tragedy. They might read it as horror. I don’t know. Unless they tell me,
I’ll never know… I’m always going to be more excited and drawn to ideas, even
if it’s dime store philosophy, than I am attracted to emotions. I’m just not
that sort of writer. Emotions are fashionable, meaning that they wax and wane
according to particular moments in time. But still, I don’t hate emotional
fiction. I just think that there are tons of other writers who can evoke
emotional responses so much better than me.
NC: It seems that you trust the reader
to be intelligent enough to have their own perspective. Another thing about the
language is the fact that in this world, they use the word ‘primitive’ with a
negative connotation, almost to describe an enemy or an unwanted way of life.
Why did you choose ‘primitive’ specifically?
RS: I remember being taken aback the
first time I heard somebody use ‘savage’ in slang. I was floored by all the
connotations. So yeah, there’s a definite emphasis in the book on euphemisms
and how we use them. Also, I really wanted to highlight how dependent the
language of commodity capitalism is upon using euphemisms. The two are so
incredibly intertwined. For example, you really start to see it if you
specifically look at the language of start-up tech companies. They all make
mention of ‘angel’ investors, someone who’ll come in and prop the company up by
giving them millions of dollars… There are all these little euphemisms that
pepper the different characters’ speech throughout the book. For instance, the
soldiers are called ‘combat associates’, and they often talk in euphemisms and
don’t even realize that they’re doing it… But I think I’m getting slightly
off-topic. I chose ‘primitive’ because it’s the mirror opposite of ‘civilized’,
which is the other word often mentioned throughout the book. And of course,
civilized is a word that carries its own fraught, connotative weight. It’s a
euphemism that’s used in really classist and racist ways.
NC: Speaking of angels, I wanted to
understand why that was used for the AI as well. Can you elaborate on the
reason why you decided to call this form of AI an angel?
RS: It’s the irony of it. This thing is
going around killing everything in sight! It goes back to my previous
statements. Calling a cyborg that kills in the name of capitalism an “angel”
is, in itself, an ironic euphemism. There’s that, and there’s also the fact
that “angel” is one of the most overused terms in the English language. We’re
always running around, using the word willy-nilly: ‘Oh, you’re such an angel
for doing that’, ‘You sleep like an angel’, angel face, angel eyes, angel dust,
angel hair pasta, etc. I could go on, but if you haven’t guessed already, I’m
sort of into playing with all of the different ideas that swirl around language,
the philosophy and uses of language and stuff. Those are the kinds of things
that really interest me.
NC: Another component I noticed in Silverfish is the theme of getting AI
to trust humans, as opposed to the other way around. The idea that AI feeds on
what you feed it, and what you feed it is what you get back in return. Was that
intended?
RS: In Silverfish, the Angel tells Clayton, “You’ll have to think differently,” but she doesn’t exactly or explicitly tell him how or what to think. What the Angel says is basically something to the effect of, ‘I will give you the tools to rebel, to think outside of the box, but you’ll have to do it by yourself.’ I framed it that way because it’s about what one can do with the concept of language. And for Clayton, at least, he decides he can use language to communicate. But language is fallible, you can make mistakes with language. Language is not a perfect way of communication. One of these very common fantasies is that, somehow, we’ll stumble upon an ideal means of communication, where we can be understood without the use of language. That’s why there’s such an attractive strength in concepts like empathy, which avoids language altogether and substitutes direct feelings instead. I mean, we all know that language is an incredibly invaluable tool, something that won’t let us down, but still, people are always going to be able to lie. They’re always going to be able to fudge things. The whole fantasy is that we can somehow have a pure form of communication. We’ll never get there.
NC: In terms of Afrofuturism, I think
that’s another reason ‘primitiveness’ maybe applies, because for a long time,
people were seen as primitive for those sorts of miscommunications. But it is
also futuristic to be able to communicate without language.
RS: I don’t really see it as
communicating without language. Because again, that’s a fantasy. I see it more
as using language against itself in a very clever way. What I mean by that is…
Well, in any society in which you are not a part of the dominant culture, in
which you’re a member of a marginalized group, you’re often forced to learn how
to speak the dominant culture’s language just as the dominant culture speaks
it. But then something really interesting often happens. While still speaking
the dominant culture’s language, the marginalized begin to strategize alternate
ways of verbal communication that rely upon the use of dominant culture
language, but actually makes the language say something entirely different. In
other words, they begin to invert and subvert certain sounds, words, and
meanings, so that the words they use convey something else. In the Western
hemisphere you can see this all over the place. Particularly among Black and
Brown people, who have had to devise various language strategies in order to
overturn essentialist dominant culture tropes. Basically, BIPOC have had to
learn how to remix language in a way that works to ensure not only their agency
and culture, but also their very survival. Now, in terms of Afrofuturism, maybe
it’s correct to say that BIPOC culture turning language against itself is
Afrofuturistic, maybe it’s not. In either case, I agree with you that there’s
nothing primitive about it.
NC: Thanks for working with me on that.
Was there anything that I didn’t ask or bring up that you want to clarify or
mention? Or you want readers to know?
RS: Maybe just the obligatory word
about creative writing. A really good piece of writing advice I got when I was
in school that I still cling to is to assume that the reader is as smart as you
are. Let them come to the conclusion that they need to come to. You have to
have enough trust in the reader to be able to come up with some of the answers
to things themselves.
J. Gordon Faylor, Editor-Publisher of the
online platform, GaussPDF, is the author of several books, as well as, a few
collections in association with his colleague, Brandon Brown. Of particular
note is Faylor’s 2016 novel/long poem, Registration Caspar (Ugly
Duckling Presse), a collector’s item and a brilliant example of innovative
writing that is, at once, a “transrational” experience and a psychological
journey for the main character and the reader, alike. In my review of this book
I asserted that, “The interpretation of Registration
Caspar that I advance…represents my subjective experience as a reader of
the novel. I do not claim to understand Faylor’s serious or playful intentions;
however, I am of the opinion that the book is both serious and playful as a
work of art.” I would make a similar claim about Antoecians, Faylor’s
new volume of experimental poetry. Asked to reflect on his collection, the
writer stated [via email], “I suppose I’d just note that it’s very much a work made in a
state of quarantine, and which comes out of protracted solitude and frustration
in and with that solitude, but which I also see—however abstractly—as the kind
of concluding book in a trilogy that also includes People Skulk and Want [both
available from Lulu.com]. Hesitant to speculate more on how they’re connected
beyond sheer chronological proximity….” Herein, I will provide obligatory commentary on what I mean
by “experimental” poetry, as well as, discuss
Antoecians as an exemplar of Postmodern innovative, avant
garde writing that expands our understanding of what associative,
“collage,” and political poetry entails.
The word, “antoecians” can be [over]simplified to mean
entities existing in separate, though, not
unassociated, spatial domains, like the discontinuous yet distributed
landscapes that the collection under review represents. In a 2012 essay, the
Stanford poetry critic, Marjorie Perloff, a promoter of literary
experimentation, advanced the idea that, “in recent years, we have witnessed a
lively reaction” to the culture “of prizes, professorships, and political correctness”
by a growing group of poets “rejecting the status quo.” In
characteristic fashion, Perloff goes on to create a binary between poetry with
and without traits that we generally attribute to the lyric, in particular, the
personalized, “I,” as well as, music. One might argue that the poems in Antoecians
lack the formalized musical elements that the mainstream reader expects [but,
see below]. However, such an assessment—a standard—begs the questions: What do
we mean by “music?” and Can we re-frame “music” in a manner that is consistent
with poetry as an artistic enterprise rather than as an “ism” with invariant
definitions and boundaries? As a student of experimental literature who regards
Formalism highly, I am always curious about the seeming “tug-of-war”
between conventional poetics dominating
our narratives about “good” poetry, on the one hand, and poetry that
challenges, even, opposes, received wisdom about what a poetic masterpiece
should be, on the other.
In her consideration of a lyrical : experimental divide,
Perloff highlights questions fundamental to the ways that form, content, and
meaning are understood as literary criteria. For example, the esteemed critic
raises these questions: What makes a lineated text a poem? Does a poem require
some sort of closure or circular structure characterized by a beginning, a
middle, and an end? Should the poet speak via her/his/their own “person?”
Should the poet divulge intimate, autobiographical details? I suggest that,
like the poems in Antoecians, the avant garde poem can meet
formalist standards [if that is a valuable pursuit at all] if we view words,
phrases, sentences as units of wholes [whole poems, whole compositions, whole
structures] capable of standing on their own not only as units subordinate to
and secondary to the whole. Such a re-framing of what we mean by a poem raises
elements, components of the whole to levels equivalent to the whole that exist
on their own terms capable of standing alone or as parts—in combination with,
even, greater than, the sum of the parts of the whole—a [literally,
politically] radical transformation of a hierarchical into an egalitarian form
or structure. Such a redistribution of the power of parts—of words, phrases,
and their additional combinations [and re-combinations]—provides a bridge from
the grand conceptual frameworks of Modernism [Marxism, Psychoanalysis,
Capitalism, “Genius,” Utopianism, Idealism] to the “fractured,” fragmented,
even, relative, realities and landscapes of Postmodernism, as exemplified by the
poems in the volume under review.
Importantly, if we are to argue that Faylor’s compositions are not inconsistent with—if not, actually, continuous with—the poetry of Modernism and the rules of Formalism, and that Faylor’s text is anti-establishment, but not a rendering of anti-fascist or anarchic literature, it is necessary to demonstrate that Antoecians is a collection of rule-governed poems—a formal property that can be viewed as choices and as “intentional,” to employ Perloff’s term that she used to argue that Conceptual poetry is not “uncreative writing.” This perspective is not intended to suggest that Faylor selected or wrote each word, phrase, etc. in a conscious, aware manner. However, it is to suggest that Faylor’s consciously or unconsciously positioned elements, components lend cohesion to the composition itself—a form of literary integrity. In experimental writing, repetition, classically represented by the writing of Gertrude Stein, is widely acknowledged to be the most recognizable “glue” or technique unifying an experimental, avant garde collection. Faylor’s repetitive method is apparent on every page, in every stanza, of his new volume—repeating words comprised of double-letters, resolving what might seem to be a paradox between whole and part or between unfragmented and fractured. Perloff might see this as a trait or flavor analogous to what she calls “circular structure,” characteristic of conventional writing [see paragraph 3 above]. However, though I am in constant search for evidence of formal characteristics in experimental writing, Faylor would probably discount or, even, dismiss, any significance such comparisons may seemingly embody.
Other intentional or “rule-governed” features of the compositions in Antoecians, permitting fracture to coexist with unity, are word play [Ludwig Wittgenstein], including, the creation of neologisms, methods employed—apparently, but, not necessarily, consciously—to generate novelty, expanding parts and wholes—virtually, creating new forms and meanings. Thus, “Windatry Dontcry. Your amyxial Slaty-Gray;” “Was the leg-dump Thermaltake;” “the dim boat Scramsilence;” “the planet ruined people I saw as empaths.” Off and on throughout the text, Faylor repeats sounds: “godwit;” “sunlit;” “unlit.” With these and other techniques, Faylor combines and recombines form, content, and meaning—creating independent, as well as, interdependent, functional units. Other traits include the occasional incorporation of conventional elements, components—possibly self-referential material—[“As before, as foretold, I doze off at work. I make less money than I did before.”; “an already simple Oakland worry makes”]; beautiful images [“imagination gone corpulent”]; emotion, including, loss and love [“couldn’t read that for years after you left”]; and, on p 14, lines can be found that approximate music—or, rhythm, for sure.
Other features of the poems in Antoecians expose the hand of a professional, rather than, an amateur writer—a serious, highly-evolved poet with a mature, “intentional” poetics. In particular, not only, repetition, but, also, one- and two-syllable words, as well as, hard consonants are employed to full artistic effect, resolving—or negating—another seeming paradox between balance and skew—again, whole : part or unfragmented : fractured. I find Faylor’s deference to the political to be, particularly, noteworthy—the establishment of an understated, non-intrusive, respectful relationship with his readers by placing “interpretive power” [as per Formalist, Helen Vendler] in the reader’s person—a solidly Postmodern methodology. To the extent that Antoecians can be said to embody [fractured] content, as well as [fractured] form, meaning, also, is a function of the beholder’s body and mind via sensations, feelings, emotions, thoughts, images, associations, and abstractions stimulated through interactions with words on the page—not necessarily contiguous elements, components on contiguous pages. Finally, though I recommend Faylor’s new book, especially, to those who are experts, students, or consumers of—or who are curious about—experimental writing, broadly defined, this collection will appeal to any reader who values literary invention and an opportunity to engage with art of a high, though not rarefied or pretentious, order. In addition to Faylor’s other works, Antoecians deserves a wide audience.
—
Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA.
Naya Clark discusses with Peter Ramos his book Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge. In Remarkable Bridge Ramos delves into what goes into poetic translations, referencing poets such as James Wright and César Vallejo; Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda and Langston Hughes; Luis Palés Matos and William Carlos Williams; Elizabeth Bishop and Octavio Paz, and more.
In this interview, Ramos answers
questions regarding how language and place literally and figuratively cross
boundaries and connect poets to one another’s works. He also uncovers how
references impact their own origins, and the difference in academic and poetic
writing in his writing processes.
Naya
Clark: In what other ways do you think language overcomes and infiltrates
socio-political blockages for people?
Peter
Ramos: That’s a good and tricky question. Or maybe the answer is
tricky. There is, on the one hand, the undeniable fact that there are plenty of
words and cultural items that find their way into U.S. culture. Let’s take the
most basic example: food. I’m sure there are plenty of people in the States who
enjoy Mexican food, tequila, etc. And I’m equally convinced that some portion
of these people are vocally opposed to Mexican immigrants. So, there’s that. But even with food, I think
(and Anthony Bourdain made this point over and over again in his shows) once
you get invested in the people who make the food and you do so with generosity
and respect, I think you’re making a bridge toward another group of people and
culture outside those of and in the U.S. I guess what’s necessary are these
opportunities for curiosity and generosity; these fight xenophobia; these lend
themselves to thinking beyond our borders. Here’s an example, though I don’t
bring this into my book: In 1992, I bought 100
Poems from the Chinese, all translated by Kenneth Rexroth. My knowledge of
Chinese culture before this was limited to Chinese-American food and a small
amount of basic knowledge of China’s economic ties to the U.S. But even though
I didn’t speak or read Chinese, this book opened a door to another culture that
I wanted to explore. The same was true for me when I read translations of Pablo
Neruda and César Vallejo. I’d never been to their homelands, but I felt a human
connection to these poets and their worlds. Maybe this is patronizing, but I
don’t think it is. Literature (and art and music), as much as if not more than
scientific, technological advances, has always represented the height of any
civilization’s achievements, so reading translations of poets from around the
world often (always?) shows us what is most noble, least downtrodden, about the
cultures and people whom these literary writers create. And this, at its best,
leads or should lead to geopolitical breakthroughs, generosity, respect.
NC:
Within Remarkable Bridge, you discuss
the connections poets are able to make with one another through translation. In
your opinion, what would be the most defining sort of connection/understanding
between poets from translating each other’s work?
PR:
As I try to explain in [Remarkable
Bridge], the poet who translates a work from another language has to do the
work of lifting up her own language (or stretching it, moving it beyond the
recognizable terms) in order to accommodate the translation of that which is in
the other language always beyond mere transmission of the words into the new
language. I’m paraphrasing Walter
Benjamin here, and I use his extensive parts of his essay “The Task of the
Translator ” (itself in translation in my copy) in the book. This way of
finding new phrases and metaphors to accommodate and do justice to the poetry
in translations offers the translator-poet new opportunities—in terms of
language and form—for her “own” poetry. I also allude to and rely on Emmanuel
Levinas’s idea of obligation to an “other” who both cannot be fully understood
yet obliges the poet translator (in this case) to respond to that “other” with
care. Or, as I write in the book’s introduction,
In his “The Ego and the Totality,”
Levinas makes the following argument about the self and its ethical
relationship to the other, a relationship of mutual obligation based on the
fact that the other, who is equally a free subject, cannot be completely known to the self. And yet we
are also obligated to the other because meaning, which is essentially social,
can only come about in a relationship with
the other: “To show respect is to bow down, not before the law, but before
a being who commands a work from me. But for this command to not involve
humiliation…the command I receive must also be a command to command him who
commands me” (43).
Translation in poetry takes a
similar form, an obligation to an original work (an other) that is always in
excess of any single translation of it. The original is always beyond a
translator’s rendering of it, yet that surplus, precisely—which accounts as
well for the necessary strangeness that a translator can capture in her
translation—must be respected; it thus compels the translator to be responsible to and for it.
NC:
As a poet, how has focusing on Remarkable
Bridge as a scholarly, analytical text impacted your way of writing poetry?
PR:
When I write literary criticism, I’m trying to make a
certain kind of point or argument. When I write poetry, I’m not trying to make
a point in the same way. When I write poetry, I’m trying to invite more mystery
and atmosphere or mood. For me, there’s something more rational involved in
teaching and writing criticism than in writing poetry.
NC:
One of the notable points that recurs throughout Remarkable Bridge is that translations and references impact their
origins just as much as they’re informed by them. Do you have contemporary
examples of this?
In [Remarkable Bridge]
I discuss, in some depth, two contemporary poet-translators: Roberto Tejada and
Rosa Alcalá. They’re both U.S. citizens, and I believe that the translations
they have rendered bring more attention to the work of the original poets
besides informing the original work of these poet-translators, themselves. In the case of Tejada’s work, he has helped
bring more visibility to the Cuban poet, José Lezama Lima. The same is true
about the artist Alcalá translates, Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña. This idea
(that poet-translators impact the work of the poets they translate) seems to
come— however indirectly— from T.S. Eliot’s often-quoted lines in his
“Tradition and the Individual Talent”:
What happens when a new work of art
is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art
which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves,
which is modified by the new (the really new) work of art among them. (Selected Prose 38)
NC:
In reference to Clayton mentioning that Vallejo’s poetry should be read in
context with where he wrote them (Peru, Paris, etc.), how important is place
when writing poetry versus making translations?
PR:
I’ve never rendered poetry from another language into English. In my own
poetry, place plays a significant part (as well as the people I meet and
befriend and get to know in a specific place). I grew up in Maryland until I
was 30. And I’m sure the rural areas I had easy access to back then helped me
fall in love with the writings of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Sherwood
Anderson and others. And I believe these writers had a great influence on my
poetry back then. In 1999, I moved to Buffalo for graduate school. And that
area—with its elegant, worn down post-industrial rust-belt environment, in many
ways like Baltimore, the city I knew so intimately, as well as the fellow grad
student I got to know, and still speak to—all of that changed my writings and
my life, my sense of the world, in ways that are incalculable. There’s a
terrific book of essays called Buffalo
Trace: A Three-Fold Vibration by Mary Cappello, James Morrison, and Jean
Walton, each one of whom is an author in her/his own right, but these are their
reflections on moving to this city to enter University at Buffalo’s PhD program
in the 1970s and 80s. It’s an amazing book, and each writer captures the
essence of that city in that time and of getting to know other graduate
students and how all of this affected them deeply. It’s also worth mentioning
that Robert Tejada sent me this book and that he, Rosa Alcalá and I all met as
PhD students at University at Buffalo at the same time. These two, as well as
other graduate students and some of the professors, made my time as a graduate
student in Buffalo so rich, intellectually and in many other ways.
NC:
Remarkable Bridge discusses how
language has the ability to change writers’ writing style and personal
politics. For instance, Langston Hughes’ travels to South America and Cuba. On
a personal level, has travel affected you as a writer and scholar, or people
you know?
It has. And this is probably more true for people like Roberto Tejada (who lived in Mexico City for a decade or more) and my brother, Stephen Ramos, who besides the traveling he did with our family, went to Spain and then Nicaragua for more than three years. I know this kind of travel (and what are the right words here, temporary expatriation?) deeply influenced their intellectual, political, aesthetic and cultural values. And obviously these experiences made them even more fluent in Spanish. To learn another language is to double your world. For my part, I would travel with my family to Valencia, Venezuela on most Christmases until I was 21. My father was a Venezuelan citizen, and his mother and brother (and extended cousins, aunts and uncles) all lived there, even after my father arrived in the U.S. in 1964. For reasons I think I understand, my father didn’t speak to us in any language other than English, though he could speak five. I believe he thought our being bi-lingual would interfere with our assimilation. I’m sad he didn’t teach us Spanish, but I understand. Therefore, when we went to Venezuela, our cousins and my brother and I would speak “Spang-lish,” and this was an introduction into speaking another language. Also, of course, just experiencing the culture, the landscape, the people of a country like Venezuela deeply affected me. It wouldn’t be until a few years after I went there last that I would bring my senses and recollections of the place—the Indigenous and metropolitan cultures, the music, the food, even their version of Catholicism (so different from that of the Catholic churches we attended in those days that were made up of the descendants of Irish, German, Italian, and Polish immigrants) and the people—into my own poetry at some point.
NC:
Some of the most complex forms of translation in Remarkable Bridge are William’s Translations of Palés Matos
poetry, which makes reference to specific words and phrases within
afro-Caribbean dialects, surrounding the complexities of race. You discuss what
Walter Benjamin describes as “pure language”, stating that a
translation needs to be transparent. What is your personal perspective of how
transparency can be maintained across language barriers?
PR:
I’m not sure I would say that Benjamin’s “pure language” is the same thing as
or an example of transparency. In my chapter on William Carlos Williams, my
argument is that Williams generates an English version of Palés Matos’s poem
that involves a fraught (and in some ways problematic) version of minstrelsy in
which Williams is trying to approximate an Afro-Caribbean tone in his
translation without merely “copying” or finding each exact word in English. The
translation has to honor the original without being a mere translation of it; in some senses it has to be a different
poem.
NC: When you refer to a poem’s afterlife,
is this after translations, references, or interpretations have been made? What
is the defining moment of a poem having an after life?
And to continue my
answer from the previous question here, my arguments threading the book
together involve the way in which the work of honorifically and artistically
translating a poem from another language often shows up in a poet’s “own”
poetry. So, for example, Williams’s sense of the New World, with all of its
Indigenous, colonial, racial hybridity (often fraught, obviously) that he picks
up from the Palés Matos poem that he translated will ultimately show up in
Williams’s own poetry and its appearance there, maybe more than in the
translation, should be noted as an afterlife of the Palés Matos poem.
Williams’s mother was Puerto Rican (like Palés Matos), but it’s also important
to remember that Williams never thought of himself as other than White. Such
encounters in the New World—between lighter skinned Latin Americans and those
that have more visibly African features— have a history of explosive violence,
oppression, injustice, as is hopefully obvious to most people, and Williams is
himself guilty of blind spots to race and class. But he also suspected that
Latin American poetry (as well as the poetry from Spain) could offer more
opportunities to poet-translators in terms of their own work. He understood
that such encounters were also rich, worthy of celebration.
NC:
What is the major impact/takeaway you’d like for readers to get from Remarkable Bridge?
PR: I quote from the last paragraph of my book, which I hope
will interest and inspire poet-translators, critics, poetry lovers and others:
Within the world of arts and
letters, especially, canon formation is a way of establishing political hierarchies,
a way of centering cultural politics. Asserting the need to reexamine the ways
in which poetry canons across the Americas have far more connections than has
been assumed or critically assessed is ultimately to exalt both U.S. and Latin American/Caribbean poetry.
Such a (re)vision would also avoid a paternalistic or condescending approach to
the latter, even as it acknowledges the aesthetic, cultural, and linguistic
debt so many U.S. poets owe to those who lived and wrote below our border. In
the name of national self-interest [at least], we should look upon translations
into English as an important means of keeping our own language vital,
rejuvenated, refreshed. This book examines such intersections as they have
occurred throughout the Americas, and I am hopeful that others will take up
this kind of critical approach and apply it to cultures and countries around
the globe.
NC:
What would you recommend for those interested in reading or conducting
translations?
Wow! There are so many, I feel overwhelmed by the question.
How to translate poetry is not something I’ve done yet, but those interested in
translations should pick the poets they are interested in and see if any of
them have translated poems into English. One might also look into a country that
he/she is interested in and find out which poets from that country have made it
to the U.S. (or English-speaking countries) through translation and then begin
there. It’s a long road and it takes some digging, but it’s also filled with
delights. The “new” is always a promise, and the world is still much bigger
than we imagine.
—
Naya Clark is an Atlanta-based writer from New
Jersey. Clark enjoys the challenges of writing articles, reviews, poetry, and
interviewing other writers and artists. She is an Assistant Editor at Urban
Ivy and an interdisciplinary freelance writer. In her spare time, she
is underlining good sentences and organizing local art events. More of her work
can be found at NayaClark.com.
Peter Ramos’ poems have appeared in New World Writing, Colorado
Review, Puerto del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, Indiana
Review, Mississippi Review (online), elimae, Mandorla and
other journals. Nominated several times for a PushcartPrize,
Peter is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost
(BlazeVox Books, 2008) and three shorter collections. Lord Baltimore,
his forthcoming book of poetry, will be available in January, 2021 on Ravenna
Press. An associate professor
of English at Buffalo State College, Peter teaches courses in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century American literature.
The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.
BY NANCY REDDY
I am writing this column from the passenger seat of my car, which is parked alongside a road deep in the snowy woods. I’ve dropped my kids off for two hours of outdoor camp at a wildlife center, and before I know it, it will be time to retrieve them. They’ll tell me all about the turkey vulture and the bald eagles and the blue jay (named Blueberry! my five year old yells over and over, to make sure he’s heard) and ask for snacks and complain about being too hot in their snow bibs and then too cold. But for now I’m trying to write.
This column has been hard to start. In the ongoing emergency of the pandemic and the long-term emergencies of systemic racism and gendered caregiving burdens, which have all highlighted in stark terms that time to write and even think are allocated unevenly, even writing the words “writing retreat” has made me a little nervous. With half a million Americans dead, it has sometimes felt frivolous to write about buying nice chocolate and writing goals on a white board. But also I believe that writing is vital, and that claiming space for writing is just as essential now as ever.
To think about how we might recreate some of the benefits of a retreat or residency, I spoke with three writers, all poets and parents, who have recently created at-home writing retreats. Chelsea B DesAutels, author of A Dangerous Place, forthcoming later this year from Sarabande, talked to me going on “retreat” while dogsitting for her parents. Twila Newey, author of Sylvia, created a one-week writing retreat in her own house. And Christen Noel Kaufmann, whose hybrid chapbook Notes to a Mother God was a winner of the Paper Nautilus Debut Chapbook Series and will be published this year, has declared each Friday her writing residency in her home.
All three writers talked about the significance of calling their time a retreat because it allowed them to claim it as a space for writing. Kaufmann wrote that “Calling it a residency/retreat is important to me because it lets the people around me – my husband and kids – see it as real time for work. I literally tell my children I’m going to work. It also helps me take it more seriously.” Similarly, Des Autels said, “Calling it a “residency” is actually kind of a big deal. First, it indicates to me that this is time I’m allowed separate from my other obligations, and that I am supposed to prioritize writing. Second, it indicates all of this to my family—they know I’m away to work.”
A few tips from these three writers, whether you’re looking to get away entirely or just carve out an hour or two one day a week:
Prepare your space and anticipate your needs
All three writers described physically arranging their space to prepare for writing.
When DesAutels worked at her parents’ home, she wrote on a dining room table in front of windows overlooking a frozen lake. She says, “the first thing I did was clear off their table so that it was completely open, and then unloaded and organized my own work—laptop, notebooks, a few of the books I brought and knew I’d need to reference, folders with research and edits, and a candle.”
Though Kaufmann and Newey both described cleaning, Newey also granted that “maybe you work well in a cozy mess” and so she advises writers to “prepare your nest so you’re comfortable,” whether that means total tidiness or piles or something in between.
If you’re working at home, you may need to also proactively block out distractions. Newey, who was writing while at home with her husband and four children, wrote that “I recommend ear plugs or a pair of shooting range earmuffs if, like me, you can’t tune out your children’s complaints/arguments.” (She clarified that “I do not own a gun, just the earmuffs.”)
Define your goals for your retreat
DesAutels’s work was driven largely by the need to finish copyedits and write the acknowledgments for her book, so she was working with a clear task and deadline. Similarly, Kaufmann wrote a list of tasks and projects: “I usually make a list of what I want to accomplish and write it on the white board above my desk. That can be a certain number of poems written/revised, a word count, books read, or more administrative tasks that come with publishing.”
If defined goals feel too constricting, you might draft a menu of options. Newey wrote a big list of possible things to write and read, then selected a few from each list.
Establish a rhythm
DesAutels based her schedule on the one she’d used previously while at a month-long residency: “I planned to wake every morning at the same time, make French press coffee, and write early and for as long as I needed until I had a poem draft. Then I’d walk the dogs and eat lunch. I planned to spend my afternoons working on the other projects. I brought food that wouldn’t require much preparation. I planned to spend my evenings reading and revising.”
There’s a great conversation during the Commonplace episode on Macdowell about setting up a routine during a residency that includes several different poets’ approaches.
Give yourself credit for everything, including your rest
In writing about her retreat, Newey reminded me of the twin definitions of “retreat,” which both feel relevant now:
retreat: n. a quiet or secluded place in which one can rest and relax.
retreat: v. move back or withdraw. as from battle
She went on to say that “For me the week was also a rest from social expectations around production, publication, the scarcity model. My time to sink into the rich and generous space of creativity where there’s always more than enough or take a daily nap or leisurely walk or watch some t.v.” On the list of things she’d accomplished during her week Newey listed both finishing and submitting a chapbook and writing new poems and sleeping in until 8 or 9 AM and taking a walk each day. This feels like an important reminder that all of those activities can be part of the writing process.
Similarly, DesAutels wrote that, even though she hadn’t written as many poems as she’d planned during her time away, “I still count the residency as a success. I’ve had a hard time during the pandemic setting aside private time to write. The residency was so wonderfully quiet. I got to spend time in my own mind. And I read a lot more than I have in a long time. I might not have come home with as many new drafts as I’d wanted, but I came home with ideas and with a softer mind, and that’s a step in the right direction.”
More Resources
Several residencies have shifted some portion of their programming online, making parts of the residency experience available to writers working at home.The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center have both launched virtual programs (Virtual VCCA and Virtual VSC, respectively) that aim to build community and celebrate fellows’ work. (The Virtual VSC event calendar for February, celebrating Black History month, looks bonkers good, with a lineup including a reading and a craft talk by Joy Priest, Tommye Blount and Nathan McClain in conversation, and a conversation about Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, among others; all events are free and open to the public.)
If you are looking to actually get away, Sundress Academy for the Arts is accepting applications for summer residencies through February 15th, with full and partial scholarships available for BIPOC writers and writers with financial need. Because the residency is so small – two people in the farmhouse and one more person at the coop up the hill – I think it would feel quite safe. Tin House is accepting applications for its residencies, which include programs specifically for writers working on a debut and for teachers, and weekend residencies for parents, through March 14. If you’re a parent, the Sustainable Arts Foundation’s list of residencies to which they’ve awarded grants in recent years to make them more accessible for parents can serve as a helpful starting point for residencies that might work for you, either by allowing you to bring your children or providing funds to offset the cost of childcare while you’re away.
I hope that, wherever you are in your writing and your writing life, you’re able to carve out some small space to feel like a writer, whether that’s a week or a weekend or a sliver of the morning before anyone else is awake. As Melissa Stephenson writes in her lovely essay, “Confetti Time,” “In the end, it doesn’t matter when or how the work got done. It matters that it did get done, one tiny piece at a time.”
NANCY REDDY is the author of Pocket Universe (LSU, 2022); Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series; and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). She’s also co-editor, along with Emily Pérez, of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (UGA, 2022). Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace and her essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, Brevity, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University in New Jersey.
I have lost myself in Penny
Slinger’s archives. It’s an easy way to spend a Saturday afternoon during
underemployed COVID times.
2.
Back in 2019 I read a throwaway
footnote in a David Graeber book: at some point, the USSR hoped to feed their
people with Spirulina, the protein packed algae and modern-day superfood. I
failed to locate any evidence supporting this claim.
3.
I did find another Cold
War/spirulina connection though, in the LA Times, 1985: Manufacturers of Algae Derivative Claim they could “Feed the World”.
In the article, Microalgae International Sales Corp. hosts a cocktail party at
which Christopher Hills, the ‘father of spirulina,’ touts the powers of his
sustainable green slime. Goodbye starvation. The company operates as an early
MLM and donates product to charitable causes–including 1,900 pounds of
spirulina tablets for, “Mujahideen Afghan freedom fighters”. Spokespeople claim
the Mujahideen are scaling mountains to victory, subsisting on algae and snow.
Doctors question health claims and decry the arrogance of shipping pond scum to
the poor.
4.
To me, it sounded like the perfect
longform article just waiting to be made into a podcast. It sounded like money,
bingeable content. You have an MLM, spurious medical promises, a charismatic
“Western guru scientist”, and US involvement in the Soviet-Afghan War. Wild
stuff. I took some notes and put them away.
5.
Now that I’ve lost my health-food
job to the pandemic and have a month without ghostwriting work, I return to the
story. I finally have time to “follow the money,” and, “track down sources.”
Unfortunately I don’t know how to do any of that. I left school with no research
skills and find nothing meaningful on Microalgae International Sales Corp., or
on this period in Hills’s life. Every link on his foundation’s website–I try Archives; I try Afghan Refugees–returns me to the homepage.
6.
It’s especially frustrating because
Hills is in my reach. He’s all over the internet, photographed with scientists,
prime ministers. He received a glowing obituary and in the photo he glows, too.
The man was prolific. He wrote books I won’t read because I imagine they
approximate the kind of eye contact that washes brains. I assume hypocrisy, the
implicit sins of a spiritual conman. I am wary of entertaining that kind of
mind after my year with the health food company where I too sold spirulina,
under the rule of another aspiring guru. She also wanted to save the world with
capitalism and positive thinking. There is no art there.
7.
In all my fruitless research one
name keeps coming up: Penny Slinger. Hills’s wife and protector of his legacy,
she ran their Goddess Temple after his death. I avoid reading about her because
I am skeptical of spiritually driven, age-gap romances, the muse and the
bearded man. In the one picture I see of them she’s beautiful and gazing into
Hills’ eyes. It scares me.
8.
At my final dead end, I consent and search
her name. There must be two Penny Slingers. All these sharp black-and-white
photos and collages? This British beauty, domineering, naked, in leather or
decked out in a full mane of feathers? Where is the repressed earth mother? Who
is this subversive surrealist?
9.
I go to her website and find that
yes, there are several Penny Slingers but they are all the one: Penny Slinger.
Her lines are solid in portraits, ragged in collage. Rotting and youth is
everywhere. Here she is, modern and sleek in the 60’s; here, writing volumes on
tantra; in recent interviews she’s a sphynx, composed, grinning and older.
10.
In one color photograph from a
magazine profile she’s standing indoors, indomitable in front of perched
falcons. There is surely bird shit on the floor. The scene is a dream I’ve
already had, and I dream about the dream.
11.
I look through stills from a film
she acted in–The Other Side of
Underneath–,the only British movie directed by a woman in the 1970s. It
depicted female psychosis. That shoot ended relationships. A man died in its
aftermath. I find it for free and skip to the middle. I can tell this movie
would destroy me though, so I close the window.
12.
For several years it’s been the
fashion to rediscover neglected female artists, the Babitzes and Carringtons.
By rediscover, I don’t mean to say that life forgot Penny Slinger, or she it,
just that the internet has never pushed her on me. She hasn’t turned up on my
Instagram.
13.
She’s the subject of a recent
documentary called Out of the Shadows
andI watch the trailer. Nowhere do I
find the hazy smile of a woman usurped by an old man. I’ve stopped looking for
it. I entered my search prejudiced, playing into this fantasy that she stopped
making art. To indulge in that fantasy would be a sin and the most monstrous
arrogance of all. Of course she never stopped. We were always going to find her
again.
14.
Forget Hills. I don’t see green
algae in Slinger’s photos so I won’t care about green algae, or my lost job, or
capitalism gurus. My vendettas are mine. I should probably work on them.
Anyway, now I’m less interested in podcast worthy stories than in falling into
a Penny Slinger rabbit hole. And I do, all afternoon. I find everything.
There’s plenty and not enough. Her books would cost a fortune to a laid-off
woman in pandemic. They’ll come back into print soon though; I’m sure of it,
because she’s left the Goddess Temple compound for Los Angeles. She recently
designed a set for Dior Haute Couture and gives interviews.
15.
I trace this artist’s face over
years and hear her calling me out for storing my womanly powers in the spare
room. I am afraid because she is wilder than the life I chose and matches a
life I might have chosen. She is brave enough to inhabit a haunted house,
formidable enough to gain access to one and does, a place called Lilford Hall.
It’s in ruins. Picture Manderlay. Her partner lived there as a boy and grew up
to be a moviemaker named Peter Whitehead. The two plan a film together, start
shooting in the estate. When they split up he drops the project and she spends
years making her own book out of that time and space: An Exorcism.
16.
A quick search tells me that Peter
Whitehead’s work has been called unspeakable. At some point he became a
professional falconer. Hence the falcons in the magazine piece, I assume. I
didn’t know that was a viable career path, but I guess for an English male who
spent his childhood in Lilford Hall, anything is possible.
17.
Because anything is possible, I
watch myself read about Penny Slinger for the rest of the afternoon. I sign
into JStor because it makes me feel academic and membership is free during
pandemic. I enter: Penny Slinger Lilford Hall. All I find is a letter from
Peter Whitehead to someone named Niki de Saint Phalle. I read the letter to its
end, saving some lines but not their contexts. He mentions dropping the film
with Slinger. Being from the future, I know she’s going off to make An Exorcism. Peter Whitehead seems mean,
but what do I know? I think of a life of meanness, of breaking your word to
people but not to your art.
18.
I open a tab for Niki de Saint
Phalle and find her huge, joyful statues of huge, joyful women called Nanas.
She and Slinger are both stupidly beautiful. Beauty doesn’t seem to matter to
them. They use it how they can, like they’d cast it off and laugh and grow old
then young then old again. So much scares me but the Nanas don’t.
19.
Have I always been this afraid? The
story of a part-time ghostwriter in pandemic falling into the world of someone
else’s art won’t buy me anyone’s attention. Considering that Dior set and Out of the Shadows, I’m behind the times
already. “This woman,” I hear an imaginary voice scoff, “thinks she has
discovered Penny Slinger? She’d never heard the name, Penny Slinger, before
Pandemic?”
20.
Alright, but then where are the Babitz/Carrington
documentaries? Where is Penny Slinger’s biography? I am afraid if we don’t get
them down in print our attention will have only been a trend. I need more
information. I need a paperback before she walks away again, off of the
internet and out of earshot. I wish I’d learned to write biography.
21.
There are other leads I could follow
this afternoon. Why did Peter Whitehead live at Lilford Hall–32,406
square-feet, over 500 years old with 100 rooms–when he was young? Was it
already in shambles? I’m curious about his access, but am more curious about
Penny Slinger taking it from him. I’m curious about the hall’s disrepair. How
long did its ruin take? Lilford Hall had a great fall. All neglected structures
crumble. How did they put it together again, and why? More information, please.
22.
I won’t find those answers. But I
tell myself a story: some very old family was gifted Penny Slinger’s hardcover
on a Christmas morning in the late 70’s. Flipping through the pages, they were
returned, after a lifetime away, to their treasured estate. They wandered
through it. They found their rooms filled with nudes and floating nuns,
scorpions, a mouth in flight.
23.
What these bloated landed gentry
said was, “The wallpaper is in strips; the floor is littered with the ceiling;
find the old help and rescue those mirrors.”
24.
What they meant was, “Our ancestral
entrance is blocked by a pair of spread legs. We are going to have to exorcise
this exorcism.”
25.
And they almost did. How long before dust is the permanent state of affairs? The Lilford Hall website does not link to Penny Slinger’s archives. It doesn’t mention her at all.
—
Lori Green studied across genre at the New School’s Riggio Program for Writing and Democracy. Her work has appeared in Silver Needle Press, 12th Street Journal, and Whitevines Review. She lives, writes, and paints with her husband in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Cat Chen is a writer based in New York. She is currently a reporter for The Business of Fashion. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other publications.
The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.
BY NANCY REDDY
I love a slow meditation about why writing is hard, and what that difficulty might mean – that’s probably why I became a poet, so I could obsess on a moment and dwell on it and distill it in language – but I thought, early in this relaunch of The Up Drafts, it might be nice to start with a few practical, actionable tips. By late January, late in the pandemic, don’t we all just want a quick fix?
Four practical tricks, if you’re feeling stuck, plus a slightly more philosophical bonus tip.
When it’s hard to get started:
Set a Timer
Having hours and hours to write, uninterrupted, is magic, but if you don’t have that now (most of us don’t, now or ever), do what you can with what you have. Set a timer for ten or fifteen minutes, and see what you can do. I have the browser extension “tomato clock,” and it counts down in 25 minute chunks, or pomodoros; seeing the time moving can be very motivating.
A quick example: last week, my older son was distraught about his art assignment and how complicated it was and how it was going to take him forever, and I told him to just set a timer and work on it for ten minutes and then, whatever he had done in that time, he could turn in and move on with his day. (Read: play Minecraft.) He worked for ten minutes, showed me how much he’d done, and then happily continued. A small amount of time – ten minutes or fifteen – is enough to get you started and often to overcome the inertia of not-writing.
A timer works especially well for showing you how much you can get done in limited time. If you only have 10 minutes, you can still use those 10 minutes to write. Victoria Chang wrote Barbie Chang in her car while waiting for her children at language classes and school pickup.
when you’re feeling stuck in the middle of a project:
Switch writing medium
If you’re lost in the morass of a word document, it can help to switch medium. A printed draft is easier to grapple with and mark up; you can cut it, tape it back together, and scrawl in the margins. I often find that if I can see the whole thing at once, as a set of pages spread out on the bed or taped to a wall, I can see where I’m circling the same idea or where I’ve managed to avoid, even over 6000 words, saying the thing I’m really trying to say. An example: Katie Gutierrez, whose novel More Than You’ll Ever Know is forthcoming in 2022, shared this picture recently of a printed draft of her book along with scissors, pen, and tape, an old-school cut and paste.
And sometimes even getting started in a Word doc can feel too hard. When I was writing my dissertation, the word doc often felt really high stakes, like I am writing A Chapter, so it has to be Good. (This is why I never write in nice notebooks – too much pressure!) Instead, I did a lot of drafting in Evernote, where you’re just opening a new “note” rather than starting with a fresh, official Word doc. The interface in Evernote was unfamiliar enough that I could tell myself I was just taking notes, just jotting down ideas. Then, I’d print out all scribbly Evernote “notes” and have text to work with for revision.
If the blank screen itself is stressing you out, switch to hand-writing. If a whole notebook page is too much, I’ll try a post-it or an index card. Sometimes I need more space, so I’ll use the large post-its I have taped to my wall to outline a project and see the connections.
when you’re struggling to clarify your ideas
Talk about it (even if it’s only to yourself)
When you’re writing, you’re working to communicate something, whether you’re telling a story, or figuring out a problem, or making an argument. But it’s easy to get so stuck in the particulars of word choice or so lost in the steps of a complicated argument that you lose sight of what you’re actually trying to say.
I used to share writing regularly with a good friend from grad school, and when I was getting ready to send something to her, I’d find places where what I’d written wasn’t as sharp as I wanted, or where I wanted her help. I’d start by opening a comment box and writing, “what I’m trying to say here is . . .” and, often as not, what I’d write, after I started talking to the version of my friend I’d conjured up, was what actually needed to go in the essay, so I’d just cut and paste from that comment box into the main document.
Talking to someone – even if it’s just yourself, even if it’s an imagined reader in the margins – is one of the quickest ways to get unstuck. Try explaining what you’re saying out loud, or record yourself with your phone or laptop. You can use the comments in a digital file; starting with “what I’m trying to say here is . . .”
When the words finally come:
Say Yes
One of my favorite moments from last summer’s #1000wordsofsummer series was Carmen Maria Machado’s discussion of how she’s taught her brain to make more ideas. In that newsletter, Machado wrote that she’s never struggled with writer’s block
because I am constantly nursing my obsessions: reading about what excites and interests me, rejecting ideas of high- and low-brow, letting myself indulge in narrative pleasures however and wherever they appear. And I’m constantly stumbling across ideas: riding the trolley, walking through my city, reading books, driving, cleaning. And the minute they come to me—no matter what I’m doing—I write them down.
It’s that final part – recording the ideas – that really matters. If you have an idea, if you have a sentence, if an image or a voice arrives to you, record it. Teach your brain that those words matter, and you’ll also teach your brain to make more of them. Sometimes this means pausing mid-run to type something into a google doc on your phone, or getting out of bed as you’re falling asleep to capture the sentences that have finally aligned when your brain relaxed. This summer, I’d been working on an article for a week straight and was in the horrible phase of drafting where I was sure I was just too stupid to get it all to come together, when, at bedtime one night, my brain finally clicked it all together. The words were running through my head, and while I might have sometimes told myself I’d remember it the next day, during my real writing time, I’d just read Machado’s newsletter, and I got up and wrote, and that nighttime drafting became my Poets & Writers article.
If you’re feeling down:
You have everything you need
This final tip is more of a mental reframe than a writing tip. It’s easy, especially with the way writing circulates online, to confuse writing with publishing, and to always feel like everyone else is doing more and having more success than you are. But the reception of your work – by editors, by readers, by reviewers and people who screen for fancy prizes – is largely out of your hands as a writer.
And more than that, it’s not your job.
It’s your job to write the best poem or essay or story or book that you can. It’s your job to make the weird gorgeous thing that only you can make. And here’s the thing: chances are, no one asked you for your writing.
You already have everything you need. As writers, our materials are simple: pen, paper, laptop. Maybe post-it notes and colored pens, if you’re feeling fancy. Time.
No one has to publish your book or buy it or review it in The New York Times. But that’s also a gift. You don’t need anyone’s permission or approval to do your work. No one owes you and your writing anything. No one can stop you, either.
NANCY REDDY is the author of Pocket Universe (LSU, 2022); Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series; and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). She’s also co-editor, along with Emily Pérez, of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (UGA, 2022). Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace and her essays have appeared in Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, Brevity, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University in New Jersey.
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