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Our Book Contest has been extended through September 22! Stay tuned for more Judge Spotlights, excerpts from last year’s winners, and author interviews!
BOOK CONTEST EXTENDED – SEPT 22
Author: admin
Contest Judge Spotlight – J’Lyn Chapman – Nonfiction/Hybrid
” I am eager to read works that take risks and innovate narrative approaches within the capacious “creative nonfiction” genre. “
As we near our contest deadline, we are thrilled to introduce you to last year’s winners — and this year’s judges! J’Lyn Chapman’s incredible collection of essays To Limn / Lying In won our Nonfiction/Hybrid Contest, as selected by Maya Sonenberg.
You can buy J’lyn’s book HERE
Taking its inspiration from the artist Uta Barth’s photographs of the sun as it enters her home and the poet Francis Ponge’s notebooks kept during the German occupation of France, this collection of lyric essays contemplates light as seen through the domestic space and its occupants, predominantly the author’s young children. Meditations on how through light the external world enters into and transforms the private spaces of self and home inextricably link to the author’s writing on life, or the giving of life. These vocabularies weave and tangle while the essays’ forms depict the staccato rhythms of thought and the estrangement of time one experiences when living with children. The essays can be read as standalone pieces, yet build on one another so that patterns emerge, like the obviation of how language serves to illuminate and veil meaning, the repetition of and ekphrastic approach to religious imagery, and the ineffable experience of depression. These essays continually return to the speaker’s admission that the life one gives another is ultimately unsustainable and that despite this catastrophe of living there is the resilience and bewilderment of being together.
Read the most recent review of To Limn / Lying In in The Colorado Review.
Future Friday – August
We’re thrilled to bring you this month’s Future Friday – a creative nonfiction piece by May Hathaway.
May Hathaway is a high school student in New York City. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Blue Marble Review, perhappened, and Sandpiper Magazine and has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She is a 2020 Adroit Journal Creative Nonfiction Mentee and enjoys doing crosswords in her free time.
How To Immigrate
1. The immigrant narrative was set in stone by the time my mother got off the plane at JFK, her first and only one-way trip to date. She knew the role she was meant to fill and stepped off the plane anyway, suitcase rolling behind her.
2. My mother avoids the word “immigrant,” but I cling on to the label of “first-generation” because it is the only identifier that can explain my upbringing.
3. In Chinese school at age six, I learned the phrase yi min. Literal translation: shifted people. I imagined continents rearranged, like Pangea, not my mother hopping over the Middle East and Europe and the Atlantic Ocean before the hair at her temples turned gray.
4. The immigrant body stripped of its functionality is just a body.
5. I often wonder about the logistics of immigration, though my mind always manages to find routes around that word; my mother and I are both afraid of confronting reality sometimes. More specifically, I wonder about the intricacies of moving to a foreign nation—how many suitcases would you need to check? One of the many issues with moving somewhere where no one knows you is that there is nobody to help you with your bags at the airport.
6. So much current literature refers to us as a faceless, nameless horde. By “us,” I mean immigrants and the children of immigrants. By “current literature,” I mean every story.
7. I am not the daughter of immigrants. I am the daughter of an immigrant. The distinction matters because it makes saying “first-generation” feel fraudulent.
8. When I was younger, I loved how-to books. How to bake a cake. How to start a lemonade stand. How to become an astronaut. Never did I wonder how to immigrate.
9. My mother and I are not minimalists, so I cannot imagine her packing all of her belongings into suitcases, but that is what she did at the age of thirty.
10. Another issue: real estate. Last summer, my parents and I moved into an apartment we had toured three times before committing to living in it. My mother is picky about everything: sunlight, square footage, feng shui.
11. Sometimes, I read stories about immigrant bodies with no eulogies. Sometimes, I see their faces on newspapers strewn across avenues. Sometimes, I close my eyes and think I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.
12. My mother had a small wedding—her dress was navy and contained no ruffles—but she has made me promise that I will throw her a big funeral.
13. My history books like to refer to America as the “promised land,” but the only promise any nation can keep is the certainty of erasure. America excels in this area.
14, A lesson from my mother: Americans are bullshits artists. She does not clarify on our car ride home from school, not even when I dig my chin into the passenger seat in front of me and press my palagainst the center console until my wrists ache from bending. She mutters these four damning words over and over and over until I finally realize that I am expected to understand and internalize (though I still don’t get it, not really).
15. Immigration inherently calls for blank space—a hollow place where your home should be, a new culture to transplant like an extra organ.
16. Items in my mother’s suitcase, circa 1998: two photo albums, batteries, a stamp collection from her teenage years. Omissions: college textbooks, her extensive Celine Dion CD collection, a sense of belonging.
17. Another lesson from my mother, her forehead pressed against my bedroomwindowpane: Americans love summertime. The neighbors are hosting a cookout and their dog is barking noisily. Damn pitbull. Our invitation got lost, I think. My eyes burn from the smoke seeping in through the screen door, charred meat and mayonnaise.
18. Identity politics is less of a noun than it is a verb—a way of commodifying immigration for consumption, a way of survival.
19. A confession: when I was six years old, I tried to widen my eyes, pinch my nose bridge higher. I tried to forget how to tighten my lips into Chinese characters, how to speak with my immigrant tongue. Erasure is transgenerational.
20. Final lesson: Americans live for emptiness, and my mother is nothing if not a vessel.
Interview with Christine Hume – Author of A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story
[PANK] Team Member Emily McLaughlin sat down with [PANK] Author Christine Hume about her new essay collection, A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story. Buy it HERE
We could not be more pleased to announce the April release of Christine Hume’s little book A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story, a disability-forward essay that melds memoir, neurology, chromopoetics, and literary criticism into an ecstatic embodiment of an illiterate girlhood. Shaped as an index, rather than a primary text, Hume posits the cruel optimism of reading, which promises to shape brains and lives, against the dyslexic’s subterfuge intelligence. In vignettes, meditations, lapses, guesses, and fragments, all refracted through the color red, this work questions what reading means and how we come to claim it.
PANK: Thank you for talking to us about A Different Shade For Each Person Reading The Story. PANK is so fortunate to publish such a wonder.
CH: I’m the fortunate one!
PANK: A Different Shade For Each Person Reading The Story does read like a bit of a mystery, like what learning to read as an avid reader and writer with dyslexia might experience? And it feels ever-growing, still alive. Does it feel like more of a poem to you? Are you able to say where it began? With which piece? With which vignette, fragment, guess?
CH: The process of writing this chapbook was extended, evolving and shifting over seven years. I certainly didn’t set out to write it; I resisted it even as I felt compelled toward it. I had been writing a long essay about my girlhood refigured by the color red when my daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia. I read a bunch of books about dyslexia and a bunch of other books about color or color theory. Both groups of books were missing a crucial sense of subjectivity and interiority. The books about color were often shallow lists of dazzling facts and stories; somehow most art historians, for instance, manage to kill the use of color in visual art by a thousand dull knives. They miss color as an experience, bodily and aesthetic, which is, to me, the point. Most of the books I read about dyslexia were like self help books, or information-driven, which I often appreciated, but never felt connected to emotionally. Eventually, the red girlhood essay split in two, with a lot of fall out. Much of this had to do with my enlarged capacity to face my own dyslexia indirectly through my daughter’s–and reviewing my life through its lens. New memories returned involuntarily, and so did some of the research I did 20 some years ago in grad school–on John Keats and Charlotte Bronte. I also liked the homophonic relation of red to read (past tense) because reading for me has always been auditory and mistake riddled. Red itself was my lead. I didn’t know what I was writing, red was leading me somewhere. Red coalesced the shame and embarrassment as well as the libidinal thrill and material pleasures of reading. You are right, it definitely could keep growing, but I pared it back instead. Once I realized what I was doing, it was more the work of assembly and arrangement. I left shades and stories out; I made it elliptical and suggestive; I made it look like a series of prose poems, relying on white space and gestalt. If it feels like poetry, it’s because dyslexics often think in poetic modes–in images, gaps and materialities–and read best in short discrete chunks that activate our imaginations, that require readerly involvement. I was trying to make a dyslexic-friendly text, more than I was trying to write an essay or a serial poem.
PANK: This leads me into my next question about your use of chromopoetics here. Can you tell us more about it?
CH: I teach a creative writing class I call Chromopoetics. In class, we write with, about, through, and into color, a visual phenomenon that seems to elude linguistic expression. Have you ever tried to describe a color or represent it in language? It’s difficult, and that difficulty is a good place to sharpen writerly skills. It’s a class that studies the poetics of color, but it is also by necessity an exploration of queerness, excess, narcosis, superficiality, memory, alienation, and meaning itself. We get together with the Art Theory class and trade ideas, language, and projects; we mix and complement and contrast. We follow chromatic whims, but we also look at a lot of art, fashion, photography as well as listen to music/sound art and go on color walks. I came across the term, “chromopoetics,” maybe hyphenated as “chromo-poetics,” in an interview with Brazillian artist, Cido Meireles, whose work I also teach in class. As far as I know he coined the term. In context, he uses the word to insist that we don’t reduce his work to didactic political or symbolic meanings, but that we leave ourselves open to the work’s chromopoetics, its allegiance to perception, sensitization, mystery, phantom textures, affective intimacies–complex experience!–that does not cancel out the political but augments it. Partly, he’s correcting the dogged perception that Meireles and other Latin American Conceptual artists face because of their relative political awareness and acuity (compared to most western European and North American Conceptual work). I find the term useful for thinking about a canon of literature that employs color to do both symbolic and poetic work, each extending the reach of the other. Some work I include in this canon: Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child, Han Kang’s The White Book, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red; Marie Ndiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green; Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings, Gerturde Stein’s Tender Buttons, Wayne Koestenbaum’s Pink Trance, William Gass’s On Being Blue, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Porochista Khakpour’s Brown Album, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and shorter works such as Kevin Killian’s “Color in Darkness,” Lisa Robertson, “How to Colour” Samantha Hunt’s “The Yellow,” N. Scott Momaday “The Colors of Night,” David Foster Wallace’s “Church Not Made of Hands,” “Everything is Green,” and “Brief Interview #42” — and a lot of poetry. I include non-contemporary works as well–like Moby Dick’s whiteness as well as Jane Eyre’s scarlet curtains–but since this is a creative writing class, we focus on more recent work. In class, we explore the ways that language colors our perceptions, the ways that color situates language, the ways that we see through language and color, the ways that color and language are similarly contexted dependent as well as context-creating–manifesting moods, structures of feeling, politics, and poetics.
PANK: And so was it difficult at all to settle on the color choices for each piece?
CH: I did a lot of interesting and unnecessary research that helped ground my choices, often in ways that aren’t readily available. I mixed the names of reds from a variety of disciplines with my own inventions, trying to let the subjectivity of the shades guide me. I was thinking about the philosophical counterexample that David Hume poses to his own empirical theories, one that resonates with the magic trick of reading for me. He says, presented with a spectrum of blues with one shade missing, we can form an idea of this missing shade even if we have never had a prior impression of it. In other words, we can generate an idea without first being exposed to the relevant sensory experience. In this case, the system of colors forms a space in which gaps can be recognized and, if not too small, can be filled in. Color systems always leave something out as they attempt to totalize; it’s a lovely kind of desperation, like memory itself.
PANK: Early on, in the fifth piece, you write, “Does reading take place in one person’s consciousness or out there, in a system that separates you from me?” You also refer to yourself as a closeted dyslexic. Was this as liberating to write as I assume vulnerable? You refer to yourself as a closeted dyslexic, was this book the first time you have revealed your struggles with dyslexia publicly?
CH: Finding out in late college allowed me to grieve a little and shrug it off. I had already absorbed a toxic amount of shame and figured out ways of getting by and working around my disability. I never allowed myself to be curious about my condition. I never identified as dyslexic. It took my daughter’s diagnosis her then tutor asking me to give a presentation to the local chapter of the Dyslexia Association to really start thinking about how my life and writing have been shaped by dyslexia. I had only told a handful of people in my life at that point. I had habitualized avoidance. Not of reading, but of exploring my relation to reading. No way was I going to reflect on a bottomless pit of pain, but then the thought of talking to reading tutors, for whom dyslexia was common and surmountable, gave me a chance to push beyond my fear. That presentation set me up to re-imagine my entire life through this new lens. I’m grateful to my daughter’s tutor, Madelon Possely, who invited me. The women in her group were incredibly supportive and curious, asked wonderful questions and offered thrilling insights. I couldn’t stop thinking about their questions and about how my own writing was (unwittingly! unbeknownst to me!) had been cryptically addressing dyslexia all along. Discovering the subtext or the true subject of some of those poems was liberating. For instance, the first poem in my second book uses a list of “comprehension questions” to imply a narrative. I wrote this remembering my habit of skipping the reading passage on standardized tests and jumping right to the questions. Often, the answers seemed loaded in the questions; they were leading questions or they pointed to their answers somehow. This was a compensation strategy; it was also a way of reading the questions as a kind of poem, where a lot of the narrative is suggested indirectly. I’m not answering your question, though, not even indirectly! A Different Shade… was definitely my first public outing. After writing it, I remember the first time I mentioned being dsylexic to students. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I dropped the word and owned it in a small graduate class. At the end of the semester, a really inspiring and dear student surprised me with a handmade card in which she thanked me for talking casually about a learning disability in class, making it seem normal and easy. I was floored. It was a kind of first for both of us, releasing us at least momentarily from the grips of useless but deeply felt impostor syndrome.
PANK: Your profound “Maroon” vignette is hard to summarize. You tell us how your mother might call a neighbor a maroon, meaning moron. “The word “moron,” itself coined by a psychologist in the early 1900s, performs its own meaning when misread or mispronounced . . . To equate “moron” with “maroon” though implies a sonic relationship between abandonment and idiocy. To be illiterate is to feel marooned, isolated, left. It took humans two thousand years to develop literacy, and now we give a new human about two thousand days until we expect her to start reading . . . if you consider the other meaning of Maroon—an escaped slave living in the Caribbean—you see how abandonment is just what you chose to ignore, an oxymoron.” I’m botching this, but wow. This piece seems to encapsulate what your entire book is about, the experience of reading and the experience of being misunderstood as a different type of reader?
CH: Language is always on the move. Parents make themselves the object of scorn to their children with their outdated language, which is always linked to outdated ideas. After 1880s with the invention of factory dyes, red goes from a rare royal luxury, a symbol of wealth and power, to cheap in every sense of the word: vulgar, suspect, crass, risky. Only in the 19th century did red acquire racial connotations in the Western world via (1) the “red Indian,” (2) “Carmen,” the novella and opera from carmine the color cochineal insects produce, and (3) “maroon,” a runaway slave from the late 17th century (a word produced from marron meaning “feral” in French and/or cimarron meaning “wild place” in Spanish). Because red is one of our longest named colors in English, its history comes loaded with ideology and metaphor. It drags its dinosaur tail of meaning into the present, which creates the conditions for misunderstanding. Or understanding something unintended, other kinds of knowledge.
PANK: And “Estrus Red” too movingly meditates on so many things. How did you settle on this title and or each title?
CH: I meant to evoke the idea of being in “heat,” a biological cycle when the female is suddenly very visible. The blood is menstrual blood here, and I want to link reading with receptivity, fertility as well as erotic pursuit. That feeling of visceral absorption and chasing language wherever it leads; texts that get freaky with you and get you sprung but slowly–all the chemistry that marinates your body while you read. Reading is fully biological. We must change our brains, rewire our minds, in order to see marks on a page as readable text. And reading allows us to be penetrated by another mind, another biology, another rhythmic pulse.
PANK: You tell us here, “Anyone who has ever felt bereft upon finishing a book understands this transformation, which is both temporary and, in some measure, permanent: you can’t go back, you have changed.” You seem to be summarizing your own book here. Any reader of this can never go back to thinking of dyslexia, of reading, or of the color red, in the same way again. You have changed our experience of all of these things. Was this your authorial intent or did you have intentions you were aware of when writing?
CH: Thanks, that’s great to hear! I didn’t have that [transformation] specifically in mind, but of course what “finishing a book” there means–writing one or reading one?–is ambiguous. Maybe because reading was such an arduous activity for me early on that the effort of reading a book felt akin to writing it, or so I imagined.
PANK: Readers can experience your experience and see things in a new way with each fresh read, the way you might have learned to see words on the page. With the index of shades of red, each shade catches your eye in the periphery from another angle. To you, is there an ideal way for the way this book should be read or do you have an ideal reader in mind? That may seem counter-intuitive, is there a way you would like this book to be taught to writing students? Or, what I am trying to say here, perhaps, is in thinking of this as a rethinking of the cruel optimism of reading, is there an optimistic way you would teach this book to writing students, or a different way to teach this book to students with disabilities?
CH: I love this question, thank you! I included the opening “Instructions” after feedback from readers at DSQ [Disabilities Studies Quarterly], who because I think it’s a mostly scholarly venue, needed some framing for the piece. (An excerpt was published there last year.) I thought their request was an opportunity to say why I didn’t want to introduce or conclude the piece. I wanted readers to have to figure out what was going on as a kind of simulation of the dyslexic experience, not an exact replication of it, but an experience that involves piecemeal figuring and patience. The “Instructions” make clear that there is no ideal way to read the work, and encourages reading as a heterogeneous activity, and not an entirely standardardized act. As much as our education system has been co-opted by capitalism and has become a kind of factory for manufacturing readers (K-3rd grade), human difference prevails. Our brains are not all wired the same way. Many of the dyslexics I know started reading well after 3rd grade! None of them ended up in prison as is the rumor about people who don’t read by 3rd grade, though I also know that prisons hold a statistically high number of people with learning disabilities. Reading itself is not a measure of intelligence, but we treat it that way. In an ideal world, I would have used the dyslexie font (weighted font that’s easier for people with dyslexia to read), perforated all the (unpaginated) pages, and included a link to the free audio book version.
PANK: That’s next on PANK’s list. Thank you for your time, Christine. PANK loves you!
Why Superheroes Wear Capes
BY SHAMECCA HARRIS
I twirled to Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” at the center of a doll town I’d created in my mother’s living room. Teacher Barbie stood at the foot of a plastic-covered couch that I’d routinely spill juice, or milk, or germs on. Her forced smile greeted a toy classroom of Tuttis and Todds, Barbie’s lesser-known tween twin siblings. Nearby, just beneath the glass wall unit where my mother hid the good china, a Barbie Bride admired an abstract mannequin in a tiny white dress. Her groom, a hand-me-down Donnie Walberg from Mattel’s New Kids on the Block collection, sat waiting a few feet away in a flamingo pink convertible. I wanted the townsfolk to have a prime view of ABC’s Saturday morning cartoons, so I placed Skipper behind the cash register at the bodega replica in front of the TV stand. In retrospect, I realize that I was no genius architect; I was merely a seven-year-old hoarder of toys.
Fashion occupied the center of my makeshift Barbie world. Each extended holiday away from school, I’d wake up with the sun, splash the entire contents of my toy box onto the floor, and dress and undress dozens of plastic torsos for hours. Barbie’s elaborate costumes reminded me of trips to Buster Brown’s, a local children’s store where my mother and I shopped for the perfect Easter dress, ruffle socks, and patent leather shoes every year. While most children squirm at being poked and prodded by a seamstress, I indulged in my real-world opportunity to play dress up. I was a Barbie girl, after all. I’d dress and undress my own flat torso in fluffy church dresses while blowing kisses at my reflection in the water-stained mirror.
Years after I dumped my doll collection down the trash incinerator, I am still a Barbie girl. As an adult, I no longer need a holiday as an excuse to play dress up and embrace every day as an opportunity for spectacle. My mood is the preeminent muse for each outfit of the day. On mornings when I am feeling fierce, I channel Beyonce with a yellow maxi. On nights when I am feeling fiercer, I channel Rick James with my platform boots.
And then, there are days where there are no words to describe the wildfire blazing in my gut, days where I’m convinced that, if there is a God, He has forgotten I, too, am His child, days where I don’t believe in anything, least of all myself.
July 7, 2016
“Stay with me!” Diamond Reynolds pleads from the passenger seat, as her fiancé, Philando Castile, bleeds out behind the steering wheel.
Castile, a 32-year-old Minnesota man, has just been shot by a police officer during a routine traffic stop. Blood spills out from his torso, soaking clear through his crisp white T-shirt. As Reynolds live streams his final breaths from her smartphone, the couple’s 4-year-old daughter, Dae’Anna, looks on from the back seat.
“He’s licensed to carry,” Reynolds explains to the camera as Castile moans in distress. “He let the officer know he had a firearm and he was reaching for his ID and his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm.”
“I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his hands up!” the officer retorts angrily, still pointing his gun at Castile who appears to drift in and out of consciousness.
Castile’s eyes rotate to the back of his skull as he rocks his head slowly back and forth in a hypnotic wave. When he finally stops moving, his eyes settle into a cryptic gaze.
“Oh my god, please don’t tell me he’s dead,” Reynolds wails. “Please don’t tell me my boyfriend just went out like that.”
Each time I lay down to sleep, I see flashes of Castile’s eyes in a hostile roll. There is no use trying to sleep; I may as well stay woke. Desperate and dumbfounded, I resort to making a political statement with my wardrobe. I am well are a good outfit can’t eradicate systemic racism but, if I was going to save the world, I needed to look the part. In tribute to the loss of black life, I reach for a black cape with wide sleeves that gave the illusion of wings each time I lift my skinny arms. I complete my costume with a black bandana tied around my face like an LA gangster. I take a final peek in the mirror and I look like a black-American super-shero, an awkward mashup of Solange and Tupac. I call her Queen Goddess and endow her with the power to kick white supremacy’s ass.
Bodies quickly shuffle into the subway car to avoid being trapped by the temperamental doors. I am among the growing mass of travelers and yet feel as if I’m in a world removed, an invisible bystander of Queen Goddess’ swag. She is I and I am and she.
“Excuse me,” Queen commands. Her voice is robust and powerful. She is not apologizing for taking up space so much as she is demanding that space be provided to her. She speaks to everyone and no one in particular, all at the same time. The crowd parts and Queen confidently strolls down the narrow aisle, her cape catching the breeze of her graceful stride. Shortly after she snags a rare empty seat, a preppy meets hipster man in his early ’30’s, plops down in the seat next to hers.
“Is everything alright?” he whispers in her ear.
Normally, I might be moved by this thoughtful gesture. I might thank the subway creeper for his concern and, despite yearning for peace of mind, I might lie and tell him I was just fine. Queen, on the other hand, isn’t so impressed, nor is she so polite. Queen quickly shifts her gaze and covers her eyes with a pair of dark sunglasses. She is blind to the bullshit today. The part of her that wants to be liked is dormant, and what survives is a bad-ass alter ego who just wants to be free.
“No!” she responds, positioning her dark frames on the brim of her nose to flash the fury in her eyes. “I am not okay!”
The man quickly transforms from a pale white to a crimson red as he gets up and walks solemnly to the other end of the car. He keeps his head bowed for the rest of the ride with the exception of an occasional nod. Queen assumes that wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but either way, she has no interest in catcalls or small talk. So long as the world could neglect black lives, she could neglect white tears.
When she arrives at her stop, she exits with the same stunning confidence with which she entered. She floats past the idle booth attendant, flies up the sullied stairway, and welcomes the burning intensity of the early morning sun. She has been contained underground long enough. She is ready to unleash her powers in the real world, but she is not welcome there.
As soon as she enters the office, her revolutionary spirit is deflated by the deafening silence of our peers. Their backs are bent, their heads are bowed, and their gaze is fixed on their desktop screens. Her air of defiance is met with cynical stares. No one cares how angry she is. The only talent of value here is a knack for silence.
This is where I step in. I am an obedient worker. I shut my mouth, I put my head down, and I get shit done. Still, despite my best efforts to keep Queen in check, I can’t seem to contain my alter ego’s rebellion, and she eventually storms up to our supervisor’s desk.
“I’m not feeling well,” she says matter-of-factly. “I have to go.”
Queen darts down the steps and out of the building before her boss can respond. Once outside, she pulls a powder blue pouch of Turkish tobacco from her mini-backpack and rolls a skinny cigarette. She presses her lips to the narrow opening and takes a long pull, inhaling the comfort of the warm thick smoke and exhaling the tension from her listless bones.
“Whatever I do, I will not be silent,” she says to herself between pulls before flying back down to the underground subway with her cape in the wind.
—
SHAMECCA HARRIS is a creative writer and teaching artist born and raised in Harlem, New York City. She is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at The City College of New York where she also teaches English Literature and Composition. Her essays, reportage, and experimental writing have appeared in The Rumpus, Global Citizen, and Apogee Journal among others.
[REVIEW] this is no longer entertainment by Christodoulos Makris
A video online might make you laugh, say aww, or appall you — whatever the reaction, one of the most common actions after the viewing is to scroll down to the comments and see what everyone else is saying, and agree, disagree, respond, or, if you’re like me, lurk behind the screen, eavesdropping with your glass to the digital wall. Christodoulos Makris has taken this oddly satisfying online social activity and made poetry with his new book, this is no longer entertainment, a work of documentary poetics that sources all of its language from the comments section of various websites. As you might expect, there is much language that is harsh, insensitive or mistaken at best. But there is also language here that approaches profundity, oftentimes in a voice that smells like a world-weary cultural critic (and it may well be) more than it sounds like a petulant youth complaining online about pop music, immigration, or the demise of Great Art.
The book is wide-ranging, as you might expect — Makris covers pop music (Huey Lewis and the News make an appearance), impressionist painting, international travel (the Balkans, France, Ireland), and dabbles in immigration, gender, as well as class politics, and it does so in an acrobatic manner, darting between poetic registers, code-switching from satire to sentiment. For example, in “7.” we see that
He also says, “Like rain
Passports outside the Western world do not let us
Citizens pass any port
Ask Snowden or Assange how free is the western
Followed by the next poem, “8.” A poem that responds to “7” indialogic fashion:
I don’t believe the writer
Why didn’t he stay with many of his fellow
countrymen
Looking like a Somali I would be concerned if I
Wasn’t stopped and questioned
It’s happened to a Muslim friend of mine who also
Travels a lot in his line of work (telecoms)
I get calls where a number is displayed but when I
Call back it’s disconnected
I suggest getting rid of the beard (21-3)
The book’s most affecting moments happen when the mind puts those two poems together (that is, after having read both). These collisions mark the book — between poems, between registers, between East and West, between ideological positions. Speaking of those positions — reading the book, one gets the feeling that the comments might have been posted by those that fall on the ends of the ideological spectrum (a spectrum that changes based on the given poem’s subject), and Makris writes in a way that takes note of the pleasures and pitfalls of extremes while displaying a wariness of both as he watches dialogue between two sides that are dug in.
As much as anything, the book reaffirms the idea that the internet is a place, with an ethos of its own, (the phrase, the internet wins recalls similar phrases used by hikers and hunters when speaking of the wild). That said, this reader has the sense that there’s a bit of despair in this place. Yes, authority has been diffused, but the economic and political power structures to which so many poems here speak — often in diatribes, sometimes in lament — those are very much in place. I mean to say that the book seems to assert that the internet is to dissent what the steam valve is to the tea kettle. But Makris also offers wonder and hope. After all, that same steam once powered locomotives, and here we are, a few months removed from a video of George Floyd dying with a knee on his neck, a video that sparked online outcry and a global movement for justice, widespread talk of reform, and a handful of policies and laws (local and national) that have already been amended. A way of happening, Auden wrote of poetry — this book by Christodoulos Makris happens in a similar fashion to the way the internet does — leaping, at all turns witty, unexpectedly poignant, and brutal in the most disgusting and hilarious ways. This book is a testament to the relationship between poets and physics — as long as there are space and time, the space being physical or cyber, poets will occupy that space, and listen.
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Hayden Bergman is a poet and translator. His work has appeared in Gravel, the story collection What Doesn’t Kill You and is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review. He serves as the Books Editor at The Literary Review. You can reach him at hayden@theliteraryreview.org.
doors! a conversation between kevin latimer, author of ZOETROPE, and emilie kneifel
Grieveland, 2020
Latimer’s debut book of poetry, ZOETROPE, is out August 8th 2020. Emilie Kneifel sat down with him to discuss pink, the embodiment of punctuation, whether doors close, and who lets a poem be political.
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EMILIE KNEIFEL: tell me about pink.
KEVIN LATIMER: it’s my favourite colour. it’s also a betrayal of masculinity, which, as a Black and queer man, i try to subvert a lot. so pink as in queerness, and pink as in a sense of letting go of something.
you also use it to describe the opposite of letting go, i guess? is that the body? like when “pinkness / hangs.” the strangeness of a body. i’m thinking about all the necks and knees. body parts. disembodied body parts.
as a unit of exposure, yeah. i try to pick body parts that crack or snap. or this feeling in the real world of being heavy and stuck, in contrast with space where everything is sort of loose and free.
right. like the space between your bones expanding. next: exclamation points. i feel like they introduce the awareness of an audience at the most basic level, the idea of reactions to what occurs in the poems.
in a way of feeling, yes. it lets you know that this thing is serious, or this thing is something that you should pay attention to. beyond that, i just like the way it looks. it sort of looks like a body. this is a larger point towards punctation as sort of as a visual effect. it looks more concrete. using ampersand, for example, there’s something about the way it looks. it visualizes to me something actually being there. i guess that goes along with where the eye wanders. punctuation is a place where the eye stops.
that is so exciting, because i told devin gael kelly recently that the ampersands in “vertigo” make me see people and balloons. wow. i feel like i’ve unlocked the kevin latimer experience. i’m wondering about that idea of stopping, and also velocity. there’s one poem, “swallow me, sky,” where you’re like, “say all the following, slowly.” can you talk more about that? [pulls up the poem] there’s an exclamation point too. how ideal.
i think movement was one of the most important things i focused on in the book. a lot of the poems sort of move in a way where you don’t really know where place is. the exclamation point after “the sky opens suddenly / and the sky goes to hell” is a sort of a break point, the first concrete place where you’re in a scene and you know you need to stay there. there’s a lot of places where the punctuation is wrong on purpose, and it’s a sort of jarring point. sort of a break in the rhythm and the movement.
hm. like when someone in a play stomps their foot and it jolts you. the other really interesting use of punctuation is how you begin a line with a period. i want to know what you feel like that’s up to.
it’s a way to denote space. or denote that you’re in the specific space. when i use periods at the beginning of a line, i don’t use them at the end of a line, sort of as an opposite to stopping. i always try to give periods in each poem their own rule. i think in “last dispatch at the end of the world,” all the periods are used for scene placement or an action happening. but in other poems, they’re used as a point of starting, or a point where a character begins.
that’s so smart. i want to know about the “is this weird?” in “moratorium on flight and fame.” you’re doing a lot of world-building in this book, but there’s also a lot of snapping back into “the world,” the world being a place where one is perceivable, and maybe how that differs from the experience of being a child.
i think the snapping back moments disorient you from this world that is illogical by nature but that you’re starting to see as logical. there’s things that don’t make sense, or are not normal, but at this point in the book you’ve come to accept them. the “is that weird?” is telling you that you shouldn’t accept this. it’s letting you know that, one, i am unreliable and, two, the world you’re living in inside this book is unreliable.
right. right. so even the reader isn’t safe from the pitfalls of the world. the reader can fall through as well.
yeah. i want you to know that this is a play or that this is something that’s happening on a stage.
i’m excited to hear that you’re thinking of it as a play. i was worried that i was just doing that because i know you write plays. but you are thinking of it as a staging of sorts?
it was intentional in that way. the spectacle is sort of there before, in that i want you to see it but you’re not forced to. by the end, in the last section of the book after the credits, i’m telling you you’re in a play.
right, exactly, you see the light fixtures. okay. kevin. what are the necessary elements for a world?
i think intention is the most important thing. this world has to exist for a reason. before you start thinking about the characters or the situation, it’s “what is the main function of this world?” “what are the triggers that make this world function?” so, for example, i chose plays because there’s this universal “you’re on a stage” sort of thing. but then what you think isn’t possible on a stage is happening on a stage, and that doesn’t make any sense! so i think about a world that is uniquely mundane, and using very concrete things in a way that shouldn’t be possible.
that use of what we might call absurdity, or the juxtaposition of things, is happening on multiple levels, the first of which is obviously content, deer holding guns, and the second of which is on the level of form. the repetition and the splits, if i may call them that, feel like a similar kind of twist, where you’re doing something– “on purpose” is what i want to say, even though that’s wrong. do you have thoughts anywhere around that?
the intention was to see how far the limbs in this illogical world could stretch. to find that little space where what is improbable now becomes probable, because i’m telling you so. maybe through content, or me changing how the page is moving. i wanted to try to figure out what this idea of spectacle can be stretched to, and how tactile can i make sound.
you’re almost lifting form to the level of content by giving it this dense texture. like, rather than being the receptacle or whatever, it’s another character in the play.
yeah. or another stage.
do you think meaning changes when something is repeated over and over again? or is something other than meaning moving through it? or do you think there is something to the incessance of repetition that requires one to stop, and for nothing to move?
i think the latter. the intention of the 137 shots in the space opera poem is to show how long it takes to reload 137 shots. i think there’s something tactile in the way the mouth moves that makes you register how long this is taking. and in terms of the “my boy is dead,” it’s just how much grief repeats itself, and becomes this single-minded thing that sort of engulfs everything else. so repetition is mostly used when i want to, one, sort of beat this into your head and, two, put you into the emotive state in which this is happening.
i feel like the “livingliving” repetition is a different kind of movement. would you agree with that? because it’s not existing in that same block of text, there’s room for something else?
in the original publication, it’s this sort of house, but i thought it would be interesting to contrast the living that’s sort of moving with the judgment that’s coming. it makes you realize that this thing is ending. then, by the time it’s over, you get these tactile things that you can’t do anymore.
can we talk about scope and zooming in and out? i think we’ve talked about speed in a horizontal or linear sense of the word, but i’m wondering about the z axis, or access, of miniatures and giants in your poems.
i think it just goes back to the title of zoetrope. the intention is that these are many different stories and many different characters in their own very small worlds that can, at any time, zoom out to something bigger. the way stories affect me on my physical heart level, or on a societal level. and i’m also really curious about this alternate way of telling story, the illogical nature of it. trying to take away the assumption of what is normal in this world. because nothing is, unless i state it is, or let it be that way.
i’m thinking about the line in “a poem turned political” when you say “this poem is political because i let it.” you were just talking about letting a poem be normal, and i’m wondering if there’s almost something nonchaotic about the illogic or the absurdity of your world, that something about them is nonchaotic because we know that they are artificial. can we talk about natural disasters? i’m just thinking about the destruction of that world.
i got really interested in God’s plagues. how they were so small and tactile. locusts are really interesting to me. and the contrast yet the sameness of natural disasters and disasters inside your own body. in terms of something falling apart but the rest staying the same. or how the body reacts to its own disasters in terms of the setting of the bigger disaster.
that’s what i love about how you use natural disaster, or just the weather– it’s always attached to the body. “i kissed the homies”’s “muddy tongues like fresh rain” or what the twister in “this tuesday in kansas” does to the bodies of the people trying to put out the fire.
the idea of a sort of threat too. what i think is really interesting is not so much fear of the disaster, but fear of what disaster will do to the body. how we use the world as a standard bearer for what’s normal. what happens when disasters are happening inside of yourself, but the world is also in a state of disaster?
that’s good. that’s really good. and the way they crack differently, or how different things crack them.
yeah. but also they end in the same way, in terms of this thing opening up.
the wavering door.
that’s my favourite image in the book.
am i allowed to ask about it?
yes, feel free.
you can pick one of these, but: where is it, or what is it made of, or is it closed now, or where is it going, or what was before it, or is there a window in it?
the idea is that the door will always be wavering, but the real question is what’s behind it. and in this poem [“something about the pink sky”] particularly, the whole idea is this obsession, and coming to the understanding that you’re not getting what you want, but you’re getting something else. i think i really wanted to personify how love sweeps someone up like a tornado, and then trying to hold onto what is real. the mail box, for example, is this idea of grounding. and taking that away with the wavering door. it’s holding onto this image you have in your mind, but being open to what the alternate could be.
how is that related to the wavering door in the last sentence of the postscript?
one, it answers the question of whose hand i’m brushing for. two, it makes the zoetrope come back full circle. the door never closes, because the questions that i’m asking don’t get answered, and these emotions that i’m feeling, in terms of this obsession or this idealized version, don’t go away. it just sort of circles back around, and something or someone else opens the door and walks into the room. whether that’s my mother, or God, or me, or the deer.
it definitely feels like the door is always open, and there’s always something passing through it. it reminds me of doors in kitchens.
i like that. it’s just this sort of accepting that you don’t have an answer to the question, or that you don’t know what’s going to come through the door, just that something always will. i’ve been thinking a lot about the question of what is this book for, what i was doing when i started writing it three years ago, when i was 23, and writing it now, when i’m 26. all these experiences i think i struggled with a lot.
the graph at the end of “the last dispatch,” where it’s like “blk boy / how do you deal / with grief? // on my knees?” i really fumbled around with the question mark. originally it didn’t have it there, but it felt like i was answering the question. this is just one way in which i just don’t know, but i’m realizing it’s not working.
what’s not working?
the way of grieving. or in the case of this poem, the way of not accepting grief.
how do you understand those graphs?
in terms of a speaker, me talking to God. it’s just a voice in my mind, i think. it takes over the page because it takes over like an anxious thought. me trying to figure out what is wrong and what the solution is, and me realizing in every case there’s no one answer or the answer is what i want it to be.
in the sense of self-determination, or?
less self-determination, more that the answer changes so frequently. or in terms of: this is a passing thought that seems to be correct at this moment in time.
right. right. okay. i see. whatever you put into the bubble that day is correct.
yes. or in the rules of this world, this is how i see this being correct. like, i think the idea in the “on my knees?” part is penance, but i’m realizing that it’s not working and that denying it doesn’t make it go away.
i feel like that brings us back to our question about letting chaos exist in a constructed world.
here we are.
we’ve landed. hello houston. i guess maybe that’s where the chaos gets let in, because you have no choice. because even in the most constructed of worlds that’s a question you don’t have an answer to.
i guess in terms of chaos just being an accepted part of life, or learning to accept these chaoses as a part of life. because i don’t want it to be this despair thing where you can’t change it and it’s inevitably going to happen. more of a thing where how do all of these whirlwinds survive in your body.
right. right. i didn’t mean to imply despair. i’m actually thinking the opposite, which is that you are still the constructor of the world, so you get everything else. you get to decide that Black boys drive comets and that they fly. everything is available to you. but even as the constructor of the world, there are still limits to your own–
yes. exactly. yes.
can we talk about that line?
which line?
“the poem is political because i let it.” i’m curious about the idea of you or the speaker or the constructor of these worlds’ agency over what does and does not fly — literally — in this world.
first of all, changing the idea of what a political poem can and cannot be, and doing that on a micro level in the way that it affects a Black boy’s body. how do i make you care about this thing? i think the way to do it is by opening it up and letting you know that the tactile thing it’s affecting is my body, and my mother. using that at the end of a line opens it up and sort of focuses it in a way that gives the permission that this is now a political poem.
how old do you feel you are?
a child, indeterminate age. anywhere between eight in some places and sixteen in some places. an age where discovery is confusing.
in which physical places are you those ages?
with my mother, i am very young and very confused about the nature of her illness. her death, though that occurred when i was 23, feels like i was younger because of the confusion. there are places, like “in poem turned political,” where i am older than that. it becomes an understanding of control, so i see myself as older. there are places, like “last dispatch from my dying mouth,” in which i feel dead, in the way that i have accepted that this is happening, and i feel like all the ages, and i’m asking all the questions all at once.
is that what being dead feels like? being all the ages all at once?
yes.
is there milk in space?
i think there’s everything in space.
how does a deer hold a gun?
typically using its mouth.
what is your relationship to reality?
present. often confused, but always accepting.
would you close the wavering door?
can i tear down the wavering door? i’d like to tear down the wavering door. and i guess not in a way where it doesn’t exist, but in a way where it sort of spreads so everything is wavering.
what would you do with the door after you took it down?
i think i would just leave it there. the door would just sit on the ground in perpetuity.
it just kind of sleeps there.
dust everywhere. zoom out of what’s behind it.
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KEVIN LATIMER is a poet & playwright from Cleveland, Ohio. he is the founder & co-editor-in-chief of BARNHOUSE & co-organizer of grieveland, a poetry book project. His plays have been produced by convergence-continuum & recent poems can be found in jubilat, Poetry Northwest, Passages North, Hobart, & elsewhere. he really likes Nickelback.
EMILIE KNEIFEL is a poet/critic, editor at The Puritan/Theta Wave, creator of PLAYD8s/CATCH, and also a list. find ’em at emiliekneifel.com, @emiliekneifel, and in Tiohtiá:ke, hopping and hoping.
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die
BY CHRIS GAVALER
CHRIS GAVALER is an English professor at W&L University where he serves as comics editor of Shenandoah. He has published two novels and four books of comics scholarship, and his visual work appears in the North American Review, Ilanot Review, Aquifer, and other journals.
Future Friday Feature – July
We’re thrilled to present an incredible poem for this month’s Future Friday!
Trisha Santanam is a junior in high school from Greensboro, North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Train River’s Summer 2020 poetry anthology and is forthcoming in the Cardiff Review.
Origins of Fear
Toward a Celebration of Multitude: We Are Here
BY CHRIS CAMPANIONI
When we began the folio series—launching, coincidentally, with the Latinx/Latinidad folio in March of 2019—our aim was not just to continue producing spaces to celebrate a rich multitude of voices, but to respond to the often-superficial “diversity” initiatives embedded in the fabric of our institutions, the diversity-as-a-goal instead of as a starting point to further address issues of inequality ranging from programming and access to care and support. Specifically, we wanted to continue to produce spaces in which the editorial process itself could become democratized and open to the public. Anyone—regardless of education or experience—could submit an idea, proposal, or question, from which to develop a call, review submissions, and curate a volume. What we wanted, what we still want, is to address the startling lack of diversity in the literary and publishing community, an ecosystem that often feels like an establishment with a not-so-secret passcode: the metric of white and male and cisgender. During one of our early Zoom calls prior to the launch of this summer-long “live” folio, Ruben enthusiastically spoke of the work undertaken by M. Bartley Seigel, Roxane Gay, and their staff of readers, the debuting of so many luminous writers in this space beginning in 2006, a time well before I could even dream of having work in publication, let alone publishing the work of others. Our conversations provided me with a renewed appreciation of this growing folio series, as well as the privilege to be able to contribute to a reorientation of the publication-as-scarcity model. We want to publish more writing, to celebrate more writers, to open up the possibilities for more kinds of writing: texts that straddle genres or destabilize and re-write generic conventions and hierarchies by their very nature.
We should remind ourselves that the work of representation so often has to be imagined before it can be concretized. I often remind myself that Latinx scholars are not visible in the academy—by the time I finished my coursework for the PhD, I encountered exactly one Latinx writer on the syllabi handed to me every fall, every spring, throughout four years of graduate school—but also: we’ve been made invisible: among all represented groups, we have the lowest undergraduate and graduate program enrollment. Ruben Quesada has here assembled a celebration that doubles as a testament: to our history—and moreover—to our future, to where we are going, which so often is a response to where we have been. To remark upon and remake our own colonized past, our own history of racialization and acculturation, and to make beauty out of that traversal, in so many forms, through bodies of experience that, in so many ways, transcend the cartographic purview of empire, the spatio-temporal landscape of nation. What is the Latinx experience but an experience of displacement that dissolves all boundaries, and yet the power of harnessing such a fracture, to turn the wound into a mark of healing, compassion, and renewal?
Here we find persons of the Latin American diaspora navigating the complex issues of everyday experience in a world that claims to be “postcolonial,” not the least of which involve negotiating colonial languages, origin stories, unreturnable exile, migratory flows, assimilation practices, and the perils of all categorical constructions, particularly ones that flatten differences among members of such a vast community, a people that, as José Martí once proclaimed, come from everywhere … and are going everywhere.
It’s this last bit that has been an especial light as the people of the Americas and beyond continue to grapple with the “novel” Coronavirus, and the virus of white supremacy that has long shaped our culture and institutions. Among the myriad content that Ruben has here shepherded to publication, readers will find newly-published poets alongside celebrated novelists, and celebrated novelists-turned-newly-published poets; stories about sorrow and joy and resilience and strength. We are only at the halfway point; this introduction wants to herald, to set in motion or divulge, but it also wants to reflect upon. It is my hope that throughout this past month, and in the month to follow, readers can take this celebration of Latinx literature as a starting point, to imagine a radically different canon, a radically different discipline from which we continue to produce knowledge and literature, an alternative Latinx imaginary that moves beyond the representations of our community that have so often been produced by people outside of it. This is a starting point, which is a celebration, and a celebration, which is, in many ways, unlocatable on any map. And still—we are here.