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A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month
TWO SHADES OF GREY
I. Dear Mr. Grey:
All new lovers need to learn restraint.
Unless it’s sexy fun, you’re doing it wrong.
Your Red Room of Pain may make me faint
with desire: all lovers could use some restraint,
someone to show the ropes, the cuffs, the quaint
trappings of bondage, to come on strong.
But while all lovers need to learn some restraint,
your controlling lack of fun is doing it wrong. Continue reading
Tyrese Coleman’s compact, powerful story “How to Sit,” from the March/April issue, contains three generations of women, explosive in their anger and love. Below, Tyrese talks pride, beauty, and the stories we carry in our bodies, our bodies carry into the world.
–interview by Diana Clarke
1. The narrative voice in “How to Sit” is so raw, furious and vulnerable, in particular where you describe how the grandmother’s “toenails are close to my leg. They are daggers. And if they were attached to her fingers, and if she were forty-seven and not sixty-seven, she would use them to scratch my face for pitying her.” How did you write into that place of anger and imminent violence?
I was mad, spitting mad, about a situation that I could not control when I wrote this. And in trying to understand who and what I was mad about, I considered the idea of being so frustrated that physical violence, down right fighting, is the only possible release in some cases.
But, what brings a person to that level? I personally feel it’s the failure to meet your own expectations. A woman like the grandmother in “How to Sit” is not a person used to being suffered. She was a star! And the worst thing that could happen to a woman so fiercely independent, to the extent of debilitating selfishness, is to be caged or told there is anything at all she cannot do. Pride causes that. Pride and having certain expectations out of life. And when the realization happens that, despite the visceral desire to change the situation, you are trapped and now, indeed, you are someone to be pitied, well, there is nothing left to do with your arms and legs and nails, but to scratch and fight, to show whoever it is that thinks they know you better than you know yourself, enough so that they have the audacity to pity you, that you are still someone to be reckoned with. Continue reading
Original poems & found images
–by Mia Sara
Breaking Ground
Designing a house is like a road trip with Action Barbie and G.I. Joe,
in The Country Camper with the picnic set, and the fold-out tent.
Endless miles of opportunity ahead of you and ample storage capacity
for all that baggage you thought you’d left behind, but didn’t.
There will be oversights, bumps in the road. Too late, you will notice
the internal structure is missing some vital parts, like Barbie, and Joe.
In the enthusiastic effort to compensate, Barbie will lose one sun-kissed
fully pose-able leg, and the wheels will come off the camper, tossing Continue reading
A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month
WHAT CAN BROWN DO FOR YOU?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/29/3d-print-sex-toys-ups_n_6240784.html?utm_hp_ref=weird-sex
UPS redefines package delivery:
betting if you build it, they will come,
they’re providing a new service (for a fee).
UPS redesigns package delivery,
equipping 100 of their stores with 3D
printers (used to make sex toys by some,
but then, UPS defines “package delivery”).
If you build it, they will come.
***
Heidi Czerwiec is a poet, essayist, translator, and critic who teaches at the University of North Dakota and is poetry editor at North Dakota Quarterly. She is the author of three chapbooks, including Self-Portrait as Bettie Page, and the forthcoming A Is For A-ké, The Chinese Monster. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Waxwing, and Able Muse, and you can visit her at heidiczerwiec.com
–by Dan Reiter
A Lawrence Weiner canvas at the Walker Art Center
I am in a dive bar in Minneapolis, waiting out the interlude between poets, watching William Tyler navigate a tractate of reverb. The thought of tomorrow’s panel discussion––”The Writing of Atrocity”––has me locked in a cycle of dread and procrastination. They expect me to speak ten full minutes, yet I have nothing prepared, no idea where to begin.
Behold the young literati: bold-rimmed, russet-bearded, baroque, well-inked. Come here for truth. Tyler’s pick sends out blistering messages; he manipulates his pedal until his guitar is playing three-part harmony. Why hadn’t I worked on my presentation last night? Who wastes a perfectly free evening unscrolling the #AWP15 twitter feed? But God, that tweet of Melville House’s––Saeed Jones (@theferocity) flaunting a gorgeous paperback of Baldwin’s last interview––was a classic: “James Baldwin and @theferocity give better side eye than you.” Continue reading
46 pages, $12
Review by Yanyi Luo
A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters is a book of bridges. Within, tiny machines are drawn between self as self, self as lover, self as monster. Contrary to the title, no monsters are laid bare for examination. Rather, they are pressed between sections, folk and mythic characters metamorphosed through the speakers of Sax’s three-headed introductory triptychs, all titled “Bestiary”:
charybdis—
when i suck in / i make deadly / whirlpools / ask anyone
who’s managed / to climb out / alive
The ministry of making art in Appalachia
–by Final Girl
Femme Fierce
Alone, I showed my passport. Alone I boarded a plane. I flew for graffiti, for a street art festival of women artists. I flew to London to participate without knowing for sure I could do it. Alone, I arrived. Alone I found the train. Alone I found the room. I ate alone in a pub full of men. I walked alone to the station to meet strangers.
Final girl! Final girl!
Then a woman was calling my name, my true name. A woman ran across the station to me, and sometime between her calling me and reaching me, she became not a stranger. And there were two women who became not strangers too. We embraced upon first meeting.
Because it was and was not our first meeting. Continue reading
A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month
VALENTINE’S DAY BREAK-IN AT FUNERAL HOME
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2015/02/13/3564129_homeless-man-charged-with-necrophilia.html?rh=1
I like how we don’t need to talk.
Sometimes sex just leaves you cold,
you know? And women usually mock
how I don’t really want to talk,
but you, I’d place on a catafalque.
There’s not a lot who fill your mold.
I like how you don’t ever talk.
Sometimes sex just leaves you cold.
***
Heidi Czerwiec is a poet, essayist, translator, and critic who teaches at the University of North Dakota and is poetry editor at North Dakota Quarterly. She is the author of three chapbooks, including Self-Portrait as Bettie Page, and the forthcoming A Is For A-ké, The Chinese Monster. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Waxwing, and Able Muse, and you can visit her at heidiczerwiec.com
–interview by Diana Clarke
Is it too much to say that Jenny Xie’s story “Wendy Beside Herself,” Wendy finds herself even as she loses her own arm? Of course it is. Wendy doesn’t find herself—none of us ever do. But, in Jenny’s words, “our remembrance of loss is an acceptance of that fissure; it becomes a part of our architecture.” The search, the gaps, is all there is.
1. The opening line of “Wendy Beside Herself” does such interesting things with time. By writing “Three years after Wendy Tsai loses her right arm…” you situate the reader in a present informed by loss. Before we know anything about Wendy, we know what she is missing—and even though the loss happened three years ago, the news of it is delivered in the present tense. How do losses shift and change with age? How do we integrate them into our sense of self?
There’s an element of traumatic loss that always remains incomprehensible. I think it’s our tendency to return to a moment of loss in an attempt to understand it, but it’s an intellectual and emotional orbiting that never really brings us closure. As we change and age, our remembrance of loss is an acceptance of that fissure; it becomes a part of our architecture.
2. Just looking at your story, I was struck by the form, the em-dashed dialogue tags rather than more standard quotation marks. That formatting made each piece of speech visually startling, an upset to the urgent, visual descriptions in the rest of the piece. What inspired you to shape dialogue in that way? Continue reading
