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A conversation with Ruth Danon and Philip Brady

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Ruth Danon and Philip Brady, poets and prose writers, engage in a conversation exploring their shared love of Joyce, their complementary sensibilities, and the very different writing processes that resulted in their recently published books.

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Ruth Danon: Let me start by saying how much I enjoyed reading Phantom Signs. I love the passionate virtuosity in the way you handle the language and the variety in the essays. You kept me engaged because you are so engaged. And so a number of questions come to mind.

First, I’m interested that right away, in the second paragraph of the introduction, you invoke a kind of Manichean universe — “the writer’s dark, the editor’s light.” And all the way through it seems that binaries haunt you. “Written word” or “living breath;” what is outside of temporal limits and what is defined and constrained by them. I can’t help but think about matter and spirit and about what appears to be the deep influence of an Irish Catholic upbringing in your work. Could you address the way your early background shapes the distinctive and pervasive internal debate between “dark” and “light” in your work?

Philip Brady: I grew up in Queens, which in the sixties was a bit like nowhere at all. Now Queens has become everywhere. I imagined my own Queens, and reality didn’t object much. There were 60 kids per nun and we were arranged by height so the back rows were a no-go area where you could read or daydream as long as long as peace prevailed.  At home, I rocked in front of the hi fi to my father’s come-all-ye-diddly-eye albums, and as the poem says:

 

On hands and knees, speed adjusted to song,

I squinched my eyes and soared over the streets.

My heels kept me from regressing beyond Queens,

But I embodied an oceanic voyage,

Finding in rhythm a charm against time’s surge.

 

That’s from another book, not part of our conversation, but it shows that your question pinpoints my obsessions. I think that poetry is always just beyond our reach, and what we call “poems” are our attempt to reach them—to enter a world where language connects time and timelessness, and lines are conceived and spoken in one breath. This also seems a recurring theme of this mysterious and light and dark-striated book, Word Has It. The poems are, in your phrase, “Shot Through”—not only with light, but with musing and murmuring that attune “domestic” speech to “habitation.” Even the title, Word Has It—affirms and questions language. If Phantom Signs divides, Word Has It radiates into “a silence of my own making.” How do these poems come about? How to they work their frank and subtle magic?

RD: Magic? That’s a nice word to attach to the poems. Thank you.  I can say quite frankly that they come about without intention just as the book itself was discovered by looking at the many poems I had written without assumptions. I am committed to the notion that we write our way into the unknown and that what I can bring to bear on any instance of writing is my life as I’m living it and some ineluctable pull of language. My habit has been to write every day, late at night, and quite quickly. Occasionally, as in the case of the “Word” poems one night will provoke the next and so a series comes into being. I am also committed to the notion that the hardest task of the writer, after getting the words onto the page, is to read what’s there and to understand what’s there. I didn’t know I was writing political poems until I looked at them, hard. I found a narrative in the poems when I started to read them in relation to one another. I found the language of the last part in books and articles about Roman divination because I had taken it into my head that I was interested in augury.  So this work springs from deep, unknown sources – written without thinking but reflected upon with a great deal of thought and what I hope is an unsparing willingness to see what’s in front of me. Beyond that, I think, and have just discovered this, that the subtext has everything to do with my feeling that as a child of immigrants and exiles I, too, live in a condition of exile, longing for a home but never quite finding it and now, in view of what the books seems to have had as prophesy, in a state of despair about the home I have come to live in.

Another question: If I read you accurately at all you seem to be exploring the ways in which poetry and life as a poet expand beyond the activity of “making” poems. Is there a kind of vocation that transcends the idea of “product?” that is one of your concerns? In other words, even beyond the binary of process versus product, is there some existential condition or role implied in the way that a person might (ideally) take on the role of poet? I’m interested in this in part because it seems connected to the end of the second part and all of the third part of my book, Word Has It, and so I’m wondering if this is a point of connection and conversation for us.

PB: My enigmatic sub-title, “the Muse in Universe City” is meant to contrast the power and linguistic force of poetry with the fact that it has been appropriated by academia, which seems to be poetry’s bastion. Universities support poets and poems—and literary non-profit presses, like the one that I run, Etruscan Press, and Nirala, which produced Word Has It in a beautiful dual edition, cloth and paper. As you know, there’s a strange disconnect between the idea of poetry—which is generally held as an ethereal vocation—and the small, dedicated audience of poetry readers. While the readership is small, many if not most people turn to poetry at some time—or even begin with poetry. As I have it in one essay,

 

“Anyone touched by a poem burns to write one—or better, to have written. This is not true of novels or plays or screenplays or memoirs. Like acrobatics or opera, I love to watch, but do not seek to emulate. But poems look easy; they make us feel we too could ignite language. As a provost once asked, ‘Is that a real poem or did you just make it up?'”

 

At least part of the problem, it seems to me, lies in the definition. We apply the name “poetry” to literary poetry, but we tend not to think of all the other linguistic practices through which people receive an aesthetic experience. Poetry has always had this divide—between the esoteric and popular traditions. But now the name poetry has been usurped by the esoteric tradition—that is, the literary tradition. So, “Poetry requires a belief that within language, and outside of any particular iteration of language, there are possibilities that can never be attended at one time. They have one foot outside. They are beyond. They are what we used to call the Muse: not a persona, or a Star Wars Force, but a condition, a state of things. It flickers on the page and in the air. It circumnavigates the dead.”Another i ssue is the dominance of the lyric. Now that drama and epic have been ceded to prose, poetry’s most salient characteristic seems to be brevity. Coming to grips with this radical distortion of scale is lyric poetry’s gift and responsibility.  How do we get people to stay in this infinitesimally eternal moment—the line, the phrase, the word. You quote Yuyutsu Sharma, whom I had the pleasure of meeting recently, “to be a poet…you must set your house on fire and walk away.” One reading of this line would be that the house is prose—or even language—and that the poet walks away with only breath and utterance.  In Phantom Signs, I argue that “art is not a personal activity. It is a soulful receptivity. It is the impression left upon the mind when all writing has been effaced.” In their brevity, in their illumination of particular moments, and in their blending of line and sentence, the poems of Word Has It leave unique impressions. I’d love to hear more about the source of this lyric model.

RD: My first impulse is to say “I don’t know,” but that is a cop out, so I will try as best I can to take on your question. There is, of course, a fine tradition of short poems. Think of Sappho and Basho, of the imagists, many of Creeley’s poems, even, for pity’s sake ,the terrible instapoets of the moment.  Models of brevity are everywhere.  In both high and low culture.   I think of lyric moments as suspending chronological time,  the way the rabbis describe the Sabbath.  These brief pieces in the book, written usually late at night,  represent moments of suspended time. My days are generally long and I don’t usually get to the page until late at night. I’m tired. Part of me wants to resist the whole enterprise. So I write under the pressure of time and tiredness and resistance and the bits of poems emerge out of that mix. But then there is also the tradition of the long poem and I love those as well. My earliest and deepest influence was Eliot.  So because I also want to write long as well as short and because the fragments and bits seem to suggest a narrative, I end up putting the small poems together. They aggregate. In that aggregation I begin to understand what I’m doing.

PB: I find the notion that you are writing at night, “under the pressure of time and tiredness and resistance”—almost in an altered state–scary and attractive.  It implies a faith in the power of the connection between mind and word, as if you are tapping into some source that surfaces when the ego-self is less active. And it implies, for me, that that source is revelatory. I’m thinking of William Heyen, a poet I write about in Phantom Signs, who speaks of “The landscape within…,” and  “Faith in an inclusive and enabling aesthetic” requiring  “a belief in the idea of wholeness.” “Everything in the end,” Heyen writes, “comes to One.” I think of this kind of poetry as tuning psyche to song, and for me it requires enormous willingness to reveal that “landscape within.”

As they say in Queens, I dig with the other foot. I am less confident in whatever source I might unveil in an inner landscape. For me to write, and believe in what I have written, there must be many layers—what I’m calling in my new long poem, Counterclockwise Time—which is the time and craft layered in the making of the poem, which must appear in Clockwise Time—which has, in my poem, two aspects—time lived and reconceived as told. But I love the poetry that seems unfettered and unmediated—open to self and world.  I wonder if this speaks to your writing process and mission?

RD: An interesting question and not so easy to answer – or maybe there isn’t a singular answer. I think that in some ways we/I (at least) write one long poem that is the poem of our lives. My first poem (written when I was a child) offered concerns and poetics that have remained with me – namely the focus on language as a concern and a linking of abstract and concrete that seems to be something people comment on in my work. So in some ways I’m “fettered” to those preoccupations. How they surface is the mystery of the work and the joy. But everything I write is also in the context of other writing. In “Habitation” there is a little homage to Williams. I have often used found text, especially from Wittgenstein and the Renaissance architectural writer, Alberti.  Eliot has been a major influence, as has been Ashbery. But the mediation does, I think, occur at a very deep, subconscious level. What I steep myself in emerges in ways I can’t predict. I wish I were even more porous than I am, though I am, as you say, open to the world as it presents itself in an ongoing fashion. And much of that “world” is the world of other texts, the world of language, which is my real home. And that brings me to my next question, which has to do with the world of literature.

You and I share a deep love for Joyce’s “The Dead.” It’s a story I’ve taught a million times and the ending never fails to send chills up and down my spine.  I’m curious about a couple of things about your relationship to the story and how that relationship has shaped your own writing.  Do you think Gabriel is fully redeemed at the end? And by that I mean do you think he really discovers a kind of love for Gretta that he hadn’t had before? Or is he, at the end, simply drawn away from eros into thanatos — into an awareness of his own and everyone’s mortality that leaves him feeling pretty alone. I’ve constructed this as a binary and I’m wondering if it’s a false binary and I’m wondering if, as in the perplexing (in a positive sense of perplexing as in one that forces us to think hard without necessarily arriving at a conclusion) essay about Kirk Nesset, the question can’t be resolved neatly and that part of what you are up to in this book is the way paradoxes remain thus — not everything gets resolved – and is there an aesthetics implied in that? (Wow, that’s a mouthful.)

PB: I’m delighted at your delight with this wonderful story. I’m probably too personally invested in the character of Gabriel to be a fair critic, but I have always thought that his confession comparing his husbandly love for Gretta with Michael’s Furey’s youthful passion for her is the most poignant of moments. “He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.” For me, as a man entering the suburbs of old age, this confession is the most refined and intense feeling: his lifelong love for Gretta is far deeper than Michael Furey’s youthful passion. And I think you’re right—there isn’t a satisfactory binary. Gabriel is in love, and he is also alone; he is generous and also self-engrossed.  And in a sense, the ending—one of the most beautiful I’ve read—reminds us too that it is possible to fold irony into lyric, and identity into dissolution, and prose into poetry, just as the snow is general all over Ireland, and at the same time falling “on every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns…” Vast and tiny—that radical dislocation of scale which is poetry’s colophon.

RD: Oh how I love your phrase “the radical dislocation of scale . . . poetry’s colophon.” So lovely! And that makes me ask the next question. I know that in my own life the conditions under which I write poetry and under which I write prose are quite different. Poetry requires a kind of urgent liminality.  Prose demands that I be clearheaded and focused and with a surfeit of time. Your prose is lush and rich and very poem- like. But your prose is prose nonetheless and so I am wondering if you experience the two modes of writing as two modes of being.

PB: Yes, I’m glad to come back to this—because it does speak to a question, which has occupied me as a poet, writer, and publisher. Etruscan Press was founded in a conversation with novelist Robert Mooney, asking whether poetry and prose were manifestations of the same impulse, immersed in different practices and traditions, or if on the other hand they were completely different arts, joined by the technology of the alphabet. We find the nexus in poetry, which partakes of movement and narrative, and prose which features moments of stillness. Composing poetry I imagine no audience. I write and read poetry to reshape my mind—as Seamus Heaney puts it, “I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” On the page, a poem remains, for me, a draft. If it has not made its way into my synapses, escorting me to sleep or accompanying on a walk or whispering in the subway clatter or taking me out of a seminar or tavern, it has not fully been realized. I love what my teacher Jerome Rothenberg once said, “I make those poems which I have not found elsewhere, and for whose existence I feel a deep need.” Rothenberg connects his own poems with those first conceived by others, but which he has creatively inhabited. For me, this is where poetry is distinct—in its failure to belong solely to an author, in the power of rhythmic utterance to braid many consciousnesses, in its invitation to joyful anonymity.

For me, writing prose is a conversation. It’s a human, social activity. As I have it in one essay from Phantom Signs, “I have a love-hate relationship with sentences. I love the freedom and the buoyancy, the smooth texture on your skin and the way they go on and on, executing a flip turn at the margin. But, they do go on. I compose them only in daylight or lamplight, always alone. They can’t be learned by heart; they can’t breathe for long away from print. They are—or at least my sentences seem—foreign. Sentences have no darkness. They are devoid of mystery. If you think of something that might go in a sentence, you stick it in. Bent on transposing whole cartons of toxic reality on to the page, you get woozy.”

Ruth, why don’t we conclude with a few poems from Word Has It.  Your choice.

RD: Hmm. How about if we each conclude with something from our respective books. I’ll put in three poems and then maybe you can put in something from your book that speaks to them. I like the idea of equal time.

Here are three that have to do with being a writer:

Habitual

In the circle of light that interrupts the early dark she pursues foreign mysteries. Do not take this as metaphor. Rather, she, the writer, has become obsessed, it’s fair to say, with mystery novels written by people she doesn’t know set in places she’s never seen. The crimes are appalling – serial murder pursued as performance art. Spike-loaded apples, aberrant snowmen, and so on. Clues are heavy on archetype. Some readers will recognize the allusions. It doesn’t matter, though; the point is clear enough. Murders in books are acts of imagination but after a while the mysteries become quotidian. The writer acquires mysteries with increasing frequency, first delaying the purchase to avoid guilt, then acquiring a mystery almost ever day because the pleasure is too intense to refuse. She learns that serial murderers begin to leave less and less time between crimes because the kick doesn’t last. The writer understands this. The body gone, there is only language. Serial murderers leave notes, write in code. They grow increasingly impatient. They hate the dark. They want to be found.

Large or Small

In a silence of my own making I wait to hear the death shriek of stars. Because they are so far away I will wait for a long time. I don’t even look into the darkness dotted with tiny lights. I turn over my hand to see the lifeline etched in my palm. Always a bad reader

of fortunes I have little to offer

in the way of threat or consolation.

 

Augury

Craters of ash,

Lost nouns naming and

Renaming themselves,

Unwinding the black ribbon

Around your lonely neck.

You had one finger to the wind.

You had shoes without laces.

You boiled away tea water

Until the pot scorched

Craters into unfathomable

Ash. You stuck you hand

In it. You stuck your fist in,

You scooped something out.

Something hollowed out now,

And unfathomable.

 

From the essay, “Nine Phantom Signs” from Phantom Signs: The Muse in Universe City, University of Tennessee Press, 2019.

From Hex

There is a word that I am loathe to say. It sends a small shiver up my spine. Not the usual—fuck, cunt, shit, prick, ass. Nor the sloppy ones like darling, pumpkin, sweetiepie, lambkins. Hearing “Yaddo” always made a friend wrinkle her nose, but I lack allergies to odd-sounding words like firkin or Iroquois. I pronounce with equanimity terms that portend evil, like triglycerides. I am not dismissive of tongue-twisters or ululation or jaw harping. I jabber to my cat. I sing alone.

It’s just this one word. It does not relate to sex, exactly, though one of its definitions is a body part. I would not say it out loud to myself, or to others if I could safely circumlocute. I would not have it uttered within earshot. The French version doesn’t squick me, which is ironic since the English is an obscenity in French. It is not a fetish; it does not fester behind a veil of incense and fishhooks. Though I can write the word, to write it while admitting that I would not say it—this I cannot.

I hex this word. I do not curse or swear. I hex it. If I spoke my hexed word you would not cringe. It is not shameful. But to say that I cannot say it would color my humanity; it would divide us, reader, in this particular. Hex is the lust of virgin silence, the tensing of the unfired synapse, the spell between bars of the equal sign. Hex causes and precedes. Sans hex, words perfectly denote. They mean the same to everyone. They lack gaiety.

Every utterance is spun, like a charmed quark, by its hex.…

The intricacies between fragment and meaning

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WORDS BY BY M. SULLIVAN

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There’s a woman unveiling a painting, on the right, by the entrance. She grips a red, tasseled cloth half-draped over the canvas. Poised like this, she is a matador. Her gaze is locked on the entrance. From looking at the whites of her eyes and how she holds herself, she is prepared, able. She conducts us into the gallery. And, like a bull, she tampers with our expectations. We expect conflict, but are fooled into a dance. We think we know, but are deceived. We are distracted by a fragment, while the whole picture remains obscured. The artists exhibiting at Aicon Gallery remind us that there is always more that remains to be seen.

 

Mequitta Ahuja, Material Support (Study III), 2017, Oil on canvas

 

Mequita Ahuja, the woman in the painting, is an African American with South Asian heritage. Her angular portraits feature cropped scenes and barren backgrounds, giving us incomplete narratives and brief glimpses into rich lives. Accompanying these intimate scenes, Ahuja’s Pomegranate Molasses (2018) and Sesame Paste (2018), present us with traditional Middle Eastern food—a nostalgic view of an area most readily associated with war. With only words and scattered snippets of facts about pomegranate and sesame, a small part of the region’s history buds into light. A recipe for sesame cookies conjures a bygone childhood and the sweet smells of a comforting home, tossing away prejudged visions of a strife-filled life.

At the rear of the gallery, the Indian artist, Rina Banerjee presents us with a work that invades and recaptures your eye at every chance. The work’s title is a brief story that begins with the stark line, She would be a vision of Beauty if only…her complexion was whitened! (2019). A bust of a woman rests on an ornate wooden stool. She has downcast eyes. Lines of cotton thread lead from the bust to the mirrors covering the wall behind her. Though she is turned away from her reflection, she is tied to it—it is inescapable. In each mirror: a fractured image. One angle shows the bust, another shows nothing, some strings, the viewer, the other works in the gallery. As the mirrors hold a prominent and imposing position in the space, the gallery, too, is flooded with the same inescapable vanity.

Along the west wall, in beautiful and horrific contradistinction to the former artists, are the works of Peju Alatise. Working with metal, stone, and resin, among other materials, Alatise has a hardness, a jaggedness, that keenly confronts the viewer. The eighteen panels collectively entitled Lost (2015) make use of a wide range of colors and patterns that gesture to traditional Nigerian textiles. The patterns at the tops of the panels taper off, fraying, as torn fabric, giving way to sawtoothed rips in the panels that resemble rusted iron. Within these holes, there are figurines with long and snaking limbs—all painted red like intestines. The violent gashes spill Nigeria’s innards—the country is wounded and vulnerable. Still, the bright colors of its culture overawe in their brilliance.

 


Peju Alatise, Lost, 2015, 18 mixed media panels

 

At the base of a spiral stair are three seated figures—Lagbaja, Tamedu ati Ogbeni (Anybody, Nobody, Somebody) I, II, III (2019). Each is cloaked in a tattered red cloth. Life-sized, their macabre presence is felt and not easily ignored, instilling fear in the space. The first bears a cross, the second carries an assault weapon, and the third wears an immense necklace of rosaries. The cross, the rifle, and the beads are composed of a number of small human statues. The figures of the cross scramble and clamber over one another as though in desperation; the figures of the rifle are supine and rigid; and the figures of the rosary beads are curled into fetal balls. As an attendant explained to me, Alatise, who is from Lagos, Nigeria, sadly could not come to the opening night because of a visa restriction. Looking once more at the seated figures, such a circumstance was dispiriting, yet unsurprising—as though by now we should be used to such barriers.

On the second floor, the works of two Pakistani artists form unexpected connections. The first artist, Faiza Butt, creates fantastical paintings and ceramics decorated with cartoonish line drawings, starscapes and toys, like childhood dreaming. One portrait, entitled Ghost (2019), stands apart. It shows a child wrapped in a blanket, calling to mind an image of a refugee. Planets and stars still fill in the background as with the seemingly more lighthearted works, but the child’s eyes are faraway, staring at some point just below the viewer’s gaze, and so looking through the viewer, as though we are the ghost.

Positioned next to these large, colorful and dreamlike works are the small, graphite drawings of Saba Qizilbash. Two of Qizilbash’s larger drawings, Sialkot to Jammu (2018) and The Grand Trunk Road – Kabul to Torkham (2019) depict cities on the India-Pakistan border and the roads that connect them. Drawn on a series of panels, the hard lines separating one section of the scene from the next give the image a vaguely surreal quality as pieces that certainly align nevertheless seem off at the same time, as though the border between them distorts the whole. Butt’s and Qizilbash’s widely different works, displayed side-by-side, bridge the line between a sharp reality and a magical otherworld. We are left to wonder about their relation—if they are perhaps different tellings of the same story or if, together, they somehow form a more complete tale of the artists’ shared homeland.

 

Saba Qizilbash, Sialkot to Jammu, 2018, Graphite and wash on water color board

 

In the dimly lit room at the back of the second floor is a separate exhibit featuring another Pakistani artist, Ghulam Mohammad. Although not part of Intricacies, perhaps Mohammad’s works can be seen as a fragment of it, changed by and changing the whole. The centerpiece, Tana Bana (Fidget) (2019) is described as “paper woven carpet.” It lies at your feet, delicate and large. You bend down to see that the cut paper has Urdu words printed on it. The words are broken off and meshed together by the weave. The language’s meaning is lost where the edges of the paper join and overlap, creating new letters, new words, new language. Though the meaning has been utterly deconstructed, the resulting arrangements, the randomized calligraphic strokes, form a design more beautiful and more entire in its own right than its individual parts.

And Hung on the walls, more curious even than paper carpet, are what seem at first glance to be fabric swatches. But, looking more closely, what appear to be fibers are actually letters—hundreds of individually cut-out letters. What words these letters originally formed, and what sentences those words shaped—what ideas—are lost now. Now they are intricate fragments, part of a new whole, with meanings still to be deciphered.

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Intricacies: Fragment and Meaning

Exhibition: August 8 – September 14, 2019

Ghulam Mohammad | Gunjaan

Exhibition: August 8 – September 14, 2019

Aicon Gallery, 35 Great Jones St, New York, NY 10012

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M. Sullivan lives in Brooklyn.

[REVIEW] The Geese Who Might Be Gods by Benjamin Cutler

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(Main Street Rag, 2019)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

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For many poetry collections, the theme of place is central to the images, ideas, and emotions they seek to instill in their readers. In the book Romey’s Order, Atsuro Riley couples a unique regional dialect with the memories of growing up in the backwoods of South Carolina to create a rich and highly percussive collection. In the work of B.H. Fairchild, the Midwest – both its people and the landscape – shapes the speaker’s understanding of not only the region, but the world at large. For Benjamin Cutler, southern Appalachia courses through the veins of his debut collection, The Geese Who Might Be Gods, and with a voice that is clear, lyrical, and maturely measured, we are gifted with poems that are both beautiful and hauntingly memorable.

The beauty of Cutler’s collection lies in its ability to weave the historical with the personal, and to create a narrative where the understanding for a greater truth is found in the relationship between the two. In the opening poem “Peeling Bark for Bread,” the speaker ponders a documentary that details the Sami people (from Scandinavia) and the manner in which they’d peel bark and grind it into flour. This rather random fact inspires the speaker to do the same to their mother’s dogwood, albeit unsuccessfully. The mother, “in grief and rage,” laments the speaker’s actions, but when the splintered edges grow back within the year, the “leavened loaves under the sun” remind both speaker and mother (and reader as well) how wounds can heal and eventually flourish.Many poems center on familial relationships, either through the frame of the speaker’s childhood or through the eyes of the speaker as a father. In one poem, the speaker remembers turning to his brother and his brother’s friend to help fix a lawnmower, and when these two “shamans garbed in grease / and denim” have resurrected this “child” (the lawnmower), the idea that family serves as a foundation and backbone to one’s own needs is illuminated in a subtle yet thoughtful tone. In “Butterfly Funeral,” the speaker, now a father, shows his son how certain moments require our attention and care rather than the more common act of capturing a scene through a photograph:

See their color:

a spill of ink on yellow paper.

See their movement:

wings like hands opening

and closing in uncertain prayer.

 

Remember so you can tell her:

they’ll be gone when we pass again.

 

Looks like a butterfly funeral,

 

he said and—

with such reverence—

 

brushed one finger

over on attendant’s wings.

 

It shuddered but did not fly.

 

These poems are heartfelt, but without falling into the trap of being overly sentimental. Page after page, Cutler seeks to create images filled with emotional and intellectual nuance, delving into subjects such as A.L.S. (“How to Speak With the Dying When the Dying Cannot Speak”), grief in the wake of a school shooting (“A Refusal”), and the anxiety surrounding survival should the world enter its last stages (“A Tomato Sandwich for the End-Times”).

One of the most intriguing aspects of These Geese Who Might Be Gods is how Cutler can take a seemingly grotesque image and find meaning that isn’t apparent on the surface. In “Bear Paw,” the speaker finds a “fraction of a crucifixion – / a single [bear] paw nailed to a telephone pole.” After bathing in a shallow pool, he returns to the paw and ponders the last moments before its death:

How heavy he must have fallen,

how silent and still

 

as blade cut through radius,

tendon, and ulna—as spike

pierced the palm’s pad, paw

 

lifted high for a sign:

flesh as dark and bloodless as guilt,

bone as pale and dry as forgiveness.

 

There’s a certain sense of guilt that the speaker feels for the bear, wondering if it experienced defiance or fear before it was killed. Nevertheless, the speaker ultimately feels cleansed (or forgiven) of having to witness the aftermath of such a strange, brutal act. Even when the images are not based in reality, they remain stark and offer a chance at greater reflection. In “Waking From Tooth-Loss,” the speaker navigates a dream where his teeth fall out and expose “nerve / and purple-blooded absence.” He doesn’t know exactly what it means that he’s losing teeth so rapidly in a dream (some interpretations of this would indicate that it symbolizes anxiety and the way we think we are perceived by others), but he knows that once he has awakened, he cannot regain the feeling – however ominous it is – he had when he was asleep:

But now that I’m awake,

I have forgotten the secret.

Now that I’m awake,

my teeth are here, rooted to bone,

and you are not.

I cannot ask. You cannot answer.

Hurry your return,

if you can, because soon I will swallow

something that tastes

too much like loss.

These teeth are tired of chewing.

The “you” comes in unexpectedly, but it can be in reference to the “I” that the speaker left behind in the dream (a separation, if you will, that he experienced when he woke up), and this loss, this constant “chewing” of everyday life, reveals that there are always moments out of our grasp, those we can only hope to retell.

There are debuts that are good and there are debuts that are great precisely because they remind you of the power of poetry and how important it is in capturing the environment, the people, and the moments that shape our most basic understanding of this world. The Geese Who Might Be Gods is an incredible book that examines our relationship with nature, loss, family, and with ourselves, and with that “endless hungry search” for meaning, we find light in these pages where we least expect it.

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Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

“There is loft; there is flight; there is the strange lightness of being”: an interview with Linda Watanabe McFerrin

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(Santa Fe Writer’s Project, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY LELAND CHEUK

—

Since the 1990s, Linda Watanabe McFerrin has been a voice for those caught between cultures and genres. Her best-known works are the novel Namako: Sea Cucumber (1998) and the story collection The Hand of Buddha (2000), both published by Coffee House Press, but McFerrin is also an award-winning poet and travel writer. Her body of work is collected in Navigating the Divide, as part of Alan Squire Publishing’s Legacy Series, which is devoted to publishing career-spanning collections from independent press authors. I had the privilege of interviewing McFerrin over email, after reading this category-defying collection.

Leland Cheuk: I was so impressed with not just the array of poetry and prose in Navigating the Divide, but also the arrangement of the pieces. Though we were just getting snippets of your longer works of prose, broken up by poetry and travel writing, there’s a narrative build for the reader from beginning to end. What was your thinking as you chose the order of the pieces?

Linda Watanabe McFerrin: Although it is not arranged by genre or chronology, Navigating the Divide does cohere in a narrative way. True, it is built from pieces pulled from work written at different times and in various genres. In that way it is an abstract construction, but the bits are all from one source, a single worldview. So it’s my world—the traveler’s world, the outsider’s world—arranged with a narrative arc or a “story.” The through line is an emotional one, and it escalates. For me, it has to begin with the story goal, with “Love.”  In subsequent sections, the terrain becomes trickier, the footing less sound. In the final section, the reader is on the edge, and all I need to do is to give a little push into the surreal, which is actually a relief, I think, after “Death and Shadow.” There is loft; there is flight; there is the strange lightness of being that comes with acceptance and escape.

LC: Your pieces seem concerned with bridging the proverbial gap between Japanese and American cultures, but also with bridging the gaps between reality and surreality, life and death, and genres: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. What’s driving your desire to write about the in-between spaces and categories?

LWMC: The world I grew up in was quite multicultural and far-flung. I was raised in the U.S., in England, and in Japan. Family and friends came from many cultures, and we had quite a few writers and storytellers among them. Our house was sometimes a caravansary and our bookshelves—full of diversity, full of photo albums, magazines like National Geographic and books by writers like Paul Theroux, William Burroughs, and Walt Whitman—just another prompt toward exploration. I was constantly trying to find a way to integrate all of this. I’ve always used my work to create a personal path into and through it all.

LC: There’s a lot of attention to diversity in publishing today and many, many more authors of color are being introduced to American readers. Many are writing about some of the identity issues you’ve written about over the course of your writing life. What do you think of today’s writing about identity in America? Are we just covering the same ground or are we making actual progress?

LWMC: I love the fluidity; that this cultural business is not settled; that we seem to recognize what’s “in the circle” and what’s “out” and that it is necessary for this to constantly change; that we are not forced to identify in a predetermined and constrained fashion; that we can create our own identities and stretch the “definitions” that limit our understanding. I think we are beginning to realize that by embracing the outsiders, we grow the collective. That it is a topic of discussion and a point of contention is progress.

LC: I loved the poem “Legacy” in which you write: “I’ve thrown out the kimonos, the costumes and robes / I’ve made a new self out of flowers and surgical steel / a shiny new self that blooms every spring / And I’ve cast all the ancestors / back over the sea”. Have you felt constrained by your heritage in your writing (or in the publishing of or reception to your work)?

LWMC: I’ve never felt constrained by my heritage in my work. Maybe I have been constrained by my heritage in life, where I’ve danced the outsider’s dance, but not in my work, which is a record and release of that dance. In my work, I’ve always felt inspired by my heritage, challenged by it, sometimes confounded by it. It’s the same relationship I’ve had with my family: It’s part of me, not all of me, and I want to simultaneously accept and refuse it. I think it’s that tension that fuels what I lay down on the page. I can use that. I wish I had that kind of control over my life. I don’t. Others exert a certain power over outcomes in this world, and where that is the case—in publishing, for example—my heritage has worked to my disadvantage.

LC: You write beautifully about kamis (ghosts) in your novel Namako: Sea Cucumber and elsewhere in the book. Who are some of your literary kamis? 

LWMC: I explain the concept of kami in a childish way as Ellen in Namako. The kami are Shinto gods or spirits that take the form of things important to our lives. There are supposedly millions of kami. Ellen tells her friend Anne, “Almost everything is a kami.” So a kami is more a spirit than a ghost and that spirit can be found in the strangest places. Sometimes it finds its home in a being, but often it occupies some other aspect of the natural world. It’s the vulnerability of a baby bird, the power of the wind, the ferocity of a tiger and so on. A tree, a shadow, a musical note, the paper that sits on my desktop—I guess I find my literary “kami” in everything—dark or light—that moves me. 

LC: What I love about your travel writing in Navigating the Divide is that it’s very experiential and doesn’t read like glossy travel magazine writing. You’re not the tour guide; you’re open to wandering, meeting new people, experiencing the absurd. Where are you off to next and who are some of the travel writers that inspired you?

LWMC: I spent the first part of the year traveling in Hawaii, in France, in Greece. I’m off to Washington, D.C. next for the book launch. That’s where my publisher is located. Then there is the tour. I’m not sure where that will lead me. It’s an open road, isn’t it? I hope I will do some more exploring of my own backyard, but overall, I think it will be a surprise. I wish I could say I’m off to another swamp, another rainforest, another desert area, but I think I’ll be hanging out in bookstores and libraries for a while … which is fine with me; I love them. As for the writers who inspire me, they are, fortunately, all over the country and all over the world, and maybe on this tour I’ll get to visit some of them. Let’s see: Maureen and Tony Wheeler in Australia; David Downie in France; photographer and writer Alison Wright—along with so many other creative folk—in New York; Tim Cahill in Montana; Jan Morris in England; Paul Theroux in Hawaii; Haruki Murakami in Japan … and so many great ones right here in my neighborhood.

—

Linda Watanabe McFerrin is a poet, travel writer, and novelist. She is the author of two poetry collections, two novels, a collection of award-winning short stories, and a travel guidebook. Her literary honors include the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and various travel writing, poetry, and fiction awards. Her latest novel, Dead Love (Stone Bridge Press, 2009), was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in a Novel. As the founder of Left Coast Writers, Watanabe McFerrin has taught and mentored a long list of writers and is a beloved figure in California’s rich, historic literary culture. She has led workshops around the world,  and with ASP author Joanna Biggar, she co-founded the Wanderland Writers series of workshops and anthologies, which they co-edit.

 

 

What can trauma, as a theoretical lens, teach us about justice? An interview with Lacy M. Johnson

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(Scribner, 2018)

INTERVIEW BY JO VARNISH

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Lacy M. Johnson’s collection of essays, The Reckonings, is a powerful meditation on the issues of violence, justice and mercy.  Through writing that is at times deeply personal, and her commentary on politics and culture, Johnson challenges the reader to examine their beliefs and their actions.

Jo Varnish:  Your memoir, The Other Side, is a beautifully crafted account of an horrific trauma you experienced at the hands of a man who has evaded our societal norms of justice by fleeing the country.  How did The Other Side inform or inspire your writing of The Reckonings?

Lacy M. Johnson: I feel like I’ve already told the story of how a question I was repeatedly asked while on tour for The Other Side prompted the inquiry I pursue in this book, so I’m going to answer a slightly different question, which is how these two books work together. In The Other Side I write the story of a horrifying trauma — how it changed me to survive being abused, kidnapped, raped, and very nearly murdered by a man I once loved. It changes me still. The Other Side is a story about memory and experience, about the fiction of before and after, and about how, because I will never “get over” what happened, I have instead learned to carry that story of it with me in ways that feel more or less okay.

The Reckonings is a different book — different in form because it’s a book of essays rather than a memoir, but also because it is a book in which I allow that earlier trauma to become a theoretical tool with which to interrogate violence more broadly — sexual violence, ecological and environmental violence, racial violence, gun violence. In the process of that interrogation, I realized that the many violences I write about in this book spring from the same source, which is the particularly white supremacist patriarchal belief that power only ever means power-over, and that strength is only ever synonymous with cruelty and force. What can trauma, as a theoretical lens, teach us about justice? How can occupying a vulnerable subject position — open, candid, exposed, unarmed — help us to interrogate the stories we tell about how stories should end, about what we owe to one another, and about how to build a world that is more just and equitable than the one we live in today? — these are the questions I wrestled with in The Reckonings, which is rooted in my own experience of violence, but uses that experience as a lens for looking at the world.

JV:  Both The Reckonings and The Other Side were finalists for National Book Critics Circle Awards, and were widely critically acclaimed.  The Reckonings has been described as a ‘thoughtful and probing collection,’ (Kirkus) and you as writing with ‘palpable compassion and brilliance,’ (LitHub).  Does the validation of your words and sentiments resonating so strongly with your peers give you hope in this time of division and unease?

LCM: I don’t think of hope as the result of any kind of interaction — and certainly not of critics with my work — but rather as an “orientation of the spirit” (Vaclav Havel), or perhaps as an ethical commitment. When we look at the massive problems that face us in this moment — climate change, racial violence, sexual violence, mass shootings — the magnitude of each problem individually and collectively can feel like just too much to overcome from where we are right now. The scale is too massive, we tell ourselves, and we lose hope. But I think a lot about the trope in science fiction we have come to readily accept: that a person can travel to the past and make some small change that radically alters the future. But what we accept less readily is the idea that we can make small changes in the present that radically alter the future. I think hope is a commitment to action right now, an investment in a future that has not yet been revealed to us, and possibilities we can’t yet see.

JV:  Lily Meyer, in her review of your book for NPR, wonders if the #metoo movement might be a reckoning.  Do you view it as such?

LCM: Only partially. A true reckoning would require a more substantial shift in the balance of power. Perhaps you noticed how each time this movement makes a step forward, our stride is met with backlash, and a reframing of our collective narrative about the epidemic of sexual violence against women as an epidemic of false allegations about men. A real reckoning would make that reframing transparent and ineffective  — or, better yet, impossible. I think we’re moving toward that but we still have a long way to go.

JV:  Your essay On Mercy explores the meaning of mercy in relation to death row prisoners and terminally ill children.  You write with grace and elegant restraint, and it is, I think, impossible not to be moved to tears as you take us with you to the children’s ward, and give us a glimpse at the lives of the children and their parents.  Your threading of the inmates’ circumstances facing capital punishment and the terminally ill children feels natural and poignant in the context of mercy.  What inspired you to juxtapose what initially seem to be such disparate situations?

LCM: “On Mercy” is actually the first essay I wrote for this collection. I had been traveling in support of The Other Side and kept getting asked this question about whether I wanted my rapist to be murdered, and a friend who works in criminal justice very helpfully suggested Autobiography of an Execution by David Dow — a lawyer in Texas who founded the Texas Innocence Network to defend people on death row — and that book led me to Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, who is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama. Both books engage the question I had begun rolling around in my head — how are we to say what anyone deserves? — but approach that question in order to make a critique of the death penalty. I had just recently completed a year of teaching writing in a pediatric cancer ward, and noticed that in the discourse around the death penalty, there is a lot of talk about mercy, about alleviating suffering, about dignity, and in some ways that mirrors the discourse around end of life care that I had overheard during my year teaching in the hospital, though what people meant by those terms when talking about dying children was very different from what they meant when talking about men who are scheduled to be murdered by the state. During a single year, several of my students died and thirteen men were executed by the state of Texas, and the circumstances of their deaths were the subject of two very different but overlapping conversations about mercy: in one case that word meant ending suffering for the innocent and in the other it meant ending life for the guilty. I wanted to think through how one word could have such radically divergent meanings.

(Lacy M. Johnson, courtesy of the author)

JV:  In Goliath, you write, ‘We human beings are not born with prejudices.  Always they are made for us by someone who wants something.  We are told we have enemies who hate us, who want to make war with us […]’   Do you think that it is easier to elicit fear in human beings than compassion?  Are there societal factors that predispose an individual to a reaction of fear instead of empathy?

LCM: No, I don’t think we’re predisposed to fear and suspicion and hatred. I’m writing in that essay about anti-Muslim racism following 9/11, and something that didn’t make it into that essay was that following the attack on the World Trade Center I spent a year working as an Americorps VISTA volunteer and my particular placement was to work as a Peace Educator. As part of the training for that position, I learned that by the age of 10 most children have witnessed 100,000 acts of violence in the media, and that because they are naturally compassionate and empathetic, bearing witness to such repeated and prolonged violence damages their empathy in profound and devastating ways. It is far easier to teach a person to fear another if they have already learned not to feel for them.

JV:  You describe admitting for the first time in public that you were kidnapped and assaulted in your essay, Speak Truth to Power.  You go on to detail a disgusting comment made by a professor in Georgia, jealous of your success, implying that you may have invented the story.  I know, as I am sure most do, women who have been raped who have not reported the violence against them.  Can you feel the tide shifting against the established patriarchal mindset towards one more inclined to embrace those who have been violated through harassment or assault?

LCM: Yes, It does feel like things are shifting away from a patriarchal mindset, and I think that is part of a broader move away from white supremacist patriarchal ideology. It also feels like the hold the petroligarchy has on our natural resources is slipping, that capitalism is about to collapse under the pressure of extreme economic inequality, and that part of the pressure on these institutions to fail is a growing collective awareness that these are not separate institutions but a single desire to bring the many under the control of the few, and that this desire goes by many different names. This isn’t happening on its own of course, but is the result of generations of social, political, emotional, and psychic labor, and usually the labor of people of color. I think it’s important to note that if it feels like we’re making any progress at all, we have our elders to thank for it.

JV:  In your closing essay, Make Way for Joy, you write, ‘Justice means we repair instead of repeat.’  This line struck me as call to action for conscious effort, in ourselves, and in the wider community.  Do you think today’s younger generation is more inclined, through their use of social media and their instant connection to an audience, for example, to fight for change, or do you think they are less inclined, perhaps in part due to the constant scrutiny that comes along with that use of social media?

LCM: I don’t think this is a generational issue so much as a cultural one. I notice that many of my students, for example, are reluctant to engage in activism, but if we look to the Parkland students we can see the ways that this generation is not only capable of very effective activism, but are committed to it because the generations before them have dropped the ball. (Fellow Gen Xers, I’m looking at you.) People often deride Millennials for our own cultural failures, but let’s remember that Occupy Wallstreet was largely fueled by the energy of Millennials, many of whom had been economically disenfranchised by the stock market crash and were protesting that there was no accountability for the corporate greed that got us into that mess in the first place, though there were bailouts to rescue those corporations from the consequences of their own actions. My advice to my students in Generation Z, who might feel that the pressure of various scrutinies inhibits their freedom to “step out of line” and into what Representative John Lewis might call the “good trouble” of civil disobedience, is that there is no one who will ever give you permission to practice your own freedoms except yourself, which is why we must support our collective liberation in all the ways we know how.

—

Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and author of the essay collection The Reckonings, the memoir The Other Side — both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists — and the memoir Trespasses. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Guernica, and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the Founding Director of the Houston Flood Museum.

Having moved from England aged 24, Jo Varnish now lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.  Her short stories, creative nonfiction, and poetry have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Manqué Magazine, Brevity Blog and Nine Muses Poetry.  Last year, Jo was a writer in residence at L’Atelier Writers in France.  Currently studying for her MFA, Jo can be found on twitter as @jovarnish1.

 

Kervinen’s Cyber Poetics

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(ma press, 2018)

REVIEW AND INTERVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

—

“What does poetry look like in the technological age.” Kenneth Goldsmith

 

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, an internationally recognized artist, is a Finnish composer, producer, writer, visual artist, publisher [ma press], and editor of the new journal, coelacanth—a venue for experimental poetry. His work focuses, mainly, on algorithmic processes, computer-assisted compositions, and various other methods based on cybernetics, chaotic dynamics, and stochastic systems, among others. For purposes of the present review, I am advancing Kervinen as a “cyber poet,” and his book, as little as a single point, can be read as a collection of randomly-generated prose poems or as a long-form poem. The following piece is representative of the works in the volume:

 

Limpness inverted psychoses black-and-

blue affidavit Not only within the breakdown

point of an L-estimator is bounds undertone

decontaminate merrymaker bloodsucker defend and

apocalypse fight bottom tacky manifestly infuse

refusal scenario aardvark sponge as a single

point dairy the image that tress thick resilient

nuclear energy difficult computationally. In

many circumstances L-estimators are adjacent

cymbal congestion temp unequivocally broadcaster

as in the median (of an

 

I asked two of my friends to read and comment on this piece. Walter, a senior citizen and serious student of classical, English-language poetry, responded that he did not understand the poem and that it might as well have been written in Finnish. Meghan, a young mother and a published poet who writes beautiful lyrics, including iambic pentameter and soft rhyming, said that the poem was not her style but that she would like to learn more about experimental literature. In a sense, these readers are correct to imply that, from a Formalist perspective, a lot is missing from these compositions, though many of the texts include elements of strong image and emotion [“repeater,” “orgasm,” “breakdown”]. For the most part, however, the compositions, in whole and in part, are “defamiliarized” and “strange,” as Viktor Shklovsky noted when speaking of poetry using common language in such a manner as to alter the reader’s sensation or perception—features relating as little as a single point to Futurism and Dadism.

Surely, the poems in as little as a single point are examples of avant garde writing, often characterized by repetition and redundancy [“L-estimator,” “breakdown” or “break-down,” “minimum or maximum”], intermittent punctuation and capitalization, as well as, non-sequiturs throughout such that words or phrases may not follow logically from one another [“collage” poetry]. Some of the phrases begin as if they might become complete sentences—then veer off into something completely unrelated [“The breakdown point of an L-estimator is given by antonym are basis of why upper and sarsaparilla accommodations transformation…”] Additionally, some cryptic meanings might have been built into the randomly-generated texts. The book’s title, for example, may refer to a “single-point rubric” [Education] or a “single point of failure” [Systems Engineering].

Further, like many innovative works [e.g., Joyce’s Ulysses], these compositions may be viewed as “language-games” [Wittgenstein], and this algorithmic prose poetry is a type of “performance art”—playful, probing multi-sensory experience, creating, for some readers, a type of [signal] noise. Also, consistent with many experimental poems, these pieces are “indeterminate,” challenging the status of the author’s and reader’s egos and lacking a “thetic” component of narrative or closure. Indeed, each word or phrase can stand alone, permitting the reader to combine and recombine them into novel [meta-novel] texts. I would urge Walter and Meghan to consider John Cage’s comment: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually, one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

(Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, courtesy of the author)

In an attempt to gain a better understanding of Kervinen’s methods and purposes, I solicited answers to four of my questions via e-mail, as follows:

Clara Jones: How would you classify this book of poems? i.e., What kind of poetry is it?

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen: For me this is a series of prose poems, all written algorithmically by my own program[s]. More usually, I call my ‘poetry’ as ‘writings’, it somehow describes [what I do] better, especially computer-generated texts, but lately I have started more and more to manually change things I am not satisfied [with], which [in] some cases means I rewrite [the] whole thing. That means the direction is from computer-generated to computer-assisted. [A] few years ago I had strict rules to NOT alter/change anything generated by my programs. [I]t was just one binary choice: [generated] either by computer or manually. Getting older seems to mean getting a bit softer, too.

CJ: Can you envision ever working with an “intelligent machine” [robot] with haptic [human interface]  capabilities to create poetry?

JK: I have done computer-generated music, texts and images [since the] early 1980’s, and so far, I haven’t seen anything even remotely intelligent [in] any machines. [W]e are still far away [from] “thinking” computers. [T]here’s always [a] human behind [the machine], programming, collecting data, organizing information etc, and of course, someone need[s] to switch the computer on. For me, [the] computer is an extended pen, another point of view, [a] different approach, where I “convert” my ideas to the format the computer is able to handle and then write the program to generate stuff, according [to]  the idea I have already formed in my mind. So, basically, I write programs to emulate myself.

CJ: As a poet, what is the worst or best advice you have ever received?

JK: I have no formal education in writing or literature, I studied musicology, composing and computing in university. So, this is [an] interesting question. [P]erhaps because of [the] nature of my writings, I have never gotten any advices. Not a single one.

CJ: What poetry projects are you currently working on?

JK: I am mostly working with music currently, but I write 1-3 books per year, run two presses, Gradient Books and ma press, and I am editing [the] first issue of [a] new e-zine, coelacanth; these are ongoing projects. I work very impulsively, I have no idea what I am going to do tomorrow, or next three hours. I am [currently] working with some art-related, mostly music, processes [most of] the time. [My] children have all moved to [their] own houses; I am living with my wife and our four cats, and I work constantly, except when sleeping, time [that] is dedicated to [my] extremely stupid dreams, which can’t be related to anything in real life. And not only stupid, they are usually also unbelievable boring. I also eat, but that I have always considered as a waste of time.

Clearly, Kervinen has given much thought to his multi-faceted career as an experimental artist. Whether or not he considers himself an overtly “political poet,” his methods are oppositional—refusing to conform to mainstream standards established by Formalists such as Cleanth Brooks or Helen Vendler. At the same time, although we might classify him with the Post-modernists [fracture/fractured language and motivation], he shares with Modernists, such as Eliot, James, and Stevens, the acts of expanding our understanding of poetry’s forms and content. One is reminded of Kenneth Goldsmith’s observation: “An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.” Surely this perspective suggests that experimental compositions, such as those in as little as a single point, share features in common with what most critics and readers think of as traditional poetry (e.g., originality, “interpretive power”). Indeed, it might be suggested that Kervinen’s poems are not anti-authoritarian as ends in themselves but, rather, innovative and exploratory commentaries on contemporary psycho-social ways of being and “events in the world”—both existential and veridical. This is an important book that is highly recommended to consumers of the avant garde, as well as, to any reader curious about the current and future direction of cyber literature.

—

Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is author of the poetry collection, /feminine nature/ (GaussPDF, 2017). Clara, also, conducts research on experimental literature, radical publishing, as well as, art and technology.

[REVIEW] The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams by Mary Mackey

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(Marsh Hawk Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY JOAN GELFAND

—

Having just won the Eric Hoffer Award for the Best Book Published by a Small Press in 2019 and a Women’s Spirituality Book Award, The Jaguars that Prowl our Dreams: Collected Poems 1974-2018 is a stellar work. In the span of forty years, Mary Mackey has published 14 novels, most with big five publishers (two under the pseudonym “Kate Clemens”) and eight collections of poetry, one of which, Sugar Zone, published by Marsh Hawk Press, won her the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence.

Added to these accolades, two of Mackey’s quirky and sensual poems from the series “Kama Sutra of Kindness” (Travelers With no Ticket Home) were featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. All this was accomplished while teaching Film and Creative Writing at California State University Sacramento for over thirty years.

Mackey is a magnificent thinker with broad passions: pagan cultures, literature, anthropology, ecology and history are subject explored in “Jaguars.” After graduating with her PhD from The University of Michigan in 1970, she arrived in Berkeley, California, and began publishing in earnest.  Her first novel, Immersion, was recently re-released. An ecofeminist novel, which takes place in the jungles of Costa Rica, it is a portent of climate change.

Serious topics such as ecofeminism, history, and ecology might sound dry, but like many magnificent thinkers before her, Mackey is in full possession of a wild and wacky sense of humor that always puts her readers at ease. I’ll also say here that while her mind is magnificent and her interests broad, her work, while stunningly layered, is always accessible.

I first fell in love with Mary Mackey’s poetry when she arrived at the open mic at the Gallery Café (San Francisco), a series that had a reputation for attracting exceptional poets. Mackey’s vibrant jungle imagery mixed with her confident and mellifluent Portuguese enchanted and enticed me to learn more about her work.

 

From Sugar Zone:

“Eles estão comendo   they’re eating

purple snails   powdered viper venom

lagartas esmagadas   flowers that dye their lips

the color of blood   singing of cities of blue glass

and the jaguars that prowl our dreams”

 

We are not in Kansas anymore, I whispered to myself. Or even San Francisco.  It was thrilling.

As I became increasingly familiar with Mackey’s new collection, I was beguiled, awestruck and amazed at her ability to embrace the beauty of the world while being able to hold the frighteningly challenging, particularly in Brazil where real and present dangers were omnipresent. Rather than recoil, Mackey remained alert to the terrors and danger, external and internal threats:

 

“Sempre me amendrontou    I have always

been afraid  tankers strung out along the horizon

like a necklace of black

seeds   a idéia de ter um filho   of the idea

of having a child   let’s get drunk

on cachaça forget her outstretched

hands her face   the delicate angle of her nose

 

Mackey allows anxiety its full due, asking questions with no answers, setting down posits that lead nowhere except to more difficult questions.

 

tell me why they are burning

palm trees on the road to the airport

why the water tastes like ashes

why the windows of the cars are blind?

(Sugar Zone)

 

As a poet and reviewer, I had spent time researching Elizabeth Bishop’s source documents at Vassar College. In my essay, “Elizabeth bishop’s Alternate Worlds,” I explore Bishop’s development as a poet and novelist and the work she did before and after her experience in the Brazilian jungle.

I had delved into the boxes of archives guarded by the college where the young Bishop had studied and been taken under the wing of the well-connected Marianne Moore. As I worked, I began to make connections between the two poets.

Connections yes. But I want to make something clear before we go too far down the road:  Bishop’s visions that resulted in a series of mystical and magical poems were inspired by experiences in the Brazilian jungle with ayahuasca – a half century before the hallucinogenic substance became a household word. Mackey is, and has always been, stone cold sober.

 

From the poem: “I Went to the Jungle Seeking Hallucinations”:

“I drank nothing I ate nothing

yet the fevers made me prophetic”

 

The daughter of a medical doctor, her experience with “an alternate world’ and visions began at a young age with an unfortunate predilection for running dangerously high fevers; an experience which terrified her parents but gave her the first opening to another reality.

 

From “Breaking the Fever”:

When I was young

fevers were attacked

the grown-ups would rub you

with alcohol

wrap you in wet sheets

refuse you blankets

fan you, feed you

plunge your wrists in cold water

 

In this poem, we have the entry into the world of a child disabled by illness in the form of a ravaging fever. Mackey uses a fine, but almost sickly rhythm here that telegraphs that this forced bed rest is just the beginning of the saga. Using recombinative rhyme (echoing/ wrap you, refuse you blankets, fan you feed you), we are in unflinchingly dire territory that is about to get worse:

 

“…At 105 I would start to hear voices

soft and lulling

at 106 faces would appear

swimming around me

 

stretching out their hands

they would gesture to me

to join them

I was always very happy then

floating out on the warm brink

of the world.”

 

No ayuhuasca required.

The second and third pages of the poem are absolutely magical, but it’s a spoiler if I tell you where this poem goes.

Whatever the outcome of that 106-fevered experience, one thing is certain: it opened Mackey to a world she could live with, so that years later, when she is struck in the Amazon jungle, she maintains the strength and presence of mind to pen another brilliant poem. For example, in her recent poem “105 Degrees and Rising,” Mackey writes that fever:

 

‘lifts [me] from my bed/in an ascending spiral /whispering my name over and over”

 

If what comes before prepares us for what comes next, Mackey has been prepared as a child by those fevered visions, once striking in the safely of her parents’ home, now striking in the far away, primitive jungle. In both cases, she hangs tight.

It is in the “Infinite Worlds” section of Jaguars that Mackey begins to let loose with imagery that is memorable, remarkable and absolutely frightening, but always adhering to poetry’s rules and codes and aesthetically pleasing in the darkest ways:
From “Ghost Jaguars”

by day   you told us   the dead crouch in the jungle

arms wrapped around their knees

heads down   blind

living in a great blueness

that expands to the horizon

like an infinite ocean

 

at night, they rise

and hunt ghost jaguars

drink the black drink

fuck the trees

 

If you allow yourself to see this collection as a metaphor, I would suggest it depicts a poet drawn to fire, to destruction, and to experiences so intense they force you to question your life, your priorities and your raison d’etre.

It is true that, for many writers, the edge is where they feel most vital and at one with themselves. Take the journalist Marta Gellhorn, who craved war coverage as much as Hemingway needed to fish or Neruda needed his political disruptions and protests. But unlike an Ezra Pound, or a even a Carolyn Forche, there is never  a sense of judgement or partisan politics in Mackey’s work. The poems stand on their own.

And then there is the figure of Solange, a figure Mackey first introduced her readers to in her award-winning collection Sugar Zone. Solange appears repeatedly through out Mackey’s later poems. Is she real? A lost friend? I don’t know, but I do believe that if Mackey had not been opened to an alternative reality early in life, Solange, the mythical and magical creature, could never have manifested.

Here is a recent poem in which Mackey introduces us yet again to this alter ego/goddess/mythic figure:

 

“Solange in her Youth”

sometimes you froze among the briars

deaf to our pleas to come back to the boat

froze as if you were listening

to a great slow rush of water

that would someday bear you away

 

I identified Solange as a spirit sister, and I love her, and I think in many ways, Mackey must love her too. Take for example, this excerpt:

 

“for a whole week, I missed Solange

Por uma semana eu tive saudade….

 

for twenty minutes   I

stood in the deserted street . . . looking

for something

no longer there”

 

This progression of an image from book to book is exactly the beauty of a collected work: It engenders analysis; it gives readers the chance to discover how a poet arrived at point c from point a. It is, in its best form, a roadmap of a poet’s oeuvre.

Not all authors progress as Mackey has from her initial deeply personal to increasingly spiritual work. We don’t all go from the concerns of the immediate (career, partners) to thoughts of the world or to cultivating the ability to look at the wider world with compassion, patience and empathy.  Not to mention, we do not all possess the mettle to position ourselves in the middle of a remote jungle where, given our proclivity toward fever, we would likely face another bout of illness.

Reporting that Mackey has progressed from personal to global is not meant as a blanket laudatory statement. Mackey is very much a product of her times, having started publishing in the 70’s when women writers were seeking to analyze their personal lives – the correctness of their politics, their sexual relationships and their career choices. One must remember that Mackey began writing her poetry just as an entire movement of women was breaking the chains of invisibility, just as entire classes of people today ache to break the chains of poverty, drug warlords and .

And for all of this poet’s serious looking, connection making, and reportage, Mackey is in full possession of humor; she takes life, but not herself, seriously. This humor puts us at ease. For example, I find it impossible not to laugh when reading “L Tells All,” Mackey’s rewrite of the myth of Leda and the Swan, reincarnated as a confession in a supermarket tabloid. Apparently, Leda’s relationship with Zeus did not go well:

 

“we had nothing in common

his feathers made me sneeze

I was afraid to fly

he was married

(of course

they all are)

we even had religious differences

 

This critique of a collection of Mackey’s best poems from a total of eight  of her ten collections, leaves four collections I have not given their full due. To summarize: the early collections function as the foundation of Mackey’s magnificent mansion: we have a stand-alone section entitled “A Threatening Letter to Shakespeare,” and four previous book length collections: Split Ends (a deeply personal collection –  4 poems included) One Night Stand (3 poems on the topic of sexual politics,) Skin Deep and The Dear Dance of Eros 13 poems total on the topic of a young woman choosing to move through the world, the walls she hits, and the doors she pushes open.

Like the painters Gaugin, Picasso, Manet, this poet would never have found her rhythm had the early poems not been written. They are part of the journey and the training of the muscles of listening and opening, crafting and communicating.

And, finally, in 2018, along with writing new poems about the tropics, Mackey began to explore her Kentucky roots. These Kentucky poems form the section “The Culling”  open the collection. Personally, these poems, as much as I support delving into one’s heritage and being transparent, are like an astronaut taking up gardening. It’s a fine pursuit, but we know that she must have the dream of space on her mind. These poems read like an addition to the family archives, an exposure of a painful roots, but they do not possess the same fully inhabited, magical, exotic and inspired worlds of the other collections. Perhaps because the information came down in family lore rather than immediate experience, they lack the same emotional investment, and even curiosity.

Still it takes a confident poet to lay down the tracks of a family whose matriarch was mangled by a hog, where guns prevailed, horrible catastrophes were common, and men were summarily valued over women. The hazard here, is that by opening with this series of poems, Mackey runs the risk that her readers may not not recognize the depth of her talent and the pyrotechnics she displays in her recent mystical poems and the award-winning books that have catapulted her to fame.

—

Author of “You Can Be a Winning Writer: The 4 C’s of Successful Authors” (Mango Press), three volumes of poetry and an award-winning chapbook of short fiction, Joan Gelfand‘s novel set in a Silicon Valley startup will be published in 2020 by Mastodon Press. Recipient of numerous awards, nominations and honors, Joan’s work appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Huffington Post, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Kalliope, The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Levure Litteraire,  Chicken Soup for the Soul and many lit mags and journals. Joan coaches writers on their publication journey.  http://joangelfand.com

[REVIEW] Headlong by Ron MacLean

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(Mastodon Publishing, 2019)

REVIEW BY WENDY J. FOX

—

Well into Ron MacLean’s Headlong—originally published in 2013, and reissued this year by Mastodon Publishing—Nick Young, needing something to help him channel his anger and worry, does what he says he used to do in the old days to get through it: he writes.

Nick is a washed-up journalist who has returned to his hometown to help his father after a stroke, and it is with a journalist’s nose for uncovering a story that MacLean develops this novel over a hot Boston summer. Middle-aged and divorced, it’s clear Nick would probably not have left his life in LA (despite there not being much to leave) if he thought he had any choice in the matter. He’s unemployed bordering on unemployable, and not a single women enters his orbit without her appearance being commented on. He’s grossly fond of the word “sexy.”

Yet, MacLean’s steady hand manages to balance the floundering, can’t get out of his own way, occasionally lecherous Nick with an important story about activism, friendship, and family.

The novel follows the thread of a labor dispute that ignites into violent protest, pitting radicalized youth against corporate scions, and ups the already high stakes of what it truly can mean for families when workers are striking by weaving in the unsolved murder of two union janitors, a complicated friendship with a close friend’s son, and a police department who protects their own.

Against this backdrop, Nick is coming to terms with what it means to him to be a journalist again, and while he fights it, his muckracker instincts will not allow him to let go of any lead, and he begins to cover the story in earnest, landing a feature and a column. At the same time, he’s sleeping on a futon in his father’s neglected home, the medical bills from the nursing facility are piling up, and his dad, who is not improving, regularly mistakes Nick for Nick’s dead uncle.

Headlong is a kind of modern—and decidedly literary—take on hardboiled crime and detective stories. MacLean’s careful pacing and thoughtful character development lends a novel that could easily veer into the didactic or cliché a layer of empathy, while still keeping the elements of the genre that keep the plot exciting and the pages turning.

Ultimately, though, Headlong is a book about what it means to have idealism, to lose it, and to start to find the thread of it again. It is a novel about having been young and not being young any more, and it challenges readers to consider mortality and their own choices. What do we think justice, whether it is social, environmental, meted out by a judge or a family member, really means? MacLean doesn’t have all the answers, but he pushes us to understand what we’d give, or give up, to get it, and he writes through all of these questions with an assured, steady grace.

—

Wendy J. Fox is the author of The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories (winner, Press 53 short fiction contest & finalist for the Colorado Book Award), The Pull of It (named a top 2016 book by Displaced Nation) and the forthcoming novel If the Ice Had Held, selected as the Santa Fe Writers Project grand prize winner by Benjamin Percy. Writing from Denver, CO and tweeting from @wendyjeanfox.

[REVIEW] Scattered Clouds by Reuben Jackson

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(Alan Squire Publishing, 2019)

REVIEW BY RISA DENENBERG

—

In a poem titled “on the road,” Reuben Jackson introduces a motif that recurs throughout his new collection, Scattered Clouds: New and Selected Poems (Alan Squire Publishing, 2019). This poem—the first one in the book—tells the story of black family taking a car trip in 1959, in which the son convinces his dad to stop for the night in Columbia, South Carolina, at “the frontier motel,” but then, it takes this turn,

It worked,

         So why did he return without
room keys?

In his sixties now, Jackson possesses a formidable curriculum vitae, with overlapping careers as music scholar, jazz archivist, teacher, mentor, radio host, and poet. Scattered Clouds mingles poems from his first collection, fingering the keys (Gut Punch Press, 1990) with newer poems, creating a tome that is both retrospective and contemporary.

The title, Scattered Clouds, seems to suggest free movement, which is in synch with the many poems that feature jazz musicians—Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Gato Barbieri, Johnny Hodges, Big Mama Thornton, Ben Webster, among others. These poems are a history lesson in 20th century jazz and funk. Reading them, I felt well-schooled. In the poem, “thelonius,” about jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, Jackson offers this reflection,

bizarre?
mysterious?

i say no.

for he swung like branches in a march wind.

reached down
into the warm pocket of tenderness.

Scattered Clouds also suggests a sheltering sky that is overcast with shrouds of racism, suicide, and brutality. This more menacing aspect is evoked in many of these poems, for example, the poem, “Key West,” where Jackson again portrays a youth traveling in the South with family, in which the young speaker notices a white woman, and is admonished by his mother,

. . . to turn my eyes
Toward Heaven

         Where it seemed
Even the sky and clouds
Sat

         Apart

The book’s first section is comprised of the poems from fingering the keys. These poems are intimate, revolving around childhood, family, neighborhood, school, and a mounting awareness of black musicians, black music, and black political struggle. The interesting, rather than affected, use of no caps throughout fingering the keys confers an ethos of authenticity to these poems (democracy with a small ‘d’), as if Jackson is saying: These are for me and you, I will sing if you care to listen. His language, always accessible, is graceful and emotionally powerful.

In the book’s second section, “2: city songs,” Jackson returns to the many of the same motifs, often captured through a wide-angle lens. In “white flight, washington dc, 1959,” he recounts,

no more playmates
staring
quizzically
at the negroes
on my father’s
album covers

sarah goldfarb
reminded me
of a girl i saw
in an old mgm movie

even though her father said that
like my crush on her
was impossible

Jackson was raised in Washington DC. His year of birth—1954—was the same year the Supreme Court ordered desegregation of public schools throughout the U.S. Of course desegregation has never achieved integration or parity in education for black children. Still, it is notable that DC schools were among the first to implement the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and so, for a while during the late fifties (prior to ‘white flight’) public schools in DC were integrated. I am a Jewish woman born in DC, who also attended DC public schools in the fifties. Jackson’s poems about his childhood make me feel we might have been classmates. You could substitute risa denenberg for sarah goldfarb. We have all suffered the effects of segregation, a point I think Jackson makes most eloquently here, just as he describes its most insidious effects on African Americans.

Consider these devastating lines from “thinking of emmett till,” where the speaker’s experience brings the lynching of Emmett Till to his mind,

stars winked
above the diner
where I asked
a blonde waitress
for sugar,

and got
threatened by
a local

with
bloodthirsty
smile.

The last section of the book, “3: sky blues,” contains a sweet surprise, a delicious and light dessert after a nourishing, but somewhat heavy, meal.  To appreciate the origin of these poems, you need to know that for several years, Jackson relayed stories about his friend from Detroit, Amir, via Facebook posts. In an introduction to this section, titled “Amir & Khadijah: A Suite,” Jackson describes how he “first met the late poet-barber-romantic curmudgeon, Amir Yasin, at a party,” and “in the spring of 2017” Amir “met Khadijah Rollins.” They fall in love, Amir writes some poems, and the couple was “not so secretly married.” We are also told that “Sadly, Brother Yasin died in his sleep in early 2018.” Jackson concedes that he shares a birthday with Yasin, and claims that it was Khadijah who “thought it would be nice” to include “a few of Yasin’s love-struck musings.” Whether Amir was a poetic persona or an alter ego, whether the romance was actual or imaginary, hardly matters. I can’t help but wish that I had followed Jackson’s social media musings.

There is a tonal shift in Amir’s poems that we don’t find in Jackson’s. They are short and lyrical— and downright romantic. From several poems titled, “Dearest Khadijah,” we find these lines,

To touch your face is to
Feel my fingers pray.

And,

         She is a buoy
in the harbor
at dusk.

In this section we also find this Jackson-penned poem, titled “For Trayvon Martin,” in which the speaker-as-angel walks 17-year old Trayvon home from the store with soulful tenderness—an act which is also a prayer. It ends with these two stanzas:

We shake hands and hug –
Ancient, stoic tenderness.
I nod to the moon.

I’m so old school –
I hang until the latch clicks like
An unloaded gun.

Abashedly, I admit that I had not read Jackson prior to reading Scattered Clouds. But that is exactly why this compilation of poems from his first book with the two sections of newer poems is such a gem. If some of the poems are familiar, you will nod as you read them. And if not, you will feel like you’ve been missing something. Scattered Clouds further establishes Jackson’s role as a steward of Americana.

—

Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She is a co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press; curator at The Poetry Café Online; and has published three full length collections of poetry, most recently, “slight faith” (MoonPath Press, 2018).  

[REVIEW] water by Reuben Woolley and Jan Stead

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(Self-published and hand-bound [limited edition, /10, 17cm x 21cm])

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

—

“The chap book with Reuben is finally finished…[t]he stitching was the hardest part—getting the holes lined up and not tangling the linen thread. I have had angst over this bit since the project started but I am relieved to find it all worked….” Jan Stead blog, smallwindowstudio

“There was earth inside them, and they dug.” Paul Celan

I regularly peruse Entropy Magazine‘s feature, Where To Submit, and have noticed that a few journals are dedicated exclusively to collaborative writing; and, in the domain of experimental literature, hybrid work—often between writers and visual artists—is not uncommon. Collaboration is difficult, even between the best of friends. There are always issues of coordination and control, not to mention the inevitable conflicts of egos. I collaborated with a colleague once—on a major writing project, and it was the worst experience of my 40-year professional life. Notwithstanding others’ experiences, Reuben Woolley and Jan Stead have produced a joint effort that has yielded outstanding results. water, the pamphlet under review, is a visually stunning creative work showcasing the noteworthy talents of two artists—one a poet, one a printmaker and painter.

Jan Stead answered questions from me via Facebook. I, especially, wanted to know more about her life and work, her inspirations, and her role, as well as her process creating water. What follows is extracted from her responses. She is located in the UK, residing in North Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire where she has a “small window studio.” Often working outside, Nature and, in general, the world around her, are her primary influences. She “admires” David Hockney and, also, draws inspiration from words. “Reuben’s work has recently been very important to me….” A former teacher, Stead now works full-time as an artist.

Regarding the chapbook with Reuben, Stead received five poems from him with a water theme or thread, afterward, preparing the illustrations. In her words: “I made five drypoint plates on metal and decided on a colour palette so there was a coherence [see photo accompanying this review]. I used ultramarine, permanent yellow, permanent red, raw sienna hue and sepia on a textured paper. I followed a ‘traditional order’, the front cover is a Bastard Title i.e. no author name just the title, followed by an introduction as to the composition of the book. This page was signed by us both so I signed first, then it went to Spain for Reuben to sign and then back here. The poem and its illustration were stitched together first in a way that makes them lay flat when the book opens so you can see text and image together.” Further: “ The ‘illustrations’ for the poems are drypoint etchings each are an edition of 10 that is shown as /10. They are made by incising the lines into a metal plate with a variety of sharp hand tools. I retyped Reuben’s poems in an old typewriter font following his layout.” Additional details, including, technical ones, can be found on Stead’s blog and on her Facebook feed.

Reuben Woolley is an internationally recognized poet from the UK who resides in Spain. He has been featured in jacket2 and other venues, he has been interviewed by editors, publishers, academics, and other poets, and his books, chapbooks, and poems have been received enthusiastically by his readers, peers, and publishers, particularly, those who appreciate “exploratory” or political poetry. In addition to writing, Woolley publishes and edits two poetry journals, The Curly Mind, an online venue for innovative work, and, I am not a silent poet, an online journal reserved for poetry with political relevance, especially, topics concerning abuse. Reuben’s “referential” [Marjorie Perloff] poems have an instantly-recognizable style—elements of collage; juxtapositions of words, phrases, and other grammatical units—[apparently] meaningful or not; repetition [from water, the word, “tick”]; soft and hard rhyming [from water, “speak” – “speak,” “light” – “night,”, “ways” –  “waves”]; copious white spaces; innovation and play with grammar and punctuation [especially, use of periods, double-spaces, and back-slashes as partial or full stops—sometimes, along with white spaces, slowing the pace of reading]; lack of capitalization;, as well as, relative consistency of form.

All of these features not only demonstrate that Woolley has “found his niche,” but, also, that his poems have a recognizable and intentional “voice” and persona. In addition, the consistent and repetitive features of his poems unify his work within each poem, within books, and across collections, highlighting a perspective expressed in a 2018 interview: “Miles Davis, John Coltrane, who led me into Free Jazz. [sic] I’m trying to get a Free Poetry of a similar Nature. This does not mean anarchy; no good verse is free. The good poet…controls every element at his or her disposal….” Woolley’s work is in no manner “derivative;” however, he has credited numerous musicians and writers as inspirations—among these are, Paul Celan, Jerome Rothenberg, Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Denise Levertov, Bob Dylan, Charles Bernstein, Alice Notley, Helen Ivory, and Fran Lock.

water is heavily influenced by literary conventions, apparently, characteristic of all of his poems, since echoes of his last book resonate throughout the brief, new, 5-poem, 5-print, collection. In January 2019, I reviewed that expertly-written and handsomely-produced volume, some time we are heroes, in the online journal, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, observing that: “The repetition of wet things—liquid things—is ubiquitous throughout the text  [ e.g., ‘water,’ ‘blood,’ ‘rain,’ ‘beer,’ ‘breast milk,’ ‘ocean,’ ‘liquor,’ ‘tears’],”, and one notices that the last word of water‘s final poem [“north  water  &  waves”] is “heroes” [“my whispering heroes”], lending water a type of closure or regularity over time. In addition, many words in the new book refer, directly or indirectly, to water, among them, “rain,” “ocean,” “fish,” “sea,” “waves,” and “boats.”

In literature, “water” symbolizes life, cleansing, and rebirth. Reuben’s poems, read, in water, from first to last, can be interpreted as a person’s quest for wholeness over the course of his/her life—over time [from water, “you hear tick tock the old / like fish / remember six seconds repeat / staring a cold night /   tick      / tock              ;”  “a same you say / a doppler / shift  ticktocticktock / we band the waves  a truly / sea”]. Though, throughout water, there seems to be no necessary correspondence between poem [left-hand page] and color print [right-hand page], each of Stead’s fluid, misty images contains a circle, and three [of five] prints contain either, what appear to be, branches or a trunk of trees. The circle symbolizes Mother Earth or sacred space and is reminiscent of the Hindu/Buddhist/Jainist, Mandala, in which a circle appears within a square with a center point—the “boundaries” inherent to circle-symbolism. Related to these associations between poems and prints, trees symbolize, like water, union or physical and spiritual nourishment. Of course, water can be soothing and nourishing, as well as, dangerous, highlighting the present pamphlet’s complex and rich themes of life, death, and time [and memory?] that are replete with what the poetry critic, Helen Vendler, has called, “interpretive power” [see, especially, the poems, “private battlefields / personal interpretations” and “not  crossing  i  say”].

I would be remiss not to mention water as an example of the monetization of poetry—a short work of art sold for 100 pounds sterling. While this initiative is not a novel one, it is not practiced on a wide scale, and it may be time for poets to discuss methods for making their work financially sustainable. By way of e-mail, I asked Woolley about plans for a marketing strategy for the expensive, new collection. He responded that, probably, the pamphlet will be sold at Stead’s art exhibitions and in galleries. The poet noted, with surprise, that one of his Facebook followers has expressed an interest in purchasing a copy of water and that, at a later date, the artists “might bring out copies at a lower price…after the ten are sold.” Another idea floated by the poet, based on Bob Dylan’s lithograph prints, “The Drawn Blank Series,” would be to produce a “series of the artwork and poem combined.” In 2018, I wrote a proposal* suggesting that poets market their work, in association with a visual artist, according to the same criteria employed by visual and other artists [e.g., “performance artists”] who contract with galleries. The intent would be, in part, to enhance poets’ income from their art, to broaden the influence and impact of poetry, as well as, to increase the range of artforms represented by a given gallery.

Clearly, no poet would be obligated to participate in such a marketing strategy. However, if the tactics were even marginally successful, advantages (e.g., stream of income, incentive for poetry journals to pay poets, increased status of Poetry among the Arts and in public) should obtain to poets and galleries alike. The Woolley-Stead model and related concepts might be discussed at literary retreats, conferences, M.F.A. departments, etc. Whatever devolves from initiatives like water, the pamphlet represents a psychological and spiritual whole that many of us hope to achieve across our lifetimes. Though not a religious text in any manner, Woolley and Stead have created a chapbook for the spirit, in addition to, a work of intellect, sensation, and emotion—Art, in the most fundamental sense, worthy of being part of a rare book collection. water will be well-received by all readers of hybrid texts and avant-garde projects.

 

*available via e-mail request: foucault03@gmail.com

—

Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is author of the collection, Poems for Rachel Dolezal (GaussPDF, 2019).