The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.
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BY NANCY REDDY
I began this series wanting to think about what it means to be stuck in your writing. People get stuck for lots of reasons: a hard new project, rejection, fear of failure, lack of time. Jessica Abel, a creativity coach I interviewed for an upcoming column, says that people who already have a track record of creative success often get stuck because they commit to too many projects and get scattered. (Her “What’s Stopping You?” checklist might help you uncover the obstacles in your way.) Hannah Rule, a writing studies scholar who I interviewed for a previous column, describes freewriting as one way into generating new ideas, and she also described a more social approach to brainstorming, when she asks her students to pass papers around the room and comment on each other’s ideas for research projects.
But sometimes I think being stuck originates in places outside the writing.
I was really struck by poet and memoirist E. J. Koh’s description of this phenomenon: “It’s not that I’m stuck in my writing; I am stuck somewhere in my living.” When she’s stuck like this, she writes, “Then I do what I fear doing. I must make amends with my mother, or I must challenge my terror with flying, or I will do that thing I do not want to do.”
Koh’s piece made me think about the non-writing things that help me sustain a writing practice. They’re actually pretty simple: plenty of exercise and enough quiet space in my life so I can hear my brain work. Because my utter lack of hand-eye coordination made team sports and gym class torture for me, it’s taken me until well into my adult life to think about my body as much more than a house for my brain. But, like many of us, I have a brain that spins and spins, and I’ve found that a run goes a long way in bringing it back to a manageable hum. My sister, whose brain is similarly busy, has recently taken up meditation, and she recommends the UCLA Mindfulness app. (Apparently, my dad, who’s also taken up yoga in his late 60s, recommended it to her; may we all be so full of surprises.)
And exercise can also provide a space away from the computer or notebook to let my brain work on a problem. When I was at the Vermont Studio Center this past summer, I’d write inside my studio until I just couldn’t go any further, then go for a run along the rail trail; several days, as I moved, the problem I was working on unstuck itself as I passed over bridges and through fields. (I recommend using the voice recorder on your phone to capture those sentences, even if you look like an oddball talking to yourself in the middle of a trail or street.)
I’ve learned, especially since having kids, that in order to be an even halfway decent human being, much less a writer, I need a not-insubstantial amount of time to myself– and I’ve learned that “by myself” means also the absence of digital distractions. When I walk to spinning or barre at the exercise studio in my little town, I leave my phone at home, and the quiet of that half-mile walk each way is truly restorative. (It also means that I can’t Instagram my early-morning exercise, which is good, because no one really likes those people, anyway.)
Other people have different answers to this question of how to make a writing life. At a recent event at the Penn Book Center, Carmen Maria Machado and Jaquira Díaz were asked about self-care and revealed that their practices both include therapy and sex. When I asked people on twitter, I was struck by how many people’s answers included nature, like novelist and poet Valerie Nieman’s comment about “hiking solo – the only voices are the ones in my head.” Twila Newey’s reply, that she refuels through “walking, reading, gardening, staring out windows, the beach, birds & the moon” made me think about the value of non-productive work, that what looks like staring or wandering is often actually part of the writing. And though defending “doing nothing” as a pathway to increased creative work might not be quite what Jenny Odell had in mind, I’m finding myself especially receptive to arguments for creating open spaces in our lives.
So, if you’re feeling stuck, you might think about what practices or habits or breaks in routine–all the parts of your life that are distinct from but intertwined with your writing life–could help you get unstuck. As Hannah Rule points out, “writing isn’t contained in the mind or in the relay between mind and page; it rather romps all over–into cars, classrooms, night shifts, nurseries, showers, walks, laundry, chats, everywhere!” What do you need to make your writing life?
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NANCY REDDY is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series, and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere, and her essays have appeared most recently in Electric Literature. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University. She’s working on a narrative nonfiction book about the trap of natural motherhood.
In this time of reflection, we invite you to sit down with our 2019 [PANK] Books Poetry Contest Winner, How to Love the World by Elvira Basevich and selected by Trace DePass. Basevich’s words are as haunting as they are beautiful in this stunning meditation on trauma, resilience and hope.
Set just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, How to Love the World is at once a condemnation of the world, a daydream of America, and an unsent love letter—written and rewritten over the course of ten years—to a dead family. A meditation on intergenerational trauma, resilience, and hope, How to Love the World is written in the tradition of epic poetry and follows the author as she retraces her mother’s journey to New York City in the summer of ‘89. A Jewish-Uyghur refugee, the author is born along the way, marking the unclear boundary when the memory of a family becomes historical memory, loss the condition of a new beginning. How to Love the World casts refugee women and daughters as the rightful judges of the world and the world as the rightful home of all human beings.
Even in a catastrophic world, still we seek the solace of stories. You won’t be disappointed with our April release We Know This Will All Disappear, a first collection by Melissa Ragsly and our 2019 [PANK] Fiction Book Winner selected by Gabino Iglesias.
We Know This Will All Disappear is a collection of short stories and flash pieces that explore the chaotic and exhilarating inner lives of women and grief. The sense of loss they navigate does not always stem from the death of a loved one, but rather the loss of something dear, something familiar. What do we put in that empty place when something is gone?
These stories create a beautiful and devastating atmosphere for the reader to follow characters as they play an emotional hide-and-seek. Looking for answers as well as questions in dark surprising places. Replacing a lost thing, you can make your world more chaotic and claustrophobic—adopt a mannequin with your friends, sing the entire karaoke catalog, sell your story to a momager—or you can shed things around you to make more room for the grief. You can rent a secret room, you can grow your baby outside the womb, you can sleep in your childhood bedroom under your Bruins posters. These are the ways these characters survive.
These sixteen stories are not about defeated people, but people that are in a pause, a crossroads, that only they see before them. These characters are intimate with themselves; intimacies are raw but not always truthful. These are stories of adaption.
“We Know This Will All Disappear burrows under your skin looking for answers to questions you didn’t know you’d asked. These stories are dirty, brilliant, painfully human, fast, and strangely sensual. They were pulled from somewhere between a drunken phone call and a half-forgotten childhood dream. Read them.” – Gabino Iglesias
Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X is a strangely poetic,
heartfelt, dark, and wonderfully creepy exploration of womanhood dipped in
surrealism and wrapped in a bizarre love story where physicality plays a
central role. Packed with writing that inhabits the interstitial place between
horror, literary fiction, science fiction, and dark fantasy, The Book of X is
a unique narrative that pushes against the boundaries of the genres it draws
from while simultaneously carving a new space for itself in contemporary
fiction.
Cassie, like her mother before her, was born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. Despite the deformity, she spends a somewhat normal childhood with her parents and older brother on the family meat farm. She usually stays home with mom while her father and brother go to the farm to rip chunks of flesh from the earth to sell at the market. When Cassie starts going to school, her life is sometimes disrupted by people who discover her physical abnormality. Cassie grows up and learns that finding a boyfriend and making friends are no easy tasks when your body is considered grotesque by most people. After surviving school, she leaves home and moves to the city where she finds a desk job. While living in the city, Cassie meets a few men, but it never works out. Meanwhile, the knot in her abdomen starts causing her pain and she begins to visit various doctors in hopes of finding a solution. The struggles with her body seem to be a physical manifestation of the struggles she is forced to face in her new life. Her boss is abusive, the city is depressing, and her family is far from perfect. The meat from the farm brings less money every day and her parents’ aging becomes obvious to her. Finally, her father dies and that sends her back home. Her return to the farm, an experimental surgery, and a new man who enters Cassie’s life under less than ideal circumstances force her to reconsider her life as she learns to enjoy imperfect love and comes to terms with her identity and body.
Etter created a unique world in The Book of X. Most of the narrative deals with everyday events like going to school, going to work, financial woes, a rough mother, and coping with rejection and depression. On the other hand, the story is infused with surreal elements?a store that sells men, meat farming, strange medical procedures?that somehow make perfect sense within the context of the story. Reality and weirdness inhabit the same spaces effortlessly and without clashing against each other. The result is a novel with a gloomy, depressive core that is also somehow hauntingly beautiful and wildly entertaining in its strangeness.
While this novel is unique and Etter’s voice is entirely her own, there were passages that reminded me of a variety of works, all of which are among my favorites. For example, the combination of sadness and strangeness brought to mind the novels of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Also, the book features short chapters made up entirely of dark imagery, strange visions, and nightmares that haunt Cassie. These passages are strong enough to cause discomfort in the reader. Also, they reminded me of the bizarre sense of discomfort and fascination I always feel while watching Begotten, an American experimental film written, produced, edited, and directed by E. Elias Merhige that has no dialogue and is entirely made up of dark, gruesome, religious, disturbing imagery:
“He opens the lid wider. More light creeps into the box, and I can see bodies slithering beneath the water, slick, scaled. Suddenly, a small face comes into view beneath the surface: two eyes, strange nose, a mouth.”
While the darkness that permeates The Book of X is one of
its most powerful elements, the narrative is also infused with poetry that
comes at the reader unexpectedly, kind of like finding a gem while looking for
lost papers in a dumpster. That said, the poetry is also imbued with an
unrelenting melancholy that crawls into your chest and refuses to let go,
settling between your ribs and camping out for a few days:
“My throat is so full of love and sorrow that no more words come out. I can’t breathe and I know nothing, looking into the heart of the future, the relentless oncoming of death.”
Etter is a talented storyteller and The Book of X is proof of that. This is a book that is many things at once. On the surface, it is a narrative that explores a disfigured woman’s life and how cruelty and adverse reactions to those who are different are at the core of humanity. However, just under the surface, it is a sorrowful story about a lonely woman whose biggest wishes are to achieve some degree of normalcy in a world that has shown her how ugly normal can be and a look at the ways in which our nature as social animals drives us to relentlessly pursue companionship even when doing so repeatedly leads to suffering and rejection.
“In the afternoon, I read a book on the couch. I can barely catch the sentences, I can only imagine Henry’s lips, the history of the entire world in a kiss various genealogies of flowers blooming each time our mouths touched, how first I smelled lilac, then rose, then hyacinth, wet from the garden.”
The Book of X shines because it brilliantly enters into multiple conversations with various genres and shows how writers can use elements from whichever genre they please while respecting the rules of none of them. Etter’s many conversations, and the way she creates something entirely new, effortlessly bridge the gap between bizarro fiction, surrealism, horror, literary fiction, and noir without ever adopting any of their limitations. Furthermore, all of it happens while she creates a delightful dark and brutally honest narrative that shows what it means to be a woman in the world and that explores the ways in which what we are is brutally and/or tenderly shaped by the way others perceive us. In a way, this is a book created to expand the canon of what can be considered feminist literature, but it is also a celebration of storytelling that proves making up your own rules is sometimes the best way to create something unique and memorable.
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GABINO IGLESIAS is a writer, journalist and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. He is the book review editor for PANK Magazine and a columnist at LitReactor. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
It’s day two of [PANK] Book Week and we’re thrilled to feature the winner of our 2019 [PANK] Little Book Contest, all our futures by Jody Chan, available now for pre-order to be released in April.
all our futures confronts a history of violence against bodies deemed disposable: sick and disabled queers and racialized people, who presently and historically faced state violence and genocide in the form of institutionalization, or incarceration, or forced sterilization. This poem refuses to turn away from the entanglements of race, class, disability, and environmental and reproductive injustice. It is an indictment of conversations about family and kinship that stop at the carbon footprint of raising children. It is a love letter to a future child. It is a reckoning with climate grief, and the worlds we build for each other, one decision at a time.
Weaving between generations and geographies, all our futures asks what it means to make a life in the face of climate and political crisis— how to let go of the shame that tells us we do not deserve to imagine a future we want, a future we belong in. Ultimately, all our futures says, home is a place we make. Though nothing is guaranteed — not time, not hope — Chan imagines a place beyond climate and political apocalypse (difficult, yes; abundant, yes) where queer, disabled people are needed, valued, loved. This is a book for artists and healers and organizers, and everyone who gives their breath and heart to the hard work, the heartwork, of movement-building.
“all our futures is a potent reckoning of physicality, reproduction and lineage. Part documentary, part confessional song and part future-manifesto, these poetic sequences dissect the legacies of eugenics against disabled and indigenous peoples. With impeccable skill, desires here are interwoven with threats of doom. It is exciting to witness such a fearsome poet as Jody Chan, who reveals a world in which “no one is born clean.” – Logan February
As we gear up for weeks of reading safely indoors, there is no better time to expand your library than with the incredible new books from [PANK]! For the next week, we’ll be featuring our April Releases — starting with Sisyphusina the beautiful hybrid collection of a reflection on female aging by esteemed poet Shira Dentz. Get a head start on National Poetry Month! You can order it HERE.
Sisyphusina is a cross-genre collection of prose, poetry, visual art, and improvisatory music, centered on female aging. Faced with linguistic and literary traditions that lack rich vocabularies to describe female aging, Shira Dentz uses the hybrid form as an attempt to suture new language that reflects internal and physical processes that constitute a shifting identity. By deviating from formal classical construction, and using the recurring image of a rose, Sisyphusina circles around conventions of beauty, questioning traditional aesthetic values of continuity, coherence, and symmetry. Some of the book’s images are drawn from separate multimedia collaborations between the author and composer Pauline Oliveros, artist Kathy High, and artist Kathline Carr. A musical composition improvised by Pauline Oliveros, based on one of her text scores, titled “Aging Music,” is the book’s coda, and readers can listen to it online by scanning a QR code inside the book. The interweaving of these collaborations with the author’s voice and voices from other sources imbue this book with a porous texture, and reimagines the boundary of the book as a membrane.
Prismatics: Larry Levis & Contemporary American Poetry (Diode Editions, 2020) is a collection of the full-length transcriptions of the extended interviews Gregory Donovan and Michele Poulos conducted with a group of America’s most notable poets—including two U.S. Poet Laureates—in making the documentary film A Late Style of Fire: Larry Levis, American Poet. These discussions cover not only their relationships with Levis and his poetry, but also more wide-ranging commentaries on a broad spectrum of American literary life.
Here, they sit down with Kathleen Graber, author of new poetry collection The River Twice (Princeton University Press), winner of the UNT Rilke Prize.
Michele Poulos: Tony Hoagland, in his essay “Flight and Arrival,” discusses Levis’s various muses: oblivion, self-annihilation, extinction of the self, the end of his life, and perhaps—I’m not quoting precisely—the wish to be both present and yet always elsewhere, a longing to be nothing, which I think is provocative. Then you have what might be the other extreme, which is somebody like David St. John who says in his essay in A Condition of the Spirit, “What I see happening is a real love of the world.” So, those are distinctions that I’d like to talk about in depth.
Kathleen Graber: When I was reading several essays,
I was struck by a desire, on various critics’ parts, to make an either/or
claim: you’re either nihilistic or you’re visionary in a sort of spiritual way.
You’re in love with the world, or you’re in love with your own death. What I
like about Levis, which makes him unique, is that it’s always both; there’s
such a complexity and simultaneity of existing in those states. I’ve read
essays where that has been described as sort of ping-pong, that he’s always
oscillating between wanting an annihilation of the self and wanting a sort of
visionary, Whitmanesque embrace of the world. He believes in the political
reality—and that the political reality matters to him, as an heir to Philip
Levine—or that he doesn’t at all, and he’s a surrealist at heart and an
image-maker and that he’s much more interested in his interiority than he is in
any kind of exteriority, and that the most you could say is that he somehow is
constantly penduluming back and forth between those two impulses. It was interesting
to read about that, because I certainly see all of that in his work.
But for me,
it’s all stew. [Laughter.] It’s not “and then carrots, and then potatoes, then
meat.” It’s sort of like, “No, it’s all in there, together, at the same time,”
and it doesn’t feel like a contradiction, because poetry isn’t about putting
forth a philosophical program or a metaphysics. He’s not obligated to choose;
he’s merely obligated to be honest about what it feels like to be human, and I
think that that is what it feels like
to be human. I think that we do realize that people actually really do suffer.
There actually really is pain and political reality and oppression, war,
violence in the world, and that at the same time we have an inner life that can
be, at times, completely disconnected from that, and that we can be preoccupied
with our own interiority given the extremity of our own personal life at the
same time that we are aware of what’s going on in the world around us—those
aren’t mutually exclusive psychic states, for me anyway.
So that’s one
way of breaking out of a fractious interpretation of his work.
There’s been
a fascination with saying he’s a nihilistic poet or a morbid poet, and it gave
me a lot of pause because I had to stop and think, “Well, what do people mean
when they say something like that, when they use a world like ‘nihilism,’ which
is a sort of slippery term. And I wonder whether some spiritual people will
simply say, “If you have no faith, you’re nihilistic,” or, “If you don’t
believe in an afterlife, that’s a kind of nihilism,” or, “You don’t believe the
world has an objective meaning other than whatever meaning we ascribe to it,
and that’s nihilism.” I think that in Levis’s work, there’s always a sense of
another world beyond this one. I don’t think he believes in an afterlife per
se, but I think he feels a profound, ineffable––and that’s a term that comes up
in more than one poem––something, something that is beyond our capacity to
articulate it, that infuses the world with what feels to me like tremendous . .
. tenderness. So I don’t see the poems as nihilistic; I see them as
heartbreaking and sad, and there is a loneliness, but I think that all of those
emotions come out of this tremendous sense of being unable to fully connect in
a communion with the world. And I think that’s the human condition; I think we
all feel it. I think if his poems are moving and popular, it’s partly because
he, more than any contemporary poet, captures that longing, that sense of being
haunted by an elusive otherness to
which we belong and don’t belong.
I don’t know
if that’s going to translate or make any sense, but I was just reading one of
his own essays, and he spoke a lot about animals in poems. Horses are so
essential. Horses and stars are probably the two most important images—or among
the most important, recurring images—in his poems. And so I stopped when I read
that, because I’m always so moved by his horses. And what he says about horses
is that the horse is the poet, the horse stands in for the muteness of the
poet, for what the poet can’t say but wants to express, that that’s the
function of animals—their languagelessness. On the other hand, there’s also a
sense that they have access to another realm—and whether these two things are
related, whether they’re corollary conditions—that because they have no
language, they have managed to retain and have access to a sort of instinctive
understanding that we have now lost—because one of the barriers for us might be
intellectualization; it might be consciousness; it might be language, which
might be the byproduct of consciousness.
And so we
look at them, and we are filled with a kind of envy for their ability to simply
be, that they’re mortal beings that have, as far as we know, no preoccupation
with their own mortality. They have no ambition––and there’s another thought connected to this––perhaps beyond being
what they are, and so they don’t struggle with a sense of self-identity. You
know, a horse is a horse. Having said that, a horse is a particularly fascinating
animal to have chosen as your avatar, because there are very few purely wild
horses left in the world. Horses are essentially domestic, broken, corralled
beings. So in that way, they are the absolute threshold between realms—maybe
dogs would be another example of these beings, or cows, but cows don’t have the
grace of a horse; a horse retains more of its wildness than a cow or a dog, yet
it’s a domestic animal; it’s more powerful in some way and has a lot of really
primitive associations attached to it—so, the horse is a threshold between a
human world and a purely animal world.
And so, I’d
hate to use “unconscious” or “subconscious,” but at the level of metaphor, the
level of image-making, it’s not by chance that this is the animal to which he’s
most attracted and in which he finds a corollary. Some of the horses are
workhorses, farm horses; some of the horses are racehorses. And it’s hard not
to think of the racehorse as a metaphor for the poem, or for the poet, right?
It’s a thing that wants to transcend itself, that runs as fast as it can to the
point of self-destruction, not because it’s pursuing self-destruction. If it
destroys itself it’s a byproduct of simply running really, really fast to doing
the thing that is most in its essential nature to do. It has been put here to
do that, and in the process of doing that, it inadvertently injures itself
because it has no sense of its own limitation. So if people are going to ask
about the connection between creativity and self-destruction, I don’t believe that
people set out courting self-destruction; I feel that they may have an
obliviousness to their own limitations that then, in the pursuit of a kind of
creative transcendence, leads them to fall into a pattern of self-destruction.
MP: Would you mind, for the sake of the movie,
revisiting that idea about limitations? I know that there was a complete
overarching idea, and maybe we could try to encapsulate it for the film.
KG: I’ll try. I’ll have to go back to horses. Is that
okay?
MP: Sure, yes.
KG: So, I can refer to “There are Two Worlds.” It’s not
a poem that’s actually anthologized out of Winter Stars. It wasn’t
in the Selected, and I can understand
why. It’s not a poem without flaws, but it’s a poem of so many achievements—and
there’s a recurring metaphor. First of all, the poem starts with the line,
“Perhaps the ankle of a horse is holy,” which, when I read that for the first
time, I just had to stop. That was as far as I got. I closed the book and said,
“Okay, I’m just going to think about that one for a while.” I can’t articulate
why I find that to be such a moving line. I think some of it is personal. My
father loved the horse races, so that a big bond that I had with my father was
about horse racing, the history of horse racing. There was a great horse, War
Admiral, and he actually was cut stumbling out of the gate but won the race
anyway. He was there in the winner’s
circle, bleeding out from his ankle, in fact. And then for a long time––we
don’t have it now––we had a picture of my father as a bystander, because it was
during World War II, and there weren’t many spectators at horse races in the
middle of the war, and so for the few spectators who were there, you could get
onto the track and you could get very close to the horses and to the action. So,
my father was in the winner’s circle with War Admiral. Then minutes later, the
horse was taken away covered in blood.
Now, as soon
as I say that, I question it. I’m like, “Is it War Admiral?” I’m out of
practice. Is it a different horse? I want to say, “Could it have been Count
Fleet?” Then I think it was Whirlaway. But, maybe I’ve gotten it wrong. This is
where I would have to Google it. Anyway, “Perhaps the ankle of a horse is holy”
moves me deeply, and it’s simply because so much power rests on such a tiny,
fragile joint. And so the poem goes through a lot of moves in a very quick
space there, and it gets to a point where it says—it repeats itself— “If the
ankle of a horse is holy, & if it fails / In the stretch & the horse
goes down, & / The jockey in the bright shout of his silks / Is pitched
headlong onto / The track, & maimed, & if later, the horse is /
Destroyed, & all that is holy // Is also destroyed: hundreds of bones and
muscles that / Tried their best to be pure flight, a lyric / Made flesh, then
// I would like to go home, please.” And I have always read that as a metaphor
for the work of the poet, that the poet is a lyric made flesh. It wants to be
transported. It wants to become the poem in some way. And so a poet who, in the
act of writing, has that rare experience of being carried away by the process
is very much like a horse wanting only to fly, running as fast as it can down
the track. And in some way we might say that one part of our being is the
horse; there’s another part of our being that is “the jockey in the bright
shout of his silks.” And as a byproduct of the horse’s exuberant desire for
flight, the jockey is maimed. That is the most articulate expression that I can
think of to explain why sometimes creative people suffer tremendously,
seemingly at their own hands. I always tell my students, “You don’t need to
look for sorrow; you don’t need to look for heartache if you think that that’s
where great creativity comes from. Just wait. You don’t have to go looking; it
will find you. That’s part of being human.” But I think there is a mythology
that that is a conscious courting of the darkness, and to me, I don’t think it
is. I think it is this other thing, where something out of control happens, an
unconsciousness of the limitation of the being.
MP: Do you remember being first introduced to his
work?
KG: For someone as old as I am, I came to poetry late in
my life, and the consequence of that is that by the time I first read Larry
Levis’s poems, he was already deceased, and I think it may have been Mark Doty
who said to me, “Here’s a poet you’ll really like. Go see if you can find it.”
And there was a really fabulous independent bookstore on the campus, or what
came to be called a campus, on Washington Square Park. It’s now a bodega. But they
were going out of business, and that was where I bought Winter Stars. It was the only Levis book left on the shelf, and
that was the first one that I bought, and it was a really transformative moment
for me. Now if anyone were to ask me, “Who are your essential poets?” I would
say, “Levis and Gilbert and Charles Wright.” And up until that point, I would
have said, “Charles Wright.” So I came to Levis and Gilbert later than I came
to Charles Wright, and I think that anyone can see the similarities between
Wright and Levis. When I read Charles Wright, I thought, “Oh, I’m in the
presence of a mind that works like my mind works, how that moves: it’s fluid,
it’s moving, it’s shifting, anything can be in the poem, it goes from topic to
topic.” I called it “juggling.” And the things that are being juggled are not
always similar. I think that Levis is a more extravagant juggler than Charles
Wright is. Charles Wright has got his act much more under control, and I think
Levis is juggling chainsaws and flaming batons, simultaneously, and then with a
bowling ball and a bowling pin—so, things of very dissimilar weight, size,
gravity. I feel like with Charles Wright, it’s much more
orchestrated. Levis sometimes feels out of control, but that’s the
exhilaration of it, right? If there’s not a churning chainsaw [laughter], you
lose something. Three bowling pins are not as exciting.
MP: In an interview with J.D. McClatchy, Wright was
asked about some of the religious motifs in his poems, and McClatchy basically
suggests that Wright’s argument is “the absence of belief.” And I asked him if
he would agree with that, and he said, “Oh, I absolutely agree with that.” Then
I asked him about Larry’s argument, and I guess I’ll ask you the same thing, if
that’s something that you’re comfortable talking about. What is the argument
Larry makes?
KG: I don’t think it’s about the absence of faith. I think Charles Wright has less faith than Larry Levis has. Charles Wright has a tremendous fascination with faith and with spirituality, and he, I believe, wants very, very much to believe, wishes he believed, but it doesn’t work that way. Unfortunately, you can’t make yourself believe. So if the horse is recurring and stars are recurring in Levis’s, wind might stand in in Charles Wright’s work for the divine or some sense of something bigger than we are that moves through us. It’s invisible; we can feel it, but we can’t capture it. If we hold it, if we still it, it’s lost. So, it’s not completely true that there isn’t a presence, or there aren’t hints in Wright of some wavering of his atheism. You can ask him if he feels that. I feel like sometimes he thinks, “Well, maybe I’m not as certain as I used to be,” or maybe, “Today I’m not as certain as I was yesterday. Tomorrow I can be certain again. But right now, I don’t know. Something feels different.” And with Levis I feel like there’s always a sense of, “I have no faith in an afterlife or a god or a design or a plan or anything like that. That’s not what I feel; I just feel a sort of faith that it matters in some way––that we don’t suffer without reason, or that it doesn’t matter if we could make the world a better place, or we could alleviate our own sorrow or someone else’s sorrow––that those things do matter profoundly. They don’t matter because there’s another world in which we’ll be rewarded or not be rewarded; they matter profoundly because people shouldn’t suffer in their lives. And if we can make someone’s life better or our own life better, we should do it. And if we can find a way into consolation or a way into feeling like a part of the universe, then wow, let me try as much as I can; let me chase it as far as I can and see if I can’t pin it down. But part, of course, of its beauty is that it resists us, that feeling of belonging.” But I believe he believes that it’s out there, and it’s worth pursuing. And that seems like a kind of faith to me.
___________
Gregory Donovan, the film’s producer, is the author of the poetry collections Torn From the Sun (Red Hen Press, 2015), long-listed for the Julie Suk Award, and Calling His Children Home (University of Missouri Press), which won the Devins Award for Poetry. His poetry, essays, and translations have been published in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, and many other journals. His work has also appeared in several anthologies, including Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia (University of Virginia Press). Among other awards for his writing, he is the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award from New England Writers as well as grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and fellowships from the Ucross Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Donovan has served as a visiting writer and guest faculty for a number of summer conferences and low-residency programs, such as the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Chautauqua Institution Writers’ Center, and the University of Tampa MFA program. Donovan is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he helped establish its MFA program, and he is a founding editor of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts.
__________________
Poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker Michele Poulos directed and produced A Late Style of Fire: Larry Levis, American Poet. Poulos is the author of the poetry collectionBlack Laurel(Iris Press, 2016) and the chapbook A Disturbance in the Air, which won the 2012 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. Her screenplay, Mule Bone Blues, about Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, won the 2010 Virginia Screenwriting Competition and was a second round finalist in the 2017 Sundance Screenwriters Lab competition. Her poetry and fiction have been published in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Smartish Pace, Crab Orchard Review, and many other journals. She has won fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the David Baldacci Foundation. Poulos has taught creative writing courses at Virginia Commonwealth University and Arizona State University, and has been invited for readings and as a guest lecturer at the College of William & Mary, University of Utah, Drew University, Columbus College of Art & Design, and the O Miami Poetry Festival, among other universities and writing conferences. She is currently at work on a feature-length documentary about women’s participation in Mardi Gras.
Fleabag was, without question, a 2019 hit. Hollywood affirmed the societal value of Fleabag this fall, offering writer, director, and main actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge widespread recognition for her work, winning three Emmy awards in 2019, and two Golden Globe awards.
Set in London, Fleabag reckons with the everyday struggles of a white, English, cis-gendered British woman. People of color don’t really figure into her storyline (except for one sexual encounter, in the second season). The show, though aware of whiteness, doesn’t seem interested in contextualizing Fleabag’s life within the grand scheme that produces her material conditions. Despite this, I still loved the show.
The highlight of Fleabag is not Fleabag herself (I know too many like her– troubled
white feminists who daily confront the contradictions of their privilege and
oppression), but the show’s narration. Waller-Bridge’s direction cultivates an
intimate relationship between the viewer and Fleabag, created by moments when
she looks directly into the camera. Through the screen, the viewer has access
to the character’s self-reported motivations and thoughts. It’s those moments
where she is the most tender, cruel, and honest. What’s interesting is that
these connections are established by the visual—they begin when Fleabag makes
eye contact with us.
Perhaps more enchanting than these moments was
the split second when someone else – the (Hot) Priest – noticed the eye contact was happening. (Hot) Priest’s intrusion
into Waller-Bridger’s narration is like watching someone enter the mind of the
maker. (Hot) Priest, played by Andrew Scott, is tumbling into the understanding
produced by the poet and a clear-eared listener. It is this thing which makes
art powerful: the negotiated space between two people trying to understand the
thing between them, and by extension, one another. This is what makes (Hot)
Priest hot: he wants to build this space with Fleabag. He already sees her. He
wants to know her.
These past six months, I’ve been so happy on my
own, and yet, even at the heights of my solitude, I wonder: what does it mean
to be seen? How does it feel to be known? And perhaps most terrifyingly: are
such requests impossible?
//
Seeing and knowing are irrevocably linked for me. This idea I’m engrossed with–being understood—recognizes that our methods of communication are not always useful in sharing the totality of our sentiments. As John Berger says in Ways of Seeing, “Seeing comes before words. A child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” Language, and the intangible and inaccessible images produced by language, allow me a way into recognition. But it is not plain language.
Language is not built for the lives we lead.
Though I call my good friends often from the other side of the earth, there’s a
part of my life they’re missing by not physically seeing me. Kelsey doesn’t see
the way the angles of my face soften when I talk about a new crush. Mia doesn’t
see how the new Maggie Rogers song makes my eyes well as I think about that
last person I loved. Irene isn’t here to touch my forehead when I think I have
a fever. Our texts don’t suffice. They do not make me recognizable.
Earlier this summer, I was traveling around Europe with a childhood friend. The last city we went to was Rome. I was at Palazzo Barberini, which houses the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica or Italy’s National Gallery of Ancient Art.
It plays host to many famous paintings, but
perhaps the most singular is La Fornarina
(the Baker), a portrait by Raphael.
The figure is believed to have been Raphael’s lover, Margarita Luti. She
appears in other paintings by Raphael, but it is this painting that draws out
the rapture in me. I am particularly interested in the way Raphael uses
translucent cloth to suggest Margarita’s agency in exposing herself. A classic
subject of the period is the naked body. Raphael shows this form in La Fornarina, but covers her in cloth.
Thus, she is clothed and naked, visible and opaque, at the same time.
The fabric is a delicate muslin, made popular during the Mughal Dynasty in South Asia. This particular weave is the product of weavers in Dhaka, in Bengal. It’s where my grandmother was from. So hands like hers, brown hands, delicate hands, made the medium necessary for this moment of intimacy. These hands remain invisible, translucent, just like the fabric they created. They are unseen in La Fornarina, and so they can’t be known, either.
In the painting, the subject is seemingly trying (and failing) to shield her body, not unlike Fleabag. She, too, makes eye contact with us. But she is unlike so many of the female nudes of the era, drawing the anonymous viewer in. Implicit in her language is her lover. Raphael’s relationship with his subject is not unlike (Hot) Priest’s. His painting suggests that he is peering in on this subject, a woman who attempts to remain hidden, yet still desires to be perceived.
But the perspective of narration is different. In
Waller-Bridge’s show, Fleabag unfurls her own story. Raphael, instead, shows us his mistress. His painting then is
less about the viewer seeing him as it is about the viewer seeing what he sees.
Implied in the image of his lover is his act of looking at and perceiving her.
Or, as Berger says, his painting is interested in the act of recognizing her. He wants to share this
moment of visual intimacy with us. He wants to create a moment of shared
seeing.
Sight, then, also reveals our connections to one
another. And in the case of this painting, with the missing brown and Black
hands that created its moment, it also reveals the ways we erase one another.
//
Consider the Netflix series Sense8. The show follows the lives of 8 people who have a gene that allows them to experience one another’s senses and emotions in real-time. In the show, Kala, a darker-skinned, curly-haired, desi woman falls in love with the German Wolfgang. They fall for each other because they see each other—literally, but also emotionally.
In order to communicate their shared feelings,
the directing Wachowski sisters decide to show us that they can see what one
another sees. When Kala is in Mumbai, Wolfgang is with her. They are not just
sharing their emotions, then. They are sharing their connection with the world.
But we might wonder—what would happen if this
connection were not forged in their biology? Would Wolfgang’s seeing of Kala’s
body and life lead to him knowing and understanding her? The Wachowskis picked
actors of different races, languages, and religions for their show. Could Kala
and Wolfgang’s true connection have existed in Waller-Bridge’s world or in our
world? Or is it only in a work of fantasy that someone like Kala could be
understood by someone like Wolfgang, someone white?
//
As a child, when people asked what I wanted to be
when I was older, I used to say: I want
to be free. Buried inside that statement was something deeper: I wanted to
be understood.
These days, many of my closest friendships are
with other writers. None of us have perfect vision. Every person I have ever
felt romantic affection for, though, has had perfect vision. But even when I
showed them my body, they couldn’t see me enough to create that special space
of sight, of seeing and being seen. I have wanted to make that space with them,
that space shared by Fleabag and (Hot) Priest, by Kala and Wolfgang, by
Margarita and Raphael.
They read my work with dedication. My writing is
Fleabag’s voiceover, Raphael’s painting. I’m looking for the reader who can see
me through the page, who is fighting to make this space with me. Because they
do have to fight. There’s much crowding the space where the reader might be
able to recognize me.
As a writer, I am in the business of sharing my business. I use my work – poetry, prose, fiction – to communicate essential qualities I see in people and the world. I’m trying to show the reader what I find beautiful about living. These are moments of recognition, and thus, intense intimacy. My writing is about fleshing out the seconds where I am tender with the world. So they reveal me, too.
I’m not trying to make myself hard to understand. When I write a story with complex allusions, I want people to get it. I want them to understand the delicate environment I’ve created with language in order to communicate a more nuanced and delicate thought. My work is a part of a larger project of being understood. It’s about giving the reader enough information so that they can walk through the haze and find me, understand me. One of my biggest fears, then, exists on the opposite end of knowledge and made its way into music a long time ago. As Nina Simone ached on my father’s old record player, Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.
Perhaps the irony here is that life seems to
insist time and time again that we are most understood by those who “see” us.
But in my experience, seeing my body alone has not rendered me known. My last
partner saw me but she did not understand me. I thought she did until I
realized, she couldn’t. I wasn’t like her – she who has gay grandmothers – I
was always going to have to fight to be seen. Some days, she doesn’t have to
fight. Seeing, then, is not directly knowing for people like me. There is work
that the see-er has to put in to reach that thing we call comprehension.
Fleabag doesn’t share herself, ultimately, with
Hot Priest. She shares with the viewer to avoid
being seen by real people. She knows the cost of being misunderstood, as
exemplified by those jarring interactions with her family members. But for me,
for my friends, it’s different. When I look at Raphael’s painting, I see a
subject. I choose to engage in the painting’s constructed moment of intimacy.
There’s a privilege there, in Fleabag’s ability to shift back to the language of recognition with (Hot) Priest when she is ready. I don’t have that space in my life. I can’t help but think of the white person who met me a few months ago, trying to embody all that I was in a few words. Their choices? Indian, Woman, Immigrant. But they would never be reduced down to words. No one would attempt to make a whole person into a series of adjectives.
When I refuse to be seen, it is not an act of defiance. I am giving in. There’s an inertia at work in the way that I am seen and perceived. The inertia tends towards disinterest, erasure, or stereotypes. I have spent my life desperately trying to explain myself through the web of misunderstanding that exists where Fleabag finds love. It’s exhausting.
Unlike Fleabag, I don’t fear being seen. I demand
it. I demand you find it in yourself, dear reader, to fight for this moment
with me. I need you to see me for who I am. I need you to assist me in undoing
the objecthood that I am otherwise left to drown in.
These days,
I feel most seen and understood by my friends. Not because they look at me
and see a familiar story, but because they have perceived the words of my stories. They take time to
tread through the haze created by a world that insists on my objecthood. They
had to walk through the haze of “unseeing” made by ignorance, the very haze I
was able to escape through books and movies as a child. It wasn’t literally
“seeing” other people that helped me forge bonds with them, just as so many saw
Fleabag, so many saw Margarita, and so many see me. I was made into an object
by the enforcement of a different kind of seeing, making me into a thing to be
seen, instead of a person to be recognized.
It is using art as a way of seeing that allows us to understand one another. In his book, John Berger says that “to be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself…Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.” I remember painting my own body in a painting class last year. How much I loved my legs. But I could only paint when I was alone. When it was just me and the force of my mind’s eye. My writing removes the pedestal, the slick glory of linseed oil and mohair. I wish to be before you, without disguise. I wish my writing, if not myself, to achieve the velocity of escape from the soul’s nudity, from display. Seeing through my writing is my way of rewriting, of revealing myself. It is the way of seeing me that takes precedence over all else. This is the seeing I cherish. And there is a beauty to it that exceeds all description, and thus, all language.
—
ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE is an undergraduate at Yale where she majors in Ethnicity, Race & Migration. Her work has appeared in Teen Vogue, the Indiana Review Online, Paper Darts, and Broad Recognition, among other places. Ananya’s work is mostly concerned with love, liberation, and certainty. You can find her early in the mornings watering her plants or listening to love songs.
As the Pacific Northwest editor for Joyland—a magazine founded on the idea that fiction is an international movement supported by local communities—I’m tasked with determining what makes PNW literature. Through Joyland, I had the pleasure of meeting Genevieve Hudson, author of the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018). I’ve carried the book with me through two moves, and many of its stories have stuck with me like they are my own memories of childhood heartbreak, adult heartbreak, and all the inside jokes that help you laugh through those aforementioned heartbreaks.
When
I consider Pacific Northwest literature—looking
beyond the physical boundaries of the Pacific Ocean and the Cascades—I search for the stylistic choices and
thematic concerns that connect writers of this area. First, I must consider
some of our historically iconic authors: Ken Kesey, Oregon’s merry prankster of
hippie lit, and Tom Robbins, whose novels are like the West in book form,
boundary-pushing pioneers of prose. What connects these authors is their
playfulness, even in the face of tragic plots.
But to sum up who we are as writers that way doesn’t feel complete. There’s more, and it’s something sacred. Where our books may laugh in the face of God (Oregon and Washington are part of the “Unchurched Belt”), we do show absolute reverence for nature. Cheryl Strayed hikes the PCT to enlightenment and Lidia Yuknavitch continues to find new ways to transform bodies into oceans. Many of us may lack religion, but we have no shortage of spirituality.
Our literature exists in this intersection between the irreverent and the reverent, and that’s where I found Genevieve Hudson. She came to me by way of the short story “Too Much is Never Enough” about a young protagonist with two best friends, a boy and a girl she loves in different ways, but who are confused by or disinterested in her love. The main character first meets Catherine Elizabeth, her inseparable childhood best friend she calls Lizard until the girl’s mom stumbles in on them while they are making their vaginas “fart.” It’s a funny scene of kids innocently discovering the absurdities of having a body, but it quickly darkens when the mom, confused by the tomboyish best friend, enrolls her daughter into ballet classes and effectively ends the friendship.
Next, the girl befriends Mason, a rabble-rousing boy introduced holding a homemade bomb. “Mason looked like an angel, which was lucky for him because he acted like the devil so the two just about evened themselves out.” With Mason, she smokes stolen cigarettes and arm wrestles. As her body matures past childhood lines, she finds herself wanting to be him and to be loved by him. But instead, Mason finds Lizard, now Katie: “There was something they found in each other they could never find in me. I was not enough boy for Lizard. Not enough girl for Mason. I was something in between them.”
In between is where Genevieve’s stories live: characters in-between identities, settings in between Alabama and Amsterdam, a tone in between hilarious and heartbreaking. Her writing lives in a fluid space between a funny anecdote someone told you about their rural childhood and your third eye’s fever dream.
“Too
Much is Never Enough” is not the only story of a tomboy figuring out how she
fits in at the skatepark and punk shows where teens constellate in Pretend We Live Here. In “Scarecrow,”
it’s Crow filming her best friend Jed and his fearless little brother on her
camcorder while the boys perform daredevil stunts. In “Skatepark,” the
protagonist is the only girl who skateboards besides the boys, and one of only
two “12-year-olds who were brave enough to drop-in on the 12-foot half-pipe.”
These stories are ripe with young girls who run from Sunday school dresses and
refuse to stand on the sidelines while the boys have all the fun. Instead, they
run towards their best friends’ older sisters, and they are wild with rebellion
and first love. “She takes off at a slow pace for the show. It’s the kind of
night with the day still in it…She stops and rips a sprig of lavender from a
bush. She rubs it over her face and arms, shoves it inside her training bra.”
In
many of these stories, the tomboy experiences a loss of innocence: a confusing
sexual encounter she immediately regrets, following a reckless crush, watching
her best friend sacrifice a piece of himself for the love of an estranged
parent. These stories end with each character’s sudden jolt into adulthood. It’s
as if the characters in these stories grow up and become the jaded, sarcastic,
but occasionally still optimistic adults of the collection’s other stories.
The
title of the collection is a line pulled from the story “Date Book,” in which
the protagonist recounts a year with her long-distance girlfriend in short
blurbs for each month. “By September you are another country again. The thought
of you causes me to pick weeds, to put poems on the back of receipt paper. I
get a package in the mail. It’s wrapped in a map of the place where you live. I
fall in love with the smell of the cardboard, the image of your palms folding
the top down. We meet on an island in the middle. I feed myself to you until
we’re full.” The months are carefully and lovingly filled with acutely personal
details, so that when January gets only the solemn entry “January,” the reader
knows the end is near. “In February we go to Seattle to say goodbye. We
accidentally rent a weekend apartment over a lesbian bar. We laugh all the way
up the stairs.” It the end of their story, but they are pretending together.
“We pretend we live here. We drink from cups. We unmake the bed.”
As the title of the collection, Pretend We Live Here sounds more like a command. It seems again to point to the in-between space this book evokes for me. There’s an implication of transience in the title, which is true for many people who come west. The Pacific Northwest, as the farthest point of the Contiguous United States, is often where people end up, particularly now as an influx of workers come here for tech jobs. Hudson is herself a transplant to Portland from Alabama, and her stories draw from all of her real-life settings. Whether the stories are set in a small town in Alabama or the queer art scene in Amsterdam, the characters within them are searching for something.
The
first story in the book, “God Hospital,” and the last, “Boy Box,” both end with
the protagonist being led away from a place. In each, the young girl follows an
older girl, who acts as a guide, either away from or, potentially, to danger.
The characters in the collection, children figuring out gender fluidity and
first crushes or adults navigating complicated relationships, are seeking
guides, but the guides—and Hudson—rarely take the reader to expected
places.
Don’t try to pin Genevieve Hudson down. She will keep you guessing, and goddamn that’s something I adore in a writer. She has taken up the mantle of Robbins, Kesey and the other psychedelic, blue-collar poets of evergreens, mountain streams, and witty one-liners, and is queering the canon of Pacific Northwest literature.
—
KAIT HEACOCK is a writer and book publicist whose work centers the lives of women and non-binary folks, particularly those in the queer community. Her shorter work can be read in literary places from Joyland to The Millions, infrequent reviews for the Women’s Review of Books, and in her debut short story collection Siblings and Other Disappointments. Her work has received support from the Montez Press summer residency at Mathew Gallery and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel about what happens when women turn their anger outward.
Throwback Thursday is a monthly series that re-visits work originally published in [PANK] Magazine.
—
Wow! 2019 was a wild ride. I had a beautiful time. Camping under the stars. Firing off submissions to literary journals. Trying out new recipes. Working myself like a dog. And winning the Mountain West Poetry Series. (Shameless plug.) My first full-length collection will be out in the Fall of 2020.
I also had a wonderful time reading your work, too, dear reader. I spending countless nights browsing literary journals, falling in love with language over & over. For its richness. For its compactness. For its tautness. For the ways that it luxuriates on the page. For all it says & the things it withholds. So many of the capabilities have felt negative.
I’ve also been listening to classical music to pass the time. Yesterday, I attended a live performance of Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto no. 3, performed by the Colorado Symphony with Brett Mitchell at the conducting helm, & all I can say is that I left with my heart full of dark water. A bittersweet chocolate you can live inside. Also, I’ve been reworking my way through Mahler’s symphonies chronologically, one-by-one. And what a treat it’s been. Yet the most soul-satisfying experience I’ve had in recent memory has been listening to Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony no. 3, where Portishead’s Beth Gibbons sings the operatic parts. Sinking inside her trill lush hauntings has been a highlight of my winter.
While being published in PANK was a wonderful experience, I never heard from you, dear reader. Feel free to shoot me a message if you want to reach out to shoot the shit about language, poems, recipes, travel stories, or to grab a beer if you’re ever in the mountain west. (Colorado, to be specific.) kevinaphan@gmail.com.
–Kevin Phan
[Kombucha
& skincare]
*
Kombucha & skincare. Ointment & rice paper. Oil changes,
jasmine dreams, sun salutations. I pray alone. For everyone. It floats up &
through my living kitchen. This need to smooth in. Feelings, big as barns,
gliding toward the sun. Lost in bright confusions, bone cancer at the center–she
loved us once. Does god care for shipwrecked vessels, tending to the sick as
their bodies, one-by-one, disintegrate beyond trembles? A feel good comedy,
except some people, or flesh approaching compost. & In the book of
Now, world’s gone wild. “May all beings reach enlightenment, quickly.”
(All the bats of the universe geolocate inside my prison cell.) Precious
human birth–life I plan to taste just once–what’s one pure act I’ve done?
A lyric running down my godless honey scraps. What a lesson. Something about
how hunger swells us close to education.
[Childhood’s sweet, rotten gospel]
*
Childhood’s sweet, rotten gospel, coloring my words &
tongue—Presbyterian, Methodist, Unitarian, Baptist, on & on. May I learn to
love again, for the first time. White eternal of my comforter snowing my
room–bright flower, bright flower. Gutters, jamming with Fall’s rot leaves. I
pledge Allegiance. Mother’s voice keeps calling to me in dreams. Says“in
death we’re stronger than ourselves.” (Our Maker, neither punitive nor male.)
Morning meditations into universal Love, praying alone for everyone, yet I fail
to feed the birds! Eternities’ shadow breeds in my mind, raining a patch on the
shed’s rusty nails. We’re overlapping presences. Jade rabbits enter purple heavens.
There’s just no cure for that. I want to light every necktie on fire. I
want to go slopping ‘round the ocean in a casket, amigo to whales, reeking
storms & ancient secrets.
[Just as time erases kisses from my body]
*
Just as time erases kisses from my body. Just as my family bows down to sadness & cancer. & I fall into dreams rehearsing the Dictionary of Distant Angels. & Rise from morning hay, clean as a salt lick, in a field of long division. I pray alone for everyone, recalling the Diamond Sutra. “However many beings there are in whatever realms of being might exist, whether they are born from an egg or born from a womb, born from the water or born from the air, whether they have form or no form, whether they have perception or no perception or neither perception nor no perception, in whatever conceivable realm of being one might conceive of beings, in the realm of complete nirvana, I shall liberate them all. And though I thus liberate countless beings, not a single being is liberated.”
—
KEVIN PHAN is a Vietnamese-American graduate of the University of Michigan with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa with a B.A. in English Literature. He is a former Helen Zell Writers Program Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he won the Theodore Roethke & Bain-Swiggett Poetry Prizes. His work has been featured (or is forthcoming) in Columbia Review, Poetry Northwest, Georgia Review, Conjunctions (online), Crab Orchard Review, Fence, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, SubTropics, Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, & elsewhere.
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