John Amen—Illusion of an Overwhelm

NYQ Books, 2017

Page Length: 89

Retail: $15

John Amen’s Illusion of an Overwhelm continues the experimentation in language that was evident in his last few collections of poems, especially The New Arcana (NYQ Books), co-authored with Daniel Y. Harris, and strange theater (NYQ Books). Amen’s latest is a collage of voices and personas, a mix of the physical world and metaphysical one, and an examination of where we are in this present moment, specifically in the way that it addresses hyper-consumerism and carefully incorporates everyday speech into the stanzas, including text speak.

At times, it can be difficult to keep track of all the voices within the collection. The first section, “Hallelujah Anima,” contains a number of forms, including prose poems and narratives that veer into surrealism. It also includes several references to American consumerism, such as images of the American suburbs, strip malls, and gas stations. The second stanza in the 9^th poem reads, “I bargain with a salesman/saying I won’t be a servant,/the salesman riffing who do you think you serve?/I have to admit I serve myself./Someone pumps a car horn, I turn my head,/I’m shouting your name into a cellphone,/condos & gas stations as far as I can see.” In the 16^th poem, the speaker admits, “I’m not Odysseus or Iago, rather/a prime number running his errands, shuffling/through the strip mall, through bloom & wither,/ which is to say my souvenirs remind me/I don’t actually exist.” In past collections, Amen has mixed references to literature or art with the everyday or pop culture, and he does it especially well in “Hallelujah Anima,” drawing attention to our hyper-consumer culture and notions of identify lost in the American ‘burbs.

The second section, “The American Myths,” is just as layered as the first and introduces a new cast of characters to address the undercurrent of racial issues and greed that permeate the American political system. The 7^th poem in particular left me wondering if it was written in response to President Barack Obama’s election in 2008, more specifically the way that Obama’s image became a staple of pop culture, a black face plastered on Shepard Fairey posters, with the word HOPE in large letters. There is reference to a “shrine erected in 2008 in honor of the lost boy” in the first stanza, and the poem concludes:

Now’s his chance to sway public opinion, white

God as his personal Super PAC. The black son

thumbs-up for the camera, toothy on the billboard.

The black son roaring on Super Bowl Sunday.

This is how he storms the world; that’s payback,

baby, manifest destiny, that’s o bless America.

The third section, “My Gallery Days,” contains voices of hipster artist characters and isn’t afraid to address how capitalism and favoritism have infected that world, too, namely who obtains grants, who doesn’t, and who lands showings at big-name galleries. The final section, “Portrait of Us,” contains long, meditative poems that combine the physical and metaphysical worlds. Again, images of everyday domestic space populate some of these final poems. The second stanza of the fourth poem reads:

A moment ago,

you were tending a potted amaryllis,

we were discussing a menu for Friday,

whether fish or chicken, beans or broccoli.

I yearn for the details once disdained,

a sugar pack under the leg of the dining-room table,

the Persian rug we moved an inch to the right,

lightbulbs that needed changing.

Heartbreak’s the beauty

we’re handed is already seizing:

I’m in love with what I call you,

but these illusions, so hypnotic,

have no place in the clouds.

Like several other poems in the book, that stanza illustrates how Amen’s work is able to root itself in common images, in this case, the American ‘burbs, and then suddenly push to something deeper, in this case, notions of love and identity, before the poem concludes with the lines, “All I remember is how it destroyed me/to think no trace of our love could endure.”

As I read and re-read Illusion of an Overwhelm, I continually thought about this moment in American history, a moment that has given rise to a president who reduces his thoughts to 140 characters, a moment when a former president can make $400,000 for giving a speech to Wall Street execs while his party claims to be connected to the working-class, a moment so dominated by pop culture that it has produced a celebrity president. The book again proves that Amen’s ear is attuned to American language, including text speak, similar to the way that Whitman, Ginsberg, and Williams were able to capture the American idiom in their body of work. If they were writing today, they would probably be using hashtags and emojis.

Dianne Borsenik is a kind of Cleveland Poetry legend.  She attends everyone’s readings, travels with her buddy John Burroughs to read at Cafes and Coffeehouses all over the Midwest, runs a small press herself, and performs with a rare kind of energy that echoes so many forms of populism.  Often funny, her poems are a kind off mix of heartbreak and comedy.   She uses language that is clear, accessible and often uses rhetorical shifts.   She can be bluesy, she can tell stories, she can write small imagistic poems, and she can make you laugh out loud, something rare in a poet.  She isn’t scared of risking sentimentality and she can be directly political at times.  She is musical.  She can be unapologetically Reto-Beat.  And she is…. Well, she is a fun poet.  In the best manner a poet can be.  She is the kind of poet you could take your friend who had never been to a poetry reading, and they would have a blast hearing her perform.   Perhaps she is who Lucille Ball would have been if Lucille Ball had been a poet and not a comedian.    

In this book, put out by Burroughs fine small Cleveland press Crisis Chronicles,  Borsenik collects her “Greatest hits” as she says.  The author of numerous chapbooks, this is  her first big book and it is a good one.  Buy this and take these poems and read them on street corners, share these poems at work, at the hospital, at the bus stop.  Here is a small lyrically prose poem, as much about sound and wit as anything:  

Everybody Must Get Stoned

 

—Bob Dylan “Rainy Day Women”#12 & 35

 

It’s time to turn it on time to rock hard rock solid rock steady rock-a-bye baby time to rock out with your cock out rock and roll rock around the clock throw away the rocking chair and move it like you mean it time to rocket to the moon to mars to a comet to an asteroid they’re just bigger rocks anyway don’t take this time for granite

Christopher Bakken  Eternity & Oranges  University of Pittsburgh Press ISBN-13: 978-0822964049   https://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=36608

Christopher Bakken has been writing a spare eloquent formalist poem for decades.  His formalism presents a deft combination of image and rhetoric with precise metrical maneuvers.  He has one of the quietest and most precise ears in American poetry. His poems often occur in rooms and the small intimate venues where people laugh, drink, love, and grieve. One of the interesting things about Bakken’s subject matter and landscape is his ongoing love affair with Greece, particularly with his half adopted home of Thessaloniki where he spends his summers.  Like Gilbert, there is a sense off the expatriate in Bakken, as his heart even when home is over there, on a cobblestoned street, or walking with the goat herders on a Greek Isle.  And because of this, to speak of Bakken’s work I often want to evoke Greek poets rather than American poets—particularly C.P Cavafy and Yannis Ritsos: Cavafy for his exploration and detail and use of the miasmic and labyrinthine Alexandrian streets he lived in; Ritsos for the politics and sense of time that informed his work.  Bakken’s work arguably draws both from these two grand Greek rivers, and yet calligraphies an alphabet all his own, one that is both mythic and intimate in the same breath.   Here he is at his best in the poem that draws the book’s title:

Confession

 

Night came to hurt us from across the island,

resurrecting crickets in the old well.

You’d removed both of your arms and your hair

had turned to ash by the time I touched it.

 

If you go, I asked, how will we speak to those dead?

I said this knowing we couldn’t ever.

Yet monks had put out a wooden table

and were waiting for the blood and bread.

 

All day, the mountain.  Talking and falling apart.

I had to carry you most of the way.

All day: eternity and oranges,

stones and some fear I could and couldn’t see.

 

Now, a half moon and the stars were roaring.

The orchard behind us was roaring too.

I couldn’t bear their chanting anymore

and urged myself to disappear, like you.

Karen Craigo  No More Milk Sundress Publications  ISBN 978-1-939675-39-2  https://squareup.com/market/sundress-publications

I have known Karen Craigo for nearly 20 years now.  She’s been slugging it out in the trenches of poetry for decades as an editor, an organizer, an English lecturer, a comrade.  The author of two fine chapbooks this is her first full length collection.  What is impressive about this book is it does not feel like a first collection, but like a third or fourth collection.  There is a sure maturity to these poems. This book has received a number of positive reviews.  In Cleaver magazine Shaun Turner wrote . “Craigo’s poems are not barriers, but rather structures from which she explores the female body in relation to itself and to other bodies, and to our collective body as a people.”   Turner is dead on here in identifying Craigo’s poetic exploration as grounded in the body “I love how it sits roundly,/ a warm stone, when it is calm/ its waters stilled, (What I Love About My Body);   or in unflinching motherhood, “My son wakes to tell me/ I terrify” (Hours After Anger, He Wakes Me).  In her powerful death sequence, Craigo shows such a deep and varied approach to the poem and its capacity for real, true emotional range and complexity.   In addition, there is—dare I say for use of a better word—a holiness to these poems that rises from the body into a kind of light:

Milk

 

Last night, a baby cried

outside my window and I knew

I should be holding it.

I was pretty sure

she was talking to me, my own baby

a thousand miles away,

grown hazy, not as clear

as the music from the courtyard.

I brought the hand pump

in my backpack and it took all day

to draw an ounce.

My baby and I are near the end.

It’s no one’s fault—each day

I have less to give,

less milk, I mean.

There’s a magnet in me—

it’s just a metaphor, so it’s OK

that the pull is stronger

over distance. Let me return

to that baby in the courtyard,

to its terrible music

and how I wanted to go

to her, give to her.

And I cried a little, the way

mothers cry, and catch it,

and place it in smallest mouths,

so this morning there was a glass of it,

of milk—what the body repels

as it pulls the other to us.

The world is dense with hunger.

Sometimes I have to pull his fist

from my baby’s mouth

just to feed him,

and I am mindful that hunger for some

is a fist that never stops

being a fist. What I’m trying to say

is I couldn’t dump that milk.

For the baby in the courtyard,

for my baby, for all

the babies, I drank it down.

Cheryl Dumesnil  Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes  University of Pittsburgh PressISBN-13: 978-0822964315  https://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=36669

Cheryl Dumesnil is one of those writers who writes slowly, chiseling out a small body of exquisite poems over the decades.  I went to graduate school at Syracuse University with her many years ago.  She was a year ahead of me and she was by far the best writer in our program.   This is Dumesnil’s second fine collection from the University of Pittsburgh Press.  Her first book received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize.   This is one of the books I blurbed and highly recommend:

“Dumesnil navigates the hallways of illness and childbirth with grit and grace. She offers us soaring birds, revolutions and plums. Odes to October, memoirs to tampons, sea snails and Tsunamis, air guitar with Eddie Van Halen, Ritalin and Pink Floyd and Facebook, a book hinged at the end of the last century and the beginning of this new bloody one. This is a book full of the love of women and sons, drag queens and last calls, and always the gospel of the body, and its constant prayer of falling. A kind of faith in falling, a performance against failure as a way to get us somewhere else, through words, or as Dumesnil urges us, ‘Say it again, say it again, as if your voice could rewrite the code.’”

Lake Dharma

 

You arrive at the lake, expecting
to meet grief on the trail.
Instead: a fleet of white pelicans
patrolling the shallows, steam
rising off the water glow.
Cormorants on the watchtower
moan and tick, indifferent
wings shrugged toward the sun.
Not even the day moon, having
dusted off last week’s rusty eclipse,
cares to hear your story
of a marriage slowly crumbling,
a young friend lost to cancer.
Then another. And another.
This whole forest depends
on that felled tree rotting into
home for salamander eggs,
centipedes, six varieties of moss.
Black phoebes rattle winter
thistles, swollen throats percussing:
this is, this is, this is . . .

Martin Espada  Vivas to Those Who Failed  W. W Norton & Company  ISBN-13: 978-0393249033  http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Vivas-to-Those-Who-Have-Failed/

I love to read the work of an older poet at the height of his powers.  Martin Espada reminds me of  other great political poets such as Joy Harjo, Naomi Shahib Nye, Adrienne Rich and  Philip Levine in that all were writing or wrote their best poems well after the age of 50.  Espada’s powerful tomes have always directly engaged the social realities and interactions of the world.  He is truly our North American Neruda.  And like Neruda he shows a formal and investigative range that is unmatched.  But in Vivas to Those Who Failed he has surpassed himself. The title comes from Walt Whitman and is the title for a cycle of sonnets on the Paterson Silk strike of 1913.  Like Shahib Nye, who wrote some of her greatest poems about the death and life of her father, Espada offers some of his most moving poems in the ten poems on the death of his father Frank, who was a community organizer and a wonderful photographer.   The book also includes some off Espada’s best poems about baseball and brotherhood.   The micro detail and use of poetic image in this book is deft.  In a 2016 review in the Progressive, Jeremy Shaffenberger wrote, “Hands have always been resonant poetic images for Espada, not least because they’re able to carry the weight of so much symbolic, metaphorical, and metonymic significance. In a 2010 interview, he said that in such working environments “you’re only seen for what your hands can do. The rest of you is rendered invisible.” Espada’s poetics involves advocating for these invisible people, bringing “the rest” of them out of the darkness.”

And I concur these are poems that reach a hand of verbs to lead us his readers and fellow citizens out of darkness and despair.  Espada is one of our best storyteller poets and these book is full of powerful narratives, that when collaged side by side, offer us a quilt of grief and gunpowder, a tapestry of resistance to study and learn from, to teach us how to survive and fight, like all those who failed before us, whose legacy will lead us to victory, during these oppressive times.

The title poem of the collection can be found here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/58738

Yao Glover  Inheritance   Aquarius Books , Detroit

   http://aquariuspress.myshopify.com/products/inheritance-by-bro-yao-hoke-s-glover

Conversational and musical in the same breath, Yao Glover writes poems that engage the political and social realities of this nation, of his family, and his Inheritance and what that means in all the personal and cultural significance of the term.  Mixing poems both lyrical and rhetorical he explores the intimate landscapes of who makes us who we are.  In the poem “Buttoning my Shirt,” Yao remembers his father getting for work in the morning and then realizes/ “i’m staring /you in the eyes/ daddy, i got your back/ and your face/ in the mirror. /it’s morning/ i’m buttoning my shirt.”  That moment when the grown son’s face becomes the father’s”.  In the terrifically titled,” the art of war as fried fish in the house of my mother” Glover intones, “when the belly gets coated/ with the blues, feed on this.”   Glover’s range blows from blues to small cantatas.  He is a mix of many registers, with the politics say of a Baraka but even with the small strange surrealism say of someone like Serbian Vasko Popa who he reminds me of with his disjunctive repetition and cadence as in these syncopated lines from “Guitar”:

a box of strings

a wooden box

a box made of wood

with strings a

 

a walk with strings

walk these strings

this wood,

walk with me talk

 

with these strings

A longtime book proprietor and former founder and owner of Karibu Books in DC, Yao is one of those cultural workers who has worked for decades too promoting others through his book space and online with his Afrocentric cultural blog Free Black Space.  But more than anything Yao is a poet, giving us a kind of radical spiritualism, so necessary for these oppressive times:

Solitary

i have tried 
to be beautiful
i have sung
when singing 
was brother to pain 

i have run 
with my arms stretched out
and it slowed me down

i have called you 
ever and lasting
and done and begin

i have held you 
in a lullaby 
when there was no sunrise
when my beliefs became 
dry and brittle like bread
in the sun 

i have shed many songs
that the birds came and ate

and this

is the only one 
i remember

Les Kay  At Whatever Front  Sundress Publications ISBN-13: 978-1939675439  https://squareup.com/market/sundress-publications

Les Kay is another one who has been slugging it out in the trenches of poetry for decades.  I met him first briefly when he was an undergraduate in Jim Daniel’s class when I was a visiting reader in the mid 1990s.  Since then he has gone on to graduate degrees and years living a precarious economic existence as an underpaid cultural worker in the academy and as a freelance writer.  He is the author of two excellent chapbooks, one I blurbed is a long narrative poem titled Bad Ass.  At Whatever Front is his very first full length collection and one worthy of much notice.  In many ways this a book about working class men, and an investigation into constructions of masculinity.  Like the best poems of social engagement, Kay brings us into the lives we don’t read about in the news.  This book is full of “war stories,” both literal and metaphorical, but where Kay impresses me most in some of the surest and most memorable lyric poems I have read in some time that are scattered throughout the collection like small measures of metaphysical pause.  Perhaps to remind us as he says in his very 21st century poem “Google as Mememto Mori”: “I know this, at least:/our lives are beautiful/in their loss and/this is beauty.”   But what Kay shares with so many writers on this list is that beauty is not enough. There is real engagement with the social and political realities of the world in this collection.    One of my favorites is this powerful portrait that opens the book:

Blue Memento

 

The warehouse heat seeped

through his shirt, pushed temperature

up like typhoid; pneumatics whirled

and presses clanked steel and wood

with enough force to slam razored

dies into cardboard or an errant hand.

On busy days, his ears hummed

like alarm clocks, his blue uniform

darkened with sweat, fresh paper cuts

remapped the calluses of forty years

with tributaries of blood, and his eyes

blurred with the repetition of movement,

but after each twelve-hour shift, my father

gathered the mistakes which were a fraction

of an inch off and folded the boxes himself,

so that he might have a memento of each

account to display along the shelves

of his trailer, so that he might cradle

baseball card boxes, glazed like enamel,

and hold them out to me saying:

Look, Son, look.

Jennifer Militello  A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments Tupelo Press ISBN-13: 978-1936797752  https://www.tupelopress.org/product/camouflage-specimens-garments/

Jennifer Militello’s third book takes her lyric exploration to the next level, using a varied structure of epistolary poems and prose poems as well as anaphoric structures.   But here she goes to places in tone and depth of emotional range that I rarely see in the prose poem, as if she turns the sentences inside out to become lyric.   Her series of “Dictionary entries” shows her imaginative and exploratory range.  This is very much a poet’s book, as Militello is a poet’s poet in the best sense of the word.  With her surrealist leaps and bitterly ironic drenched lines, she seems more Eastern European than American.  As I’ve written in a longer review elsewhere “This is a book of ecstatic revelations, griefs and betrayals.  Relationships and narratives are implied within a lyric framework.  It has been a long time since I read a book of poems that seems less about meaning and more about sound.”  And yet that sound drives us towards elusive revelations and meanings, or perhaps more precise is to say pieces of meanings, which we fill in with our own lives, or the tatters of them.

A Dictionary at the Periphery

On the day I was born, the moon’s phase 
was waning crescent. No death
to sweeten like a side dish. No infant

to ease from its roughhewn crib and lay
among the savage rushes. No soft words. No
mouth to feed. No rope to hang from. No barn

to raze. The shock of me was an utter root,
cruel in parts. Gone as a body, vacuous and 
black. Left bankrupt by the witnessing

I’d done, I made a fist and shook it
toward the world. Often blighted. Often
cold. Jagged, late, matted with moons,

aping a gray aroma of flesh,  eyeteeth
of a she-wolf, urn of human ash.
A torn god, sad as seasons. Burnt offerings,

poured libations: the remedies I invented 
were scented with abyss. Tongues to mourn
wonder with. A flex like heaven’s wings

to lash me to the mast, unmask me,
cradle me to sleep. The day I was made,
I was made veiled. Knee-deep in eucalyptus.

I was made scarved. To understand my wax
and wane, the hint of a sword mood stitching 
in my breath, give me a heart of wastelands 
 
or dirt. Eyes mutiny, bland mysteries
of anisette, hunting the char lodged within me.
Things drop stinking into beasts.

One cannot wilt. One shall not want.
I was the last animal at the lamp the night
man was born. Record me in the morgue’s lost books. 

Sean Singer   Honey & Smoke  Eyewear Publications ISBN-13: 978-1908998439  https://store.eyewearpublishing.com/products/honey-and-smoke

Nearly 20 years ago Sean Singer seemed destined to begin a vibrant and profitable literary career.  He was publishing his miraculous and investigative poems in some of our finest journals. His poems, though they exhibited many of the so called elliptical facets of the time, and the exploratory moves, also showed a kind of street wise social awareness.  His book Discography gathered together his first poems of music, jazz, and showed the promise of his deft ear.  This book was awarded the 2001 Yale Younger Poet’s Prize and was widely reviewed.  But Singer is a singular poet and somehow the tone of where he was going didn’t catch.  It was like trying to explain later Coltrane to someone who only loved Kind of Blue.  Singer’s poems are ambitious, and cut across aesthetic lines.  There is something both archaic and futuristic in his poems at the same time.  So his second collection, despite such an auspicious literary debut, proved difficult to place.  When I first came upon his poems I felt a kinship immediately with this young gun.  He seemed to fulfill perhaps the more exploratory notions in the long lined worked of later Lynda Hull.  Perhaps Singer was writing the poems Hull might have written if she had lived, with her shared love of Jazz and urban landscape.  And like an avant-garde Jazz musician, Singer often shows the seams of the making of the poem as a made-thing unfolding in real time. This is a part of Singer’s song, part of his making while unmaking a made-thing to show the seams.  Singer is the anti-magician, giving us The Reveal in the act of pulling back the poem’s curtain.  In an interview in the journal Memorius, Singer said of his process, “My subject is often the meaning of creativity, or the process of making a piece of writing, or a piece of art. The figures you mention are sometimes characters through whom I can talk about the project of writing, the project of making poems, and the questions of being a writer or an artist. I resist the first person singular and would like to make a poem where there almost is no speaker at all, or a minimal one. Perhaps these figures are masks or voices through which I can let the speaker come through.”

Living On Nothing But Honey And Smoke

for Albert Ayler (1936-70) & Cleveland

Evergreen leather winterwear and a honky-tonk, but salty glissando,
a man revealing his baby-life in the dark, when the dark was a scattered ambrosia,
but opening plaints with dynamite, and a grill and a tremolo and hard plastic reed.
What is self-evident, he said, was a colored disk, a sword, the cup of indignation.
I have seen the bright wall of the universe, magnified ten times, and eat only green
things. But when President Johnson was a spooky longhorn, the Pope got the message,
a clicking sound with his tongue, the spirit’s balafon hymnic, the freak bearing.
As the saxophone wends and balloons, so the vision. It wasn’t funny anymore.
Flowering in the very field, his legit sneers, he has sucked the air out of the room,
mesmerized hyena, and brought us back on a kind of ship, afloat & afflatus driftwood…
and the East River took us to the foot of Congress Street Pier where our lungs had dried.
Become Ashtabula, taxonomic, a burned running, a fur peeling, a pure feeling, an orange.
Become an admirer.
Become Olmstead, Parma, and Ashtabula, where translucent quays burn with fox-oil,
overweight drivers, gray mosquitoes, a wood flushed with the lashing waves of pine.
Her brunette radar zoned me, gathering buckeye, rucksack, and eyeglass cloth
we became river: Ashtabula was the orange wreck of bricks, boards, a nurse.
The mud slung me, part of the forest, to a new river. This isn’t tenderness, you know:—
it’s worn. The river, Little Cricket Neck, was burning mineral, iron filing, flies, and tires.
A marvel how rectangular fires make unearned past efforts, so we blazed, filthy nuggets,
to the utter gully, wherewith sky like Gethsemane, we sneaked into the guestroom, all cushiony.
At any rate, we were pierced. The clumps of soot hit the windows, all black now, & I exhaled.
Become a wizard, a ghost, a spirit, a saint, a bell, a Cleveland, the final cadence, two octaves up.
Become an admirer.
Become Ashtabula or become assiento, the darkness of river, aspergillic breaking into ashunch.
Become, yes, admirer.

Francine Witte   Not All Fires Burn the Same. Slipstream Press Chapbook Winner  http://www.slipstreampress.org/not_all_fires.html

Francine Witte is a long time school teacher who has been writing really engaged poems for decades so I was happy to hear when she won the Slipstream chapbook contest.  Witte is deceptive.  A poet who is domestic, but also very streetwise.  Quiet and yet unflinching.  This is the second of the books I blurbed: “Francine Witte narrates the lives of men and women searching through the losses, leaning towards one another through the flames.  Brazen and beautiful, gritty and full of smart shifts, uppercuts and angles, or do I mean “angels flying south for the winter.” Or when, “A piece of the sky breaks off/ and falls into your coffee cup.”  Lost girls, tired working class wives, wolfs and weather,  divorces on mars, instructions on what to do when facing a bear, or unflinching remembrances of rapes rendered and not withheld, Witte’s range is imaginative or real when needed, precisely piercing, full of metaphorical moves and narrative epiphanies.  This small book has enough punch to break the heart’s teeth,  driving us down streets “woven with bones and ash and anything else leftover when a dream dies.” And yet what is left, after the dream is dead is perhaps these poems:  with their deft directions for survival.”

Not All Fires Burn the Same 

Take the ones on the evening news,
forest scorch, flames like wolf tongues.
You are watching, safe behind your TV tray, 
feeling smug and oh so cool. Not at all 
like those fires you started as a kid, stolen
matches, newspaper in the sink. Sparks
flying under the cabinets and you could have
burned the kitchen down. But that 
was nothing like the fire of your husband
and his other woman, how you thought
he should be strong enough to reason 
her away. You didn’t see his fingers
and how burnt they already were. Dark
and scarred as that TV forest you thought
was so far off, where the fire had to eat
its fill before it could go home. And when
your husband finally limped back to you, 
hands full of dead smoke and regret, 
you let him into your lukewarm
bed, and when he kissed you, you 
could taste the ashes still in his mouth.

Patrick Rosal Brooklyn Antediluvian ISBN-13: 978-0892554744 http://www.perseabooks.com/detail.php?bookID=127

I first met Patrick Rosal exactly twenty years ago when he was a graduate student at Sarah Lawrence College.   I was invited to read at a small festival at Bloomfield College with Patricia Smith, Joe Weil, and someone I didn’t know that turned out to be Patrick.  Even then, at such a young age, I knew Rosal was something special. The way he walked to the mic, the way he mixed languages and moved effortlessly from the chiseled and exquisitely formal to the colloquial. As someone who grew up in the very first wave of hip hop in the late 70s and early 80s, I was so amazed to hear finally a second generation poet who fully embraced hip hop too.  You have to remember how rare it was to hear this 20 years ago.  His ear was finely turned for the subtleties of syntax and his heart spun like two complementary turn-tables.  Rosal was writing even then poems that unapologetically were exploring not just who he was, but were saving the lives of friends and family he had lost along the way, poems that sang both his native town of Edison, NJ and his Filipino heritege.  He was really beginning to ask questions and become deeply exploratory about his Filipino heritage in a way that saw the links to broader colonial and indigenous struggles. In the books he wrote to follow, these threads were expanded and deepened with ever increasing complexity as he grew not only as an artist, but as a man, and a human being who asked questions of what that means.   His line lengthened to a Whitmanesque-like line at times.  A kind of mix of Larry Levis, Amira Baraka and Jessica Hagedorn.  He blew longer, stronger, better.  

In this, his fourth book Brooklyn Antediluvian, Rosal deepens and adds complexity to his themes of urban, ethnic, and ontological exploration.  He uses a managed and meticulous attention to syntax and sound to create his odes, elegies and antiphonal progressions through various dictions and discourses.   All told with a situated class awareness. Rather than individual lyrics, these are a kind of collective psalm.   He gathers the raiment of his childhood and neighborhood and mixes them with influences from the world.  There are echoes of Neruda in his odes such as the marvelously titled,    “A Scavenger’s Ode to the Turntable (Or a Note to Thomas Alva Edison):

… Me and my boys—sons of cops, bookkeepers

and ex-priests—picked up gear other DJs didn’t want

 

no more. One prep-school kid, who just bought

a shiny new mixer, tossed out his two-month-old

 

Numark which we picked from the garbage and

Hoisted home.  We harvested the slider from the rich

 

kid’s rig.  I stripped the wires’ tips and soldered them

to pitch contacts.  In a basement of a maple split

 

in Edison, NJ, we were learning to turn anything

into anything else, while our mothers played

 

mah jong in the sala, and our fathers bet

slow horses and the government bombed Iraqu.

The lines are revealing for so much.  The re-appropriation of discarded gear is almost an Ars Poetica for Rosal’s poems themselves— able to rework any territory—that which another poet might discard— to make something beautiful and important. These lines show the class and cultural perspective of Rosal’s poems.  People have jobs in his poems, live in specific places in his poems and are aware, even if obliquely of the larger politics of the world around them.  In this poem we move deftly from boys rebuilding the detritus of turn tables, to mothers playing mah jobs to father’s betting on horses, and then the big move to the Iraq war.
The sixteen page phenomenal title poem can he found here. http://atlengthmag.com/poetry/brooklyn-antediluvian/

Resources

https://www.cleavermagazine.com/no-more-milk-by-karen-craigo-reviewed-by-shaun-turner/
https://memoriousmag.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/poetry-spotlight-contributor-sean-singer/
http://progressive.org/magazine/bearing-witness-poetry-martin-espada/

NYQ Books, 2016

Page Length: 104 Pages

Retail: $15

After recently re-reading Raymond P. Hammond’s Poetic Amusement, a book that isn’t afraid to criticize the current state of academia, contemporary American poetry, and the pressure to publish or perish, I can’t help but find similarities between Hammond’s work and Weil’s latest collection of poems, A Night in Duluth, at least in terms of argument. The key similarity between the books is their willingness to take on the contemporary American poetry scene, namely all of the hobnobbing that goes on and the rapid speed at which some poems are churned out in order to fill a CV or earn tenure. Yet, the final pages of Weil’s book remind us of the power that poetry can still have, especially when it elevates the everyday image as something of beauty.

Hammond and Weil’s books are completely different forms. Initially his MA thesis at NYU, Hammond’s book is broken into chapters and can be viewed as a collection of essays on the current state of American poetry, one that references everyone from Aristotle to Robert Bly to make its points about the proliferation of M.F.A. programs and “workshop poems” cranked out in creative writing classes. Weil’s collection employs a language that blends the high and low brow and seamlessly references Edith Wharton and Henry James in the opening stanza of “I Want to Lick Your Knee and Weep for Rahoon,” and then asks at the beginning of the second stanza, “Where the fuck is Rahoon?” The mix of working-class language and references to literary giants or theorists (another poem references Adorno) has become a staple of Weil’s work. The working-class mixes with academic culture, and the speaker isn’t afraid to criticize some of the absurdities of academia or the po-biz, which is why Weil’s book reminds me so much of Poetic Amusement.

In “What Editors Are Looking For Is,” Weil writes:

I have noticed that the poems

and the editors, and much

of the scenery surrounding

the poems and the editors is

beginning to look the same—

fixed so to speak in an “Excellence”

that does not quite cohere.

In the previous lines, Weil imagines editors who are rarely pleased, with brittle faces, eventually smiling, somewhat, with a “pinched gladness that says/I believe this poem and I can/do lunch together. This poem will/not embarrass me should we be/caught in the camera’s eyes.” This poem and the point it makes again reminds me of Poetic Amusement, specifically that there is such a pressure to publish that sometimes academic poets pen safe poems merely to add to their publication records. The gatekeepers of literary magazines, meanwhile, are also careful what they publish in order to preserve their reputations and not offend.

The final pages of Weil’s book shift away from criticism of academia and the poetry scene and are exactly the type of poems Hammond imagines are possible, if we move away from a committee mindset and teach students to deepen their reading knowledge, place their poems in historical context, and draw on rich, lived experiences, even painful memories. One of the book’s last poems, “I Was a Good Son,” is one of the most confessional in the book, but it is also the opposite of the poems that Weil and Hammond rail against. It isn’t a safe poem, but one marked with brutal honesty, as the speaker recounts the last moments with his mother. The second stanza reads:

How do I tell her I wanted to fuck girls. I wanted to

escape into flannel shirts and beer, becoming whatever

it was that was not her dying. Even now I am

ashamed, and say: I was a good soon. I was a good soon.

What I was is love and love is not good. It is not dutiful.

It does not “Stay the course.” It breaks like a cheap watch.

I was a cheap watch. Ma, forgive me. I was a cheap watch

And both of us were lying.

After reading that poem, I had to set the book down and take a deep breath, reminded of the power poetry can still have, especially when it draws on a lived experience. There are other poems that remind me of Emerson, William Carlos Williams, and the American poetic tradition, not necessarily because of their form, but in the way they praise the everyday image, including the wind in a lover’s hair, as recounted in “Vibrant Monday Poem in Which Certain Things Almost Occur,” or a childhood memory about peeling chestnut shells in “Horse Chestnut.” That poem also shifts after a few stanzas to recall Anne Frank’s story, before finally confessing that a sort of spiritual beauty exists in the most common images in this world, including trees and chestnuts.

 A Night in Duluth doesn’t hold back. It pokes fun at the po-biz and academia. It also reads like a journey about a working-class poet who ended up in academia and knows that he’s a strong teacher, but doesn’t want to play the game of hobnobbing that the profession sometimes requires. The final pages, however, show Weil’s knowledge of the American poetic tradition, in that his poems reflect Whitman, Emerson, and William Carlos Williams’ theories that the everyday image, including working-class language, belong in American poetry, and there is a poetic energy and spirituality that can be found there.

Suicide Hotline Hold Music

by Jessy Randall

Red Hen Press, 2016

$11.95

Sometimes it seems as if the poetry world is forever on a search for the New. Or I should say, New! Going further, the highest praise for poetry these days is to say it “reinvents language.” As if the English language has been basically used up, and poets are tasked with making it work again, from the ground up. Or maybe it’s that poetry itself no longer draws the audiences of yore: “yore” being…Elizabethan theater? Homer’s Greece? Perhaps Kennedy’s inauguration? In any case, one can safely say that there are two tribes in the poetry world: the highbrow, dominated by academia, and the lowbrow, dominated by pop music lyrics, poetry slams, rap, and greeting card/ Internet poetry. The former is held to high standards, divided into genres, and is judged by editorial and “established” peer discretion. The latter is held to to the standard of popularity (and/or monetary success). The search for the New! is part of highbrow poetry’s search for a validation of its existence, at odds with what have become the Western values of profit and popularity über alles. Enter Jessy Randall in the middle of all this with her third poetry collection, Suicide Hotline Hold Music. Not only does she not reinvent language, she uses the same vernacular we hear in sit-coms, grocery checkout lines, and the corridors of middle school. Yet manages to put our brains on “refresh” mode, looking at ourselves and the world differently. I attribute this to her unique voice; perfectly balanced (funny but not too funny; weird yet recognizable; whimsically satirical) to fulfill the directive for suicide hotlines, as stated in her title poem: “the main thing is to keep them on the line.”

On this point, Randall’s voice permeates both the comics and the poetry, managing through her playfulness, subtle wit, and counterpoint between “normal” and wacky, to keep us with her. Her poetry is not so much about the astounding phrase or unheard-of imagery, but rather about a tension between revelation and restraint, the commonplace and the outrageous, a low-key, ordinary walk through a surprising otherworld within. With comics as simple and basic as one could imagine added to mostly brief poems and unassuming diction, she manages to present a surprising and satisfying array of experiential wisdom. Like this example from “Pool Rules,” a list poem whose elements jump from the expected to those which speak apparently to a wider pool:

No smoking. No horseplay. There will be

no stealing of your best friend’s boyfriend.

No nose-picking. Say please. In sexual matters,

be generous, but do not think of it that way.

No watch-wearing. No digital clocks. No

t-shirts with sayings on them. Spell *ketchup*

with a *k*. Do not drink to excess. If you must

read a book in the bathtub, be careful. Turn off

cell phones unless you enjoy subtle disdain.

This is how I like my rules, in what seems like no particular order, yet whose order gives it the element of surprise. But in case that strikes you as too suburban, she already admitted to suburbanizing New York (“I Ruined New York”: “I’m the one who wrecked … the alive, excited state of the streets, the way the museums embraced everyone who came in”) and has passed through the “Nine Circles of Motherhood Hell” (a poetry cartoon), the best defense of mothers I’ve seen in a long while. (See below.)

The title’s mention of “suicide,” couched as it is in “hold music,” almost imperceptibly acknowledges the human condition, its necessity to deal with death and despair. If this book was meant as a sort of antidote, it may well have succeeded. I found myself drawn back to it when, sans hotline, I felt a bit overwhelmed. Maybe it was the wisdom of the “Food Diary of Gark the Troll.” Or more likely, knowing things could be worse—knowing I could have been “The Girlfriend of Time,” who ended up with “a face full/ of ectoplasm and no one to cry to.”

The unspoken element here is that her poems ring true. Social commentary slips through the comedic approach with a sleight of hand in which neither overwhelms the other. One of my favorites is this:

The Practice Children

 

“assignments might include divvying up responsibilities in a ‘practice house’ that sometimes even included ‘practice children’ borrowed from local orphanages.” —Emily McCombs, “Home sweet Home ec,” Bust, August/September 2009.

 

We know we’re only for practice. It’s

a comfort to us. Nothing we do has any

long-term effect, so we can behave perfectly,

for a time, win prizes for our goodness and then

it’s right back on the bus home again,

regular life waiting for us, the bunk beds,

the dinner trays, the horrible bathrooms.

We’re practicing, too. We’re practicing on you.

Here she explores the word “practice” itself and the psychological cruelty of its use through the voice of the children, “we.” This in itself acts as both a rebuttal to and exposition of the callous negation of the children’s individuality in the quote. Without showing anger or speaking out of character, the children’s voice creates a subtle jab at the quote’s moral vacuity with “earn prizes for our goodness” and “regular life waiting for us.” Here the words “goodness,” “regular” and “perfect” are used to poignant and satiric effect. Of course, the best part is the last line, where the “practice children” turn the tables. We can only guess what that involves.

Part of what’s trending in poetry now is genre-bending. By including poetry comics, Randall can certainly check that box. What interests me most is that although poetry comics is an amalgam of words and graphics, with the latter usually dominant, her voice remains a constant in both. The simple and down-to-earth (or TV) language is the same in both. The graphics too are simple and down-to-earth, giving the sense that anyone could do it. It’s a matter of the same wit and casual tone interspersed with quirkiness, applied differently. That the poems are mostly short and the comics simple certainly holds the notoriously short modern attention span. She fills that short space with observations that keep us reading. As one might imagine, in experimenting with a medium, some efforts will be more successful than others. In her quest for brevity, for packing subtle meaning into the simplest and most rudimentary of graphic and verbal juxtapositions, a few of her poems and comics fall flat in their restatement of the obvious. If she was banking on sparsity itself as a poetic device juxtaposed with the humor of oversimplification, it works sometimes but not all of the time—although this is more a matter of subjectivity and taste than fatal flaw. What we get in return from her “investment” is that even what doesn’t seem to say much does so out of understatement. So you’re underwhelmed? Turn the freaking page..!.. Now that’s better.  It may be a letdown in the sense that one, expecting a ladybug, finds a potato bug. But was that really so bad?

Which brings up the issue of what we hope to find in literature. Since Randall’s work really takes on some of the features of what I described above as “lowbrow”—accessibility, common language, comics (as opposed to the Visual Poetry use of blurry typeface as Art), humor, and brevity—she may find herself not only straddling genres, but worlds as well: the Art world as opposed to the Pop world. Rewinding history a bit, this has been done successfully by no less than Shakespeare, who wrote plays for the common man, not a literate culture, made accessible via theatre. There has always been a back-and-forth between the Cultured and the Boor; education (think middle school) forms an equalizer in modern society. By harkening back to a younger school age, Randall leaves the post-grads in a quandary: this is not your MFA-certified material, so is it Poetry? Even poetry comics can be done with more finesse, in technicolor no less. It’s…well, what is it? Whatever it is, it’s New! And that means unique.

So here we are, in this era of depression and despair, Trump looming like a giant bully on the horizon, the 99% counting yachts while we count imaginary sheep, suicide hotlines sprouting everywhere, and I do not, on certain days, really want to hear long odes by Jorie Graham. I want to hear the sound of  “Everybody’s Hair in Middle School.” Literally. A couple of awkward pie graphs of love and I’m good to go. This may not be what Jason Guriel hoped for when he complained in “Why Is the Great American Poem So Hard to Write?” about how the world needs “a poem, not just poetry. That’s what our era is lacking, claims a growing chorus of pundits. . . .” Randall may not write the Great American Poem, her work may not be what some say ought to be done, but she does write “self-contained” original pieces and collects them into her book like (her cartoon of) boyfriends in a candy box. There’s a place on my bookshelf for that.

Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2016

Page Length: 71

Retail: $14

Poems of Survival: A Review of Jason Allen’s A Meditation on Fire

Jason Allen’s debut full-length collection of poems, A Meditation on Fire, reminds me of what remains in a boxing ring after the final round. The poems spin tales of mental and physical bruises, blood, scars, and shadowboxing. Yet, even in the most confessional, sobering work, poems that speak to addiction and sobriety, the book is not without its humor and salvation.

Several of the poems are so visceral that we feel what the speaker feels as we thumb through the collection. The opening poem, “Blues Before Sunrise,” for instance, loosely plays with the blues form, namely the repetition, not the rhyme scheme and meter, to give us insight into the speaker’s troubled mind, as he listens to Muddy Waters.

I’ve got nothing

to do but listen to the rain

while a dead man named Muddy

sings the blues inside my skull

Immediately, within the short, unrhymed, four-line stanza, the poet does much to establish the mood. There is the physical aspect of the rain, but there is also the haunting quality of the music, which pounds the speaker’s skull like rain to pavement. The rest of the poem takes the reader for quite a ride, with images of a burned-up couch, a rusty canteen, a one-eyed mutt with ribs showing, and vials crushed beneath the speaker’s boots. The imagery does much to set the tone and drop the reader into an uneasy setting. By the end, the speaker states he will leave as soon as he is allowed to leave and he has been waiting for a midnight train. The rest of the collection is a journey of sorts, through drug houses, family memories, and ultimately, sobriety and newfound love.

Much of the book also addresses father/son relationships. “Gunmetal Blue” is sorrowful in its opening, set in the late fall, when the trees are bare and scrape against the speaker’s window, but the poem shifts midway from the image of the outside world to a dream in which the speaker is seated at a bar with his father, making apologies for pulling splinters out of his hand, perhaps after a fight. He is even sorry for forgetting his father’s face. Despite the complicated history, however, the speaker concludes with the powerful declaration, “I’m not one bit sorry/to have survived.”

There is another thread that runs through the collection: the idea of prayer and meditation as a means of salvation. To be clear, none of the poems in the collection are religious, but they do find salvation, either in love or through thankfulness. The way Allen uses repetition throughout the book also resembles the act of prayer. “Angels at Dawn” is another poem set in winter, but it is about overcoming winter, a metaphor for overcoming addiction and other life struggles. Like other poems, the opening stanza immediately establishes a clear, concrete setting:

This winter I feel lucky

to have survived

the thousands of miles

of white knuckles on the wheel

the bald tires on snow and ice.

A few stanzas later, however, the speaker confesses:

This winter I may have died

but for a moment I am at peace

weightless in this montage—

her sleeping face

the falling snow

the shopping cart man

calling out

to angels at dawn

the morning light

against the frost

on my neighbor’s

stained glass window

the feel of her hand

as she tows the dream-line

and sleepily says goodbye.

In the hands of a less careful poet, the poems of survival and prayer in A Meditation on Fire would not have worked, but Allen is able to mine personal memory without being sentimental. He also constructs vivid images so that we are there with him during his childhood, as he gets in fights with neighborhood boys. We are there in the punk houses, as Black Flag songs blast from the radio, and we are there when the speaker feels the warm breath of a lover against his cheek. A Meditation on Fire is a fine celebration of life and personal triumph.

(For Alfred)

Edgar Allen Poe, Oh-Poe is established as foundational in American literature, as a classic of the New Voice that has hallmarked the reverberative roar of American artistic influence, but his legacy is one that is gravely compressed: most textbooks will feature a work of prose and a poem–usually “The Raven”–and texts for the lower levels will also feature illustrations that are as lurid as 1950s science fiction cinema posters. Instructional editions for secondary education put more emphasis on an unfortunately short life than they do on brief comments reducing Poe’s work to that of America’s brief Gothic tradition. Although Poe still appears in classrooms, his is a legacy that is now a cliché of corvids and black lipstick, an autumn lesson that is augmented by store displays for Halloween. It is more than unfortunate that scholastic views of Poe have been mostly reduced to either emotive demonstrations, or as an opportunity for evidence of classical allusion in poetry.

It might just be that this truncation of pleasure offered by Poe to our descendant culture is born of sacrifice to standardized testing in public educational institutions; it might be that miserly offerings in collegiate anthologies are the result of Committee written Curriculum of texts overall, it might be that attention that might be paid to Poe in advanced work is still constrained by the Overview of buffet anthology style of syllabus design–always also segregated by the Corset of region or historical time–and, alas, professorial prejudice, but even advanced readers stumble over Poe, tumble over the density of his sentencing, and stagger about or his deft use of tore.

Given Poe’s position in American literary history, it is sad, ever pathetic, that a crucial aspect of his work has been so consistently overlooked his sly and distinctive use of humor.

Humor is, at its core, a moment of shared perspective. There’s an inherent similarity between the “Aha” of philosophical enlightenment and the “Ha Ha” response of a joke–in both cases, the listener is electrified with the bolt of an unexpected idea, and atingle with the immediate internalization of that current of thought coming to ground. Since Poe was prolific, it’s not difficult to find roaring examples of absurdist humor that delights still, and which then and now are groundwork for whole movements in literature, in painting, in cinema, in music. Still, the tendency is to be overly convinced of Poe’s work as a sermon of a serious mind, and to overlook the joy of his jokes.

It might be that a further look into two of his pieces might yield an even more profound respect for Poe’s brilliance, and greater appreciation overall. Certainly, even secondary students who have been pointed toward the more physical aspects of Poe’s humor find a satisfaction, a first flower of critical euphoria that is far superior to the deflated disappointment offered by standardized views. Undergraduates, although often resentful of how Poe illuminates lapses in their reading level, will find in Poe an increased sensitivity to language, structure, setting that can carry them to increased critical ability overall.

In this direction, allow a rereading of “To Helen”–three stanzas of five lines with an interesting rhyme structure: specifically, the introduction of a shift in line 9 of the large vowel.

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicean barks of yore,

That gerity, o’er perfumed sea,

The weary, way-worn wandered bore

To his own native shore.

 

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

To the glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome.

 

Lo! In yon brilliant window-niche

How statue-like see thee stand,

The agate lamp within thy hard

Ah, Psyche, from the regions which

Are Holy-Land!

Depending on pronunciation, this longe appears to repeat the rhyme in lines 1 and 3, and echoed in line 11, however, if the vowel of “Greece” is felt as a rhyme with “niche”, then it is unlikely to rhyme with the “which” in line 14. This jarring of the rhyme unsettles the ear, and might be seen as a bit of a poke for whoever slept through the quadruple alliteration in line 3 of “weary, way-worn wanderer”. Having established the poem as one of direct address in the first line, the aural sense of this alliteration is of breath, of breathing: Poe is breathing on Helen. Whether or not modern courting techniques have undergone modification in subsequent centuries, biology hasn’t–breathing a bit much tends to indicate some rise in internal physical pressure. Poe is breathing a bit heavily or Helen here. While this may or may not amuse, Poe is also fairly thorough or his classical allusions here–so much so that the poem has become a favorite of instructors of literature as an illustration of that device. Given the direct address of the poem, and the references to flowers, seductive mythic females, and ancient civilizations, Poe’s technique here is that dark Comedic trick of hyperbole–a technique still used in verbal foreplay. While a hormonal infusion will put a glow around object of passion, Poe’s choices here are absurdly elevated–any view of Baltimore (or any of Poe’s cities of residence) are rarely of glory or grandeur; however, the occurrence of three consonant Gs within two lines, a continental rhyme, once again gives an aural effect of verbalized breath, of grunting. It is at this point, Poe gives us the poem’s most concrete image of a woman standing in a window holding a lamp, specifically an “agate lamp”, which has not much color but which makes for rice assonance with “hand”, so that the focus is or her hand. The point of view here is amusing–the Voice of the poem is on the other side of the Window, he is Outside. Despite the intimacies of the previous thirteen lines, the voice of the poem is not in physical proximity to the inspiration for these devotions. In modern parlance, he could be stalking her, or otherwise viewing her vicariously. The poem closes with two lines of introspection from the point of view of the poem’s vision, and a charge in direct address to that of thought, or Psyche. The charge in direct address is the clue to the purch line, so to speak: “the regions / which Are Holy-land!”. While line 15 end line rhymes with that of line 13’s “hard”, the meter climaxes with four syllables and two stresses. Poe literally climaxes the poem with a bit of blasphemy.

While the humor in “To Helen” might not be of the rough and nasty variety that is vogue at the time of this rereading, still it serves everyone to be aware of the breathing, grunting and blasphemy inspired by the poem’s person of direct address. The humor here is assly as Poe’s structure: subtle in shifts of rhyme, aural, allusive, and complicated in a meter that suggest symbolic structures. This sort of humor-slightly wicked-is not a Corsisteritstance in Poe’s work, although humor is present in all of his writings, both prose and poetic inform. Poe seems to wary the tone of his humor to suit his topic, as a form of emphasis of his point; it may well be that the reader insensate to the “Ha” might still get the “Aha,” but without the lilt of laughter.

But ah, it might be that an inflexible reader, a puff of wooden importance, might still laze about with dismissive gestures about Poe’s mere romantic tones. Generic summations of romanticism emphasize the sensate as incertive for the swells of narrative plot, but such similar claims are applied by Poetry.org to a synopsis too of the Symbolists, as well as to their “successors” the Surrealists—once again, shuttling off vibrant poems to some old folks home of historical literature. Given the cultural influence of the post atomic age, even an acknowledgment of these days of techno-barbarism, Allow then a rereading of Poe’s “Sonnet-To Science”:

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

  Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

  Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

  Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

  Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,

  And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

  Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Once again, Poe uses direct address in his first line, lestthätsimplest point be clouded. Here, Poe’s tore is more bitter, as evidenced by his harsh verb choices in lines 2 and 3 of “alterest” and “preyest”. In case the violence of these verbs is missed, Poe directly addresses the poem’s object with the pejorative “Vulture” at the beginning of line 4, and Continues with line 5 “How should he love thee?”. The point of view here is an attempt to love something unsavory, potentially repugnant. Poe does not ask how could, but instead asks how should he takes on science’s very point of view-an inspection of the unlovely. Poe enumerates Science’s misdeeds by Once again using widlentwerbs:”dragged Diane”, “driven the Hamadryad”, “torn the Naiad” in conjunction with the lofty sense given by the allusions.

Obviously, the energetic verb choices here give Poe a tone of passion consistent with his Carlor; however, his wry laughter is still present. Consider the poem’s adept conclusion, that begins online 2 and is signaled by the slant rhyme of “flood”, which ought to match the vowel of line IO’s “wood” but does not. A first glance yields the standard rhyming couplet of the end two lines, but the difficulty of construction has “torn”working in appositive constructions still enumerating science’s misdeeds. Softly enough, Poe utilizes “Elfin”, and the allusions in the poem bear the weight of this reference, except for the implication of elfin as being similar to children. Poe’s accusations now include the destruction of childhood’s innocence, and yet he continues or with a reference to his own self for the poem’s concluding note. By now, “torn” is operative for the last line, which sings an assonance of vowels, including the alliterative “tamarind tree”. The image is of a drowsy mind in a pleasant position being forcefully removed, and a modern mind might speculate or how Poe would view deforestation. Yet, there’s much afoot the use of tamarind tree, for its allusion is to that of the Budda, as tamarind is native to the Budda’s geographical origins. Poe’s posited dichotomy is of science versus spirit- an argument that rages Centuries later, however, Poe is positioning himself as Budda, and one  treated with violence. The humor here is far more dark, a sort of self-deprecating hyperbole. Given that Science is an activity, a mode of thought, Poe’s accusations to Science are absurd-therein the bitter laugh: Science is a Criminal of no substance, but much afoul is done in its name. This humor might strike some as jaded, but it accomplishes the goal of understanding, of a seen point of view. Although Science was a new citizen of the western Culture in Poe’s time, his view of it is presentiert from a modern context. It is a more macabre laugh in modern times for our “Ha Ha,” as our polluted waters sully the Naiad realms, but “Aha” is certainly present.

And yes, it might still be that Poe’s language alone is too much of a challenge for the ear all too accustomed to the computerized beat box prosaic to the modern soundscape. In a culture of crude questions that quantify inquiries into multiple guess responses for supposedly educated thinking, and mob response for the not more than sensate populace, such turns of phrase are not even tackled by the most masterfully adept griots of the flickering media.

But ah, let the lower of literature succumb once again to the sensual sweep of Poe’s language, and yet singer wiser eyes on his gift to letters. While the work of Poe has been given a place in history, and Poe himself credited with the invention of genres still in use, Poe’s influence or art- already acknowledged to Symbolism, Horror, Surrealism but also thus to the connective ligaments of the modern body of thought, the influential sweep of DaDa, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism-car be tied to his dark humor. Ary modern viewer of the paintings of Ivan Albright or of German Expressionism, is viewing the progeny of Poe, Additionally, and perhaps more obviously, is the influence Poe has had or our modern griots: Comediaris. Certainly, the self-deprecation, the cynicism, the hyperbole evidenced in Poe’s work are easily found in a pantheon of Comediaris. While modern allusions have charged, the rhyme of rap music and its jaded point of view have antecedents in Poe. We owe Poe, and we owe far more than is offered in reductionist textbooks, flyover anthologies, and emo-oriented Pinterest offerings. His is a prepotency that has influenced far more in western Culture than is currently credited. If finding the jokes is a step toward acknowledging that potency, then it’s one that ought to be both taken and taught.

Chapbook: My Bedside Radio 
Author: Anthony Cappo
Publisher: Deadly Chaps

My Bedside Radio is a chapbook written in narrative form. The reader follows the narrator from childhood to young adulthood struggling to understand a seemingly contradictory and fearful world. It touches on themes such as sexuality, war, racism, social scripts and paternal abandonment.

These poems are deceptively simple; they aren’t laden with metaphor or high diction and the lines rarely have more than five words in them. It’s as if the poet made a compromise between the complexity of life and the simple-hearted perception of a young person, as if Cappo told the young narrator, “Yes, I know how to write about your confusions, about your realizations, about your awe and loneliness and if you let me do it, I will do it so that if I were able to throw this book decades into the past you would be able to read it.” In this compromise he refuses to burden the growing protagonist with sententious analysis and instead gives him a sympathetic once-over before looking to the larger world. Cappo does not lock his protagonist in pity-driven isolation but frees him into the larger scope of being, for which everyone—his sister’s boyfriends, Nixon, Byron, fugitive guerrillas – is responsible:

[Freedom, freedom, everybody wants freedom]

Freedom, freedom, everybody wants
freedom, my bedside radio explains.

Goodbye, stranger; baby don’t
get hooked on me; never fall
in love again.

Other people such a problem.
I thought together was the whole point.

Life isn’t simple, Cappo seems to write, but the apparent contradictions of the world mustn’t obscure our language. Contradictions lead to uncertainty but words are the tool used to approximate truths. The radio, with its songs and news, plays the role of an authority figure to the young narrator and at the end of the book, the adult protagonist understands the identity-forming power of words.

Anthony Cappo is just as skillful and considerate of sound in his poems as the singers that come through his radio. The strength of his sound comes through his fluent use of assonance. One of my favorite poems from this book demonstrates how well he maneuvers the vowel sounds:

[My bedside radio says that was all he missed]

My bedside radio says that was all
he missed, he ain’t comin’ back.

I sing this and my baby sister
complains, you don’t know that, dad

Might be coming back. Everyone
tells her no no, he’s just singing

a song. But she’s right – I’m not.
And he isn’t.

In this poem, Cappo plays the “i” sound against the “o” sound, creating a dialogue between the vowels. The “i” is definite and cruel: “missed”, “this”, “isn’t.” The “o” is a protest, upset and insecure: “no no”, “song”, “not”, “don’t.” The sounds in Cappo’s poems are not just part of the poetic music, but play intricately to each poem’s meaning. One can argue that the main dialogue is not even between the characters, but between these “i” and “o” sounds that would be able to carry all the weight even if the poem were written with nonsense words.

Even when opportunity affords it, he chooses to surprise rather than shock his audience (“When I asked her what adultery meant // she said to ask your father”). His uses of metaphor aren’t far-fetched (“just two married guys stinging // the town, honeying the girls.) and even his use of surrealism shows great control. The radio may be “sad” or “goofing off” but the personification of the radio never detracts from the poem as a slice of the actual.

What is most astonishing about these poems is the multitudes that they contain in such a small space. The poem “[Come on people now, smile on your brother]” is sixteen lines. In it Cappo is able to put the audience in a specific era, acknowledge hypocrisy and the limitations of music, disparage idealism, mock commercial tactics, and demonstrate the incredible disparity between the private and public treatment of a minority group.

The last three lines of the poem are “There’s harmony in buying the world // a Coke, but Ruben Carter / didn’t make out so well.” I want to go into these lines because this is one of many great places where Cappo shows his understanding of language to not have to use a lot of it. (I can imagine him describing certain poems as pushy). His minimal use of language demonstrates his understanding of white space. The large, uninhabited areas of the page spread wide and unanswered. Whereas a charged topic such as race relations would set less skillful poets into apologetic writing, Cappo lets the untouched page speak the immeasurable silence of perpetual racism.

My Bedside Radio is a collection of poems that follows the development of a maturing protagonist alongside the historical development of a culture. In the beginning the radio gives inchoate messages (“AM radio the new truth / acid protest”), staticky with confusion and destruction; by the end Jim Morrison is proclaimed “the sexiest man alive, but dead.” Our protagonist is now an adult and the authoritative voice of the radio is turned down. We witness him as grown, physically navigating an outside environment far from his bedside, and learning, tentatively how to sing his own song.

In the stampede at Godhra, the first child is trampled.
The Sabarmati Express stalls at the platform

like a suitcase bursting. The bogie’s coupling is cut,

the railcar isolated, sprinkled with kerosene.
Look what happens. When we collide

a struck match drops. Our arms flail

from shattered windows. Charred chappals
graze the rails. Dusty pant legs flutter, brimmed

with flames. Our mouths gasp small choking

o’s. Now the whole city smells like paan,
a gritty red splatter on gravel-strewn sidewalk.

We know we are too many. When the burnt bodies

are swathed in faded salwars, tossed in the bed
of a rusted pickup, and carried to the Ganga,

we want only the warm silt of flour dusted over

a chapatti. We turn the fan on high, cup a tea light
in our hands. Watch our prayer flicker.

lowering

his hood flares out, spectacle pattern
like tessellations, the glint of him gilded just so

in the light. the cobra is a garland—no, the cobra
is a man’s knuckles, a girl’s hair clumped
between them, & you

are the girl. you hold your sadness
with both hands & know
how to drive a shovel between your body
& venom, know the heft

of the handle, splintering your palm.
this isn’t your first time.

you killed the last one as he came
toward you, zigzagging, his tracks in the sand
like a graph or table

showing how many more women died
alone this year, in your village
this year, as babies this year, walked
toward him thinking spectacle—

& his snake-blood made the sand blacken,
made it curdle, almost, made your blood

curdle, to hear the slicing, to feel his neck
shorn by the blade, & you stared as blood worked
its way back out of his body, thought

of the man who watched you bleed
on his bed the first time & didn’t offer
to help. the cobra veers right & you lift the shovel,
pewter almost humming, almost alive,

the blade trembling as you wait
for the snake to change its course—

flow

As a noun, it’s a word that makes most girls I know cringe.
A word whose synonyms—motion, flux, current—
remind me of the Cooper, the Ashley, the steady, continuous rivers
I swam in at sixteen, the first time I ever
wore a bikini. I wonder if those girls
think of a body of water—or just of bodies, of boys
who poke fun at cycles. It gets tricky for me
with the verb. As in to go along with a series of actions
you may not feel totally comfortable with. To move
in a steady, continuous stream toward or away from a certain
vanishing point of action. As in a lover saying “go with the flow”
was sort of his approach to relationships. I have gone with the flow
all the way up to the moment when time
slows & you see the thing you love
being taken from you. Resistance to the flow is often met
with an impression of me as steady, as in going steady, or why
are you so uptight? I went with the flow once
at a party in college & the next day threw away all
of my tank tops, every strappy thing
I could find. Flow can also refer to blood
between legs, to menstrual cycles, to any kind
of wound & what comes from it. As in no blood was spilled
when he stung my cheek but I felt something flow
out of me—steady, continuous. I felt it as I bolted
home, & again when I burrowed into piles of laundry.
We say a poem does or does not flow, that things either move forward
or not at all; fish are carried with the river down or upstream;
there’s this liquid motion that’s steady, continuous,
predictable. Something that cannot be stopped.

Indian American poet Raena Shirali grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where she currently lives and teaches English at College of Charleston. Her first book, GILT, is forthcoming in 2017 with YesYes Books, and her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Four Way Review, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, and many more. Her other honors include a 2016 Pushcart Prize, the 2016 Cosmonauts Avenue Prize, recognition as a finalist for the 2016 Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, the 2014 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, recognition as a finalist for the 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize in 2013. She is currently a poetry reader for Muzzle Magazine & will be the Spring 2017 Philip Roth Resident at the Stadler Center for Poetry.  You can find more of her work at www.raenashirali.com

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world—what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Raena Shirali: Much of my motivation on a poem-by-poem basis comes from a resistance against silence, as well as a desire to enter into and provide a new understanding of various psychologies. I first fell in love with poetry because of persona, because it provided opportunity to escape my own thoughts (at least, that’s what I thought persona was offering me as a young poet), and I still return to persona or ekphrasis whenever I get stuck. But I think persona provides more than self-discovery by means of vicarious experience. It’s an opportunity to create and cultivate empathy. That’s what makes poetry such a powerful medium—a medium I can’t imagine life without. To loosely quote Casey Jarrin, one of my most influential teachers, poetry is an empathy machine, and everything that fosters empathy is not just worthwhile, but necessary. I think that’s closely related to why I’m excited about the poebiz landscape right now. We’re seeing so many more POC voices, LGBTQ+ voices, marginalized and oppressed voices getting recognition at the Poetry Foundation and Teen Vogue and beyond. That motivates me not just to keep writing, keep remaining dedicated to writing poetry for and alongside my fellow POCs, my fellow women, anyone who has questioned or struggled with their heritage or sexuality—but further motivates me to read and promote those authors actively. How do our fragmented experiences, our traumas, our flawed attempts to articulate those traumas, ultimately add up to our collective consciousness? Our collective empathy? Our capacity to praise, or mourn, or change?

FFF: What are your influences—creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?
RS: That really depends on where I am in my writing process, but I do make a point to consume art that isn’t poetry every day—whether that’s compiling art on my Tumblr, listening to podcasts, stopping by the Halsey gallery, or reading in a sculpture garden. I’m a firm believer in indirect influence—the confluence of experiences and art forms as the real generative space—as opposed to reading an article and having an immediate reaction in the form of a poem. Don’t get me wrong—social and political issues completely drive my work, but I’ve had to train myself to not let my impulse or initial emotional response take charge in the poem. I have too fierce a reaction to things like gang rape in India—a topic my book addresses extensively—to write the first thing I feel. I have to sit with that violence, and ask how it can speak to, say, a red sculpture smattered with white bird shit I saw a few months ago, or the girls in sorority tees sitting underneath it, talking quietly. I guess my creative influences are those of association and accumulation, which makes sense, considering my experiences with assimilation and camouflaging as a woman of color writing in the South.

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems—as author and as reader?
RS: Aesthetically, I’m always thinking about lineation and enjambment first and foremost, and I especially prioritize fragmentation over symmetry. To me, no poem is really the final word, even if the poem is fulsome in its articulation and conception. It seems almost haphazard to call the poems in GILT complete, in a way, when the notions of fracture, chaos, and fear are so integral to the project. I think that’s my central challenge and preoccupation—to allow individual poems as well as the book to be a liminal space, where answers aren’t accessible to us, because in any instance of violence, what is the answer, really? How do we explore such barren landscapes— landscapes fraught with the aftermath of violence, landscapes where girls aren’t welcome, where girls are the fear-riddled creatures we’ve brought them up to be, no matter the country?

I’ll say that recently, I’ve moved away from more conceptual poetry, and instead, selectively read work with discernible stake. I’m more drawn to art that allows violence its gruesome elements, while also investigating and implicating lyricism in conversation with that violence. That kind of art—poems like Tarfia Faizullah’s in Seam come to mind—should be as visceral as the event it seeks to expand and mold for the reader. Rape, for instance, shouldn’t fit into a template or a box, and we shouldn’t only be willing to engage with similar subject matters when they fit into outlines that make us, as readers, comfortable. I try to practice that belief in my reading, writing, and teaching, but that isn’t to say it’s not hard, uncomfortable work.

Deconstructing language and experience is cool to me. Poems like Franny Choi’s “Pussy Monster” are cool to me, because they’re risky and fun, while also being succinct and brilliant critiques. Any work that challenges convention is cool to me, too. For instance, I’m enjoying watching the lyric essay as a mode shift and mutate and resist definition even more defiantly, especially in work that engages pop culture and is written with the attention to detail and capacity for empathy of Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s “On Serena Williams and the Policing of Imagined Arrogance”. It’s super interesting to me when poetry gets circulated on social media, especially lately around the utterly unfathomable violence against black men and women & the LGBTQ+ population in America. I love that these pieces feel and are more immediate, necessary, and laudable than some of what we, as a culture, still praise canonically. I love watching and being a part (in whatever small way) of that change.

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something—an experience, a piece of art, anything really—that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

RS: Language barriers have shaped me more than I care to admit. Growing up, my parents spoke English in the house; and since they actually speak two different dialects of Hindi (Gujaratri and Konkani), and English was more comfortable for them, they rarely spoke Hindi (though, props to my mom, who tried pretty hard to teach us the basics for a year or so in there). So throughout my childhood and adolescence, taking trips to India or visiting family (most of whom speak Gujaratri), I felt this sense of alienation, coupled with a deep desire to fit in (a pretty common narrative for first generation immigrants). It’s interesting because, on the one hand, growing up so blatantly not-white in South Carolina, I wanted desperately to be the antithesis of my family, my heritage, my skin—but on the other hand, I craved a sense of belonging that I must have known, innately, couldn’t be attained by assimilating. I feel that sense of not-belonging in my poems as strongly as I do in my sense of self, and it’s taken years to accept that not-belonging does not mean I have no identity, but rather, that liminality is likely the most significant aspect of my being.

I finally had that realization when I was 22, seeing Fred Wilson’s “Iago’s Mirror” at the Boston MFA, and that was a real turning point in both my poetry and my conceptualization of identity and otherness. “Iago’s Mirror” is this gorgeously ornate series of stacked Murano glass mirrors, but the whole piece is entirely black. Of course, it’s a comment on Othello and blackness above all, but it made me become obsessed with the idea that the act of looking at myself, as a child of immigrants, had been completely altered by the fact of my brownness as other. I mean, at some point growing up, I just stopped explaining what being “Indian” meant. I was always going to be not-quite, and kids explained me away as “definitely being half-white” or “really light skinned for a black girl.” It was exhausting explaining myself, so I just grew totally apathetic. I stopped owning my skin—stopped owning my body, really—and that period of my life is one marked by depression and eating disorders, as a result (subjects that GILT engages with, by the way). “Iago’s Mirror” flipped the lens for me. I was 22, finishing out my first year of grad school, had finally left the South and found a community I felt a part of. And then I saw this piece—one that, it seemed to me, spoke to issues of colorism and diaspora and intersectionality—and I just realized I wasn’t writing about the shit that needed to be written about. I could make the choice to actively embody and promote my identity, not just in my life, but, perhaps more importantly, in my poems. In doing so, I could own the parts of myself that were “too dark.” I hadn’t written a single poem involving my own identity before that point, and now I can’t imagine what my poetry would be without it. That piece of art changed everything for me.

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.
RS: It almost feels silly to plug it at this point, but given the state of our current political climate, I feel it bears repeating: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is, by far, the most important text I’ve read in the last year, not just because of its exploration of America’s race issues, but because that is a book that, every time I read it, pushes me—in terms of genre, self-evaluation, grief, cultural critique, praise. It asks that we own the microaggressions committed against us, as well as those that we—inevitably, unintentionally—are implicated in the perpetuation of. I think that’s incredibly brave and important work, and am always thinking about how I can navigate a similar space in my poems. Parts of GILT address the aspects of my upbringing that were and are incredibly privileged, while simultaneously engaging in the racialized body as alienated, perhaps as a direct result of the community that privilege entails or bestows. So, I guess I’ll say that Citizen isn’t just important as a text to hold up in order to say, “Racism exists!” but more so for us to examine our own day to day engagement with and movement through our world, and to be willing to change it, to open the door for other POCs, other LGBTQ+ writers, anyone who has been and continues to be disenfranchised in seemingly quiet ways.

The second book I’ll recommend is a stretch, not because it isn’t an amazing collection of poems, but because it is incredibly hard to get your hands on. Morocco by Matthew Savoca and Kendra Malone Grant was released by Dark Sky Books in 2011, and is currently priced at $361 on Amazon. No joke. So it feels a bit ridiculous to even tell people to seek Morocco out, but I can’t answer this question without doing just that. Morocco is scathingly minimalist, and doesn’t fuck around when talking about fucking around. It taught me to truly own how the body can be equally wrecked by grief, love, and heritage. It’s raw and tender and full of slippery things, and both voices in the affair are represented honestly enough to make the reader uncomfortable. You know how sometimes you see a movie or read a book (The Sun Also Rises comes to mind) where the central relationship is so fucked up that it’s somehow appealing? That’s what these poems are. They’re gorgeous, bright, dead spaces. You can’t help but fall in love with them, even though they’re poisonous and addicting. And you don’t regret falling for them once you have. Find this book. Seriously.

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

RS: I guess this is the place where I plug the book! My first collection of poems, GILT, is coming out with Yes Yes Books.

And as an end note, I think it’s important to mention that several of the poems in GILT are persona poems dealing with incredible violence and trauma—something that I am cautious and wary of throughout the drafting and composition process. Leslie Jamison, in The Empathy Exams, borrows this little bit of wisdom from Faulkner that I’ve been obsessing over: “It isn’t enough, but it’s something.” I feel that applies to all art, but to poems where the author has to reach beyond their own set of experiences especially. And I think that’s how I feel about GILT. It isn’t enough to write one collection about this truly wide-ranging set of issues, but it’s a start. It’s something.

Indian American poet Raena Shirali grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where she currently lives and teaches English at College of Charleston. Her first book, GILT, is forthcoming in 2017 with YesYes Books, and her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Four Way Review, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, and many more. Her other honors include a 2016 Pushcart Prize, the 2016 Cosmonauts Avenue Prize, recognition as a finalist for the 2016 Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, the 2014 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, recognition as a finalist for the 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize in 2013. She is currently a poetry reader for Muzzle Magazine & will be the Spring 2017 Philip Roth Resident at the Stadler Center for Poetry.  You can find more of her work at www.raenashirali.com

NYQ Books, 2016

Page Length: 116

Retail: $15

The last several months have been trying as an American citizen. Donald Trump’s candidacy has used xenophobic rhetoric to demonize minority groups and immigrants. In these times, Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s body of work, which often focuses on her Italian-American family heritage and celebrating the immigrant experience, is especially relevant. Her newest collection, What Blooms in Winter, draws on the deeply personal to vocalize her story and also give praise to the melting pot aspect that has always been a foundation of American culture.

Gillan’s latest collection continues to draw on the narrative form, and most of the poems use personal memory to address broader issues, including the immigrant experience, climate change, and global terrorism. The early part of the collection moves through grade school, before shifting to her teenage/twenty-something years, during the 1960s and 1970s. The book then addresses a number of losses in the poet’s life, including close family. Finally, the book concludes with a number of poems about Italy and her parents’ immigrant experience. The language is accessible, but the content is never simple.

Because of this election season and national dialogue, I was most drawn to poems that explore what it means to be an American. In “The First Day of High School,”  the speaker recounts trying so hard to look like an “American middle-class girl,” including wearing the right clothes. Soon, however, the speaker learns that preppy clothes can’t hide who she really is or mask her “lower-class accent.” The poem then weaves in and out of memory, navigating to a moment when a famous poet told the speaker to hire a voice coach to erase her accent. The speaker refused and concludes her poem in defiance against any notion that she is not American.

Another poem, “Our First TV,” addresses manufactured notions of the American dream. The speaker lists various images from TV shows she watched growing up and their portrayal of the American success story, including the big white house and huge living and dining rooms on “Father Knows Best.” The speaker goes back even further to Dick and Jane books that taught her about “the other America” with a “pipe-smoking father raking leaves/in his cardigan and brown dress pants.” It was that first TV in the living room, however, that taught the speaker about class divide and how her living situation, a “cold-water flat” with small rooms and Italian chatter, was different than the upper-middle class American homes she viewed on TV. The poem concludes with one final reality about class divide in America, and the lines resonate especially well post-Great Recession:

All the TV programs in the world

could not have prepared me

for the invisible walls

that protected those people

from people like me.

Other poems cry out in frustration against global terrorism or climate change. “The Catskills in Mid-September,” for example, celebrates the beauty of the northeastern mountains, but ends with the lines, “As the weather swings from downpour/to drought, I know we are all to blame/know there is so much that has to change.” Other work centers on family and recalls the poet’s sister, parents, and even more recent interactions with grandchildren in bucolic settings of Italy.

Overall, What Blooms in Winter places the poet squarely on the side of the immigrant and the underdog. The book never strays from the narrative mode and frequently draws on the poet’s personal memories, either to merge the personal with the political, or to honor the memory of those who have come and gone in her life.  I am grateful for Maria’s voice. Her work stands as a protester banner, waving boldly against anyone who wants to make the country less inclusive.

Everyone who moves to Cannibal Island is given a house.

The houses are okay.

On one hand, the houses all have Thermo-Twin windows, which are very expensive and come with 3 full pages of warranties.

On the other hand, everyone who sleeps in the houses on Cannibal Island has nightmares in which their fingernails fall off and there is a dead ferret under the sofa in the living room that they can’t seem to remember to call animal control about.

But it’s all right, because every Tuesday the cannibals go door to door handing out cake!

Cannibals make very good cake. Surprisingly, (and no one ever believes this at first), the cake is vegan.

The cannibals also have excellent memories because if a non-cannibal expresses that they have a peanut allergy or a penchant for red velvet, the following Tuesday the cannibals make sure to accommodate.

The cannibals teach each new resident of Cannibal Island that cool trick they all first learned from a Buzzfeed video where you cut out the center of the cake, then push the remaining halves of the cake together so the cake does not go stale during the week.

After all, cannibals hate waste and always do their best to be good Earth citizens, forming good communities with housing, weekly cake, and gleaming teeth.

Becoming a Cannibal

Non-cannibals who live on Cannibal Island can sometimes become cannibals.

Many believe the process simple as knocking the postman unconscious, removing his leg with a bone saw, and eating the leg.

But it is not.

First, you must be a resident of Cannibal Island for a minimum of 7 years.

If you are a woman, the cannibals strongly prefer you do not have children before you become a cannibal.

But if you have them after, that’s okay.

Next, you must perform a series of secret tests. Statistically speaking, non-cannibals who are popular within their peer group tend to perform better on these tests than their unpopular counterparts, and white non-cannibals tend to become cannibals at a higher rate than their non-white non-cannibal counterparts. But as the cannibals like to remind anyone who brings this up, correlation is not causation. And they are definitely not racists.

After passing the series of secret tests, the non-cannibals must all, at once, attempt to jump off a small footbridge, even though logistically speaking less than half of them will fit on the bridge, so that thins the herd, too.

And then the cannibals choose from the non-cannibal cannibal wannabes who managed to jump off the bridge.

If anyone asks the cannibals how they choose, if that person is lucky the cannibals are silent. But if that person is unlucky, the cannibal closest to them bites off their smallest finger, spits it at their feet, and walks away.

Margaret Bashaar’s first book of poetry, Stationed Near the Gateway, was released by Sundress Publications in early 2015. She has chapbooks from Grey Book Press, Blood Pudding Press, and Tilt Press, and her poetry has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including New South, Caketrain, The Southeast Review, Copper Nickel, and Menacing Hedge, among others. Her most recent chapbook, Some Other Stupid Fruit, was released by Agape Editions earlier this year and is available through THEThe Poetry Blog. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where she edits Hyacinth Girl Press and encourages art anarchy.

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world—what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Margaret Bashaar: As far as I can recall I’ve always been driven to create—I think most people are, honestly, it’s just a matter of cultivating that drive. I’ve created in a lot of different mediums—I used to sing for many years (I took voice lessons for almost 10 years), I played the violin when I was younger, I used to draw and paint a lot—but poetry was always the medium that I carried with me no matter what other art form I was dabbling in. And honestly it’s the one I’m best at and I’ve been most able to grow and develop within. There was always a ceiling to my ability with other art forms. I have yet to find an endpoint to my growth and curiosity in poetry.

I hate the “poebiz landscape,” truthfully. I think the landscape as it currently stands is detrimental to art and the creation of art. I could rant about why and how all day, but to specifically answer your question, I navigate the poebiz landscape because if I want to share my work, it is part of what I must do. I also routinely work around the poebiz world to share and create poetry and promote and celebrate the poetry of others, so I think part of my motivation in navigating the poebiz landscape is to find new and exciting ways to try to subvert it.

FFF: What are your influences—creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

MB: I always cite T.S. Eliot as one of my influences, because reading “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” when I was in the 6^th grade was what made me want to be a poet. Now having a child who is in the 6^th grade, I also realize how ridiculous I was to be a 6^th grade fan of that poem.

I draw a lot on horror imagery—I’m a fairly delicate, sensitive soul (I swear) and when I was a child I was exceptionally fearful. Like, lie awake at night almost every night genuinely afraid that some unseen horror was lurking in my closet ready to devour me levels of fearful. I think there is a part of me that still has those fears, and so rather than lie around worrying about them, I write them into poems. So there’s a lot of body horror and a lot of people being eaten in my poetry. I’ve had my work compared to films like Trouble Every Day and Martyrs (the original 2008 version).

Though on the subject of body horror, I got an infection in my brain when I was about 12 years old. It affected my basal ganglia, and made me unable to walk or talk for a bit over 6 months. I think some of my desire to dissect the body in my work comes from that—seeing my body as this weird alien thing that wouldn’t do anything I wanted it to at a very formative time in my life. I have some brain damage from that, and while I cannot tell you exactly where that comes out in my poetry, I know that it does—it’s this sort of floating constant, having my brain/body connection always a tiny bit out of my control. It definitely causes me to focus on the body in my work.

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems—as author and as reader?

MB: A professor of mine in college introduced me to Dadaism and Surrealism, and the work both of those movements did in regards to drawing unexpected, startling imagery into poetry and creating unexpected equivalencies in work has stuck with me. I think that really helped shape my aesthetics quite a bit.

If I am being honest, though, most of what I have been trying to do with my poetry anymore is just fucking have fun. If I don’t step away from something I wrote with at least some level of glee at having written, lately I have been questioning why I even spent the time writing that particular piece. I write because I love the act of writing, and I write because I need to write. The writing is the important part—that act of creation and spell-work. And I look for that as a reader, too—if I read a poem or a collection and it feels urgent and it feels like some manner of euphoria came from the creation of the work, I am more likely to enjoy that piece.

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something—an experience, a piece of art, anything really—that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

MB: A few years ago I met this woman in my local artist community and we HATED each other. I thought she was a bitch, she thought I was a stuck-up cunt and we were each annoyed that the other’s friends were also our friends. But somehow, in spite of this, our mutual friend Skot saw something about both of us that made him think we would make the best of friends. So he sort of shoved us together and demanded that we get along. I guess we both like Skot enough that we played nice with each other for long enough to realize that we actually DID like each other and that our initial impressions had been totally and completely wrong. And the woman I thought was a bitch is Rachael Deacon and she’s actually the best human person friend I know and now we run FREE POEMS together and make arts anarchy and I wrote about her in my first book, Stationed Near the Gateway (Sundress Publications, 2015) and she painted the cover art for the book, and I think the moral of the story is that Rachael Deacon is awesome. In all seriousness, though, Rachael IS great, and I feel like it’s really easy to miss that person who jives with you and your philosophy and work over petty crap or an awkward first impression. I feel very fortunate to have a friend like Skot who saw that Rachael and I would get along and cared enough to work to get us to see that too, and to have had the opportunity to try again with someone who has become an amazing friend and the best collaborator in art and arts event creation I ever could have asked for.

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

MB: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s i’m alive / it hurts / i love it is one of those books that, whenever someone asks me about poetry that I think is truly great I always mention. She’s such an amazing poet—I feel like far too much of poetry right now is focused on perfecting craft at the expense of musicality and movement, and Espinoza’s work really is some of the most gorgeous, musical writing I have come across in years. I cried reading this book, and I’m not a crier when it comes to poetry. Her writing is THAT moving.

I also really love Deathless, by Catherynne Valente. It’s not necessarily poetry, but Valente’s prose is so gorgeous in Deathless that I would read a few lines and then go back and reread it just because the writing is that deliciously beautiful. It’s pleasurable and satisfying to read in a way that I’d not before experienced with prose. It’s poetic, but without losing its sense of story and movement, which I find is often a problem in fiction that is going for poetic language.

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

MB: I’m good! These were pretty solid questions that made me go all think-y. So that’s enough thinking for a bit, there

Margaret Bashaar’s first book of poetry, Stationed Near the Gateway, was released by Sundress Publications in early 2015. She has chapbooks from Grey Book Press, Blood Pudding Press, and Tilt Press, and her poetry has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including New South, Caketrain, The Southeast Review, Copper Nickel, and Menacing Hedge, among others. Her most recent chapbook, Some Other Stupid Fruit, was released by Agape Editions earlier this year and is available through THEThe Poetry Blog. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where she edits Hyacinth Girl Press and encourages art anarchy.

In the poem, “The Bear,” A bear literally walks through the hallways of a home, pauses outside a sister’s room, her door ajar.  Morgan writes:

“I’m opening my door just a crack.

I’m looking down the hall. My sister’s door is open.

And nothing else. Of course nothing else. Then

I stop. Something in the dark. Large. A couch,

slowly moving toward me. Two reflections.

Looking straight at me. Now I’m already inside

my sister’s room locking her door. But what can

locks do against a bear?”

Morgan notes the speaker says “Of course nothing else.” Just a door is open. When a danger is present all we want to do is seek out our loved ones and make sure they are safe. He does not see his sister, just a gateway to a violent attack. There is also a potent surreal element with the “two reflections.” Morgan sees himself and the bear looking back—he sees the bear in himself . The lumbering imposter in a childhood home, a seeker of  trouble and blood.

Morgan’s  poems get to the point quickly. Common visuals that exist in our every day, like a furnace or items that you wouldn’t give a second glance too, become threatening and terrible. When I mean common, I mean things you ignore because they are everywhere: walls.

In Morgan’s poem “The Wall,” a woman’s husband is eaten by the wall and it is gruesome. It is not cartoonish but breathing and horrific. Morgan builds tension slowly though. The house exhales smoke but there is no fire. There is no warning. It’s like the woman senses something is wrong and goes to look for her husband who is already being eaten by the wall.

“His body’s upright, immersed high.

Like the kitchen wall’s eating him. A leg dangles.

His warped lips stretch like taffy. Eyes puff, bubble…

She tries tugging his body back

from wherever it’s going—it tears.”

Like people who are taken from family members suddenly and without explanation, Morgan’s prose poem is a terse example of this helplessness. There is pure trepidation on the page and the husband does not even get the chance to say good bye or scream. When there is a scream, it comes from the wall: angry and bottomless.

If we are unnerved by adults getting eaten by walls, adults who have a remote sense of control and power in the world, even if this is a delusion, it is even more unsettling to read about the shadows who run amok at a children’s playground.

In “Under Control” It is Morgan’s speaker who claims “ I set my shadow loose on the playground again.” Not only is he the boogey man or pulling the strings of the darkness like a marionette, but this isn’t even the first time he’s done it. We get a sense of a dark habit-like game almost like portraying an addiction.

He makes this humorous excuse:  “ I’m sorry—never been a winner.”

It is when we are at our most vulnerable, our most lowdown that base human emotions rear their ugly heads: the ability to hurt, to lost empathy.  The mothers and fathers try to grab their children up before they are eaten, but it is a losing battle.  Morgan softens the blow with this:

“But the children thought the whole thing was a hoot.

Can’t blame them.

Little monsters.”

This poem is a monster playing with other “little monsters.” This  “scary” is more tongue in cheek but also like a warning.

The poem “Omen” feels more like a traditional fable with birds falling from the sky, deer “shrieking” and even a  cast of mob mentality filled “villagers,” who hammer off granite from a mountain and carry it back home in suitcases, literally attacking the earth.

I’m not going to give away what happens in this poem but just be warned “It was a bad night for sunsets—that night it almost didn’t happen.”  There is humor in these lines as well a perceived uneasiness.

The last poem of the collection, “Georgia” is very lyrical and different than the others. It is almost a place personified.  If Morgan states that we cannot feel safe in traditionally safe places (the home, the playground, etc) the solution is: internalize the place you want to be. Let the wholeness reside in you. Safety, after all, is a state of mind.

Here is an example of Georgia’s transient soul and personhood:

“Georgia dabs its neck and wrists with sweet tea cologne, then enters a bar to find a friend.”

“Georgia sits in a Denny’s at three in the morning, weighing out good and evil.”

“Georgia has a coral snake on one shoulder and a king snake on the other.”

No one is going to mess with Georgia— yet Georgia also seems alone, mingling with snakes and rats, the rare friend.  There is a warning at the end of Georgia, however, sort of proclaiming Georgia was hurt once and learned the hard way. Georgia, Morgan promises to readers, “will never be that fellow.” Georgia holds the snakes but knows how to avoid a bite. We should all be so lucky.

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens is the author of two full length poetry collections (Yellow Chair Press and Stalking Horse Press.) Her chapbook “Dixit: Every Picture Tells a Story, or The Wrong Items,” is forthcoming from White Knuckle Press in 2017 and “She Came Out From Under the Bed, (Poems Inspired by the Films of Guillermo del Toro)” is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Recent work is at Lime Hawk, concis, and Inter/rupture. Visit: http://jennifermacbainstephens.wordpress.com/.

“’I know / there is violence in all of us,’ these ‘problematic feminist’ poems assert. This work reminds us that what is truly problematic is poetry devoid of awareness of complexity and complicity, and feminism without nuance. Some Other Stupid Fruit lays bear the strangeness, the rot, and the inherent hypocrisies of our gendered identities, and refuses to put a cherry on top.”

—Arielle Greenberg

“Musings on maneuvering through the rapey ol’ patriarchy. Margaret Bashaar’s newest chapbook hits the ground in heels kicking for the artery. In case you haven’t been listening to her poetry thus far, Some Other Stupid Fruit all but grabs your stupid face and wills its words to crack your orbital bones and release the gooey insides of your eyes. Honest, brutal observations in rapid succession, enough to leave the reader concussed. The roar of a self-aware woman in today’s asshat weird world. Some Other Stupid Fruit is an airtight collection. Don’t be a jerk, read the book.” —John Thomas Menesini, author of Gloom Hearts & Opioids

Yolanda J. Franklin’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in African American Review, Sugar House Review, Crab Orchard Review’s American South Issue, and The Hoot & Howl of the Owl Anthology of Hurston Wright Writers’ Week. Her awards include a 2012 and 2014 Cave Canem fellowship, the 2013 Kingsbury Award, two nominations from FSU for Best New Poets (2013 & 2014). She is the recipient of several writing retreat scholarships, including a summer at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Squaw Valley Community of Writer’s, Postgraduate Writer’s Conference Manuscript Conference at VCFA, the Callaloo Poetry Workshop in Barbados and Colrain’s Poetry Manuscript Workshop. Her collection of poems, Ruined Nylons, was a finalist for the 2013 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Award. She is also a graduate of Lesley University’s MFA Writing Program and is a third-year PhD student at Florida State University.

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world—what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Yolanda J. Franklin: I am not motivated to write poems. It’s more of a luring, calling, or purpose. I live poems and life is unwritten poetry. Being a working poet, for me, is more about establishing and cultivating friendships with other poets, celebrating their successes and cultivating with a community of writers who are dedicated to developing a craft of poetry as a vehicle for social change.

FFF: What are your influences—creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically? 3. Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems—as author and as reader?

YJF: On how my poetry speaks to the current state of race relations, I must say that my aesthetic must always signal beauty, the political, even terror. My poems respond with a notion that each of these positions must exist ubiquitously in order to correctly right, create, and historicize the black experience as a whole. As the poet Vivee Francis notes, “The whole of me is so many things and I have to cover the spectrum in my work.” Therefore, my poetry engages in a discourse that exculpates Cornelius Eady’s claims that, “We are only seen through the brutal imagination. If you want to push back, then write the imagination unbrutal.” Decisively, my poetics fosters a discourse that contemplates this “terrible beauty” and my duty as a female poet of color to interrogate both Francis’s and Eady’s assertions while analyzing the benefits of diverse poetry that I can produce.

What’s cool in literature/art and most important to me in a poem is seeing something I’m familiar with in an unfamiliar way, having an emotion evoked that I’m only used to experiencing arise from images and metaphors on the page, and unique innovations with craft that intrigue me sonically.

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something—an experience, a piece of art, anything really—that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

YJF: Currently, I am creating poems that address and interrogate the relationship between white first wave feminists and black second wave womanists. I am interested in “the trouble between us.” For me, this trouble is centered on the silencing of black women’s voices by some white liberal feminists’ blind plight towards their “belief that they really are progressive.”

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

YJF: I am going to reinterpret this question by sharing poets that I think everyone should read. First, everyone should read Natasha Trethewey’s oeuvre, who as a poet in many ways captures all of the characteristics of what makes Zora Neale Hurston the “Genius of the South,” and like Toni Morrison, she interrogates race and deconstructs monolithic notions of Blackness while utilizing historiography with the Ekphrastic form. Secondly, I think that everyone should read Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec because of her personal mythology building; her persona poems that capture her own personal historiography and her astonishing love poems. Finally, everyone should be reading Lucille Clifton, Jericho Brown, Nikky Finney, Claudia Rankine, and so many more….

Yolanda J. Franklin’s work is forthcoming or has appeared in African American Review, Sugar House Review, Crab Orchard Review’s American South Issue, and The Hoot & Howl of the Owl Anthology of Hurston Wright Writers’ Week. Her awards include a 2012 and 2014 Cave Canem fellowship, the 2013 Kingsbury Award, two nominations from FSU for Best New Poets (2013 & 2014). She is the recipient of several writing retreat scholarships, including a summer at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Squaw Valley Community of Writer’s, Postgraduate Writer’s Conference Manuscript Conference at VCFA, the Callaloo Poetry Workshop in Barbados and Colrain’s Poetry Manuscript Workshop. Her collection of poems, Ruined Nylons, was a finalist for the 2013 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Award. She is also a graduate of Lesley University’s MFA Writing Program and is a third-year PhD student at Florida State University.

Saba Syed Razvi is the author of In the Crocodile Gardens (Agape Editions, 2016). She is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in Victoria, TX. Her poems have appeared journals and such as The Offending Adam, Diner, THEThe Poetry Blog, The Homestead Review, NonBinary Review, 10×3 plus, 13th Warrior Review, The Arbor Vitae Review, and Arsenic Lobster, among others, as well as in anthologies such as Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War Faith and Sexuality, The Loudest Voice Anthology: Volume 1, The Liddell Book of Poetry, and is forthcoming in Political Punch: The Poetics of Identity. She has been honored by James A. Michener, Fania Kruger, and Virginia C Middleton Fellowships. She earned a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing in 2012 at the University of Southern California. Her chapbook Of Divining and the Dead was published by Finishing Line Press in 2012, and her chapbook Limerence & Lux was published by Chax Press in 2016.

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world—what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Saba Syed Razvi: Every person alive experiences the world according to his or her own unique circumstances, resources, inherent dispositions, and choices—and, yet, our societies and our media often paint what is seen as successful in narrow and limited terms. Measuring life’s experiences by its successes can be misleading, especially when so much of life’s appeal comes from its broader and more nebulous approaches. What I am most interested in is the liminal, the spaces that are rooted not in collective approval or expression but in individual approaches to life and the things in it—desire and dream and longing, fear and despair, the beautiful and the grotesque, the sublime and the strange, the ephemeral, the in-between, the echoes. Often, these things feel more true and more universal than things expressed as universal to begin with. I think that this sense of a truth beyond fact and praxis finds resonance in myth and fairytale, in folklore and in our ideas about the divine and the seductive. So, I guess I am interested in the knowledge of gnosis and noesis, in the epistemological shadows cast upon the primal experiences longing and the unknown, dream and mystery. Poetry is not a practical choice in a world concerned with money, nor is inherently a tool of another experience of reality, and its aims are to reach between psyches to make connections; I find this nebulous but deeply meaningful connection made possible by art is crucial to the experience of humanity in a world which is, at this time, so filled with darkness and disconnection, with the willing turning of a gaze away from the experiences of deep and impossible suffering.

Any art has the ability to connect people to each other in ways that honor their individual experiences of life, but poetry has special meaning for me, and I gravitate toward it with a kind of personal bias. Words carry layers. They hold ideas and sounds, utterances, feelings, evocations, invocations. They bind us and they revile us. They reveal almost as much as they obfuscate, or perhaps the other way around. A painting or a song feels to me like a game taken into the self, but poetry feels like a game which includes the self and the other, a game of overlapping dimensions and infinite possibilities for both experience and expression. The ideas that we can make an art of something like language that can be used for so many less artful things makes every statement a puzzle; in doing so, it makes it possible to give voice to the impossible, the ineffable, and the otherworldly. For its potential and its potency, poetry is the art that most appeals to me – though I have to say that a good story, a good painting or song or sculpture or dance or film can be just as captivating when done by one whose favor lies that way.

The poebiz landscape both delights and puzzles me. It is at once an arena in which possibility and collaboration is possible, and one in which competition and power struggle is common. I am often surprised to see the ways in which the issues of our ages are advanced through the channels of poetic outrage and uncertainty, but it is also in these spaces that I learn to recognize the intimacies of social value. I applaud the social justice and discourse that has been made possible by the poebiz scene, especially on issues of gender, race, religion, otherness and belonging, sexuality, and accountability. It is delightful to see such progress and such lively, courageous ideological engagement and contest in this arena that is often not associated with such moxie and such potency. I appreciate the ways in which the poebiz arena reminds us that words are powerful and that artfulness can matter, especially when it comes to the things that mark as as human rather than machine or animal.

FFF: What are your influences—creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

SSR: I think my answer to this changes based on my moods. I tend to find myself writing and taking notes all the time, whether I am scribbling in a pocket notebook on a hike or tapping on an app on my phone while listening to life bustle around me. I find that various parts of my life—real or imagined, find their way into the shape at the base of a poem or other. Music of all kinds. Painting. Nature. Social Issues. Dreams. Divination. Myth. Artifacts from Ancient Civilizations. Unsolved Mysteries. Folklore and Legend. Superstitions. World Literature. Graphic Novels and Comic Books. Psychology. Space. Astronomy. Riddles. Lullabies. Scientific Innovation. One of my favorite things to do is wander through museums and look at the various artifacts there, examine the descriptions, research the topics myself and imagine a world that contained them. Lately, my interests also include politics, specifically those politics related to human rights and fair representation of all people.

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems—as author and as reader?

SSR: This is a really interesting question to me for a lot of reasons, in part because the idea of aesthetic can be so malleable and varied. What I see as lush, indulgent and intimate might be seen as too much for some readers or not enough for some readers; it all depends on preferences, I suppose, and on value. That’s why I love that you followed up the question of aesthetic with value. I personally prefer my language ornate and playful. I like things that feel baroque and multivalent, multifaceted, multidimensional. I like literary art that seeks to invoke what its about and create an atmosphere or mode. I like work that feels incantatory and immersive, a little wild and impulsive. I tend to enjoy work that doesn’t give in to restraint unless it wants to give in to restraint, the excess over the minimalist. But, I also like work that has energy and that feels powerful, that feels like a dream that won’t let you go or a nightmare that you are compelled to explore and relive in the telling of it. I like nostalgia and reverie, ambiguity. I suppose that because I enjoy these things, I sometimes find them in my work—and that’s definitely true of some of my work, especially In the Crocodile Gardens, which invites the reader into a sumptuous experience, or my chapbook Of the Divining and the Dead. I would like to think that the approach I seek is one juxtaposition, of a dark veil of lace through which bright, neon colors shine upward, or like a stained glass window lit by a candle from the other side, the refraction of light and shadow on a wall upon which patterns are cast, a woodcut printed with India ink on silk dyed in swirls of color, and the hint of pattern on the underside of softness. The idea of phosphorescence and luminosity, specifically that in contrast with shadow, drove much of my first manuscript of poems, heliophobia, some of which might be found in my chapbook by Chax Press called Limerence & Lux. I would like to say that my poems reflect my attitude toward hospitality, there is much value in giving opulently and generously, in welcoming your guest to the best of what you can offer, the most that you can give. However, I should also say that I think it depends on the project. For a long time, I have also been working on a collection of poems inspired by advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive theory; many of these poems focus on restraint and specificity, rather than opportunity and possibility. For me, aesthetic depends on purpose and on the project at hand. My current work seeks to draw from the opulence and decadence of beauty, the intensity which makes the grotesque alluring and seductive, the gaze that can invite as much as it can slice through an intimate moment, the violent assertion of self that the world demands of our waking experiences and the freedom of dream. Perhaps the easiest way to describe how I see my own aesthetic is to say that I imagine writing with luminous color on shadow and waiting for it to fade from sight and to rest on the inside of the eyelids in memory. I hope that my poems will, in some way, make the world seem as unreal and as real as it never can in fact, but always does in the fantastic epiphany of a truth that is felt in the bones.

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something—an experience, a piece of art, anything really—that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

SSR: I grew up in the Houston metropolitan area where it is possible to find a myriad of cultural and artistic events to attend and experience. My parents often took me and my sisters to various events with them. Among the museums, wildflowers, orchards, symphonies, plays, and libraries, we attended parties held by the Hyderabad Association, such as mushairas. If you’ve never been to a mushaira (or, never heard of one), it’s essentially a gathering of poets which feels like a cross between a featured reading, a poetry slam, and a spontaneous concert. It was at these occasional mushairas, filled with words and forms I didn’t really understand yet and with literary traditions I only later studied, that I was immersed with a love of the communal and joyful aspect of poetry. Often, the younger children and teens would retreat to the back of the ballrooms or auditoriums, or into some lobby or anteroom, and build a sort of commentary apart from and parallel to that of the larger audience. We would tell stories of ghosts or djinni, share dreams and wishes and crushes and struggles, bond over our hybrid cultural identities, our cultural in-betweenness and our ordinary lives, or simply fall into what seemed like an absurdly big family party with its familiarity and its fun and its secret intrigues. People we met here were friends that lived all over the country, friends that we only really spent time with at these events. A floating community, a temporary zone of shared time, a confluence of coincidence. I learned the power of the word in this way, of song—and it reinforced the various stories and songs and performances of my childhood, too. I learned that poetry could be a thing that binds people together who would never otherwise have cause to connect. I learned that community can be joyful as well as judgmental, that life is all about the adventures you choose to create in the spaces created by others around you. Somewhere, in the overlap of these things, I found that poetry had woven itself into my earliest impressions of what it means to connect to other human beings. Even now, when I attend conferences or readings or festivals, I am reminded about the possibility of transcending the ordinary spaces of life by way of words that access the fantastical, the frightful, the intimate, and the beautiful.

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

SSR: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Conference of the Birds. I think that the former reminds us to value delight and open-mindedness, especially in the face of the unexpected; the latter reminds us that all of our experiences are multifaceted and that mindful reflection upon them creates an awareness that leads to confidence and connection. I have so many favorite books, and I change my mind daily on what I love the most, but today, I think that these are the lessons that we don’t get enough of in our hyper-connected and still alienating experiences of the world.

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

SSR: I didn’t talk much about the role of popular culture or cultural criticism, yet, but I do think it’s important—not because of the authority that it contains, but because of its potential for compulsion of the heart and mind. I didn’t talk very much about narrative or academic scholarship, but I have to say that a great deal of my experience as a writer has been shaped by my experiences in the academy and my experience in rebelling against a narrative imposed upon me by the world, rather than presented by myself. I think that a lot of really wonderful poetry is being written today, that much of it contends not only with the worth of one’s voice, but also with the structures of knowledge the seek to contain it. I would like to think that this informs not just my own work, but that of the poets whose work I love to read, the journals and books I most appreciate. Sure, there is a lot of work out that there that seems to be stuck in a past that isn’t as concerned with a real kind of fairness, but I think there’s a lot out there that has chosen to transcend that attitude—and I would like to hope that my voice is among the ones that people will want to hear. The things that people want to hear tend to fall like echoes over the crests and peaks of the terrain that makes up every horizon. Some of the most interesting narrative that is being written today tends to find a place in Speculative or Science Fictional spaces, spaces of popular culture, and I think that’s worth thinking about: what holds resonance on a large scale. One of the things I really love is the television program Doctor Who (and the world of spinoffs and characters and ideas it’s created), and there’s an episode in which The Doctor says something like, “We’re all stories in the end; just make it a good one,” and there’s another episode in which he says, “Nobody really understands where the music comes from . . . when wind stands fair and the night is perfect, when you least expect it, but always, when you need it the most, there is a song.” I just wanted to end on those two statements because I think that in this current moment, poetry lives between story and song—maybe it always has—and, that is just where I want to be, as well because it feels like a space that is full of dynamism and hope, life and dream; I hope that pocket outside of time is where my poems will take readers or listeners, too—and that they enjoy being there, inside those words.

Saba Syed Razvi is the author of In the Crocodile Gardens (Agape Editions, 2016). She is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in Victoria, TX. Her poems have appeared journals and such as The Offending Adam, Diner, THEThe Poetry Blog, The Homestead Review, NonBinary Review, 10×3 plus, 13th Warrior Review, The Arbor Vitae Review, and Arsenic Lobster, among others, as well as in anthologies such as Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War Faith and Sexuality, The Loudest Voice Anthology: Volume 1, The Liddell Book of Poetry, and is forthcoming in Political Punch: The Poetics of Identity. She has been honored by James A. Michener, Fania Kruger, and Virginia C Middleton Fellowships. She earned a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing in 2012 at the University of Southern California. Her chapbook Of Divining and the Dead was published by Finishing Line Press in 2012, and her chapbook Limerence & Lux was published by Chax Press in 2016.

These days of summer fading into autumn mark the perfect moment for readers to enjoy Ariana D. Den Bleyker’s chapbook The Peace of Wild Things (Porkbelly Press, 2015). These, natural, purposive poems feel as if Den Bleyker has briefly emerged from years living in a forest, to whisper to us about the subtle violence of nature, crafting an ethereal environmental exchange between a woman and deer, swans—even the wind—that will make eager readers out of many.

In “The Future is an Animal,” Den Bleyker’s speaker dreams of transforming into a wolf. The resulting epiphany at the end of the poem that is most unsettling:

“My legs push, muscles scream against my own

shifting imprints, stirring layers of ankle, flank,

shoulder bones, knuckles, each organ a world-

without, hovering above obliteration. My lips draw

sustenance  from viscera, glean from the silence…

and suddenly, I’m willing to be eaten.”

Along with becoming a new animal form, the predator wolf also gives birth to “steam and maggots,” her body becoming a savage thing from storybooks. But the wolf also gives birth to butterflies: what is savage lives in balance with the delicate, is vulnerable in its willingness to be consumed. It is this struggle between savage and beauty that haunts the lines of all of these poems.

The touch of death—literally—is ever-present in this collection: dead deer in the forest, dark imagery surrounding a swan, and hunting wild boars. We can never touch these symbols of exquisite wildness while they are living; they are wily, and their survival depends on quick, evasive motion. We come across them quietly, by accident. Bodies in the woods give us pause and create awe.  In the poem “Something Breathed on a Dead Deer and the Hair Inside Its Ears Waved at Your,” Den Bleyker tries to get close, captures a feeling of longing in writing about the last moments of the deer, mapping its steps:

“                                               From

the simple order of the tracks you knew,

without looking, what place in the wild

night the animals came from the through

which of our windows they have gazed

into…”

We feed these creatures, place them near our homes, track them, touch them in our mind’s eye as they breathe their last breath. Like them, we humans have one foot in the grave and one poised to flee. Like the quickness of death, the animal faces change in just seconds from living to dead, reminding us of the fragility of life at any given second. This change is underscored by Den Bleyker asking us directly, “What do you recognize?” a question to which she offers a possible answer in “What We Learn From Skies,” stating:

“Sometimes we want birds to just be birds,

the sky to remain intact,

all the right places beautiful and untouched.”

And yet sometimes even the birds in this book represent dark, transformative forces; the crow itself is a shapeshifter that changes by the minute. Is it a body, or just a group of falling feathers? From the poem “Hard Winter:”

“The crow…

hovers as the deer lays down

her bones, soft bellied on the edge

of stone, hooves etched across

the moss, fetal…all limbs

drawn beneath her throat,

breath refusing to come back,

time locking her jaw…we dream

practice our own deaths, remind

ourselves all flesh is grass.”
The crow, the deer, the humans: we all return to the earth but we also return inward to reflect. We hide indoors and huddle against each other for warmth on short winter days, taking comfort in the “caves of our own bodies.” The peace of wild things, as Den Bleyker seems to suggest later in the book, may be death; yet these poems are respectful and curious, creating an awe in the reader as we witness these beasts passing away. Den Bleyker sees, and brings to the page, the quiet peace that we might all hope for someday for ourselves—for, after all, our own bodies, our own shells, also provide but temporary homes for our perhaps–wild spirits.

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens is the author two full length poetry collections (forthcoming from Yellow Chair Press and Stalking Horse Press.) Her chapbook “Dixit: Every Picture Tells a Story, or The Wrong Items,” is forthcoming from White Knuckle Press in 2017 and “She Came Out From Under the Bed, (Poems Inspired by the Films of Guillermo del Toro)” is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Recent work can be seen at Lime Hawk and Inter/rupture. Visit: http://jennifermacbainstephens.wordpress.com/.

Everything We Always Knew Was True is a miraculous, self-performed open-heart surgery in which everything we always loved about James Galvin is exposed and made new by self-deprecating charm and dead black humor. Never has an American poet so seamlessly fused the superficially opposite impulses of the deep image and the talky self-awareness of a particular strain of the Western avant-garde.

James Galvin – Everything We Always Knew Was True
Copper Canyon 2016
Page Length: 75
Retail: $16

How is it possible for the work of James Galvin, the face of the most famous poetry program in the world, to be so wildly underappreciated? One could spend a lot of time trying to understand this: is it because of his association with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop that critics have largely ignored his work, especially over the last twenty or so years? Or is it because his style walks so boldly in the footsteps of the many celebrated American poets who have taken as their central subject the natural world, and have done so with a language we can loosely call “plainspoken”?

A combination of these theories would view Galvin as the inheritor of a tradition of Iowa faculty poets (Donald Justice, Marvin Bell, not to mention recurring faculty members like Galway Kinnell and Robert Hass) who represent some “old guard” of American Poetry. But if this is Galvin’s inheritance, where are his deserved awards? Of the four just mentioned, three won the Pulitzer Prize, and between them all four have won many of the most distinguished awards in American letters. This is not to downplay his CV, which includes a Guggenheim and an NEA Fellowship, but Galvin is one of America’s most important living poets, and his oeuvre is as impressive as anyone in his generation, yet critics continue to leave him on the periphery as though he hasn’t published anything of note since 1997’s Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975-1997. He has.

In fact, Galvin’s work has since blossomed in a manner that none of the aforementioned poets’ has. But the evolution didn’t come without struggle. 2001’s X was a clear departure from Galvin’s previous work, retaining his singular mastery of the Western landscape, but filtering it through a decidedly broken subjectivity demonstrably ravaged by a crushing divorce. X is wildly uneven. It is the work of a poet struggling to find a new frequency. It includes some of Galvin’s greatest poems—“Fire Season,” “Promises Are for Liars,” “Heat Waves in Winter Distance,” “Depending on the Wind,” and the collection’s finale: a Dantesque sequence that culminates with a Paradiso of parental love.

None of these poems could have appeared in Galvin’s earlier work, for they demonstrate a speaker who is as unsettled by life’s ruthlessness as he is certain of its beauty. This ambivalence is certainly present in Galvin’s earlier work, but in X we find a poet whose faith has been radically shaken: a self-effacing quiver begins to trouble the line; existential anguish seems the book’s undertow. On the whole, X is one of Galvin’s best collections, but its unevenness is evident in a poem like “Ought,” which foregrounds wordplay and wit, anticipating Galvin’s evolution over his next two collections to relatively underwhelming effect.

In 2009, Galvin published As Is, his weakest book. To be fair: Galvin at his worst is better than most at their best, but As Is will stand in Galvin’s oeuvre as a document of transition between what he perfected in his early work—a brutally beautiful naturalism with remarkable metaphysicality—and a new, decidedly postmodern idiom that balances his faith in the image with a disarming tonal looseness marked by charming self-deprecation. In early Galvin: either everything matters or nothing matters. In the new Galvin: everything matters and nothing matters, and the causal relationship between these facts is perfectly circular.

The growing pains of As Is can be found in poems like “The Music” and “The Red Telephone,” where Galvin’s courageous departure from the natural world is awkwardly met with a kind of un-tethered wit. What is clever in a poem must be rooted in something outside its own self-satisfaction. And Galvin’s cleverness, though clear, seemed forced: like he was trying to squeeze into hand-me-down shoes. This was troubling to see in a world-class dancer.

But whatever aesthetic hiccups were introduced in As Is have paid off handsomely in Galvin’s new collection, which is, remarkably and decidedly, his best. Everything We Always Knew Was True is a miraculous, self-performed open-heart surgery in which everything we always loved about James Galvin is exposed and made new by self-deprecating charm and dead black humor. Never has an American poet so seamlessly fused the superficially opposite impulses of the deep image and the talky self-awareness of a particular strain of the Western avant-garde. We certainly see the fingerprints of Robert Frost and W.S. Merwin, but not without the whimsy of Apollinaire and John Ashbery.

The few critics who have written on Galvin can only think of one thing to say: that he has a firm grasp on the American West. He certainly does: he is the single greatest writer about horses in American literature. But what makes Galvin great is the subterranean intensity beneath the scenes he paints. Consider the following poem from the new book, included here in its entirety:

A Ceremony

My father coughed up a few bats
And that was that.
With a smithy’s hammer,
I broke and flattened his gold heraldic ring.
“Hit it again,” my sister said,
And I did.
There were three of us.
We stashed the ashes with the ring
In a cairn of black rocks.
My niece piped up,
“Isn’t anybody going to say something?”
I looked at my sister,
Who shook her head.
“Nope,” I said,
And the three of us walked away. (65)

Galvin’s signature here is not the hammer or the “cairn of black rocks,” but rather the blunt force of the final five lines, when the human milieu is laid bare in an exposure equal parts revealing and concealed. The genius of the poem lies in what its silence says and the cleanliness of its annunciation.

Or consider the following pair of ekphrastic poems, a genre Galvin has certainly mastered. The first reads in Galvin’s oldest style: tonally demotic; image-driven; remarkably restrained.

I paint my own front yard. The big pole gate
Left open so the subject can become
The narrow two-track road, which turns away,
And vanishes. It could be coming home
Or going. I’m not telling. The open gate
Means someone left, and I am waiting for them

To come home. You have to tell the truth. (“Five Paintings by Clara Van Waning,” 22)

Much of the poem would fit nicely into Galvin’s first four books, but the explosive presence of “I’m not telling,” is something Galvin had to earn post-Resurrection Update. It takes an otherwise lovely poem and sets it ablaze with the complicated strike of a withholding, self-aware speaker, which then flickers against the surface of the haunted, “You have to tell the truth,” which, when it lands, feels inevitable.

One of the collection’s most dynamic poems, “The Newlywed Acrobats,” written after Marc Chagall, manages to capture an astounding amount of Chagall’s romantic abandon and dreamy hover.

He sports gold-sequined tights and
slippers.
The bride is decked out in a gold bikini.
Her breasts are
two miracles.
Her smile is, well, blinding.
…
On the steps,
an avalanche of confetti.
Clowns are shot from cannons to the
right and to the left.
…
They spring each other higher and
higher and scarily higher until he vaults into a fourth-floor window
and she follows like a comet’s tail.
…
They look deeply into each other’s eyes, his bleary, hers
fierce with determination.
She says, “You’re not gonna believe this
part.” (13-4)

The weightlessness here is astounding for its palpable joy. In it we find an exuberance missing almost entirely from Galvin’s early work, and here, combined with his singular grip on the image, we are taken into a slipstream of what feels like true love.

When considering twentieth-century comparisons, one must mention Frost, Merwin, James Wright, Robert Bly, and Charles Wright (as well as the “Iowa Poets” mentioned above). What none of these masters was able to do, however, was to successfully and truly transform, over time, their aesthetic. Galvin has done that. The exception may be James Wright, whose early formalism is nothing to sneeze at, but whose later deep imagism transformed a generation.

The closest comparison, I would argue, is James Merrill: perhaps the twentieth-century’s single greatest poet. Like Galvin, Merrill is inexplicably underappreciated, and he is very highly appreciated. Like Merrill, Galvin combines a deceptively smooth formalism with a postmodern playfulness that refuses to take itself too seriously, which is, of course, perfectly serious. Like Merrill, Galvin exudes a hopelessly charming, dead-serious romantic streak, a brutal self-awareness, and a potent metaphysics in which the visible and invisible exert upon each other enormous counter-pressure.

The critics who are content to call Galvin a “nature poet” fail to grasp how utterly metaphysical his nature is. Galvin’s natural world is not unlike Melville’s white whale: elusive; beautiful; deadly; metonymic. It is the closest thing to the divine that its author can hope to approach, and even trying to see it involves significant risk.

One of the collection’s highlights, and one of its most contemporary features, is a nonconsecutive series of short poems titled, “What It’s Like,” which refuse to identify the “it” of the simile, leaving it appropriately open for nothing less than just about anything. The following are presented in their entirety:

What It’s Like

Horseback in an old burn.
Deadfall everywhere.
No way forward.
No way to turn around. (25)

What It’s Like

A freight elevator in free fall.
A grand piano in it. (37)

The series is reminiscent of the opening sequence of Mark Leidner’s Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me (Factory Hollow Press 2011). The openness is haunting; the vision unflinching.

It is a rare enough thing for a poet to write a breathtaking body of work. James Galvin had accomplished this by the mid-nineties, and were he a lesser artist, he’d have continued to write in that style forever. Of the poets who manage to cultivate a discernible voice, the ones who try to modify it often do so awkwardly and, too often, into courageous disaster. When considering Galvin’s oeuvre, there is a distinct new frequency that enters with X and then wobbles uncomfortably through As Is. The new voice, though, has blossomed fully in Everything We Always Knew Was True, which marks Galvin’s greatest collection to date and may one day stand as the defining book of his career. More importantly, it demonstrates that sometimes—although rarely, and never without struggle—a great poet can somehow become even greater.

Jen Fitzgerald is a poet, essayist, and native New Yorker whose work has been featured on PBS Newshour and Harriet, as well as in Tin House, Salon, PEN Anthology, and Cosmonauts Avenue, among other places, and is forthcoming at Colorado Review and Public Pool. She is the host of New Books in Poetry Podcast as part of the New Books Network, and a member of the New York Writers Workshop. Her first collection of poetry, The Art of Work, is forthcoming with Noemi Press in September 2016.

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world—what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Jen Fitzgerald: My creativity makes me feel as though I am functioning at my highest level of “human.” It comes, entirely from within me (I of course recognize inspiration and stimuli), it forms inside of me, and then I am the means by which it finds its form outside of me. It is something that I have denied others access to as a kind of self-preservation. Very little was mine throughout my childhood and adolescence. I vigilantly protected my thoughts, imagination, and drive to create. I kept my inner life sacred. Because of this, having my work in the world is alternately exciting and slightly unsettling.

Right now, I am interested in “full rooms.” I find these through a mixture of photography, poetry, prose poetry, and the lyric essay. A “room” could be completely full with only a few couplets, or it may take a series of photos and prose for readers/viewers to inhabit a space, wander around, and feel present. I do this by feeling—like reaching around in the dark until you recognize a form and grabbing hold.

What primarily propels me is that I am not supposed to be able to do this—I wasn’t supposed to be able to go to graduate school, I especially was not supposed to be able to go to graduate school for poetry, and I am not supposed to be able to define my life by my art. My family didn’t pay for my school. I worked three jobs at some points while going to school part time. It took me ten years to earn my bachelor’s degree.

Because I felt like I didn’t belong in these spaces of higher education, I was extremely anxious that it would be taken away from me, that my achievements would be credited to someone else, and that no amount of labor would ever be enough to prove that I had the intelligence, ability, and drive to be a successful writer and poet. I tolerated exploitation because I thought it was the only way a person like me would be granted access. Because of this, I worried a lot about “poebiz” at the beginning of my writing career—I no longer do.

FFF: What are your influences—creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

JF: I find myself most influenced by framing the world around me. I do this primarily through photography—essay and poetry follow shortly after. By moving through whatever landscape I am in, looking for the perfect frame, I feel that I am “elevating the everyday.” There is so much art present in simple moments!

I understand how important it is for working-class, blue-collar people to see themselves in art. They think, as I have been told, that these experiences are not worthy of artistic rendition. From witness comes action—this stands true, further as: from viewing comes creating. Art moves us; it moves us especially to try our own hands at building, painting, sculpting, and making tangible representations of beauty. Those with power are all too quick to cut off the majority of our population, our laboring population. There is talent among the ranks of men, women, and non-binary laborers. There are artisans and creators, there are innovators and a resourcefulness that one would have to witness to believe. But they know about whom stories have been written and who appears in portraits. It can be discouraging. We artists can subvert that understanding with our own labor.

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems—as author and as reader?

JF: I like to think of myself as an “Ashcan Poet.” If you all are unfamiliar with the Ashcan School, definitely look them up. There were a group of artists, loosely affiliated, at the end of the industrial revolution in this country. They were disenchanted with academic realism and they rejected Impressionism. They sought, instead, a gritty realism. This was also during the time of Riis’ documentation of NYC slum conditions in, “How the Other Half Lives.” Their paintings were journalistic and sought to render truth.

Poetry, like painting, can become a sort of self-replicating algorithm, where we do what has worked best for centuries so that we can get in under the radar. I am interested in innovation, taking risks, and challenging myself to challenge the art form. I have seen a movement toward this ideal in contemporary, American poetry, especially among emerging poets. And I fucking love it.

What is cool/important?

Hybridity

Realism

Hyper-Realism

Narrative Drive

Grittiness

Honesty

The Body

I value impact—I know what I want to do and what I want my poetry to do in the world. I value connection. While I may not be “a poet’s poet,” I of course want my fellow poets to read and connect with the work as I have read and connected with theirs. Just as I wrote this for my peers, I wrote this collection for the members of UFCW Local 342, for my grandparents, for undocumented workers world-wide, and for anyone who works three damn jobs and still finds time for their art because it is the only way they feel at peace—the only time they know bliss.

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something—an experience, a piece of art, anything really—that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

JF: Two, disparate and unlikely bedfellows come to mind as helping me form as a writer. These were, hearing Maurice Manning read for the first time and Super Storm Sandy.

What transpired on Staten Island during and after Super Storm Sandy has deeply affected me as an artist. I learned the difference between voyeurism/exploitation and framing to elevate. I began to understand that we have a responsibility to represent ourselves. If we don’t, we leave ourselves open to misrepresentation, historical revisions, and being made caricatures of through the skewed lens of the privileged.

Fact: History Gets Revised.

I am cursed with a long memory and a keen sense of injustice. My writing is memory interacting with artifice. I will drag a fragment of each of these facts through every sentence I write:

• The borough president reported to the city and state that Staten Island was fine after the storm, some downed tree limbs at most. He hadn’t even left his neighborhood. The entire shoreline of our island was devastated.
• It took six days for the Red Cross to show up. They started soliciting donations 24 hours after the storm. Proud people made on-air pleas to get some sort of help. The discomfort and pain of asking for help was apparent on their faces and in their body language.
• The NYC marathon was due to start only two days after the storm. AIG set up heated tents with hot food and drinks at the starting line for the runners. The starting line was near marsh land where we were looking for the bodies of our missing.
• After threats and protests by islanders asking for help and respect, the marathon was cancelled. AIG packed up their tents. The entire surrounding area was comprised of homes torn to shreds, overcrowded shelters, no electricity, no heat, and families riffling through rubble in their yards to salvage whatever they could of their lives. They watched the unused heaters carted off and the untouched coffee poured out on to the street.
• Mayor Bloomberg flew a helicopter around a portion of the shoreline, landed for a few minutes to make a statement, and then left. He did not return again.
• We set up our own relief networks. We solicited our own donations and distributed them to our neighbors.
• Entire communities were uprooted, there was a mass exodus of poor folks, renters, and those who couldn’t afford to rebuild. Insurance companies did everything they could to not pay up. Portions of the island will never be the same again.

The first time I heard Maurice Manning read, I was in the auditorium of The College of Staten Island (years before Sandy). Much of my knowledge of poetry was the classics, and I was not wholly impressed. When I heard Manning read, when I heard the cadence of colloquial, I was struck. I didn’t know I could render, so honestly, the people in my everyday life. My people have a cadence too— it may not be as melodic as Manning’s, but it still sings. And they live ordinary lives that I too, could elevate to music. It made me feel powerful.

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

JF: I think that every poet should read books about the natural world, clouds, storms, plants, flowers, fauna, etc. I think every non-fiction writer should read The Red Book by Jung or Joyce’s Ulysses to sit in completely disorientation with the furthest stretches of what the human mind can do to reality, and every fiction writer should read poetry to release their pen’s inner scalpel. And those who don’t write, have the luxury of reading absolutely everything for sheer enjoyment.

I also suggest finding three different mediums that deal with the same content.

Lastly, I suggest reading whatever the hell you want because we get enough syllabi, recommendations, and must-reads.

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

JF: I’d like to talk a little about what I’m working on right now—in particular, the new collection I’ve been focused on for the past year and a half. The poems, so far, have been written while traveling the country in a sort of frenzy or fear of staying still. I just moved from Staten Island, the place I grew up, the place my family has called home for nearly 200 years. It was part of my identity and moving from it deprived me of the insulation that ready-made identity affords. This distance was necessary to create emotional and geographic space from past and continuing trauma. This is coupled with the desire to understand what it means to be an “American,” and the geographical, historical, and moral boundaries that go along with this term.

This collection is about “hiraeth,” the Dutch word that means nostalgia or homesickness not only for a place, but for the feeling a place elicits. I moved from state to state hoping this longing and confusion could be assuaged, that a feeling of comfortability could be triggered and I might feel at ease, maybe even at home.

These States of our nation, These States of mind, These States of being all represent the varied people, terrain and beauty that we are surrounded by in our everyday lives. We don’t need to run frantically, though I do recommend it for the wanderers and explorers, to find a new version of ourselves. I discovered that a physical journey to find where one belongs is actually a journey into the self, regardless of how the landscape might change. I am still on this journey and wonder is this very journey is not simply a life well-lived.

Jen Fitzgerald is a poet, essayist, and native New Yorker whose work has been featured on PBS Newshour and Harriet, as well as in Tin House, Salon, PEN Anthology, and Cosmonauts Avenue, among other places, and is forthcoming at Colorado Review and Public Pool. She is the host of New Books in Poetry Podcast as part of the New Books Network, and a member of the New York Writers Workshop. Her first collection of poetry, The Art of Work, is forthcoming with Noemi Press in September 2016.

Your newest collection is called Other People’s Stories. I wondered if you could tell us a little about the significance of the title and how it relates to the theme of the collection.

Barbara Elovic: Other People’s Stories serves as the title and the underlying theme of my poetry collection for a few reasons. As a young poet I wrote mostly confessional material. As I got older I found myself less interesting as subject matter and was intrigued by the idea of telling stories that weren’t about me. Philip Levine said long ago in an interview that even though the audience for poetry is small he wanted his poems not to be so recondite that someone had to be a regular poetry reader to understand what he was talking about. That idea appeals to me greatly. I also was lucky enough to have both as a friend and teacher the underacknowledged brilliant poet, Enid Dame. She taught me about the craft of midrash poetry in which the writer chooses stories from the Bible as subject matter to retell with one’s own understanding, insight, and spin.

Even though some of the poems’ subjects are imaginary creatures or people I’ve only read about, I’m telling their stories not mine. Of course, my perspective influences the telling and clues about me are revealed, but the I of the poem is someone other than Barbara Elovic.

Michael T. Young: The collection seems to explore the complex and often plastic way stories are told. I think of the last lines of the poem “Arshile Gorky,” which go, “the stories he told about himself/were just another work of art.” I wonder if you could talk a little about the art of storytelling and its importance in the collection.

Barbara Elovic: I believe that as people live through their days part of their consciousness is the story of the life they believe themselves to be leading. We as individuals tell stories to ourselves, not necessarily as they happen. Perhaps after a day or a much longer period of time an introspective person sits quietly and thinks about what he or she has been doing and what it adds up to. This was an idea featured in feminist thought a few decades back when women were acknowledged to think of themselves as the heroes of their own stories; specifically as regards the Western literary canon in which male heroes and protagonists predominate. Or the idea that what Hemingway wrote was full of big ideas about the world and women who wrote about what happened in individuals’ homes were not doing something equally important.

Michael T. Young: A number of the poems hinge on a shift of perspective or alternative points of view as, for example, “Eve’s Version,” or “You Think You Got Problems?” I wondered if you might address the significance of these alternatives in the collection and its theme.

Barbara Elovic: “Eve’s Story,” and “You Think You’ve Got Problems?” are written in the first person because I wanted the poems to have immediacy for the reader. I come from an Orthodox Jewish background from which I’ve lapsed, but I was taught stories from the book of Genesis when I was a very young girl. When a person learns something as a child it sticks with them on an almost subliminal level. So I had both what I learned as a small God-fearing child in mind when I wrote both poems and my adult re-evaluation of the biblical stories referenced at play. I believe now that Eve was portrayed as a temptress and a troublemaker. Now I think being a troublemaker can be heroic.

To Order Other People’s Stories, click the image.

Michael T. Young: The collection takes up a number of political and socio-economic issues. There are the overt poems about Robert Moses or Susan B. Anthony. But there’s also the poem about Dorothea Lange. Could you tell us a little about these political and socio-economic issues and how they relate to the collection’s theme?

Barbara Elovic: Robert Moses and Susan B. Anthony were clearly the kind of brave troublemakers I just mentioned. And Dorothea Lange is best known for the pictures she took while working for the WPA Artists Project that Franklin Roosevelt established to help the country out of the Great Depression. Her compassion for her subjects make her photos breathtaking. She composed her most famous photo, “Migrant Mother,” with the subject at the center. The mother’s hair is dark, but her face is deeply lined and she’s probably younger than she appears to be in the picture. Two small children with their backs to the camera bury their heads on both of the mother’s shoulders, framing her. We as viewers can only see the mother’s eyes. The photo makes explicit that she bears the weight for the care of her kids literally. Long after I had seen the photograph, a documentary aired on public television about Dorothea Lange and helped explain at least one source of her compassion. She had suffered from polio years earlier and that pain helped her identify with the suffering of people from a less-privileged class than hers.

Michael T. Young: What do you see as the relationship between imagination and history? How is it important for us today, dealing with current issues in the world?

Barbara Elovic: It took me decades to learn that the history taught me up until high school was only one version of America’s story. Now that I embrace left-wing politics I would say that in fact what I was taught was a combination of propaganda and lies. In fourth grade we talked a little about racism and slavery, but nothing much that I remember was said about the persistence of racism. The story of Thanksgiving was a pallid, happy story worthy of a bank calendar; Native Americans and the Pilgrims sitting down to dinner and being good neighbors. Indian reservations were still to come and the imminent theft of their land appeared nowhere in my social studies textbook.

Imagination at least in part is what one thinks for herself when ranging outside of the conventional boundaries of a shared narrative. American Exceptionalism, which many people in this country take as a given, is a myth to me that excuses the murder of the indigenous population of this country and the second-class citizenship of people of color. And then there’s the right to interfere in other countries’ politics because we’re inherently better than they are when all we’re really doing is adding to global corporations’ profits.

Cell phone cameras have only recently revealed what American cops see as unquestionably appropriate behavior when harassing, wounding and even murdering black men and boys. We now at the very least have some cognitive dissonance popping up, but I don’t see police training or tactics adapting. In fact right-wing politicians blame the group Black Lives Matter for inciting murder of police, which is malarkey to be blunt. They are demanding equal treatment from law officers, but the cops have tin ears and see them as a threat. And too many politicians back them up.

Michael T. Young: In reading the collection and considering the importance of telling our own story and even the freedom to remain anonymous, I also wondered where those needs come together with our need for friends, for companionship. Is that intersection where we share a common story or is it in some other place?

Barbara Elovic: I think in today’s political climate in which rancor predominates we tend to have many friends with whom we share ideas about what’s going on around us. I have friends really annoyed at me for not being a Hillary Clinton supporter. That disappoints me greatly. I’ve learned of late to nod and make sympathetic noises because I don’t want to argue anymore. I was the captain of the debating team in my high school, but that was a long time ago.

I have this Jules-Feiffer-inspired notion of adults as aging bodies encrusting little children inside them riding tricycles whose feet don’t quite reach the pedals. I think it’s the rare person who actually grows up as she grows older. I think artists, those that interest me anyway, are truth tellers. That doesn’t mean they have outstanding social skills, but it makes their ideas more interesting. It also doesn’t make me want to be friends with great artists.

I was very young when I went to graduate school in creative writing and I was overwhelmed and didn’t know how to behave among the professors. Most of them weren’t very kind and too many of them had serious drinking problems, which brought out the nastiness in them. Their best selves were in their poems, not in the personae they paraded around among us lowly students.

It’s wonderful to have friends from different backgrounds. Today my poet friends fill some of that bill.

Michael T. Young: Which is your favorite poem from Other People’s Stories and why is it significant for you?

Barbara Elovic: My favorite poem in the collection is the last, “Leap of Faith.” My father died when he was in his early sixties after suffering from Parkinson’s disease for more than twenty years. When I was young and naïve I assumed I’d have a book published by the time I was thirty because I would calculate the ages of the contemporary poets’ whose first books I admired. They were usually in their early thirties. Easy peasy. I’ve written many poems about my father and had hoped to make his story better known because my poems would be widely read. Ha!

Michael T. Young: Are there any prose works that you feel have significantly influenced you as a poet?

Barbara Elovic: For this collection biographies had direct influence on some of the poems I wrote. I also wrote some of these poems many years ago. Biographies of Robert Moses and Arshile Gorky supplied some of the information for the poems about them. I loved the Curious George books as a kid. I learned the improbable story of his creators from an exhibit at New York City’s Jewish Museum. That’s a very specific answer to your question. In a more general sense I assume that every book that I read and enjoy influences me. I won’t read beyond page fifty of any book of prose that displeases me because there’s always so much more to read and life is short.

Michael T. Young: What are your favorite activities that have nothing to do with poetry or writing?

Barbara Elovic: I enjoy teaching the Pilates exercises as well practicing on my own. I love taking long walks. I also love to travel and gain the perspective that I get from seeing other places and talking with the people living there.

Michael T. Young: Thanks for your time, Barbara. Let’s close with your favorite poem from Other People’s Stories.

Leap of Faith

Whether I light Sabbath candles
on time or not at all
is only my affair.
So when the eager young woman
comes between my friend and me
on the street to ask
Excuse me are you Jewish?
I always lie.

What I love and whom I believe
is strictly up to me.
My prayers are only mine and always private.
But my father who died years ago
took his faith with him across the ocean.
Running from the Nazis kept him motivated
the rest of his short life.
On his yahrzeit I light a candle
that blazes while I sleep.

If you would like to read a review of Other People’s Stories, you can find it here: http://prickofthespindle.org/2016/05/13/the-power-of-anonymity-a-review-of-other-peoples-stories-by-barbara-elovic/

Without having to go to a funeral, you are really lucky. The girl on TV is no older than I was when everyone
in my quivering home learned to hustle one more ghost into our already overflowing pockets
& even though it is not real, she is being swallowed by a carnivorous grief that is howling & escaping through 
the screen on all fours, pacing around at our feet & begging us to move. Pissing on the blanket sewed by a
grandmother’s hands. Hands that were once a salve for every wound, hands that once clapped along with the 
good gospel in a church shack & once cupped a child’s crying face & once broke bread & then one day just 
broke. Outside, another sky undresses itself to its blood red flesh & what kind of world is this to bring a child 
into anyway? The names we carry have been carved into so much stone clutching the ground in Ohio it is 
impossible to consider how many years it would take to lift them out and pass them on to anyone as small as 
the crumbs from a good meal. but who are we to deny our families the delivery of new blood? New hands to 
assist with the burial and becoming of the earth that chews at the edges of whatever years our elders have left 
& maybe even us in our youth even though we moved out the hood & gunshots don’t echo over the river out 
here & boys don’t leave the barren fields & go to war just so they can fall asleep with full stomachs. It is 
somehow easy to forget that there are so many ways to die while black & not all of them involve being made 
hollow while the world watches & isn’t that a funny thing? How there is all this danger I ignore & make plans 
for 2016 & beyond & beyond & our fathers still want grandchildren in spite of all this & I am afraid that if I 
do not raise children to carry the heft of my body when it dies then I will be only bones after my soul exits to 
spare all of you such heavy lifting & how awful would that be & who would speak my name around a drunk 
& buzzing table when the card game runs dry? & on the elevator, when the woman eyes how I lock fingers 
with my wife, she leans in close & tells us she can tell we’re newlyweds & we smile & she asks how many 
children we’re going to have & I look past her face & into the metal wall where my fading reflection is 
whispering enough to carry endless caskets through the sinking mud.

The House Party, 10:30PM, Courtright And Livingston

another storm is crawling its way from the west
a grey husk rattling the windows of any small town it passes through
scaring the deer from their spring drink and crowding the forest
with the tremble of retreating hooves
the percussion of fear
here, a mother has left a house to her boys
left a Friday night to its own unraveling
the walls stretched to capacity
the bedroom a father never returned to in winter
now a dj booth
bring only yourselves and whatever can be passed
through the eye of a sewing needle
that which put its arms around the splayed denim
of jeans an older brother outgrew
and pressed the edges together
gifting them another year of life
another party where someone will pull a boy
close by their belt loops while
the dj plays One More Chance
for what feels like the 25th time in a row
one for each dealer who didn’t live long enough
to arch the wood on a house’s floor like a good spine
thrown into the heat of dance
by now everyone knows the chorus
even the line of bodies outside the door
eager to get in
stretching down the street
past the graveyard where ten niggas
got buried last Tuesday
the chorus jumping off of every living tongue
from courtright down to east main
the lightning sneaking behind everyone’s back
to turn the sky blue
a brief and bright sweater pulled over the cool night’s stomach
and the thunder that follows
an eager god begging the dj to run it back
one last time

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, a columnist at MTV News, and a Callaloo creative writing fellow. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, is being released in 2016 by Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press.

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world—what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib: So, at the core, I believe myself to be a storyteller. I think of myself as someone who sits in the tradition of black storytelling, and I think poetry is the best way that I can get those stories outside of myself and into the world where they can (ideally) meet other people who see themselves in them, or live them in a different space. I think that is my motivation on both fronts. I’m not too into all of the pobiz stuff, if I’m being honest. I keep track of it, I’m a poet who writes and publishes, so I’m active in it. But it’s a space that I think holds the art back by holding up all of the wrong things and people so frequently. I see poets of color changing the landscape. Queer and trans* poets changing the landscape. The pobiz aspect of it is rarely interested in holding that up, and so I think I’ve weirdly created my own pobiz. It’s mostly just a biz where I push that work to the front and try to make it more visible.

FFF: What are your influences—creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

HWA: I’m getting much more into pulling influences from non-poetry places. I still get my main influences from poetry, of course. All of my peers/friends/the legends who occupy the genre. But I really pull from a lot of other things. I love Josephine Baker. I watch and read a lot of Josephine Baker interviews, over and over. I really pull so much from the way she moved through the world as an artist who was deeply engaged in social movements. Same with Nina Simone. Those are my two bridges, right now.

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems—as author and as reader?

HWA: I like work that I can fit inside of, even if it is about an experience that is not my own lived experience. So I try to offer that to anyone who reads my work. I think the writing should be a living breathing space. As much as a museum, or a park, or your favorite room. What is most important to me is crafting that space and allowing people to walk inside of it. I don’t necessarily believe that the work should always teach. Sometimes it should be funny, relaxed, something to escape into . . . but an escape, nonetheless.

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something—an experience, a piece of art, anything really—that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

HWA: Terrance Hayes’ poem “We Should Make a Documentary About Spades” was the first poem I read that made me feel like I could write the way I wanted to. A narrative that seems scattered, but is still tight, hitting all of the right notes, speaking to a very specific type of blackness that I understood. It was an entry point, to me. A thing that told me I could rejoice in and talk about culture and have it be understood. I was lost before reading that. I was trying too hard to bring people along for the ride. It opened up a world in which the ride is already full of your people, just waiting for you to join.

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

HWA: A book I think that everyone should read is Alice Walker’s The Temple of my Familiar. It is the first book I fell in love with, and I just re-read it like last year. It has aged well. I think it’s the book that gets lost in her catalog, but it’s risky. It takes chances when dealing with narrative and voice, in ways that a lot of books don’t. It taught me how to write into story using my voice in as many different ways as possible.

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

HWA: I have a book coming out! My first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much comes out July 19^th, from Button Poetry!

FFF: Congratulations! Tell us a little bit more about the book. What was it like writing it? What are its overall goals, as a project?

HWA: It was hard to write, specifically because in order to pull it off the way I wanted to, I had to revisit memories and places, and force myself to be honest about them. The pursuit of nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake is, most often, dishonest. I approach nostalgia, most times, with a type of selective honesty, and I couldn’t do that here. It’s a book that offers a small window into the generational violences of gentrification. And so, I had to consider how these things sit in emotional and physical spaces for myself and people I love. That’s hard, especially when I’m talking about the dismantling of my actual home—Columbus, Ohio, a city I love. Pulling that grief out of myself and sorting it out on paper was hard. But it made me feel closer, more connected to the city that still remains.

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, a columnist at MTV News, and a Callaloo creative writing fellow. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, is being released in 2016 by Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press.

In Emily O’Neill’s Make a Fist and Tongue the Knuckles, (Nostrovia! Press, 2016) the boys are sweet even when they are leading you by the hand to the back of the bar and the girls always know better. These poems are intimacy laid out on a conveyor belt—all parts are deconstructed and rebuilt. The intimacy is cataloged from kissing a stranger on a porch, to admiring a lover’s freckle colony, to justifying one’s job when meeting a date’s parents for the first time. O’Neill’s imagery travels around the block a few times and doesn’t apologize for it: her poems are harsh, gritty beauty.

O’Neill begins her dark walk with the poem “World’s Smallest Woman.” Her words are almost like those of an instruction manual:

“You can’t explain surprise

to yourself. Somebody else has to.

In the mirror your hair gets longer but

your eyes remain the same depth. Keep that

gulf to yourself.”

How many faces do we have to show others? To ourselves? O’Neill’s speaker knows about crappy first jobs, sharing drugs at work, making out in cars, knowing more about her own exit from a relationship than the other person in it.  She isn’t afraid to expose skin or call it like it is. One of the first poems that displays this distance in connection is “Your Boy Came By.” In the third stanza, aloofness plays a part but people still strip down the ankles at the end of it.

“Didn’t buy you a drink because why bother

bartering. Your boy, for free of you

won’t risk it…”

O’Neill’s speaker can only “fly away from the fire before (she’s) finished.” (From the poem “No Flinching.”) The details in racking up relationship bodies are staggering. Knives are a repeated image. Some knives are imagined as being planted in dirt and then growing trees on top of them. Let something lovely grow from weapons meant to cut. One knife is placed in the speaker’s hand by a shirtless boy who recites Coleridge. There is also blood (“I’m sure I’ve bled on sadder men,” is one memorable line from the poem “How To Whistle.”) In contrast, there are also multiple images of shoulders. We carry burdens on our shoulders and each poem in this collection is fighting a fight. We don’t know who wins but that doesn’t seem to matter. The fight feels important.

O’Neill never writes about intimacy in a clichéd way. In the revealing and almost confessional “Need to Know,” we witness exquisiteness. We recognize the exchange here between two people:

“I took my dress off for you—an invitation

to keep seeing what you shouldn’t take.

You won’t just take and I like that.

You hesitate and I bite harder. I want you

stuck like river bending in a valley…

Here, my fingers. Little ghosts. Here,

your fingers troubling me like rain

haunts the freeway in a dream.”

In such a hunger driven, spiny collection, this subtle moment is beautiful and haunting and gives the reader a glimpse into O’Neill’s softer side.

Here are some of O’Neill’s knowledgeable lines that are written like a manifesto, like we should be taking notes:

“Can’t be poor when you’re a killer.”  (“Lucky Like That.”)

“Give me a choice better than razor or grave.” (“Always a Sinner.”)

“Leave marks or I won’t learn.”  (“Always a Sinner.”)

“You were falling asleep on camera as I was waking up on camera.” (“Orioles.”)

“Never liked men with guitars. How they need constant noise keeping them still.” (“Last Year’s Blues.”)

“Shoes make the man aware that he can leave at any moment.” (“How to Whistle.”)

O’Neill’s speaker instructs us on how to survive, but it’s tough.  In “Poem for Brunch with Your Family Where They Asked When We’d Be Married,” there is a whole world of characters revealed throughout the two page poem. Here is an example of the inner psyche of the speaker here:

“It wasn’t that they asked what I did for work and choked

at the utterance of waitress or your mother’s insistence

on grad school as unfortunate or your uncle demanding

a second glass for the beer in front of me…”

We witness O’Neill’s speaker as a prisoner at this uncomfortable table. We feel her skin

crawl at being judged by these people who do not know her and may never know her well. We empathize. We also want to run away.  The speaker confesses:

“Yes I have parents. No, you can’t meet them.

My father is dead and my mother needs coaching

on how not to kill what she loves.”

Then the poem takes another glorious turn with these lines:

“The disappointment I am for not dropping everything

to stand by my man…Part of womanhood is waiting for

your turn to speak and they wouldn’t give me one and that

tells me everything about weddings…”

This poem is a novel of voice and vigor and slaps us across the face, and we still want more. Whereas so many of these poems circle around the speaker’s relationships, there is a transience to the language and the actual fleetingness of the intimacy. Its breakneck pace is powerful and does not let up. (It is, “O’Neill writes “the dance nobody teaches:” (From “Need to Know.”) We cannot go to O’ Neill for answers though, even though she has already told us how to live. She reminds us in the last line of the very last poem “Not So Fast,”

“Don’t answer me. I won’t stand still long enough.”

Luckily we read her words, hold them, tread on them softly, because she deserves no less and we cannot stay away, even if we end up following her into the cold, dark night.

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in the DC area. She is the author of eight chapbooks and two full length poetry collections forthcoming from Yellow Chair Review and Stalking Horse Press. Her chapbook “Clown Machine” recently came out from Grey Book Press this summer.  Recent work can be seen or is forthcoming at Jet Fuel Review, Lime Hawk, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Inter/rupture, Poor Claudia, concis, and decomP. Visit: http://jennifermacbainstephens.wordpress.com/.

Abnormal Repetitive Behaviors

Or “stereotypies,” as animal behavioral

Researchers sometimes call them, are seen

Especially in research animals who live

Their lives in tiny cages or who live                                                                                                                               

 In larger cages in zoos, anywhere there is

A sense of conflict and panic and feeling trapped

it is four decades later, but my body                                                                                                           

behaves as if it does not know this,                                                                                                                      

As if everything now is the same                                                                                                              

As it was then and it is on guard,

this body on guard before it thinks.

My grandparents were beautiful like the glass

and their voices were always kind

and now the tea cart sits in my living room,

sunlight twinkling across the long-necked bottles.

My daughter, at thirteen, this unicorn, all legs

and brains and speed, now winning

All her cross-country meets and reassuring

Herself when she too melts down,

Caelan its only hormones. what

you are feeling isn’t real.

My daughter, who knows at thirteen

Things it has taken me

four decades to start sorting out,

what my grandmother, my father’s mother Annie,

could never sort through with all those

emotions running through her like flame,

making her dangerous, the one you can’t stand

to be around; never for Annie, four decades for me,

what my daughter knows now

at thirteen.

Terror still lives within these poems and sorrow for the cruelty and chaos of a world in which humans cannot seem to exist without destroying as much as they create, but the vision of a new world is there. What an amazing and powerful book.

i don’t have the luxury of pretending i’m just like any other woman

when i died nothing changed and everything was normal

the sun set at 4:47 p.m. on the dot

i was caught up in a green flash of light called beautiful

we are all called beautiful when we become bodies

“we must not be loved”

“we must not be loved”

“we must not be loved,” i whisper

to a picture i took of myself in the mirror

i’m just like any other woman

my name is god’s empty dream

my name is joke on primetime television

i love to laugh but the sound has become poison to my blood

it hesitates to flow and then explodes with fury

i am a sloshing bucket full of memories

i drown inside myself

trans woman

asterisked human

pull of flesh speaking gravity’s only language

hear both sides of the story.

i need to see birds pecking out your ears.

we must consider everything.

you will bleed to call me male.

i will squirm and piss myself

off.

here, a bandage. wrap it around

my body. i am shivering

in the cold of you, you real woman forest.

i am thousand year old fungus

mourning all the light

that has passed over me.

here, both sides of the story.

something on the internet about echo chambers.

something on the internet about dead trans women.

here, both sides of the story.

i have not slept in five years.

i called you to come carry me away and

you swallowed me up instead.
 

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in California. Her work has been published in The Offing, The Feminist Wire, PEN America, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS will be released this month (August) through Civil Coping Mechanisms. More of her work can be found at joshuajenniferespinoza.com and on Twitter @sadqueer4life.

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world—what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza: My drive to write mostly comes from my inability to understand and deal with my own emotions as a trans feminine/mentally ill/traumatized person in a world that kind of hates all of those things. With poetry I can attempt to subvert the language of the world that has been inscribed on and within me against my will. In navigating the poetry world I am motivated by the same thing that motivates me to navigate the world at large, and that is simply surviving as unscathed as possible.

FFF: What are your influences—creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

JJE: Panic attacks, comments sections on articles about trans women, bad dreams, good dreams, bad memories, good memories, poems I’ve only half-read, windy days, people who I love and who inexplicably love me back, the possibility of the end of this world and the emergence of a better one.

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems—as author and as reader?

JJE: There’s a line in one of my poems that goes “the only aesthetic i have left is survival” and I guess that sums it up pretty well. I’m interested in art that does some kind of work in addition to simply existing as a beautiful object. I would love to be able to just create aesthetically pleasing work or whatever, but I don’t feel like I have that luxury. I’m more interested in disruption, not in the sense of being shocking for its own sake, but in the sense of challenging that which keeps me in the position of having to fight for survival.

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something—an experience, a piece of art, anything really—that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

JJE: Before I finally admitted to myself that I was trans I had spent a long time getting sicker and sicker, physically and emotionally, from the stress of holding it all in. I hadn’t cried in years and every day was one long panic attack. Near the end of this I stopped eating and was totally dissociated from everything. I was sure I would soon either be in the hospital or dead—but finally something in me broke and I just started crying in the car one day. I remember vividly my head against the window, the sun warm against my face, staring off at some mountains in the distance and sobbing because it all felt so real for once. I started feeling everything again and within weeks I was like “Holy shit—I’m not a man and I never have been.” I think a lot of my work attempts to recreate those moments of breakage, of transcendence through pain and destruction, of the necessity of tearing something down in order to discover or create something better in its place.

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

JJE: Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip completely destroyed everything I thought I understood about poetry, history, and the articulation of trauma. José Muñoz’s Disidentifications is essential for anyone interested in a non-whitewashed history of a queer and trans resistance that operated through the strategic appropriation and purposeful confusion of the cultural products and signs of white supremacy, heteronormativity, and the gender binary.

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

JJE: Not that I can think of! Thanks!

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet living in California. Her work has been published in The Offing, The Feminist Wire, PEN America, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS will be released this month (August) through Civil Coping Mechanisms. More of her work can be found at joshuajenniferespinoza.com and on Twitter @sadqueer4life.