Beloit Poetry Journal Poet's Forum

Brittany Cavallaro on "The Girl in Question"

2012-02-01T10:32:00.000-05:00

I wrote “The Girl in Question” in early summer, a time ofyear that’s historically been creatively fallow for me. June 2011 wasespecially so; I was busily packing to leave town, and I can’t even really tellyou what poetry I was reading at the time. The job I was running off to was atan academic camp for high schoolers, one I’d attended myself as a teenager. I’dbe living and working with creative writing students. At that age, in mywriting, I’d been particularly interested in magic and how it was performed—spellsin Latin, or faux-Latin; animalfamiliars; circles and quarter-candles, one for each cardinal direction;talismans made from newts’ eyes and crow feathers. In the books I read, therewas obvious metaphor in the magicians’ attempts to control their surroundingsand relationships through spell-casting, especially when the magicians wereyoung girls—my favorite to read and write about at that time. My reading interestsare broader now, but as I packed, I felt as if I was about to inhabit an old,familiar version of myself. Before I left, I reread some of my favorite booksfrom my teenage years. This poem came from that reading.

“The Girl inQuestion” was intended to be the final poem in a longer series that weavesthrough a manuscript I am working on. Thepoems constitute a myth whose central figure is a girl at once bandit andmonarch, delicate and truculent, victim and aggressor. Through the indirectlens of her character, I wanted to explore some of the binaries of adolescence,particularly female adolescence. In this poem, I gave my character adoppelganger, a not atypical move in fantasy, particularly when the protagonistis a teenager. At that age, you try on personalities the way Marie Antoinettetried on ball gowns; you can feel that you’re many people simultaneously andthat none of them have anything in common, not even a name. That there’s nopoint when the gaps between your “yous” will be stitched back together. Thetheme of mending, buttoning, and fastening appears throughout “The Girl inQuestion,” and its impetus is very much in the idea of pulling together into asingle self.

Of course, none of this is remotely new territory. The poemowes as much of a debt to Buffy theVampire Slayer as it does to Lucie Brock-Broido’s A Hunger and Alison Stine’s OhioViolence, and it owes more than that to my students from last summer. As itturned out (Harry Potter notwithstanding),they were considerably more grounded in the trappings of this world than I was at that age, though they were still awash inthe same stew of becoming and all its attendant mysteries—magical ornon-magical.

Pattabi Seshadri on "Desert Grass"

2012-01-01T17:02:00.002-05:00

What blurt is it about virtue and about vice?

Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me . . . . Istand indifferent,

My gait is no faultfinder's or rejecter's gait,

I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

–Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

The context of “Desert Grass” is the Iraq war andspecifically Abu Ghraib. The speaker is a godlike figure, perhaps the God of Abraham,perhaps someone else. The quotations are fragments of speech overheard by thisfigure from various players in the drama of the war—a tortured insurgent, themother of a future jihadi, Lynndie England. They were sampled from or inspiredby several texts, including the testimony of Abu Ghraib prisoner Ali Shalal tothe Malaysian War Crimes Commission and newspaper articles. My process ofcomposition can generally be described as rewritten collage. I combine samplesfrom multiple texts, write over and between them, and repeat.

The poem's most conspicuous borrowing is from Walt Whitman.He can be found in several places, including the title. Why Whitman? I imaginethat the godlike speaker might have been the source of Whitman'sprophecies. I wanted the poem to havesomething of that omnivorous, roving attitude, an opening loose enough that Icould fold all of the poem’s materials into it: not only voices and bodies, butpetroleum deposits and phosphorescent light sticks, dried grass and barbedwire, satellites and surveillance recordings.

More significantly, “Desert Grass” was my attempt to get theAmerica of Walt Whitman to reckon with the America of Abu Ghraib. I wanted toask what it would look like through Whitman’s lens, in which every soul isinfinitely valuable and everything has its place in the cosmos, even violenceand criminality. I also wanted to explore one of Whitman's most particularlyAmerican self-contradictions: that fierce belief in the dignity of theindividual, combined with a strangely passive fatalism in the face of humansuffering (re: “manifest destiny,” “the invisible hand of the market,”“collateral damage”).

I wanted to ask: has Whitman's America died, or can it stillbe seen in Abu Ghraib? Have we lost thecapacity for the empathy that compels Whitman (or at least the character named“Whitman”) to take in the runaway slave, dress his wounds, and invite him todinner? Are we incapable of granting the same dignity to the prisoners of AbuGhraib that he gives to the slave at auction, when he takes the auctioneerstand and declares him too valuable for the highest bidder?

Or are we more like Whitman than we realize? We know fromhis newspaper editorials that while he opposed the spread of slavery, he was noabolitionist, arguing at one point that “slavery is not at all without itsredeeming points.” When we condemn Abu Ghraib but write it off as the exceptionthat proves the rule of American decency, are we lost in the same utopiancomplacency of Whitman’s “The universe is duly in order . . . . every thing isin its place /. . . / The call of the slave is one with the master's call . . and the master salutes the slave?” When heannounces that “The keptwoman and sponger and thief are hereby invited . . . .the heavy-lipped slave is invited. . . . the venerealee is invited” to hisdinner table, what is he saying about his opinion of the slave? In other words,are we just smoothing things over with Whitmanesque gestures of love andbrotherhood?

Necessarily then, I am also asking: What is the proper roleof the poet in the face of something like Abu Ghraib? Is Whitman right that itis not her place to call evil to account? Should she save a place for both thehooded prisoners and the smiling guards at her table? Even if I managed to dothat, would I be able to respond with anything other than outrage? And if so,would I be aestheticizing a crime?

Bruce Bond on Audubon

2011-12-01T10:20:00.001-05:00

The storythat sets the poem “Audubon” into motion is true: the night my father died Iwas miles away in Texas while he, who had suffered for so long in California, acceptedthe inevitable as it in turn accepted him. Unable to sleep, I set out to write apassage through the difficulty, my heart cast out of its usual place, exposed. Itdid not matter much to me if I had broken some decorum, if I made selfish useof suffering, his, mine, or that of future readers who knew the man. I wasdoing what a love of words had prepared me to do, to make something, to transfigure,as tragedies do, pain into meaning, heartbreak into the redemptive and confrontationalpleasures of form. So much for emotions recollected in tranquility. I was inthe thick of something that seemed not hostile to art, but rather at the coreof the unspeakable from which art derives its language. To speak this placeinto being is both a form of supplication and a violation. It is to attempt theimpossible, which seems to me still to be the function of art, to honor silencein its own tongue.

This isnot to say I do not understand the objections some folks have to the unabashed andready rendering of the tragic, though to see this as “exploitation” oddly suggestsnot only selfish motives but also an act at the expense of another’swell-being. I understand as well that the sudden creative transformation ofgrief may figure in some contexts as premature or an exercise in bad taste. ButI also think a general denial of the paradoxical nature of art’s engagementwith the horrible via the aesthetic is common. In her book Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Hélène Cixious talks atlength about how when your write about something, you kill it off. One interpretationI brought to this was the sense that representation is at once a negation andan affirmation, a barrier and a bridge to that elusive referent beyond our languagefor it. Thus whatever mastery we might sense in the act of creation is likewisemitigated by a certain helplessness, a knowledge that otherness can neverannounce itself as purely other.

All thisset the scene for my encounter with Audubon, who clearly loved birds but notenough to spare their lives in the service of his art. His particular form ofaesthetic murder, being literal,exploited his subject in a way that exaggerated the self-interest implicit inthe act of creation. By way of his story, the troubling implications of the “detachedattachment” of the artist’s gaze come into focus. I admit, I love Audubon’spaintings, and that love disturbs me when I think of the cruelty that made thempossible. Part of what I admire is Audubon’s powers of attention, his nearreligious devotion to the designs of nature, not to mention the paint itself. Assuch his work, like all art, calls upon a simultaneous control and abandon, aready hand, an open eye. Where the eye opens, the heart is soon to follow: suchis our hope. In my poem “Audubon,” I wanted less to stand above Audubon inmoral judgment than to make his tension my own. The only credible affection Iknow is through a hole in the self not the other direction entirely. I wanted the father now to participate in the writing act,to make of it less a declaration of feeling than an invocation to the unseen;less a testament of will than a collaboration with silence, the thing that diesthe moment that it speaks.

Coffee with the Editor

2011-10-31T19:29:00.006-04:00

In the absence of a good coffee shop where we can put our elbows on the table and talk away the morning, I'm making myself available on the blog this month to respond to your questions and comments about the journal and poetry at large. What do you value about the BPJ? What would you like to know about our editorial process? Is having a print journal to hold in your hand still important to you: (Don't worry--we're not abandoning the printed page.) What more might we do to sustain the community of readers and poets we serve?

Lee Sharkey, Co-editor

Michael Broek on "The Logic of Yoo"

2011-09-01T11:09:00.004-04:00

“The Logic of Yoo” was woven together from many different threads of my thinking. Since my mid-teens, I have been interested in philosophies of violence. I remember watching a spate of movies one teenage summer–Full Metal Jacket, Deerslayer, Platoon–trying to understand what seemed to be a masculine propensity for self hurt and destruction. This was also the summer of Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as the school reading I had been assigned: A Farewell To Arms, The Stranger. This is only to say that these were the tragedies I grew up on artistically (not to mention Eliot and Conrad and Yeats), and the questions that they raised have never left me. In fact, they have colored everything.

Much more recently, while finishing my doctoral work, I read Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, and while I was moved by his sentences, I argued in my dissertation that the last few pages of the novel completely undermine its premise, illustrating the problem of political fiction and poetry–of unearned outrage, of naïve responses to the complex questions of human suffering. Nevertheless, the book again caused me to consider the “problem” of evil, or, as I prefer, the philosophies of violence. This was one thread.

“The Logic of Yoo” is very different from the poetry I had written previously. My wife, the poet Laura McCullough, helped me think about this when we talked in the shower about a contest she had just finished judging (The shower is a great place to work out these problems. It's the only meditative space in our house). There were literally dozens of manuscripts written by men like me–sincere, passionate, loving, not burdened by public scarring. This, I realized, was the problem of the White, heterosexual, middle-class male with feelings, or the WIMF. I was not manic-depressive or a womanizer—but one cannot be a Robert Lowell or a John Berryman anymore. I had not worked in a factory or gone off to war—I was not a Yusef Komunyakaa or a Brian Turner. In short, I had nothing going for me as a poet. I had to think about my speaker in some new way. This was another thread.

The actual writing of the work was, of necessity, accomplished quickly. As a part of a writing group that developed out of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, I had committed to writing a poem a day for a month, emailing a new draft every night to my poet colleagues, who would e-mail me their drafts as well. I read an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a “writer” who plagiarized papers, for a hefty fee, for college students. I had followed the issue of John Yoo and the “torture memos” throughout the Bush administration. And I had just finished my doctorate, so I was still in research mode. This was the final thread.

Returning to the problem of The Road, which is the problem of many political poems (including most of those in Sam Hamill's well-intentioned Poets Against the War project), I settled on a protagonist whose “job” it was to write about an ethically dubious person (John Yoo), who in the process was forced to examine the ethical implications of his own choices. Thus, the voices of the two ethically compromised writers would intermingle. The research occurred very quickly. There were many de-classified memos, and as I had entertained the idea of going to law school some years before, I enjoyed reading Yoo's arguments. As a poet, I was fascinated by the lawyer's use of language. From beginning to end, Yoo seemed depraved, and I don't use that word lightly. He seemed desperate to elucidate a logic to fit his pre-conceived notion of what had to be done. But then again, my protagonist had trod down the same path. This was the element of empathy that I wanted. It would be easy to scream and yell and say Yoo was absolutely wrong and shame on him, but that would be to ignore that Yoo was only writing what his bosses wanted to hear, what many voters wanted to hear–the evildoers would be punished; we would be safe.

The rest of the work was constructed quite organically. The language of the memos was so striking that I realized Yoo's actual words had to enter the poems. I found his comments in the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson especially illuminating because they represented the thinking of the young man, which was at once frightening and comic (One doesn't need to go to difficult lengths to inject a postmodern sensibility into one’s poetry). I wrote a poem a day. I decided to use actual footnotes, crossing the boundary between scholarly and poetic writing. After about two months of daily work, the work was 80% complete.

The circumstances of waterboarding led me back to Hannah Arendt and even further back to the guillotine and Hobbes. How does cruelty become institutionalized? How do we justify dictatorship? I didn't aspire to answer these questions directly. If there is any prescription in these poems, perhaps it is found in the hybrid form itself and in the struggle against the truth of aloneness, felt by the torture victim as well as, to a different degree, the protagonist.

Tracy Zeman on "Grass for Bone"

2011-07-27T13:00:00.003-04:00

Biologist Edward O. Wilson’s concept “biophilia” roughly means a natural or genetic affinity between human beings and other living systems resulting from the co-evolution of “us” with “other.” Wilson claims that “the unique operations of the brain are the result of natural selection operating through the filter of culture. They have suspended us between the two antipodal ideals of nature and machine, forest and city, the natural and artifactual.” “Grass for Bone” originated from these ideas and the inherent inseparability of human, land and culture—“stream carves into gully into dusk into / bodies boiled in lye then scraped clean / turning bones into rusted machinery / a stand of pale orchids no longer.”

Throughout the series three primary motifs overlap and meld into and out of one another: grass, burial, and animal. I grew up and still live in an area that once was prairie and, until recently, knew almost nothing about it. After reading about the North American grasslands (see a swath of land beginning just east of the Mississippi river and extending to the Rocky Mountains), and its fragmented history, I began to see how the grasslands are a place of origins. Many European settlers from forested lands, however, saw the American grassland as a vast nothingness, a sea of land with only a lone bur oak occasionally breaking the horizon. The grassland’s history is one of beauty, violence and change, of displaced peoples and animals, and environmental degradation.

In the series I often juxtapose grassland images with human burial rituals, as in:

water clinging to bluestem
grass clinging to wind & sun
an “ache in the bone” a litany in negative
we stand at the river’s edge to watch
the fish swallow what’s left
of you this keno a bathing place
for the after & the rest also

Burial practices coinciding with grass and animal images tie death to land. Historically, environmental conditions influenced methods of body disposal. At times in the series, a specific “you” is buried or mourned. This “you” surfaces now and again throughout the poems, making the sequence part-elegy. Lost landscape, lost practice, lost person.

Birds, wolves, and bison, animals both extant and extinct are scattered throughout the lines as sound, or track, or bone: “define the treeline we share / with the rest carrion cardinal compass-flower / bringing a way of being with / not against.” I try to illustrate how we share and do not share our world, a world increasingly crowded, degraded, and warming. Aside from the more serious concerns, I also love playing with the language of this landscape and the beautiful vocabulary that grew from it, “bath of sedges,” “wild plum or peach leaf willow,” “copse of false / Solomon’s seal.”

Formally, I take Lorine Niedecker’s “condensary” to heart to tell this story of fragmentation in a fragmented, condensed form, with associative half-sentences and collaged half-stories. Moving through a text of broken narratives is different than reading a strictly narrative text; however, the same questions one would ask of any text are still relevant. Where and how do the images shift? What meaning is created by their juxtaposition? What is happening with sound and line? For instance, in the second section a sparrow in a minor place bumps up against a sewn sieve of redbud leaves, which is followed by the image of a noose and hoof-prints and a railroad. To me this is a stanza that explores marginalization. The field sparrow is declining due to a changing and fragmented habitat; i.e., the sparrow is only allowed a minor place. Railways are places where a number of prairie plants have been preserved but only in narrow strips. And death can be a form of marginalization, both for the dead and the bereaved.

Finally, a few of the voices and influences in the poems are Erik Seeman’s Death in the New World, Richard Manning’s Grassland, Emily Dickinson, Agnes Denes’ The Human Argument, and Joanna Newsom’s album Have One on Me.

Jenny Johnson on "Aria"

2011-07-01T08:44:00.006-04:00

As a record collector and a fan of all sorts of music, I love thinking about the relationships between sounds and bodies. One way to think about “Aria” is as seven meditations on this theme. In a conversation about what we might call a “queer poetics,” poet and friend Gabrielle Calvocoressi asked me: “How many times have we wanted to use our body in a way that is just past the point of possibility?” When I drafted sections I-III, I was thinking about this question in relationship to the music that arises out of the body. I also thought hard about my use of plural pronouns when writing this poem, the turn towards a “you,” the use of “we” to capture what theorist Ann Cvetkovich calls “public feelings.” When I refer to “dance interludes” in sections VI and VII, I am interested in music’s ability to rattle bodies in public spaces, too. Specifically, I drew inspiration from Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, a book that opens with a personal experience of a Le Tigre concert, a space where Cvetkovich felt a vital queer and lesbian subculture had formed in response to trauma. Having seen this band live, I knew what she meant and tried to write into this sensation.

I also decided while working on this poem (and the crown as a whole) that metrically I did not want to prioritize unity over disjunction. Rather, what I was most interested in was playing with the sounds and restraints that emerge from a queer body, the sounds that emerge from a queer collective, a body or voice that has the potential to be unified by its disjunctions.

Admittedly, as a poet with queer and feminist sensibilities writing a blank verse sonnet, my impulses err on the side of disruption. I want to break a meter much more than I want to write within it. However valuable this impulse, I found that I had to first fool around with what’s “normal” before I could effectively trouble my metrics. So, when I drafted “Aria,” my first crown, I set the following limits: Irregular feet should not outnumber regular feet in a line. No more than two substitutions per line. [These limits did not hold in the final revision, but these guidelines were crucial to the poem’s genesis.]

My hope was that the first sonnet would foreground the crown’s tensions and establish its sonic texture. The desire to silence or disassociate from a high pitch or a curved body is a concern the speaker wrestles with throughout section 1. Later, the speaker reveals a chest that is bound. I wanted to create in the pitch, timbre, and quantity of sound specific moments where the music, too, is cut off or disrupted. Ultimately, these subtle variations and returns build to a visible psychic crisis and narrative shift in lines 8-11. The stanza break bifurcates the sonnet form, creating a visible chasm. The body is bound. Or is it? Sound is bound. Or is it?

The last line of the first sonnet offers a final turn when the “off-pitch soprano steals through” the flattened “frame.” What does it mean to be “off”— to be unsatisfactory? to be strange? to be separate from? I’m not sure. Are the voices in this poem “off-pitch”? Do they satisfy or dissatisfy the ear? And if so, whose ears? Your ears? According to which standard of musical measure? I do know that there is in line 14 an imbalance of vowel pitches; three high frequency “i” and “e” sounds in “this,” “pitch,” and “steal” clash against the low frequency “o” sounds in “soprano”. On the other hand, the line is not necessarily metrically irregular. So, even if the writer/speaker/body lacks control of one aspect of the sonnet’s music, another aspect of the music is regulated. The one metrical irregularity in line 14 is that the line is truncated to nine syllables. The intent here was to give “steals through” extra-emphasis, space to stretch. And the phrase does stretch—the long-voweled diphthongs in “steals” and “through” take forever to say.

I’ll stop here. There’s much more that I am happy to talk about with regard to the making and thinking behind this poem. Also, in order to give credit where credit is due here are a few liner notes.

Notes for “Aria” (see hyperlinks on right):

In section 2, the italicized lyrics are from “Kimberly,” written and performed by Patti Smith. Section 3 alludes to Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato to sing in the Sistine Chapel Choir and the only castrato to make a recording of his voice. Section 4 invokes jazz flautist Eric Dolphy; bird songs often inspired his compositions. Section 5 makes reference to a BBC recording of nightingales in 1942 in England. Intending only to broadcast the birds in song, engineers in Surrey incidentally recorded the nightingales alongside the drone of bombers flying overhead en route to Manheim. In section 6, the italicized lines are from the Le Tigre song “Fake French.” In section 7, “Danse Russe” is the title of a poem by William Carlos Williams. The italicized lines are lyrics from “[You Make Me Feel Like] A Natural Woman,” first released by Aretha Franklin and co-written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and “She-Bop,” written and performed by Cyndi Lauper.

Jeff Crandall, Garth Greenwell, Peter Pereira, and Brian Teare on “Gay Poetry, Politics, Poetics”

2011-06-01T11:19:00.006-04:00

The Summer 2011 issue of the BPJ features a symposium on “Gay Poetry, Politics, Poetics.” The four poets who took part in the symposium and the editors all felt that what the journal was able to fit within the eight pages at the "back of the book” opens up an important conversation, one that needed to continue in a more capacious venue—and with voices beyond the original discussants’. And so, for the month of June, we have migrated the conversation to the Poet’s Forum, hoping you and others will join in.

You will find a brief excerpt from the opening of the print symposium below, and a link to the text of the entire symposium both in the blog post title above and under BPJ Links to your right.

JC: Clearly a gay sensibility exists in poetry. There are nuances, references, and shared experiences which can be expressed in poetry that straight people will never glean, but that a gay man or woman would recognize instantly. The hetero world is so very man/woman oriented that everything it looks upon is seen through that filter. When a gay male poet writes, “We met in the park / at dusk” it means something very different than if a straight man or woman wrote it. . . . But the intense, raw pain of Paul Monette’s Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog, to cite just one example, is simply human. There is nothing gay about the experience of losing someone you utterly love. Why is a line being drawn across human experience because that love is man/man vs. man/other?

BT: Jeff, I think you go right to the heart of the matter with ardent clarity, the matter being the question of gay poetry: What is it? Does it exist? If it does, how so? If it doesn’t, then why do people act as though it does? At the heart of your response, I see you potentially arguing for a universal humanism that both trumps historical context and posits an implicit scale of value: “human” > “gay.” If I choose to play devil’s advocate in response to your question, please know that I don’t intend to single you out. I think you’re articulating a powerful question about art’s relationship to political experience—a question I almost daily ask of myself and my work as a poet and critic. But I wouldn’t myself say that there is “nothing gay about the experience of losing someone you utterly love” to AIDS, in the U.S., in the ’80s.

Reading Monette for me now is not just to revisit my own memories of losing my partner to AIDS-related complexes in 1999—which was, to be historical about it, a very different death than it would have been had he died in the ’80s. For me to read Monette in 2011 is also to be immersed in recent history that is finally just far enough away to be history: a specific era whose politics, activist actions, and emotional atmosphere were dictated and circumscribed by the very particular cultural and economic leadership of the U.S. government, moralizing and panic-driven public attitudes toward gay male sexual¬ity, limited medical knowledge of AIDS itself, and a paucity of ways of treating it. So while I totally understand what you mean about the universality of the loss of the beloved, the cultural and historical context at work in Monette’s autobiographical poems not only leads me to read them as representative of gay experience of a certain time—it insists that I do. I think that this is Monette’s particular form of literary activism: he refuses altogether the binary between “human” and “gay,” but not by erasing the particulars of gay experience or the specifics of gay history. He insists that though there is no difference between “human” and “gay,” the record nonetheless must stand.

Christopher Munde on “Entomology of Exhaustion” and “What Was Gentle Has Turned Careful”

2011-04-01T09:12:00.004-04:00

“Entomology of Exhaustion” and “What Was Gentle Has Turned Careful” are my attempts to articulate a father's transformation from victim of circumstance and unfocused aggression to aggressor against order and focused love.

“Entomology . . .”'s narrative premise, which is laid out in the first stanza, was drawn from my own father's experience of having to excavate through the residuum of the World Trade Center to get to his job across the street. In a very physical sense the return path from horror to the boredom of his job was obstructed by the desks and walls and bodies of thousands of his peers. In the poem, this unexpected work sets in motion a psychological change, wherein the father attempts to block out the white-noise political “sense” of the attack by aligning it with his feelings of drowning amid a family and its needs.

I wanted to bear out this progression in the form, with thought's lolling lines repeatedly enjambed to mimic both the systematic repetition of the work and the character's precarious logical leaps. Lines edge forward and draw back in light of the terrible implications leaching into his consciousness, yet the work he is aware of performing (both physical and mental) only distracts him while his values are slowly deformed. The insect similes thread the scene thematically and serve as biological precedents for the gestating ideas.

This biological theme is echoed and further solidified by the body farm scene in “What Was Gentle Has Turned Careful.” The term “body farm,” in my somewhat simplified understanding of the process, refers to land where donated bodies are cast as stand-ins for suspected crime victims by forensic scientists, who track their decomposition with the hope it will reveal clues to a crime. The elements, faceless aggressors, weather the bodies while a detached scientist merely records the decomposition process and its lifelike attributes. By interweaving the parallel narratives of the father acting out his version of a forensic pathologist (clearly a dream) and performing a lonely familial duty (possibly real), I tried to make clear the clinical perspective overtaking all aspects of his life. As the similarities between the threads pile up, distinctions become vaguer, until the father is left as an observer, seated in an auditorium at a work site that is unambiguously real.

Initially, I struggled with the presence of the two narratives in “What Was Gentle . . . ,” and briefly, with my own impulse toward using narrative at all. There followed a shorter version in which the home life thread was excised and the forensic narrative was cyclical and evasive, yet I ultimately chose to go back to the original form, since I feel the details of both scenes are what compel the reader to temporarily share the father's mindset. While the father is only “someone's” in “Entomology . . . ,” here he gains a particular family and enacts the process of willful disassociation. Only after the two threads culminate in the father’s analyzing all bodies as art on a stage did I want the rift between my character and the reader to open.

Daneen Wardrop on "Mozart's Starling" and "Counterpoint"

2011-03-01T17:49:00.006-05:00

One of my guilty pleasures is reading books about animals. It’s a joy, for instance, to read that dogs and humans may well have joined up in prehistory, during the time of gargantuan predatory mammals, to forge an alliance that increased each species’ chances for survival:dogs were fed on a regular basis by humans and humans were protected and shown useful hunting grounds by dogs. Either group might have perished without the other. All in all, humans may not have had much going for them otherwise.

“Mozart’s Starling” and “Counterpoint” tap into species collaboration of sorts, though I wasn’t really conscious of that until I started writing this rumination. It doesn’t seem so farfetched to me that humans and animals try to communicate with each other. I talked to a trainer once at Shedd’s Aquarium in Chicago who told me that dolphins understand sentences. They put together subject, verb, object; in fact, most of the dolphins at Shedd’s know hundreds of sentences. And this was just in the case of dolphins learning human syntax—imagine what might happen if humans tried to learn dolphin. It seems to me one of the purviews of the arts to allow us to imagine what it would feel like to be another consciousness. Hence the persona poem—or in this particular case, the animal-being poem.

Before I started writing “Mozart’s Starling” I looked up the sounds a starling makes (there are many instances online) and found myself astonished at the vocal range, including clicks, chirrs, conspiring whispers, melismas, dive-bomb musical scales, voices with uncannily precise accents, and incredibly manic delivery. At some point it didn't feel presumptuous to imagine myself speaking starling. To capture all these facets of voice on the page I felt I needed to do what writers are usually cautioned not to do—use excessive capitalization, exclamation points, even superscript. I wanted to convey the bird's preternatural liveliness.

It only makes sense that in their day-to-day lives, composer and pet would have heard each other’s riffs resounding in their heads. It seems altogether plausible that Mozart’s starling would have reproduced some of the sound effects of his keeper. But when you hear the virtuosity of the starling it also seems altogether possible that Mozart might have cribbed some of his musical phrases from the bird, which is what I want the poem to suggest. Clearly Mozart himself believed that he and his companion communicated. (He cared enough about the bird that, upon its decease, he organized a funeral, during the same week as the death of his father.)

The layerings of voice here are important to me. The German comes mostly from remembered vocabulary after a time of living in Bonn when I was in junior high—hence my degraded preteen diction including Scheiss, etc., which made it easier for me to enter Mozart’s infamous love of scatological talk. The poem mediates formal and informal German, folk music, classical music, and bird music—all languages speaking in concert with each other. I guess the crux of the poem might lie in these polyphonic strands, and in the understanding that the process of creative inspiration has trouble distinguishing origins, that a composition echoes and reechoes in involvement with others. A work of art builds itself in the context of relationship, depending upon the point and counterpoint inherent in interaction.

Which brings me to “Counterpoint,” another poem of creative collaboration. Temple Grandin makes the beautiful suggestion that our ability to make and hear music may well arise out of another relationship in prehistory when humans tried to mimic birds in their wondrous capacity as song makers. We may have creatures besides ourselves to thank for one of the most poignant parts of being human: the ability to sing.

Anna George Meek on "Self-Possession"

2011-01-31T12:57:00.002-05:00

A lifetime ago, along the rocky, desert cliffs on the west bank of the Jordan River, a shepherd boy fell into a deep hole. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he found himself in a cave, surrounded by ancient clay pots; groping inside, the boy pulled out a crumbling roll of parchment, the first of 900 pieces to be discovered in the caves. Although he did not know it then, he held in his hands the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I’ve always loved this bit of history: the accident, the important texts buried deeply with us for thousands of years. The words that tell stories about who we’ve been in the past, and inform who we might be now.

“Self-Possession” opens with the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is the last poem in a sequence of five poems called “The Genome Rhapsodies,” which returns often to the scrolls. I began the sequence in 2000, when my imagination was captured by another discovery: the news that scientists had nearly finished deciphering the entire human genome, a microscopic blueprint of the human creature, which we all carry within our cells. Newly discovered text!—or rather, old text.

Here was the mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls again. How do we read and write ourselves? And what of that—the reading, the writing, ourselves—do we own?

Ownership has a lot at stake. As scientists argue about who owns the information in the human genome, Jordan and Israel continue to tussle over ownership of the scrolls, and the land itself remains a site of bloody contest. Even the idea that we own ourselves seems muddy. When I wrote “Self-Possession,” I had just given birth to my first child—my body, not my body—and my father was diagnosed with a dementia, most likely genetic, which killed him four years later. I myself have a painful neurological disease that my daughter may inherit. I’m darkly aware of the genome that my father, my daughter, and I share. At the same time, I belong to my father, my daughter belongs to me, and both of us, to her.

My belief is that, like the body, identity is hardly singular; it exists as a manifold of overlapping, conflicting, and unclearly bounded parts. Thus it matters directly how we treat one another, how we write ourselves, and how we read (or misread) one another. The monolithic, autobiographical “I” that much American poetry is fond of (and insistent upon) seems inadequate to the task of speaking such an identity. The formal aspects of “Self-Possession” are in part my attempt to expand an “I” so that it can, in Whitman’s words, “contain multitudes” (though I hardly mean to compare my writing to Whitman’s!).

I’ve tried “we,” of course, a pronoun that makes its way into “Self-Possession.” And some of my favorite poets, Elizabeth Bishop among them, use a “we” I’ve fallen head over heels in love with. But the danger of “we” is appropriation, an assumption that the poet speaks for others. I struggle with this. The pronouns tussle a bit in “Self-Possession” for this reason.

Nevertheless, “Self-Possession” was the most effortless section of “The Genome Rhapsodies” to write. The lines kept twisting and spinning out. Like DNA strands, each line in the poem has its generation in the lines before it. My imagination functions like this too, highly caffeinated, whirling forward through a synthesis of material already richly in mind. At times, the poem felt out of control, and the best lines were ones I stumbled upon, like—dare I say it?—like old scrolls.

And you? What poems best enact your sense of what identity or self-possession is? What pronouns do these poems use? Can American poetry open up “I”? Can American poetry reclaim “we”?

Janice N. Harrington on "Why, Oh Why, the Doily?"

2010-12-31T19:19:00.007-05:00

A MEDITATION ON THE ART OF DOILIES

“Why, Oh Why, the Doily?” was triggered by re-discovering a collection of doilies, family keepsakes. So began a meditation on the meaning of doilies and the devalued artistry of women. My early attempts in 2004 sounded elegiac—here’s a lost time and here’s what doilies meant. Despite continual revision, drafts never moved beyond the small container of personal history.

In 2007 I began working on a series of poems about the African American folk artist Horace Pippin. Pippin fought and was wounded in World War I. After the war, he drew memories of the war, still-life paintings, memory pictures of his childhood, portraits, and landscapes. He also painted, with meticulous deliberation, an amazing array of doilies. I didn’t see the connection, however, between Pippin’s work and my own early efforts to write about doilies until I read Selden Rodman’s Horace Pippin: A Negro Painter in America. Rodman’s words describing Pippin’s obsession with doilies gave me a springboard that led to the doily series. I knew I wanted a poem that enacted obsession, wanted to crochet a poem (links, chains, intertwining, dropped stitches) that moved from the specifics of family history and memory toward more abstract representations.

Section One
This section draws on my first attempts to write about doilies. It begins with memory: a woman crocheting beside the front window of her living room. I then join this memory to other threads. I wanted to ground readers with a clear, understandable image before moving forward.

Sections Two to Six
If readers think of the themes that the poem engages as threads, then it is possible to see weavings and interweavings. The poem is growing from a specific memory to the ways doilies trigger memory and, more broadly, to cultural memory (ring games, Little Sally Walker, childhood), always expanding: doilies as works of art, architecture, mathematical expressions, etc. While I wrote, I continually asked myself, what are doilies? What do they do? Why do we make them? Why am I captivated by a construction of tangled thread? Those questions drove and built each section.

Section Seven
Like doilies, catalog cards (in the predominantly female world of libraries) are made by women. Like doilies, catalog cards are anonymous. No one recalls the art that assigned a book’s location or captured a book’s content with a snapshot of language. I saw a sympathy between the art of making doilies and the art of making catalog cards. The poem describes the doily in the condensed, objective language of a library card and presents the rhizomatic connections that place doilies in larger contexts, including an allusion to Bishop’s “Filling Station.”

Section Eight
What are doilies trying to say to us? The poem suggests this large biblical word: Behold! The word of angels and old testament prophets. Doilies are baroque and ornate. The word “look” didn’t have the weight that I wanted readers to consider. I also saw this sentence as a way to clean the reader’s palate before the longer and more expansive meditation of Section Nine.

Section Nine
Readers might see a contradiction between section eight and section nine. Doilies know only one word, yet later a doily asks questions. Does this mean that the questions that doilies ask don’t require language? That form and the relationship of their threads shape the questions that doilies ask?

If they ask questions, then can they also generate narrative? Perhaps some doilies can only speak one word, but others have a larger vocabulary? The poem never settles those questions.

Section Nine builds on the visual format of a Bernard Tschumi essay and adapts it for its own purposes. It was probably the most challenging part of the poem. I had to formulate the abstract queries that I hoped would defamiliarize the doily. If section nine succeeds, then a reader can no longer look at any doily as “just a doily” or as “handiwork—women.”

Section Ten
This section completes the poem’s arc from personal memory to an ekphrastic poem that weighs the artistic obsessions of Horace Pippin. Pippin’s doilies look like the barbed wire fences of No Man’s Land. They speak to the eye, and the hand can almost lift them from the canvas.

The last section also alludes to Frost’s bitter “The Road Not Taken.” Although Frost’s poem defies easy sentimentalism, when I study Pippin’s doilies I see converging trails. I see the doily as a vehicle of expression and as a way of seeking. Pippin was searching. Artists search. And so, metaphorically, the doily grew into a labyrinth, a maze of lace that completed the poem.

Elizabeth Langemak on "Expectation" and "Illinois Cornfield as Nude Descending Staircase"

2010-12-01T11:18:00.006-05:00

I wrote “Expectation” after visiting Walt Whitman’s tomb in Camden, New Jersey. I suppose this isn’t surprising. But the thing that surprises me, looking back on it, is that I started writing the poem even before I arrived at the cemetery. As I was getting into the car twenty miles away, I already understood how everything would turn out: I knew that I would expect—or hope—to feel moved at the tomb. I also knew that I wouldn’t be.

And that’s how it went. I left the cemetery sensing—as I knew I would—that I’d somehow failed to comprehend something spelled out very clearly in front of me. I spent a long time afterward struggling to write a very different poem about Whitman but then realized that the more interesting poem, for me, was about this failure to connect with what I objectively understood to be an important or interesting moment.

I’ll also say that the experience of writing this poem—and of visiting the tomb in the first place—was colored by the weird understanding that I was going to write a poem about whatever happened there. I have this feeling a lot, and the feeling is, I’ll admit, dirty. I visit tombs, talk to my students, look at art, think about movies and deer and breakfast and conversations with the people I love most in this sort of mindset. There isn’t much escape from it, and I understand that this isn’t an original feeling. Stephen Dunn has a great poem called “The Routine Things Around the House” where he confesses that “When Mother died / I thought: now I’ll have a death poem. / That was unforgiveable.” Perhaps it is unforgiveable, but I’ve forgiven him because I’ve come to believe that this constant scheming is an unavoidable symptom of the poem-writing condition. We expect a little better of ourselves, and yet.

While “Expectation” tries to deal with these abstract ideas in a concrete way, “Illinois Cornfield as Nude Descending Staircase” is a comparison between an abstract painting and the concrete image of a cornfield. I wrote the poem last fall after returning from a run along some Illinois country roads. Looking at the cornstalks, I had the nagging sense that they reminded me of something and was surprised to realize, when I returned, that I was thinking of Marcel Duchamp’s painting. Hitting on this identification was exhilarating; it was like believing I saw the face of someone I knew in a crowd, deciding it couldn’t be that person, and then realizing that it was.

The most interesting realizations I’ve had about this poem, however, have occurred in the process of writing this essay. As I wrote, I showed drafts to two readers I trust; both times this has resulted in conversations about the appearance of the word “woman” in the poems’ last lines. To my surprise, both readers argued that the “woman still unshucked” in “Illinois Cornfield” suggests a feminist reading for the poem as a whole. In the first conversation, my reader was interested in the multiple connotations of the word “shuck”; she suggested that shucking might be something that is done to a woman, perhaps with a sexual connotation. In the second, my reader and I discussed the poem’s genesis in Duchamp’s painting; he reminded me of the implied power of a male artist’s gaze on a nude female figure.

I understand and like these readings but, quite honestly, I wasn’t thinking of either when I wrote the poem. I suspect, for example, that I simply assumed the female figure’s autonomy: the shucking, as I originally imagined it, is not done to the woman but is something that the woman does for herself as part of an evolution made visual by the painting. Nor did I think about the male artist’s gaze on the female body. In fact, one of my favorite stories about Duchamp’s painting concerns the controversy it originally created because the “nude” doesn’t really resemble a woman, naked or otherwise. My most immediate concern in writing the poem was how I might convincingly reproduce my excitement in sensing a visual connection between a cornfield and an abstract painting not known for its resemblance to any part of Illinois.

I see, however, that the woman’s appearance at the end of this poem and of “Expectation” is suggestive, especially when the poems are read together. In answer to the questions this might raise, I’d like to suggest that both poems use the word “woman” in similar ways: in each, I have purposefully used it rather than “person” or “man” in order to avoid vagueness or inaccuracy. From my perspective, both poems spend most of their time approaching ungendered notions such as disappointment or change. Perhaps this privileging of verbal specificity and universal experience over gender issues is ultimately the happy product of feminism, if not the outright feminist gesture that my readers saw; in these poems, I assume the right to speak as or about a woman without consistently monitoring what the final product claims about that woman’s relationship to men. Or perhaps not. I’m also willing to imagine that I’ll revisit this essay in a few years and wonder how I could have ignored my obvious impulses to address feminist issues.

At any rate, in writing this essay I’ve been reminded of how exciting it is to discover things I didn’t originally know about my own work. I’ve also been reminded of how easy—and tempting—it is to ordain poems with meanings that I didn’t originally intend. That said, there is a sizeable part of me that wishes I had aimed for the meanings other readers have ascribed to my poems, which enrich them in compelling ways. And, of course, there is also the part of me that knows it doesn’t matter what I intended. The poems live in the world now, and as they find their readers they find their meanings.

Christopher Howell on "Edvard Munch" and "The Circular Saw Children"

2010-11-04T22:20:00.007-04:00

Shortly before writing “Edvard” I had been thinking about Munch, of how he had said that, as a painter, he did not need to know what he was doing, but only that he was doing it in order to find out. I had been thinking that this is kind of the way I write, in response to some compulsion or sound, shapeless except for the urgency it excites. And I just follow it, kind of dowsing toward satisfaction. I did not have Munch specifically in mind when the poem began; but as the female figure revealed herself and the context broadened, something like the feeling his paintings stir in me came out of the wall behind me and looked over my shoulder.

I didn’t look back, of course, I just kept writing, listening for its approval, letting World War One (the defining event of Munch’s generation) come in there, letting the lost child of the poem, all the lost children, become death itself, maybe.

Then I was astonished to find that, through the agency of the war weary soldiers, the speaker himself comes into the poem, in the act of writing this very poem, drinking the very tea I am drinking now (Barry’s Gold, by the way), the soldiers not so very happy to find him there, again, probing, constant as the rain:

. . . always the withered
flowers and haunted look of a girl
going nowhere and a road that stops
while seeming to go on. Always someone
lifting tea through its own steam
as he writes on a yellow pad.
Always the disgrace of his probing
and then the rain…

It is, I hope, as though the scene of desolation imagines the speaker, that accepting this is the price the speaker must pay for imagining it. I loved that, and the birds that cannot be anything but black. Nearly everything in the poem has this darkness, except the nameless red bird (line seven) that is not there, is perhaps a figment of the girl’s hysteria that is, in fact, the hysteria of defeat—and not simply that of an army, but of everyone, really, in the face of war’s seeming inevitability and its uniformly horrific results.

And what would the Kaiser say, having set all this in motion and seeing it now, seeing death in a lost girl, the soldier’s bottomless indifference? Listening to this question literally cools the tea; and perhaps the speaker wakes, more or less, vaguely ashamed, and the girl is alone and there is no one left in the poem to name the flowers, if the flowers are really there.

And that is Edvard Munch, that is the kind of psychological landscape into which his work can bring you. So his name seemed to me a good title for the poem, though the poem is not about him. Whatever it was looking over my shoulder noted this, took a deep breath and went home.

*

“The Circular Saw Children,” is not as ghostly, has a different sort of narrative drive. And, of course, use of the first person plural has the contradictory effect of removing the reader grammatically while at the same time drawing him or her closer rhetorically to both the action and the narrator’s tone. It is a tone and manner with which most of us are familiar from having spent much of childhood in the menacing and enchanted forest of the fairy tale.

I have written a number of poems in this manner, and I trace my impulse (or freedom) to do so to Andre Breton, who said, in the First Manifesto, “There are fairy tales to be written for adults, fairy tales still almost blue.” He was speaking, more broadly, of childhood’s freedom from the kinds of psychic constraints that lead, in adulthood, to dreariness, rage, conformity, and nameless and unnecessary terrors. In childhood we are free, he felt, to confront these matters with a psychic purity unoppressed by reason, personal and cultural guilt, or the mindless dray horse of strict believability. Therefore the path to the Marvelous, he believed, lead through that zone of the mind where childhood’s powers and creatures remained in tact, that is in the unconscious. If in childhood we are free to confront imposed restraints or explore the outrageous liberation that may result from banishing such restraints in the relative safety of the tale that can go anywhere, plumb any depth or vault over any barrier, then such tales (or poems), composed in later life, may open the secret doors leading to the monumental intelligence of dreams.

While I don’t really buy this entirely (and there are flies in the ointment: actual children seem to have left Breton more or less unmoved), it is certainly true that the tale leading away from reason, into the Greenworld or the dark, may bring back to us knowledge that is both ancient and entirely new. “Circular Saw” wants to establish itself as this kind of journey right away, with “We waited, of course, to become disks.” I think it is the “of course” that brings forth the chill that suggests an alternate world. And as the poem moves along, what emerges is an alternate moral vision, one in which shape trumps all ethical considerations, flattening and unifying them in a perfectly closed system of action and regard.

. . . We thought
it would be perfect to be endless
edges gliding, perhaps flung
and cutting things off at the knees.

The cruelty of such circumstance
would not belong to us
but to the shape of us
merely, an accident of science…

In a way the poem slips back through Breton to Lautreamont and De Sade, their argument that moral perfection must permit complete freedom of thought and action, including the cruel and bestial. But what I hope the poem discovers during its fairy tale like descent into the unconscious, is that perfect systems lack passion, which means they also lack remorse. I honor the surrealists for their devotion to the mind’s release from bondage (no pun intended), but there are reasons why we grow out of childhood, and not all of them have to do with securing gainful employment. There is also the matter of growing into a capacity to integrate the range of human feeling, of not becoming monsters of perfection who coolly drown our neighbors.

I guess in that sense “Circular Saw” is a political poem. This is another result of the first person plural point of view, the poem has a social component, as a fairy tale must: it opposes systems that worship the pathology of perfection—which the poem expresses in terms of the circular. By negative example, it comes down on the side of messy, passionate, angular, beautiful human life. I didn’t know I was going to write about this when I started; I simply followed that first line, the voice of it, to see where it wanted to go. Then again, maybe this is what I’m always writing about, one way or another, and I’m happy with that.

Kirun Kapur on "Light" and "Melon Cleaver"

2010-09-30T19:28:00.006-04:00

“Light” and “Melon Cleaver” (and the other poems in this sequence) are based on stories I’ve known my whole life, stories central to my family’s history and identity. So, when I began writing them, I knew (more or less) the narrative I’d follow. This had never happened to me before. Usually, I write like a character from Grimm’s: I fumble in the forest, intent on a path that’s been eaten by birds. For once, my path should have been clear brick, not bread crumbs—but I felt even more lost than usual.

For one thing, I had a commitment to the literal truth—never a good situation for poets. I don’t believe a poet is any more obligated to tell the literal truth than a novelist. The lyric “I” is a work of fiction; if bread crumbs lead away from facts, she must follow. However, these stories didn’t belong wholly to me. They’d been lived and retold by my father, uncles and aunts. I wanted to tell them the way I’d heard them.

Context posed another problem. The poems revolve around the dissolution of British India. Many Westerners are unaware that India and Pakistan were once one country, let alone that their 1947 partition induced an enormous migration (the largest in modern history), notable not only for its size, but for its brutal communal clashes. I felt the need to provide background information, a sure way to strangle the life of a poem.

I also had in mind an admonition: a poet I admire once advised me to avoid direct depictions of violence in poems; he found them manipulative, an assault on the sensibilities of the reader. He admired (as I do) poems where a single bird in the town square can evoke the horrors of 20th Century European history. In the stories I wanted to tell, a direct experience of violence within a close community was the single most crucial issue. Could I address that kind of violence explicitly?

I thought the answer might lie in a broader framework. I spent months researching the major events of 1947: the Truman doctrine was proclaimed; Kalashnikov designed the AK-47. The partition of India and Pakistan was just one thread in a chaotic, bloody blanket. By weaving the events of 1947 into my family stories, I’d hoped to slip in the necessary background information, blunt the violence and use historical material to provide contrasts and surprises. This grand idea resulted in a glib, list-laden bit of verse, reminiscent of a pop song: “We Didn’t Start the Fire. . . .” I shelved the project for almost a year.

Then, I happened to be at a reading where a poet read several sestinas. I came away thinking about repetition: a word or phrase paced and repeated becomes an incantation, a ritual, a structure. Isn’t that exactly how the telling of these stories had worked in my family? And what about variation, the breaking of expected repetitions? Might it enact retelling, misremembering, the rupture of family structures and rituals?

I began to sense the path, the shape of a poem: a pantoum, with its circular structure and its spell of repeated lines. The repetition and variation of whole lines gave me a way to build up information organically, to create an intimate world and then break it. As I worked, I found the form providing a second voice, locked in conversation with the old, immutable stories.

Karen Lepri on "Root" and "Wave"

2010-09-03T21:50:00.005-04:00

The poems “Root” and “Wave” come from a short series, "Meso Cantos," which belongs to a longer body of work made up of groups of these cantos. The label “cantos” is not only a response to The Canon (I was reading Pound, thinking of Ovid) but also a descriptor of how I view these short, lyrical works—I want the poems to sing, to combine rhythms, sounds, and images to produce lyric beauty. The different groups of cantos (Nano, Micro, Meso, Magna), organized by scale, mostly respond to scientific or natural phenomena; however, to borrow from Forrest Gander's writing on George Oppen, they also attempt a “meditative investigation into intersubjectivity,” a consideration of world through the body, through the human eye, through the observer's awe. They are poems of perception that struggle with the question of how and what to perceive in our surroundings: at what scale, according to what theory, in which world?

The "Meso Cantos" derive from what I consider middle forces—somewhere between universe and bacteria—currents, winds, atmosphere, waves, root systems. The elements vary in terms of global reach but are connected by their roles as carriers (of force, water, life) and the wide-scale effects of what they carry. When I write one of the cantos, I begin with two types of material, my own preconceptions and scientific research—though I used the Latin terms in “Root” less for their scientific meanings (which are quite bland) and more for their acoustic zing—the i's, s's, r's. This music elevated what for me is already a wonder—the roots themselves. In the moment of writing, I am often drawn to scenarios opposite to the ideal I initially imagined. I begin to incorporate vulnerability or subtle violence. I feel it is necessary to interfere with flat beauty or my own naïve awe.

The titles are important starting points, but they must transform in order for the poem to work. One of my colleagues once described this type of transformation as “self-revision,” a term I find interesting: the poem revising itself, not the poet revising the poem. In “Wave,” I began with the “real” world and moved into the imaginary. I live on the coast and spend a lot of time watching the waves arrive. I was thinking about where the force that forms the wave originates, if there even is such a place to pinpoint. The unpredictability of waves compared to the very predictable rise and fall of the tide in the harbors and beaches, as well as their unseen forces, led the poem to the incalculable consequences of war and the deep seas’ historic use as nuclear test sites.

With their short stanzas and frequent enjambment, these poems' broken, riddled forms allow space, I hope, for the reader to meditate on an image or to read multiple meanings. I want the poems to move beyond the page, as Barbara Guest has said, as opposed to resting in it. Their success depends wholly on the reader's terrifying leap from page into ___________.

Karl Elder on "Ode in the Key of O"

2010-08-01T12:11:00.004-04:00

To the One of Fictive Music

Grant me this: a modicum of intrapersonal intelligence allows for speculation regarding undercurrents in the etiology of a poem: canonical verse whose title this analysis borrows as its own, for example, or winning as a teenager an argument with one’s father, proving there is no perfect circle, yet subsequently understanding that, while absolutely accurate measurement is impossible in the physical world, perfection exists in and as approximation, one apparatus of reasonably seasoned consciousness—unlike Plato’s horse, his mystical illustration of pre-existing ideal forms or ideas, the claim that identification is the soul remembering a thing from heaven wholly horseshit. Only after experience is perfection manifest and only in the imagination, imagination being the empiricist’s and poet’s generator of miracles.

I sometimes think of poems as possessing both an ecto- and an endo- skeleton—the latter metaphysical—poetry then seemingly a phenomenon as much like sculpture as painting. Oh, it’s two-dimensional on paper, all right, but multi-dimensional in the formulation and in its readers’ apprehension of that latent energy before them. In making “Ode in the Key of O,” a habit of counting syllables re-emerged in me, thumb to four fingers and every fifth note thumbed, only this time I sensed the hand morphing from abacas to rosary.

So, ought I wince over the rogue syllable my student and friend Rob pointed out in stanza four? Nah, when the most quoted line of pentameter on the planet (“To be . . .”) owns eleven syllables? Now, am I rationalizing? Oh yeah. While of course content must dominate, the strictest adherence to superstructure in this piece is part of the art.

“Ode . . .” was born in the shadow of the title poem of my volume Gilgamesh at the Bellagio, in which each of its 27 stanzas ends with an “O” rime—aural, visual, or conceptual. Both poems were composed under fluorescent light on top of an up-turned cardboard box, itself atop a pool table and elbow-high, cue ball wearing blue smudges where it last rolled at an angle of about one o’clock. Opposite the box on a concrete wall, a round electric clock still clicks.

Probing for a construct, I settled on a period at the close of the first, and nine progressively smaller stanzas, doubtful I could maintain the form when, around the fifth stanza, I prematurely landed upon—after maybe two weeks of three hours per day—the final line of the poem. “Whoa. Is this negative Negative Capability or what?” I thought, confounded and elated at once, mind’s eye on something like a photo of a funnel cloud, the “endo-“ abstract but with a picture of the “ecto-“ as concentric rings or a tightly wound spring tapering to the point of the pen in my dangling forearm and hand. As to the remainder of the poem—as well as its predetermined form—I’d not known a vortex quite like this: absorbingly, alluringly laborious, as if a mason were laying block with the I-beam levitating, miraculously, above.

Susan Tichy's "A Ghost"

2010-07-03T14:44:00.003-04:00

On The Mountain

Those who climb mountains make a special claim to knowledge: that their step-by-step (or hand-over-hand) experience is the truth of a mountain, unavailable to those who merely look. In Simon Schama’s words, a climber’s perception is akin to collage: “an additively constructed assembly of details, each one discretely verifiable.” As a walker in high mountains (though never much of a climber) I consider this truth to be obvious, and fundamental. I hold it in tension with other ways of knowing—especially, of course, what I’ve learned from poets—but am interested in the fact that I have been walking rocky trails longer than I have been writing poems.

Some days, I say the one-two line structure, the open and open-ended syntax, and the asymmetrical rhythms of “A Ghost” mimic walking on rocky ground—“a stumbler stumbling / uphill,” assembling an experience that can’t be reduced to sentences with more orderly, hierarchal organization. Other days, this form seems merely literary, a line evolved from earlier poems . . . which in turn devolved from Oppen and other poets, not from my feet. Moore’s “An Octopus” also stands in the background—a very tall ridge, though behind that, taller still, stands Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.”

The poem has a setting—a ridge in the Colorado Sangre de Cristo—and a not-quite-absent beloved, lost in and to that landscape. It also carries, in the tension between its images and its thoughts, a long conversation among those who think on their feet and those who think with pencil in hand—a debate in which I can’t help but take both sides.

In the 1850s, John Ruskin, a lover of mountains and of J.M.W. Turner, criticized climbers in the Alps for their focus on the summit and on what Leslie Stephen described as “hours of labour, divided into minutes—each separately felt." While such muscular sensation might be good preparation, Ruskin argued, it could never be the truth of painting, which for him included a more omniscient eye. That eye was not merely Romantic, however: it was geological. Of Mountain Beauty, the 4th volume of Ruskin’s Modern Painters, is largely devoted to the structure of mountains, from their wave-like crests to the microcosmic topography of a stone in the hand—both of which make visible the ghostly landscape of living rock conjured by our knowledge of geology as not-quite-arrested motion. In Ruskin’s own drawings are no human figures: the artist himself is the traveler and his eyes are our eyes. In this I find a parallel to the grammatical absence of the poet in Taoist mountain poems of T’ang and pre-T’ang China—an absence I have emulated in “A Ghost.”

Ruskin was not an artist, per se, but one who used drawing as a way of seeing, attaining by hand his own muscular knowledge of mountains. Many of his drawings from the Alps remain unfinished—one part a colorist’s dense or delicate tapestry, one part a skeleton of penciled rock forms, their contours and ridgelines extending over inches of raw paper. Critics have chided him for a short attention span, but unfinished sentences don’t trouble me: those drawings are eerily moving, records of a process that halted at the exact moment a sought-for knowledge was reached.

Jessica Goodfellow on Clocks and Chronospecies

2010-05-31T20:57:00.005-04:00

“species: empty:” is the 18th of 30 poems in a cycle about a marriage. Both it and “clock: rules:” describe a period in the marriage when one partner has left temporarily and is incommunicado, and the other partner is in the unenviable state of waiting, but not sure for what.

One constraint I imposed on the cycle was that the title of each poem be two words: the first word being the second word of the previous poem’s title, and the second word being the first word of the title of the subsequent poem. This constraint had some unintended consequences. In particular, I reached the 18th poem and found that I had run out of things to write about species, having paid scant attention during biology courses in school. Consequently, I wrote a clumsy poem and moved on, ignoring the problem as much as possible.

When I had nearly completed the cycle and could no longer avoid the 18th poem, I was still flummoxed. I considered going through the 17th poem and finding a different keyword to put in its title, thus releasing myself from the necessity of thinking any further about species. But remembering the Paul Valery quote (as attributed by Reginald Gibbons), “poets are those to whom the difficulty of writing gives ideas, not those from whom it takes them away,” I started researching the meaning of species (with a heavy sigh, I might add).

When I found the definition of chronospecies, I saw that it fit into the cycle on at least two levels. First, since “clock: rules:”, the 22nd poem, was written chronologically before “species: empty:” due to the problems mentioned above, I knew the cycle was headed towards a consideration of timepieces. A clock is an instrument that measures the passing of time, and so a species is a clock, but really, I can’t think of many things that aren’t. Second, the missing marital partner has returned to the ancestral home in what feels to the left-behind partner like a turf war between allegiances and families, between the eras of childhood and adulthood, between hometown and current home, a schism strong enough to suggest even a difference in species across inhabitants of those times and places, even when one inhabitant is the same being.

It is easy to connect the dots between clocks and rules, between the calculations of time and the laws of nature. But since “clock: rules:” is more about waiting than about timepieces, I began to wonder about the rules of waiting: who makes them, and can they be broken, and if so, to whose advantage. The suspended state of waiting seems both continuous and endless, and yet the concurrent passage of time, as measured in hours and minutes, seems to be disjointed, ruptured. The list-like form of these poems I hope captures that tension.

My sincere thanks to the Beloit Poetry Journal for publishing these poems.

Nan Watkins on Translating Yvan Goll

2010-05-01T18:26:00.006-04:00

The two poems of Yvan Goll’s that appear in the Spring 2010 issue of the BPJ are from his last manuscript, in German, called Traumkraut or Dreamweed. They are the inventions of a patient lying in European hospital wards, fighting the incurable leukemia that was diagnosed in New York in 1945 but would not take his life until 1950, in the American Hospital in Neuilly, near Paris.

I first came across Goll’s work when a friend showed me English translations of a few poems. Then I read Galway Kinnell's very beautiful translation, from the French, of Goll's Lackawanna Elegy. Goll was Alsatian and bilingual in French and German. I see translation as an act of liberation: freeing a work from the box, the prison, of one language and giving it life in another. Hence my desire to liberate Goll's work into English.

Goll specifically chose to write the fifty poems that comprise the volume Traumkraut in German rather than in French. The poems inhabit a world of fever, pain, lament, and finally tenderness and love. Goll becomes obsessed with a "Traumkraut," a strange hallucinatory plant that gives him a kind of "new birth" to confront his fatal illness. Immediately from the neologism of the title, the translator is confronted with finding an equivalent expression in English. "Traum" means "dream," and "Kraut" can mean "cabbage," "herb," "plant," "weed." The German word for weed is "Unkraut," so I decide to couple the English "dream" with "weed," thus preserving the rhythm and assonance of the German title as well as the paradoxical sense of the undesireable, the unwanted, linked with dream. Curiously, some earlier writers had used the term "Dream Grass," but since Goll refers to his Traumkraut's bloom and flower in various poems, I have rejected that translation.

Some of these same problems of "non-existent" words and compound nouns occur in the poem "Rosedom" as well. German has the creative facility of forging words together to make strong new compounds, but English is shy of that. In my translation of the many new compounds in "Rosedom," I want to retain the idea of a single word, rather than separate words, i.e., moon rose, so I hyphenate the English words to become moon-rose, brain-rose, etc. Somehow it does not work for me without the hyphens. Flowers and roses are a favorite metaphor for Goll, so it is a stunning reversal for him to include such harsh and negative imagery in the poem ("unrose," "raves in fevered fields," "blazes for the roseless").

English is a Germanic language, so when I seek word choices for these poems, I invariably begin with those with Germanic roots: In "Rosentum," for instance, the second line reads: "Die in Tierköpfen brennt," For "Tier" I choose the word "beasts" rather than "animals," both for its alliteration with "burns" and for the stronger monosyllable. In line 4, I want to convey the meaning, but also Goll's push of language, so "Aus Schädeln geschädelt," becomes "Skinned from skulls."

"Old Men" is Goll's glimpse of the dying men around him in the hospital ward, as well as the hint that he knows he is becoming one of those men. I try to use the force of monosyllables and the crunch of consonants to convey the harshness of the scene.

Jennifer Atkinson: The Genesis of the Canticles

2010-03-31T17:25:00.007-04:00

I wrote my first canticle in Assisi, where Saints Francis, Clare, and Giotto preside everywhere—in the Cathedral and churches, the pizza joint on the corner where school kids line up after class-trip tours, the pastry shops selling Francis cakes and almond-cherry cookies called Chiaras, the five million souvenir shops, each one chock-full of crosses, wind-up toys, Assisi t-shirts and baseball caps, faux rustic planks decoupaged with Francis’s all-too-famous poem: “Canticle of Brother Sun. . . .”

It was late February, raw, and mostly rainy. I was staying at the Convent of the Suore di Brigida. No religious goal in mind, I just wanted an inexpensive, quiet place to stay near Giotto’s frescos. My bags were lost somewhere between D.C. and Rome and even once they were found, the airline refused for 4 days to deliver them. So in the hours not devoted to self-pity and waiting for my underwear to dry, I wandered around the village and olive groves or stood in the Cathedral under the frescos.

The cathedral is on two main levels—the ground floor with crypt below, and the large, open, high-windowed gallery upstairs. For two days I hardly even went upstairs. I spent my time on the ground floor of the cathedral feeding euros into the coin-operated lights that illuminate Giotto’s Mary Magdalene cycle. I love—and who doesn’t?—Giotto’s narrative panels, the mixture of realism and symbol, the sureness of line, and the straight-forward acknowledgement of the body in the spirit and the spirit in the body, but I also found myself enthralled by the story he was telling of Magdalene’s life after Easter. I didn’t know the Magdalene legends at all then and so I was reading them in his language of images. I thought about Giotto and his apprentices grinding the pigments, preparing the wall, and working quickly in the dim room. I thought about a narrative told in a series of separate panels, set side by side and end to end, each sealed off from the next and yet linked formally, compositionally.

The first canticle I didn’t call a canticle until later. “Assisi Rain,” now “Canticle of Assisi Rain,” was a ghazalish poem from the start, a moody five-couplet piece that owed its allegiance as much to music as to the Assisi saints or the desk in the convent where I wrote it. By May of that year I was back home in Virginia teaching summer school but with several more 5-line or 5-couplet poems written. Canticle, little song, now seemed an appropriate name for the form. It would be disingenuous to say nothing of St. John of the Cross’s (dark night of the soul) “Canticle” or “The Canticle of Canticles” (aka Song of Songs), both of which inform my canticles’ mixture of spiritual journey and sensuous earthly pleasure, but Giotto’s method was as influential as either. As was the winding-ever-upward architecture of the Umbrian hill town.

This past summer, a year or so after returning from Assisi, I was lucky enough this past summer to spend a month in a Provencal “perched village.” I wrote a little song every day while I was there, in the region where in legend and fresco Magdalene is said to have ended her days. The form opened a bit wider to accommodate more prose and more Magdalene, but 5 has remained the magic number even as the sequence grew to 60-some canticles, a book manuscript (I hope) with “Canticle of Assisi Rain” in second place, right after “Canticle of A.”

Many thanks to Beloit Poetry Journal for publishing this group of the Canticles!

Charles Wyatt on "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens"

2010-02-28T16:43:00.006-05:00

I think I need to look at some history. In the past several years, I’ve been fascinated by Rembrandt drawings and this led me to many attempts to draw them again in poems. It didn’t take me long to realize that almost all of those images had narrative implications. So my question to myself became, “What comes next?”

Then I became interested in archaic words as points of departure for poems. A poem examining an antique word asks another question, “What went before?” It burrows into the word and tries to discover its possible cosmologies. Then I became interested in fairy tales (because I’m a fiction writer and I wanted to burrow into the notion of story). There’s a lot of counting in fairy tales which seems to have more to do with music than with narrative—perhaps it’s the hinge where the two parted—I still puzzling this out. Anyway, there are always fairy tale images floating around in my unconscious these days.

I tell my students that poems come out of poems and stories come out of stories. But there are lots of ways that can happen. We can take a story type as a cantus firmus and write a new melody over it. Using the musical analogy is comforting to me because I’ve made my living as a symphony musician for most of my life, and I like to think of music both as something that comes out of poems, and as something that builds them or allows them to happen.

I’ve always enjoyed reading Wallace Stevens. My grandmother gave me The Collected Poems when I graduated from college. I’ve read them in a kind of sleepy way, listening the way people listen to music while doing other things. So when I got the idea of doing a sequence of poems which use lines of Stevens as points of departure, I found myself doing something new. In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking asks, “Why can’t we remember the future?” He’s led to that question by a mathematics that allows time to move in either direction. But there is something in music that is kin to this notion. Neurologists have discovered that musical memory lies in a different place in the brain and works in a different way. People who have totally lost short term memory still have musical memory. Oliver Sachs has written a lot about this issue.

When I play a Mozart flute concerto from memory, I am connected to everything which came before, but also to everything that is coming. There is a continuum which allows the musician to be connected to all of the music even though he or she is still having to plow through the present moment of life’s narrative (however long the present is).

So a line of Wallace Stevens has any number of histories, all its connections with the poem it’s in and all the other poems it lives with in that ratty old book my grandmother gave me. And if I let it fall on me like music, it connects with my own images which spring out of the future. I’m getting to burrow back and float forward at the same time.(I don’t know if it’s completely honest to say images spring out of the future, but I do know they weren’t there a moment ago. Where were they?)

Because I was thinking about “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” as a model, I wanted the poems to be short. I wanted to let go of them as soon as I could. Of course, they hung on as long as they wanted. Back to process. Like blowing bubbles? Some burst. Revision meant going on to another poem. First person didn’t work very well for me—I think Stevens uses it when he’s being most cerebral. This isn’t what I was after. I just wanted to let go and float away.

Kerry James Evans on "Leaning in from the Sea"

2010-01-31T16:58:00.003-05:00

I tend to remember quite a bit of what I hear. When I began writing “Leaning in from the Sea,” I started with this idea of the “heard” thing: the emotion and the physicality of an experience strained by voice. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macbeth speaks mostly in iambic pentameter before he meets the witches. After he meets the witches, who speak in trochaic tetrameter, his speech changes, and he begins speaking in trochees and often in spondees. He loses his mind. What he hears he then speaks. His actions are then confused by his speech. Often I see this in my work: this disjointed narrative caused by what my narrator has heard. I am a young poet so it comes as no surprise that my narrator—especially in this poem—is struggling to form an identity.

The section breaks offer a shift in tone and logic. This poem is about poverty and class and race and the speaker in this poem has a difficult time understanding the words he heard as a boy. His own syntax imitates what he has heard. However, the real struggle is for him to put these pieces together and come out of the narrative with a hold on his experience. He claims responsibility in some sense I suppose, but he also looks for a way out. He in fact is leaning in from what he has heard—a protective measure—but the underbelly is much darker. His actions are influenced by what he has heard.

For me, this poem came out of a need to understand the landscape that in many ways has shaped me. As a Southern poet I am also writing from a tradition that questions the blood, the decisions and the history of a scarred agrarian society.

I just returned from a visit to Mississippi, where my mother still lives. She has adopted two foster children who are behind in school. She lives in double-wide next to a cornfield next to pine thicket next to another field. There are deer nesting in the pine thicket right now. The fields won’t be plowed for a couple of months. About two miles over, a chemical plant hums day and night. It also glows something awful.

Obviously these are images relative to the trope of this poem. Right now, in “Leaning in from the Sea,” I have yet to come to terms with this “home.” While there is beauty here, I am sure, there is no beauty in what I see, and there is nothing beautiful about this poem. Here there is an inherited blood that moves in my work. And there is a gun. There is mange on the land and there is poverty and racism and ignorance. This is where the poem comes from. As I reread this poem, I am often struck by how flat and void of music it is. I’d like to find that music in future poems. Which is to say that maybe we can broaden the discussion on this forum beyond this particular poem.

When is music necessary? Is lyricism all there is to poetry? In this poem, the narrative strangles the lyricism. These are my thoughts lately. When I wrote this poem, it was catharsis and a search for responsibility, the notion that I could end the narrative with silence. Silence must live in poetry as it must live in the poet. Often a poem wants to escape from what is heard, and in the lyric, we often find beauty and space. Here there is yelling and there is violence. I don’t know that the political can ever be comprehended in a poem, but sometimes what matters must be screamed there.

Don Schofield on "Harmony, USA"

2009-12-31T17:38:00.004-05:00

I started writing what would eventually become “Harmony, USA” twenty-five years ago, while leaning on the hood of my brother’s pickup. We had just left Atascadero State Prison where our nephew was serving time (still is) for rape (second offense). I wasn’t writing a poem then, simply putting down notes, wanting to capture his words as precisely as I could. I tried several times over the years to turn those notes into a poem. I was writing free verse then, and I guess I had too much freedom to do justice to his voice. Whatever I wrote seemed off. I didn’t want a poem simply apologizing for, explaining or condemning the actions of a man I barely knew and had seen maybe half a dozen times as an adult. Yet I found his gestures, the way he spoke, the way he wore his denim shirt buttoned tight at the neck and open at the waist, how he explained himself and his day to day life in prison fascinating, disturbing.

Two things happened that ultimately enabled me to get this poem out: first, I visited Robert again in the early ‘90s, this time with the woman I had been with for eight years and, as it turned out, soon would be breaking up with. Second, after putting the poem aside for over a decade, I came back to it when I was trying my hand at blank verse.

As Dick Hugo used to say in his workshops when talking about form: “A poet does one of two things: he either starts in jail and works his way out, or he starts with freedom and works himself into jail.” Those words, plus the post-structuralist term “prison-house of language,” kept crossing my mind as I worked and reworked the various sections that started appearing. By choosing to write the poem in blank verse, and thus measuring the lines more strictly, I was, as Hugo would say, putting myself in jail. In this case that was exactly where I needed to be.

Once I was in jail, Robert’s voice gained power. But so did the poet in me. In jail I could give myself the freedom to bring in other voices, and thus frame Robert’s presence, so to speak, in various other events, places and perspectives surrounding that visit. Moreover—and this was critical to the poem finding its larger theme—once in jail I could break the rules. I had to break the rules of narrative if the poem was to find its true subject, which of course isn’t Robert.

In the end “Harmony, USA,” at least to me, is about desire, how we fantasize and express it, what and who we violate sometimes to satisfy it, how narrative—and language itself—aids and abets it, and how ultimately desire in our minds spans the gamut of impulses that must be kept in harmony. Which is where poetry comes in.

Mary Molinary: Thoughts concerning poems composed for/by the left hand

2009-11-30T21:05:00.005-05:00

This sequence of poems began, and served as, a dispossession ritual for me.

Typically, I work projects in tandem: a longer piece worked for a year or more, punctuated by one or two interrupting or concurrent, smaller projects. With a background, and continued interest, in Linguistic Anthropology, I came to poetry purposefully and seeking to explore and develop further what I hoped would be my contributions to the Human Conversation, as I call it, and concerning in particular the play between the Diachronic and Synchronic; between (cultural) History and Memory; and those Discourses at play between them all. I chose, then, Poetry rather than Anthropology and Film and, more importantly perhaps, chose a return to the Delta South to pursue these poetics and this thing called poetry.

This sequence is a sequence. Not a series. The sequence was a dispossession ritual.

I envisioned the most recent long long piece (being made in the midst of a long long war) as a long long river without end; a river cutting through a landscape with all the teeth and force of a chorus, of history, feeding and being feed in synchronic bursts over time and time. Diachronia. Confluence and contingency. Confluence and correspondence. Delta South as metonymy for a Global South, as metonymy for the long long stories of oppression, cultural amnesia, and resistance.

A sequence, like a ritual, has a beginning and an end.

Over two years deep, and a few smaller projects, into the long long river piece, I realized I needed to envision a temporary stop, if not ending. My crisis wasn’t so much with “language” itself—language can never really be emptied of meaning and power regardless the attempts—but with the very act of writing. The act of writing: the body assaying meaning and sense was moving too quickly. Pen and ink, keyboards and illuminated screens. I needed to remember. I needed slowness. I needed lessness.

Enter one #2 Ticonderoga fat yellow pencil for beginners. Holding it with estranged familiarity.

Remembering the thrill of making. Letters and words. I decided to write a tribute of sorts to my left hand who never had the pleasure of that learning, and that would act as an allegory for a very real and illusory “South” in order to help me dispossess (so that I wouldn’t end up like Q. C. in Absalom! Absalom!). Quickly, I realized that for the dispossession and experiment to work, the Left Hand would need to write the poems. The “bastard in the woodshed” needed to compose this sequence. That would be my imposed limitation leading to lessness.

A sequence is a ritual. Experiments might be rituals. Liminal spaces inhabit all of them.

What I expected from this experiment was that my left hand would move slowly and make a few mistakes, but would quickly improve. I do not subscribe to theories of essentialism or to theories of genius, so I was quite certain that my left hand would have only minor and short-lived problems with articulation. What floored me is that my left hand did not know the first thing about poetry. Apparently, I had learned that (and what else!?) with only or mostly my right hand. My left had to learn to write a poem. Even after the right was eventually allowed to edit, the left hand poems remain mostly honest about that process. The difficulty in the process was determining what parts could be cut without losing the account of that process—and how many inconsistencies and errors could or should be left. I don’t know how they have the generosity and time, but Lee Sharkey and John Rosenwald spent considerable time assisting and suggesting just the right sorts of changes. (As ever.) Moreover, what Lee and John and BPJ do especially well is the arrangement of poets and poems in each issue. I am always excited to see my work in a context of their choosing. The reverberations and hauntings created that way.

While the Dispossession Ritual Experiment, and seeing/hearing the poems, in the conversational context of the Winter BPJ taught me much, I haven’t yet had the time to process fully all the implications of it.

This sequence of poems began