Joy Katz, Why Does a White Girl Get to Write About a Lynched Man?

The photograph** sat on my desk for ten years. (I am a slow writer, but this is the longest it has ever taken me to finish a poem.) Someone sent me the article thinking I’d be interested in the show. I was. I went to the show, but I can’t remember any image except this one.

I am writing this the week after Claudia Rankine’s reading at AWP. In that reading she presented Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change” and raised an objection to its description of a black woman tennis player, a description that invokes racial stereotypes.

Hoagland’s poem uses stereotypes brutally. By “brutal” I mean that the poem doesn’t comment, except in the artifice of its making, on the fact that it uses them. It declines to sum up for me what I am supposed to feel, or what the writer felt. I am glad for that aspect of the poem; I don't want to be made safe. What white person, even a young white person, even a woman, even now, gets to safely say that she is absolutely not racist?

I tried for a kind of brutality when I wrote this poem. When I write brutally, I never want to attack you. I am writing to discomfort myself. It’s too easy to say I can write about a lynched man because anyone can write about anything. 

It would have been nice—healing?—if i could walk into the chasm between me and the photo, between me and this man. I would like to scoop up something from that space (a shovel full of mud or a rock, in the form of a stanza) and put it down on the page as something I could jump on, and then put down another and jump closer, in order to connect me to this man and bring you closer to the fact of the lynching, but I can’t. There is no path to get me there. I only feel a certain way when I look at the picture. I tried to get close to that.

So I did some wretched (to me they feel wretched) things. I rhymed “mother” and “murder” and I said that a hanging man has an expression. He has a facial expression as much as any corpse has an expression, which is to say doesn’t, because what I call an “expression” is a function of the physical hanging. Anything I say about his face is me imposing an idea about his face onto him. Any metaphor I make is uncomfortable on a million levels, not least because I am a white female, in a different century, eating a sandwich at my desk. I say he looks like a boy looking up at a kite. (When people look at the faces of corpses, they often say they look peaceful in order to comfort themselves or someone else.) His hands are tied behind his back; you could superimpose a photo of a man holding his hands behind his back politely, or with forced politeness. 

When I look at the photo, I am good at being objective while also feeling wretched. (Maybe this is also what the people who sent their neighbors to the gas chambers were good at?) I can concentrate on the composition of the photo because i was trained to do that in design school. The only perfect y-axis is the one the man hangs on. He hangs straight down. You can say an object  is “true” when it hangs plumb. He is true; the other two important compositional elements in the picture are curved (the tree) and skew (the trashy little step he climbed on to get close to the noose). The other "true" object in the poem is a bunch of grapes hanging from a fancy hook you can use to ripen fruit—you put it on your kitchen counter.

I say the tree leans in like a pet. Then I rhyme “pet” and “poet.” In that way, with two steps, hop hop, I jump closer to the man in the picture. I am a living creature. I lean in from where I sit, as the tree leans into the frame.  I mean to be brutal to myself when I ask  “what kind of a poet would say that”—and then I go on to say that there is a sturdiness in the heaviness of how he hangs. There is no one else in the picture. The white men who slung him up are gone. One more made the photograph. Saying the man looks casually abandoned, like a rake, gets at (I hope) that the lynchings were ubiquitous, more functional than remarkable to the people who came to see them. But I also suggest, by my last metaphor, that the man is no more dignified than a tool used for manual labor. It’s an uncomfortable place to leave myself, and you, but it didn’t seem like the poem ought to leave me in a safe place, because the photo doesn’t.

Joy Katz is the author of The Garden Room (Tupelo Press) and Fabulae (Southern Illinois University Press). Recent poems have appeared or will soon in The American Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Blackbird, and elsewhere. Her awards include a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and in the on-the-ground and low-res programs at Chatham University. She lives in Pittsburgh.


Joy's Poem originally appeared in The Notre Dame Review


**Editors Note: Because of the graphic violence of the photo in reference, we've chosen to provide links to an online gallery with an explanation of the image essay:
The Lynching of Joseph Richardson, September 26, 1913 From Without Sanctuary

Aaron Angello, The Poetics of Poemedia

When poet/artist Erin Costello and I set out to make Poemedia, we had a simple question in mind: What is the role of the printed poem in our contemporary, media-saturated environment? The piece did indeed address this question, but it also addressed a number of other aspects of contemporary poetry and digital art/literature. I’ll touch on a few of them here.

First of all, for those of you who haven’t seen it, Poemedia is an art and poetry installation first produced in the Atlas Black Box Theater on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder. Around 300 original poems printed on 8 ½ by 11, white cardstock are hung from the ceiling, 2 to 7 feet from the ground. Four video projectors project a live “VJ” performance – a live cutting of found and created video – onto the poems as the audience/readers walk through the installation, reading as they go. Sound is also being mixed live either in conjunction with or in opposition to the video. The sound palate is dominated by advertising, talk radio, pop music, serious music, sounds of urban life and sounds of nature.

Poemedia Final Compilation




Here are a few of my observations:

Interactivity

The contemporary reader is entirely comfortable consciously interacting with a text. I believe this is due in large part to the prevalence of web culture in each of our lives. We are getting ever more used to calling the shots when it comes to reading. We are used to surfing text.

In Poemedia, each reader reads the poems in the order he or she wants; each reader reads as many or as few poems as he or she wants. No one who has experienced it, to my knowledge, expressed any dissatisfaction with this process. A few did mention that they felt they were following some kind of narrative, making connections between the poems that weren’t necessarily intended by us, the authors. Each piece of text was unchanging and unchangeable, yet the reading experience was unique to each reader.

Interestingly, readers seemed entirely okay with reading these paratactic pieces in this environment. No one commented on the disjunctive nature of the proximity of one poem to another. If, however, these poems were in a traditional book, I believe many readers would fixate on that disjunction. For instance, the challenge a poet like Lyn Hejinian poses to her reader – the challenge to interact with the text, to make meaning, to recognize existing linguistic structures by seeing those structures break down, etc. – become less of a challenge when the piece is obviously and clearly interactive.

Community

One of the most interesting aspects of Poemedia is the fact that when an audience member/reader enters the space (enters the text), he or she becomes a part of it – literally. The video is not only projected onto the poems, but onto the people. The audience members/readers read the projected text and image off of each others’ bodies. Their bodies also become part of the overall visual structure of the piece. Many have stated that they became aware of the fact that they were indeed a part of the text while they were a part of the text.

In fact, literature doesn’t exist if it is not read. And there is a sense of community around any given text which helps to contextualize it. This is taken for granted on line, there is an understanding that reading a text on a website, for instance, is communal – there are probably others out there reading it too, but reading a print book is also communal. If I read Susan Howe or Harriet Mullen, I enter into a community of people who have read Susan Howe or Harriet Mullen. Poemedia made this fact literal and readily apparent.

Digital

Poemedia is digital art, but it is digital art on paper. Each hanging piece of paper is a screen. It is both tangible and transient. Sound and video interact with text that the reader has chosen to read at a given time. The sound and video is not a distraction, rather it is a part of the literary experience.

I don’t think the book is going anywhere, but the way we, as readers, experience it has already changed.



Aaron Angello is a poet and multimedia artist who is dedicated to the exploration of the space between sentences, words, letters and marks of punctuation. He edits the University of Colorado's MFA literary journal Timber and teaches creative writing.


Aaron's collaborator, Erin Costello, is a writer and interdisciplinary digital artist. Her poetry manuscript, "The Sciences Of" won the 2010 Jovanovich Imaginative Writing Prize and her work has appeared most recently in Trickhouse, Umbrella Factory, Edge, Titmouse, Palimpsest and Crash. She is the co-founder and editor of SpringGun Press and lives in Denver, Colorado where she studies and teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado.


Both are working towards their MFA in creative writing at CU-Boulder.   

Guernica 3D

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, The Origin of the Whale Shark: An Ars Poetica

When the dive-master yelled, “Flaaat!” my legs seized with terror and my body unfolded into the shape any body would take when a confronted with a giant whale shark gliding directly towards your head: a pancake. Actually, since I was floating on the surface of the water of the 6-million gallon “Ocean Voyager” tank at the Georgia Aquarium, and most of my ears were submerged as I was face down, the command sounded more like “AAABBATTTTTTT!” Just minutes before, us guest snorkelers were instructed over and over again: “If you hear me shout, ‘Flat,’ that means you’ve got a whale shark swimming directly under you. Flatten your body so your belly doesn’t skim her back.” I could hardly believe a fish, longer and wider than a school bus, was swimming directly toward my head. I thought for sure I would be swallowed whole inside her gaping wide mouth.

An accident, of course—whale sharks only eat plankton and bits of shrimp—but what an accident to tell my son and husband back home in New York. What a dumb legacy to leave them in this way. But as the giant fish moved closer to my head—at the last possible moment before I thought she would crash into me—the whale shark sank just low enough to not touch me at all, though her dorsal fins almost brushed up against the belly of my wetsuit as I hovered there. If I wanted to, I could reach my hand down and pet her spotted back, but I was too terrified to do anything but float, lift my belly and curve my back as far up as it would let me as I tried to get out of the shark’s way.
It was as if she was toying with me—wanting to give me a little fright, just enough to let me know exactly who was queen of this tank. This particular whale shark repeated her close encounter drive-bys with me several more times during the entire length of my snorkel session, even though there were five other snorkelers plus two dive-masters in the tank besides me. Each time she passed me, I saw her giant eyeball look right at my mask, curious as a spaniel. Very rare to happen at all, let alone to the same person, said the dive-master.
By the time I climbed the metal ladder out of the Ocean Voyager tank, I could barely walk on the concrete deck. I had tensed up all the muscles in my arms and legs for the last half an hour and suddenly, even the fairly light-weight snorkel system seemed as heavy as carrying a bag of mulch. Around my neck. In the locker room, I was the last one to change back into my street clothes. When I was sure all the other snorkelers had already left the room and were probably all lined up to collect their souvenir photo, I sat down on a wooden bench. Still wearing my half-unzipped wetsuit, I wept with my face in my hands.

Even though I spent almost a year studying them, I was never prepared for the size. Even though I spent almost a year studying them, I was never prepared to submit myself so completely to Nature. Or rather, man’s interpretation and preservation of Nature by adding 1.8 million pounds of sea salt in a giant tank of water so that all these creatures could live and swim together. For science. For entertainment. For spectacle. Perhaps for a little of all three. In addition to the three whale sharks in the tank, there was a giant hammerhead shark, notorious for attacks on humans—and scores of other dangers: blacktip reef, spotted wobbegong, zebra, and sand tiger sharks.

Even though I had fulfilled a life dream to swim with a whale shark, I felt incredibly guilty. My son could have been motherless. My husband, a widower. And I certainly felt sorry for the sharks. I was able to leave the aquarium and fly home to my family. I had brought back a whale shark hand puppet for my son. When I gave it to him in the car, he promptly slipped it over his tiny fist, which he unclenched to make the shark puppet mouth open/close-open/close-open/close. He giggled in his car seat as my husband drove us all home. It was as if I had never left them at all.

*
[[ Bolinao, Philippines ]]

Everyone knew where Kablay kept his coins. One of his eyes always pointed left towards the starfruit grove, and the other was always fixed on his coins in the tin cookie box under his bed. Every night, after his dinner of bangus fish and jelly seaweeds, the neighbors heard him pry open the cavemouth lid of the cookie box. He stacked the coins into a small silver city, then crashed them just to hear the noise. Just to see the light disperse into a hundred pieces on his bedroom floor. Sometimes, lizards mistook it for a flash of moth-wing and collided into one of the pile of coins, their whippy tails scattering silver along the floorboards. All night, lizards peered out from behind curtains and shook their head from side to side, as if to say, “No-no. No-no.” Each night, these small crashes became familiar and expected as a sort of   metallic lullaby in the otherwise quiet province, save for the occasional bark of a stray dog.

            When the Great Typhoon hit and it was clear the dams would not hold, all the villagers fled to the hills of Patar. No time to collect photos, rambuntan fruit, or rosary. Everyone left the province except Kablay. He sat on the floor in his house and hugged his cookie tin to his chest. The no-no lizards had long since scattered. The waters rushed through the province and swept everything out to sea: tender, young chico trees and even whole bamboo stands where you could buy a sweet fizzy drink poured into a plastic bag with a straw. Even the hapless chickens and stray dogs with their mouths wide open whirled away into the ocean.

            But Kablay held tight to his coins and his coins held him. He held them so tight, they pressed into his body and left a white spot. And another. And another and another spot until his whole back was dotted white. Kablay’s mouth became a small cave and the bubbles that popped from it were silver. Sometimes you can still see Kablay and his wide eyes still searching for a small ship, a scrap of moonlight. Every April he comes back to see if he left any more coins behind. Kablay’s money is always with him, pressed into his dark, leathery skin. And because he loved his coins so much and did not want to part with them, his legs shrank into fins until he turned into a whale shark. The spots on his back look like a whole city of light, where everyone is always awake and where everyone tries to remember the simple sweet memory of soil. 

 Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the poetry collections, At the Drive-In Volcano, winner of the Balcones Prize, and Miracle Fruit, which was named Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine and the winner of the Global Filipino Literary Award. Other awards for her writing include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Pushcart Prize. Her third collection of poems, Lucky Fish, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2011. She is associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia and lives in Western NY with her husband and two young sons. 

Curtis Bauer, I Wish I Were Out Walking

I’d like to go for a walk, but right now I’m too busy with work and project obligations. I can’t catch up during the day and evening, so I’ve let that seep into my morning, my before-light writing time.

Half a decade ago, I worked on a year-long project with the poets Ryan Walsh and Sebastian Matthews: the project, Walking the Morning Line, required that each of us write several lines every morning, either on a theme or threaded out of something we had read, seen or heard the day before. We emailed the lines to each other, typically in the morning after a walk, or at least the first cup of coffee, but before we started the day and all its subsequent crap began to filter into our observations. Often, the first email would set the mood for the other two. No matter where we were in the world, no matter how busy we were, we wrote our lines—we felt the obligation to each other and to the intention of the project. This project led us into a daily practice, necessary like brushing your teeth, or getting dressed to go to work. Here’s a sample I sent from Spain:

It's 7.30 in the morning and here I am, thinking about this blind kid I saw the
other day, and how he sticks in my mind more than any beautiful woman or man I've seen on the streets here, and how that seems to make sense to me, that a typical, normal person should stay with us over the less ordinary, extravagant beauty.

Although part of the project intended to keep us in communication, another part intended to allow us room to meander through ideas, compose some phrases or fragments that would eventually lead us to something specific: a poem or piece of prose. It reminded us to fix our attention on the world around us, to be awake to our observations, even if those lines took months to develop into something else we wanted to work on. The above lines later turned into the beginnings of a poem, a little more specific, though not yet the poem it might become:

Give me a choice—a sexy lady
with so much hair and breast
and sweet perfume, or a boy
blind, weeping and crossing
a street, and I'll choose him.
I need a little more angle
walking in my life, and horn
blare, a man at my side
tapping my shoulder
as I careen toward traffic,
on-coming and rude. Beautiful,
round-faced boy confused by the light
pole he can't walk through, his cheeks
flushed red and his eyes, worthless
and hazel, rolling up, into his head.

This project didn’t really end, but the space for it started to fill, for me at least, with another method of focusing on my own writing. Instead of walking around and thinking about how I might revise a poem, I began to wander about in the poems I was reading in Spanish, thinking about how those poets were crafting their lines and rhythms in my second tongue. Perhaps the transition was a natural one, to move from living abroad to recognition of and meditation on linguistic idiosyncrasies. I don’t think one has to live in another country to be concerned with or invested in translation. It’s an act we do constantly when we see and talk or write about what we see or hear—also, remember, metaphor is translation; in fact, in Greek it means to move; you see the word written on moving vans all over Greece. But for poets at least, translation from one language to another seems a necessary act; it brings us closer to the language of our poems by requiring that we break through the surface and sub stratum of our observations, emotions, thoughts, etc.. It’s like something my archeologist friend Chris Witmore has to do when he’s surveying a new area for a dig: he reviews satellite images taken of the terrain, and then compares that data to what is on the ground in front of him, a practice called Ground Truthing. In theory the collection of ground-truth data enables him to adjust what he knows from afar, or in my case, what I know about my own language through the evidence and layers of another. I know the Spanish language has its rules of syntax, and I know there is more than one meaning for a word. The oddity of the Spanish syntax and how I’m often pushed to a dictionary to look up even the simplest word, reminds me on a certain level that I need to slow down in my own writing practice, dig a little, get my hands dirty. This also reminds me that my poems can benefit from a recognition of what is a natural form and structure in this other language, but is uncommon—though not grammatically incorrect—in my own.

Although the following poem (by the Spanish poet Juan Antonio González-Iglesias) has no surprising syntactical quirks, its easily recognizable gist in the original title, even if you don’t have a vast knowledge of Spanish, will lead most readers to think of the Ars Poetica form.

Arte Poética

Si no quieres quedarte a mirar la tormenta
Yo la miro por ti.

Ars Poetica

If you don’t want to stay and watch the storm
I will watch it for you.

But as an exercise, we might also think of a literal translation (an easy one even the newest beginner might do with a dictionary):

Art Poetic

Yes/If no you want stay you to look the storm
I it/her I look for you

Juan Antonio would kill me if he saw this, but my point is that even the most basic study—and incorrect if you use “Yes” instead of “If” (yes would be sí)…—of the individual words of this poem can set a poet off down a track that might lead to the beginnings of a poem that may become a new ars poetica.

As I mentioned earlier, translation is about moving. I’m concerned with how my poems evolve, shift and expand. Another approach connected to my practice of writing poems is how I work into them through prose. I still write letters by hand—though I’m cutting back on that because my friends tell me they have a hard time understanding what I’m saying—and correspond frequently with family, friends and other poets and artists. Part of this comes from my need to maintain a connection to friends who are living all over the world; but another relates again to how I enter into language, dwell in a space and siphon from it the workings of a poem. These prose pieces are often quick, written with one person in mind, though perhaps sent to several friends as dispatches; they’re like conversations, but ones that require that I wait for a response. The waiting is quite important for me; it requires that I slow down, that I think intensely about the subject for a while, and then that I return to it again through the lens of the response from my correspondent. The following is an excerpt from a piece I wrote last summer in response to a friend who was traveling in eastern Europe, who had written me responding to an observation I had sent him about looking out my apartment window.

Train Lines, Thinking of Hikmet

It’s 2010, early June and I’m sitting by the window on the Sevilla-Granada train. It’s a Sunday, mid-day and hot. The heat is a glare that hurts the eyes. I never knew I liked to squint. There’s a word in Spanish—hincar—that means to look upon someone or some thing with great attention, as if hooking or attaching one’s eyes to the object. I like the sound of that word and squinting is what I’m doing with this dry, flat landscape. As if looking away from it, as if looking down at the paper or the work waiting for me in my bag would be some sacrilege I don’t know how to regret, that I might miss something important out there, and my eyes know this. I like how my eyes hook the tossed-away bottles under graffitied walls as the train leaves Santa Justa and heads east, passing through Dos Hermanas and clattering by stretching fields of apartment blocks. I forget that I love looking at these tall, vast buildings until I’m pulled by their rows under the force of an engine, but my eyes glean the windows and balconies for color, for someone looking out on this train passing by, like I would be, because I also love to watch trains, almost as much as riding them. I think of my friend who wrote a short note recently, telling me he had just taken a nine hour bus ride to Sophia—one can only write short notes on buses—and I wish he could have taken a train because it’s so much easier to let your eyes wander when you can stretch your legs and use the restroom; even the grime and trash along the tracks, the squalor around the station, seen from a stiff vinyl upholstered seat is a lovelier sight than what we can see from the plush comfort of the bus. And who likes to watch busses pass by anyway? No one has to stop and wait for a bus crossing; no child stands at the roadside and gestures to the bus driver to honk his horn. At least not here.


Reading this again, that trip comes back—the rhythm and noise of the train as it dislocated me from one city and hurled me into another, the frame of those windows, the murmur of conversations around me. Though the geographic distance (and cultural…and social) is vast between West Texas and my homes in Spain, if I can tap into that energy and give myself the time…I can write something—poetry or prose—that can take me back there, even if only briefly, or push me in a different direction.

Days have passed since I first wanted to leave the house for that walk, since I’ve been able to dwell in any place creative. I know there’s an interesting view from my office at the back of the house—light must be coming into the yard, defining the leaves, the utility poles, a cat on a branch over the neighbor’s garage—and I know I only need a little space to crawl through to wander into the rest of the day, that I need to shrug off the obligations for only an hour, write some lines to friends. Out of them I’ll find my way into a poem, or down some other, unexpected path. A little time; that’s all I need. It’s not so hard.


Curtis Bauer has published and has poems and translations forthcoming in Fulcrum, The Dirty Goat, The American Poetry Review, Circumference, The Cortland Review, and Barrow Street. He has been a finalist for the New Letters Poetry Prize, The Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and The Glimmer Train Poetry Open. He won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize for his first poetry collection, Fence Line, published by BkMk Press in 2004. He teaches Creative Writing and Translation at Texas Tech University and is the publisher of Q Ave Press Chapbooks.

Poemedia: Erin Costello and Aaron Angello

Jake Adam York, No Marker But Memory

Dear Reader,

My wife and I stand in the backyard, waiting for dinner to be done. We won’t, we know, have many more weekends—maybe any—when we can use the grill.

It’s remarkable, she says, thinking of how few bean pods have come off the locust that’s going yellow overhead. Normally, the yard is covered, like the pool of balls at a child’s play-place, with these beans, and it can take all morning to clean up the yard.

Less work tomorrow, then. Welcome news.

•

I’ve just received copies of Persons Unknown, my new book, from my publisher. It’s a little unreal, if for no other reason than I really haven’t seen it or had much to do with it for several months.

I had worked on it for almost three years, thought about it every day, but for most of the past year, it’s been in someone else’s hands. It’s felt missing.

So, it’s good to see it, but it’s also a little like a family reunion: I haven’t seen it in so long, I’ve learned to live without it, and now I have to learn to live with it again.

And like that cousin you haven’t seen in 15 years, it’s asking questions. What have you been up to?

The answer to that question is both I’ve been busy and Not much.

•

The color of things is changing. Part of this is sun, the light swinging around to the South. It happens so slowly, of course, you don’t notice it day to day, but then, one day, you’ve crossed some threshold and the light is different.

And now that the light is different, even without the locust’s bean pods to trash the yard, my mind is a pile of leaves.

•

It’s a little more than a year since we got the call, as we headed down from the mountains, that my uncle had died.

We flew back—to Alabama—the next day, and not even two months later, we drove back to be with my family for Thanksgiving, the first without him, to help hold everything together.

The funeral is something of a blur. I remember it the way you remember the events of a day in which you’ve had a few too many cups of coffee: it’s one long streak. It’s hard to remember specific moments in that week without remembering everything: booking a flight, driving to the airport and then from Atlanta into Alabama, the service, all the questions, his widow calling me to come help organize his clothes, the lawyer taking me and my brother to lunch, the rental car company double charging us for the insurance and me ready to throttle someone, my wife taking over.

Thanksgiving is clearer, quieter and more momentary. Clearest is a walk we took, my wife and I, up an old logging road behind my grandparents’ property, toward the creek where I spent a lot of Fall afternoons, and wading through tides of oak and sycamore leaves.

Which was how I spent many Saturday afternoons, after the white noise of college football became overwhelming or when I just got bored. We lived a mile from my grandparents and another mile from anyone else, in the middle of the woods, and we had one television that got two channels, but basically was whatever my dad wanted to watch. But I could walk.

And Fall was always walking through leaves, through two-dozen acres of mixed forest. Everything barren and buried. The canopy that kept the stars from any summer night now spidery and open, and the understory one long spread of brown.

Which meant that a lot of things were hidden, waiting to be uncovered, good or bad. The heart leaf of wild ginger or a copperhead’s bright muscle.

•

I don’t know how it is for anyone else, but when I finish a book, I go through a lull. The intense focus required to complete the book and to attend to all the details—reading every line maybe two dozen times, reading the entire book in a single sitting a half-dozen times, remembering one’s plans and comparing one’s ideas of what was supposed to happen with what did—is gone, and I feel untethered. I’m floating, unfocused.

This can be a blessing. I can try things I was reluctant to, for fear of taking time or attention away from the book. I can cast about and try to figure out what’s next.

Which is what I’ve been doing. But it’s been a year of flood—ideas, maybe too many of them, and poems, maybe too many of them, too—in which I can’t find the channel.

•

My uncle died in the hospital. He was being treated for hypertension. He was given something to relax him, but it had the opposite effect: he broke out the window of his seventh-story room and leapt.

A few months before, my friend Craig Arnold disappeared in Japan. We learned a few weeks later the search team had concluded he fell from a cliff on the side of a volcano.

In January, a student of mine had jumped from his apartment building downtown.

A year of falling.

•

I sent a copy of my manuscript to an elder poet with whom I’ve worked. He wrote back, complimentary of the book, but he also wrote me: you can’t keep writing these poems—after a while no one will want to read them any more.

By “these poems” he means my ongoing project to write about each of the more than 130 martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement—the 126 men, women, and children murdered as a result of racial animus between 1955 and 1968, and the legacy of that brutality and hatred, the Matthew Shepards, the Oumar Dias.

Matthew Shepard you know. Ourmar Dia you probably don’t.

Dia was a Senegalese immigrant who’d come to Denver to work for a better life. He lived in a small apartment and worked at a hotel downtown. He sent money back to Senegal and saved so he could move his wife and children to the United States. On November 18, 1997, Dia got off work and stood waiting for the bus on a downtown corner just before midnight. A skinhead, Nathan Thill, came out of the dark, shouting at him. A few minutes later, Thill shot Dia dead. During the trial Thill explained Dia was “wearing the wrong uniform.”

The following Spring, the Colorado General Assembly passed a resolution that ends:
Be It Resolved by the House of Representatives of the Sixty first General Assembly of the State of Colorado, the Senate concurring herein:

That we, the members of the Sixty first General Assembly, are horrified and angered by the senseless, despicable, and tragic murder of Oumar Dia.

Be It Further Resolved, That we express our deepest regret and sorrow for the death of Oumar Dia.

Be It Further Resolved, That we condemn, with all of our hearts and souls, the murder of Oumar Dia and the despicable, racist, and immoral beliefs that motivated it.

Be It Further Resolved, That copies of this Joint Resolution be hand delivered to Oumar Dia's wife and children in Diorbivol, Senegal, if arrangements for such hand delivery can be made with the United States Department of State. If such arrangements cannot be made, copies of this Joint Resolution shall be sent by mail.

But there is no marker, except the bus stop, except the intersection. Except the Joint Resolution.

No marker but memory.

•

Two years ago now, I flew into Jackson, Mississippi, on my way to a conference. I was working on a poem about Medgar Evers, assassinated in his driveway on June 12, 1963, the subject, in part, of the film Ghosts of Mississippi. The Evers home had been restored in the process of filming the movie and was, I had learned, to become a museum curated by nearby Tougaloo College. I wanted to see the home, and, as I stood at the rental car counter in the Medgar Evers International Airport, I asked my rental agent what was the best way to get there. She turned to another agent and said, “Can you help this man find his friend’s house?” I had to explain who Medgar Evers was.

An hour later, I was in front of the house. It looks like it did in the movie, like it did in 1963, as far as I can tell. There’s a plaque on the front of the house, and a small marker on the telephone pole across the street that would tell you where it is, “City of Jackson Civil Rights Tour, Site 49,” if you knew where to look.

•

Some years the leaves would pile up so thick you couldn’t see the creek itself, only a crease in the hummocks.

•

No one will want to read them anymore, he writes. And maybe he’s right.

People want the world to come back to normal.

Just the leaves falling and piling up, just the clearing away.

Not the peeling back to find the bindweed curling up again.

Not the old story still happening.

•

Dear Reader, today the record
I’m listening to is Thelonious Monk’s Monk’s Music.

It begins with a rendition of “Abide With Me,” written not by Thelonious Monk, but by the namesake, William Henry Monk. The tune of the hymn is called “Eventide.”

Gigi Gryce on the alto sax, Ray Copeland on trumpet, Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane on tenor saxes. It slides into a septet version of “Well, You Needn’t.”

This seems like good advice for me: what I want, what (maybe) I should want.

On the other side, “Off Minor” is giving way to one of Monk’s signatures, “Epistrophe,” from the Greek for turning in place.

Side B ends with “Crepuscule With Nellie,” which brings us back to eventide.

Maybe we stand in the leaves and turn and the leaves spin away, leaving us on the ground again.

This is going to take some time.


Jake Adam York is the author of three books of poems—Murder Ballads (2005), winner of the 2005 Elixir Press Prize in Poetry, A Murmuration of Starlings (2008), selected by Cathy Song for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and winner of the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry, and Persons Unknown (2010), forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press/Crab Orchard in October 2010

Greg Pardlo, Somebody's Daughter

After my reading in Detroit a woman approached me to say that she enjoyed my poems but that she felt one poem I read was insensitive to people working in the sex industry. “As a former exotic dancer myself,” she said, “I was hurt by the suggestion that there was something wrong or shameful about such work.” The poem she is referring to deals with, among other things, a man’s changing attitudes about how much control a parent can exercise over a child’s life. I quote Chris Rock who famously boiled the issue down to this: a father’s primary job is to keep his daughter off the pole.

I understand things differently now that I have daughters of my own. But before I was a father, I recall a couple of lengthy arguments I had with people—one of whom became my wife—people I felt were myopic and condescending in their approach to the issue. My wife’s argument was that any woman who made a living plying the sexual imagination of men was a victim of malevolent social forces and was being exploited. Her argument considers the way economic conditions create a limited set of opportunities for women. This world of limited opportunities is made worse by cultural practices that devalue women’s labor. It is only natural, my wife would argue, that a woman would turn to such an occupation either to compensate for feelings of insecurity and self-loathing or to validate herself as fetish object through the empty flattery of male attention. This, my wife said, was why men are often misled into believing that strippers, for example, had chosen their occupation over and above others, and that this was an informed choice. They are victims, my wife says, of men who prey on their compromised social position, men who prevent them from imagining other possibilities for their lives.

All of this, she would be quick to acknowledge, can also be said of wives.

Before becoming a father, I argued we must keep in mind that every human being has agency. Except where physical coercion is used, there are few power dynamics in which one party holds absolute authority over another. Authority must be given, and that “gifting” constitutes an empowered act. We understand the people at the bottom of a paternal system of power are actively engaged in authorizing the symbolic king’s or father’s or master’s position. Each member of a family, tribe, community, network, etc., determines the quality of their participation within that group. My point being that what we see as malevolent social and economic systems are, for people within them, reality. There is a bourgeois arrogance in demeaning people for manipulating the systems in which they live. Disparaging someone for choosing to become a stripper in response to limited social and economic opportunities is like denying the afterlife to ancient Greeks because they existed before we invented Christianity. In other words, because the relatively comfortable conditions in which we live and raise our middle class families does not provide for any real measure of economic mobility (certainly not enough to assuage our middle class guilt) for the poor and working class, and because the conditions in which we live narcotize us into believing we, too, are conscientious and morally justified, we must vilify others for, essentially, not being us, and for engaging the system in ways that may radically afford them a greater exercise of agency.

But that was before I became a father. The woman who found fault with my poem, I thought, was approaching the issue from a more personal perspective, one that harkens back to the days of political correctness. I understood her to be saying, if you don’t have something good to say, don’t say anything at all. And I started to respond to her out of frustration. I found myself thinking, if there was nothing wrong with being a stripper then why did you stop doing it? Then I realized what she was defending was her hurt pride. Not necessarily her actions within a particular economic system; she was not railing against a hegemonic ideology. And she was right. I could have made my point without resorting to the Chris Rock joke. I could have chosen not to perpetuate a culture in which the sex worker is alienated and vilified (because that is the only way men may continue to profit from it). She handed me her card and offered to continue the conversation. I discovered she is a graduate student at the local university. Here’s another possibility: perhaps all she was trying to say was that she was somebody’s daughter, too.


GREGORY PARDLO is the author of Totem (APR 2007). He is recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received other fellowships from the New York Times, the MacDowell Colony, and Cave Canem. Pardlo is an associate editor of poetry for Callaloo, and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at George Washington University. His website is pardlo.com.

Patrick Rosal, Digging Poetics: the Mastermix

I dug through crates this past Sunday at a friend’s garage. Real crates, maybe a dozen filled with vinyl from the seventies, eighties and early nineties. We gasped and even threw our hands in the air a couple times when we pulled out some DeBarge 45, Freestyle’s “Don’t Stop the Rock” or New Order’s “Blue Monday”. There were the obscure but unforgettable Euro joints too, like Secession’s “Touch”, Antonia’s Italian-import, disco-version of “La Bamba”, and Tin Tin Duffy’s “Kiss Me”. It wasn’t until I actually read the Song of Solomon out of the Bible that I realized that song’s lyrics were lifted right from the sexiest of those holy verses.

In 1983, I had no idea the word syncretic existed, let alone what it meant, but I didn’t flinch when I heard the praise of litany Whiz Kid shouted out in his hit “Play That Beat”: “Punk rock, new wave and soul, pop music, salsa and rock and roll, calypso, reggae, rhythm and blues. Master mix those number one tunes!” Music was music. Still is.

Whiz Kid’s lyrics are a testimony to the death of the word master mix, which is now supplanted by the words remix or mashup. The earlier phrase, master mix, was meant to evoke mastery and skill. It was, of course, in line with a hip hop aesthetic of swagger and braggadocio. But the term was also subversive.

We weren’t aspiring merely to be master mixers, we aspired to mix the masters. We learned to break them down, the ones who held the power, the overlords, and put them back together again the way we wanted. And if the mix was good, people danced. The activists might refer to this as “agency” or “empowerment”. We called it mixing.

(It’s even funny to think where we got crates to hold all our records in the first place. We usually snuck behind Foodtown, tagged the back wall, then snatched the crates off the loading dock and piled near the dumpster. I remember grabbing a new, bright red one the first time, bringing it home and reading the text on the side: WARNING! Unauthorized use or possession of milk cases is against the LAW. Criminals WILL be prosecuted. I said, Fuck it, and dropped my twelve-inches right in.)

Check Whiz Kid again: “Master mix those number one tunes!” as if the chart-toppers by themselves would not hit, but chopped up in pieces and spliced to other sounds and other kinds of music they would, according to the Rakim mandate, move the crowd. Teachers and bullies might, in school and on the corner, cut you down, but you could go
home, reach into a stack of masters, from Mozart to Mtume, and cut them up. (Whiz Kid’s twelve-inch begins with the sound of a saw in quarter notes.)

The club scene has changed dramatically in thirty years. Step into a New York lounge and see how many people are just standing around with the music blaring. Strangers used to meet on the dance floor (some went home alone). In the post-Napster era it’s remarkable how one-dimensional the music is. DJs and producers have access to more beats than we ever had. If the lounge has wifi, you can make a request for a song the DJ doesn’t even have on his hard drive. He can download it right there. All the songs we knew, had heard snippets of, all available now, with a quick search and a broadband connection.

Maybe this is just dumb nostalgia, and I’m feeling sentimental about getting on my knees to dig through crates and spending twenty dollars on a few no-name imports hoping I have a horn hit or break that some other DJ doesn’t have, something to twist the played-out hook or corny pop song. All I know is we grinded to all kinds of music, any kind of music, if the DJ could flow. The S-and-M sultriness of “Dominatrix” blended with Strafe’s “Set it Off”. God bless Malcolm McClaren (I just learned he passed last month), who managed the Sex Pistol and produced the b-boy hits “Buffalo Gals” and “Double Dutch”. On KTU, the Latin Rascals gave us Kurtis Blow, Culture Club, Kraftwerk, John Rocca, and many more—seamlessly.

I don’t miss lugging those heavy-ass milk crates from basement to van to venue, the walk-ups, the set up and break down, spending my meager split at the diner, leaving the equipment in the driveway until morning. It was work—or something like it. Well, I’m a poet now, and not for nothing, but I’m still digging.





Patrick Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive , which won the Members’ Choice Award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and most recently My American Kundiman, which won the Association of Asian American Studies 2006 Book Award in Poetry. He was awarded a Fulbright grant as a U.S. Scholar to the Philippines in 2009. His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The Literary Review, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Non-Fiction, The Beacon Best and Language for a New Century. He teaches in the Rutgers-Camden MFA Creative Writing program.

Eve Jones, All the Poems Lied

The failure of language to genuinely (re)capture an experience has always been a fascination for me. Always: a disconnect between what actually happens in the world and what, consequently, we create. After all, they’re just words. The sculptor is standing with his hands in wet clay and the cellist wraps her arms around all that string and wood. After all.
Do we genuinely attempt to write poems about love/death/fear/jealousy/suffering/awe? Yes. Are they often knee-buckling, emotionally wrought poems? Oh, yes. Can they come close to the actual experience? I think so. But can they equal it? No.
Doesn’t that drive you a little crazy sometimes?
Maybe that’s why war poetry fascinates me as it does. There’s no better example of that disconnect. What other experience is a seemingly unending, unflinching 360-degree view of shit and suffering? How can it possibly be conveyed through language with adequacy and accuracy? How does someone wade through bodies one afternoon and then hunker in the bad light to write about it? No, no – not how does someone, because there are many therapeutic and artistic reasons why someone would turn to language for that exorcism. It’s not a question of whether to write a war poem; it’s a question of whether it is even possible to make art a semblance of the catastrophic.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
For most of us, the front line happens elsewhere. Wilfred Owen, the English language’s most popular World War I poet, set out to “agitate” Europe’s sleepy-headed view of war. In poem after poem, like “Dulce et Decorum Est,” he attempts to look war in the face. And he does, he does: “the white eyes writhing in his face,/ His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin.” My god. But at the same time – to my desensitized, 21st century ear – there is such music , such an orderly form to his grisly scenes. I confess I can’t help but love words like “sludge” and “blood-shod” and “guttering.” So I hum right over his attempt to show me war.
Jarrell, hosing the gunner out of the ball turret, comes damn close.
I think about this because a sequence in Bird in the Machine edges up to the label “war poetry.” It takes the form of letters, sent by a soldier from an unidentified front. I played with the literal, assuming stains and tears and other damage to the text. I let the language fail as I imagined it would/should. These were deliberate decisions, yet my strongest impression of those poems now is that I couldn’t/can’t look at the horror of war straight on. I took it in pieces, in manageable fragments of narrative, in my peripheral vision. It feels like a flinch. My own failure? Language’s?
So maybe the philosophical question is whether it is poetry’s (or any art’s) responsibility to equate to the experience or feeling in question. Is it a silly question? We attempt, over and over. There are incredible war poems out there. Yusef Komyankaa’s “Thanks.” Yehuda Amichai’s “The Diameter of the Bomb.” Brian Turner’s “Here, Bullet.”
Czeslaw Milosz says in Road Side Dog:
An atheist should accept the world as it is. But then whence comes our protest, our scream: “No!” Precisely, this excludes us from Nature, determines our incomprehensible oddity, makes us a lonely species. Here, in a moral protest against the order of the world, in our asking ourselves where this scream of horror comes from, the defense of the peculiar place of man begins.
The peculiar place of man. Not just to kill each other in cold blood, but to attempt, generation after generation, to make sense of that tendency. Not just to make it survivable, but to make it beautiful. What loneliness, and what luxury.
Those are not my poems. Those are my attempts. I tell you, I am not a camera, but sometimes I want to be one. Look. I want to know you know. I want to know I know. Look. I just have these words. I want to harm you.
Owen saw a man guttering like a candle. He heard the shells’ “demented choir” and perhaps he scattered sonnets for the doomed like small flags. This is what we seem to do, trying to write up against the unspeakable – we let the thing go inside its cage. Still, there’s a cage.
Is that the point?

Eve Jones’s poetry has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Hotel Amerika, Natural Bridge, Nimrod, and Poet Lore, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, she teaches writing and humanities and lives with her family in St. Louis, and soon Colorado Springs. Her first book, Bird in the Machine, was published this year by Turning Point Press

Stacey Lynn Brown, Finding Form

A couple of days ago, I flew down to Atlanta to visit Karen Head's class on Southern Poetry at Georgia Tech. As an institute of technology, Georgia Tech is a gathering ground of mathematically-inclined geniuses who study Aeronautical Engineering and the like. Not much room for poetry, one would think. But one would be wrong: Karen Head is planting seeds of poetry down there, sowing wispy stems of art that shoot up unexpectedly between concrete slabs of science and math. And their approach is phenomenal.

I walked into the room of twelve students who were almost equally divided along gender lines—
also a rarity for Tech, which notoriously has more men than women. Desks in a circle, each student with a copy of my book in hand, they dove right in, asking some of the most intelligent questions I've ever heard asked of a poet, or of poetry.

Maybe it's the difference between left and right brain thinking, but these students of engineering, math, and science approached the poems and the words on the page in an analytical style that defied (and, in my mind, surpassed) the rhetorical strategies of conventional literature classes. They drew connections in an almost formulaic way, analyzing the relationships between words, ideas, and biography as if it were something quantifiable, which made me wonder: is it? Does free verse, which I always considered to be freewheeling and high spirited, actually consist of mappable equations? Does this mean that math is relevant after all? Does it apply to the arrangement of words on the page, to my choices regarding form, or the lack thereof?

As I explained to the students, I write primarily in free verse because I want the poems to find their own forms rather than having me superimpose form over them. When I write in a form with rhyme, for example, my effort to get to the required sound at the end of the line ends up steering the poem's direction rather than allowing it to take its own path and shape. They seemed surprised, on some level, that I would resist a formula. Wouldn't a formula make it easier? Weren't there discernible formulas in my first book? Didn't I see them? (It's a question I'm still thinking about. I wish I'd asked them to map it out for me, Will Hunting style.)

These students were on to something, something I'm just beginning to be able to articulate and understand myself. My longstanding insistence that form hinders content has been turned on its head recently by my second manuscript, The Shallows, which is structured around the title poem—a poem that has declared itself in no uncertain terms to be a crown of sonnets. This was not my idea. In this case, the content truly dictated the form, and I had no choice but follow it.

My father suffered a massive stroke in the spring of 2008, and no matter how much I fought against the idea of writing about it, the poems came—and continue to come. As I began to sketch and shape the manuscript, I kept coming back again and again to the Gulf of Mexico and the trips that our family took together every year. From my childhood days of bobbing in my father's arms to our swims together as adults, it was a constant in our lives. And one specific image kept haunting me: on what would be our last trip to the beach together, my husband and I sat on the balcony and watched my father as he walked into the ocean for what would be his last swim. The line came to me: My father, wading out into the sea. I scanned it. Iambic pentameter. Uh oh. It seemed like the beginning of a sonnet, felt like one. But that line didn't want to just happen once. It wanted to both begin and end something; it wanted to be a part of something larger that brought experiences together and contained ideas and lines that overlapped and led one into the next. It insisted upon being the first and last line of a crown of sonnets,
interwoven ideas and images coming full circle back again to the image that haunted me most, that stood for so much: the venturing out into an uncertainty, the journey away, the return to something so primordial.

As I began to work on it, each individual poem in the sequence became an opportunity to explore and encapsulate a different time period in that ocean, different contexts for growth and the changes in a relationship between father and daughter. For once, the idea of form didn't feel limiting but instead became expansive, ripe with possibilities. It was a house with seven rooms that I could decorate however I wanted to, each room echoing and reverberating against the next and last. I suddenly got it: what once had seemed so limiting was actually one of the most liberating approaches to writing poetry that I had ever found. I already knew the structure of each poem, so I could actually focus even more on the content itself. Form was fun.

This approach to poetry—as something structured in a quantifiable way, as a series of relationships with variables and valuations—was completely new to me but was the cornerstone of how the students at Tech approached it, instinctively. In our discussion, I learned a great deal about how I might find patterns and significance in aspects of poetry I used to just see as being intuitive. They taught me this. They also reminded me, in their computational wisdom, that my crown would need a total of at least 49 rhymes. Thanks for that reminder, guys. Math rocks.



Stacey Lynn Brown was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and studied at Emory University, Oxford University, and The University of Oregon, where she received her MFA. A poet, playwright, and essayist, her work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Daily, Copper Nickel, and The Rumpus. Her book-length poem in sections, Cradle Song, was published by C&R Press in 2009. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, where she lives with her husband, poet Adrian Matejka, and their daughter.

Allison Joseph, Writing the Body: Hands, Fingers, Moles

Whenever I'm stuck for something to write about, I think of the body. One of my favorite writing prompts involves singling out a body part (mine or someone else's) and writing about it. I've written about the mole on my upper lip, the recurring stye I get on my right eye (never my left, for some reason), my hair, women's breasts, Rita Dove's fingernails (spectacular) and my husband's belly. To me, the human body is one of the best landscapes to explore--I never tire of thinking of it, of writing about it, of rescuing it from the easy promises of commercials and magazine ads. The human body is work--but to me, writing about it is the kind of work that's well worth doing.

The idea of rescue was firmly in my mind when I wrote the following poem:









The Middle Finger

Others come to condemn you, but I
come to praise you--your no-nonsense
sense of authority, your rigidity in the face

of foolishness, your pride in flipping off
the buttpinchers, money-grubbers
and backstabbers, all those steal

from the collection plate grinners.
I am particularly fond of mine: long,
articulate, resting spot for the pens

and pencils that sketch the words
and drama that I cherish, humble
co-worker with thumb and forefinger,

nowhere near as arrogant
as the smug ring finger who wags
her certitude over the rest of the hand,

such a drama queen with her
store-bought band. The middle finger
needs no ring to make everyone gasp,

making its point straight up,
no equivocating, just hating,
president of the let me tell you what I

think club, no words needed to show
the most righteous anger in the
fastest way, torch you can light

simply by lifting a finger.
Why is everyone so afraid of you
when you're merely pointing heavenward?

Allison Joseph

I wrote this poem with the notion in mind that demonizing one finger of the hand is both strange and delightful--why this one finger? Why is the middle finger so scary, so taboo? I like my middle finger; it does exactly what I want it to do. So I wanted to write a tribute to both its strength and its utility, a poem that both recognized and gently mocked its power. I liked that I got in a dig at the ring finger in this poem, which leads me very naturally to my next finger poem. I've seen way too many off those "He went to Jared" commercials not to write a ring finger poem.

Since the human body is constantly in flux--in sickness and in health--there's no limit to the ways in which it can be explored in poetry. The more I write about my body, more fearless I become, the more accepting of its limits, the more respectful of its abilities. The more I write about the bodies of others, the more imaginative I have to make myself become--how do her feet hurt after a day in those high heels? How do his lungs feel after the burn of another cigarette? Writing about the body, I reach, stretch, become limber, looser--a lot more like the person I've always wanted to be.

Allison Joseph’s award-winning poetry looks her own past—and America’s too—squarely in the eye.


Allison Joseph is all grown up—has been for years. But she’s built a reputation for poetry that’s rooted in her childhood and adolescence, both the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. As a black girl coming of age in the Bronx, Joseph had a complex, interesting, and often oppressive world to negotiate. Her poems re-create that world, celebrating some things and indicting others, and they’ve been winning plaudits nationally for this associate professor of creative writing at SIUC.
Joseph's fourth book, Imitation of Life, was published in April 2003 by Carnegie Mellon University Press. A new manuscript of hers titled Worldly Pleasures has won the 2003 Word Press Poetry Prize and will be published next year. A first-place prize in the 2002 Wallace W. Winchell Poetry Competition, announced in February 2003, and other recent top poetry awards from Georgia State University Review and Yawp Magazine (a literary journal whose name alludes to a Whitman poem) have added icing to the cake.