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.

Jewell Parker Rhodes, Ninth Ward

When Hurricane Katrina strikes, one young girl in New Orleans will need all her strength to survive in Ninth Ward, a stirring children’s book debut by award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes.


In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit, I was transfixed by new stories and images of the survivors. I always kept asking myself, “What about the children?” I caught glimpses of them, but seldom did I hear a child’s voice.

My own family had experienced the 1994 Northridge Earthquake; my children were five and three. My three year old stopped speaking; my five year old, kept hiding. For a week, my husband, children, and two dogs all lived on our “big bed” in a broken house. But we were all safe, no one had died, and we didn’t have the second punch of the levees breaking after a natural disaster.

Still, it wasn’t until 2008 when Hurricane Ike was threatening New Orleans, that Lanesha’s voice spoke to me: “They say I was born with a caul, a skin netting covering my face like a glove. My mother died birthing me. I would’ve died, too, if Mama Ya Ya hadn’t sliced the bloody membrane from my face.”

There she was! An orphan, someone nurtured with care by an elder, and someone born with a caul, a sign of “second sight.” I just knew Lanesha was a survivor—a strong, resilient, and heroic child to be celebrated. With loving from Mama Ya Ya, friends, and the companionship of a dog, Lanesha would endure. More importantly, I wanted her to mirror all the children who get challenged by natural and unnatural disasters—whether it be a hurricane, poverty, or family dysfunction. Lanesha is the child who throws her arms about herself and says, “I like me.”

I was the child with far less self-esteem who sometimes hid in the closet, crying. My mother abandoned me as an infant and Grandmother Ernestine raised me. Grandmother, like Mama Ya Ya, was a conjure woman, believing in ancestors and holistic healing. She was the community griot, telling stories to heal us all. Grandmother’s love eventually did heal me. But I was less cool, less smart, and less creative than Lanesha. Lanesha, though, is the character I would’ve loved reading about!

Ninth Ward has sad moments but it isn’t a sad story. Just as Mama Ya Ya dies, my Grandmother died. Just as the levees break, life sometimes seems unbearable. But just as Lanesha shares her story to inspire others, I’ve found storytelling to be my passion.

I was born in Pittsburgh but my very first adult novel, Voodoo Dreams, was set in New Orleans and honored its mixed-blood stew of social and spiritual traditions. I’ve been writing about, visiting New Orleans ever since. I think I might have lived there in another life.

My entire life has been about getting ready to write Ninth Ward. Lanesha is a girl with hope, a big heart, and the belief that “Always, eventually, the universe shines down with love.”

Last week, I toured schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Jackson and Oxford, Mississippi. I met hundreds of children who all gleefully loved books and wanted to be writers. It was an amazing experience and I felt uplifted. I felt that my dream to one day become a children’s book writer was indeed fated to happen. I am still holding the smiles of the children in my heart.

Here is a video clip of me on the TODAY SHOW speaking with children interviewing me about Ninth Ward. Imagine those wonderful kids multiplied and you’ll have a sense of what it felt like for me all last week visiting schools.


“Absolutely exquisite . . . both timely and unforgettable.” – Patricia Reilly Giff

“A story told with gritty poetry.” – Richard Peck

Dr. Jewell Parker Rhodes is the Piper Endowed Chair for Creative Writing at Arizona State University and the Artistic Director for Piper Global Engagement. She is the author of the adult novels: Voodoo Dreams, Magic City, Douglass’ Women, Voodoo Season, Yellow Moon, and the forthcoming, Hurricane. Ninth Ward is her first children’s book.

Kathy Fagan, Ox

“How’s your crack?” he asked. “You’ve heard this question before, yes? How’s your crack?”

And indeed I had heard the question before, decades before, from my grandparents, both of them immigrants to New York and native Irish speakers. They refused to teach us Irish—called Gaelic in those days—nor did they return, or ever wish to return, to “the old country.” But occasionally, under pressure from family and friends, they submitted to an evening of Irish dancing and music, and the brogues that were familiar to me gave way, if only for a moment, to a tongue that sounded like nothing I’d heard before and nothing I believed at that time I’d ever hear again. For Gaelic was a dying language, or so we’d been told—a rumor that was, evidently, wildly exaggerated.

What I heard as “crack” and is pronounced like “crack,” is spelled craic and means, depending on your source, spirit, joie de vivre, fun. It’s a word I rediscovered yesterday, over coffee with a Greek scholar I’d met at a party last spring. He’d told me then that he’d be traveling to Ireland for an intensive Irish language course in summer and I’d expressed interest in this. He’s launching an Irish language conversation group on our campus this fall—no previous knowledge of Irish necessary—and wanted to know if I’d like to participate.

Last spring I had cast about uncharacteristically for invitations and opportunities such as these. My craic was unwell. My relationship of sixteen years had ended suddenly and brutally in winter—the winter itself had been exceptionally brutal—and by spring I thought if I did not surround myself with human company I might die. I am not by nature a gregarious person; I’m the type who, if I go to a party at all, sits in one spot and talks to the two or three fellow-partiers who happen to wander by. Maybe. So call it what you will—instinct, mental health, avoidance, the biological imperative—I forgot my usual diffidence and threw myself into socializing the moment temperatures rose above 50. I restored old friendships, made friends of acquaintances, found new friends, and even dated a little.

Two nights before the condition of my craic was questioned, I attended an ox roast with the man I’ve lately been seeing. I’m a long-time vegetarian. “Tastes like roast beef,” I told my best friend. “But you don’t eat roast beef either,” she said. Even my carnivorous boyfriend chickened out when he saw in the food tent the slabs of grey meat. But I paid the money so I ate the ox.

At least once each day, whether I’m with someone or alone, the grief I felt nearly a year ago meets the joy I feel now and the two together scoop a pit out of my heart and drop it into my throat. The physical sensation is so intense that I wonder if people can see—or, rather, I wonder why they can’t. And when I consider how I’ve gone on, how many of us go on in the face of troubles far more profound than my own, I think, Of course I ate the ox! I could have brought the creature down and slain it myself. I myself—to paraphrase Milton—am slain. It is curious, this empathy. The thanks I give for meat and the passage of time. The forgiveness I foresee bestowing. The forgiveness I hope to receive.

I’m thinking about how often we reject suffering at the expense of others: leave our homelands, abandon our long-term partners, host community ox roasts. Evil can perpetrate this, of course, but more often the impulse arises out of a simple human desire to worship the life it’s given.

Irish, I’m told, is a language that doesn’t allow for abstraction. As conceptual a term as craic may be, its execution lies in the concrete noun and the active verb. Friend. Fiddle. Dance. Kiss. Ox. I wonder if there might be a word in the lexicon for gratitude.




Kathy Fagan is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Lip. She is the recipient of grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the NEA, and the Ohio Arts Council. Her work has appeared in Slate, Field, The New Republic, and The Paris Review, among other literary magazines. She is currently completing a fifth collection titled Sycamore and teaching in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University, where she also edits The Journal.Further information at Kathy Fagan

Cynthia Hogue, On Writing (of) Disaster

Having just published When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, a book of interview-poems that I made from interviews with evacuees and photographs by my co-author, Rebecca Ross, I was alert to the implications articulated in “The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Parts I and II,” now archived on the Poetry Foundation’s website. Ross’ and my book is published by Bill Lavender of UNO Press, who has also published the University of New Orleans’ own oral histories project, Voices Rising I & II, edited by Rebeca Antoine. I knew this work, but not Abe Louise Young’s Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History and Memory Project or Raymond McDaniel’s Saltwater Empire. The exchange between these two poets is timely for all of us who have responded to Katrina.

For the project I undertook, twelve interview-poems, the ethical issues Young discusses were those with which I’d wrestled for the three years it took to finish the book. I’d asked other questions, too, having to do with genre: Can a prose interview be turned successfully into poetry? Alive in Truth is an archive, not a poem, and McDaniel’s Saltwater Empire, which takes portions of the interviews collected in Alive in Truth, and shapes them into an assemblage of poetic voices, is a poem. Since my interview-poems fall somewhere between these two works, I want to share some of my own process here.

When the Water Came approaches its material (the experience of evacuees of the storm) with awareness of the ethical terrain. Its methodology, making a poem from the study of a voice, seems straightforward, even simple, but I knew that I was striking a delicate balance in this act of witnessing. I needed to pay attention. I’d schooled myself in the field, reading works like Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting and Shoshona Felman’s and Dori Laub’s Testimony, essays analyzing “the vicissitudes of listening” in relation to “bearing witness” (in their case, the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University). Over the years, I developed courses in the “poetics of witness” in order to broaden my knowledge and integrate this profound field intellectually and poetically through the pedagogical endeavor.

When I read Young’s and McDaniel’s pieces, it seemed to me that they were on parallel tracks. She addresses the issues his book raises for her, and he tries to explain what he did in the book, a bit inscrutably, “I don’t know what I did; I only know what I tried to do, what I wanted to do.” He was negotiating postmodernist poetry in a time of disaster, resisting “autobiographical writing,” writing of a shared experience (by those quoted, not by himself) by drawing on “found” personal narratives. It’s hard to miss the irony that in doing so, resisting his own personal details, he has adopted those of others, erasing the specificity of their experience. That McDaniel is defensive—if eloquent—is illustrated by the fact that he quotes the Alive in Truth site partially to explain that he was simply taking them at their word: “’Please explore our new digital archive of oral histories. We encourage you to read, reflect, and respond to these stories,’ reads the home page of the site; I did,” McDaniel notes. But astonishingly, he overlooks the copyright statement below: “Copyright © 2006 Alive in Truth. All rights reserved. All interviews, archival material, and photos are protected by copyright and require written permission from Alive in Truth for excerpts or reproduction in any form” (emphasis added). To ignore this statement, to insist that the material was “public” because posted on the internet, and to claim that the copyright law is “an irreconcilable muddle”—whether it is or no—may all be valid legally, but sweeps aside the ethical concerns that Young expresses both carefully and earnestly. McDaniel performs what amounts to a linguistic sleight of hands.

To be sure, after Katrina, it was hard to know what to do as an artist moved to respond in some way. Personally, I felt that I had no right to give voice to my emotions, because I was neither a native nor a resident. But like McDaniel, I noted some of the egregious stereotypes in the news and wanted to counter them. I honor the moral integrity of Young’s work with evacuees, her compassionate listening to them as individuals with voices of their own. I aspired to that as well. At the same time, I respect McDaniel’s concerned, if misguided, poetic investigation of embodied experience from a place of detachment, not compassionate detachment so much as analytical distance. McDaniel should have abided by Alive in Truth’s stipulation that permission was required to quote, as a courtesy to those who survived the storm and those who did the work of interviewing the evacuees. In citing the source, he followed the letter of the law. His question, “Does it matter that I wanted to draw attention to a dangerously simplistic representation by making a more complex one if my methods cause offense?” seems to me at once pointed and disingenuous. He isn’t answering Young’s objections, but that is a different issue than whether his art has integrity.

In dealing with a similar terrain, in working with a very experienced public artist, Rebecca Ross, in being aware that evacuees were participating in the project because they wanted their story heard in their own words and not framed by my thoughts, I took pains to ensure that each person I interviewed had access to the work in progress, was kept in the loop as it developed, was consulted for the accuracy of the material, and asked whether they were comfortable being a part of the project or wished to withdraw. I wasn’t posting the interviews but making interview-poems, using only the words of the individual evacuees. All interview-poems appear in the book only with the formal permission of each evacuee. I wanted to individualize inhabitants who did not have a voice—not to “give” them voice, but to offer a forum in which their voices might be audible, particularized, and dignified by the poetic measure I heard in their words.

When we had the book launch in New Orleans on August 31, 2010, Ross and I were on a panel with evacuees who had contributed interviews to Voices Rising II, among them the Nigerian Poet Laureate, Niyi Osundare, and the volume’s editor, Rebeca Antoine. Osundare criticized the tendency of journalists to want to impose falsely optimistic resolutions on his harrowing story of almost drowning with his wife in their attic. Neither McDaniel nor Young do that, and nor do Ross and I. We counter such tendencies with truth. I see our work as part of a Katrina “quilt,” offered as what E.L.Doctorow in a recent Nation calls “the aroused witness, the manifold reportage . . . [to] awaken our stunned senses to the public interest[.]” In response to one despairing comment from the audience that “no one elsewhere in America cares about New Orleans now,” I said that we do care, that we artists from elsewhere are among the “seeds” Katrina planted around the country, and we’re being called forth to speak now of New Orleans, and all that it represents about our country. Ross and I listened so intently that evening in order to remember, so as to be accurate. We listened so hard because the voices speaking were so soft that they seemed in danger again of being drowned out.






Cynthia Hogue has published seven collections of poetry, most recently The Incognito Body (2006), Or Consequence (2010), and the co-authored When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina (interview-poems with photographs by Rebecca Ross), also published in 2010. Among her honors are a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, the H.D. Fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, an Arizona Commission on the Arts Project Grant, and the Witter Bynner Translation Residency Fellowship at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Also known for her criticism, Hogue has published essays on poetry, ranging from that of Emily Dickinson to Kathleen Fraser and Harryette Mullen. Her critical work includes the co-edited editions We Who Love To Be Astonished: Experimental Feminist Poetics and Performance Art (U of Alabama P, 2001); Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (U of Iowa P, 2006); and the first edition of H.D.’s The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton (UP of Florida, 2007). Hogue taught in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans before moving to Pennsylvania, where she directed the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University for eight years. While in Pennsylvania, she trained in conflict resolution with the Mennonites and became a trained mediator specializing in diversity issues in education. In 2003, she joined the Department of English at ASU as the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Currently, she is working on a collection of essays entitled Wayward Thinking: Notes on Poetry and Poetics and a book-length translation from the French of Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc Nancy entitled Fortino Samáno (The Overflowing of the Poem), with her husband, the economist Sylvain Gallais.

Jorn Ake, "I wanted the world in my next book..."

The epigraph to my most recent book comes from Philip Guston. Philip Guston was a member of a school of American painting labeled Abstract Impressionism by the painter, Elaine de Kooning. By way of simple explanation, Abstract Impressionism differed from Abstract Expressionism by exchanging the latter's gut-level gestalt of attacking the canvas with paint and brush (or in the case of Jackson Pollock, with paint and bucket) for a more evenly tempered and temporal application of hue to the canvas. Where Abstract Expressionism was active and gestural, Abstract Impressionism was calm and contemplative. Guston's work, while informed by the same Hoffmanesque school of color theory, more closely resembled the carefully enlarged sections of Monet's water lily paintings than the whirlwinds of Pollock or the dark obliterations of Robert Motherwell or Franz Kline. He was famous. His work sold well. And in a show of new work in 1970, he completely changed what he was doing.

With his new work, Guston disrupted the esoterica of “pure” abstraction by invading his own work with figurative representation that allowed him to populate his paintings with more direct or directed meaning. When Guston was asked why he had shifted away from his earlier very successful work, he replied, "I got sick and tired of all that abstraction -- I wanted to tell stories." Gone were the atmospheric layers of paint, the gauzy translation of space through hue and tone, and in came a comic book's worth of hooded figures who smoked cigarettes, kept house with bare lightbulbs, guns, domineering alarm clocks and small Holocausts of shoes and their dismembered or orphaned limbs. Guston's paintings, coming midway between the end of World War II and all its revelations of inhumanity in Europe and Asia, and the end of the Vietnam and all its revelations of inhumanity possible in ourselves, were all about the anger and frustration of an artist who felt he could no longer continue to create work so thoroughly removed from daily life that it had as its premise rules which prohibited narrative representation.

I read Guston's quote at a show if his work in London at the Royal Academy of Art (an ironic location perhaps, but there you go.) At the time, I was living in Prague and spending a fair amount of time following my wife around Europe as she traveled on the business that brought us to Prague in the first place. I met people during these travels who had experienced the width and breadth of Soviet oppression, who had been betrayer or betrayed, and even some who had survived the Holocaust, the Soviet era, and now had profoundly legitimate doubts about capitalism, democracy and globalization. At the same time, I watched from a distance as my own country flirted disturbingly with democratic totalitarianism and embraced revenge as central to its international diplomacy. And we were surprised when we felt relief when the doors to the airplane closed on our return to Central Europe after visits to the country we considered our home.

I had just finished my second book. I like that book, if I can say it without too much ego. However, as I started working on my third book, I began to think of this book as an example of what I wanted to avoid. While the central object is an extended elegy, the political remained a liminal presence in just a handful of poems. Contrastingly, vivid examples appeared in the United States that suggested that one could indeed be persecuted for what one wrote in spite of Constitutionally guaranteed protections on speech. And I heard the stories of friends who experienced the Soviet era and its complete absence of those guarantees. The abstraction of a wholly lyric poetry seemed to become less and less about this world and every day more and more about mediation, deferment, and self-protection.

So Philip Guston's quote stenciled onto the wall of the Royal Academy gallery came at the right time. For me, that quote was all about permission. Guston seemed to possess the capacity to shift the mode of representation into that which best fit what he wanted to say, rather than making the expression subservient to the method. Too often artists (and I include myself in this address) unconsciously internalize a set of rules for expression that delimit the area within which creative work can occur, like those invisible fence systems people install to control their dogs. Those fences only work if the borderline jolt from the collar stops the dog from crossing into the neighbor’s yard. Once the dog has crossed, however, the jolt becomes the propellant into the wider world.

I realized I wanted the world in my next book, and for me, the world meant stories. Since I was writing poetry, that meant more narrative and the inclusion of history and politics, things I felt I did not have permission to include in a poetical work until the jolt of Philip Guston's words on the wall crossed me over. Now I felt if I was going to get in trouble with my country for something that I had written, I wanted to get in trouble for something unequivocal. Freedom of speech is perhaps not merely the right to say anything but is more thoroughly the responsibility to say something of value. But if the stories I told were to have value, especially if I wanted to tell the stories of others, the demand was upon me to tell these stories honorably. That meant researching the history of the events included in my work, keeping notes on conversations with people who had first hand experience, collecting photographs from the events in my poems, and traveling to locations myself. I did not want to propagandize. I did not want to preach. I did not want to write an essay in verse. I wanted to write poetry. But I wanted the stories most of all.

I am not sure that I was successful. I am not sure that being successful is necessarily the objective of art. Instead, I think that art is the discipline of striving, of working towards something that is not as much ineffable as it may be unreachable. However, there is value in striving for the unreachable. That's why I still like my second book. Its failures are essentially a given, so what elements are merely proximal to success feel like positive movement. And so again with my third book. I tried to go beyond what limits of subject matter I had set for myself and become more of the world than nebulous and lyric (though to be clear, I see no mutual exclusivity between worldly poetry and lyric poetry - indeed I hope they can be one and the same.) What failures are contained therein hopefully sit well beyond the failures I have achieved before.

My grandfather was a Presbyterian minister. During World War II, he and his family, including my mother, were held in a Japanese prisoner of war camp for three years. After he returned home, his profoundly spiritual social conscience coupled with his direct experiences with incarceration created a fortitude within that would not let him shy away from confronting injustice. Perhaps as a result of that fortitude, he was never given permanent position in a congregation and spent the politically tumultuous era of the 1950's and 1960's as a traveling minister. I have copies of his sermons delivered during this nomadic period, including one that examines the life of Robert F. Kennedy. My grandfather wrote as follows:

"Robert Kennedy dreamed impossible dreams. And in the memorial service held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, his brother said of him, 'He was a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.'
He tried, even though his dreams seemed impossible.
That has been our trouble, in trying to reach out we have been satisfied with reaching what we can.
But in a day which calls for reaching the impossible dream, we must strive to reach what we cannot."
That, I think, is why I write - to reach what cannot be reached. And if my writing does one thing, I hope its reading invites a writer to go beyond what limits they have set for themselves, the way Philip Guston's words gave me the jolt to leave the yard and enter into the wider world, whatever their chosen mode of representation may be.


Jorn Ake began Boys Whistling like Canaries (Blue Lynx Prize - EWU Press 2009) while in Prague where he lived for three years. He has a BA in Fine Arts from the College of William and Mary. His MFA in Creative Writing is from Arizona State University. His first collection of poems, Asleep in the Lightning Fields, won the 2001 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 2002. A chapbook of his work, All About the Blind Spot and Other Poems, is available from Popular Ink. The Backwaters Press published his second full-length collection, The Circle Line, in 2009 as an editor's choice. He currently lives in New York City.

photo credit to Dan Sheehan

Terrance Hayes, The Ride: Finding a Love That's Gonna Last

I’m thinking about cars. And when I say cars, you should know I mean poems and books of poems. Sometimes when I think about houses I am also thinking of poems. That’s one thing I love about poems—they can be almost anything. That’s what I love about metaphor. But today is a nice day and I have been out cruising and I have been talking with another poet (who is trying to get someone to drive her car) about poems. That’s how I got here. It will become tedious to point back to poems each time I mention cars so just keep this idea at hand. Car=poem. I was listening to “The Couch Sessions Present a Tribute to Yukimi Nagano ” because it is 55:48 long and I wanted to talk to you about cars for about that long, but now I am listening to Gary Numan’s “Cars” (3:59) because it is perfectly, obviously apropos: “Here in my car / I feel safest of all.” (Synthesizers are making a comeback and I feel a bit of nostalgia-tinged glee and a bit of dread about that.) Car is a blunt round word. Like book. A little less like poem, which to me is closer to a word like home. But automobile—that word is closer to why thinking of cars is like thinking of poems. The self in transport. The mind wants to be moved. Maybe a poetry teacher is part driving instructor, part mechanic. A teacher can suggest the best route, explain the rules and customs of the car universe; and a teacher can inspect the parts of a car: the wheels, the transmission, the battery. (If we were talking houses, I’d say the teacher is a kind of interior decorator.) But really, I don’t want that sort of work most of the time. I mean not if I ain’t getting paid for it. Mostly I want to be a passenger. I can be a benevolent carpooler, or a shotgunner, but being a hitchhiker is fine too. I just want to go for a ride. I just want to see where you’re taking me, Driver. And I’ll hop in just about anything that moves: model T, forklift, covered-wagon, Hummer. Long as you got room for me. Gary Numan’s been done for a while now and I’m listening to Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn, but after that I’m listening to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” (“need to find a love that’s gonna last”). There’s not much room for my legs in a Corvette, but I’ll squeeze in to experience the speed. And the intimacy. To be shot along a dangerous, winding road with you. I’ll come along if I trust you.

I’m talking about cars because that’s how I was trying to explain this whole poetry book business to a sweet exasperated poet just morning. I’ve looked at a lot of cars these last years. Used to be I loved what was shiny, exotic, roomy. I was once like the judges at a car show. Innovation counts, for sure. Practicality counts too. The cars are often hotly colored at those shows. You don’t have to live in Detroit to see them either. They’re parked in the big convention halls of your town a couple of times a year. I saw this snazzy tinted SUV in a tent at a Jazz Festival many years ago. The context was supposed to suggest, I’m guessing, classiness. My mouth was watering. I sat my daughter, who was barely a year old at the time, behind the wheel. Parked there under those bright lights in that bright music on that bright day, the SUV looked like perfection. But then, a year or two later I saw the same model somewhere in the city. Not nearly as dazzling. Wasn’t dirty or anything. Wasn’t broken down. But it was just big. Blocky. Ordinary. It had a made terrific first impression, but thank goodness I couldn’t afford to take it home. Sometimes I think too few car makers are building cars a soul can live in/with. Are you following me? You see where I’m going?

There are these car plants all over the country. People are building these grand vehicles, and I don’t blame them. They want drivers. (That’s not the same as needing drivers, of course.) But there are these car plants and these lovely cars rolling from the assembly lines with bells and GPS navigators and sparkling paint. What mechanic wouldn’t want to peek under the hood? What driving instructor wouldn’t say, yes I’d like to help that thing there on its way! And then, here you are—this is what I said to the exasperated, discouraged poet— here you are with your ride. It’s not unadorned. It’s got a great sound system. It’s got wide clear windows. It’s eccentric, even. The wheels look kind of Italian. You must know a little something about speed. And the body! The body looks like something refurbished in Cuba, you been to Cuba? You must have a background in automotive repair too. The seats look made from, goddamn, is that a quilt! Your grandmother’s quilt? Shit! This is a wild ride. I admit I’ll be a little nervous when we pull off, but sure let’s go.

I’m not proposing solutions here. You can’t tell folks what car to drive or what passenger to be, what path to take. I’m just identifying a problem. Here you are having built a car from scratch. It’s like one of those mythical amalgamated creatures? Griffins, Minotaurs, and such. That’s what you have, something enchanted, something strange. Back at the car plant, many of the bosses are telling the youngsters—or many of the youngsters are telling themselves, your car should be both irresistible and recognizable. For sure, it should have some flair, some personal touches, but when the judge comes he needs to know the trucks from the hatchbacks, the roadsters from the tanks. Some judges like tanks. Tanks are durable, intimidating. You never know whose driving a tank. Some judges like that. The Hummer was a military Humvee (High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicle) before it was a Hummer. Judges don’t mind—judges like in fact, a little surprise, but they want a car to be identifiable. How else would they categorize it? So you walk— you and I walk into the car show and we’re amazed at these brand-new vehicles. I mean you absolutely have to attend the car shows, you have to know what people are making—and we do. But here’s the thing: most of the cars only have enough gas to get them from the assembly line to the show room. Some of them don’t even have engines! There go the judges with their ribbons and trophies for cars they won’t drive more than once. They’ll step from the show room without looking back, a lot of them. I don’t know if we should blame them for crowding the streets with cars that won’t hold up. Cars with plastic that looked like silver under the display lights, cars with pleather that looked like leather. Maybe we shouldn’t blame them. They’ve got their own cars to build after all. (And some of those cars ain’t really worth riding around in, truth be told.) They do the best they can. This whole thing is discouraging to me too, frankly. I’m sorry. I’m thinking of you and your strange, hand-made car. I could drive to paradise and back in it, I know that. I’ve been under the hood. You know Robert Frost had to go to England to have his first book published, and look how he turned out! Does that help? What if he’d decided he needed to become a modernist? What if he decided to make T.S. Eliot poems! I don’t care much for either of them, but that’s not my point. And I don’t mean to simply say: “Hang in there!” though that’s what I’m saying; “Hang in there.”

Let’s go outside and cruise around in your ride for a bit. If I was a badass, I’d say let’s drive it through the showroom glass and right up into the mix! But that’s not your style, I know. I love your car. Let’s maybe just tail one of the judges through the city. And when whatever he’s driving breaks down, let’s give him a ride… No, fuck the judges. Let’s just go cruising. Let’s pick up anyone smart enough to want a ride.




Terrance Hayes is the author of four collections: Lightheaded (Penguin, 2010), Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006); Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), which won National Poetry Series; and Muscular Music (Carnegie Mellon University Press 2005, Tia Chucha Press, 1999), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has received many honors and awards for his poetry, including a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, two Best American Poetry selections, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife, the poet Yona Harvey, and their family.

Congratulations to Terrance Hayes
National Book Award Winner in Poetry for his collection, Lightheaded

Summer, Where Have You Gone?

The summer hiatus of ABOUTAWORD comes to an end this week. Look for guest posts this fall by Terrence Hayes, Kathy Fagan, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Cynthia Hogue, and more.

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.

Black Nature: Cave Canem at Notre Dame

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.

Colleen McKee, So You Want to Edit an Anthology?

When I took on the project of co-editing an anthology of personal narratives, Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak About Health Care in America, I said yes because it sounded cool (after all, I do like women), and it was a dreary blistering summer, and I was underemployed. I have an MFA in Creative Writing, and I read the magazines writers are supposed to read, but it was only after I edited the book that I realized I had never read or heard any advice on editing an anthology. Yet it can be a more time-consuming, complicated process than writing one’s own book. For me, it was worth it—I have made terrific, smart friends across the country because of readings. And there is no greater pleasure than to hear an audience laugh uproariously at a black-humored essay, or have women tell me that the book has helped them feel supported as they navigate their own health care labyrinths. Still it is work, a lot of work. So here are some tips for anyone considering editing a creative writing anthology:

1. Make sure you have the time for this and you really want to do it. The creative, fun part--reading amazing essays or poems or stories, and doing readings in front of captivated, sexy audiences who all want to take you out for drinks afterwards—that is a very small part of the work. Unless you can afford an assistant or two, you will spend tons of time doing clerical and sometimes unpleasant things such as mailing off reject slips, updating lists of contributors’ addresses, sending out forms requesting reprint rights, etc. Between soliciting work, editing it, seeking a publisher, editing and proofing again and again, then promoting of the book, count on working hard at this for four or five years. If you’re a teacher, that’s like adding one or two classes to every semester for four or five years.

2. Don’t expect to make money at this. Maybe if your book has cross-over appeal as a textbook, and is published by a company who chooses to promote the bejesus out of you. Then again, my book is selling as a textbook, and my publisher is pretty supportive. My book did make a profit the first year, which is unusual. I made $75. What about an advance, you may say? Many small presses do not do advances, and if they do, you may have to choose between using it to pay your contributors and paying yourself. I think writers should get paid. I used the money to pay each writer a small fee.

3. Do not be shy about promoting your anthology. Carry your business cards and promotional postcards around (if your publisher won’t have them made, get them made yourself). Carry a copy of your book wherever you go and be prepared to talk about it to everyone. If you are a woman, this is probably going to feel really egotistical and weird. If you need to, tell yourself you’re not doing it for you; you’re doing it for your contributors. And remember that while bookstores are great, they are not your only friends. My contributors and I have read at universities (where we might actually get paid), an anarchist bakery, a synagogue, an acupuncturist clinic, an older women’s political action group, a women’s studies conference, bars, and even a few bookstores.

4. Travel cheap and travel wide on book tour. If you live in the Midwestern U.S., the Northeastern U.S. or Canada, or England, consider planning your tour around the Megabus schedule, the super-cheap yet comfortable, reliable bus. Don’t feel bad about asking contributors if you can crash on their couches. You can ask your publisher to pay for this, but she probably doesn’t have the money to pay for any of it. So make a low-budget adventure out of it, and have fun.

5. I could say a lot more, but blogs are supposed to be short. Have questions? Email me.


B'shalom,
Colleen

Colleen McKee is co-editor of Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak About Health Care in America (Penultimate, 2008). She is also author of a collection of poetry about food and sex, My Hot Little Tomato (Cherry Pie, 2007). Her poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications such as Poetry Daily, Bellevue Literary Review, and Criminal Class Review. She will be reading memoir at the Meramec Writing Festival in St. Louis on Apr. 7th, and poetry at the Holiday Club in Chicago on Apr. 23rd. Colleen teaches English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. You may virtually visit her at colleenmckee.blogspot.com or email her at lilyofthegutter@yahoo.com.