Category Archives: Writer and Reader

Poet Steve Fellner on the Joys of Insignificance; Pat Strachan on When Not to Edit


Poet Kate Greenstreet blogs at Every Other Day, where she’s compiled an archive of over 100 interviews with contemporary poets about the road to first-book publication and how it changed their life (or not). I especially treasure these tongue-in-cheek words of wisdom from Steve Fellner, whose book Blind Date with Cavafy won the 2006 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize:


I had been sending my book out for many years, and I was crazy determined to get a book of poetry published. I got an MFA and PhD in creative writing. During all this time, I was sending out various incarnations of the book. No one wanted it. It was (and still is) an uneven book, but there were a lot of worse books out there, and I liked sending things out in the mail. Even when you get a rejection in the mail (and I got a zillion of them), it’s always fun to have opened the envelope. It’s like watching the Oscars. Even if the actor you love loses, you at least enjoy the spectacle.

I knew my book would never be accepted by a huge press, but I was completely comfortable with the idea of being insignificant. Still am. The world is nice that way: no one holds insignificance against you….

It’s hard to get readings when your book comes from a small press and you’re an insignificant writer. Again I don’t mean insignificant as pejorative. Most of us are. There’s comfort in being insignificant: you’re free to do what you want; no one is watching you. In fact, I want to write an essay, a meditation about the power and positive consequences of being insignificant. There’s so much pressure to matter in the literary community. This isn’t to say there shouldn’t be significant writers who win major awards, but aren’t there any other alternatives to aim for?

I have a friend who is a significant poet and he’s working on his second book. Occasionally, I’ve watched him work, and he is constantly looking at his first book when he writes poems for his second. He wants to make sure his new poems are as good as the first. If I were a significant poet, I would engage in this behavior. But I don’t, because no one is watching me, and as a result, I don’t need to watch myself as closely. To draw an analogy, if you are a beautiful person, the world expects you to leave your house looking attractive, well-groomed. If you’re a person like myself, no one cares if you leave the house wearing dirty socks or if you have a stain on your shirt. You’re free. Significant poets and beautiful people shoulder a great deal more responsibility than the rest of us.

Fellner also encourages authors not to lose confidence in their own vision, with one exception:


I also find it sad that I read so many young poets are constantly changing their manuscripts after not placing in a contest. When everything is so oversaturated and so many contests are run by committee, taking your losing to mean anything is dangerous. Having been a screener for contests, I can say that I’ve seen so many manuscripts look overlabored. You need to let go of your manuscript. There’s only so much you can do.

Unless you have a bad title. Here’s an embarrassing confession: for years I sent out my manuscript and never placed. I called it the dumbest, dullest things! Aesthetics of the Damned was one. Hoaxes and Scams was another.

As soon as I called it Blind Date with Cavafy (all the poems were basically the same ones that appeared under the other titles), I started being named a finalist. And I won pretty quick. After many, many years of bad titles. This is my theory: most screeners, most poets are insecure in making aesthetic judgments. The mention of Cavafy made it clear that I knew something about poetry. The humor of the phrase “blind date” juxtaposed with the literary allusion signaled I was a poet. I am very embarrassed to admit this, but I think it’s true. There’s so much out there, and most people are tentative, they need clues that they’re giving the right book the award. That isn’t to say this is why I won, but I did notice that I started making it past the initial rounds much more often. Choose a smart title. Most titles suck. They’re boring and pretentious and vague.

Read the whole interview and a sample poem from Fellner’s book here. Find out about Marsh Hawk Press’s contest and other new titles, and sign up for their e-newsletter, here.

On a related note, I was heartened by these comments from legendary editor Pat Strachan (formerly of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, now at Little, Brown) in an interview in the latest Poets & Writers:


Q: Do you have any sort of guiding philosophy that shapes your editing?

A: Not a guiding philosophy, but I do think it’s extremely dangerous to mess with a novel structurally, because it’s close to poetry in that it’s almost pure consciousness. The way it comes forth from the writer is the way it should probably be, even though maybe the beginning is unclear or not enough action happens in this part or whatever. With a literary book—I hate to say literary, but a piece of serious fiction that isn’t genre fiction—I try to stay away from structural suggestions because they can be very damaging. One big change can make the whole house of cards fall apart. So with literary fiction I really try to stick to line editing. I also think the less done the better, and I consider myself a fairly heavy editor. But I do as little as I can do, because a work of serious literature is a very fragile construction.

I personally have something of a schizophrenic relationship to editing. As the editor of the Winning Writers newsletter, one of my tasks is selecting subscriber poems to feature in our “critique corner” with revision suggestions and possible markets for their work. However, as a writer, I have always belonged to the Howard Roark school of aesthetics: I’d rather blow up the building than incorporate someone else’s changes to the blueprint.

This rugged individualism is harder for me to maintain now that I’ve shifted from poetry to the novel. I can see all sides of a poem, whereas a novel is too big for me to get my bearings. It’s the forest rather than the treehouse. So I’ve begun seeking out advice, both about my work-in-progress and about the craft of fiction generally, which often leaves me more confused than before. How do I know whether someone else is right? Sure, she’s a reader, but is she my reader? Would she naturally pick up the type of book I’m writing, if we didn’t know each other? On the other hand, if I’m more selective about whom I ask, aren’t I predetermining the result by seeking out people whose answers I can predict?

And so once again I find myself between the Scylla of legalism (must get the RIGHT ANSWER!) and the Charybdis of radical doubt.

Painted Prayerbook Sketches Journey of Faith

Artist Jan Richardson, whom I discovered through the Image Journal e-newsletter, blogs about faith and the creative process at The Painted Prayerbook. Her meditations on Bible readings from the Episcopal lectionary are accompanied by simple yet rich abstract paintings and collages that express her intuitive response to the text.

Recent posts that resonated with me include The Red Circle, about setting aside the ego in order to discern when your work is complete; and Transfiguration Sunday: Mum’s the Word (Maybe), where Richardson asks how the artist knows when, and in what medium, to tell a story that is important to her:

…In the absence of being able to build physical dwellings, the disciples would have wanted, I suspect, to construct a story about their mountaintop experience: a container of words, at least, that would help them hold and convey what had happened to Jesus and to themselves. Perhaps anticipating this, Jesus enjoins them not to tell what has transpired until after his resurrection. It’s one of the only times that Jesus, a man of action, urges them to wait. This is not for revealing, he tells them; this is for you to carry within you, to ponder, to conceal until the fullness of time.

Perhaps like Mary with the child in her womb.

It was important that Peter, James, and John have that mountaintop experience. It wasn’t important for them to tell the story, not yet; that wasn’t the point of their outing. But the experience would work on them, shape them, and continue to transform and perhaps even transfigure them. The knowledge they carried would alter every future encounter: with Jesus, with their fellow disciples, and with those to whom they ministered.

The story of the Transfiguration calls me to remember that there are times for revealing and times for concealing. There are seasons to tell our story. And there are seasons to hold the story within us so that we can absorb it, reflect on it, and let it (and us) grow into a form that will foster the telling.

As a writer and artist and preacher, I don’t claim to handle that line between revelation and concealment with consistent finesse. But I’ve figured out that one of the core questions in discerning whether to share an experience is this: Whom does the story serve? Does my telling it help you reflect on your life and how God is stirring within it? Or does it merely provide information I think you should know about my own life because I hope it will impress you and induce a response that serves me more than it does you?

How do you discern what and where to share about your life? Whom do your stories serve? Do you have a story of transformation that could help someone else? Is it time to tell it? Is there work that God still needs to do within you so that you can tell the story in the way it needs telling? Whether revealing or concealing, how are you continuing to become a dwelling for the presence of the God who transforms us?

Back from AWP: Preliminary Report


My husband and I returned yesterday from three action-packed days at the AWP literary conference in New York City, the largest annual event for poetry publishers, literary journals and university presses. We handed out hundreds – maybe thousands! – of Winning Writers contest flyers, hung around with editors from our favorite magazines, and picked up numerous books that I’ll be blogging about over the next few weeks. (Especially if I give up computer solitaire for Lent.) Some highlights:


Rebecca Wolff from the experimental poetry publisher Fence Books plied us with fortune cookies containing fabulous prizes (I won a free subscription to their journal), but their handsomely designed books needed nothing to sweeten the deal.  After picking up Ariana Reines’ The Cow, winner of their 2006 Alberta Prize, I went back to Rebecca the next day and said, “I just want to stand here and tell everyone to buy this book, it redefines what poetry should do!” I mean, check this out:


from “Knocker”

Acres of wishes inside her. Any liver. To harden the gut. Boys rinse their arms in what falls from my carotid. My body is the opposite of my body when they hang me up by my hind legs. I mean the opposite thing. Not a wall with windows in it and flaglets of laundry waving or being so easy to mouth his so-thick. Sloes and divorcing her miserable eyes from the rumor they stir up in me. Everything on the planet is diverted.

Worse is less bloody pussies to lick. Everything good’s an animal.
…

Meanwhile, the Ayn Rand Institute had deployed two young, cheerful people in nice suits to advertise their very lucrative essay contests for high school and college students. I commended them for establishing a beachhead in what had to be an unfriendly environment, populated as it was by thousands of liberal academic types who were cranky from long restroom lines and inferior tuna sandwiches. I bought The Art of Fiction, a compilation of Rand’s lectures on writing techniques, which will either clear away my plot problems like Howard Roark blowing up an ugly building, or crush me with guilt because my process is so irrational.

As research for the aforementioned novel, I attended three different panels on gay literature, where I got to hear Reginald Shepherd say “buttfucking” and met the sublime Carl Phillips, who expressed a refreshing impatience with the constraints of identity politics. On a more serious note, Shepherd’s recent autobiographical essay in Poets & Writers resonated so deeply with me that I purchased his latest nonfiction collection, Orpheus in the Bronx.

Other writers whose work I intend to explore as a result of this conference are Brian Teare, Marcia Slatkin, Jeffrey Harrison, and Gregg Shapiro. I picked up the latter’s book Protection at the Gival Press table, where I was also directed to the literary journal Bloom: Queer Fiction, Art, Poetry and More.


The biggest idea I took away from AWP was “permission to speak”. This concept came up several times during a panel honoring feminist poet-theologian Alicia Ostriker. The panelists were talking about how Ostriker recovered women’s voices in the Bible and led the way for women poets to write about our own experience. For me this week, the permission I needed was to write outside my experience, to take on the voices of characters outside my own gender, sexuality, values and personality, without feeling afraid that I was appropriating someone else’s culture or being “inaccurate”. Even on panels defined by that old PC trilogy of race, class and gender, it seemed that the defensive fiefdoms of the 1990s had given way to a celebration of cross-pollination and role-playing.

Paradoxically, another benefit of this experience was a new permission to be myself, as in not comparing my writing to anyone else’s. I came away with a notion of “talent” capacious enough to include Reines’ furious, scatological, disintegrating prose-poems, Phillips’ finely crafted, melancholy lyrics, and Rand’s rationalist polemics and potboiler plots.

Just remember the cautionary words of Ed Ochester: “There are many mansions in the world of poetry, but some of them are McMansions.”

Prison Poems by “Conway”: “Trapdoor” Revised and Others


My pen pal “Conway”, who is serving 25-to-life in California state prison for receiving stolen goods, returns this month with a revised version of “Trapdoor” and other new poems. I’m enjoying the surreal turn that his work has taken, as he feels a greater freedom to make associative leaps and use imagery rather than explanation to convey emotions.

Trapdoor

All the eyes that have groped–
    invoked, these melted sands,
        us trees in the snow, reaching out
for warm lights brightness
    instead, suffocated by whiteness.

The Sun only dissolved the black asphalt
    melted its pain, in vain
        reflecting on this concrete
crumbling, like stale crackers.

All these faces tied together on the same chain
    vacantly staring out
        of a teasing television’s lens

A world of opportunity offered, taunted
    without scents, glints
        but never relents.

A cliche “so close yet so far away”;

This distant world’s condemned
    by icy wind, forgetting its place
        in the prison’s pecking order;
Seasons listening for prompts.

Still, the only real sounds offered
    will turn into useless static
        untuneable noise we avoid.

Paranoid, of a despicable crowd’s opinion,
    wonder, about thunder’s irrelevance.

When the Earth falls open
    to swallow your soul;
Then, like a trapdoor spider
    closes back up
        to hide the hole…

********


Memorial

This nostalgic promise retraced
is still yours, till the end of time
yours was, to always be mine
those cold feet at night
disturbing our warm bed so fine
recollect the crash
shielding your face with mine
reminisce, we missed a sign
I won’t forget my distress
watching you bringing
our bonded blood into this world
howling–kicking & screaming
make note: who made you a mother
we awoke in love with each other.

Now summon the silence: (when I fell)
when I landed in jail
this slow dragging Hell.
I carry you still, I always will
that crept up on me
like a whisper instead
I conceived my widow, before I was dead

memorizing it all, I had no one to call
no one to talk with, cushion this fall
the stillness complied too
it almost implied nothing of you
except
A tragedy like that
has not happened yet
I’m still alive, besides so are you
these shackles they try to disguise
just might catch our lords eyes
then trust the true light to come shining on through.

still, I can promise you this
we will never regret a kiss
your name on my breath, forget
my voice as it dies in the wind
an authentic heart
can never pretend, or
dishonor fate’s dividend…


********

Failure

A Guitar string breaks
        slakes away the note
    Picks this translation
weak inspiration coils up like a snake
        ready to strike out
            fangs on the concertina
slice razor sharp through the flesh
        this song being sung
            on those broken dreams
    hungry schemes of fate
shake off the silver strands empty music
            surrounds the silence
        counting another approach
when wounded strings fail to sing…

Poetry Roundup: Huntington, Luddy, Hecht


Some poetry collections that have recently come across my desk:

Cynthia Huntington’s The Radiant has been on my must-read list ever since a poem from this collection, “The Rapture”, made the rounds on my poetry listserv. (It’s reproduced on the website of Four Way Books, which awarded Huntington their Levis Poetry Prize in 2003.) The book is well-named because a sublime light pierces through her treatment of even the darkest subjects, as in “The Rapture”, describing the seizure that heralded the onset of her multiple sclerosis:


I remember standing in the kitchen, stirring bones for soup,
and in that moment, I became another person.

It was an early spring evening, the air California mild.
Outside, the eucalyptus was bowing compulsively

over the neighbor’s motor home parked in the driveway.
The street was quiet for once, and all the windows were open.

Then my right arm tingled, a flutter started under the skin.
Fire charged down the nerve of my leg; my scalp exploded

in pricks of light. I shuddered and felt like laughing;
it was exhilarating as an earthquake. A city on fire

after an earthquake.
…

A lover’s betrayal is another of the book’s main storylines. Here, she is equally at ease flinging visceral curses at the other woman (“I want to throw stones at her mother’s corpse,/send her children to name-change foster homes”) and depicting the austere beauty of the Cape Cod coastline where she goes to face down her solitude. The latter theme connects the luminous poems in the first section, “On the Atlantic”, where pain and peace somehow coexist in concise verses whose every word feels bought at a great price. From “Vale”:


This vale of tears, this world…
As in: the valley of the shadow
of death, the cloud, the fall,
the unknowing. As when he said
“I’ve had another life”
and his face was lit with escape.

This world is where we die:
place of gardens and fires,
water carried up from streams.
Water carves itself a home
in the lowest place. Can only rest
when there is nowhere to fall.
…

There is no easy hope here, and yet The Radiant is anything but despairing. Though stylistically more accessible, it reminded me of Katie Ford’s Deposition, one of my favorite poetry books, which is similarly haunted by an ineffable God who is sensed through absence and obedient suffering. In “Hades”, Huntington writes that God made the dog “Stunned by desire,/mistaking the vastness /of his hunger for a taste/of the eternal”:


It’s always the same,
so awkwardly sad,
how they stare at you
when you’re making dinner
or having tea and reach
for a biscuit–how they’re
transfixed with wanting.
“It’s not the real God,”
you tell them, “not the food
of this earth.”
But they don’t believe you,
and are not saved,
and that is why a dog
is set to snatch and growl
at shades, starving forever
before the dismal gates.

My only criticism of Huntington is that she sometimes falls too much in love with her own best lines, repeating them more than once in the same poem. Some writers like to do this to give free verse more structure, but I find that it usually dilutes the effect of the line in question, making it seem like a clever prepared remark rather than a spontaneous outcry compelled by the emotions of the poem. The illusion of unguardedness is important to maintain, however much we know that poems this good are the product of careful craft.

****

Wolf Heart is North Carolina author Karon Luddy’s first poetry collection. By turns sassy, nostalgic, heartbreaking and wise, these poems cover some of the same territory as her hilarious and moving young-adult novel Spelldown, about an irrepressible adolescent girl whose love of learning provides an escape from small-town poverty and her father’s alcoholism. As a writer who works in both genres, I found it instructive to see how new facets of the same events were revealed, depending on whether the narrator was the young girl, masking her vulnerability in sarcastic down-home prose, or the mature woman poet, able to assemble the fragments of memory into a clear-sighted yet compassionate picture of a troubled family.

Luddy’s poetic style is simple and straightforward, but she has a gift for apt phrases, folksy yet with a sting. For instance, in “What They Didn’t Cure”, about her father’s hospitalization for pneumonia, she selects a few key details to expose both personal and class-based tensions:

…Has he been crazy like that before? the doctor asked.
No, but he drinks an awful lot, Mama said,
then hung her head
like a little girl who’d been
caught killing a kitten.

Delirium tremens–the doctor pronounced
as if he’d solved the riddle of the Sphinx.
A week later, pneumonia cured,
they discharged my father, his eyes shining like
black marbles he’d won from the Devil.

****

I really wanted to love Jennifer Michael Hecht’s new poetry collection, Funny. Her first collection, The Next Ancient World, came out from Tupelo Press around the time of the 9/11 attacks, and brilliantly anticipated the disorientation of a late-stage empire waking up to the news that its historical moment would pass away like all others before it. For Hecht, a historian and philosopher, humor is always connected to its cognate, humility. As she explains in Funny‘s concluding theoretical essay (which is worth the cover price all by itself), comedy generally arises from someone else’s lack of self-knowledge. Something is funny because we, the outsiders, see the absurdity of a situation that the participants are dead serious about.

In this sense, humor can be a leveling political force, similar to the study of history. To show that ideas have a history, as Nietzsche did in The Genealogy of Morals, is to make formerly self-evident truths appear contingent, and thereby open up space for other ideologies. Hecht’s most recent nonfiction book, The Happiness Myth, applies this genial skepticism to various conceptions of the good life from ancient times to the present. (This book is so well-written that she nearly persuaded me to get high and march in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, which suggests that the Athenians had a point about the dangers of philosophy.)

Funny is a high-concept book that unfortunately didn’t animate its theoretical skeleton to my satisfaction. I loved the premise: each poem is an extended riff on a somewhat corny joke, imagining back-stories for the characters and exploring what their predicament reveals about human alienation and mortality. I bought the book on the strength of “Hat Trick”, one of the best in the collection, which I read on The Cortlandt Review website. Other favorites in this book were “A Little Mumba” and “Chicken Pig”. Too many of the poems, though, were not as tightly written, feeling more like scattered notes for a philosophy lecture, without an emotional investment in the characters.

I wonder whether Hecht has fallen prey to a type of spiritual exhaustion that I’ve seen in writers who look too long at death without forging a connection to the transcendent. It’s the same mood that darkens absurdist-philosophical comedies like Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life or Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide series, as well as the later works of poets Stephen Dobyns and Mark Strand. Perhaps “life as cosmic joke” falls flat by Hecht’s own standards because a godless universe has no outside vantage point from which we can laugh at our own short-sightedness on earth. There’s no possibility of getting outside, no larger context to shrink our agonies down to scale. Without the Divine, perhaps there can be no Comedy.

Remembering Dorothy L. Sayers


Mystery writer and Christian apologist Dorothy L. Sayers died on this date in 1957, and is commemorated in a very informative thumbnail bio at The Daily Office. More reflections on her work can be found at the blog Dead Christians Society.

Her 1940 lecture “Creed or Chaos?” is a bracing rebuke to “enlightened” Westerners who would like to have religious sentiment without doctrinal clarity. As later postmodern critics of liberalism were to point out, everyone has a creed, a set of core beliefs about the nature of humanity and the universe, on which we base our political, ethical and economic choices. The historical context of her speech — Europe facing the rising Nazi threat — reminds us how high the stakes can be. Sayers argues:

While there is a superficial consensus about the ethics of behaviour, we can easily persuade ourselves that the underlying dogma is immaterial. We can, as we cheerfully say, “agree to differ.” “Never mind about theology,” we observe in kindly tones, “if we just go on being brotherly to one another it doesn’t matter what we believe about God.” We are so accustomed to this idea that we are not perturbed by the man who demands: “If I do not believe in the fatherhood of God, why should I believe in the brotherhood of man?” That, we think, is an interesting point of view, but it is only talk — a subject for quiet after-dinner discussion. But if the man goes on to translate his point of view into action, then, to our horror and surprise, the foundations of society are violently shaken, the crust of morality that looked so solid splits apart, and we see that it was only a thin bridge over an abyss in which two dogmas, incompatible as fire and water, are seething explosively together.

In this sense, militant atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have more in common with Sayers than with liberal-relativist Christians. They understand that religious doctrines have life-or-death consequences, though they disagree about what those are. (This theme was dramatized in G.K. Chesterton’s The Ball and the Cross, about an atheist and a Catholic who propose to duel to the death, and instead become fast friends because no one else they encounter even understands why the issue is worth dying for.)

Here is Sayers on the Incarnation, also from “Creed or Chaos”:

It is quite useless to say that it doesn’t matter particularly who or what Christ was or by what authority He did those things, and that even if He was only a man, He was a very nice man and we ought to live by his principles: for that is merely Humanism, and if the “average man” in Germany chooses to think that Hitler is a nicer sort of man with still more attractive principles, the Christian Humanist has no answer to make.

It is not true at all that dogma is “hopelessly irrelevant” to the life and thought of the average man. What is true is that ministers of the Christian religion often assert that it is, present it for consideration as though it were, and, in fact, by their faulty exposition of it make it so. The central dogma of the Incarnation is that by which relevance stands or falls. If Christ was only man, then He is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; if He is only God, then He is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life. It is, in the strictest sense, necessary to the salvation of relevance that a man should believe rightly the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Unless he believes rightly, there is not the faintest reason why he should believe at all.

Finally, visit the archives of conservative webzine The View from the Core for more pithy quotes from Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker and other works.

More Thoughts on the Prose-Poem


In the latest issue of Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry, my friend Ellen LaFleche reflects on how the prose-poem genre, occupying a space that is betwixt and between, can be especially fruitful for exploring the identity disruptions produced by illness:


I experience diabetes as a disease that lives on and between boundaries. For example, the person newly diagnosed with diabetes is told that they have “control” over the disease process. Achieving this “control” involves a difficult regime of diet, exercise, self-education, glucose monitoring, frequent labwork, and numerous visits to specialists. But diabetes is also a progressive disease, a reality that even the most dedicated diabetic cannot change. And even someone with tight control over their blood glucose levels can experience complications. So the idea of “control” is both a reality and an illusion. Some experts claim that diabetes can even be “reversed” with various dietary supplements such as cinnamon capsules or fenugreek seeds. These did not work for me, and I had to struggle with feelings of guilt over not being able to miraculously reverse my illness. Perhaps the most confusing boundary was when a specialist told me that I could be a “healthy person with an illness.” What did that mean? Was I ill, or healthy? Or both? Can a person be both ill and healthy at the same time?…

I had written and published four prose poems before I realized how strongly I had tapped into my unconscious feelings about illness. All of the fairy tale characters were struggling with some form of disability or illness. In my first prose poem, Rapunzel has suffered a stroke (a possible complication of diabetes.) (“Rapunzel Recovers from a Stroke”, Patchwork Journal, online here) She cannot speak, so she spits fire at the nurse who wants to cut off her archetypal long hair. Rapunzel’s hair is her power. I realize now that this poem helped me to prepare myself for a possible future complication. Yes, I will spit fire at any person who tries to take away any part of my power or dignity.

In “Identity Theft”, (Silkworm, 2007) Rumpelstiltskin experiences rage at his situation. He has been promised the queen’s firstborn son – he did, after all, save the queen’s life by spinning straw into gold. But the queen refuses to honor her side of the bargain. She deceives him by stealing his identity. Rumpelstiltskin has lost control – something that I deeply fear as a try to manage my illness – and he feels justifiable anger. He splits in half, “a kind of split personality.” Only after seeing this prose poem in print did I realize that the words “split personality” reflect my struggles over the daily duality of control vs. non-control, over the strange duality of illness vs. health.
Ellen’s poetry appears in this issue of Wordgathering, along with African poets Tendai Mwanaka and Omosun Sylvester, and other well-known names.

I used to tell people that I was a poet because I had too short an attention span to write prose. (So how did I end up writing two novels at the same time?) At the Poets.org site, Lynn Emanuel’s entertaining, edgy prose-poem “The Politics of Narrative: Why I Am a Poet” echoes this sentiment:


…And then he smiled. And that smile was a gas station on a dark night. And as wearying as all the rest of it. I am many things, but dumb isn’t one of them. And here is where I say to Jill, “I just can’t go on.” I mean, how we get from the smile into the bedroom, how it all happens, and what all happens, just bores me. I am a concep- tual storyteller. In fact, I’m a conceptual liver. I prefer the cookbook to the actual meal. Feeling bores me. That’s why I write poetry. In poetry you just give the instructions to the reader and say, “Reader, you go on from here.” And what I like about poetry is its readers, because those are giving people. I mean, those are people you can trust to get the job done. They pull their own weight. If I had to have someone at my back in a dark alley, I’d want it to be a poetry reader. They’re not like some people, who maybe do it right if you tell them, “Put this foot down, and now put that one in front of the other, button your coat, wipe your nose.”

So, really, I do it for the readers who work hard and, I feel, deserve something better than they’re used to getting. I do it for the working stiff. And I write for people, like myself, who are just tired of the trickle-down theory where some- body spends pages and pages on some fat book where every- thing including the draperies, which happen to be burnt orange, are described, and, further, are some metaphor for something. And this whole boggy waste trickles down to the reader in the form of a little burp of feeling. God, I hate prose. I think the average reader likes ideas.
…
Read the whole piece here.

Poemeleon Prose-Poem Issue Now Online

 

Online literary journal Poemeleon has just released its latest issue, which is devoted to the prose-poem. In addition to poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Christina Lovin, Eve Rivkah, Cecilia Woloch, yours truly, and many others, Ann E. Michael contributes a thought-provoking essay about typography as a conveyor of meaning.


Poetry has been represented through the typographic art for several centuries; but until recently, few poets have spent much time considering how typography affects the form of the poem. After all, the printed page seems “merely” physical, inanimate, without the breath, rhythm and music that vivify the poem in performance (even if the reader performs it silently, while reading). The printed page has traditionally been the realm of the editor or designer, not the poet who is more accustomed, perhaps, to confrontations with the blank page. But now that we can, essentially, typeset our work as we compose, poets are becoming more aware of how margins, line spaces, and tabular settings can be indicators in the work and alter the form in which the poem is presented—can animate it further. I think prose poets, in particular, could discover in typography a tool with which to push this flexible form in interesting directions.

In verse, a good poem is more effective with its line breaks intact. Even lacking line breaks, the form will peek out from the justified margins because the rhythm, the rhyme, the breath is imbedded. A verse-poem’s line operates on rhythm (and, when read aloud, breath) foremost, with phrasal pacing as a sort of minor premise. With prose, semantic pacing, and the sentence as a unit, have the upper hand. Pacing and rhythm are dependent upon syllabic stress, word choice, sentence length, punctuation, and line breaks, which act as visual cues. In prose poems, the writer/editor’s choice of margins on the page may also be used as visual cues.

With prose poetry, perhaps even more than with free verse, because the formal structure is not on the surface, traditionalist detractors may assume that the form is a thoughtless free-for-all. Prose poetry removes the familiar cues of rhyme, meter and line breaks that tell us “this is a poem”. Like abstract painting, this can foreground other aspects of the artist’s materials that we formerly overlooked. Though it risks becoming gimmicky (a flaw I find in much “concrete poetry”), creative typography can illuminate the significance of the visual choices we make when writing and reading.

Aficionados of the prose poem can read more examples and essays on the subject in the journal Double Room.

Christina Lovin: “Coal Country”


I.
What I can’t remember, and what I can:
my mother washing coal dust from the necks
of Mason jars filled with last summer’s jams
and vegetables, their lids and rings black
with grit, contents obscured then visible
beneath the touch of a damp flannel rag
she wiped across hand-printed labels,
then dipped again into an enamel pan
where gray water settled from suds to silt.
Those cloths were always discarded, never
used for dishes again, deemed unfit
for the kitchen. Fifty years are over
now: I’ve known sullied cloth and family:
how some stains never wash out completely.

II.
Some stains never wash out completely,
but my mother’s mother, Mary, would scrub
worn work camisas for the soiled but neatly
oiled and pompadoured Mexican railroad-
tie men who came to coal country laying
the wooden ties two thousand to the mile.
Boiled in lye, bleach in the wash and bluing
in the rinse, the shirts emerged starkly white
and innocent as angels. But these iron horsemen
of the Apocalypse, bearing spikes and crosses
for coal and cattle, carried pestilence
with them in that Spring of early losses-
my grandfather dead of flu in ’17-
not knowing the damage that would be done.

III.
Not knowing the damage that could be done
we swam in the bright green lake of caustic
water. We thought it daring fun to plunge
beneath the foamy surface, opalescent
with chemicals that oozed unseen from dull
slag heaps: gray hillocks of thick detritus
left from the processing of newly-mined coal.
Knox County was blessed with bituminous
veins, cursed with the scars of its retrieval.
By the sixties, production had slowed down
to a handful of mines that were viable:
the older underground shafts abandoned,
while strip mining left the once-lush landscape stark,
rusted hoppers spilled coal beside old tracks.

IV.
Railroad hoppers spilled coal beside new tracks
as my mother, at ten, scurried along
the crisply graveled rail bed, packing sacks
of burlap with the fuel that had fallen
from overfilled cars. On her lucky days,
the bags grew heavy quickly and no snow
fell across the hills or, ankle-deep, lay
filling up the trackside ditches below,
where the tiny tank town of Appleton,
Illinois, lay crammed into the valley.
And sometimes, when the weak winter sun
grew thin as gruel from a caboose galley,
kind wind-burned men climbed atop the coal cars
and the black heat was gently handed down to her

V.
This was how the black heat was handled: First,
the topsoil was peeled back by bulldozers
and piled aside for reclamation. Burst
through with draglines, the veins lying closer
to the surface were fractured, making it
easy to scoop the coal from the ground.
Crushed and separated, refined for what-
ever use it was destined: fine powder
for the power plant at Havana, coke
for steel, stoker coal for industry, egg and lump
for the furnaces of homes. Shale, sandstone,
pyrite-impurities-were hauled away and dumped
like wasted lives: what helps and what hinders
and what remains: dead ash and cold cinders.

VI.
And this is what remained: dead ash and cold cinders,
carried in an old coal hod to the driveway,
dumped in the low places. Rusty clinkers
of stony matter fused together by
the great heat of what warmed our little home
on sharp winter mornings. And in summer
the sunlight spiked off the marcasite nodes:
jewels that scraped and stung, lodging under
the skin of my shins and knees when I fell
from my bike to the cinders and gravel.
White scars remain to remind and foretell:
the last delivery truck of T.O. Miles;
shadows filling empty corners of the coal
room: one small, high window like a square halo.

VII.
One small, high window with a square halo
of light around the ill-fitting metal door:
coal lumps heaped up the walls. Dust billowed
through the air, covering the worn brick floor,
my father’s tools stored inside for the winter,
and the many shelves of calming jars, contours
soft beneath a veil of dull black. Heat sent
rising through the grates above and the roar
of the ancient furnace were a living
pulse to which we pressed our ears and bodies,
until the natural gas lines reached us, ending
our affair with coal. But like lost love’s memories
swept clean, damp days a dark stench still rises and chokes
with what I can remember, and what I won’t.


Copyright 2006 by Christina Lovin. Reprinted by permission.

Christina’s poem has won numerous prizes, which should come as no surprise. Most recently, it was awarded the “Best of the Best” prize from the online journal Triplopia, a contest for poems that have already won first prizes in other contests. Triplopia editor Tracy Koretsky’s commentary on “Coal Country” is a model of how poetry critiques should be written, full of insights into poetic form, prosody, and layers of meaning. Read the commentary and Tracy’s interview with Christina here.

What? You haven’t bought Tracy’s novel Ropeless yet? What’s the matter with you? Go here now.

Makoto Fujimura on Jesus and Monsters


Acclaimed visual artist Makoto Fujimura shares some profound insights about resisting the cultural imperative to choose between religious faith and the unfettered artistic imagination, in this article from Implications, the online journal of the Trinity Forum. Highlights:


If you are an artist, you know you are seen as out of the mainstream, as avant-garde, but you also have been treated like a misfit or patronized like a child. You struggle to find meaning and significance in that gap between the two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. “Grow up and do something useful for society!” The world seems to place them in opposition, pitting Innocence against the reality of the Experience. Artists are caught between being able to have that curiosity, inquisitiveness, and emboldened sense of discovery of a child and the reality of the “adult world,” a reality that forces us to realize that we all indeed live in fear, in a ground zero of some kind or another. In our conversation to create a world that ought to be, we must start at that zero point of devastation.

In a recent Fresh Air broadcast with Guillermo Del Toro, Terry Gross interviews the writer/director of Pan’s Labyrinth. A remarkable film. It is not what you would call a family film, but as a kind of Narnia for adults it delves deeply into the mystery of redemption within the cruel setting of the Spanish civil war.

Terry Gross interviewed Del Toro about his upbringing, in which his strict Catholic grandmother tried to exorcize him twice because he was drawing monsters. He was forbidden to imagine a fantasy world. That was his “ground zero.” So he grew up having to bifurcate his moral sense of duty to his family, and his growing imagination. He was lead to believe that he could not have both imagination and religion, that the two worlds could not be reconciled: so he chose to journey on the path of imagination, leaving religion behind him.

Some of us identify with Del Toro, thoroughly. We feel that the church has tried to “exorcise” us of our imagination. Del Toro states “I invited Jesus into my heart as a young child . . . but then I invited monsters into my heart.”

International Arts Movement exists for this type of wrestling of faith, culture, and humanity. It starts with the admission that living and creating in ground zero means you live with both Jesus and monsters.

Wrestling in this way, we give ourselves permission to ask deeper questions. What if the monsters do take over? That would be a concern of parents for their children. That may be our current cultural condition of fear. But I think the situation is reversed: monsters have already taken over in reality, and the only hope we have is to imaginatively work backwards. We are to take charge of the situation, and we mediate both the sinister and the good. Just like in Pan’s Labyrinth, we need to know we have a greater inheritance waiting for us.

Some have called the twenty-first century the “Creative Age.” Phil Hanes, philanthropist and arts advocate, at a recent National Council on the Arts meeting, began a discussion on how we need to prepare ourselves as a nation to address this shift. Richard Florida, Thomas Friedman, Daniel Pink and others have noted similar shifts in culture: The Information Age is behind us, and yet we, in America, are educating our children to thrive in that past. The skills and knowledge for Information Age are now outsourced, but we are ill equipped to lead in the age of imagination, the age of synthesis.

While a hard term to define, the Creative Age will certainly mean one thing: we would have to reconcile living with both Jesus and monsters in our imaginative territories. We have to reconsider the artist’s role in society, in our education of our children; and we need to redefine how we see ourselves, all of us, as creative human beings who need art in our lives so that we can preserve a child’s innocence in the midst of horror and unspeakable evil, and help them to prosper and thrive in the creative age.

Read the whole article here. On a related note, the Internet Monk says “Bring it on!” to movies like “The Golden Compass”, the upcoming adaptation of the first book in Philip Pullman’s atheist fantasy trilogy for young adults (i.e., the anti-Narnia):


I’m firmly in the camp of Chesterton on this one. The more the atheist talks, the more Christianity makes sense to me. When I listen to atheists describe their noble vision of existence in an absurd and meaningless world where their firm and rational grasp on reality can give meaning to all of us who walk the aisle to becoming “Brights,” I’m so grateful for the doctrine of total depravity I could write an entire musical about it….

Atheism has been around for a long time. It’s going be around for a long time to come. It’s going to make more documentaries. It’s going to have more best-sellers. I’m sure it will have its own reality show on MTV. Your kids are going hear from atheist friends, professors and employers. They are going to be a lot less reluctant to portray Christians as a threat to peace and civil society than they were in the past.

You need to get ready for the “new atheism” to become a factor in every facet of our culture. We won’t get ready for that if we protest The Golden Compass or the twenty atheist-friendly Hollywood products that are coming soon to a theater near you.

No, it’s time to love your enemy. (Atheists aren’t the enemy anyway. It’s time we quit falling for every panic monger who wants to tell us that some group wants to “attack the family” or “take away our rights.” It’s not true most of the time, and when it is, Jesus had plenty to say about the blessings of being persecuted.) It’s time to find ways for the light to shine winsomely. It’s time to be a servant for Jesus’ sake. It’s time to give a reason for the hope that is in us. It’s time to turn and face the atheist challenge and not protest, run away or declare war.

Atheism has a powerful appeal when Christians aren’t well taught, honest and engaged. Its message can be potent when you’ve lived like a rabbit instead of a watchman or a witness. Many of the Christians warning us of “Atheists Ahead!” may be afraid their own faith couldn’t survive reading Sam Harris’s book. Atheists make dozens of challenges to Christianity and Christians that are MUCH NEEDED and LONG OVERDUE for consideration in many Christian circles.

If that is the case, then I say buy the atheist nearest you a good dinner, because he/she is doing us all a favor by challenging that house of cards we’re so afraid might get blown over. Remember this: when the atheist finishes making his presentation to my students, they’ve just learned that it makes no difference what they do. It’s all a matter of chemicals hitting the brain anyway, and it goes no deeper. When I finish my presentation, there’s a reason to go to class, to study, to pass, to graduate, to do something with your life and even to continue on with hope if you fail. The atheist says eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. I say remember your creator in the days of your youth, because he will bring all things into judgment.

My talk sounds a lot better when they’ve heard his/hers. Don’t forget that.

(I for one would love to see a musical about total depravity. Perhaps starring Nathan Lane as Martin Luther?)