Category Archives: Writer and Reader

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?)

Getting Unstuck


Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative hosts an online forum for contributors to weigh in on the question of the month. October’s topic was the ever-timely (or ever-untimely, depending on how you look at it) problem of writer’s block: How Do You Get Unstuck?  Some words of wisdom I found especially useful:


Arlene L. Mandell: “Hereʼs a radical idea: Perhaps itʼs all right to be stuck sometimes, not to be a busy little writing bee frantic for that next fuzzy morsel of pollen. Badly mixed metaphors like this one often come from the need to put something, anything, on the page.”


Harriet Gleeson: “The problem was possibly triggered when a respected mentor suggested that I could aim at a (first) chapbook using the theme Flight, the metaphor which has been winging its way into my work recently with no particular effort. The thought of publication was maybe too exciting — I started to WORK towards the chapbook perhaps — WORK the metaphor into my current piece, when what I needed to do was quit flapping and trust the thermals.

This time the problem hatched I realized that I had been trying to strangle words and images into the shape of the metaphor – deliberately setting out to write the content in terms of birds, flight, and other avian qualities. Sanity was further reinstated when I remembered that I do not need to pin every detail of the poem to the metaphor (indeed it would then be a poem about birds, I think). With this thought came relief. Immediately ways to proceed with the poem began to move in my consciousness.

The resulting feeling of relief led me to reflect on the experience and I remembered a quote from Jane Hirshfield: ‘A work of art defines itself into being, when we awaken into it and by it, when we are moved, altered, stirred. It feels as if we have done nothing, only given it a little time, a little space; some hairline narrow crack opens in the self, and there it is.'”


Susan Bono: “[N]o piece of writing is worth finishing if you already know what you want to say. Why pursue the obvious unless you’re convinced you’re God’s sacred messenger, bound to deliver your message under threat of torment and damnation? Writing demands a state of confusion, which leads to groping, which in turn leads to dead ends and getting stuck, time and time again. The whole point is finding your way out.”


Tamara Sellman: “[A] change of scenery and pace can unlock a lot of previously stuck doors. While digging dandelions out from underneath the arborvitae, a word might come to mind and spin off associations that lead to the solution I need to correct my plot’s course. If I were to drive across town, an image might suggest a new dimension for my setting. An overheard conversation at the market might reveal something about my character that I didn’t know before, something that would explain why he’s behaving oddly. The trick is to be open to possibilities for your story writing during all times of the day, not just during your writing time. This way, you are more likely to find that skeleton key that fits all your problem-solving needs. “


How have I gotten unstuck, at various points during the writing of my novel?

*Attended the Three-County Fair
*Watched inane movies about teenagers
*Listened to music that my characters enjoy, but I don’t
*Marched in a gay parade
*Read fashion magazines
*Spent the weekend in New York City
*Asked my characters what I should do next (the answer is usually “Please don’t kill me!”)

I doubt that this will be helpful to anyone else, but if you get any good advice from my characters, please let me know. Keep in mind that Prue is the only one with any sense.

Mark Levine Interviewed at jubilat


Mark Levine’s second poetry collection, Enola Gay, is on the short list of books that expanded my understanding of what poetry could do. His post-apocalyptic, enigmatic images make sense the way a door creaking in a horror film makes sense. You don’t have to know what’s behind there to realize it’s something scary; in fact, it’s scarier because your rational mind can’t define it. Some excerpts from poems in the book:

from Counting the Forests

…He was counting the forests. That was his plan.
He carried a sack of dried fish
prepared by his servant and cured
in sea-salt. His servant was near; he could hear
the rasp of his servant’s breath.
His servant was making the vigil in a mountain
somewhere in the ice-country; and the ice-country
   was vast
and blue and full of death-forms. So was the forest.

Here in the red forest: a forest of birds.
Birds and dark water and looming red leaves
brushed with murmuring voices.
They swept towards him, the voices, like
   tensed wings.
And he ran from them; but the red
forest was glazed and the trees were vast
with ice-forms. And at the edge of the red 
   forest
he could see into the stone forest and 
   could see

the voices rinsing over the stone floor.
He had been there already and had taken count.
And he had counted the animal forest and the
smoldering forest and the weeping forest and
   the forest
of the forgotten tropics and the God-forest.
What could he say to his accusers?
…

****
from Eclipse, Eclipse

…The law is coming, three battered islands hence;
the splash is coming, the radar is coming, the law
is coming wearing Mother’s private wig.

Comes a horseman, steady on the climb, a blade
against his thigh, a rumor on his spine.

Nearness is all. And the roots of the great tree
swayed in the heat, and the swollen seeds
struck the temple walls and left no stain.
Surely the great creeds could have warned us
to test the soil of nearby planets; our voices 
   plunged
like the voices of the gods’ outcast armies.
All of us wanted to take the steep walk back
into the memorial noise; feeling sick, not feverish.

A pencil in his glove and a shovel in his soul
and big plans for a secret farm: comes a horseman.

****

This year, Levine is back with a new collection, The Wilds. He was recently interviewed by Srikath Reddy in the literary journal jubilat, a piece that has been reprinted online at Poetry Daily. Some notable excerpts, below (boldface emphasis mine):

ML: It always surprises me (and sometimes worries me) to realize, long after the fact, how little aware I am—or how ill-informed I am—of what my preoccupations are when I’m writing, and how very partial is my understanding and command of what I’m saying….

It troubles me a bit that, as poets, we seem to be required to pretend that everything we put in poems emerges from a very supportable rationale. Maybe we’ve been successfully cowed by those who are hostile to poetry, and have internalized their suspicion that the whole thing is a sham, an elitist attempt to confound and mock the guileless reader. And so we apologetically, or pompously, give in to this rather recent expectation that artists are supposed to talk a good game about what they do. I’ll tell you, I once spent a week interviewing the skateboarder Tony Hawk—a bit before he became a multinational industry—and here’s what I liked best about him: great skateboarder, not great interview subject. Every time he got on his board it was magic; every time he opened his mouth it was, well, pretty ordinary stuff. His intelligence was thoroughly absorbed in what he did, and to him, talking about it was not only irrelevant—it was almost a violation of the spirit of his sport. This seems appropriate.

By now, I’ve spent enough time around young people who are trying to write poems to recognize the common anxiety, even embarrassment, at simply being a poet, rather than pretending to be a poet and an eager A-student rolled up into a single reasonable package. But why, with all the hand-wringing poetry talk out there—our own, no doubt, included—are there some matters that, it seems, are very rarely aired, even in the supposedly brasstacks environment of the poetry workshop? Embarrassing questions, like: How much do you know what your poem is about when you’re writing it? Do you know who is speaking? Do you know what the situation is? Do you know what your themes are? When you get right down to it: Do you know what is happening—what is going on—in your poem when you are writing it? I don’t know about you, Chicu, but I’d often be lying if I answered most of these questions in the affirmative. I don’t even want to be able to say “yes.” If I could, I’d wonder why I was writing a poem.

****

SR: …[W]hat I want to focus on is what you described as “that cusp of consciousness that a child is perched on,” and how it shapes your sense of what poetry is. That cusp of consciousness seems a lot like the threshold between knowing and uncertainty that Keats described as negative capability. And I’d agree enthusiastically that this cusp or threshold is the most productive space for a poet to inhabit. But lately I’ve also been worried that uncertainty lets one off the ethical hook—it lets one, as it were, refuse to grow up.

I guess my vague feelings of guilt about not speaking up more about the political situation over recent years has something to do with this. In the lead-up to the war, for instance, I felt uncertain about whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction tucked away somewhere in Mesopotamia (among many other things), and my general reluctance to forcefully decide matters for myself mirrored, I think, a broader failure of liberals to dissent from what our nation is perpetrating abroad. That’s a detour, I know, but what I’m getting at is a sense that there is a danger to uncertainty. I’m definitely not advocating a more political poetry—Lord knows I find most overtly political verse to be fairly unliterary—but I’m wondering what you think about the ethics of uncertainty as a poet writing today.

ML: I know what you’re saying, but the thought of assuming a certain kind of ethical responsibility in poems makes me bristle a bit. Do you remember when you were younger and some snide kid told you to “grow up”? I think I can still hear that voice. I hated that kid. What he was really saying was: Don’t be yourself. Don’t have an imagination. Behave. I’m just not interested in growing up in those ways.

(On the other hand, I already find myself mourning a certain kind of bygone communal maturity—the days when people could disagree about poetics and politics in respectful and civil ways, without needing to assault each other from the safety of their dreary blogs.) I was once on a little panel about some forgettable issue or other and one of the other members was an ambitious and quite accomplished young critic, a guy then under thirty, who complained that poets in America had lost the value of being “judicious and authoritative” in poems. I was taken aback. He struck me as one of those people in college who wears a bow tie and carries a pocket watch—as someone who has gotten overinvested in a certain model of “maturity.”

There may be a lot of things wrong with poetry—now and always—but the reluctance to speak with authority doesn’t seem to me to be one of them. In my mind, one of the services poets perform, intuitively, is to hold up the authority of poetic and imaginative tradition against other claims to authority. My suspicion is that the recurrent charge that poets are not sufficiently engaged is typically a symptom of one of two things: the right-wing interest in trivializing poetry and misplaced left-wing guilt. I’m not proposing a Peter Pan model of the poet, but my guess is that “not growing up”—if it constitutes a willingness to remain, as you say, “in mysteries, doubts, and uncertainties”—is much preferable—poetically, ethically, politically—to being prematurely pickled.

SR: So it’s this cusp of uncertainty that you somehow find to be both fundamentally poetic and fundamentally ethical?

ML: That cusp—I don’t know, I think the desire to be there must in part be temperamental. I like basketball games that go into overtime; overtime drives some people crazy. I don’t really care about how books or movies end. I like the unresolved. I’ve always been drawn to the moment “before”—the moment when you have a heightened awareness that you’re in the presence of something real, something meaningful, but when the meaning hasn’t yet been captured. To me, that’s the “intensest rendezvous.” In Bob Dylan’s terms, it’s the refrain of “Ballad of a Thin Man”: “Because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” That’s one reason that, for me, striving to write precise, deftly rendered imagery—material that conveys much more, through the senses, than can be expressed in other terms—is vital.

But I understand your uncertainty about uncertainty. (Your meta-uncertainty?) It’s something that the uncertain ones among us must grapple with. Doesn’t it come down to a question of the authenticity of our uncertainty? If uncertainty is a posture—something we adopt in an effort to make cool poems—it would, indeed, be frivolous. But true uncertainty is a beautiful thing. And my guess is that those (like Mister Bow Tie) who adopt the posture of certainty are far more dangerous, morally and politically—and of course artistically—than those who have fewer answers, less of an agenda to promote, and who try to use their work as a way of shedding a little light on the darkness.

My glib, reflexive take on this problem would be that of an aesthete: that the ethical task of a poet is to write as well as he can, as accurately, forthrightly, and courageously—to be as uncompromising as he can in relation to poetic truth. But that is a tall order, an ideal against which one always falls short. Also, of course, excellence is not value neutral: is the ethical task of a nuclear bomb maker to make the best bomb he can? Um, no. But in that case the problem is that the medium itself—nuclear bomb making—is morally corrupted from the start. Whereas I have cast my lot with those who believe that the poetic tradition is, at its height and in its impulse, noble, resistent, and self-scrutinizing. So, yeah, I think the world woul
d be a much better place if we all listened to each other the way poems listen to us.

****

ML: …Of course I’m aware that poems, like everything else made by human beings, are artificial, but I don’t believe that excludes poems from approaching authenticity, and partaking of it—as far as I’m concerned, poems routinely do that, and that’s a big reason that we read them. One thing that’s so moving about poems is that we know they are artificial, but still we invest them, and their materials, with the force of the real. We need to do this, because we need to feel the reality of our lives. When I write the word tree, I don’t just see a word or construct—I see a physical tree. And if I’m not being particularly lazy as a writer, I’m going to do more to specify the reality, the tree-ness, of that tree—not only as a way of writing a “nice” poem, but of specifying, and thereby sharing in, the reality of reality.

SR: So “no ideas but in things”?

ML: It’s easy to talk in abstract terms, which always makes me uncomfortable, because I’m drawn to the physical experience of poems, not their ideas. You asked whether, in reading poems, we can begin to distinguish between the appearance of authenticity and something that smacks of the real deal. Don’t you think we rely on being able to make that distinction, however provisionally? I have to believe it can be done. The poem makes a claim—”My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense,” for instance—and, after submerging ourselves in the poem, we can ask, “Do I feel the truth of the claim in the poem, or does it just seem like a convenient or clever thing to say? Does the poem, in its rhythms, syntax, imagery, and so forth, grapple with drowsiness, numbness, and pain, or not? Does the claim feel abstract or, as you say, ’embodied’?”

And how does one embody the experience of one’s poem? There must be as many ways as there are authentic poems (i.e., not that many). First off, I suppose, one believes in the reality of one’s own imaginative event. One orients oneself to a position inside the poem—one lives in and through the poem, rather than hovering above it, using it as a way to say something that makes one seem clever, or as a vehicle for producing nice poetic effects, which, once you’ve read enough poems, are not as rare or interesting as they might first appear. I’ve found, myself, that focusing, in particular, on imagery, has helped me to “feel” the poem by employing my (generally underused) senses, rather than trying to direct the poem with my often enfeebled brain.

****

ML: [On the painter Francis Bacon] … I love the way he deploys traditional values—of form, structure, line, color, modeling, and subject matter—to explore what he calls his “nervous system.” He also talks, in his interviews with David Sylvester, of using traditional techniques and materials of painting to capture, even trap, the real. Reality is the outcome of his process, not a known quantity that he enters his process wishing to depict.
That last sentence is going to be my new motto as a novelist. Read the full interview here.   

Lance Larsen Interviewed at Meridian


Award-winning poet Lance Larsen is the editor of Literature and Belief, the literary journal of Brigham Young University, where some of my poems have been privileged to appear. In this 2003 interview, he discusses writing and faith with Doug Talley at Meridian Magazine, a publication of Provo College in Utah. Highlights:


MERIDIAN: Do you see yourself as tending toward melancholy, and if so, why?

LARSEN: I don’t see myself as being melancholy, at least not unusually so. G.J. Nathan once said, “Show me an optimist and, almost without exception, I’ll show you a bad poet.” Why? Because bad poets don’t usually wade into trouble; they don’t dive. If the scriptures and classic literature can be trusted, and I think they can, only trouble is of much interest. At heart I’m a romantic—but a romantic who believes that visions aren’t worth much if they aren’t tested by everyday living.

****

MERIDIAN: …Do you, yourself, see the poems as largely autobiographical, or were you trying, instead, to speak from a persona, a fictionalized voice?

LARSEN: I love what Philip Levine says about this: “Why be yourself, if you can be someone interesting?” Like Levine, I’m always making things up in my poems. Exaggerating, telescoping, cutting and splicing.

****

MERIDIAN: Tell us how your faith, and anything about Mormon beliefs in particular, has influenced your poetry and your approach to your work.

LARSEN: At times I have written very directly about my Mormon experience. I’ve written at least four poems about the sacrament, a poem about collecting fast offerings, and poems about a church court, baptism, and a baptismal interview. More often, however, my poems are infused with my beliefs in a more subtle way. In a review of Erasable Walls, one reviewer refers to this belief as “the gravitational pull of the divine” one can feel “along the margins of the text.” Nicely put, I think. This is how most poetry makes its argument, through the back door, as it were. Not by pounding the pulpit, or lecturing, or proof texting from the scriptures.

Read the full interview and sample poems from Larsen’s collection Erasable Walls, a finalist for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, here.

Old and New Friends in Charlotte


We had a wonderful trip to Charlotte, NC this past week, where I read my prizewinning story at the monthly meeting of the Charlotte Writers’ Club. Many thanks to contest coordinator Annie Maier, president Richard Taylor (editor of the Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets), and other club officers for making me feel like a queen for a day. My tech-savvy but overworked husband made a video of the reading, which I will post here as soon as I can prevail upon him to extract it from the camcorder.

The featured speaker at the meeting was poet and novelist Karon Luddy, another past winner of the CWC’s short story contest, who read a touching and hilarious excerpt from her new book Spelldown. Set in a South Carolina mill town in 1969, this novel follows a quirky, brilliant adolescent girl who is determined to win a national spelling bee, while coping with her father’s alcoholism. I am looking forward to reading my signed copy.

Karon also read from her poetry book Wolf Heart and discussed how an author goes about choosing the right point of view for a story or poem. Her novel, for instance, was originally written in third-person past tense, but ended up in first-person present tense, because the heroine had such a strong personality that she wanted to tell her own story. Somehow my own novel has ended up with two first-person narrators, a third-person omniscient narrator, and poems by two other characters. Is this merely a sign that I can’t make up my mind, or am I the next Dos Passos? Time will tell.

The day after the reading, M. Scott Douglass gave us a tour of his one-man publishing operation, the esteemed poetry press Main Street Rag. Scott is a craftsman as well as a writer, taking as much pride in his skilled operation of precision machinery as in his literary achievements. He works hard to produce high-quality books at affordable prices. Some of my favorite MSR poetry books are Stacey Waite’s Love Poem to Androgyny , Richard Vargas’ McLife, and Anthony S. Abbott’s The Man Who. MSR runs several annual contests that are listed on their website; many runners-up are also published, more than is typical for a manuscript contest.

One Charlotte writer I didn’t have the chance to meet is John Amen, but this seems like a good time to put in another plug for his work, anyhow. He has a series of fine poems in the new issue of the e-zine Mannequin Envy. John edits The Pedestal Magazine, an online journal of art and literature.