Conscience, community, purity: Salesses, Hong, Galbraith, and Hamid

Speaking of fan-fic, pandemic, virtual schooling, balancing need for income with all the other attention the world asks of us, I’ve been reading many things I want to share but don’t have time to edit for submission. That is why I love this Five Things trope that Summer Brennan shared on her writer’s blog:

Back in the olden days of writing on the Internet, a group of writers I knew would often write brief essays or nonfiction blog posts structured around a list of “five things.” These “things” were usually observations, thoughts, confessions, referrals, or investigations. Each thing could be many paragraphs, or just one short sentence. I don’t know who originated the form. It might have been adapted from the fanfic trope of the same name, which goes back to the early 1980s, in which five scenes are presented from a story or relationship. It may also have come from LiveJournal blogs of the early 2000s, out of which emerged a popular type of entry called “five things make a post.” Or it may have developed separately, a kind of writerly convergent evolution, a carcinization of words, like how different animals keep independently evolving into the shape of crabs, over and over again in the dark depths of the seas. Creatures forged by the same environmental pressures. Regardless of where it came from, I found it to be a good way of getting thoughts down. There seems to be something about the number five that helps to give a satisfying structure, at least to the writer, if not to the reader. As I find my way back into regular online writing, I’ll be using it again here.

And I’m going to borrow it in the coming weeks… I’m going to leave lots of 5 things related to writing, poetry, intellectual “history,” nostalgia, longing, all the usual obsessions torqued to the key of pandemic-time. Or lack of time. A staggering lack of time even for night owls like me.

Starting with 5 things on conscience, community, and purity, everyone’s favorite afternoon topic, a space where I am working through thoughts and readings rather than constructing a theory or a position or following logic into some fantastic eschatology that mankind can use to justify the disappearance of Others.

1. The untenability of individual choice

“...the word conscience had gone out of ordinary use--it was not carried in newspapers, books, or in the schools, since its function had been taken over...by 'class feeling'. Kindness became something to be ashamed of..."
- Nazdheza Mandelstam's memoir, Hope Against Hope

Sometimes power looks like writing a poem that speaks into the space of damning others while ignoring how we live with the blood on our own hands. In Solzhenitsyn's Gulag, each prisoner confronts the choice of survival--how far will you go to preserve your own life? Often the choice is posed between losing one's life and losing one's conscience.

But we are all guilty. As women of the Confederacy were guilty, though they could not vote or exercise political power, we are all guilty of the crimes the US commits in the world. No nostalgia releases us from that. What I’m interested in, however, is the site where guilt and notions of purity converge.

2. Matt Salesses’ doppelganger

I had been trapped by language ever since I thought it could save me.
- Matthew Salesses, Disappear, Doppelganger, Disappear

I think we hear the confluence of purity-trangressions in the voices of many cross-national adoptions, in differing pitches, valences, and degrees. In this novel, we see the disinheritances of assimilationist. The narrator reflects on the early death of his parents which led him to be adopted. Communication remains the most difficult thing for a Korean adopted by American parents. The narrator mixes their ashes together and throws them off a hill, remembering how they tried to fit in with local Chinese. His parents had been sure they would start life again with a triumphant return to their homeland but they died instead. We were as restless as regret.

And: I wanted us to get free of what we wanted-- his parents wanting a return and yet being thrown off a hill in a way they wouldn't have wanted.

Salesses refers to Korean belief that sleeping with a fan can kill you, and how this shocked is American daughter. How our homeland beliefs can be seen as ignorance. It is the alienation—the part where I remember being mocked for putting a hat over my toddler’s ears—of how traditions (read superstitions) are rendered impure, or situate one outside the shared knowledge of magic America.

To feel present, I think, is to experience other people sharing your experience.

And the narrator’s daughter, saying “ I envy you for feeling nostalgic about yourself when you were never that great to begin with.” The link between envy and nostalgia. Or, more broadly:

How memory fools desire. You slowly forget what is gone but never stop feeling its absence.

In one of several interviews with Megan Galbraith (whose own The Guild of the Infant Savior: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book is coming out this summer, which I anticipate) , Salesses mentions the English language's structural role in -isms, how "English grammar prioritizes subject and action over object and description (read: observation) - the idea that writers shouldn't use adjectives or write a 'passive sentence'." He uses jokes, puns, wordplay to subvert these priorities. Borrowed from Murakami how the protagonist has a very particular view of reality that others find outrageous, and conflict comes from reconciling existence. 

The value we put on speaking up, on being heard and seen, can become a way of disapproving of the margins of the margins....The value of visibility depends on how we are visible and to whom and why.

This feels like a good argument against tokenism. The Iowa-style workshop functions best for poets who are writing into popular spaces, or accessible ones that rely on majority cultures and language. We believe that everything is political - that the poem is political – and yet our workshops assume that silence is respect and good sportsmanship rather than time wasted as people try to figure out the meaning of a word they could never have encountered. Beth Nyugen: "..a  system that relies on silencing and skewed power and endurance is a terrible system." Or just a capitalist one.

3. Traitor to what, per when

I needed to write this book because as a mongrelized person, I feel personally threatened when everybody around me is seeking purity and certainty. I wrote the book I needed. The same impulse has guided me in these twenty odd years of writing; the audience has always been secondary. So many of us become writers because we need for certain books to exist that no one else is writing; especially, those of us who have migrated or have been dislocated. If you need a book to exist badly enough, you’ll write it. People who talk about writing, but never do, are not literally dying for that book’s existence; if they did, they would have written it.

- Mohsin Hamid in an interview about “denuding purity” with Guernica

For Mohsin Hamid, fiction exists as an imperative which makes space for his own existence; it is a vehicle for "denuding false myths of national purity," a realm outside the ordinary tropes of migration, the false linearity of journeys, the subtexts of "fake purity." 

Is there such a thing as true purity? Isn't all purity a performance of a posture evoking something? 

Posture is a pose that suits the clothes. We select based on what we plan to feel, perform. Anything on Sunday might turn opera—baroque, roccoco—whatever it takes to appear suitable, depending on the day's construction of what it means to be authentically american or romanian or southern or southwestern or post-soviet etc.

To the extent that identity aims towards certainty - towards the security of belonging - it constructs itself in hope of the unattainable. Jiayong Fan's essay, "How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda", reveals how the use of one's voice, the effort to speak oneself true, is complicated by the uses of others. She describes a "Jiyang Fan" created by Chinese trolls and nationalists who rebuked her American citizenship, "even though her body flows with Chinese blood-- the blood of the descendants of the yellow Emperor.." Fan's crime is that of turning her back on her motherland - of rejecting her primary loyalty by leaving and seeking a new mother. 

The entire notion of a traitor is a crime based on impurity and infidelity. The traitor is one who lacks loyalty, maintains multiple allegiances, refuses to choose one side in the stadium or spectacle of nationalisms. But betrayal is also intimate: Fan's mother calls her a "traitor" at fifteen, after reading her diary, discovering that her betrayal involved repudiating her Mother's rage, her fury at living a second-hand life, her exhaustion. "It's reductive to compare a mother with a motherland" -  and yet the immigrant mother embodies the motherland, it's customs and ways, it's recipes, it's superstition, it's language, it's folklore, its history, it's great mystery, its promise of safety.

4. Cathy Park Hong’s minor feelings

"Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way whites see you...."
- Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings

Trauma in the Asian-American diaspora is related both to sites of rupture and sites of erasure. Reading Cathy Park Hong, thinking how Asianness is related to the Eastern desire to be seen as European, to be made Western. The tension between being colonized by Russia or by.... Asian Americans who have assimilated often forsake the connection to the actual nation or country that created them. Asian is default racial marker, per US needs, an americanist construction. This guilt I feel when reaching towards my Romanianness, or mentioning that Russia, too, is a colonizer of nations, and communism swallowed countries and languages. But the ignorance of dominant american ideologies relies on the privilege of using immigrants as agitprop, positioning them against the countries they fled, celebrating each individual as a triumph of assimilationist bootstrap rubrics. O america: where we cannot conceive a trauma that doesn't resemble our own.

Poet Prageeta Sharma said Americans have no expiration date on race the way they do for grief, and they expect you to get over it. Hong cites then in her discussion of the publishers' low tolerance for ethnic stories that aren't americanzied by trauma. For Hong, to grade looks on "a pain scale" automatically creates a market for pain which quickly evolves into an edifice, a hierarchy, a structure of ascendance. Competing over pain is the americanist in a country where we still cringe if others glimpse our scars. 

I keep thinking of the Pixies song and how they tame us, how they cookie us, how the cutting part is shaped as part of the baking process, and then ask us to sell the tool of our submission. To be a beautiful cookie on the empire’s plate.

5. The never-fumble pose of founding fathers

To exonerate Mao, much of the violence was blamed on his wife, Jiang Qing, and three other radicals, who came to be known as the Gang of Four.
- Barbara Demick, "China's Rebel Historians"

While I’m not certain about the totality of Demick’s review, I suspect that many dictatorships have something in common, namely the stake placed on the purity of the founding father, in this case, Mao Zedong, whose Cultural Revolution changed what patriarchy permitted to so many men, starting in 1966 and ending with Mao's death in 1976. About 1.5 million humans died during this event – and this is only negligible if one subscribes to a racism which believes Chinese lives are somehow smaller and less significant or real than other lives, somehow acculturated to this loss.

A tinny leitmotif of founding-father-worship exists across many nations, including the US, where teachers regularly use the words “Declaration of Independence” without irony to describe the founding of a state built from the lives of slaves and erasure of Native tribes and First Peoples. Perhaps one must Jefferson the halls. One must Che the men and blame the women. One must Mao the national landscape. One must put a bullet in Rosa Luxembourg to make space for Stalin. One must subscribe to the power articulated and institutionalized by cults of personality that center men.

Alternately, one may find an Elena Ceausescu to blame for the actions of the Nicolae Ceausescu—a fairly popular take in the Romanian emigre community, where women are easier to demolish, easier to indict for the lack of nurture, the heartache, the messy house, the cold soup, the failed coup.

In "The Art of Being Guilty in the Politics of Resistance: Depoliticizing Trangression”, Boris Buden notes that any firm opposition of us/them must be constructed, since it is hard to create distances under capitalism. Post-colonial world is saturated with diasporas – and post-colonial hybridity is read different ways, by liberals as positive multiculturalism and by others as a force of emancipatory subversion. There is no happy fusion because hybridization "prevents identity's attempt to constitute itself essentially" and be established without contradictions.

The goal is for "transgressive transculturation" to alter the binary nature of cultural power relations by melting the borders, for it is these borderlands between established identities which create the "lines of exclusion and subjugation". But "hybrid resistance must not become a secure space of retreat for those in revolt, an illusionary space of an original innocence". 

If you have a car you aren't innocent, I repeat to all friends who have buried the ghosts of what their ancestors did to others in distant lands—if you are alive, your past is haunted by what others have done in your name, which is to say your gas-guzzling lifestyle, your cheap revolutionary t-shirt (a product of capitalist branding), your national self-esteem and exceptionalist billboard.

One must reckon with this presence—in the present—on the page.

Or else find a wife to blame for the whole edifice….

Poetry and music: The dialogue

The sense of the line

Listening to my son practice piano has changed my sense of the poetic line. I think the ear and the mind can both discover poetry techniques from music composition. 

In a 1931 lecture, composer Arnold Schoenberg credited Mozart with teaching him "the art of unequal phrase lengths," or "the art of creating secondary ideas." From Bach, he learned "the art of inventing groups of notes such that they provide their own accompaniment" and "the art of creating the whole from a single kernel," namely the 12-tone revolution that develops from a single kernel that is both melody and accompaniment. 

Musical forms enacting structural return and improv

And once again it was June—mild, long, slowly fading evenings, evenings promising so much that no matter what you do with them, you always receive the impression of defeat, of wasted time. Nobody knows the best way to get through them. March straight ahead or maybe sit at home before a wide-open window so that the warm air, saturated in the sounds of summer, may permeate the room and mingle with books, ideas, metaphors, with our breath. No, but that’s not right either, it’s not possible. You can only mourn them, those unending evenings, mourn them when they pass, as the days grow shorter. They can’t be seized. Perhaps these long June evenings can only be perceived by way of regret, remembrance, nostalgia. They can’t be plumbed: you’d need to head for the park, one foot in front of the other, while sitting simultaneously on the terrace and listening to the voices of the city fall still as the last blackbirds sing … But that won’t do either. Birdsong has no form, no adagio, no allegro. In a detailed study of music, a certain philosopher once observed that “nightingales don’t listen to other nightingales sing,” only somewhat exalted people do. Hence you can only tear yourself away when you get bored (let’s be honest here). Whereas a musical composition, subject to the discipline of form, forestalls the moment of our boredom.

Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration

Music is described as a form enacting return—structural return that relies on reprise, repetition, patterns, memory of earlier notes and melodies. A piece often begins with a statement and then returns later as ‘recapitulation,’ but with a different texture—the texture of evoking what has come before it. The bridge, or transition, mediates—to quote Daniel Berenbeim—the transition determines not only itself but what comes after it. 

This repetition and accumulation are made possible by hearing—where poetic language amplifies the valences through connotation and poetic language. To repeat a word in a poem is to attract others, to collect the dust a word gathers across time and line. I am thinking of the way mom said my name….. and how this changes on the page across stanzas.

In “Singing With the Taxi Driver: From Bollywood to Babylon,” Jay Prosser describes using music as “ a channel for returning forgotten pasts” as he writes the memoir of his mother’s family. Producing the memoir replicates Berenbeim’s composition strategy as Prosser begins with mother’s statement and then recapitulates it, which can reconfigure her self-concept and mediate “what comes after.” Where the eye distinguishes and discerns, the ear blends and connects—but what makes music so hard to express in words is what makes it such a fantastic vehicle for emotional life.  

Black poet Michael S. Harper borrows "black jazz man's improvisational worldview" and assumption that what he creates in the particular could be an accident, an improv, a reaction. See his poem "Corrected Review." Harper takes the artist's responsibility as activating, listening for the shifts and energizing the line through improvisation, thus moving the music forward. The improvisational worldview centers contingency while also building upon prior lines and riffs—it upcycles fragments.

First music & memories of displacement: From Teju Cole to Transtromer

The satisfaction, the pleasure, the comfort one takes in these poems comes from the way they seem to have preëxisted us. Or perhaps, to put it another way, the magic lies in their ability to present aspects of our selves long buried under manners, culture, and language. The poems remember us and, if we are perfectly still, give us a chance to catch sight of ourselves.

Teju Cole, “Miracle Speech: The Poetry of Tomas Transtromer”

The ear has a 7 month advance on the eye in fetal development. The oceanic rolling of a womb is the first lull. The first music is always a memory of displacement. Music has a way of reinhabiting the lost homeland, the songs they carried: doinas.

As we begin in a womb, my thoughts on music and poetry return to an essay by Teju Cole—an essay which incubates, still, in my mind—where he describes his affinities, the lyres to which he returns, again and again, in fascination: Bach, Arvo Part and Tomas Transtromer.

In "C Major", Tomas Transtromer's narrator leaves his lover with the first snow:

Winter had come
while they were making love.

And the streets are altered by the joy: "All things around him on the way toward the note C."

In "Allegro", the narrator ends a "black day" by playing Haydn. And the sound changes the mind as the player shoves his hands into his "hadynpockets" and raises his "haydnflag" and language expands to hold the transformative power of music.

In notes to The Great Enigma, translator Robin Fulton approaches Transtromer's "lifelong interest in poems whose growth parallels musical development", and how this works as theme and variation in his poetry. Transtromer himself points to "The Journey's Formulae" as a "bagatelle, five lines perhaps.... terribly important." 

“Symmetry with deviation”

I see plants as slow-motion spontaneous gestures. They’re working according to a pattern, but they also have some spontaneity in how they grow. People who write about beauty often talk about symmetry being hardwired into our preferences. That’s not wrong, but symmetry by itself gets boring. What’s exciting, what’s pleasurable, is symmetry with deviation. And the fractal development of plants is endlessly attractive to me—the way they repeat themselves on different scales. It’s like music.

Rae Armantrout. Interview with Brian Reed, "The Art of Poetry, No. 106" Paris Review, Issue 231, Winter 2019

Jim Whiteside's fugues held loss together, or borrow the formal repetition of the fugue to recreate a sort of dialogue in motion. I thought about Mahler’s 5th Symphony played on a blade of grass when I reviewed Whiteside’s chapbook last year, and how he begins the book with a fugue.

In Latin (and in my homeland), the verb fuga means to run. Whiteside’s poems use running as a form of poetic motion, a movement that is both lyrical and essential to the questions of queer identity in many southern states.

Sometimes, the memory of him playing
runs backwards. The notes leave the room, return
to the end of his instrument, back to his body.

I also thought about Paul Celan's disruption of the fugue as a form, or rekindling of its nature in running to reconstruct the inability to run, the helplessness of Jews during the Shoah. The death fugue is one that cannot run. It begins, tries again, and falters. In Romania, it wasn’t even a fugue—it was titled as a “Tango”….

My forthcoming collection, Dor, uses the traditional music form of the doina to score dor for the voice, to render it as cross-temporal vocalization, an intimate localization.

The refrain and the lyric’s infinite “I”

Of feeling unattached to tense or personhood, Mark Strand says "it exists in an overriding infinity, out of time but responsive to time." I’m thinking of the word "Now" at the beginning of a line. And the lyric poem as one which "manifests musical properties, but one intended to be read or spoken, not sung." The tension in the lyric form links itself to musicality while holding it away, refusing it. 

Lorrie Moore suggested that "every marriage needs a refrain" when written. I think marriage is one of the most dangerous thickets to enter in a poem. A refrain can be ice or flame or countless spaces on the spectrum between two dissimilar states of matter, two separate objects. But maybe we aren't quite objects--maybe the poem exists to reveal how each of us is their own epiphany.

And passion is impossible to sustain as refrain. Someone has to die. Someone must Juliet the scene. On passion, I am mute. Only grief is as intense and consuming as sexual passion. Only grief can match the desperate pitch of that emotional climate. Since both love and loss occupied epics as well as elegies—since these forms are some of the earliest vessels for poetry—the role of the chorus and refrain tangles in questions of what our species needs from sound. The lullaby that soothes a child to sleep.

The planned obsolescence of American grief.

Planned obsolescence

Defining grief is an American industry. Each culture has its codes and conventions for mourning. American culture invokes a planned obsolescence when it comes to grief. We are expected to move on quickly and get back to work, back to shopping, back to life. But for the human, a definition of grief is nothing more than an external limit of what is expressed. 

Emily Rapp devotes a chapter of her memoirs to a grief list, a simple listing of things that "Grief is:", including "Sudden clatter of sunlight everywhere." Rapp observes there is no hierarchy of suffering in grief or love, no floor or no ceiling, since "loss is not quantifiable." There is no measure and therefore no appropriate form in which to box grief. Loss is imminent in its immanence. Loss has no teleology, no goal or end point. 

Complicated grief & camellias

When one's longing for the dead lasts longer than a calendar year, the therapist may consider a diagnosis of complicated grief. I learned this from a therapist.

For a few months, in the second year of my mother's death, I paid $120 for each hour spent in the Febreze-inflected office of a highly-recommended therapist. I paid this money in order to talk about dying, losing, the gray bird, the ring, the terrible fuschia of camellia petals swallowing the stairs. 

"This is a classic case of complicated grief," she announced.

When I asked her, quite wondrously, what uncomplicated grief looked like, the therapist replied: "Oh that's just the word we use for medical coding so we can prescribe medications and make sure the patient doesn't continue any habits of self-harm."

But what are habits of self-harm?

The therapist smiled and assured me I wasn't quite there yet, although "not being happy can be a form of self-harm."

This struck me as a very americanist perspective.

She said it wasn't American; it was science; it was the cutting-edge of new diagnoses in grief-adjacent maladaptations.

Still worried about the bird, I told the therapist that the pressure to perform happiness was like a bulldozer clear-cutting the soul and smothering the sun. I told her the cult of positivity was brutish, beastly, and overly focused on consumption. I told her what I believe--and what poets have helped me to inhabit--namely, that happiness is happenstance. It is a happening. It is a surprise rather than a goal or achievement. Chen-Chen said Sara Ahmed said that--and I believe them. 

The therapist repeated her assertion that being sad is "maladaptive" and "not a good example for your children, who need very much for their mother to be mature about the loss of a mother." 

I asked if her mother was living. She said yes but--

I opened my eyes very wide to increase the effect of rolling them. I expressed the un-science of opinion in that her words seemed intolerant, unfortunate, and bland. Maybe the pressure to fake happiness is a form of living death. It's no coincidence zombie dreams are on the rise. Faking happiness is not innocent or generous--it is not innocuous--those are merely the looping justifications parroted by insta-culture and self-help studs. 

[Of course—during all this—I kept worrying if I was upsetting my therapist, or if I was inconveniencing her by being unlikable and not responding to treatment or being compliant or….. Each time these thoughts wandered through my head, I remembered how much money had between transacted between us, how much money she received to listen, smile, and pick a sticker to paste on my face. Was my job to affirm her? Was my job to make her feel good about doing her job, even though the work she was doing felt harmful? Everything from the You Can Climb This Mountain posters to the coffee mug rimmed with images of laughing children felt so flimsy in that room, in that office of therapeutic amaze-balls.

And isn't it amazing--if you stop to think--how incredibly reckless and loathsome we can be in our performance of Happy? It's a status symbol in the emotion economy. The bleached smile as a means of keeping up with the Joneses.' And isn't it terrible how the performance of happiness cuts you off from yourself, and makes it more difficult to experience or recognize authentic happiness when it arrives?

I told my therapist that faking happiness was like faking an orgasm--after a while, you can't tell the real thing from the performance of it. After a while, you can't tell the feeling apart from its objectification as a product one delivers to others. 

My therapist's face stiffened into an uncomfortable smile. She insisted that faking orgasms was a sensible strategy when a woman didn't really feel like having sex. 

I stopped seeing this therapist because the poet in me knows what the human in me hopes, and that is: not having sex is the most sensible thing to do when you don't feel like having sex. 

And grieving is what you do for a long time after death.

*

I forgive myself—in advance in continuum—the failure to score progress marks in therapy.

I forgive myself, as I forgive my therapist her insularity, her narrow vision, her overwrought posters.

Anna Akhmatova once said to Joseph Brodsky, "You do not know just what you've been forgiven," and he treasured these words like a talisman.

I, too, know so little about the distance between the roof and the nimbus named Death.

Notes on erasures

(inspired by Jason Myer’s tweet)

Erasure | əˈrāSHər |: a form wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains

I’m posting the links to the craft essays, reviews, and articles without citing them because time is a limited resource, and also, because there is something formally interesting in setting writers’ thoughts on a form in conversation.

SOLMAZ SHARIF: “Erasure means obliteration.
The Latin root of obliteration (ob- against and lit(t)era letter) means the striking out of text.
Poetic erasure means the striking out of text.
Poetic erasure has yet to advance historically.
Historically, the striking out of text is the root of obliterating peoples.”

WILL CORDEIRO: “Kenneth Goldsmith argues that we don't need writers anymore, we need information processors (whether people or machines) who can navigate, rearrange, and index the overflowing cache of digital bits that already exists. For Goldsmith, there's a surfeit in the textual economy, with clickbait and automated systems generating hordes of new gobbledygook on auto-pilot. His solution is for us literati to switch focus from content to context. What matters isn't what a piece says but what we can say about it, he claims. The process of composition is more important than its results. Documents don't need to be glossed and interpreted; they need only to be interpolated and glazed.”

KATY DIDDEN: “I have worked on other erasures—in all cases, like this current project, they were collaborations with visual artists. I worked with my cousin, erasing texts about land in New York, from passages about the Algonquin tribe, to Whitman on the early Dutch presence in Brooklyn, to articles advocating for establishing tent cities on vacant land. These are also meant to reveal forgotten or violent histories in the settling of land and claiming of territory.”

NICK LANTZ: “I realized that the poem would itself be an interrogation, an almost abusive litany of questions. Though the poem of course reads against the backdrop our recent torture scandals and debates, its surreal turns free it of any particular time and place. The interrogator-protagonist who took shape ultimately interested me not for reasons of political ideology but for the way in which he exemplifies how even when we are privy to the most clandestine recesses of human behavior, we are still fundamentally shut out of true knowledge. No matter how many "questions" we ask, we cannot know everything.”

CECILY PARKS: “In an act of ultimate erasure, Dickinson asked that her poems be burned when she died. If you believe that Dickinson’s effacements were a noncompulsory, though not uncomplicated, choice, then the fact that her request was not granted—the poems were published—can seem like a further effacement, an excision made with a very sharp blade.”

SRIKANTH REDDY: “I then deleted language from the book, like a government censor blacking out words in a letter from an internal dissident.”

ISOBEL O’HARE: “I don't conceal the original words and allow them to sit beside the ones I've chosen to highlight, in greyed-out text.”

M. NOURBESE PHILIP: “Physically manipulating the text helped me in the process over the long run: the very fact of physically mutilating the text broke the spell that the completed text has on us. I use the word “mutilate” with great deliberation here since I was deeply aware at the time I worked on Zong! that the intent of the transatlantic slave trade was to mutilate—languages, cultures, people, communities and histories—in the effort of a great capitalist enterprise. And I would argue that erasure is intrinsic to colonial and imperial projects. It’s an erasure that continues up to the present.”

SRIKANTH REDDY: “Erasure is really, to me, a technique that orients one toward questions of word order. You have to find a sequence of words in the source text that works as a sentence of your own. So I’ve come to pay a lot more attention to grammatical construction, as a result of my work with erasure.”

TRAVIS MACDONALD: “The anarchist in me says: there are no rules or boundaries that should not be broken on principle. The author in me, admittedly, bristles at that notion and insists, intuitively, that there is no form without rules to define it. In any case, it is clear to me that if there are rules to this game, they are still being written. That being the case, I would say that the need for attribution lies entirely within the judgment of each erasurist’s individual moral code. In fact, the only rule I can think of worth following would be that the work should understand it’s own code/form and abide by it at all costs.”

DAVID DODD LEE: “….linearly, left to right, though on occasion I broke my own rules, and in such cases I might find a letter I needed to create a word in the line above the one I had just appropriated. This sometimes happened subconsciously. But I failed the erasure test. This became partly what Sky Booths is all about. I wanted so badly to create poems that would stand on their own I cheated.”

SRIKANTH REDDY: “I decided to close up the spaces between words in my erasure as a way of “covering my tracks.” I wanted to erasure the traces of my own erasure, I suppose. On one level, this was just a kind of Borgesian game—I wanted my reader to slowly discover that he or she was reading an erasure as they made their way through the book. But on another level I think there’s a politics behind those sorts of decisions.”

JANET HOLMES: “When my second book came out, appropriating portions of a diary my father wrote in the 1920s, an elder poet came up to me and dismissively said, “I suppose all we need to do now to write poems is to steal someone else’s writing.” It was an expression of the same kind of feeling: real poetry has no sources. That elder poet’s work is largely dependent upon classical mythology, but somehow that does not, in his mind, diminish it. Erasure work brings up questions like this and gives us a perspective from which to discuss them.”

ANGEL GARCIA: “Unlike erasing and black redaction, erasure using blank space allows us to create and converse with our own experiences. Around and inside those blank spaces we can reclaim and reappropriate. In the seemingly simple act of taking back the language of harm, from the language of harm, poets of color are able to make and insert new narra- tives of resilience. In this way, erasure too, becomes a form of code-switching with all its historical connotations. Erasure is language translated and retranslated. It makes meaning new. In this new language—code-switched (but not coded)—we are allowed to resist by expressing dissent. We are able to dismantle and deconstruct the official language. From the legacies of trauma, we can find power. Erasure is an assertion of that power. Erasure is recovery. Erasure is resistance. Erasure is resilience.”

JEANNIE VANASCO: “Why erase the works of other writers? The philosophical answer is that poets, as Wordsworth defines them, are “affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.” The more practical answer: compared to writing, erasing feels easy.
But I am here to convince you: to erase is to write, style is the consequence of a writer’s omissions, and the writer is always plural. 
To erase is to leave something else behind.”

Erasures

“Reaching Guantamo” by Solmaz Sharif”

“The Dickinson Composites Series” by Jen Bervin

“Misdirection” by David Dodd Lee

“Declaration” by Tracy K. Smith

“Watershed” by Tracy K. Smith

“Archaeology, p. 28” by Vanessa Place

“Self-Portrait as the Bootblack in Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple” by Robin Coste Lewis

“Lesson VIII: Map of North America” by Elizabeth Bradfield

“St. Mary’s Home for Unwed Mothers in Otahuhu, Auckland” by Chloe Honum

by Nicole Sealey

“Poem In Which Words Have Been Left Out” by Charles Jensen

“Lines on a skull” by Ravi Shankar

Nonce erasure of Wikipedia English page by Wikipedia

Videos + Lectures

Mary Ruefle “On Erasure: Visual and Textual”

Robin Coste Lewis “The Race Within Erasure”

Erasure Prompts + Exercises

1. “Erasure & Revision Exercise: Dear __________” from Emilia Phillips

2. “Erasure & Revision Exercise: Love Poem Lost” from Emilia Phillips

3. “Illuminated Erasure Exercise” from B.J. Best and C. Cobusta

Writers on the legacy of Walt Whitman

At some point, most American kids will read a poem by Walt Whitman. For some, especially those living in small, rural towns, reading Whitman will open new doors, enabling them to inhabit their queerness, to repudiate heteronormativity in this country’s history.

Countless poets will discover their line, their formal permission, in Whitman’s odes. In 1961, James Wright will note that his poetry is drawing closer to Walt Whitman's - "using parallelism not as device of repetition but as an occasion for development" of vision, images proliferating from the one. Which is to say the song-like preacher voice of Whitman is being challenged or reconceived as a different sort of development, something other than a sonic device.

But anyone who reads and loves Whitman will eventually grapple with his legacy, or wander into his correspondence (available online). What follows is a brief (ongoing) compendium of brilliant writers who approach this in their own words, from their own angles.

Abdel-Moneim Ramadan, “Walt Whitman and Me: Notes on a Poetic Education”

Alexandre Ferrere, “Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg: A Story of Influences”

Alicia Ostriker, “Loving America and the Problem of Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Allen Ginsburg, “Taking a Walk Through Leaves of Grass”

Andrew Lawson, Walt Whitman & the Class Struggle (PDF)

Ann Waldman, “The I Is Another”

Bethany Schneider, “Whitman’s Cane: Disability, Prosthesis, and Whitman’s Leaning Pose”

D. Graham Burnett, “Out From Behind This Mask”

D. H. Lawrence, “Whitman” chapter from Studies in Classical American Literature

David Baker, “Elegy and Eros: Configuring Grief”

David Eberly, “A Serpent In the Grass: Reading Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara” (PDF)

David S. Wallace, “Why Should I Venerate?’ Walt Whitman at 200”

Don James McLaughlin, “Walt Whitman’s Gift”

CAConrad, “From Whitman to Walmart”

Eddie S. Glaude Jr., “The Magician’s Serpent: Race and the Tragedy of American Democracy” (PDF)

Eric Savoy, “Reading Gay America: Walt Whitman, Henry James, and the Politics of Reception” (PDF)

Galway Kinnell, “Strong is your hold: My Encounters with Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Gay Wilson Allen & Ed Folsom, ed. Walt Whitman & the World (PDF) excellent resource on how non-american author have read Whitman in their own words & essays

George B. Hutchinson, “Langston Hughes and the ‘Other’ Whitman” (PDF)

George Santayana, “Walt Whitman: A Dialogue”

Gregory Woods, “Still On My Lips: Walt Whitman in Britain” (PDF)

Jeremy Lybarger, “Walt Whitman’s Boys”

Jericho Brown, “If God Is Love”

Joann P. Krieg, A Whitman Chronology (PDF)

Jose Marti, “El Poeta Walt Whitman” (PDF in Spanish)

Jorge Luis Borges, “Walt Whitman, Poet of Democracy”

June Jordan, “For the Sake of People’s Poetry”

Kazim Ali, “Reflections on Walt Whitman at 200”

Kenneth M. Price, “Love, War, and Revision in Whitman’s Blue Book” (PDF)

Kenneth M. Price, “Whitman in Blackface”

Kenneth M. Price, “Edith Wharton and the Problem of Whitmanian Comradeship”

Kenneth M. Price, “Transatlantic Homoerotic Whitman”

Kenneth M. Price, “Xenophobia, Religious Intolerance, and Whitman's Storybook Democracy”

Kenneth M. Price, “Passing, Fluidity, and American Identities”

Khaled Mattawa, “Whitman’s Democratic Vistas”

Langston Hughes, “The Ceaseless Rings of Walt Whitman”

Lavelle Porter, “Should Walt Whitman Be #Cancelled?”

Lina Gregerson, “The Self in the Poem: Walt Whitman in Washington”

Marina Irena Ramalho de Sousa Santos, “Atlantic Poets: ‘Discovery’ As Metaphor & Ideology” (PDF)

Mark Doty, “Our Sly Progenitor: Revisiting Walt Whitman”

Mark Edmondson, “Walt Whitman’s Guide to a Thriving Democracy”

Mary Oliver, “My Friend, Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Matthew Zapruder, “Poem From Harm”

Michael Moon, “Rereading Whitman Under Pressure of AIDS: His Sex Radicalism and Ours” (PDF)

Nathanael O’Reilly, “Imagined America: Walt Whitman’s Nationalism in the First Edition of Leaves of Grass”

Nina Murray, “Walt Whitman in Russia: Three Love Affairs”

Peter O’Leary, “It Looks Quite Curious: Oppen’s Whitman”

Robert K. Martin, “Fetishizing America: David Hockney and Thom Gunn” (PDF)

Ronald Johnson, “Letters to Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Sahar Elmougy, “Towards A New Master Narrative of Trauma” (PDF)

Stanley Bill, “Translation As Talking to Oneself: Milosz Makes Whitman Speak” (PDF)

Susan Margaret Brown, “Pessoa and Whitman: Brothers in the Universe” (PDF)

Thom Gunn, “Forays Against the Republic” (PDF)

Tom Sleigh, “One Way of Caring: The Limits of Whitman’s Vision”

Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (PDF)

Prompts inspired by Lewis Hyde's primer for forgetting

Lately, I have been obsessed with memory, absence, keepsakes, monuments, transgressive translation theories—and David Naimon’s remarkable podcast, Between the Covers. Enter Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past (Picador, 2019), a book structured as an episodic notebook, a collage form that juxtaposes “not just free association but free forgetting.”

Towards the end, Hyde explains that random leaping across time and nation-states, political mythologies and spiritual myths, is an intentional strategy that declines “to declare a train of thought.” He refuses to interpret the gaps, as “interpretation too readily declared dims the lights of things” while “holding off allows the elements to glow.”

And it is true that these elements glow, glow—grow to near glowering. Hyde is fine with this. He intends that the spaces between entries “foreground what happens with any book we read”—what happens with the act of reading, itself, wherein we absorb certain images while abandoning others. [Aside to Ionesco’s rhinoceros: I am tempted to argue for interesting extensions to current critique/ literary theory in americanist academic spaces but that would be a different thing, an alternate direction, a strip mall with lonelier parking lots and standardized, ticket-incurring gaps.]

What Hyde wants is for the book’s form to resemble the neurological experience of remembering, forgetting, self-mythologizing, and collating tiny scraps of monuments into selfhood, its scatterings:

The episodic form acknowledges the collaged afterlife of anything we read—or of any life, for that matter, for we we too are discontinuous creatures, scattered in time, the meaning of our existence something we can only imagine.

This book inspired me to write, to remember, to forget, to hold world history against the world and its historians, to wrestle the self-loathing of oppositional identities as I have experienced (and embodied) them in both the South and the Romanian emigre community. In the spirit of this love, complicity, horror, hope, and fascination, I leave you with a few notebooking avenues directly inspired by Hyde’s collage.

1.

Forgetting is the shears with which you cut away what you cannot use, doing it under the supreme discretion of memory….When we say that we consign something to oblivion, we suggest simultaneously that it is to be forgotten and yet also remembered.

- Soren Kierkegaard

For Lewis, there is a paradoxical nature to consigning a memory for forgetting. If the etymology of consigning comes from a Latin word meaning “to mark with a seal,” what does it mean to consign to forgetting? And my mind meandered into consignment stores, where one encounters the difference between consigning and giving away. Or what we keep so close that we cannot give away, choosing instead to re-sell it through a third party, imagining a value to the memory, something others might pay to keep.

Maybe this requires sketching, a notebook, a pen, your head formulating words to loosely describe shelf or a table or a rack in the Consignment Boutique of Forgetting—the objects on this shelf, the memories attached to them, marked for sale. Maybe this is the beginning of a short fiction about disputed value, and the voices in dispute, the varied valorizations of individual memories and experience. Maybe it’s a list poem. Maybe it’s an essay. Maybe it’s a notebook entry that kills time by underestimating it.

2.

Things we remember for their artifice. Lewis recollects two incidents from childhood: being seven, choosing the bun he thinks Mrs. Brown wants him to select (i.e. the moral bun) in a bakeshop and, later, being ten in a kitchen agreeing with his mom that she should get a haircut because he thinks that’s what she wants him to say. He wonders:

But why do I remember these events? Because in them I am performing someone else’s script. When I perform myself, that’s forgettable, and rightly so, the actions of the unself-conscious self leaving no necessary marks on memory.

O the injurious heart, how it collects and recollects the ways in which one’s behavior aimed to please or conform with social scripts. Recollect five such events from any point in your life. Write them down as lists, including details. Then pick one to poem with an eye to the strangest estrangement.

3.

In describing Slobodan Milosevic’s celebrations of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Lewis explores the way this date, June 28th, was weaponized for ethnic war and genocide. To ignite a sense of grievance, Milosevic’s speech declaimed shattered national dignity and humiliation, the violation of motherland, the idea of treason, the counterpoint of courage and heroism in dying for an abstract cause. It was an evocation of lost causes. In Hyde’s words: “Thus does a lost cause’s causes apparent humiliation get turned on its head and become proof of the highest ideals.”

Psychiatrist Vamik Volkan coined the term “chosen trauma” to describe “an identity-forming ancestral calamity whose memory mixes actual history with passionate feeling and fantasized grieving and hope.” He spoke from the ground of his own loss:

“..the idea that [the Serbs] could change their minds and choose a kingdom on earth was not articulated until the awakening of nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth century.”

For the notebook: pick an identity group in which you are a participant or communicant (i.e. Catholic Church, Southerner, Russian, Ukranian, Uighur, academic, etc.) and take notes on the potential events or loci of chosen trauma, the words used as descriptors, the lexicon of humiliation, the allusion to eschatological fulfillment or what might bring change). Alternately, write a brief sketch of a Civil War reenactment from the point of view of a Confederate-identifying participant. Research news articles and features reports for particular lexicons, note any references to transcendent experience and/or descriptions of rootedness, of feeling part of something bigger. Consider writing a fictional interview with this participant.

4.

In 1882, Ernest Renan published his paper, “What Is A Nation?”. It warned against confusing nationality and ethnicity—since this confusion could lead to irresolvable military conflict. On Renan’s view, “ethnographic politics” was destabilized by the metaphysical nature of its claims, and how those claims evolved over time, how those claims depended on the exclusion of others in the name of ethnic purity. Renan believed it was better to forget ethnic claims and rigid ethnic identities which could no exist in multilingual spaces: “…the essence of a nation is that all its individuals have many things in common, and also that everyone has forgotten many things.”

Hyde argues that “all group identity, all abstract knowing, has such origins", and even “families know themselves by their recollection and elision..” For your notebook, sketch what recollections constitute your family identity. Start nuclear and then move to include extended family. Climb as high in the family tree as you wish. Or, just circle the trunk. Then sketch the elisions, the things no one discusses, the forgetting which prevents conflict—who is asked to sacrifice most to maintain these elisions? Who is the beneficiary? Play with the words collision, collusion, and elision.

5.

Mythological memory applies the logic of myth to the unstable narratives of the personal or public. It offers an easy way of divining meaning from inexplicable human tangles. I think of Orpheus, how he calls the poet—to do a Brodsky or Rilke and change Orpheus’ myth in a way that encapsulates personal fears of rejection or loss. Or Oscar Wilde’s Salome as the spurned lover, seeking the kiss of John the Baptist, the conquest.

“It’s an American ending, a Lone Star ending with the kind of individualist forgetting that cannot possibly scale. We get private romance but no model of how to study the nation to forget the nation.”

Thus does Hyde frame “Forget the Alamo!”, the final line of John Sayles’ movie Lone Star, as spoken by the Chicanx history teacher, Pilar (in contrast to “Remember the Alamo!" that bit of memorabilia on the postcards and t-shirts of American boyhoods). A diptych perhaps, a two-sided image of remembering and forgetting on the same page.

6.

“Man does not die in a ditch like a dog—but at home in history,” wrote Boris Pasternak. Hyde elucidates “state-transition amnesia,” the struggle of the newly-bereaved. It could be the loss of a pet or the loss of a homeland. How does the end of Yugoslavia define what it means to be born as a Yugoslavian? What stories fill the narrative gap?

I keep thinking of how accommodating one’s self to loss requires forgetting, burying the past, forgetting my mother’s voice so that other humans can feel less haunted—and how this amounts to a betrayal.

Forgetting is the only form of forgiveness; it’s the only vengeance and the only punishment too. Because if my counterparts see that I’m still thinking about them, in some ways I become their servant, and if I forget them I don’t. I think that forgiveness and venegeance are two words for the same substance, which is oblivion.

- Jorge Luis Borges in the last interview before his death, when asked if he had forgiven the Peronists

Write a list poem or outline a curriculum for an ars oblivionis, or what Hyde calls “an art for loosening the hand of collective thought.” I say list but I also mean an incantation, a curse, an injunction, a recipe, an instructional, a collect, a liturgy…..

Although Hyde doesn’t touch on this, I kept thinking of haunted houses as both signifiers and narrative modes in pop culture and mythology. The entertainment of haunting, it’s consumption as a form of estrangement during Halloween. Some of us want to be haunted by what has been lost. Some of us settle for hauntedness generated as play, as distance rather than proximity.

7.

What gaps feel like open wounds? What faces exist in the gaps? What books from childhood carried a sense of something left undone that might be mistaken for nostalgia? How does duty taste when you are alone in a room saturated by its enormous disquietude?

In this same key, there is Eugenia Ginzburg writing from inside Soviet prison, notes the fears and worries and internalized trauma of family culture; no family culture leaves its children unmarked. What did yours do that makes it hard to trust the world to believe it's kindness to accept its kisses? How did school culture support or subvert family culture? Think about the tribalism of school, the scars, the risk of speaking out against friends who are bullying others. The sadism of unthinking, regurgitative nostalgia, a portrait of a politician or history teacher.

8.

Repetition as a formal mechanism for re-membering. A mode for piecing back together, gathering as verb form of togethering, or calling as summons for memory—calling my mama’s name again and again in the hopes of retrieving her scent, the brisk kindling of her laughter lighting the hallway, the illuminated manuscript of her voice, her mouth, her flesh.

9.

On the syntax of amnesia—the unreliable narrator repeating the memory back—and how vulnerable we are to being brainwashed. To being fooled. To having a memory of delight transformed by the retrospective gaze of others.

Thinking about how this plays out in national myths or even college sports fanning—to forget or step back from these myths is seen as treason. To question these myths is to be “a bad sport” at best. To stare at the worship of football coaches critically is to see Tommy Tuberville rising to power in Alabama, riding the coattails and power of that inviolable mythos.

How does this syntax play out in commercial events and valorizations? Our lives are buyable. We shop for churches. The market will provide newer and better forms. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to more suspense; to melodrama. I think there is so much to write in this ephemera, and I feel like Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Projects attempted to give form to the juxtapositions of public ennui and distraction during times of social crisis. One could arcade this pandemic, this neo-fascist moment, this pressure to continue “working” and normalize a daily mass-death from a virus so that later experts can say “it was inevitable.” (To note how many experts say things are inevitable is to note, perhaps, that experts have conflicts of interest between saving lives and sustaining capitalist systems.)

10.

Psychologist Pierre Janet’s study of dissociative amnesia led him to propose that we think of memory not as a fixed record of the past but as a fluid event, an ongoingness: “Memory …. is an action; essentially, it is the action of telling a story.” One of Janet’s patient could not incorporate the shock of her mother’s death into the rest of her personal life-story. She could not make it part of a living narrative. For Janet, this patient could not really “be said to have a memory…it is only for convenience that we speak of it as a traumatic memory,” since the act of re-membering was absent.

Tomas Transtromer’s poem, “About History” (translated by Alice Fulton):

Every problem cries in its own language.
Go like a bloodhound to where the truth has trampled.

And, from my notebook: "Poetry is the language the dead use to help us forget they are dead," said Valzhnya Mort (whose surname means death in multiple Latin languages.)

[Addendum]

And so I end with the words of others, the ways in which they read Hyde’s collage, the virtual community of readers and thinkers in the world who encounter a book with the urge to speak of it to paper…

Hyde’s “associative collage” of fragmentary stories, meditations and recollections turns on this paradoxical relation between memory and forgetting. Perhaps the most intriguing and original argument of the book is that forgetting is an essential condition for imaginative as well as political freedom. Imaginative freedom has been Hyde’s abiding theme since the publication of his now classic 1983 study The Gift, which made the case for the infinite generosity of a “gift economy” of art against the pinched rivalries of a market economy. [Josh Cohen’s review]

Hyde describes A Primer for Forgetting as “a thought experiment seeking out places where forgetting is more useful than memory,” so the deployment of this hijacked historical memory might seem curious, as it militates against Hyde’s thesis. But Hyde is always an honest broker of ideas. An open-hearted interdisciplinarian who traces arguments across anthropology, history, poetry, and other fields… [Sebastian Stockman’s review]

Devin Gael Kelly's "walking poem"

Here I am fondling the particular mode of a poem 
that feels like a walking poem, feeling Devin
Gael Kelly's "Self Care in the Land Of A Thousand 
Horses", wherein what holds us or creates 
stillness is pace, gait, the pitch of the step-breath, 
precise pauses signaled by syntax so that  
I may be walking and thinking about onions
until fire hydrants remind me of lace – of that slip 
I must have left or else lost in the year I was losing 
everything, or else using a dash to press 
my face against the glass of a bakery 
where two women argue over cupcakes, 
using their hands, raising their hands to 
push away words, and how hands always 
fall into birds when one cannot hear 
them, when this one woman catches a bird 
in the air & kisses the less expressive 
lips & everything stops for this moment's
raw reconciliation, the scent of later sex
& cupcakes—though I am still moving.
I am haunted by break-ups, faking, lost
cats & earthquakes who keep secrets
if only to surprise or deflate us
like this thing in my ex said about forgetting, 
or how I'd already done it, before the 
chicken and the egg scenario nothing 
came first, he said he couldn't imagine 
me ever having children & this is when 
I knew his imagination was suffering 
or gutted by performance anxiety & 
I can imagine him now taking off shoes 
in a room with big windows and rising 
to greet a woman who can't imagine him 
not imagining her in stilettos. And 
I am using these sharp shoes to bring you 
back to the street, back to the surface 
of asphalt where we are walking and 
thinking about one thousand horses.

Addendum: I think the ampersand makes it move faster?

On "Every Atom" by Erin Coughlin Hollowell

1. The loss of memory in poetic subjects

There are many ways to lose a mother. Alzheimer’s is a particularly difficult journey of loss, a grief that begins before the death of the body—a loss that demands reconciliatory gestures from the poet, as James Meetze’s Phantom Hour has demonstrated.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell’s Every Atom begins in relation to those ghosts, or to the empty, unremembered spaces. Dan Branch notes that Hollowell’s mom’s mental capacities were declining as Hollowell wrote this book. And she did not write it from a distance—instead, Hollowell gave up a writer’s residency in Washington State to assist her father in caring for her mother. The book is dedicated: “In memory of my parents, Leonard James Coughlin and Mary Louise Coughlin".”

Although the poems place the mother in landscape, or navigate her absence by landscape metaphors, the tone often wanders into the ethereal, which is to say that ethereality might be a coping mechanism in poetry: how language of presence is displaced by language of absence.

Most interesting to me was the role played by metaphor, imperatives, and conditionals across the breath of this collection.

From the outset, we know the narrator is trying to relate to ghosts, or finding a space for them in ordinary life. See “The last scud of day”:

I brush away the hours
like the smear skids of eraser
left over from a project that went
from unwell to undone. Words
scrawled over the ghosts of others
and then rubbed away again.

We suspect the work of finding meaning requires a relation to hieroglyphs, to reading the signs in surrounding objects, as in "Night of the few, large stars," which ends with the poet trying to make sense of constellations:

Three stars:
a king, a shadow queen,
a child who is lost on purpose.

It is images and metaphors—rather than people, loved ones, stories—that provide mooring in these poems. And Hollowell’s images are powerful; they are hinges for the poem, spaces at the threshold of something opening or closing. I held my breath midway through "The palpable in its place and the impalpable in its place" when I came across this image:

The window blank with light.

And because I find complicity more compelling than innocence, I valued the way the poet unpacks (or carries) guilt in these poems. It is a complicated guilt—a human one. "Waits by the hole in the frozen surface" begins with waiting for a memory, evoking the absence of both memory by implying a sort of loose complicity in the narrator's inability to remember. O reader, you must remember this book is about a mother losing her memory and dying—but we are also standing on a frozen lake, somehow, waiting for something to explain the hole in the ice:

I remember kneeling before my brother's coffin
but of my mother's grief there is a hole, as if

I've taken scissors and neatly cut her from the day.

Hollowell returns to this metaphor, to this hole in the ice of the lake often, as in "Life whenever moving":

Imagine your mother
was a turtle. Her great
three-chambered heart

beating between two
hardnesses. Her legacy
a sandy hole or a shade

on a riverbank. And you,
left in a leather purse
of an egg.

This poem moves through imperatives to imagine--to imagine the mother as turtle, oyster, cicada, to fill in the whole with an image---and then to relate to it, to find meaning about the daughter in relation to that image. And I keep thinking how the imperative can, in poetry, serve as a vehicle for incantation, a spell the poet wants in order to inhabit the raiment of liminal space.

3. The poetry of titles

So many questions lately in the poetry community about titling poems—and how titles work best in a collection— Hollowell’s titling is haunting; the titles can be read on their own, as a poetic mode. Titling does the work of conveying tone in this book. Notice how she does this rare thing, namely, enjambing the titles, allowing them to stretch across the page and then break, as in:

“For the fourth-month moon showers have, 
and the mica on the side of the rock has”

which begins with a powerful image, and it’s relation to imperative:

shine, glisten like that sleek lick
of damp left behind by a snail. 

These titles are conversant with the poems, rather than nominative—they do not name what will happen so much as present the conditions under something could occur. They describe a mode rather than a theme.

4. Hollowell’s conditional mode

Also: this sense in which the metaphors, themselves, are imperatives for the poet.

And how close these metaphor-imperatives come to the conditional form, or how the conditional, itself, is implied in them—though also evoked directly, as in “Perpetual payment,” which begins:

If you could unlock the box
within the box within the fist
of meat that beats to its mechanized
meter, you would find my father.

The poem progresses through six quatrains to end in a reversal, a resistance to both the father’s explanations and, in a sense, the stories themselves:

My father’s stories built the house
we set on fire and fled from. My father’s

stories built a plucky woman on a train
that none of us have ever met. Somewhere
the bear is still bleeding. Somewhere
that mother is still riding the train.

Maybe stories are not helpful. Certainly metaphors and conditionals seem like more significant terrain for this particular grief, this attempt to live with a loss. Rather than construct a new mythology to assuage grief, Hollowell remains restless, eyeing the hole In the ice, the moon, every atom—eying them loosely, tenuously, as possibilities rather than explanations.

I love this. I could say more—o I could burn the day with details—instead I rest in this interesting approach to what is not quite elegy, or what edges lament without settling for the narrative that allows lament to grow its iconographies. What if mom was an oyster? Who would her daughter be, then?

Thoughts on Ewa Lipska

1.

Ewa Lipska is usually considered a Polish poet. She was born in Krakow in 1945. She won the Koscielski Prize (1973), the Polish PEN Club prize (1992) and the Jurzykowski Foundation Prize (1993). Currently, she lives between Krakow and Vienna.

“Much of her work emerges out of the events of World War II, and interrogates social and political issues with a skeptical surrealism. Her most recent volumes—1999, Sklepy Zoologiczne (Pet Shops), Ja (I), Gdzie Indziej(Somewhere Else), and Drzazga (Splinter, 2006)—are influenced in particular by her friendships with Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal.” [Words Without Borders]

2.

What I love about Lipska is her sensibility, the way she wants to let history make her cynical, and yet somehow the avenue of the poem, the motion itself, undercuts the cynicism. Lipska was close to Szymborska and Wiesenthal—she shares a birthplace, a certain sensibility—but sees herself as unaffiliated with any school or national boundary. Her rejection of nationalism is linked to the belief that art depends on fidelity to authentic experience rather than virtue signals.

In “Preface: The Absurdity of Beauty,” found at the beginning of A New Century (Northwestern University Press, 2009), Lipska asks if the poet who witnesses something terrible is allowed to "describe what took place so unexpectedly"--and how? Must it be a dictation of facts or a recreation of aura? Recounting an accident, the witness of it, Lipska attempts to discern the poet’s role in "the dictatorship of the moment" when "things conjoined irrevocably, a terror of fate and coincidence":

“May a poet take advantage of fate in such a situation and describe everything that took place so unexpectedly and suddenly? May he or she dictate to a typist the defenseless facts, add some details, empathize with the victim? To die on a sheet of paper playing the main part, at the same time avoiding compassion that leads to the inevitable corrosion of words? Whom to be in such a situation? An onlooker, a stray wanderer, an agitator? Can you hear the fear and uncertainty when I bend my head over a sheet of paper?”

This understanding of the poet as both riddle-maker and truth-seeker recurs in Lipska’s poetry, challenging the quality of reported truth or eyewitness accounts, revealing a less solid ontology than we might wish at a time when fake news costs so much.

3.

In “Four Notes on Ewa Lipska’s Poems,” Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska notes that Lipska “deeply mistrusts wena, a Polish term used mainly in highbrow literature” to describe moments of insight or revelation. For the poet, wena is just the vein carrying blood—it is neither god nor collective pronoun; neither kingdom nor nation. So what matters to the poet, if not the nation or the ego? Nowakowska says:

“Since artists mostly suffer from hubris and bravado, art does not matter much, unlike love, which is the most important factor conditioning human life and endowing it with meaning.”

Nowakowska also cites the recurrence of fate as a powerful mocking force in Lipska’s poetry, and I think this is true, but I also feel like Lipska’s focus on helplessness isn’t fatalism, or a worship of fatalist systems and their associated determinisms, but a general bow to uncertainty—to the reality of things happening outside our plans, systems, and social sciences.

4.

“Although Lipska is sometimes considered as part of the "New Wave" group of the 1970s, she distances herself from such associations, preferring to operate autonomously. Over the years, her mistrust of the language of her daily surroundings, for her a language of masks and lies, has grown. In response, Lipska has developed an inverted language, which is confrontational and frequently ominous. Her poems are lucid, and in few words, she puts forth her own reality with gentle irony. Fascinated by human behaviour, she strips away the false meaning of words…” [Poetry International]

According to Robin Davidson, Ewa Lipska describes her poetry as a sort of "skeptical surrealism, meaning she calls into question even the surrealists’ claim that images are purified of social or political motive, for any system of art may give rise to a fascist aesthetic.”

This irreverence for systems plays out in a sort of hermeticism, a gaze which looks forward while also looking back, a sort of historical rubber-necking gesture which loosens temporality in her poems. Her use of cliches in poetry--her rupturing of them to forge an individual voice--reclaims language from ruins somehow. 

What does Lipska do at the level of the line? What part of her work fascinates me? A few short comments, acknowledging that I do not know Polish, and so my thoughts on translation and poetics are limited by this formal constraint.

She mobilizes the energy of the short couplet and tercet with impeccable images and metaphors. This is fairly constant in her work, and I study the brisk syntax of her lines like butter on bread in a terrible forest.

She begins a poem in the key of refusenik, as in from “No One” translated by Robin Davidson & Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska:

I agree to this landscape
which does not exist.

She interiorizes images associated with revolution, and lets them be altered by the motion into the body, as in “The New Century”:

We speak to each other in fireworks.
A groggy noun in the mouth.

She embraces the faux-pas of referring back to the title and explaining it in the final breaths of a poem—which, I have been told, is an amateur move in contemporary American poetics. See, for example, from “Number One”:

And so what
when love
a twig brushed by the wind
is always Number One
and leans toward us.

She ends the poem, “A Juicer,” in a single-word stanza with a period: “Yes.”

She works diaphoric metaphors for memory so well, so carefully, resisting simple equivocations, as one sees in “A Splinter” translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska:

Problems begin
with a splinter lodged in memory.

It is hard to remove it
much harder to describe.

Wood shavings fly. The apple cores of angels.
Dust up to the heavens.

She flexes the short poem’s form in ways that both suggest cliche and undermine it. Here is the entirety of “Indiscretion” as translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska:

Had she busied herself in time
with the systematic counting
of ship screws
it would not have come to this—
indecent acts of poetry.

She reexamines the idea of inheritance in the context of a barbaric European history—by dragging images through the poem, linking them to motions, anchoring them in dust—as one sees in “Helplessness.”

She brings divinity down to the earth of concurrent disasters which most gods and monsters want to stay above, as the longer poem, “Newton’s Orange”:

Now everything has become clearer.

God has admitted
to being only human.

5.

And yet I find some translations of Lipska preferable to others—for the way in which the seam of the poem is split. For example, “The Smells of Evil” translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska, keeps this critical couplet:

The valedictorian of the unenlightened star
gazing into the sky of hypocrisy.

But other parts of this translation feel less realized, less lush in their barrenness, than the translation by Susan Bassnett and Piotr Kuhiwczak shared below.

And here’s another Lipska poem by the same translators (which I found in my typed notes and need to source properly)…..

6.

And here’s Lipska’s “Dictation” in its entirety, with my clumsy apology for not being sure which translation this might be that I scribbled into my notebook…. Although many of her poems feel ars-like, “Dictation” does so on multiple levels, including the title—and I think this makes sense to anyone from former Eastern Bloc countries.

7.

And here is me, realizing my kids haven’t had lunch, and wanting to write more but also to end, to end, to end with Lipska’s words from the preface to A New Century, because they are instructive somehow—they speak both to our hunger for belonging and all the desperate, dehumanizing ideologies humans support in order to feel themselves part of something, kindred to a larger group of meaning and existence.

"The boundaries of the soul and the boundaries of countries do not overlap."

8.

2001

translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska

2001, dear Mrs. Schubert, is not only the beginning
of the new century, but also the number of my imagination.
As you know, for some time now my fiction
has resented my flirting with reality,
consorting with useless time.
I therefore inform you that the dead season is coming,
which, as usual, I am spending
on the short-term list of missing persons.

Lit mag cento: The Florida Review Vol. 43, No. 1

I expected the darkness
mid-revision, full of hints and pretty visions
fire-singed and thinned.
Whoever said getting older
to clear what can’t be cleared. I’ve started drinking
draining one thing, filling another, sometimes
the bullfrogs. No one keeps score
but the winners know—I touched
her pinkest helmet for luck.
And the warp of shadow.

I mean the tender
for you to take home, for you to
feel known and divided by fifty-six
millioned panes more and
there’s more that’s the formless
from the mind’s mud-gas
gushing like lust from the tank. I’ve dug
in the terroir-based knowledge,
like mass: all ritual & communion.
Outside, the sky, a soi-distant
dickhead before the walls of Jericho
and the warp of shadow.

[Amanda Hawkins, Dylan Weir, Lillo Way, Lyn Lifshin, Nicole Stockburger, Owen McLeod, David Rivard, Gerry LaFemina, David Rivard, Carl Dennis

Amanda Hawkins, Dylan Weir, Lillo Way, Lyn Lifshin, Nicole Stockburger, Owen McLeod, David Rivard, Gerry LaFemina, David Rivard, Carl Dennis]

21 ways to end a poem or leave your lover

1.

With a final action that echoes outside the poem, a closure with sensual details that stick to the skull and stay in the room. I think of how Mary Ruefle ends "Lightly, Very Lightly" with this picture of a woman listening to the slow tick of a clock hidden inside a drawer, a mysterious count-down that is both intimate and unexplained:

somewhere the lady of the house
puts the alarm clock in a drawer
where she cannot hear it
then tells the children to be quiet
and stands there listening
to its tick.

2.

With an image that undermines a prior assertion or statement, thus casting doubt over everything you promised. Deborah Digges ends "The Wind Blows Through the Doors Of My Heart" with the invitation of "quiet, a quilt spread on soil", followed by the statement:

But we will never lie down again.

A poem that sets up this image of a peaceful quilt, a respite, and then denies access.

3.

With a statement that circles back around to the poem's first tentative breath while amplifying the pressure of that breath until you wince. The fingernails have been pressing into your palm the whole time and you didn't realize it. How could you have known Minne Bruce Pratt would leave you with:

The poem as the locked room.

(See "The Relation Between Words and People: After KR Rilke", American Poetry Review.)

4.

With a short question that is answered in a fashion that echolocutes its way through the poem. I'm thinking of complex, numinous way in Kayleb Rae Candrilli ends the lengthy, three-column poem titled “You've Heard This Before, The Only Way Out Is Through" with: 

there is a razor in the apple
and the apple is the earth. Listen,
my nightmares are dreams in which
everyone walks in the same direction--
that rhythmic lockstep. Both of my
grandmothers considered abortion.
And can you imagine?
Being so close to nothing?

5.

With an inclusive question that invites the reader in deeper, as in Aimee Nezhukumatahil's sonnet, "Naming the Heartbeats", which ends in this expansive “we “ that binds the reader's reverie to the speaker’s:

And what is the name for movement we make when
we wake, swiping hand or claw or wing across our face, like trying
to remember a path or a river we've only visited in our dreams?

6.

With a powerful image that reinforces or weaves together previous images in the poem. I’m thinking of the sonic boom that ends Wanda Coleman’s “Etheridge,” and how last line’s image—and the action in this image—feels like a speech-act or a sound-act or a space between the flesh and the portrait, and how sacredness inhabits this image by offering a subversive iconography that leans (loosely) on biblical lexicons:

he kissed the reefer burning his thief’s fingers
leaned against that bitcoin’ hood and blimped the itch

his blaze interrupted the sermon and singed and singed the robes

7.

With a pivot word (or words) whose re-definition that brackets the conflict in the poem by flipping it, fleshing-out the synonyms intimately. As in synonyms for what touches us become intimacy. I'm thinking of what Jericho Brown does at the end of "Hero" with black and dark, and how it refers back to gratitude. Starting with the sixth line of this poem because it what Brown does is incredible:

I am most interested in people who declare gratitude
For their childhood beatings. None of them took what my mother gave,
Waking us for school with sharp slaps to our bare thighs.
That side of the family is darker. I should be grateful. So I will be—
No one on earth knows how many abortions happened
Before a woman risked her freedom by giving that risk a name, 
By taking it to breast. I don’t know why I am alive now
That I still cannot impress the woman who whipped me 
Into being. I turned my mother into a grandmother. She thanks me 
By kissing my sons. Gratitude is black—
Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death.
Thank God. It can’t get much darker than that.

8.

Ending with an I statement that repositions the poem's direction. The poem plods along and then turns, ending in a strange action with repositions the narrator or the subject in an interesting way. It alters the light of the poem. I’m thinking of Gerald Stern’s “The Far Edge of Kilmer,” which ends with a statement:

I am holding open the burnt door.

Or Johanne Dubrow’s ending of a poem with “I hold this punctured story to the light.” Notice how the 'I' statements assert something about the future as related to the present, and engage the use of poetry itself. Often this sort of ending can have a metaphysical touch; there is a sense of mystery opened in action which makes the closing feel less like closure.

9.

With a question that affirms the value of uncertainty. Mary Oliver's poem, "How Would You Live Then?", is composed entirely of questions from start to finish. She ends on a question that underscores the sense of wonder in both tone and form:

What if you finally saw
that the sunflowers, turning toward the sun all day,
and every day--who knows how, but they do it--were
more precious, more meaningful than gold?

10.

With a prophetic statement, repeated for emphasis. The way Czeslaw Milosz ends his "A Song On the End of the World" (as translated by his son, Anthony Milosz) makes the repetition feel like a doubling, not quite a repetition so much as an enlargement of the space in which the first admonition operated:

There will be no other end of the world.
There will be no other end of the world.

11.

With an object that comes to mind after various verbal acts of refusal. In a poem about refusing. Practice saying NO at different pitches. In different places. With different props. Insist with Anne Boyer that you are "Not Writing". Or not missing. Or not overwatering the flowers in an urge to save the world. Develop a rich tapestry of no's that you can't resist. Aim for the most irresistible no you can manage, and give it texture, sonics, beat, passion, lyric. The most magic no. Learn from Anne Boyer's "No". But end with an evocative (and solid) object.

12.

In a liminal, haunted space that re-visions the skeletal. See: leaves disembodied by dusk. There are no bodies between shades of light, in the space inter day and night. And yet this space is less liminal than that of the cardboard flower hatbox on the top shelf of the closet. Ghosts. Every poet needs one to have the last word. Once. I feel like what I mean to suggest here is cryptic. And there is something very odd about quoting the crypt, so I won’t.

13.

With a couplet of doubled metaphors, especially if the lines enact a light parallelism by beginning with the same word or article. I’m think of Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Daily”, which ends so beautifully (I can’t even talk):

The days are nouns: touch them The hands are churches that worship the world

14.

With the title of a painting or an opera or a musical composition. Zach Savich does this in his prose poem, "Chestnut City", which ends the first stanza with a quote from Cocteau and then ends the second stanza--and the poem--with the title of a painting:

Could go to sleep in the bushes and wake and it will be like a fairy tale only nothing will 
change. "Path Before the Bride Appears."

15.

With a culmination, an escalating crescendo effect. See Deborah Digges' "To Science", in which the extended metaphor climbs, spirals, and culminates in a sort of evasive conclusion:

for nothing. Just thinking of your hands
I can go wet, or dreaming, come
in my sleep, and wake to a day
in which all men are liars, wearing clothes.

16.

 With an ending that explains or qualifies the title. This is a motion that swerves back around and returns to the beginning. It usually requires a title abstract enough to demand unpacking. For example, Heather McHugh's "Meantime" suggests a sort of time; it begins in the past tense to describe 'how things were', which it does for three stanzas before ending in a single-word, separated, set apart:

thirteen.

This word converses with "Meantime," and expands on the temporality (not to mention that it packs the power of a two-syllable last line, alone, revelatory.)

17.

Ending in exclamation or ecstasy. How Gerald Stern ends “The Dancing” with a sort of exhalation, a creative and spiritual breath related to the invocation of deity:

oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

The dissimilarity of the words wild and mercy do so much to heighten this effect.

18.

 With a precise, complicated simile. I love how L. Eric Greinke ends “SONNET XI. Even as the poem bends” (from his Sonnets for Ted Berrigan) with a precise and complicated simile:

Like your thighs upon the sheet.

19.

With a command or imperative, instructing the reader (or the You) to do something. I’m thinking of Sharon Olds in “I Go Back to May 1937,” where the final line shifts the stakes and alters the emotional valence into a sort of wistfulness:

I want to live. I   
take them up like the male and female   
paper dolls and bang them together   
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell you about it.

There is no closure because the next action depends on something external to the poem, namely, the You. I feel like Louise Gluck uses this strategy often, and it creates suspense or mystery which hinges on implication.

20.

With gorgeous alliteration and maybe ellipses. Even though ellipses seem to be on the wane, I know a few editors miss them. And some poets have made them magnificent; have used them in ways that change the breath at the end of the poem, or even change what we allow ourselves to have received from it. I’m thinking of how Gwendolyn Brooks ends “Jessie Mitchell’s Mother” with this sequence of slant end-rhymes and then the alliteration in the last line followed by ellipses:

Forced perfume into old petals, pulled up the droop,   
Refueled
Triumphant long-exhaled breaths.
Her exquisite yellow youth . . 

21.

With a last line composed of monosyllabic words that change the speed and motion of the poem by sharpening it. I’m thinking of Louise Bogan’s “Women,” which ends:

As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.

Lit Mag Cento: Five Points, Volume 18, No. 2.

Cento from Five Points Vol. 18 No. 2

What is devotion?

Me here. You there.
The crockpot squatting

between us, the unspoken building up
in the rooms. There was

infinite suffering.
It had three minutes each
to describe itself

toeing into the light.
Many wept. I settled

for detachment,
leave roses at your feet;

loam and that Alabama clay, that hymn
that one can taste and not become

vigilant in retreat. Why think
of any of this now

you are so often silent,
lured from a cover of seafoam

like half-dressed game:
a single country dove

swearing it
is hope

[Elizabeth Spires, Elizabeth Spires, Adam Vines, Jeffrey Harrison, Kate Daniels, Kate Daniels, Adam Vines, Kate Daniels, Elizabeth Spires, Adam Vines, Gregory Frazer, Chelsea Rathburn, Elizabeth Spires, R. T. Smith, Gregory Frazer, R.T. Smith, Adam Vines, R. T. Smith, Gregory Frazer]

This is a part of a series of centos in tribute to lit mags I have to give away for lack of space. I wanted to imagine these poets in a room (though not limited to a stanza) and put the poems in each issue in dialogue with one another as a way to save what touched me. Formally, for the most part, I have kept the poets’ original line breaks.

You can support this journal by subscribing and sharing their work.

Lit Mag Cento: 32 Poems, Fall/Winter 2018

Some say no one can predict the rain.

In every interval is an archive,
or a revolved named after a snake
you notice only when you look away.

Of God’s determination to keep quiet,
it’s the garden spider who eats her mistakes.

That bird I thought was an insect was a bird
watching you being then, just then:
the surface pines and a damp June wind.

Bell-skirted, ruffled, pouf-sleeved
I overthink therefore I overam
this tempered halt,
its alien script across the sky,
the version of me you love is only
patched.

Unfilled wolf,
take yourself out of some context, an A sharp as
piecework.

Night:
come back.

I just like having someone there in the dark
and confetti, with torn moonlit
spinnerets,
shivering.

[Laura Sabbott Ross, Makalini Bandele, Hailey Leithauser, James Davis May, Eric McHenry, Traci Brimhall, Alessandra Lynch, Robin Myers, Emma Hine, Anya Silver, Eric McHenry, Robin Myer, T. J. McElmore, Emma Hine, Bobby C. Rogers,, Hailey Leithauser, Makalini Bandele, Bobby C. Rogers, Gina Franco, Bobby C. Rogers, Michael Bazzett, Hailey Leithauser, Amit Majmudar, Robin Myer]

This is a part of a series of centos in tribute to lit mags I have to give away for lack of space. I wanted to imagine these poets in a room (though not limited to a stanza) and put the poems in each issue in dialogue with one another as a way to save what touched me. Formally, for the most part, I have kept the poets’ original line breaks.

You can support this journal by subscribing and sharing their work.

Lit Mag Cento: Gulf Coast Fall 2017

Sometimes I find myself huddling
orchid-shaped,
in the one patch of soft, something
masculine
in the kettle of my chest.

I am sometimes
the knife singing an older song
falling between the walls. It is the dead,

this butter grip on the dark,
the distant self
like a daughter
too loud.

And neon carrot.
Powerslam. Chokehold.
The still-tender.

What I mean is once I was a boy
something
masculine 
in parks strewn with heads of rubbled statues,
coo-cooing

coo-cooing
is a kind of possession.

Waiting to be identified,
I wanted to know everything
about suffering,
an insect, its interior,
and who walks over blood and then knocks.

[Nicholas Wong, Jayson P. Smith, Sarah M. C. Baugh, Roberta Iannamico trans. by Alexis Almeida, John Gosslee, Jayson P. Smith, sam sax, Nicholas Wong, Sarah M. C. Baugh, Leila Chatti, Catherine Brasner, C. McAllister Williams, Sarah M.C. Baugh, sam sax, Roberta Iannamico trans. by Alexis Almeida, Philip Metres, Celia Bland, Celia Bland, sam sax, Rosemary Kitchen, Leila Chatti, Mitchell Jacobs, Kyle G. Dargan]

This is a part of a series of centos in tribute to lit mags I have to give away for lack of space. I wanted to imagine these poets in a room (though not limited to a stanza) and put the poems in each issue in dialogue with one another as a way to save what touched me. Formally, for the most part, I have kept the poets’ original line breaks.

You can support this journal by subscribing and sharing their work.

A time for epistolary forms among writers

Dear Erin, I’ve been thinking about what I would add to the list and I realized that being alone in my head and cut off from community begs for epistolary. The thing about anxiety is how it perches in the throat and then feels like a cobweb, the way it mimics symptoms of infectious diseases. It’s not a bird with feathers that perches in the soul—it’s a poacher that waits for the perfect target.

Dear Danielle, Your chapbook is blowing me away. I am so grateful for your existence and your words and the digital cosmos that tangled our paths. I am reading you every day and finding new winged things that taste of freedom.

Dear editors and staff of journals who nominated me for Pushcarts this year, you make every single rejection bearable. There will never be a way to thank you enough for believing in my writing or my words or my voice or whatever is believable about this girl who sometimes hardly believes herself and the fact of her own existence.

Dear Pidgeonholes Team, Thank you for working tirelessly to promote and support and publish writers. Thank you for all the things I have learned (and keep learning) about the challenges of editing a literary magazine, and the multiple balancing acts and considerations that go into decisions. Thank you for inspiring me and teaching me and letting me be a part of something beautiful that I value deeply.

Dear Robert Musil, I am still fascinated by you. I’m not sure you deserve this by which I mean time is so fleeting and you have a way of destroying it with your sentence structure—not to mention ethics entering every single reading decision of the pandemic-shortened daze. But living in the US and knowing how easy It is to reject complicity for our actions in the rest of the world, I feel I still need to read you in every possible translation of avoidance.

Dear Cockroach Who Saw Me Naked This Morning, I am so glad you were there. I am so glad we got to share that moment of silence and slight disgust together. I know where you hid and I won’t tell a soul.

Dear Noemi Press, I am so glad I got a subscription to your books this year. As a result, my poetics has been rocked, rattled, and reshaped by the incredible writers you publish. I needed that. I am still crawling through the aftermath.

Dear Louie, thank you for being a light in small tunnels.

Dear Rosebud Ben-Oni, thank you for curating and crowdsourcing such an incredible list of poetry publications for the Kenyon Review blog. This resource is a consistent trove of books that we can return to and read and share and support and it’s the best of literary community in action.

Dear Lana, I love your novel. And I understand how challenging it can be to make a choice under social pressure, especially when you know life is tenuous and every year might be the last and you are alone (so alone) in that knowledge and timbre.

Dear Random Sample Review team and poetry submitters, thank you for your patience as I learn to navigate a new system. Learning takes time. Learning takes patience. I am deeply humbled by (and grateful for) yours.

Dear Facebook, thanks for being a great place to share photos with family across the country and world until Trump won the election in 2016. Thanks for helping Trump win the election in 2016. Thanks for keeping many nice retirees in my life on a level of reality that wouldn’t be legal if it were a drug. Thanks for being a great space for humans to attack each other under the auspices of personal offense when I post something related to racism or xenophobia or homophobia in the South. Thanks for really enabling that level of hurt.

Dear Facebook, I’m not done. Thank you also for how you’ve cornered the market as a vector for the evil eye. Thank you for excelling in lo-fi judgmental nonsense. No one ever likes the articles or the poems I post—my audience tends to like 1) the photos of family or 2) the posts where people get into fights over how much racism is actually racism and the only people arguing are white.

Dear fellow rape survivors, it’s strange how random life can be. It’s strange how none of us deserve it and yet some of us have been taught to believe that we do. I re-vision my desire for revenge daily. I have to remember that my rape was not the only thing that ever happened in the world, even though it felt that way to me. I have to balance my belief in justice and carceral reform against the parts that want blood and vengeance. Surviving rape is like waking up and realizing that every single man around you is a threat, and every single friendly conversation is the interlude to violence. There is no safe space. There will never be another safe space. Surviving, for me, means knowing that rapists are everywhere in a culture that glorifies rape. The culture work is my revenge. It is also my only hope for justice. Patriarchy is at its most effective in its constructions of feminism as a reaction to men. I am not interested in visions that limit me to reacting and punishing—I am interested in visions that dethrone the male gaze and divest from masculinist models of violence. It is possible to believe that rape is horrible and prisons are also crimes.

Dear rapists, I see you. I see your smiling wives, your family portraits, your daughters playing softball. And I look forward to the day when our justice system includes a reparative component that focuses on making restoration and putting you in classrooms where you will spend parts of your week (every week) talking to young people about rape. We don’t have enough prisons for all of you. And we never will. I I’m ready for tools that don’t build the master’s house.

Dear COVID-19, I know that you don’t give a damn but I thought I’d mention anyway how much I despise you. Just to be clear. I despise you even more than I despise Donald Trump, and that may be ontologically useless but it helps me to say it aloud anyway. Fuck off, COVID-19.

Dear friends and fellow writers, it is a cruel time for new books. It is a hard time for those juggling childcare with working from home. It is a terrifying time for those with spouses or loved ones working on the front lines of the pandemic. It is a time of rampant nativism and xenophobia justified for historical reasons, and this applies to the literary community as well as the world at large. It is a haunting—and haunted—time. It is scary. It is scary in its repetitions and new rhythms of disappointment. every day I wake up and every day I crawl into bed after telling my children it is not as scary as it seems. It is a time when I need all the things Rebecca Solnit said about humans in times of trouble to be true. But I don’t know… I just don’t… I’ve always been accused of over-hoping and keeping my head in the clouds. Mammals look better in lyric.

Dear landfills, forgive me for the insane amount of trash I’ve been producing lately. There is no alternative. This is because we refuse to see one.

Dear mountains, I miss your wildflowers, your vistas, your interior-softening hardness.

Dear Mom, you’d never believe the shit that’s been happening since you left.

Dear panic, I hear you. Constantly. Daily. Every time I make a list for my family or try to start the letters I wish Mom had written before she died suddenly. Every inch of quiet between sirens in this crowded city. Every other breath.

Dear epistolary, I can’t remember why I started writing this but the azaleas have lit the street and the sun goes about her business as usual and more than anything anything anything I hope you give us a chance to do that.

"Brink of Life" by Khashayar Mohammadi

Today I am fascinated by Khashayar Mohammadi’s poem, “Brink of Life,” published in his chapbook, Solitude Is An Acrobatic Act, (Above/Ground Press, 2020). Because I am fascinated, I want to peer closer. So I will.

1.

Khashayar Mohammadi is an Iranian-born Toronto-based writer and translator. He is an immigrant who misses his first language enough to return to it, to keep it alive through translation.

I suspect that poets who translate have a different relationship to language than poets who do not. Sometimes I suspect the number of words a poet uses diminishes in direct proportion to the amount of time they spend translating other poet’s words; it’s as if each word becomes heavier or carries more. Or maybe it’s the opposite.

2.

The title of Khashayar Mohammadi’s poem begins on the brink of something—the brink of life—and we expect the poem to develop this, which also links to defining life somehow. You can’t be on the brink of something undefined. The word “brink” designates an edge, a boundary, a cliff, a limit.

It is a short, one-stanza poem—everything is given to us in eleven lines—and this compactness makes its structure visually significant. The architecture stands out in a way that it wouldn’t if this were a longer poem, if it asked more from the eye, if it were busier, if it spread its energy across stanzas.

There is no punctuation, no period at the end to denote closure.

There is one capital letter at the beginning, and the word “Children” is the only word that receives this sort of visual attention.

Children delivered like parcels
a body can reject an unwanted body

Right away, one senses the motion will blur the end of line from another, and this, in turn, will make it hard to distinguish which body is the subject. —And I love this. I love this. I love that the line doesn’t read “Children are delivered like parcels” because the absence of “are” is the absence of an equal sign, or an equivalence.

It’s amazing what the tiniest verb (or its absence) can insinuate. This absence shifts the weight of the address from a first person witness to a mystery. The speaker is there and not there. The speaker is thinking, and delivering images which connect.

The motion from the first line to the second line is seamless, but something happens in the middle of the second line: a tiny crack opens up, and the poet’s decision not to use a comma is (I think) a decision to keep the motion blurred, to keep the equals out.

Read it with a comma. The comma clarifies, or serves a sorting function:

Children delivered like parcels
a body can reject, an unwanted body

The poet’s lack of punctuation is accomplishing something here—it is making it hard to tell which body is unwanted, or what part is a parcel—it is blurring the container and the contained.

3.

Mohammadi disorients us again with the next line, an image that pulls away from life but indicates time, indicates simultaneity:

while dolls await in triage

He doesn’t say the babies are like dolls—he posits the dolls alongside, or in the same poem-space, as children and bodies. Just when I think he is going to clarify or make a distinction, the poet swerves, shifts into swift anaphora, piling metaphor atop definition:

a child as a gift leased from the hospital
a child compounds interest daily
questions questions questions

I linger here. I know that the brink of life is not going to be the line I expected. I realize that the motion enacted by the poem is actually altering the form of a brink, curving it, turning it into a circling motion.

figures abstracted in privacy glass
mirrors are ashamed of reflecting
no longer show the woman her body

I realize that the mirrors have more agency, more power to verb, than children.

I also realize that the dolls had a similar agency—the dolls could wait. The inanimate surrounding objects could do more, or act with more volition, than the children or the child or the unwanted body who are acted upon.

Even in the woman’s relation to the mirror, it is the mirror who can show—not the woman who is looking. The poet doesn’t tell us that she is looking. The poet tells us what the mirror is doing, or not doing, namely, showing.

And so I am at this brink, where life is not something which seems to belong to the human subjects, but to the surrounding objects.

I know the poem is almost over. I know I am further from an edge because there is no line, no delineation. Picking up where the poet left off—“her body”—I read through to the end:

a soul cemented in language through names
a life nestled within life in language

Here, her body is defined as a soul cemented in language through names. Her body is defined as a life nestled within life in language. There is no reference to fetuses or babies or children—it is the woman’s body who is centered in this final, circling motion (which the repetition of life in that last line helps to accomplish).

5.

I love this poem for the way it withholds comfort somehow. I love the way it leaves us alone, separate, and yet bound by a life which names us. I’m not sure if the poet intended a larger point about the role or importance of names—and I’m not sure I need that from this poem in order to feel it does important things.

“I want my poems to keep someone company,” Mohammadi said in an interview.

I suspect many of us live in that loneliness—in the relationship we build into the poem, and the hand it stretches across an invisible room, asking to be read, to be of use, to be felt.

This is the cover image from his chapbook. Because solitude is both titular and transcendent in Mohammadi’s work, I tried to see if it speaks to this “brink of life,” and the tension in that relationship. There is a man pushing a single tree a top a hill. Or the tree has fallen over and the man is trying to plant it or re-root it. There is something that wants to stay and someone that is doing unclear things related to roots which could go either way.

There is no brink, quite. But there is the aloneness. There are two forms of life, and each as alone as the other, and maybe this, itself, is the relationship.

You can follow Khashayar on twitter here or read his incredible translations online. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

"Voice" by Jennifer Horne: Wondering towards a mother's voice.

Today I’m fascinated by Jennifer Horne’s poem, “Voice,” which can be found in her chapbook, Borrowed Light (Mule On A Ferris Wheel Press, 2019). Read it slowly.

---

Voice

For burning bush, substitute smoking stump.
For tablets, this tattered notebook with your wisdom notes.

Waking to sunlight, the smell of last night’s bonfire in my hair.
You left my dream only moments ago.
If I leapt from bed and ran down the straight dirt road,
could I catch you?

Wraith-smoke. Spanish moss.
Coffee in an old diner mug, heavy as a serious thing.

All day the rain continues, and I resolve to do as you urged:
begin my true life, start now.

“You’re not afraid of not liking it,” you said.
”You’re afraid you’ll like it so much it will change you,
demand a life as big as you can imagine,
a voice to match.”

---

1.

This is the final poem in a chapbook that explores inherited light, or the way in which various forms of light can be an inheritance which shapes and speaks into the present. The poet’s mother appears frequently in these poems—and I think you can feel the way she is both the beginning and the going-forward of the poet’s voice, or what the poet needs to say.

From this chapbook, we learn that a mother leaves multiple forms of light in her wake. We learn that Jennifer Horne’s mother was a poet, a female that lived with unabashed zest at a time when any zest in mothers was suspect. I sense a tension between the mother’s uninhibited spirit and the poet’s, and this is part of the legacy the poet brings to the page to understand.

The poem begins in the middle of this exploration, in a soft repudiation of Moses’ patriarchal visions:

For burning bush, substitute smoking stump.
For tablets, this tattered notebook with your wisdom notes.

The poet is sitting in a space where something has burned, and she is looking not to the stone tablets of a male god but to the notebook written by a human mother. The authority of some man’s prophecy is replaced by the words and visions of a particular woman, and her reckoning with life.

2.

At the end of the second stanza, the poet wakes up from the dream and wonders towards the mother’s voice:

If I leapt from bed and ran down the straight dirt road,
could I catch you?

I love how the poet’s voice mingles with the mother’s voice. I love the stark brush-strokes used to depict both dream and waking, to dissolve a clear line between them. I love how the You of this poem is murky, almost incorporeal, and how this contrasts with the heavy seriousness of the coffee in a diner mug. And how Horne tacks back immediately towards the voice and what it asks of her:

All day the rain continues, and I resolve to do as you urged:
begin my true life, start now.

And I think of my own mother—the way she took up space with her laughter and lust for life—and how the things which embarrassed me about her as a child are the things for which I admired her as a woman.

3.

Having a passionate, bohemian mother, or one whose spirit plays a predominant role in the visions of the child, often means that her stories frame the world more convincingly than other authorities, including peers, media, and friends. I recognize an urge to record the world for my mother since her death, to substantiate her stories and warnings somehow, and to keep her alive in this.

Is this what it means to be my mother’s daughter? To keepsake her fascination with life, her insatiable hunger for new experience, her commitment to her sensuality? Am I holding the world for her in what Dan Beachy-Quick calls “the hut of the poem”?

4.

We have reached a point of awareness about agency, and how the words or images or symbols we lay over others may be a form of disrespect. It is easier to have these conversations in the abstract than the particular. Yet, as writers, we struggle with staying in our lanes, or trying to discover which ghost shares the lane with us, and how that intersects with permission to poem them.

What is the line between elegy, tribute, portrait, and appropriation in a context where each person is the sole arbiter of their own life?

Whenever I write my mother, I worry about theft.

I worry about whether I’m recreating her in the way I want her remembered. Or whether I am ruining someone' else’s memory of her by writing my own.

I don’t have any answers or rules. I don’t know my lane when it comes to my mother who was many things to many other humans, each of whom has a different claim to remembering.

5.

I return to Dan Beachy-Quick’s essay, “The Hut of Poetry” (found in his Wonderful Investigations: Essays, Meditations, Tales). He writes notes that a poem doesn’t have to be “funereal in its relation to death.” He continues:

“To read is the most common form of encounter with the dead. The dead on the blank page need not remain dead. Time in the page is different from time in the world….. Death in the poem is only a pause before rebirth. Death is but a delay inside the form.

Language offers a method of experiencing death without dying…The poem on the blank page houses a creative center infinitely larger than itself, than its own lined confines, but a power that has no useful ends without suffering the impossible limit of the poem’s form. The forging of limit through form is the poem’s most fundamental work, and the result of that work is that the poem becomes not a vessel of knowledge conveyed, but a dwelling where knowledge occurs.”

There is a sense in which form is actually what pushes through and re-visions death. I see this in Horne’s poem, in her syntax, in how she builds long lines like trails of crumbs in a forest where every child misses her mother—and all the bad things that happen to a child are linked to the lack of knowing which voice to trust, or what to believe of their own.

6.

In this hut of this short poem, the mother warns the child against fear—against reticence—against holding back from living a “big” life. Notice the role of the bigness here:

“You’re not afraid of not liking it,” you said.
”You’re afraid you’ll like it so much it will change you,
demand a life as big as you can imagine,
a voice to match.”

And so the poem ends with the mother’s words, which—when recorded, when heeded, when hallowed—become scripture or prophecy.

The book ends with this poem. The ghost has the last word about the future. Yet the ghost belongs, inextricably, to the daughter’s voice, to its bigness, to its motion forward.

To quote Dan Beachy-Quick again:

“But a home is never the world—a home is a separation from the world. A poem is never the world—a poem is a separation from the world. The world we read, and in reading see, never stays a world. Language’s gift to us is it’s failure. The enchantment of language is superseded in importance by its disenchantment.”

The mothers are gone. Neither the male prophets nor the wolves can help us. The poem is a temporary respite in which time and corporeality are overcome. The ghost is beautiful for this singular, liminal instant. She urges us to use our voice, to make it big enough to hold her—and big enough to wonder alone.

"The Structure of a Flower: Stem" by Andrea Rexilius

Today’s fascination is a poem by Andrea Rexilius. I found it in her poetry chapbook, Afterworld, published by Above/ground Press in Spring 2020. You can purchase a copy online. I’m sharing the text as it appears in the chapbook itself.

A title creates an expectation—it tells us what to expect from the poem. The title tells us that the poem will be about that structural part of a flower known as a stem. Notice that the poem is not analyzing the structure of a plant or a tree but of a flower—the flower is centered, the stem’s relationship to the flower is structural. This is what we are given from the outset.

And what we do know? We know the stem is the part which holds the flower-head aloft or connects the bloom to the ground, its source of nourishment. In some cases, the flower is also the vessel of fertilization which enables new flowers to be born.

But the poem does not begin with a flower or a stem or a stalk. The poem begins in a very specific moment—”the day the deer died”—and the poet’s first-person voice emerges in the space around this external death event which occurred in the world. The past tense of the poem begins with this pressure it puts on the present. We realize that the title is not going to play a descriptive role in this poem. And so we are left to wonder how this will work, and what the poet wants to subvert or re-imagine.

“I was alive in my house.” Period.

That period holds us back for a split second before the repetition creates a new sense of motion that pushes us forward, that qualifies what being alive in her house meant.

“I was alive in a watery field / of glaciers.” I love the use of repetition here, as if to thicken the onion layers, to both wrap and unwrap a globe around the speaker. The house changes to become a melting world, another grief, a silence which is someone liquid—and both coalesce in the speaker’s throat in this “realm of birchwood”, a surreal metaphor. The world inside the throat maps onto the outside world in a way that creates suspense.

The poet is describing a moment in the past and yet grappling with her presence in that moment. She will do this again. Several lines begin with “I was”. And there is a subtle and marvelous thing happening in my mind as I read the “I was alive” statements placed near the wildfires, the deer dying, the time before trees, the changing interior and exterior conditions; I am wondering what it means to be alive, or what it signifies to continue living in a circumstance where the words used to describe my condition, namely alive-ness, are not modified by surrounding circumstances.

The death of a deer becomes plural. The fires are no longer the work of imagination but the reality of a landscape. There is no border between being and having been.

And yet I am here, silent. I am reading a poem about stems which has become a poem about connections and borders which has become a condition involving water and silence in my throat. I am wondering what Andrea Rexilius wants from me as she continues this pattern of retracting and qualifying statements in a way that both undermines and develops them. It’s not a dialectic motion so much as seasonal one. It’s less systemic than loosely-plotted in a form of anticipated variance. I love the climate inside this poem, or the way that it’s motion creates a sense of climate rather than climax. But it is heavy.

It is heavier than the silence after a eulogy. It is hard to carry because, like many silences, it remains expectant. It wants words to fix, explain, and pour over. And all of this world-building or world-destroying happens in the first stanza.

How does Andrea give this poem such a strong sense of motion? Notice that there are three stanzas, that we are led to believe this will be a poem about stems, and that certain words & images are carried over from the previous stanza.

In the first stanza, we find “the realm of birchwood” in the her throat, and the stanza ends by qualifying this, by making it clear that the birchwood is on fire, and the fire is “lodged” in her “throat”, and it is making a hissing sound that fire makes which cannot be described as human. The outside world is drawn inside the poet’s throat into the space of speaking. We use our words to make sense. We use our voice to express the sense we make of an experience. We use our words to shout “Fire!” but the poet is not shouting Fire!—the poet is making the sound of wet wood burning, hissing.

Why do fires hiss? The sound comes from water being turned to vapor (or steam), and then being pushed out of the material under pressure. This pressure is “lodged", or living, in the speaker. It is a sound in lieu of words. It is also a form of silence, if we understand silence to be a space of unspoken things, or things we don’t discuss. But the hissing is important. Dead wood doesn’t hiss—it crackles. The hissing sound in the poet’s throat is the sound of living wood, or wood that holds water, burning. It is the sound of water leaving a living body.

The second stanza begins with an assertion: “There is no difference between the damsel and the savior.” I re-read that a few times for its blunt dismounting of saviors. The poet brings back the drought, this time as a “silence / resourced.” The line break after silence startled me a little; we already know that drought and silence are related, so when this word resourced appears, it thickens things. There is a tension inside the word resourced—in the idea of a source or origin being used again, in a motion that involves returning, and in the noun form of resource which is associated with mining and extraction industries.

The poet never mentions mining. She never says the phrase natural resource, and yet it insinuates itself somehow. There is the stem’s relationship to water—and the water centered in the poet’s body, in the speechless throat, in the life of the plant as well as the planet. There are no clear lines or boundaries to separate these sources of life from their resourcefulness or their absence.

And the third stanza returns with the same words, rubbing them harder, making small fires of the friction between their given meanings, the meanings acquired in previous stanzas, and how the poet expands them. The “damsel’s nightgown” is the night sky, the water is an ocean, the savior is what is “rooted.” The connection to the title is an opening, an extended metaphor that is modified in each stanza, and the closest we come to resolution is in the last line, which begins with an assertive “Only”, which feels insistent, and leaves us with a word, sanctum. This is an old Latin word whose meaning has thickened over time; it comes from the Latin, neuter of sanctus ‘holy’, from sancire ‘consecrate’.. It is a meaning-full world. It designates a sacred place, especially a shrine within a temple or church. It is also used to refer to a private place from which most people are excluded. It is a bounded word, a word that creates boundaries in its association with sacredness. But sanctum also refers to a refuge, a retreat, a safe place where one cannot be harmed.

What is the place of rest? We return to the flower parts—the root, the stem, the structure. The poet is not finished; an uncertainty is implicit in this Afterworld she is trying to imagine or to survive. I think we see a deep structural criticism in this poem as well as the book. I think Andrea Rexilius is trying to find boundaries, to look at parts, to discern responsibility and function when the borders of harm do not exist.