Tag: poem

Lyric Essentials: Sade Andria Zabala reads a poem by Annabelle Nyst

Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Sade Andria Zabala reads a passage by Annabelle Nyst.

You mentioned when you submitted this clip by Annabelle Nyst that you stumbled across this passage by chance on tumblr when she was unknown. Can you tell us a bit about Nyst and your experience coming across her work?

Sade Andria Zabala: Yes, I don’t think she’s written that much online though. I did stalk her blog a bit and know she is an Australian who moved to New York, now working in advertising for BuzzFeed. But even her blog entries are worth reading! When I chanced on the poem the first time, I was awestruck. Kind of when you read shocking news or something – like literal physical reaction of drawing back from the laptop. When you read it for the first time, it seems something purely aesthetical which happens to be good writing. I saved it for future reference in case I wanted to reread. A year or so later, I changed, lived, grew up some more. Reread it by chance and was like, “Yup, wow, that’s still me. That’s really me in a poem now, shit.” I decided I was going to get it tattooed (laughs).

Sundress: Which line did you pick?

Sade Andria Zabala: ALL OF IT! (laughs) Then I got more tattoos and realized it wasn’t going to fit on my forearm. I already have an Albert Camus tattoo there now so… I’m considering getting just the last line, “When she’s high she’ll dress down for you, all skin, and skin, and skin.” If my impulsiveness gets the better of me and I run out of arm space, I’ll do “skin, skin, skin” on my thigh instead.

Sundress: “Skin, skin, skin” has such a great sound. We did another Lyric Essentials with Connie Post, who picked “Two Countries” by Naomi Shihab Nye. She said of the opening line, “The simple starkness and power of ‘skin remembers’ those two words, together, in and of themselves, are enough to make any reader want more.” There’s a similar magic in the repetition of “skin” at the end of this poem. Can you describe it for us?

Sade Andria Zabala: “Skin remembers” well… that is definitely true. (smiles) I connected with this piece as a young woman undergoing sexual awakening and maturing, navigating independent life. That’s a turning point for me. I was raised, and still live in, an insanely conservative Catholic society who shuns anything that is not Maria Clara (our expression for traditional house-family-bound Filipina). I was spoon-fed everything! So now, there’s this girl in her early twenties experiencing the real world for the first time, experimenting, clueless.

Consider the line “when she’s drunk she’ll dress up for you.” In the game of mate-finding, that’s particularly true. Drunk infatuation. Drunk on alcohol. The superficiality of attracting, luring someone. Like imagine being in a party with said someone.

Connect that to the skin line, “when she’s high she’ll dress down for you.” It alludes both to sex, and intimacy. Gone the defense of the bar crowd and mutual friends, the facade of small talk and well-thought outfits. There you are! Facing this person wearing all your insecurities. Scar on your right thigh from getting hit by a bike at 5, scar on your knee from tripping down the bedroom stairs one too many times, scar on your face from someone’s surfboard.

You are there not to attract anymore, but to give them part of you- flesh (and tiny peek at your soul).

No matter how serious or casual the affair, we leave parts of ourselves to someone when we connect with them at such an intimate level and vice-versa. Yes, even one-night stands. So that repetition “skin, skin, skin” was especially haunting. No more party. Just you, him. Empty apartment, well-past midnight, lamp lights, silhouettes, bodies writing lyrics. The imagery!
Reading that part was like seeing a high-speed montage of all my past lovers.

Even now I can’t help but tangibly remember some of those memories. (pauses)

It’s nostalgic, I guess… Skin remembers.

Sundress: What do you make of this part, placed in the center of her poem: “She said, ‘I break the law because I’ve never broken a heart and I want to know what it feels like to be the brick not the window pane.’”

Sade Andria Zabala: Again, it’s going to be a personal answer as I relate to this poem so much. Perhaps the author meant the first half to be literal. Being stuck in a loveless relationship from your teens, your first and longest relationship where you’re too dumb to know how to get out of. It makes you go and discover new things. Drugs. Vandalism. Art. People. General acting out and not giving a fuck without even being aware of it. Rebellious? Looking for trouble.

My romantic relationships prior were not healthy. The Filipino mentality on love tends to be unhealthy. Girls are brainwashed to think marriage is the end-goal, that marrying the first guy you ever date or sleep with is a must, that you stick with them despite emotional and physical abuse. Yeah. Then you do break-up despite the protests of your family, but the relationships after that sort of repeat itself. You go after guys, relationships that tend to be one-sided, that have a chance of not working out because maybe you’re not sure you both can (or even want to) commit. You’re stuck in this rut you’ve made for yourself because you’re still young and it is difficult to unlearn. It is more a challenge to unlearn than learn.

What I’m trying to say is – this line basically takes on the transition from girl to woman, from doormat to dominant. Or at least Nyst is expressing her desire for it. You cannot live life always playing the victim, the safe side, the good guy. Sometimes, you gotta be the villain. You gotta face your demons and become them for awhile. You gotta do some fucked up stuff to learn, to grow, to understand and discover yourself. Even at the cost of leaving a mess out of someone.

Let me be, for once, the one to hastily pack my clothes and shut the door while you lay sleeping. Let me be shameless, selfish. Let me be the one to hurt and not the one hurting.

Damn… love really is just a cycle of us hurting each other because we were hurt by someone else.

Sundress: You mentioned earlier you read this poem, and then, after having some life experience, came back to it later, and read it with more meaning. How has that experience affected you as a writer?

Sade Andria Zabala: The best way possible, if you can call it that. You know what they say, tragedy makes for good art. I had actually become somewhat addicted to this process – destroying myself, fixing myself, the exhilarating feeling of loving myself again. I purposely went into this lifestyle not just because I enjoyed it, but because the control was empowering. The self-destruction at each experience was addicting. I’d say some of my best writing came during this time. I found my voice, my style after years of doing writing prompts attempting to mimic other writers I looked up to thinking that was the way to go, to be a better artist. Some of my earlier writing sound insincere because to that. That’s why I’m so, so proud of War Songs, my new book. It is a sort of homage to this poem and the stories that come with it.

But before that? Jeez, was I mess! A fascinating mess, albeit haha. I am now trying to live artistically without that crutch. To write and create regardless of how “perfect enough” a piece might feel for me, compared to my other writing. “Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”

But it can be difficult. Sometimes I fold into myself again, take a hit or two, a drug, a drink, purposely allow my sadness to gnaw at me as an excuse to get in the “mood” to write. The moment the artist’s life ceases to be tragic, well, you’re fucked.

Lately I’ve been somehow satisfied, the good days are more constant and I gotta remind myself life doesn’t have to be dark to be interesting. It is okay to live a “boring” life because you are loved, you are loved, you are loved and you do not need to self-destruct to know it, you do not need to write a poem to show-off to the world that how you feel is real.

My poems don’t always need to scream bloody murder I realize that now. I’m trying to write about other things, despite the theme not being my strongest suit. I’ve been trying not to dismantle myself for the sake of dismantling myself.

It is okay to be okay. I am trying.

Sundress: Are there any other Nyst poems you can point us to? And, since Nyst’s poetry mostly just ghosts around on tumblr, are there other tumblr poems and poets you can point us to who you found similarly inspiring?

Sade Andria Zabala: Nyst doesn’t write poems anymore, I think, but there’s this post on her blog called “This Is Probably About You” and oh, god, it’s wonderful in the worst way possible.

On the latter, yes, definitely. There’s “Emergencies” by Buddy Wakefield. There’s “Love Poem” by Rudy Francisco, “OCD Poem” by Neil Hillborn, “How To Be Alone” by Tanya Davis (directed by Andrea Dorfman), and Shane Koyczan’s “6:59 AM”. Marianna Paige, Quay K., and, fuck, probably one of the best undiscovered poems and writers ever “If I Wanted to Fuck You” by hugewineglass on tumblr.

~

What is essential to you as a writer or poet? What piece changed your life? Gave you hope, validated and voiced your fears, was there while you triumphed over them? What piece brings you joy? Made you laugh or grin like a fool? Who was it who made you sit back in wonder, inspiring you to be a stronger writer? We want to know. Send us a recording (or packet of short recordings) of you reading your Lyric Essential—a short story, a handful of poems, an excerpt or two—to SundressLyricEssentials AT gmail DOT com. Then we’ll talk.

SadeSade Andria Zabala is a 24-year-old Filipina surfer and nomad sometimes residing in Denmark. She has self-published two collection of poems – Coffee and Cigarettes and War Songs,  the latter released just this September. Zabala has appeared on literary sites/publications such as The Chapess Zine, Berlin Artparasites, Germ Magazine, Hooligan Magazine, The Rising Phoenix Review, and more. In her spare time she likes to eat words and drink sunlight. You can reach her at surfandwrite.tumblr.com.

 

 

Annabelle NystAnnabelle Nyst is a creative at BuzzFeed and may be found on twitter at @annabelle_nyst.

Lyric Essentials: Tim Suermondt reads “This World” by Czeslaw Milosz

Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Tim Suermondt reads “This World” from Selected and Last Poems 1931-2004 by Czeslaw Milosz.

Thank you, Tim, for introducing me to Czeslaw Milosz. I am assuming, based on the title of the book and the poet’s name, that Milosz wasn’t writing in English. Is this a translation? (Who was the translator?) Can you tell me a little about the poet?

Tim Suermondt: Milosz spoke English and may have done a bit of writing in English. He was a Professor of Slavic Literature at UC Berkeley for many years. But he worked with translators—mostly with the poet, Robert Hass. Hass does most of the translations of the poems in the Harper Collins addition. There are a few others who translate and a number of the later poems in the book are translated by his son, Anthony.

Milosz did some work for the Polish resistance against the Nazis in WWII, and after the war he became an attache for the Polish Government. In 1951 he defected to Paris. And by 1960 he was at Berkeley. He did eventually make it make it back to Poland after the Soviet Empire collapsed in 1989. He’s considered by many to be one of the most important poets of the 20th Century. He won the Nobel Prize in 1980, and died in 2004.

This is what he said in an interview in 1983: “I feel that today poetry is under a kind of blackmail on the part of all the theorists who are trying to make poetry different from prose: ‘This is true poetry, this is not true poetry.’ I know that American poets today try to overcome this. But, in my own experience, I felt the need to liberate those requirements of what was considered poetry, to get a more free hand in order to say something. That is why I say in a poem, ‘Ars Poetica’: ‘Yes, I can see this is not poetry. This is something else. I don’t know what it is.’ Then I am much more free in writing.”

Sundress: The quote you shared is interesting. Do you feel this need to determine what is and what is not ‘true poetry’ has been overcome?

Tim Suermondt: No, far from it and it will never be overcome. We’re often far too contentious creatures to agree on the truth of almost anything, let alone what constitutes “real” poetry.

Ask ten poets and critics and you’re likely to get ten different answers. I like what the poet/critic Adam Kirsch has written about the “cooked” poets and the “uncooked” poets, and this doesn’t even cover the layers within and outside that definition. Just look at what we’ve been subjected to over the recent decades: Formalism and some strain of Neo-formalism, Language Poetry, Experimental Poetry, Narrative Poetry, “Free Verse is bad”, “Free Verse is good”, “What do we do about the Lyric?” Prose Poetry, and on and on. The traditional Canon that once held sway was good in the sense that it gave, or tried to give, clarity as to what made for good to great poetry.

But it often overlooked the daring and the inventive, keeping its classical sheen as aloof as possible. And it very often left out many poets, especially women and minorities and rightly lost ultimate authority. While there’s nothing wrong with a poet looking at certain rules about the poetic art that have come down through the ages—there’s much that can still be put to use—there’s nothing wrong with a poet tweaking, if not sometimes breaking those rules. Milosz had it right: write the poem as well as you can and let others and history attempt to categorize—rest assured, they will.

Sundress: “This World” is a heavy poem. Are you able to put it into a little more context for us? Am I right to hazard a guess that this was written sometime during or shortly after WWII?

Tim Suermondt: It’s logical to assume that “This World” was written during or shortly after WWII—especially given Poland’s tragic history for most of the 20th Century. The country endured the Bolsheviks, the Nazis and the Soviet Union before being set free in 1989 when that Soviet Union finally collapsed. And the ending of the poem certainly echoes those long, difficult years. But the poem was written in 1995—a reflection of an older man assessing this world in a most imaginative way. Just to think that, in particular, so much suffering in the world (of humans, not abstractions) was not the end game, that it will be reversed and made whole, is quite a powerful statement. And though not stated as such, the poem implies that the good we experience might be given back to us a thousand fold. Of course, it’s probably not the case but who really knows? I’m more than happy to give Milosz the benefit of the doubt and let poetry do the impossible.

Sundress: As a baby-boomer, growing up post WWII, how did you feel about “This World” when you first read it? I know I immediately inserted my own generation references—the “War on Terror” and the highly-publicized school shootings—into my first listening of the poem. What did you think of and how did you connect to it?

Tim Suermondt: I’m indeed a baby boomer, oh the Cold War years for me. But every generation can feel this poem to be speaking to them—and in a sense it is. The poem is universal and touches on concerns that will always be a part of our human condition. And it was this universality that moved me when I first read the poem. And I have to say it was also just an enjoyable poem to read—I loved the construct. Good poems can do that to us—all of us.

Sundress: How has Czeslaw Milosz influenced your own work?

Tim Suermondt: I don’t think any writer can say exactly how another writer influenced his or her own work. Let me put it this way. In the early 80’s in a small bookshop in Florida, I was browsing around and pulled out a book by Milosz (I’d heard of him only vaguely)—”Bells in Winter”—and was taken by the very first poem “Encounter”—the final line being: “I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.” I was struck by the beauty, humanity and gravitas of the poem, along with my desire to be able to write a poem like that one day. I knew I would keep this Milosz around. And in addition to those attributes I mentioned, his poems employ hard and interesting questions about faith, ethics, history and philosophy—sometimes done with a sly humor and flesh and blood sensuality. Quite a list, and I always hope the poems I write show some of those qualities too.

Sundress: You mentioned before that you’re “more than happy to… let poetry do the impossible.” Are there other poems by Milosz you can point us to which voice hope for the impossible? Or other or interviews we should follow-up on?

Tim Suermondt: Milosz has many poems that flirt with the impossible. I’ll mention three poems that I really like and that deal with this flirtation: “Gift,” “Amazement,” and “Meaning”—which was written four years before “This World” but seems to be a precursor of it. All of these poems and all the others are only a Google click away. As for interviews, Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations from the University of Mississippi Press is a good one to read—it’s nicely wide-ranging.

~

What is essential to you as a writer or poet? What piece changed your life? Gave you hope, validated and voiced your fears, was there while you triumphed over them? What piece brings you joy? Made you laugh or grin like a fool? Who was it who made you sit back in wonder, inspiring you to be a stronger writer? We want to know. Send us a recording (or packet of short recordings) of you reading your Lyric Essential—a short story, a handful of poems, an excerpt or two—to SundressLyricEssentials AT gmail DOT com. Then we’ll talk.

Tim Suermondt is the author of two full-length collections of poems: Trying To Help the Elephant Man Dance (The Backwaters Press, 2007) and Just Beautiful (New York Quarterly Books, 2010.) His third collection Election Night and the Five Satins will be published early in 2016 by Glass Lyre Press. He has poems published and forthcoming in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Blackbird, Bellevue Literary Review, PANK, North Dakota Quarterly, december magazine, Plume Poetry Journal, and Stand Magazine (U.K.) among others. He lives in Cambridge (MA) with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

czeslaw milosz bio picBorn in Lithuania in 1911, Czeslaw Milosz spent much of his childhood in Czarist Russia, where he published his first collection of poems, Poemat o czasie zastyglym at the age of twenty-one. As an adult, he defected, leaving Poland due to the oppressive Communist regime which had come to power post WWII. He moved to the United States where he lived from 1960 until his death in 2004. Milosz wrote his poems, novels, essays, and other works in his native Polish. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Allie Marini’s Before Fire: Divorce Poems

allie and george


Streuselküchen, Prasselküchen, Butterküchen

Some say, lying is done with words & silence,
but it is also done with küchen, streusel—
something scattered or sprinkled:
flour, cinnamon, butter, sugar, crème, nut meats, cherries, fat—
all the makings of happy marriages or happier funerals.

Simple cakes, these—though the baker knows better.
Yeast & milk, the freud-und-leid, mixed together to form dough,
which though silky to the touch, takes heft & might to make smooth.
In the kitchen, the baker kneads by hand, flipping & punching
until every knot turns soft & velvet.
Leave it still, heart-warmed, until it doubles.

Zuckerküchen assumes nothing.
Flat cakes for oblong unions, lopsided loves & slivered luck.
Most of the time, it’s more crumb than cake;
though sometimes—a puff pastry or short crust foundation,
a dough formed from shortening, more pie than küchen—
it’s up to the baker to decide: Sweet is sweet.

Years ago, a Silesian baker tied her apron strings,
pulling rolled pastries & butter-sugar tartlets,
veined & studded with pockets of cinnamon,
out of the warmth of her oven—to get to a husband’s heart,
travel a path from his tongue, & when he wrongs you,
invent Käseküchen; soft cheese will mask the salt.
Emboss it with cherries. Show him how sweet it is to sit at your table.

When he strays & comes back to you, celebrate the ripe fruit of reconciliation,
a bit sharp, sour-sweet as the reddest of strawberries in your famous Erdbeerküchen.
Lace it with an edge of whipped cream—
forget the way the crust crumbles under the tines of your dessert fork.

Later, use a flat pan for a simple confection:
Baumküchen, whose layers are the rings of a tree,
gone from acorn to oak in the oven—
mature & ripe, its filling pinwheels vanilla, nutmeg-glazed apple slices,
the pinch of occasional jealousies & the remaining scars of old fights,
strident as an unexpected spike of ginger or cinnamon—
softened by a flutter of cardamom &
a skillful piping of sweet white icing on the top.

What’s left, in the kitchen,
after the husbands have been wedded, forgiven & buried,
after the kids have moved out &
the guests have come & gone:
just crumbs, & the memory of desserts not always sweet.
Beerdigungsküchen; the baker grieves.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This selection comes from Allie Marini Batts’ collection Before Fire: Divorce Poems, available now from ELJ Publications!  Purchase your copy here!

Allie Marini holds degrees from Antioch University of Los Angeles & New College of Florida, meaning she can explain deconstructionism, but cannot perform simple math. Her work has been a finalist for Best of the Net & nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is managing editor for the NonBinary Review, Unbound Octavo, & Zoetic Press, and co-edits for Lucky Bastard Press with her man, performance poet B Deep. She has previously served on the masthead for Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Journal, The Weekenders Magazine, Mojave River Review & Press, & The Bookshelf Bombshells. Allie is the author of  Unmade & Other Poems (Beautysleep Press), You Might Curse Before You Bless (ELJ Publications) wingless, scorched & beautiful (Imaginary Friend Press), Before Fire (ELJ Publications), This Is How We End (Bitterzoet), Pictures From The Center Of The Universe (Paper Nautilus, winner of the Vella Prize), Cliffdiving (Nomadic Press), And When She Tasted of Knowledge (Nomadic Press), Southern Cryptozoology: A Field Guide To Beasts Of The Southern Wild (Hyacinth Girl Press), Here Comes Hell {dancing girl press}, & Heart Radicals, a collaborative collection with Les Kay, Janeen Pergrin Rastall & Sandra Marchetti (ELJ Publications).  Allie rarely sleeps, and her mother has hypothesized that she is actually a robot fueled by Diet Coke & Sri Racha. She met George R.R. Martin & did not die. Proof of immortality? Not sure, but it does make a compelling argument…Find her on the web: https://www.facebook.com/AllieMariniBatts or @kiddeternity.

Erin Elizabeth Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the author of two full-length collections, The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake, 2011) and The Fear of Being Found, which will be re-released from Zoetic Press later this year. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing and teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee. She serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications and The Wardrobe.

Lyric Essentials: Connie Post reads “Two Countries” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Connie Post Reads “Two Countries” by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Connie, I must tell you how excited I am to be discussing a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. I’m currently working with poet Laurie Byro on a William Stafford Lyric Essentials, who I understand was her mentor. That fact, and a few of her poems I’ve familiar with, is about the extent of my knowledge on Nye. Can you tell us a little more about her?

Connie Post: Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis Missouri in 1952. Her father was a Palestinian Refugee and her mother of European dissent. She grew up in in Texas. Her writing is imbued with the suffering of the Palestinian people and also reaches across cultures to bring deep meaning to our many different worlds. After 9/11, her work became particularly important as a voice, a bridge between the Middle Eastern world and Americans. Her other influences include Wallace Stevens and Gary Snyder. Her poems about heritage are remarkable and have made a deep imprint on the lives of many. She is also the author of several children’s books. Her early books of poems were published in the 1970’s. The book that knocked my socks off was Words Under the Words (1994). After I read Words Under the Words I bought every other book of hers I could get my hands on. Among other things she now serves as Chancellor on the American Academy of Poets (since 2009).

Sundress: This is a poem that almost begs to be read aloud. After listening to the audio you sent in, I looked at the text to get a visual of the characters used. As I expected, “Two Countries” is dominated by hissing sibiliants, but what I didn’t hear at first were the almost opposing nasal consonants. Encountering the poem first in print was likely a very different experience. What made you really take notice of this particular poem from Nye’s collection?

Connie Post: Honestly, the first line stopped my cold in my tracks. The simple starkness and power of “skin remembers” those two words, together, in and of themselves, are enough to make any reader want more. I immediately wanted to know what skin remembers, how, why. I wanted to know the whole meaning and the spaces in between. I admire the hissing sibilants and reading the poem definitely takes one to another level, as the reader must take time to slow down for the lines like “Skin ate, walked slept by itself”.

The opposing nasal consonants of course provide a perfect oppositional texture, and provides yet another layer to help the reader immerse themselves to the exact story of skin, and how it stretches beyond ourselves.

Sundress: It’s a great first line, but it surprised me. It’s not how I expected a poem titled “Two Cities” to begin. And the end isn’t where I expected the poem to wind up at, either. Can you walk us through the poem a bit, and what it means to you, particularly that, “skin… stretches beyond ourselves”?

Connie Post: I believe great poetry provides the unexpected in the most delightful of ways.

The title, “Two Counties” primes the reader to think of one theme and then first two lines take us down a completely different path. Good poems should surprise us immediately and this one does! Towards the end, Nye brings the two concepts of skin and traveling, perfectly interwoven. In the beginning of the poem she gives “skin” a life, a voice and a pathway. I love hearing the voice of skin, and how it adopts all the human qualities we have yet also feels unseen. It hides our most secret selves and yet travels, too.

The expansion of the poem starts when Nye states “it was never seen” then to expand the skin’s life over the hip of a city, a mosque and the layered meaning of “a thousand corridors of cinnamon and rope”. The imagery here brings the poem to a whole new level.

It brings us outside the skin and to the larger world. When Nye states “when skin is not alone” she continues to explore our humanity and then helps us see how we can be larger than ourselves, living beyond our own borders, whatever they may be.

Sundress: When you described her, you said that Nye’s work managed to “reach across countries”. Do her poems often start with an individual subject or personage, such as ‘skin’, and expand to express an inner-connectedness? How does “Two Countries” compare with her body of work?

Connie Post: Many of her poems do indeed start an individual subject and expand in unexpected and meaningful ways.

The two attached poems* “Breaking my Favorite Bowl” and “Dog” exemplify this skill. These two poems are similar to “Two Counties” in the start with one simple concept that grows to a larger universality that stretches across many bridges.

Attached in the link below is another of hers “Making a fist” which truly punches me in stomach. There is a visceral feel to it. By the end I was even making a fist!

“Making a fist”

Nye has a way of bringing the larger to the smaller and the small to the larger in ways that are connected so intricately that you don’t even know how intricate until the end of the poem and when you re-read it. I think the poem “Two Counties” is very representative of the style of her work. One of her other famous poems “Kindness” changed me as a person, and a poet.

Sundress: How has Naomi Shihab Nye changed you as a person and influenced your work?

Connie Post: Naomi Shihab Nye has changed me probably more than any other contemporary poet. When I first opened her book Words under the Words I was mesmerized. That book changed the way I wrote poetry. Of course now I have all of her books. The more I read her work, the more I realized there were avenues of image and metaphor I had never explored. Nye has a way of noticing the smallest of details in the most perfect way. She also has a way of viewing the world from afar and then also up close at the same time. She links ideas and images together that I never would have thought of before. She selects words and language that that are both exquisite and musical. She gives remarkable beauty to the voice of suffering and her specific use of culture helps a reader step through many unopened doors. I am grateful for her gift of poetry. I think she writes differently than many of the poets today. Her voice is very unique and I carry with me one of her most famous poems “Kindness” and it helps reminds me of how I need to live my life every day. I recite the poem in my car when I am stressed and on walks in our neighborhood.

*These are currently unpublished online. Excerpts from “Breaking my Favorite Bowl”:
Some afternoons
thud unexpectedly
and split into four pieces
on the floor.
…
I’m thinking about apples and histories,
the hands I broke off
…
the unannounced blur
of something passing
out of a life
Excerpts from “Dog”:
The sky is the belly of a large dog,
sleeping.
…
The dog who floats over us
has no master.
…
It is the long fence
of their hoping he would stay
that he has jumped.

~

What is essential to you as a writer or poet? What piece changed your life? Gave you hope, validated and voiced your fears, was there while you triumphed over them? What piece brings you joy? Made you laugh or grin like a fool? Who was it who made you sit back in wonder, inspiring you to be a stronger writer? We want to know. Send us a recording (or packet of short recordings) of you reading your Lyric Essential—a short story, a handful of poems, an excerpt or two—to SundressLyricEssentials AT gmail DOT com. Then we’ll talk.

Connie Post #2Connie Post served as the first Poet Laureate of Livermore, California from 2005 – 2009. Her work has appeared in The Big Muddy, Calyx, Cold Mountain Review, Crab Creek Review, Comstock Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Slipstream, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her awards include the Dirty Napkin Cover Prize, The Caesura Poetry Award, and the Montclair Poetry Contest. Her chapbook And When the Sun Drops was the 2012 Fall Aurorean’s Editors Choice Award. Her work has received praise from Al Young, Ursula LeGuin, and Ellen Bass. She has been short listed for the Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize, The Muriel Craft Bailey awards (Comstock Review), Lois Cranston Memorial Awards (Calyx), Blood Root Literary Magazine, and the Gary Gildner Award (I 70 Review). Her first full length book Floodwater was released by Glass Lyre Press in 2014 and won the Lyrebird award.

NaomishihabnyeNaomi Shihab Nye, born 1952 to an American mother and a Palestinian father, is a poet, songwriter, and novelist residing in San Antonio, TX. After 9/11, Nye spoke out against both terrorism and prejudice towards Arab-Americans. Her most acclaimed volume, Fuel (1998), was thus followed by 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002). In 2012 Nye was named laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature.

Lyric Essentials: Stevie Edwards reads “Long Lines to Stave off Suicide” by Rachel Zucker

Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Stevie Edwards reads the poem, “Long Lines to Stave off Suicide” by Rachel Zucker.

The poem you picked to read for us is dynamic and intense. Before we listen to your recording, what can you tell us about Rachel Zucker’s work and Museum of Accidents?

Stevie Edwards: What I love about Museum of Accidents (and other work by Rachel Zucker) is that she demystifies motherhood. I think as a culture we have a tendency to put motherhood on this pedestal where everything is unicorns and apple pie. Although I don’t have children, I know that wasn’t the case for my mother, and that’s not to say she didn’t love her children. I think she did and does deeply. But I think Zucker’s bravery in talking about depression in motherhood, in talking about the fear of transmitting one’s more negative aspects onto a child, makes it a little bit easier for me to breathe. She tackles the fears I have about motherhood, in a way I can only really compare to Sharon Olds. Zucker has this amazing balance between tenderness and bite; the negative capability in the poems makes the moments of light seem more important, more expensive.

Sundress: “Long Lines to Stave off Suicide” has a great rhythm when read aloud. Is the form of the poem, and its use of the page, which it seems to undulate, typical of Zucker’s work?

Stevie Edwards: Rachel Zucker often has these kind of wild looking pages with lots of long lines and lots of somewhat erratic looking (but I would also argue quite skillful) indentations. Museum of Accidents has a non-standard trim size with a wider than usual page width, and her poems often take up the full thing. I’m not sure if this is a useful reference, but visually the poems in this book look a bit similar to the poems in Crush by Richard Siken. The ways she uses indentations and line breaks create a controlled world in which the reader is thrashed around. There will be these little hesitations of white space, and then the emotional explosion of a sprawling line.

Sundress: The thrashing is audible. The first moment in this recording that struck me was as Zucker relates making pancakes for her son’s class and one of his classmates becomes oddly attached to her. As you read the lines it moves back and forth smoothly for a bit. The first shock—the boy’s mother was dead—is delivered with the same rhythm; it is that sentence that follows:

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with its abrupt short line, that grabbed my attention. Her admittance of her sudden relief—that in her child’s life, she’d succeeded simply by being around during his development—comes as a punch. It is that same willingness to share a very human thought that Olds has, but of course Olds is less sprawling in comparison. There are more instances to investigate. Which lines hold particular meaning for you?

Stevie Edwards: Those lines you’ve quoted are definitely ones I’ve walked around with for awhile. The opening of this poem has always stuck with me:

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First, I’m really struck by the choice of beginning the poem with “or,” which I take to suggest a contrasting action the speaker could take instead of suicide, another option. I think there’s a bit of biting humor to the phrase “everything for a long time is so / keep-the-baby-alive,” but also a lot of ache. I don’t have children, and I think one of the reasons I haven’t gone that route, at least not up to this point, is knowing that if I had them and killed myself it’d be the most monstrous thing I could imagine doing. As someone who’s dealt with suicidal ideation since my early teens, I have this tendency to guard others from depending upon or caring about me—though it doesn’t always work. However, I’ve also seen having children really, as corny as it might sound, give people I know who’ve struggled with depression a sense of purpose. A thing they feel they have to live for no matter what. I’ve also seen it do the opposite. I guess what really blows me away about that opening is how honest it feels and how much it gives us about what’s at stake for the speaker.

I also love the section where the speaker and her son are on the subway and the son looks at a sign and says “why…should you / say something if you see something?” which is both cute and heartbreaking.

Sundress: As an educator, tell us how you feel about these lines:

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Stevie Edwards: I am currently working full-time in publishing, but I did teach at Cornell from 2012-2015. There’s a sentiment there that I certainly can connect to — a question I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and don’t have an answer to is whether or not one needs to have suffered to be good at writing poetry. That’s not to say I think all good poetry has to be about suffering. At times I’ve read student poems that lacked emotional resonance and thought that maybe they hadn’t felt enough loss to comprehend the miracle of a tulip opening. But that’s not all student work. Some student work has made me feel glad in my bones for poetry. Sometimes I feel so grateful I get to help discover poetry. And sometimes I think that my question about if poets need to have suffered is just me being bitter about my ideas of easy lives I haven’t been dealt.

Sundress: It does seem to be an interesting, common discussion in poetry circles though—“do you need to suffer to write (good) poetry?” Do you feel like the undercurrent of suffering in this poem came from a necessary truth, some sort of real occurrence? Or, perhaps, I should ask if you feel that while you can take some ownership of this poem—as you have by recording it, because of its personal importance to you—if that also allows you to speculate past the boundaries of the poem to the poet?

Stevie Edwards: I don’t really feel comfortable speculating past the bounds of the poem to the poet’s lived life. I think this is a poem of necessary truth, but I don’t think that means it has to be a “real occurrence.”  To some degree, our writing is always informed by our own obsessions and experiences, but I don’t think it’s fair to assume that such influence always shows up in literal ways. That said, there’s a roundness to this speaker, to the full spectrum of emotions that ranges from such sweet moments like “banana after brush-your-teeth time” to the rage and despair of lines like “oh, for fucks sake, there’s no difference between ‘stones or ‘rocks’ in Virginia’s / frock. down, down, down…”— which I think would be challenging to achieve without some personal insight. However, I will say that I think it’s weird that there’s such a frequent impulse to interrogate whether or not people’s sadness in poems is real. Nobody ever is like, were those daffodils in Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” really THAT great?  How do we know that it wasn’t really just a couple of tulips, but maybe daffodils sounded better? Was he exaggerating their beauty? There is such a strong cultural pressure to invalidate negative emotions, a pressure which I believe comes from a place of fear—fear of admitting what one’s actually felt, fear of perceiving what humans are capable of going through, fear of powerlessness.

Sundress: You mentioned how Zucker has impacted you as a reader—that her “bravery in talking about depression in motherhood… makes it a little bit easier for me to breathe.” How has Rachel Zucker influenced your work?

Stevie Edwards: I think the lines from this poem that have most directly influenced my work are somewhat less directly tied to bravery and more to do with aesthetic (although, those things aren’t completely separate). I do appreciate the ways in which Rachel Zucker makes spaces for women to write about less idealized versions of motherhood. When I read really pristine portraits of motherhood, frankly, it makes me think that I could never be good enough to be a mother. And, more and more, I don’t think that’s true.

The lines from this poem that have influenced my writing the most are:

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There was a period of time where I was cutting and cutting and cutting my poems down to shreds. But these lines shook something loose in me. Yes, I love it when poems have real world things. When there are blue jays and bass. I love the ability to reenact an instant through language and form. I love Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” the list of stuff I can touch with my hands, even if I have to Google half the items. And I love how wild Zucker’s form is—how she’s chucking objects all over the place. There is nothing dainty about this poem’s form or style, and I love her for doing that. I think Zucker’s writing is beautiful but not pretty. Perhaps, to some extent, it would be a lie to put this poem in pretty little couplets with a bunch of highly ornate language. For awhile, I operated under and idea that if I was going to write about something as controversial as suicide, I had to do it in the prettiest lines to get away with it—as if I might trick editors who’d ordinarily scoff at the topic with some really enticing assonance.

Sundress: Are there any other Zucker poems, reviews, or interviews you would recommend?

Stevie Edwards: Oh, there’s lots of poems! I really like “Welcome to the Blighted Ovum Support Group” and “Hey Allen Ginsberg Where Have You Gone and What Would You Think of My Drugs.” She also has several other books, which you can check out on her website rachelzucker.net.

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What is essential to you as a writer or poet? What piece changed your life? Gave you hope, validated and voiced your fears, was there while you triumphed over them? What piece brings you joy? Made you laugh or grin like a fool? Who was it who made you sit back in wonder, inspiring you to be a stronger writer? We want to know. Send us a recording (or packet of short recordings) of you reading your Lyric Essential—a short story, a handful of poems, an excerpt or two—to SundressLyricEssentials AT gmail DOT com. Then we’ll talk.

Stevie EdwardsStevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. She is Editor-in-Chief at Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. Her first book, GOOD GRIEF (Write Bloody 2012), received two post-publication awards, the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University – Carbondale. Her second book, HUMANLY, was recently released by Small Doggies Press. Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, The Offing, PANK, Vinyl, Devil’s Lake, Indiana Review, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Cornell University and a BA from Albion College. She currently lives in Charleston, SC, where she works for a nonfiction publisher by day and is a poet by night.

Rachel Zucker is the author of nine books, including her memoir MORachel Zucker2THERs (Counterpath Press, 2014), and The Pedestrians, a double collection of prose and poetry forthcoming from Wave Books. Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and named one of the best books of 2009 by Publisher’s Weekly. Widely published, her poems have appeared in journals including: Barrow Street, Iowa Review, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner. Zucker received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2013 and currently teaches poetry at New York University.

Lyric Essentials: Tim Peeler Reads “On the Eve of My Becoming a Father” & “Shadows” by Leo Connellan

Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Tim Peeler reads “Shadows” & “On the Eve of My Becoming a Father” by Leo Connellan.

Thank you for joining us Tim. When you sent in your recordings, you mentioned that Connellan was your earliest influence. How did you come across his work and what was reading that first poem like? Do you remember which one it was?

Tim Peeler: Thanks for having me. When I was at East Carolina University doing undergrad in the late seventies, even though I was an English major, I hung out mostly with artists. A friend named Michael Loderstedt loaned me a book of poems entitled simply Selected Poems by Leo Connellan. Loderstedt, who is now a well-known artist and photographer in the Cleveland area and Kent State prof, had grown up on the North Carolina coast at a place called Emerald Isle. He had been drawn to the book because so much of it is about the lobster fishermen of Maine and their life near and on the water. The first poem in the book is a long one called “Lobster Claw.” It is written in a concise yet powerful language, and when I read it, and later the other poems, I realized that it was possible to write about blue collar people and experiences in ways that didn’t romanticize their plight or attempt to manipulate the readers’ sense of nostalgia. I looked for the book over the weekend and failed to locate it, and I can only hope that some interested person stole it from me as I did from Michael.

Sundress: It’s interesting that you mention that Connellan doesn’t romanticize the plight of the blue collar class. Can you elaborate on why this is important (and it looks like surprising at the time)?

Tim Peeler: It’s important because his honest treatment of the working class raises their existence to the level of art and it also helped establish his niche in the poetry world, something he achieved for most of his years, without a university affiliation or academic standing. So the first line I read of his was the opening line of “Lobster Claw” which is “Morning and I must kill,” which is probably one of the greatest first lines I’ve ever encountered.

Sundress: Full disclosure: after listening to the poems you sent in, I searched for more online (although to my chagrin I could not find “Lobster Claw”) and read what I could. I was impressed to see that while he had attended the University of Maine, he was a salesman. That’s about as blue collar, everyman as an individual can be.

In our ‘publish or perish’, MFA-filled poetry environment, there seems to be a premium placed on university affiliation or academic standing. I’ve heard whispers of a dark Literati, playing gatekeeper to success. Universities are the Free Masons, MFA programs are the initiating handshake. On the other hand, I have heard compelling arguments against grad school. Do you feel that Connellan’s ability to raise the working class’s “existence to the level of art” was dependent on his view as a poet outside of academia?

Tim Peeler: I think that not just his poetry but his self-concept depended on his status as an outsider. Even after he became the Connecticut poet laureate and the writer-in-residence for the University of Connecticut, and had garnered the support of writers like Richard Wilbur and Karl Shapiro, he still felt like he was the kid that didn’t fit in because he wasn’t good at sports, that could never please his father who thought that writing poetry meant he was a sissy. Connellan identified with the underdog status of the working class, and he approached the process in a very working class manner, waking at 4 AM every morning to write till 6 AM when he had to leave for whatever job, whether it be typewriter ribbon salesman, fry cook, janitor, or whatever. So by raising the level of their existence to art, he raised his own as well.

Sundress: What immediately struck me with this first poem, “On the Eve of My Becoming a Father,” was its title. I expected a more joyous piece, but what followed was more melancholy in tone. I would have never linked this poem to fatherhood without the author’s direction. And, like it was a cliffhanger, I kept waiting on a direct reference to a newborn as I expect in a poem about impending fatherhood. A poem whose meaning changes or becomes suddenly clear only when presented with the title displays a smart economy of language. What attracted you to this poem?

Tim Peeler: When I first read that poem, I had no idea what fatherhood was about or what a profound change having children causes in one’s life. But I did know what it was like to run wild and fail at various things in my life because I couldn’t get out of my own way, and this is what I identified with. Now when I read it, I know exactly what he’s talking about, and unlike then, I hear his nasal voice with all its sadness and hope and its yearning for love and acceptance. The poem, like most of his, is auto-biographical. Connellan traveled extensively around the United States, mostly hitchhiking, working whatever jobs he could find until he reached his thirties. When his daughter was born, he settled down in the northeast, mostly ended his bout with alcoholism, and set about telling the story of who he was and what he had done. And yes I appreciate the economy of language and I’m probably a sucker for that melancholy tone. But when I first read it, before I got to know him or to know anything much about poetic technique or poetry in general, I just knew that I liked it.

Sundress: When you say that most of his work is autobiographical, is it always obvious and is he known for writing without a persona? In a climate where many poems are not autobiographical—and should not be taken as such—what does it mean to you knowing his poems aren’t just a persona?

Tim Peeler: There’s always some distance between an author and his or her autobiographical self, because no one can be totally self-aware or have completely accurate memories. Yet even in Connellan’s most ambitious work, the trilogy entitled The Clear Blue Lobster-Water Country, the persona, Boppledock faces dilemmas similar to those that Connellan experienced: loss of mother in childhood, addiction and rehab, and a father’s non-acceptance. But the beauty of the work is that you don’t have to know Connellan’s personal story to experience the power of his work. I don’t know what he would have thought of today’s emphasis on communicating through a persona or for that matter what he would have thought of the proliferation of Internet poetry or MFA programs. I have often thought that the 2000 presidential election killed him, and that he died just in the nick of time.

Sundress: Was “Shadows” another poem which you read earlier in life and came back to with new meaning?

Tim Peeler: I do look at “Shadows” differently as an older person. When I first read it, I was a religious person, so not being one any more in the traditional sense changes my perspective on that punchline ending.

Sundress: Both of the endings have a similar punch for me—a sense of disconnection. In the first, the moon is beyond him; in the second, God seems to be the unattainable. If you had to hazard a guess, what would you say Connellan intended us to take away from the last line of “Shadows”?

Tim Peeler: These are both kind of punchline poems, especially “Shadows.” And I can tell you exactly what he wanted us to take away from that one. He once described to me how he was inspired to write the last line in “Shadows.” He was in traffic in New York City on a bridge, feeling sorry for himself and wishing his life had turned out better. In fact, the adult Connellan who fully realized that the Catholic church and his parochial schooling had contributed to his many problems was talking to God when it occurred to him that on this same bridge there might be someone who has “real” problems, who is in much greater need of help. So in the line, God looks right through him to see someone else who needs Him more.

Sundress: Do you have any last thoughts about Connellan to leave us with? Perhaps any additional poems or interviews we should read?

Tim Peeler: I would say check out his books, especially the trilogy, the selected poems from Pitt Press and Crossing America, both the written version and the version he recorded with numerous musicians from different parts of the country a few years before his death.

Regarding the earlier comment about Leo’s death—he was tremendously upset over the outcome of the Bush-Gore presidential race and how it had played out. Connellan was a staunch New England liberal who cared very much for the “common man,” and he felt this country, which he had traveled extensively as a youth and written about his whole adult life was headed in a bad direction. So maybe this did aggravate him to point that it caused a massive stroke. Who’s to say.

In closing, I would say that Leo was a really good guy and an underrated talent. I talked to him many times during the last ten or twelve years of his life, and like many aging artists he desperately wanted to be remembered and wanted his poetry to be read by future generations. I would hope that some folks discover his work through this interview, and I thank you for giving me this opportunity.

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What is essential to you as a writer or poet? What piece changed your life? Gave you hope, validated and voiced your fears, was there while you triumphed over them? What piece brings you joy? Made you laugh or grin like a fool? Who was it who made you sit back in wonder, inspiring you to be a stronger writer? We want to know. Send us a recording (or packet of short recordings) of you reading your Lyric Essential—a short story, a handful of poems, an excerpt or two—to SundressLyricEssentials AT gmail DOT com. Then we’ll talk.

Tim PeelerA past winner of the Jim Harrison Award for contributions to baseball literature, Tim Peeler has also been a Casey Award Finalist (baseball book of the year) and a finalist for the SIBA Award. He lives with his wife, Penny in Hickory, North Carolina, where he directs the academic assistance programs at Catawba Valley Community College. He has written thirteen books and three chapbooks.

 

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Leo Connellan, author of 13 collections, was an American poet born and educated in Maine, whose lobster and fishing industries provided the backdrop for much of his work. At the time of his death in 2001, he was poet-in-residence for the Connecticut State University System, having served since 1987. Connellan’s work has been featured in anthologies such as The Maine Poets: An Anthology of Verse (Edited by Wesley McNair, 2003) and Poetry like bread (Curbstone Press, 2000).

Lyric Essentials: Laurie Byro Reads “Traveling through the Dark” by William Stafford

Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Laurie Byro Reads “Traveling through the Dark” by William Stafford.

Laurie, thank you for joining us today. I was not previously familiar with William Stafford’s work, although I saw his name while working on our Robert Bly Lyric Essentials post and know he was a contemporary. I’d love to hear more about poet before we discuss his poem. Who was Stafford?

Laurie Byro: He was a contemporary of Bly, born 1914 or so. He was a conscientious objector in WW2 and I believe lived in a war camp for two years. Came to poetry really late, published first at 46 or so. Made up for it, really worked for it… [becoming] the consultant to the library of Congress (now the poet laureateship). He was the one who famously said, “I try and write a poem a day” to which Bly said, “And so what if you aren’t writing so well that day?” Stafford said, “Well then I lower my standards.” I may be wrong, [but I] don’t think Bly ever was [a poet laureate].

He wrote about the ordinary and he passed this on to Naomi Shihab Nye, who had him as her mentor. [He wrote about] the importance of pulleys and buttons, and being “political without being overtly so” by sameness, by not allowing terrorists to prevail. My first poetry group met on 9/11 (I was asked by my boss if I wanted to meet) and of course we did, we had to, there has not been a day in America when folks don’t meet to discuss poetry. Stafford and Ginsberg and Nye among others would have insisted that I meet with my group. We have to do what we can in the face of a complicated world.

He has been compared to Frost for the obvious similarity with declining nature/farmland and encroachment (I think that’s a good word) the encroachment of civilization on nature, nothing civilized about it. “Traveling through the Dark” and “The Road Not Taken” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” have similar echoes to them I think. I think Stafford is as complicated as Frost, but does rhyme in such a way, you don’t notice it. [They are] both “dark” poets. Both diving into the wreckage, as Adrienne Rich would say. ‘The wreckage’ being humanity.

Sundress: You’re making me reconsider my take on Frost—I had not considered a darker undertone. I see that tone here though. That same, “We have to do what we can in the face of a complicated world” you mentioned. When I first listened I thought, This is a great poem about survival. I love how Stafford started “Traveling through the Dark” by making his actions a question—it is usually best to roll them into the canyon. What most struck you about this poem?

Laurie Byro: The woods listening. The forest thinking about the consequence of a lost deer. I called my dad up and read him the poem. He was a farmer before HE jointed the Navy in WW2. So he “got” William Stafford instantly—dad went to 9th grade and quit. But the impulse is the same. Dad hunted (was told, “Here is ONE bullet, bring home a deer”) and hated it. So I knew he would know if the fawn could be saved by midwifery or something, like if Stafford knew what to do.

Dad says that deer have those long legs and it would have been impossible [to save the doe], he would have done the same. He said, “that’s a sad poem” and changed the subject. He taught all the young boys in our area about rifles, but he’d whisper to the deer to run faster and escape.

I also do that, “Frost is dark.” Light for me would be William Carlos Williams. And I also say “outside inside”—[WCW] obviously goes from the out, in; Stafford and Frost from the in, out. YES, they have delightful imagery, but the impulse is from the interior and not what we obviously see, some of the others go out to in. You know? Walt Whitman is a light/white poet. Emily Dickinson (dark).

Whenever I am lost in a decision I say, “but what about ___ that is my only swerving” and folks get it.

Sundress: That’s a horrible decision to have to make—to try and save the fawn or clear the road. I probably would have called animal control and let them decide. I love how simply your father’s comment sums up the cost of surviving, of making those decisions—whether or not you know them to be right. But the decision the speaker has to make is just one, ordinary, dark occurrence. You mentioned that he passed along this ability to write about the ordinary to Naomi Shihab Nye (more on that later); how has he influenced your work?

Laurie Byro: An early mentor who looked at our work told someone, “No highfalutin words,” and that stayed with me. “Be as clear as water” (Andrew Motion.) And while some work is complicated, because as this [one] does, it means several things, yes? It’s strength to me is the amazing rhyme masked as ordinary conversation. If you listen, iambic pentameter happened because that is the natural breath we take when we speak in normal conversation. William Stafford had that right, which is why Shakespeare translates so well to how we speak today. Frost writes simply. Wallace Stevens (his rival) [is] a bit more obtuse, but still, the father of modern poetry, Walt Whitman, started it by using everyday language. That is key, I think, to a successful poem. I can’t abide poetry deliberately convoluted—I think it dissipates rather than enhances. I don’t think a poem should announce, “You are reading a poem,” which is why the daft [formality of] beginning each sentence with a capital letter became outdated.

Sundress: What would you recommend for further Stafford reading? And what should we be reading by Naomi Shihab Nye?

Laurie Byro: For books, Nye first: 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East.  Love that book. And this one: Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.

“A Ritual to Read to Each Other” I used to leave this poem in lockers at work and say to folks “memorize this and then see me” as I was the supervisor of 20 people and often folks act out. One woman called the police on a patron “didn’t like the way she looked” and she was dressing oddly. Like me.

That’s the one I go back to as well as the “dark” and his book Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford. The “ritual” one is something we all should study. “The Errors of Childhood” and “The Darkness Around Us Is Deep” [also].

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What is essential to you as a writer or poet? What piece changed your life? Gave you hope, validated and voiced your fears, was there while you triumphed over them? What piece brings you joy? Made you laugh or grin like a fool? Who was it who made you sit back in wonder, inspiring you to be a stronger writer? We want to know. Send us a recording (or packet of short recordings) of you reading your Lyric Essential—a short story, a handful of poems, an excerpt or two—to SundressLyricEssentials AT gmail DOT com. Then we’ll talk.

Laurie Byro Laurie Byro‘s short stories and poetry have appeared in dozens of presses including: Loch Raven Review, The Literary Review, Triggerfish, Snakeskin, Redactions, Chaminade Review, Chronogram, Grasslimb, Re:al Journal, The New Jersey Journal of Poets, Red Rock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and The 7th Quarry (from Wales) among others. She has won or placed in 39 IBPC competitions. In January 2011, Laurie was named one of the “Poets of the Decade” by the IBPC competition for her 2000-2010 work, amassing more awards than any competing poet. Her chapbook The Bird Artists was published in 2009 and Laurie was Poet Laureate of Allendale, NJ from 2009 to 2013. Her work draws on myth and fairytale and her experiences of foreign places in the years she worked as a travel agent. Her poetry insists upon the continuing importance of fantasy, mystery and “the other” in our lives. Laurie has been facilitating Circle of Voices, poetry discussion in NJ for over 15 years, currently at the West Milford Township Library where she is Poet in Residence.

William Stafford was an American poet and pacifist.William Stafford 2 In 1962, at the age of 46, Stafford published his first major collection, Traveling Through the Dark, which won the National Book Award for Poetry the following year. In 1970 he was appointed the twentieth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Stafford passed away in 1993 after having published 57 volumes of poetry. For more, visit: williamstaffordarchives.org.

Lyric Essentials: Anne Champion Reads “Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse” by Traci Brimhall

Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Anne Champion reads “Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse” from Rookery by Traci Brimhall.

Brimhall is widely published: The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review to name just a handful of journals; her last full length was published with W. W. Norton. What was your first encounter with her work like? Was it Rookery?

Anne Champion: Rookery was the first collection I read of hers. Sometimes the right book just collides with you at the right time. I had recently left a long term relationship in which my boyfriend had been unfaithful. I was in grad school at the time, and I confided in another student. Later that day, he emailed me a link to Brimhall’s “Aubade with a Broken Neck,” and said that her work might speak to me as much of Rookery deals with infidelity.

I immediately bought the collection, and I read it several times. It’s hard to describe my experience with that book—it was personal, it was finding a kindred spirit, it was spiritual, it was inspiring, it was heartbreaking. At every turn, I marveled at her images, her hard hitting truths, her gorgeous rhythm, cadence, and movement of a line. As the poem I chose suggests, Brimhall is unafraid to tackle big game in her subject matter, and she unabashedly stares directly into the abyss, revolting and marveling at the profane simultaneously. There’s so much wonder in her work, and even at its darkest, I feel strangely hopeful and comforted.

Sundress: It is often about the right piece at the right time. This is a prayer that seems both simple—to be cared for like an angel would carry someone—and complex at the same time. I’m guessing that complexity is ‘the abyss’ you mentioned. Can you walk us through “Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse”?

Anne Champion: “Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse” strikes me as incredibly layered and complex. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of the poem itself as a sort of prayer, a calling out to the world for something. And this poem does exactly that, though what it calls for is unexpected. Anyone familiar with the Book of Revelations would see why we might want to avoid the nightmare of the Apocalypse, but Brimhall seems to suggest she wants to avoid the utopian idea of perfection and heaven. The speaker claims she wants a heaven that’s “dirty, beautiful, and sinking” with “riots in the city of peace.” She doesn’t want to be spared gunshots outside her window or a creepy stranger who touches her while she’s sleeping.

But why? The speaker mentions that gone would be “Goya, Paris, and the Marinsky ballet.” In this, she’s suggesting that the world’s seedy underbelly serves us in inspiration, it is the catalyst for the most admirable part of the human condition: art.

I feel like this hits a complex truth: as much as we hate the world’s evils, as much as a more perfect world is in our dreams, we do, indeed, “love what we kill.” The world, in all its infallibility, in all its pain, is still a world we cherish, just as imperfect people (like the speaker’s father mentioned at the end) are people we deeply desire to be loved by.

Last year I went on a peace delegation to Palestine: I’ve never been so sad in what I witnessed there. I’ve also never been so inspired by the human spirit. It’s a binary so tightly woven, and Brimhall’s poem seems to suggest that heaven would unweave it and leave the beauty in tatters.

I also love the references to God, the Devil, and other religious myths. For example, it starts with lifting a candle to see who the speaker speaks to—that’s a nod to the Greek mythology of Eros and Psyche. The cadence of the poem sounds like a sermon—it booms in its confident declarations. And the form—tercets with each line indented—works in a couple of ways. Tercets generally signify instability, as three is an odd number. You never have a three-legged chair or a three wheeled car, for example. It just can’t hold things up. But the indents also feel like a constant reaching out and pulling back, like waves on a shore, a cycle of begging and being denied or ignored–something like prayer. You can only reach out, but nothing reaches back to you.

Sundress: There is so much in what you just said—I’m taken with the image of tercets being naturally uneven.

Am I right to say than that the speaker of the poem doesn’t necessarily believe that the artist or poet needs to especially suffer as an individual in order to create art, but rather that it is the general mess of the world that inspires artists? The simple everyday chaos? When you first read “Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse,” was it a poem which supported or challenged your personal views?

Anne Champion: Correct—I don’t think this poem attempts to promote the tired cliche that all artists must suffer. I actually don’t believe in that myself—I think we can and should write about all subjects, including happiness, love, exaltation. Nor do I think this poem wants to suggest that suffering in the world is necessary, or even good. I hate the injustices in the world. I don’t feel inspired by dead children washing up on beaches, by unarmed people of color murdered by cops. I will write about them, yes, in an attempt to combat them, but I do not sing the praises of suffering. I would love to see a better world, and I hope to actively keep fighting for it.

So yes, I think this poem is praising the chaos, praising the ways we can still sing, write, and create in the midst of the imperfect world. It praises the wonder of what we are capable of, despite everything. It’s actually awe striking that we can have so much awe and joy, given the terrors, both large and small, that fall upon humanity’s shoulders. Even in the midst of it all, we can still want to “die of love.”

When I first read it, it didn’t challenge or support my previous beliefs, but it showed me a truth that I didn’t know I already knew. I love when a poem can do that.

Sundress: Do you think your experience in Palestine was at all influenced by having previously read “Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse”? When you were in Palestine did this poem come to mind?

Anne Champion: Nothing could have really influenced or prepared me for the experience in Palestine. I did a ton of reading: I read poetry, history, political articles, and kept current on the news. And still—I was not at all prepared for the range of emotions I felt, the things I witnessed, or the stories I heard.

Actually the experience is really hard to articulate. I can never answer any questions about it well except to say that I can’t describe it all. I felt every range of emotion, every day. But I was also in a constant state of grief, as the situation there is quite dire, bleak, and heartbreaking. But then I felt adoration and gratitude for the people I met, for the spirit of resistance, and the art I witnessed.

To be honest, this poem didn’t come to mind during the experience—but no poems did. I was simply trying to cope, trying to absorb as much as possible and manage the grief I was feeling, while also figuring out a way to become useful to the cause in a concrete way.

It was only after coming home and beginning to process the experience that I turned back to poetry, both writing it and reading it. In reflecting on the experience, this poem simply felt even more true. It’s not that I don’t want to see horrible situations changed—I do, passionately. But I do still love this horrible world, despite everything that should have made me not love it. I don’t want the Apocalypse and heaven, I want to stay here and keep fighting for the “dirt and music.”

~

What is essential to you as a writer or poet? What piece changed your life? Gave you hope, validated and voiced your fears, was there while you triumphed over them? What piece brings you joy? Made you laugh or grin like a fool? Who was it who made you sit back in wonder, inspiring you to be a stronger writer? We want to know. Send us a recording (or packet of short recordings) of you reading your Lyric Essential—a short story, a handful of poems, an excerpt or two—to SundressLyricEssentials AT gmail DOT com. Then we’ll talk.

Anne11Anne Champion is the author of Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013) and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, forthcoming). Her work appears in Verse Daily, The Pinch, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, The Comstock Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. Find her at anne-champion.com.

 

Brimhall_Headshot_2014-210-expTraci Brimhall is the author of two full-length collections: Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize. Her poem, “The Silk Road Epistles,” appeared in Sundress Publication’s 2011 Best of the Net anthology. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College (MFA), and Western Michigan University (PhD), Brimhall is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.

Lyric Essentials: Ari Eastman reads “Royal Heart” by Andrea Gibson

Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Ari Eastman reads the poem, “Royal Heart” by Andrea Gibson.

First, I want to say thank you Ari for your moxie in picking a spoken word poet. Gibson is a force to be reckoned with, and you did a great job portraying that in your recording.

Let’s pretend for a moment that I’m not familiar with Gibson. What can you tell us about them?

Ari: I’ve been a huge fan of Gibson for a while. “Honey” was the first piece I stumbled upon and it was like experiencing a sudden high of the most wonderful explosion of feelings. I was hooked from there on out. Activist, poet, general badass — Gibson is incredible at navigating the most vulnerable and raw human emotions and somehow putting it all together in a breathtaking poem. Their work also focuses a lot on important issues like gender norms, LGBTQ struggles, identity, politics, etc. Really powerful and meaningful stuff. I actually saw Gibson perform live my senior year of college right after I got a tattoo, so I like to think I’ve got some of their poetry circulating in my blood.

Sundress: “Honey” is such a great love poem. It must be magic to watch Andrea perform in person. Was they your first introduction to Slam?

Ari: Watching Andrea is so incredibly magical. They just command a room and it’s inspiring to watch. But actually, my first intro to spoken word poetry was a fella named Rudy Francisco. I stumbled upon a few of his poems on YouTube one night and was instantly in love. He’s just so charming and likable. And weirdly enough, the universe came through and he ended up being one of the coaches when I joined the UCLA poetry slam team back in college. So not only did I meet one of my first ever poetry inspirations, he became a mentor and a good friend.

Sundress: Now “Royal Heart” is also a love poem, but if “Honey” was the new happy-go-lucky pop single, from, say Carly Rae Jepsen, “Royal Heart” would be the new Lana del Ray. It’s full of minor keys and starts off with a bang:

You will never be let down by anyone
more than you will be let down
by the one you love most in the world
it’s how gravity works
it’s why they call it “falling”

It’s full of a rich melancholy. What most drew you to this poem?

Ari: I think for me, “Royal Heart” is just so layered and that’s what really attracted me to it. It’s got this duality of incredible vulnerability, but also such a strength in just announcing, “Here I am! This is me! Take it or leave it!” I love that about Andrea in general, and especially this poem.

Sundress: How has Gibson’s vulnerability, or style in general, influenced your own work?

Ari: I love the strength in telling the truth. Gibson is such a great example of that. They are unafraid of stripping the things society tell us we should shy away from, and I really identify with that. It’s helped me tremendously in being brave with my own work. I never want to be afraid to go places that aren’t easy. Gibson is a big source of inspiration to me, in that regard.

Sundress: Why don’t you leave us with your favorite recorded performance of Gibson, and then perhaps introduce us to Rudy Francisco?

Ari: My favorite has to be this. Chills. Every. Damn. Time.

Rudy is an incredible poet, and all around good, good human being. This is one of my favorites by him:

And he’s very well known for this poem:

~

What is essential to you as a writer or poet? What piece changed your life? Gave you hope, validated and voiced your fears, was there while you triumphed over them? What piece brings you joy? Made you laugh or grin like a fool? Who was it who made you sit back in wonder, inspiring you to be a stronger writer? We want to know. Send us a recording (or packet of short recordings) of you reading your Lyric Essential—a short story, a handful of poems, an excerpt or two—to SundressLyricEssentials AT gmail DOT com. Then we’ll talk.

Ari

 

Ari Eastman is a spoken word poet, a staff writer for ThoughtCatalog and YouTuber who will tell you random facts about sharks (if you’re into that kind of thing). She strongly believes in balancing the feels and the funnies. And is always down to split a cup of frozen yogurt. Just don’t make fun of her for still liking gummy bears. Her three books, Green Eyes, I Promised You I Wouldn’t Write This, and Everything Sucks, But I’m Still Happy, are available on Kindle.

 

Andrea Gibson is a poet and an activist. The fiAndrea Gibson 2rst winner of the Women’s World Poetry Slam, Gibson has performed in numerous venues across the states and been featured on C-SPAN, BBC, Air America, and Free Speech TV tackling topics such as gender, bullying, white privilege, sexuality, love, and war. She has released five full-length albums, most recently FLOWER BOY, and three books, THE MADNESS VASE, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns, and PANSY. Gibson in Boulder, Colorado.

Lyric Essentials: Jeremy Johnson reads “Green” by Kevin Lawler

Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Jeremy Johnson reads the poem, “Green” from The Seasons by Kevin Lawler.

When I think of Kevin Lawler, I think of the prairie and Omaha. For you, what comes to mind when thinking about Kevin Lawler? How would you describe The Seasons and his other work?

Jeremy Johnson: The thought portal that opens in my mind when I start thinking of Kevin Lawler is as strange as it is infinite.  His work is spiritually medicinal.  Lawler’s demeanor alone exudes timelessness and an overwhelming peace.  I think of hanging out with him back stage in a play we were in, watching him sway as free as a summertime toddler to the jazz band opening.  I think of being laid out couch-ridden in illness, and reading The Seasons over and over, until the sickness found space elsewhere.  I think of his grateful eyes welling up while receiving the Theatre Arts Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, his wild hair refusing to stay out of sight lines.

I perceive The Seasons as written through the perspective of a time nomad, who rides the signs of the changing earth from moment to moment, sometimes millenniums apart.  It makes the smallest things crucial and the universe seem like a neighborhood.  I feel my consciousness welling over into other places when I read it.  It’s imaginative, intimate, and altogether breathtaking.

Sundress: Lawler wrote The Seasons over decades, is that what gives it the sense of being narrated by a “time nomad”?  Are the sections organized stylistically or by subject? I’m assuming “Green” is from the spring section?

Jeremy Johnson: The actual timeline in which Lawler took to write The Seasons definitely contributes to that time-traveling flavor of the book, but moreover, it’s just the focus and wide-spanning presence of mind with which he writes.  He can watch the snow and be pulled back to the 20’s reflexively, and bring the reader with him.  It is indeed organized by the literal seasons; “Green” is in the Spring section.  Winter focuses on quietness, Spring on change, Summer on love, and Fall is its own aesthetic.  And, really, they all have the same descriptive wandering and timeless qualities throughout.

Sundress: Out of all of Lawler’s the plays and poems, what makes “Green” special for you?

Jeremy Johnson:

“Ball
continue your silent spin.

We can fly through space
and smell wet leaves
at the same time.”

That part is everything to me.  We strive to retain a reverence for the mysterious infinite as well as an equal reverence for every moment as it happens.  I don’t know why, but it just makes me feel like a big awesome cloud.

Sundress: I love that ending. The scope of this poem is impressive—he manages to weave a lot together: hints of man vs nature, man vs technology, and technology vs nature, while maintaining the feeling that these at-odds are everyday. How does “Green” compare stylistically to other poems in the collection and to Lawler’s play-writing?

Jeremy Johnson: Yeah, that scope is a cornerstone of Lawler’s style.  He often starts small, reaches as far as he can (in distance, time, tone), then loops it back in.  Lawler’s playwriting is similar in its fluidity and explosive imagery.  Outlandish props, choreography… I remember watching his play, “The Tulip” back in 07 maybe and being completely consumed by its playfulness, then eternally shaken by its tragic turn… that whole scope thing.

Sundress: How has Kevin Lawler influenced your own work?

Jeremy Johnson: Lawler has influenced me to be a better listener.  My weaknesses in my writing come through the channel of ego and unfocused mind.  Listening as a discipline can’t be understated.

~

What is essential to you as a writer or poet? What piece changed your life? Gave you hope, validated and voiced your fears, was there while you triumphed over them? What piece brings you joy? Made you laugh or grin like a fool? Who was it who made you sit back in wonder, inspiring you to be a stronger writer? We want to know. Send us a recording (or packet of short recordings) of you reading your Lyric Essential—a short story, a handful of poems, an excerpt or two—to SundressLyricEssentials AT gmail DOT com. Then we’ll talk.

Jeremy JohnsonJeremy Johnson is a writer out of Omaha, NE.  He’s written plays, novels, books of poems, books for kids, and movies.  Amid the slow chaos of nurturing a family of two kids and a beautiful wife, sometimes he’ll knock back a bottle of whiskey with some friends at an abandoned paper mill or follow the moon down some railroad tracks, thinking of songs.

 

 

 

 

 

Kevin Lawler is a playwright, director, actor, producer, and poet. The founder and host of the monthly storytelling gathering “The Stories of O,” Lawler is also the Producing Artistic Director of The Great Plains Theatre Conference, a co-founder of the award winning Blue Barn Theatre, and the Artistic Director of the National Institute For The Lost.