Tag: poet

Lyric Essentials: Georgia Pearle reads francine j. harris

GPearle Headshot9.jpgFor this installment of the Lyric Essentials series, we’re welcoming poet Georgia Pearle, who reads work from francine j. harris. Georgia shares why she appreciates the ambiguity in harris’ work as well as the joy that comes in seeing the different ways that poetry can resonate with each of us. Thanks for reading!

Riley Steiner: Why did you choose this poem for your Lyric Essentials reading?

Georgia Pearle: Simply: because I love it. That sound. Those rhymes. Good god, that perfect staccato.

Also: because I meant to review the book that this poem came from, I loved it so dearly, it ached with me in such a way, and I got that review accepted by more than one publication but couldn’t deliver my edits in time. I couldn’t deliver my edits in time because I was spending far too much time on a bus (five or so hours a day), single parenting, trying not to get kicked out of a Ph.D. program, overworked, and very broke, so I suppose this feels like a small token of penance to “play dead” because, damn, I loved that book and wanted to champion it, but I couldn’t pull it off at the time.

Georgia Pearle reads “in case” by francine j. harris

RS: What do you admire about francine j. harris’ work in general? How did your relationship with her work begin?

GP: I love her syntactic ambiguity and her refusals, especially. Her work seems unafraid to drop her readers into her own world of poem and let them squirm there, let them deal with it. How often in workshops did I hear people demand a particular sort of explanation from poems—“I can’t tell who this speaker/this figure/this person is” or “I can’t tell where/why we are in this place,” or “what is (blank) supposed to mean,” as if a poem, even a storied poem, should provide that sort of obvious spelling out over its own music.

I love her line breaks, how they make meaning hover and shape-shift. They remind me of those paint jobs I used to see on so many cars back home in ‘Bama—you know the ones that look green from this angle, purple from that, and some shimmering something else when you watch them dead-on? It’s a particularly purposeful slipperiness, a way of being many thoughts at once. Similarly, I love her punctuation, those periods that halt the reader and keep them moving simultaneously. And the way she pushes enjambment to its limit, breaking lines mid-word until meaning splits into so many multiplicities.

I love her fracturing of narrative. I found her when I was attempting to work out these narrative poems that were still also fractured, dealing with violence and trauma and sexuality in the Deep South, that were attached to place and yet trying to detach from place, and I kept hearing people ask me to clarify the poems. Her work helped me consider clarity in other ways: sonic clarity makes its own sort of meaning, doesn’t it? And, too, the juxtaposition of certain images, the repetition of those images, don’t they accrue to something explicit and exacting, even when that thing is difficult to paraphrase? They do. Of course they do.

RS: Could you talk about your interpretation of the relationship between the three sections of this poem? Why do you think harris chose to group them in this way?

GP: Well, to start there’s that gesture to the corona, that gesture to the crown, in the linkage between the three. The end and the beginning of each section mirror each other, but shift each other, a reflective trinity that begins with this justification of pleasure and joy and this reaching toward cleansing spaces and community/communion then pauses at otherness and whiteness before moving on to more we-ness in blackness.

In the first section, clit, of course, carries its usual meaning, that small bud of desire (which we now know is much larger than the visible tip), that source of pleasure and desire and agency, but there’s the sonic similarity to “clip,” too, as in clip of a gun, this gesture toward protection/female weaponry, just as the repetition of the phrase “in case” gives us this sense of both containment and hope.

In the second section, it’s impossible for me not to pick up the resonances of all these white images—the supposed preciousness of whiteness, historically, the ways in which our country has historically protected white citizens in idea and in actuality through legalities and through military force and through the supposed rightness of peace and the means of which that “peace” has been bought. There’s no mistaking the violence of the whiteness in this stanza, or its conflation with quietude and silence.

And in the third section, the loudness of repetition: “our mouths,” again and again, and “our shut up. our / shut up. our shut up.” What resounding refusal to silence. If this poem felt necessary when I first encountered it a few years ago, it has only gotten more necessary in the interim.

RS: Throughout the poem, but especially in the third section, listening to the words out loud brought harris’ use of rhyme and rhythm to my attention in a way that I think was much more striking than reading the poem on a page would’ve been. What was your experience like of reading this poem out loud versus reading it in print?

GP: What I found reading it was that I actually hated feeling like I had to choose its emphasis. It’s better on the page, more complicated than I think I made it as I read it aloud. I recorded it a few times, trying each time to get more of the lost ambiguity, or rather the many-ways-of-meaning, back into it. Of course, I don’t trust that my reading struck in the same ways or the same places that harris would have struck it in her own reading of it. But maybe that’s the pleasure of reading someone else’s work, once they’ve released it into your hands. Seeing all the varied ways it can strike you each time you approach the thing, that’s part of the joy.

RS: Has harris’s work influenced your own? If so, how?

GP: Honestly, I wish her work would influence me more. I find her poems unmooring in the best possible way, breaking from polemics, willing to procure the profane for us and reclaim it, and willing to do the same with the supposedly holy. In preparing for this, I reread her poem “how to take down an altar.” Everyone should read that one, too. Who doesn’t need the reminder to “Move / the Angels by their buttocks, not their wings”?

francine j. harris grew up in Detroit, Michigan. She graduated with an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan in 2011 and published her first book, allegiance, the following year. Her second book, play dead, was published in 2016. Her work has appeared in literary magazines including Ploughshares, Poetry, Rattle, Boston Review, and many others. harris received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2015 and currently the writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis.

Further reading:

Purchase play dead from Alice James Books
Purchase allegiance from Wayne State University Press
Read an interview with francine in Divedapper

Born and raised in the Gulf South, Georgia Pearle is an alumna of Smith College and holds an MFA in Poetry from Lesley University. She has been a coordinator of the VIDA Count, a senior editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, and her poems been published with Women’s Studies Quarterly, Kenyon Review Online, and Ninth Letter, among others. She recently finished a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston.

Further reading:

Visit Georgia’s website
Read three of Georgia’s poems from Terrain.org
Read Georgia’s essays in The Houston Chronicle and OffCite

Riley Steiner is a recent graduate of Miami University, where she studied Creative Writing and Media & Culture. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, she enjoys baking, cheering for the Green Bay Packers, and spending way too much money at Half Price Books. Her creative work has recently appeared in the Oakland Arts Review and Collision.

Lyric Essentials: Sam Albala reads Harryette Mullen

Screen Shot 2019-06-05 at 4.32.02 PMWe’re thrilled to welcome Sam Albala for this installment of Lyric Essentials. Sam reads two of her favorite poems by Harryette Mullen and shares with us why she appreciates them. Read on for her insight into what makes Mullen’s poetry accessible and how that poetry has inspired her own work. As always, thank you for your support of this series!

Riley Steiner: What drew you to choosing these poems?

Sam Albala: I have always loved Harryette Mullen.

I was a student the first time I heard her perform. She told a story about inspiration being this almost mystical object running past the physical world, and having to catch it before it went away. In my head, I was sitting on a farm in the Midwest watching this ball of light and power rumble by like a supercharged tumbleweed (which I might be impacting that word due to her tanka diary Urban Tumbleweed, but it still fits). The story stuck, and I’ve heard other writers talk about inspiration in that way.

These two poems felt most powerful to me simply because they are relatable when it comes to a relationship to self, other, and creativity. Mullen is funny, smart … she lingers in the mind. It also seems to me that a lot of her work, these poems too, can be approached with your story instead of trying to relate to an assumed version of the writer’s story. Not all poems or poets feel like that. Sometimes you are reading poems written by a college literature professor and you cannot shake the tone, experience, or history of a college literature professor from the work.

I appreciate that the poems are personally accessible.

Sam Albala reads “Elliptical” by Harryette Mullen

RS: “Elliptical” is ambiguous in who its speaker is addressing. Do you have an interpretation of who “they” might be? Why do you think Mullen chose to write the poem this way?

SA: I saw “they” in multiple ways. On a simplistic level, I imagined it as a court case transcript with all the evidence, details, facts, etcetera, left out. On a personal level, the speaker versus they can be any interaction between an oppressor versus oppressed. A person in power and a person with less authority. However, it is impossible to know which one is which.

The narrative is a standard one that most of us go through when we deal with conflict. While it is toxic to tell another person’s story, to point fingers without accepting responsibility, we still have to identify and understand where our thoughts and emotions come from in order to better direct them to better action. We also need to see how and if we can defend our own story by figuring out the connection with others. In this way, the speaker is sorting through being both the oppressor and the oppressed. Or, rather, figuring out their relationship and feelings between themselves and the “they.”

RS: What was your experience like when you were recording the poems? For instance, did you already have a pretty good idea of what the poems would sound like, or did you try out different intonations? What was your thought process behind the way you read them out loud?

SA: When I wasn’t thinking too much, the recording turned out best. I was nervous I was breathing too loud or needed to slow down or that I was losing my voice.

I speak into microphones a lot on a regular basis … I fear losing my voice a lot … it never happens, but I always think it is happening. With both poems, I wanted to channel Mullen’s wit and confidence. I did slow down, speed up, and play with moving the recording device closer and further because I was nervous about how it might have sounded. I think I always know, and always have to relearn, that it is best in recording and reading out loud to practice often, but to not be in your head while you are in the middle of the action. That’s when you stumble.

Sam Albala reads “Sleeping with the Dictionary” by Harryette Mullen

RS: As a writer and lover of words in general, I really enjoyed “Sleeping with the Dictionary.”As a poet yourself, how do you feel about this poem? Do you relate to it at all?

SA: I love everything about this poem. The innuendo and the intimacy I, and I believe many poets, feel when it comes to their relationship with language. We can’t get enough. We want to be able to get it right, to practice, to know it better than we think possible. There is a play on words and playing with words. We are always trying to take words to bed with us, trying to pick them apart and get a better connection with them. I love that!

I have also, a time or two, literally spent time with a dictionary in bed, trying to find different ways to relate to sections of words. There was a band I was performing with last year who challenged me to write a poem that was both sultry and subtle. There was a month or two spent highlighting all the words I found romantic, sexy, or soothing in a small travel dictionary. It is a fun exercise in building your own relationship with words. It might also point out what words you subconsciously avoid, neglect, or forget about on a regular basis.

RS: Has Harryette Mullen’s work influenced your own in any way?

SA: Very much so. I fangirl around her sometimes. Being a fangirl is a side effect of being influenced by her work.

So it is a tangent but, a few years ago, I was on a retreat in New York, and I gave her some baby carrots. She was talking about being hungry and I gushed to have the opportunity to give her my snack. I doubt she remembers me or my name, but I won’t forget that small interaction.

Idolization with poets seem to happen—with me, anyway—when I hear a poet I like perform their work. I feel inspired by her relationship to music, though. I have a strong connection to music and always try to involve it in my life. Mullen’s tanka diary, and how place influences her work, is something I strive for. I also love how her personality seems to shine through, without ego. I think readers can enter the work without seeing “other.” Her writing is accessible to writers and readers of many different backgrounds.

I want my writing to show a little bit of who I am and what I see without alienating anyone. If an experience I write about is foreign, I hope it is still something that readers feel they can walk around in and catch glimpses of.

Harryette Mullen is a poet from Los Angeles, California. She was born in Alabama and raised in Texas. After graduating from the University of Texas, she went to to receive her doctorate degree from the University of Santa Cruz. Her books of poetry include Tree Tall Woman; Trimmings; S*PeRM**K*T; Muse and Drudge; Sleeping with the Dictionary; Urban Tumbleweed; Blues Baby; Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, Muse and Drudge; and Broken Glish: Five Prose Poems. She has also published essays in MELUS Journal and Meridians, among others, along with a book of essays and interviews entitled The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed To Be (University of Alabama Press, 2012). Her poetry is known and acclaimed for its experimentation with structure and wordplay. Mullen currently teaches creative writing and African-American literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Further reading:

Purchase Sleeping with the Dictionary from the University of California Press
Purchase Urban Tumbleweed (Graywolf Press)
Read poems by Harryette Mullen on the Poetry Foundation website

Sam Albala is a poet tethered into the warm, comforting arms of mountains. Often found gobbling horizons and babbling about road trips, tea, and anatomical hearts, Sam is eternally pondering connections, both lost and found. Her writing has appeared in Genre Arts, Stain’d Magazine, Be About It Press, Spit Poet, Boulder Weekly, BUST Magazine, Mental Floss, 8th Street Publishing, South Broadway Ghosts Society, Punch Drunk Press, Sonic Boom, Gambling The Aisle, Synapse, Lamplighter, and more.

Further reading:

Visit Sam’s Contently page
Read three of Sam’s poems from South Broadway Ghost Society
Read two of Sam’s poems from Punch Drunk Press

Riley Steiner is a recent graduate of Miami University, where she studied Creative Writing and Media & Culture. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, she enjoys baking, cheering for the Green Bay Packers, and spending way too much money at Half Price Books. Her creative work has recently appeared in the Oakland Arts Review and Collision.

celeste doaks reads Hannah Lowe

biopic2In this installment of Lyric Essentials, we have the pleasure of welcoming poet celeste doaks to the series. celeste reads two poems by British poet Hannah Lowe, “Dance Class” and “B-Boy Summer,” and shares her insights about how these poems help “excavate” childhood moments and how diving into these everyday moments can help us grow. celeste tells us why she is drawn to Hannah’s poetry and why she believes other readers relate to it as well. Thank you very much, celeste, and as always, thank you to our readers for supporting this series!

(Editorial note: celeste prefers her name stylized lowercase.)

Riley Steiner: Why did you choose these poems for Lyric Essentials?

celeste doaks: While there are many poems I could’ve chosen by Hannah Lowe for this series, these two stood out to me both as metaphorical and aural gems. Often, I think when the literary world views work that’s simple, they tend to overlook it or think of the work as simplistic, reductive. Especially when it comes to narrative poems. However, Hannah’s work has internal rhymes that are working on a complex level. She is attentive to sound and how that governs a poem’s internal structure. And lastly, I wanted to share her wonderful work with an American audience who may have never heard of her. When I met her on my UK book tour, I found her to be delightful—both on the page and in person.

 celeste doaks reads “Dance Class” by Hannah Lowe

RS: What are some of your favorite lines or phrases from these poems?

cd: One of my favorite lines in “Dance Class” describes who I assume is the dance instructor:  “And Betty Finch … / swept her wooden cane along the rows.” This line is such a strong image, but also the wooden cane seems to clank against the floors as she moves along each row. I can almost hear it! And when a visual can conjure sound, I think this is when you know a poet has been successful in their conceit. In “B-Boy Summer,” the descriptions are razor-sharp.

When the narrator talks of  “caps and shell-toe trainers” or “baggy jeans and neon laces,” I get an instant visual that ironically matches the hip hop uniforms that black boys also donned in the Midwest. “Loaded / with desire to be a boy” is just so psychically heavy for me. The use of “loaded” made me think of weapons, but also connotes a general heaviness which is in tension with the childhood admiration here. I also love how this poem is loaded with muscular verbs like “rocked,” “springing,” and “fling.” Those words come alive all by themselves. And the poem’s magnificent return to itself starting with the early line of “Beautiful boys / in the flower garden rocked to the noise” to the penultimate line of “loving boys who never saw me / in the silent garden” was perfect.

celeste doaks reads “B-Boy Summer” by Hannah Lowe

RS: What do you admire about Hannah Lowe’s work in general?

cd: Hannah’s work is very much about memory and childhood, intersecting with race, gender, and class. This resonates with me and my work. Her poems also take time to investigate the everyday, minutiae that makes up our lives. That’s what Neruda did and therefore elevated the mundane to a kind of holy status. By examining our childhoods as adults, we have a chance to return to various sites of embarrassment, excitement, and awkwardness.

Humans can truly begin to evolve by fleshing out these moments. So honestly, one of the reasons I love Hannah’s first book Chick is because it echoes many of the themes in my first book Cornrows and Cornfields. My poems take a trip backward to excavate and sometimes reinvent, those memories. Many of my favorite female contemporary poets such as Sharon Olds, Patricia Smith, and Dorianne Laux have done the same in some of their early poems. I think it was Cicero who said, “Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.” I truly believe that and enjoy poets who at one point see childhood as a foundational site for memories.

RS: As I read them, both of these poems tell us about the speaker’s feeling of difference from the people around her and her desire to belong in those worlds where she feels like an outsider. I think poetry can be a powerful way to bring feelings and situations like these to light. What’s your reaction to those themes within these poems — do you think Lowe is successful in conveying them? What effect do they have on the reader?

cd: It’s funny you used the word “difference” here. Hannah Lowe is a mixed-race British woman who had a Chinese-Jamaican father and an English mother. It might seem to readers that the two of us are as diametrically opposed as Superman and Kryptonite; however, those differences are exactly why I’m drawn to her. As a black female in America, I can see my otherness in her otherness. However, there are also moments in which Hannah’s work transcends race, gender, and class constructs. When Hannah’s narrator says, “but I was never a B-Girl, just a body / growing,” I recall my girlhood growing up around men and boys and wanting to possess some of that authority in the world.

As a young black girl growing up in the Midwest, I also craved that equality and freedom (that Hannah wants) without fear of physical danger or societal scrutiny. Even though this poem is very gendered, I know every human can remember a moment when they wanted to be a cool “insider.”

Poetry can indeed become a way to translate and transcend your own helpless moment. I live for poetry like this. And of course, I think Hannah’s successful in her attempts, but I’m clearly biased! Hannah can suspend a moment in time the same way Gwendolyn Brooks does when she talks of “And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall” in her poem “kitchenette building.” I believe every reader enjoys being drawn into new worlds that have a “familiar” feeling or reading experiences that they can map their own perspectives onto.

Hannah Lowe is the author of the poetry collections Chan (2013) and Chick (2016), published by Bloodaxe Books. In 2015, she published a memoir entitled Long Time, No See. Her chapbooks include The Hitcher, R x, and Ormonde. Hannah’s most recent work is The Neighbourhood, published in January 2019 by Outspoken Press.

Further reading/listening:

Purchase The Neighbourhood from Outspoken Press
Visit Hannah’s website
Listen to Hannah’s long poem “Borderliners” from BBC Radio 4

Poet and journalist celeste doaks is the author of Cornrows and Cornfields (Wrecking Ball Press, UK, 2015). She is also the editor of, and contributor in, the poetry anthology Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Joy, and Sexuality (Mason Jar Press, 2017). Her chapbook, American Herstory, was Backbone Press’s first runner-up prize winner and will be published late Summer 2019. Her journalism has appeared in Huffington Post, Village Voice, Time Out New York, and QBR (Quarterly Black Book Review). She is Pushcart Prize nominee and her poems have been published in multiple online and print publications such as The Rumpus, Chicago Quarterly Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Baltimore Magazine, Bayou Magazine, and others. In the fall of 2017, she was the recipient of a Rubys Literary Arts Grant. Doaks is the University of Delaware’s Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing for 2017-2020. In her very spare time, she enjoys co-hosting the literary podcast Lit!Pop!Bang!

Further reading/listening:

Read celeste’s poem “American Herstory” from Split This Rock
Visit celeste’s website
Purchase Cornrows and Cornfields from Wrecking Ball Press
Listen to Lit!Pop!Bang! on Apple Podcasts

Riley Steiner is a recent graduate of Miami University, where she studied Creative Writing and Media & Culture. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, she enjoys baking, cheering for the Green Bay Packers, and spending way too much money at Half Price Books. Her creative work has recently appeared in the Oakland Arts Review and Collision.

 

 

Erika Moss Gordon reads Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

UnknownIt’s time for a new installment of Lyric Essentials, and for this round, we’re excited to welcome Erika Moss Gordon to the series. Here, Erika talks about her admiration for Rosemerry Trommer as both a friend and a writer and discusses how Trommer’s work invites the reader in to see the beauty in the “everyday treasures” that her poetry illuminates. Thanks for reading!

Riley Steiner: I really enjoy that both of the poems you chose involve the speaker addressing their own self — in one poem, a younger version of that self, and in the other, the personification of their physical body. I think it’s so interesting to see the speaker’s view from farther away, what they say to their own self when they’re a bit removed. What do you admire about these poems that made you choose them for your reading?

Erika Moss Gordon: Rosemerry’s expression of the vulnerable human experience is an invitation to be a part of her own emerging story. Her poetry moves gracefully between the divine and the mundane, and reminds us daily that the two are inextricably intertwined — or better yet, that they are the same thing. It was difficult to pick just two of her poems, but I picked these recent pieces because of how personal they are, and how much I can relate to both — as a woman and as a mother. It all goes so fast, doesn’t it?  And how rich it all is. And heartbreaking. And beautiful.

Erika Moss Gordon reads “A Woman Addresses Her Body” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Erika Moss Gordon reads “Time Bend” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

RS: What do you like about Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s work? How did you first discover her poems?

EMG: I met Rosemerry almost fifteen years ago in a prenatal yoga class (which is another reason I wanted to share specifically one of her pieces about parenting). We were both pregnant with our first-borns (who are about to turn fifteen in September. Yikes!). Rosemerry has written a poem a day since 2005 — a poem every day for over fourteen years! What a gift, and a beautiful practice that I truly believe will go down in history. And when you read her work you’ll see … it’s absolutely wonderful stuff. She really does find a poem inside every rotation — and the gems she continues to unearth will knock your socks off. And it reminds the rest of us that our lives are full of everyday treasures, too.

RS: Has her work influenced your own in any way?

EMG: Her work has influenced me so much. I also write about the everyday, and Rosemerry has been such an inspiration as time marches on and as the layers shed and shed, or as her website reveals … as the veils fall and fall. She has been a mentor both in writing as well as in the spoken word. She is also an enormously gifted performer. Watching her is watching a master. She taught me about what it means to bring words to life — about the shared experience, and about how much more juicy it suddenly becomes when we invite others in. There is a generosity in her art, and this spirit of collaboration lifts everyone around her up.

RS: On a related note, what are you currently working on?

EMG: I have been fortunate to stumble upon a collection of my father’s journals from the 1970’s, and I am currently in the process of transcribing them. I was very close to my dad who passed away seven years ago, and he was a tremendous writer. In all honesty, I’m not sure how this is all going to look. Even putting it into words is a little frightening. But my fantasy is that I will still get to work on an intimate writing project with him after all this time.

Erika Moss Gordon lives in Ridgway, Colorado, with her two children, where she writes poetry, works for a film festival, and teaches yoga. Erika’s writing has appeared in Mountain Gazette Magazine, Fungi Magazine, Telluride Watch, Telluride Magazine, Telluride Inside and Out, Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, Salmonberry Arts, and 99 Poems for the 99 Percent, a collection of poetry. Her most recent book, Phases, was winner of the Fledge Chapbook Award, published by Middle Creek Publishing in 2016. Her first chapbook, Of Eyes and Iris, was published in 2013 (Liquid Light Press).

Further reading:

Visit Erika’s website
Order Phases from Middle Creek Publishing
Purchase Of Eyes and Iris from Lulu or Amazon
Read four of Erika’s poems at Colorado Poets Center

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is the author and editor of the books Naked for Tea, Even Now: Poems and Drawings, and Holding Three Things at Once, which was Colorado Book Award finalist. Her poetry has been published in many literary journals, including Rattle and Spectrum, and anthologized in An Elevated View: Colorado Writers on Writing, Poems of Awakening, and Poetry of Presence. She served as the first poet laureate of San Miguel County, Colorado, from 2006 to 2010, and as Colorado’s Western Slope Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017. In 2006, she began writing a poem a day, and has continued the project ever since.

Further reading:

Visit Rosemerry’s website
Dive into Rosemerry’s poem-a-day project, “A Hundred Falling Veils”
Watch Rosemerry’s TEDx talk, “The Art of Changing Metaphors”

Riley Steiner is a recent graduate of Miami University, where she studied Creative Writing and Media & Culture. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, she enjoys baking, cheering for the Green Bay Packers, and spending way too much money at Half Price Books. Her creative work has recently appeared in the Oakland Arts Review and Collision.

Aaron Abeyta Reads Yehuda Amichai

unnamedIn this latest installment of Lyric Essentials, Aaron Abeyta shares his thoughts on four of his favorite poems by Yehuda Amichai. He discusses his love for Amichai’s work and the ways in which Amichai’s poetry explores “what it means to be human,” often using vivid images of childhood and everyday life in his observations of humanity that have captivated readers for over fifty years. As always, thank you for reading and supporting this series!

 

Aaron Abeyta reads “The Box” by Yehuda Amichai

Riley Steiner: Why did you choose these particular poems?

Aaron Abeyta: Amichai, in general, is one of my literary heroes, and his [book of] selected poems, where these poems appear, never leaves my bag; it’s my blankie, haha. As for these poems in particular, i chose them because they are among my favorites. The complexity of the everyday, the way that imagination is shaped in childhood and called upon in adulthood, the way that an apple, or a memory or a box or whatever, can be this conduit to a deeper appreciation and understanding of what it means to be human. In summary, i chose them for their simplicity and their complexity, but mostly i chose them because i love them.

Aaron Abeyta reads “My Father in a White Space Suit” by Yehuda Amichai

RS: Yehuda Amichai is such a historically influential and established poet—widely translated, published, and reputed outside his home country of Israel. Has his work influenced your own in any way?

AA: What draws me to Amichai, other than the amazing poems, is his understanding of faith and how that can contribute to any poem or text. So, in this regard, being a writer that calls upon faith, memory, home and family, i believe that i am kindred, or at least “get it,” when i read his poetry. I was exploring these themes before i first read his work, but his mastery and seamless use of the poem as vehicle has definitely given me something to aspire to.

Aaron Abeyta reads “Inside the Apple” by Yehuda Amichai

RS: I love these lines from “Inside the Apple”: “I trust your voice / because it has lumps of hard pain in it / the way real honey / has lumps of wax from the honeycomb.” It uses such a vivid and beautiful comparison to describe emotion in a way that feels very genuine—to me, “lumps of hard pain” is a perfect description of the sound of grief in a voice, and I never would have put that phrase to it before I heard it in this poem. What are some of your own favorite lines or phrases in these poems?

AA: I would defer to my answer to question one, expand upon it, perhaps. I have a way of annotating poems where i will identify lines, commas, images, whatever i feel is perfectly rendered. The poems i chose were poems where the entire poem was annotated; i.e., the entire poem, every comma, caesura, break, etc. was perfect. As to the images, i especially like how Amichai, when discussing something of import to an adult, uses his “escape routes” and moves the poem back to childhood. Any line or image that does that, always seamlessly in my estimation, is what makes me love his work. The line you pointed out doesn’t do that necessarily, but i love images that make you look at something in a way that transforms it. For instance, every box i look at now is somehow made more meaningful by Amichai. Same goes for the honeycomb … that image belongs to him now … it’s no longer honeycomb, if that makes any sense.

Aaron Abeyta reads “The Diameter of the Bomb” by Yehuda Amichai

RS: While reading about Amichai, I came across a quote of his in which he described his belief that all poetry is political. Do you agree with this statement?

AA: Short answer … yes … i agree. I agree because what we chose to omit, by the act of omission, is as political as it gets.  If i were to write about lollipops (i don’t believe i would … but who knows?), then that is political because i chose to write about that subject when i clearly could have written about something with more import. However, if the lollipop poem is “good,” then i have rendered it into something new, and it can then be the vehicle for a message that others didn’t or couldn’t anticipate. Put another way, we are always sending messages, through poetry or otherwise, and i suppose i believe that all messages are important and therefore political.

Aaron A. Abeyta is a Colorado native and professor of English and the Mayor of Antonito, Colorado, his hometown. He is the author of four collections of poetry and one novel. For his book colcha, Abeyta received an American Book Award and the Colorado Book Award. In addition, his novel Rise, Do Not be Afraid was a finalist for the 2007 Colorado Book Award and El Premio Aztlan. Abeyta was awarded a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship for poetry, and he is the former Poet Laureate of Colorado’s Western Slope, as named by the Karen Chamberlain Poetry Festival. Abeyta is also a recipient of a 2017 Governor’s Creative Leadership Award. Aaron has over 100 publications, including An Introduction to Poetry, 10th ed., Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, & Drama, 8th ed., Conversations in American Literature: Language, Rhetoric, & Culture, The Leopold Outlook, Colorado Central Magazine, The High Country News, and numerous other journals.

Further reading:

Visit Aaron’s website
Watch an interview with Aaron for the 2017 Governor’s Creative Leadership Awards
Purchase colcha from the University Press of Colorado
Purchase Rise, Do Not Be Afraid

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) is a poet from Israel whose work is renowned across the world. He is the author of Now and Other Days (1955) and the collections Poems (1969) and Selected Poems of Yehuda Amichai (1971). Amichai’s other work includes two novels and a short story collection. His poems are globally acclaimed and have been translated into forty languages.

Further reading:

Discover more of Amichai’s poems in The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
Read Amichai’s poems at the Poetry Foundation
Read a review of Amichai’s work from The New Yorker

Riley Steiner is a recent graduate of Miami University, where she studied Creative Writing and Media & Culture. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, she enjoys baking, cheering for the Green Bay Packers, and spending way too much money at Half Price Books. Her creative work has recently appeared in the Oakland Arts Review and Collision.

Amy Strauss Friedman Reads Jessica Walsh

ASF Head Shot.jpgIn this interview, Amy Strauss Friedman shares a fun story about how she met Jessica Walsh and tells us why reading her poetry for the first time gave her goosebumps. We discuss two of Walsh’s poems from her newest book, The List of Last Tries: “Bitter” and “Night Garden.” Below you’ll find Amy’s readings of these poems and her thoughts on their themes of difference, rejection, and the search for connection.

Riley Steiner: What drew you to choosing these poems in particular?

Amy Strauss Friedman: Jessica Walsh highlights the ways in which we all feel we don’t fit in through the narrative she constructs; she fashions a gothic, dark, disconnected character who taps into our own insecurities. Our neighbors don’t like us. Our towns don’t want us. Complex people, those who don’t fit the cookie-cutter “norms,” are outcasts. We immediately relate to the girl-turns-woman narrator in this book, who ends up orphaned and assumes that even her parents couldn’t bear her. We are all aspects of her struggle.

The two poems I chose emphasize the narrator’s perceived differences between her and the world around her, the ways in which she works to scorn others before they scorn her. The first is a relatable summer camp experience, the second is a result of the narrator’s earlier experiences with rejection. Being discarded hounds her; it becomes her identity. There are many references to bugs in these two poems, as well as elsewhere in the book, as the narrator digs into the earth for connection that she doesn’t seem to find above ground.

Amy Strauss Friedman reads “Bitter” by Jessica Walsh:

Amy Strauss Friedman reads “Night Garden” by Jessica Walsh:

RS: What do you admire about Walsh’s work? How did your relationship with her work begin?

ASF: I’ll start with the second question first because the answer is very funny. Jessica and I taught English at the same community college for five years before we knew about each other. One day Facebook suggested I send her a friend request, so I checked out her profile. I found myself saying, “Wait, what? She and I are both poets and both English teachers and both work at the same school and don’t know each other? How is that possible?” So, I sent her a friend request and then asked if she’d like to meet for coffee on campus. We did so, and I loved her immediately. We went to throw away our coffee cups after our conversation, and both of us just stood over the four or so bins, not knowing where to deposit our cups. We burst into laughter. Compost? Recycle? Trash? Paper? Jessica looked at me and asked, “How many advanced degrees does it take to get rid of coffee cups?”

As to her work, I picked up her first full-length collection, How to Break My Neck, not sure what to expect. There are times where I have loved poets but not their work, and vice versa. But Jessica’s work was excellent. Her poems gave me goosebumps. How they jump into an issue without introduction without losing the reader; that’s a terribly difficult feat to accomplish. How she uses alliteration and line breaks to draw a reader into the ethos of her world. I feel scarcity in her work in the best way. No unnecessary words. No fillers needed to bridge stanzas. An immediate curiosity about message that holds our attention.

I decided soon after reading and being wowed by her first book that I wanted to review it, and I began to star my favorite poems. When two-thirds of the book was starred, I knew I needed a new approach to questions about her writing. Jessica never loses sight of her message, and creates characters worthy of lengthy novels while doing them justice in short form.

RS: What was your experience like when you were recording the poems? For instance, did you already have a pretty good idea of what the poems would sound like, or did you try out different intonations? What was your thought process behind the way you read them out loud?

ASF: I’ve been lucky to hear Jessica read poems on several occasions, so I knew I couldn’t mimic her style. She reads directly without airs, lets the poem be the performance, and knows from where all her influences and intentions come. I don’t know all of the backstories that create her style of reading, so I put that out of my mind and read them aloud the way they sounded in my head. They tell stories so forcefully that they need little help from me.

RS: “Bitter,” in particular, is striking to me with its air of defiance. Thinking back on when I was younger, I can identify with both girls: the one who acts “as required by popular girls,” and the speaker, who defies those standards. I definitely remember feeling like there were certain mysterious “requirements” to be popular in those middle-school-age days, and also feeling like I’d never figure out what those were. Do you identify with the speaker of this poem at all? Do you think this defiance manifests itself as we grow older?

ASF: I always consider it a bad sign when people peak in middle school. There are very few people I knew as popular in middle school who have ended up wildly successful as adults. The nerds, the outcasts, the misunderstood; they’re the ones to watch as they grow. And among the requirements for popularity when I was young were generally terribly permissive parents who wanted to be their children’s friends. It was usually a particular form of dysfunction that encouraged kids to grow up too fast. Today that happens more readily due to the Internet. But many parents still work to limit those influences. So, I saw the narrator as a person ripe for success one day, who already understood that fitting in with Stepford children was absolutely the wrong path to take. She taunts them. She goes out of her way to discomfit them. And in making herself repulsive to them, she becomes far more interesting.

Amy Strauss Friedman is the author of the poetry collection The Eggshell Skull Rule (Kelsay Books, 2018) in which she applies a doctrine in tort law as a guide to personal relationships, and the chapbook Gathered Bones are Known to Wander (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016) in which she examines disconnection from each other, and ourselves. Amy’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her work has appeared in Pleiades, Rust + Moth, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her work can be found at amystraussfriedman.com.

Further reading:

Read Amy Strauss Friedman’s “What Happens to a Voice Too Long Unused?” in Rust + Moth
Purchase The Eggshell Skull Rule
Read an interview with Amy about her 2016 chapbook Gathered Bones are Known to Wander

Jessica L. Walsh is a Professor of English at Harper College in Chicago. She is the author of How to Break My Neck and The List of Last Tries (Sable Books, 2019) along with the chapbooks The Division of Standards and Knocked Around. Her poetry has been published in literary magazines such as Tinderbox, Sundog, Stirring, RHINO, and many others.

Further reading:

Read Jessica Walsh’s “Reliquary” in Whale Road Review
Visit Jessica’s website
Purchase How to Break My Neck

Riley Steiner is a recent graduate of Miami University, where she studied Creative Writing and Media & Culture. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, she enjoys baking, cheering for the Green Bay Packers, and spending way too much money at Half Price Books. Her creative work has recently appeared in the Oakland Arts Review and Collision.

Lyric Essentials: Clodagh Beresford Dunne Reads Two Poems By Jan Beatty

i84a1802-2-webWhen Clodagh Beresford Dunne sent me these poems, I found “The Kindness” right away, but couldn’t find “T-shirts.” None of Jan Beatty’s books were at my library, and I couldn’t figure out which book the poem was in, anyway. I emailed Clodagh to ask if she could send me a picture of the poem. She replied, “I’m afraid I don’t have a book excerpt of T-shirts, and I can’t seem to find the name of the collection it comes from, either. All I know is that it was sent to me by my friend Thomas McCarthy just following my own father’s death. A poem I sent him, about finding my father’s spectacles a month after he died, prompted Thomas to send me the Beatty poem.”

Jessica Hudgins: Both of these poems begin with a physical object—the elk, the bag—that gives Jan Beatty a starting point. She describes where these things are, and where she is as she looks at them, and then why she’s looking at them. It’s a really simple, really expansive way of approaching a poem. When you write, do you begin in a similar way? How has Beatty’s work influenced yours?

Clodagh Beresford Dunne: This is a really good observation, and you’re right, it’s a wonderfully expansive way of entering a poem. I believe it stems from the brilliance and sincerity of Beatty’s grounded narrative.

This entrance mechanism is beautifully filmic if you think about it—it instantly creates a sense of place, of truth, of measured step – the essential components of the perfect poem. With Beatty’s poetry there’s always a sort of reassurance that she’s a poet who has properly experienced life—that she’s been in a familiar place, that she has taken the time and care to accurately record its dimensions, that she can constantly triangulate the what, the where, and the why if you like.

There’s a brilliance in the clarity of her imagery, in all of her work. The precision and concision of her language generates a real and physical force.

In terms of my own approach to writing, I suppose, yes, I sometimes begin in a similar way – not that it’s ever a conscious decision, of course. I think the storyteller in each of us will always take the same beaten path. Sometimes, the clarity of the narrative won’t be straightforward, to begin with, though—I’ll notice, after a few drafts perhaps, that the strongest entry point might be hidden in the middle of the poem. I have a habit of “throat clearing” when I begin to write a poem and it’s almost a given that I’ll scrap early lines or stanzas as I begin to edit. I find it really helpful to leave poems for weeks or months or even years and go back to them when I’ve forgotten what I was trying to say. Your inner ruthless critic is great at locating the cleanest line from A to B.

In terms of how Beatty’s work has influenced mine, I would say that it’s her fearlessness and the breadth of her voice that I’ve been inspired by the most. She’s given me the confidence to write with courage—to say what I feel, to avoid my self-censor, to write from my heart, and, at all times to be authentic and human. She’s taught me that to write is to be engaged in a warfare of sorts – that you must endure through the pain, and make it to the other side – that there will be momentary peace, that there will be full-on battles, and that it’s perpetual.

The poems I’ve chosen to record for you, are tender poems—two poems that mean a lot to me, but Beatty is probably best known for her kick-ass poetry (I’m thinking of her work in The Switching/Yard, in particular—poems like Dear American Poetry, Letter to a Young Rilke, Why I don’t Fuck Intellectuals, for example). I’ve been privileged enough to hear her read to packed audiences in the U.S.—to witness her, in her own inimitable, gentle way,  instill a crowd with a fire and energy like I’ve never seen before. And that’s what I love about Beatty and her work – that she addresses subjects like suicide, abortion, misogyny, kindness, love, grief all with the same precise and balanced pen. Her lyric is so wonderful, too, of course, and, for me, she symbolises the excellence that women writers should continually strive for—the courage to speak up.

The dedication in Beatty’s most recent book, Jackknife reads like this:

“For women everywhere
who are told to be nice
and to shut up.”

JH: These poems are gentle with their subjects. Especially in “The Kindness,” when the poet describes the calves, “as they bend to eat grass / look up / at the mother at the same time.” Can you point out a few other moments that you admire in these poems, and describe what you admire about them?

CBD: I admire so many moments in both poems. They’re both so intricate and work on a multitude of levels, yet both have this wonderful accessible ordinariness about them, too.

Clodagh Beresford Dunne reads “The Kindness” by Jan Beatty:

 

In “The Kindness,” what I might admire most is that one might think that Beatty has been gentle with her subject, yet, the reader has, in fact, unwittingly, been taken on a terrifying, physical, reverse-journey with Beatty, and, by the end of the poem, they end up being equal beneficiary of the small act of historic kindness, that Beatty has been shown.

This physical pull is created in lots of very clever moments in the poem. For example, Beatty instantly places her juxtapositions on common ground, if you like: calf and mother, city dweller and rural dweller, fragility and strength, looking up, looking down, liberty and preclusion … so, with the mere mention of football fields, we’re off! And the poem becomes a rapid and physical episode.

The language used creates moments of beautiful unification with the scene and the movement: e.g. “run into each other” “hold” “steal” “bumping” and I love the moments of false peace that emerge in the poem—e.g., the gentleness of the title and the bucolic opening scene of “The mother elk & 2 babies” that is quickly toughened up and cancelled out by “sniffing / the metal handle of the bear-proof trash bin.” and again when the poet dwells on the elk babies’ beauty, only to be jarred into the realisation that she’s still not at a safe enough distance from the elks.

There’s remarkable effectiveness in the three indented sections of the poem, too – where the kindness actually occurs—and where Beatty captures the physical pushing-in of the door, within the poem’s architecture.

……..

“a hand on the door,
I was walking in”

……

“a hand on the door
from around my body”

……

“a hand on the door
& the bottom of me
dropped/”

Beatty also has brilliant pacing and distancing in this poem and she guides the slide and reversal into memory with her use of movement:

“they bend”

“I’m backing up slowly/”

“The sloping line of their small snouts & /”

“…backing /into the woods past the lodgepole pines”

“Stripped down”

“The bottom of me

Dropped/”

I read recently that Solzhenitsyn once said that courage and kindness were the greatest virtues. It’s as if “The Kindness” is a lesson in both. It’s a very real and very beautiful poem.

In “T-Shirts” I really admire the moments where Beatty offers her reader the specifics of what she’s retained and what she’s given away. It creates a heightened sense that although the subject matter is universal, this is a unique and individual experience. We’re told exactly how and where the T-Shirts are stored in her apartment, their size, the slogans they carry, how they’re speckled, stained etc. We’re given precise colours, fabrics etc. of the items she’s given away, too.

“I keep my father’s  T-Shirts
in a brown bag in the hall
in between the bathroom and the bedroom.”

“They are big, extra large”

“One says ‘The Best Beer Drinkers Are From Whitehall’”

This sort of detail is so brave and honest and we’re given a calm and composed, yet deeply sad, explanation as to why the poet is keeping the T-Shirts, how they were a huge part of her relationship with her father,  how her engagement with them or attention to them, since he has died, is much the same as the way in which one encounters grief: a mere glance or a fixed stare, depending on the day.

What’s particularly lovely is how Beatty so simply gets a hold on one of the most difficult aspects of grief—that part of loss which is so personal to the bereaved; the texture and touch of the loved one, their smell.

“Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep,
I go to the bag and sort through them,
hold them to my face
and say hello”

Clodagh Beresford Dunne reads “T-Shirts” by Jan Beatty:

 

JH: “The Kindness” is such an interesting title because it at once points to the specific gesture in the poem, and elevates it by referring to it more generally as kindness. We would expect “Kindness,” or “The Act of Kindness.” Obviously, the one Beatty chose is a better title. With “T-Shirts” it’s the opposite. The poem is about grief—why title it “T-Shirts”?

CBD: It’s an indelibly perfect title, isn’t it?  The simplicity of what Beatty chooses as the tangible in order to illustrate the intangible is what makes the title so effective, I think.

T-Shirts are such universal and light items of clothing—they’re garments we’d normally wear on sunnier days, in casual, home-life, relaxed settings and this instantly suggests the familiar, something with which the reader can immediately connect and feel at ease, and the grief becomes so painfully understandable, almost unbearable, as a result. There is no longer any use for the T-Shirts here—there are no more T-Shirts to be purchased, to be worn, to be speckled with paint, “There is no place for them since he has died.”

There’s nothing extraordinary about a simple speckled, sloganed T-Shirt, yet when its owner dies it becomes an irreplaceable item connecting this daughter with her father, the only remaining evidence of the love that existed between the two, a holdable item that carries the essence of the departed, in every sense of that word.

The T-Shirts are suddenly rendered surplus, defunct, useless after death. If one thinks about the word T-Shirts, they’re so-called because of the shape they make when laid out flat—(t-shirts would be incorrect) and there’s a poignancy in that, too—a surrendering to death, and to grief, in a way.

Clodagh Beresford Dunne is an Irish poet, living in Dungarvan, Co Waterford in the southeast of the country.  Her poems have appeared or are upcoming in Irish and international publications including Poetry (Chicago), The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Stinging Fly. Her work has also been recorded for broadcast in Ireland and the USA. She was the recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Emerging Writer Award, in 2016,  and her poem “Seven Sugar Cubes”  was voted Irish Poem of the Year at the 2017 Irish Book Awards. A former lawyer and award-winning public speaker, she is currently working towards publication of her first full collection.

The poet Thomas Mccarthy has said of Beresford Dunne: “She is a writer of immense seriousness and purpose. Her poems announce a new vision to us, a new vortex of energy that localises human experience and domesticates genius.”

Further Reading: 

Clodagh Beresford Dunne’s website
Clodagh Beresford Dunne at Poetry Ireland
Clodagh Beresford Dunne at the Irish Times

Jan Beatty is an American poet. Her books include The Switching/Yard (2013), Red Sugar (2008), Boneshaker (2002), and Mad River (1995), published by University of Pittsburgh Press. She is a recipient of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and the Creative Achievement Award in Literature. She directs the creative writing program at Carlow University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Further Reading: 

Jan Beatty on WQED’s “Voice of the Arts” series
Jan Beatty reads “The Kindness” at Split This Rock Poetry Festival
Jan Beatty in conversation at Cold Mountain Review
Purchase Jan Beatty’s Jackknife 

Jessica Hudgins is a writer and teacher currently living in Georgia.

Lyric Essentials: Helena Mesa Reads “Winter Stars” by Larry Levis

Helena Mesa PhotoWhen Helena Mesa wrote to tell me which poem she chose to read for Lyric Essentials, she said, “When I think about formative poets for me, Levis always comes to mind. I still remember reading Winter Stars in my kitchen in Houston, and awakening from the thrall, still in my kitchen, sitting on the floor, my lunch cold in the toaster oven.” Here we’ll look at Larry Levis’s control of the line, and think about how that control gives him more freedom to address loss and regret. We’ll also consider how Levis’s attention to specific moments in the past deepen the emotions he describes as happening now. Thank you for reading.

Jessica Hudgins: It was really moving to me, after learning that you first read this poem in your kitchen, to read the poem myself and see that it takes place in another domestic space—the poet’s backyard. You say that this poem and the book Winter Stars shaped you. Can you say a little more about that? How has Levis’ work influenced you?

Helena Mesa: As a young poet first reading Winter Stars, I was struck by the meditative quality of Levis’ poems. I never knew where he would go, how he would arrive there, and I was awed by the way his poems came together. Take the opening narrative of “My father once broke a man’s hand / Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor.” I never imagined that narrative would move to the statement of misunderstanding to the mind-as-city metaphor to the beautiful, intimate arrival: “Cold enough to reconcile / Even a father, even a son.” As a young female Cuban-American poet, I feared sentimentality, so much so that I buried sentiment under layers of imagery and detachment. Reading Levis was invigorating—he allowed readers to meditate on a small moment with him, and through his meditation, he risked revealing emotion as he discovered meaning.

Levis also challenged me to embrace the free verse line. When writing, I’d hear my teachers repeat, “Think in a 10-syllable line.” It was good advice for me at the time—the syllable count gave me a structure to work within and against as I learned what the line could do. And, while I loved poets whose lines weren’t traditionally shaped by syllabics (poets like Yusef Komunyakaa, Lynda Hull, Lucille Clifton), I didn’t yet understand how they constructed their lines so each possessed integrity, each resonated. In fact, when I first read “Winter Stars,” I foolishly thought the lines weren’t controlled. Look at some of those early lines:

With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held

The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first

Two fingers, so it could slash

Horizontally, & with surprising grace,

Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand…

The line breaks are super unexpected. The hard enjambments on “held” and “first” push forward, but Levis’s caesuras within the lines—versus the ends of lines—create tension that mirrors the poem’s opening narrative. When I read “first / two fingers” aloud, the internal rhyme and hard stresses emphasize each syllable, which slows the pacing, which lets me further visualize the image before I reach “so it could slash.” The “sharpened fruit knife”—a dangerous object—is being “held,” and the pacing slows down as Levis zooms in on the image of how Rubén Vásquez held that knife “horizontally”—pause—“& with surprising grace”—slightly longer pause—“Across a throat.” So dangerous. The lines tug between speeding forward and pausing with punctuation, musicality, and end-stopped line breaks. And then, Levis balances the most dramatic detail—“Across a throat”—pause—on the same line with “It was like a glinting beak in a hand”—something potentially beautiful that, of course, isn’t beautiful. It’s such a delicate balance between contrasting elements, and Levis’s craft—his control—both evokes sentiment and undercuts sentimentality at the same time.

Helena Mesa reading “Winter Stars”

JH: The extended metaphor that begins, “If you can think of the mind as a place continually/visited…” is particularly striking to me, and of course the way that Levis’s attention keeps coming back to the stars. Can you point to a moment in the poem that you admire and describe what you admire about it?

HM: Yes, exactly! How those stars become a mechanism for meditating on his father and his looming death. There are so many things to admire. The beauty of the turn “I got it all wrong,” stated in plain vernacular speech. Or, the poignant direct address to his father. Or, the sincerity of “where a small wind.…wakes the cold again— / Which may be all that’s left of you & me.” But, today, looking at the poem again, I find myself focusing on Levis’ repetition of “now” in that almost-surreal fourth stanza. Three times he says “now”—it’s insistent. In its most simplistic function, the repetition grounds the reader by locating us in the present time; but more importantly, the repetition of “now” allows Levis to both move through time and pay attention to time. The present moment—in its limitations and imperfection and sorrow—is merely the present moment, and even this moment will be lost, like the California light, the place in their lives, his father’s speech, his father’s life, their relationship.

JH: Do you consider “Winter Stars” an elegy? Like, of course it is, but it also seems less concerned with grief than reconciliation and the way that memory connects us to one another. What do you think?

HM: I’m strangely fascinated by elegies that are non-traditional elegies, which might be another reason why I’m drawn to Larry Levis. When asked about being an elegiac poet, Levis once said, “I often feel that that’s what I am as a human.”

I think of “Winter Stars” as having an elegiac eye or positioning—we see him mourn as his father “is beginning to die”—losing language and, presumably, memory. The grief is present, but it isn’t that raw grief we associate with the death of a loved one. To me, that grief points toward a different kind of loss—Levis mourning the relationship he could have had with his father, and realizing it might be too late. If Levis portrays his father as “ashamed” for “a lost syllable as if it might / Solve everything,” Levis may also feel shame for getting “it all wrong.” And, because the poem focuses so much on the father-son relationship, and even ends on those two clauses, yoked in one line—“Even a father, even a son”—it’s hard for me to detach one from the other. To think of his father’s approaching death means Levis is also aware of his own mortality, without saying so.

True to “Winter Stars” as a whole, however, Levis unites contrasting emotions, or perhaps, turns toward complex emotions. The mourning and elegiac eye end on reconciliation. The sky might be a wide expanse, but within it is starlight, which Levis twice alludes to as something that persists. And, in the final stanza, Levis describes a “pale haze of stars goes on & on.” Starlight endures, in contrast to the temporality of the moment (the meditation), in contrast to the tension between the speaker and his father (the past).

 

Larry Levis (1946-1996) was an American poet. He published several books for which he received recognition from the International Poetry Forum, The American Academy of Poets, and the National Poetry Series. Levis taught at the University of Missouri and Virginia Commonwealth University and directed the writing program at the University of Utah.

Further Reading:

“Winter Stars” by Larry Levis
“The Poet at Seventeen” by Larry Levis
Larry Levis reads at the 92Y
Edward Byrne on Larry Levis at Blackbird

Helena Mesa is the author of Horse Dance Underwater and a co-editor for Mentor & Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in journals such as Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, and Sou’wester. She has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences, and she has attended Squaw Valley Writers’ Workshop and Napa Valley Writers’ Workshop. She teaches creative writing at Albion College and lives in Oakland, California.

Further Reading:

Helena Mesa on Verse Daily
Mentor & Muse 
Review of Helena Mesa’s Horse Dance Underwater
Purchase Horse Dance Underwater

A note from Anna Black: It has been my great pleasure to be a part of the trajectory of this series. Through it, I have met many new friends and come to learn about a number of poets that had heretofore been unknown to me. This has been a tremendous pleasure and I am grateful for having had the opportunity. As I am now handling new roles for Sundress, I am handing over the series to the capable and deft hands of Jessica Hudgins, our former intern, and I’m excited to read the new voices that she will bring to the table, too. As for me, you can find me as the host over at Poets in Pajamas, and I’m also now serving as the staff director for Sundress. So I didn’t go far. I hope you’ll welcome Jessica and make her feel at home as you all did me. -Anna

Jessica Hudgins is a writer and teacher currently living in Georgia.

 

Lyric Essentials: Mia Leonin Reads Two Poems by Shara McCallum

Mi LeoninMia Leonin here reads “Madwoman’s Geography” and “From the Book of Mothers” by Shara McCallum. In the process of discussing these poems, we cover incredible ground. Are women permitted public rage? What is it in writing motherhood that is so challenging? Leonin touches on the risks of writing motherhood, the need to thrive in the wise wilderness of the unconscious, and what can only be referred to as McCallum’s songs.

Black: Why did you choose poems by Shara McCallum to share with us?

Leonin: I met Shara McCallum when she was an undergrad at the University of Miami. Although she was a gifted young writer, she was thinking of pursuing a career in musical theater. Clearly, she found a different path. She is now the author of five books of poetry.

However, two of the most distinctive elements I appreciate in her work are the construction of voice and the musicality of her diction and syntax. I think McCallum’s love of song, persona, and theater transferred remarkably to her poetry. I am a creative writing lecturer and have been surrounded by nineteen- and twenty-year-old undergraduates for the better part of twenty years, so I appreciate the trajectory of Shara’s passions into her career.

One may consider a career in musical theater as much of a pie-in-the-sky endeavor as poet; however, Shara possessed the desire and skills for voice, performance, and music and to this day they contribute to her unique qualities as a writer. Perhaps someone else may have integrated those passions into another profession. The point (and what I try to communicate to my students) is this: Shara reminds me that if we are in touch with those activities that enliven and embolden us, if we recognize what most gives us a sense of purpose, we will find a place for that purpose. Shara’s truth is a complex one of black and white; mother and daughter; American and immigrant. Her poetry holds these contradictions and more.


Mia Leonin reads “Madwoman’s Geography” by Shara McCallum

 

Black: And why these poems in particular? 

Leonin: “From the Book of Mothers,” a poem from This Strange Land is one of my favorite poems. It explores the complexity of motherhood—moments of tenderness and whimsy, anger and trauma, life and death. Above all, it is a poem that sings. I was so excited to participate in this project because it was an excuse to read this particular poem out loud. The late poet Miller Willams called the poem “a meeting place between reader and writer.” This has always felt true to me—a poem is an act of co-creation between reader and writer. “From the Book of Mothers” takes Williams’ dictum one step further: it is a song that wants to be sung.

I also selected the poem “Madwoman’s Geography” from McCallum’s most recent book, Madwoman. A poetic descendant of Rita Dove, Louise Gluck, and Lucille Clifton, McCallum is a master of voice and persona. In “Madwoman’s Geography,” she creates a voice of feminine authority, agency, and transformation.

In my first life, I slid

into the length of a snake, then

sloughed scales for wings.

She takes us from Eve to Icarus in three short lines. Wow!

McCallum’s work underscores women’s life-long metamorphosis, stirring psychological and emotional depths without falling into sentimentality.

Black: Can you explore the concept of the long poem a little? 

Leonin: I think the literary collage is at the essence of many long poems and that is definitely the case with McCallum’s “From the Book of Mothers.” Her use of collage reminds me of the quilt made by an anonymous woman from Alabama at the Smithsonian and referenced by Alice Walker in her essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.”

The collage is a symbol of the communal reservoir of “women’s work,” a feminine resourcefulness women have accessed for generations to create something beautiful from the mundane, the oppressive, and otherwise unbearable aspects of our daily lives. The women in McCallum’s poems contend with mental illness, neglect, abuse, and poverty. It’s no accident that McCallum employs the collage form to create a work that is vibrant, resonant, and beautiful in musicality and image. The collage aesthetic also affords McCallum the linguistic and cultural latitude to move from the Ganges to the Jamaican Patois of wutless, to numbers in Hebrew, and beyond. McCallum’s syntactic sense of the line is always tight. It’s as if she is writing the bountiful, wholehearted lustiness of Whitman and compressing it into the hymn-tight lines of Dickinson.

McCallum writes: “Pushed from the calabash stained by its pulp,/we were turned into little girls.” The sh in “push” and “calabash,” the alliteration and echo of “push” and “pulp”—these words in proximity churn towards a melodic syntax. The cumulative effect is orchestral and rich.


Mia Leonin reads “From the Book of Mothers” by Shara McCallum

 

Black: Likewise, maybe the concept of a “mother poem”?

Leonin: There is a double consciousness that comes with motherhood: one is propelled into the world of what is and what should be. That should may come from self, society, or both, but as my mother used to say of her mother’s punishments: “the thinnest branch makes the sharpest switch.” Our narrow definition of what is deemed acceptable or interesting to write about on the subject of motherhood cuts deep. We are expected to underscore the mama bear fierceness of mothers, the nurturing instinct of mothers, and the “instinctive” bond between mothers and children, but what of the loneliness, despair, and resentment? What of boredom and humor? What of fathers who mother? Right now, we are having a more public conversation about what it means for a woman to be angry and the double standard imposed upon women when it comes to expressing anger.  We are not supposed to express feelings of outrage and most definitely not on behalf of ourselves.

To ignore women’s experiences is to ignore the power of those experiences and the power of women. The patriarchy is invested in that imbalance of power. It permeates our nation at every level from the top down. George W. Bush’s presidency gave us “No Child Left Behind” and a “Culture of Life” while waging a war that took hundreds of thousands of lives and ripped apart countless families in the Middle East and in the United States. Now, with our “grab ’em by the pussy” president, the already thinning veil has been ripped away. Donald Trump, our president and a man accused of multiple sexual assaults, ridicules Dr. Ford, a victim of sexual assault and lauds her alleged assailant, selecting him to serve on the highest court of the land.

There is a double consciousness that comes with motherhood: one is propelled into the world of what is and what should be. That should may come from self, society, or both, but as my mother used to say of her mother’s punishments: “the thinnest branch makes the sharpest switch.” Our narrow definition of what is deemed acceptable or interesting to write about on the subject of motherhood cuts deep. We are expected to underscore the mama bear fierceness of mothers, the nurturing instinct of mothers, and the “instinctive” bond between mothers and children, but what of the loneliness, despair, and resentment? What of boredom and humor? What of fathers who mother? Right now, we are having a more public conversation about what it means for a woman to be angry and the double standard imposed upon women when it comes to expressing anger.  We are not supposed to express feelings of outrage and most definitely not on behalf of ourselves.

If you are a poet and a woman and you want to write about motherhood, you know you are taking a risk. People don’t want to know motherhood and parenthood deeply. We are in a country that loves to sound the trumpet of family, but denies children healthcare and parents maternity leave. It separates children from their parents at the border and seeks to interfere with a woman’s reproductive choices. McCallum doesn’t just write about motherhood. She writes about it as a changing state of being. She reminds us of the connections to one another, to life, and to death. Her fragmented stanzas and sections interweave movement, echo, and variations to haunting effect. This dramatic tension builds and recedes until the poem ends on a profoundly simple question:

If not this room, this life

then where, then when?

McCallum’s writing about motherhood—here and elsewhere in her work—reminds me: Here. Now. It gives me the courage to write.

Black: What are you working on now?

I’ll be honest. I’m working on living. I’m emerging from a period of great change—the end of a long marriage, the beginning of creating my own home, and the middle of mothering a teenager. I am a strong believer in the wise wilderness of the unconscious mind and so to begin writing, I need to avoid creating a particular project and just write.

Also, in the last few years, I have filled many notebooks and computer files with words that I think are more on the lyric essay end of the spectrum than they are poetry. In time, I will return to these notebooks and cull through them. In the meantime, to return to the wilderness, but well accompanied, I will begin a series of writing exercises that I call “Papelitos.”

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Shara McCallum is a Jamaican-born poet and author of five poetry collections including the most recent, Madwoman (Alice James Books, 2017). McCallum received her MFA from the University of Maryland and her PhD from Binghamton University. McCallum is a Professor at Penn State University and the former director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. McCallum was recently awarded the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for Poetry and has in the past has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Byner Award from the Library of Congress, and other honors.

Mia Leonin is the author of four poetry collections: Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child (BkMk Press), Braid, Unraveling the Bed, andChance Born (Anhinga Press), and a memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). Leonin has been awarded fellowships from the State of Florida Department of Cultural Affairs for her poetry and creative nonfiction, two Money for Women grants by the Barbara Deming Fund, and she has been a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts/Annenberg Institute on Theater and Musical Theater. Leonin has published poetry and creative nonfiction in New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Witness, North American Review, River Styx, Chelsea, and others. She received a special mention in the 2014 Pushcart Prize anthology. 

Leonin has written extensively about Spanish-language theater and culture for the Miami Herald, New Times, ArtburstMiami.com, and other publications.  Leonin’s poetry has been translated to Spanish and she has been invited to read at the Miami International Book Fair, Poesia en el Laurel in Granada, Spain, and in Barcelona, Spain. Leonin teaches creative writing at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.

 

The Good Stuff:

 

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Anna Black received her MFA at Arizona State University and her BA at Western Washington University. She has served as the editor-in-chief of the magazines Hayden’s Ferry Review and Inkspeak, and is a twice awarded Virginia G. Piper global teaching and research fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the anthologies We Will be Shelter and In Sight: An Ekphrastic Collaboration, as well as the journals 45th Parallel, Bacopa Review, Wordgathering, the American Journal of Poetry, and New Mobility among others. Black has taught composition, creative writing, and/or publishing at Arizona State University, Western Washington University, Perryville Women’s Prison, and the National University of Singapore. Black is the host of the Poets in Pajamas reading series and staff director at Sundress Publications.

Lyric Essentials: Julie Marie Wade Reads Two Poems by Maureen Seaton

Julie Marie Wade is the author of ten collections of poetry and prose and a longtime reader of Maureen Seaton. When we sat down to talk about Seaton’s work, Wade had deeply valuable insight which took us down roads from the epiphanous to the Blunderbuss. Wade looks deep into the heart of Seaton’s work and evidences the grace and good humor with which she connects. This interview is as much a tribute to Seaton by Wade as it is an instructional for anyone who hasn’t yet considered the importance of Seaton’s wide-ranging body of works. This interview made me wish I were one of Wade’s students.

Black: What made you choose the work of Maureen Seaton?

Wade: I think there are poets each of us have needed for many years before we find them, and when their poems appear before us at last, the experience is almost mystical—a feeling of having known someone before you knew them, of being deeply affirmed by the epiphany of their presence in the world. Maureen Seaton is just such a mystical, epiphanous, much-needed poet for me.

I went to high school and college in the 1990s, at a time when Maureen was coming out as queer and coming into her own as a poet who worked as diligently in form (sonnets, villanelles, et al.) as she did in the most envelope-pushing, experimental spaces. She was taking risks, in her life and in her art, that I didn’t yet realize a person, let alone a woman-person, could take.

Somehow I did not encounter Maureen’s writing until after I had already taken the greatest plunge of my own life, though—not going through with my marriage to a man at the end of my first year of graduate school and continuing my journey through life with my true love, a woman named Angie, to whom I am now happily married.

Not long after that plunge, in 2003 or 2004, I read a poem by Denise Duhamel called “When I Was a Lesbian,” which I found stunning and thrilling, a poem which opened doors for me to imagine my own life as formerly (for all intents and purposes) heterosexual. I took that poem as an invitation to begin exploring more consciously the first twenty-two years of my life “when I was straight.” But what I didn’t realize until I delved deeper into the collaborative poetry written by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton (Exquisite Politics indeed!) was that Denise’s poem was written as a response to Maureen’s own “When I Was Straight,” which belongs to an ever-growing series of other poems—“When I Was Avant-garde,” “When I Was a Jersey Girl,” “When I Was Bi(nary),” etc.—that opened onto the vast landscape of Maureen’s work in conditional, circumstantial, and subjunctive spaces.

Years later, I had the privilege of meeting and coming to know both of these poets, long-time friends and collaborators, in real life, and I was audacious enough to ask them to bless my own book-length project, a collection of poems called When I Was Straight. Not only did they bless it—they blurbed it, collaboratively!

 

Black: Why these particular poems of Seaton’s?

Wade: I have never read a Maureen Seaton poem where I didn’t have the sensation, at one point and usually at many points, of hearing a gong reverberate inside my head. When I read Maureen’s “When I Was Straight,” the gong struck loudest at this moment: “there is no lover like a panicked lover.” It was one of those moments—the best moments for readers of poetry, I think, or readers of any literature—where I sketched in my notebook, How did she know?!?! There was a cosmos in that line, one I recognized in my own life but had never even attempted to name, let alone in such a concise and elegant (and witty—I love the omnipresence of Maureen’s sense of humor across her canon) way.

So I knew I wanted to record this poem because it was the first, though by no means the last, of Maureen’s poems to seize me in that visceral and oracular kind of way. Then, I started looking at other aspects of the poem, particularly the diction and the juxtapositions. Who describes heteronormativity as “that Old Boyfriend Theory of Headache and Blunderbuss”? Who uses the word “blunderbuss”? I started noticing the little sparks coming off of pairings like “linearity and menthol” (an abstraction paired with a potent concrete), “pretense and fellatio” (there again), and chewy Anglo-Saxon words and phrases like “crowded with cleavage,” “fickle,” and “winged clavicle.” Which is to say I fell in love with this poem on all levels: conceptually, sonically, stylistically. It’s also meta, as the poem performs its own “trapeze art and graceful aerobics.” The poem is that art, those aerobics.

For the second poem, I ran into the challenging fact of the enormous range and depth of Maureen’s body of work to date. With so many gongs striking inside my head, so much marginalia scribbled on every page, I decided to choose a poem that moves in diametrically different ways than “When I Was Straight.” That poem is pulled taut like a tightrope in its shape on the page—all those lovely tercets upon which the speaker-as-tightrope-walker is performing her remarkable feats, turning somersaults and riding unicycles and juggling torches. I wanted to showcase something different. There were so many poems I considered— “What She Thought,” “Impatiences,” “The Nomenclature of Wind,” “He Crossed the Hallway with a Soul in His Hand,” and “Red” standout among them—but in the end I chose “The Realm of the Wide” as exemplar of Maureen’s wide-realm poetics. Instead of a tightrope, this poem is the circus tent, a canopy she opens over the whole world of her knowing and longing and wondering. If this poem were a horoscope, it would describe something essential about every Zodiac sign.

 

Black: “The Realm of the Wide” is particularly unique in its scope. This is a winding long-poem with a lot of great turns. What about it do you want to call particular attention to?

Wade: Through all my years as a student, there was an incongruity—really a snobbishness—that I never understood in the realm of literary theory. We learned there was a school of criticism called reader response, but then we learned, both explicitly and in a variety of subtle ways, that this school didn’t “count” as a real school. We could deconstruct and post-structuralize. We could go through mimetic doors and intertextual doors and feminist doors in our examination of texts, but we couldn’t go through that primary door of our own personal experience of intellectual-emotional-visceral engagement. As a teacher of creative writing, I know I don’t stand a chance of encouraging my students to “write as readers”—to cultivate an awareness of their audience—without acknowledging and anticipating a reader’s response to their work. And if we are writers, we were readers first and also readers in a state of essential perpetuity, let’s hope! So how can I ask my students not to cross the threshold of reader response, which I value not only as a doorway to meaningful analysis but also as a doorway to meaningful emulation?

Which is to say: “The Realm of the Wide” speaks to me directly as a poet with similar intellectual and emotional investments to Maureen Seaton. It also speaks to me as a poet who is always studying the possibilities of poetic form and the elasticity of poetry as a genre. It speaks to me as a teacher of poetry for similar reasons—the thrilling range of invitations and permissions the text offers to fellow and future writers. This poem further addresses me as a person with multi-genre and hybrid-text infatuations and commitments. I wonder whether poem is really only one name this text might answer to. Is it a micro-lyric-essay, too? A micro-lyric-segmented-braided essay? Some or all of the above?

This imperative alone: “Feel yourself mingle with the word you love beside you.” That’s what poets do, and lyric essayists, too. The words are alive. They can lose cells and run temperatures.

I’m also obsessed with finding new ways to talk about the moon, something that crystallized for me when I read Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s extraordinary memoir, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. She invites readers to tell her something she hasn’t heard before about that much-romanticized heavenly body. Maureen does it here, seamlessly: “this moon has got me up the way someone comes in and drags you out of bed to play cards or eat mayonnaise on toast at 3 AM…” Yes! That way. That moon. Exactly.

There are bullet points in this poem, denoting the list from “baby pigs” to “a shaman in a wheelchair.” The blanks that follow the chorus of adjectives “Sorrowful,” “Joyful,” and “Glorious” are actual blanks, not the word “blank,” which changes the experience of reading the poem on the page versus listening to the poem read aloud. These visual poetics in Maureen’s work instantly transform the ranch house poem into a multi-floored mansion: rooms on top of rooms, a ceiling that is also a floor, etc.

And then the two quotes juxtaposed at the end, the high-art intellectual sound of Magritte’s statement about “symbolic meanings” and the profound yet directly accessible statement about vanilla attributed simply to “Nick,” the famous artist in conversation with the Everyman or Anyman. This is Maureen’s hierarchy-neutralizing power as a poet. She validates so many ways of knowing simultaneously. She rejects high horses. Her work is full of dark horses and wild horses. Her work epitomizes for me what Magritte means by “the inherent mystery” that many people sense in an image but are also frightened by because it can’t be easily named and thereby tamed. I find that inherent mystery everywhere in Maureen’s work, so I’m just holding up this poem as a representative example. When she says, “It mattered, but only slightly,” she is making a spectrum out of a taken-for-granted binary. If we are used to thinking of things mattering or things not mattering, as many of us are, then here come those surprising hoofbeats of “slight mattering,” the invitation to a thought experiment of mattering on a sliding scale.

Maureen’s is a luminous, curious, capacious, unrelenting mind. I would follow her anywhere because she has never used her intellect as a weapon or crafted her rigorous, expansive poems with only an elite readership in mind. On the contrary, I find Maureen Seaton to be one of Poetryland’s most generous guides. If she takes her readers into a swamp, she supplies the waders. She also grows and tends the orchids we are destined to find there.

Black: Does this work connect to your own in some way?

Wade: Perhaps more than any other poet, Maureen has taught me that you can write as and from all your varied versions of self, including the most seemingly contradictory. Many poets become known for writing a certain way, a certain kind of “signature style,” a recognizable shape to the content and/or appearance of their poems—but not Maureen. I think her poems are deeply fluid, within and across every book project and sometimes even within a single poem. These poems are queer in the truest and deepest sense of the word—spectral, rhizomatic, protean, “all-of-the-above” poems. And this fact alone has given me tremendous permissions in my own approach to writing. I’m not trying to make my work into something that stays put after it’s placed on the page. I want to make work that feels like a living organism, the way Maureen’s poems do. Instead of the poem (or lyric essay, or hybrid form) as art object, I want to learn how to make the most porous and anti-static kinds of creations. If the poem is likened to a painting on the wall—vivid and imagistic—let it also be a painting where the eyes move, where the frame slants, where it is never the same painting twice that the viewer looks upon.

I often talk to my students about entering their own writing “through the smallest door,” and sometimes the smallest door is a single word. I like to get as close as I can to individual words, and Maureen’s poems bless and press that enterprise further. One whole stanza from “The Realm of the Wide” consists of: “The word: Outlandish.” And what a word! I love the invitation to stare at the word, to see the “out” and the “land” and the “dish” in it just by lingering in that long pause. I’ve never asked Maureen if she is synesthetic, but her poems are, and as a synesthete who experiences the world of language in vivid colors, Maureen’s poetry amplifies my synesthetic experience of the world as well, adds another tier/floor/skylight. “You could jump the fire and ride to where the words are backdrafting,” she writes. How visceral and invigorating and absolutely true!

Finally, I think it’s Maureen’s own biomythography she’s drafting and revising and reimagining across these pages. (I hope Audre Lorde wouldn’t mind my invoking her term here, as I know Maureen and I both deeply admire and write as grateful readers of Lorde.) Maureen’s poems resist stasis because she has resisted stasis—staying put in any one role, category, or geographical location. Maureen is candid about falling into and out of love, marriage, divorce, sexual awakenings, motherhood, faith, doubt, and always, the complexities, dare I say “the inherent mysteries,” of gender, desire, and the body. There is much in her life’s reckoning and recurring themes that overlap with my own. In another salient capsule of experience that seems to denote the way she was raised, Maureen writes, “Everything/ should be Disney or saintly.” That was my first imperative, too. With every poem and hybrid form, Maureen is teaching me how to write my way beyond those initial strictures of conventional beauty, contrived happiness, and religious dogma.

Black: What are you working on now?

Wade: On the prose front, I’m writing essays for a collection called “The Regulars,” which is another slant on my own bildungsroman. At a certain point in time, I realized that I have stories I tell and stories I write, and it occurred to me that some of the stories I tell—which are often the most absurd glimpses of my childhood, darkly humorous but also intimidatingly sad—might have another kind of life on the page. The title is a reference, in the most literal sense, to being regular customers at the Old Spaghetti Factory every Sunday, my parents and I, but also to the relentless quest for normalcy—or at least to be perceived as normal and consequently likable, admirable, and good—that governed my upbringing. (“Everything/ should be Disney or saintly” indeed!) Angie, my spouse, suggested the title, which I love, and so I’ve been writing my way into some of my own personal oral tradition, the stories I have only shared with close friends who say, “Tell us about the time you had to …” or “What was it your parents did when …”

On the poetry front, I’m writing a lot of secular psalms for a sequence that I think will belong, eventually, to a collection called Quick Change Artist. That project might also subsume some or all of the poems from When I Was Straight, which illustrates the before-and-after experiences of someone, essentially the same someone, who was first perceived as heterosexual and trying very hard to tow many tacit heterosexual lines, and then who, in the second half of the project, reckons with all the new ways people respond to her as an out lesbian, a woman marked by sexual difference.

There’s also a hybrid-form memoir about food that I’ve been toying with for years called The Western Family. (I grew up on the West Coast, and the brand of most of the food products we ate in our home was “Western Family.” Food as source of pleasure, shame, ritual, family connectedness and family discord, and food as marker of a particular zeitgeist is something I intend to explore.) And eventually, I plan to write a collection of poems that mirrors the question-and-answer clues on Jeopardy!, the game show that seems to have played ceaselessly at the dinner table throughout my youth and is now playing throughout my adulthood, recording daily on our DVR, in fact!

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Maureen Seaton received her MFA at Vermont College and is the author of nine poetry collections and a memoir, Sex Talks to Girls among many other projects. Her work has notably appeared in Best Small Fictions and Best American Poetry among many other places. Seaton has received multiple awards and recognitions for her work. Among them, several Lambda awards, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection, Fisher was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2018. Seaton is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Miami, Florida.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of ten collections of poetry and prose, including Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, Small Fires: Essays, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems, When I Was Straight, Catechism: A Love Story, SIX, Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems, and the forthcoming The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, co-authored with Denise Duhamel. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Florida International University in Miami.

Links to the good stuff:

Seaton at Black Lawrence Press

Seaton’s Newest Collection, Fisher

The Rumpus Interviews Maureen Seaton

Seaton at Lambda Literary

Julie Marie Wade’s Website

Julie Marie Wade at The Academy of American Poets

Julie Marie Wade at Tupelo Quarterly

Wade’s When I was Straight

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Anna Black has served as the editor-in-chief of the magazines Hayden’s Ferry Review and Inkspeak, and is a twice awarded Virginia G. Piper global teaching and research fellow. She received her MFA at Arizona State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the anthologies We Will be Shelter, edited by poet Andrea Gibson and In Sight: An Ekphrastic Collaboration, as well as the journals 45th Parallel, Bacopa Review, Wordgathering, SWWIM, The American Journal of Poetry, and New Mobility among others. She has taught composition, creative writing, and/or publishing at Arizona State University, Western Washington University, Perryville Women’s Prison, and the National University of Singapore.