Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! Today we’ve chatted with educator and poet Sunni Brown Wilkinson about Lisel Mueller’s work, revealing what you’ve been reading in your work, and connecting writing to occupied spaces and histories. As always, thank you for tuning in!
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: How and when did you first discover Mueller’s work?
Sunni Brown Wilkinson: I’d seen Mueller’s name around on the internet for a while on poems I really liked, and then about a year ago a poet friend posted ‘Alive Together’ on her Facebook page one day and wrote about how much honor she gave that single poem, how profound it is. I went to the library a week or so later and checked out the book Alive Together, Mueller’s newer and selected poems, and fell in love with her work. I’ve been exploring her poetry ever since.
AH: Mueller’s work is often said to engage with history and folklore, with both personal and private lives. As a writer, do you relate to this inspiration, and if so, how?
SBW: I very much relate. One of the things I love most about Mueller is the way she celebrates the domestic life as a vibrant, necessary space, but also connects that space with history and specific historical or artistic figures. It’s as if she’s constantly braiding together moments in her day, things she touches and people she loves, with something she read about a composer or a study on bees or a meditation on Monet. She sees how things intersect.
And her own family history of fleeing Germany at the onset of WW II at age 15 with her parents and, from the safe harbor of America, watching her native country implode, informs nearly every poem, if not contextually than in spirit. Where we come from and the road of our past, the marvel of being able to live the life we do, are themes that seem to hold onto the hands of nearly all of her poems.
AH: How has Mueller’s work inspired you? SBW: My mentor in grad school, Christopher Howell, once said, “Your work should reveal what you’ve been reading.” I love how Mueller does this so openly in her writing. She writes directly about Mary Shelley, Patricia Hearst, science magazines, composers, fairy tales. Each poem is a portal into this living space where other great minds work and mourn and live. She keeps a humility about her own genius by admiring the genius and discoveries of others.
Her poem “Reading The Brothers Grimm to Jenny” is just heartbreakingly lovely. The line “Jenny, we make just dreams/ out of our unjust lives,” and the image at the end of herself holding “the golden key” for her daughter, whose understanding of the world is rooted in her mother’s words, reveal this person who knows the worst of the world and still believes in the magic. And who reverences the childlike belief that good will conquer all. She both questions and celebrates that.
There’s a warmth, a curiosity, and an admirable dexterity of the mind that comes through in every Mueller poem. She’s equally comfortable writing about her grandmother’s gold pin, bees, roadtripping down the highway, and picking raspberries as she is writing about classical music and composers, Monet, the Queen of Sheba. Why wouldn’t you want to hang out with someone like that? She’s interested in everything! She’s down to earth and deeply perceptive. Her language is electric and accessible. If we could choose a BFF dead poet, mine would be Lisel Mueller. She reminds me to stay curious, read gobs, and live purposefully in my own quiet spaces.
AH: What have you been up to lately? Got any exciting news to share (about life, writing, anything!)? SBW: I recently started writing essays. I’m taking a very slow route to putting together a collection, but I’ll get there. I’ve already got the central ideas in place and am tinkering with the parts. It’s also coming up on Halloween, so that means we’re reading scary stories at our house and going for hikes in the foothills and having fires in the fire pit and making lots of soup, so life is good!
Lisel Muller was an American poetry born in Germany. After fleeing Nazi Germany at age fifteen with her family, Mueller became interested in memory and history within poetry, which led her to produce prolific work. She is the author of the Second Language (1986) and The Need to Hold Still, among many other books.
Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s most recent work can be found in Western Humanities Review, Coal Hill Review, New Ohio Review,Ruminate, and South Dakota Review. She is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and The Ache & The Wing (winner of Sundress Publications’ 2020 Chapbook Prize). Her work has been awarded New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, and the Sherwin W. Howard Award and was runner-up for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.
Find Sunni’s collection The Marriage of the Moon and the Field here.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear in Barren Magazine, Hobart, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is pleased to announce the guests for the November installment of our virtual reading series. This event will take place on Wednesday, November 17, 2021, on Zoom (http://tiny.utk.edu/sundress, password: safta) from 7-8 PM EST.
Joy Jones is a trainer, performance poet, playwright and author of several books, including Private Lessons: A Book of Meditations for Teachers; Tambourine Moon; and Fearless Public Speaking. She has won awards for her writing from the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities, and the Colonial Players Promising Playwrights Competition. Her most recent book is Jayla Jumps In (Albert Whitman & Co, 2020).
Anna Leahy is the author of the poetry collections What Happened Was:, Aperture, and Constituents of Matter and the nonfiction book Tumor. Her work has appeared at Aeon, Atlanta Review, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Poetry, Scientific American, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and her essays have won top awards from Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood. She directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Chapman University and edits the international Tab Journal. More at https://amleahy.com.
Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress 2021) and chapbooks The Optimist Shelters in Place (forthcoming Harbor Editions 2022), Still Life (PANK, 2020), Parrot Flower (Glass, 2020) and White Goat Black Sheep (FLP, 2018). Winner of the 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize from New American Press, her work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Slipstream, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Lunch Ticket, Borderland, etc. She is an Assistant Professor of First Year Writing at Michigan State University and serves as an associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry. Find her work at kimberlyannpriest.com.
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is a writers residency and arts collective that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers in all genres including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, academic writing, playwriting, and more. The land on which Sundress Publications operates is part of the traditional territory of the Tsalagi peoples (now Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians) and Tsoyaha peoples (Yuchi, Muscogee Creek).
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week poet and educator Kimberly Ann Priest joined us to discuss the work of Rebecca Lindenberg, becoming a poet, poetry as a form of excavating memories. Thank you for tuning in!
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: During our email correspondence, you mentioned that Lindenberg’s Love, an Index was one of the first poetry collections you read when you decided to write poetry. How did this experience shape how you’ve approached your own writing?
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Kimberly Ann Priest: Excellent question. I’m going to give you some background on my entrance into the poetry scene….
It was 2013. I was almost 36 and making a brave move to divorce a violent spouse while also pursuing my MA. I made $11,000 a year as a grad assistant instructor, plus child support, and found myself in the throes of exhaustion and grief and a new style of harassment from my soon to be ex. We had been married for 15 years and I had become accustomed to a semblance of romance, but mostly a list of reasons why I wasn’t a suitable romantic partner. About a year after divorce, my ex would come out as gay and continues, to this day, to assert that the violence of ‘the past’ was not his fault nor the complications it has caused me his responsibility. Getting out of this relationship, with two children in tow, was daunting and complicated as he and his family maintained control over all of my material possessions and the community around me, and continued to try to hold sway over my children’s perspective of the marriage. (Thankfully, on the latter, they were not successful).
All of that said to provide context to my state of being when I entered my grad program at Central Michigan University. I was worn to a thread and working diligently to rebuild myself and a career after having not been allowed to do so for those 15 years. I started my MA with a focus on Brit Lit, but after one semester realized that what I needed to do was write, not analyze others’ writing so much. I think it was October when I sat down with Robert Fanning, one of the poetry professors in the English Department, to inquire about the Creative Writing track in poetry. I remember how “chill” he was during our meeting and thinking that this is what I needed: chill. I needed something in my life to be less demanding and more therapeutic. Thus, I began my journey as a poet.
I don’t recall if we read Lindenberg in class, or if her work was recommended to me elsewhere. I took a lot of courses on craft and female poets so she may have been one of them. All I remember is getting her book and reveling in its steady beats and weaving of grief and romance. It felt like love. It felt like rain. In fact, Megan Devine says “Grief is love in its wildest forms.” It felt like that.
I was writing a lot of love poems then—an irony given my circumstances. But I think the earliest stages of my grief were marked by the loss of romance in my 20s and 30s. I was grieving the love I had felt for someone who didn’t love me back. I was grieving the death of the person I thought he was. The backstory of Lindenberg’s Love an Index is heartbreaking. The man she writes about and grieves in this book was her partner of several years who went permanently missing on an expedition to explore a volcano, something he loved to do. When I married, my partner was my best friend. Somewhere along the way, within only a year or so, I lost him. He went missing. No romance ensued and I found myself mostly alone in my homes with children, emotionally and economically striped to the bone. Somehow, Lindenberg’s work spoke to this early grief—the loss of romance I felt—because her connection to her partner was so raw and real and desirous. She does not hold back her feeling—even writing poems that reveal anger and argument, regret and desperation.
And this is how her work shaped my early writing, and still shapes it today. My work is deeply relational and, I think, multi-dimensional. No relationship is all joy or all hate, all pain or all roses. Even my relationship with my ex cannot be flattened this way. In “The Language of Flowers,” Lindenberg turns love round and round and shows us both the beauty and pain of it, the sentimental and practical. I appreciate this about her writing. The emotional life is grounded in the reality that there’s a little hate in love, a bit of anger in desire, a lot of bravery in lament, and tensile quality strength in the tenderness and weakness born of agony. Lindenberg has helped me embrace grief in my work as an expression of everything I once loved and hope to love again.
KAP: Both “The Language of Flowers” and it’s opposite “The Language of Flowers Revised,” as well as “Carnival,” take objects—flowers and carnival masks—and reveal their duplicity. Again, as I mentioned in the first question, love fueling both celebration and grief. [It might even be said that grief is another form of celebration.] In these poems, flowers are constructed of various materials, even glass and paper, to translate different facets of desire, wanting, care, heartbreak. All of it is love. And all of it is potentially deceitful. In “Carnival” the mask (not to be confused with pandemic masks) is understood as a facial covering both concealing and revealing beauty and pain [as if these are mutually exclusive] and it’s hard to know which it is covering and what it is doing just as it is hard to know our own hearts.
These poems suggest that no emotion is exclusive—or even assured. “[A] moon face” reads “Carnival,” “with a healed gash that means harvest.” What a line. The wound, the gash, is signaling a season of harvest, of plenty. Or how about in “The Language of Flowers where “Plum” means “lost in beauty” and comes right before “Poppy Red” which means “threatening pleasure.” Such a juxtaposition of getting lost in something desirable to the senses as a possible threat of pure bliss. Something is always at stake in Lindenberg’s expressions of romance.
Maybe the most difficult thing about loving someone who does you almost nothing but harm, is that you are unsure of your own love. The emotional self is constantly confused. How do you love someone that screams at you and pins you to walls or shatters glass at your feet only to watch you pick it up slowly so your children won’t walk on it? I only know I tried. Flowers never meant what they were supposed to. And unmasking my abuser was always turned on me in a vicious game. I listen to these poems and wonder what it’s like to write and read them as someone deeply in love with someone who also loved them back. I am so interested in the way they are familiar to me in their metaphors, yet different in their expressions. Or are they? I don’t know. I hope to find out someday.
AH: When asked why she writes poetry in an interview on McSweeneys, Lindenberg said the following: “I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say.” Now I am asking you: why write poetry?
KAP: I appreciate Lindenberg’s answer. I’m not convinced poetry is about language at all. I think it is most certainly about what cannot be said, the silences. It is certainly that for me. I can’t tell you what it’s like to love someone who harms you, or long for romance for 15 years while caring for children, or grieve an abuser, or hate everything the abuser does, or want flowers to mean something wholly different from what they’ve always meant—but I can show you. I can write the wordless pain and desire. For me, poems are most certainly about what I cannot explain.
When I started writing during my grad program, I had no words for what had or was happening to me. In fact, I was in such a dissociated state that I barely even remember what happened those 15 years; I only knew it was bad. Writing, after my grad program, became about excavating those memories. All I could do was portray snapshots of moments and feeling. Many things were “echoing around in my bone-dome” that I could only access through the poem. So, yes, to Lindenberg’s answer.
These days, I don’t have memories to excavate. I have found all that I need. But the echo-ings will come again with new experiences. I feel this deeply. There will always be echoes that have no language; and for those, I will need the poem.
AH:Have any updates (about life, writing, anything!) that’d you like to share?
KAP: Sure! I just moved to Pittsburgh for a year as the James Tolen Writer in Residence at Writer’s House. Thus far, I am inspired by the squirrels all around. There are so many squirrels. I haven’t begun writing yet, but there may be some squirrel poems soon.
My next chapbook comes out with Harbor Review Press in March. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know Allison Blevins, the press editor (who happens to have a new book out—Slowly, Suddenly). My book is called The Optimist Shelters in Place and was written at the onset of the pandemic. It’s my first non-trauma book so I’m excited for something emotionally different on the horizon. It tackles loneliness in America, among other things.
Other than this, I’m just calibrating to a new environment. I finished three full-length books of poetry this year and they are all going out into the world seeking homes. I moved through a lot of past territory in those poems and now I’m exploring the present moment, which is a strange, nice shift. While at Writer’s House, I’ll be doing some memoir pieces and other prose. And maybe just relaxing a bit… watching squirrels.
Rebecca Lindenberg is an American poet and educator. She is the author of Love, an Index (McSweeney’s 2012) and The Logan Notebooks. Her poems, criticism, and essays have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry 2019, Tulepo Quarterly, and Diagram, among others. She currently is teaching at the University of Cincinnati, where she also edits the Cincinnati Review.
Read “He Asks Me to Send Him Some Words (Home)”in Tulepo Quarterly.
Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress 2021) and chapbooks The Optimist Shelters in Place (Harbor Editions 2022), Still Life (PANK, 2020), Parrot Flower (Glass, 2020) and White Goat Black Sheep (FLP, 2018). Winner of the2019 Heartland Poetry Prize from New American Press, her work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Slipstream, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Lunch Ticket, Borderland, etc. She is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University and serves as an associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear in Barren Magazine, Hobart, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com
Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of NOMBONO: Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Poets, edited by Akua Lezli Hope. This is a collection that asks us earthers, terrans, the identified sentients of this planet to reconceive how we perceive ourselves in this world.
In the stunning and imaginative NOMBONO: Speculative Poetry by BIPOC Poets, we are presented with visions, invocations, foretellings, and bold harbingers. NOMBONO, drawing from the Zulu word for “visionary,” brings together mystical dreams and possibilities that are at times both striking and devastating. This anthology asks: are we on a bright threshold or at the edge of a dark precipice? Are we about to take flight and evolve or plumet into cataclysm? Around each corner in this book there may be a hyena man, salmon women, Mananggal, prayers, or curses. There is steady, unbroken eye contact, and there is fierce joy and fury. Here we have the limitless, boundless exploration of resplendent worlds.
Linda D. Addison, award-winning author, HWA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, and SFPA Grand Master, said of the collection: “The masterful Akua Lezli Hope is the quiet conductor of this transformative poetry collection, with work from around the world, each solo piece glows against the infinite dark/light background of galactic imaginations. Here, we are reminded that the blood of ancestors, whispering in our DNA, still sings of the stars to all souls, now and forever.”
Akua Lezli Hope is a creator and wisdom seeker who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, sculpture, adornments, and peace. Her honors include the NEA, two NYFAs, an Elgin and SFPA Award, and Rhysling and Pushcart Prize nominations. Her collections include EMBOUCHURE, Poems on Jazz and OtherMusics, which won the Writer’s Digest Book Award, and THEM GONE. She is the editor of Eye To The Telescope #42 on The Sea. Her scifaiku micro chapbook, Stratospherics, is in the Quarantine Public Library. Her 2021 Elgin Award–winning chapbook, Otherwheres, is available now.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week writer and educator Emily Schulten is joining us to discuss the work of fellow poet Theodore Roethke, writing on grief, and first encounters. As always, thank you for tuning in.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: How and when did you first discover Roethke’s work?
Emily Schulten: I imagine my first encounter with Roethke were in graduate school. At least that’s when his work impacted me such that it has stayed with me. There are some poets who can do this, who have this power to stick with the reader in her daily life, sometimes in the background and sometimes the foreground, but there consistently.
AH: Roethke was such an inspiration for many, from former students to Sylvia Plath. How has his work inspired you as a writer?
ES: Roethke’s use of rhythm is so musical. The heaviness that he is able to create in tone pairs with these earth images to haunt the reader and even to contribute to his mythmaking. This musicality and myth-making inspire me as a writer, as does the ability to consume the reader with his creation of atmosphere.
AH: Why did you choose these poems? What drew you to them specifically?
ES: Roethke is a grief poet. More than that, he is able to take grief and use it to transcend himself and to make sense of his grief. These poems are emblematic of the grief that inspired so much of Roethke’s work, the relationship he had with his father in both life and death. (A connection we see that Plath was particularly inspired by.) “Root Cellar” and “The Lost Son (Part 1, The Flight)” approach this grief in strikingly different ways, but with much the same outcome. “Root Cellar” depends so much on the greenhouse imagery to convey the emotion the speaker feels in this place that represents his father, and “The Lost Son” is a more inward journey and interrogation for the speaker. These poems illustrate well Roethke’s breadth as well as his use of sound and image.
AH: Do you have any news to share?
ES: I’m eagerly anticipating November’s release of my second collection of poems, The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar, from Kelsay Books.
Theodore Roethke was an American poet from the mid-twentieth century. After his father’s death and uncle’s suicide, he would become an educator who taught many giants in American poetry: Sylvia Plath, Carolyn Kizer, and so many more. During his lifetime he won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Award for two different collections.
Emily Schulten is the author of two collections of poetry, The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar (Kelsay Books, November 2021) and Rest in Black Haw (New Plains P). Her work appears in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, The Missouri Review, and Tin House, among others. Schulten earned her MA from Western Kentucky University and her PhD from Georgia State University. She is a professor of English and creative writing at The College of the Florida Keys.
Read her poem “Navigating the Afterlife” in Salamander.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear in Barren Magazine, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com
In dark, dense forests and well-kept domestic houses, Roseanna Alice Boswell’s collection Hiding in a Thimble (Haverthorn Press, 2020) weaves the fairytale of adolescent girlhood with a grimness reminiscent of the Brothers’ Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen. As she asserts in the book’s opening poem, “Forest: Feat. Thicket:” “If / everything is in its place, a forest should / look almost domestic.” It is in these myths—of Snow White, a recurring anthropomorphized “Bunny,” and personified does—that the speaker identifies facets of herself, and the horrors of a girlhood defined by the male gaze and male desire.
In this collection, the speaker’s rapidly changing body becomes a site of profound alienation and disassociation. “Snip/Slide” recounts the painfully vivid tale of the speaker’s violent alteration of a bathing suit to fit in with other preteen girls: “I / am a watermelon—blocky and green,” she laments, before “I cut the / middle out and it is ragged and rolls down / but I don’t care.” In this poem, exposure stops a childish, innocent girlhood in its tracks; “I / will never slide down another slide as long / as I live,” insists the speaker, defiantly racing towards the womanhood that she sees symbolized in the other girls’ “lemon print bikinis and tanned middles.”
Throughout the book, the speaker grapples with her own burgeoning desire, which both empowers and disenfranchises her. Recounting a first crush in “You Make Me Feel Things I Can’t Tell My Mother,” sexuality straddles childhood, where “who knows what could happen / on Hello Kitty sheets.” However, the same conflict follows the speaker into adulthood. “I make an excellent wife with my recipes / from Aesop,” she brags, recounting how she must contort herself to please her husband and other men: “I almost imagine myself a pomegranate / with all that hidden flesh for plucking.” The possibility is both titillating and heartbreaking, as the speaker conflates desire with being desired, adopting male wants as her own. Even as she reflects that “I’ve developed a lot of empathy for colanders / &/or condoms recently. Really anything / that has to filter potential catastrophe / for a living,” she boasts that “If any girl is home with a broken heart / it’s not me.”
The disconnect between the speaker and her own body is frightening enough, but as the rest of the collection reveals, it is adulthood—and the male attention it brings—which intensifies this disconnect, making it still more harmful. In several poems about “Bunny,” the speaker places herself in the shoes of this small, helpless prey animal, analogizing the creature’s timidness to her own obedience, demureness, and submission to men: “Mable Bushytale stores everything / away for her husband / never takes a stray / acorn for herself,” reads the opening stanza to “Lessons in Deportment,” both lauding this self-sacrificial behavior and mourning its impact on Mable, who “is always looking for ways / to take up less.” Such internalized violence is coupled, more explicitly, by comparisons between predator animals and the rape culture that characterizes so much of female adolescence. In “Bunny Fables,” Boswell adopts the victim-blaming language of media, explaining “she should know better / than to stray / off the path alone.” In the face of a world where “her bones / will be delicious / cautionary tales,” the bunny may find that Mable’s desolate, empty nest is the more appealing option.
A profound sense of irony cuts through Hiding in a Thimble as Boswell recontextualizes the patriarchy’s language in a sharp critique of its impact on young women. In “Funny Girl Talks,” contemporary media unravels the fairy-tale image of the bunny: “hey just look up my Twitter @ / swellbunny you’ll see how fucking funny / I can be.” This poem, and a few others, offer a jarring, vocal anger that contrasts the quiet bitterness of most of the collection’s pieces. Boswell surgically deconstructs the same myths that she’s spent much of the collection exploring, recasting her speaker as “shrew-mouthed and screaming” and insisting that “Girl-hearts always become cannibal.” Here, the violence that the bunny-girl experiences is refocused on those who have hurt her. Ultimately, the speaker attempts to reject the genealogy of ideal femininity that she inherited from her own mother, claiming that “We are not going to grow / old conventionally if I have any say.” Even for a woman scarred by patriarchal violence and self-hatred, healthy versions of domestic bliss are possible, where “My lover’s arms are warmer / than our furnace ever gets.” But doubt lingers, and “everyone becomes somebody’s mother.” Hiding in a Thimble maps the quiet traumas of girlhood onto familiar fairy-tale imagery, stitching a myth that, like most fairy-tales, is less idyllic and more violent than it first appears. Its “cautionary tale” is not the bunny who strays from the path, but rather this account of the dispossession, silencing, and alienation that young women face in their intimate relationships as they become objects to be desired and animals to be hunted down.
Katherine (Katy) DeCoste is a queer, white settler currently living on the unceded territory of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples and the WSÁNEĆ peoples, where they are pursuing their MA in English at the University of Victoria. In 2020, they received their BA Honours in English and History from the University of Alberta. You can find their poetry in Barren Magazine,Grain Magazine, The Antigonish Review, and other outlets. When not writing, reading, or answering emails, Katherine can be found playing Dungeons and Dragons, volunteering with food support initiatives, and forcing their friends to eat their baking.
Knoxville, TN — The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by Kathryn Davis. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, October 17th, 2021 from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/sundress with password “safta”.
Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. This generative workshop series will give you prompts, rules, obstructions, and more to write three poems in two hours. Writers will write together for thirty minutes, be invited to share new work, and then given a new set of prompts. The idea isn’t that we are writing perfect final drafts, but instead creating clay that can then be edited and turned into art later. Prose writers are also welcome to attend!
Kathryn Davis is a writer and editorial intern with Sundress Academy for the Arts. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing from Grand Valley State University, and served as editor-in-chief of the university’s literary journal, fishladder. She writes and produces films from the southwest corner of Michigan.
Our community partner for October is the Joy of Music School. The Joy of Music School provides access to quality music education for disadvantaged children and teens. All of the instructors and mentors are volunteers who aim to foster self-esteem, character, and supportive community relationships with their students. To learn more about the Joy of Music School, check out their website here.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! Today artist and writer Summer J. Hart joins us to discuss the Louise Erdrich, being left breathless by writing, and poetic origin stories. As always, thank you for tuning in!
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: What drew you originally into Louise Erdrich’s poetry? Is there an origin story of how you discovered her work?
Summer J. Hart: I encountered the novels of Louise Erdrich long before reading her poems. After graduate school I spent a year or so temping. One of my jobs was as a receptionist for a realty management office. A retired New Yorker cartoonist named Boris Drucker rented the office next door and we became friends. My job was neither challenging nor interesting, so I would often read or draw behind my desk. Boris saw my copy of Erdrich’s novel Love Medicine and the next day brought in his copy of Tracks. For the rest of my time in the office, Boris and I spent our lunch breaks talking about our love of drawing and Louise Erdrich. Erdrich’s writing, whether prose or poetry, never fails to goose-pimple my arms. I’ve spent years researching, collecting family lore, and making art about my own mixed Native and settler heritage. Before reading Love Medicine, I had never heard stories as similar to those my aunts and grandmother shared with me about life on and after leaving the reservation.
AH:I was absolutely in love with the details woven into the poems you’ve read! What were your favorite lines and/or images?
SJH: From “Owls”: “Each night the noise wakes me, a death / rattle, everything in sex that wounds.” I love the way Erdrich writes about sex in this poem as “raw need / of one feathered body for another.” The owl is a symbol of death so terrifying that even children don’t enjoy the lilting repetition of its name spoken in Ojibwe. Which was very fun to read! Kokoko. This poem rips bodies open—pulls feathers and bones from flesh. But, it also nourishes.
A barred owl asks again and again, Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all? The couple in the apartment also have an aching, visceral need. “This is how we make love” she writes, “when there are people in the halls around us…” The world inside the apartment is stripped back until there is nothing left but two bodies clinging together. All around them the gears of domesticity churn, relentless. The grinding consumption and expulsion of days whir along. Outside, birds fly from one throat to another. Neighbors scrub plates in the sink. A glass breaks. The pungency of frying onions drifts down the hall.I am drawn to the images (and sounds) of the owls, the humans, and the dead tree. I read this poem as both love letter and Memento mori.
From “That Pull from the Left”: I love how she begins this poem with a name. Butch. This Butch, even if I read nothing more of him, has somehow been with me my whole life. “But something queer happens when the heart is delivered.” The word delivered. She follows the first iteration of this line with “when a child is born…” A baby is delivered. Cattle are delivered and again to slaughter. Meat is wrapped carefully in brown paper and delivered to the outstretched palm of a customer. The heart, cut from the body is how we begin and end, the start / stop of a muscle. We cling to life in life (our lolling eyes), and our bones fight to keep the flesh and sinew attached even after a final blow delivers death. The poem talks also of the queerness of the woman’s own heart. How she can feel “That pull from the left…” Then, there is the queerness of the sky, or perhaps internal weather, before the dark plunge.
AH: As a writer and creative human, how have you been inspired by Erdrich’s work?
SJH: Louise Erdrich is my forever-favorite. Her work absolutely inspires me to be a much braver writer—my instinct is to self-censor, skirt around the truth of a thing. But she writes fearlessly about living, loving, dying in the natural world…with a bit of magical reality woven in. Her words leave me breathless, but my senses are sharper having read them.
AH: Got any news to share? It can be life, writing, creative updates–anything!
SJH: I am honored to be the Land Acknowledgment Writer for The 3rd Thing Press’ 2021 cohort (forthcoming November 2021). My poem, “Salt for the Stain” appeared in the Massachusetts Review’s Winter 2021 special issue, A Gathering of Native Voices. The website accompaniment to this issue including video readings and links to Native resources will launch this fall. My first full-length collection of poems, Boomhouse will be published by The 3rd Thing Press in 2023.
Louise Erdrich is an American novelist, poet, and children’s book writer. A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, she has devoted her work to exploring the lives of Native Americans and those of mixed heritage. She has published three poetry collections and several novels, many of which have received critical acclaim.
Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist from Maine, living in the Hudson Valley, New York. Her written and visual artworks are influenced by folklore, superstition, divination, and forgotten territories reclaimed by nature. She is the author Boomhouse (2023, The 3rd Thing Press) & the microchapbook, Augury of Ash (Post Ghost Press). Her poetry can be found in Waxwing, TheMassachusettsReview, Northern New England Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her mixed-media installations have been featured in galleries and shows including SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NYC; Pen + Brush, NYC; Gitana Rosa Gallery at Paterson Art Factory, Paterson, NJ; and LeMieux Galleries, New Orleans, LA. She is an enrolled member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear in Barren Magazine, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Striking Illumination: Erasure as Excavation Workshop,” a workshop led by Jeni De La O on October 13, 2021 from 6-7:30PM. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).
This is a wrap-around workshop that includes pre- and post-meeting materials. The workshop will open with an exquisite corpse icebreaker followed by a discussion on the erasure methods illustrated in the pre-workshop packet. Participants will then practice three types of erasures together using celebrity media apologies. From there, participants will have time to work on erasures using their own source material or sample material provided in the session. The workshop will close, time permitting, with a collaborative erasure of the exquisite corpse poem that the group will write together.
Prior to the workshop, we ask participants to access and review the workshop’s prep packet, which features two craft essays and three poems for consideration in the class discussion. The prep packet can be found here.
By the close of the session, participants will have two drafts started, a list of publications that publish erasures, and an invitation to submit to The Estuary Collectives Visual Poetry Zine scheduled for publication in December of 2021.
While there is no fee for this workshop, those who are able and appreciative can make direct donations to Jeni via Venmo @Jeni-DeLaO-1.
Jeni De La O is an Afro-Cuban poet and storyteller living in Detroit. She is a 2021 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow in Literary Arts and a founding member of The Estuary Collective. She is Managing Editor atKissing Dynamite Poetry and authors the monthly column, BROWN STUDY, at The Poetry Question. Her chapbook, SOFIAS, is forthcoming from Ethel Press in 2022. Jeni has appeared as a storyteller with The Secret Society of Twisted Storytellers, Lamplight Festival, MouthPiece Stories, and The Moth MainStage. Her poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, Columbia Journal, Sugar House Review, Glass Poetry, and other places.
Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week writer and educator Jory Mickelson has joined us to discuss Brian Teare’s poetry, learning from another’s work, and being grounded within a speaker’s body. Thank you for tuning in!
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi: Why did you choose these poems and how did you discover Teare’s work?
Jory Mickelson: Well for one, they are some of his shorter poems. Brian Teare has an incredible ability to write dozen-plus page, dazzling poems. I chose to focus on some smaller bites of his writing rather than read excerpts of longer pieces.
In Teare’s poem “Then I painted the two rectangles,” there is such a sweet resonance between reading the poem and seeing the poem on the page. Additionally, I love how he yokes the two windows above his sickbed in this poem and also the function of imagination in art, all in one go.
The poem “Perceiving is the same as receiving and it is the same as responding.” seems initially simple. It is made almost entirely of images. But it is also an explanation of the speaker’s mind on the page. I’ve read this one again and again, and it always causes me to pause and reconsider what is happening just below the surface.
AH: How has Teare’s work inspired you as a writer and creative? JM: In a real way, Teare’s work teaches me something new in each of his book. There is a quote by Allen Ginsberg that says, “Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.” Minds don’t come more original than Teare’s. He is fearsome, persistent, and totalizing. What I mean to say is every book is different from his previous one. Some of the concerns repeat, but the language is always pushing itself into new avenues of thought and he is always taking received forms and adapting them. Stretching them. Making them serve new purposes. Who wouldn’t want to learn these lessons?
AH: In an interview with The New School, Teare said the following: “Our most vulnerable sites of selfhood are our bodies, our mortal naked selves. They ground us in mammalian experience, a welter of hormones and hungers.” He used this to describe how he wants the language and images of his poems to be for readers. Do you relate to this with your own work (if so, how?), or with what you typically read?
JM: I definitely relate to Teare’s work being grounded in the body, in what he calls “mammalian experience.” The poems in my first book Wilderness//Kingdom (Floating Bridge Press, 2019), are grounded in the bodies of the speakers and in the terrain they inhabit or pass through. The embeddedness or embodiment found in Teare’s work is something we share. Though we approach it or think about it on the page in differently.
In my new manuscript, I wrestle with the legacy of Western U.S. history and what it tells us about our contemporary issues of climate crisis, violence, waning empire, etc. These new poems brought me into the bodies, landscapes, and minds of the past in new ways. It was fascinating to see how their “welter of hormones and hungers” aligned or departed from our own today.
AH: What have you been up to lately? Got any exciting news to share (about life, writing, anything!)?
JM: Well, while I was at a writing residency in Taos last winter (Thank you Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico!) My book Wilderness//Kingdom won the 2020 High Plains Book Award in poetry and it was fantastic. All of us residents had a tiny outdoor pandemic party to celebrate.
More recently, I taught the Master Class at our local writers’ conference about how poetry, meditation and mindfulness are interrelated. And just this week I was asked by Hugo House in Seattle to teach classes for their winter and spring schedule! I love the energy in the classroom that happens with writers. While I love writing poems, teaching is definitely my second joy.
Brian Teare received his BA from the University of Alabama and MFA from Indiana University. Teare has received fellowships from the the National Endowment of the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and was a previous Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University. He is the author of the collections Doomstead Days and Pleasure, among many others.
Read his poem “When we are on the right track we are rewarded with joy” here.
Learn more about his collection Doomstead Dayshere.
Jory Mickelson’s first book, WILDERNESS//KINGDOM, is the inaugural winner of the Evergreen Award Tour from Floating Bridge Press and winner of the 2020 High Plains Book Award in Poetry. Their publications include Court Green, Painted Bride Quarterly, Jubilat,Sixth Finch, and The Rumpus. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and were awarded fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Winter Tangerine, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico.
Ashley Hajimirsadeghi is a multimedia artist and writer. She has had work appear, or forthcoming, in Barren Magazine, DIALOGIST, Rust + Moth, and The Shore, among others. She is the Co-Editor in Chief at both Mud Season Review and Juven Press, and reads for EX/POST Magazine. More of her work can be found at ashleyhajimirsadeghi.com
