Tag: reading

Lyric Essentials: Hazem Fahmy reads “After the Cameras Leave, in Three Parts” by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib.

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Chris: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Hazem Fahmy reads “After the Cameras Leave, in Three Parts” by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib.

Hazem, this is an incredibly poignant, powerful poem you’ve read for us today. What can you tell us about Abdurraqib’s poetry for those folks who might not be familiar with his work?  Also, have you had a chance to read his new, debut book The Crown Aint Worth Much?

Hazem: Hanif’s work is so rich and captivating, I really don’t think there’s one way to exactly encapsulate its power. I’d say my favorite thing about it is his incredible weaving of pop culture and personal experience to create a mythos out of his native Columbus. I know of no other poet working today who has such an impeccable ability to immediately and thoroughly familiarize the reader with their hometown and, really, whole world.

I actually just recently ordered the book and it’s on its way now!

Chris: What are some of the elements that makes “After the Cameras Leave, in Three Parts” essential to you as a writer? Are there certain qualities in this poem that you try to emulate in your own work?

Hazem: This poem really highlights three things I am actively concerned with in virtually all of my work. It’s a powerhouse narrative that works with culture’s relationship to trauma and empowerment and brings the history alive through the voice of a city. As a Cairo native navigating American spaces that continually demonize and ostracize my culture and identity, I find immense power in this kind of emphasis on cultural history as a means of validating both the self and the identity to which the self belongs.

Chris: I’m curious about your take on the opening line of “After the Cameras Leave, in Three Parts” where the narrator says, “They listenin’ to the wrong music again, child.” What do you think the narrator is trying to communicate about the wrong music (“Mississippi Goddamn”) and right music (“Sinnerman”)?

Hazem: I am not very familiar with Simone’s work (let alone nearly as familiar as Hanif is), so I won’t attempt to analyze the dichotomy between the two songs too much. As I understand it, both songs are a response to extreme violence, but in slightly different ways. “Sinnerman” seems to be more concerned with sheer grief whereas “Mississippi Goddamn” focuses more on rage. This poem takes a long, hard look at the trauma and grief marginalized communities often can’t find the time for, often because the brutal marginalization is ongoing, and in that sense I see why Hanif would pay more attention to “Sinnerman”.

Chris: Cultural commentary, conceptions and receptions of the self, and “powerhouse narrative” as you put it seem especially important to poetry today which calls to mind a lot of incredible books—Marilyn Nelson’s My Seneca Village is one, Suck on the Marrow by Camille Dungy is another. Hanif tweeted the other week about his poem, “On the Filming of Black Death” being shared after the recent events in Tulsa and Charlotte (Hanif’s poem references a different, earlier shooting in Tulsa). Are there writers in addition to Abdurraqib that you feel people need to be reading right now?

Hazem: In general, people absolutely need to be reading more poets of marginalized identities, especially ones who’re actively attempting to craft new narratives out the of histories and cultures we’ve been born in. If I have to pick a few, I’d start with Safia Elhillo. Reading her work means being in a master class on how to see the world, in all its beauty and pain, through the smallest and most seemingly commonplace facets of our lives. Ocean Vuong has similarly changed the way I think of writing on the self, especially in the way he weaves his personal and family history with that of his country. I can also never recommend Danez Smith enough. I can’t think of any other writer who has such a thorough ability to wrestle with trauma and the horror of oppression while also creating space for hope and breathing.
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Hazem Fahmy is a poet and critic from Cairo. He is currently pursuing a degree in Humanities and Film Studies from Wesleyan University. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming in Mizna, COG and HEArt. In his spare time, he writes about the Middle East and tries to come up with creative ways to mock Classicism. He makes videos occasionally.

Chris Petruccelli is the author of the chapbook Action at a Distance (Etchings Press). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage, Nashville Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Still: the Journal, and elsewhere. Chris enjoys drinking whisky and smoking cigarettes with older women.

Lyric Essentials: Emilia Phillips reads “Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly.

 

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Chris: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Emilia Phillips reads “Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly.

Emilia, what a haunting read! A few months ago Kori Hensell read Dickey’s “The Sheep Child” which “Song” reminds me of with its strange, surrealist qualities. What makes “Song” essential to you as a writer?

Emilia: “Song” embodies the essential strangeness and loneliness that I most admire in poetry. It’s not just about grief or violence or loss, or reconciling those things together, but the feeling that the poem in some way moves into that space freed up by something left behind or taken away, and it can never quite fill up that space. I often find that I’m most interested, invested, and devastated by poems that do that very thing.

Chris: I love the exchange between the beginning and ending of this poem where the goat’s song at the start appears to become the song of the boys who did the killing at the end. What do you make of this kind of reciprocity that bookends the poem?

Emilia: That ending seems to be more about the poem’s songiness more than the voices of the goat or the boys. In some ways, the song is the poem, and so the poem describes its own creation by its description of the song at the end. This feels especially true to me because of the poem’s title—“Song.” The poem is the song that is sung within the poem. It’s like looking into a mirror that’s facing a mirror here, and because of that, rather than crowding out the reader, it opens up space, to create more loneliness. I can’t help but think of a line in an Elvis Perkins song here: “Your vampire mirrors, face to face, / they saw forever out into space.” The poem that is the song that is the song mentioned in the poem seems to leave a gap, a loop that can never close. In that way, the poem sends us spinning back to its beginning: “Listen,” it says forever.

Chris: “Song” then epitomizes the type of poem you’re most interested and invested in by promising an eternal redundancy of almost fulfilling a void via the loop it creates? That is absolutely brutal! Also an incredible, and beautiful concept. How else does Kelly appeal to your interests of loneliness and strangeness in this poem? Is there any particular part of the poem that catches you every time you read it?

Emilia: Well, I don’t think I could answer this question without mentioning that singing goat’s head! But, in some ways, that’s the most obvious strangeness of the poem, right? I mean, what really gets to me is the way in which the girl interacts with the goat. There’s loneliness there, but I don’t see it as a bad loneliness. Isn’t the girl with the goat not in a contented loneliness? Is not each lonely unto its own species, not to mention its own self?

Chris: Is the “essential strangeness and loneliness” you mentioned admiring characteristic of Kelly’s work? What other poems or books do you enjoy that attempt to fill a void, but come up just short?

Emilia: If I had to create a synesthetic analogy for Kelly’s work, at least those poems in the book from which “Song” appears, I’d have to say that she reminds me of standing on a windy hill, where the wind fills one’s ears and seems to carry snatches of meaning, but they dissolve quite quickly. That’s not a complaint. For me, Kelly is a master at mystery, of not over-determining a poem. That’s what I most admire. Levis does this, and so does Alice Oswald. I also feel it intensely in the works of Lo Kwa Mei-en, Paisley Rekdal, Diane Seuss, and Dana Levin—but all in different ways! For me, the work that really devastates is that which buckets out a lot of water in an idea but spills some in the process and can’t fill that space back up.
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Emilia Phillips is the author of two poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, Groundspeed (2016) and Signaletics (2013). Her poetry appears in Boston Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2015 Nonfiction Prize from StoryQuarterly, the 2012 Poetry Prize from The Journal, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, among other places. She’s the Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Centenary University.

Chris Petruccelli is still doing his thing in East Tennessee. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage, Cider Press Review, Connotation Press, Nashville Review, Still: The Journal, and Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel. Chris continues to drink whisky and smoke cigarettes with older women. Check out his chapbook Action at a Distance from Etchings Press.

Lyric Essentials: Emily Corwin reads “Damsel, Stage Directions” by Stacy Gnall

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Chris: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Emily Corwin reads “Damsel, Stage Directions” by Stacy Gnall.

Emily, a fantastic poem you’ve read for us today. What can you tell us about Gnall and her work?

Emily: Gnall’s book, Heart First into the Forest was recommended to me by a friend who had read her work and immediately thought of me. In poems, I am always interested in female bodies, fairy tales, girlhood, woods, Midwestern landscape—all of which Gnall is investigating, so the book was really inspiring for me. She is from Ohio, which was another connection, since I spent my years in undergrad and grad school there, and she completed her MFA at Alabama. I believe her first book draws heavily from her MFA thesis collection. It is really a magical set of poems. I also discovered, recently entering the role of Poetry Editor at the Indiana Review, that we had published some of the poems in that collection back in 2009. It was so exciting to see the poems in a different context, to see them before they became part of the book.

Chris: I find the “stage directions” portion of the title intriguing. There is the implication that this is an act, but throughout the poem it seems the escape we are witnessing is real. What do you make of the title and how it influences the poem?

Emily: I would say, the poem is playing with the idea of a damsel in distress as a role to be played, but interestingly, a role that follows certain directions. She must wake in a place she doesn’t recognize, she must fall just once in the chase. Gnall is playing with a familiar narrative, that of the girl alone in the forest, the girl running from a mysterious, implicitly male threat. There are expectations for what that looks like—we know with this scene of the chase, we have seen it before. But we don’t know, in this poem, how it will end, and that creates tension, an investment on our part. Notice how, by the end, the repetition of “must” has fallen away. The girl manages to escape the threat as well as the expectations embedded in her narrative.

You’re right to say it feels less like an act and more real. I would read the “stage” here as being less of a theater stage and more cinematic. The poem has an immediacy and a motion to it, like a film sequence, the camera tracking our heroine through the woods and out into the road. The stakes are so high—we want her to survive, and we are given access to every moment of the chase. So that, by the end of the poem, when there is the implication of a happy ending, that she made it—this is very satisfying. Though we do not know with certainty if the threat is still behind her, there is still a sense of relief and triumph—that at least, she has made it out the woods. This poem stays with me—I return to it again and again, and each time, I still get caught up in the suspense. What happened to her before the poem began? Who is the “him” and how far behind is he? Will she make it out this time? It really is like watching a favorite scary movie.

Chris: I love the open endedness of this poem that you mention. It gives the poem this sandbox feel—allowing the reader to change the story every time the poem is read. Are uncertain endings something you use or experiment with in your own poetry? Or are you more of a definitive ending type of person?

Emily: I like uncertain endings for sure—my writing tends be extremely lyrical, ambiguous, suspending the reader in emotion. The poems I like reading too tend to end in an undefined space. I think that’s what makes a poem beautiful—its mystery, its multiplicities, the poem as a site for many readings. I don’t want to know everything about it all at once, I want there to be something open and indefinite, a thing I can return to over my lifetime and understand it differently each time. That kind of poem has longevity and power for me.

Chris: In addition to the suspense and urgency in this poem, what other features of “Damsel, Stage Directions” make this poem essential to you as a writer? Are there other poems by Gnall that you would recommend to us?

Emily: What makes this poem essential for me is its attention to pacing, its whimsy and magic, its lush imagery that opens up into larger themes of gender, myth, and story-telling. I love all of Gnall’s work, but especially, “Bella in the Wych Elm,” “Trespass,” and “What the Child Was Given Next”—all of which are in Heart First into the Forest. I cannot wait to see what she does next.
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Emily Corwin is an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University-Bloomington and the Poetry Editor for Indiana Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Winter Tangerine, Hobart, smoking glue gun, and Word Riot. Her chapbook, My Tall Handsome was recently published through Brain Mill Press. You can follow her at @exitlessblue.

Chris Petruccelli recently spilled boiling hot mashed potatoes on his foot. Yikes. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage, Cider Press Review, Nashville Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and Still: The Journal. Check out his chapbook Action at a Distance from Etchings Press. In his free time, Chris continues to drink whisky with older women.

Lyric Essentials: Pauletta Hansel reads “The Hug” by Tess Gallagher.

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Chris: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Pauletta Hansel reads “The Hug” by Tess Gallagher.

Pauletta, this is a wonderful poem you’ve read for us today. I’m not sure if Gallagher or her work need an introduction, but do you remember your first experience with her poetry? What do enjoy most about Gallagher’s work?

Pauletta: Chris, I think the first poem of Tess Gallagher’s I read was “I Stop Writing the Poem” “about” (ostensibly) interrupting writing to take care of the laundry, which always gives me an immediate ping of recognition—the tangle of art and life and memory. I am drawn to narrative poems, both in reading and writing. To poems where the story itself is the metaphor for some larger story. Gallagher does this especially well. The intimacy of the details within her poems gives me a sense of not just clearly viewing the scene, but embodying it.

Chris: What about this particular poem, “The Hug”? What are some specific elements that make this poem stand out to you as an essential piece of writing?

Pauletta: I chose “The Hug” as a poem to learn by heart when I used some of the practices in Kim Rosen’s powerful book Saved by a Poem in one of the poetry classes I teach. The poem was given to me by a potter friend who is also a great reader at a time when I was helping to care for a dear friend with brain cancer. Caring for him meant also caring for his complicated and somewhat ornery family. Pam said, “You have to read this poem!” And so I did, and not just read it but lived with it, took it into my breath, chanted it (“How big a hug is this supposed to be?) and through this process, came to a deeper sense of what it means to be connected and responsible to and for, not just those we choose, but those whom our lives choose for us.

What I never managed to do is to learn the whole poem by heart—it’s a long one!—but there are still bits and pieces of it embedded and available to me when I need them, as I often do, caring now for my mother who has dementia, and doing this within her current living situation in a memory care unit of a nursing home, so that hardly a day goes by that I don’t “lean my blood and my wishes” into a stranger for whom I feel such tenderness or into my mother who, while never a stranger, is often so very different from the mother I knew.

So, how do you (do I, do we) come back from those experiences? We don’t, in a sense, because they remain within us, “the imprint of/a planet in my cheek/ when I walk away. When I try to find some place/ to go back to.”

Gallagher’s poem is so much about a particular hug—hers, not mine—that I can smell the man’s overcoat, hear the voice of the street poet recede as the coat and the man envelop me. And “the houses—/what about them?— the houses.” (Ah! That line gets me every time!)

But the poem is also Joe, and my mom and the guy, Bill who paces the dementia unit and says, “Hi, Babe” every time he sees me. We writers all know that the universal is only visible within the particular. Gallagher does such particularities brilliantly, I think, and then startles us into the universal as the image of a button imprinting a planet on the speaker’s cheek, becomes one world flowing into another. For me, this poem (like the hug it describes) is truly “a masterpiece of connection.”

Chris: Do you find it difficult to read and write narrative poems given the level of intimacy and transportive power that exists in them? I imagine that it takes an emotional toll to “go there” while writing, reading, and creating such emotive conditions in a piece of writing.

Pauletta: The short answer is no. When I write I usually go to an interior place that I identify as being “down below” emotion. I feel a sort of clarity, an intense desire to “get it right,” to write my way through a remembered experience to a place of truth—albeit a subjective truth. Mostly I feel a sort of relief that I am naming the experience as fully and well as I can. I don’t write for catharsis. I write for understanding, and hopefully to create something beautiful and whole out of my life, even the broken parts. Especially the broken parts (that’s where, as Leonard Cohen says, the light gets in.)

Right now, much of my writing is about my mother’s experience with dementia, and my experience with her. I find myself living, and writing, very much in the present. The past feels less available to me and happy memories make me sad! I am sure there is a perversity about that statement which says as much about my personality as it does about my current situation! But the losing of self for my mother, and the losing of mother for me is constant—not static—a verb, not a noun, and this is very much affecting the poems I write. The remembered experience may be from this morning or last week, rather than decades past, which gives it a sort of immediacy on the page. So the challenge becomes how to contain this in a poem in such a way that it is not overwhelming to the reader. To write poems that are intimate but still communal. I find myself turning to form, which is new for me. The sonnet has been particularly useful to me. It helps me lean toward craft in my poems even as I am writing them, which, for me anyway, provides a counterweight to the intimacy of the poem’s present tense.  So, the short answer was no, but the long answer is…complicated. (Tangled, again.)

Chris: One last question, Pauletta. What other poems by Gallagher would you recommend to us? And—I lied—one other question: are there other poets you enjoy reading who tangle together all the threads of our tumultuous, beautiful human lives?

Pauletta: Gallagher is one of the poets that I have encountered mostly in anthologies, rather than in her collections, and I see I need to change this. In addition to the poems mentioned above, I love “Black Silk” (and recommend, too, the essay where I first encountered it, in Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry).  Also the poems, “Choices” and “Red Poppy.” And here, Chris, is the great gift of this interview to me: I did not know that Gallagher wrote about her mother’s journey with dementia. My research to answer this question sent me to a book on my shelf I have not yet read, Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, with a foreword and several poems by Tess Gallagher.

Other narrative poets I love? So numerous! Allison Luterman, Dorianne Laux, Larry Levis, George Ella Lyon, Ada Limon, Cathy Smith Bowers (proving I read poets whose names don’t begin with “L!”), Sharon Olds, Nick Flynn, Maurice Manning, Linda Parsons, Frank X Walker, Kathryn Stripling Byer, Lisel Mueller …I’ll stop here, as there is no way to name them all! But you might note that a fair number of those have southern and Appalachian roots. Appalachian literature is as diverse as the region itself, but still, there is something about a good story that is a connecting force.
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Pauletta Hansel was recently named Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate. Her poems and prose have been featured in journals including Atlanta Review, Talisman, Kudzu, Appalachian Journal, Appalachian Heritage and Still: The Journal, Stirring and on The Writer’s Almanac and American Life in Poetry. She is author of five poetry collections, most recently Tangle (Dos Madres Press, 2015), What I Did There (Dos Madres Press, 2011) and The Lives We Live in Houses (Wind Publications, 2011).  Pauletta is managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. Pauletta leads writing workshops and retreats in the Greater Cincinnati area and beyond.

Chris Petruccelli is the author of the chapbook Action at a Distance (Etchings Press). His poetry can be found in Appalachian Heritage, Cider Press Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. Chris himself can be found somewhere in northeast Tennessee drinking whisky and smoking cigarettes with older women.

Lyric Essentials: Kirun Kapur reads “Meditation at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass.

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Chris: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Kirun Kapur reads “Meditation at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass.

Kirun, I remember first being introduced to Robert Hass through his book Field Guide and getting absolutely floored. Sun Under Wood was really spectacular as well. I could read Hass all day. Do you remember your first run in with his work and what that was like? What makes Hass’ poetry so essential?

Kirun: My first encounter with Hass took place in the stacks of the University of Hawaii library. I was still in high school, but, occasionally, I could get permission to visit the University library for “research purposes.” I pulled Field Guide off the shelf at random, never having heard of the book or of Hass. I didn’t read him all day, but possibly all afternoon. The UH library was difficult to like. It was dark and cavernous and the lights in the poetry section never worked properly, blinking and buzzing. The only thing it had in common with the sunny, tropical exterior was that it was always humid. I read Field Guide, damply, sitting on the floor at the end of an aisle, angling the book to catch some light from the windows.

What’s essential about Hass has changed for me over the years, but what I remember from that first encounter is simply the way the opening poem captured me. The first line is “I won’t say much for the sea.” For someone living on an island (an island sentimentalized and exalted precisely because of the beauty of the sea) this was an extraordinary thing to say. I loved, immediately, his tone—seemingly frank, unsentimental, occasionally edging toward raw, even rude. “Here filthy life begins.”—another line I remember so clearly. I loved the way the delicacy and power of the ocean scene is entirely preserved, even heightened, by Hass’s bald tone. That tone allowed him to say anything and everything—from minute observations (“fins of duck’s-web thickness) to grand truths (But it’s strange to kill/ for the sudden feel of life. The danger is/ to moralize/ that strangeness”). I read the poem over and over, first marveling, then trying to understand the trick of it.

Chris: My favorite thing about “Meditation at Lagunitas” is how simple and universal it is. I have to admit I almost cry whenever I look at a photo of Robert Hass—he’s just so damn perfect. And his work is the same—so smooth, approachable, and calm. I always get choked up and swoony at “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” What lines or images do you most enjoy in this poem?

Kirun: Oh, there are many. The line “to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,” is such a pleasure to say, making a bramble of my mouth. The lines “After a while I understood that,/ talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,/ pine, hair, woman, you and I” are favorites, too, capturing so much of what I love about this poem—its scope, meaning, its perfect balance of intimate and abstract. Really, the whole second half of this poem kills me.

Chris: I love the quiet tension that Hass creates. “Meditation at Lagunitas” always seems so multifaceted and clever—part elegy, part ars poetica, a celebration of diversity and our inability to wrangle our minds and language around everything we experience. I’m fanboying. What are the elements in this poem that are most important to you as a writer?

Kirun: It’s hard to pick just one or two important elements, but recently, I’ve been interested in how far a poem can travel, how much space it can create in that journey. Meditation at Lagunitas travels such an incredible distance, moving from the abstraction of the beginning (“each particular erases/the luminous clarity of a general idea”) to the concrete nouns of the end (“shoulders,” “pumpkinseed,” “bread,” “blackberry”). It moves by turning inward—from the world of big ideas toward the most intimate world of private speech and feeling: first a personal talk with a friend, then the memory of an intimate love affair, and, finally, the self talking to the self in private revelations that send us back out into the world (“it hardly had to do with her.” “I must have been the same to her.”). When I read the poem, I feel that movement as a lowering of the voice, both the sense and the volume of my voice falling through the registers of sound and speech.  You can’t possibly say the first line, “All the new poems are about loss,” in the same manner as you say the last: “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. The word “blackberry” has been transformed by the movement of the poem—by the end it is a platonic ideal, an intimate sensual object, a numinous religious relic; it is a word, a thing, an elegy and an immediate feeling, all at once.

Chris: One last question in regards to “pumpkinseed” as a name for the flitting orange fish, are there any names of things that you particularly love? Or do you have a name for something that you, a friend, or family member has created that you enjoy?

Kirun: I grew up in Hawaii, where the English is sometimes heavily inflected with a creole called Pidgin. Pidgin incorporates words from a great variety of languages—Hawaiian, Samoan, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese—reflecting all the cultures that have come to the islands. I love so many Pidgin words and phrases. “Hemajang,” for instance. It means completely messed up. As in, Kirun’s answers to your questions are all “hemajang.”
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Kirun Kapur is the winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry and the Antivenom Poetry Award for her first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, Prairie Schooner, The Christian Science Monitor and many other journals. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and at Brandeis University. She will be a visiting writer at Amherst College in the fall. Kapur has been awarded fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and MacDowell Colony. She is the director of the New England arts program, The Tannery Series, and serves as Poetry Editor at The Drum Literary Magazine. She was recently named an “Asian-American poet to watch” by NBC news. Kapur grew up in Honolulu and now lives north of Boston.

 Chris Petruccelli’s latest poetry can be found in Appalachian Heritage. New poems are forthcoming in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel volume 19: Appalachia Under Thirty. His work can also be found in Cider Press Review, Connotation Press, Nashville Review, Still: The Journal, and elsewhere. Chris currently works, runs, and drinks whisky in east Tennessee.

Lyric Essentials: Sandra Marchetti Reads “Eating Alone” by Li-Young Lee

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Chris: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Sandra Marchetti reads “Eating Alone” by Li-Young Lee.

Sandra, amazing poem you’ve read for us today. How did you come to know Li-Young Lee’s poetry? What was it like when you first experienced his work?

Sandra: Li-Young Lee was one of my early heroes in poetry, along with Sharon Olds. I’m honestly not sure how I came to his work, though it was probably in college and maybe at the hands of Richard Guzman, my first English professor, who helped me learn something about non-Western literature. Lee is an “Asian-American” poet, but he eschews that term. I have read everything of his now, as he writes sparingly, and in that way he has also been a guide to me (I don’t think of myself as particularly prolific).

When I first experienced his work, I felt this overwhelming sense of wisdom in his words. He knew something—though that’s another concept Lee himself would eschew! Encountering that sort of timelessness is powerful for a young poet, and it showed me what great poems could do (a mind melt!). At the time, and maybe still now, I felt a poem was received in some ways from another source, another voice. Lee has this expansive voice, that time travels but is fully grounded in the now. He speaks to the domestic and the fabulist in all of us.

Chris: The first strophe of “Eating Alone” is full of beautiful imagery and sounds. I love “The ground is cold,/ brown and old.” Are there particular moments in this poem that you especially enjoy?

Sandra: I needed to pick a short poem because I cherish every line of Lee’s. Maybe I cherish every line of “Eating Alone” because the poem is short. It is the perfect embodiment of what a poem can do. Looking back at it, scrutinizing the poem for this interview, I see myself striving to write this poem every day of my life. It’s compact, it’s sonic, it’s imagistic, it’s sensory, and the ending is a surprise—not heavy handed at all. It is beauty incarnate.

As for the line you quoted above, it’s a favorite of mine as well. It’s so sonic—those long “o” sounds. I’ve often thought, what if the line was: “brown, / old and cold”? That wouldn’t sound as nice at all. It’s like the “black old knife” in Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.” “Old black knife,” the typical order for those words, doesn’t do much for me at all. However, these greats see sound differently. They see the possibility in the words. I’ve even incorporated “cold, / brown and old” into a poem of my own (giving proper credit, of course). Other favorites? “Icy metal spigot”; the internal rhyme of “knee” and “creaky” in the second stanza along with “crazily” and “glazed” and all of the “l” sounds in that stanza that makes it stroll and roll along peacefully; and then the third stanza—all of the “e” sounds—“me,” “tree,” “see,” “lean,” “deep,” “green” leading into “steaming” and “sesame” in the last stanza. The “e” sound continues to the end, as not to jar us sonically. However, the image at the end is completely new, only a slight call back to the very beginning. The cooking image disrupts us, but the sound stays on course. This is the master at work. I love the colors of the poem: red, green, beige, chrome, pink. And the senses! If you look, all five senses are present in this poem, which is what truly fleshes the images. I also love magical realism—the image in the corner of your eye and when you turn to touch it, it’s gone. That temporal quality is a specialty of Lee’s. I could talk about the intricacies of this poem forever, but…

Chris: Five senses, color, and sonic quality all packed into a relatively short poem. Is that characteristic of all of Lee’s work? Do you try to emulate each of these qualities in your own writing? Or is there an element that takes precedence, as in sound over color, color over image?

Sandra: I think it is characteristic of Lee, though this poem is on the short side for him. Some of my other favorite poems of his are longer: “Dreaming of Hair,” “The City in Which I Love You,” “Always a Rose,” and even “Persimmons” come to mind as longer pieces that do some similar work as “Eating Alone.” I am partial to shorter poems, and I write shorter poems, which is probably why I picked this one. What I like about Lee’s longer works is his ability to weave—he is essentially writing lyric essay that includes family history, visual image, and a confluence of languages in those pieces. “Eating Alone” is a microcosm of all of those things. That is often what I attempt in my work: the world in one blade of grass, or one “young onion.”

I once did an exercise where I took my five favorite poems of all time (including this one by Lee) and the best five poems I felt I had ever written and did a close comparison between them. I was trying to figure out what I internalized from these poets I loved. From Lee, I have definitely learned how to use sneaky slant rhyme, and I have learned how to use color. Often, after readings, folks will comment on the colors present in my poems, which I am routinely surprised by—since I often let sound take precedence over color in my revision process. Image is sometimes what gets the poem going—you can see Lee is working off image here. His actions become recollection, and recollection eventually brings him back to the present moment. Sometimes I start that way, or sometimes I’ll hear a sound that sets me ticking.

Chris: You mentioned not being a prolific writer and neither am I (which that took me awhile feel okay about). Could you speak about your process a bit? What’s writing a poem like for you?

Sandra: I am not prolific, that’s for sure. I have gotten to a point where I’m writing maybe 20 poems a year which seems like a lot to my former self who could maybe muscle up a third of that. A good support system of poets who keep me writing can be credited for that. Lee is not prolific either, and I have heard him say of his memoir, The Winged Seed, that he demolished whole drafts of the book and started over. I cannot imagine! He said it was because those drafts didn’t “listen” enough, and they weren’t close enough to the source—the voice of God. So, he listened again, hoped to listen better, and re-wrote. I don’t often delete things I write, but I do have a hard time listening. I have a hard time snatching moments to write. I compartmentalize and write only during “writing time” which seems like it’s almost never. So, I work really hard over breaks. This summer I am working on my poems a couple times a week (which is quite a bit for me). I send out poems for publication during the school year, revise, and maybe draft a few things. Most of the drafting, though, comes when I have a break from work.

I have found that allowing myself to draft poems as notes has helped to take the pressure off. I used to write out a whole draft on notebook paper, but lately I have been drafting in notes, and filling in the rest when I have time to sit down. I think one of the differences from when I was a beginning writer to now is that I can work from a silhouette—an outline—and make a poem of that. I’ll go back sometimes to the notes months later to flesh out the piece. It’s like a place marker, or a bookmark.
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Sandra Marchetti is the author of Confluence, a full-length collection of poetry from Sundress Publications (2015). She is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays, including Sight Lines (Speaking of Marvels Press, 2016), Heart Radicals (ELJ Publications, 2016), A Detail in the Landscape (Eating Dog Press, 2014), and The Canopy (MWC Press, 2012). Sandra’s poetry appears widely in Subtropics, Ecotone, Green Mountains Review, Word Riot, Blackbird, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Her essays can be found at The Rumpus, Words Without Borders, Mid-American Review, Whiskey Island, and other venues. Currently, she is a Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies at Aurora University outside of her hometown of Chicago.

Chris Petruccelli misses the cold of Fairbanks and the slammin’ meals prepared by his buddies August and Elle. He is the author of the chapbook Action at a Distance, and his poetry appears or is forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage, Cider Press Review, Nashville Review, Still: The Journal, and elsewhere. In the next week he will begin brewing mead. Wish him luck.

Lyric Essentials: Daniel Crocker Reads “How to Watch Your Brother Die” by Michael Lassell

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Chris: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Daniel Crocker reads “How to Watch Your Brother Die” by Michael Lassel.

Daniel, you recorded reading this poem a few years ago back in 2013 with the caption, “One of the best poems ever written.” I reckon it’s not lost its impact. What was it like to discover this poem? Do you remember when you first came across “How to Watch Your Brother Die?”

Daniel:  I can’t remember exactly where I read it. I think I was taking an independent study in LGBT literature when I was introduced to it. Either way, I remember it hit me hard the first time I read it. Although I think I’m a pretty emotional person, I’m not always a very emotive person. I’m not ashamed at all to say I cried the first time I read this and several times reading it since.

I remember those times in the ’80s and even the ’90s. There was so much fear and misinformation. There was Reagan. Of course, homophobia was wide spread at the time. It’s hard to believe now that a disease killing so many people would be politicized and framed as some sort of moral failure, but that’s just how it was then. This poem took all of that political discourse and made it personal in a beautiful, powerful and painful way. It’s hard to ignore a poem that has that much power in it.

Chris:  Lassell’s poem certainly isn’t holding any punches. It’s a powerful piece dealing with a wide range of emotions. What do you think is key to the poem’s ability to handle so much fear, hate, loss and confusion and not become overwrought?

Daniel: I think for a poem like that, the key is to just tell it like it is. That is, your audience is going to know if you’re just trying to manipulate them emotionally. If you got something, and you just tell it plain, then the impact is like a comet. It just hits you. It’s a hard writing habit to learn. It took me years. I can’t speculate how Lassell did it, but I will anyway. Probably, he just had this important thing to say and he just said it without over thinking it or trying to make it “poetry.” Instead, he wrote something right to the point and powerful.

Chris: How does “How to Watch Your Brother Die” compare to Lassell’s other poetry? Is all of his work charged with identity politics?

Daniel: It’s not. He writes in a lot of different genres and in a lot of different ways. To me, somehow, that makes this poem even more special. It’s in my top five poems of all time, and that’s saying something. I’ve read a lot of poems.

Chris: Do you think more poets and writers would benefit from following that advice—telling it plain? Or does it work best in a specific time, place, and medium?

Daniel: For the most part, I like the ones that tell it plain. That said, many of my favorite poems are lyrical and many of my favorite poets write lyrical poems–and those can be just as powerful and moving. In general, the more brutal the subject matter, the more power “plain” language can have. I put plain in quotes there because while it’s certainly easy to follow, there are also some very beautiful lines in “How to Watch Your Brother Die.” I just don’t want to confuse accessible language with boring language as those are two different things.

Poetry is so complex and there’s such a variety, so many different types right now, that it’s easy to get excited about (even though every year or so we all hear that poetry is dead–it’s not). I don’t want to be one of those writers who advocate a certain style as being better than others because it really just depends on what the poet can do with whatever style they write in.

Chris: You discussed the emotional weight of “How to Watch Your Brother Die” the effectiveness of telling it like it is. What other mechanisms are at work in Lassell’s poem that qualifies it as “essential?”

Daniel: It’s a part of history. It was written early on, at the start of the AIDS epidemic. It’s kind of hard to imagine what that time was like if you aren’t  old enough to remember it. There was so much confusion and fear. Parents were keeping their kids home from school because they didn’t know if you could catch it from a water fountain or what. There was so much misinformation. The sex talk I got as a kid, was basically my Dad handing me some pamphlets on AIDS and telling me to read them. There are several good documentaries on this, and I would suggest How to Survive a Plague as a good place to start.

Back to the poem itself–it does so many thing so brilliantly. First, writing in second person forces the reader into empathy. Writing it from the point of view of the straight brother also made it easier to relate to for most people. Again, there was so much fear and homophobia at this time. Rather than angrily rail against it (though there is certainly anger in the poem), Lassell invited people into a world they may have known very little about. He humanized the epidemic for a lot of people who wouldn’t or couldn’t (for political, religious, just plain homophobic reasons) humanize it for themselves. So not only is it a great poem as far as poems go, but it’s also an important poem–which, as far as I’m concerned, makes it immortal.

Chris: Thank you for sharing and reading such a powerful poem. I keep thinking about the scar and all that it represents–rage, both physical and emotional pain, and, ultimately, it becomes a symbol of forgiveness and love for Lassell’s brother. What’s your favorite line or image? Maybe picking one is tough—go for two.

Daniel:  Mine has to be the scar as well and for all of the reasons you said. I also love this, “Think that/ you haven’t been kissed by a man since/ your father died. Think,/  “This is no moment not to be strong.” From a technical perspective, I love those bold line breaks. More than that, I like what it says about traditional masculinity. Those attitudes are changing though, and that’s a good thing.

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Daniel Crocker is the author of three collections of poetry, a novel, and a short story collection. His recent chapbook, The One Where I Ruin Your Childhood is available to download for free at the Sundress Publications site.

Christopher Petruccelli is an associate poetry editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection and is currently trying to survive his first winter in Fairbanks, Alaska. His poetry has appeared in Connotation Press, Still: The Journal, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Action at a Distance, is available from UIndy’s Etchings Press. In his free time, Chris enjoys smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey with older women.

Lyric Essentials: Donna Vorreyer Discusses William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116

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Chris: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Donna Vorreyer reads “Sonnet 116” by the bard of Stratford.

Indeed, a surprising choice. I don’t think I’ve read Shakespeare since high school! Not sure if that’s a thing I should be admitting or not. What is it about the ol’ bard that makes him so essential? Is revisiting Shakespeare something that all contemporary writers would be wise to do?

Donna Vorreyer: When I discovered Shakespeare in sixth grade, through a teacher who brought me Romeo and Juliet, I fell in love with the sound of it. I didn’t understand it all, but it didn’t matter. At that point, I was a goner. I went to the sonnets on my own, and then my father introduced me to his favorite, Twelfth Night, (still my favorite as well) and then high school brought me the usual slate of tragedies to seal the deal.

My ragged Riverside Shakespeare from college is one of my “save it in a fire” books – I have many emotional memories tied up in that copy of the complete works, but Sonnet 116 has always been a standout. The line “O no, it is an ever-fixéd mark” cast a spell on me the first time I read it and inspired me to memorize a poem for the first time. Years later, my husband gifted me with a mobius bracelet that has Sonnet 116 engraved around its curves. I wear it nearly every day.

I would say that everyone would be wise to revisit Shakespeare, but especially writers. His stories, emotions and conflicts are so universal that they still resonate after hundreds of years. This is why theaters around the country continue to reinvent and modernize the stories without changing the language. I’ve seen Macbeth staged with modern mercenary uniforms and weapons, Romeo and Juliet as gritty Matrix-style club kids. Love, class war, secrets, the art of the deal, death, betrayal, violence, gender identity/relations, humor, sex –every writer is essentially rewriting some element of life that Shakespeare has already explored. Most importantly for me, Shakespeare epitomizes the joy of language – the wordplay and the sheer music of it – in a way that no other writer does. And the music of a poem, for me, is not an element you can “leave out,” like nuts from a cookie. It MUST be there, and in Shakespeare it is. Always.

Chris: Do you perceive, and mourn, a loss of well employed meter in contemporary poetry?

Donna Vorreyer: I would say yes to perceive, but no to mourn. Encountering mostly free verse, today’s casual reader could be lulled into thinking that attention to meter does not exist.  But I think there are plenty of writers out there successfully using meter (and even – gasp! – rhyme) well in contemporary poetry. One that comes to mind immediately is Jessica Piazza who, in her book Interrobang!, works exclusively in sonnet form. Other writers like Stacey Lynn Brown and Patricia Smith, have gained recent attention for sonnet crowns. Writers like Kay Ryan work successfully in traditional meter, and the music of the poem is crucial in the work of contemporary writers like Melissa Stein and Katie Ford.

Meter provides the contemporary poet with a framework to use and then break, if desired. It is a part of our spoken language, so it cannot disappear if a poet is writing anything resembling speech. And, although exact end rhymes are out-of-fashion, they still show up subtly in some cases, and internal and slant rhymes are common in free verse. I would never mourn the “loss” of any element of poetry, as trends in publishing come and go. (For example, the ghazal has been EVERYWHERE at poetry readings I have attended over the last year.) So, meter will always be a valuable tool for any poet – no need to write it any elegies quite yet.

Chris: Shakespeare first states what love is not in the opening quatrain, and then segues into offering his own definition. What do you make of his choice to begin with negation?

Donna Vorreyer: Negation is a tool that Shakespeare uses quite a bit in the sonnets, most famously in Sonnet 130 – “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips red.” That poem negates until the last couplet, leaving the volta to the very end. Contemporary poets also use negation to highlight a persuasive position or to point out a disingenuous speaker “coming clean” and telling the real story.

In Sonnet 116, I think Shakespeare uses the negation as a tool of argument. The initial negation follows an imperative opening: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/admit impediments” – in other words, don’t give me any bullshit about true love having defects or bowing to obstacles. It is natural for a speaker to negate after that kind of pronouncement –You know that bullshit you were just talking? Hell, no, it is NOT that at all –so we get “Love is not love/ which alters when it alteration finds/or bends with the remover to remove.” And then he proceeds to lay out what love is, using the language of ships and storms and stars. He returns to the negation with “Love is not Time’s fool” and immediately rebuts by admitting that love can’t defy time, but won’t be changed by it, either, bearing “it out even to the edge of doom.” Since this is normally where the volta would come in, the negation is softer here than in the beginning, balanced with reason. Then he just drops the mic with the couplet. It’s a beautiful thing.

Chris: In addition to the interesting use of negation and masterful meter, what else made you decide that Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” is one of the most essential pieces of writing to your bookshelf?

Donna Vorreyer: For starters, it is bold without being sentimental. And, although at this point some of the images might seem like clichés (a guiding star, etc.), they weren’t in the 1600s! “Whose worth’s unknown although its height be taken” is to me the loveliest of metaphors about the value of what one carries on the inside. I don’t think there are enough love poems in contemporary poetry, and those who write them are often dismissed as sentimental or even amateurish. But what emotion is more universal than love? And the sonnets are models of all sorts of love poems: definitions, abstractions, affairs requited and unrequited, secret love, forbidden love –you name it, Will’s got it. There is much to learn from these poems. It might seem old school or formal to cite Shakespeare as an essential in my writing life, but my love for language and its music, sparked initially by my father reading aloud, was fueled by Shakespeare at a formative stage. And, being in a 35 year relationship with my husband in a world where relationships are often temporary, this particular sonnet speaks a truth to me.

Chris: Earlier you mentioned a lot of contemporary poets that write sonnets. Is the sonnet your favorite form of poetry? What do you make of quasi-form poetry—sonnets that are only sonnets because they’re called so, or are dubbed sonnets because they’re 14 lines?

Donna Vorreyer: I don’t know that I have a “favorite form” of poetry, but I do have a tendency to write and enjoy reading short poems. My early drafts often follow a sonnet-like arc, both in terms of length and where a volta comes in. (There is at least one formal sonnet in each of my books, so I am drawn to the form.) Sometimes, when I have a draft that seems clunky, I will force it into that fourteen line cage to see where the meter/language can be tighter. I don’t mind people calling their poems things like “modern sonnets” as I don’t believe in telling any writer what his/her poem is or isn’t. I’m not a purist, in that sense. But I do appreciate when I see a well-written formal sonnet that doesn’t announce itself as such, and the control and precision of diction that create a sonnet are qualities that I admire in a poem of any length.

Chris: A few months ago a theatre group here in Fairbanks put on Star Verse. I think it was supposed to be a retelling of Stars Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, but with Shakespeare as the author so everything was put into iambic pentameter, bits of free verse, and well-timed R2D2 beeps and blaster noises. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend. What’s your favorite reproduction or adaptation of Shakespeare that you’ve seen? Have you ever seen a production of Shakespeare that was just plain strange?

Donna Vorreyer: I’m a Star Wars fan, so I wonder if that play was based on the Ian Droescher book that reimagined Star Wars in Shakespearean language. I have seen productions at the RST, high school productions, and numerous plays here at Chicago Shakespeare Theater where we attend nearly every show. On film, my favorite is Trevor Nunn’s version of Twelfth Night.

Onstage, two of the most unique and special were CST productions of The Tempest. This year’s version featured magic/production effects designed by Teller (of Penn & Teller) and a Caliban performed by two actors who were gymnastically-entwined through the entire play. We were in the front row, a foot from the actors, and could not figure out the magic happening. It was a truly one-of-a-kind night.

Also, a production from a few years ago only used three human actors. Two were Prospero and Caliban- every other part of the play was performed by the third cast member using marionettes and elaborate wooden masks. Staged in their small upstairs theater, it was a disconcerting and intimate theater experience. I can honestly say I have never seen a performance of Shakespeare’s plays that didn’t move me in some way—perhaps that is why he is an essential for me.
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Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013) as well as seven chapbooks, most recently Encantado, a collaboration with artist Matt Kish from Redbird Chapbooks. She works as a middle school teacher in the Chicago suburbs. That’s it. Brevity is, after all, the soul of wit.

Christopher Petruccelli is an associate poetry editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection and is currently trying to survive his first winter in Fairbanks, Alaska. His poetry has appeared in Connotation Press, Still: The Journal, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Action at a Distance, is available from UIndy’s Etchings Press. In his free time, Chris enjoys smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey with older women.

Lyric Essentials: Blas Falconer on “Infidelity” by Stanley Plumly

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Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Blas Falconer reads “Infidelity” by Stanley Plumly.

Chris: Blas, this poem strikes me as “confessional.” Am I wrong in thinking that? What can you tell us about Stanley Plumly’s writing? Is he the type of person to be offended by the confessional mode?

Blas Falconer: You know, Stanley was my professor back in the day at the University of Maryland, and if he had not helped me to break out of a terrible rut, I would have stopped writing twenty years ago. So I committed to memory as much of what he said as possible and often hear his voice when I am working through a poetry problem.

When I read your question this morning, I remembered him say, “Every poem I’ve ever written is somehow about my father.” I can’t remember the context, but it was probably an offhanded comment in workshop in response to someone else’s poem, something about poetic obsessions. This wasn’t terribly surprising, I suppose, but it left an impression because of what he said soon after: “Every poet eventually has to learn how to not write about himself.” I think that these comments come to mind because, after all of these years, I’ve never thought of this poem, any of his poems, come to think of it, as confessional, though it’s easy to see why someone would. When I imagine the speaker of the poem, I don’t think of Stan.  Nonetheless, I don’t think that he’d be offended.

Chris: So much depends upon that single letter, “I.” It must be a tiresome role. It’s interesting that he doesn’t come to mind as the narrator. Do you think the poem suffers in anyway if it is read with Plumly as the speaker? What does the poem gain if it isn’t him?

Blas Falconer: No, I don’t think that the poem suffers or gains anything either way.

Chris: I really like the idea of “poetic obsessions.” Are there other obsessions that inhabit Plumly’s poetry? Do you have any poetic obsessions yourself?

Blas Falconer:  As for Stanley, I don’t know, maybe birds.

As for me, I often return to the landscape of Puerto Rico, my mother’s homeland, and to my mother, and to exile. I return to these subjects even when I’m not writing about them explicitly, which was Stanley Plumly’s point, I think.
Chris: I also enjoy this idea that poets have to learn how not to write about themselves. To me, that sounds like a thing easier said than done. Was not writing about yourself something you were already practicing when you were at Maryland? Or did that come with experience?

Blas Falconer: I think that Stanley meant to suggest that eventually we had to move beyond our own stories to address our obsessions. We needed to find alternative approaches, other devices. I don’t think that he wanted us to do away with narrative altogether.

For some of us, it was a thing much easier said than done. At the time, I was, for the most part, writing poems inspired by personal experience, and I still often have to challenge myself to move beyond some version of my own story.

Chris: Do you think Plumly was attempting to get students to write universality into their poetry? For instance, in order to write about our obsession accurately we have to consider and understand them both subjectively and objectively?

Blas Falconer: I’m sure that he was, Chris, and I think that he was also encouraging us to find multiple methods of approaching a recurring theme so that we didn’t write the same poem (or same kind of poem) over and over again.

Chris: This may be a bit of an odd question, and it’s definitely the wannabe critical geographer in me talking, but given how you return to the landscape and your mother in your writing, I’m curious, what does “place” mean to you? How do you perceive and understand the landscape?

Blas Falconer: The Puerto Rico of my childhood was somewhat Edenic, and so in my mind, rendering the landscape became a way of infusing my poems with a sense of wonder and loss. I guess that I often use landscape as a means of conveying a sense exile. For example, my first book, A Question of Gravity and Light, often juxtaposed imagery of the island with the imagery of Tennessee to express this sentiment.

Chris: Blas, sorry for the strange detour from Plumly’s poem. We’ll get back to it now. What characteristics of “Infidelity” make it essential to your bookshelf?

Blas Falconer: It’s been fun, Chris, and this question is perfect because it helps me to better articulate my first point. When I read “Infidelity,” I’m drawn into it the way that I’m drawn into a compelling film. Watching a good movie, I don’t think about the actors or the screenwriter or the director. I’m not wondering if the trees in the background are real. (They probably aren’t.) I just give myself over to the experience. Only after the magic is over will I wonder how the movie was made.

Similarly, after reading “Infidelity,” I begin to see how hard everything is working to create the experience: the title, how it speaks to both to the parent and the child in the open-ended final lines, the narrative with all its pauses, the descriptions, the lines, the line breaks, the turns, the repetition, even the comma in the middle of the thirteenth line, for crying out loud. Everything works together to draw me into the world of the poem, not the world of the poet, and it happens every time. For me, this is why it’s essential for my bookshelf, because it’s a model for the kind of poems that I like to read and the poems that I aim to write.
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Blas Falconer is the author of two poetry collections, The Foundling Wheel and A Question of Gravity and Light, and a coeditor of two essay collections, The Other Latino: Writing Against a Singular Identity and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, and a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, his poems have appeared in various literary journals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Puerto del Sol. He is the Poetry Editor for The Los Angeles Review and teaches in the low-residency MFA at Murray State University. His third poetry collection, Forgive the Body This Failure, is forthcoming through Four Way Books in 2018.

Christopher Petruccelli is an associate poetry editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection and is currently trying to survive his first winter in Fairbanks, Alaska. His poetry has appeared in Connotation Press, Still: The Journal, Rappahannock Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Action at a Distance, is available from UIndy’s Etchings Press. In his free time, Chris enjoys smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey with older women.

Lyric Essentials: Natalie Easton Reads “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds

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Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Natalie Easton reads “Sex Without Love” by Sharon Olds.

I’m such a Sharon Olds fan, I’m excited you picked her. Before we get into the great poem you recorded for us, can you tell us a little about your first Olds experience?

Natalie Easton: Picking her was almost unavoidable, for me. She’s always the first to spring to mind when I think about whose work I’ve enjoyed wholeheartedly. I knew of her, of course, but my first real introduction to her came after you visited my house in May 2014 and left Satan Says behind. (I still have it–sorry, you’ll get it back, promise.) I loved her accessibility, her lack of frivolity, her poetic narrative full of truth and completely lacking in pretense. I loved the way her poetry made me cringe; her descriptions of our bodies, of her sense of family, of conflicting emotions so tightly entwined that betrayal and love become almost indistinguishable. She makes it easy to believe that this dynamic is the norm. She implies–more than explains–how these feelings came to mesh in her mind, but manages to completely avoid sentimentality.

My love cemented further in June of that same year when I devoured Strike Sparks on a camping trip, her book in one hand and a drink in the other.

Sundress: I think what strikes me most about “Sex Without Love” is how she first compares two people having sex without love as “beautiful as dancers” and “gliding over each other like ice skaters,” then as pros, “the great runners, alone with the road surface” and how these ideas feel so contradictory, and yet, both are imbued with a sense of wonderment and admiration by Olds. What strikes you most?

Natalie Easton: What strikes me most about the acts you mentioned is obvious, of course: the physicality involved. These are sports she’s talking about, where there are goals achieved and medals given. Of course, those things can just be done for pleasure, but nonetheless there is a competitive nature there.

 What grabs me in general about the poem is her desperation to separate herself emotionally from the act, and how she even subtly hints at the pain involved when one cannot do that: “wet as the / children at birth whose mothers are going to / give them away.” She envies these lovers, but never has to state it; we come to conclusions about her emotional state of mind through what she doesn’t say.

Sundress: I agree, it is a lot about “What she doesn’t say.” Okay, for a minute, let’s say “Sex Without Love” is a lesson—what does it teach?

Natalie Easton: In terms of interpretation, I think perhaps it could teach us to look closer at how even the supposedly pleasurable is something to be worked toward. (Her work always teaches us about the failings of our humanity.) Common, everyday occurrences get parsed endlessly by people with high emotional intelligence, which I think certainly describes Olds. One person may experience something and walk away feeling strangely discontent, but an artist like Olds brings those muddled feelings to light and identifies them.

In terms of formatting, when I read this poem aloud I tried my best to capture the breathlessness of it–the running, the gasping for air: the passion in those line breaks. I’m not sure how well I got that across, but that was one thing that, for me, reading the poem aloud revealed. The other thing I notice in this poem is the imagery: first we have ice skaters, but then red steak and wine and wet babies and runners. Mixing images like this is something I’m wary of doing in my own poetry because it can easily become distracting and inefficient, but she makes it flow; there is a logic in her associations.

Also: no stanza breaks. She shows us with these poems that they aren’t always necessary, but again, this poem is all about breath; in this instance, the reader should feel close to running out.

Sundress: Having read the entirety of Strike Sparks, how would you say “Sex Without Love,” from her second book, compares to her newer work? What is essential Olds?

Natalie Easton: What the poems of Strike Sparks, her collected works, have in common is the gut punch. This is something she has always been capable of, but I feel that her more recent work has seen her style become more polished, her descriptions more keen. There’s that constant kernel of truth that makes you want to barrel on ahead recklessly, sucking in your breath the whole time. Of course, there is no questioning that she’s always been pretty fantastic.

Essential Olds is, I would say, about getting to the uncomfortable, and then living there so comfortably that we all squirm to read it but are unable to look away; who would want to, when what she has to say is so human and interesting? I marvel at her ability to discuss intimacy in the way she does, and how her own fractured relationships have led her to long for things in a way that never seems requited. Sadly. Maybe that’s partly the temperament of artists in general–a driving factor.

Sundress: How has Olds influenced your own writing?

Natalie Easton: I don’t know that my answer to this question will be anything but banal. I think what every artist does, in the face of work they admire, is try to learn by osmosis. There’s a certain helplessness there, as well: the idea that I will never do this. But we try to take elements of what we love so much, and then put our own spin on it. For me it’s the way Olds describes things…I feel the same way when reading Ted Hughes’ work: “How did she/he get to this description, to this thing I feel all the time, and put it into words?” Everything is so clear; even what we haven’t experienced feels like truth in their experienced hands. They make it all look so easy. It’s anything but. That’s the level I’d love to reach one day.

Sundress: Who else “makes it all look so easy?” Other than Olds, who would you recommend?

Natalie Easton: I love Mark Doty, always, though I can’t say he always makes it look easy; at times he gets quite cerebral. I enjoy it, but can’t emulate that. Ellen Bryant Voigt is fantastic; I particularly enjoyed her book Shadow of Heaven. I frequently recommend C.D. Wright’s “Deepstep Come Shining,” which was suggested to me by the poet Russel Swensen, who reminds me of a poetic Bret Easton Ellis. He’s a Black Lawrence Press poet, and they always put out good stuff, so give him a go. Michael Bazzett is another one; You Must Remember This is worth a read. I also have a slew of books I acquired while at Bread Loaf that I haven’t managed to get through yet, so when I’m done with those I’ll have a lot more to recommend, no doubt.

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Natalie Easton’s poems have appeared in such publications as Jet Fuel Review, Superstition Review, and Sweet. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2014, and was a contributor at Bread Loaf in 2015. Later that year she went to Firefly Farms in Knoxville, Tennessee, for a week-long SAFTA residency.

Rhiannon Thorne‘s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Midwest Quarterly, and The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, among others. She is the Managing Editor of cahoodaloodaling and an associate interviewer and a book reviewer at Up the Staircase Quarterly.