The Generative, a poetry blog

Food For Thought

2010-10-25T06:37:00.000-07:00

So I've been thinking about this blog for a while. Thinking, not doing. Which is a constant theme of mine. One of my favorite things to do when I'm not writing/reading poetry is cooking and baking delectable items. I figured I might as well install a feature I will call "Food For Thought" as part of my plan to keep up with my fledgling blog, and perhaps to spark a duel interest in poetry and comestibles, a tried and true tradition. So without further adieu, I will present to my dear readers FOOD FOR THOUGHT, and what better way to begin such a venture than with an American favorite, apple pie.

AMERICAN APPLE PIE

This all started with a trip up to New Paltz for some serious apple picking. We picked so many apples that our bag broke. There is an unequivocal Edenic experience to be had from picking apples from a tree and eating them then and there. This intertextual act is more apt upon offering up your shiny pectin prize to your partner, especially if you are a woman and your partner is a man. And oh, the sin is good. The sin is especially good if you then take man's first disobedience from Eden into the kitchen and bake that shit into a steaming pie.

I absolutely hate recipes that permit you to buy pie dough. What kind of world is this where that's okay? Crust is the best part about pie, in my most humble and correct opinion, so you'd better make sure you don't do something dumb like buy dough. Don't give me crap about how you don't have a rolling pin; I used a cup and that seemed to work just fine:

Pie Dough:
2 cups flour
1 Tblsp. sugar
1 tsp. salt
6 Tblsp. butter (cut your butter into six pads)
6 Tblsp. vegetable shortening
6-8 Tbsp. ice water

Mix your dry ingredients using a dough mixer. Add the butter and shortening and mix. Should look crumbly. Add the ice water, stirring in one tablespoon at a time. Your dough should be moldable in your fingers. You can test its volume by rolling it into a ball. If it doesn't crumble, you're good to go. It should be just past the point of crumbly. Roll your dough into a ball, wrap it up in plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge for half an hour.

Apple Filling:
5 tart apples
1/2 cup sugar
2 Tbsp. flour
2-3 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ginger powder
dash of nutmeg
1 tsp. salt
1 Tbs. apple cider vinegar
1 Tbs. lemon juice

Peel and slice apples; place in bowl of cold water and lemon juice. In another bowl, mix all other ingredients. Add the apples. Done.

Mold your dough:
Slice your refridgerated dough in half. Sprinkle flour on your mat, on your dough, and on your rolling spin/cup/improvised cylinder. Basically, sprinkle flour like it's snow on Christmas Eve all over any area that so much as makes contact with the dough. Roll each half until flat, but make sure your perfectly well-meaning land of dough doesn't stick to the mat. Lining your mat with parchment paper may just do you wonders. Line a 9' pie pan with first layer of dough. I like laying the bottom layer a little thicker than the top layer so it soaks up all that juicy filling. Fill your pan with your apple filling. Repeat rolling process on second half, and lay over the apple goodness. I placed my top layer over the pie in segments in order to have a really flakey crust, but you can do whatever you'd like, so long as there's a little breathing slit.

Bake your pie at 400 degrees for 50-60 minutes. Let cool for twenty minutes. I sprinkled mine with cinnamon. Now, dear readers. Devour.

And speaking of neglecting this blog...

2010-10-01T10:23:00.001-07:00

—NEWS! I have actual news—

Remember all of five minutes ago when I posted that amazing poem by Timothy Donnelly?

Tim's agreed to do an interview with me!

—More News!—

Remember all of forever ago when I wrote that post about book titles that I found especially fine?

Sasha Fletcher has also agreed to do an interview with me!

More to come. Soon.

The Rumored Existence of Other Poetry Collections

2010-09-09T13:13:00.000-07:00

Recently, I ordered five poetry collections, which, upon delivery, I tore through with wild abandon. It has become increasingly difficult to write a poem, to even imagine writing a poem. The sheer idea of constructing a poem to exist in some quantum space is, in itself, an exercise in pathos—no, actually, you know those wonderful daguerreotypes that depict a person in the midst of spewing a face-filled cloud of ectoplasm from their maws in a fit of spiritual possession? It's an exercise in that. That's kind of what I imagine is happening to poets around me as I dumbly sit with pen in hand, waiting for the paranormal to take plasmic form in my mouth. Anyway. Since the inception of the blog, the goal has been to provide the nectar of writerly wisdom. (Nectar may or may not include ghastly plasma.)

WEIRD.

These silences in the blogosphere are indications that I myself have been without such nectar. But it stops here. At least the crippling thought that I will forever be mediocre. This thought, while perhaps true, is not conducive to the blog. And I'm sure reading Infinite Jest does not help the constant, overwhelming feeling that I will never articulate exactly what I'm feeling or thinking at a given time. A poem functions most powerfully through inexactness anyway. Which is why I thought it would be fun to show off one of the books I ordered and ravenously consumed, followed by a sample poem from the collection.

Timothy Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation, is the book that prompted my Amazon-frenzied glee in the first place. I have been absolutely amped for this extremely talented poet's second collection, which is already afire with accollades. That it was selected as the September book for The Rumpus Book Club, even as the release date on Wave Books is slated for October 1st, is pretty darned impressive. Anyway I am treating this book the way a 12-year-old girl would treat a new Justin Bieber album, except that I don't have TD's face plastered all over my room and I don't burst into hysterical tears and fan myself wildly when I see/read him, and you know what this is pretty ricketty metaphor except to say that I'm super stoked.

Here's a sample poem, "The Rumored Existence of Other People," published originally in The Iowa Review and republished on Poetry Daily. This poem's got everything: Mephistophelian irony, a Kantian relation to objects, a humor that is both

hilarious and tragic a la Timothy's panache. Anyway, I think this poem is genius, and

probably about language and/or I've been reading too much Wittgenstein on rainy days. Enjoy.

I dreamt my household consisted largely of objects
manufactured by people I would never meet or know
and some of these objects dangled down from the ceiling
while others towered dizzily upwards from the floor.
If most of them stayed where I left them as if dozing
in embryonic thought, still others came with features
conducive to movement, making them appear more
endearingly alive as they powered up and off in search
of excitement, an hour's diversion—no harm in that.
Intuition stopped short of determining whether or not
any of the objects kept in contact with their makers
via some kind of bond, perhaps a physical connection
explicable through science, or else a spiritual affinity
notoriously difficult for an outside party to understand.
But the more I gave it thought the more it seemed to me
believable. A silver line, a souvenir, a sieve of relation
meaning to release something lovingly means always
remaining tied to it. As to be somewhere completely
means never having to leave. I thought to figure out how
many presences collected around me at that moment.
Did they possess consciousness, would they cooperate.
Should I expect a new kind or the mundane damages.
Everywhere I might be now in light of where I've been.
I dreamt I held out my hand and before long a banana
flew up from the industrious parenthesis of Costa Rica
and provided for that hand before it knew it wanted.
Start slow, be consistent, and your levels will increase.
I dreamt the will of manufacturers to produce goods
was shed from those goods long after they were made.
All the windows overlooking a landfill or production site.
The more I gave it thought the more it seemed to me
obvious. Also touching. Whoever built that warehouse
across the way built it thinking someone would one day
look at it in wonder. Also sorrow. To keep an endless
store of that feeling. To make, to provide it. That I might
turn my back on a building like that will have become
unthinkable tomorrow, when my sympathy with most
abandoned things is effectively cut from the budget.
I dreamt in increments of three, five, and eventually ten.
Not the way the objects at hand rubbed me but more
the way those beyond me made me pang for them there.
I might even say the walls, the floors, the plush carpets
unrolled on the floors and the furniture, the refrigerator
and any item in it, nautical tchotchkes and the curtains
clamped tight as August quahogs to optimize my output.
The shedding of the will, too, takes place incrementally
across decades, late at night, the little shifting in a room's
air profile comparable to a ghost's entrance if not quite
equivalent. At work beyond the warehouse, everything
else: droplets on navy felt, protection sensed in a system
whose products had begun to forecast accurate wants.
I dreamt a body's indentation beside me on the mattress
vanishing as the presence found the door through a film
adaptation of silence. Child with gifts for ravens in pockets.
Lady affianced to alien abduction. Figure of the human
experiment almost over. I open my mouth and in no time
lasagna, Chianti, a greater than expected rate of melting,
atrophy, military action, and a ravenousness that shook
my confidence and the hinged box I keep pin money in.
The rumble of it recalls the convulsion Plato says the gods
sank Atlantis with to chasten its inhabitants, whose vast
majority descended from Poseidon and one of the island's
earth-born shepherdesses. As long as divinity remained
predominant in their nature, Atlanteans kept obedient to
the laws of their progenitor, but over time, what was divine
diminished, and love of wisdom and virtue gave way to
love of wealth and luxury, which in the past had seemed
merely distractions. To those who lacked the ability to see
through the radiance of things, the Atlanteans appeared
to be thriving: palaces, baths, mines rich in orichalcum.
Herds of elephants. Vineyards, orchards. Access to upwards
of a dozen sherbets. The chance to astonish houseguests
with golden oblongs and lozenges. To watch as vampires
turned mortals into vampires for cash, despite the fact
that vampires could easily devise a life without having to
dirty their pale hands with money again, but apparently
nothing restores that old vitality like a night of spending.
I dreamt a percentage of my money had been touched
by entrepreneurs of the undead. I dreamt I'd never guess
how much. Dreamt no idea where my money had been.
What bathroom floor or choir stall or Alp or what disgrace.
Dreamt I couldn't taste a difference. Dreamt my money
might want company, and I had better not keep putting it
in my mouth in that case. As drawing from a songbird's
coloratura, I dreamt the secret to prosperity is being
commonesque. Profiteroles, remote control, the ruin of
my body. And tremulous as horses hidden in old plaster.
Confused as vinyl siding. Certain as what's happening
can't have all at once, or even all that fast, but by degrees
imperceptible until too late, eyes trained to other tasks
as the sheep took to clover, distracted as a vortex of plastic
debris measuring twice the size of Texas patched itself
together mid-Pacific, a swirl like a god's intoxicated eye
but not surveillant, voyeuristic, a bright new continent
only in it for the kicks, its culture to bask, its historiography
accidental, with every bit of flotsam serving as a double
record of one product's manufacture and consumption.
I dreamt in complex packaging that posed no less a threat
at the factory warehouse than up among my cupboards
or dropped in the superabundant trash bins at airports.
Found it simple and good to forget that threat by letting
perception of such objects eclipse true knowledge of them.
Any worry washed in umbra. Like being in the moment
only endlessly. I hear the naked hands of strangers make
my dumplings but experience insists what makes them
mine is money. I open the door and I extend good money
into ancient night, night prosperous with stars, order heavy
in my hand. I'm immortal that way. I lie down and I feed.

I'm alive--I guess--

2010-09-07T09:06:00.000-07:00

I will as I always do, with the guilt-ridden acuity that comes with being a slacker in pursuit of some kind of excellence, apologize for my near month-long silence. It turns out that I have been doing nothing at all to possibly excuse myself of this inactivity; I am merely practicing nothing, still being matter myself, still able to clean moldy bathtubs and everything! Since we last spoke however, I've read Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and am now up to page 350 of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, the latter of which feels abso-fucking-lutely interminable. Despite the monstrosity in book-heft alone; despite the rather exhausting diatribes people would find themselves standing before me spewing on what DFW was really trying to do with this "piece"; despite the dense, long-winded chapters siphoned through nearly incomprehensible street verbiage matched only by dense, long winded chapters siphoned through mad, conspiracy-theoried scientific language that has so plagued my reading experience; despite these, I'll call them humps, there is some of the finest, most beautiful prose I have ever read.

But this isn't really a post about David Foster Wallace. This is more of an assurance post, to say that I am in the process of lining up more interviews, and that I'm not going to post my Joanna Klink review in full here because I've decided to submit it to a few magazines instead. I'm sorry that I can't stay true to you and only you, blog.

I'm also going to be teaching a class on the contemporary line, so I may post my ideas here every once in a while for you, dear readers, and my theoretical students. So just be on the look-out for that.

Ben Marcus, the inglorious, unheroic, nobody

2010-08-11T11:29:00.000-07:00

I finished Notable American Women by Ben Marcus yesterday. Here's a challenge: read this book and as you're reading it, try to explain to people what it's about. They will look at you like you are describing a very new, very complicated, very unappealing sex position, and maybe Snoop Dogg's there watching from a throne. Regardless, you will be met with, let's just call it, skepticism. As a precautionary measure, it's usually best to show these skeptics the paperback in question. And as prospective readers are wont to do, they will flip over the book to read the usual false, showy superlatives attached to any book of merit: Incredible!, A fantastic journey!, ____'s best yet! Usually as unreliable as a shroom-head's description of a tree. Just a guess. Even someone as dubious as I am about such things (in case that wasn't clear), I was immediately smitten with Marcus. Here's the back of the book:

"Ben Marcus is a genius, one of the most daring, funny, morally engaged and brilliant writers, someone whose work truly makes a difference in the world."—George Saunders

"How can one word from Ben Marcus's rotten, filthy heart be trusted?"—Michael Marcus, Ben's father

It's a combination that stays with you. Even this, even this act of posturing the book as a piece of marketable literature, even this is being subverted. So for someone like me, whose bitters have burned and settled in my own rotten, filthy heart, I knew this was speaking my language. Or I thought I knew. In fact I didn't know that it was doing exactly the opposite of speaking my language by seeming to speak my language.

Let me attempt, as I attempted at many bars over the past week, to explain the mechanisms of this book. Before I say this book is a critique on the very nature of an idea, it must be noted that America is, within the book and as America stands outside the book, also an idea. But now I've gone and told you what I think without even telling you what this book is about. Here goes.

As early as the 19th century, discoveries were being made to suggest that our very existences were poisoning the wind. The language we produced, the motion we produced, the breathing we produced, anything to indicate our proof of being was also a means of sullying the earth. Imagine our current desideratum push for environmental sustainability, followed to its most absurd, grotesque, and unlikely conclusion. Even Woody Allen's Sleeper, a movie about awaking from a coma to discover red meat was good, carrots bad, with poets so dissolute as to ponder the profound word-play of "dog is god backwards"--such an absurd take on our attempts at physiological ablution are at least creatively lodged in Opposites land. But this book is not relying on such a visible foil.

The book takes place on a farm in Ohio, quite the fucking boon for any piece of inspirational note. Behavior modification is necessary in order to deal with regulating our stillness and silence, and who should regulate this but a leader of American women named Jane Dark, who runs the show with a strange nascent army of American women called the "Silentists." Fathers are seen as crude and pathetic blotches on the world, and are interred alive in the backyard, with only small audible pitches from god knows where that are there to engage their small, dull imaginations. At least this is the case with Michael Marcus. There are people who are forced to breed by their mothers and fail at this act, and they go by the name Ben Marcus. When girls are born, they try on names until they fit. Each name should entirely define a person, as she will take her name from the American Bank of Names.

That just gave me heartburn. It's Magic Realism meets Science Fiction meets Global Hysteria. Like all good Ohio families, this book is a sandwiching of father and mother, with a sad law-abiding, self-deprecating (these two go hand-in-hand in this world I'm not even trying to make a political statement about our current status-quo, really I'm not) son named Ben Marcus who can't even "send" his fucking seed into a woman who actually tolerates the experience of sexual intercourse with him.

It should be noted that after this sentence, I closed my laptop and closed my eyes for five hours, which I guess is my loose interpretation of what the kids are calling "sleep." This is only to necessarily drive the point of my commitment to you, dear reader, that it is not simply my complete lack of concision that prevents me from giving you the general weathers of this book. It's just that saying BEN MARCUS IS A FUCKING LOSER only paints half the picture.

The reason I decided this would be a good topic is not just because of how much I enjoy Ben Marcus's exceptional prose. As I read Notable American Women, I could not get Moby Dick out of my head. Namely, Ishmael. Ishmael who is without origin, existing only in the prefab architecture that makes up his present-tense; Ishmael who provides us with outdated notions of whaling and a wonky, parodic take on cetology, the study of whales. This latter choice to do so encapsulates our unprecedented lack of knowledge on the whole business of such an enterprise, and no doubt, this was a choice.

Now, there is quite a difference between Ishmael and Ben Marcus: where Ishmael slips into the invisible realms of third person for most of the book, Ben Marcus is anything but. Another glaring difference: Whaling was, and still is, an extremely dangerous activity all for the sake of oil, and Moby Dick is based on this fact; the inception of the "Silentists" no doubt aligns with women's suffrage, industrialization, and a Hobbian sense of order, but such a group does not actually exist. Where these two DO align has everything to do with falsely encrypting information via a narrator who is not only unreliable, but also unheroic and abashed, whose severe mediocrity somehow allows him to survive the cautionary tale. How does one reduce the person already reduced of character? This must be how they survive so well.

Of course, to speak in this manner should mean that the focus is not on the narrator, Ben Marcus, though he is present and even fucked at points, but on the conceits of the book. And yet, we are fascinated by these flawed male characters. The conceit grows from the vertical graph of the character, who is, at best, fledgling. Which brings me to my next point. Aren't we all Silentists' or interred fathers laughing at and inflicting pain on our speaker? Don't we love watching our speaker curl up and cripple by the exceedingly-heavy blows of existential aloneness? Do we not cruelly amuse ourselves by wondering how long it will take for the speaker to be a bag of bones? And when they make it out alive, aren't we thankful insofar as we were able to properly be delivered the grim portrait of another flawed human being too fused to the implemented laws to even question the rather problematic circumstances that are his genetic make-up? Without that nagging anxiety of heroism?

Current books in my bag

2010-08-10T15:25:00.000-07:00

In case you were wondering, these are all great.

Interview with Anna Journey

2010-08-10T13:56:00.001-07:00

A year and a half ago, I worked as an editorial assistant at The New Criterion. One of my jobs was to send the famously irascible poetry critic, William Logan, books for possible review. New books would come in from publishers all over the place. In this case, it was an act akin to leaving your baby out in the Savannah, with lions and cheetahs and hyenas running around searching for pink soft chewy things to eat. I liked going through the new books, for obvious reasons. Usually though, I'd peruse the book and feel uninspired, place it back down, and that would be that. I had been trying to work on a series of poems called "Quarry is a Place for Nesting" (it didn't work out) when what book should arrive but a book called If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting by Anna Journey. There was a feeling of almost sisterhood, with our similarly felt utliziation of a word like 'nesting'; so much of a wry conflation of maternity and a post-modern age's sensibility. I did my usual dance of opening the book in order to scan it for possibly exciting language. I read the first poem, "Adorable Siren, Do You Love the Damned?" I read the first poem. I read the first poem. I read the first poem. Almost immediately, my poem, which had instantly seemed so kith on the surface, became wildly inferior to the beauty, control, and wile of Journey's work. I remember being most drawn to the closure's sex-and-violence grace, which made me feel like something in me was slipping off into a crag:

...I'm drunk
though I won't wear heels, honey, or I'd fall
for anyone. I'd fall devil
over heels over edge over oleander
over open mouth
over birthmark over forked
tongue over forked tongue
that turns on mine.

The experience of reading this book made me want to trade in my diction for arcane tools and demented flowers. I remember wanting very badly to know this person, or at least make myself known to them. After I got into the contact with her, her name started popping up everywhere, whether in the literary journal Parnassus, or on random websites lauding the book as part of a best summer reading list. She's a poet of decadence, flare, trickery, and come-hither, someone with whom music and character are on equally intense lyric plains. I knew that speaking with her would be fun as hell, and all of its sexy devils. And with all of the sharp, irresistible language in her poems, this interview revealed to me the very level balance between her attention to language and her intellectual prowess in Contemporary Poetry, which are also earnest and smart as hell to say the least.

The Naughty Fabulist's Heart: A Conversation with Anna Journey

In your debut collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, there is, amid other things that I hope to get to, a powerful obsession with flowers and even the renaming of flowers. It’s like a Field Guide to Flowers of Hell. You also have an interest in the elegy, and suffice it to say, there rings an elegiac note (if not straight up elegies) throughout your collection as well. There is an obvious connection between flowers and the dead, but can you speak of how these obsessions converged in your mind to become such a ferocious lyric?
“Field Guide to the Flowers of Hell”—oh, yeah. I like that! You know, I think it’s tough to explain the nature of one’s own peculiar obsessions. (“Why was the Fonz my imaginary friend in fifth grade?”; “Why did I collect squirrels’ tails?”) Obsessions can often feel quite mysterious, even to the obsessed!
One summer, while I was a broke MFA student in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, I worked in the lawn and garden section of Lowe’s hardware shop in Richmond, Virginia. Believe it or not, I actually requested the outdoor assignment, despite the mosquitoes and the sweltering June humidity. This way I could escape the bland palpitations of Muzak that sorely afflicted the indoor realm of the store. I could also stare at tea roses, Japanese maples, and stone fountains instead of light bulbs, vacuum cleaners, and toilets. When I wasn’t working the cash register, I’d go on watering duty, and walk around the steamy hanging gardens with a hose, letting the dry plants drink up and deadheading the shriveled stems and husks.
I only knew the names of a few flowers when I began the job. I soon realized, though, that if a lady walked up to me and asked me in which aisle we kept the lantanas, I couldn’t very well stutter, “Uh, you mean those yellow things with the tinier, orange tongue-thingies inside?” I soon memorized the names of nearly every plant in the store.
We’d get shipments of new flowers each week. One time, several carts full of roses arrived and, to my surprise, the flowers were named “Anna Elizabeth” (my first and middle names). I got a real kick out of helping load those frilly, pink versions of myself onto the tiered display cinderblocks. I was like, “No, after you, Anna. After you.”
There are certain varieties of hibiscus with bizarre and cosmic names, such as “the Fifth Dimension” and “Eye of the Storm.” I decided to see how far out I could go with my renamed flower and decided upon “Lucifer’s Panties,” among other monikers. There’s a poem in my book called “Lucifer’s Panties at Lowe’s Garden Center” that draws on my experience in the garden center. So goes my floral education.
But I think poets have always been interested in flowers. Wordsworth gets it right in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” when he writes: “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” And look to Baudelaire’s haunting Les Fleurs du Mal or Plath’s aggressively leonine bouquet in “Tulips”: “The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.” Flowers remind us of our mortality: they’re beautiful; they’re brief. Plus, I like a lyric in which decadence and damnation meet.
I’d like to imagine all poetry collections are written as a way to avoid and/or escape the Muzak, that bland score of ennui. And rereading “Lucifer’s Panties at Lowe’s Garden Center” with this autobiographical tip does change so much of the experience for me. That you changed the name of the flower from “Anna Elizabeth” to “Lucifer’s Panties” due to the flowers being “too damn pink and ruffled” makes me wonder about gender roles in this collection—especially up against the devil, who is unmistakably male, and with whom you are always in the midst of some spectacular bitch dance. The devil is also part of a community of red things that so often make an appearance (your hair included), but his appearance is, for obvious reasons, the most active. And yet, it seems the devil’s always up against you, the fearless feisty femme, rather than the other way around. Could you talk about that dynamic a bit, and then more generally how the devil works as a recurring character?
I think I’ve always been interested in the fabular realm: I love the magical characters that populate fairy tales, folk tales, and myths. The devil strikes me as one of the most potent mythic figures. He’s dark, he’s gaudy, he’s powerful, he’s wounded, and, oh, he’s sexy as hell. I think there’s a lot of imaginative and erotic potential to be found in such a figure. Maybe he’s my male muse, or a kind of alter ego: my big, red, psychic wrestling partner in that—what did you call it?—“spectacular bitch dance.”
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake calls Milton “a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” for the way the latter writes more adventurously and imaginatively about Satan in Paradise Lost. I think all poets hold a lifetime membership in the Devil’s party, or at least they should!
I think, too, that recognizing—and reckoning with—the demons that wander our streets and thoughts is a way to split open the beautiful world and expose its underlying sense of menace or threat: dark desires, bizarre fantasias, old traumas that warp the machinery of our memories and our minds’ eyes. There’s a wonderful quote from an interview with the film director David Lynch in which he discusses growing up cloaked in the beguiling normalcy of Middle America. He used to stare at a lovely cherry tree in his suburban neighborhood. “But on the cherry tree,” Lynch says, “there’s this pitch oozing out—some black, some yellow, and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.”
I know I’ve got my glittery card of damnation in my wallet at all times. I absolutely love that Lynch quote, and it reminds me of your poem “Walking Upright in a Field of Devils,” specifically the lines, “In the field: goat eyed and planetary, // something about to move, the half-bloomed moon, / a pecked-out tea rose.” What a great moment. It also makes me wonder, speaking to that beguiling normalcy of Middle America—or really, any American suburb—about your dueling negotiations with the, as you called it, “fabular realm” and the autobiography. You speak of your dead grandparents and great-grandparents with a kind of Blakian weirdness—in “The Mirror’s Lake Is Forever,” for
example, the dead, your grandfather included, “can watch you pee without // even a trace of embarrassment.” Your immediate family does come up too, especially that sinewy image of your mother and her snapped vertebrae. How does one follow the other further down that infernal rabbit hole?
As a novice poet, I’d try to faithfully record my immediate personal experiences. I’d write about a break-up or, you know, the monstrous tragedy of turning twenty-two. To encourage me to write outside my limited experiences, an early poetry teacher of mine suggested that I try assuming personae. I love Norman Dubie’s persona poems. I admire the cinematic sweep of his historical places, his vivid imagery, and his startling approach to the dramatic monologue. Damn, he drives me wild! Dubie remains an important poet to me, and he has one of the most formidable imaginations I’ve ever encountered. I wrote many a persona poem trying to apprentice myself to his style. I felt like my early efforts fell flat, though. I mean, my severed head’s posthumous monologue to a cluster of fallen pecans was affectively shocking, but it felt like a showy, baroque cicada shell. It’s when I returned to personal subject matter—after avoiding it for a long time—that I felt I maybe began to fill in that missing core.
Each poet writes from her own oddball set of “dueling negotiations,” or tension-creating oppositions. I suppose the fabular autobiography is my favorite weird knot of invention, myth, and memory. I feel haunted by the past—my mother’s accident, my mysterious ancestors, my childhood so distant that even those old, euphoric moments warp. I also feel like I’m in love with magicians, alchemists, and sideshow freaks. If I weren’t a poet, I’d be one of those folks. Or maybe poets are already magicians, alchemists, and sideshow freaks! So, I find myself laughing at—and sympathizing with—Larry Levis’s outburst to his graduate poetry students at VCU (“I don’t give a shit about your petty, little lives!”), even as I’m irresistibly drawn to the siren song of my own personal history. But I’m also a naughty fabulist at heart. Sometimes I open my front door in the morning, holding my coffee mug, and find myself stepping into the lands of Kafka or García Márquez. As Wallace Stevens says, poetry is the supreme fiction.
What a strange land both those lands would be! Larry Levis’s comment makes me wonder about Sylvia Plath, perhaps because admirers of Plath do give a shit about her petty, little life. There are so many lovely ties between you two, from the music to the raw, coarse, lest we forget female imagery. There’s this line of yours, for example, from the poem “Letter to the City Bayou by Its Sign: Beware Alligators,” where you write, “I’m made // of so many girls I can’t get them all / drunk at once or they’d mutiny,” which reminds me of one of my favorite Plath poems, “Fever 103°,” and that famous closure: “(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)— / To paradise.” I know that you’re invested in the work of Plath, both aesthetically and scholarly—could you talk about her influence on you, and also how you came to unearth, “Ennui,” a previously unpublished poem of hers?
Plath’s poems are the ones I remember loving for the longest time. If she and Charles Wright had ever gotten together, I would’ve fought the celestial beams of energy in the cosmos to become their love child. I recall reading “Lady Lazarus” in my ninth grade creative writing class and then writing my own poem. I think my fifteen-year-old brain named my early effort “I Know Who Waters the Roses in Hell.” A prescient choice! At that point, however, I didn’t yet recognize the difference between the deeply psychic, Dantescan scope of Plath’s “Fever 103°” and the kitschy, gothic verve of Veruca Salt’s post-grunge tune, “Forsythia.” They both have strong (and sly) female voices, grotesqueries aplenty, and a sort of eerie flower-power; and—at the time—that was good enough for me.
But, you know, I eventually stopped head-banging my dyed pink hair in coffee shops filled with clove smoke, and went to art school as an undergraduate. Because I majored in art at VCU (I wanted to become a potter and to live in the Blue Ridge), it took some time before I realized I needed to study poetry. After taking my first college-level poetry course when I was twenty-one, I knew I was hooked. I doodled notes—and little hearts—all over Plath’s pages in the McClatchy anthology!
My favorite party trick is to recite, from memory, the entirety of “Daddy” or “Lady Lazarus,” while imitating Plath’s crisp, slightly British accent. Her poems’ theatric muscularity, steely imagery, and take-no-prisoners speakers have always stuck in my head.
Plath’s early Petrarchan sonnet, “Ennui,” the poem you’ve asked about, is an example of how hard she worked in order to become a groundbreaking poet. A common misperception about Plath is that is her depression made her a great poet—as if illness were an instant poetry wand. That old madwoman trope does a great disservice to Plath’s work in that it undervalues her rigorous studies and likely unprecedented sense of discipline and ambition. No one worked harder to become a poet than Plath.
Plath wrote “Ennui” during her undergraduate studies at Smith. The piece is especially interesting, from a scholarly perspective, because it shows Plath creatively responding to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. (I’ve written about the subject elsewhere, in my essay “Dragon Goes to Bed with Princess: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Influence on Sylvia Plath,” which was published in Notes on Contemporary Literature.) Although the poem’s laden with all sorts of literary allusions, the fairy tale imagery in “Ennui”—particularly the “naïve knight” and “blasé princesses”—connects with the imaginative associations and metaphors Plath annotated in the margins of her personal copy of The Great Gatsby.
I inadvertently encountered “Ennui” during my first year as an MFA student in creative writing at VCU. I took a seminar course on Fitzgerald, taught by Dr. Bryant Mangum. One of our homework assignments was to peruse the University of South Carolina’s website called the “F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary.” I was immediately fascinated by Park Bucker’s essay, “A Description of Sylvia Plath’s Copy of The Great Gatsby.” Bucker mentions how next to the passage in which Fitzgerald’s blasé golden girl, Daisy, complains, “I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything,” Plath scrawls the phrase “L’Ennui.” Her marginal notes also refer to Gatsby as a “knight” and to Daisy as a “princess.” I understood that Plath had titled several early poems “Ennui,” so I grabbed her Collected Poems from my shelf and flipped to the index. Although the full text of “Ennui” is not included in the book, the index to her uncollected juvenilia does list the title. The Collected also specifies that Indiana University’s Lilly Library houses the original typescripts of the poem in the Sylvia Plath archive. Thus, I obtained photocopies of “Ennui” from the Lilly Library for use in my research. Because I’d written about “Ennui” in my seminar paper, I wanted to properly cite it in my bibliography. I assumed the poem had been previously published, perhaps in a school magazine or someplace like Mademoiselle, but I couldn’t figure it out. I finally discovered the poem’s unpublished status through writing to the librarians at the Lilly Library and to the estate of Sylvia Plath. Her estate, currently overseen by her daughter Frieda Hughes, generously granted the online journal I worked for at the time, Blackbird, first serial rights to publish “Ennui.” So that’s the story of my youthful, literary sleuthing: Anna Banana, PI.
That is pretty incredible. I can’t even imagine the level of excitement the people of Blackbird must have felt getting those serial rights. Or more importantly, how freaking awesome that must have been for you! That is quite an adventurous first year in MFA-land. I think the most exciting thing that happened to me my first year was finally having an ingrained understanding of the NYC subway system. So it goes. And speaking of MFA programs, did you begin work on If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting while you were at VCU?
I wrote almost my entire first book at VCU, although a handful of poems from my first year in the PhD program at the University of Houston ended up going into the collection. The Houston poems in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting include “Adorable Siren, Do You Love the Damned?,” “Letter to the City Bayou by Its Sign: Beware Alligators,” “Elegy: I Pass by the Erotic Bakery,” “Night with Eros in the Story of Leather (1),” and “Night with Eros in the Story of Leather (2).”
Your earlier question about the devil got me thinking about how the landscape of Houston seeped into my psyche. In Richmond, I lived on the benignly named Cherry Street, between my favorite punk rock cafe and a lush, Southern Gothic cemetery sprouting ancient magnolias and overlooking the James River. In Houston, my apartment fell between the gritty S & M supply store “Leather Forever”—its display of leather corsets, braided whips, and punishment paddles—and a cluster of raucous nightclubs pulsing with bass and neon. One of the biker dives that I could see as I scrambled eggs in my kitchen had in its front window a taxidermied bobcat baring its fangs. There was this twitchy neighborhood guy—my boyfriend and I called him “The Alpha Mullet”—who’d circle the block on his wobbly bicycle, selling meth to the clubbers. Once, I went outside on my balcony to drink a glass of wine and a tranni hooker was strutting in my driveway. She had a pretty sweet wig, but her pimp looked a little tweaked out and I was like, “Uh, can I just stare at the moon without getting mooned, please?” My block was a writhing sexscape!
That’s pretty rough. Those writhing sexscapes definitely shine new greasy light on your poems. I’m certainly interested in how the different regions affect your process. It’s always got me thinking about organization. It seems to me that the recurring characters in the book help to organize the book into sections. What decisions went into the order of the book? Were there any specific organizing principles?
The best way I know how to show off a book’s character is to allow the poems themselves to suggest an order. This technique makes for a more natural progression, one that takes its cues from a poet’s own obsessions. All poets write from their obsessions: for Frank Stanford it’s meditations on death and the delta; for Linda Bierds it’s historical figures and events; for David St. John it’s desire and its cinematic landscape; for Beckian Fritz Goldberg it’s the relationship between body and spirit. Because we all write from our own peculiar psychic obsessions, there are often conversations between poems that begin to happen as you shuffle the pages.
My obsessions in If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, as we’ve discussed, are often mythic or fabular: I’ve got classical myths, family stories, Appalachian spells. I’m also interested in persuading a reader by voice. Because the voices in my poems are so similar tonally—even in the persona poems—I decided to emphasize that continuity in the book by suggesting that there’s one recurring character.
In addition to creating a tonal through-line, I found that giving structure to my book through the repetition of certain images and motifs best suited my poetic instincts as a compulsive mythologizer. For instance, in most sections I placed a poem about a metamorphosis. In one section, family ghosts return to the world disguised as magnolia buds. In another section, a miscarried sister crashes a costume ball in the form of a luna moth. Rather than grouping all the metamorphosis poems together, I scattered them throughout the book so they’d echo and intensify through repetition and accumulation.
Most writers I’ve talked to agree that it’s important to print the poems and spread them out so as to find common threads, to notice pleasing clusters, and to shuffle the pages with ease. Some poets drape their poems over ironing boards, some string them along clotheslines, some spread them across the floor. I used the surface of an extra twin bed in my cabin at the writer’s colony, Yaddo. I made four horizontal rows of poems on the bed—one row for each of my book’s four sections. Using multiple sections helped me manipulate my poems within small, manageable units: each section was like building a longer poem with its own echoes, intensifications, and closure.
Finally, I sent off the manuscript. But not before I did a funny dance in front of my blacklight poster of the nine muses and hinted to Orpheus that it’d be in his best interests to help me out.
Looks like the muses saw your dance was good. So, let’s talk about the present and near future. You must have some projects lined up. Do I hear any second collections ringing in the firmament? Do you think you’ll ever escape the devil, or are you in that red bosom to stay?
I’m almost done revising my second poetry collection. Right now, I’m calling the new manuscript Whisper to the Hive. You know, there’s this funky superstition that after someone dies, you’re supposed to go to a beehive and tell the insects about it. That way, the bees won’t abandon their hive. I love the magical thinking behind that belief—that language carries such potency and power.
I also love the red bosom, but I don’t think there are any devils in the second book. There’s a recurring character from the speaker’s past who has an eyeball-sucking fetish, an angel who likes to slurp barbecue sauce from her red fingers, and a restless insomniac with a penchant for hallucination. And some twisted elegies. Oh, and a fistulated dairy cow, a clawfoot tub, a feline specter, a childhood house, and a fickle A.C. unit that all double as portals through time.

Touching the Void, and Our Extreme Orders

2010-08-07T08:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I watched, with treachery, the wild survivor's tale that is Touching the Void, directed by Kevin MacDonald. The structure of the documentary is part raw story-telling and part dramatic reenactment. More specifically, one part is devised of portraits of the three climbers', with each divulging their perspective of what happened; this provides the streaming narrative for the documentary. There is a calm backdrop for these moments that undoubtedly connotes that they’re safe from harm now. The other part has about it the style of amateur recording, taken in the unlikely midst of Siula Grande, a mountain in the Peruvian Andes; it is a shaky, frantic attempt at recapturing the memory of a climber, Joe Simpson, who, after falling 100 feet into the crevice of a glacier and breaking his leg, must drag himself, somehow, back to a camp that may not even be there anymore.

Aside from being simply rapt by the battle to descend the glacier (quite an apt metaphor for story-telling), I was also drawn more and more to all the juxtapositions that, intentionally or not, helped strengthen the narrative. Juxtapositions through dueling landscapes, temperaments, climates, and composition, to name a few. There's a moment near the end where Joe is experiencing what I can only surmise as actually dying (don't worry, I'm not giving anything away; clearly, Joe's beautiful and healthy face is a current, constant presence), and this is when I really started to notice a doubling taking effect: sky and mountain, snow and rock, wind and rain, man and landscape, life and death. On a more macro level, narrator and event, me and them, peril and safety, past and present.

As I started to make all these tautological connections, it dawned on me that language is devised of and arranged similarly. Milton's famous beginning to Paradise Lost, "Of man's first disobedience and the fruit," helps give rise to dichotomies so effervescent, our world's artistic formation is not only based on, but also dependent on such foils of abstract and concrete things. Need I remind of William Carlos Williams' maxim, No ideas but in things or Wallace Stevens' final soliloquy, Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself. The words we choose to use seem ballasted by the things we choose to become--or not become. It's a Cartesian paradox, to think in order to be, to be in order to speak, to speak in order to become, to become in order to think anew, so that an opposite of thinking--speaking--becomes the aim.

There's that classic opening to Macbeth with the three witches that defines our current understanding of paradox: fair is foul and foul is fair. Joe can only keep our attention because the slow convergence of fair and foul, life and death, god and nothing, health and its reduction, strike a chord with our own morbid curiosities. We think therefore we are; we witness therefore we think we know. We keep thinking we’ll get further, that we’ll find the god damn camp, even with our mortal limits shadowing close behind us.

Since I was five, I've dealt with existential crises. The first time it happened, I remember I was in the cafeteria drinking the rest of my chocolate milk over a garbage pail. I felt a tug somewhere irretrievable in me and had a very strong urge to cry. Not a regular cry either. There was something almost rapturous about it. That if I didn't cry at that moment, I would be silent forever. Dramatic for a five year old (or a twenty-something year old), I know. The point is, I was shaken by my existence. I've never been one to ask, What does it all mean? or Why are we here? I find such questions too obvious a set up, too desperately reaching for the ornate reason. I'm not religious, and I've come to a point where I barely respect those that are. Be that as it may, however, I felt shaken by a force seemingly outside of my control. (I did not cry.)

There was this moment in the documentary where Joe, in dragging his broken-limbed body to a dream of safety (irresistable Auden moment), said that the command to survive in his head was so strong that it felt like it was not issuing from him, but from a completely alien register. Joe made it clear earlier as he looked into the deep blue void of the crevice that he did not believe in God, that when you're dead, you're dead. It seems obvious that the push to survive is within us--somewhere--the way the push to survive is so primary an intelligence for a cat. This account, mixed with his account of dying later, struck me most of all about the movie. Not as much the perseverance, admirable as it was, but the involuntary psycho-ticks that so prompted and desensitized his excruciating physical state. Which, again, is another example of the power of juxtaposition. Juxtaposition of a supreme order.

Every writer, every artist, every single person experiences two worlds at once, that of mind and body. Religious people are, for the most part, assured that it's only their bodies that are dying. There is again at work a concrete and an abstract way of thinking and being, hence my mention of Cartesian paradox earlier. Think to be, speak to think to know to be. Every day of our lives (probably) we greet somebody, and pierce that membrane of being in order to communicate. Perhaps an exchange occurs. We retreat; we go back into our own wilderness. Joe, and so many other lost climbers and explorers with more unlucky outcomes, was stuck at the scariest merging of worlds. The great expanse of the Andes with great fluxes of weather; the sky overhanging indifferently above his reduced body; the declining health of his body; and lest we forget his two minds (another Stevens nod) which were at once fear and doom, and yet something as foundering as the involuntary voice. Everything about perilous thinking feels ghostly. I'll argue that the mind, with its endless exposures and secrets, is always haunting our choices. The combination of physicality and mentality that a movie like Touching the Void presents gives me the feeling that every single thing we experience can be broken into two vast realms. And how else can our minds organize any of it than by flashing images of sky or mountain, life or death, city and nature, you and I. Always we are moved equally by what something is, and the shock of what it cannot be.

Paris Review Purging

2010-07-26T09:31:00.000-07:00

This site provides a great account of the injustices that have recently been strung around the new editors of The Paris Review after they "de-accepted" much of the forthcoming poetry section. Now, I've never attempted to submit to The Paris Review due to its level of pomp and regard, and my exact lack of such things. However, it seems inevitable that any poet who dares enter into the "accomplished poet" bracket from the lesser "up and coming poet" bracket will submit to The Paris Review. Hell, were I to dare the fates and enter into the "up and coming poet" bracket from my current "fresh out of the MFA-world/young grasshopper poet" bracket, The Paris Review would be first on my list, and I'd only have my fingers crossed for the more amicable boilerplate rejection note. If then my fate-tempting submission were returned with the stamp of acceptance, I would probably be beaming out of gratitude for years. Seriously, years. To call The Paris Review the creme de la creme of literary journals does not suggest enough what honor would be felt to be accepted into that league of writers of whom even non-readers of poetry and fiction can at least recognize names.

A few months ago, I would have told you that being accepted to such a storied journal is probably one of the most unique feelings one can have to a literary journal. Now I'm pretty sure the most unique feeling one can have towards such a reputable journal is being accepted and then de-accepted a year later. The level of mistrust and even betrayal I would harbor in my sinking heart would be unreal. In fact, the lack of respect these editors have for—I'm going to go on a sturdy limb here—talented writers boils my blood almost enough to not want to submit work there under this editorship. This, though, doesn't mean anything to anybody that isn't me.

Which brings me to my point: this is not going to hurt The Paris Review, despicable as the act of rescinding may be. They will continue to ride on their top-tiered reputation and this unsavory exposure will most likely fade. Unless The Paris Review, under Lorin Stein's editorial eye, begins to considerably fall down some notches in prestige and innovation. Even then though, the elite name will keep the journal afloat for some time before the readership is seriously injured as a result. It may even create an even larger readership with the recent controversy. Chances are, the writers who have been victim to the superseding will be more than just fine.

News! Wow!

2010-07-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

The Generative will be interviewing poet and essayist Anna Journey!!!

Anna Journey, whom I made note of rather meritoriously in my last post about ballin' titles, is stellar and I'm very excited to pick her brain.

Here's a sample of her work, from the collection If Birds Gather Your Hair For Nesting:

Red-Haired Girl Wants You to Know

by ANNA JOURNEY

The sycamore mark on her inner thigh is a continent
about to divide itself into the angel
that sat in the votive light

of a fourteen year-old's cigarette, and the angel
that was never there

but for the inked tattoo of wings under each blade
of a bartender's shoulder. Behind her eyes

there is a jealous god—
one wild swirl in each iris, each center a mix of pitch
and Byzantium about to catch.

There is a remedy for all of this
or none of it. An old man's advice:

don't let a morning pass
without swallowing nine
gin-soaked golden raisins. Do this to keep

arthritis at bay.
Or for the hell of it.

While she wonders why the only man to tell her

what's sexier than nudity
was an art critic and not a lover. She detests

the way red-haired women morph

into whores, sinners, or fox fur
shawls with the heads left on. Look, when that girl stared Zeus down
in all his glory, her hair was all flame for a moment.

And it was worth it.

Then dust. Then a poppy field with its charred seeds
between silks with a scent that could bring

the gods to their knees.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Also, expect a review of Joanna Klink's new book Raptus in the coming days.

A Rose By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet

2010-07-13T05:58:00.000-07:00

I have been seriously slacking with you, blog. I've been treating you like that dear friend I so badly want to get together with, but then cannot pierce the membrane of fatigue and blase enough to heed to my social urges. I've also been working on my poetry collection, and as it sits on my escritoire nameless (and yes, I have an escritoire), I've been thinking about the titles of successful collections that have come out in the past twenty years. It seems I can't escape the urge to be precious, even when I make a conscious effort to avoid it. I at first thought to name my collection something bold, something wild, something wholly subject and definitive; naturally then, a title with a definite article would allude to that occult panache, that surrounding talisman, that American gothic that so defines a book about haunting artifacts and desiccated kingdoms. However, upon turning it into my thesis class, I felt immediately self conscious and knew that my title (which will not be disclosed here or anywhere ever unless I make it in this world and it then becomes a thing I and all of my cohort can chortle at with retrospective ceremony and understanding for the next generation of writers) would carry little more than the lifespan of an inside joke.

Titles that successfully descry the mysteries of their books with "The ______" are rare gems in this world. Let's play around with those successful poets who in kind have successful titles that earn this construction.

THE END OF BEAUTY by Jorie Graham
Possibly the best book of poems to come out in the last twenty years (okay, 1987 was more than twenty years ago but since I can't adequately wrap my mind around the year 2010, we're going to be a little liberal with our estimates). This title has everything. A position on poetry, on self, on myth. Imagine how diffused and flat this title would have been were it borne without the The. The realm of possibility, with a title like this, is endless, but Jorie is able to contain it with a winged rhetoric and clearly-drawn center.

THE US by Joan Houlihan
I'm skipping around here, but this baby just came out. This title resonates with the dimensions of folklore and subsequently, identity. Using our everyday pronouns as tribal appellations, her syntax is jarring and the meaning threshed clean only when we detach ourselves from the usual associations that come with grammar. Lines like "She were the watcher and tender of pyres" and "Ay lived and spoke to what ay was" only dredges the mythos of the title deeper.

THE MASTER LETTERS by Lucie Brock-Broido
So, while Jorie's THE END OF BEAUTY is, to my mind, the best collection to come out in twenty years, this is my favorite collection to come out in the last twenty years. Obviously (or not so obviously), this is riffing off of Emily Dickinson's torqued letters to a "master." But this collection is as much about the master thou (who need we even say is male) as it is about the irony of "the master," who in this book stays the silent figure, or in another word the object, while the subject wildly dances the dance of purposefully over-the-top and vaulting diction. They are not letters to a stranger (Thomas James' collection which Lucie belovedly resurrected from obscurity) but rather, letters to a monument, though even this designation is overwrought. The Master Letters. It can be nothing other.

THE KEEP by Emily Wilson
A little over a year ago, a friend mentioned this book to me. I took one look at the first poem "Nonesuch" and within a week, THE KEEP was mine. The love I felt for this book was borderline unhealthy. Maybe because it was so outside of my style, and yet so within the realm of ideas I had and still have about poetry. So many of the poems are slight, negating scenes of nature through negotiations with the thou figure. When they aren't slight, they are long and sectioned poems, part field guide part aubade. What makes THE KEEP such a great title is its simplicity, its improbable noun-ness, the lovely gesture that a collection IS the keep to the poet's psyche. Fab.

So those are spotlights, but there are others, so many others. THE BEAUTY OF THE HUSBAND by Anne Carson comes to mind. But this is all to say, there is a certain power to titles like these, titles which signify not just an overarching theme for the collection, but are themselves the signifier or the portal into, as Vincent Hugo would call it, "un monde enfermé dans un homme," or a world kept inside a man.

Well. That does have some luster to it when put that way, especially for my collection. But then what about the one-word titles? Consider the spell of some of these words alone: RAPTUS, DEBT, SPELL, DEPOSITION, NEVER, TREMBLE. I think of one-word collections and I immediately think of ARIEL, a collection rising from the runes of a single word. What ultimately makes the delivery of this title type different from that of "The_____" titles are the claims. To name Mark Levine's debut collection THE DEBT, that would imbue a strategy over the whole collection, towards resolution (perhaps asymptotically). As it stands without article, however, its function is geared more toward artifice as a means, perhaps, to solution. Just as THE END OF BEAUTY would be radically removed of urgency and project were it called AN END TO BEAUTY or AN END OF BEAUTY. Gag me with a spoon; I'm so glad Jorie's a brilliant technician. The remarkable one-word title seems gifted to only the most pure of hearts. And since the very idea of a one word designation brings me closer to ulcers, I'm going to confess a heart of filthy cowardice on that one.

There are of course other options. The sentence title. The sentence can function as a fluting title over the whole collection. Here is one of the first pictures that show up when I type "fluting collection" into Google Images:

Zomg, a fluted bezel!

But no, I rather like this fancy watch as a metaphor, if for no other reason than it stands as a fully functioning accessory. Classy, perhaps at times gaudy and showy, but one can navigate the space time continuum pretty well with one of these gadgets. I unleashed pretty hard with my "The _________" titles because this construction seemed so alluring to me, me who thinks there are aligning powers at work in my measly collection. But I'm thinking now this choice for a title will ultimately triumph, as this provides an accessible route into the poet's imagination, and sounds downright beautiful if done right. Here are some examples of doin it and doin it and doin it well:

IF BIRDS GATHER YOUR HAIR FOR NESTING by Anna Journey
This book is fierce. Fierce. FIERCE. It's like I'm being beaten senseless while simultaneously falling in love with a sassy red-headed lady. Which is fine by me. The title cues us in on the power of the voice, which leans on point A of a logic equation, the poems themselves point B. One begins the collection in terror of what it means for birds to gather their hair for nesting--does it mean death becomes them, or simply that birds have found stray pieces carried off by the wind (almost romantic against the posthumous option)--and we leave with the chill of such lines like "Look, when that girl stared Zeus down/in all his glory, her hair was all flame for a moment.//And it was worth it." Hair today, gone never.

WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS & WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS by Sasha Fletcher.
Holy Moly, I forgot just how long that title was until just this moment. But so much of the language in this book reflects the preemptively lavish language applied to the title. It's a book that relies on everything you get from the title: an outside and an inside (which occur paradoxically at once), an overdeveloped imagination, apocalyptic ceremony. This shit is tumescent.

So many others. I HAVE TO GO BACK TO 1994 AND KILL A GIRL by Kathryn McGlynn is a book I've been meaning to read because of its amazing title. What strikes me about these titles is, again, the accessibility mixed with a certain sangfroid, an audacity which always makes for higher stakes.

This was rather long-winded, but this is all to suggest that book titles carry the whole ecosystem of a collection with them, and that there is an entirely different art attached to the naming of a body of work. It's using that same word-maestro area of the brain, but with more gusto so as to avoid sinking to a level of preciousness that will, at best, blend in with the rest of the slush. At worst, it'll lead to a whole blog entry on gorgeous titles where one tries to avoid saying I'M REALLY FUCKING JEALOUS after every other sentence—you know, were one to do such a heinous thing.

World Wide Whitman, or That Cat Had Some Wit, Man.

2010-07-03T14:19:00.000-07:00

In a NYTimes article by inimitable critic Helen Vendler called "Singing the Poet Electric," Vendler is part ingratiating and part on a mission to correct poet C. K. Williams in his quest to eulogize Walt Whitman in a second book of the series Writers on Writers, put out by Princeton University Press. The book, while simply called On Whitman , doesn't take such a simple stance, according to Vendler. Nay, Williams, who is writing a rather touched kind of prose, ascribes Whitman to something of a, as Vendler calls it, "patron" to the 60s revolution and subsequently, the Beat generation.

One is left to wonder whether this quintessentially 19th-century American poet would be tickled to be the fearless bearded leader of our century's sordid revolutions. Vendler has her doubts, and so do I.

And yet, I find it remarkable how transplantable the words of Whitman are to revolutionary sympathies. Poets and other writers writing in the late 19th-century were writing towards the generosities of their fellow men, towards a certain hope for humanity—and how interesting too that the American Civil War was taking place at the same time, this a time where generosities and hopes were particularly important to the ethos of the American Union. It is no surprise then that those writers whose literatures were especially present during that war (Whitman, Melville, Emerson) are ones who today remain so quotable.

The idea of superimposing aesthetics and moral codes of the past over our own is not necessarily a mistake, I don't think. It isn't right as it can unnecessarily open doors to hubris and misrepresentations in art, but deferring completely to one's biography to refute such claims just isn't exciting to me. And to be clear, I'm not saying that Vendler is doing this. She actually is quite fair in her assessment of Williams' book. But I'm interested here in the power of history in literature, current and past. How change occurs in one lens, and doesn't in another.

Emerson talks about the "immobilities" and "absence" of "elasticity" in art in his essay Experience ; later, he talks about time and human equivalence, how five minutes of time today are, no matter what, equal to five minutes of time one hundred years ago. I balked, it's true, at this idea that art is not flexible, and also that time is qualified, well, by time and time alone—not exactly poetic. But if we begin to think of "Guernica" or "Moby Dick," the frameworks remain intact; that five minutes of time when removed from context is still five minutes of time that passes. War provides a framework. Industry provides a framework. Vendler talks in the end about how ethics too, along with variables like landscape, anecdote, and history, is a subordinate factor to the poetry.

I think this is what compels us to presume certain liberties in our American icons. Just as Ginsberg searched the post-industrialized supermarket for the forefather of American poetry in a place as unlikely for Whitman as California, it remains understandable for one of our famed contemporaries to participate in that same imaginative search for the Whitman in our own questionable history.

Nerding Out Fridays

2010-07-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I decided I would commit to reading all of T. S. Eliot's essays; it however occurred to me that my reference point for all of the Spanish tragedies and even Elizabethan tragedies is, how do you say, lacking. It could be that I am not yet of a status where esoteric knowledge comes as a easily as a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Nay, instead, I merely salivate at the D-I-Y magic kits made tantalizing by clever infomercials—or to snuff out this measly metaphor, there is something of a pomp sans circumstance to being limited as a reader. I try and follow, can't, but then find myself furiously underlining an idea regardless, an idea that stands glimmering in its abstract gooeyness. After a diatribe about Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry in the essay "Rhetoric" and Poetic Drama , Eliot says, "At the present time there is a manifest preference for the 'conversational' in poetry—the style of 'direct speech,' opposed to the 'oratorical' and the rhetorical; but if rhetoric is any convention of writing inappropriately applied, this conversational style can and does become a rhetoric—" These moments are head-wrappable, in the sense that this remains applicable to an audience interested in the evolutionary tract of literature, even if that interest comes with a certain lack of resources. One can see that designations of device and even tautologies are malleable, appropriated based on the current temperament of the scene.

For example, a big ass whale will eat a smaller whale, even if the smaller whale is also our idea of the bigger whale (illustration released after the discovery of Leviathan Melvilleis):

If that isn't objective correlative, I don't know what is.

And speaking of temperament, there is nothing quite like waking up and deciding to eschew yesterday's goals and then implanting a new, just as intimidating goal. The new goal is to read Emerson completely, which is a task that comes with a (much) larger archive. All of this, I must remind, has been inspired by Joanna Klink's Raptus which I will refer to ad nauseam until I've completed my research and write a post for already. So I woke up today after really bizarre dreams about stowed-away brothers and their evil pimps, and opened up Emerson's collected essays and poems to Experience, always a favorite anyway. Emerson refers to Labrador spar, a crystalline rock found in the Labrador region of Canada, "which has no luster as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors." And this very important angle, this angle is the individual and cultural milieu, the thing of temperament. And it's also how I feel about Emerson—which isn't to say that he lacks luster until a certain angle, but this is to say that every time I pick him up, my attention is grabbed differently. I look to pencil lines from previous nights of furious scribblings and read a line like "Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it." Sure, that still interests me, but it doesn't have that same immense effect now that "Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in," has about it. I mean, they are saying very similar things there; an objective equivalence is at work (a borrowed phrase from Eliot), with our life as a ship, our sails as trivial.

And we can think about conversational as the rhetorical, and maybe there's a Steinian title-phrase shadowing this idea, Composition as Explanation. So should I feel shameful for not having read Kyd or Nashe or Lyly? Sure. But am I rendered paralyzed by my fissured backlog? I think everyone should keep in mind the symbolic gesture of this Labrador Spar, because I think this becomes the crux to our experience as readers, performers, artists, etc.

Oh, and while I'm at it, here is a brief list of phrases in the first few pages of Experience that stuck in my ribs like whoa:

"Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception."

"In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterward discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass that 'tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue."

"Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in."

"So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours."

"There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth."

"I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature."

"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion."

"From the mountain you see the mountain."

Oh, and I'm starting to expand my blog-knowledge. Check it out. I now have "Gadgets" alike to other cool blogs.

W.S. Mer-WIN!

2010-07-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

W. S. Merwin to be named 17th Poet Laureate of the United States! Breaking from his edenic reclusion of Maui to be our new legislature of the world sounds about as fun as, well, returning to an office job after basking indefinitely in Maui. In a NY Times article, he seemed a mix of reluctant and deprecating when he said, "I can’t keep popping back and forth between here and Washington." And yet, he does relish "being part of something much more public and talking too much." O ye poets, how I love thee wry jabs.

Read more from this article here!

Ode on a Grecian Burn, or The Art of Zing! Editorializing

2010-06-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

While I was in Virginia a few weeks ago, my parents and I stopped by this used bookstore/antique store in Dayton, VA. The beauty to these shops is that, generally speaking, the man behind the counter has no idea the worth of some of the books he's selling. I left with an armload of extremely old and rare books amounting to a total of $4.50, the charming trail of wood pulp following me out the door.

I hadn't yet looked through any of the books until last night. Actually, old books used to utterly creep me out, and one could chalk my, I'll call it, apprehension, up to the obvious reason: that everyone who had anything to do with the book, whether its writing or its production, was super dead. But for me, the whole aura of the book had about it an energy so alive and so potent that it made me feel like the dead one, being so voiceless and out of range of this brand of thinking, this seemingly encyclopedic skill of what I'll call "schoolboyship." But last night, I took out one of my trophy finds, a collection of poems by John Keats called ODE ON A GRECIAN URN, THE EVE OF ST. AGNES AND OTHER POEMS, put out by Riverside Literature Series. Here's what it looks like:

The reason I bought this book in the first place had to do with, not only the fact that John Keats is my number one pilot, but also because my mom mentioned Ode on a Grecian Urn that morning to me as a poem she very much enjoyed, and it was the first time I could remember her talking about poetry with such an informed lightness to her voice. It warmed the cockles of my heart is what it did.

The reason I thought to take it out last night was because I was thinking about Joanna Klink's beautiful collection Raptus, as I had mentioned in my previous post. I was thinking about sentimentality, and Joanna Klink's wild partaking of this ilk; how she is able to write into this tradition of sentimentality without sounding self-parodic or glib; how she is (and this is Keats talking here) "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." I wanted to search for the Keats in Klink, which is undoubtably there, in order to buttress her collection to its deserving height. But before I could get there, before I could do the proper garnering, I read some very funny editorializing which I thought I would share with you, my questionably present readers. (Klink review IS coming, but is nowhere near done.)

The first poem of this book is On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer, one of my favorite poems of all time. I might as well post it, though for shame! if you haven't read it. No no, I forgive you.

ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Now this is all well and good. But this is a very peculiar editor, one whom upheld his anonymity so as to be the infallible voice of the press to which this fine book was bound. After this first poem, there was a note referring to line 11:

"11. That it was Balboa and not Cortez who first saw the Pacific an American schoolboy could have told Keats, but it is not such slips as these that unmake poetry."

For whatever reason, this issued a mighty guffaw from my person, followed by a hearty OH SNAP. Find me that schoolboy of Today's world. I will give him a cookie and a Pulitzer.

MORE TO COME SOON.

HELLO BLOG WORLD!

2010-06-30T13:17:00.000-07:00

Gosh, the first sentence is always the hardest. I suppose by way of introduction, my name's Natalie, and I write, read, and critically review poetry, the latter of which is the hope for this here blog. Now, when I say I "critically review poetry," this means neither that I read poems in some remote area of Upstate New York and brim with utter hatred at the thought—no, gall—of this or that idea, nor does it mean that I believe my opinions are the be-all-end-all of contemporary poetry. Whether flouting or fawning, the purpose of this blog is to investigate the stakes in poetry collections fresh to scene via review and interview.

Since it's Summer '10 and I'm not yet employed thanks to our fledgling economy and my seemingly meaningless MFA-degree, I've been buying a lot of books at St. Mark's Bookstore, the Barnes & Noble at Union Square, and Spoonbill, close enough to my stomping grounds in Brooklyn. (That's right, you read a whole paragraph without knowing that I'm actually Brooklyn scum.) These are some books that I've picked up (and guys, listen, I need to emotionally prepare you—not all these books are poetry collections, okay?), which for now, I'll merely describe in three words, this way it's less likely of sounding like reckless blurbing:

Raptus by Joanna Klink— Kindhearted Crisis Lyric
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson— Vicious Journey Nowhere
Orion You Came And You Took All My Marbles by Kira Henehan— Hardboiled Metaphysical Irony
Mean Free Path by Ben Lerner— Discursive Psychological Redemption

All of these books are brand-spanking new except for Jesus' Son, which admittedly took a while to enter my radar, and an even longer while to actually purchase, and an extremely short while to read. The other three books you should expect to see review posts for in the near future, as I'm sure my minx-y exclamations have made you just short of piss yourself in minx-activated glee over.

Is it weird that I'm totally cool with Google's templates? My limited savviness it seems has exchanged canny sensibilities for complacent approval. One day, poetrydegree.blogspot.com, you will be beautiful.