When I first read Bishop as a young poet, I was dazzled by her perfect syntax and rhythmic modulation, the nearly flawless detail of images. Rereading her as, I would like to think, a mature poet, I am struck by the power of her social conscience. Pity is the underlying feeling she conveys, compassion and a deep feeling for the injustice of privilege. Few of her poems overtly express outrage, but it is very much at the surface with a poem like Pink Dog. It is so clearly about how society at large treats its poor and homeless, wanting them to just dress up and play a part so we don’t have to feel uncomfortable by their presence. But in light of it, I reflected on other, earlier, Bishop poems and realize they do the same thing, such as House Guest. Here is a figure who is forced to live a life not of her own choosing. In that context, the poem concludes,

Can it be that we nourish
one of the Fates in our bosoms?
Clotho, sewing our lives
with a bony little foot
on a borrowed sewing machine,
and our fates will be like hers
and our hems crooked forever?

It recalls Kennedy’s assertion that “freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.” It aligns with what happens in the poem “In the Waiting Room.” The speaker, about to turn seven, realizes her singular self, “you are an Elizabeth,” and this is coeval with realizing she belongs to humanity, “you are one of them.” But this gives rise to countless questions of identity—what does it mean? So the speaker asks,

What similarities—
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts—
held us all together
or made us all just one?

The poem returns, in the end, to its historical (and social) context: World War I.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

Again the poem is located in social issues, constructs. Where do our allegiances lie and why, the poem seems to ask. Or, more importantly, why decide to kill for country or cause when to be you or anyone, well, “nothing stranger/had ever happened, that nothing/stranger could ever happen.” All those running about killing and obsessing over borders and politics and power and land are like Bishop’s sandpiper, lost in the details of a world that is

minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn’t tell you which.
His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!

Her poetry seems to say, take pity on us, on yourself. We are alone, even in the most crowded city. And for those with privilege, even more so, take pity. As the speaker in Manuelzinho says at the end, speaking to his land worker, whom he had looked down on,

You helpless, foolish man,
I love you all I can,
I think. Or do I?
I take off my hat, unpainted
and figurative, to you.
Again I promise to try.

Her poetry or its speakers do not even presume to know themselves fully. They have the humility of realizing that absolute self-knowledge is limited and to presume it is to fall into the same evil as those who presume to any kind of absolute knowledge. Every flawed one of us must humbly struggle to be a better person in whatever station we find ourselves.

First card: Seven of Cups

The Record of Coco Charbonneau

July 25th, 1949, The Black Forest

Sara la Kali, stretch your black wings around me— If I am no one, inscribe me with purpose. If I am someone, speak it to me. I will believe anything you tell me.

My dear, sweet once upon a time….

In The Black Forest, I stand over the man who I’ve hated most in the world, the man who is now bound and gagged at my feet, his balding head bruised by the butt of the MAC-50 semiautomatic pistol that’s pointed at his third eye, and I need to decide whether or not I am a person capable of ending another human life.

I know that I am Coco Charbonneau, nineteen years old, burlesque dancer and fortune teller at Zenith Circus in Paris, but that’s just a dress I wear, and when I take it off, all that’s left is an inscrutable bastard with translucent skin. But I know that most fairy tales begin, I mean really begin, with an interdiction.

I learned this when I was young and my mother told me old Romani folk tales that she learned from her mother. When I say she told me these tales, I mean that she translated them. I am the first generation of my family unable to speak Rromanes, the language of the Romani people. The rest of the world calls us Gypsies, a word that falls from their mouths like a curse. And it’s because of that curse, the world’s hatred and fear of us, that we were forced to run and hide from the Nazi’s purge in these woods and shed our language. Anyone who thinks that Gypsies are nomads because of inner wanderlust is a fool. Nomadism is born from persecution, as ugly as rape and murder, and we’ve been dogged for so long that running has become part of us.

Most Roma keep their language but my mother decided against it as an extra precaution. It’s why I have no soul. Well, one of the reasons. Just in case, I learned some Rromanés at the circus Girard and Sunita.
The man sobs into the gag and the dead leaves softening the ground. It’s the first time I’ve seen him cry and it’s undignified—I enjoyed ripping a strip from the hem of my skirt (a calculated insult) and stuffing it into his mouth. May he choke on my pollution.

Anyone who thinks that Gypsies are nomads because of inner wanderlust is a fool. Nomadism is born from persecution, as ugly as rape and murder, and we’ve been dogged for so long that running has become part of us. Latcho drom. Pray for a safe journey.

Still, I haven’t shot him yet.

The crow is silent in the Norway Spruce boughs above us and won’t give me any more directions. When I asked her if it’s wrong for me to kill a man, even a man of his poor cut and caliber, she said, “There was never a time when I ceased to exist, or you; nor will there come a time when we cease to be.”

He’s sobbing too much, even with the gag, and either he’s shitting his fear or he’s trying to weaken me. Either way, I’m not about to tolerate it. I snap, “Shut up! You think crying will work with me?” He quiets in an instant and his mushy red cheeks slacken as though he never wept at all.

In a proper story, the hero has to disobey before anything changes, good or bad. There is a specific moment when the hero makes a choice that irrevocably spins Sara-la-Kali’s wheel of fate in one direction or another.
When I was a child, my mother taught me drabaripé, the art of fortune telling, which is really the art of reading human nature. She taught me to pin-point that moment of interdiction in my clients’ lives over their palms, cards, or tea cups, and, most importantly, their conversation. Finding that moment became an obsession. Every time I broke a rule as a child—riding our ancient pony, Baxt, when he’s out of humor; touching my lips to the drinking vessel; crying out in pain—I wondered if that was my interdiction, the thing that had set my life on fire. But interdictions really matter. It’s not like when your mother tells you, good Gypsy girls don’t curse (even though that’s bollocks), and then later, when you’re stirring the soup over the fire and the broth spits and scalds your hand, you cry, cock-sucking bastard! because you’re angry and you learned it from your uncle. The worst thing that happens then is the slap your mother gives you. No, I’m here with a pistol in my hand because, for better or for worse, I broke an oath.

I promised myself I wouldn’t wait before shooting him, and yet, I’m holding a cold gun. I’m not afraid of the blood that will pour from his shattered head; I’m not plagued by warmth or nostalgia. My uncle deserves a brutal death. But there is the lingering question over the signs that led me here: I cannot unknow what I read in my cards. Every good teller knows that when you read your own fortune, you fall prey to your own fears and desires—like shadow and light, they throw your vision, flirt with your heart, and spatter the wall with the darker dregs of your mind. The card I drew signifying me, the querent, had this to say on top of it: “The Seven of Cups suggests she is creative, observant, and intuitive, but prone to hallucinogenic fantasy and too indulgent in dreams. When her heart aches or hopes, it aggravates the scorpion within and prods her self-serving nature (her wildness to survive). The scorpion is protective and self-protective, deceptive and self-deceptive, and unable to differentiate between those dreams and reality. If she believes her feelings to be the objective truth, she will make errors in judgment.”

The crow speaks obliquely on these matters, saying, We are infinite, eternal, and whole, and that answers none of my questions. Up on that bough, she looks like an open, bird-shaped door to the cosmos suspended in a boldly blue sky.
*

Jessica Reidy is a writer of part-Romani (Gypsy) heritage from New Hampshire. She earned her MFA in Fiction at Florida State University and a B.A. from Hollins University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart, and has appeared in Narrative Magazine as Short Story of the Week, The Los Angeles Review, Arsenic Lobster, and other journals. She’s a staff-writer and Outreach Editor for for Quail Bell Magazine, Managing Editor for VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, and Art Editor for The Southeast Review. She also teaches creative writing, yoga, and sometimes dance. Jessica is currently working on her first novel set in post-WWII Paris about a half-Romani burlesque dancer and fortune teller of Zenith Circus, who becomes a Nazi hunter.

Note: The first of the three poems below is a continuation of the above excerpt from Zenith — written in the voice of Mina, Coco’s mother and a Romani poet, “Mina the Lotus” is from Zenith‘s book-within-a-book, titled Eating the Midnight Lotus.

Mina the Lotus

A conversation between Mina and Sati Sara, the Romani Goddess of Fate, Time, and Chaos

If, like you say, I am rooted in you
as a lotus is rooted in water,
then where are you, Dark One?
I don’t ask that you tell me
but nothing could live without water this long—

The problem with you, Goddess, is you
only know spirits and mine’s inside a body,
so when you say all of this is an illusion
you speak to my ransacked shell, cracked open
where it matters, so your words trickle out.

I live in Paris, not the Ganges.
Your blood is not the Seine.
I cannot rinse my flesh away
like clay. The virgin
will never rise, cold-petaled, above the fray.

The town I sprung from thinks I’m loose
as sin, but I’m faithful
to your black-mud skin.
Fate must have wanted me damaged
so I don’t know who to blame—
you for forgetting me? Or him for breaking in?

Last night, you brought me to the Jardin du Luxembourg
and golden-black ecstasy from root to crown.
Every fish spouted my blood, red running freely,
drowning in Medici’s lovely insult to the city.

You said, “An arrow only has one target.”
I suppose yours couldn’t find me.
Black Madonna, I hated your power
as a girl because it was the only story I believed in.
The Keeper of Fate; the Keeper of rape.
I didn’t understand that time
is chaos, that time is your crown,
and the red thread noose of birth
and death had severed in your teeth
at the belch of the void.

In my dreams, I wash your feet in Leda’s Hidden Fountain
and make an elixir from your bathwater,
drink it, and die to be inside
you, genatrix of the three worlds,
pour myself out your mouth
where Polyphemus surprises Acis and Galatea.
Then I pray for your strange tongue
to slither out and drink, just to know
you lapping at my root.

Terrible Mother, you let him tear my insides
out the root, even though I prayed
for you to save me or strike me dead
and you did neither:
he split me and my soul rotted out.
It’s how I know you’re not my mother.

After the raping years, my village sent a viper to me:
I wore her poison like a necklace in my attic apartment.
I let her hang from my earlobe by her fangs
and called her pretty
as we looked out the window onto Montmartre.
She took off her skin, all her idea,
to banish the bad blood
and make up for what was done,
even after she sat, airing her fangs
in her basket, waiting for my hand
to drop. That’s when she scented a sister
—both bait in a world that lets that happen.

Now every blood-wet petal
is a scale; my root, a writhing tail.
Even vipers oblige me.

I stripped-off shame and family custom
to be with you. My skin came off next.
I stretched my leather, pegged it
to the earth by four points of desire.
I don’t ask to regrow. Unpetaled,
I am raw in the finery of pain,
pacing naked in the catacombs, parceling
my ego like mala beads, counting
108 heads in your garland
looping like the alphabet around your neck,
looking them straight and naming them one by one
so when you come, you’ll eat them instead of me,
my darkness, my love.

But it’s morning
and there are crows above my bed—
your initials.

When I love you,
I love even the monster of you
and I don’t need to understand.
I count the feathers your crows drop
on the hardwood floor and interpret the sum,
infinitely reading the filigree across my palms
and screaming meaning into it, into your mess, because the universe was made from sound, goddammit, and I will break it
and know it from sound.

I give the feathers water in a bowl.

And it’s true that I’ve given you everything
I have and might have some day. Neither
of us are meant for daylight, but I am
meant for possession. You are meant
for dancing heads off of demons underfoot,
for devouring your worshipers or the egos they offer you,
for abandoning your charges in the name of Fate or Chaos
and refusing to name which.

You let him
empty me
and I haven’t forgotten.

Come into me, let me drink
your water through my root!
Make it up to me—you should
know that’s how love works.

All I have left are 108 crow feathers, one sister viper,
and two fangs in my demon-eater heart.
You’re not the only one with secrets.

I only ask that you love me as I love you.

First Exorcism
When the demon is slain and blood spits to the soil birthing new demons, one for each drop, then I’ll light candles. When the veil falls over my mother’s eyes and she becomes so many unreachable women, one for each silk thread, then I’ll try not to search for her. We are Roma, Gypsies, so when she is diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder and refuses the hospital, we throw a healing ceremony. I don’t tell her it’s an exorcism. Why frighten her? When it’s over, I won’t remember her screaming, “You were raped because you’re a whore.” I won’t remember that her white father pimped her through kindergarten. I’ll only remember that she gave me dimes for each pinecone I collected, that she held me even in madness, that the pine boughs shivered their glass-like blood when touched, and that each mother-self sprang up from the sword.
The Gargoyle Back Scratcher
The woman with calcifying organs is my mother. She scrapes the gargoyle back scratcher along her hard back, again and again, even though it bleeds in places where the skin gives up and cracks. “We used to have wings,” she says, wincing. “We used to have gills.” But her body grows neither. The skin is the largest organ, so her body grows armor, inside and out, so strong it will crumble her with brittle resolve. And what will fall out? Her pearl handgun that we had to hide, her dead father’s collection of child porn, my baby teeth she tried to throw away. She likes the gargoyle’s bulldog face pressing into her palm. She likes when I tell her how gargoyles scare demons away, even though she knows it many times over. She’s had two exorcisms now, but we don’t like to talk about that. She talks to spirits, but I don’t argue because they say nice things. She talks to the Romani Gypsy ancestors from her mother’s side—they say they’re proud that I keep the family trades alive, that I’m a good dancer, and I should keep telling fortunes, even though I could be a professor now if I really worked at it. My mother likes to see me as a new version of an old part of us. She likes to see me as the composite sum of parts of herself that she wished for but could never have. She likes to remember that I collected gargoyles as a child because I was afraid of dolls—she neglects that it’s because they stay still, hard, and silent just like I did beneath my cousins and uncles. They stay dead with eyes wide open, just like she did beneath her father. This our destiny, or chaos, depending on Fate’s humor, she told me. My mother comes at you all at once with darkness: how quickly she’s hardening; how brutally she’s dying; how much she loves me; how many suicides she’s attempted; how little I’ve suffered in comparison; how there is nowhere to go to escape the brain, the hardening, the blood but to crack open into the arms of Death, and Death is the beautiful woman for Roma. She will line her skin with gargoyles and say, “We used to have wings, beauty. We used to have gills.”

Jessica Reidy is a writer of part-Romani (Gypsy) heritage from New Hampshire. She earned her MFA in Fiction at Florida State University and a B.A. from Hollins University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart, and has appeared in Narrative Magazine as Short Story of the Week, The Los Angeles Review, Arsenic Lobster, and other journals. She’s a staff-writer and Outreach Editor for for Quail Bell Magazine, Managing Editor for VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, and Art Editor for The Southeast Review. She also teaches creative writing, yoga, and sometimes dance. Jessica is currently working on her first novel set in post-WWII Paris about a half-Romani burlesque dancer and fortune teller of Zenith Circus, who becomes a Nazi hunter.

Poetry with the kind of intellect that Roger Reeves displays in his debut, King Me, often runs the risk of insularity and in-speak to the point of exclusion: through literary or cultural allusions, technical jargon or prohibitively challenging diction, big-brained poetry often leaves full-hearted readers with too little blood to keep upright. Reeves’ poetry, though, is as emotionally riveting as it is intelligent: an incredibly rare feature in the landscape of contemporary poetics. And it’s this stunning emotional force that keeps Reeves’ poems thoroughly accessible.

Like Whitman’s, Reeves’ project is the very opposite of exclusion, and the means by which he keeps his brain from blocking the reader’s view is by moving his feet expertly among a vast crowd of recognizable witnesses. This is fundamentally a peopled poetry, and the range of people to whom it speaks is rivaled in scope only by the range of people of whom it speaks: Mike Tyson, Vincent Van Gogh, the Wu Tang Clan, Anne Frank, Duchenne de Boulogne, Yosemite Sam, Ernestine “Tiny” Davis, Jack Johnson, Mikhail Bulgakov, Emmett Till, Cher, Charlie Parker, and Mussolini, to name a few.

And yet, this is not poetry rooted in pop-culture—this is poetry as culture, and it refuses to ignore the moral imperative of witness. And not merely the passive “witness” of one who has been present at the scene of a crime (though this poetry is present at the scene of many crimes)—but more importantly the active “witness” of the fire-breathing Pentecostal shrieking life into bones.

“I, Roger Reeves, hereby pledge that I will not come back
to this city, if this city will not come back to me.

I leave the children waving their flags and wrists
at a dark sky, without worrying about the coconut tree
dropping its wintered fruit upon their heads.

I leave the man with his one leg turned backward
to walk this street twice as pure contradiction.

I leave the heron on the roof, the dachshunds
scrambling over the cobblestone in their black
patent-leather shoes, and the flies to open wide

and swallow as much melon as they can before evening comes
and that same melon is between my lips.”

(from “Pledge”)

These poems are charged with swagger and force. The book’s cover, a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, is an appropriate harbinger for the explosiveness of Reeves’ lines, which demonstrate both technical virtuosity and urgent bursts of lyric intensity. Like the iconoclastic painter, Reeves oscillates between the figural and the emotive in such rapid succession as to render the two nearly indistinguishable. Moments of vivid imagery are blurred down the page by a cadence not unlike the dripping of paint from a spray can: evocative of the necessarily primal.

“Father, forgive me
for the moths shrieking in the orchard
of my mouth. Forgive the rattle and clatter
of wings inside the blue of my brain.
Even if these iron bars queer a field,
queer a woman standing too close to a reaper’s blade,
a half-moon hung and wholly harsh,
even if this woman, burdened like a spine
carrying a head and a basket of rocks,
forgets the flaw of a well-sharpened tool,
let her not mistake my whimper and warning
for the honk of a goose in heat.”

(from “Self-Portrait as Vincent Van Gogh in the Asylum at Arles”)

Reeves often deploys dislocation as a means toward location, as though the only way to see a broken world is through vision fractured by the brutalities of history and mended, momentarily, by lyric clarity.

An early poem in the collection, “The Mare of Money,” tells the story of the lynching of Emmett Till, and while the story itself packs all the punch worthy of weeping, Reeves complicates the burden of the narrative by juxtaposing Till’s brutalized body with that of a nearby dead horse:

“She listens to the men’s boots break
the water when they drop a black boy’s body
near her head, then pick him up,
only to let him fall—again,
there: bent and eye-to-eye with her
as though decaying is something
that requires a witness”

A brave poet rooted in the history of his people would tell the story of Till’s lynching; a truly original poet would do it from the perspective of a dead horse. But Reeves does not merely tell the story from the horse’s perspective. He goes further:

“but not this mare;
she does not get the luxury
of a lyric—a song that makes
our own undoing or killing sweet”
In a fractured genius all his own, Reeves removes the speaker into a liminal space both lashed to and by history, powerless against atrocity save the admittedly modest consolation of disembodied witness and the haunted quiver in the speaker’s own testimony.

“They part
here: the boy’s body
carried back to town by another,
as the horse stays, says nothing
because horses don’t speak, besides
this one’s dead.”

The poem itself, then, becomes the only living body through which we can access a reality so grotesque and inescapably true. And while there is no beauty in the historical fact of a black boy’s murder, the poem in this context offers a kind of grace and ghosted beauty pushing out toward resurrection. 

Here and throughout King Me, in poems such as “Some Young Kings” and “Self-Portrait as Ernestine ‘Tiny’ Davis,” not only are the subjects of the poem re-granted the humanity that had once been stripped of them, but poetry itself is affirmed as a capable and necessary medium for this bestowal.

To hear Reeves read these poems live is as visceral an experience as you will find at any poetry reading in the country, and the poems on the page sing themselves into the corners of whatever room they happen upon. It’s difficult not to feel the pulse of gospel truth beating through the lines that trace history and race and gender identity—and it’s with absolute authority that these poems testify to that of which they speak. But if we’re sticking with ecclesial metaphors, it’s important to note that the poems here are less sermons than prayers: never didactic, but rooted in blooded conviction and full-throated oblation, offerings to, yes, God, but more importantly: to God-as-God’s-People, which is to say All People. Which is to say: You, Reader.

A collection as dynamic as King Me poses countless challenges for a reviewer with an eye toward a word count, but none of these challenges proves as daunting as the danger of hyperbolic praise. I want to be frank: this is the most powerful debut I’ve encountered since Shane McCrae’s Mule, which was the most powerful I’d encountered since Richard Siken’s Crush, which was the most powerful since Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa. And the lineage here is not simply a matter of taste: like each of these collections, King Me is endowed with undeniable lyric force, formal vision, unrelenting self-implication and, most astoundingly, redemptive grace. And, like these poets, Roger Reeves has, after just one collection, established himself as an indispensible voice in American poetry.
Notable Poems: Cross Country; The Mare of Money; Shadowboxing Herons; Some Young Kings; Self Portrait as Ernestine “Tiny” Davis; Brief Angel; Someday I’ll Love Roger Reeves

Copper Canyon, 2013
Page Length: 74
Retail: $15

Bradley Harrison is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD student at the University of Missouri. His work can be found in New American Writing, Fugue, New Orleans Review, Forklift Ohio, Best New Poets 2012 and elsewhere. His chapbook, Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012).

Notes from a Time Traveller’s Journal: Wallflower. Mixed media.

Bio:
MANDEM is the art name shared by Maize Arendsee (an art instructor and Studio Art MFA student at Florida State University) and her life-partner, Moco Steinman-Arendsee. Drawing on an academic background in classical mythology, gender studies, and critical theory, MANDEM works across media and materials (painting, assemblage/collage, film, sculpture, and book-making), intentionally destabilizing genre in terms of content and media. MANDEM has received numerous art awards, including Juror’s Merit at the LaGrange National XXVII (2014) and First Place at the FSU Museum of Fine Art Summer Annual Exhibition (2014). While being widely published and nationally exhibited, MANDEM remains actively involved in the Tallahassee art scene. (www.MythpunkArt.com)

Artist Statement:
We are a transdigital artist. Our art is an exercise in categorical violations, simulation, and narrative (translation: we are makers, rule-breakers, tricksters, and storytellers). We work across media and materials: painting, assemblage/collage, film, sculpture, and book-making, and purposefully refuse to discriminate between physical and digital tools. (This is an integration we refer to as “transdigital”). The final products are a union of digital and physical medium such that the two become indistinguishable, and this ambiguity of medium is utterly intentional. This is a both-neither art — a cyborg art — half digital and half organic. Our work intentionally destabilizes genre, both in terms of content and media, an intention born out of personal identity as a queer feminists. We are interested in subtle ways to defy comfortable expectations. Our subject matter is also liminal, often featuring characters of uncertain biological identity (blurring the lines between genders and between humans, animals, and machines), or objects caught between two states of being. We create work that is simultaneously repulsive and beautiful, and I use this uncomfortable dichotomy to pull my audience in to the polyphonic narratives embedded in my work. The work is deeply informed by our academic background in antiquities, mythography, intellectual history, and literary theory — our paintings, assemblages, and films transform the foundational myths and metaphors of Western culture to hint at a new post-postmodern (and quite often post-apocalyptic and post-human) mythos.

The Poem as Archive:
A Conversation Between Carrie Olivia Adams & Kristina Marie Darling

__________________________________________________________________

Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago, where she is a book publicist for the University of Chicago Press, the poetry editor for Black Ocean, and a biscuit maker and whiskey drinker. She is the author of Forty-One Jane Doe’s (book and companion DVD, Ahsahta 2013) and Intervening Absence (Ahsahta 2009) as well as the chapbooks Overture in the Key of F (above/ground press 2013) and A Useless Window (Black Ocean 2006).

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of nearly twenty books, which include Melancholia (An Essay) (Ravenna Press, 2012), Petrarchan (BlazeVOX Books, 2013), and Scorched Altar: Selected Poems and Stories 2007-2014 (BlazeVOX Books, forthcoming). Her awards include fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She was recently selected as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

Carrie Olivia Adams’ first book, Intervening Absence, played with ideas of form. Her second book, Forty-One Jane Doe’s, brought the ideas to praxis: she made films in the hopes of creating immersive companions to the cinematic language of the text.

Throughout, Adams’ work has drawn from the language of mathematics, architecture, medicine, and astrophysics in order to create a hybrid voice—one that troubles the line between observation, objective detail, and the intuition of inference. Her forthcoming book, Operating Theater, moves poems to the stage, creating a poem-cum-play in five acts. 

_________________________________________________________

Kristina Marie Darling: I’ve always admired your work as a poet, particularly the ways your book projects engage archival material. Your most recent collection, Forty-One Jane Doe’s, draws from source material that ranges from the scientific to the sublime. As the book unfolds, treatises on mathematics, astronomical diagrams, and scientific discoveries inform the poems as much as the speakers’ emotional topographies. I’m fascinated by this tension between subjectivity and clinical language: rhetoric that strives for objectivity. Your work places seemingly impersonal discourses in conversation with emotion, affect, and sentiment. It’s often the archival material you’re working with that gives rise to this tension between registers, and between different types of language. With that in mind, I’d love to hear more about your process working with archival material. What role do non-poetic texts play in your creative process? What does this archival material, this presence of other voices and types of language, make possible within your work?

Carrie Olivia Adams:  I am one who has a whole list of things she would like to be other than a poet—detective, spy, physicist, astronomer, zoologist, forensic pathologist, diplomat. I have a whole list of things I wish I had studied: fewer books on books and more books on the making of the world around me. I am completely drawn to things I know very little about. Math feels almost exotic. And yet, equations, in their logic and language, are syntax, which is the most familiar. I love to diagram sentences. I’m also someone with a day job. I am not an academic or a professor, but working in university publishing allows me the chance to brush against ideas, to glean new knowledge in tiny pebbles that I stick in my pockets. Many years ago, when I was at the University of Chicago Press, my cubicle was near the offices of journals of astrophysics, and so when it was quiet I would read what I could, pocketing phrases and ideas.

And so began some of the earliest poems that attempted to incorporate disciplines that were not my own. I wanted very much to get out of my head, out of my very solipsistic skin. And I have often, for reasons both good and very bad, not frequently read a lot of contemporary poetry. Instead, I’ve sunk myself into the very opposite of what I do—indulging in thick, intricate novels and attempting to understand visual perspective through the diction of film angles. I have wanted to write poems that could have dialogues with ideas or modes of expression other than just other poems.

And I want to write poems to someone other than myself. I want poems to be a form of empathy. I don’t want my poems to recount my memories to myself in a dark room. I want them to be something other than me. Though they begin here, I want them to go out and inhabit other bodies and feel other lives. I want the reader to find them to be a companion. And like the best of friends, they listen. Incorporating archival material and found text allows me the best chance to listen—to not speak over, but to get inside and understand. This is perhaps part of the play between the subjective and the objective that you noticde in some of the poems, an intricacy that allows them to both report and question. I hope it’s a place where even things that sound like fact, still have a feeling.

One thing in particular, among many, that I think our work shares in common is an interest in the structures of how information is shared—how both an apprehension and a natural mistrust of the structures used to convey it. I’m thinking specifically of the deconstructive elements of Correspondence, which offer footnotes, appendices, an index, and a glossary as a substitute for a narrative. It opens, in fact, immediately with a subplot,without us ever knowing the plot. These trappings of formal structure like indexes and notes and glossaries are usually used with a voice of authority. But when used alone, that notion is completely undercut. I’m curious about what continues to draw you to these formal forms of organization and the ellipsis of text they imply.

Kristina Marie Darling: I’ve always been intrigued (and troubled) by the hierarchies that we tend to impose upon language. And I’ve always admired the way your work blurs not only textual boundaries, but also the barriers we create between artistic disciplines. I really enjoyed the companion DVD. of original films that accompanies Forty-One Jane Doe’s, and would love to hear more about how you envision the relationship between poetic language and the language of cinema. What does film make possible within your artistic practice?

Carrie Olivia Adams: I originally began to experiment with film during a time when I felt completely overwhelmed by language. I’ve never been an incredibly visual person; in fact, I often feel very spatially impaired. I’m tactile. I hardly ever drive a car because trying to move a body of matter outside myself through physical space is a challenge—how long am I, how wide am I, what space can I take up. In contrast, I love riding my bike because at any moment, I can always put my feet on the ground. Which is all to say that I cannot visualize anything or hold a picture in my mind. I think that I can only recall what specific places in my life look like when I am not in them, because of associations and stories I have made or told about the place. My visual memory is a narrative memory. For many years, I even dreamed mostly in words. Sometimes sentences would fall on me like thin sheets of cotton bunting (the dreams had a texture, if not an image). Last night, I was chasing around a name in my dream; I kept trying to solve it like a puzzle. In my sleep, I wasn’t inhabiting any particular place, but a word kept scratching at me like an intuitive question.

I turned to the camera as a substitute for my weak mind. Here was something that could be an extension of my eye and frame and hold a picture in a way my imagination never could. I started making films about a decade ago, before people were really talking about poem-films. An element was missing from my work, so I went on a quest for vision. Film aided me as a writer to return to and revisit a scene that I otherwise might have lost. New details, new angles, new shadows became apparent to me. My camera conjured what I could not alone.

At the same time, it created another layer of collaboration between me and the reader/viewer. I could offer a companion to the text—not a straightforward retelling or a parallel experience, but a dialogue with the poem. And through this my hope was that the poems would further open out and invite in the audience. I wanted to not only share a world, but to create something more it could envelop.

I think we both have an interest in the architecture of a project. Neither of us creates truly stand-alone poems that are single objects on a page, but we think more along the lines of the sequence and the series, the book as concept and as structure. I’d love to know how that interest in form developed for you, and how you approach and plan a given project. To what extent is the structure an organic outgrowth of the writing process or a formal, strategic foundation already set in place before most of the text has come together?

Kristina Marie Darling: That’s a great question. I think that the sequence, or the book-length poem, opens up a wide range of possibilities for the type of readerly engagement that you describe. When the reader is asked to forge connections between different elements of a book-length project (different literary forms perhaps, or even images and work in other mediums), the text becomes a collaboration between the poet and her audience, allowing them to participate in the process of creating meaning from the work.

For me, the book-length project represents not only a collaboration between the poet and a potential reader, but also, a dialogue between parts of the self or different parts of consciousness. What’s especially intriguing about poem-as-project is that it allows the writer to create juxtapositions (between different forms, voices, and mediums) that are often not possible within the space of a shorter, stand-alone piece. Each of these different modes of representing experience allows for a different way of thinking, a new way of perceiving and processing the world around me. The book-length project allows these various ways of thinking, and vastly different ways of being in the world, to illuminate and complicate one another.

Because the book-length project is a collaborative process, one that affords an opportunity for spontaneity and experimentation, I try not to plan the book beforehand. There are certainly poets who build their books around a given concept. But for me, this forecloses possibilities for dialogue to unfold, and to carry me places I wouldn’t expect it to. I try to allow myself to discover the structure of the project as I create it, to allow order and coherence to emerge from within the work itself.

I think that my investment in the poem-as-book-length-sequence is part of the reason I’m so drawn to your work. I appreciate the fact that your work juxtaposes artistic mediums, and also wildly different archival texts, allowing the extended sequence to become a space for dialogue. And the reader is invited into that conversation as well. The poet becomes, in many ways, a curator of voices and literary forms, the poem a conversation that crosses boundaries between forms, mediums, and individual pieces.

With that in mind, I’d love to hear more about how your role as an editor and curator informs your creative work. Black Ocean presents a unified catalogue of individual collections, but each voice, each text, adds something new to the existing conversation. To what extent is the process of editing a literary press, and building a concise, unified catalogue, similar to constructing a book-length project? How has your practice as an editor opened up new possibilities for your creative work?

Carrie Olivia Adams: That’s such an interesting question. I’ve never thought of Black Ocean’s list as being similar as a way of shaping a larger project, but I think you’ve hit upon something. It’s true that we have a very unified voice or aesthetic across the book list—all of the authors have distinct approaches, and yet there is something very recognizable that makes a book a “Black Ocean book.” And I’m really pleased we’ve been able to achieve that, especially given that the editorial process is extremely collaborative and democratic. Black Ocean publisher Janaka Stucky and I have always worked really closely together to choose books that thrive in the middle space where our fascinations and curiosities overlap. There are definitely poets that I would love to publish, whose work I greatly admire, that will probably never be a part of the Black Ocean catalog because their work falls too far on my side of the aesthetic spectrum. And the same, I’m sure, is true for Janaka. Together, we hope to find and publish poetry collections that excite us both and tap into our individual hopes for what poems can do. And it means that I often publish poets who are engaged in projects completely unlike my own, but that intrigue me because of their difference. The middle ground between us has become a very fertile place that has allowed us to cultivate the Black Ocean aesthetic while challenging our own.

Most of the books that we publish are very closely edited by me in dialogue with the author and Janaka. But I usually wade into the thick of it first, concerned as much with the minutiae as the overall structure. My hope is to get as close to the poems as possible—to understand what their underlying mode of narration, structure, communication, tone, form, etc. is and how to make that clear and consistent across the work. In many ways, the poems should subtly, intuitively guide the reader in how to read them. Each collection has an accent, a dialect, a syntax that is its own; and, my goal is to make this breadcrumb trail available to the reader.

This editorial sensibility is impossible to suppress when working on my poems—which is as helpful as it is detrimental at times. I am the worst at silencing myself. Which is why I often don’t write at all when I am in the midst of editing a work or reading our open submissions. I have to compartmentalize the lives if I am ever going to keep working on my poems, and the only way I’ve found to do that is with the distance of time. There are seasons of the year for writing and there are seasons for sitting quiet.

With Black Ocean, I just finished editing Feng Sun Chen’s second book, which is currently still in search of a final title. When I think of a work that’s a perfect example of something that’s so far away from my own, and that I find incredibly fascinating and invigorating as an author, it’s Feng’s. Her work is messy and visceral and loud and unashamed—as much as my own has the neat-as-a-pin precision of an old maid. But this is what makes her so interesting to edit—to let go and be absorbed into a little bit of chaos. Personally, I am working very slowly on a long project called Daughter of a Tree Farm, which began as an erasure of a memoir of Sofiya Tolstoy. Just like many of my previous sequences, the work blurs the lines between the borrowed text and my own words. It’s been on pause for a few months while I’ve been reading for Black Ocean, and I think that I cannot turn back to it entirely until I read the newly published The Kreutzer Sonata Variations, which translates (for the first time into English) Sofiya’s story that she wrote in response to the The Kreutzer Sonata. In it, she reverses the perspective and tells the story from the wife’s point of view. Exploring her mind and voice a little further seems like a necessary tool to the sympathy of the erasure.

 Photo credit: Cedric Terrell

NOTE: Adele and I started this interview a while back and I never had the chance to post it. Some of the elements refer to her book  as a recent publication.

MT: I first want to comment on what I see as the arc of this collection, What Matters. Memory, in this book, seems like a kind of sacrament: memorializing literally makes real by nature of the act. I’m thinking especially of the line “language…larger than / logic” (“The Sap Bush”). (I’ve chopped that line up, but it seemed so evocative to me that I couldn’t bypass it.) The first section fulfills and meditates on this traditional task of the poet. Then the second section puts that function into crisis—the poet dies (or rather confronts the possibility of her own death). The crisis is (I think), if the memorializer dies, how do those that the poet loves (including herself) continue to exist? This crisis gives birth to the third section, which affirms “We Don’t Forget,” but is admittedly much more subdued (chastened?) in its memorializing. Would you agree with this characterization?

AK: I love that poetry allows for different interpretations of meaning. Your “take” on What Matters is compelling (and I love where you’ve gone with it), but it’s rather different from my own. Memory as the “arc” (or perhaps “ark”) of it all wasn’t quite what I had in mind. Memory does play a role in the “story” (and, yes, the book does tell at least part of a story), but memory in the book’s context isn’t quite what “memorializing” suggests to me. I agree with you that remembering is one of the poet’s tasks. A contemporary poet (I think it was Gerald Stern) once said, “It’s the poet’s job to remember.” Getting back to “memorializing”—I’ve always thought that when we memorialize, we honor the dead (you, know, preserve their memory)—What Matters is a book about survival. Most importantly, it’s a book about the human spirit. It focuses on the fact that we’re all survivors of something: fear, grief, illness, the losses of loved ones. Individual details may be different, but we’re all survivors.

The poems in the first section look at the past and how, even if only peripherally, we are who we were. Those poems set up for section two, which deals with my own breast cancer experience—a confrontation with mortality during which I often “went” to the past, a safe place when nothing else in my life was safe, a place that reminded me what living was about and buttressed the contents of my survival toolbox. The poems in section two are about the conditions of survival—how we meet them and what they cost us. You’re spot on about the second section giving birth to the third, which looks at life as it is and the ways in which the human spirit remembers how to live. There was a definite before, during, and after sensibility when I arranged the poems. You mention  “We Don’t Forget,” did you notice that the last word in that poem (the last poem in the collection) is “rejoice?” That wasn’t by accident.

MT: It’s interesting that you use the word “survival” because that’s exactly what I had in mind when I was thinking about memorializing—only I was thinking about it in terms of helping others into the world, helping them survive their own passing. For me, one of the pleasures of this collection was that it evoked what poetry does so clearly—poetry remembers and, building on the word ‘rejoice,’ celebrates—so it’s really enriching for me as a reader (and poet) to see your own survival and the role these poems played in it. I did notice “rejoice,” but I hadn’t thought about it in the context of the whole book—joy and rejoicing as, in the end, “What matters” or what “We don’t forget” how to do. I see pretty clearly how remembering related to your “survival toolbox,” but can you elaborate more “rejoicing” and its role in your own survival story?

AK: Thanks for your kind words, Micah. It’s so important for poetry to leave enough gaps and silences for readers to fill in the blanks. I hoped that What Matters would offer a message of encouragement and hope while giving readers room to map out their own places in the poems.

No form of survival is ever a “sudden epiphany.” Survival is a slow process, a measured progression that requires nearly impossible determination (read “understatement” here). It’s definitely a spiritual journey—sounds kind of trite, but this trip we call life is about spirit.

For me, and I suspect for many, gratitude is a necessary part of the process. Of course, it’s hard to be grateful when you stand on the edge of crash and burn. One day you’re simply living your life and the next you’re faced with something you didn’t anticipate and aren’t sure you can deal with. It happens to all of us sooner or later, in one way or another. Surviving becomes part of the trek, but it’s a lonely walk no matter how much support you have. Faced with fear, grief, loss, or illness, where do you go? You either give into the darkness of it all, or you look for a way out. Acceptance is part of the way back up—a grace that can lead to gratitude. (Stay with me, I’m working toward rejoicing.) There’s so much for which to be grateful (one more hour, one more day). Learning how to be grateful is another instrument in the survival toolbox. If you can manage gratefulness, you can begin to move away from the damages of what you work to survive. It’s kind of like when the feeling of the subject matter becomes the poem. You remember how to live, you remember what happiness is, and that projects itself backward and forward. Slowly, you begin to rejoice in whatever happiness and love you can find. What do we live for? From the poem:

Grace is acceptance—

 

all of it, whatever is—as

in we live for this: love

and gratitude enough.

MT: This concept of gratitude is important to poems, I think. Who for you are some “poets of gratitude,” poets who embody or maybe model gratitude as a almost poetic mode?

AK: The poet who rushes immediately to mind is Gerald Stern. The first poem of his that I ever read (many years ago) was “Lucky Life.” In that first read, Jerry impressed me as a “grateful” poet, and I don’t think this theme in his work has changed over time. Mary Oliver, who celebrates the natural world with inherent gratitude is one of any number of poets who seem “gratefully typical.” I suspect that the poets who express gratitude most effectively are those who have defined it in themselves and incorporate it into their work as a way of acknowledging and affirming what they’ve been given. Inherent in their poems are generosity, appreciation, and compassion. Another “gratitude poem” that stands out for me is .

MT: Forgive me for bringing in my own poems, but this discussion of gratitude makes me think of a line I’ve been working with in one of my own poems: I call gratitude a kind of vertigo: in part because it feels so depthless. Once you open yourself to it, in a way everything must become gratitude. I’m curious if you had the same experience with it? That somehow learning to be grateful is a kind of release, a radical openness?

AK: I’m so glad you brought your own poems into this “discussion.” I’ve just been listening to you on YouTube, and I’ve read several of your poems online. In your work, which I see as a kind of semi-surrealist/New York School hybrid, there’s a definite sense of gratitude—even your “riff, riff, riff” in the Melville poem, your priests “out in Manhattan,” and those pesky birds in your beard suggest something of gratefulness and praise; and there’s the point I want to make: gratefulness and praise, for me, are part of the same sensibility. It’s about always being open, always being in process—totally depthless, as you note. There’s a profoundly spiritual component when it comes to radical openness and the release it can bring—gratitude follows naturally. That said, I have to believe that emblematic gratitude in any poet’s work is a reflection of the poet’s truest, most generous self. Not all poets go there, and if you don’t feel it, you can’t write it. For me (and I suspect for others as well), craft half-fills the glass, gratitude raises the elixir to the top.

MT: I use the word ‘depthless’ because that is the thing about gratitude (and praise, as you have pointed out): there’s never too much. No matter how many times poets have praised the beauty of the beloved—whatever that might be—it never gets old. Even if poets are doing similar ‘moves’ when they praise. I think this is one of the great lessons of reading poetry from the past: things have changed little and praise never gets old. There is something profound in that recognition, I think—something about the nature of being is revealed there. One artist who really captures this for me is Brian Wilson—from the Beach Boys. When I listen to his album SMILE, it feels like he’s tapped into this endless well of creativity, of joy almost. I also feel the same thing when I listen to Handel or read writers like Horace and Auden. They all seem to go back to that same ontological source. As you pointed out, once you have tapped into this, craft almost seems to become a side issue. Or maybe it would be better to say that craft is transformed? Elevated? As you said, though, there is a radical openness. This is terrifying, isn’t it? You’ve also taught writing for many years, I believe. Obviously this openness isn’t something ‘transferred’ to a student, but in your experience as a teacher, is it something that can be elicited somehow?

AK: The “depthless” quality of the kind you mention is precisely what makes certain poems timeless (Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud,” O’Hara’s “Autobiographica Literaria,” Kinnell’s “Crying”). There are legions of such poems (mega-known and not-so known). Just as the beauty of the beloved and the praise never get old, neither do the poems that celebrate such intense awarenesses; and, yes, I do believe that radical openness transforms and elevates craft. You mention music, and I agree that it’s hard to listen to some composers and not rise to the joy they’ve created (it’s impossible not to “smile” through Brian Wilson’s “Good Vibrations”). Gratitude and praise speak the language of joy, and I think if we read deeply enough, there’s either an inherent sense of gratitude/praise in most poems or a longing for it (which is one of the reasons I love reading about poets as much as I love their poems). BTW, did you know that the setting for Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” was a poem by Schiller?

Yes, I’ve taught for what seems like forever in schools and in private and agency-sponsored workshops, always with a nod to the “elevated mood” of what we call “great” poetry. I can’t say that I’ve ever consciously “lesson-planned” to elicit openness, and I’m not sure if it can be elicited when there isn’t a predisposition to it or a willingness to “go there.” Most importantly, the role of “teacher” is to inspire and encourage writers to try. What really resonates for me is your idea of poets working from the same ontological source. For me, this approaches the spiritual. In poetry’s great conversation with the spirit, there’s a profoundly “mystical” component (not to be mistaken for “religious”) that praises or gives thanks in one way or another. To not be open to that, to miss out on it—now, that would be truly terrifying.

MT: I remember the moment when I first felt like I tapped into that source: I spent much of high school trying to sound like TS Eliot. And I remember writing one night by myself in my room when suddenly I felt (felt!) a kind of hush fall around my room as I finished the lines of a poem. It was a kind of spark but also a satisfied emptiness—like I’d come to some kind of rest. That feeling alone was enough to keep me coming back to poetry for a good 4-5 years. These days I’ve realized that the more you chase it, the less you have its grace in that sense. Anyways, that was a key transition point for me as a writer—where I knew what I was doing had somehow transcended itself, my own (little) artistic Damascus. Did you have an experience like that? A moment when you unexpectedly “tapped in?”

AK: What a wonderful moment, and so interesting that you mention T. S. Eliot. My first experiences with poetry came early: when I was four, I was diagnosed with something called “polio fever” and spent most of that summer in bed. My mom, a great reader who appreciated all kinds of poetry, taught me to read and write using poems by Eugene Field and the Gospel of St. John. She wasn’t a trained teacher, so I have no idea how she managed it but, by the time I got to kindergarten, I was already writing little poems. It wasn’t until high school, however, that I discovered Eliot’s “Four Quartets” and fell in love with poetry that didn’t rhyme and used language in such amazing ways (what I thought of as “mature” poetry at that time). For me, the realization wasn’t that I’d tapped into the “source” but, rather, that I recognized it and wanted to be there. The “tapping in” is an ongoing part of the process. As you expressed it, the more you chase it, the more elusive it becomes. It is definitely both gift and grace when, in writing poetry, you find the “road called straight” and the scales fall from your eyes—that happens from time to time and makes the trek worth its price.

MT: It’s interesting to use the word ‘mature’ to describe writing. Now that you have quite a number of books under your belt, do you feel you can go back and see ways you have matured (or perhaps simply changed)? Were there things that you felt you had to write about that you no longer feel inclined to discuss? Sometimes now when I go back to certain poems of mine, I have a hard time remembering the person who wrote them. I don’t know whether to be sad about that or not.

AK: I make a point of not looking at the “old” books and chapbooks because every time I do I want to tweak and refine the poems in them. I’ve always focused on imagery and sound, but I’ve moved away from primarily narrative poems to, most recently, prose poems that look at the ways in which the spiritual self interacts with the outside world. Earlier on, there were stories that needed telling but, now, having been told, I don’t go back to them and consider them “turned corners” in my life.  As you noted, there are times when I barely remember the person who wrote those poems. Most of the time that’s a good thing.

MT: Which came first—the change in form (to prose) or the change in content (from narrative)? Or was it a kind of organic unity? I guess I’m trying to get at the sense of how an artist navigates a change in his or her art—how the artist senses it and knows to move with it.

AK: Making the leap from lined poems to prose poems was definitely organic, nothing I planned but had been leaning toward for some time. I didn’t consciously navigate a change in art direction, but after finishing What Matters, I went for a long time without writing anything. I’d begun to think that maybe I’d never write again when, finally, I wrote a prose poem. Completely unplanned. There wasn’t any sense of a shift, but I did move with the idea of something new.

When I started to write the prose poems, the process was the same as always. I don’t think about what I’m doing when I begin a poem and, most of the time, I have no idea where a poem might go (sometimes nowhere). Imagery and sound have always been in the same craft-arc for me, that hasn’t changed, but not having to think about line breaks was freeing. After years of writing narrative and lyrical poems, I welcomed something different that can be lyrical or narrative, both or neither. I’m especially drawn to the way prose poems contain complete sentences and intentional fragments, the way they speak the language of dreams, and how they give a nod to the surreal.

At this point, my poems (both lined and prose) have become deliberately shorter—I want them to be more focused and compressed, more seamless and sharper-edged. Now (and I don’t recall ever thinking about this in my earlier work), I want my poems to tell me something bout myself, something I haven’t learned yet, or something I’ve forgotten. I want them to startle and surprise me.

MT: The long poetic silence is terribly frightening for a writer, I think. I went through something similar after getting married and moving to Vancouver. Both my life and life environment changed radically. I also started teaching, which I found took up a lot of my creative energy. During that silence I tried to come to terms with the possibility of not writing again—a kind of dark night of the poetic soul, if you will. It was an almost spiritual confrontation—stripping away false conceptions of my poetic selfhood, what ‘kind’ of writer I was, what it means to love poetry and be ‘poetic.’ It changes your approach to writing. When the poetry did return, I found I was writing more consciously formal poems. I’m not sure why that was, but the structures gave me more confidence—especially since I felt ‘out of practice.’ I also felt, though, that there was a maturity I didn’t have before, that I had gone to a new depth. It’s interesting then that you describe your own shift after not writing as wanting poems that tell you something about yourself—they’re more searching, piercing, perhaps. Do you feel like you’ve stripped something away? Gotten to something more ‘essential?’

AK: “Spiritual confrontation” is a great term for the almost–panicky feeling of poetic silence and the challenge it presents. Like you, there was a time when I worked full-time and had concurrent part-time jobs, and all the commitments of daily life. There wasn’t a lot of time or energy for poetry. When I did have time, the muse was often absent, so I started to write nonfiction for journals related to teaching and for conservation and ecology magazines—something like you turning to formal poems except that what I wrote didn’t requite the intense concentration and need for long expanses of uninterrupted time that poetry requires (it’s easier for me to put a piece of nonfiction aside and come back to it later, than it is to “suspend” a poem). What I learned is that I can write poetry without needing prose, but I can’t write prose without needing poetry. There have been a few times when I seriously thought I’d just give it up, and did for brief periods, but I could never make it stick. Even when I’m not writing a poem (which is too often), I think about writing one.

As I’ve gotten older, my creative priorities have changed—the need for approval tossed out of the ring. I used to care tremendously about what people thought of my work. That’s changed. I’ve recognized writing poetry as the spiritual process it’s always been for me—what you call “poetic selfhood.” The need for approval has segued into a need for my poems to mean more than they say, for the poems to offer spaces and gaps for readers to fill in,  for whatever is personal in the language to speak and to be understood in more voices than my own. When I first started sending poems to journals, there was a lot of personal, narrative poetry in vogue, and I conformed to that. Now, it’s not about telling my story, it’s more about telling a story that will have meaning for others along with, and other than, me. Like all changes—essential, yes, fundamental and necessary.

MT: Sadly, I find myself dreaming about the time when I will really stop caring about what others think of my poetry. Can you tell me more about that freedom? Was there any way that you achieved it? Or did it just come with experience?

AK: Maybe a combination of age and experience? I’m not really sure. It was definitely sparked by many years of studying New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton in which Merton wrote “Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves.” He went on to write, “If you write for God you will reach many men [and women] and bring them joy. If you write for men [and women]—you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write only for yourself you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted you will wish that you were dead.”

MT: This reminds me of something Joe Weil once told me about medieval artists: when painting or decorating a cathedral, they saved their best (most holy?) work for corners nobody else would ever see. It also reminds me of the scholastic distinction between ‘making’ and ‘doing.’ Doing is the realm of “Prudence,” which, as Maritain says, “has for its matter the multitude of needs and circumstances and traffickings in which human anxiety flounders about.” This is the world of writing for others, a kind of constant reflexivity, this is Maria Gillan’s infamous “crow” that caws at poetic instinct. On the other hand, you have “making”—the true realm of art, concerned purely with the truth of the creation itself. Its mode is human, but, as Maritain again says “there is for Art but one law, the exigencies and the good of the work. Hence the tyrannical and absorbing power of Art, and also its astonishing power of soothing; it delivers one from the human; it establishes the artifex—artist or artisan—in a world apart, closed, limited, absolute, in which he puts the energy and intelligence of his manhood at the service of a thing which he makes. This is true of all art; the ennui of living and willing, ceases at the door of every workshop.” I think this is really why ancients spoke about art as a kind of possession (i.e., inspiration) because there is really a sense in which the artist is in the service of something other. Yet we still speak of an artistic identity. To what extent does an artist serve two masters?

AK: This all reminds me of the difference between process and product and how some artists live in service to the things they make. But … does the product serve as arbiter of the process quality? What is the ultimate good of the work? Which is the greater truth, the process of creating or the product created?

It’s the old dilemma of two masters. The scripture reference in your question is apt. Of course, St. Matthew is talking about serving God or money (mammon) in Matthew 6:24, but to take the quote further, “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.” (Nemo potest duobus dominis servire: aut enim unum odio habebit, et alterum diliget: aut unum sustinebit, et alterum contemnet.)The question is, “Which master does the individual artist serve, the creative process or the thing that he or she creates?” I suspect that some artists manage to do both, but there has to be a preference—spend time in the process of creation, or sit back and admire what you created (“the good of the work”)? I suppose it all comes down to individual responses to the creative experience, what the artist names as his or her priority and what he or she wants to possess more—the ability to create or the created thing. This all kind of begs the question of ego (and goodness knows we see enough of that in Poetryland). I can imagine the medieval artisans Joe told you about, how they created with the highest intention and made sure their work would only be seen by God—storing up their “treasures” for heaven.  I suspect that all artists are in the service of “something other,” how they define it (artistic identity) is entirely personal (unless, of course, it’s defined by the public, and that’s another (smelly) “kettle of fish”).

MT: I wonder if we might conclude our discussion by looking at two of your poems—one from an earlier era and one of your newer prose poems. Could you share one or  two poems and comment on how your evolving sense of poetics shaped the craft choices you made in those poems?

AK: Here are two poems, one written when I was 6 or 7 years old and the other from A Lightness, A Thirst, or Nothing At All (the prose poems collection, forthcoming in 2014 from Welcome Rain Publishers).

Today

Today I threw my poems away.

They didn’t say what poems should say.

Maybe someday I’ll write a book.

But Look! I reach my hand up to the sky

and touch the place where sparrows fly.

(1955)

_______________________

What Calls You

Back then I wasn’t sure what calling meant. I thought something mystical—God’s hand on my arm, a divine voice speaking my name. Instead, I discovered the colors of cyclamen, how even the meanest weeds burst into bloom.

It works like this—among the books and fires—grace comes disguised as the winter finch, its beak in the seed; the twilight opossum that feeds on scraps—her babies born beneath my neighbor’s shed. Every day, I learn what love is: the finches, the opossum, the child with Down Syndrome who asked, Can I hug you a hundred times?

Whatever idea I had of myself turns on this: what lives on breath is spirit. I discover the power of simple places—silence—the desire to become nothing.

(2013)

_____________________

Sheesh! Am I still writing the same poem? I wonder if, perhaps, a lot of us do that in one way or another?

Apart from recognizing a strong sense of the Divine and an incorporation of human nature into the natural world, I can’t say that I’ve ever consciously thought about an evolving sense of poetics or deliberate craft choices. Auden said that a poem should be more interesting than anything that might be said about it. I’ve never been big on analyzing anything. For me, poetry is best when it’s “discovered” rather than written. I admire certain poems for their technique, for their music, and for the brilliance of their language. But those qualities fall short if a poem doesn’t have a strong “spirit center.” By “spirit center” I mean what we discover about ourselves and about others when we read a poem. If a poem is cleverly constructed or contrived, if it does linguistic handsprings, and if its meaning becomes subordinate to form, it may attract attention (especially if that sort of thing happens to be trendy at the moment), but what a poem lets us see, what we find out about ourselves and others because of that poem, and the ways in which a poem tells us that we’re not alone—these are “what matters” to me.

Thanks so much for this interview, Micah, and my sincerest congrats on Whale of Desire—a must-read spiritual and artistic tour de force!

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of twenty books, which include Melancholia (An Essay) (Ravenna Press, 2012), Petrarchan (BlazeVOX Books, 2013), and Scorched Altar: Selected Poems and Stories 2007-2014 (BlazeVOX Books, 2014). Her awards include fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She was recently selected as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

SL: Reading The Sun and the Moon is a bit like dreaming to a beautiful and haunting soundtrack. The book makes use of incantation, repetition, iteration and reiteration to create a mysterious and ceremonial solemnity. And then there’s the celestial bodies which inhabit the narrative, not to mention the astronomical clocks looming over everything. Can you talk about the etymology of this book, and how it might relate to astronomy, dreams, music, or the supernatural?

KMD: That’s a great question. I’m very interested in relationships that are haunted: by the past, by landscapes, and by one’s own imagination. The Sun & the Moon is essentially a love story, one that’s haunted by celestial bodies. The book takes the astronomical clock as its central metaphor, depicting astral bodies that are forever orbiting one another, and forever distant from one another. Their union is haunted by a sky filled with debris and dead stars, the remnants of what once was a burst of light.

 
In its own strange way, the book is very autobiographical. I believe that poetry can be autobiographical, and deeply personal, yet still imaginative, unruly, and strange. For me, creating an imaginary world like the one found in The Sun & the Moon is almost more personal than writing down what actually “happened,” since the reader sees and experiences what (for me) was the emotional truth. After all, there is no objective truth to be had, not even for scientists.

 
SL: I very much agree – the notion of the “personal” is so much roomier than that of the “confessional.” I’m fascinated by the poems from The Other City, which I am pleased to be publishing in a future issue of Posit. They seem to address an ‘other’ version of what might be considered ‘ordinary’ reality: weddings, elementary school, daily civic life, etc. I also love the prose poems which you recently published in The Tupelo Quarterly, from The Arctic Circle. Can you tell us a bit about those collections, and when and where we might get the chance to read them?

 
KMD: Thank you for the kind words about my new poems! The Other City is still a work in progress. The poems are a bit different from my previous work, since they use sound to forge connections between ideas and images within the text, and essentially to create narrative continuity. I think of them as an engagement with Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, as well as the work of more contemporary writers: Hanna Andrews, Thalia Field, and Inger Christensen. A couple of the poems are forthcoming in Laurel Review, and I’m thrilled to have several pieces in Posit. I hope to have the manuscript ready to send out by the end of the year.
And The Arctic Circle was just released by BlazeVOX Books. In this collection, you’ll find a newly minted wife, the ghost of another wife, and a man whose true love was found frozen inside his house. I hope you’ll check it out! It’s perfect for Halloween, after all.

 
SL: I will, absolutely! Speaking of ghosts, a distinctive feature of your poetry is the integration of sentimental iconography with intimations of destruction. Darkness and light seem interdependent, and bridal imagery, fire, and ice appear repeatedly. Can you talk about what informs your poetic vision, and the thematic and/or formal continuity between your works?

 
KMD: I’ve always been intrigued by representations of romantic love, particularly the ways they often blur into cliché. Because certain types of images (bouquets, lockets, love notes) appear so frequently in very bad poetry, we stop seeing just how odd, how disconcerting they are. I love taking those same images, that same iconography, and making the reader see how strange it all is. For me, poetry is also an archival practice, an effort to excavate strange, disconcerting, or otherwise otherworldly material culture from a buried past.

 
SL: All of the works we’ve discussed are written in different configurations of prose. What draws you to prose poetics? Does it present you with any limitations, and do you ever write lineated verse?

 
KMD: I love prose poetry because if the reader sees a paragraph, they immediately have ideas about what the text will be like. These readerly expectations are material, which I can use to surprise them. For me, there’s nothing better than working against the reader’s expectations of what’s possible within a text, and making them question their ideas about poetry, prose, and everything in between. So much of the time, we impose limitations on a text based on its appearance, its form, before we’ve even started reading. I think of prose poetry as an opportunity to foster more open minded reading practices, to show the reader that anything is possible within a literary text.

 
SL: Can you tell us a bit about your astounding productivity?

 
KMD: When I start writing a book, it literally takes over my life. I can’t rest until the project is completed. I think this is mostly because I work in longer projects, with each book orbiting around a different idea or stylistic preoccupation. This makes it easier to fall into a particular project, since there’s almost always a little white thread I can follow through the dark corridors and endless staircases. If I worked on the level of the individual poem, though, I’d probably be halfway through writing my first book. The idea of starting over with each poem frightens me, maybe even more than the unruly sky in my newest collection.

 
SL: That is very interesting. It’s hard to imagine any creative process frightening you! In addition to your daunting creative output, I understand that you are working on your PhD. Can you tell us about your scholarship?

 
KMD: I’m so glad you asked about my scholarship! I’m working on a dissertation that examines representations of philosophical discourses in modernist women’s writing. I’m particularly interested in the ways that these female writers use form and technique to comment on, question, and revise arguments presented by male philosophers. It’s fascinating to see these women reclaiming agency over a predominantly male discourse. This scholarly work has really come to influence my teaching, as I frequently tell my students that the smallest decisions within a poem (a line break, a bit of alliteration, etc.) can make an ambitious philosophical claim. What’s more, this can be done without presenting the argument in the content of the work itself. The project engages the work of Marianne Moore, Nancy Cunard, H.D., Lorine Niedecker, Gertrude Stein, and Mina Loy, as well as philosophical writings by Freud, William James, Karl Marx, and Henri Bergson.

 
SL: That sounds exciting, and obviously relevant to your own literary creations. How much does your scholarship affect your poetry? How disparate are the mindsets you access to write in the two modes?

 
KMD: For me, poetry is a scholarly form of writing. I think every poem as an act of deconstruction, a response to literary works that came before one’s own. Marianne Moore coined the term “conversity” to describe poetry as a conversation — with tradition, with other poets, and with other ways of being in the world. I think there’s definitely something right about her worldview. Poetry offers the opportunity to not only comment on literary tradition, but to simultaneously inhabit and revise it.

 
SL: Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and process!
_______________________________
Susan Lewis lives in New York City and edits Posit (www.positjournal.com). Her most recent books are This Visit (BlazeVOX [books], 2015), How to Be Another (Červená Barva Press, 2014), and State of the Union (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2014). Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in such places as The Awl, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Dusie, EOAGH, Gargoyle, Otoliths, Ping Pong, Propeller, Raritan, Seneca Review, and Verse. More at www.susanlewis.net.

That Crumpled

It was a tryst.  It was a trip.
Difficult fiction.  Certain collapse.

I do this all the time.

Collapsed.  Back together.
No stable structure.

I collapsed.  I collapse.
No one was hurt.

But I had to collapse.

 
Slow Return

It was a tryst with a woman,
supposedly.

It was a rush,
maybe.

It had tunnels that led
from inside out into,
probably.

This is clad in lore and embellishment,
but the facade tumbled along that long,
long road—two kids, partner, furniture,
mementos in storage. I collapsed.
They did, too.

The façade.
This façade.

I had to be rebuilt from the ground up,
and while portions could be saved
almost everything else had to be
reconstructed.

Closed for so many years,
sleepy,
vanishing,
nobody.

Now, bare, I move,
I know what’s happening
downstairs.

There are windows!

A door.
Life.
Magic.

People want that.

[FROM: “Slow Return for a Former Speakeasy That Crumpled,” by Elizabeth A. Harris, .

Temptation

I’m here, ever-
present.  Pulling hard,

I resisted,
but gave in.

The first change
was to use the word:

You.

Succumb To

I’m here
to persuade you.

The urge, pulling
hard.

I resisted, but
couldn’t.

I gave in
to the filling

up, the fallen under,
the spiked craving.

The half-tender,
perfect: if.

You could.
You don’t want to.

You could.
You want to.

[FROM: “You Can Succumb to a Sticky Temptation,” by Melissa Clark, .

Heather Aimee O’Neill teaches creative writing at CUNY Hunter College and is the Assistant Director of the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. Her most recent collection of poetry, Obliterations, is co-authored with Jessica Piazza and forthcoming by Red Hen Press. Her poetry chapbook Memory Future won the Gold Line Press 2011 Chapbook Award and an excerpt from her novel When The Lights Go On Again was published as a chapbook by Wallflower Press in 2013. Her work has been shortlisted for the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner-Wisdom Award and has appeared in numerous literary journals. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her two sons.

Jessica Piazza is the author of two full-length poetry collections published by Red Hen Press: Interrobang–winner of the AROHO 2011 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize and the 2013 Balcones Poetry Prize – and Obliterations (with Heather Aimee O’Neill, forthcoming). She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and is currently a contributing editor for The Offending Adam and a screener for the National Poetry Series. She co-founded Bat City Review in Austin, TX, Gold Line Press in Los Angeles and Speakeasy Poetry Series in New York City. She teaches for the Writing Program at USC and the online MFA program at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. Learn more at www.jessicapiazza.com.

Arielle Greenberg is author of the forthcoming poetry collection Slice and the creative nonfiction book Locally Made Panties, as well as the previous poetry books My Kafka Century and Given, and the chapbooks Shake Her and Fa(r)ther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials. She is co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of Home/Birth: A Poemic, and co-editor of three anthologies: most recently, with Lara Glenum, Gurlesque. She writes a regular column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review, and her poems and essays have been widely anthologized. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship and a Saltonstall Individual Artist Grant. A former tenured professor in poetry at Columbia College Chicago, she now lives in Maine and teaches in the community and in Oregon State University-Cascades’ MFA.

I dig Arielle’s perspective on poetics, feminism, sexuality, art, and life in general, so I asked her to come hang in my Infoxicated Corner and chat a little. She graciously agreed to share her light with us.

Fox: I’m really excited to start off this conversation with my newfound knowledge that you were a Binghamton University (SUNY Bing) undergraduate English major — which I was, too — and that you spent some time moving around New York State and New York City in the 1990s. As someone who went through adolescence in the 90s, I feel it shaped a lot of my creative impulses. I also definitely feel that my years spent living in upstate New York and in New York City shaped my aesthetics and worldview, as well. (To be really real about it, I am obsessed with 90s culture and also with New York as my homeland, ha.) I’m curious to know how (if at all) being in New York in the 90s shaped your writing, your thoughts on poetry/art/music, etc.

Arielle: I just saw online that you are a Binghamton alum! That’s crazy! I was only there my first year before transferring to SUNY Purchase, the state system’s one school with a conservatory arts program—and how I ended up at Binghamton and came to leave is a long story that involves issues of class and gender that I know interest us both, but which I’m not sure we need to go into right now. But yes: I grew up in upstate New York, in Schenectady, from 1979 until I left for college in 1990, and then was near and in NYC from 1991-1998, until I left for graduate school back upstate at Syracuse.

I am likewise obsessed with 90s culture, though it’d be fascinating to compare notes on this: my obsession is as a Gen Xer, and is all about 1988-1996 or so, when I was a teenager and young adult, and has to do with my introduction to the punk subculture and my eventual involvement with zines and riot grrl. I feel incredibly fortunate to have been in college–and to have been a college radio station DJ (and station manager) at a really cool school—from 1990-1993, and to have had access to the NYC music scene during “the year that punk broke.” It was kind of like being a 19 year old who got to go to Woodstock, I think. (Which is another subculture that was formative for me, albeit vicariously: I was already obsessed with the hippie counterculture of the 60s when, in 1989, there was a ton of Woodstock anniversary nostalgia and resulting media.)

Anyway, yeah: it would take me pages to describe all the ways that New York and the 90s shaped me as a person, but here’s a shorthand version, a list:
– One of the first and best friends I made at Binghamton during Freshman Orientation was Theda, who, like me, was into cinema. We took our first feminist theory film course together. She introduced me to underground comics like Love and Rockets; underground comics became a big thing for me. She’s now a cameraperson in Hollywood, I think.
– Another friend at Binghamton, Janna, turned me on to the proto-riot grrl 70s punk band the X-Ray Spex, which became huge for me. Janna’s now an artist.
– Yet another Binghamton friend, Carley Moore, who was also my roommate, was a poet, and we had one of our first readings together. I feel like we pushed each other to be weirder in our work. She’s still a poet and writer, with an MFA.
– At Purchase, I met a ton more amazing artists and freaks and had incredible professors, all of whom who helped me discover things like conceptual art, book arts, performance art, installation work, Fluxus, French New Wave film, and on and on. I also started really collaborating there: I wrote a performance piece for which I “hired” a student artist to make the sets and another to provide live musical accompaniment; I made a feminist zine with my friend Heather (now an artist and art librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill); I wrote text for an installation artist’s work.
– I took courses in feminist theory, reproductive rights, film studies, performance art, etc. I took out library books on all these subjects, wrote papers about the figure of the tragic whore and the crazy woman, learned about Kathy Acker and Annie Sprinkle. This was the era of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon feminism, and many of my friends were on board with those ideas, but I knew I wasn’t, and when I started my own zine and started identifying as a riot grrl, I knew I wanted to differentiate myself by being sex positive, though I’m not sure that was a term that was around or that I had access to at the time. I wrote a pro-porn manifesto in my feminist zine.
– My boyfriend in the late 80s and early 90s was a total music and film hipster, and through him, I got into a lot of more obscure music and movies, and went to see a ton of concerts. We saw Jane’s Addiction, Sonic Youth, Siouxie and the Banshees, the Raincoats, Blur—just a ton of interesting bands, and a lot of lesser-known bands too. The music itself was influential, but also just being part of that scene and meeting other kids at shows was fascinating.
– I was part of queer communities for the first time back then: a close friend came out in high school, and then many of my friends came out during college. It sometimes felt like everyone I knew was queer, and that was delightful to me. I marched with ACT-UP at the pro-choice rally in Washington in 1992. Being part of all that informed my ongoing interest in alternative sexualities, and in activism, and in community-building. I was part of other collectives, too: women’s groups and food co-ops and group living situations and such. This kind of communal work and living has stayed vital for me.

There are a million more ways that being in New York and among all these peers and instructors and culture informed me, but these are some of them.

F: I find it so endearing and awesome that you wrote a pro-porn manifesto in the 90s; I was, by the mid-90s, just entering adolescence and also just starting to get my feet wet reading feminist theory. I remember feeling at odds with a lot of the prevalent tone about sexuality, but my sexuality was also pretty new to me at that point in time, and I had the slightly prideful, slightly frightened, mostly awkward sense that my own feelings of sexual agency were anomalous in the greater context of feminism. I was excited by both sex and feminism, and I was torn about whether I was allowed to “be part of” both in the way that I wanted to. I remember feeling very validated in reading The Feminine Mystique when I was 15, when I got to the part in which Betty Friedan used research to support the idea that confident, empowered women frequently saw sex as more of a fun, playful activity than their gender-traditional counterparts, who saw it as something unpleasant or fearful. I was not “sexually active” at that point in time, but like all teenagers, I was certainly engaging in some sexual behaviors. I remember thinking vaguely, when I read that book, This means there’s hope for me. I can be a feminist and like sexy stuff, too. It’s OK if I feel like I’m in charge and it’s a fun game. At that point in time, I had some reservations about when I would decide to have sex, because I was scared that the ‘fun’ feeling of making out and such would somehow be taken away — so much of the conversation I was hearing about sex had to do with the idea that there was an almost inherent violence and aggression built into the act, and I was afraid it would change everything. I found those ideas terrifying, and I felt I was also maybe missing something or unable to understand them fully, somehow. So, I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about how you perceive sex-positivity in the 90s, and how its relationship to feminism may have grown or changed since then? Do you see this fitting into poetry in any interesting or promising ways?

A: Again, I don’t think I knew the term “sex positive” in the 90s, but I knew that the anti-sex feminism of the Dworkin/MacKinnon camp was not what I wanted for myself, and that there had to be another way. There was a lyric from a Jane’s Addiction song back in the 80s, “Sex is violent,” and a punk girl in my high school wrote on the bathroom walls. I remember thinking, what option does that leave for me, as someone who wants to have sex? Because I did: I wanted to have sex that felt good and interesting and fun. I also liked the idea of porn–I came into contact with very little actual porn, but I did like erotica–and I identified very much as a sexual being. My belief was that of course there is inherent power in being seen as sexually attractive, and that one can wield that power: I saw the models in my father’s 1970s and 80s issues of Playboy, for example, as holding power over their viewer, over the male gaze. I know that’s a reductive reading, but I still do believe an element of that. I mean, I believe that we all engage in power exchanges in almost every transaction we have with other humans over the course of the day: I wish there was no shame in naming and owning that some of that power has to do with sexual desire and attention. It’s an aspect of the human experience: a problematic, complicated, fraught aspect, but nonetheless, it’s not going away, so I’d rather work within that system that try to deny its existence.

But in the 80s and 90s, I felt rather alone in thinking these things as a feminist; it wasn’t until I read about Annie Sprinkle through my performance art research as an undergrad that I found a model for sex positive feminism. It’s also only recently that I’ve developed an alternative, sex positive lens by which to view the idea that sex is violence: that there can be a kind of cathartic, consensual, primal and fierce erotic physicality which can be a joyful, negotiated, beautiful and sane expression of loving violence. “Violence” has only negative connotations in our language, and I don’t mean it that way here, but what other word is there to use? Sometimes humans like to hurt other humans, and sometimes other humans like to be hurt: not just in sex, but in various athletic competitions, in dancing, in play-fighting. As long as that is done safely and consensually, hurray for expressions of our animal selves!

Recently, I’ve heard other feminists around my age—queer women, sex workers, non-monogamous folks—talk about how they, too, felt rather lonely and isolated in their sex positive beliefs during the late 80s and early 90s. The era certainly had a very specific predatory tone, and women’s sexual agency was under massive critical attack in the mainstream culture, by way of things like the reproductive rights wars, the Bill Clinton scandals, the Anita Hill case and the hoopla over Murphy Brown, for starters. In that sense, it was a hard time to be a sex positive feminist.

I’m amazed at what’s happened in just the last few years. My sense is that all the work being done among young queers, trans people, sex educators, sex workers and others has had an enormous, fantastic impact on growing the sex positive movement. From what I can tell, there is much more varied and active discourse about it now, from academic forums to social media.

I’m still waiting to see how this is getting refracted through contemporary poetics. Because of my interest in gender and sexuality, and my own current project of pornographic pastoral poems, I’ve been on the lookout for work of sex positive erotic writing by women, and there’s not all that much. Most of the sexually explicit work is telling the necessary stories of trauma and abuse; there’s not much of pleasure or agency. This is of course a reflection of the rape culture in which we live, but I am trying myself to write into that void and to encourage others to do the same when possible.

F: Tell me a little bit about your life/trajectory as a professional poet. For me, there’s such a difficult rift that everyone has to build her own bridge or raft across, between the poetic impulse/consciousness/talent and the business of being a poet anywhere (particularly, though, in New York). Did you always know you were a poet? Did you always know you wanted to pursue that professionally?

A: Yes, I’ve been a writer since I was very young. I was a reader first, and early, and out of that I organically became a writer. I was fantasizing about being published and winning literary awards and such when I was a young girl. I grew up on Anne Frank, which is a loaded and complicated literary legacy for a little Jewish girl. She’s so famous! She’s so tragic! She’s so dead!). Sylvia Plath, who wrote a book with my name on the spine (that’s my original spelling) which my mother kept in our house, only furthered those notions. But from the time I was very little—like, 8 or 9 years old—I was being praised and noticed for what I wrote. I liked being praised and noticed, and I loved language, so I kept doing it. I also was fortunate that the poet Lyn Lifshin lived in my town, and was an early instructor and mentor to me; she was very encouraging and took me seriously. I won some awards for writing by middle school, and published in literary magazines in high school.

I’d say I’m a career-minded person: by nature, I’m responsible, hard-working, pragmatic. This is maybe an unusual temperament for a poet, but that’s who I am. So there was never a time when I didn’t approach this stuff with some measure of drive and perseverance. That said, because I’m so practical, I put my writing on the back burner for much of my 20s, because I had to work to pay my bills. It took awhile for me to feel like I could risk focusing on art-making as a career.

F: Your ideas on aesthetics are really interesting to me, especially because of all the contradictions and nuances they’re able to hold, with their arms full — your essay on the Gurlesque made such an impact on me that when Ricochet Editions, the press I co-founded and co-run, decided to pursue my idea for Among Margins [an anthology of innovative critical writing on aesthetics], we knew right away that we wanted your voice to be included in the project. Can you tell me a little bit about your identity as a scholar? Did you always imagine yourself living an academic life — or maybe a more publicly-intellectual variation of an academic life? What drew you to scholarship? What keeps you there?

A: For one thing, my father is an academic: he’s an experimental psychologist, which means he does research that doesn’t necessarily have immediately practical applications. So I grew up thinking that academia was a good job that paid the bills (though without much left over)—if you like to teach, which both my father and I love to do—and also the notion that you could spend your time thinking through rather abstract concepts.

You know, I am not sure if I would say I’m a scholar first and poet second, or the other way around. Thinking through big ideas (and writing about them in critical prose) has always been as vital to me as writing about them in poetry; they are the dual, and twinned, ways I approach making sense of my world and culture and self. There is really nothing I love more than ideas—or maybe I’d say I love language and ideas equally. And it’s just how I think: I think macro. For example, I’m in a women’s group where I’ve gotten some flack for often trying to shift a conversation about someone’s individual struggle into a discussion about the patriarchy or about body image: some of the members feel this is too much, and too “academic.” Yes, I’m an academic, but I’d think this way whether or not I held a teaching position. I have always thought this way. I like looking at the big picture stuff: at systems, at context, at intersections.

I love the idea of a public intellectual. As a teenager, I was really inspired by reading Joan Didion and Susan Sontag: I loved that they felt free and brave enough to write about anything they liked, regardless of discipline or genre or academic training. And they wrote for a broad audience, but did so with fierce intelligence. Later I read bell hooks and felt the same about her. These women rock my world, and I think about them as models for my own career quite often. I worry that the specialization and professionalization of graduate study has made it less possible for the public intellectual to exist. I want to write about my ideas about sexual fetishists, for example—I think I have some interesting theories. But I have no formal training in sexology and hold no degrees or credentials in it. Does that mean I can’t write about it? Who is “allowed” to have an idea and put it out there these days? And what about all the not-so-smart stuff out there, the reactionary and simplistic self-help stuff, that gets published by people with credentials? I fret about this sometimes.

F: I think, for me, there’s a lot of stress on who’s ‘allowed’ to say what in the public sphere. The internet can get awfully scream-y about such matters, and while I find that very off-putting and discouraging, I think it’s important to challenge the idea that only certain people — ‘credentialed’ people, in many instances — are ‘allowed’ to put forth certain ideas on certain matters. I’m particularly sensitive to this lately in terms of class. As someone who’s pretty immersed in academia right now, I feel frequently that I’m staring into a room filled with ‘educated,’ credentialed people who are very privileged to be part of an educated class. The way they speak to about about people of other classes, as though their viewpoints and life experiences and opinions are inherently worth less or are less informed, is a huge point of contention for me. I see it as ignoring one’s own privilege and using that privilege as a means of dismissing and discounting others, or being condescending to them — while simultaneously writing articles that decry the abuse of other types of privilege. This gets tricky, too, because it frequently blurs the lines of socioeconomic demarcation. You can come from a fiscally (or racially, or sexually, or socially) underprivileged background, join this educated class of people, and end up marginalizing other viewpoints in kind of a new way. I feel lately that I see this turning into an issue of who is ‘allowed’ to say what, or ‘allowed’ to be heard, and the way credentials play into it I think can be very deceptive. I personally know several auto-didacts who are beautiful writers and charismatic, intricate thinkers, and yet they have been dismissed, sometimes publicly, by those who are more ‘credentialed.’ I don’t know whether you have any opinions about how poetry (or art), in particular, might be affected by this weird allowed to say/not allowed to say dynamic? It’s of major interest to me, because it’s something I am extremely aware of when curating Infoxicated, and also in the two anthologies I’m editing right now, one of critical writing about aesthetics and one of political poetry. I want art to be accessible to everyone. I fear ‘allowed to say’ blurs into ‘allowed to think’ and ‘allowed to read or enjoy.’ So, if you have any ideas about this ‘allowed to’ dynamic as it affects art/poetry and maybe seeps into other things (who feels allowed to participate, who feels allowed to pursue certain types of careers), I would be interested to hear what you have to say.

A: I agree with you, and I also agree that it’s tricky. Some of the art I love best has been made by autodidacts, or outsider artists, or college drop-outs, etc. And yet as an educator I’ve seen the very real difference it can make to be taught, to be exposed to ideas and work. I have hardly ever seen an education ruin a good artist, and I’ve seen an education help artists many times. But an education should make one better able to serve the community, not enable one to hold oneself above or away from the community.

I think what I want for all artists and thinkers—all sentient beings, really—is to preserve their own visionary capacities, by any means necessary. When we talk about an artist or writer or thinker or scientist as “great,” aren’t we usually saying that they are somehow visionary, groundbreaking, innovative? And sometimes those innovative ideas come distinctly from not following the well-worn or expected paths through education and career. And sometimes they come because of those paths, or despite those paths. The fundamental essence—the original vision—has to exist no matter what, no matter the setting or credential. You can have all the credentials in the world and make work that is as boring as shit. And you can have no credentials and make work that is boring as shit, too. It’s hard to turn off all the static and let yourself access your inner mystic, the otherworldly magic that’s coming via Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus car radio that Jack Spicer evoked: the voices from the beyond that speak in pure poetry.

F: How do you locate or define Balance between being a poet and scholar? What, for you, is the relationship between the two? Does your academic of research affect your creative work, and/or vice-versa, and if so, how? What does that flow look like? Is a separation between the two ever effective? Why/why not?

A: There’s no separation, really. I mean, there is in the sense that I will take on a job that is Write an Essay about Topic X and then I will also write poems about Topic X “on my own time,” which is to say, not on deadline and not for payment and in a way that feels entirely for my own pleasure. But really, the interests I want to research are the same interests that drive my poems. They are just two means of investigation. They each hold their own pleasures for me.

F: In addition to the intersection of creative scholarship and process, you’re kind of emblematic to me of an intersection between feminism & sort of a rational, liberal viewpoint on things in our culture, and an attitude or worldview that I think is a little more iconoclastic, quirky, unpredictable — difficult and fun and really scrutinizing and critically independent and rigorous, and I know this is probably too many adjectives so maybe I’ll edit it down later. Can you talk about that a little bit? How would you characterize the way you process and react to the multiplicity of realites that comprise American life? How do you deal with speaking gracefully in public about viewpoints that you know are not popular? Does this ever spill over into literary or aesthetic ideas that are less popular among your fellow poets/artists?

A: Gosh, I wish I knew how to speak gracefully about the many stands on which I take unorthodox views! Mostly I think—I know—that I come off as self-righteous and weird and rebellious and elitist all at once, and that I put people off quite a bit. That’s not my intention, but I tend to be overenthusiastic and emphatic and it can come across as argumentative or bossy or adamant. I can be argumentative and bossy and adamant, too, but sometimes I’m just being exuberant, and, because I’m a New York Jew and a cheerleader and a punk, it still comes across utterly lacking in grace. I would not say that “gracefulness” is one of my virtues. I love and admire graceful people and have very little of that in me.

The way you’ve characterized it here—“the multiplicity of realities that comprise American life”—gets at the heart of how I see the world. I see things as complicated. I like things that are complicated. I like things that are challenging, purposefully difficult, innovative. I always have. I loved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for this reason. I love Surrealism. I love James Joyce. I like playful; I like wild; I like strange.

I think the other thing is that I want to live a life that feels fully lived; I’ve always believed that the best way to spend our short time on earth as humans is to engage in life as a radical experiment. To do that, you have to be somewhat bold. You have to go toward difficulty and be willing to shift paradigms. You have to be able to come up with creative alternatives to the default choices we’re all primed to make. You have to swim upstream. My mother was a difficult person, but she was in some aspects a proud non-conformist, and there’s a longer legacy of pioneers and artists and experimenters in my extended family, so I was lucky to grow up and feel that non-conformity was valuable.

Two quotes I stand by on this: the first is from an Israeli psychology professor, Tal Ben-Sahar, who studies happiness. His main finding is that “happiness lies at the intersection of pleasure and meaning.” I believe that. (Like me, Ben-Sahar gave up tenured academia and, after achieving a lot of success, made a big move to simplify his family life, a move that went against the norm of someone with his career trajectory. He also preaches expressing more gratitude, which is something else I’m pretty keen on.) The second is from Anais Nin: “I must be a mermaid. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” I live with plenty of fear—I’m a pretty anxious person, really—but I do think I fear shallow living more than anything.

F: I saw recently on social media that you were sharing/discussing an essay whose main point of conversation was that possibly the social institution of monogamy is harmful to women. I feel like there’s that typically male trope of the free-spirited writer who never fully buys into monogamy — and then there are a few female writers/artists who have made a point of not only conducting themselves in a similar way, but have also pointedly incorporated it into their writing and their literary or artistic lifestyle. I’m thinking of women like Anais Nin and Diane Arbus — women whose work really advanced their craft in innovative ways. Do you think stepping past the confines of monogamy is helpful aesthetically or creatively to women? Or has that impulse outlived its use, in that particular way?

A: Here’s what I think about this: I think that if something feels like a confine, we ought to step past it. Not just as women or as artists, but as humans. Many lifestyles can work for us humans—we’re happily a pretty adaptive species—as long as they are choices or compromises made with intention and awareness, and not default modes followed without thought. For example, some women artists should have children, and some should not, but ideally they would be choosing either with some real agency and purpose and support. You could be a great writer who never travels, never leaves her parents, even if you had hoped for other plans—Emily Dickinson! Lorine Niedecker! And certainly you can be an amazing woman writer for whom conventional relationship structures are stifling and whose path toward more unusual lifestyle deeply informs and shapes your work—Gertrude Stein, Jane Bowles. But you can also be an amazing woman writer for whom some pretty traditional lifestyle choices nourish and sustain you: I love thinking about Lucille Clifton and her many children and her enormous accomplishments. I think what matters is if you feel fulfilled and joyful and empowered by your decisions; that you feel like you had some agency over your decisions; and that you also have found a way to work with what you’ve got.

F: I love that attitude of doing what works for you as an individual. Speaking of living a constraints-free life — my last question for you was going to be, what would your dream vocation be (if poet and scholar and all the other totally rad stuff you do now were off the table, and also if you had no rules or responsibilities)? Like, alternate-universe profession?

A: Well, to get back to something I said above, I sort of wish I could go back to school for a PhD in human sexuality, so that I could spend years studying and writing about all the aspects of that subject that fascinate me. But since that will take too long, I’ve thought about becoming a relationships counselor. I love thinking about that stuff and I like helping people and telling them what to do to make their lives better. But that’s not really a dream vocation, exactly. I’m being practical again. I think I’m too pragmatic for this question.

F: Thanks for sharing your illuminating, super-smart mix of fancy and pragmatism with us. Best conversation I’ve had all week!

Darcie Dennigan’s Madame X conjures a post-apocalyptic vision whose darkness is always imbued with play and benign strangeness. The speakers in these poems seem genuinely (and, somehow, amusingly) undecided on the question of their own humanity—yet humanity seems to be at the very center of Dennigan’s work: these poems ruminate on human identity and the centrality of art, even as they wander the strange landscapes of the imagination, the holy, the comic, the tragic. Take, for example, “The Job Interview”:

“At one point, I also did some work as a skydiver.
It was a strange summer because I was pretty young and had just gotten my period.

Not to be gross, but I basically bled all summer. And that was mostly fine.
It was beautiful weather and I, you know, wore dark pants, took loads of baths.

But there was one cloudy day, and they sent us up anyway.
I thought—if the crotch of my pants rubs against a cloud, I’ll leave red streaks.

And I did fall through a cloudbank and even kind of tried to do a split mid-cloud.
But clouds are nothing to rub against, are nothing but emptiness.
…

I’m so sorry,
so sorry to have a body. 

But how else.”

The poems carry the weight of contradiction: they are living, bleeding, oddly-shaped bodies tumbling through space—apologetic for their thrown-ness but somersaulting nevertheless, uncertain of the reason for their freakishness, yet completely certain of their presence. This “sorry/not sorry” disposition creates tremendous energy in poems that fuse the sacred and profane, life and death, innocence and sex, waking and dream life, all while maintaining their comic levity and stunning beauty.

Dennigan’s “sorry/not sorry” oscillation is not limited to the narrative elements of the poems but is enacted formally in rather overt ways. Many of the poems share a form: a highly experimental prose poem with intermittent ellipses. This curious structure ostensibly aspires toward formlessness, as the words tumble in compact units and breaths, bursts of unnerved lyric that seek to undermine their own authority. The result is a compelling occupation of a liminal space more akin to linguistic vapor than the more stable forms we’re used to seeing in American verse—they float about the page in odd patterns, drifting on whims and asides, wafts of strange speech. 

And yet, despite these gestures towards formal indeterminacy, Dennigan’s poems are so deeply certain of their uncertainty that, eventually, forward momentum becomes unavoidable. We begin to see that what first appears as reluctant weight shifting between nervous feet is in fact a kind of dance: an entirely new and strangely beautiful step.

“They … thanked us … patted our / lab jackets … Then they turned away from us … They turned back / to the children … in the sand … building castles … and alphabets /… and … grand frigates … with sand yes … but also with pieces of / … They were building pillars of … bone … they built a frieze … / with an image of the sun … it was a sun the size of a heart … a heart / the size of the fist of a kid …” (from “The Atoll”)

To further counterbalance the weightlessness of the form, Dennigan roots these poems in conventions more characteristic of prose: character, dialogue and narrative. And the narrative arc of the collection can be viewed as one of the strangest bildungsromans ever. 

We see the speaker as a young adult contemplating the various paths art has to offer:
“I went / on … Wanted the summa cum laude next to my name in the art / school graduation program … I asked the school how to … They / presented three honors tracks … suicide … jail … madness … / Madness was graded on a curve … madness being … relative … / The other two … strictly by the book .. Okay I said … Jail sounds / good …” (from “The Corpus”)

We see the speaker as a young wife and mother:
“We were frozen in the yard of a dollhouse. The yard was turf instead of grass. I was the wife doll in a lounge chair. The husband figure had a rake in his hands. The kids were also dolls and there were bubbles around their dolls heads and they were posed as if trying to pop them. Then the yard suddenly exploded and in my doll head I thought, Run.”

 (“Whale”)

We see the speaker as a male Pietá defending the maternal identity of men:
“As if a chorus of female opinion / were a prerequisite to knowing my … It just happens that some / of the most exciting … I mean … the long line of great Pietá advancements in the 20th … I mean … the Virgin laughing over / Christ’s body … the Virgin mourning Christ as a miscarriage … / the bitch Virgin holding Christ between her teeth by the nape / of his neck … the Virgin who left to find herself … so many / variations on the pierced milk ducts Virgin … women … all women … This is not to deny my own … my own work … has / … greatness …”

 (“The Matriarchy”)

The world into which the speaker grows is absurdly cruel, so it only makes sense that the speaker’s development would itself be absurd. 

The collection’s title, Madame X, places it in the tradition of the famously controversial Portrait of Madame X (later renamed simply Madame X) by American painter John Singer Sargent. Like Sargent’s portrait (and the countless productions on both stage and screen since) Dennigan’s collection is engaged in the problem of feminine agency in a bleakly patriarchal world. The women in this collection are often seen in positions of cartoonishly-exaggerated, corporeal suffering:

“I closed the doors (every season is too full of longing!) and
rechristened myself Flora.
I drank a vat of rose water and put both my wrists through the
slicer. 

And then I began to bleed—a white powder.
Flour.

And then you came in.
I would have known you even if you were not wearing in your
buttonhole a carnation.

The bakery is closed, I said tersely.
I was bleeding profusely. 

I loved you even before you said
Nothing breaks more slowly, more silently, than bread.”
(“In the Bakery”)

The artist suffers to create art. The woman suffers in a world that hates women. The woman artist, then, if she wants to create, suffers a unique violence: a brutalization of the female form that renders the “feminine” the result of sustained violence both figurative and literal. So we see blood-streaked clouds and arteries spewing flour—we find the speaker with scars in her throat from blowing divine light.

Madame X is a fearless collection: formally adventurous, thematically compelling, and unflinching in its aesthetic risks. Its combination of strange apocalypticism and comic levity is reminiscent of Matthia Svlaina’s wonderfully odd Destruction Myth (Cleveland State 2009), and its meditation on female agency in a cartoonishly-violent, patriarchal milieu suggests Dennigan’s place among the best poets of the Gurlesque.

Notable poems: The Job Interview; Out of the Ether; In the Bakery; The Center of Worthwhile Things; The Matriarchy

Madame X, Darcie Dennigan
Canarium, 2012
Page length: 112
Retail: $14

Bradley Harrison is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD student at the University of Missouri. His work can be found in New American Writing, Fugue, New Orleans Review, Forklift Ohio, Best New Poets 2012 and elsewhere. His chapbook, Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012).

Photo credit: Cade Leebron

As autumn deepens, poet and essayist Kathryn Rhett meditates on the magnetic forces of inner weather.

In Bed

Grace Note

The night by hours           ​the horse by hands.
Our grudges measured in the salt the moon shed.

They weigh me down like prey does a mouth.

You died like the animal ​         of a sudden.
Because it can not reckon its end.

Each footfall in the past’s savage fashion.

Because the one sound it knows is song.
And the one song it knows ​                is now.

Afterfeather

​​after the myth of Philomena

The past tracks your scent.    At your heels
like king’s hounds            and hungrier.

This is what comes after massacre.

Your tongue cut from the root.    The purple
need to weave      what placed you rough-
handed here.     This is what comes after massacre.

If the thread can be read by your sister.    If
you can kill      what’s most dear to your defiler.
If you can feed what’s most dear      to your defiler.

(Like the tail in the mouth of the snake       rattling
at the taste.).        This is what comes after

massacre:      a fistful of feathers.
And what does it matter?      Whether
they will take flight or fold over.
​​​​​                                                            And you’ll

carry and carry out the same      sentence, letter
by letter.     Throat holding    its single
note.        Memorized like some kind of prayer.

Rising through the limbs     by octaves         each year:
this is what comes to the ear      after massacre.
Its weight        not wearing at the heart

‘til it’s marble.       Or muting to
watercolor.   Or dispelling like rumor.
But becoming an unbeautiful muse.

Sing it to the tarnished        sling of moon.
Write it with the red       at the base of the feather:

For the winged, the blood is always   warm.
For the scorned, the story   is always   at the start.

Shadow Play

Your hands held
to the tune
of an elk’s
head

and me,
curled like a bass
clef in bed: ​​

we fill in
the blanks
of night.

Days come
together
like braids.
My hocks ache
in growth.
Now the pelvis’
punctual spate.

And ease
is a shadow.
And shadow is
reflection’s
father.

An antler
at water.

Already I’m
an animal
you don’t
understand.

Stacy Gnall is the author of Heart First into the Forest (Alice James Books, 2011). Her poems have appeared in journals including The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, and Indiana Review. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Alabama’s MFA program, she is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. She is at work on both a poetry manuscript and criticism that explore the human-animal connection.