Solmaz Sharif – Look

Graywolf Press 2016

Page Length: 93

Retail: $16

 

 

The winner writes history; the loser writes poetry. Not that Solmaz Sharif’s debut from Graywolf Press, Look (2016) is anything short of extraordinary. It’s just that the cliché about the “winner” is too true for Sharif to resist subverting in her urgent, prophetic, and virtuosic invective against the Nation State in general, and the contemporary American Nation State in particular.

 

It is hardly new for poets to use poetry as a means of political resistance, but rarely have we seen the politics of language play such a prominent role in the resistance. Sharif uses a variety of avant-garde forms to put enormous pressure on language itself so as to exploit its materiality, and therefore its malleability—a process of weaponization that can be used to liberate as well as oppress. Given the enormous oppression brought forth by the militarization of language, which is itself a kind of violent occupation, Sharif seeks to re-contextualize weaponized words in a process that might exorcize the English language of its most demonic possessions.

 

Until now, now that I’ve reached my thirties:

All my Muse’s poetry has been harmless:

American and diplomatic: a learned helplessness

Is what psychologists call it: my docile, desired state.

I’ve been largely well-behaved and gracious.

I’ve learned the doctors learned of learned helplessness

by shocking dogs. Eventually, we things give up.

 

These opening lines of the poem “Desired Appreciation” present the reader with a credo that posits the “learned helplessness” of nonviolent poetry as a means of complicity. The speaker gestures to the death of her own complicity in a brilliant image that serves opposite agendas: “Eventually, we things give up.” The “learned helplessness” of human complicity—of poetic complicity—is the resting state of one exposed to prolonged torture (here represented by the shocking of dogs). The American public—and by extension American poetry—has been psychologically tortured by prolonged exposure to “shocking” horrors, such that we must learn to normalize brutality and unspeakable violence not only in our lives but in the very language that is the substance of our thoughts. This acquiescence to horror is a “learned helplessness,” such that we must write about flowers and falling in love lest we lose ourselves in the grip of despair. Poets too are things, and, “Eventually, we things give up.” But even as Sharif offers a potent metaphor for the “learned helplessness” of American poetry, she, with the exact same metaphor, offers us a means of resistance: to “give up” docility is to be shocked too many times—to, in an act of poetic desperation, use the very means of torture to subvert the captivity.

 

This is precisely what Sharif accomplishes in Look, which offers contemporary American poets a look into what a revolutionary resistance to Imperial co-option might look like. The most pronounced example of this is the many poems in the collection that re-appropriate terms taken from the United States Department of Defense’s “Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.” This practice participates in the tradition of the American avant-garde, beginning perhaps with Gertrude Stein and extending through the Objectivists and then later the LANGUAGE poets, which seeks to subvert the Imperial occupation of the English language by calling attention to language’s materiality. This is accomplished largely by the process of re-contextualization in which words’ meanings are determined not by some kind of intrinsic semantic cargo but rather by the larger context into which words, like objects, are placed and misplaced.

 

Sharif uses familiar, stabilizing poetic forms such as anaphora, the litany, and parallel syntax to place tremendous pressure on the diction culled from the DOD’s lexicon, words marked in the poems as foreign by their appearance in small caps: terms like INTERTHEATER TRAFFIC, HUNG WEAPON, PENETRATION AIDS, and SAFE HOUSE. In this typographical designation, Sharif mimics the problematic us/them tribalism inherent to all ethnic and political identities. This presentation of language inherently “other” calls attention to it—our awareness is heightened by its dual-citizenship, and we instinctively wonder whether its presence disrupts an otherwise “safe” poetic experience. In this way, we come to distrust the words, for we know that whatever sense in which they belong to the poem, they also serve another, more sinister master. In doing this, Sharif indicts the “learned helplessness” of benign, supposedly-non-political poetry by calling attention to its inattention: by interrupting poems that might otherwise be pleasant to our palate with targeted phrases like DESIRED PERCEPTION and THRESHOLD OF ACCEPTABILITY, Sharif brilliantly and subtly incriminates the reader for a habit of CIVIL CENSORSHIP. In so doing she implies that much of American poetry is little more than a LOW VISIBILITY OPERATION.

 

Sharif’s is the ground of BATTLEFIELD ILLUMINATION, whereby the poem seeks to redeem language itself for its complicity in human atrocity. Hers can be described as a guerilla poetics, whereby the overwhelming force and hubris of the occupying force is used against it, and this is made possible only by the native’s intimacy with the nuances of the terrain. Here the “native” is the poet and the terrain is our language—violently taken and brutalized by a Nation State to which it does not belong. Many twentieth-century guerillas believed that a true revolution could only take place when the occupied population became sickened at the abuses of its occupier. By forcing readers (and poets) to LOOK at what is being done in our “homeland,” Sharif accomplishes extraordinary work toward our necessary revulsion.

 

The bad news is that language, as an object, can be weaponized as a means of oppression and terror. Worse yet, unlike steel and plutonium, language is the substance of thought and identity: it is only through language that we can understand ourselves and the world in which we live. It is what we use to make sense of our lives: to justify the things we have done and want to do. When a Nation State occupies the language of its people, it creates an “us” by engendering a “them”—it necessarily splits the world into a quasi-tribal dichotomy. By doing so, the State unifies its populace by the perpetual generation of an enemy—a something against which we can be together. It is language alone that makes this possible.

 

However, the good news is that a word, unlike steel and plutonium, can never only be one thing. A word is unique among objects in that it always exists multiply: it may mean one thing, but it always necessarily also means something else. The alchemy of this transubstantiation resides in the power of context, and Sharif is an extraordinary wizard. The context of the DoD manual is war; the context of the poem is supposed to be peacetime. Of all the binaries Sharif seeks to dismantle in this collection: East/West; Islam/Christianity; Brown/White; Terrorist/Soldier; Enemy Combatant/Civilian; none more pervasively haunts the pages than the dissolved line between Wartime and Peacetime. This dissolution, only possible in an Empire, is the collateral damage of the weaponization of language. Sharif masterfully undermines and contradicts this violence by exposing the inherent multiplicity of words; which is to say, she rages against the dull machine of war by turning its weapons against it—into poems with which she hopes to provoke a sleeping community out of its “learned helplessness.”

 

 

 

 

During 2016, we will shine the spotlight of our public esteem & rapt attention on two poets per month. This month’s second poet is Samantha Duncan.

 

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world—what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Samantha Duncan: I’m still very new to being a poet and the po-biz world. The majority of my creative work and education was in fiction, until about four years ago when I more or less switched over to poetry, so I’m still learning a lot through my experiences being a poet and press and journal editor. There are specific challenges that motivate me to write poetry—there’s a succinctness to it that requires cleverness and intimacy with language, and that really exercises writing muscles I don’t always use in fiction writing. It’s that uniqueness of the form and construction of it that drives me to stick with poetry, despite it not being my primary writing field.

FFF:  What are your influences—creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

SD: I don’t consider myself a terribly artistic person, outside the writing spectrum. I became heavily interested in book arts and papermaking, several years ago, and a lot of those little details make their way into my writing. It’s such a tactile form of art that’s fun to write about. I also cite music as perhaps a second love, after writing, and it’s a vast landscape to draw inspiration from, whether it be someone else’s song lyrics or my own experience with playing instruments.

I have a Sociology degree and I’m a news junkie, so those issues are constant influences. No matter the direct topic, I’m always looking for the stories and voices I feel aren’t being heard enough. Some would argue that the prevailing point of view in most poetry is that of the straight, white, male, and so a greater representation of experiences is important to me, both when writing and when choosing work to publish as an editor.

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems—as author and as reader?

SD: I really value inventiveness in poetry. As writers, we’re examiners of language, and poets have the unique opportunity to create our own molds for that language, to affix a personality of our choosing to it. We’re allowed to subvert the act of straightforwardness, and that opens doors to a free-play word arena. I really admire poets who write with such a rhythm that seems natural yet doesn’t sound like anything you’d hear in regular conversation.

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something—an experience, a piece of art, anything really—that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

SD: Not really an experience or art piece, but I’ve written a lot about Malala Yousafzai since her attempted assassination. Her life and her relationship with her father fascinate me and have awakened me to some new realizations about my own upbringing. Her story has also led me to read and write more about women’s oppression in less developed countries, which can be very different from the inequalities women face in America, but just as important to talk about.

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

SD: There are so many poets I think everyone should read, for many different reasons. I’ll throw John Ashbery out there, because I think people should become more comfortable with the notion of enjoying work they don’t always fully understand. He’s not extremely accessible, but he’s re-readable, and you get a little more out of him each time you do.

Fiction-wise, I think everyone should read Margaret Atwood. I have a long-standing beef with the fact that 1984 and Brave New World are on school reading lists but The Handmaid’s Tale mostly isn’t. Also, Amelia Gray’s Gutshot, because I love women who write weird, grotesque little stories.

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

SD: Nope, I think you squeezed everything out of me. Loved this interview, thanks!

 

Samantha Duncan is the author of the chapbooks (Agape Editions, 2016), One Never Eats Four (ELJ Publications, 2014) and Moon Law (Wild Age Press, 2012), and her work has appeared in The Pinch, Meridian, Stirring, and Flapperhouse. She serves as Executive Editor for ELJ Publications and reads for Gigantic Sequins. She lives in Houston and can be found at  and 

Stay with Me Awhile

By Loren Kleinman

ISNB: 978-1941058350

April 2016

Winter Goose Publishing

Reviewed by Brian Fanelli

Loren Kleinman’s last collection of poems, Breakable Things, had a lot of references to Charles Bukowski, even in terms of subject matter, specifically the poet’s willingness to not shy away from raw subject matter, such as drinking or sex. There are still some echoes of Bukowski in Stay with Me AWhile, but Kleinman’s new book draws more resemblance to Anne Sexton for the way that it addresses matters of the body and notions of beauty. The book is also more expansive in form, containing a number of prose poems and work that is more surreal than it is narrative. At the heart of the collection, however, is a theme that has been most pronounced in Kleinman’s work, the need for love and affection in an increasingly isolated and fragmented world.

Kleinman’s growth as a writer extends to how she addresses the erotic, which also echoes some of Sexton’s work. For instance, in the short prose poem “Me and Him,” the speaker confesses, “I want to know what makes him cum,” but the poem digs deeper than mere sex, illuminating the layers of feelings that coincide with sex in a long-standing relationship. In the next line, the speaker states, “I want to hear what happened to him that one night in his mother’s arms.” In many of the poems, the speaker admits how guarded she is around men, but “Me and Him” shows a tenderness, especially in its concluding lines, “He asks me to take off the do not enter sign/Joseph slides his face against mine. I let him crawl inside me/this time, fill me with sugar and kisses.” This is a nice contrast in tone and subject matter to some of the other poems that address loneliness. In “The Snow Reminds Me to Play,” the reader feels the speaker’s ache and desire for love and affection, especially in the lines, “The snow is loud and strong/It makes love to me when no one else wants to.”

Other poems tackle gender constructs, and Kleinman does so in direct, forceful language. “It’s Cold Out There” recounts a conversation between the speaker and a friend over the idea of beauty. This poem is also different from some of Kleinman’s earlier work for the surreal lines woven throughout the narrative.

 

No. No. I will not go outside and listen to the wolves tear

at the moon. It’s just that I’m alone. It’s just that you make

me feel so alone. You know. It’s not an achievement to be

that pretty, you say. It’s a bunch of glock and glick and it’s

cold out there. Look at my thighs. Look at the scratches

and stretch marks. Look at the skin pulled back from my

fingers. And you lick the marks; you eat them out with a

fork and knife. I’ve already forgotten what it’s like to be

loved; what it’s like to be. Let’s sit down in front of the

TV and nibble at our skin. Let’s sit here and stare into

the deepness of our eyes, then we’ll go outside and eat the

cheese form the mice’s paws.

The lines about wolves tearing at the moon and eating cheese from mice’s paws is an interesting, surreal juxtaposition to the rest of the poem, which is generally a more narrative prose poem. There is also something consuming about the couple’s attention to each other, namely the idea of nibbling skin and licking marks.

Ultimately, the book circles back to the character of Joe, first introduced early in the collection, in “Me and Him.” The concluding poem, “We’re Here Briefly“, is celebratory, recalling a simple moment, when the speaker drinks on a rooftop with Joe, while holding his hand and smiling. At last, the speaker finds the love she desires. Overall, Stay With Me Awhile marks a shift in Kleinman’s poetry and shows she is willing to experiment more with tone and form, while addressing a deeper subject matter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sinister Barista Meets the Loch Ness Professor

“Let us prepare for a life of rational happiness.”
—Emily Dickinson’s father in a courtship letter to her mother

The summer everyone I knew was going to Italy. The June everyone got
engaged. So much getting down on one knee, so many surprises
(but not really) in gondolas. I’m not ready for these kinds of summers.
I’m not ready to get engaged, I’m not even ready to open a lemonade stand.

Which is not to say I am not in love or not committed or don’t know
how to make lemonade. I am, I am, & I do. I do but let’s hold off
on saying “I do” with the rings & relatives, cummerbunds & giant cake.
Except let’s not hold off on the giant cake. & let’s not hold off on being

irreversibly in love. Happiness needs no preparation or warrantee
or reason. I’m ready to say that. I’m ready to watch any romcom/action
combo where two people topple tyranny, fall in love. I’m ready
for the movie where four people topple tyranny, fall in love,

& make consensual arrangements to keep it open.
Or six people just stay in & become best friends. Or seven
billion people befriend themselves. I’m ready for the movie based
on a true imagination, the poem based on the loveliest headline:

The Sinister Barista Meets the Loch Ness Professor. I’m ready for them
to meet & talk about their common interests. I’m ready for the summer
of the part-time organist with the full-time son of the seamstress.
The ice cream scooper & the delinquent pooper.

The wholesome mountaineer & the shy puppeteer. The perfectionist
cat owner & the petulant dry cleaner. The mechanic & the crescent moon
enthusiast & the midlife crisis magician. The proudest amoeba.
I am ready to court self daring & raunchy listening.

I am ready to court Emily Dickinson’s collected poems. To court awe
before arguing. To court arguing when necessary. I am not ready for it
but will support people getting divorced from each other if they want to.
I am ready for people wanting cake & a good movie to cry to.

Let us not prepare for a life of rational happiness but let us always
have enough money to buy cake ingredients. Let us discuss
many important matters while we work on the cake.
Like how flamingos get their pink. Or the summer sky its flamingo.

Or how the current time is, in fact, a palindrome: 12:21.

 

 

For I Will Consider My Boyfriend Jeffrey
after Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, Fragment B, [For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry]

 

For I will consider my boyfriend Jeffrey.
For he is an atheist but makes room for the unseen, unsayable.
For he is a vegetarian but makes room for half-off Mondays at the conveyer belt sushi place.
For he must vacuum/mop/scrub/rinse/hand sanitize/air freshen the entire apartment to
deal with the stress of having received a traffic ticket.
For he dances in his seat while driving us to the supermarket.
For he despises tarantulas, sharks, flying on planes, & flightless birds such as the cassowary
of New Guinea, which he has only seen in videos & thinks looks like “a goddamn
velicoraptor.”
For he is Jeffrey Gilbert of Gilbertsville, New York.
For he possesses in abundance, no, in excess, the sexiest facial hair in the cosmos.
For he allows his beard to grow & grow, & when it has grown up & down & out, & he
knows he must start afresh, he takes a tenderly long time to shave.
For this he performs in ten steps.
For first he looks upon his furry countenance to assess & accept the difficult journey that
lies before him.
For secondly he washes with holistic care his whole foxy face.
For thirdly he does not use any cheap concoction from a can; he uses Arko, a fine Turkish
shaving soap his father gifted him.
For fourthly he brings the soap to an exquisite lather with a handmade brush.
For fifthly he spreads the soap generously about.
For sixthly he wets his sleek razor in the stream of warm water quietly exiting the faucet.
For seventhly he shaves.
For eighthly he shaves.
For ninthly he shaves, then asks me to come help with the tenth & final step: trimming the
back of his neck with a small electric razor.
For having shaved he exclaims that he feels more himself than ever.
For he more than ever cannot stand Dave Matthews Band.
For he owns & occasionally plays a keytar—a keyboard guitar—if you ask him nicely.
For he owns many musical instruments & can be seen fiddling with them for hours.
For he transfers his music onto a computer where he fiddles with it further in a way that is
recognizably mysterious—it’s the prayerful playing around in rhythms & almost-
meanings—& it requires him to wear big silver headphones, & he looks lost, & he is, I’m
sure of it, like I am when I write a poem, but adorably so, like puppies are when they’ve
wandered away from their mother/owner/anything familiar & yes, he’s wandering in
notes & beats like a corgi yet somehow like a wolf too, utterly focused, & like most
members of the canine family I’ve seen, utterly happy.
For he looks happy & doesn’t know I’m looking & that makes his happiness free.
For he creates happiness on purpose & by accident.
For by holding him I can believe not in God but in goodness.
For by kissing him I can believe not in eternal life but in life.
For he does not fare well on planes but will fly if it means flying to those he loves.
For he flies & he loves.

 

 

Interrogation at the Hands of Rita Repulsa

So you’ve captured me. Unmasked me. Know my true identity. Yes. I’m Kimberly.
The Pink Power Ranger. Likes saving the world. Likes never giving up
& all things pink. Pink punches. Kicks. Dinozord the pink pterodactyl & love
of my life the Red Ranger. I’ll never tell you his identity, go ahead make
the ropes tighter. We’ll always be together, Pink & Red, close shades of Ranger.
Too hard to be with Non-Rangers, we put them in too much danger—
kidnapped, bait, even destroyed. Destroy them! you monsters like to holler.
& when we’re about to tackle you: Crush them! No one says kill or murder
or mutilate. Know why? Got to stay positive. You evil things need to, you keep
getting pummeled by us. We good guys have to, we keep almost getting wiped
out by you. Then at the last minute crushing you, I mean, at last saving
the world. Every week. Do I get tired of it? No. Maybe. This week,
a tiny, & that’s why I’m here, bound. Still, won’t let you destroy me
or the earth. How? How, when I’m your prisoner, & Pink, not Red or Green
or even Yellow? Going to get my morpher back from minion #2. Yes.
Telling you my plan. That’s how confident I am of it. Favorite part of the job,
these verbal jousts. Plus morphing into Pink, simply getting dressed. My costume
like any Ranger’s, except prettier & pterodactyl on the helmet. Helps me feel
positive. Powerful. There’s another popular word. Powerful. No one says
violent. No one says terrified, just a kid, just a minion, only feel safe inside my uniform,
my helmet. No one says too hard even hanging out with regular people, they’ve never
gone into battle, never had to destroy, week after week. Do you ever get tired?
We say, It’s morphin’ time! You say, Destroy them! We say, You’re toast! You say,
She’s escaping! Get her! I say, Too slow! & positively, pinkly smash in your face.

 

 

Playing in the Square

It could happen like this: we rush out of the station,
late for work, & find a small band playing in the square.
Been playing in the square all morning! they shout to us.
& with winsome smiles, urge us to join in, handing us
instruments. & somehow, we’re taking them—
an accordion for you, a fiddle for me.

& more people stream out of the station.
Been playing in the square all afternoon! we shout to them.
& with kind mischief in our smiles, call them
to join in, rolling out more instruments. & somehow,
an old woman with beautiful fingers takes up a clarinet,
a sad-eyed boy becomes our fourth bassist.

& people pour out. Been playing in the square
all evening! & we have instruments
ready. & we begin to spill, the square
stretching strange as an octopus. & the children vote
in favor of dancing, & dance. & somehow,
a stray bulldog becomes our main percussionist.

& doctors treat people without charge.
& mothers laugh with their sons.
& neighbors argue with passion, but no one goes hungry.
& some even fall dreadfully in love. We’re playing
in the square all night!
& the night joins in,

the moon in its borrowed suit of gleam,
the stars & planets finding their spots
a bit clumsily, foolishly—
they each take up their ancient instruments
& spin their amateur bodies, somehow remembering
the music, the movement.

 

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and forthcoming spring 2017 from BOA Editions, Ltd. His latest chapbook, Kissing the Sphinx, is available from Two of Cups Press. His poems have recently appeared in Raleigh Review, The Poetry Review (UK), and the PBS Newshour weekly poem series. Chen is a Kundiman Fellow and a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University. Visit him at .

During 2016, we will shine the spotlight of our public esteem & rapt attention on two poets per month. This month’s first poet is Chen Chen. 

Fox Frazier-Foley: Talk to me about the core of your creative drive and the expression it finds through poetry. There are lots of ways to be creative in this world – what motivates you to write poems, specifically? Additionally, what motivates you to navigate the poebiz landscape?

Chen Chen: Thank you for these questions—big and kind of impossible, but I’m glad to be living with them. Why poems? I actually started out as a fiction writer; I tried writing novels. These were imitations of whatever I happened to like, from Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In college, I wrote both poems and stories. I also wrote scholarly essays that went on too long and basically argued that literature is super neat (I still do this, in my doctoral program). Then in my third year, I took my first poetry workshop and just fell in love with the weird difficult astonishing ways of saying and wrecking and loving that poems give us.

I am part of so many different communities, histories, sparks, losses, trees, whispers. Poetry is a place where I can ask my Many and if I’m lucky, my All, to come in and converse. I can ask a frozen lake in Upstate New York to talk to an artificial pond in Lubbock, Texas. I can ask Pablo Neruda to talk to the stray cat that greets my partner and me when we pull into our driveway. I can ask your silences to dance with my silences; a form of talking, maybe. So: responding to what I read and love, attempting to create spaces for conversation and stray cats. And lately: what is real learning and how does that intersect with but also sometimes depart from institutions of education? And always: how can I, anyone, keep the heart, a heart, keep our places and selves living?

As for the poebiz, I think it’s crucial not to confuse prestigious publications and awards with what our actual work is. Of course, these shiny things have practical outcomes that are important—I have been supported throughout my graduate school life with scholarships and fellowships. And getting paid here and there for a poem does make a difference. (POETS SHOULD BE PAID BETTER.) Yes. That said… when I was a lonely kid in high school, going to the local library and discovering poets like Li-Young Lee, Louise Glück, and Robert Hass for the first time, I had no idea that blurbs were written by friends or former teachers of the writer and bios were quite often written by the writer. I had no idea that FSG was a “good” press and that it was more prestigious to publish in New England Review versus somewhere else. Now I know these things and I know why they are or can be important. However, aiming to publish in New England Review is not the same thing as attempting to write an exciting, moving poem. (A poem that can give and give.) You can have both “goals,” of course, but the former is achievable in a much more concrete way. The latter is big and impossible and infuriating and wonderful. On a similar note, I think it’s crucial not to confuse a style of poetry with making poems. Finding a style or a voice can be delightful; it can also be deadly. I would like poets to have questions and dreams rather than styles.

 

FFF: What are your influences – creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?

CC: I love the films of Wong Kar-Wai. I love the music of Perfume Genius. I love ridiculous huge purple snow pants on anyone, anywhere. I love my mother figuring out how to send me texts in Chinese and then how to send me emojis. I love the paintings of Paul Klee and Agnes Martin. I love Audre Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Martín Espada’s introduction to Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination, and this recent book edited by Timothy Yu (Nests and Strangers) examining the work of Nellie Wong, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Bhanu Kapil. I love a painting by Anselm Kiefer entitled “Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome of Heaven.” I love Kundiman, an organization dedicated to Asian American writers. I love the pug dog calendar that hangs in the living room I share with my love. I love the March pug dog.

 

FFF: Describe your aesthetic as a poet. What do you value? What do you try to do with/in your work? What, to you, makes cool art/literature? What’s most important for you in a poem, or in a book of poems – as author and as reader?

CC: I value a poet’s idiosyncratic obsessions and a poet’s depth or scope of compassion. I like seeing a range of emotional and intellectual concerns. In my MFA, I started out trying to be a Serious Poet for some bizarre reason. I like humor, though it’s more important to me that someone real is writing the poem. Being a Funny Poet can be just as tiresome as being a Serious Poet. I like musics and formal dexterities, though the thing needs to move, not just impress. I like disliking a poem and then liking it. I dislike poems because of my tastes, which often need expanding. I loathe poems that harm or erase people. I like erasure poems, ones that demonstrate an understanding of the power dynamics of erasure and erase texts, not people. I like having my mind blown. I love not knowing what a poem is doing to me. I love poems that do what the cherry trees do, to rip off Neruda.

 

FFF: Tell me, if you’re willing, about something – an experience, a piece of art, anything really – that has fundamentally moved and/or shaped you as a person. What was the experience? What was it like? How did it shape you as an artist/poet?

CC: One of my best friends from high school liked to practice her photography with me as a model. She would take all these pictures and then we would look at them together on her computer. I remember saying, more than once, “Ugh, I look so Asian in this photo.” And my friend would say, “Um, you are Asian.” At the time, I would just say “I know” and make it seem like I was joking—but about what? It has taken a long time for me to really think about the internalized racism and messed up beauty standards I’d accepted and tried (try?) to live up to.

Earlier today I saw a posting about a new scholarship for Asian American actors and performers based in New York City. New York City—a place with a big and super diverse Asian American population. And we need a scholarship. So that Asian American actors have a (better) chance. Part of me is so glad that the organization behind this scholarship is taking action. Another part of me is so angry that the situation (in film and TV, in literature…) seems to improve for a select few and then the idea is that somehow we’re “diverse enough” now.

I grew up in the 90s, started college in 2007—and I still felt like being Chinese, Asian, Asian American, like these were ugly things and the more I could look and behave like a white person, the better, the more beautiful, the more person I could be. I don’t feel that way now, but I do wonder who I would be if I hadn’t spent so much time wishing I was someone else, hadn’t pushed away certain interests deemed stereotypically Asian (piano—I should’ve given piano more of a chance!), hadn’t thought I could never reconcile being both Chinese and gay. The thought of “well, the awfulness shaped me and I’ve turned it into art” doesn’t seem right. I don’t want to fetishize suffering, ever. I think it’s a pretty basic expectation, that people of color should be able to see dignified, complicated, beautiful representations of themselves on a daily basis.

 

FFF: Name a book or two that you think everyone should read, and tell us a little bit about what makes it/them so mind-blowingly awesome.

CC: Two books that have come out in recent years:

Hello, the Roses by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. This book is so expansive and attentive—to landscape, to notions of culture and self, to illness, to the opening of flowers and affinities. Berssenbrugge stands out to me as a writer for how she insists on a spectrum of feeling, perception, and vocabulary. Blending the mythic, the quantum mechanic, the phenomenological, and the medicinal, she makes poems (always now in sequences of longish sentences) that seem densely packed at first glance, but are really some of the most welcoming spaces I’ve encountered on the page. Berssenbrugge writes, “I tell you, your own thoughts and words can appear to inhabitants of other systems like stars and planets to us” and I believe her.

Life of the Garment by Deborah Gorlin. This book is so lilies-&-urine full of life, is living, every time I pick it up—it twitches and shivers and pinches me like a magnificent crab in my hands. A poet of world-bending physicality and a sort of gritty spirituality, Gorlin teaches me to inhabit space the way space inhabits me. Wildly. Graciously. Completely. Gorlin writes, “Cars sorrow too, their glittering/surfaces, metal wigs on wheels” and I believe her.

 

FFF: Anything you want to talk about pertaining to your art/craft/literary or writing life that I didn’t ask?

CC: Aren’t beavers AMAZING? Aren’t queer poets of color doing the BEST work? I’m going to make more time for walks. And soups. And supporting the poets, poetries I love.

 

 

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and forthcoming spring 2017 from BOA Editions, Ltd. His latest chapbook, Kissing the Sphinx, is available from Two of Cups Press. His poems have recently appeared in Raleigh Review, The Poetry Review (UK), and the PBS Newshour weekly poem series. Chen is a Kundiman Fellow and a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University. Visit him at .

 

Bear the Grief : Get Up and Try Again

 

In All Day, Talking (Dancing Girl Press, 2014), Sarah Chavez’s narrator unlocks missives to a dead beloved, named Carole. These poems are so full in rich detail and experience, it can sometimes be difficult to remember, as a reader, that they should not be read as non-fiction.

 

In an interview with Chavez has acknowledged some biographical overlaps between her own lived experience and that of her narrator in this collection. At another point, Chavez noted, “There really was a Carole, she really died, and I do mourn her. I also grew up in Fresno in a working class environment. [However,] these poems, are more concerned with expressing an emotional truth and the details that best serve that emotional truth…”

 

We are increasingly aware, as contemporary readers, of the importance of not assuming that poetry based in biography is non-fiction; if we honor All Day, Talking by reading it as art, and not as confession or reportage, we gain: the work is an elegiac page-turner.  As the narrator mourns Carole, she also mourns herself. Our loved ones are our mirrors.

 

These poem-letter-monologues spike with heartbreak, anger, and humor: we play spectator to their hardcore honesty and relish the narrative stream of consciousness. If Carole is a ghost, she is alive on every page of this collection. We read the words as in a poem movie. The text sparkles with cinematic flare, the characters walk through scenes with fluidity whether hanging out at a bus stop, cleaning up dead beetles, or eating Twinkies. We hitch a ride with the narrator, ourselves visiting ghosts, witness the narrator’s shivering loneliness in buying a coffee:

 

“…the woman behind the counter,

she fucking looks like you. Tall,

round breasted, long stringy hair, skin

white, shining from the heat

off the espresso machine,

What can I get you hun, she says.

She calls me “hun.” You

would never call anyone that…

You hated false familiarity

that veneer of sweetness…I

miss you so much it’s like I swallowed

a bomb…”

 

 

This recreated action in the poem is so detailed, so signature of each page—they are every tiny action in the world and the narrator is just trying to hold it together. The narrator wants to tell many people to fuck off: those who slighted her, those who remind her of Carole. Yet she does not. She buys her coffee, her finger grazing the finger of the waitress who looked like Carole, almost cries. She goes to work. She gets a haircut. Through her days, she functions, because her lips are always moving, always talking to Carole, re-connecting, rebuilding.

 

The skinny format of these poems presents themselves like letters, or a grocery list. Of course, they are like a list. The narrator catalogues Carole. The bare bones of the words and mood are present: we want to, no we need to remember it all, like possessions lost in a fire. Make a list while everything is still fresh in your mind. There is no need for flowery language: these poems are crisp.

 

Chavez writes:

 

“Dear Carole, I finally did it

 

I cut it all off into a trendy bob

that fades up from the back. You told me

not to, said you loved my hair long.

Well you’re not here anymore.”

 

And then this two line poem on its own page:

 

 

“Dear Carole, Just a quick note

 

C Flat.”

 

These mini poems check mark off moments with Carole: a conversation about getting a haircut or not—the C flat comment comes off, potentially, as a private joke. We don’t know for sure, but it doesn’t matter.  We witness these intimate moments, feel the bond between Carole and the narrator, reflect on our own bonds.  As the narrator informs us, these poems are about “Nothing./ Anything. Everything, really.”  Every phrase, bad joke, like, or dislike is catalogued. When Carole is gone, she still smokes, walks around, drives a Cadillac down the sun-blazed street.

 

We tick off Carole’s likes and dislikes with the narrator throwing in our own as well, thinking what will we remember when someone we love is gone? What will be the hardest memory to mourn?

 

Some letters and images have a vulnerable symbolism. Items symbolizing loss:  hair, teeth, a dog, and a ring.  Using commonplace objects further our feeling of loss for the narrator and for Carole herself. Every day descriptions also illustrate that perhaps we stay in similar routines with various people.  When that person is gone, we suddenly don’t know what to do with ourselves. In the poem referenced above, the narrator gets the haircut she wanted, maybe having mixed emotions about it. When the narrator goes to the dentist to get her wisdom teeth pulled, she is alone. She gets drunk the night before as a coping mechanism to “dull her brain.”  The narrator tells Carole about it:

 

“I want to yell at him: Don’t you know better

than to take from people who have nothing

but these relics, these baubles?

 

But he’s got my still slab of tongue in his hand

and the noise that comes from the back

of my throat is just choking, as if a person

could even choke an absence.”

 

The reader feels her isolation: having to complete stressful activities alone, not having that ride home from a loved one. The narrator mourns the loss of Carole through teeth getting pulled, wanting to yell at everyone who does not seem to understand. How could they?  We are all alone in our grief, or it feels that way.

 

Through the mentioning of the dog, “Shadow,” we experience a new kind of loss: regret. Chavez writes that the narrator sees a dog that looked like Shadow, who was sad to being with- (It was as if the universe had been playing mix-em ups with spare dog parts.) The narrator expresses:

 

“…I wish

we’d never brought him home.

If we’d never met him, never been licked

by his fat pink tongue, been warmed

by the heat of his solid body on the couch

watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer,

we’d never have known the desiccated

emptiness of every night

after the night we found

his bed vacant ad the back door

yawning in the stasis of moonlight.

 

It doesn’t matter how loud or late

into the night you call someone’s name,

if they are gone, they are gone.”

 

The loss of the dog reflects the narrator’s pain in losing Carole. She does not know what happened to Shadow: if he ran away because he was tired of living with them in their “filthy mobile home,” or if he was stolen by a “crack head.” It is the not knowing that exacerbates the pain of the loss. The mind plays tricks, questions if there was love present at all. The narrator regrets the dog and also, never saying thank you to Carole, once, when she splurged on pizza for them, when money was tight. Whether big or small, loss is loss.

 

These poems are not without humor. Despite the fact that the narrator admits that she cries at Folger commercials or goes weeks without touching another human being, we also laugh at the particular details that create a whole human. When we laugh, we forget pain momentarily.

 

An impressively descriptive poem begins with “Dear Carole, Today I’m wearing that ring…/ you stole for me at the art fair…”

 

It is in this poem that we travel with Carole and the narrator to the art fair, laugh as the narrator describes the “hot hippie without a bra” that Carole would roll her eyes at. It is poignant. When the narrator talks to the hippie vendor and covets a large red and black swirled ring: the hippie says: the ring wants to be a ring. I never take from the Earth without permission. The narrator feels nervous, says “Cool,” and walks away.  A few minutes later, at a cross walk, Carole presses something into the palm of the narrator’s hand. It is the ring. Carole then says:

 

“The stone told me to take it. It said it wanted you to wear it.”

 

We cannot help but smile.

Pages later when we learn that the ring breaks, we feel a heaviness in our chest.

 

These poems rise and fall with the everyday rush of a river current.  Even the mundane, the humorous episodes, the losses these women experienced together, all of it— we feel with gusto.

 

Chavez’s very last line of the collection is something we already know (we empathize with all of these poems), yet this last line comforts us. We simply recognize: “Always the talking is to you.”

 

 

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and now lives in the DC area. She is the author of two full length poetry collections (forthcoming.) Her chapbook “Clown Machine” is forthcoming from Grey Book Press this summer. Recent work can be seen or is forthcoming at Jet Fuel Review, Freezeray, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Inter/rupture, Poor Claudia, and decomP. Visit: .