Chapbook: My Bedside Radio 
Author: Anthony Cappo
Publisher: Deadly Chaps

My Bedside Radio is a chapbook written in narrative form. The reader follows the narrator from childhood to young adulthood struggling to understand a seemingly contradictory and fearful world. It touches on themes such as sexuality, war, racism, social scripts and paternal abandonment.

These poems are deceptively simple; they aren’t laden with metaphor or high diction and the lines rarely have more than five words in them. It’s as if the poet made a compromise between the complexity of life and the simple-hearted perception of a young person, as if Cappo told the young narrator, “Yes, I know how to write about your confusions, about your realizations, about your awe and loneliness and if you let me do it, I will do it so that if I were able to throw this book decades into the past you would be able to read it.” In this compromise he refuses to burden the growing protagonist with sententious analysis and instead gives him a sympathetic once-over before looking to the larger world. Cappo does not lock his protagonist in pity-driven isolation but frees him into the larger scope of being, for which everyone—his sister’s boyfriends, Nixon, Byron, fugitive guerrillas – is responsible:

[Freedom, freedom, everybody wants freedom]

Freedom, freedom, everybody wants
freedom, my bedside radio explains.

Goodbye, stranger; baby don’t
get hooked on me; never fall
in love again.

Other people such a problem.
I thought together was the whole point.

Life isn’t simple, Cappo seems to write, but the apparent contradictions of the world mustn’t obscure our language. Contradictions lead to uncertainty but words are the tool used to approximate truths. The radio, with its songs and news, plays the role of an authority figure to the young narrator and at the end of the book, the adult protagonist understands the identity-forming power of words.

Anthony Cappo is just as skillful and considerate of sound in his poems as the singers that come through his radio. The strength of his sound comes through his fluent use of assonance. One of my favorite poems from this book demonstrates how well he maneuvers the vowel sounds:

[My bedside radio says that was all he missed]

My bedside radio says that was all
he missed, he ain’t comin’ back.

I sing this and my baby sister
complains, you don’t know that, dad

Might be coming back. Everyone
tells her no no, he’s just singing

a song. But she’s right – I’m not.
And he isn’t.

In this poem, Cappo plays the “i” sound against the “o” sound, creating a dialogue between the vowels. The “i” is definite and cruel: “missed”, “this”, “isn’t.” The “o” is a protest, upset and insecure: “no no”, “song”, “not”, “don’t.” The sounds in Cappo’s poems are not just part of the poetic music, but play intricately to each poem’s meaning. One can argue that the main dialogue is not even between the characters, but between these “i” and “o” sounds that would be able to carry all the weight even if the poem were written with nonsense words.

Even when opportunity affords it, he chooses to surprise rather than shock his audience (“When I asked her what adultery meant // she said to ask your father”). His uses of metaphor aren’t far-fetched (“just two married guys stinging // the town, honeying the girls.) and even his use of surrealism shows great control. The radio may be “sad” or “goofing off” but the personification of the radio never detracts from the poem as a slice of the actual.

What is most astonishing about these poems is the multitudes that they contain in such a small space. The poem “[Come on people now, smile on your brother]” is sixteen lines. In it Cappo is able to put the audience in a specific era, acknowledge hypocrisy and the limitations of music, disparage idealism, mock commercial tactics, and demonstrate the incredible disparity between the private and public treatment of a minority group.

The last three lines of the poem are “There’s harmony in buying the world // a Coke, but Ruben Carter / didn’t make out so well.” I want to go into these lines because this is one of many great places where Cappo shows his understanding of language to not have to use a lot of it. (I can imagine him describing certain poems as pushy). His minimal use of language demonstrates his understanding of white space. The large, uninhabited areas of the page spread wide and unanswered. Whereas a charged topic such as race relations would set less skillful poets into apologetic writing, Cappo lets the untouched page speak the immeasurable silence of perpetual racism.

My Bedside Radio is a collection of poems that follows the development of a maturing protagonist alongside the historical development of a culture. In the beginning the radio gives inchoate messages (“AM radio the new truth / acid protest”), staticky with confusion and destruction; by the end Jim Morrison is proclaimed “the sexiest man alive, but dead.” Our protagonist is now an adult and the authoritative voice of the radio is turned down. We witness him as grown, physically navigating an outside environment far from his bedside, and learning, tentatively how to sing his own song.

A Railroad Puja

In the stampede at Godhra, the first child is trampled.
The Sabarmati Express stalls at the platform

like a suitcase bursting. The bogie’s coupling is cut,

the railcar isolated, sprinkled with kerosene.
Look what happens. When we collide

a struck match drops. Our arms flail

from shattered windows. Charred chappals
graze the rails. Dusty pant legs flutter, brimmed

with flames. Our mouths gasp small choking

o’s. Now the whole city smells like paan,
a gritty red splatter on gravel-strewn sidewalk.

We know we are too many. When the burnt bodies

are swathed in faded salwars, tossed in the bed
of a rusted pickup, and carried to the Ganga,

we want only the warm silt of flour dusted over

a chapatti. We turn the fan on high, cup a tea light
in our hands. Watch our prayer flicker.

 

 

 

lowering

his hood flares out, spectacle pattern
like tessellations, the glint of him gilded just so

in the light. the cobra is a garland—no, the cobra
is a man’s knuckles, a girl’s hair clumped
between them, & you

are the girl. you hold your sadness
with both hands & know
how to drive a shovel between your body
& venom, know the heft

of the handle, splintering your palm.
this isn’t your first time.

you killed the last one as he came
toward you, zigzagging, his tracks in the sand
like a graph or table

showing how many more women died
alone this year, in your village
this year, as babies this year, walked
toward him thinking spectacle—

& his snake-blood made the sand blacken,
made it curdle, almost, made your blood

curdle, to hear the slicing, to feel his neck
shorn by the blade, & you stared as blood worked
its way back out of his body, thought

of the man who watched you bleed
on his bed the first time & didn’t offer
to help. the cobra veers right & you lift the shovel,
pewter almost humming, almost alive,

the blade trembling as you wait
for the snake to change its course—

 

 

 

flow

As a noun, it’s a word that makes most girls I know cringe.
A word whose synonyms—motion, flux, current—
remind me of the Cooper, the Ashley, the steady, continuous rivers
I swam in at sixteen, the first time I ever
wore a bikini. I wonder if those girls
think of a body of water—or just of bodies, of boys
who poke fun at cycles. It gets tricky for me
with the verb. As in to go along with a series of actions
you may not feel totally comfortable with. To move
in a steady, continuous stream toward or away from a certain
vanishing point of action. As in a lover saying “go with the flow”
was sort of his approach to relationships. I have gone with the flow
all the way up to the moment when time
slows & you see the thing you love
being taken from you. Resistance to the flow is often met
with an impression of me as steady, as in going steady, or why
are you so uptight? I went with the flow once
at a party in college & the next day threw away all
of my tank tops, every strappy thing
I could find. Flow can also refer to blood
between legs, to menstrual cycles, to any kind
of wound & what comes from it. As in no blood was spilled
when he stung my cheek but I felt something flow
out of me—steady, continuous. I felt it as I bolted
home, & again when I burrowed into piles of laundry.
We say a poem does or does not flow, that things either move forward
or not at all; fish are carried with the river down or upstream;
there’s this liquid motion that’s steady, continuous,
predictable. Something that cannot be stopped.

 

 

 

Indian American poet Raena Shirali grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where she currently lives and teaches English at College of Charleston. Her first book, GILT, is forthcoming in 2017 with YesYes Books, and her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Four Way Review, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, and many more. Her other honors include a 2016 Pushcart Prize, the 2016 Cosmonauts Avenue Prize, recognition as a finalist for the 2016 Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, the 2014 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, recognition as a finalist for the 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize in 2013. She is currently a poetry reader for Muzzle Magazine & will be the Spring 2017 Philip Roth Resident at the Stadler Center for Poetry.  You can find more of her work at 

During 2016, the Spotlight Series has (usually) focused on the work of (approximately) two poets per month. This month’s second poet, whose feature concludes this series, is Raena Shirali.

 

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?

Raena Shirali: Much of my motivation on a poem-by-poem basis comes from a resistance against silence, as well as a desire to enter into and provide a new understanding of various psychologies. I first fell in love with poetry because of persona, because it provided opportunity to escape my own thoughts (at least, that’s what I thought persona was offering me as a young poet), and I still return to persona or ekphrasis whenever I get stuck. But I think persona provides more than self-discovery by means of vicarious experience. It’s an opportunity to create and cultivate empathy. That’s what makes poetry such a powerful medium—a medium I can’t imagine life without. To loosely quote Casey Jarrin, one of my most influential teachers, poetry is an empathy machine, and everything that fosters empathy is not just worthwhile, but necessary. I think that’s closely related to why I’m excited about the poebiz landscape right now. We’re seeing so many more POC voices, LGBTQ+ voices, marginalized and oppressed voices getting recognition at the Poetry Foundation and and beyond. That motivates me not just to keep writing, keep remaining dedicated to writing poetry for and alongside my fellow POCs, my fellow women, anyone who has questioned or struggled with their heritage or sexuality—but further motivates me to read and promote those authors actively. How do our fragmented experiences, our traumas, our flawed attempts to articulate those traumas, ultimately add up to our collective consciousness? Our collective empathy? Our capacity to praise, or mourn, or change?

FFF: What are your influences—creatively (esp in terms of other media/other art), personally, and socially/politically?
RS: That really depends on where I am in my writing process, but I do make a point to consume art that isn’t poetry every day—whether that’s compiling art on , listening to podcasts, stopping by the , or reading in a sculpture garden. I’m a firm believer in indirect influence—the confluence of experiences and art forms as the real generative space—as opposed to reading an article and having an immediate reaction in the form of a poem. Don’t get me wrong—social and political issues completely drive my work, but I’ve had to train myself to not let my impulse or initial emotional response take charge in the poem. I have too fierce a reaction to things like gang rape in India—a topic my book addresses extensively—to write the first thing I feel. I have to sit with that violence, and ask how it can speak to, say, a red sculpture smattered with white bird shit I saw a few months ago, or the girls in sorority tees sitting underneath it, talking quietly. I guess my creative influences are those of association and accumulation, which makes sense, considering my experiences with assimilation and camouflaging as a woman of color writing in the South.

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?
RS: Aesthetically, I’m always thinking about lineation and enjambment first and foremost, and I especially prioritize fragmentation over symmetry. To me, no poem is really the final word, even if the poem is fulsome in its articulation and conception. It seems almost haphazard to call the poems in GILT complete, in a way, when the notions of fracture, chaos, and fear are so integral to the project. I think that’s my central challenge and preoccupation—to allow individual poems as well as the book to be a liminal space, where answers aren’t accessible to us, because in any instance of violence, what is the answer, really? How do we explore such barren landscapes— landscapes fraught with the aftermath of violence, landscapes where girls aren’t welcome, where girls are the fear-riddled creatures we’ve brought them up to be, no matter the country?

I’ll say that recently, I’ve moved away from more conceptual poetry, and instead, selectively read work with discernible stake. I’m more drawn to art that allows violence its gruesome elements, while also investigating and implicating lyricism in conversation with that violence. That kind of art—poems like in Seam come to mind—should be as visceral as the event it seeks to expand and mold for the reader. Rape, for instance, shouldn’t fit into a template or a box, and we shouldn’t only be willing to engage with similar subject matters when they fit into outlines that make us, as readers, comfortable. I try to practice that belief in my reading, writing, and teaching, but that isn’t to say it’s not hard, uncomfortable work.

Deconstructing language and experience is cool to me. Poems like Franny Choi’s are cool to me, because they’re risky and fun, while also being succinct and brilliant critiques. Any work that challenges convention is cool to me, too. For instance, I’m enjoying watching the lyric essay as a mode shift and mutate and resist definition even more defiantly, especially in work that engages pop culture and is written with the attention to detail and capacity for empathy of Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib’s . It’s super interesting to me when poetry gets circulated on social media, especially lately around the utterly unfathomable violence against black men and women & the LGBTQ+ population in America. I love that these pieces feel and are more immediate, necessary, and laudable than some of what we, as a culture, still praise canonically. I love watching and being a part (in whatever small way) of that change.

 

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?

RS: Language barriers have shaped me more than I care to admit. Growing up, my parents spoke English in the house; and since they actually speak two different dialects of Hindi (Gujaratri and Konkani), and English was more comfortable for them, they rarely spoke Hindi (though, props to my mom, who tried pretty hard to teach us the basics for a year or so in there). So throughout my childhood and adolescence, taking trips to India or visiting family (most of whom speak Gujaratri), I felt this sense of alienation, coupled with a deep desire to fit in (a pretty common narrative for first generation immigrants). It’s interesting because, on the one hand, growing up so blatantly not-white in South Carolina, I wanted desperately to be the antithesis of my family, my heritage, my skin—but on the other hand, I craved a sense of belonging that I must have known, innately, couldn’t be attained by assimilating. I feel that sense of not-belonging in my poems as strongly as I do in my sense of self, and it’s taken years to accept that not-belonging does not mean I have no identity, but rather, that liminality is likely the most significant aspect of my being.

I finally had that realization when I was 22, seeing at the Boston MFA, and that was a real turning point in both my poetry and my conceptualization of identity and otherness. “Iago’s Mirror” is this gorgeously ornate series of stacked Murano glass mirrors, but the whole piece is entirely black. Of course, it’s a comment on Othello and blackness above all, but it made me become obsessed with the idea that the act of looking at myself, as a child of immigrants, had been completely altered by the fact of my brownness as other. I mean, at some point growing up, I just stopped explaining what being “Indian” meant. I was always going to be not-quite, and kids explained me away as “definitely being half-white” or “really light skinned for a black girl.” It was exhausting explaining myself, so I just grew totally apathetic. I stopped owning my skin—stopped owning my body, really—and that period of my life is one marked by depression and eating disorders, as a result (subjects that GILT engages with, by the way). “Iago’s Mirror” flipped the lens for me. I was 22, finishing out my first year of grad school, had finally left the South and found a community I felt a part of. And then I saw this piece—one that, it seemed to me, spoke to issues of colorism and diaspora and intersectionality—and I just realized I wasn’t writing about the shit that needed to be written about. I could make the choice to actively embody and promote my identity, not just in my life, but, perhaps more importantly, in my poems. In doing so, I could own the parts of myself that were “too dark.” I hadn’t written a single poem involving my own identity before that point, and now I can’t imagine what my poetry would be without it. That piece of art changed everything for me.

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.
RS: It almost feels silly to plug it at this point, but given the state of our current political climate, I feel it bears repeating: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is, by far, the most important text I’ve read in the last year, not just because of its exploration of America’s race issues, but because that is a book that, every time I read it, pushes me—in terms of genre, self-evaluation, grief, cultural critique, praise. It asks that we own the microaggressions committed against us, as well as those that we—inevitably, unintentionally—are implicated in the perpetuation of. I think that’s incredibly brave and important work, and am always thinking about how I can navigate a similar space in my poems. Parts of GILT address the aspects of my upbringing that were and are incredibly privileged, while simultaneously engaging in the racialized body as alienated, perhaps as a direct result of the community that privilege entails or bestows. So, I guess I’ll say that Citizen isn’t just important as a text to hold up in order to say, “Racism exists!” but more so for us to examine our own day to day engagement with and movement through our world, and to be willing to change it, to open the door for other POCs, other LGBTQ+ writers, anyone who has been and continues to be disenfranchised in seemingly quiet ways.

The second book I’ll recommend is a stretch, not because it isn’t an amazing collection of poems, but because it is incredibly hard to get your hands on. Morocco by Matthew Savoca and Kendra Malone Grant was released by Dark Sky Books in 2011, and is currently priced at $361 on Amazon. No joke. So it feels a bit ridiculous to even tell people to seek Morocco out, but I can’t answer this question without doing just that. Morocco is scathingly minimalist, and doesn’t fuck around when talking about fucking around. It taught me to truly own how the body can be equally wrecked by grief, love, and heritage. It’s raw and tender and full of slippery things, and both voices in the affair are represented honestly enough to make the reader uncomfortable. You know how sometimes you see a movie or read a book (The Sun Also Rises comes to mind) where the central relationship is so fucked up that it’s somehow appealing? That’s what these poems are. They’re gorgeous, bright, dead spaces. You can’t help but fall in love with them, even though they’re poisonous and addicting. And you don’t regret falling for them once you have. Find this book. Seriously.

 

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

RS: I guess this is the place where I plug the book! My first collection of poems, GILT, is coming out with Yes Yes Books.

And as an end note, I think it’s important to mention that several of the poems in GILT are persona poems dealing with incredible violence and trauma—something that I am cautious and wary of throughout the drafting and composition process. Leslie Jamison, in The Empathy Exams, borrows this little bit of wisdom from Faulkner that I’ve been obsessing over: “It isn’t enough, but it’s something.” I feel that applies to all art, but to poems where the author has to reach beyond their own set of experiences especially. And I think that’s how I feel about GILT. It isn’t enough to write one collection about this truly wide-ranging set of issues, but it’s a start. It’s something.

 

 

Indian American poet Raena Shirali grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where she currently lives and teaches English at College of Charleston. Her first book, GILT, is forthcoming in 2017 with YesYes Books, and her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Four Way Review, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, and many more. Her other honors include a 2016 Pushcart Prize, the 2016 Cosmonauts Avenue Prize, recognition as a finalist for the 2016 Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, the 2014 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, recognition as a finalist for the 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize in 2013. She is currently a poetry reader for Muzzle Magazine & will be the Spring 2017 Philip Roth Resident at the Stadler Center for Poetry.  You can find more of her work at 

Maria Mazziotti Gillan— What Blooms in Winter

NYQ Books, 2016

Page Length: 116

Retail: $15

The last several months have been trying as an American citizen. Donald Trump’s candidacy has used xenophobic rhetoric to demonize minority groups and immigrants. In these times, Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s body of work, which often focuses on her Italian-American family heritage and celebrating the immigrant experience, is especially relevant. Her newest collection, What Blooms in Winter, draws on the deeply personal to vocalize her story and also give praise to the melting pot aspect that has always been a foundation of American culture.

Gillan’s latest collection continues to draw on the narrative form, and most of the poems use personal memory to address broader issues, including the immigrant experience, climate change, and global terrorism. The early part of the collection moves through grade school, before shifting to her teenage/twenty-something years, during the 1960s and 1970s. The book then addresses a number of losses in the poet’s life, including close family. Finally, the book concludes with a number of poems about Italy and her parents’ immigrant experience. The language is accessible, but the content is never simple.

Because of this election season and national dialogue, I was most drawn to poems that explore what it means to be an American. In “The First Day of High School,”  the speaker recounts trying so hard to look like an “American middle-class girl,” including wearing the right clothes. Soon, however, the speaker learns that preppy clothes can’t hide who she really is or mask her “lower-class accent.” The poem then weaves in and out of memory, navigating to a moment when a famous poet told the speaker to hire a voice coach to erase her accent. The speaker refused and concludes her poem in defiance against any notion that she is not American.

Another poem, “Our First TV,” addresses manufactured notions of the American dream. The speaker lists various images from TV shows she watched growing up and their portrayal of the American success story, including the big white house and huge living and dining rooms on “Father Knows Best.” The speaker goes back even further to Dick and Jane books that taught her about “the other America” with a “pipe-smoking father raking leaves/in his cardigan and brown dress pants.” It was that first TV in the living room, however, that taught the speaker about class divide and how her living situation, a “cold-water flat” with small rooms and Italian chatter, was different than the upper-middle class American homes she viewed on TV. The poem concludes with one final reality about class divide in America, and the lines resonate especially well post-Great Recession:

All the TV programs in the world

could not have prepared me

for the invisible walls

that protected those people

from people like me.

Other poems cry out in frustration against global terrorism or climate change. “The Catskills in Mid-September,” for example, celebrates the beauty of the northeastern mountains, but ends with the lines, “As the weather swings from downpour/to drought, I know we are all to blame/know there is so much that has to change.” Other work centers on family and recalls the poet’s sister, parents, and even more recent interactions with grandchildren in bucolic settings of Italy.

Overall, What Blooms in Winter places the poet squarely on the side of the immigrant and the underdog. The book never strays from the narrative mode and frequently draws on the poet’s personal memories, either to merge the personal with the political, or to honor the memory of those who have come and gone in her life.  I am grateful for Maria’s voice. Her work stands as a protester banner, waving boldly against anyone who wants to make the country less inclusive.

 

 

Cannibal Island Housing

Everyone who moves to Cannibal Island is given a house.

The houses are okay.

On one hand, the houses all have Thermo-Twin windows, which are very expensive and come with 3 full pages of warranties.

On the other hand, everyone who sleeps in the houses on Cannibal Island has nightmares in which their fingernails fall off and there is a dead ferret under the sofa in the living room that they can’t seem to remember to call animal control about.

But it’s all right, because every Tuesday the cannibals go door to door handing out cake!

Cannibals make very good cake. Surprisingly, (and no one ever believes this at first), the cake is vegan.

The cannibals also have excellent memories because if a non-cannibal expresses that they have a peanut allergy or a penchant for red velvet, the following Tuesday the cannibals make sure to accommodate.

The cannibals teach each new resident of Cannibal Island that cool trick they all first learned from a Buzzfeed video where you cut out the center of the cake, then push the remaining halves of the cake together so the cake does not go stale during the week.

After all, cannibals hate waste and always do their best to be good Earth citizens, forming good communities with housing, weekly cake, and gleaming teeth.

 

 

 

Becoming a Cannibal

Non-cannibals who live on Cannibal Island can sometimes become cannibals.

Many believe the process simple as knocking the postman unconscious, removing his leg with a bone saw, and eating the leg.

But it is not.

First, you must be a resident of Cannibal Island for a minimum of 7 years.

If you are a woman, the cannibals strongly prefer you do not have children before you become a cannibal.

But if you have them after, that’s okay.

Next, you must perform a series of secret tests. Statistically speaking, non-cannibals who are popular within their peer group tend to perform better on these tests than their unpopular counterparts, and white non-cannibals tend to become cannibals at a higher rate than their non-white non-cannibal counterparts. But as the cannibals like to remind anyone who brings this up, correlation is not causation. And they are definitely not racists.

After passing the series of secret tests, the non-cannibals must all, at once, attempt to jump off a small footbridge, even though logistically speaking less than half of them will fit on the bridge, so that thins the herd, too.

And then the cannibals choose from the non-cannibal cannibal wannabes who managed to jump off the bridge.

If anyone asks the cannibals how they choose, if that person is lucky the cannibals are silent. But if that person is unlucky, the cannibal closest to them bites off their smallest finger, spits it at their feet, and walks away.

 

 

 

Margaret Bashaar’s first book of poetry, Stationed Near the Gateway, was released by Sundress Publications in early 2015. She has chapbooks from Grey Book Press, Blood Pudding Press, and Tilt Press, and her poetry has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including New South, Caketrain, The Southeast Review, Copper Nickel, and Menacing Hedge, among others. Her most recent chapbook, , was released by earlier this year and is available through Poetry Blog. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where she edits Hyacinth Girl Press and encourages art anarchy.

During 2016, the Spotlight Series focuses on two poets per month whose work and consciousness move us, challenge us, inspire us. This month’s first poet is Margaret Bashaar.

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?

Margaret Bashaar: As far as I can recall I’ve always been driven to create—I think most people are, honestly, it’s just a matter of cultivating that drive. I’ve created in a lot of different mediums—I used to sing for many years (I took voice lessons for almost 10 years), I played the violin when I was younger, I used to draw and paint a lot—but poetry was always the medium that I carried with me no matter what other art form I was dabbling in. And honestly it’s the one I’m best at and I’ve been most able to grow and develop within. There was always a ceiling to my ability with other art forms. I have yet to find an endpoint to my growth and curiosity in poetry.

I hate the “poebiz landscape,” truthfully. I think the landscape as it currently stands is detrimental to art and the creation of art. I could rant about why and how all day, but to specifically answer your question, I navigate the poebiz landscape because if I want to share my work, it is part of what I must do. I also routinely work around the poebiz world to share and create poetry and promote and celebrate the poetry of others, so I think part of my motivation in navigating the poebiz landscape is to find new and exciting ways to try to subvert it.

 

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

MB: I always cite T.S. Eliot as one of my influences, because reading “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” when I was in the 6^th grade was what made me want to be a poet. Now having a child who is in the 6^th grade, I also realize how ridiculous I was to be a 6^th grade fan of that poem.

I draw a lot on horror imagery—I’m a fairly delicate, sensitive soul (I swear) and when I was a child I was exceptionally fearful. Like, lie awake at night almost every night genuinely afraid that some unseen horror was lurking in my closet ready to devour me levels of fearful. I think there is a part of me that still has those fears, and so rather than lie around worrying about them, I write them into poems. So there’s a lot of body horror and a lot of people being eaten in my poetry. I’ve had my work compared to films like Trouble Every Day and Martyrs (the original 2008 version).

Though on the subject of body horror, I got an infection in my brain when I was about 12 years old. It affected my basal ganglia, and made me unable to walk or talk for a bit over 6 months. I think some of my desire to dissect the body in my work comes from that—seeing my body as this weird alien thing that wouldn’t do anything I wanted it to at a very formative time in my life. I have some brain damage from that, and while I cannot tell you exactly where that comes out in my poetry, I know that it does—it’s this sort of floating constant, having my brain/body connection always a tiny bit out of my control. It definitely causes me to focus on the body in my work.

 

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?

MB: A professor of mine in college introduced me to Dadaism and Surrealism, and the work both of those movements did in regards to drawing unexpected, startling imagery into poetry and creating unexpected equivalencies in work has stuck with me. I think that really helped shape my aesthetics quite a bit.

If I am being honest, though, most of what I have been trying to do with my poetry anymore is just fucking have fun. If I don’t step away from something I wrote with at least some level of glee at having written, lately I have been questioning why I even spent the time writing that particular piece. I write because I love the act of writing, and I write because I need to write. The writing is the important part—that act of creation and spell-work. And I look for that as a reader, too—if I read a poem or a collection and it feels urgent and it feels like some manner of euphoria came from the creation of the work, I am more likely to enjoy that piece.

 

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?

MB: A few years ago I met this woman in my local artist community and we HATED each other. I thought she was a bitch, she thought I was a stuck-up cunt and we were each annoyed that the other’s friends were also our friends. But somehow, in spite of this, our mutual friend Skot saw something about both of us that made him think we would make the best of friends. So he sort of shoved us together and demanded that we get along. I guess we both like Skot enough that we played nice with each other for long enough to realize that we actually DID like each other and that our initial impressions had been totally and completely wrong. And the woman I thought was a bitch is Rachael Deacon and she’s actually the best human person friend I know and now we run FREE POEMS together and make arts anarchy and I wrote about her in my first book, Stationed Near the Gateway (Sundress Publications, 2015) and she painted the cover art for the book, and I think the moral of the story is that Rachael Deacon is awesome. In all seriousness, though, Rachael IS great, and I feel like it’s really easy to miss that person who jives with you and your philosophy and work over petty crap or an awkward first impression. I feel very fortunate to have a friend like Skot who saw that Rachael and I would get along and cared enough to work to get us to see that too, and to have had the opportunity to try again with someone who has become an amazing friend and the best collaborator in art and arts event creation I ever could have asked for.

 

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.

MB: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s i’m alive / it hurts / i love it is one of those books that, whenever someone asks me about poetry that I think is truly great I always mention. She’s such an amazing poet—I feel like far too much of poetry right now is focused on perfecting craft at the expense of musicality and movement, and Espinoza’s work really is some of the most gorgeous, musical writing I have come across in years. I cried reading this book, and I’m not a crier when it comes to poetry. Her writing is THAT moving.

I also really love Deathless, by Catherynne Valente. It’s not necessarily poetry, but Valente’s prose is so gorgeous in Deathless that I would read a few lines and then go back and reread it just because the writing is that deliciously beautiful. It’s pleasurable and satisfying to read in a way that I’d not before experienced with prose. It’s poetic, but without losing its sense of story and movement, which I find is often a problem in fiction that is going for poetic language.

 

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

MB: I’m good! These were pretty solid questions that made me go all think-y. So that’s enough thinking for a bit, there

 

Margaret Bashaar’s first book of poetry, Stationed Near the Gateway, was released by Sundress Publications in early 2015. She has chapbooks from Grey Book Press, Blood Pudding Press, and Tilt Press, and her poetry has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including New South, Caketrain, The Southeast Review, Copper Nickel, and Menacing Hedge, among others. Her most recent chapbook, , was released by earlier this year and is available through Poetry Blog. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where she edits Hyacinth Girl Press and encourages art anarchy.

In Christopher Morgan’s Fables with Fangs, (Ghost City Press, 2016) a micro chap of eight poems delivers us into the inner workings of the home, the symbolic place of safety, but there are no picket fences here. Morgan’s poems weave surrealism, fear, and humor into a classic tapestry that reveals how  unsafe we all really are. The definition of a fable is a concise tale that intends to reveal a moral lesson by the end. Morgan tips his hat, signs off a good luck in those dark woods, friend, and leaves it at that. The lesson learned is watch out.

In the poem, “The Bear,” A bear literally walks through the hallways of a home, pauses outside a sister’s room, her door ajar.  Morgan writes:

 

“I’m opening my door just a crack.

I’m looking down the hall. My sister’s door is open.

And nothing else. Of course nothing else. Then

I stop. Something in the dark. Large. A couch,

slowly moving toward me. Two reflections.

Looking straight at me. Now I’m already inside

my sister’s room locking her door. But what can

locks do against a bear?”

 

Morgan notes the speaker says “Of course nothing else.” Just a door is open. When a danger is present all we want to do is seek out our loved ones and make sure they are safe. He does not see his sister, just a gateway to a violent attack. There is also a potent surreal element with the “two reflections.” Morgan sees himself and the bear looking back—he sees the bear in himself . The lumbering imposter in a childhood home, a seeker of  trouble and blood.

Morgan’s  poems get to the point quickly. Common visuals that exist in our every day, like a furnace or items that you wouldn’t give a second glance too, become threatening and terrible. When I mean common, I mean things you ignore because they are everywhere: walls.

In Morgan’s poem “The Wall,” a woman’s husband is eaten by the wall and it is gruesome. It is not cartoonish but breathing and horrific. Morgan builds tension slowly though. The house exhales smoke but there is no fire. There is no warning. It’s like the woman senses something is wrong and goes to look for her husband who is already being eaten by the wall.

 

“His body’s upright, immersed high.

Like the kitchen wall’s eating him. A leg dangles.

His warped lips stretch like taffy. Eyes puff, bubble…

She tries tugging his body back

from wherever it’s going—it tears.”

Like people who are taken from family members suddenly and without explanation, Morgan’s prose poem is a terse example of this helplessness. There is pure trepidation on the page and the husband does not even get the chance to say good bye or scream. When there is a scream, it comes from the wall: angry and bottomless.

If we are unnerved by adults getting eaten by walls, adults who have a remote sense of control and power in the world, even if this is a delusion, it is even more unsettling to read about the shadows who run amok at a children’s playground.

In “Under Control” It is Morgan’s speaker who claims “ I set my shadow loose on the playground again.” Not only is he the boogey man or pulling the strings of the darkness like a marionette, but this isn’t even the first time he’s done it. We get a sense of a dark habit-like game almost like portraying an addiction.

He makes this humorous excuse:  “ I’m sorry—never been a winner.”

It is when we are at our most vulnerable, our most lowdown that base human emotions rear their ugly heads: the ability to hurt, to lost empathy.  The mothers and fathers try to grab their children up before they are eaten, but it is a losing battle.  Morgan softens the blow with this:

 

“But the children thought the whole thing was a hoot.

Can’t blame them.

Little monsters.”

This poem is a monster playing with other “little monsters.” This  “scary” is more tongue in cheek but also like a warning.

The poem “Omen” feels more like a traditional fable with birds falling from the sky, deer “shrieking” and even a  cast of mob mentality filled “villagers,” who hammer off granite from a mountain and carry it back home in suitcases, literally attacking the earth.

I’m not going to give away what happens in this poem but just be warned “It was a bad night for sunsets—that night it almost didn’t happen.”  There is humor in these lines as well a perceived uneasiness.

The last poem of the collection, “Georgia” is very lyrical and different than the others. It is almost a place personified.  If Morgan states that we cannot feel safe in traditionally safe places (the home, the playground, etc) the solution is: internalize the place you want to be. Let the wholeness reside in you. Safety, after all, is a state of mind.

Here is an example of Georgia’s transient soul and personhood:

 

“Georgia dabs its neck and wrists with sweet tea cologne, then enters a bar to find a friend.”

 

“Georgia sits in a Denny’s at three in the morning, weighing out good and evil.”

 

“Georgia has a coral snake on one shoulder and a king snake on the other.”

No one is going to mess with Georgia— yet Georgia also seems alone, mingling with snakes and rats, the rare friend.  There is a warning at the end of Georgia, however, sort of proclaiming Georgia was hurt once and learned the hard way. Georgia, Morgan promises to readers, “will never be that fellow.” Georgia holds the snakes but knows how to avoid a bite. We should all be so lucky.

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens is the author of two full length poetry collections (Yellow Chair Press and Stalking Horse Press.) Her chapbook “Dixit: Every Picture Tells a Story, or The Wrong Items,” is forthcoming from White Knuckle Press in 2017 and “She Came Out From Under the Bed, (Poems Inspired by the Films of Guillermo del Toro)” is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Recent work is at Lime Hawk, concis, and Inter/rupture. Visit: .

 

“’I know / there is violence in all of us,’ these ‘problematic feminist’ poems assert. This work reminds us that what is truly problematic is poetry devoid of awareness of complexity and complicity, and feminism without nuance. Some Other Stupid Fruit lays bear the strangeness, the rot, and the inherent hypocrisies of our gendered identities, and refuses to put a cherry on top.”

—Arielle Greenberg

“Musings on maneuvering through the rapey ol’ patriarchy. Margaret Bashaar’s newest chapbook hits the ground in heels kicking for the artery. In case you haven’t been listening to her poetry thus far, Some Other Stupid Fruit all but grabs your stupid face and wills its words to crack your orbital bones and release the gooey insides of your eyes. Honest, brutal observations in rapid succession, enough to leave the reader concussed. The roar of a self-aware woman in today’s asshat weird world. Some Other Stupid Fruit is an airtight collection. Don’t be a jerk, read the book.” —John Thomas Menesini, author of Gloom Hearts & Opioids