NPM Daily

Sarah Blake is the author of Mr. West, an unauthorized lyric biography of Kanye West, out with Wesleyan University Press. Named After Death, her first chapbook, is forthcoming from Banango Editions with an illustrated companion workbook. Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and many others. She was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship for poetry in 2013. She lives outside of Philadelphia with her husband and son.

A Goodbye

It has been an enormous pleasure spending my National Poetry Months dedicated to the voices of poets and editors and scholars whom I so admire. It makes it difficult to announce this, but this will be my last year running NPMDaily. So I thought I would talk about why I started it.

Years ago, Matthew Zapruder read at the graduate program I was attending, and afterwards he spoke about a reading Mary Ruefle gave. The best I can remember it: at the end, she didn’t do a Q&A—she said, “I want to talk about metaphor,” and she did, and it was great.

I’ve been to enough readings now to have seen and felt these moments, usually during a Q&A, where something great comes out that wouldn’t have. And I realized there weren’t enough spaces for those moments to occur. I wanted to make a space for exactly those moments.

Some years, the posts were a lifeline for me back to poetry, when I couldn’t write myself. Some years, the posts were what sparked writing, for myself and for others. I heard from other poets. I heard from teachers using posts in the classroom.

Every year I know of more poets I want to feature—all the voices I’d like to give a little space to, to hear what they’re thinking, to get a look into the ways their brains work, ways that bring them to poetry, this art form I love so incredibly.

erica lewis lives in San Francisco where she is a fine arts publicist and curates the john oates house reading series. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various online and print anthologies and journals. Books include the precipice of jupiter, camera obscura (both collaborations with artist Mark Stephen Finein) and murmur in the inventory. daryl hall is my boyfriend, book one in the box settrilogy, is just out from Barrelhouse; mary wants to be a superwoman, book two,is forthcoming from Jack White’s Third Man Books in 2017. Recent chapbooks include publications from Ypolita Press and Lame House Press; chapbooks are forthcoming from Belladonna, Lark Books, and After Hours/The Song Cave. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.

 I want to talk about success. I know, it seems like such an oxymoron when we’re talking about poetry, but bear with me.

A couple weeks ago I went to AWP for the first time. I won’t lie; I had such a great time.

I know that not everyone had the same experience, and I totally respect that. But, man, seeing all of you, reading, hanging out, walking around the book fair, I’m so appreciative of that experience. I felt so much love and support and isn't that what the whole thing is about? Just being present? Enjoying the fact that we’re all kind of in this poetry thing together? We may be in different places in our writing careers, hold different politics and views, but man, we’re all here. We’re doing it. And no one is laughing at us or giving us glazed-over eyes when we tell them what we do.

But then there is the ugly flip side. Someone told me that the only reason I enjoyed AWP so much was because I have a book that just came out. Because I’m aligned with so and so. Because white dudes like me. Seriously?

“Success,” whatever it means, certainly shouldn’t be a point of shaming. It’s a matter of perspective. And maybe that definition changes with age. And maybe the question to ask is not “why do all the white dudes like you?” Maybe it is to ask yourself, “Why do I write poetry?” “Does what I’m putting out into the world help anyone else?” “What’s the endgame?” “What’s at stake?” Maybe the point is to use whatever platform you have and pay it forward. Use whatever you’ve learned or experienced or achieved to help another poet. Isn’t that, too, part of our lineage as poets?

giovanni singleton’s Ascension (Counterpath Press), informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane, received the 81st California Book Award Gold Medal. She is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. Her work has been included in What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, Best American Experimental Writing 2016, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African American Poetry, Hick Poetics: An Anthology of Contemporary Rural American Poetry, and North American Review and exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute’s American Jazz Museum, San Francisco’s first Visual Poetry and Performance Festival, and on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She is the 2015-16 Visiting Assistant Professor in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University.

C is the Color of Attention or Abecedarianism’s Architecture of the Poetic Soul

I am learning to write the alphabet. Again. They were miswritten in times before now. They strained to conform. Instruction led hand across languaged battlefields. Japanese. Tibetan. English. Calligraphy lessons to loosen the grip of a pen held too tightly. I quit the uppercase G, saying it’s to reclaim my own authority. Make a different G, a Vimala G composed from two sized C’s. The literary archive and published facsimile allow for eavesdropping on past gestures. The written by hand could be more true, more alive, living still. Handwriting as flesh.

Reconfiguring my relationship to letters of the alphabet invests and animates said and written words that then make lines and expressive writing. Writing connects, communicates and is an act of paying attention. C opens focus from the cradle to the. . . C being color, being colored. The letter A begins it and maybe is C’s ear. C as in chant. Copious, candle, confession, creation, confidence, causation, crave, collate, collaborate, cohort, calamity, Community. . .

I am relearning to write letters of an alphabet. The letter C is present. C for consonance. C for curse or collusion as C does with its sound of letters K or S most often. Cloak and dagger. C makes a cup of coffee. I observe C and fear for its openness or reluctance. Womb. I watch and study and practice on ruled and unruly paper. I stalk C to its core. Minimalism mirrored in one-letter poems. Braided cable like The Beatles sing “Let It Be, Let It Be” made in the key of C.

Third letter of alphabetic system. C’s back rounds from an earlier version of a point stuck out. Writing curves the body like C. The practice of C produces constellated influence heretofore unknown. Gathered up bones do music and shine like Clifton (Lucille), Coleman (Wanda), Coltrane (Alice), Cortez (Jayne). Scribbling scribed in poetry life. All Californian caught tongue. Geographical trains of thought transmission leave the station and keep going on and on. . . 

Eleanor Stanford is the author of Bartram's Garden and The Book of Sleep, both from Carnegie Mellon Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals. She is a 2014/2016 Fulbright scholar to Brazil, and lives in the Philadelphia area.

Poetry Exists in the Facts

“Poetry exists in the facts,” wrote the Brazilian modernist poet Oswaldo de Andrade in 1928, in his Anthropophagic Manifesto.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been writing poems about and in the voices of traditional Brazilian midwives. I spent two months in rural Bahia in 2014 as a Fulbright fellow, traveling around the countryside and listening to these women’s stories, and will return this year to complete the grant.

Why? What is it about these women and their traditions that draws me to want to hear their stories, to write them down?

Some of it is the facts: Brazil, particularly its economically depressed regions in the North, faces enormous challenges in terms of resources and access to safe birth. Meanwhile, many private hospitals in Rio and São Paulo have C-section rates as high as 98 or 99 percent. (According to the World Health Organization, the recommended rate is 10-15 percent.) Midwifery, which could help alleviate many of these disparities in Brazil, is often persecuted rather than supported by the government, and is--according to the American midwife and writer Ina May Gaskin, “in danger of extinction.”

Other facts: Dona França’s ninety-four-year old hands cutting garlic. Dona Maria’s tiny feet in wool socks and child’s sandals. Dona Aúrea’s sour countenance, as she offered me windfall oranges from her yard and talked earnestly about apocalypse.

More facts: bath of cottonleaf for contractions. Tea of sweet basil. Warm olive oil to ease the baby’s passage.

So much writing about the medicalization of birth, pro and con and everything in between, is polarizing and political. It can be almost impossible to avoid a tone that’s at least a little bit self-righteous or accusatory or maudlin.

Poems allow me a way to talk about midwifery that is beyond both polemic and sentimentality. The facts of these women’s lives are beautiful, worthy of record. Is it a fact that hitting a woman on the small of the back with her husband’s left shoe will restart a stalled labor? That a black butterfly comes to land on the baby’s umbilicus sometimes, causing death at seven days?

Poetry exists in the facts, and beyond the facts too. “The way we speak,” Oswaldo says. “The way we are.” “The shacks of saffron and ochre in the green of the favela.”

Lindsay Lusby is the author of the chapbook Imago (dancing girl press, 2014) and winner of the 2015 Fairy Tale Review Award in Poetry, judged by Joyelle McSweeney. Her poems have appeared most recently in North Dakota Quarterly, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Third Point Press, Sugar House Review, The Lumberyard, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. With Jehanne Dubrow, she coedited The Book of Scented Things, a poetry anthology from the Literary House Press; the duo are currently at work on the next anthology in this series: Still Life with Poem, to be released in October 2016. She is the Assistant Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College, where she serves as assistant editor for the Literary House Press and managing editor for Cherry Tree.

The Gorgeous Grotesque

I’ve always had a difficult time explaining my love of horror movies to the uninitiated. Honestly, I’ve even had difficulty explaining it to myself. Why am I drawn to these visual stories of serial killers and sci-fi monsters? Although I haven’t yet found an explanation for this fascination with morbidity, I think I have come closer to understanding the poetry of it. One of the best shows to grace television over the last three years—Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal—is one of those missing links. Each gruesome crime scene is an intricately-constructed piece of art. Aside from being visually stunning, they are all laced with elements of fairy tale and allegory. Both the creative and destructive forces of the natural world—and humanity stitched almost seamlessly back into it. The bloom of decay.

A little over a year ago, I took this recognition a step further. I decided to write a series of poems in conversation with the iconic serial killer movie The Silence of the Lambs. The idea took hold in me while rewatching the movie for what must have been the twenty-first time (at least). I noticed how “Starling” became a sort of refrain in the script, how Agent Clarice Starling was both woman and bird at these moments. What could I do with that? This series of poems became an exploration into how a murder investigation is its own dark fairy tale. Weave in the pervasive and bleak natural world, the inherent dangers of girlhood, of being a young woman in a male-dominated world hunting a killer of women. I borrowed lines of dialogue from the movie for my poem titles: “Why do you think he removes their skins, Agent Starling?,” “Look at him, Starling. Tell me what you see,” “That is rather slippery of you, Agent Starling,” “How do we begin to covet, Clarice?,” “Have the lambs stopped screaming?” These poems don’t look for beauty in spite of the death and decay and viscera they are made of, they recognize the strange, gory beauty that is already there. Have you seen the Anatomical Venus in Florence? Could you deny that beauty?

Wo Chan is a Fujianese immigrant, poet, and drag performer. Wo is the recipient of honors from Poets House, Kundiman, Asian American Writers Workshop, and Lambda Literary, and is published in The Margins, Cortlandt Review, No Tokens, and others. Wo is also a member of the Brooklyn based drag alliance Switch N' Play, and has performed at various venues, including weddings, municipal Pride festivals, Ivy League institutions, and the Architectural Digest Expo. (Photo by Jocelyn Yan)

Three Months Of Dreams Written Half-Asleep, Before April. Depression Hit And I Stopped Dreaming.

drove a firetruck into a (fire)wall

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C. liked a post on my instagram. the anxiety woke me

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at united nations meeting (set in what looks like an austin powers movie), K. stands up and shouts—referring to a country in the middle east—“I Will-not-stan for this!” and smirks. wake disgusted my brain punned at itself

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dream i have six fingers. voice in dream explains “some poets just have six fingers.” not a big deal

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need new language to describe dreams—beyond plot points—atmospheres, gray walls, red lights.

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i am trying to get out of something, but it isn't that urgent

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bred a pack of twenty prize (carrots?) like cats in a cat show

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playwright from hawaii sent me five copies of their plays, typed on the back of miniature calendars (featuring sunsets of hawaii)

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walking through drive thru to pick up milkshake (no car) and ran into Meryl Streep filming a commercial for Burger King

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stole 200 dollars from bubble tea cash till and was caught on camera, but still i denied it. store was called Ali Bubble (like Baba)

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father made me watch info video after info video on precious gems. sapphire grows in soft, aged tree trunks. or can be found in the eyes of mother wolves. mother wolves are not dangerous. only citrous, an orange liquid, can cut citrine.

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had to write an essay on a football game. desperately trying to finish the essay before the game started. everyone laughs

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sweep dust and bark off a steel table, bare hands, cold table

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desperate, anxious, scared, arrived in India riding a bus towards 837 Grove Street (all the outside window was sunset), missed my stop (my brother didn't want to drive me to my mom’s house, my mom was showering and my phone was wet), i got off the bus, overshot my destination by miles, bus driver told me buses don't run the other way Fridays, best get a taxi. phone that was on 2 percent now on 8 percent. Facebook video call Chelsey W. who lives at 837 Grove Street (only person i know in India) says oh my gosh if i had known you were coming i’d be there but my girlfriend said get down to the hospital and wait for me, and i respond does this mean i can't come over? no response so i say it again. and again. and again. my phone is dead, i plug it into the base of a flagpole. there is no sensation

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been having dreams full of logistics—lots of red lighting—involving my family, my mother in pantsuits organizing car rides, wake up stressed, minor headache

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the slow, slow laze of vacation but instead we are displaced, unhomed and in a hotel. glare of glass, wooden pillars, rain rain rain. Oliver and Basil appear and reappear “we are going on a journey” to the fairgrounds, to the wet hills. we wear ponchos, though when we get wet I don't feel wet. most of my dreams are journeys. I am in a cafe with C. there is anxiety, but the kind you feel at the beginning of a footrace and you have just overtaken someone

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touching abs with the carelessness of your fingers through a chain-link fence and all the ecstasy of shoving your face into soft rabbits’ fur

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riding the bus with “the black kids from middle school” i am unsure if it is raining or we are underwater, submarined into deep sea. the stars outside have my mouth open so wide and astonished, i could drown in the air alone. look, we are eating potato chips and somebodies in the backrow starts beating a rhythm. him, we, and I begin to sing, all chorus, all unison, until the bus slams to darkness. there are no stars. wet fabric on my face

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tiny beds in the basement of an outdoor church where I am only allowed to speak Spanish. “¿donde están los jóvenes de mi año? my mind constructs in my mind’s bad Spanish. none of the kids my age are here. where are they? “¡¡Miami!!”

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long saga, long long saga of a dream but I remember the final sensation of being back to nature. my bare foot pressing into a field of cool, spring clovers.

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sleeping poorly on a friend's couch, haven't had dreams, but flat-noted thoughts on the cusp of waking. Steven (friend’s roommate) says “I wouldn't mind Wo so much if [he] didn't breathe so hard through [his] mouth.” woke up mouth so dry

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taught English class to two “African children in a village.” both wanted me to buy them toys. “write a poem about what you would buy with all your pennies” tears. I buy toy airplane for $63.69 for child. soldiers kill other children

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dreamed my dear brother (username: dearbrotherbrother) had been following me for years on instagram

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two children on the airplane with me, Syrian boys maybe, whom I share everything with. I open my soda and pass it around. we each take sips one after the other, no worries of spit, the littler boy’s chest like a turtle’s chest, I think he has never tasted soda. and I remember I was once little, and a boy, on a plane, holding a cola in my hands like it was a precious thing, a message from my father, like medicine, instructions on new living

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shaving one spot on my chin

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working at restaurant again i spent nearly an hour trying to make a nice chocolate drink for my table while i had 4 other tables. drank the drink myself. my brother smiles for the first time in years playing super Mario brothers. Jess comes over to visit. she brings 10 pounds of rice as a gift

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rubbing my face against a baby’s face—the softest thing

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i dye my hair two shades of scarlet and lilac in the mirror with crayons. as if my hair were a coloring book

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nap dream, cruising in a bathroom. touched a dick and it wasn’t gross (all dicks in my dreams are gross) but it wasn’t exciting either

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my new apartment is humongous and super clean, swinging mirror, wood floors, flooded with light.

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a wavy blue line i trace with my finger turns into a crest of blue mosaic

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S. ejaculates on my face (4-5 full squirts) after i jerk him off under the table for hours as A. sits in the corner eyeing us and masturbating. i feel a freedom in my chest, like the laughter that swells up after you’ve kicked the can & the neighborhood kids scatter.

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in the lobby of disneyworld, i am at disneyworld. it is underlit, dim, and expansively partitioned: a hotel bar, a ticketing turnstile, a restaurant decked in glass and wood, and a makeup studio—different worlds of my life agglomerate. my mother is looking for me at the lobby bar, at the turnstiles. i know she is yelling my name, her mouth opened wide though the shouting is quiet in my ear. i am preoccupied at the beauty studio, doing a man’s makeup in the dim lighting. i can’t see. i have no tools for this. different creams, different liquids i can barely discern in color dolloped on my fingertips, i blend them into the man’s large face. the texture of the face is uniformly pockmarked, though not inflamed. he had large, beige pores, a type of skin that had been through tough periods but had now grown relaxed, older. the man whose makeup i’m doing does not trust me. he doesn’t tell me that i’m an imposter (i list off my credits) but i am touching his face, his eyes closed, his breathing collected in my hand—people are easy to read when you are standing that close. i am blending concealer out under his eye though it is too dark to see the color. a coworker shows up with a full brushbelt and i am relieved he takes over. i am also ashamed. i can’t find my mother

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so embarrassed, so anxious, i miss my stop on the train and end up in China. my mom can’t find out about this—i have to get home before she finds out! asking everyone on the train where to transfer to get to the airport or how to transfer back. the woman i am asking laughs at my pingyin “fei ji chang.” instead of saying “airport” i mispronounce it and say “airplane long.” they are laughing at me (I look this pronunciation up later and learn I haven’t mispronounced anything, but I am exposed as a Chinese foreigner in China). the train goes deeper and deeper into China. a stranger FaceTimes someone for directions and it is my cousin in on the line. i hide from the camera, scared he will find out i’m here and tell my mom. i transfer to a train that i believe would take me back the other direction, but i am wrong. it is the local train to Mongolia. i wake up, my whole body stiff and buried in blankets.

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graduation ceremony, with brother, best fit in suit. answered two questions to graduate. did it through eating ice cream eaten after Eileen Myle’s and Einstein’s

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the naked back of an Asian person, my age, pushing a car out of a flooded street. it is pouring rain, rainwater runs down his back (a few hairs), becomes a part of the flood

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in a wheelchair, shit in the seat of my pants, wetly. going from one end of an ornate french building (museum-esque, white marble, gold trimming) looking for a bathroom, one with a door that locks

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asking my mom “are you sure you're born year of the boar? what about dad?”

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eating Chinese pastries at Hong Kong bakery with mom and small precocious toddler. toddler (so cute!) is going to meet up with “Lara” later. “the tall one with long black hair and bangs?” “no, black Lara with long legs and strong arms.”

earlier: walked around carrying the same or similar Chinese toddler who sang an idle melody in my arms as i harmonized humming. the town looks like the setting for a small Eighteenth century French town. our singing culminated at the fountain, where i held the toddler by the hands as he stood on the rim.

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Major Jackson is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. He teaches at the University of Vermont and is the poetry editor of the Harvard Review. His first book, Leaving Saturn, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. Each of his last two collections, Hoops and Holding Company, was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature Poetry. His latest book is Roll Deep, published by W.W. Norton, which the New York Times describes as “a remixed Odyssey.” He lives in South Burlington, Vermont.

Happy Misunderstandings

In Letters to a Young Poet, in response to a request to assess a batch of poems, one titled embarrassingly to our ears, “My Soul,” Rilke famously remarks to young Franz Xaver Kappus, “Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write.”  I must confess at times I do not know what compels me to write poetry, and often, I secretly rail against what may appear as a product of narcissism tinged with the veneer of self-importance and linguistic pomposity.

My ignorance, however, is one of the beautiful paradoxes of my life, one I joyfully relish! Such obliviousness allows me the freedom and lack of self-consciousness to dig, to go in search of early forms, that palimpsest of images which gives texture to those other Major Jackson’s that make up my multitudes, a rewarding process that to my surprise unveils always distilled portraits I knew not layered inside me.

Recently, after admiring the views along my drive to southern Vermont on a typical early Spring day, sunlight blazing what strips of remaining snow that lined the roads and mountains on Route 30, I was posed that most quaint of literary questions after a poetry reading: “What is your creative process?”  Had it not been for the fact the query came from an elder of the community, I would have confessed in coarse, unrefined language, “Lady, it aint pretty!”

I possess no habitual routine that is the equivalent of flower-arranging or scrap-booking or rigging the masts of a ship inside a Mason jar.  When I sit down to reveal the complexities of my humanity or those hidden inside me, what others may think as elemental, I am engaged in something far more unsettling and terrifying, blood-curdling even.

I possess no procedure or practice like playing a musical composition or writing with a favorite pen or sporting a smoking jacket while I write that consistently yields a poem as picturesque as northern New England.  Such details trivializes. I work with no specific theory about poetry, nor attempt to evoke a “Western” consciousness. What emerges is the result of painstaking acts of intellection, language, and spontaneous composition, that moment when the iron either burns or smooths out silk or linen, revealing both successes and failures.

Writing poetry is far more urgent than a reader can imagine, and thus, any feelings of vanity or conceit I may awkwardly experience smolder away into something far more illuminating and useful for an exhausted yet still exhilarating planet.  Rilke knew too that no art is reductive to a few critical comments, which Kappus and many of my students desire: “[T]hey always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible.”

And yet the most effective, moving poems to my ear are those in which the poets’ humanity blazes off the page up into the cosmos, into that dark, deep space revealing a bit of that struggle of how it arrived here.

CODA: Serendipitously, I write today from The Betsy Hotel in the Writer’s Room in Miami. Yesterday when I arrived, carefully placed in the center of the desk was a copy of Letter from a Young Poet by Hyam Plutzik and hanging from the ceiling of wall, a framed copy of a Plutzik poem, fitting for my discussion here:

The Poetic Process

The poetic process is lonely but theatrical, Improvisation before an empty house With the dread that prompter and stagehands will stay away.

The problem is always one of self-projection. Burbage must die while he wears Hamlet’s beard; But also, strangely, when the tragedy is his own.

Justin Boening is the author of Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last, which won the 2015 National Poetry Series, and a chapbook, Self-Portrait as Missing Person (Poetry Society of America, 2013). He's a senior editor at Poetry Northwest and a co-founding editor of Horsethief Books. justinboening.com

Some Notes on Certainty

There are only two types of poets in the world.

Or that’s what I’ve learned.

Auden said some of us are Mabels—gifted by our ignorance, a little reckless, blissfully susceptible to vulgarity—while others of us are Alices—stoic, well mannered, less prone to frivolity, more inured to humanity’s unending capacity for self-destruction and violence. According to Auden, notable Mabels included: Donne, Shelley, Joyce, Yeats; and Alices: Woolf, Austen, Marvell, Valery.

I suppose these categories make sense, in their wry, winsome, Auden sort of way. They’re at very least entertaining.

Dick Hugo’s formulation of the same (or similar) two categories interests me more, however. In his essay Writing Off the Subject, and with Auden in mind, he said that all writers “carry to the page one of two attitudes.” “One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music.”

What a fascinating verb, “conform.” As if these forms, music and truth, might exist within a hierarchy, one with dominion over the other, (which angels are allowed to sing to which?), or as if music (or truth) might be like a vase, and truth like whatever it is that invariably enters and fills that vase (water, wine, flowers, air?) once it’s allowed to exist.

Hugo singles out Auden as one of the few poets clever enough to get away (ever) with subscribing to the first “attitude.” And let’s be honest, maybe Auden didn’t always pull it off either. Hugo recommends the second “attitude” for “those of us who find life bewildering and who don’t know what things mean.” Sign me up.

I don’t know much. In fact, maybe I know nothing. I certainly don’t know which “attitude” one should adopt as a writer, which one is more likely to lead toward vision, surprise, discovery, attention, or whatever else one might hope to stumble into by experiencing a poem. I suspect as writers an overwhelming majority of us do our sulking somewhere in between.

As a reader, however, I find, especially in this moment—a moment when we ask our poems to be useful, to be active (politically and socially), in a moment when we demand, even, that a poet know what her poems might mean—I cleave to that trait of poetry that originally, when I was fifteen years dumb, invited me in. Sure, poetry cast its spell on me through its usual avenues—its strange collision of recklessness and order, ecstasy and sadness, conservation and revolution, et cetera—but, without a doubt, the quality that kept roping me back toward it was that I didn’t have the slightest fucking clue what any of it meant.

Aziza Barnes is blk & alive. Born in Los Angeles, Aziza currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi. Her first chapbook, me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun, was the first winner of the Exploding Pinecone Prize and published from Button Poetry. Her first full length collection i be but i ain’t, from YesYes Books is the winner of the 2015 Pamet River Prize. (Photo by Jerriod Avant)

CONCEPT? BLACK thoughts on conceptual poetry as a tool towards empathy

Vanessa Angelica Villarreal was born on the Rio Grande in McAllen, Texas. Her work has appeared in Waxwing, Caketrain, DIAGRAM, The Poetry Foundation Harriet blog, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo Fellow, and her book, Beast Meridian, was a finalist at Nightboat, Futurepoem, Saturnalia, and Willow Books, and is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2017. She came up in Houston, Texas.

MutaMutationbility: Mem(mem)ory anddna Poetrtry dnand Can(cancer)CancercerceCanrcer

Memory, and its flawed, fiction-making recall, is both a coping mechanism and an imperfect art.

The basics: memory functions on three levels within consciousness, and is always being redefined.  Immediate memory recalls the smallest details, like a page number or a small task; working memory holds longer-term information such as where the car is parked, a locker combination at the gym, or a shopping list for the week; and long-term memory holds facts, observations and identity-forming information, the narratives that make up who we are. Memory is a bit of a ghost and a bit electricity—mappable via brain energy, but not fully classifiable like files in a drawer or data on a USB. Memories disappear and reappear as psychic apparitions. Shape-shifters.

The space between erasure and invention is where, I believe, the best poems can emerge. Where fact can take the form of myth, and language can capture the strangeness of the liminal body, the bordered body, the rupture where the strangest grief transforms, transfigures into that which can save.

When I speak of trauma and mutation/transfiguration, I look at this cellular quality in a poem in Dougas Kearney’s Patter:

Trauma becomes the abnormal thing that takes the predictable data of the day-to-day and warps it from recognition, makes strange its unfolding. The trauma becomes a warping agent, and its recall even more.

I want to stop here to talk about cliché. In workshops, the institutionalized advice from academic writing authorities is to tell migrant and marginalized bodies to stop writing their trauma, to stop with the dead grandmother. To them, the most unforgivable act is to write solipsistically. The biggest error a young writer can commit is to write through suffering, pain, loss, family, self, because the institutional reader simply doesn’t care. Empathy is an expensive ask from the privileged, and only the most skilled writers should ever write their trauma, because only through craft can one learn how to write these things in an unsentimental and detached way. To avoid the self is the ‘real’ art; to elide the thing being written about is the art; to evoke without saying the thing is the art.

And that advice is a hegemonic violence. This might be apt advice for middle-class students from the suburbs who emerged from white nuclear families. But for students outside of this paradigm continually dealing with ostracization, this advice negates their whole existence. The dead grandmother is no longer the unforgivable cliché, but rather the only link to an origin, a culture, a history under attack and erasure via assimilation.

MD Anderson Cancer Center, 1991-93.

Most of my poems will begin here. This is when my grandmother’s cervical cancer will have returned aggressively, wound its black roots up her spine, and begun to spring white roots into her blood and brain. The good doctors will treat her for free in exchange for her body to receive experimental treatment. I will watch her body become an object of study, open itself under blades. I watch her blood pour into needles. She will not be able to communicate her pain. Her language is not right. And they see her pain less, her immigrant body an object of study, her brownness less human, more able to take pain. I will watch her body receive death from nuclear magnets, her teeth rot inside her head, her skin grey with defeat.

almost never needed a translator   because the entire staff     cuando yo vivía en Tampico yo era                       learning how enormous amounts of data are written onto DNA            Millennia of evolutionary information is stored in a single strand of              

Cancer. (n) the disease caused by an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of the body

I still cannot write all of this. But from the incomplete memories, moments emerge, their strangeness a pliable thing amenable to language, a warping thing. Because I cannot recall the thing perfectly, I am moved to be honest about how the memory is mutated. In a poem, I might take the string of a mylar get well balloon to float away from the hospital room where my grandmother is screaming ya dejame morir. In another, I might place my grandmother in different hospital rooms, each room holding the same grandmother in a different context. Each poem will be a dream loaded with subliminal ghost data, some experience too lost, too erased, too fractured to be recalled correctly, but its psychic residue absorbed into my DNA.

Long-term memory is the most defective form of information storage, most fallible, the most vulnerable to being warped, manipulated, and filled in with subjective fiction. It is a narrative fashioned by context, deformed just a bit each time it is remembered by the time and place it’s remembered in. The more a thing is recalled, the further from real events it becomes, the more of our own current contextual data replaces that which is erased. To objectivity-obsessed fact-seekers, this would be a bad thing, but for poetry, it’s fertile ground.

C. Russell Price is an Appalachian genderqueer punk poet living in Chicago. Previous publications include: Assaracus, Court Green, Nimrod, MiPOesias, Weave, and elsewhere. They currently work with The Offing (a channel of the LA Review of Books) and Northwestern University. Their chapbook Tonight, We Fuck The Trailer Park Out Of Each Other will be published in June 2016 by Sibling Rivalry Press.

“If I’m Butter, Then He’s A Hot Knife”

Carolyn,

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir and four poetry collections— including Milk and Filth, finalist for the 2013 NBCC award in poetry. With John Chavez, she edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing published by Counterpath Press. A CantoMundo Fellow, she teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University, while serving as the publisher of Noemi Press.

SYNAESTHESIA

I get wildy debilitating migraines that leave me thick-tongued and dim for a few days. One feature of the migraine is photosensitivity accompanied by flashes of color. When I was a little girl, I would sometimes lie in bed and see little green and silver flashes that corresponded to each dish clattered into the dishrack.

I sensed pain’s borders in my body, the texture of those borders. Some pain was viscous; other pain was brassy or zig-zag like nails on a chalkboard. Seeing the physical manifestation of abstract things was useful for my world-building in poetry, layers of sensation

My friend, Ruth Ellen Kocher and I both can be compulsive. She channels her compulsion into form. I tell her that I channel my compulsiveness as much as I can into syntax. Each clause is an event of texture, sound, and connotation. I play inside the syntax to derive the most mouthfeel.

I smell trouble. Actions speak louder than words. The green-eyed monster.

We hate the word moist because our mouth becomes a tidy ceramic basin, its sides licked up by splashes of water. Moist is the purgatorial state between wet and dry.

The feeling of pain resembles the anguished, troubled height of convulsions, and suffering-the long and the slow kind-has the intimate yellow which colours the vague bliss of profoundly felt convalescence. Fernando Pessoa

I listen to a song recorded in the 70s. I see the reedy vocal cords trembling the sounds into the air. The hair on my arms rise and my nipples get hard. The body can be a lightning rod to sound.

I once had a friend who kindly warned me against my propensity for the pyrotechnic. Another friend told me I wrote in language that could sell anything, both descriptions of my language as laser show.

Aristotle: There seems to be a sort of parallelism between what is acute or grave to hearing and what is sharp or blunt to touch; what is sharp as it were stabs, while what is blunt pushes, the one producing its effect in a short, the other in a long time, so that the one is quick, the other slow.

Sylvia Plath must have been a synesthete. The ephemeral ghost world in a multi-dimensional Braille. She renders, she solidifies in the poem “Metaphor:”

Metaphors by Sylvia Plath

I’m a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising. Money’s new-minted in this fat purse. I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf. I’ve eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

Saara Myrene Raappana is a poet and editor. She’s the author of the chapbooks Milk Tooth, Levee, Fever (Dancing Girl Press, 2015) and A Story of America Goes Walking (Shechem Press, coming in spring 2016). Her work has appeared or will appear in numerous journals, including Blackbird, Linebreak, [PANK], The Gettysburg Review, and Vinyl Poetry and Prose, among others. She was born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in southern China, is a founding editor of Cellpoems, and works for Motionpoems. For more, go to saaramyrene.com.

The Mercy Rhyme

I planned to write something about the vital mundanities of writing because for so many years a misguided belief in the magic, inborn nature of poetry kept me from working to be good at it. I’ve compensated by no longer entertaining ideas of muse-driven poetries. I’m super into the lifting-with-the-legs bits, which is to say that I meant to write a few paragraphs about, say, all the deep narrative digging the can accomplish, or the ways tone shifts if you switch from iambs to anapests. Instead, I keep coming around to mercy.

For example, Gregory Orr and his How Beautiful the Beloved—for when I need to turn loss on its angles. In “Untitled [This is what was bequeathed us],” Orr writes three full stanzas of unrhymed free verse in which the (lost) beloved left us “no other world / But this one.” The concrete details are sparse: “Willows and the river / And the factory / With its black smokestacks.” One bleak “bank / On which the living gather.” No other side, nothing to cross.

Last spring, I found my great-grandfather’s lantern in my parents’ garage. He, like most of my other great- and grandfathers—men who dug deep in the rock, manned switches, lifted a heavy narrative—mined copper. The lantern, coated in orange rust and white rust, was tangled in strings of Christmas lights in a cardboard footlocker with a moldy coat and probably some shoes or a dead plant. Every evening for a week, I rubbed the lantern’s basin with steel wool until it shone. Each morning, more orange rust. Eventually I knew I’d have to render the lantern unlightable by coating it in clear Rustoleum. It’s in my living room, suffering no rust, no longer exactly my great-grandfather’s lantern but with the same look, same insides. A rhyme.

There are other rhymes scattered around, from folks whose banks I’d give literally anything to reach: Hat that Grandma Norma wore to chemo. Grandpa Leslie’s work jacket. Glasses that Travis wore before we ever met. From Toni, not even a picture. Just “This earth the beloved left / And, leaving, / Left to us.”

What’s left, then, no matter how I try to avoid it, is the magic of the words, their mercies. Orr bridges what’s left to what’s missing with these last three lines. With rhyme:

No purpose but what we make.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. Co-editor, with Eric Plattner, of The Selected Writings of René Magritte, forthcoming from Alma Books (UK) and University of Minnesota Press (U.S.) in 2016, she is also the author of seven books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, including, most recently, the novel O, Democracy! (2014) and the novel in poems Robinson Alone (2012). Her second novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2017.

Imaginary Mirrors: Hybrid Strategies for Creative Biographies

As co-founder and editor of Rose Metal Press, an independent publisher dedicated to producing three books a year in hybrid genres, I notice a lot of micro-trends among our submissions. One of the most fascinating in recent years has been a drift toward poetic or creative biography, which is to say innovative or lyric approaches to narrating episodes from the lives of public figures.

If traditional biographers aspire to get out of the way of their subjects in order to render objective portraits, writers of creative biographies tend to take the opposite approach, emphasizing the impossibility of ever rendering such a portrait, and embracing these limitations not as failures but as opportunities for imagination and interactivity.

Two authors in the RMP lineup this year—Anthony Michael Morena, author of The Voyager Record: A Transmission, and Kelcey Parker Ervick, author of The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová—use a variety of techniques to tell their stories, offering new and poetic modes of presenting the past and the people in it. Morena tells the story of Carl Sagan, focusing on his work on the Voyager probes and on their Golden Records, while Ervick reconstructs and reinterprets the life of an underappreciated 19th -century Czech author and proto-feminist.

Both embrace the fragmented and incomplete nature of history through surprising formal decisions and conscious engagement with primary source materials. By emphasizing personal connections and subjective responses, they offer fresh strategies for literary engagement with figures from the past.

A prose-poetic passage from The Voyager Record: A Transmission beautifully illustrates how a hybrid approach to established history and hard science can give readers the chance to see something familiar in a new way:

There are three Bach tracks on the Golden Record. Three Bach tracks. And when you add Beethoven and Mozart, Germany becomes the most highly represented culture on the Golden Record. Steve Martin made a joke on Saturday Night Live that the aliens found the Golden Record and wrote back: “Send more Chuck Berry.” It’s funny; without context the aliens probably won’t be able to place any of the music chronologically. Will they know that “Johnny B. Goode” is the most recent musical style offered on the Golden Record? Will they hear the Chevy engines roaring outside of the studio, fizzing Coke bottles, Jim Crow, the clamping-shut of fallout shelter doors? Will they notice any difference at all between Chuck Berry’s song and Blind Willie Johnson’s? Or will they listen to Bach and think that his music is the latest development, disembodied aesthetics, endpoint in humanity’s linear artistic progress from simple to complex? Why include so much Bach if not for some humming importance?

What’s especially appealing about Morena’s collaged, patterned, deliberately repetitive approach is the way this lyrical method lets its users build on what they’ve already read, as when they encounter this passage slightly later in the manuscript:

A joke:

A producer calls up Arnold Schwarzenegger one day and tells him he has a great idea for a movie. It’s a movie about all the great composers of European history, says the producer. He’s got all these big names already attached to the film: Stallone is going to play Vivaldi, Van Damme is going to be Mozart, Dolph Lundgren is going to be Beethoven. So what does Arnold think? Is he in?

“Yah, that sounds great! I’ll be Bach!”

Eugenia Leigh is the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books), the winner of the 2015 Late Night Library Debut-litzer Prize in Poetry. The recipient of fellowships and awards from The Frost Place, Poets & Writers Magazine, Kundiman, Rattle, and the Asian American Literary Review, Eugenia received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.

On the Terror of Writing a Second Book of Poems or How I Like My New Face

In November 2012, several months after Four Way Books accepted my first poetry manuscript, and two whole years before the book would manifest as a real thing my mom could buy with real cash, I read a beautiful essay by Lisa Russ Spaar in the Los Angeles Review of Books about poets’ second books.

Holy hell, reading that piece was a lesson in how I can morph something good into something monstrous. In the essay’s 2,400+ words, my self-doubt zoomed in on one sentence that has played in a taunting loop for almost three and a half years since: “In other cases, second books themselves falter. … [They] can be repetitious and, worse, stalled and self-parodic.”

Mind you, the meat of Spaar’s essay asserts that second books can be glorious. She points to Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel as examples of second books that became the poets’ “break-out texts”—proof that second books can be “more daring, fierce, and full of brilliant risks.”

And yet, I managed to close the browser and walk away with only the terror of becoming “self-parodic.” Of telling the same sad story in the same sad way for the rest of my sad little life, then dying.

Fear is a bitch. By the time my first book was on my shelf, every poem in the book had been published in a literary journal. But instead of charging forth with confidence, I published a single poem in all of 2015, the year after my book was born. I replied to solicitation emails from journals with a “Sorry, I have nothing for you right now” or failed to respond to them at all. Because shame. Plus, the rejections from the two places I managed to submit a smattering of poems to only deepened my paranoia that every editor of every magazine could see right through me: I was repetitious. Stalled. Self-parodic.

But here is something I learned only recently: this fear is as irrational as being afraid I will have the same face for the rest of my life.

I learned this while videochatting with Lisa Fay Coutley’s MFA students at The University of Oregon along with Chloe Honum and Phillip B. Williams this past March. Lisa had assigned our three debut books of poetry to her graduate workshop students and invited us to field their smart and thought-provoking questions.

At one point, our conversation honed in on the topic of voice—more specifically, whether it’s possible for a poet to create his or her voice. We ultimately settled on this idea: poets can labor at their craft and at dozens of elements of poetry, but voice is something unique to each poet. Something we are born with. Like a face. We can paint the face to look like someone else’s face. We can even alter it surgically. But without the glitter and frills, our face is our face, just as our voice is our voice. And the way to discover our voice is to write and write until we recognize the sounds that are distinctively ours.

We discussed the voices of our first books, then commiserated in the shared dismay of realizing that those voices don’t mesh with the new poems we are writing now. Someone—Chloe?—exclaimed, “No one tells you that between your first and second books, your voice will change.”

Light bulb.

After your first book, your voice will change! Why wouldn’t it? Our larynxes change. And we change. The human I am now is a far cry from the human I was when I wrote the earliest poems for that first book. Not always a better human, but a different one. Neither my husband nor my therapist existed in my brain when that manuscript was accepted. I didn’t even have the same passport, let alone the same phone number, and I was still foolish enough to believe I could handle martinis.

Gina Myers is the author of two full-length poetry collections, A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009) and Hold It Down (Coconut Books, 2013), as well as several chapbooks. Recent poems and reviews have appeared at the Brooklyn Rail, Fanzine, Bedfellows, Poetry Project Newsletter, and elsewhere. Originally from Saginaw, MI, she now lives in Philadelphia where she works in higher ed communications.

I hate clutter at home and try to rid myself of unnecessary possessions, going through a regular shedding process, culling books from my collection, donating clothes, shoes, coffee mugs, etc. Each time I move I want to be lighter.

However, in the notebook I always carry or on my cellphone, I am constantly collecting--fragments of language, book titles, poem ideas, news headlines--creating a digital clutter that continues to accumulate until I grow uneasy and need to purge the data, attempting to place the mess into some kind of order, something poemlike.

I regularly say that I am not good at being a poet because I take long breaks from writing. It’s been six months since I last wrote a poem, and a year before that one. However, I am good at hanging out in bars. I’m good at meeting new people. The social exchange, the clips of news--neighborhood and international--the personal histories, all are of interest. I enjoy listening and learning and getting into the occasional, often sports-related, argument. This provides more brain clutter too, a life-enriching brain clutter.

deborah brandon is a genderqueer writer who holds an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Additional work appears in [PANK], Cream City Review, Bombay Gin, Mom Egg Review, Denver Quarterly, White Whale Review, Transom, Ocho, MiPOesias, Moonshot, Hotel Amerika, Cadillac Cicatrix and Puerto del Sol and others; and the  anthologies Writing the Walls Down: A Convergence of LGBTQ Voices and Stone River Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poetry.

A long time ago, I wrote narrative poems. Mostly they were confessional; that was what I did. In 2003, the person I was closest to in all the world died. It shook me to my core. My sentences fragmented; shards of imagery fell in symphonic piles, and I began arranging them with one ear to the ground, listening for an oncoming train. The far-off train was narrative, that is to say my work never stopped caring about a narrative—it hears one, way off, a faint rumbling in the background—but it did stop answering to one.

As a poet I am concerned with sound and the way language plays with meaning. Words on a page tossing a ball back and forth even in the dark, maybe especially in the dark. How much can I prune this back before the ball drops? I grew up in a family of musicians. I took music lessons from an early age. Piano first, then eventually oboe and voice. I planned to become a professional musician and although circumstances forced me to sell my oboe at age 19, as a poet I would argue I have become a professional musician, because my poetry is first concerned with sound and phrasing. I sing my daughters to sleep; I sing through the ostinato of words on the page letting other words in on some secret.