These four recent books of poems should appeal to anyone who loves a good story. Warning: the plots may be absurd or cryptic or surreal—or may slip out the back door when you go looking for them.

Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions Ltd, 2011)
by Aracelis Girmay

Aracelis Girmay’s Kingdom Animalia, borrowing animals for metaphor and mirror, asks how a person can live as the one “pushed or fallen/out of the grave, to live.” The living in her books is big and ecstatic, the contemplations of death also somehow so. Her poems tumble into pleas, odes, and elegies, sometimes seeming to land with the imprint not of the brain but of the heart, at least as it can be summoned through poetry’s music. They are never restrained, jaded, or flattened. The speaker watches “the sea & beach move into each other’s mouths” and cries out “O, god, let us love / like they love.” Because of this largeness, this declarative ripeness in the poems, it’s sometimes easy to overlook the precision and intelligence of smaller images, as in the beginning of “Portrait of the Woman as a Skein,” which asks, startlingly, earnestly: “Tell me what, on earth, / would make you leave your hands / or want to, at the wash-sink? / in the lemon grove? / on the way home from standing, baffled, / in the grocery?” and opens from there.

“& isn’t the heart / an ampersand?” Girmay asks in “&.” Yes. In this book, the heart joins the self to everything it can. The heart exists perhaps only what it can join. The speaker’s loved ones are stretched across countries and continents and generations, so the ampersand is necessary, a symbol both rapturous and rending. At times family includes even people not related to one another, as when the speaker watches an intimate scene between a young man and a distraught woman who is not actually related to him, but who somehow is by the end of the poem.

Girmay’s poems are all about such connections, about the pull of family, the pull of earth, the pull of places one has been, the pull of the body’s own impulses, all the “touches of the disappearing.” Where they pause on politics, as in “Praise Song for the Donkey,” which recalls a moment of destruction in Palestine, it is in the context of how impermanent we already are and just how pointless the acceleration of violence is.

One day, not today, not now, we will be gone
from this earth where we know the gladiolas.
My brother, this noise,
some love [you] I loved
with all my brain, & breath,
will be gone; I’ve been told, today, to consider this
as I ride the long tracks out & dream so good

I see a plant in the window of the house
my brother shares with his love, their shoes. & there
he is, asleep in bed
with this same woman whose long skin
covers all of her bones, in a city called Oakland
& their dreams hang above them
a little like a chandelier
& their teeth flash in the night, oh, body.

—from “Kingdom Animalia”

Something in the Potato Room (Kore Press, 2009)
by Heather Cousins

Though this book is a few years old now, it is well worth bringing to the attention of fiction readers (and all readers) who might have missed it. In Something in the Potato Room, Heather Cousins draws us into a world that is bizarre and full of underside-of-the-rock images: a little bit Edward Gorey, a little bit office satire, and a little bit Heart of Darkness. The poems are bodily—full of saliva and crotches, houses “the color of lips and toenails,” then later mandibles, pearly bones, tendons, headaches.

The lines are like some dark glue that might seep out from the edges of a proper Victorian photograph. In fact, Victorian-style drawings dot the book and occasionally hold the frame of an image a touch longer than the poem.

Written more like a novel than a set of disparate poems, the untitled columns of text follow a protagonist who works at an unnamed museum, the stress of which seems to throw her into a state of hypochondria. She is tended by a cryptic, vaguely sinister doctor who sends her on vacation to clear her head. She buys a house and encounters more menacing mysteries there, but these become, at least, her own. The potato room of the title is a “dark, crumbling walk-in” found downstairs in her new home, one perhaps once used for cold storage. It is in this room that a central gruesome re-birth takes place, propelling the remainder of the book and ferrying the narrator into a kind of purpose with a story that’s all images and yet somehow utterly legible.

I held him. Like sailors
hold oars. Like the starv-
ing hold bread. Like boy
scouts hold knots. He was
pointy and full of scuttles.
He smelled of mushrooms
and placenta. It filled the
small room. Coated us.
An oily dust. My hair and
eyelashes were full of it.

Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie (The University of Akron Press, 2010)
by Joshua Harmon

Here is another slightly older book well worth resurrecting. “Can we just get rid of / Poughkeepsie little by little?” Harmon asks in a rare lighter moment (or maybe it’s the most deadly serious), but before he can get rid of it, he must build it exhaustively, and that he does in eight sections of truly remarkable poetry all devoted to that one city. This is possible and not gimmicky only because Harmon is so talented and does not go simply for a surface catalog of landmarks, nor fall into a detached disdain.

Borrowing openly from literary inspirations as diverse as Baudelaire, The Spoon River Anthology, Homer, and Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” at times Harmon’s vignettes make me think most of the work of a poet he doesn’t allude to—the T.S. Eliot of “Preludes,” with his “conscience of a blackened street / Impatient to assume the world.” Other times they are more like a Bruce Springsteen song pushed up into slightly more rarefied and intellectual language. Reading them you are word-ported to a stagnant and litter-strewn street, perpetually twilight, often cold, where the sealed-in domestic and commercial rituals lend not a sense of community but a sense of something encrypted, of many people working toward many survivals in some fiercely private way. Poughkeepsie and its people make up a kind of tragedy of self-containment (“We’re cutting down our half of the tree, you can do what you like with yours”).

The no-break look and rhythm of the early long poem “The Poughkeepsiad” may be off-putting to some readers at first. “The Poughkeepsiead” is not only one sentence that spans six pages; it is one sentence that barrels along like an avalanche gathering nouns, never culminating in a verb. Sure there are verbs, small actions, embedded in the lines, but the poem seems trapped (productively, in a literary sense) in “a terrain of nearly unbearable enjambment,” to use Ann Lauterbach’s astute assessment on the back cover. It can certainly seem intimidating, as if one would need a flash of instant large-scale understanding to match its ambition, but if you can shake that feeling and submit to the poem’s moments, you will find each astounding in its own right, from the “wire cart/loaded with the music of aluminum / cans” to the “traffic-struck doe kicking limply / beside the road” or someone sleeping “through gruesome / histories of endurance like an eyelash stuck to a cheek.”

For capturing a sense of place, far more often fiction’s work, it is hard to think of a book of poems that is more successful. As animated by Harmon, Poughkeepsie is a realm where knowledge of a place and the visceral feel of it are never far apart, where “it’s going / to get colder: and it gets colder.” At 90+ pages, the book is probably not one to read in a sitting, but open to any page and you’ll find a stunning portrait that speaks volumes about how poems, which so often boast of being timeless and placeless, can also land somewhere and lose nothing.

The automatic garage-door opener

lifts on a prospect of Poughkeepsie: 

row of parked cars along curb, man

leaf-blowing each falling leaf, 

sumac growing beneath the overpass: 

if you’re not part of the problem, 

you’re part of the lengthening 

tragedy: we see all the others 

slipped into the bright shapes of endeavor, 

imprints snow slowly fills, but the stray 

detours and workarounds of the secret

city inside the more obvious one 

elude our plundered adornments 

and church-bell quarter hours

—from “Two Pastorals”

Lucky Fish
by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
(Tupelo Press, 2011)

With Lucky Fish, Aimee Nezhukumatathil makes her second appearance in this column. Considering the critical acclaim she is enjoying, this is probably the least of her recent accomplishments, but I think it says something about the reliable accessibility and charm of her voice, coupled with a joyous curiosity that can be appreciated by poets and prosers alike.

The bright and sun-struck poems of Lucky Fish seem at first to be pure Neruda-like odes to fruits and critters and to all that can be projected upon them, so pomegranates scattered from a stolen tree are the “stormy and still-beating hearts” of the original owners and stars in the sky are “cola-colored.” So the speaker says to a lover “I point my pistil / & blade of leaves to you.” But what’s most satisfying in these poems, and where Nezhukumatathil parts ways from the lusty and satisfied Neruda, is that they are not always pleasure-seeking. Sometimes they are inquisitive, often compassionate, sometimes even gently accusatory. These worlds don’t belong to us. They have their own meaning first, before we read our own onto them. The poems are inhabited, too, by a melancholy note, represented by disconsolate petting zoo animals and caged great apes and a fortune telling parrot who guesses that those to whom it tells less welcome fortunes might “tear [its] red beak / in two angry pieces / like a pistachio.”

The poems lean, too, into the magical, as when a flower eats a farmer in “Corpse Flower” or a boy transforms into a bird in “The Feathered Cape of Kechi.” They are fables and fairy tales, yes, but so, the poet suggests, is a honeymoon or motherhood or being a poet, all such delicate and unlikely states, all reliant on the larger narrative we bring to them, what we tell ourselves we are doing—and why.

The poems are not all nature-driven and fable-like. One of the most enjoyable sequences in the book is about Nezhukumatathil’s own identity. In “Dear Amy Nehzooukammyatootill” and “Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?” she betrays her affection for students trying to figure out her poems and poetry in general. In “Dear Betty Brown,” she strips the affection away to chastise the Texas Representative who suggested that citizens with un-American sounding names should change them to make pronunciation easier for others. The book’s third section is a sustained look at pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood, from a husband who stays “strong as a pepper plant” during his wife’s labor to the early weeks with a baby whose “ears / glow from behind like a church window.” In the haunting poem “The Toy Universe,” Nezhukumatathil zooms out from her son’s toy universe, where “there are smiley faces on trains, / race cars, buses” to the universe of the children “piecing together toy trains / and race cars and buses” in China, living out very different childhoods. In this poem, Nezhukumatathil breaks open the insularity of attentive motherhood. Her poems always seem to be about how much more can be let in, how much farther empathy can extend into world both human and animal, without breaking down our own carefully tended bonds.

She’s been warned not to sleep with moonlight
on her face or she will be taken from her house.

She wears eel-skin to protect herself. She tilts
her face to the night sky when no one is looking.
During the eclipse, eels bubble in their dark

and secret caves. Toads frenzy in pastures
just outside of town, surrounding the dumb cows

in a wet mess of croak and sizzle.

—from “Eclipse”

Katie Umans is one poet of Two Poet Truffles, a chocolate and poetry enterprise that publishes The Concher. Her first book of poetry, Flock Book, is forthcoming this summer from Dzanc/Black Lawrence Press.

Nadelson is the Hallie Ford Chair in Writing at Willamette University. He also teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. He lives in Salem, Oregon. A former student of Scott’s, I took his short story workshop as an undergraduate at Willamette. This interview took place over e-mail in September and October 2011.

SCOTT NADELSON: I think what happened when I started listening to Dylan was that I heard language—carefully constructed language—in a context I couldn’t easily categorize or contain. I was one of those high school kids who didn’t care much about anything, or didn’t know that you could care about anything; I went to school, did my homework some of the time, watched a lot of TV, and listened to music as loud as I could. Until then, any kind of written language I didn’t understand I’d quickly find frustrating and abandon; if I understood it too easily, then I’d dismiss it as not worth my time. When I listened to music, I hardly paid attention to the lyrics; if anything they were a way of following the melody and singing along to the beat. But Dylan put language forward in a way I couldn’t ignore even if I wanted to. In the best of his songs, his lyrics were mysterious and evocative but also precise, playful, full of emotion, unsentimental. Plus there was an energy in the progression of words, in their rhythm, in the layers of imagery they unfolded that seemed to contain more meaning than the words or images themselves. I was surprised to find so much pleasure and tension in the way language could be approachable one moment and then move just out of reach the next.

I’d listen to, say, “Chimes of Freedom,” and I’d feel like I was getting a pretty good handle on it—the speaker hears in peals of thunder bells tolling freedom for the downtrodden masses—and then out would come these lines that were so gorgeous and baffling that my head would empty of all rational and simplistic thought: “Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail / the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder.” I’m sure it’s because I already was drawn to music that I was open to lines like this, that I was willing to let them seep into me, even if I couldn’t quite grasp them; if I’d read them on the page, I probably would have turned away. But once Dylan’s voice got into my head, along with the possibility that language could make me feel something even if I didn’t know why, I was soon more open to other forms of writing as well.

At that point, of course, I still mostly wanted to be a rock star with really cool hair. But now I also wanted to be one who could write a song that made you forget to breathe.

You’re not the first writer to list Dylan as an early influence. I think it speaks to that community’s ethos as not only poets, but storytellers. I’d argue that many of Dylan’s songs – “Tangled Up In Blue” comes to mind – are condensed stories. Do you agree? (As a side note, speaking of influences, when I looked up “Chimes of Freedom,” realizing I didn’t know much about its origins, I learned that Dylan himself wrote the song after reading Rimbaud.)

Absolutely. In those early years Dylan owed a lot to Rimbaud and the beat poets, but he was also a terrific storyteller. He had a gift for pacing and distilling narrative down to its essence. Some of his best stuff is narrative: “Tangled Up in Blue,” for sure, and pretty much everything else on Blood on the Tracks; “Ballad in Plain D”; most stuff on John Wesley Harding and especially on The Basement Tapes.

I once read an interview with Dylan, or maybe I heard another songwriter talking about it—or, who knows, maybe I made it up—in which he claimed that he hated nothing worse than story-songs. In response, the interviewer, somewhat in shock, listed off a number of those songs with narrative impulses, and Dylan snapped, in near rage, “Those aren’t story-songs! They’re ballads!”

What I love about that anecdote is that it suggests Dylan saw himself working in a particular narrative tradition; the idea wasn’t to stuff a story arc into a five minute song, but to use and update the ballad form to explore contemporary narratives. I think it’s because he understood the form so deeply, had listened to and sung old ballads so many times that he absorbed their narrative rhythms, their pacing, their compression and mystery, that his narrative songs don’t feel dated like those of a lot of his contemporaries.

I’m curious whether your experience as a reluctant reader influenced your teaching methodology? Did that perspective give you any insight into how to reach students who don’t think literature is relevant to their lives?

That’s a great question. It may be an exaggeration, but I’ve often believed that literature saved my life; I was heading down a fairly self-destructive path when I got serious about reading and writing, and discovering something that meant so much to me allowed me to refocus my energy in positive directions. And that has definitely affected the way I approach teaching and the way I think about education generally. The reason I never cared about literature when I was young was that no one made me understand that I should or could care; teachers just told me I had to learn that a simile uses “like” or “as” and that Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter. They didn’t tell me why those things mattered. The problem, I think, was that by the time I started school the study of literature had become divorced from the physical, emotional, and intellectual experience that literature is meant to create. No one talked about how Hamlet had moved them, or how Huckleberry Finn had made them laugh; they just talked about whether Hamlet really went crazy and about the symbolism of the Mississippi River. Above all, no one talked about loving literature, and if you don’t love something, what’s the point of spending hours reading and talking about it?

So in my teaching life, I try to express this love as much as possible. The work I choose to share with my students is work that moves me, that haunts me, that mystifies me, and I try to always return our conversations to the students’ actual experience reading a story or poem: where and how it made them nearly cry, where and how it sped up their pulse, where and how it suggested connections that made their heads spin. I try to remind writing students that they should find joy in the process, and if they can’t, then writing might not be the best pursuit for them. I think people should devote their lives to things that matter so much to them that they can’t imagine doing anything else. And education should be a means to discovering and deepening those passions; it should help people find the things that are going to make them want to get out of bed on difficult mornings. The most successful writing class I can imagine is one in which I help beginning writers find a reason to face a blank page when the words aren’t coming easily.

That sounds like a worthy outcome for more experienced writers as well. It isn’t a coincidence that writing is often described with religious terminology—i.e. Joyce Carol Oates’ The Faith of a Writer. So much of writing is facing that blank page or disconnected jottings, and, to quote Lorrie Moore, “trudg[ing] ahead in the rain, regardless.”

In a recent interview on The Nervous Breakdown you revealed (to yourself) that you’re a “floundering” writer. You said, “Most of the time I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, no idea where my ideas are leading me, but I’m stubborn about following them through, and eventually, if I’m lucky, the effort leads me somewhere interesting.” Can you share how you keep yourself motivated even when you are “floundering”? I love the image of a struggling Eudora Welty cutting apart her drafts, re-arranging them, and then piecing them back together with straight pins. Do you have any rituals or tricks to share?

I guess the thing that keeps me going, even during the most frustrating periods, is that I love process more than product. Whenever I’m stuck, or confused about where a story is heading, I try to return to those things in writing that bring me the most joy: odd perceptions, tense dialogue, obsessive thought. I try to have fun riffing on a little scene or quiet conflict and not worry about whether anything will come of it. And small, unexpected discoveries spur me on to search for more discoveries. Even if an idea finally crumbles to dust—which happens all too often—I usually have other little scenes or conflicts in mind, and the promise of those small discoveries gets me to sit down and work every chance I get.

I wish I could say I had useful tricks or rituals. I love that image of Welty with her cut-up drafts, too. My process is much less delicate, more bludgeon than straight pin. I often just keep going back to the beginning of a story or essay I’m struggling with, trying to find the right angle in. I write forward until I get stuck, then start again, from a slightly different angle. I often end up with as many as fifty false starts before I find my way to the end of a first draft. I used to resist this process, and I still sometimes find it maddening, but now I think it’s mostly productive: what happens is that in writing these false starts I’m working to find the right storytelling voice, the one that can carry the material, that can access the characters and conflicts in the most effective way for the story. It’s rare that I find this voice on the first few tries, in part because I don’t know the characters well enough yet to understand their most crucial concerns. There’s probably a more efficient way of going about it, but I just keep beating my head against a piece until something opens up or it gives me such a headache that I have to set it aside.

The other thing I do when I’m having trouble finding my way is to look for models, especially in old favorites. If I’ve just had a terrible writing morning, I’ll pull down a Leonard Michaels story, for instance, and within a few minutes I’m in such awe, experiencing such pleasure in his voice, in the movement of his prose, that I’m already wanting to get back to work. It’s not that I then try to write a Leonard Michaels story; but that a Leonard Michaels story is even possible, that such a thing can exist, makes me so grateful and excited that whatever setback I’ve just experienced, even if it’s a significant one, soon feels diminished in comparison.

You have an impressive publication history. This September saw the release of your third story collection, and a book of autobiographical essays is forthcoming in March 2013. Considering that you balance teaching in addition to your writing, to what do you credit your prolificacy?

If I can credit anything it’s mostly stubbornness and obsession. Teaching and writing take a lot of energy, and often the same kind of energy, and doing both at the same time means putting in long hours and feeling stretched thin. I sometimes wish I could give myself a break during the school year, and not try to write while I’m teaching, as some writers I know do, but I’ve come to find I really need the work as part of my daily life. I’m not a terribly religious person, but writing has become something of a spiritual practice for me, like meditation, or maybe more like mental yoga, and without it I feel ungrounded. A few days without it, and I’m pretty quickly at loose ends. A week, and I’m miserable, and my wife starts begging me to get back to work.

Do you have a specific schedule or just grab the time when you can?

Until my daughter was born, I had a pretty regular writing schedule; I’ve managed to keep my mornings free to write for a couple of hours before having to turn to other things. With a now one-year-old, that has changed quite drastically. I almost never have more than an hour of unbroken time, and I’ve had to adjust the way I work. Now I’ll write for half an hour, forty-five minutes at a stretch, but I still try to do it every day if I can. What I’ve found is that I used to waste an enormous amount of time. I’d putter around for half an hour, looking at books on my shelves, staring out the window, before I’d get down to serious work. If I do that for thirty seconds now, I know quickly I’m going to lose whatever time I’ve got. I’m sure that puttering was useful to get me in a certain mindset, but now it seems like a luxury I’ve had to leave behind. Right mindset or not, I’ve got to get typing.

Because I work in short(ish) form, I never write an entire draft of a book at once. In fact, I usually don’t even know I’m working on a book until well into the process. I just work on stories or essays, usually a couple at a time in different draft stages, until I have a number of them that start to speak to each other, and then I start thinking about the whole. So by the time I’m working on something I’m calling a book, much of it is already in late draft stage, and some of it might even be close to finished. Then it becomes a matter of filling in gaps, smoothing rough edges between pieces, thinking about a larger arc.

You’re known for placing your stories in your native New Jersey, even though you’ve lived in Oregon since 1996. Beyond writing what you know, to what do you owe this fascination with your birthplace? What is it about writing in absentia that appeals to you?

When I started writing, I never thought New Jersey would become such a central part of my fiction, but now I write very few stories that aren’t set there. And hardly any of my stories have characters who haven’t come from the place where I grew up. I do think part of this is familiarity, or at least that’s the way it started. But more important is how the setting has evolved in my imagination over the past fifteen years. New Jersey has become less an actual place in my fiction than a state of being, a kind of limbo between the great city and the vast continent, where people are caught between retreat and full engagement with life and all its uncertainty. What the place offers me is a setting ripe with quiet tension and internal conflict, as well as a metaphor for the illusion of safety and security amidst the chaos of human intimacy and connection.

I sometimes send my New Jerseyans off into foreign lands, and a different kind of tension arises when they bring their baggage of fear and repressed desire into places where they can no longer contain the contents. In the new book, for example, I’ve got a kid with his grandparents in Jerusalem, and there all hell can break loose when his family conflict plays out against the backdrop of a much wilder setting than the one he’s left behind. But the conflict is still one that evolves in and out of his New Jersey state of being—I can’t imagine him coming from anywhere else.

Do you ever research places you’re writing about, or do you write from your memory and imagination?

The research I do is almost always a result of necessity. I need to know the name of a certain street, or remember where a lake is located in relation to a mountain, or look at a picture of a church in Zurich, and then I do the most cursory possible Internet searching to find the crucial piece of information or something that’s a close approximation. In other words, I let my imagination lead me and use research only to fill in gaps; but as soon as a gap is filled, I go as quickly as possible back to the imagination. Being a writer has meant never being an expert on anything, but having the barest trivial knowledge and surface understanding of a whole bunch of different things.

How does a story benefit from being set in a specific place as opposed to an anonymous city?

It really depends, I think. There can be something very freeing about using a landscape that’s open, that doesn’t restrict you to a particular set of geographic and cultural markers. Think how much more exciting Kafka’s vision of America is than if he’d actually known what New York City looked like. But using a real place can offer all kinds of opportunities for texture, for tensions that arise out of a character’s relationship to that place and to a reader’s associations with it. I do think it takes a certain kind of imagination to create a place out of nothing and to make it specific and real enough that a story can inhabit it. For me, having an actual place to work off of allows my imagination to focus on the things that concern me more—a character’s internal struggle, for example, or a failed communication between characters. I’d much rather spend my time imagining what a character thinks or does than what street he needs to take to get to the center of town.

That said, I do use some made up New Jersey towns in my stories, in order to give myself leeway to move buildings around, or make a place grittier than it might be in real life, or add some quirky details. But readers are more ready to accept them as real because I’ve put them in a geographic location that has certain set features and associations.

Aftermath’s epigraph features selections from the work of two poets (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Stephen Dunn). The selections are apt and closely mirror the collection’s eponymous theme. Were you reading Longfellow and Dunn while completing the collection, or did the relevance strike you later?

Both the Longfellow and Dunn quotes came after the book was finished, pretty much accidentally. I discovered the Longfellow poem when I was getting ready to send the manuscript out—I wanted to make sure there weren’t any other books called Aftermath, and when I searched the title, up came Longfellow. And I almost fell out of my chair when I read it and saw how beautifully it evoked the feeling I was trying to capture in the stories. The Dunn came soon after and was even more random; an acquaintance posted a link to it on Facebook, and once again I couldn’t believe how perfect it was, how it went straight to the heart of loss and acceptance and a begrudging carrying on—in fact, it did in a few lines so succinctly what I’d tried to do in nearly three hundred pages, that I nearly despaired and considered sticking the manuscript in a drawer. But like all good writers, I decided that if I couldn’t beat them, I’d steal from them, and I went from having no epigraph to having two.

Do have a habit of reading poetry? If so, do you think it affects your prose in any way?

Poetry was my first literary love—after Dylan—and I do read a lot of it, though not in as deliberate a way as I do fiction or nonfiction. Usually I let friends recommend something, or I pick up something at random in a bookstore, and devour a poem or two while I’m pacing my office before class starts. I have a lot of admiration for and envy of what some poets are able to do—the distillation, the direct line to emotion and depth of engagement with the sensual world, the associative leaps and structural experimentation. And I know the more poetry I read, the more closely I pay attention to the rhythm of my sentences, the interplay of sound and syntax and breath.

What advice would you give your younger self?

I think it would be the same advice I give myself now, whenever I feel frustrated or lost, whenever I worry that I’ll never write another decent book or story or sentence: Don’t take yourself too seriously.

I once had a teacher who told me a story about a conversation he had with Grace Paley. He was working with her while at Stanford, complaining to her about how badly the writing was going, how tortured he was by the process. And she turned to him and said, “You don’t have to do it, you know. No one’s sitting around waiting for your next story.”

It may be devastating to realize that no one but you is going to care if you stop writing. But it’s also wonderfully freeing. All pressures and expectations drop away. You don’t have to worry about shaping the future of literature or saving the world. You can just put one word after another for the simple pleasure of making something out of nothing.

Further Links & Resources

Note

[1] “Angle of Vision: A Conversation With Scott Nadelson.” Trachodon Magazine. January 2011.

You see, I am standing here on the threshold of releasing my first book of poems. Like a pregnant overpopulation expert, I am happy but embarrassed about my condition and looking for ways to explain and justify it to the world. Hundreds of books of poetry come out every year from presses ranging from high profile to out-of-someone’s-basement. The number of copies sold for most of these books more closely resembles a figure you’d expect for some of those one-of-a-kind homemade wrist warmers on Etsy than mass-produced books with a marketing plan behind them. I expect most of the non-poets who buy my book will share my last name. And I expect a fair cross-section of those purchasers will stick to complimenting the cover and the abstract accomplishment of publishing a book.

It’s easy to wonder at the point of publishing within a genre that goes virtually unread. And, even though I have put down books of poetry in the last year that have left me stunned and delighted, and even though I am one of FWR’s ambassadors of poetry, I don’t think I could explain to you why otherwise reasonable people do it. So when the poet and critic Craig Morgan Teicher described David Orr’s book on Slate, I felt those little butterflies in my stomach that I get when I think someone’s finally going to write the ultimate demystification of poetry. Orr’s an interesting and light-footed reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and he seems to understand what needs to be tackled: poetry’s alienation from the rest of the literary world, not to mention the non-literary world; its “inbred culture”; and the intimidation factor that makes people feel they are not equal to reading poetry even if they suddenly get the urge. (As Orr notes in the book, “Even if most people don’t know what poets do, the average person feels that whatever it is, it must be spectacular.”) I also got the impression from the Slate article that Orr was going to admit that poetry was made by poets, something that you might think is obvious but that so many poetry guides ignore, preferring to treat poems as objects that appear with intact codes and intentions, like stars formed by natural gases in deep space.

Not where poems come from.

Let’s put aside Orr for a moment. Consider the poet. Yes, not the lobster. (I will resist using as a metaphor for poets that blue-blooded and shelled creature that scuttles across the ocean, fierce and clawing, but is most often seen piled obscenely in a tank with too many of its own kind, claws rubber-banded…) No, consider the poet. The writer’s life—any writer’s life—is tough, and I have nothing but admiration for those of you with the attention spans and scope of vision to craft short stories and novels. But when you tell people you write novels, they have at least read some, sometimes even happily, on sunny beaches. They may not have read your type of novel, but they register object recognition. When I tell people I’m a poet, I cannot say the same. They know what poems are, of course, but most of them don’t understand how poems make up books and could not name a book of poems they’ve read in the last year or even five years. In fact, to discover the last poem they read, you’d probably have to ask when they graduated from high school and put the pushpin approximately there, along with the last map-able brain wave devoted to the quadratic equation and the Magna Carta.

When I tell people I’m a poet (or when they discover it against my efforts to conceal it) they usually ask me right away, “What do you write about?” It’s a well-meaning question, one that nevertheless makes me want to respond, “I don’t know. What do you live about?” (On a side note, I am seriously contemplating a second book of poems all on one subject, and one of the things to recommend that approach is that, next time I get the inevitable question, I will be able to respond cheerily, “Ducks! I write about ducks!”)

What my next book will be about.

My answer is usually so scattered and grasping that I only further confirm the stereotype of poets as pretentious word-fetishizers not quite smart enough to write real books with characters and plots… or the other stereotype of poets as dreamy, stunted adolescents still writing about how the world doesn’t understand them in diaries with tiny pick-able locks. People also want to know if my poems rhyme (answer: only if I hate them) or are in a form they know, like haiku (Richard Howard is reported to have said that reading too much haiku is “like being nibbled to death by goldfish”). They also want to know if I make money/a living as a poet (a question I am seldom able to answer to, due to my uncontrollable laughter).

My dear fiction writers, I am sure you get your share of well-meaning but ultimately wearying questions, but most people know what you want (superficially: a book contract, hordes of readers, Ryan Gosling playing your main character in the movie version… more meaningfully: to write the great American novel and be discussed in literature classes). Poets want similar things, but we scale our expectations down a bit (movie adaptations of poems are few and far between), and we are in the odd position of having to explain that we understand we have virtually no readers and write anyway. Also, if we want to get published, we almost always have to enter a first book contest, which is embarrassing, the equivalent of putting on a swimsuit and parading across a stage for a panel, while you guys get to put on suits and ties and go on a proper job interview. Then, when we do get published, releasing the book is, in the words of Don Marquis, like “dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.” And that defeatist assessment describes success in poetry, folks! Imagine failure.

But the truth is that I would set aside all my cynicism about this strange business if I could just have a good answer to the question of why I write poetry, read poetry, and care about poetry in the first place. And David Orr was going to come up with it, I was sure. He was going to build the perfectly engineered and constructed bridge between me and the non-poets. Gosh, I’d even take a rope bridge.

This week at my office job (the sugar daddy to my poetry career) I am taking a mandatory online Defensive Driving course. It’s unintentionally funny and woefully out of date, but the one thing it has in spades is definitions. “Defensive driving is driving to save lives, time, and money,” the movie trailer voice tells me. This is sort of what I secretly hoped David Orr would do for poetry. “Poetry is using words to save the world, expand the mind, and rejuvenate a tired language!” the movie trailer voice would say… and then we’d be walked through five real-world scenarios that showed it doing just that.

David Orr

But he doesn’t. Instead Orr writes a perfectly enjoyable, reasonable and sometimes funny book about “two mutually uncomprehending factions: the poets, for whom poetry is a matter of casual, day-to-day conversation; and the rest of the world, for whom it’s a subject of at best mild and confused interest.” He write eloquently about how the public feels “trapped between a tediously mechanical view of poems and an unjustifiably shamanistic view of poetry itself,” but he is less Martin Luther King declaring “I have a dream…” and bridging great divides than a political analyst sharply and smartly characterizing the mutual suspicion of today’s political factions on CNN.

Orr breaks the discussion up into sections: The Personal, The Political, Form, Ambition, The Fishbowl, and Why Bother. In “The Personal,” he addresses the widely held (and often paralyzing) assumption that poetry is the “pure expression of our inner lives,” when of course it is a much more complicated and impure expression. He even includes an anecdote of a woman appalled to learn that he gets paid to criticize poetry! While I wish he’d gone a bit further in debunking some of these assumptions and prejudices, to go much further might have required a search warrant for poets’ brains. None of us really ever knows how personal a poem is. My most personal poems (in the sense of being closest to actual experience and unfiltered thoughts) are seldom my best ones and seldom even seem the most personal.

Mary Ruefle

One poem I adore for its rash, goofy confessionalism is Mary Ruefle’s “Snow”. How can you not feel like you know something about the woman—something quite intimate!—once you have read this poem? Yet how can you ever know for sure that “Snow” isn’t merely a whimsical exercise? Perhaps Mary Ruefle gets amorous only on the sunniest of days and is on a tropical beach with her lover at this very moment, laughing at us. What makes “the personal” appealing is not just that it exposes someone. It’s that it juxtaposes that exposure with something more universally revelatory like, in this case, those “quiet, cold, gentle sleepers who cannot think of 
themselves,” who make the original meteorological striptease all the more poignant and sweet. And even the most constructed poem is personal. What, after all, is more intimate than being in someone’s imagination?

In “The Political,” Orr acknowledges that politics and poetry are “both matters of verbal persuasion,” which means they ought to be very comfortable in each other’s company (and indeed, in other times and other countries, they have been). Nevertheless, he is probably right when he asserts that “the average voter, upon being told that a group of poets felt strongly about a particular issue, would be less likely to say, ‘Well, I am persuaded!’ than to say, ‘We have poets? Do they wear capes?’”

Orr does a fine job with the easier task—identifying the attributes of bad political poetry: “[Many pseudo-political poems] put forward no argument, make no revelatory comparison, confront no new audience, engage no misconception in language likely to be understood by the deceived, and so on and so on. Instead, they enact a version of the contemporary meditative lyric—‘here I sit, having some poetic thoughts’—with a few political words taking the place of, for instance, reference to waterfalls and foliage.” Poets may not change hearts and minds, especially not hearts and minds that aren’t already leaning into poems, and the best political poems may not be the most persuasive or vice versa. They may not even be recognizable as political.

Yet I am surprised that Orr does not identify some of the more compelling political endeavors in contemporary poetry, such as CD Wright’s full-length book on Louisiana prisons (One Big Self), Brian Turner’s war poetry, Jorie Graham’s 2008 book on global warming (Sea Change, which I must admit I haven’t read yet), or the very presence of Brenda Hillman, an abstract and cerebral poet who has actually managed to scare real members of Congress with her presence at hearings and sessions, if only because of the primal, vestigial sense that poets are dangerous to politicians, especially dishonest politicians.

“Ambition” is obviously about exploring what it means for a poet to be ambitious. In discussing ambition, Orr has a habit of reaching for yesterday’s greats (Bishop and Lowell) to make his points or at least relying on today’s very established voices (Graham, Walcott, Collins… and let me just say, as a side note, perhaps it’s time for the once outsider-y Kay Ryan to stop being everyone’s go-to example of an iconoclast now that she’s been Poet Laureate). Really, these are the poets now sunning themselves beside the pool. It’s too bad that Orr ignores, for the most part, the younger and more aspirational poets who are actually in the pool now, doing their laps or trying to surface.

“The Fishbowl” might be my favorite chapter. Orr sums up the dilemma of the poet-in-academia quite nicely when he writes that, “on one hand, they’re confronted with the standards of fairness and civic responsibility that exist for professors; on the other hand, they’re drawn (and expected to be drawn) to the art form’s rambunctious, impassioned history of oddball behavior and outrageous self-promotion.” Also in this chapter, he breezes insightfully and humorously through the Foetry scandal and (rather predictably but still entertainingly) blurb hyperbole. (Is anyone calling it blurbole yet? Can we?)

And then we are at the final chapter, “Why Bother,” in which Orr asks, not rhetorically, “Are we so sure of what poems have to offer?” After all, “a poet uses the same words that hundreds of millions of people use every day to marry, fight, console themselves, entertain, grieve and order cheeseburgers.” Can we be sure they understand something deeper about those words than everyone else? In semi-answer, Orr recounts a moving story of his father trying to recover from a cancer-related stroke. Poetry plays a cameo there. And that is the one real concession he makes to poetry’s larger-than-life potential. Soon he is back to humbly suggesting that “out of such small, unnecessary devotions is the abundance of our lives sometimes made evident.” Maybe he’s right. Maybe poetry is an eccentric private hobby, like curling or collecting Faberge eggs, and should be embraced as such. Maybe it is “a private pleasure and an occasional irritation that can’t easily be justified in public terms.”

So, should you buy Orr’s book and use it as a guide to today’s poetry? Truthfully, I think there is more in it for the poet to recognize than there is for the non-poet to learn. You will likely come out of it with largely the same relationship to poetry that you came in with. I can’t blame Orr for not quite doing what I, over years of reading, writing, teaching and submitting poems have also been unable to do. Yes, a few things do get in his way. He has a habit of assuming everyone’s taste is the same as his, but then who doesn’t? And he is a bit disdainful of poetry’s insider culture while also relying on it for most of his insights and jokes, but that’s probably unavoidable. Finally, and most disappointingly of all, he doesn’t provide me with my perfect answer for the question of why I write and care about poetry, saving me any further soul-searching. That said, you could certainly do worse for a meditation on poetry as a pastime, culture, and charming absurdity. And Orr has made me think—maybe if I did get a cape, people would just ask me about that instead.

About the Columnist

Katie Umans is a poet. What is she doing here? Indulging her love and envy of fiction and maybe getting you to try a little poetry. (Please? You might like it.) These days, she lives in New Hampshire. She is one poet of Two Poet Truffles, a chocolate and poetry enterprise that publishes The Concher. In addition to holding an office job, she teaches genius kids through Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth. Katie steals her own time for writing now, but she has in the past been happily swaddled in the support of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (where she was a post-graduate fellow), the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and the New Hampshire State Council for the Arts. Her first book is forthcoming in 2012 from Dzanc/Black Lawrence Press; she received the 2010 St. Lawrence Book Award for her manuscript, “Flock Book.” Katie’s poems have been published in journals like Crazyhorse, Columbia, the Bellingham Review, Mid-American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Forklift Ohio, and the Indiana Review. Three books that are hugely important and influential to her are Nabokov’s Lolita, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Plath’s Ariel — a list that makes Katie sound like a really dark and disturbed person, but she absorbs these into a generally cheerful and stable personality.

[Editor's Note: There are some differences between poems linked to in their original online forms and the newer published versions in the books themselves. All quotations are from the print collections.]

Post Moxie
by Julia Story
(Sarabande Books, 2010)

No, not just because of her last name, though it does tie in nicely, doesn’t it…

These are stories of angst and the Midwest and alienation, each held still for one stunning moment in an untitled, window-shaped prose poem. I found myself getting into bed at night and reading this book, something I don’t usually do with poetry, which generally requires a daytime alertness. But I didn’t feel any need to interact with these poems, and I mean that as a compliment. I didn’t interpret them or decode them. I simply let each one arrive and depart, and it told its story exactly as I needed to know it.

And I found that to be a wonderfully unusual experience for reading a poetry book. It’s not that these poems are shallow or simple. They have great eerie depths and resonance to them. They’re just so whole. “I am not very smart at the very beginning of spring, when even the sidewalk has hormones,” writes Story. In another poem: “There are this many heads I want to break with this many bottles of Night Train, but I’m blonde and from Indiana so I look at the floor and smile.” Interestingly, for poems that feel so whole, there is an awful lot of breaking up, and not in the romantic sense. “I prefer to forgo the body altogether,” Story writes, and that’s true only in the sense that her bodies seldom are “all together.” They are usually in pieces. The body gets rearranged and moved and even mailed around. It tunnels in and out of landscapes.

Story writes in a style that many of her poetry peers have written in – she accumulates surreal images and conveys deep heartbreaks with a disaffected postmodern shrug. Yet she manages to exist in a completely naturalistic way in this style, and that’s what makes this book truly distinct and memorable.

I take my harp down to the water, but
it isn’t a harp, it’s a person and we’re
falling in love. Birds land on us and I
grip the air with my eyes. Hills are arms
and the landscape is a bucket. His whole
body is taped to me or taped to a picture
of the world.

– from “untitled”

Thin Kimono
by Michael Earl Craig
(Wave Books, 2010)

It may be unfair to drag biography onto the stage, but Michael Earl Craig lives in Montana and shoes horses for a living, and these frequently seem like poems that might be spoken by someone who lives in Montana and shoes horses for a living. They are precise, cool, metallic poems, laconic and wry. They are the poems of observation and spun-off thought that might easily arise from solitary work. The language is plain, unflowery; it’s the disjointed logic of the images that turns the lines into spare poetry. The way white asparagus grows without the sun that would have made its chlorophyll surge, these poems feel like their story-lines have been cultivated in a different environment, so that there is something slightly alien and deprived about them, though you recognize their shapes. For instance, in one poem, a man at the bottom of a pool is “pretending/to be fixing a ladder” while a possibly possessed herd of synchronized swimmers practices around him. The moment has all the reverberations of a short story, but in only nine brief stanzas.

The poems of Thin Kimono are often about people in bleak situations who encounter the indifference of others, whether it’s a man whose dog won’t help him out of the snow or the speaker whose girlfriend throws him out into the night “just as one cracks open the window/of a passing sedan and pokes out/a wrapper.” Other times it’s the speaker who is unsettled but passive in response to images of violence around him–a war photo, a brutalized mannequin, a doomed robin, a stinging behind his own face “like some kind of a problem behind a billboard.” Craig blurs the line between the person confronting and the writer capturing. Feeling like “a man in a park, dripping wet with gasoline,” he is told he is merely experiencing “writer’s block.” Fortunately, nothing has blocked these strange and evocative poems from the page.

Suddenly it was time.
A single black llama ran briskly up a hill.
There was pinochle in another town.
The hungry actress ordered sea bass.
And somehow from my poem came your feeling of consent.

- from “I Was Thinking”

Noose and Hook
by Lynn Emanuel
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010)

Let me just say upfront that the middle section of this book is a morality play in which the main character is a dog who speaks in a baby-talk Cockney dog dialect.

OK, maybe I should have worked up to that. Please don’t go, at least not until I’ve told you that this one of the best books of poetry I can remember reading in years. Noose and Hook is recklessly brilliant, both animal and intellectual. It is about world-wearines, poetry, the self, and the way war erodes us, even from a distance. Think of the unapologetic minds of Gertrude Stein and Anne Carson, and you will have some sense of where Lynn Emanuel harkens from (even though she tries to renounce Stein in a late poem). This is her third book, and it has an advanced career quality to it. Not trying to impress, not trying to behave, it can go anywhere the poet wants, and it’s exhilarating.

Now back to that play, “The Mongrelogues.” As if the dog’s language were some sort of Middle English we might find alongside that of The Canterbury Tales, Emanuel takes up the dialect and invests her canine character with a puzzled, then trusting, then indignant take on the world that alternately shelters, abuses, abandons, scapegoats, and interrogates him. The dog’s mistress is named Mistrust, and Dogg must absorb her fate, her reaction to “middle age” and to troubled times. Dogg’s fraught relationship to his mistress is revealed in the way he calls her a speaker of “Engleash,” revealing both the language and power divide between them in one invented word. References abound – to the Bible, Berryman, Wordsworth, and Neruda (“i am tired uf bein dogg,” laments Dogg, just as Neruda’s man laments the exhaustion of being a man), to name just a few. Not unlike Shakespeare’s Caliban, Dogg becomes a kind of litmus test of humanity’s ability to be kind as it explores its own power to judge and dictate another’s fate.

Emanuel has embraced poetry’s devices–its bizarre twists, its metaphors, its music, its puns and wordplay–and yet she has written a book that might well transcend poetry and appeal to many differently tuned minds, simply because of how go-for-broke it is.

Into the clearing of…
she climbed and stood

up from the black boots of her blackouts
into her body.

The coat wept upon her shoulder,
it hung upon her, a carcass heavy on a hook,

and in the sockets of the buttonholes
the buttons lolled and looked.

As she climbed into that clearing
it shook as it took her.

A fever wrote the sentence
and screwed it tight with ache

and the long hair of the grass grew silvery and weak,
lay greasily against the skull of dirt.

My mother was a figure armed with…
and came toward me

flew to me as though I were a sentence
that must be mended, that must be broken

then ended, ended, ended.

– from “The Revolution”

The Madeleine Poems
by Paul Legault
(Omnidawn Publishing, 2010)

Trying to figure out who Madeleine is and why these poems are hers, one can’t help but think of Proust’s madeleines, the bite that evokes lost worlds, and wonder if Paul Legault wants his character of the same name to be a similar device. Yet there is nothing nostalgic in these poems, in which every title remakes Madeleine in a new form: “Madeleine as Home,” “Madeleine as Matador,” “Madeleine as New Frontier,” etc. Ultimately I tend to think Madeleine is really just a material, like carbon, something elemental, of which things are made (“a new thing/of an old thing made/anew”)… or perhaps the pioneering spirit itself, the alter ego/embodiment of wanderlust with its accompanying rudder of shame and violence.

In the only poem that’s just Madeleine in her own skin and voice, she’s just as elusive as anywhere else, announcing that she is the “Madonna of chosen things” and that she will “outlast” us. She’s also a cold and brutal presence, inasmuch as she is present at all. In the end, who she is and why she’s the vessel for these poems is perhaps the least interesting thing about the astonishing images of this book. The way Legault makes abstractions feel visceral is what’s most notable. His grim, ghostly half-history is mesmerizing, peopled with Walt Whitman and Christopher Columbus and many other personas and lands, both identified and suggested.

Though the poems can grow a bit indulgent in their withholding and sometimes circular syntax and heightened, fragmented language, they are more than saved by moments of audacious clarity, as in the poem “Madeleine as James Dean and the Whale,” when the body of the whale is described as “stone washed,” literally so, evoking Dean’s famous jeans in a flash. And even in some of the withholding and circular language, there is a purposeful feeling, something darkly sexual, acerbic, and enticing, not merely remote. “In one of the rooms, time gets really close,” writes Legault, and, with still no idea of what that could mean, you feel it.

These are challenging poems, and this is probably the book that least obviously belongs on this list, but for the adventurous reader/writer of more cerebral fiction, it offers up a great reward.

- from “Madeleine as Tourist”

American Fanatics
by Dorothy Barresi
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010)

Dorothy Barresi has described her ideal poetry as “poetry that knows what it knows for only a second, and loves the brute world anyway.” I’m not sure about the fleetingness of the knowledge, but there’s no doubt about the brute world.

The title of the book tells you Barresi’s not messing around, and the first poem gets right to work, taking on religion and its slow burn into extremism in the very first stanzas. The great danger in this world is that it is made up of people who seek “a genesis wrapped/in exodus,” who believe that the better world can begin only when the competing world is destroyed. Her take on this predicament is at different moments profane, worried, questioning, brash. Through it all, God is the essential shape-shifter. “God is hammy as an old rock star,” in one poem, a “brass-knuckled, wire-tapped tough” in another.

Political poems often, with their litany-like and incurious approach, defang their subjects even as they infuse them with more growl. On the other hand, lyrically innovative poems can treat current events and anxieties as unworthy of their high-shelf beauty. Barresi, however, can discuss fanaticism head-on and then wrap her conclusions in this beautiful, vivid image: “Reading the newspapers lately, you’d think/American had been educated/In a single ray of handsome and murderous light/By which we see/individual belief is everything, being free.” She can also pause, amidst poems mostly focused on human foibles, to notice “fog mumbling along/the numbest parts of the morning’s throat” or the way turtle eggs glow “as though they had been pressed through immaculate doorlight.”

Not every poem here is perfect, but even those that don’t quite hit their stride tell us something about ourselves: whether the preening we do through diets and midlife crises or the more serious ways we confront faith, security, and responsibility. They are about looking squarely at those deciding what they’d kill for, while we decide what to live for.

Did I mention that in my catherdral a cardinal’s hat
hangs from the rafters like a tiny blood clot?
Caught up so high, so far into the brain of the thing,
that you can barely make it out?

And a full ration of gently
apoplectic saints
holding their breath in the side chapels,

and one priest
in elegant surplice

coming up from behind
everyone
like Groucho Marx goosing Margaret Dumont.

O velvet lash of the short vowel sound
laid over a flaming poker!
to burn awake
my intentions each day
as I raise myself from the dead.

- from “It Is Good To Be Amongst Catholics Again”

Further Links and Resources

- Ordering directly from the presses is a great way to keep poetry alive and well! To order one of these books directly from its publisher, click on its title in the review.

Julia Story / photo from Sarabande

- Sarabande’s website for Post Moxie features an interview with Julia Story, writing exercises, and recommendations (from the author) for further reading. Two more poems by Story, “Bride/Beer Can” and “Glossary,” can be read at La Petite Zine. Verse Daily has also featured several poems from Post Moxie, including “From Its Plastic Light.”

- In this interview at HTML Giant, poet Michael Earl Craig talks about Thin Kimono, fudge, soundtracks, and “den wash.” At Octopus Magazine, you can read the poem excerpted above, “I Was Thinking”, and two others.

In this video, he reads “I Am Coming Over to See You” and other poems:

Dorothy Barresi

- This interview with Dorothy Barresi (American Fanatics) at Words without Borders focuses on the writer’s relationship with Los Angeles and its role in her poetry. Another interview at West Branch Wired offers a link to two of her poems that first appeared in West Branch 62. At chaparral, you can read two of her poems, “How’s the World Treating You?” and “Responsibility.”

- On the University of Pittsburgh Press’s website, read a longer excerpt from Lynn Emanuel’s Noose and Hook. Via Slate, listen to Emanuel read “The Revolution” (the poem excerpted above). Here, watch her read–backed by a full orchestra–her poem “Desire”:

Emanuel reads more poems from Noose and Hook on the Poets’ Co-op TV Show (Episode 33):

Paul Legault / photo from Omnidawn's website

- Read several selections from The Madeleine Poems on Paul Legault’s website.

Julia Guez at BOMBLOG also highly recommends this book and features an interview with Legault; find out how studying screenwriting informs his poetry and why he recently published an “English-to-English translation” of Emily Dickinson’s poems.

One of my favorite aspects of Ploughshares is that every issue is edited by a different guest editor, who shapes the theme and selects pieces with his or her own particular aesthetic. Past editors have included Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Rosellen Brown, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Sherman Alexie, Russell Banks, Lorrie Moore, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Richard Ford. The current issue was edited by 2010 National Book Award Winner in Poetry, Terrance Hayes, and includes work by Benjamin Percy, Rebecca Johns and Danica Novgorodoff – among many other fine writers of fiction and poetry. Bon Appétit, mes amis!

Image Credit: Flickr

Within his cultural limits the author, as an individual, can and, indeed, must extend himself as far as he can to set himself and his art apart from the commonplace, showing all the while whence he comes, doing this through language most of all. With the translator we have quite the opposite situation. He cannot and must not set himself apart from the culture laid out before him. To do so would indeed be treasonous.

A translator, Rabassa goes on to explain, is not simply a writer but also a reader. If a translation is to be a successful one, the translator must be a particularly astute reader, attentive not only to the essentials but also to the cultural context whence the writer comes. And so we see how translation can become a snake biting its own tail: the translator as writer and reader is simultaneously subsumed and resurrected by the text in the original as a translation task. So the question becomes: how does the translator mount a sensitive, careful reading of a literary work as she writes it from one language into another?

I knew to pose this question to myself only some years after I began, with what I might call dedicated chutzpah and utter naïveté, my translation of the semiautobiographical prose-poem novel I Saw You on the Street (Je vous ai vue dans la rue) by French writer Yolaine Simha. My efforts were buoyed by an undergraduate research grant I’d received to start the translation work, and motivated by my desire to translate as elegy. I had corresponded with Simha during a semester-long study abroad in Paris. We never met in person—her debilitating agoraphobia, which served as thematic fodder for I Saw You on the Street, saw to that—and in August 1999, six weeks after I had returned to the States, Simha committed suicide.

Simha left several notes before she took an overdose of barbiturates and jumped into the river behind her house in a farm town two hours outside of Paris. Several of the notes she left for friends include the statement “ce n’est pas une question d’angoisse mais de lassitude” (“it’s not a question of anguish but of exhaustion”). Along with Simha’s other works of fiction and experimental prose, I Saw You on the Street has languished, having received limited distribution before it was declared out of print. So it was an understandable impulse to want to translate her work as homage. But of course, this led to problems in reading in my initial work on the project, and by extension—if, as I do, you buy into Rabassa’s idea that translation is always an act of careful close reading—its translation.

Image Credit: Flickr

I Saw You on the Street struck me for several reasons when I first read it, but what I found most compelling was the theme of women’s innovative negotiation of the Paris streets. Since I had come of age in a time when awareness about sexual harassment was all over the US media, I had found my transition to Paris trying, to say the least. In the late 1990s, being followed on the street in Paris was still viewed as a compliment rather than a menace. This was shocking to me, particularly since one of my central inspirations for becoming conversant in French had been the work of feminist thinkers such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. I Saw You on the Street spoke directly to what had been rendered so beautifully abstract in the works of other French feminists I had read. Simha’s fictionalized testimony of what it was to traverse city streets and feel threatened while doing so resonated with me, and surely informed my early experiences of Paris.

Petain, Vichy France, via Flickr

Simha’s work, I should note, was a large part of what led to my decision to pursue a PhD in French a few years later. That is mostly a story for another time, but a few more details encapsulate my curiosity about the intersections between Simha’s life and work: she was half-Jewish, and was born into hiding in Paris during World War II. This was, by all accounts, the root of her agoraphobia. She had, nonetheless, identified not as a Jew, not as a French woman, but as a Levantine. She had adopted Esmeralda, a Turkish name, as part of her pen name. What exactly was the meaning behind her assumption of this vague and distant socio-cultural identity? In I Saw You on the Street, it seemed to play out through themes and images that reflected upon French historical memory of World War II and Vichy, as well as the contemporary immigrant situation in and around Paris.

So the deeper I got into what became a ten-year, on-again, off-again project to translate I Saw You on the Street—and especially once I began contextualizing it more through other literary and social texts and less through Simha’s biography—the more I saw how brazen I had been in approaching the translation of this work as a new speaker of French, and as a fledgling navigator of French culture and society.

Image Credit: Flickr

I can point to three different periods of work on this translation project that might be helpful in considering the question of what it means to be a good reader if one is to be a good translator. My first attempt to translate I Saw You on the Street was spread out over two years, from November 2000 through the spring of 2002. The translation at this point served me more than Simha’s work: as I translated, I was also keeping up and developing my French. For all of my bull-in-a-chinashop approach to translation at this point, I will say that I was acutely aware of my shortcomings and lack of training any time I came across an unknown idiom, a particularly literary turn of phrase, some image or metaphor that seemed to be a literary or cultural reference.

I had two very kind readers of these first translation efforts, both tenured, full professors of French who had known Simha and taught her work to undergraduates. They were extraordinarily supportive readers: looking back at that first translation now, I can imagine that they both cringed and sighed multiple times as they made their gentle observations and raised helpful questions. With their prescience of advanced scholars, they were both aware, I would guess, that this version of the translation would open new avenues and possibilities for me, rather than lead to publication of the work in translation: I was working as an editor and playing in a band in Chicago, and this work allowed me to keep up my French during this time between undergraduate and graduate school. Their comments focused, for the most part, upon moments of poor reading, such as through cultural misunderstanding. They also helped me think about how to calibrate the translation of more literary verb tenses in this extremely terse and contemporary-sounding work. Above all, though, they both encouraged me, and for that, I can only thank these gentle and supportive readers.

Aubervilliers, via Flickr

My next translation was a far more rigorous and careful reading of the original work. This was in the summer of 2006, two years into coursework for my doctorate in French. My immersion experiences in French by this point included a summer in Aubervilliers in 2005, shortly before the riots broke out in that and other Paris suburbs. I had done some critical writing on I Saw You on the Street, as well, and as a literary critic and performance studies scholar who often attempts to embody the tone and style of the work I critique, I had had some time and practice with considering how to translate the tone of Simha’s work into English. These kinds of experiences suggest modes of reading that can lead to more careful translation of a contemporary work in a living language: through my new understanding of immigrant culture in France, I was reading Simha less obliquely from the embodied experience perspective. Through the body of knowledge I was amassing about literary traditions in French (and particularly in France), Simha’s work had become far more culturally intelligible to me. And my readers—including

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the board of a well-known translation imprint who only decided not to publish the work because they felt it couldn’t be marketed within a specific genre—were far more forthright and incisive. Their criticism of my translation was direct and targeted at the sentence level: why did you translate this idiom in that way?, for instance. Based on their comments, I decided to allow some more time to pass, to return to translate I Saw You on the Street once more before submitting it to the publisher my readers from the first imprint had recommended. I had come much closer to being the kind of reader I wanted to be the second time. But more time, experience, and distance between myself and that second reading needed to pass before I was ready to call the third time the charm.

Third reading: summer and fall 2009. I didn’t realize until some weeks after the fact that I had resumed my work ten years to the week of Simha’s death, which I honored by continuing to read I Saw You on the Street as a work situated within and yet separate from her biography. And how things had changed for me as a translating reader! I was on fellowship, in the midst of writing my dissertation. Simha’s work became a gentle entree back into reading and writing, each and every morning. Since the work is divided into 128 prose-poems, each morning I would translate one to three pages. I would begin with a fresh translation—another few years of both reading through literary works in French and another summer plus a full year of research in Paris led me to feel both more confident of and more hesitant about my readerly authority. After completing the newest translation of one prose poem, I compared the newest version to the 2006 version. Then, I would make judgment calls about different turns of phrase, and I looked up oblique expressions and concepts online. If I failed to draw a satisfactory conclusion from Internet research, I would turn to friends who were native speakers to find out what

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they thought of this or that in the work (and often it was the case in I Saw You on the Street, as was my hunch, that images such as “two kangaroos whose pockets overflowed with Scottish mice with black silky mustaches” were surrealist concoctions of Simha’s own design). I had become accustomed by my second pass through the work to relying on not only a French-English dictionary, but also a French dictionary, an English dictionary, and both French- and English-language thesauri. I combed my fingers through the hair of Simha’s work this time, I would say to friends. I wanted to render the work as seamlessly in English as it was in the French. If I learned anything from my third translation of I Saw You on the Street, it’s that good reading as a translator maintains a certain halting flow: I found that I needed to know when to stop, when to search, when to ask someone who might know better than me. Call this halting flow translator’s humility.

The translation of the elegant and epic crosscultural novel I Loved You for Your Voice (Europa Editions 2006, published in French by Balland in 1994 under the title Oum, written by Sélim Nassib) offers a particularly successful example of reading as writing. As is the case of I Saw You on the Street, in I Loved You for Your Voice, the translator’s conundrum is multiplied. I Loved You for Your Voice is a fictionalized account of the life and career of Om Kalthoum, the revered singer known as kawkab el-sharq (the Star of the East). The first-person narrator, Ahmed Rami, is the celebrated poet who wrote the lyrics to more than half of Kalthoum’s songs. Nassib’s novel could be, in a sense, qualified as a work in translation by default: with much of the dialogue between Rami, Kalthoum, and the other characters, it can be presumed that they are “speaking” in Arabic, although the dialogue is almost entirely written and read in French in the original, and in English in the 2006 Europa Edition.

Translator Alison Anderson ably preserves the resonance and flutter of several crosscultural voices in her reading-writing of the French Oum into the English I Loved You for Your Voice. There seems to be a clear awareness on her part of the importance of the translation theme that pervades the novel, for she has faithfully preserved all descriptions and references to musical interpretation as translation throughout the novel.

Rami was educated in Paris, “to learn Persian,” he tells us, “for the purpose of translating one single poem, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the Quatrains.” Rami was a renowned poet before he became Om Kalthoum’s lyricist; the opening chapters of the novel portray their first meetings. Om urges Rami to write for her after their first encounter, during which she sings in a small theater disguised as a boy, as was typical in her early singing career during the 1920s. Rami describes his alternating sense of unease and wonderment as the “boy” sings one of his poems, written in classical Arabic. The voice creeps into him, filling him “with something so natural it was obscene, unconscious of itself.” A telling detail, if we think about Rabassa’s conundrum: had the “boy” singer not maintained proper distance from the lyric? Rami feels undone as his “words were transformed into what they meant to say; even I believed they were real.” Perhaps the problem here is that Om performed her task all too well.

So it is that Om, revealed to be a girl through the curve of her breast under rough peasant’s clothing at the end of the concert, is later able to convince Rami to write for her in colloquial Arabic. And so comes a second layer of a translator’s task, to translate in order for a work to reach a wider audience. “How many people understand your words?” Om asks Rami of his lyric poetry. “Why can’t there be poetry in a language which everyone understands, why not?” Granted, this is not translation in the strictest sense of the term. Yet Rami drawn to Om’s demand specifically as a translator, and he is both anxious and excited about her proposition.

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Indeed, Rami is sparked to write his first song for Om as he works on his translation of the Rubaiyat, as, he explains, he does every evening. It’s the very nearness and closeness of language, the intimacy and alienation of working with Khayyam’s verses, that lead him to write his first song for Kalthoum:

Arabic and Persian are different, but both are languages of the East, of a same world. The physical proximity plunged me into an exaltation which kept me from sleep. The passage was within reach. And when the meaning was revealed, when the music of the poem found its equivalent in Arabic, I felt the liberation of an emotion that was nine centuries old.

Translation reaches across languages, history, national boundaries and cultural traditions, but it’s even more than that, if we are to heed Rami’s experience. For he realizes, as he grapples with a rough passage of the Rubaiyat, that he is now working on the translation “for her.” He says, “I wanted that girl to sing the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, that was all I wanted. That is what I had to have.” He describes this moment of the zenith of his quest to translate the classic work, as he realizes then that the meaning for which he grasps in the translation will all come together in her voice. In the quiet passage describing Rami’s solitary work, translation becomes musical interpretation becomes an act of sharing, of openness, of vulnerability, of love.

And it is so that he writes his first song for Om, entitled “I’m Afraid that Your Love.” This is a departure from the translation act of writing your ass off within a given story and setting: it is as if Rami describes a translation of the sense and sensibility, a translation of the emotional and visceral power, of Khayyam, to be channeled through Rami’s words and rendered through the voice of the woman who would come to be known as the voice of Egypt.

Om Kalthoum, circa 1968

Looking at Anderson’s translation of I Loved You For Your Voice offers this clear insight: the conundrum of translation as treason is responded to through the act of translating itself. Translated works tend to show their seams—in other words, remind the reader that the work is a translation, rather than the original—in the moments when they falter. A successful translation, however, reads seamlessly, and in its seamlessness can offer its own unique response to the peculiar problem of the translator as both reader and writer. As I Loved You for Your Voice progresses from the 1920s through the 1970s, Om Kalthoum singing Rami’s words can be read as a study in translation, the nearness and farness of other languages, cultures, countries, continents. Anderson’s very successful translation of I Loved You for Your Voice resonates within Nassib’s original text. The woven texture in the French of both thematic and literal movements from classical Arabic into colloquial Arabic, from Arabic into French, from lyric poetry into sung verse, remains palpable and present in the English. It is as if Anderson heeded Rami’s description in the text of how he wrote his first song as an invocation of the Rubaiyat for Om, “flowing out word after word, a poem in simple and obvious language…like a letter I might be sending to her.” The latter third of this statement might be the novel’s response to the problem of translation as treason. Alongside the original Oum, I Loved You For Your Voice serves not only as a lesson in translation craft, but also as writerly—and readerly—inspiration.

A particularly satisfying response to Rabassa’s conundrum about what it means to read and write as a translator comes in the process itself. Rabassa is famous for not reading a book before he translates it: he reads as he writes. He alludes to his own returns when he writes, for instance, about “treading very carefully” through a passage of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch once Rabassa realized that the passage alternated, sentence by sentence, between the thoughts of a character and lines from a novel he is reading. It might seem that in describing the pause and return, I am describing an obvious part of the writing process: revision. But translation revision is also a process of rereading, since a translator is as bound to reading as she is to writing. Ideally, the revision process will tie her writing more intimately both to her reading and to her reader.

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There are all kinds of ways of halting the flow. In my case, graduate seminars and doctoral research served as instructive pauses between the reading and writing of Simha’s work. As I worked on my third and final version of the translation, I condensed into a few months the halting flow of reading and writing then returning with new insight. By the third round, I had learned to pause. Rami poured a Rubaiyat-like sensibility into the early lyrics he composed for Om Kalthoum to sing, but as a translator of Khayyam’s work, he sat hunched over his bed by candlelight each and every night, reading meticulously, writing slowly. Read, write, pause. And return. So grows the seamless skin.

All across the blogosphere, writers have been celebrating April 2010 by discussing poems and sharing recommendations, including work of their own.

- At Powell’s Blog, Jae suggests three collections (including Alphabet by Inger Christensen), observing:

The poetry section of a bookstore can present potential challenges for any reader. More often than not, poetry books are precociously slim, slipping past first glance; it’s far easier to quickly name 10 famous living novelists than 10 famous living poets; and even when you know exactly what you’re looking for, small print runs may have rendered the book unavailable. Despite these occasional pitfalls, people who persist in the hunt tend to become lifelong devotees. I don’t know what provokes such dogged interest in one person and not another, but I’m convinced that finding a good entryway (even if it’s not the front door) is essential. One arresting poet can point the way to at least two others, owing to influence, peer, or predecessor, ad infinitum.

- Beloved librarian Nancy Pearl shares her favorite poets on NPR’s Morning Edition: she also recommends a novel, The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, for its wonderful poet-narrator:

The voice of narrator Paul Chowder immediately drew me in. He’s a published (but not to such great acclaim) poet who has been hired to compile an anthology called Only Rhyme and to write its introduction as well. The introduction will give him a chance to expound on his belief that rhyme is necessary to poetry, that it, at one time, was a primary part of poetry now sadly lacking in the work of most modern poets. But Paul is totally blocked on writing this, an occurrence that has caused his longtime girlfriend to abandon him. (It seems to me that much of the book we’re reading is the introduction Paul is unable to write.) It was fascinating to read Paul’s explanations of meter and scansion, and especially his pet cause, the importance of rhyme in poetry. But what I really appreciate about Paul is that he loves two of the poets I adore. They’re names you seldom if ever hear mentioned anymore, and you certainly don’t find them anthologized in collections anymore: Sara Teasdale and Howard Moss.

- At the Torontoist’s Books site, Jacob McArthur Mooney and about twenty other poets have contributed to the Optimisms Project, a series of posts in which poets speak enthusiastically (and intelligently) about the future of poetry. Visit the Torontoist’s site to read the most recent posts, or read samples by Johanna Skibsrud, Jenna Butler, George Murray, and Sina Queyras.

- Thanks to Erika Dreifus at Practicing Writing, we heard about the Poetry Book Giveaway for National Poetry Month 2010, organized by poet Kelli Russell Agodon (author of the collection Small Knots) at Book of Kells. In this project, fifty participating lit-bloggers are each giving away *two* poetry collections (one of the writer’s own, if relevant, and one s/he would recommend) to readers. To enter a particular blog’s drawing, leave a comment on the relevant post by April 30, 2010.

No less remarkable is that these profoundly illuminating and visionary pieces were composed at a time when Borges was nearly blind. By this time, as editor Calin-Andrei Mihailescu writes in the book’s postscript, Borges could see “nothing more than an amorphous field of yellow.” We quickly learn, however, that his mind’s eye was as sharp and discerning as ever.

***

In “The Riddle of Poetry,” Borges offers what he calls “time-honored perplexities”: in great poetry, there is no prescription, no certainty–only mystery and magic. He describes poetry as a “passion and a joy,” once again quoting Emerson, who regarded libraries as “a kind of magic cavern which is full of dead men. And those dead men can be reborn, can be brought to life when you open their pages.” Once we recover from this startling image, we realize the incredible and almost god-like power rendered to the reader, namely the power of resurrection. As Borges continues, we are slowly drawn into an ontological meditation. Books are viewed through the lens of questions like: What constitutes a book in the first place? Who invents it? Does the author; the reader? How do the properties of a book relate to a book itself? What are its essences? Borges answers:

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are merely symbols—spring to life and we have the resurrection of the word.

Like Borges, I have no Greek (actually in my case, my Greek is weak, or rather, bleak), but perhaps we can call this act biblionecrophilia.

St. John the Apostle, by Hans Holbein the Younger

This act of breathing life into words reminds me of the Apostle John’s concept of “the word” or logos: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14). Many Christians would argue against Hellenistic influence on the etymology of logos. Be that as it may, the varying concepts of logos may be found throughout ancient philosophy beginning with Heraclitus and on through the Stoics. Logos is generally translated as “word,” but also as “account,” “meaning,” “principle,” “proportion,” “reason,” “speech,” “standard,” “study,” and “thought,” and it is the root for “logic” and the “ology” suffix.

Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher, defined logos more ambiguously as a “fiery substance” and the “fundamental order of all.” Following him, was Philo Judaeus whose conception of the word logos references Plato’s “Theory of Forms” (where ideas represent the highest form of reality), and the interplay between the corporeal and the supernatural, as well as the mediation of ancestral and angelic theophanies. For Philo, logos is the ultimate source of all life. The Apostle John’s contribution is in his specific incarnation of the word. I prefer the ambiguous reference to the “word” rather than the Apostle’s corporeal interpretation. And we can thank Borges for declaring that we have the power to incarnate the word in innumerable ways and forms.

photo by ricoeurian (flickr cc)

Borges later describes a malady that I’m sure many readers suffer from—one that I myself have experienced in public libraries and bookstores. In his library, Borges looks “at the many books I have at home. I feel that I should die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book of one of my hobbies…I say to myself, ‘What a pity that I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.’” This overwhelming, and one may argue obsessive, love of books notwithstanding, Borges still grounds himself by asserting that “a book is really not an immortal object to be picked up and duly worshiped, but rather an occasion for beauty. And it has to be because language is shifting all the time.”

He ends this lecture with a lament of sorts: how do we come to understand something? Borges wonders whether understanding a certain something really comes from being able to define it. Instead, it may be that we can, as Borges suggests (paraphrasing Chesterton), “define something only when we know nothing about it.” He also quotes Saint Augustine as saying “What is time? If people do not ask me what time is, I know. If they ask me what it is, then I do not know.” Wittgenstein believed that time is: “Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something that we need to remind ourselves of.” A definition may provide a kind of mooring, a common ground for communication, but it may not necessarily bring us any closer toward arriving at, or drinking from, its source.

***

Borges’s second lecture, “The Metaphor,” presents us with a dilemma: that writers are faced with only a finite number of metaphorical patterns. Borges supposes that there may be only “twelve affinities” from which to draw. He cleverly uses the number twelve as a metaphor itself, meaning a very small number. Outside of these basic patterns are forms that are used to merely astonish, and are therefore fleeting. He ends this talk, however, by encouraging writers to invent new patterns, noting that “it may also be given to us to invent metaphors that do not belong, or that do not yet belong, to accepted patterns.”

For examples, Borges draws on the works of the Argentine poet Lugones, as well as those of Chesterton, Plato, Tennyson, Manrique, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and from his beloved Beowulf. He uses Shakespeare to illuminate the metaphorical pattern of life as a dream, invoking that famous line from The Tempest: “We are the stuff / as dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” Borges believes these words belong as much to philosophy as to poetry. Reading this, I thought of Zhuangzi’s famous dream:

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things. (2, tr. Burton Watson 1968:49).

photo by spettacolopuro (flickr cc)

Borges later recalls this famous passage as well and remarks on the choice of the word “butterfly” and how the feeling of Zhuangzis’s thought would have completely fallen apart if Zhuangzi had chosen some other animal or object:

A butterfly has something delicate and evanescent about it. If we are dreams, the true way to suggest this is with a butterfly and not a tiger. If Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi) had a dream that he was a typewriter, it would be no good at all. Or a whale—that would do him no good either. I think he has chosen just the right word for what he is trying to say.

I laughed out loud at Zhuangzi dreaming of himself as a typewriter; I was imagining those talking typewriters in Naked Lunch. But then I thought about how important the building blocks of a sentence can be, of Flaubert aching over every word, every jot and tittle, every punctuation curve, slash, and dot. Who defined poetry as “the best words in the best order?” Coleridge? That’s all there is, but it’s everything, and everything, to be redundant, is a lot.

***

“Telling of the Tale” finds Borges whizzing through the centuries and continents discussing the epic form in literature. The supposed “death of the novel” also receives treatment here. After the autopsy, he finds that there’s still much life to storytelling and by extension, the novel itself. Plots too fall into only a few patterns. Borges asserts that The Arabian Nights and Orlando Furioso are interesting not because of any introduction of a new plot, but because of the constant shifting within the overall structure of each work.

In this lecture, Borges famously declares that laziness kept him from writing novels. I wonder if this is the same “happy indolence” that Billy Collins has described as his modus operandi. Borges, like the ancients, defines the poet as “‘a maker’—not only as the utterer of those high lyric notes, but also as a teller of a tale. A tale wherein all the voices of mankind might be found—not only the lyric, the wistful, the melancholy, but also the voices of courage and of hope.” And he finds the greatest expression of this in the epic. He begins his discussion with The Iliad and The Odyssey. Providing the template for countless tales, these two stories still have some unturned stones. The Iliad may in fact be the story of an army who fight knowing they will be defeated, that the true heroes of the tale are not the Greeks, but the Trojans. The Odyssey is both the tale of a homecoming and the tale of adventure which Borges calls “perhaps the finest that has ever been written or sung.” And we all know how James Joyce, not to mention Derek Walcott, felt about it.

Surprisingly, Borges asserts that the Gospels supersede even these two masterworks. While Christians understand Jesus’ story to be one of a perfect man-god condescending to become the bridge–the mediator between God and man–Borges finds another story, one he discovered in Langland’s The Vision of Piers the Plowman; namely, this is “the idea that God wanted to know all about human suffering, and that it was not enough for Him to know it intellectually, as a god might; he wanted to suffer as a man, and with the limitations of a man.” Is God here practicing a kind of sadomasochism? Borges goes on to say, “However, if you are an unbeliever (many of us are) then you can read the story in a different way. You can think of a man of genius, of a man who thought he was a god and who at the end found out that he was merely a man, and that god—his god—had forsaken him.” The idea of Jesus as a genius gone mad seems familiar to me already. However, I think my understanding of the story of the Gospels is indebted to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that is, of Christ belonging to a pantheon of figures that include Osiris, Dionysus, Tammuz, Horus, and Mithras.

Borges ends the lecture declaring that great things will happen if first the “telling of the tale and the singing of the verse” come together again, and when “the pleasure of being told a story” is wedded with “the additional pleasure of the dignity of verse, where the characters, motivations, feelings of the protagonists, rather than simply their circumstances, are “intimately” known.

***

The most interesting part of “Word Music and Translation”—reflections on the pains and joys, perils and pearls of translation—is not Borges’s thoughts on translation, as it were. While these are illuminating, it’s his discussion of the magic of words, “of sense and sound in poetry” that I find most engaging. I don’t think I fall into either of the two camps described by Borges in regards to translation. I enjoy a literal word-for-word translation as much as those that take creative license and leaps, where the translation attempts to achieve the grandeur of the original, becoming a work of art in its own right. We should allow translations the same room for interpretation as musicians, poets, artists, filmmakers, etc., those who have been inspired by a literary work to realize their own work of art. Borges states that a poet should be allowed to “read a work and then somehow evolv[e] that work from himself, from his own might, from the possibilities hitherto known of his language.” I also think it’s impossible for any work to have a definitive translation. A translation will always be a rather than the translation. (I wonder if even an autobiography must be prefaced with the indefinite article “an.”) Borges’s belief that translation is a means of creative evolution is a provocative and stimulating idea, and serves as a challenge to potential translators.

Throughout his examinations of poems, Borges is overwhelmed by the incantatory power of words, they bubble over irresistibly without end. A poem here is “filled with a fierce, ruthless joy,” and another there emerges “out of deep emotion. We have to think of it as an onrush of great verse.” One poet reaches “the highest experience of which the soul of man is capable—the experience of ecstasies…” One can only marvel at how these vast deposits of words can continue to build mountains in the mind even after biological vision is lost.

***

“Thought and Poetry” finds Borges asserting over and over again that metaphors should both resonate and unsettle. He describes the battle between magic and reason: it is magic and its sister, music, that must always prevail. While still ambivalent about poetry’s magic, Borges states: “For the materials of poetry are words, and those words are…the very dialect of life. Words are used for humdrum purposes and are the material of the poet, even as sounds are the material of the musician.” And, once again echoing Stevenson, he says the “poet is able to weave those rigid symbols meant for everyday or abstract purposes into a pattern which he calls ‘the web’…words being made by literature to serve for something beyond their intended use. Words… meant for the common everyday commerce of life, and the poet somehow makes of them something magic.”

Borges lists two ways of writing a poem. One may use common words to wring out from them the uncommon, “to evolve magic from them.” This “wringing” brings to mind a trip I took to the River Ganges in Varanasi, where I watched people squeeze their colorful and sopping wet laundry, then smack it against the ghats (the stone steps lining the sacred river) to remove every single drop of water. The other way to write a poem is to use elaborate means to express the common. And while the poetry of Góngora, Donne, Yeats, and Joyce may be described as “far-fetched” with “strange things in them,” we still discover the emotions behind them burn like the blaze of a summer afternoon. But Borges, not without a hint of annoyance, says that neither of these approaches matter as regards their worth. What does matter is whether the poetry is alive or dead.

***

The final lecture, “A Poet’s Creed,” begins with the promise of finally hearing Borges’s own ars poetica but actually unspools into a celebration of what he has read, especially the books having the most profound impact on him, his life, and his life as a reader and writer. He relates the story of his father reading aloud Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” This image has lived with him a span of over six decades. Borges continues to survey his formative years as a reader. Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote, The Hound of Baskervilles, Leaves of Grass, the Norse sagas, Old English poetry, Moby Dick, and Pilgrim’s Progress all receive treatment here.

Speaking self-deprecatingly of his youth, Borges describes himself as a

17th Century writer with a certain knowledge of Latin…out for the purple patches. Now I think that the purple patches are a mistake because they are a sign of vanity, and the reader thinks of them as a sign of vanity. If the reader thinks that you have a moral defect, there is no reason whatever why he should admire you or put up with you.

This is useful advice for writers of any age and experience. Alas, this pruning seems an endless process.

Borges continues to describe the daunting and almost impossible work of a writer:

If I have attained the happiness of writing four or five tolerable pages after writing fifteen intolerable volumes, I have come to that feat not only through many years but also through the method of trial and error. I think that I have not committed all the possible mistakes—because they are innumerable—but many of them.

Borges’s humility should be admired but what must also be considered here is the incredible challenge—one may even describe it as a daunting, accusing mountain—that faces the writer. Those “tolerable” pages arrive from labored and conscientious output, through the uncertain process of trial and error, and through the making of, the awareness and recognition of, as well as the correction and ultimate learning from, mistakes.

This lecture finds Borges at his most prescriptive and there is much here for the writer to glean from. For instance:

I think I have come not to a certain wisdom but perhaps to a certain sense. I think of myself as a writer. What does being a writer mean to me? It means simply being true to my imagination. When I write something, I think of it not as being factually true (mere fact is a web of circumstances and accidents), but as being true to something deeper. When I write a story, I write it because somehow I believe in it—not as one believes in mere history, but rather as one believes in a dream or idea.

This passage reminds me of Robert Olen Butler’s book, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. Butler privileges the notion that it is from a deep yearning, from motivation’s tug-of-war, or what he calls the “dreamspace,” that significant works of art, to say nothing of one’s spiritual growth, are derived.

***

Borges concludes with a timid hope: “Sometimes I am courageous and hopeful enough to think that it may be true—that though all men write in time, are involved in circumstances and accidents and failures of time, somehow things of beauty may be achieved. When I write, I try to be loyal to the dream and not to the circumstances.” What a precious thing we have here–an elusive possibility at best, but still in the end rewarding–that through loyalty to the vision, through faith in its truth and power, we may sometimes find beauty.

Reading these lectures, I am left with the charge to surrender myself to the dream, its vast landscape, its ebb and flow, its eddying currents, its whirlpool and undertow even; to recognize that the very root of words is magic, that the pleasure of a well-told story should be fused with poetry’s dignity; to find common words to express uncommon ideas, as well as to explore its inverse; to weed out the purples patches from the pages’ white fields; and lastly, to not take vision–biological and mental, or that of any other senses, including the non-physiological– for granted.

About the Author

John Madera’s work can be found in Featherproof Press, elimae, Everyday Genius, ArtVoice, Underground Voices, Little White Poetry Journal #7, and hitherandthithering waters, and he reviews for Bookslut, The Collagist, The Diagram, The Quarterly Conversation, 3:AM Magazine, New Pages, Open Letters Monthly, The Rumpus, Tarpaulin Sky, and Word Riot. His fiction is forthcoming in Opium Magazine and Corduroy Mountain. An essay will appear in The Prairie Journal: A Magazine of Canadian Literature. He is editing a collection of essays on the craft of writing for Publishing Genius Press (2010). He edits the forum Big Other and journal The Chapbook Review. He is an Assistant Fiction Editor for Identity Theory. He sings and plays guitar for Mother Flux. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Hopefully that doesn’t sound totally creepy and stalkeresque. I just mean that I am in love with her words, and have always hoped she would go on to publish and get the larger recognition she deserves. So obviously, I am biased in favour of liking this book of poetry, even though I’m not exactly poetry’s Biggest Fan.

In a previous review of Gillian’s chapbook, This is the Colour I Love You Best (2007), I said that her work “[made] me regret everything negative I’ve ever said about poetry.” I feel very strongly that she’s a people’s poet, or would be if more people were willing to give poetry a chance. She’s great at capturing details and emotions with an artist’s eye. She also doesn’t get melodramatic, or seek to confuse her audience by leaving things out. Instead, she presents unusual images that allow readers to make of them what they will.

When done well, good poetry appears effortless. Sze’s poetry definitely seems as though she has strung words easily together, like the salmon bones threaded on a bracelet from the books’ title piece, “Playing Fish Bones.” Though she may downplay her work’s significance as “My feeble crusted offerings: / striving for sweetness” (as in “Cantaloupe”), each snapshot is actually quite deeply meaningful.

Perhaps my favourite poem in the collection is “fragmented,” which describes a woman who sees herself in bits and pieces throughout the city she calls home. It is at times narcissistic, though mostly in a bittersweet mood, the piece describes the narrator’s lack of identity. The city, she says, has her by the ankles; it has wrestled her self from her. Yet the city has also made her useful, perhaps in ways she never could have dreamt, as when a bird has created a nest from strands of her hair, “so I now live in the trees, / curled beneath the fledglings [...]”. I particularly like the image of the narrator as “part-statue / part church-top.” Her reflections are everywhere, in everything ordinary and sublime.

Like her poetic persona, Gillian Sze is everywhere at once; the poet whose eyes see right through you, but expose your weaknesses with tenderness.

Toronto- and Winnipeg-based writers, come hear Gillian read from Fish Bones this July and August.

Yet here at Sewanee everyone mingled with everyone else—poets with playwrights with fiction writers, famous and not, published and not, emerging or well established. It didn’t matter. You could sit in on Mark Strand’s workshop without even having to ask permission. You just showed up, and there it was, your front row seat to the mind of a poet laureate, and it didn’t even cost you an extra effort in a bouquet of proffered apologies.

Poets and prosers mingle at Sewanee / photo by Will Coley

Therefore, when it was Hudgins’ turn to give a craft lecture, I was one of the first to go, eager to absorb what I could smuggle back to those students in my undergraduate workshop who had more of an ear for poetry than me, their fiction-writing professor. I needed to be at that lecture for professional obligations; I wanted to be there for personal desires. But just as I was beginning to reach towards the trellises of poetic symmetry, grasping for that hanging fruit, I heard Hudgins say, a mocking lilt to his voice, “…and then he became a fiction writer, like all failed poets tend to do.”

I straightened in my chair and looked around the two dozen plus attendees present at that lecture. Many were scholarship recipients and fellows, like me, but I was the only fiction writer in the room, and the only one not to laugh with that wink-wink, nudge-nudge that was spreading with coy smiles from face to face. A curious sense of inferiority prevailed, and I got up, quietly, stuffing my notebook under my arm, tiptoeing out of the lecture hall. Hudgins’ joke, harmless as it was, struck a raw place inside me. What was I doing, anyway, at a writers’ conference that was crawling with some of the most acclaimed prose writers of our decade, spending my limited time in a poetry lecture? Just who did I think I was, deluding myself that I could pass myself off as a poet?

Maxine Kumin (AP Photo)

Back in 2001, when I did my first MFA program at Florida International University, professors shoveled poetry at us fiction writers like it was dirt for a six-foot ditch: it was a requirement of the graduate program that all students, regardless of their specialty, had to take at least one graduate workshop in the genres of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. That’s how in my third semester I found myself facing the pointed outrage of formalist Maxine Kumin, whose visiting lectureship had not specified her having to teach, in the same workshop, not only poets, but also several fiction writers who had never even taken an undergraduate poetry workshop before. We frightened three huddled together desk-edge to desk-edge on the right side of the class, eschewing direct visual contact. “It’s like teaching two different courses,” exclaimed the poet laureate, eyeing us fiction writers like a farmer eyes an infected plant. We were certain that her intentions were to eradicate us from the class like so much weed, spraying us with toxic complex syntax structures required of assignments, which, in addition to everything, had to have an exact syllabic count and a rhyme scheme. Somehow we survived through the series of ghazals, sonnets, pantoums, and other exotic sundries of the literary stem, plucking the thorns of meter and line breaks from our bruised attempts at prosody, managing through the course with many apologies to our much superior colleagues and offering them the fruits of our labor—not the preservation of the world’s beauty by capturing its delicacy, but literally “preserving” it like so much jam. These trembling, gelatinous creations we produced by mashing, processing, sterilizing, and canning our mistaken preconceptions of what good poetry should be. We wrote like fictioneers write poetry: attempting to overcome with syrupy descriptions the few insipid banalities we managed to detangle from the prickly brambles of form.

Simultaneous to that experience I took the only form course available that semester, an overview of poetry forms taught by Genius Award recipient Campbell McGrath. If Kumin was plowing and tilling us with form, McGrath was floating us into the deep, high currents of language poetry, abandoning us in those places where sky and water become indistinguishable. I was nostalgic for the solid, rocky coastline of fiction, towards which I paddled during my breaks after fishing a few lines of passable prosody. When after these two classes I presented my mossy prose to my mentor, fiction writer John Dufresne, the results were painful and predictable.

The story I had written was inspired after Louise Glück’s Wild Iris, a collection of poems addressed to flowers wherein the flowers stand in as symbols for poetry itself. I had written my story in first person, and, like Glück, I had attempted to make my narrator address a triple-audience: the reader, fiction writing, and a character in the story—a reluctant lover unwilling to commit or to give up his illicit affair. I was seduced by Glück’s sub textures, the multiple meanings embedded in the lyrical metaphors, the ambiguous nature of the voice and its subject matter. But instead of creating the multi-dimensionality I’d hoped for, my work was simply confusing. Worse, it came across as overly clever.

Dufresne, rightly, was having none of it. He failed to see the elevated double-entendre of the image, and found the idea of two adults making love while a child waits alone in another room distasteful. It was bad, I admit it, the low point of my fiction career. “They’re killing me with poetry,” I cried out after Dufresne finalized his disappointment by flapping the pages in the air and hitting them with the back of his hand, which hurt more than the worst of his verbal criticism. “That should be the title for a short story,” was his appeasing rebuttal, but he was obviously eager to move on. I wanted to explain that poetry was exercising a part of my brain that up to that point could barely hold up a cup of tea—the weak muscles of conceit, rhyme, and invention had atrophied by the over-use of psychological character analysis in fiction—but there was no sympathy to be had. Yes, I had allowed myself to be overtaken by “idea” and lost sight of “story.” But wasn’t there a way to bring poetics to prose? Or is it only the rare individual—Joyce, Ondaatje—who can travel in both worlds?

What I begrudgingly accepted that semester was that forms don’t mix so easily – at least, not for me. I see this in my students all the time: those who do well in prose can do no better than some chopped prose for poetry, and those who wrote clichéd TV re-runs for fiction come alive when they suddenly have to tangle in only a few lines with the complexities of living. With some exceptions, even the professional world reflects this discrepancy: poets will write novels in verse, while fiction writers will write prose poems. (“Add some line breaks!” Campbell would dare us, his edgy tone of voice suggesting we were cowards. “What’s wrong with line breaks? Don’t give me that prose poem stuff; that’s a copout.”) I began to suspect that if fiction and poetry were people, they’d be like a Jew and a Muslim: they may have some things in common, but nobody would ever seat them together at a wedding; nobody would expect them to do anything but argue.

If my prose mentors were unsympathetic, my poetry peers were cryptic: “There is no one way to write a poem,” my friends laconically advised, even in Kumin’s formalist class, where syllabic count, repetition, rhyme and form all appeared to have preset, unchangeable constructs. The structures and rhyme schemes I could recognize easily enough: but it was the images inside the lines that felt ethereal. Poem after poem, I would try to say something useful to my fellow poets, to uncover some code that would crack open the mystery of poetry to me, and that would help me, when I sat down to compose my assignments, identify patterns that would gauge where I was in the poet-growth process. But it was not to be. “Poetry is just poetry,” is what I kept being told; “It’s like asking what makes art.” I kept on seeing this mystery repeated in the wild patterns of my friends’ publication, a golden ratio of success that was as intriguing as the exact geometric patterns of seashells. “A poem could be a joke,” my friend Mark M. Martin apologetically explained in reference to a poem titled “Jesus Plays Super Sega” that he’d managed to publish in an anthology edited by Denise Duhamel. In Martin’s poem, the narrator is shocked by the miraculous presence of Jesus in his living room playing games on his computer, but he cannot get a response from the Messiah beyond a terse “Wait a minute.” Mark could not explain what made his poem publishable other than the fact that it was funny, but the funny thing was that I sort of “got” the poem in the joke. I could see Jesus’ intensity, could feel the Messiah’s bristling frustration at the needy interruption of the narrator… It was an image that revealed something beyond what it said. I could not have explained it then, but I was learning to sense the poem like a kōan, beyond its logic and literal value.

Still, I kept seeking to solve the kōan as if it were a Rubic’s cube with a difficult but tangible solution, frequenting poetry readings and becoming the hanger-on of the poet crowd. Another poet friend, Susan Briante, tried to appease my increasing sense of frustration: “You can actually say that there are some right ways and wrong ways of writing a story, but not so with a poem,” she reassured me. Her explanation felt like an absolution: I no longer needed to try and understand poetry; it was the mystery of consciousness manifest, and one could only grasp it through faith. Still, for one misguided moment, I felt less of an artist. I could read a story in a graduate workshop and immediately judge where it was in the developmental process, with a thorough and detailed identification of the how and the why. I could not do this with poetry. Did this make fiction less creative? Why did fiction require so many rules? Were we really sub-artists? Immured in the structures of narrative, like Charles Baxter once decried, unable to break free to leap and swim in the tides of chance?

It was as if I had forgotten how much I myself had struggled with the mastery of prose, how in my first undergraduate workshop long ago I had bitterly complained to a fellow writer: “The only stories Dufresne likes are the ones that don’t follow his own rules.” I had forgotten that knowledge about fiction hadn’t been handed to me with a how to manual; rather I’d had to scrape it off from the surface of story after story, samples sectioned from myriad lines, words, image, each carefully examined and annotated, and compiled into endless theories that sometimes contradicted one another. I had forgotten how it was that cumulative effort had turned my understanding of fiction into body memory, so instinctual that it couldn’t be separated from the physical act of putting words down on paper anymore than a human could be separated from the air she breathes. Still that inferiority complex nagged on. “Your best prose reads like poetry,” some of my most loyal admirers have said of my writing. It had never occurred to me to question that compliment, even with its implicit connotation of the inferiority of my form.

Susan Briante / photo from: http://delirioushem.blogspot.com/2008/12/susan-briante-solstice-so-jet-stream.html

Yet it was impossible not to feel vindicated when neither the brilliant Briante nor any of the other poets whose talents I had secretly envied during Kumin’s and Campbell’s class felt comfortable structuring stories under the heavy heft of realistic characters and ordinary situations during their service in the mandatory fiction workshop. I admit I regressed to childish competition. I wanted to stand up, spittle on my lips, and shout: “You want the fiction? You can’t handle the fiction!” I constructed a working metaphor for myself to better intuit the difference between the forms: fiction was a symphony composed of multiple instruments, each with a melody that complements the others, its artistry relying on harmony and structure, whereas poetry for me was chaotic jazz-fusion, showcasing amazing technical skill and inventiveness, relying more on the individual improvisation and less on the cumulative effect of careful orchestration.

Even this elaborate analogy falls short of the truth, of course. What about the orchestration of forms like the sestina, with such an exacting pattern that I am convinced only a mad mathematician could have invented it? And what about the psychosis-indulging image juxtapositions of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, or the structure-morphing Moby Dick, or the story in Robert Haas’ poem “A Story About The Body”? Are these symphonies or fusion? As I’m writing this, I revisit my friends’ words: it’s like trying to define what makes art. I cannot say what makes a poem different from a piece of fiction. But I can tell you that fiction, with all its exacting elements, demands that I create curvy well-signaled highways out of angular, mysterious mazes, or, perhaps more accurately, that I build sturdy structures out of the sandy texture of words.

Ironically, it’s this love for the density and intensity of words that began to fuel my interest in poetry. From the time I was introduced to the works of Lynda Hull, Sharon Olds, Gary Soto, Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn, and Pablo Neruda, to name just a few favorites, I began to appreciate the beauty of juxtaposition of abstracts and tangibles, or the humor that could be gleaned out of a single, well-rendered image, or from the heartbreaking insight enveloped in the cellophane of one well chosen word. Still today, I play a word game I invented for my husband. We gift each other with the utterance of a single word, savoring the physical sensations that speaking that word can arouse. “Today, I give you crepuscular,” I tell him. He responds with a “wispy” and I thank him, saying it out loud a few times because wispy feels so good in my ears and on my tongue.

It would seem that this attention to language would be integral to any writer’s work, regardless of genre. Yet, there are schisms between poets and fiction writers. That semester of poetry in Florida had certainly made me feel like a convert, somewhat clandestine and apologetic, and this feeling of being an outsider to the art of poetry got worse when I attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where years later I went for a second MFA. There, poets and writers of fiction could not take each others’ classes and were scheduled on different days of the week, so that a poet sighting became a rare thing if you were a fiction writer. This sectarianism seldom went unchallenged, in spite of a faint sense of wrongness on which we’d casually comment from time to time; we simply accepted, as our professors did before us, that the two forms belonged to what amounted to entirely separate programs.

I was curious, though, allured by the promise of something different and mysterious, an almost sexual quality to my intransigent forays into poetry. During my MFA at Iowa, I instituted what I called breakfast with a poet. In the mornings when I didn’t have workshop, I would go to the local bookstore and grab two or three titles by the same poet. I’d buy myself a latte, and read the books while nibbling at a muffin. After I was finished, I felt that I had become intimate with the details of the poet’s life. In this way I made up for the relationships I could not have in person with the poets in my program.

Cristina Garcia / photo by Norma Quintana

It turns out this illicit attraction to the other genre is not original with me. At a reading in Miami, while on tour for her book Monkey Hunting, novelist Cristina Garcia attributed the success of her lush prose to the fact that she starts every writing session by first reading a book of poetry. A teacher of mine at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Chris Offutt, said he never sat down to write fiction without first reading at least one poem. And during my teaching demonstration while applying for my current job at Georgia Southern, where I now teach both budding poets and fiction writers, I asked the class if anyone had ever tried reading poetry to get inspiration for fiction. “I read at least a few poems before I start writing,” I explained: “It helps me to orient myself emotionally for a story. Has anyone ever tried that?” The first hand to shoot up was that of Peter Christopher, a Pushcart nominated, NEA recipient, and a much beloved and admired fiction writer.

Maybe Andrew Hudgins was right: so many of us fiction writers are, after all, closet poets; or perhaps some of us seek the fluidity of poetry as the necessary contrast to the solidity of prose: a man may live on a mountain and know how to climb steep heights, yet despite being unable to change a sail or throw a net, from time to time this cold-weather man may like to leave the stolid beauty of the mountains for the pleasure of a creaking sailboat, for the gentle slap of the waves on the hull and the salt of the sea on his white, sunless skin. Not only for the time on the water, but also so that on his return he might better appreciate the hard-edged clarity of a snowy mountain peak.

That day at Sewanee, after I’d left the talk and began wending my way back across campus to my room, still mulling over Hudgins’ joke, I saw two fiction fellows heading towards the lecture hall. They waved and beckoned me over to their shady side of the street. “We’re going to see Hudgins,” they announced with welcoming smiles. “I just came from there,” I told them, gently declining their unspoken invitation by keeping on my side of the road. The two fiction writers looked worriedly at me and slowed to a halt. “Well, is it any good?” they asked me, their bodies already poised to flee. I paused, reconsidering my emotional reaction to Hudgins’ joke. What is poetry, after all? A mystery I can access but cannot entirely understand. Yet one that feeds my interest and search for perfection as a writer, nevertheless. With this realization, I could then be grateful for the elusive mystery that will forever illuminate my love of writing, whether it comes from a form whose theories I’ve learned or one that remains a dream of magic. Mystery is what keeps us interested in discovery; mystery is the basic element of self-awareness.

I smiled at my fiction friends then. “Oh yeah,” I replied, encouraging them to go, perhaps recognizing something in them as fellow truth-seekers. “But, you know,” I confessed; “it’s all poetry to me.”

About the Author

Laura Valeri is the author of the collection The Kinds of Things Saints Do, winner of the Iowa/John Simmons Award in 2002 and the Binghamton University John Gardner Award in 2003. She was a Sewanee Walter E Dakins Fellow in Fiction in 2008 and earned her two MFA’s from Florida International University and from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work appears in Glimmer Train, Gulf Stream, Big Bridge, Waccamaw, Inkwell/Literary Potpourri and a collection of essays by Italian Americans published by Creative Nonfiction and Otherpress, titled Our Roots Are Deep With Passion. She is at work on a novel, a screenplay, and a collection of linked short stories.