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.

In a role-play game, or RPG, gameplay consists largely of traveling and fighting battles. Traveling, like the “free and easy wandering” of the Chang tzu, isn’t as easy as one might think—surviving monster attacks is usually the order of the day. Even so, traveling is one of my favorite things about RPGs because an RPG is a lengthy journey in a (hopefully) immersive world. My favorite game, Shadow of the Colossus, is difficult to place in a single game genre, but it’s more RPG than anything else. You wander an expansive landscape, soaking up the aesthetic splendor, gathering information, and eventually, finding and fighting colossal monsters. Monster-killing is central to the game, and yet this game is no more about monster-killing than gardening is about slaughtering aphids or Ender’s Game is about killing Buggers.

What sets Shadow of the Colossus apart from other RPGs is its successful elevation of monster-killing to near-spiritual levels. Monster-killing becomes, like Shiva’s austerities in the mountain cave, complex and meaningful. Most games require frequent monster fights as you travel, which creates a constant low level of anxiety. Shadow of the Colossus compresses this anxiety into 16 terrifying and epic boss battles. All monster-killing is inextricably linked to a game’s quest, which gives that violence a feeling of greater purpose. A quest is a concept to which we, almost because of the archaic resonance of the word alone, attribute the capacity for meaning. So the tasks that make up a quest, such as monster-killing as you travel, can start to share in that aura of significance as you play. This is powerful in Shadow of the Colossus but also present in games jam-packed with minor monsters.

Shadow of the Colossus

I’ve probably killed thousands of beasts. I’ll spend 100 hours completing a game primarily consisting of monster fights. I’ll do this, and if a game is good, I’m as clean as a whistle at the end, not drenched in psychic gore or remorse. Monster-killing is a practical reality of most games; it’s best not to worry about or relish it too much. With monster-killing, as with practicing yoga postures, it helps to remember what it’s all for. It’s part of a quest for something meaningful, but monster-killing also relates to what, in RPGs, is often the main in-game activity: developing your character. Typically, higher levels of important characteristics, skills, etc. will accrue to your character as you complete battles. Your character (you) becomes a more multi-faceted, capable, and efficient being. Let’s call this self-cultivation via monster-killing. In my experience, games that lack self-cultivation feel a bit one-dimensional; I recently played Ms. Pac-Man (the super-speed kind, of course) and felt once again the frustration of playing a character that does not evolve.

So, monster-killing has to mean more than survival and more than self-cultivation and more than entertainment. For a game story to have legs, monsters must be able to be seen as signifying something, and killing them must also signify something. Monster-killing does not have to be a hypersigil; it’s more basic than that. The organizing moral principles of a game world often boil down to something desperately obvious: black-and-white, good and evil. This isn’t bad in itself because a good game, like a good book, then takes the player into a more familiar ambiguity. Good and bad become less easily separated and less relevant, in fact, the longer you travel. It’s sad when a game uses ambiguity itself to create interest, shifting the ground beneath our feet so frequently that we become bored and don’t even care when the true enemy is revealed to be our best friend. The trick is to create, in the gamer, a commitment to a point of view, whatever its morality—dramatic plot twists are never quite as devastating as they’re meant to be (unless the gamer or reader just hasn’t paid attention, which I admit can happen—my failure to anticipate the ending of Ender’s Game is a good example). No, I’d go for creating a creeping sense of doom, a teetering feeling, a worry—that’s how to get people. Never is this more elegantly done than in Shadow of the Colossus. The narrative is only ever suggested, but the gamer is completely committed to the events, even as your understanding of what is really going on gradually shifts and grows.

2. Choices.

In Shadow of the Colossus, you play a man alone in the Cursed Lands. Only a hint of context is given, no explanation for his arrival there with a dead woman in his arms. The man is essentially nameless, since we don’t learn it until the end. There are decrepit buildings throughout the Cursed Lands, clearly built by people now absent. The present occupants of the area are mostly lizards, turtles, fish, birds, and 16 Colossi, monsters that remain dormant until the man tracks them down and starts a fight. Each fight is absurd, terrifying in scale, a pesky fly of a man against a lumbering animated tower or a giant armored horse, until a glowing glyph is located somewhere on the Colossus and a sword thrust into it. Ribbons of black stream out of the monster and into the man after each kill. They seem to replace the light in the man, and his skin takes on ever-darkening tattoos that suggest, as they do on the Colossi, that something’s in there. What does all this mean? No official explanation has been made, but here’s one idea: he doesn’t realize it at first, but he doesn’t hesitate once he does realize—he’s sacrificing himself to bring his girl back to life. He’s trading his soul bit by bit for monster souls. The monster souls are actually smaller pieces of one larger entity, which, fully reunited in the man’s body at the end, ousts his soul.

So perhaps Shadow of the Colossus is, ultimately, a game about becoming a monster and setting evil free. All along, the man has been taking orders from a voice that emanates from a god-mouth in the roof of a crumbling temple filled with 16 Colossi idols. It could be humiliating to be such a toady, to be used so, but if it is, then we’re all a little pathetic, a bit tragic for our refusal to admit that we always serve something. In the end, the man appears to have agreed to trade his soul for his girl’s. She opens her eyes as he is finally subsumed. The interesting question is, At what point did the man agree to the trade? Did he just think all he had to do was take down a few monsters and he’d get his girl back? Did he know that he was reconstituting a force that would destroy him? You never get the sense that the man is gleeful or macho or even confident as he battles the Colossi; this is no God of War. If he isn’t informed about the particulars of his task, at the very least I think his sobriety suggests that he knows something serious is at hand.

Overall, Shadow of the Colossus is a remarkably neutral game, and I enjoy the freedom to speculate about the story and the man’s state of mind. In Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil, C.D. Wright calls poetry a way of respecting the white space. That’s exactly how I love poetry and how I love Shadow of the Colossus. I feel invited to participate in forming the meaning of this game. The game has room for my experience of it. Perhaps this is why the prospect of a film version of Shadow of the Colossus terrifies me. I dread being told with such emphatic finality what the game is “really” about. There is another writer who has already said what I mean here: in Weight, Jeanette Winterson calls herself a writer “who believes in the power of story telling for its mythic and not its explanatory qualities.” The white space is where things are not explained and the reader or gamer is allowed in.

Honestly, most games do a poor job of respecting the white space. RPGs often give you either a distinctly “good” or “evil” character to play. In some RPGs, however, such as Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls and Fable 2, you can cultivate yourself in either direction. Americans, it turns out, prefer to play good characters. I toyed with murder in both games and had no stomach for it. (I guess that makes me an exemplary American.) That killing in video games can become objectionable could be either a feature of the high realism of many of today’s games or the possibility that we are now living in some kind of meta world, where everything is cleaner and less tangible than ever before and mostly originates in our minds. This is like living in a story. Today’s tenet is that killing is bad even in games. This is because we live in our heads so much, everything we do and value sometimes seems more abstract than ever before. We do not live in a real world anymore and war is too real for our refined palates. Our moral context therefore lets us object to play killing. At least, this is one way of seeing it. I find it interesting that at some points in time, it appears that a taste or talent for killing did not automatically disqualify a person from society. Knights did the dirty work to protect the more refined aspects of civilization, as embodied by the Ladies. This is the story, anyway. But Knights weren’t considered bad if they had to kill a beast or a beastly person—the Knights’ work was in service of the good and there was no moral quandary. But I think these stories live on and grab us today not because of their historical or literary merits but because we are fascinated by permitted murdering. Playing video games, then, becomes an exorcism of sorts—or a Tantric practice of excess meant to cure the obsession.

3. Hunting and not hunting.

Monster-killing is different, though. It’s funny how you can know yourself to be mostly, if not just ethnically, a pacifist—being raised by Mennonite-raised parents—and you then find yourself hunting. It’s digital hunting, but hunting nonetheless. There isn’t any blood, but there are grunts and sighs and other intriguing sound effects (praises to the sound engineers) as the beasts give up the ghosts and whatever treasure they carry. I’d argue that the realism of many games is what makes it so easy for observing non-gamers to connect real-world violence with game-violence and skip right over the critical thinking part. Was this a problem in the era of Jungle Pit and Space Invaders? No, I don’t recall anyone suggesting I not shoot at the alien-piloted ships encroaching on my personal space. (Now that was true exigency! That was do or die.) But just because I have to fight several vicious floating fish, mutated dinosaurs, and some Berserkers as I cross a desert in Final Fantasy 12 doesn’t mean I’m a killer. Someone once asked me, “Don’t you feel bad killing all those beautiful creatures?” It’s my pleasure to inform you that not only do I not feel bad, I enjoy it. I’m getting paid and collecting mad loot.

Yet, monster killing isn’t what any game or story is about. For me, Halo 3 is not so much about hacking through an endless onslaught of aliens and Flood; it’s almost entirely about the novelty, fun, and challenge of playing with a partner (I find the enemies’ comments hilarious, too—something about their tone). Shadow of the Colossus is not so much about finding and fighting large beasts. While I did spend most of the game feeling terrified, I’ve got some sweet memories, too. The Cursed Lands are vast and still. A small breeze blows. Sun light is dappled under the trees, brilliant over the oceans, and it turns the crumbling stone shrines and plazas a soft platinum. A melancholy music plays during battles; otherwise, it’s mostly environmental sounds: water, wind, Agro’s hooves on the ground. I can hear these now. But what stays with me the most is the image of the woman’s body lying in the temple, diffusing the sun with her white dress, the doves shifting around her, the man and his horse simply watching. A few feet from an aisle of menacing Colossus idols, the tender scene becomes sublime. Without the weight of words, it speaks of the frailty of the living, the uncertainty of our tasks, and the ache of love. It is mythic. It moves me.

4. The Path and the Glimpse.

But even in a gorgeous world, monsters are not just a distraction from these emotional treats. They are not just for killing either. Monsters could be the Path itself, the path to the end of suffering, a path worth walking on, that gives sense of direction and purpose to life. A holy man tries to walk toward God, away from the world. Other holy men try to help others find the path. Sometimes I wonder if I think by completing tasks I’ll be enlightened. Sometimes I look at the end of my various efforts for a face shining behind the veil and I wonder if I’m conflating worship and task-completion. I’m knocking and knocking at the door, completing side-quests, collecting Nirnroots, rolling a katamari out of fireflies… Who waits on the other side of these doors? Does he even want what I am bringing to him? Is it even good?

I know a physicist who would chuckle at my dilemma. This man goes from A to B. Granted, his B is fusion energy, a true “creative sort” kind of vision, and the path between his A and B is far from dull. The important thing for him is to get there. Going from A to B—having a clear question and methodically answering it—in the rest of life oftentimes is dull. There is no room for wondering or wandering and asking what about C? When I think about what it is that makes playing RPGs interesting to me, it’s not the A to B. That, in fact, is what makes them boring. There are no real stakes involved. If there were real stakes, a real possibility of closing an Oblivion gate and preserving humanity to flail poignantly another day, I might value basic A to B a bit more. I might reject my own formulation of monster-fighting as self-cultivation and call it critical training. But I prefer to live and play in worlds where self-cultivation, the cultivation of life, and the search for something divine are respected options. Consider: in our world, gardeners are usually respected and admired. They may cultivate the most arcane or common of life forms. They may grow things in apparent disarray or in the strictest regiments. In truth, they spend more time spreading silica to lacerate slugs’ soft bodies, unleashing plagues of ladybugs upon the aphids, and drowning Japanese beetles in jars of soapy water than anyone ever knows. But no one would diminish gardeners’ work as mere beetle-killing.

Ask why not and someone might say, “Because gardens are beautiful.” Ah, beauty. The ultimate excuse and the ultimate end goal. The trump card. Beauty is God. Sometimes people will use God as a trump card, but that’s just too obvious. God is unknowable. God is barely perceivable. Beauty is often attributed to God. What people who invoke either are really trying to do, I suspect, is indicate that something beyond us has been Glimpsed.

Can monster-killing cause a Glimpse? Perhaps. The figure of the Death-seeker is a warrior who does his warrior duty, but more than anything hopes to be killed himself one day, never is, battles on, and inadvertently becomes a better warrior, better than everyone else, his skills ascend beyond known levels, and to those who worship that sort of skill he gives the Glimpse. They call his killing beautiful, they call it God-given. For him, monster-killing was to be his path out of here, but like some kind of bitter Bodhisattva, his field of compassion is the field of blood and blade. The Death-seeker is like Arjuna. He does not want to fight, but God says Fighting is Your Duty, it is your duty to fight because that action keeps the world in balance. The hero Beowulf also has a duty to fight. The poem Beowulf is not about battling horrendous monsters—it’s about keeping the world going, about following a code of behavior upon which life depends and derives its structure, its meaning, and its perpetuity. Without a hero to keep monsters away from the good people, all would be chaos and death. Power protects the people, and, as in Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, “Behavior that’s admired/is the path to power among people everywhere.”

5. The qualities of a monster.

Which brings me to Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, and the question of what a monster really is. Like the monsters of Beowulf, the Buggers are known to be remorseless, inhuman outsiders with whom humans cannot communicate. When you can’t communicate with something, the obvious course is to fight it, right? So humans and Buggers fight. The book is the story of Ender, a super-sensitive, super-intelligent child trained from age six to lead Earth’s armies against the Buggers. Throughout the entire book, Ender is kept busy trying to survive against a wide range of more immediate threats to his survival—his violent brother, his unforgiving training program, his loneliness and isolation, his terror about becoming a monster himself. Always a new enemy for poor Ender. He is kept so busy trying keep his head on straight that he never has a minute to question the assumption driving everything—that the Buggers are monsters—and the first time I read the book I was so tangled in Ender’s daily life that the story’s denouement practically gutted me. To learn that the child-genius battle commander Ender has been tricked into wiping out the bugger race, and to witness his grief and remorse as he learns the truth about the Buggers—it was just too much. Turns out the Buggers were, more or less, everything a monster should be—hideous, aggressive, and incomprehensible—except an actual threat to humanity. From the beginning, Ender’s reward for protecting humanity from the Buggers would be freedom from terror, as well as honor and glory, but in the end, in return for killing the Buggers, Ender is not free and is not honored. Ender is used, as the man in Shadow of the Colossus is, by a powerful and detail-withholding force.

Withholding details—in other words, failing to communicate well—is a sign of a monster. Those who use the child Ender are monstrous in their treatment of him, whatever their motivation. The Dormin, as the disembodied power in Shadow of the Colossus calls itself, speaks cryptically in a strange language; even without form, a more disturbing monster I’ve seldom encountered. I wish game designers would remember that giving monsters casual speech sort of neuters them. A monster is not for chitchat. A boss monster bloviating on its plans to kill you is comedic, not scary. Better to make the bosses unforthcoming, otherworldly, and alien. Especially since so many games promote the value of self-cultivation. In the game, your goal is to cultivate yourself into the ultimate of what you are (human, elf, whatever), the fullest expression of your potential, and why shouldn’t this include communication skills? Sometimes it does: the Speechcraft skill in Oblivion perfectly fills this need. The more pleasantly and effectively you can communicate with townspeople, the higher your Speechcraft level. Among the many typical skills your character must develop, including weapon and armor skills, fighting skills, strength, endurance, magic, etc., Speechcraft is what truly separates you from thugs and monsters.

Self-cultivation is the process of becoming good at things. It is also the process of becoming “good” in the game’s moral universe. All of us like being good, or at least knowing how to be bad. But let’s put that aside. There are some terribly beautiful games out there, and they really aren’t about good and bad, self-cultivation, or monster-killing. They offer a way to transcend necessity and ambition: deep appreciation, which is deep observation, a meditative state. A game can be played like this—Shadow of the Colossus allows it, but few others do, in my experience. I admit I indulge myself in this way of playing. I look for it. A game so perfectly rendered and self-contained, that requires so little compromise from my imagination—maybe it’s just me, but just being in this kind of game world is itself the desired outcome. It’s the good result, as the surgeons say. It’s the end of yoga practice, as the yogis say, when you don’t have to practice anymore because you have achieved enlightenment and now you can just lounge in the temple garden and leave the monster-killing to the noobs.

6. Postscript.

That, in part, is what monsters are for. Of course, monsters mostly just want to kill you. So there’s great risk. But isn’t there always? With great risk we are born. With great risk we love. With great risk we read books, listen to music, and play video games. It would seem that we cannot help but run around naked everywhere with our hearts hanging out. And then there are those monsters we fling ourselves against over and over until we get better, know more, can put our legs behind our head, or die. We need game monsters, since sometimes life’s monsters are just too arbitrary, too, well, monstrous; it matters to be able to accomplish something, even if only in a game. That could be why we invent our gods, couldn’t it? So we can suffer a little less.

About the Author

Christine Hartzler reads boatloads of fiction but writes poems and essays. The essays are mostly about video games and have appeared in Ninth Letter and the Cream City Review. Christine’s poetry has appeared in Mudlark, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Touchstone, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Christine received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. These days Christine is working on a collection of poems called PLUTO, and more essays. She writes and edits ESL books for Oxford University Press, and she is learning a lot about nuclear fusion as the communications director at a startup in Seattle. Christine has a blog at www.snowandsigil.blogspot.com; it’s mostly photos.

photo by Nick Carbó

Here’s Dustin on why he recommends this poet’s work:

Denise Duhamel can make you laugh, cry, think, and want to grab a pen to write, and she can do it all within a single poem. Yes, she is that talented! Kumin, Sexton, Plath, and Bishop are all names we recognize from our high school and college text books, Duhamel will join their ranks. Denise Duhamel is a queen of American poetry.

You can read “Kinky”, “Lawless Pantoum,” and other poems by Duhamel at Poets.org.

Snow
[by Louis MacNeice]

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s
hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

At FWR, a number of our contributors and readers are poets (the out kind!), and I’m wondering if you’d take a few minutes to tell us:

What poets or new, recent, or classic books of poetry are you reading?

Poets (and fiction writers, too, if you’re game), please send any and all recommendations to either annestameshkin@gmail.com or fictionwritersreview@gmail.com; ideally, include a brief blurb of who the poet is or what the book is about–and why s/he or it is so grand). I’ll post your recommendations on the site, giving you credit (or hailing you as anonymous, should you wish to remain so).

For inspiration, take a look at one of our very first FWR features, “Poetry for Fiction Writers: Five Recommendations” from the fabulous poet Katie Umans.

And visit Starting Today: Poems for the First 100 Days, a website that lives up to its name, offering one Obama-themed poem every day for the first stretch of his first term. Co-creator-poets Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker describe the project:

The day before the inauguration we sent out a call to poets we admire to write poems that respond, however loosely, to the presidency, the nation, the government or the current political climate. More than one hundred American poets responded immediately. The first 100 poets were each assigned one of President Obama’s first hundred days in office, and each will write a poem reflecting on the state of the nation and the world on that day. A new poem is posted every day.

To qualify for the list, each book also had to meet these criteria:

• It had to tell a story or stories – either through narrative, images, or other means.

• It had to be a new release (or close to it), since FWR focuses mostly on the current fiction scene. There is one exception, but I figure that poems about the Iraq war are unfortunately, still “current.”

1. BLACKBIRD AND WOLF– Henri Cole

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)

For fiction writers who like: Alice Munro

The cover art is just right: the tone of these poems is clear and deep as the center of a lake. Henri Cole is a poet who seems equally candid demanding, “Teach me to love” or announcing casually, “I went out for coffee and found a woman in a wheelbarrow.” <i>OK,</i> you say to yourself. <i>That sounds right.</i> Putting himself at the calm eye-of-the-Freudian-storm, Cole can say just about anything and it registers as purely felt. In this book, he gets away with all the things you would tell a beginning poet to avoid: giant emotive statements, self pity, shameless projection onto the plant and animal world, and a poem called “To the Forty-Third President.” Cole shows that, with much contemporary poetry enamored of a careful non-saying, saying can startle again.

from “Self-Portrait with Hornets”

Hornets, two hornets, buzz over my head;
I’m napping and cannot keep my eyes open.
“Do you come from far away” I ask, dozing off.
My gums are dry when I wake. A morning breeze
rakes the treetops. I can smell the earth.
The two hornets are puzzling over
something sticky on my night table,
wiping their gold heads with their arms.
Ordinary things are like symbols. My eyes are watery
and blurred. Then I lose myself again.

2. CORINNA A-MAYING THE APOCALYPSE – Darcie Dennigan

(Fordham University Press, 2008)

For fiction writers who like: Vladimir Nabokov

These poems will let you experience what it feels like to be on a front porch in West Warwick, Rhode Island (…or in an online chat room…or at “Flo’s Grille”) and simultaneously in some almost cosmic space of reckoning with nostalgia, safety, family, industry, and fate. Where most contemporary poems, perhaps in their quest to be timeless and transcendent, would never step into anything so pedestrian as a coffee chain, these poems see that the very real walls of—yes—a Starbucks or a train station or a bar in Boston actually make for some pretty transcendent stuff. But such love of place would be un-thrilling if not coupled with a voice so delightfully off-kilter and rollicking as the one that breathes life into these poems. With their classical references and rapturous etymology-driven vocabulary, the lines are loaded but never encumbered. Each reading sends something else up. Most entrancing are the long poems: “The Feeling of the World as a Bounded Whale is the Mystical,” “Sentimental Atom Smasher,” “Orienteering in the Land of New Pirates,” and “Seven Generations of Stephen Bruneros.”

from “City of Gods”

Thistly Augustine, disser of the shy world, I cannot consider your city.
I cluck my tongue at the sun & sky. The sky rises
too steeply. My soul goes no
higher than the highest highway billboard.

Oh Pericoli on a boat, a Mongoose, a motorcycle—you can’t
draw the gods of New York from New Jersey.
Just across the cosseted alley they sit: the gods in the dark, eating fishsticks.

3. MICHELANGELO’S SEIZURE – Steve Gehrke

(University of Illinois Press, 2007)

For fiction writers who like: Joseph Conrad

By writing of disturbed, obsessed, often death-bound artists from Goya to Pollock, Gehrke crafts lyrical biographies – not so much of characters as of their erosions. Gehrke does love his metaphors. Fortunately, whatever factory in his brain cranks them out, I’d buy from it wholesale. His sentences are (to borrow his preferred mode of expression) structured like Russian nesting dolls, one image inside another inside another, seemingly endlessly. Though his poems sometimes bring you to the brink of fatigue, they bring you there with a riveting confidence.

from “Magritte in New York”

Looking out upon the hushed
glass towers, the catwalks
and metal spires, the top
of the Empire State Building,
like the spike on a soldier’s hat,
the whole city, he thinks built
by an imagination more savage
than he’d guessed, Magritte sees his own
mother lit up beneath the candelabra
of the Brooklyn Bridge, lifting her nightgown
up above her knees to mount
the moon-slick railing, the night behind her,
clotted with the traffic
of the stars. He can see her slippered
footprints winding out behind her
like the punctured roll of music
a player piano eats into song,
so that he can almost hear
a music as she falls…

4. AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO – Aimee Nezhukumatathil

(Tupelo Press, 2007)

For fiction writers who like: Lorrie Moore

The poems of Aimee Nez (as she mercifully lets us abbreviate her name) start out with a simple premise, like a single dancer – “I found a bat today”… “A brunch of Bellinis and crab omelettes is how I love to wake up in NYC”… “We are the oldest people in line waiting to pet a baby sand shark” – which she then lets shimmy gently until, without your even realizing it, she has filled the dance floor. Because of all the exotic animals and foods in her poems, and perhaps inevitably because her first book was called Miracle Fruit, Aimee Nez’s poems usually get described as if they were something to bite into: sensual, flavorful, ripe, bittersweet, and so on. Fair enough. But, more frequently, the poems in At the Drive-In Volcano remind me of the taster than the tasted. We share in her appetites and meals: at turns curious, nervous, wistful, or adventurous – and always with plenty of intimate, generous conversing with table-mates between bites.

from “At Medusa’s Hair Salon”

“All the pretty men ask if I have a perm.
No, I say, my little grandmother also has

dark corkscrew curls and though
my father is bald now, it passed to me.

From my swivel chair I can hear the thruway
rolling trucks loaded with horses, cars,

or gravel headed west. Sometimes I can even
see their lights from my bedroom window

and I am sad that even at four in the morning,
when they should be asleep—I should

be asleep—I hear them push at the wheel,
following the white lines five hours

to you in Ohio. And when I’m reminded
of how you ended it, I say to Henri, Cut it,

cut it all.”

5. HERE, BULLET – Brian Turner

(Alice James Books, 2005)

For fiction writers who like: Tim O’Brien

You forgive this book all its faults. And it does have some. Not deftly organized to take full advantage of the emotional momentum it so frequently generates and yet not reckless and raw enough to abandon the need for it, it can occasionally frustrate. And yet, not only because it is probably the only book of poems you could name with an author who saw combat in Iraq, and not out of any sort of obligatory appreciation for the service it chronicles, this book settles on your brain like a sandstorm. (The metaphor’s no coincidence: the poems are full of sand.) The poetry does not bother with big ideas of heroism or purpose, but neither is it neutral or journalistic. The poems are deeply melancholy. They return to their images in a way that suggests the poet does not have the luxury of choosing other ones. Most often, the poems hovers with great apprehension over the human form: whether it is haunting clothes hung out on a line by an Iraqi woman, wandering ghostlike through history or daily life, being scattered into parts by a sudden sickening blast, or tauntingly narrating its own invitation to destruction in the title poem. The dream poems are some of the finest, attesting to the fact that the mind, while it offers the only hope of escape or transcendence, is frequently the most stubborn shackle to trauma.

from “The Al Harishma Weapons Market”

“At midnight, steel shutters
slide down tight. Feral cats slink
in the periphery of the streetlamp’s
dim cone of light. Inside, like a musician
swaddling a silver-plated trumpet,
Akbar wraps an AK-47 in cloth.
Grease guns, pistols, RPGS—
he slides them all under the countertop.”