the the poetry blog» Christopher Phelps

Poem of the Week: Kevin Simmonds

Christopher Phelps — Tue, 29 May 2012 09:30:36 +0000

Crude

H2
its smothered
O

circling
for sense

there is none

three-eyed
or blind

delirious
with repair

eventually
or now

_________________________________________________
Kevin Simmonds is a San Francisco-based writer, musician and filmmaker originally from New Orleans. His writing has appeared in jubilat, Kyoto Journal, Massachusetts Review and Poetry. His books include the poetry collection Mad for Meat and two edited works: the poetry anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality and the late poet Carrie Allen McCray’s Ota Benga under My Mother’s Roof. He wrote the music for the Emmy Award-winning documentary Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica and Voice.

Poem of the Week: Tony Leuzzi

Christopher Phelps — Thu, 24 May 2012 14:20:09 +0000

The following is from a series of Pi Poems, or Cadae—the alphabetical equivalent of the first five digits of Pi (3.1415).

Pi is a transcendental number that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter approximately equal to 3.1415926535897.

In poetry, it has been used as the basis for a syllabic form that obeys the following distribution of syllables and stanza lengths, resulting (by line length) in a kind of sonnet:

xxx __________(3)
x ____________(1)___________ } 3
xxxx _________(4)

x ____________(1)___________ } 1

xxxxx ________(5)
xxxxxxxxx ____(9)
xx ___________(2)___________ } 4
xxxxxx _______(6)

xxxxx ________(5)___________ } 1

xxx __________(3)
xxxxx ________(5)
xxxxxxxx _____(8)___________ } 5
xxxxxxxxx ____(9)
xxxxxxx ______(7)

from Cadae: The Pi Poems

The music
stopped
for a moment

then—

when we began
to savor in its absence silence—
started
again, maybe a bit

louder than before

or maybe
we only heard it
as such, a sudden intrusion
we had previously not noticed
and this is what disturbed us.

No matter
where
the city gays

there

confess their scene is
a sad huddle of hopeless bottoms
each one
wishing for some dream top

to plough him senseless—

an Eden
understood only
by those first barred who with an air
of almost tragic boredom insist
their loss is epidemic.

Imagine
some
body you would

love

to fuck then try to
find this body somewhere in the world
and while
you look and encounter

as you are bound to

encounter
one disappointment
after another imagine
just how thin and stripped of incident
your life would be otherwise

________________________________________________
Tony Leuzzi is a writer and teacher living in Rochester, NY. His second book of poems, Radiant Losses, won the New Sins Editors’ Prize. In November 2012, BOA Editions will release Passwords Primeval, a book of interviews with twenty American poets.

Poem of the Week: Andrew Joron

Christopher Phelps — Thu, 17 May 2012 09:30:57 +0000

Assumption, The

Climb, the
Premise, the—

What drama
_____of the size of signs, of sighs
Seized at zero.

A dry soul is best
_____because combustible—

But to stand
_____beyond witness, burying the sun

_____or else writing fire
_____along a circumference of unclosing

—this is my faith & my reason.

I enter history
As a secret agent or stone effigy

_____dedicated to communism
_____but eaten away by music.

My chorus
_____vacuum-crowded, I
_____beg to begin—

If now
_____is a precipice, then
A human voice predates the universe.

Everything sends, never to receive
This message

Premonitory to a shriek—of
Shredded
_____immensité the vocable, irrevocable
_____Proof.

_____________________________________________________
Andrew Joron is the author of Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010) and translator of the German fantasy writer Paul Scheerbart’s The Perpetual Motion Machine (Wakefield Press, 2011). Joron lives in Berkeley, California, and plays the theremin in the dark ambient quartet Cloud Shepherd.

Poem of the Week: Niina Pollari

Christopher Phelps — Fri, 11 May 2012 09:30:35 +0000

[Then there is this dream with its other bright edges]

Then there is this dream with its other bright edges,
a piece of paper spread over the flowering field,

thin as a reflection. You know what’s wound
tight there, wanting to undo.

Even when you don’t look, it is still there,

all brazen and sting, all blast-net of stars:

a single-walled room that is eating itself,

one big hole of hallway,
pale and crustacean. And inside it,

the milk-film bristles with light. Inside,

you keep filling with water,

and the water keeps filling with copies of you.

_____________________________________________________
Niina Pollari wrote two chapbooks of poetry, Fabulous Essential (Birds of Lace 2009) and Book Four (Hyacinth Girl 2011). With Judy Berman, she is editing the essay collection It’s Complicated: Feminists Write about the Misogynist Art We Love.

Poem of the Week: Daniel Nathan Terry

Christopher Phelps — Fri, 04 May 2012 09:30:57 +0000

The 8th of May: A Vow Made for the 7th of May

Upon seeing a video of a man in North Carolina firing his rifle
into a sign asking citizens to Vote Against NC Amendment One.

There are oaks that remember
what we would forget—the burn of the rope,
how a body takes on more weight
the moment it breathes its last, how
the earth below shoeless feet grows
hungry for the slaughtered. There are rooms
where paint has been rolled over
blood, where the body’s salt has been
vacuumed into bags of dust, where the veneer
of a nightstand still bears the imprint
of a living hand’s last message. Ghosts
of children and men and women hang
from fences, linger in the corners
of dorm rooms, courtrooms, churches.
This is how we deal with it around here, he said,
after emptying his gun into a plea for equality, and some people
were shocked by his quivering pride. I will try
not to think of him when I stand in a room
in DC and vow to love the man
I have loved for 16 years. I will try not to remember
that 17 years ago, a friend of mine opened his door
to a plea for help from the other side, only to be robbed
then stabbed to death with his own kitchen knife
because the thief felt threatened that my friend—
while begging for his life—revealed that he was gay.
I will even try not to think of my grandfather
who cannot forgive me for loving the man
who held me steady as I purchased the dress my grandmother
was to be buried in. I will try not to think of the memory
of these oaks, of those fences, of some rooms. I will say I will
and mean carry on loving you until death. I will
think of the dorm room where we first made love,
I will think of the fence around our house
and its roses that change color in the heat. I will
think of the Carolina oak who might just remember
the night we kissed in the first bands of rain
from a hurricane just making landfall.

_____________________________________________________
Daniel Nathan Terry, a former landscaper and horticulturist, is the author of Capturing the Dead (NFSPS 2008), which won The Stevens Prize, and a chapbook, Days of Dark Miracles (Seven Kitchens Press 2011). His second full-length book, Waxwings, is forthcoming from Lethe Press in July of 2012. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies including New South, Poet Lore, Chautauqua, and Collective Brightness. He teaches English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Cape Fear Community college, and he serves on the advisory board of One Pause Poetry.

Note: This poem will also appear in the October issue of r.kv.r.y.

A Perfect Poem? “The Doe” by C. K. Williams

Christopher Phelps — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:00:46 +0000

Here’s a question: What to do with (how to view) a poem you can’t help but think of as perfect?

Here’s one that falls in that category for me, “The Doe” by C. K. Williams, a latter-day sonnet:

Near dusk, near a path, near a brook,
we stopped, I in disquiet and dismay
for the suffering of someone I loved,
the doe in her always incipient alarm.

All that moved was her pivoting ear
the reddening sun shining through
transformed to a color I’d only seen
in a photo of a child in a womb.

Nothing else stirred, not a leaf,
not the air, but she startled and bolted
away from me into the crackling brush.

The part of my pain which sometimes
releases me from it fled with her, the rest,
in the rake of the late light, stayed.

Now let me qualify “perfect.” I don’t ask perfection to include striking innovation or veining a mine with new nugget. Good thing, because this poem is drippingly conventional. It’s definitely not McHugh-tragicomic or Joron-machine-surreal. It’s no New Sentence or newer freedom. But it does exactly what I was raised to think a poem is supposed to do: make my mouth water discovering its words, make my mind water discovering their meaning, and hurt me. The hurt is key. As the Greeks said, learning is suffering. So here is pain’s perfect translation-as-projection-and-or-illustration, for any deciduous-woods walker process-walking through some anguish or melancholy. Who doesn’t see a deer in the right light and feel all failings come to the fore—yours, the world’s, someone’s in between—especially when something hard has happened? (Maybe hunters don’t, or maybe they do before they don’t.)

But the perfection goes deeper (gets worse) than that. Look at the craft of the thing. From the opening anaphora on, you get the sense that each word was considered on its merits in some plenary session. Each lifted like Larkin’s votive glass of water, to congregate the any-angled light, just so. The brush crackles, the afternoon-oblique sun rakes, the alarm is incipient. Brush echoes dusk’s muffle. “I in disquiet” loudly pleads. “The suffering of someone I loved” quietly rubs. Late, rake, and pain, assonant, hit the final plangent note. There’s also a smart pair of -ings: suffering and reddening, neither too close together to seem contrived, nor too far apart to seem unrelated. And the reddening begins, early in the second stanza, to give us plenty of time to redden further (past Life magazine’s, or 2001’s, baby photo), slowly toward that burgundy finish. Even the word, rest, comes just when a slight pause is needed, to dehisce pain from itself, into pain that pain releases and pain that recognition keeps.

But it’s not just the words that are choice, it’s the movements and symmetries that are seamless. “Near dusk, near a path, near a brook” is reflected (in cadence) at the end of the octave by “in a photo of a child in a womb.” Meanwhile “Near dusk, near a path, near a brook” zooms in; “Nothing else stirred, not a leaf, / not the air” zooms out. Back at the last two lines, if we separate “the rest” and “stayed” from the rest of the words, as syntax tempts us to, a question presents itself: Which stayed more, the rest or the unrest? Both about equally, the poem answers in its ultra-efficiency.

I feel almost cheated, hoodwinked, like a focus group conspired to write a poem I couldn’t find fault with. So let me return to the opening question: What to do with (how to view) a poem you can’t help but think of as perfect?

And what if your idea of perfection makes you worry that you might be pretty boring, at bottom? I could say, well, the innovation here is to need none—to out-Frost Frost, if you like. Yet there’s always something innovative, if you look hard enough. For example, the octave doesn’t hit the sestet with any tension, as it’s usually expected to, but rather with a mild (perhaps mildly tense) stillness. The real tension happens halfway through the sestet, which is visually broken into tercets—to mirror riven pain?

But here’s the thing: I’m bored by trying to convince you, if that’s what I’m doing, that “The Doe” isn’t boring. What have I said beyond that it’s well crafted, emotionally savvy, and (to boot, in the good sense) self-aware? “Boring” isn’t much of an objective criterion, of course. (Boring’s boring apology?) The truth—as it tends to reduce—is that this poem came along when I needed a poem like it, a few years ago, having walked in the woods feeling sorry for a friend, never having thought to imagine my pain as both divided against itself and capable of self-kindness.

Collective Brightness

Christopher Phelps — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:06:07 +0000

Christopher Phelps: You mention in the introduction that you “had a hunch these poems existed but could never have imagined their scope.” Was there a specific conversation or event or book that inspired you to put together an anthology of faith-, religion-, spirituality-, belief- and non-belief-themed poems from LGBTIQ poets?

Kevin Simmonds: I can’t remember the exact moment I decided to pursue this, or why, but I’m certain my decision had much to do with Bryan Borland. He started Sibling Rivalry Press and, in my limited interaction with him, I had a strong sense that he could make this anthology possible. Bryan wants to gather and sustain the LGBTIQ community through our literary works. As far as I’m concerned, he’s doing something new in the publishing industry. Unlike many past and current queer publications / publishing houses, SRP actively strives to publish all kinds of writers, regardless of prescribed and more “mainstream” queer sensibilities. I respect and admire that.

CP: You also mention in the introduction that you “have come to prefer faith, which religion scholar Karen Armstrong refers to as ‘the opposite of certainty.’” Doubt has also been referred to as the opposite of certainty. Do you find faith and doubt to be intimately related? Do you think the LGBTIQ communities, in particular, having struggled to find their places in faith communities, are naturally positioned to write poetries that explore a connection between faith and doubt?

KS: Anyone who considers any kind of religion, especially those who grew up in the church, mosque, synagogue, coven, temple—wherever—should experience doubt. There’s such overwhelming hypocrisy, inconsistency, unanswered, unanswerable or badly answered questions. And being LGBTIQ generates more questions that are badly answered, modeled hypocritically by spiritual leaders and their respective flocks. It’s all a mess, really. As I say in the introduction, love is supposed to be the one common denominator, whether you’re Hindu, Jewish, Pentecostal or Muslim. When love and all its fruit come into question, you know you have a problem. A serious problem.

LGBTIQ people have been uniquely positioned—and “called,” even—to critically observe and then expound upon this messiness. Thankfully, mercifully, poets do their work in this and have been, like, forever. Many, like Whitman, took God back from the haters and re-gifted that Presence to us. Whitman made no distinctions between god and God or, for that matter, man, insect and beast. Others poets, like Seattle-based Crystal Ibarra, look at the God of Christianity and His followers and say, in essence, “piss off.” They distinguish themselves and their cherished beliefs from any capital or lowercase deity.

CP: To hate love is such a strange act, isn’t it? The contradiction of which leads haters to think it can’t be love they hate. So they think it’s sex they hate and that sex is what defines us, not love, and to my thinking this is the most destructive aspect of their hypocrisy (never mind the fact that there’s nothing wrong with the ways we have sex). For if someone is told not to (dare to) speak their love, how can it be known to exist? How can it be counted, let alone discounted? Historically and still, we are those for whom love has been a precarious fact, both a given and a problem: a paradox. In Collective Brightness, there are so many testaments to that love, so many paths into and out of the paradox, so many protean forms: tenderness, probity, irony, wistfulness, playfulness, anger. Some take the love paradox face-first, as in Steve Turtell’s “A Prayer”:

His book has a frayed, twisted ribbon.
Ah, the cover is Bible Black.

They sit opposite me,
a religious group visiting Sin City.

I eat my omelet, homefries, toast.
Halfway through the Book Review

I glance up. One of the boys
is staring right at me. Sadness,

maybe even desire in his glance.
I recognize myself in him,

as he wonders about me.
He is handsome and shy.

And afraid. And alone.
Please God, don’t let them

destroy him. Show him
he is loved and worthy.

Keep him from self-hatred.
Give him enough good fortune

to make him happy, enough
misfortune to make him wise.

Others repurpose the love paradox, as in Oliver Bendorf’s “The First Erasure,” redacted from a Westboro Baptist Church hate letter. Still others subvert it with Whitmanic kindness, as Ellen Bass’s poems do, or with Szymborskan sw(v)erve, as in Ana Božičević’s “Death Is All.” But perhaps my favorite of the Bs is Ari Banias’s “Some Kind of We,” how hard it reaches into the regress, into our bag of bags, to find a hypothetical ‘we’—hanging a lantern on what I love about our contemporary mess, its precariousness peeking out of itself to ask if things might be okay, if we might have some minimum in common:

These churchbells bong out
one to another in easy conversation
a pattern, a deep ringing that wants to say
things are okay,
things are okay—
but things, they are not okay
I can’t trust a churchbell, though I would like to
the way I can trust
that in this country, in every house and in most every
apartment, there somewhere is a cabinet or drawer
where it’s stashed, the large plastic bag
with slightly smaller mashed together plastic bags inside it;
it is overflowing, and we keep adding,
bringing home more than we need, we should have
to weave a three piece suit of plastic bags
a rug, a quilt, a bed of bags even, anything
more useful than this collection this excess
why am I writing about plastic bags, because
it is this year in this country and I am this person
with this set of meanings on my body and the majority of what I have,
I mean, what I literally have the most of in my apartment, more
than plants, more than forks and spoons and knives combined, more than chairs
or jars or pens or books or socks, is plastic bags,
and I am trying to write, generally and specifically,
through what I see and what I know,
about my life (about our lives?),
if in all this there can still be—tarnished,
problematic, and certainly uneven—a we.

Do you think things will be okay? What’s a poet’s political/critical role in this? Is private testimonial enough, or should we be testing our poetries less often in the college cloister and more loudly in the streets?

KS: Life is messy and things will never be OK. That’s my take on it. Yet something deeply observed and felt, something like the paragraphed observation you just made, can be transmitted beyond the “college cloister.” I’m confident of this. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have gathered all these resilient poets with their mind and spirit-altering poems. I’m their pusher. Remember that term? That’s what they used to call drug dealers back in the day.

I’m mixing metaphors like crazy but we need everything in our love arsenal—Ari’s “we,” Ellen’s wide, wide road, Oliver’s redaction and Steve’s quiet wisdom. Yes, that’s all complete metaphor but we live by assigning meanings to things, don’t we? Oliver turned an ignorant and hateful letter into a hymn…

I can’t speak for anyone but I’m fairly confident that every single poet in Collective Brightness feels called to “minister” to the unenlightened. They do it through their poetry, which is activism. Publishing and doing readings are activism.

We are taking it to the streets. I don’t know of any other anthology—shit, I don’t know of any book—that has a website with all these writers reading their work. And once we start these readings all over the world, there’s no stopping us. And we’re reading outside the rarefied halls of the academy or queer bookstores. We’re reading in museums and churches and temples and Islamic community centers for goodness sake!

CP: How do you feel about the role of poetry itself as argument or rhetoric? Many of the world’s religious documents are written in what is now considered poetry, but most of the fighting about religion happens at the level of prose—literal quotation, formulaic exegesis, anemic analogy. I sometimes wonder if the New Atheists, Richard Dawkins and company, might be more persuasive if they stopped using logic exclusively—the quotient of logic in faith is limited—and started using some poetry. (I don’t want to pass along that suggestion because I fear it might work. For disclosure, I’m a questioning agnostic: I like my God unknown, not excised.) Anyway, the argument has been made that the poetries in religions, the moderates among the fundamentalists, are what keeps them alive and kicking, and had religions just been their fundamentalisms, they wouldn’t have survived this long. They would have been simply debunked. But their (mostly undeliberate) “survival strategies” were to moderate themselves, to modulate themselves to the facts. So some atheists think the onus of bad faith is actually on the moderates—on the poetry, so to speak. What are your thoughts on this issue?

KS: Christopher, yes! Some will resent me for this, and I’ve said this before on the record: I consider the imperialists (ethnically or culturally Caucasian)—the people who want to control and enslave and codify—the enemies of poetry. All the unenlightened natives, with their ancient poems and songs and folk tales, know what they know in ways many of us never will. Yes, we need the imperialists for their logic and prose, their science and medicine and all that but not when it’s all wrapped around the throat and smothers those ideas that need and are poetry. Do you understand what I’m saying here? Push the spiritual beyond its poetry into prose and you replace mercy and grace with rules and edicts, healthy uncertainty into… you get what I’m after, don’t you?

As you know, all the poems in the anthology are organized solely by the authors’ surnames. So when something like Jen Hofer’s “Resolved” and Fanny Howe’s “The Apophatic Path” turn up on facing pages, I must raise my arms in surrender and praise! Both poems refuse to codify anything other than, well, the impossibility of pinning anything down. It’s like these poems are in perfect unison. Regarding Fanny, I know of no other contemporary poet who’s written so eloquently about and through apophatic theology, which defines God through negation.

My answers here are very circuitous, aren’t they? I resist talking about poetry as argument and rhetoric. Of course, my own work has its values and those values are obvious, I think. And I leave it at that. I’m interested in where the poems might lead instead of what their intentions might be. This may be unclear because my mind doesn’t work and process that way. I’m convinced that art can exist and function as argument and rhetoric but I don’t concern myself with that. Perhaps it’s because I’m stuck, in my own work, on what I see as two very different enterprises: explaining and expressing. Doesn’t rhetoric require explaining things? Having a complex series of wires? Whereas expressing is more abstract, open to interpretation and gestural? Ha! Do you see how funny this is? I’m returning to an earlier idea about codifying.

Moderates make me sick but the world would be gone without them. My partner is a moderate and he’s kept me from the window sill more times than I care to remember. You should know that I received many, many submissions for Collective Brightness and, honestly, I’m unable to remember any extremists—diagnosed through their poetry, of course. No ALL CAPS and !!!!!!!! or, conversely, those who had given in to apathy. In other words, LGBTIQ poets are survivors. Do you hear me? Survivors. And I’m sure there’s a scientific law or natural order of things that privileges life forms that, though able to survive on the extreme edges of things, subsists and flourishes in more stable and moderate conditions.

CP: Rhetoric need not explain. It need only persuade. But sometimes it explains in order to persuade. I’d tend to agree that rhetoric can get in the way of poetry’s other purposes. I suspect that many poets sometimes discover a rhetorical purpose in one of their poems after it was written, and that’s probably the way it should work. I do like when I feel I can discern at least some of an author’s intentions—so that meaning is shared, rather than separately brought, by writer and reader, to the table—but I also enjoy poetry that subverts intentions. In that mystery, other flowers bloom. I love Fanny Howe’s “The Apophatic Path,” how it speaks in the loveliest of tongues. In section 2 especially but in the whole poem I find a kind of rhetoric manifesting “what isn’t / is what is”—I might call it winning the argument by wiles, by charm. She even wins it by music, her rhymes irresistible because confident but unscripted. I leave that poem utterly convinced that not knowing is the way to know:

2

Basic science

will blend ghostness
among enemies.

Now bodies cemented

down in monster denominations
to be counted

one of the walking
corpses I see whitening

and emptying
under a sun

makes me know me
to be no one.

…

But of course a story, simply told, can be powerful rhetoric and testament, too. When I read Joseph Ross’s “The Upstairs Lounge, New Orleans, June 24, 1973,” my stomach hurt and I began to sweat. Nothing rhetorical needs adding (if rhetoric is sometimes an afterthought). The story and its context and the lyricism of its unfolding already do the trick:

2

Someone poured lighter fluid
onto the stairs that rose

from the sidewalk to the bar,
then anointed those slick stairs

with a match, creating a Pentecost
of fire and wind

that ascended the stairs
and flattened the door

at the top, exploding into the room
of worshippers, friends, lovers,

two brothers, their mother.
The holy spirit was silent.

No one spoke a new language.

3

Some escaped. Many died with
their hands covering their mouths.

One man, George, blinded by smoke
and sirens, his throat gagged

with ash, got out and then
went back for Louis, his partner.

They were found, a spiral
of bones holding each other

under the white
baby grand piano

that could not save them.

4

Then came the jokes.
A radio host asked:

What will they bury
the ashes of the queers in?

Fruit jars, of course.
One cab driver hoped

the fire burned their
dresses off.

…

I think of the statement William Carlos Williams made in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”: “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die every day for lack of what is found there.” Are there poems of especially fine storytelling that have caused a physical reaction in you?

KS: Joseph’s poem is striking because it’s so polyphonic. I appreciate poems that can manage poetry, storytelling and historical reportage simultaneously. I had a feeling Williams’s quote would make its way into this conversation. It had to.

The anthology is bursting, really, with poems erecting mythic stories and willing the reader into sublimity. Read that any way you’d like. Edward Debonis’s “Sacred Heart,” Amy Tudor’s “What We Love,” Dan Bellm’s “Brand new” and Moe Bowstern’s “I Give Up” transform the reader—simply by virtue of the momentary reading. The engagement, itself, must emit something into the universe: a heat, a wave, something measurable. And we mustn’t forget Benjamin Grossberg’s “Beetle Orgy,” from which the collection’s title is taken. We are exalted when he writes:

and God, also, comes to some knowledge
as if for the first time, is distracted and pleased
by the collective brightness of human skin. . . .

CP: “Willing the reader into sublimity”—I really like that. It does seem like willing, in at least two senses, is at the heart of both surviving suffering and salvaging from it. “I Give Up” strikes me as a powerful meditation that willed the writer (then reader) into sublimity:

Their wingbeats on the water
Sound like applause,
Like forgiveness.

Speaking of erecting mythic stories, how wonderfully taut is Joseph Legaspi’s “The Homosexual Book of Genesis”? And I’m glad you mentioned “Beetle Orgy,” a poem of such well-tended analogy: our being the accidental god of beetles, and not so different from them; God being like us, curious, distracted, pleased.

God leaning over the house on a casual tour
of the wreck of the world, noticing ornamentation
where it wasn’t expected.

May I ask my question in the form of an exclamation point?

KS: Joseph’s Genesis poem is funny, isn’t it? There are many other funny poems. R. Zamora Linmark’s “Bino And Rowena Make a Litany to Our Lady of the Mount” slays. And Megan Volpert’s tinybig poems are incredibly funny and deep. Here is “A place without work is no heaven to me”:

Sometimes during orgasm I see the faces of dead friends. They are waving and smiling with laughter from up and across, happy I have checked in by flinging a moment of condensed purity over the wall between us. I believe they are working as much as I am, finishing business and settling their accounts. Glad as I am to see them, sometimes one of these faces disappears where I can’t get it back again, and I celebrate that they have found enough peace to get recycled. Whatever the methods, a soul is the part of humanity that is a perpetual motion machine.

Compare those to Atsusuke Tanaka’s “Like a Fruit Floating on Water” and Seung-Ja Choe’s “I, From Early On,” two poems that are anything but funny. Rather, they are profoundly sad.

CP: I love how differently two people can read the same poem. You read Legaspi’s poem as funny, and I read it as ingeniously plangent: a tight little lyric, turning Genesis on its nose, and arriving at desire redoubled, with that choice word suggesting natural inevitability, “calcified.” I really enjoyed Volpert’s funnyserious, tinybig, prosepoetic epigrams, too. And to your list of funny poems, I have to add my favorite, Jill McDonough’s “My History of CPR,” which doesn’t resist being poignant in the midst of its humor:

In the 1700s, once we could print stuff, a guy
in the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned
posted broadsides like our cartoon Heimlich how-tos,
except they used fs for ss, suggested blowing
smoke up the patient’s ass. For real: somebody
should blow with Force into the Lungs, by applying
the Mouth to the Mouth of the Patient, closing his Nostrils
with one hand, while somebody else should throw the smoke
of Tobacco up the Fundament into the Bowels,
by means of a Pipe. At least they used a pipe.
That broadside says if you want to make mouth to mouth
less indelicate, it may be done through a Handkerchief.
Now I go to the movies, see Clive Owen punch
a fresh corpse in the chest. Human, angry with death,
at the dead, our puny lives. Imagine the first
time that worked, the look on the cavewoman’s face
when her cavehusband coughs a little, blinks, comes to.
Of course you’d hit the corpse, of course you’d try
to force air in, breath for the beloved, the lost
one, reverse everything. In Second Kings
Elijah mouth to mouthed a little boy,
revived him—maybe the first medical record,
first EMT: he put his mouth on his mouth,
his eyes on his eyes, and the flesh of the child waxed warm.

I’ve heard that some poetry workshops advise against that sort of thing. . . What’s the mantra? Be straight with your tone? (Homophone your tone?) I think I prefer my tones queer. Are there moments of tonal ambiguity in the anthology that you find particularly successful?

KS: Frankly, it’s difficult to write a funny poem. And today, there is no shortage of smart-alecky poems, which I find off-putting, juvenile and entirely forgettable. Megan, especially, seems to be a funny, razor-sharp person, so her poems happen to be funny. She’s not trying to be funny. There’s a difference. Collective Brightness is rife with poems that amplify the ironical. Irony is hilarious.

Choe’s poem is hideously dark and bleak and the dismal extremity makes me laugh. I’m familiar with Korean culture and it’s intense. Koreans feel and express very deeply. Yet, as an American, when faced with such absolute bleakness in a poem, a first-person lament like that, I can’t help but laugh. To be that down on your life and write about it. Do you understand where I’m coming from? The poem is much like one of David’s psalms. The sheer fact that the person has the wherewithal to write at all is cause for praise and thankfulness. From Choe’s “I, From Early On”:

No parents raised me
I slept in rat holes and fed on the livers of fleas
Blankly going to my death, anywhere would do,
I was nothing from early on.

We brush by each other
like falling comets, so
don’t say that you know me.
I don’t know you I don’t know you
You thee thou, happiness
You, thee, thou love
That I am alive,
is just an eternal rumor.

CP: I agree with you about smart-aleckiness. I prefer true playfulness, which it’s sometimes confused with: playfulness that isn’t juvenile, but is child-like in its curiosity and derring-do. I think there are too many gags in poetry, based, instead of on wordplay and insight, on a kind of literary sarcasm: irony’s jealous, passive-aggressive sibling that rolls a weary eye and works to undermine everything, including irony. Whereas in Tanaka’s poem, and in Choe’s poem, and in Kazim Ali’s “Home,” for that matter, and in dozens of others, the ironies don’t need opponents: they simply say, “here.” In this rat hole. Under this blanket. On this pond. Something has been found and lost, lost and found. Hear how many echoes patience knows. How absolute bleakness can remind us there is cause for praise. How few, but how sweet, the provisions of survival. Truly, it’s a beautiful collection, Kevin. Are there any final anecdotes, or wisdom words, or poem lines you’d like to share?

KS: “How few, but how sweet, the provisions of survival.” This is why I enjoy interviewers who are themselves poets, Christopher. These poets come from all over the world and find, conjure or imagine these provisions. In Kyoto. In London. In Singapore. In Australia. In San Francisco. In Atlanta and Cape Cod and Miami and Houston. Poets who’ve turned away from religion and those who are anchors of the congregation. These poets are surviving and their poems are proof, artifacts. Collective Brightness, then, is more than a book of poems. Of this, I’m certain.

___________________________________________

Kevin Simmonds is a poet, musician, and photographer originally from New Orleans. He majored in music at Vanderbilt University, and later received a doctorate in music education from the University of South Carolina and a Fulbright fellowship to Singapore where he launched the first-ever poetry workshop in Changi Prison. He wrote the musical score for the Emmy-Award-winning HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica and edited Ota Benga Under My Mother’s Roof (University of South Carolina Press, 2012), a posthumous collection of poems by Carrie Allen McCray-Nickens. His debut collection of poems is Mad for Meat (Salmon Poetry, 2011).

More information can be found at www.collectivebrightness.com and www.kevinsimmonds.com.

How Beauty (No Stronger Than a Flower) Shall Hold a Plea

Christopher Phelps — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 13:00:39 +0000

In a word, Jason Schneiderman is a poet of the helix. In his new book, Striking Surface, he turns and returns a fine Merino wool finer. By refrains; bits of anaphora; tonally and topically, he returns to his concerns in cycle after cycle, rending or revising earlier understandings, and leading new ones up new twists. Scattered throughout the book’s three sections are cycles that include “The Children’s Crusade,” “Stalinism,” “Ars Poetica,” “Physics,” “Rabbi Ishmael ben Elisha,” and “Hyacinthus.”

The middle section of the book is entirely a cycle: an unforgettable family of elegies that address his mother’s death with tenderness and probity, in a casual voice talking through grief without flinching and without sentimentality. From “Elegy I (Work)”: “Whatever dead is, you are, and how you must hate that, / busy fixer of problems, busy stitcher of crafts.” Soon we learn the role crafts played before death—how they were a kind of tacit conversation between father, mother, and son—and the roles they assume, still unfinished, in the afterdeath. Here, in “Elegy IV (Tallis)”:

I don’t tell Dad that you never finished cross-stitching
the tallis piece because you were punishing him.
You wouldn’t tell him, so why should I? I finished
the curtains you were planning, though I didn’t line them.

Picking up the thread, in the next elegy:

I wish I could see the dead as completed instead
of stopped, that some monument in my head
would be erected to you, instead of these scraps
of uncatalogued memory.

And again, in “Elegy VI (Metaphors for Grief)”:

____________________________I’d think,
why finish this if Mom won’t see it, or why
go to work if my mother is dead? She had never
been the axis my world turned on, but suddenly
everything seemed to revolve around her. No.
Not an axis. A skewer. A spit.

Throughout the book, we encounter a philosophical version of transubstantiation that an object or subject undergoes when it has been taken from us or is otherwise no longer in reach. In “Elegy V (The Community of Mourners),” Schneiderman calls it “a trap”: “Mourning’s a trap, / isn’t it? A way to pretend that what you lost / was better than what you had,” a delicious riddle that obviates our thinking those two things (people) are the same, with the bereft feeling that they are not. It’s a trap revisited in the last section of “Susan Kohner (Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life),” which begins, “Death tricks you twice. First about yourself, / and then about others,” and ends:

Does Sarah Jane owe her dead mother
more than she owed her live mother?

Of course not—but she can’t deny her dead
mother what she denied her live one.

Having gathered impressions of her sense of humor, her quietly persistent love, and her humiliating, de facto last rites before the surgery that would be her death, we feel we know this woman—this arch, in its stone and filigree—just in time for the keystone eighth elegy, which—in its omnivorousness (including a nod to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who returns from being buried in an earlier elegy); in its valences and ambivalence through which an earnest love reflects—seems to accomplish something of Shakespearian ambition (“That in black ink my love may still shine bright”), even as a stand-alone poem:

Elegy VIII (Missing You)

I thought I’d find you here, that I’d finish these poems
and you would stand out as clear as the day. As bright
as the moon. I hate those poets who tell you that
they love, but never make clear whom they love.
My mother’s eyes are nothing like the sun. How do I
miss my mother? Let me count the ways. So where
are you? I couldn’t believe you let yourself
be filmed for the video they showed at your tribute,
and I wanted to tell everyone, That’s only her voice
when she’s nervous. That’s only her face when she
has to be on display and she doesn’t like it. But at least
you were there. Everyone knows you can’t write
your way out of grief. Everyone knows that grief
never turns into anything but grief, and OK, I can grieve
you forever. But I wanted you here, in the middle
of my book. Not a complaint about what I lost
or what it feels like to lose it. But you. Your smile.
Your denim dress.

Schneiderman addresses another, closer-to-literal kind of transubstantiation in “Adorable Wounds.” An epigraph from Hopkins invites us to “approach Christ in a new way” and cast ourselves “into His sacred broken Heart and his five adorable Wounds” (a fitting bit of pronoun play between a man and his apotheosis). Longinus of Caesarea already having stuck his spear into the body of the crucified Christ, pre-poem, the poem’s speaker asks:

Is it blasphemy
to be the nail,
the spear? To want
to be the nail,
the spear?

These fives lines—in their deceptively simple revision and reiteration of that deceptively simple question—ask as much of us as any nineteen syllables I know. “A simple truth miscall’d simplicity,” as Shakespeare might have said and did, in Sonnet 66. Substituting “question” for “truth,” we have a working description of Schneiderman’s quest to understand.

In all three sections of Striking Surface, understanding is key and a key to the poems. From “Ars Poetica II”:

I’m trying to say:
Forgiving is the end of love.

The end of hate.
The end of strong emotion.

A poem should be
an understanding.

A forgiving.
But not the end of love or hate.

The poem comes to doubt itself directly (“Maybe this / isn’t a poem”), before ending up at a new understanding:

If understanding
was the wrong thing,

I asked
for the wrong thing.

It was what I wanted
when I asked.

Besides the candor of these lines, what makes them feel natural and accessible is their role in a dialogue into which the poem is structured. The poem’s speaker addresses the world-as-poem and world-as-parted-intimate simultaneously, a parted intimate who responds:

Look at all the sense you keep

trying to make.

You should know better.

That’s why I did what you think

I need to be forgiven for.

Another theme these poems thread and rethread is the nature of identity—in theology and philosophy, called the problem of haecceity (essential “thisness”). Schneiderman pinpoints the requisite subtleties with a weaver’s needle. In his death-by-flower poems (“Hyacinthus I” and “II”), he turns a wry eye upon the notion that Apollo had preserved anything of Hyacinthus in his eponymous flower, ending the first poem with, “Who are we fooling? // I’m just plain dead,” and the second with:

Who wants
to be a flower?

Better that weeds
should mark my grave

than the stars
should hold my face.

This frames the issue in a smart(ing?) little star-rimmed face. In “Echo (Narcissus)”—a sort of third wheel or three-way for the “death by flower” pair—the Narcissus myth is restored to its context of male-male love, and (as always in these poems, with a twist) it speaks for an Echo who learns to say “No.”

In “Probability,” the problem of haecceity comes more clearly into relief:

________The statistical probability of being a dinosaur
at the moment that the meteor hit is impossible to calculate,
because you would have to know whether any given dinosaur
was as likely to be any other given dinosaur, or whether
any living thing is as likely to be any other living thing—
but no matter what, the chance was tiny. No matter how you do
the math, every single dinosaur was statistically safe from
meteors. But then again, here we are, you and me, as human
and furless as we might have hoped, tiny teeth, opposable
thumbs, and all the birds locked out of our safe, insured
houses.

Here we see another large-looming theme, really a component of the problem of haecceity. If something is essentially ‘this’—an exact and unique something—then it can’t be exchanged for something very much similar, or even something identical in all its properties (Leibniz argued: if two things are identical in all their properties, those two things are really one thing). But look!—Schneiderman’s poems ask between (and within) the lines—at how exchangeable and reversible we and our circumstances are. By a fluke, we’re the ones insured, for the moment. The oscine dinosaur descendents are in the garden singing… for the moment.

In “Sailor at Nostrand and Bedford,” the non-uniqueness of exchangeable things is again brushed against. Here, from the poem’s second section:

There was a sailor, once.

What we wanted

was the same,

and each other

was the last place

we’d looked.

And in “The Book of the Boy,” the issue is fully foregrounded, pleading loudly:

____________“Why was I made?”
and the answer comes: “Because we
wanted you,” which puzzles the boy.

“But there was no me to want,” the boy
protests, and the answer comes: “Well,
we wanted something like you.” And the boy asks

“Would any small person have done?”
and the answer comes: “Any small person
we made. It was critical that we be the ones

who made it.” The boy hesitates.
The answers are getting angry. At last:
“So I was interchangeable? Then?

Before I was made?”

The poem ends exasperated and without resolution. Hiding in dreams, “maybe / by morning, he’ll be someone / specific and loved and necessary.”

Near the end of the book, in the four-part poem, “Notes on Detention” (in effect the title poem: in the second part we learn that there are six striking surfaces on the human hand, and the strongest striking surface is the elbow, according to the latest interrogation manual), we once again snag this braided issue of identity. We encounter a mine-detonating robot that has done its work so dutifully that it’s lost all but one of its legs, and is continuing to scrape along on its last before an army colonel “declared the test inhumane and stopped it. / The robot’s inventor was surprised, as this / is what the robot had been designed to do.” Then comes the crux:

________Perhaps the robot stepped
through the same door into humanity
that every victim steps out of. Perhaps
we should find that door.

In the next, the book’s penultimate poem, “The person you cannot love,” we’ve reached the end of probing the issue until, in the final poem, we’re asked to bury it in a bed of flowers that Schneiderman’s husband tends. “I Love You and All You Have Made,” wraps up the triple helix of identity—transubstantiation, exchangeability, haecceity—into a convincing and moving three-line finale: “Some days, I flatter myself to think / that I’m one of your flowers. Some days, / I flatter myself to think I’m not.”

Viewing this book through one (or three related) of its themes, much that recommends it has been passed over: its several senses of humor; its pop-culturings sprinkled handsomely throughout; its rabbinical backstories; its children’s crusades; and its wise and wide-eyed meditation on war—“Billboard Reading: War Is Over / Billboard Reading: (If You Want It)”—that puts Prometheus in dialogue with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the Aztecs, and the 1952 film, High Noon, to name a few. Nor have I mentioned my favorite poem in the book, “The Numbers Wait with God for Humans to Invent Them,” which involves Two’s being kissed, Four’s hair being tussled, imaginary numbers “who screamed at night / the things they knew,” and—almost free of charge, almost subliminally—a parable about the freedom that is division.

Fearless and affectionate, Striking Surface is a book of lyric poems that neither emphasize narrative nor shy away from it. The story, when it comes to a poem, seems to come across a music already being played; an understanding already being groped; an Ariadne’s thread already followed halfway back. Schneiderman’s are exuberances on dark topics, trimmed to their essentials, and plangent (rung up and down turns of thought and feeling) in what remains.

the the poetry blog» Christopher Phelps

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