Amaal Al-Deeb

AMAAL AL-DEEB


ليسَ للذِّئابِ وَطن

 

...سَأُغَادِرُ

دُونَ فِرَاءِ الدُّبِّ وَخَاتَمِ الأَلْمَاس

دُونَ عِبَارَاتِ التَّغَزُّلِ في أُنُوثَتِي الفَرِيْدَة..

دُونَ انبِهَارِ القَتَلَةِ بالنَّظراتِ الزُّجَاجِيَّةِ لِمَقْتُوْلِيهِم..

سأرحلُ إلى فضاءٍ وسيعٍ

يحْتَوِي رُوْحِي

المُصِرَّةَ عَلَى التَأَلُّقِ..

حَتَّى بَعْدَ انْهِيَارِ الجَسَدِ الذي انْغَرَسَتْ فِيهِ آَلافُ النَّظَرَات

كَانَ فَاتِنًا بِاعتِرَافِهِم..

كَمْ تَغَزَّلُوا فِيهِ

تَمنَّى أَكْثَرُهُم أَنْ يَحْظَى بِدِفْئِهِ وَلَو لِبَعْضِ الوَقت..

الفَضاءُ يَضيقُ

أَطيافُ بعضِهم تحومُ حَولي

تَزعُمُ أنَّ مَا أَشعَلَ فِتنَتَهَا هُوَ ذَاكَ الشَّيطَانُ الـ"مُتلبِّسُني"..

كَيَمَامَةٍ تَنْقُرُ أَحْلامَهُم..

مَا زَالَ يُعَاقِرُهُم أَمَلٌ..

باحتِضَانِ طَيفِي..

أَو مُوَاقَعَةِ خَيَالِي الرَّابِضِ فِي رُكْنٍ دَفِيء

مِنْ إِحْدَى السَّمَاوَاتِ المُتَوَسِّطَة..

وَأَنَا أَهِيمُ..

أَو أَتَسَرَّبُ مِنْ خَلْفِ ظُهُورِهِمُ..

وَرُبَّمَا تَسَلَّلتُ عَلَى أَطرَافِ كِيَانِي ذَا

بَاحِثةً عنْ رَائِحَتِكَ في الأُفقِ المُحِيط


WOLVES HAVE NO HOME

 

I’ll leave

without the fur coat and diamond rings,

without the feminine trappings they’ve plastered to me—

I’ll leave these murderers, the outline of my shape 

still flashing in their eyes

and slip away

to a place where a soul might thrive

rising and flickering like a lit wick

even after its body has collapsed, riddled with a thousand looks. 

They admit my body was beautiful, admit they wanted it

so much they can’t stop eulogizing what they’ve crushed.

They’ll still seek even a moment of its heat

as the walls crowd in, 

they circle, stalking me in the dark. 

They claim their obsession has been sparked by the devil 

who possesses me,

who pecks at their dreams like a dove.

They’ll never give up the hope

of pressing themselves against my ghost

or sleeping with my shadow

even as it glides away into the silence of middle heaven. 

And so I roam,

sliding through arms to escape beyond their reach,

prowling along the seams of myself,

hunting for the scent of you on the horizon.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amaal Al-Deeb is a poet living in Egypt.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

Amir Al-Azraki is an Arab-Canadian playwright, literary translator, Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner, and Associate Professor and Coordinator of Studies in Islamic and Arab Cultures Program at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. He is the author of The Discourse of War in Contemporary Theatre, co-editor and co-translator of Contemporary Plays from Iraq, “A Rehearsal for Revolution”: An Approach to Theatre of the Oppressed, and and has had co-translated poems published in Consequence Forum, The Common, POETRY Magazine, and Talking Writing. He has recently translated Representations of the Other: The Image of Black People in the Medieval Arab Imaginary by a Bahraini critic Nader Kadhim, which will be published by McGill-Queen's University Press.

Kirun Kapur is the author of three books of poetry, Women in the Waiting Room (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Julie Suk Award and the Massachusetts Book Award; Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015) which won the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize and the Antivenom Poetry Award; and the chapbook All the Rivers in Paradise (UChicago Arts, 2022). Her work appears in AGNI, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares and many other journals. She serves as editor at the Beloit Poetry Journal and teaches at Amherst College, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program.

Muna Al Assi

MUNA AL ASSI


مياه مشبوهة

 

خرجت من عيادة طبيبي، خفيفة كمغفرة

.تركت في حوض أسماكه رجالا كانوا يسبحون في دمي

.علّقت على جدران عيادته، الصور المبعثرة في ذاكرة مصباحي

,حتى الأسماء، التي كان يلقيها الأصدقاء تحت نافذتي كحبات قمح يابسة

.زرعتها له فيأصيص حبقته 

اصطاد كل النحل من قميصي ونظف ألوانه المائعة من الحدائق

,أنا خفيفة من قصائدي أغرقتها في كأس البيرة

.ومن أصدقاء كانوا يزدحمون في قلبي بلا أكتاف

خفيفة من عصافير كانت تعشش في جديلة قلبي

,خفيفة كوعد الغواية

,خفيفة إذاً من رجالي ومن أصدقائي

,من صوري ومن ملابسي

من نصوصي ومن نافذتي التطل على عجوز تكتب رسائل لله عن وحدتي

أنا

خ

ف

ي

ف

ة

سوى من اسم تسيل منه امرأة يابسة


MIRAGE

 

I left my doctor’s clinic—weightless with forgiveness.

 

In his fish tank, I left men swimming in my blood.

On the clinic walls, I hung photos scattered in the lantern light of

my memory.

The names recited by friends under my window, 

like dried wheat seeds—I planted in his basil pots. 

I hunt all the bees from my shirt & I clean the colors that melt over

gardens.

Every poem sinks in my glass of beer, & I’m light

of friends that crowded my heart without shoulders,

 

of friends that nested in my heart braids.

Lightness is a tempting false promise.

So—I’m not weighted by my men & my friends,

by my clothes & my photos,

 

by my writings & my window framing an old woman writing to

God about my loneliness.

I am

 

أنا

خ

ف

ي

ف

ة

 

Except for the weeping of the name: dry woman

 


TRANSLATORS’ NOTE:

The letters in Arabic spell out khafifah, meaning ‘weightless’ or ‘light’


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Muna Al Assi is a Palestinian poet and journalist, born in Syria in the Yarmouk refugee camp. She studied English literature at Damascus University and has worked in media for many years in Syria and Dubai; notably at The Gulf Emirates Newspaper. Her work has been published in French, English, Bulgarian, German, Flemish and Italian.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

Dima AlBasha is an entrepreneur and translator from Aleppo, Syria. Since coming to the United States, she has become a promoter of interfaith dialogue and intercultural understanding; as well, she’s given a TEDx talk which bridges gaps between people of different cultures and perspectives. Dima is a translator for the Her Story Is collective.

Jennifer Jean’s poetry collections include VOZ, Object Lesson, and The Fool. Her teaching resource book is Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry. She’s received honors, residencies, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, DISQUIET/Dzanc Books, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Her Story Is collective, the Academy of American Poets, and the Women’s Federation for World Peace. As well, her poems and co-translations have appeared in POETRY, Rattle, The Common, Waxwing, On the Seawall, and elsewhere. Jennifer edits translations for Consequence Forum and is the senior program manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center’s online writing program.

Rebecca Foust

REBECCA FOUST


I KEEP HOPING

 

In our minds our sister is lost to us

even as she continues to walk

the earth, pacing the small rooms 

of her last home. Waking, sleeping,

barely eating, sleeping, waking, 

and effacing minute-by-minute 

into a ghost. She is lost 

to us, but I keep hoping

that in her own mind she is not lost

—in her mind she is back in her life

taking dictation at the pentagon

and coming home to work 

on her dollhouses till dawn,

painting lines fine as an eyelash

with a brush fine as an eyelash,

trimming tiny topiaries and 

Christmas trees with twinkle lights

no bigger than the spark 

that flies off a cap gun. No bigger 

than the beads flocking the trees 

in her shadowbox

with its “Winter White” theme

—she is lost to us—

and I keep hoping that in her mind

she is not lost but still there 

somewhere, taking dictation 

of what is being said

but not understood, unstringing 

the tiny, shining pearls 

of her memories, picking them up 

with tweezers and using a glue gun

to affix each one, beautiful, 

immutable, in its perfect place. 


SNEAKY LIKE THAT

 

In the sixth week of living by myself

during the pandemic, I set up a bird feeder

to feel less alone. Now birds

 

with plump breasts—pigeon and quail, 

nuthatch & towhee—are pecking at the trail 

of seed laid almost to my back door. 

 

They remind me of bird in The Poetics 

of Space using its breast to shape its nest cup 

of mud, hollowed and pressed

 

with so much persistence

that the nest could be said to be made, 

also, of suffering. 

 

Lately I’ve been gritting my teeth 

through the days, but I’ve also begun 

waking to birdsong.

 

The birds are so many, so close, 

&—it occurs to me—not all that fast 

or smart. It took a week

 

to coax them to the feeder, 

to teach them it was there—free food 

for the taking. Maybe one 

 

could be snared for my dinner, 

I think, when the food supply fails. In fact, 

I could eat their seed

 

ground into bread & could

in a real pinch actually catch one, 

or maybe it’s time 

 

to start thinking 

about buying a gun, you know, 

just for food and maybe, 

 

protection. That’s how 

the thoughts never thought before 

come in now, often, 

 

but rarely articulate—sneaky like that.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Foust’s fourth full-length book Only (Four Way Books 2022) received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. Recognitions include runner up for the 2022 Missouri Review Editors Prize, winner of the Pablo Neruda, CP Cavafy, and James Hearst poetry prizes, a Marin County Poet Laureateship, and fellowships from Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Sewanee. Recent poems are in The Common, Five Points, Ploughshares, POETRY, and Quarterly West.

Richard Tillinghast

RICHARD TILLINGHAST


SMOKE

 

My schoolteacher friend drove me 

      in his schoolteacher’s-salary Subaru

  from the lighthouse in St. James, explaining.

I liked riding in the wet-wool fustiness

of that car, its car-heater warmth 

   and up-north funk.

 

I liked jamming my boots down into

   the days-old crumpled-up 

fast food wrappers and old newspapers,

     and I cleared with my glove

circles in the frost on the windshield

        as we bumped off the blacktop.

 

Then there we were on foot in the mud and rain,

circumnavigating the circle of stones— 

          I counted thirty-nine. We left offerings

    where others had left theirs—coins 

and trinkets: a St. Christopher, a couple of jacks, 

  a lipstick, a rabbit’s foot, a dime-store ring.

 

Someone had chiseled into one of the stones

    what looked like a rune. 

Was that a thousand years ago?

The weather had not erased it. My friend said

  that on the solstice the rising sun

     lines up across the circle’s axis.

 

And that was when the car full of Anishinaabe

appeared—Ojibwe from the look of them—,

              their car even older than ours.

I watched as they took tobacco from a pouch,

lit it and lifted up some words

            into the smoke and drizzle.

 

Did that smoke, did those words 

     keep their circle unbroken

in the life they lived among us in this America?—

invisible most days, their lives unchronicled

in the newspapers crushed underfoot 

     inside the schoolteacher’s car.


THREADS

 

When I say he was a presence 

in the house where I grew up, 

I don’t mean as a ghost. My dead 

grandfather would have had, I think, 

too much tact to return

after the dirt had been shoveled, the limousines 

parked, the black clothes folded and put away.

Still, his spirit inhabited our house.

 

He was born the last year of the war

in Tennessee, and he died

the last year of the war in France,

burning up with influenza the troops 

brought back from the trenches. 

When the Baptist preacher came to his bedside 

to pray for him, Grandfather asked him would he 

go out and get him a cold bottle of beer.

 

Grandfather died with his reserve intact. 

How little I know of the man!

I touch, wondering, the keys he left

among his things, their antiquated 

edges still sharp:

strongbox, cash drawer, lock box, 

office door and locks unknown—

keys to nothing.

 

When I was seventeen I found

in the back of the attic 

his silk frayed smoking jacket, his chesterfield 

coat with its velvet lapels. I wore 

his clothes until 

I wore them out, feeling his spirit

breathe through the threads. Here’s his gold 

watch on my table. I keep it wound.


REVIVAL

 

Abandoned on what was a road,

         a pickup truck, 

blue paint purpled by sun,

                  and a Model-A Ford

 

stalled on this shoulder of the mountain,

sumac growing up through the horsehair seats,

            rusty seed pods in league

                        with the rust of the machine.

 

Creeper interlaces the tines of an antique

                harvester in a field,

 

a cooking pot overturned in the yard.

 

Inside the house, pictures still hang on the walls,

   though they took their Bible with them.

I don’t hear the hymns they sang, do you?

And what has become of their church?

 

But let this homeplace speak. Let it tell its story

 

now that the machinery of the world 

               starts to misfire,

   stall out, and begin its slow deceleration.

 

Maybe it’s time to disappear 

down into the creek bed, quick as we can,

            ahead of what’s coming over the mountain,

 

follow the deer tracks

        and the strange cries of wild turkeys.

Flakes of obsidian, arrowheads, rusty bolts,

                a cannon ball from an old battle,

bleed into the stream 

           that obliterates our tracks.

 

Could we ride bareback again,

   plow the earth, hunt and trap,

                        sew and mend,

   rig a snare to catch the feral pigs,

            build a tabernacle

in the loneliness of the unpeopled mountains?


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Tillinghast’s new collection, Blue If Only I Could Tell You, is the winner of the 2022 White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Blue If Only I Could Tell You is his thirteenth collection, in addition to five books of creative nonfiction, including Istanbul: City of Forgetting and Remembering, and most recently, Journeys into the Mind of the World: A Book of Places, 2017. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New Republic, The New Criterion, The Best American Poetry and elsewhere. In addition, he reviewed new poetry for the New York Times Book Review for many years. The recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Council, the Irish Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Richard lives in Hawaii and spends his summers in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Angie Estes

ANGIE ESTES


SOLSTICE

 

Towards the end

                        of her life, my mother kept

                                    saying I’m going to be here

as long as I’m supposed

                        to be, as long as the days

                                    of June and as long as

Proust said a sentence needs

 

                        to be because it contains a

                                    complete thought, and no matter

how complex it may be, the thought

                        should remain intact because the shape 

                                    of the sentence is the shape

of thought: think how

                        the hummingbird feeds as long

 

                                    as it needs to, dipping

its tongue to make the nectar tremble,

                        although not nearly as long as I stayed 

                                    behind the Baptist church beneath

honeysuckle when I was ten, pulling

                        each flower’s pistil back through

                                    its throat to drip one sweet bead

 

onto my tongue before my parents

                        drove us up into the mountains

                                    for the all-day meeting and supper

on the ground, which always

                        seemed to me more like all-day

supper with cakes and pies laid out,

waiting

end-to-end on picnic tables, watermelons

 

                        soaking in their galvanized tubs

                                    of ice while the grills kept burning

until even after evening 

                        prayer, everyone still

                                    had mustard on their

folded hands and

                        faces, the nights so dark

 

                                    that all the fireflies were one

giant sparkler held up to tick away

                        the night in their hide-and-seek

                                    here-I-am, over there, here, now

here, as if the shorter

                        the days become, the longer the sentence

                                    needs to be.


LE PAYS OÙ JE DÉSIRERAIS VIVRE:

 

terra, cara, terroir: in the open

mouth of the wind, blue-black from all

                                    the kites it has eaten, blown back

like the past, where the family lives

                                    in Alexandre Dumas’ Le chevalier

d’Harmental : 5 rue du Temps-Perdu.

                                    In the about-to-bloom history

of wisteria, twisting while

                                    the soft gray paws of pussy willow

boom suddenly above me, a thunderhead

                                    nods like Mary at the Annunciation,

recalling

how Abraham said the journey is within, from

                                    inside us to inside us, nous même à nous

même. Where else could they be

                                    headed in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia when 

the chest of the Virgin Mary flies open

                                    to release the beating doves?

Celtic perigrini wandered 

                                    in “thin places,” sites in landscape

where the borders between

                                    this place and some other, past 

and present, feel most fragile, begin

                                    to fray the way bison painted on walls

in Grotte de Niaux move in

                                    and out of rock as if it were

a membrane between worlds. 

                                    Out back,

the mourning dove bobbing

                                    in the birdbath, one wing unfurled

and hoisted on its mast, doesn’t even think

                                    about sailing home. She’s somewhere

between Pavlov and Pavlova.


COMMENT J’AIMERAIS MOURIR:

 

in Old English unweder, “unweather,”

weather so extreme that it seems

                        to have come from another

                                    climate or time, still holding

in my hand a lame, which bakers use 

                        to carve their mark 

                                    on bread—not to be

confused with l’âme, the soul—

                        while blackbirds line up

                                    to form an abacus on the wire 

above me, listening 

                        to the Arpeggione Sonata, which Schubert 

                                    composed for an almost

extinct instrument, like the moon

                        we keep singing to anyway—Casta

                                    Diva, pure goddess, shine

on, shine on harvest moon

                        up in the sky (the most difficult

                                    part of the opera, the soprano 

replied, was not crying after

                        her own death)—and the moon, too,

                                    a trace fossil, a sign left

by the impress of life rather than

                        life itself, as in the fitting

                                    of a bespoke jacket: all dots

and dashes, Cezanne’s

         taches, what’s left of Mont Sainte-

     Victoire when he is done painting it.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angie Estes is the author of six books of poems, including Enchantée (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize) and Tryst, one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize.

Valerie Duff

VALERIE DUFF


BIOME

 

There was a blue drink on the porch sill at the Black Whale

and it was summer.

 

So many things show up on tests.

This is how we live, adjusting odds, percentages

 

in our favor. Still I sweated in a hot back room

with windows seamed shut

 

googling survive googling fear googling possibility

the WiFi ghosting. Never death never radial

 

symmetry or prime mover. Meanwhile outside,

bumper cars and sand toys nested

 

in the oyster grass. Island birds pieced

their nothing songs from soft white sand

 

and little tar

not far from Three Mile Island

 

against the tide, the guard who held me upside down

for fun when I was five.

 

How close lifeguard

to diagnostic tool. I never felt the thing,

 

the jelly luminescent in my breast. Its Medusa stalks

a wave of supplication, umbrella pulse of dreams.


REPORT

 

Oh, honey,

the unspoken life of the body

and the world in which we drink

tea and eat the ruby

seeds that doom us half to hell.

To be so scared

when considering

the afterlife in the sentinel

pot where tea may steep too long.

A riverbed of tannin coats

the way a specimen lines a dish.

The body, its margin

assessment, has forgotten where it came from,

a snow-capped mountain that’s left

its origins behind, strata

too deep to feel, layered up

to melting ice. Its axillary

may one day give way

to a deluge that will hide

the dye stained earth, simply

spun to a surface of water,

a change so gradual

most don’t feel the slipping

of the shoreline until core

markers are submerged, until

all systems are undone. Because invasion

history of dragon fire

yields satellites

that wink and spread across the galaxy

leaving only vapors of ourselves,

prognostic rolls of the dice,

the wheel spins to reassess

when a medieval fortune teller

with the tarot comes to evaluate

the fireworks display.

All has turned to ash, to sack.

Only skin remains,

a cloak that lived the lie so long:

cutaneous tissue with no diagnostic abnormality.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Valerie Duff’s second book, Aquamarine (Lily Poetry Review Books), will be published in September 2023. Her first book, To the New World (Salmon Poetry), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize from Queens University, Belfast in 2011. She has held fellowships from the VCCA and Writers’ Room of Boston. She is currently working in Donor Relations and Stewardship at MIT and is reviews editor at Salamander.

Alison Granucci

ALISON GRANUCCI


ODE TO THE STAR-NOSED MOLE

 

It came out of the dark, blind   sniffing

for air   not light — it was

ugly & alone & without a thought, I scooped 

up this fleshy star 

into my fleshy palm — two organs

 

of touch   touching the unknown.

But I was not root or stone, worm or loam,

I had to put him down —

faster than a wink, he disappeared underground.

It was love. There is no other word.  

 

I longed to follow him down.

           

                                                                                                If soil were my home —

and my    fossorial nature   alive at last,

                        I’d use my tusky trowel claws

            to throw back the earth to the earth 

and burrow with a fury into the murk      

 

                                                                      tight corridor of dirt pressing me on

 

with no need for useless eyes,

I’d touch-bump in a blur, 

            hunting   with my sea anemone nose — twenty-two rays

         that sense my prey’s   electricity   through water & muck —

 

able to touch twelve things   

            in one second, I’d eat any of the twelve

           deemed grub   not mud —           

          a wonder of evolution, I’d stun worms 

        with my saliva & store them   in my scullery.

 

                                                                                    If I were not me —

I’d mine a truer tunnel 

my excavation urged                  

ever downward                                                             

by an inner weight                     

where on earth does a soul belong

           

clawing through rifts & grit    past fossil & rock 

                                  drawn deeper

                                            by a graver current —

                                                      the earth’s pulse

      electric   & receptive.

 

                                                                                    If I were a star-nosed mole —

I’d raise my own star, 

            ask it to guide me

                                  as I delve

                                  ever more elusive 

                                  to what is always   

                                               churning & iron hot —

                                                my descent toward   the   

                                                                               unreachable   

                                                                               root of all stars.

 

In this untold below, what prey   but my own fear    would I eat —

                                                                                         and for what would I pray?

 

To be held by the earth & rest — 

                                                         — and to sense, with my little dipper rays

 

as I approach the end

 

                                           how in my blind digging   

 

                                                                             all I ever touched was God.

 

 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alison Granucci is a poet, writer, and woodland gardener living in the Hudson Valley. She has poems published or forthcoming in EcoTheo Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, and a book anthology of bird poems by Paris Morning Publications. In 2005, Alison founded Blue Flower Arts, the fist literary speaker’s agency in this country to represent poets, and ran it until she retired at the end of 2019. A 2022 graduate of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program, Alison serves as a poetry reader for The Rumpus and is at work on a book-length manuscript.

Paula Bohince

PAULA BOHINCE


THE UNRAVELING

 

This is the field where it happened: shotgun grass

quieting casings that fell from the lesson, where cans

yipped and the kennel hushed over the summer

when Gail got the news.  This is the field

 

where Big Jim bit the lip of his sonofabitch stallion

who’d kicked his gut, that sorrel mistake whose fetlock

went hinky, then lame, the stud fee spent

and then some, and this is the cherry, limber

 

in spring, blowing its kisses, and this is the walnut

stolen by arborists who promised a cut

then paid my mother in shame.  I’m 

on the stump, idiotic, still tasting the sawdust,

 

gripping a Queen Anne cordials box, her one

Christmas indulgence, bought from the Kmart before

the backroads unspooled, blue sirens

in aisles where our machine got its bobbins,

 

where guppies swarmed, oblivious in cities, 

where I chose my training bra for its dinky charm

so when a hubbub rang down the road

I jingled, my parents running at full strength,

 

taking up the muddy rope lassoed round

the horse’s ribs as he reared in the ditch, in fall chaos, 

the year undone, but surely there’d be another, 

another, until somewhere it all tipped over.  Just leave

 

me alone, my mother said.  I’m done with the past.

She whose future was inches, my muscular dad decades

gone.  I thought I’d die from confusion: unloved,

unraveled, with no one to braid me or pull.


ESCAPE TO FIJI

 

Swimming in a mirage, past the bull shark, sicklefin 

lemon, buoyed by a personalized ocean, psychosis floating 

me when I wearied, rescued thus by blue saturation, perfumed

and pumicing element, living

as on that Styx song in adolescence, trance overtaking fear 

on the papasan chair,

the same biblical sentence cycling 

until it engraved on my brain God’s authority.  I turned 

the watery page.  I went to the sun unashamed, submitting to new

species: boggling palms, animals like drawings.

 

Say toxin again.  Under a dome of aura, swirl over me

noni soap.  Oils of frangipani, 

verbena, gifted by the last true friend, color me in.

Flowers, include me ecstatic in your orgasm.  

Opening spheres of vistas, let me buckle with, unbothered

as clownfish or mollusk.  Erase me

lotioning little sister’s behind-the-ears, years of weeping

scales, skin like vellum, her head on my lap, our systems

changing    

permanently, in stress.  Benumbed, watching beauty queens           

departing an airplane, sisterly in leis and sashes.


WOOVES

 

Wait, what was he asking?  Wooves was how it sounded, jet-

lagged and woozy in the Highlands.  Slumped dumb on Laura 

Ashley, in woolens, drinking sherry, I heard, Do you 

have wooves where you live?  Ah, and then they came: bark-colored,

char-

coal and ash, suckling, adamant in autumnal red.  I left

Cadbury bars on his studio doorstep, each one

bigger than the next to break his politesse.  I bathed and watched

the rained on skylight.  Burns Night Supper brought haggis

and burred recitations, talk of vintages, fox hunts.  

The Oxford scholar slurred,

Did you have toy cars or a train set?  The smile melting

away was a revelation, fire snarling,

hissing at the question.  Alone, finally he confessed his mother 

was like the iceberg in Titanic and how he felt

about that Faber rejection.  A cough.  A twilit handshake.  

Clean as moss, I lay in castle-shadow, in moorish ambiance.  Wooves

were the lips of schoolboys at water fountains after 

shaggy play.  His tweed jacket as he bicycled to town for bottles

of ink.  Whine of the left behind echoing in the faraway.


MIDLOTHIAN GOLDFINCH

 

Giddy as dawn, as a promise of treasure, downwind 

from the Esk, a millennium of rain erasing the temple roof, 

allowing fields of moss and snowdrops.  Song alert

to brokenness, leant to voices lost in wind, echoing as

no one, no one.  Ecstatic bell in the steeple nest 

above saplings torqued as arrows landed in a chorus.  

Its call dims, in preservation, where knights once rested, grew 

avid, sacrificed youth to plotting and hoarfrost, to abide 

in a mutual heart, as brothers.  I’m yours, the gold murmured 

in dreams and waking, vocalizing each estrangement.


BONE FLUTE, 43,000 BC

 

Its wail fell into my feed unbidden, interrupting 

trance and techno looped during the zoned-out hour

after the funeral.  It called forth the cave, the ancient 

bear, the femur hammered by instinct.  The flutist in mother

Slovenia swayed in muslin robes, incandescent long

white hair a candle in the drip.  He played the stranger’s missive

while a virus wilded.  Ensconced in sunlight, like spiders 

crumpled in amber, we’d stood that morning before her 

name, 2021 not yet etched.  Just us and a priest in a flowered mask,

a muffled commendation of her spirit, Bible thick as the

Mabinogion.

We watched an unraveling thread on his vestments soar

as he spoke, snow overwhelming the daffodils.  After

the vigil, its startle tunneled through satellite and ether, laid 

to rest within the delicate bones of the future.  A miracle 

that it should exist at all.  And when tender improvisation shifted 

to Ode to Joy—the familiar rampage, the forceful Go on—

it touched an anguished hollow held inside my body, 

that flute the source of weeping and hope.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paula Bohince is the author of three poetry collections from Sarabande, most recently Swallows and Waves. She was the guest editor of Best New Poets 2022.  

Alice Cone

ALICE CONE


A GOOD FOUNTAIN: RACHEL CUSK’S SECOND PLACE

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021. 183 pages. $25

 

Central to Rachel Cusk’s novel Second Place is the idea that art can nudge a person into awareness—into recognition of one’s own existence and that of the world: people, places, objects, moments, now. The story is presented as a long address, written by a woman identified as M to someone named Jeffers. Its conflict is this: having seen the paintings of an artist identified as L, years ago, when she was a young mother unhappy with the trappings of her life but momentarily alone in Paris, M was jarred into awareness: I am here. Consequently, she knew she needed to live in a different way and she changed her life, leaving her husband and causing a great deal of pain to herself and her loved ones but eventually coming to live a simpler life in this beautiful, isolated place, a marsh on the edge of the sea, with a new husband named Tony, whose attention to the moment seems to be an innate trait—a man who does not need art to jolt him into recognition but who accepts his wife’s need. M’s mind is restless, inquiring, analytical. Apparently, she’s a writer (although the reader doesn’t  learn this until midway through the book), and her need to connect with art and other artists is met when the couple builds a “second place” on their property where painters, writers and the like can stay and do their work, for extended periods. M’s dream has been that L will come—she wants him to see her marsh and present it to the world; she wants him to see her. As the one whose work awakened her, L is given, by M, the responsibility of going further. Although she can see the marsh as it is and has in many ways come to recognize herself, M’s vision does not appear to be enough. She seems to need affirmation from L. 

The plot unfolds after an unnamed global crisis (which I took to be the 1929 stock market crash) leaves L with few options and he finally accepts M’s invitation, bringing a beautiful young woman named Brett to the marsh with him. This story allows Cusk—through M’s narration and her long paragraphs of analysis, the few drawn-out scenes and the stunning descriptions—to explore two questions regarding the role of the artist. The first has to do with the extent to which the artist’s mission gives him (the singular masculine pronoun is purposeful here) the leeway to be self-absorbed (oblivious? inconsiderate?), in order to do the work, and the extent to which the artist must (oxymoronically?) negate his sense of self, allow his sense of self to dissolve, in order to become a channel for the work. The other question has to do with the mental freedom such work requires—a freedom that includes but is not limited to permission—and the extent to which that sort of freedom has been denied women, historically and systemically. 

M tells Jeffers that when she saw an image of one of L’s paintings on a sign advertising the Paris exhibition, she was struck “by the aura of absolute freedom his paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentantly male down to the last brushstroke. . . . [an] aura of male freedom [that] belongs likewise to most representations of the world and of our human experience within it,” going on to say “that as women we grow accustomed to translating [that freedom and that experience] into something we ourselves can recognise.” In short, male artists have been afforded the freedom to represent the world as they see and experience it—which is not necessarily the way women see and experience the world. (Consider these lines from Muriel Rukeyser’s 1968 poem ”Käthe Kollwitz”: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/The world would split open.”) It should go without saying that artists must be afforded not only the freedom to tell the truth about their lives but permission and time. M reminds us that when a group of people are not afforded freedom of being or thought, there remains not only a range of knowledge to which they are not privy but a way of being in the world that they “know [they’re] not entitled to.” So, according to M, female artists and writers “impersonate” the males—adopting a male way of writing instead of finding their own way and winding up feeling as if some aspects of themselves are “male,” as if “the habit of impersonation has gone deeper in [them] than most.” 

And so, for M, there arise the twin problems of feeling inadequate—as if she’s a failure as a woman—and being despised—for refusing to submit and be a woman. L actually accuses her of such a refusal, and in retrospect, M suggests he was afraid of being devoured (which is different than dissolving), as he had been afraid, in childhood, that his strident mother (compensating for her own position in society?) would devour him. I believe most readers will understand that M’s problems are the result of the position assigned to women in twentieth-century society (not so different than that assigned to women in other centuries), but I take it as good news that at least one female reviewer does not seem to understand what it is like to feel inherently restrained—coerced (in part by the art available to her!) into feeling as if art were the province of men only. Like Cusk, I was born in the middle of the twentieth century, and I can relate to M’s issues on many levels, so while I was stymied by what I took to be that reviewer’s misunderstanding of M’s statements about the aura of freedom in male art, I am heartened by her inability to relate.  

That journalist’s review is one of a handful I have read since finishing the book, but before I read the novel, I refrained from finishing any review beyond the first—the one that made me want to read Second Place in the first place. This shrewd review notes the ambiguity surrounding the novel’s characters and setting, remarking that the story seems to occur “in some indeterminate prefeminist past.” At first, as I began reading the novel, I envied the way this critic was able to read the narrative blind, with the freedom to sort out its puzzle for herself—because, by then, her final paragraph had led me to discover that Cusk had based M’s experience on the writings of Mabel Dodge Luhan, who, in her memoir Lorenzo in Taos, depicts the sojourn that D. H. Lawrence (who happens to be Cusk’s literary mentor) and his wife Frieda had made to Dodge’s New Mexico estate. (The memoir is written as a series of letters to D. H. Lawrence, Frieda Lawrence and the poet Robinson Jeffers.) By the time I reached the end of the novel, however, I was pleased to have known of the book’s connection to both Lawrence and Jeffers: I happened to be familiar with one poem by each of them, and I found these two poems to be vital to my understanding of Cusk’s novel.

Lawrence’s “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through” begins with the line “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me,” with the speaker asking to give way—that he might become a vessel through which inspiration could flow, a “good fountain” that would “blur no expression, spoil no whisper.” The poem helps me to understand both M and L’s notion that an artist must get out of his own way (dissolve), in order to become a channel for the work, and the way the truth of this notion plays out in the story. Although L acts like an egomaniac, milking the privilege of being a talented, well-known artist for all it’s worth, it is only after he has had a stroke—after not only his ego but “reality” itself begins to dissolve—that he is able to see M, in his painting of her and her daughter, Justine. 

Of course, it is important that L does not paint or see M earlier. This is something she has to do herself. It has not been enough that her husband Tony can see her; it would never have been enough for the artist to see her, either. By the time M is swimming with Justine within the phosphorescence of the marsh, she has given up on gaining L’s attention and gone on with her life. She is present, within the moment, and the painting depicts her presence, illuminated within the darkness, as well as her concord with Justine, the now-grown child from whom she was separated for a year after she left her first husband, and who has come to serve as a mirror for her mother, having abandoned both the “frumpy frocks” she used to wear and her safe but ineffectual boyfriend, bringing the novel full-circle.

It also seems important that L’s acknowledgment of M does not become evident to the artist himself until later. He continues to insult her, spouting venom, long after he has left the marsh. It appears that while he was painting, he was, in fact, simply a channel, unaware, as the wind blew through him (which indicates to me that artists do the work for their own sake as much as for the public’s, hoping to be shown something true and be awakened, and which is why I believe we must beware of boycotting, or “canceling,” artists who appear to be rude or small-minded).

            In any case, L does acknowledge, at the end, what he has seen of M. In the letter found in his Paris hotel room after his death, L apologizes, saying she was right about many things and that he misses her place, asking why things become “more actual afterward” and ending both his letter and Cusk’s book by saying, “This is a bad place.” He’s talking about Paris—with its artifice—where he went to be with the daughter of his former lover, a woman with whom he had shared a summer in California, just being and swimming in the ocean, but to whose daughter he would turn as a predatory, older but famous man. 

The trappings of a culture in which fame grants men the license to lure young women to hotel rooms bring to mind “the seine-net/gathering the luminous fish” in Robinson Jeffers’s “The Purse-Seine,” as does Paris itself, which represents the city in the poem—with its “galaxies of light,” where we have imprisoned ourselves and around which “[t]he circle is closed, and the net/Is being hauled in.” Likewise, the swimming women in Cusk’s novel—the beloved of L’s youth, swimming in the Pacific, as well as M and Justine, swimming in the phosphorescence of the marsh—bring to mind the phosphorescent sardines in the poem’s first stanza. Until they are caught, these incandescent fish are visible only in the dark.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alice Cone teaches creative writing at Kent State University, where she has also worked for the Wick Poetry Center, as teaching artist and programming assistant. In 2022, Cone taught a class at KSU’s Florence Summer Institute called “Beginning Again in Italy: Women’s Journeys and Our Own,” and in 2023, she will teach “Traveling and Writing” there. With an M.A. in poetry writing from Boston University, Cone has led workshops for students in public schools, veterans at a homeless shelter, seniors in a nursing home, and providers at a hospital. Her poetry chapbooks include As If a Leaf Could Be Preserved (Finishing Line Press, 2006) and Shattering into Blossom (Interior Noise Press, 1998); her latest novel (unpublished) is The Trickster Center. Recently, Cone became a grandmother.

David Blair

DAVID BLAIR


Several Beginnings, a Neglected Essential Collection: Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems

 

1

If Delmore Schwartz had not produced his hybrid or mixed-genre classics, his 1938 book In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and the postwar book we are going to talk about here, Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems, with its title sequence inspired by Danny Kaye, would we have “Mixed Emotions” from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery, I do not know. I’m being random here, in a way, as there are a lot of other poems that find language and would do just as well. I had gone looking for one with Daffy Duck painted on the side of a bomber or something when I found and remembered how much I love this one about a dream pinup:

           

A pleasant smell of frying sausages

            Attacks the senses, along with an old, mostly invisible 

            Photograph of what seems to be girls lounging around

            An old fighter bomber, circa 1942 vintage.

            How to explain these girls, if indeed that’s what they are,

            These Ruths, Lindas, Pats and Sheilas

            About the vast change that’s taken place

            In the fabric of our society, altering the texture

            Of all things in it? And yet

            They somehow look as if they knew, except

            That it’s so hard to see them, it’s hard to figure out

            Exactly what kind of expression they’re wearing.

            What your hobbies, girls? Aw nerts,

            One of them might say, this guy’s too much for me.

 

Please don’t expect me to answer this question I have raised, but we also might not have Ashbery’s Parmigianino without Schwartz’s Seurat in poems that try their best to say different versions of everything. But what’s in this passage of this poem anyway? Eloquence or nerts? In this one of his modes, Ashbery extends what Schwartz does with the language and idiom of American “sub-literary” culture as sure as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth pick up on the idiom of the performative talk that they heard and which forms their language and which enters page after page of rollercoaster surprise, and the influence of Schwartz the writer and the personality on Bellow is so well known, thanks to Humboldt’s Gift, that we might not really have considered Schwartz and poetry enough. At the time that New Directions published the unusual Vaudeville, the publisher was expecting Schwartz to complete a long-awaited study of T.S. Eliot, which he never did. But he did complete Vaudeville for a Princess. 

Isn’t there some vaudeville in the abrupt transitions and leaps in diction, not to mention the song and dance aspects, of The Waste Land.  I always hear Groucho Marx when I read the “Good night, sweet ladies” routine in the pub at the end of “A Game of Chess.”


2

Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems came out in 1950. Vaudeville was already like Mister Kurtz (dead). That’s why Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and other comedians of the 1950s, Lenny Bruce for instance, and also the choreographer Bob Fosse, and Anita O’Day’s junky drummer, started out in burlesque. You want to know how hokey and sentimental the idea of vaudeville was in 1950, check out Singing in the Rain, those horrible plaid suits and goofy hats that Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor wear in when they do “Fit as a Fiddle” in a montage of railroad tracks. The talkies killed Vaudeville, as sure as they did the acting career of Lina Lamont. Here comes television, already casting a blue shade in Schwartz’s collection.

If you want to read a copy of Vaudeville for a Princess, which I hope you will, tonight it is for sale on Amazon for a mere $70.29, a lot cheaper than the 1938 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, which you can have as your very own for $750. Comparable works come a lot cheaper in terms of raw price. Life Studies/For the Union Dead can be had for $12.59. 77 Dream Songs for $15, Citizen, an American Lyric, for $15.69. How many of the people who have given Vaudeville for a Princess a lukewarm shoulder, particularly seventy years ago, had even read the book Spring and All by William Carlos Williams. A book that we can understand and appreciate better than the contemporary critics who gave it mixed reviews and did not appreciate how a translator of Rimbaud could find and repurpose language and borrow forms and idioms from pop culture and other seemingly naive sources, and who what’s more were probably expecting to find the expected, a series of very well-made urns rather than a composite work with moving parts whose genius lies in shifts and juxtapositions, truly, a book, Vaudeville is an antique whose time maybe has come. While a high price tag might look like an unabashed marker of success, it also means that nobody is reading a book. Some boon, Schwartz himself might say. 

But it was also meant to look something like an antique. The back cover is solid yellow, and the front cover has a black rectangle on top of a somewhat larger yellow rectangle. The graphic designer chose a vaguely thirties font for the title of the book. It resembles the opening credits for the movie Chinatown, which was a product of the thirties nostalgia craze of the early seventies. There is an epigraph from Plato’s Symposium, in English translation cast in a faux-Greek alphabet font that looks like it could be from a Jazz age translation of Catullus or Pindar or The Nightlife of the Gods by Thorne Smith, author of Topper. Curiously, the front matter and the section divider pages are made of the same black paper that you would find in a photo album of deckle-edged snapshots people had developed of their picnics and one-piece bathing suits for the first few decades of the twentieth century, a fragile black paper that works well with Schwartz’s gloominess, nostalgia and intimacy. Atlas, who is not an especially sharp judge of poetry as he is a storyteller, claims that Schwartz saw the black sheets as the equivalent of blackouts between acts. 

This reminds me of what we see in J.V. Cunningham’s epigram about a burlesque show a few years later, and the vulgarity of the Cunningham poem in a way shows something about the dark sheets as well. “I left the silver dollars on the table/ And tried the show. The black-out, baggy pants,/ Of course, and then this answer to romance:/ Her ass twitching as if it had the fits,” and so on. British Music Hall sounds like it was always somewhere between vaudeville and burlesque, a little naughtier, as the British guy in your office will occasionally call you the c-word via Cockney rhyming slang when you made that sound while eating hot ramen in your cubicle. “My life is like a music hall,” Arthur Symonds notes, drily, right before modernism, not entirely comfortable. The actual physical Vaudeville for a Princess resembles a playbill from a light musical comedy, which you might find photographs of in an old issue of Stage, the Magazine of After Dark, perhaps with a young Orson Welles as Brutus in the Mercury Theater production of Julius Caesar. It looks like something that has survived in an unlikely way from the other side of World War Two, the unspeakable and unthinkable carnage and numbers. 

I think this example of the bookmaker’s art is the best container for Schwartz’s book. There are three sections. The first, the title sequence, contains prose interludes of great humor and pathos and increasing darkness written in an approximation of a chatty and sophisticated humorist and disconsolate lecturer on contemporary issues like divorce and celebrity and the sorts of literature that are generally part of popular culture, Shakespeare, the Mozart operas with librettos by Da Ponte. Here we find the voice and collaged and multi-faceted diction that has been so important to American prose writers but which also informs his poems in general, and punctuated by song-like poems, many of them neo-Elizabethan songs that feel related to the “society verse” lyrics of Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter, but sadder. Then there is a section of poems often addressed to us as “Citizens.” This section is called “The True, the Good and Beautiful,” values that might suggest hierarchies, or ideals, but which for a democratic poet like Schwartz are contenting and non-hierarchical, a quality we find in his later work, when all of the details in “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine,” including its current location, all weigh about the same. He is always like the kid in his poem who rejects either/or for both, and in his later poems which are talky and manically ecstatic, which Ashbery thinks maybe we have yet to catch up with even as he concedes that he does not like them as much as the earlier lyrics, he tries to say everything at once. We tend to think of Schwartz in relation to his friends, Berryman and Lowell, and also Plath, of course, as poets of personal life, of confession, but that is only part of the story. They are political poets who are at odds with hierarchies of privilege, and this section is particularly important for understanding how Vaudeville is a sort of pinecone, less overt in politics, for some of what we see develop in Lowell and Berryman in the late fifties and sixties. These social poems cast what KRS-One might call their “edutainment messages” in a voice that is something like a theatrical, dubious and found cultural item in itself. Then the third section of Vaudeville, “The Early Morning Light” ends the book with its updated-Elizabethan vibe, with a sequence of sonnets, which have cumulative, downbeat force. 

I am pretty sure that when they made a movie version of Kiss Me, Kate, when Anne Miller was spazzing out and tap-dancing her face off to “Tom, Dick or Harry,” one of the hepcats dancing around her in Technicolor doublet and tights was in the same color pattern and geometry of the cover of Vaudeville for a Princess. Only the book did not get very good reviews or sell many copies and is not in print because it was ahead of its time as well as at the back of its time. 

 

3

Everybody is crazy about the short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” which is the kind of rare story that once you read it a few times, you find yourself thinking about at odd moments throughout your life. “Just tonight, I was thinking how the narrator’s father admired William Howard Taft” is something that I could have said many evenings, as I often think, “Is not Somerville a city of churches?” The ending of that story is one that epitomizes Schwartz, in his utterly sad pessimism, and his way of suggesting many hours in failed psychoanalysis and an overwhelming sense that after a disastrous childhood or after disastrous parents, you never get well, and also his articulation of the most teenage-sounding discovery of inalterable fate imaginable: “everything you do matters too much.” When you turn twenty-one, it won’t be fun at all, “the windowsill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.” There is, I believe, a little Delmore Schwartz in the poems that David Ferry writes sometimes about people trapped by immovable sadness that they were not able to lift before dying, and his sadness in remembering them and their sometimes inalterable and painful anguish feels like realizing how utterly sincere and real the sadness can be in a Delmore Schwartz poem. There are a lot of people remembered this way in David Ferry poems the way there are a lot of really good Delmore Schwartz poems full of moments that are so unguarded that I think of Christopher Smart saying that he has a “greater compass both of mirth and of melancholy than another.” Ferry steps back from them while they step into the darkness. Ferry has been around Boston and Cambridge so long that of course he remembers Schwartz being around. Like Schwartz, he used to live on Ellery Street. Chestnuts. Not chestnuts really, but brick sidewalks. The poets of Schwartz’s generation died so young, a lot of them. What bad habits. 

But I digress. What I really mean to say is that there is another ending of a different, but in some ways similar, short story by Delmore Schwartz, and I think this ending is the one that we should keep in mind when we read Vaudeville for a Princess.  Cynthia Ozick uses it as the tile for her brief collections of Schwartz’s stories and poems, a book that I have used when teaching mixed genre creative writing classes. “Screeno” is like “Dreams” with an ending that gives the narrator some stoic peace and pride and joy in not only the goodness of art but the goodness of goodness itself. This is not really what makes it so apropos to our discussion, but some plot summary is necessary. 

The plot is simple. A twenty-five-year-old poet named Cornelius Schmidt is hungry for wild renown, so much so that the only things he can bear to read in the newspapers are the obituaries of great men. Schwartz sees our culture as one where the desire for fame is intense, and it also makes people kind of stupid, and he so fits right into this culture himself, with popcorn. He is also somebody who is torn between high culture and pop culture, which he enjoys with a guilty conscious, and before getting fed up and tired of the obits, we see him force-feeding himself classical music records before gorging himself on what he really likes, “certain singing records of a celebrated movie actress.” Who this might be, I am not sure, but the narrator enjoys Schmidt’s discomfort at liking something his mean and judgmental friends, if he has any, would probably laugh about even as he tacitly defends this taste by finding it sweet, and we can hear this ironic pleasure in the way he makes it sound like porn. Cornelius is the kind of guy who folds up his own poems and puts them inside copies of books by great poets in the hopes that the greatness will rub off. The sense is that if Cornelius could unify his sensibilities, and maybe admit what he really likes, he would further along the road. The critics might not have recognized the connection between Groucho and Eliot, but Groucho and Eliot sure did. No doubt you are thinking of how different literary culture is now, as we can find Stephanie Burt, who is representative in this respect, writing as well and passionately about Frozen 2 or Taylor Swift as she does about C.D. Wright or Monica Youn or Donne or Herbert for that matter, and not with a sense of ironic campiness or hierarchical snobbery. Jarrell has an early poem called “Bad Music,” the title evoking the god-awful taste of most undergraduates at the time.  

There is hope for Cornelius though. He goes to the movies, a double feature of a Spencer Tracy movie and what sounds like a Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy movie. Must have been a Loews theater. He is excited because “Spencer Tracy was an actor who had often pleased him by an absolute unself-consciousness, and Cornelius wished to permit himself to be moved by the operetta music.”  The year seems to be either 1939 or 1940 because during the newsreel, we see Franklin Roosevelt trying to prepare the country for war, and Roosevelt had to sneak around about that until things were already getting hot for England. Roosevelt was a bit like Cornelius, hiding the true nature of his affections and taste, preferring democracy to fascism. So the Depression is ending. By the way, I want to let you know that I am still not quite at the moment that I think is so important, so typifying of the Vaudeville project, but it’s worth pointing out Schwartz is highly aware of the historical moments that surround the smaller moments of his art. Schwartz’s poetry is like a streetcar line or train that runs at oblique angles to popular events and culture, with occasional intersections and persistent commentary upon things both inside and outside of the poems. 

For instance, aside from being a hyper-real evocation of a local landscape with scrubby industry around and uneven sidewalks made of local bricks, this poem from Summer Knowledge might seem like a throwaway about how stuffy Cambridge and Boston seem, or how things felt very uncertain at the end of the Depression, and that things ahead were very ominous, and these things would all be true: 

 

            Cambridge, 1937

 

            At last the air fragrant, the bird’s bubbling whistle

            Succinct in the unknown unsettled trees;

            O little Charles, beside the Georgian colleges

            And milltown New England; at last the wind soft,

            The sky unmoving, and the dead look

            Of factory windows separate. at last,

            From wind gray and wet:

                                                for now the sunlight

            Thrashes its wet shellac on brickwalk and gutter,

            White splinters streak midmorning and doorstep,

            Winter passes as the lighted streetcar

            Moves at midnight, one scene of the past,

            Droll and unreal, stiff, stilted, and hooded. 

 

I am not joking when I say that there is something in this landscape that causes a bit of depression. If you think of 1937 as the year of the “Little Depression,” the year conservatives in the government and Roosevelt himself, in a fit of starchiness according to the admiring book about him Freedom from Fear,  backed off on economy-sustaining relief, their heads like a lit streetcar at midnight, like winter itself, like scenes of the past, their heads “unreal, stiff, stilted,” not with it, backwards, looking the wrong way, holding things up, backwards ass conservative place, probably how Schwartz, the kid from New York, saw it. When he is at his best, when he is well enough to write at the top of his powers, Schwartz is a poet whose work is always in sharp counterpoint to events and contemporary life. Maybe you thought the crabbed sonnets on politics and history that Lowell wrote in the sixties were from just from reading Eugenio Montale. I’ve got some compressed poetry that stays news for you. One of the things that makes Life Studies and Dream Songs so moving in their poems in friendship for Schwartz—elegies from Berryman, a poem about Ellery Street that Schwartz took as an elegy—is that they pick up where he leaves off, and we can say the same thing about American poetry in general. Even shorn of all this social meaning, the spatial metaphor for the moment of time as a single and lit-up streetcar passing through a nightscape as if it were still the middle of the day is like a whole book of haiku in one bump. 

So anyway, Cornelius is at the movies like Wittgenstein after a hard day of scratching his head except Cambridge University asks Wittgenstein to please scratch his head in England, and there is a very lucrative game of bingo before the movies begin. Remember, vaudeville is dead, but the movies are a bit more interactive still at the time, with stronger sense of one-of-a-kind event and happening about them. Movies trying to be theater was a thing. Cornelius is feeling like a big loser, but he wins. Accepting the prize or several hundred bucks, he makes the mistake of admitting that he is a poet, prompting the emcee to make jokes about his big feet (“They’re Longfellows”), and asking him to recite a poem, which he does in ludicrously inappropriate fashion considering the populist nature of the event, with a particularly bleak and famous passage about history from T.S. Eliot’s “Gerontion.” This is the moment that matters for Vaudeville, the almost Dadaist frustration of the audience’s expectations by delivering something bleak and real being met by the audience’s valid laughter at the young man’s pretension and move for crowd-pleasing kudos in the attention economy of the movie theater. It almost does not matter, for our purposes, that the story has an additional twist. An old man, a musician with a violin case, calls out that he has the winning ticket, and though he is mistaken, Cornelius tries to strong-arm the theater into giving the old man a prize as well. The audience getting impatient with this sudden leftwing agitation on the poet’s part delaying their pleasure, Cornelius forfeits his winnings to the old man, his elderly unsuccessful doppelgänger. Walking home, pleased with himself and the world and accepting his solitude as heroic in a Spencer Tracy sort of way, Cornelius privately recites William Dunbar’s “Be merry, man, and tak not sair in mind” to himself, a paen towards expressing all of the cultural and spiritual values of being what you might call “a mensch, a good dude.” By the time he writes “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” Auden did not really have to remind poetry readers that “to be free/ Is often to be lonely,” a certain amount of alienation from all other people and culture the ground floor, not just praiseworthy but desirable, a basic ingredient of conscious life. This was an early story, not published in Schwartz’s lifetime, one of his best. 

Go back a moment. Think of that audience, and then think about the book. There are jokes, this book looks like prose, it’s inspired by Danny Kaye, but guess what? It’s going to be bleak poetry. It’s dedicated to then Princess Elizabeth, who is about to be married, and we get “The Difficulty of Divorce.” We get Iago, “the lowdown on life.” We get Hamlet, “something is wrong with everyone.” The last poem in the section is “Starlight Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve.” In his dramatic monologue for multiple voices based on the Acts of the Apostles, the dove does not descend and bring the gift of eloquence, but more stammering, not tongues, stammering, and none of the twelve really likes being alive anymore. What has gotten into Danny Kaye now? Here is the Jesus or Holy Spirit of this poem:

 

            “Unspeakable unnatural goodness is

            Risen and shines, and never will ignore us;

            He glows forever in all consciousness;

            Forgiveness, love, and hope possess the pit,

            And bring our endless guilt, like shadow’s bars:

            No matter what we do, he stares at it! 

            What pity then deny? what debt defer?

            We know he looks at us like the stars,

            And we shall never be as once we were,

            This life will never be what once it was!” 

 

Boom. There is something like a Dadaist thwarting of expectation in Schwartz’s despairs in poems and prose and in the structure itself of Vaudeville for a Princess. Holy smoke, it’s the atom bomb. So much for Tom and also Jerry. This was hardly a Technicolor Biblical picture, too much Victor Mature and not enough Hedy Lamarr. I guess Oppenheimer was thinking along similar lines when he remembered the lines when he saw the first test one go off. That shining eyeball in the sky turns up in the old woman’s delirium—remember Hiroshima—at the end of Kurosawa’s Light in August. We’re reading about it in Stage the Magazine after Dark. The photo album’s black pages are disintegrating as we turn the pages. 

 

4

Canned language is a problem for this post-war American poet Delmore Schwartz writing early in the Cold War and after the example of mass culture bringing us not only extended radio lives for form vaudeville stars like Jack Benny and Fred Allen who are aging out of the movies, but totalitarian mayhem in the news, and yet there is something about genuine language being both noble and funny that operates as a survival principle in Vaudeville for a Princess, something that we could also say about the good medicine section of Ginsberg’s Howl, a poem that is far more famous for the way that it tries to live with the bomb. I’m thinking of the parts where he lets Carl Solomon know that he is with him, sharing a sense of cultural identity, mad humor, delight in language and in idiom. The first short poem in the book is a variation on a sentence by Pascal, “True eloquence mocks eloquence.” 

 

            Eloquence laughs at rhetoric,

                        Is ill at ease in Zion,

            Or baa-baas like the lucid lamb,

                        And snickers at the lion,

 

            And smiles, being meticulous,

            Because truth is ridiculous.

 

You could say that Schwartz does vaudeville language, and Ginsberg is there with Lenny Bruce at the burlesque. There you have it, Schwartz getting Blakean and recommending the posture of the lamb against the lion. If you don’t have the several hundred dollars at this point you will need to purchase a copy of Schwartz’s book because our discussions here, you can find the prose sections of Vaudeville in a posthumous collection of personal essays and humorous writing The Ego Is Always at the Wheel, and you will see that there is a sort of genetic relationship between Schwartz’s impromptu style of writing prose and Lenny Bruce’s jazzy and associative routines, within his “bits” of prepared material like “Thank You, Masked Man” and “The Sound,” as well as in his freeform pieces that he used to preserve his sanity and to practice his art as his legal issues weighed against him, and talk as practiced by Bellow’s characters Henderson, Herzog and Humboldt, and the performance of talk as the engine that moves The Adventures of Augie March and Roth’s novels like The Professor of Desire, the inventive sentence-by-sentence joy of Grace Paley’s The Little Distrubance of Man, and so on. It’s ironic that in his essay that apparently was the first to use the term postmodern in a discussion of poetry, David Antin really is quite snarky about Schwartz, calling him and Jarrell more or less assemblers of bric-a-brac and makers of uninspired collage, while Antin himself would go on to make “talk poetry.” Nobody owns the great free and improving world of bullshitting, close to a kind of poetry, and that is why there is a sort of revelry in the way dialogue overlaps and interrupts in life-force movies by Orson Welles and Robert Altman.

One of the common ways of thinking of the new American poetry movements of the time, is that they move against the sort of formalist poetry and generally stodgy ways of thinking about poetry and language encouraged by New Criticism. I have a theory about some of the preoccupations of that moment that in a roundabout way might explain how Vaudeville splits from an intellectual milieu that nurtures it, and also why younger poets suddenly embraced an earthier sense of life, a wilder and more derelict and seemingly obscene vocabulary. I’m not sure if it’s right, because I am in truth, not much of a scholar who is interested in too much critical apparatus so much as I am a writer who thinks through poetry and primary texts and my experiences when I am not reading, and this was before the O.E.D. was online. My roommate had him, and I remember him saying, “This old fellow is a pain in the ass.” My theory is that professors of the new critical flavor or era were very hung up on individual words and their definitions, philology. I think the assignment involved looking up and commenting upon every noun, verb and modifier in “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” or something like that, and that’s why we you read poems by poets trained by and as close-readers—Heaney, Pinsky, Hass—you find a good deal of riffing on the roots and definitions of words. In Schwartz, who was of the generation that at least partially taught the generation of the poets born in the late thirties and early forties, we feel this in his interest in idiom taking him in surprising and destabilizing and fresh, even postmodern, directions in some of the great openings of the prose interludes. Here is the opening of “Hamlet, or There Is Something Wrong with Everyone”:

 

            Hamlet came from an old-upper class family. He was the only son of a king. He was very intelligent, though somewhat of an intellectual, and he was quite handsome too, except for a tendency to get fat in the face and thicken. 

 

This is wonderful. I think I once heard my father say that some guest on Johnny Carson was “getting a bit fat in the face.” How horrible, the way that language uses everybody, and so we have to push back. 

 

Sometimes in this section, there is another mark of Schwartz’s ear for “true eloquence”, the ironic distance between the claims of syntax on rationality with the slightly asinine statement of common thinking, partially amused and partially appalled by what passes for intelligence in a country with a truly idiotic reverence for fame and success, the cause of much personal suffering in Schwartz’s poetry and also, as mass culture has always a potentially lethal side, for everybody. We are all of a sudden paying attention to the prose as prose because we are in a poetry book. How weird the language around us is, even when it seems to be behaving in a normal way. 

 

Cars are very important, even if one does not care very much about cars. This is because most people admire a handsome car very much. If one is an owner of a fine car, then one is regarded by the populace in general as being very successful and prosperous.  

 

            (“The Ego Is Always at the Wheel”)

 

There is a slightly mocking side to subtly inflated diction. I once heard a waiter at the Katz Delicatessen say, “If you will sit here, I will be your waiter.” I then asked for a cup of a coffee, and he said, “If you want coffee, you will have to go elsewhere, but if you wish to stay, I will bring you a hot tea, in a hot glass without a handle.” He could see that I was the kind of upstate hick who would object, but really defensive people never get out of their own neighborhood, so I said, “Fine.”  Writers are usually at the sweet and/or sour spot between solitude and company, and one of Schwartz’s specialties is the toxicity of literary company no matter how well anybody is doing , as we see in “The World Is a Wedding,” a novella about a circle of young snobs who are not very good writers,” and “Fun with the Famous, Stunned by the Stars,” one of the prose interludes in Vaudeville. But writers need friendship, and a lot of performative talk begins at or around a table. He has that early poem about how people always talk about each other “mockingly, maliciously,” a poem that hit me right between the eyes when I was in high school, especially his surprising acceptance of this fact of social life, which would hardly be comforting to a reader with a really awful pimple on the side of his left nostril, because “we need/ Each other’s clumsiness, each other’s wit,/ Each other’s company, and our own pride” and that all boils down to “our common love.” 

Humor and poetry have always just learned or discovers a new language or heard the delight in language just changed and always changing. We can hear the sound of dream intellectuals enjoying their own expertise and one-upmanship and self-education in the opening of “Don Giovanni, or Promiscuity Resembles Grapes,” the kind of love of language that you don’t get in school, but with friends who have also put their elbows to newspapers and books. If you want to play with other members of the dream intelligentsia, Grandma Lausch tells Augie March in example as well as in words, you have to be informed: 

 

            Don Giovanni, that much-publicized Spanish sportsman, playboy, man about town, loose liver, and singer has been dealt with extensively and             comprehensively by such experts as Mozart, Da Ponte, Balzac, George Byron, George Bernard Shaw, and other deep thinkers.

            So it would just be gilding the lily, carrying coals to Newcastle, and really redundant to rehearse the whole business of his life and works once more, except that in some respects these profound commentators have missed the point. Perhaps this was because they have the benefit of the Kinsey report’s confusions.  

 

The joke about the Kinsey report is a pop culture standard for 1950 (“According to the Kinsey report, every average man you know/ Prefers his favorite sport when the temperature is low,” according to Cole Porter’s singing barbers in Kiss Me, Kate), but he is also, in a manner of speaking, getting the librettist DePonte and Byron “and other deep thinkers” into diction of the society pages in a tabloid. If you go back to “Mixed Feelings,” you might hear something similar, Ashbery channeling the voice of a corny announcer addressing the characters in a newsreel as if the “characters” can hear them, a sort of move you might have seen in a Looney Tunes cartoon, with an interjection suddenly of Mel Blanc doing a corny paternalistic voice asking Felix the Cat if he really wants to paint glue on the bottom of that mousetrap right before he somehow explodes and steps out of his fur. The whole thing ends like a joke with a punchline with a maybe sexist/homophobic joke after rejecting explanations for Don Giovanni’s unhappy psychology by saying he was just a Lesbian and liked to sleep with girls. This seals it as a performative voice operation for one’s pals, and the only reason it does not sound completely awful is that in poem after poem, Schwartz rejects the possibility for explanation to either diagnose or heal any real problems, a point in makes in different ways at the ends of his studies of Hamlet, Iago, in two essays that end much more sadly, and I have to figure that most poets thought it was “crazy” that there were doctors who actually regarded gayness as illness. Finding a psychiatrist who did not think he was crazy for being gay was a long time coming for Ginsberg. 

In his poetry as well as his prose, Schwartz is always capable of perfect sincerity, an effect as well as an affect that he carries off by allowing his idioms to destabilize so that language can never be anything but something that thinly veils. Here is the open, moving, sincere Schwartz really talking about his own struggles with mental health at the end of his Hamlet piece, letting his voice morph into that of a clerk who must apologize for lost luggage or something like that to a customer who is irate for good reason, but it is not like anybody means to lose somebody’s luggage, even his own. 

 

…However, for what it is worth, and to use clinical terms terms, I will say in brief that I think Hamlet suffered from a well-known pathological disorder. He was manic; and he was depressive. No one knows what the real causes of the manic-depressive disorder are, whether physical or mental or both, and that is why no one understands Hamlet… and no one understands why, no one is responsible, and no one can really alter matters, and yet no one can stop thinking that someone is to blame. To be manic-depressive is just like being small or tall or strong, blond, fat—there is no reason for it, it is quite arbitrary, no seems to have had any choice in the matter,        and it is very important, certainly it is very important. . . This is the reason that the story of Hamlet is very sad, bad, and immoral . . . In this way we must recognize the fact that there is something wrong with everybody.

 

The ending of “Iago, or the Lowdown on Life” is even better, and even worse, and again, I can’t tell if Schwartz is channeling an instructor’s voice or the gee-whiz tone of an incredulous student making an important discovery that real issues are very basic, but this freshness is intensely moving and transformative of the dryness that should be the opposite of discussing anything really important. After rejecting various motives for Iago’s treachery and vulgarity before agreeing with Coleridge about “motiveless malignity” and then speculating about Shakespeare himself the way one discusses a masterful dentist or lawyer who has done something self-destructive. “He must have been a very unhappy man, even though very talented.” And then the closer, a one sentence paragraphs that is one of those sentences that I often remember when I find out some awful thing: “He seems to be saying that all he can say is that Desdemona is in her grave.” Try forgetting that.   

One of the big finds for me in Craig Morgan Teicher’s selection of Schwartz’s poetry, fiction and critical essays is “The Vocation of the Poet in the Modern World” for its discussion of Schwartz’s delight in and respect for the supposed mistakes he finds as a contingent composition instructor in student papers using idiom that seems right to them and also of how “In America itself the fact of many peoples and the fact that so large a part of the population has some immigrant background and cherishes the fragments of another language creates a multilingual situation in which words are misused and the language is also enriched by new words and new meanings.” The essay, written about the same time as he wrote Vaudeville, shows his subtle discomfort with the whole hierarchical and class situation of American universities, particularly at WASPy Harvard. As for Schwartz’s feelings about Harvard, where he had the contingent faculty blues on top of feelings of social insecurity wafted on fumes of anti-Semitic micro-aggressions, no doubt—we get a small sample of this at the start of a twelve-liner wedged like a folded coaster amid the sonnets at the backend of the 1950 theatrical program:

 

            Sick and used Cambridge in the suck-

            Ing sound of slow rain at dead dawn

            Amid the sizzle sound of car and truck

            As if continually thin cloth were torn,

 

            Blue light, plum light, fading violet light,

            And then the oyster light of the wool sky:

            Is this not, after all, appropriate

            Light for a long used poet such as I? 

           

(“The Morning Light for One with Too Much Luck”)

 

Anybody who has ever heard, appalled or not, a chorus of “Yankees suck” at Fenway Park has to get this one. Schwartz is a great poet of adjunct life. At the same time, the essay shows Schwartz’s engagement with Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, closing the distance between poetry and prose, much as translating Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell must have. So the academic focus on words as words, the example of Joyce and appreciation for his own family’s immigrant experience of language is here in Vaudeville, and also, because Schwartz is an original synthesizer, something like a Dadaist’s collection of found language, which Rimbaud practices when he praises things like “artless rhymes,” old primers, the signs of inns, badly punctuated pornography and stuff like that. This is the important Rimbaud for American poets, according to Marjorie Perloff’s “poetics of indeterminacy,” aside from all those other versions of Rimbaud as an influence that contend for our headspace, including to the one where Jim Morrison gets big as Elvis and splits his leather pants, excuse me. I am thinking of Eddie Murphy doing Elvis doing “My Way.” Bronx cheer. 

Not just in terms of verbal registers, Schwartz does things like this with broad cultural idioms, even plots, using the vocabulary of one form of entertainment and then departing from it and lighting on another one to work his gloomy magic in the spirit of Eliot’s complete definition of “objective correlative.” For instance in “The Difficulty of Divorce,” a prose piece explicitly addressed to then Princess Elizabeth on the eve of her marriage, including what sounds like the plot of The Palm Beach Story by Preston Sturges about two people getting a divorce having to pretend to commit adultery by having a one night stand, and Schwartz is also channeling the sort of prose idiom nobody is taking seriously, humor writing from magazines. Irving Howe points out that Schwartz can sound a bit like James Thurber in his prose interludes, and I think that is particularly true of Thurber’s literary parodies that can be found, for instance, in The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze or Is Sex Necessary? and other books from the thirties. 

But he never sounds like Thurber for long, moving directly from his almost strictly funny spoof “Existentialism: The Inside Story” to a poem that compares his troubled psyche to the Civil War using comic rhymes, invoking the racist minstrelsy of “Camp Town Races” and many other American songs along the way:

 

            Davis protects his friends to the end.

            The Negroes chant in the promised land,

            The Negroes jig at heaven’s gate,

            Lincoln explains why he hesitates,

            What right which wrong attack defends,

            And who with what will make amends.

 

            This is the famous Civil War.

            Assassins stop in Baltimore.

            Grant closes in remorsefully,

            Longing for home and family,

            As Lincoln signals for unity

            Until Booth kills him pointlessly.

 

                        *          *          *

            The mind resembles all creation, 

            The mind is all things, in a way:

            Deceptive as pure observation,

            Heartbreaking as a tragic play.

            Idle, denial; false affirmation;

            And vain the heart’s imagination—

                        Unless or if on Judgment Day

                        When God says what He has to Say.

 

The ending evokes the voice of God at the end of Hardy’s “Channel Firing,” the God who says, “Ha, ha.” Transitions like this from the funny to the deeply and darkly and defiantly not funny at all are part of Schwartz’s project. Schwartz practices “culture-jamming” within the confines of his own book, making us better readers. The only despised idioms are political lies, hatred, and advertising. I’m sure that Joyce would have found a way to use Thurber and Stephen Foster, too, if he had lived over here.  

No doubt a lot of critics were not thinking of Rimbaud and artless rhymes and upsetting expectations when they encountered Schwartz’s charming prose and juxtapositions. They could not have been thinking of Berryman’s Mr. Bones in The Dream Songs even though both Schwartz and Berryman are seeing racism as part of an American death trip because Berryman hadn’t written his Henry poems, which one-up Schwartz and praise him in that antic and disturbing amusement park. They probably just thought that Delmore Schwartz had started writing some bad and didactic poetry with obvious rhymes, and they did not know how to take the prose at all, probably because they thought of humor pieces in The New Yorker primarily as something to read in the john, not really as something to think about as a potential source of idiom-theft for the sake of transformation by an American poet doing something unusual with a French poet whom they mistakenly regarded as a symbolist demanding a particular kind of serious reading.  

 

5

Let’s get back to Kiss Me, Kate. It’s possible that standing here in 2021 that we would misread the various feints and echoes and borrowings and meditations upon Shakespeare’s songs and characters and the sonnet and Marlowe/Raleigh’s passionate shepherd, thinking that all of these are examples of Schwartz not wearing his learning lightly upon his sleeve, but instead seeing this as high-culture warrior stuff with a silver helmet and stars on his breast and pearl-handled revolvers. Not so. We have already seen how Vaudeville followed closely upon the heels of Cole Porter’s double musical about a production of The Taming of the Shrew that is also a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. There are a lot of charming connections between the Schwartz and Porter’s productions. One is that they both insist on economic contingencies, with the Shakespearean comic hero “come to wife it wealthily in Padua,” and a modern-sounding girl trying to choose among suitors in “Tom, Dick or Harry,” with one offering a lot of money, and another offering less money but social standing, and another offering neither money, but really amazing sex. Here is Mr. Money:

 

            I’ve made a haul in all the leading rackets,

            From which rip-roarin’ rich

            I happen to be. 

            And if thou woulds’t attain the upper brackets

            Marry me, marry me, marry me.

 

This guy sounds gangster on the old Broadway cast album, practically denasal. The social standing and less money option sounds hilarious, like some fantasy of a Beacon Hill character, so it is a surprise to learn that Cole Porter may have gone to Yale, but really he was from Wyoming or someplace—

 

            I come thee a thoroughbred patrician,

            Still spraying 

            My decaying 

            Family tree.
            To give a social boost to thy position

            Marry me, marry me, marry me.

 

While the song begins with a direct quotation from Shakespeare, once the song heats up, the idiom becomes free American singspiel, with the sorts of live and timely phrases “leading rackets” and “thoroughbred patrician” that pop in Schwartz’s prose music and prefigure the even more dramatic shifts in colliding diction that we find all over the place in the first few great books by Ginsberg, the dirty metaphysician, and Corso, the grungy Romantic, and all of O’Hara, the poet of perfect poise, and lively in Ashbery for decades. The song is a lot dirtier than Schwartz allows himself, as the slangy “Tom, Dick or Harry,” meaning any old person gets transformed and re-arranged, repeatedly, first  “Art thou Tom, Harry or Dick?” and then “Art thou Harry, Dick or Tom?” and this gets repeated enough times that we realize that Porter is making a joke about “a hairy dick,” and we know that sex will ultimately trump class and money both, as the song ends, approximately,

 

            A dicka Dick Dick Dick

            A dicka Dick Dick Dick

            A dicka Dick Dick Dick

            A dicka Dick

            A dicka Dick

            A dicka Dick

            A dicka Dick

 

Everybody must have noticed this. Happier poets to come, less ostensibly committed to the idea of grownup behavior than Delmore Schwartz generally is in his poems would allow more room for such life-affirming vulgarity of one kind or another. Cole Porter’s list songs like “You’re the Top” with a home for “Napoleon Brandy” and “Garbo’s salary” and “cellophane” probably have something to do with the topicality that American poetry comes into in the fifties and sixties, not to mention how Anita O’Day learns how to change the song and break it down because eighth notes work best for her. “You’re the bop.” 

One of the best books about poetry and popular music is Philip Furia’s The Poets of Tin Pan Alley. Here you can find some amazing things about lyrics as poetry. For instance, Furia makes a more than compelling case about the relationship between the way his major American lyricists and composers “rag” lyrics over music to emphasize rhymes made by stretching words and fragmenting them over the melodies to allow internal rhymes to function as end-rhymes and the way that, say, William Carlos Williams fragments syntax with line breaks. He also gives us a sense of the social background of the songwriters, with some of them educated like Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers at Columbia, and others arriving at music with public New York City educations, and most of them, like Schwartz, coming from upwardly mobile immigrant Jewish backgrounds. George and Ira Gershwin were from Brooklyn, too. Robert Pinsky notes how people of this generation valued poetry or the idea of poetry enough to make the names of poets common first names, Milton and Sidney, for example. Furia gets us further towards the poetry that actually filled the heads of our song writers. Some of it was pretty schlocky, and thus we get some terrible tearjerkers and histrionics from Cole Porter when he wanted to be serious. But Furia gets to the light verse tradition, and in particular the Carolyn Wells’ Vers de Société Anthology, a compendium of light verse going back to Shakespeare and the silver poets of the seventeenth century “to nineteenth century verse by Lewis Carol and Ernest Dowson,” and also about how major magazines were full of light verse. I went and found that this anthology is available for free online now, and I was surprised to find that Carolyn Wells was also a mystery writer whose books are still in print. 

So it is not surprising to find Cole Porter writing Kiss Me, Kate. As a matter of fact, Rogers and Hart had already done Two Gentleman from Verona as The Boys from Syracuse, and recently I read in The New York Times about an unsuccessful musical version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from 1939 that featured Louis Armstrong as Bottom, Butterfly McQueen as Puck, the Benny Goodman orchestra, and the enduringly beautiful “Darn That Dream,” a song that you should really hear done by Dinah Washington and a group including Clifford Brown on trumpet and Max Roach on drums. We can hear W.H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror in this light as well, another mixed genre work. When Auden writes songs, it is clear that he could write pop songs, with the “cabaret songs” in his great collection Another Time like “Calypso” and “Funeral Blues” basically saying to Noel Coward, “Hey, move it on over, bub.” The pop, faux-Elizabethan spirit is everywhere in the songs that Lorenz Hart—what a name for a poet that. Consider the introductory verses to “I Could Write a Book” from Pal Joey, a musical with a libretto by John O’Hara based on Lardner-esque short stories in the form of badly spelled letters from an unscrupulous and amoral and not very intelligent singer that Lorenz Hart manages to turn into a sort of essay collection about making art and being an artist written in songs that embody different motives and ways of conducting art and love. This great work is hidden by a lousy movie version that hides its originality. We usually hear the song as a pretty ballad for a soloist, but it is really a comic duet, and when you look at the introduction you see something that is characteristic about American songwriting, its collaging of found diction with more conventional kinds of eloquence, a characteristic of pop even today. 

 

            Joey:

            If they asked me, I could write a book

            About the way you walk and whisper and look.

            I could write a preface on how we met

            So the world would never forget

            And the simple secret of the plot

            Is just to tell them that I love you a lot.

            Then the world discovers how my book ends

            How to make two lovers of friends.

 

            Linda:

            Used to hate to go to school.

            I never cracked a book,

            I played the hook. 

            To write I used to think was wasting ink.

            It was never my endeavor

            To be too clever and smart.

            Now I suddenly feel 

            A longing to write in my heart. 

 

Then pretty soon, Linda—a quail, Joey, who is always a rat, calls her, and a mouse—is on a different kind of hook, and Joey is, too. He is hoisted on his own petard. Or is he? She is singing it too. “If they asked me, I could write a book.” The situation, the characters, the enjoyable conceits, the letter writing itself, are vaguely Shakespearean, but the demotic breeze of popular music, the principle of contrast, is all over Vaudeville for a Princess.  Schwartz may complain later on that Tin Pan Alley gets together with Hollywood to eat our heads. It really does, and it happened to him, too. He is always influenced by, borrowing from, fighting with popular culture, and in Vaudeville he writes sonnets and rewrites Feste’s song from Twelfth Night—

 

            And this knowledge, like the Jews,

                Can make glad that I exit!

                  with a hey ho, the stupid past,

                    and a ho ho, and a ha ha at last. 

 

And while William Carlos Williams thought that Raleigh was right about how we cannot go back to the country, Schwartz gives us a very dark version of “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” that shows that he suspects that Raleigh’s nymph is equally compelling and right about love:

 

            Come live with me and be my wife,

            We’ll seek the peaks and pits of life

            And run the gauntlets of the heart

            On mountains or the depths of art.

                                    We’ll do the most that thinking can

                                    Against emotion’s Ghenghis Khan. 

 

And then things get worse from there. Things are rocky in love. But things are rocky in love for Lorenz Hart as well. Listen to “I Wish I Were in Love Again” and “I’ve Got Five Dollars.” Whoah! Lots of fighting. People used to drink too much. 

Let’s end this little trip down Tin Pan Alley by getting back to Mr. Cole Porter and Kiss Me, Kate, as Frank might say, a melting ice cube sliding down the bar. Schwartz has a poem about a barbershop, “To Figaro in the Barbershop.” The poem is about how service economies create an alienation between the customer and the worker, and it’s also about how weird it is that anybody else would get so near your brain without getting closer to you. It feels creepy and sad, which is just what Schwartz intends. It also comes right after the prose of “Don Giovanni or Promiscuity Resembles Grapes,” and it suggests that part of the problem is privilege is that whole dynamic between served and server is getting in the way of love. A year before this, we have Cole Porter’s standard that has become a jazz standard as well. In “It’s Too Darn Hot,” the barbers make jokes about the Kinsey report—just like Delmore—and sing about the bounteous sex life that they enjoy, apparently fifty out of fifty two weeks of the year—Delmore, not so much, although it is never too hot for that, according to the barbers, no matter what they are ostensibly claiming, as nothing worth happening is supposed to happen by some sort of fiat, except maybe in a car

In an essay on “Stranger in the Village,” Teju Cole notes that when Baldwin wrote his fifties essays, he had no idea how powerful and great popular music would become because of Black artists and culture. We could say something similar about Delmore Schwartz in Vaudeville and popular music in general. He just doesn’t know that Miles Davis is going to feel around with quintet and “If I Wrote a Book,” and Coltrane will be there, and then A Love Supreme will happen, that Bob Marley did not live long enough to get the Nobel Prize for his lyrics but Bob Dylan did, and so on. Schwartz thinks that the popular music that inspires his book and work will have about the same chances as his marriage or any other romantic happiness will have to move the world in a positive direction: zero, like the Zeppelin business after the Hindenburg disaster, not a bunch of Christmas carols. The verdict is not in for us yet. In “I Am Very Exquisitely Pleased,” what Schwartz feels is ambivalent about what he loves to hear. One one hand, he loves music on his radio as much as Frank O’Hara wants to hear Prokofieff, Honegger or Grieg on his in “Radio,” a poem from Meditations in an Emergency that seems spun out of Schwartz, consciously or not but perfecting it with poise and acceptance that the older poet lacked. For Schwartz, neither bad news nor corporate control and propaganda can be turned off like the radio that frames the music:

 

                                    Shhhhhhhhhhh!

            Suddenly certainly the music begins

            Tinkling as for the birthday of a child,

            The dogs and fates are reconciled

            By motions soft aloft as Zeppelins.

            And stops, continues, stops or mounts because

            Of powers strange as stars. Or good or bad

            Or both, but mostly much misunderstood,

            True, false, and fabulous as Santa Claus.

                       

                                    With incoherent braggadocio,

            The storm flows overhead, beyond control,

            —Yet who would play it like a radio

            If but he could? These concerts to the soul

            Have helpless strength like summer. One must go

            Blindfolded and bewildered, groping and dumb,

            Suspicious of the kingdom which has become.                             

We would love to turn the good news off and happiness on like a radio, but as O’Hara points out, you don’t get to choose what is on the radio. The miracles might have been there for shut-ins while he was at work. As for who controls the airwaves, Schwartz was “suspicious” even before there were Clear Channel, Apple Music, Spotify, or whatever glass tube conveys your favorite blah-blah-blah-wonka-wonka podcasts and feeds. The sequence of sonnets is called “The Early Morning Light,” which he links to Fitzgerald and drinking, or painfully drying out, but it also conveys a sense that this post-war world is a new world, and in these sonnets, you can find the full range of Schwartz’s themes and concerns, both private and social ones included. They all read smoothly and freshly and surprisingly enough to me, and while they have a reputation for triteness and being uninspired, partially because of what James Atlas says about them, I don’t think this judgment holds up as well, and perhaps it has more to do with the things that Schwartz does with diction and rhetoric in the second section of the book, which is eccentric and nowhere near as on the level as it may have appeared at the time. 

 

6

It’s surprising to find Schwartz finding an America that is already starting to resemble Nixonland in “Disorder Overtakes Us All Day Long,” early, 1950, as he seems to be reflecting on how the Red Scare comes on the heels of the New Deal. In this poem, you can feel the old left politics that must have been part of his bond with Berryman and Lowell, even as the poem compares young Elizabeth to something her oldest son Charles is often compared to, a horse: 

 

            Lo, from the muff of sleep, though darkened, strong,

            I rose to read the fresh news of the age:

            “Elizabeth would like to be a horse!”

            (Though she’ll be Queen of England, in due course.) 

 

Ha. Following the pattern established with the prose interludes of the comic followed by the serious, the next part of the poem could almost be Lowell in Near the Ocean, name-checking an important New Deal holdover in the Truman administration.

 

            While in the South Pacific Southern boys

            Upon a flagship raised the Stars & Bars

            As if the South had won the Civil War.

            Meanwhile in Washington Ickes declares

 

            That every plant owned by the government

            Should go to G.I.s when they come back home.

            —What does he think this, Utopia?

            He should have stayed in bed and read a poem.

 

            These politicians have an easy time,

            They can say nothing, they have no shame,

            Kiss babies and blow promises to all

            And chant that everything is wonderful. 

 

Of course, I can’t imagine Lowell, who works from lotifer-seeming perch, worrying that Ickes with his awful name that you can’t help but smile about is being too idealistic and risking inadvertently perhaps, I don’t know, an Eisenhower administration, or some sort of eeven bigger bland liar who sounds like some sort of Frankenstein Reagan. The next part of the poem compares the act of writing a poem to something like governance, a vision of order that can never come together, a making that puts a writer in doubts, and which requires hope to try again. Today, the idea of negative capability is ubiquitous to the point that business school texts on marketing include it as useful information, but it is still news in this poem, and news in the letter to Fitzgerald’s daughter paraphrasing the concept at one point in The Crack Up

It’s impossible to imagine time-bound Schwartz getting swept up by the heroism of contemporary politicians the way Lowell and Berryman would be able to respond to more charismatic figures like Bobby Kennedy or even develop fan-boy palpitations over Adlai Stevenson. He is more like Auden in “The Managers,” who sees a post-war politician and remarks that it is impossible to imagine this stressed out and spectacled fellow riding a dolphin. “He didn’t care about Kennedy,” Stravinsky joked to Craft while discussing the atonal “Elegy for J.F.K.” that Auden wrote “with carpenter’s measurements.” Even so, there is a battered liberalism in Schwartz’s social poems that we find in the poems in section two of Vaudeville, particularly in the poems addressed to us as citizens. “He Heard the Newsboys Shouting ‘Europe! Europe!’” is particularly beautiful. I think it’s about the experience he must have had of teaching veterans, men who were about ten or twelve years younger than him like Kenneth Koch, who was a veteran recently returned from the Pacific war and who has a beautiful poem about walking around with Schwartz and the older poet telling the nice young middle-class veteran of grisly war to wear a coat.

 

                                                            Dear Citizens,

            I heard the newsboys shouting “Europe! Europe!”

            It was late afternoon, a winter’s day

            Long as a prairie, wool and ashen gray,

            And then I heard the silence, drop by drop,

            And knew I must confront myself:

            “What shall I cry from my window?” I asked myself,

            “What shall I say to the citizens below?

            Since I have been a privileged character

            These four years past. Since I have been excused

            From the war for the lesser evil, merciless

            As the years to girls who once were beautiful.

            What have I done which is a little good?

            What apples have I grasped, for all my years?

            What starlight have I glimpsed for all my guilt?”

 

I love that he calls himself “a privileged character” for being able to avoid the war, which anybody who avoided the war was and always will be, though the phrase itself is more found idiom of middle-class irritation, on the same musical scale as “fat in the face,” as the italics indicate. I believe I have heard it pop up in the lexicon that Lenny Brue gave to one of his approving judges in his freedom of speech trials as portrayed in his unscripted talk improvisations and later routines. It’s not too far from this poem to Lowell satirizing his own privilege that allowed him to “make his manic statement” and choose prison without hurting his social standing in the last in “Memories of West Street and Lepke.” While the first part of the poem has this italicized moment of pure idiom, the rest of the poem is a lot of heavy breathing diction that marks this entire section of the book. Schwartz has already, at book’s outset, put us on alert to distinguish “true eloquence” from rhetoric, and the unlikeliness, the absurdity and inappropriateness, the staginess of the language is part of its point. Inflated diction in vaudeville is W.C. Fields doing his Dickensian doubletalk. If what Fields is saying is serious or tragic, surprise. 

 

            Then to the silence I said, in hope:

            “I am a student of the morning light,

            And of the evil native to the heart.

            I am a pupil of emotion’s wrongs

            Performed upon the glory of the world.

            Myself I dedicated long ago

            —Or prostituted, shall I say?—to poetry,

            The true, the good, and the beautiful,

            Infinite fountains inexhaustible,

            Full as the sea, old as the rocks,

                                                new as the breaking surf——”

 

As eloquence, it is wonderful what he says and extravagant the way he says it; as rhetoric, this is like a weeping magician doing an obvious trick. I bet if Cornelius Schmidt had read this to the movie theater in “Screeno,” the place would have gone blotto at his extravagant style which is as calculated as Jack Benny’s ham actor dealing with a professional crisis in confidence as his wife sleeps with the Polish air force and the Nazis occupy Poland in the sublimely anti-fascist Ernst Lubitsch waltz To Be or Not to Be. While I am also reminded of how Bruce joke about how so many writers complain that they have prostituted their talent that half the time when people call their hotel bellboys in Las Vegas a hooker, half the time they send up some guy in a sports coat with a typewriter and a beard, the best American poetry is always picking the lock of privilege and the imposition of language of received dullness and caution and fear and disapproval, and a poet should always remain a student even if a poet becomes a teacher. And while poetry is the place for the truth and goodness and beauty, you have deal with the bad stuff as well. Or as Schwartz’s student Lou Reed puts it on one of his wonderful but not particularly critically acclaimed albums, “Now I have known a hero or two/ And they all learn to swim through mud/ And they all got boots caked with dirty soles/ That they get from squashing bugs/ So when push comes to shove get the Harley revved up/ and we’ll eclipse even the…” and you know the rest, c’mon.   

Later in the fifties, Schwartz will write his poem about “Manic depressive Lincoln, national hero!” and his humanity and discernment—“a politician—of the heart!” who “understood quite well Grant’s drunkenness!” because of war’s grisly horror not experienced at what Burroughs called the long end of a media fork, but “In fact, the North and South were losers both:/—Capitalismus won the Civil War—” I am very happy to read John Ashbery praising the exclamation points in Schwartz. I have never gotten away with one myself.   

One poem from this section of Vaudeville that Cornelius Schmidt might not want to have read to the crowd at the movie theater is “Lunas Are Tempting to the Old Consciousness,” for there the image of America is a boardwalk amusement park rent by fears of sexual violence, and generally speaking, sometimes it can seem as though as many as 49% of all American reminded of awfulness are capable of confirming what you have just mentioned to them about themselves.

 

            Not far, before a door, and with a roar,

            A girl’s skirt is blown up! showing her hips,

            Her drawers, her giggles, her belly and—surprise!

            Panic like rape shudders and shakes her eyes.

 

At this Coney Island of the mind, the games of skill and chance themselves are encoded with racist imagery that show the racist aggressions and desires of the whole culture of guns and sports.

 

            A negro’s face appears, to grin, if hit,

            And hurt by baseballs, sublimation sweet!

            Last is the gallery where the guns are neat:

 

            The hearts not satisfied and still denied

            Can win a mama doll with a good shot.

 

Contemporary Black visual artists, many featured in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, an American Lyric, are often teaching us to read cultural artifacts and discourse the way Schwartz does here. The Lunas poem is among the most newly timely in Vaudeville. Both Schwartz and Lowell are earlier progressive artists who read cultural items to reveal their social and psychological meanings. They are pioneers of a political critical spirit who step over a tarn into a zone. Think of how Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” deals with the specificity of history and a real place and more complex and contradictory cultural artifacts rendered with hyper realism to ultimately honor our ideals against the “savage servility” of Bostonians driving around town, and you don’t get the feeling that he includes himself in that crew, if he is thinking of the folks about to protest bussing. Maybe this moment is a climax of ultimate class satire, apiece with “Skunk Island.” To the powerful and connected, all of that driving around and racial tension is just a whole bunch of “savage servility,” savage being a way of putting down Black people and a traditional moniker for the Irish poor. It’s important to understand that Lowell works against various kind of privilege and presents himself as comic and bumbling, still something of a snob as many of the abolitionists were, even in honoring a Civil Rights movement led by Black people rather than heroic and “out of bounds” figures who wanted to end the hierarchy that would put them above other men’s shoulders as Shaw is pictured on statue that his own father was against, so much so that Lowell himself makes it ambiguous who is using the n-word. The Black kids who are protesting are the heroes and leaders to Lowell, not guys like Lowell himself. Not needing a Shaw is part of the “blesséd break.” When Lowell says, Shaw is “out of bounds,” he must be aware that there is another monument on Boston Common, a small stone marking the site of the first soccer game ever played by prep school kids in the United States. Schwartz’s poem maps out a psychic zone that reveals what he fears is inside our country and our minds, regardless of class. “This is the Luna of the heart’s desire,/ This is the play and park we all admire.”  That is his democratic way of saying, “I myself am hell.” What does Schwartz mean by “old consciousness” anyway? I guess he means “the unconscious [that] stretches, yawns, rises, wanders, aspires and admires!” But it is also something like “your consciousness before you read books and got out of your childhood home.” Lowell’s image for that is the fishes at the old South Boston Aquarium and his own little nose against the glass. 

We should know Schwartz beyond a few poems and one short story, not just because he is that good, which he is, but because he helps us see and read the progress of poetry and understand how we can be part of that progress. He is also a pinecone for poetry and prose that comes after him. We realize this when we go back to these odd poems. On one hand, Vaudeville for a Princess anticipates the radiant celebration of the eternal present tense that looks like nostalgia in  “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” and also the way that Berryman, Lowell and Plath will let something like Schwartz’s version of culture and history as an emanation of violent and racist pathology speak through the fractured and contending self of Henry, and we have seen just part of how his example works on Ashbery who says someplace that Schwartz remains one of the less obscure poets whom he reads when he wants to get writing, and yet, there is a stodgy part of him here, too. He anticipates and haunts, contradictory figure, not just the brilliant talk performances of Bellow’s narrators, but old and crusty Saul Bellow himself, pain-in-the ass conservative Bellow, ugh, come back home to be liberal, prose hero, old shit, in park bench hat really as we love you, not in some Indiana Jones fedora, old man who should maybe share that sandwich with pigeons, not go on, cranky, in various places about how awful and dumb we all are, we young punks, to know and read other things and not spend more time on the steps of the public library talking about Stendhal. Actually, I think I saw Bellow once by a Xerox machine at Boston University, and he seemed like a good time, lanky. Was he wearing boots with a heel? We hear a bit of the stuffy kind of guardian of culture in “Some Present Things Are Causes of Fear,” as if nothing good comes from greed or accident:

 

            When Tin Pan Alley formulates the hart,

            When Hollywood fulfills the laws of dream,

            When the radio is poet laureate

            To Heinz, Palmolive, Swift, and Chevrolet—

 

For poets of consciousness in the fifties like Schwartz and Ginsberg and many others, style as a form of mental control and also, ambiguously, the expression of consciousness itself—“Moloch is whose name is the mind”—is part or at least potentially part of the problem that demands emotional awareness on the part of readers and writers to keep in line. The idiom of this poem is populist and full of types, but the ending is subversive and turns on the audience and demands a psychological sense of collective responsibility, while basically saying, “You people are scaring me, and if I am with you, I must be out of my mind.” Here it is: 

 

            Do we not have, in fine, depression and war

            Certain each generation? Who would want more?

            O what unsated heart would ask for more?  

 

Is Schwartz thinking of himself as Yeats who is scornful of audience in “The Fisherman,” or is he enacting the comedy of Cornelius Schmidt reciting Eliot to a crowd that has come to see Naughty Marietta? 

In either case, the crowd at the ballgame is, as Williams says, terrifying. We can see that in “Some Present Things Are Causes of True Fear,” Schwartz is worried that the stupid cheerfulness of American pop culture and the way that loving it buys into the economic system and its hierarchies and masks a dark impulse that would lead to depression and war in each generation. Do you also watch the Super Bowl halftime show with virtuous pleasure and awe at the artistry seeming human, freakishly good and yet representative, in the middle of the brain-damage paid for with commercials for shit as if the entire evening lacked unity and underlying values? A large thing to note is that what strongly marks both O’Hara and Ginsberg is their refusal to be afraid of anything. It’s as if those two were teenagers who heard Roosevelt say we only had to be afraid of being afraid now, so we might as well just go ahead and be more real and courageous, and they nodded their heads if not at that moment, but eventually at least, and said, “Right. Got that, Franklin.” So Schwartz is not just an example; as a source, he is an example to go against, though the connections remain. The poets who form us are like family. In some ways, Schwartz really is very close to Ginsberg’s far more specific poem “America,” a poem that goes back to Schwartz’s earlier specificity with open love for the old left, and rather than treating worn out pop idioms like found objects, gets right in our faces and makes us look actual images and tells the whole scene to go fuck itself with an atom bomb. This involves doing things like reading television shows and street idioms and the covers of mass-produced magazines as texts. When I want to read something again and again, the specific detail is almost always more refreshing and expressive and lasting than poetry made as an encounter with found idioms, and that may be why when all is said and done, most readers will always prefer Schwartz’s early poetry. There is from the start a part of Schwartz who could look at the pop culture he grew up with and find an astonishing line like the one comparing a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt to an Arrow collar ad in “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar” from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and that couplet is so precise and so moving, and he is able to express so much history and even sociology and psychology and a keen grasp of the nature of mass-media and consumerism and politics—a short jump to Warhol here, original banana on cover first Velvet Underground album, and not just a box of soup, but the Campbell’s Soup Kids with tomato soup in their blushing pleasure, if he wanted to do that—with a few strokes, but he is still a poet who feels that he has to ward off a lot of popular culture because not only is the stuff stupid, it can be downright evil. We can all take a moment and regret, if we did, once loving vigilante racist cop movies like Dirty Harry and The French Connection that helped make America less safe and held up freedom over the course of fifty years, and we can wish for some sort of procedure or technique of hypnosis that would allow us to completely forget the names of all human beings ever who appeared on reality television shows, or as I like to call it, Not Really Our Confessional Television. But let’s reopen the old vaudeville house and make sure it comes back into business by reading his book however we can get our hands on it.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Blair is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of essays. His latest book True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems, 1998-2021 is available from MadHat Press. He teaches poetry in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter.

Tim Nolan

TIM NOLAN


THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW I LOVED

 

after Nazim Hikmet

 

It’s November 2020.  I’m sitting

At a high-top table amidst

A pandemic in a hotel coffee bar.

 

On the West Bank of the Mississippi.

Minneapolis.  I just read the local

Newspaper.  The Vikings beat

 

The Packers.  I don’t care one bit.

What I didn’t know I loved—

The Mississippi River.  How it’s always

 

Been in my life.  Sometimes rushing by

As cold water from snow melt up North.

Sometimes lolling—in slow procession

 

Pulling me to the South and gentler lands.

I didn’t know I loved the trees that bank

The river—the elms and oaks—

 

The birches and scrub pines.  Especially

I didn’t know I loved the saplings

Clinging so earnestly to the rock shelf

 

 

 

Above the river.  I didn’t know I loved

The rock shelf.  Set this way since

The Ice Age.  I didn’t know I loved

 

The Ice Age.  Or any age for that matter.

Especially The Age of Now.  Which 

I didn’t know I loved.  This very now.


KENNEDY, 1963

 

That was when it all began—

The dread—The—I Suppose This

 

Won’t Work Out.  The obvious

Fix was in for anything that

 

Might remotely inspire us.  So

We became cynical.  I should say

 

I became cynical—at nine-years-old.

It was that Sunday morning when Oswald

 

Was shot in the gut on the TV screen.

How many times did he flinch that day?

 

As the old fashioned hat of Jack Ruby

And his snub nose pistol moved in?

 

I remember how his face was only pain.

So much pain in his face—it became ours.

 

In those few days we came to believe

Oswald did it.  Probably alone.  Probably

 

Just because.  We always make people

Crazy.  We are very good at that.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Nolan was born in Minneapolis, graduated from the University of Minnesota with a B.A. in English, and from Columbia University in New York City with an M.F.A. in writing. Tim is an attorney in private practice in Minneapolis. His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and on The Writer’s Almanac and American Life in Poetry. Three of his four collections—The Sound of It, And Then, and The Field have been published by New Rivers Press, and the fourth, Lines, is from Nodin Press. Tim is the host of the series Readings by Writers at the University Club in St. Paul.

Jane McKinley

JANE MCKINLEY


SOLILOQUY

 

For Curtis W. Lasell (1953-2005)

 

Three weeks he’s lain with Shakespeare

propped against the knee that’s bent

on folding up, remembering the womb.

He’s learning to recite To be, or not

to be as if his life depends on whether

he delivers it without a pause, as if

a single hesitation might deliver him

to undiscover'd country, cut him down

mid-sentence, cutting short the tragedy

that is his own: elixir that is killing him,

a mother who would rather have him dead

than bear the shame of tainted illness.

 

He’s arming himself with words against

oblivion, against ammonia rising in his brain,

against weakness that prevents his doing

anything but think. Last time was different:

hurtled breakneck through night

to an abandoned station halfway there,

a place where time does not exist for those

arriving, those who linger on the platform,

unaware of what they’re waiting for.

On his return, he learned a week had passed,

but to his mind he’d only spent the night.

He can’t remember what he saw or heard

that haunts him, what it is that prompts: To be...


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble, a professional chamber music group based in Princeton, New Jersey. Her life as a poet began in 2003 when, haunted by an image, she began writing after a lapse of thirty years. Her manuscript Vanitas won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize and was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2011. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, Southern Poetry Review, on Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She earned a Bachelor of Music from Northwestern University, an MFA in historical musicology from Princeton University, and studied Baroque oboe in Vienna with the late Jürg Schaeftlein. She lives in Hopewell, New Jersey with her husband.

Tom Yuill

TOM YUILL


SAETA

 

freely after Antonio Machado

 

Tendrils groping,  

  blood

on Christ’s hands, 

 

songs of nails torn 

 

from Christ’s 

       wrists, 

 

  the songs 

 

Andalusions 

 

sing every spring

 

in search of 

                    

      Christ’s 

 

pain. 

 

Their prayers

 

are like ladders,  

                   

                     each day a bouquet  

 

for the Christ 

       of the Passion. 

 

Who do you 

love?

Who chews 

 

off his leg 

to get 

out 

 

  amble-

tumbling, as

 

each wince swims

against

  the

 

tug of

the  

 

mouths 

 

of the past? 

 

They 

 skin us—

 

   those songs. 

 

      Not 

  to 

 

pietas in 

 

  Christ’s pained 

       

         face 

 

do I sing,

 

  but the flower

 

ancient, 

 

that glides 

 

in the night, 

 

         to Christ 

 

as he 

      walks  

     

       on the 

  water.  


ACOUSTIC SHADOW OF BALLADE DES PENDUS

 

Villon

 

Freres humaines, qui aprez nous vivez,

don’t let your hearts get hard: the more 

you pity us, the more God pities you.

Not for you, to you, Brothers, do we pray.

We hang here by our necks, and Hell

and bile and hard tack acne glisten.

Magpies on our shoulders dab

our swollen cheeks. We’re scab

and bloated flesh, don’t laugh, just listen.

God loves, but doesn’t save us from ourselves.

 

We hang, we guess,

for not obeying laws, but see:

among us all just some will pass

as living their lives legally.

Hell’s thunder whelps 

us, Virgin Mary kisses us,

on Sundays sing the birth of Christ,

but neither Christ nor Mary save us from ourselves.

 

Lashed by sun, ligaments dried

and slapped by the dark, then kissed,

our brows are plucked, eyes

too. Cheeks like swollen thimbles. No mist,

no rest from whipped 

snow, never at peace.

We once decided what to do,

Now here, now there—we’re swept that way and this. 

Fuss of fat through thimble holes

the crows peck in our cheeks. Condemn us but don’t hate us, 

people. God won’t save you from yourselves.

 

Prince Jesus of bodies and of souls, just

keep us out of Hell. No wealth, nor hatred,

do we seek. Just people, please don’t send us there. 

Prince Jesus doesn’t save us from ourselves.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Yuill’s first book of poetry, “Medicine Show,” is published by the University of Chicago Press. He has poetry, translations and interviews published or forthcoming in Great River Review, A Public Space, Newsday, Literary Imaginations, Salamander and Dalhousie Review and featured on Poetry Daily, among others. Yuill is writing a literary biography of Francois Villon containing his own translations, adaptations, imitations and acoustic shadows of Villon’s poetry. He teaches in the World Languages and Cultures Department, Honors College, English Department, and guest lectures in the French Department, at Old Dominion University, and recently completed the first draft of his next book of poetry. Yuill also teaches various poetry classes at the Muse Writer’s Center in Virginia, and in the English Department at Norfolk State University.

Kevin Fenton

KEVIN FENTON


Ambivalence Café

My favorite Rolling Stones album was never released. It is not precisely imaginary; the songs exist. But they were never compiled by the band into the soundtrack in my head: I did that.    

I like to think this personal soundtrack is a great album I’ve scavenged from lesser albums, but I can’t be sure about its greatness. My relationship to that music is too personal—it invokes the streets of Winona, Minnesota in the 1970s, as I walked under the warm smells of the pizzeria three blocks from my house; as I approached the patchouli-smelling record store by the railroad tracks; as I crossed the railroad tracks with their oil-soaked ties; as I traversed the modern Winona State campus and dreamed of whatever I thought college might give me; as I walked past Winona’s big trees and shabby student rentals; and as I trudged through the residual snow of February and March. 

I knew then, as I know now, that by the mid-seventies the Stones were no longer making great albums. You can make a close-to-irrefutable case that the Rolling Stones’ last great album was Exile on Main Street. There’s a similar consensus that the albums that followed ExileGoat’s Head Soup, It’s Only Rock and Roll, and Black and Blue—were, let’s just say, a falling off. Reviews of Black and Blue toss around terms like “consumer fraud.” It’s hard to argue with these assessments. The band called its own greatest hits from the period Sucking in The Seventies. Yet this music occupies a place in my heart that feels a lot like the place where we store great music. 

Of course, that could just be nostalgia talking. These were the sounds of my teenage years. But the problem with nostalgia as an explanation for the power of this music is that my teenage years were not particularly happy times. Scorched and stunted by the death of my father; clueless about style, even by 1970s standards; and clueless about girls, even by adolescent boy standards, I was hardly living my best life. There was no golden age to summon.   

That said, nostalgia is powerful partly because it doesn’t just capture golden ages, it creates them. Nostalgia also makes artistic merit kind of beside the point. One of the unfortunate things about coming of age in the 70s is that England Dan and John Ford Coley songs can make you misty eyed.

The idea that my love for this music is essentially nostalgic troubles me. Nostalgia is in so many ways the opposite of whatever it is we seek from great art. Fun and harmless in small doses, it too easily stagnates into smugness, weakens into sentimentality, degrades into delusion, or weaponizes into tribalism. Its shrinks and separates and soothes. It's a small-souled emotion that feels large-souled. I distrust it.

But it’s too simple to say that nostalgia and art are opposites. Both art and nostalgia say, these things matter; both value emotion. Nostalgia is just disproportionate and narrow. It’s like anger in that it’s a potentially toxic emotion that helps us figure out what we value.

What I hear when I listen to songs such as “Winter” or “Memory Motel” is bigger than “those were the days.” What I hear feels a lot like greatness because great art is art which helps us construct a self. It feels like greatness because great art is art which we carry with us through decades. Those albums tincture my life and evoke my youth.

The core soundtrack includes five songs: “Dancing With Mr D” and “Winter” from Goat’s Head Soup, “Til The Next Time We Say Goodbye” and “Time Waits for No One” from It’s Only Rock and Roll, and “Memory Motel” from Black and Blue.

“Dancing with Mr D” acknowledges my teenage preoccupation with finding places that were a little more interesting and a little less innocent.  The song begins with a creeping-crawling guitar riff and Jagger’s breathy singing: “Down in the graveyard, where we have our tryst.” The effect is more evocative than scary, more David Lynch than Steven King; it’s mysterious, languid, and vivid. A later line mentions a Toussaint night. Toussaint is French for All Saints’, the holy day, morbid even by Catholic standards, adjacent to Halloween, when dead souls are celebrated. But, in the Stones’ world, it also meant Allan Toussaint, with his associations with New Orleans. 

The attraction of “Time Waits For No One” was not in the lyrics, although what teenager doesn’t like a good ode to decay. (It’s a nice shorthand for resonance.) Winona, Minnesota, where I spent my teenage years, was a river town, which made it a little more interesting than the prairie towns and quasi-suburbs to the west; Winona was a place of deshabille Victorians, river characters who made their living trapping and fishing, diners with jukeboxes at the booth, and neighborhood bars that smelled of malt. The resonant was all around me, and I was starting to notice it. 

The real attraction of “Time Waits For No One” was the music, which bore the fingerprint of Mick Taylor, the Stones guitarist at the time and an underrated influence on their sound. (He was replaced by Ronnie Wood on Black and Blue, who extended the brand but not the band.) “Time Waits For No One” feels more like water than like electricity: it’s all lead guitar, keyboards, and brushes, it’s music of streams, eddies, splashes, infusions, and murmurs. 

It’s sophisticated, which is a tricky compliment, because “sophistication” is often snobbism trying to sell itself as something more substantial. When I call “Time Waits For No One” “sophisticated,” I meant you need to be at least a little serene to appreciate it. The twitchy and trashy kid I was in junior high could only be soothed by strong hooks and simple noise. “Time Waits For No One” prepared the self which would love Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and Miles Davis. It discarded the self that liked “Little Willy.” (Yes, that Little Willy. The one who won’t go home.) 

“Til the Next Time We Say Goodbye” and “Memory Motel” broached what was literally virgin territory—the romantic self. They suggested a life beyond a life of unrequited crushes, a romantic life that was as real as friendship, a life of conversations, places (“a coffee shop down on 52nd street”), and enthusiasms. The romance itself—“watching the snow swirl around your feet”—is muted. The couple in “Til The Next Time” has been together a while; the romances of “Memory Motel” are, as the title suggests, past. The women here are imperfect, with teeth that are “slightly curved,” and they have lives outside the singer; they drive pick-up trucks; they’re “singing in a bar.” If the Rolling Stones have things to teach you about how to view women, you’re clearly starting from a bad place. Well, I was. 

“Winter” feels like it’s about a very particular sub-season: late winter—which can run from Valentine’s Day into April in Minnesota. It’s a particularly exhausted version of winter — long gone are the sparkle of first snows, the charm of Christmas, the optimism of New Years’. It’s not spring—there’s too much filthy snow for that—but it lets you imagine spring. Jagger begins with a wordless semi-moan of dissatisfaction and desire. The first words are “it’s sure been a cold cold winter.” The guitar meanders intensely, like a teenager’s walk. I also now believe that these late winter weeks in 1975 were when I came out of the first, wordless, baffled stage of my grief for my father.  

These songs meant more to me because I was a teenager and because I was a particular kind of teenager. For my older sisters, rock and roll was a reason to dance. For me, it was something else (not necessarily something better.) For me, culture was a user’s manual, a Cliff Notes for existence, the food and water of the essential self—the self that answers William James’s question, which he says is at the heart of all spirituality: What are the secret demands of the universe? 

I spent a fair amount of time alone in those years, walking the streets of Winona, ruminating in my cluttered room. But it wasn’t entirely anti-social. My friends and I talked music. It helped us explore the Venn diagrams of friendship—where do we overlap? Where do we differ? “You love the Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan, and Howling Wolf. You love Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. You love Queen, Yes, and ELP. Do I? How much?”  

I was also lonely in a more essential sense, a sense accentuated by my grief: I was busy with the self-pitying teenage enterprise of self definition. 

Music pointed to the world outside and the future ahead. At least in outstate towns in Minnesota in the 70s, teenagers were archeologists. We summoned the greater adult world from the fragments we heard and saw. When I heard Jagger sing about “a coffee shop down on 52nd street” Winona had no coffee shops. But I began to imagine them. With my friend Neal Nixon, who also lost a father, I began to discover literature as well as music. 

Winona itself felt adolescent: it felt on the verge of becoming more interesting. Or more precisely: it wanted to become more interesting but couldn’t quite figure out how. A few hippies would get it together sufficiently to open an almost vegetarian café for a few months. An independent bookstore appeared and then disappeared. We’d had a co-op which I remember for its dedication to carob.  

Winona became more interesting. It acquired coffee shops, and then a Shakespeare festival, and then a film festival and music festival. I grew up and moved away but I’m happy to come back occasionally. I discovered more music, some of which critiqued the music of the mid 70s—music which could feel exhausted and, at its worst, complacent and smug.  

The time of year Jagger sang about in “Winter” would take on special resonance for me. On a March day in my early thirties, I quit drinking. I had tried to stop and failed in late February, careening through my last binge with people cashing welfare checks on the first of the month. In those first grey days, I felt scraped, emptied, and, let’s just say, unphotogenic. As the weather struggled toward spring, with hisses of sub-zeros and sloppy melting, it provided a perfect objective correlative for what was happening inside of me. 

On my iTunes, I currently have a playlist that replicates the secret Stones album in my head. It includes the five songs I mentioned and a handful of others from that time (such as the Jamaican-influenced “Luxury”). It’s a bunch of really good songs, albeit songs in a more wistful and personal vein than the Stones earlier music. This imaginary album uniquely highlights the contributions of Mick Taylor; it nods to reggae, jazz fusion, and the best singer-songwriters; and it distinctly captures the zeitgeist of those deep seventies years when the hippies had been assimilated and the punks were still being incubated.

I labeled my playlist “Ambivalence Café.” It felt like a nice title for an imaginary album. And when I walk the streets of Saint Paul, Minnesota in February and March, past polluted snow, archipelagos of ice, and brown edges of lawn, that soundtrack starts to play.  


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kevin Fenton is the author of the novel Merit Badges, which won the AWP Prize for the Novel, and the memoir, Leaving Rollingstone.  His work has appeared in the Laurel Review, the Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. He has a JD and an MFA from the University of Minnesota and lives in Saint Paul with wife, Ellen, and their greyhound, Evie.

Janna Knittel

janna knittel


BOOK REVIEW: LINDA GREGERSON’S CANOPY

HarperCollins, 2022. 96 pages. $16.99

 

With the title Canopy, I expected more trees in this book. There are trees and ecological themes throughout, but much more, too. “Canopy” has multiple definitions. “[T]he uppermost layer of branches in a forest” (Oxford English Dictionary) is merely one. The meaning of shelter or protection resonates the most, since the book is as much about family and home as it is about the environment.

The first poem in the collection, “Deciduous,” focuses on trees, of course, but through metaphors about language and meaning:

 

Speak plainly, said November to the maples, say

            what you mean now, now

 

that summer’s lush declensions lie like the lies

            they were at your feet.

 

Plays on words such as “lie like the lies” frequent Gregerson’s poems and add rich layers of sound and sense to otherwise straightforward word choices.

            This poem addresses environmental destruction directly as well:

 

The child who learned perspective from the

            stand of you, near and nearer,

 

knowing you were permanent, is counting

            the years to extinction now. Teach her

 

to teach us the disciplines of do-less-harm. We’re

            capable of learning.

 

This poem therefore is about how the loss of forest canopies is catastrophic because they “harbor the greatest biodiversity of any habitat in the world” (Center for Canopy Ecology).

            Gregerson points out that the etymology of “deciduous,”—which means “to fall,” like the leaves of deciduous trees fall annually—“De + cidere . . . also means decide.” This poem ends with a reminder that, not just trees, but all life on Earth, are at a tipping point and human beings must move in the right direction or face extinction.

            Canopy as shelter is inferred in poems about family. In “Love Poem” (the first of two poems in the collection with this title), the speaker talks to her daughter about the loss of her sister, presumably to cancer, “the illness that had only left me bitten // took her altogether in its jaws.” She expresses a keening grief, with the lines, “[W]hat’s to become of me now / she’s gone. My sister, love, my one // and longed for only” and “I didn’t keep her safe.” Of her daughter, she says, “You said / because it has fallen on you to be my // comfort that’s your daily job.” The child becomes a canopy for the grieving mother.

            “Sleeping Bear,” named after Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan, tells stories of Gregerson’s family and immigrant ancestors, interspersed with commentary on 21st-century refugees. In Michigan’s history, she says, “the shipping lanes were thick / with them, from Hamburg, Limerick towns / along the Oslofjord, and lucky to have found // the work.” Work was either in timber or farming: “[O]ne of the routes was / lumber and the other tapped a prairie’s worth // of corn.” The word “immigrants” is never mentioned in these lines, only implied in “them” and how ships brought them from overseas. Those who survived passage over Lake Michigan were lucky, since it is known for rip currents, “and lakes like this / are deadlier than oceans: in / a single year the weather claimed one in every // four.”

            Though she emphasizes the formidable hardships European immigrants faced in previous centuries, the speaker also delineates how differently those immigrants fared compared to present-day refugees, for instance, how inured many Americans are to their plight:

 

What is it about the likes of us? Who cannot take it in

                        until the body of a single Syrian three-

year-old lies face down on the water’s edge? Or

this

 

week’s child who, pulled from the rubble, wipes

                               with the back and then the heel of his

small

left hand (this time we have a video too) the

blood

 

congealing near his eye . . . .

 

She adds, “So many children, so little space in our rubble-strewn / hearts,” as over and over the newsfeed shows such images but the United States does little to help. Later she recounts the signing of Executive Order 13769, which suspended admissions of refugees from primarily Muslim countries, a decision borne of Islamophobia, and that has resulted in tragedy for displaced people.

            “Sleeping Bear,” because of its multiple, interlaced themes, feels key to the collection. It loops further back in time to retell the legend of how the dunes and islands of the lakeshore were formed, the story of a mother bear whose cubs drowned in the lake during a crossing, a story of motherly grief to mirror the stories of Syrian child refugees. She acknowledges, however apt the story appears, “We are not / the people to whom the legend belongs.”

            Gregerson interweaves multiple themes in the longer, multi-part poems, so that “The Long Run” addresses how US soldiers were ordered to shoot civilians in Afghanistan in 2012; the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama; and environmental degradation:

 

At the turn of the century in which I was born

 

the topsoil here in Iowa was sixteen God-sent inches

deep. We’re down to half. Three tons lost

 

per acre per year because we like our groceries cheap.

 

Topsoil depletion is serious as it eventually will lead to a crisis in food production. It can be caused by intensive agricultural practices, short-sighted ways of using the land.

Gregerson writes, “I’ve sometimes taken comfort in the long run, in // the long run some worthier species will, fate willing, / inherit the earth.” In this complex poem, the horrors of war and domestic terrorism contrast with the resilience of some species, how ginkgo trees “coexisted with the dinosaurs. // A ginkgo in Hiroshima survived the atom bomb.”

            Notable aspects of the book include genre. Gregerson includes several ekphrastic poems. They describe and comment on works of art as diverse as Hieronymus Bosch’s The Haywain Triptych, an oil painting (“Not So Much and End as an Entangling”), and a soap-sculpture replica of an 18th-century statue (“Melting Equestrian”). That the poems engage with other forms of art—such as a gender-flipped casting of Oscar Wilde’s Salome (“Slip”) and an orchestral performance (“Fragment”)—as well as artifacts such as photographs at a historical site, gives a concreteness, an anchor, to a collection engaged with daunting events and abstract ideas.

            Variations in tone help keep the poems engaging as well. Poems about environmental degradation convey appropriate bitterness, such as how “Archival” describes the Global Seed Vault in the Arctic: “Assuming survival of people who / remember what the seeds are for // and something that passes for topsoil,” and “It must / have helped with costs a bit to build // the vault where once we mined for coal. / They’ll credit us with irony.” Yet humor appears, even in “Scandinavian Grim,” a poem about her mother’s impending death, when the pastor had

 

shown up at her bedside to pray

 

while we muted “Take the A Train” (her

                        favorite)

            and practiced the seven stages of

 

awkward.

 

And amid all the grief and loss, she can write a touching wedding poem (“Epithalamion”):

 

. . . The joy

            that has been

untouched by grief is precious and

 

            protectionless.

This chosen joy—Sweet lake, abide—is

            rarer still. And shared.

 

Canopy, despite encompassing pandemic fears, racial injustice, and global warming, as a whole is about how, not just to abide, but to live through it all. The speaker of “A Knitted Femur,” when trying to subscribe to an online listserv, is “asked to ‘confirm / humanity’” and says, “I checked the box.” The book asks its readers to confirm their humanity and protect the canopies that protect us, whether arboreal or familial.

 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Janna Knittel is the author of Real Work (Nodin, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Award in poetry. Janna has also published a chapbook, Fish & Wild Life (Finishing Line, 2018), and poems in BluelineBreakwater ReviewConstellationsCottonwoodNorth Dakota QuarterlyPleiades, and The Wild Word and the anthologies Waters Deep: A Great Lakes Anthology (Split Rock, 2018) and The Experiment Will Not Be Bound (Unbound Edition, 2023).

Emily St. James

EMILY ST. JAMES


INSIDE VOICE

The cab let him out at the corner of Ocean and Atlantic, and he fished in his pocket for exact change, so as to prolong this moment a bit longer. He wanted to keep from having to unlock that door and step inside. That would be the moment of truth. It would either have died from the four months of neglect, or it would have grown stronger in his absence. That was the paradox. The longer he was away, the longer it clung to life, throwing itself forward, heedless.

The cabbie tried to give him the few dollars he intended as a tip back, and he shook his head. “You sure?” the cabbie asked, and he thought that an odd thing for someone to haggle over. Maybe everyone had stopped tipping while he was away. After a firm nod, the cabbie smirked. “Thanks, man. Happy Fourth.”

He loved the feeling of California in the summer dusk, the way it drifted over the skin and slid underneath everything else. Kids raced down the sidewalk toward the beach, which already receded behind him. By all rights, he should have headed down to the beach with them, to watch the gunpowder blooms be painted across the sky. Last year, a fog had rolled in, swallowing the fireworks, even as they struggled to burn through. They turned into dull, colorful glows, the warning of what was coming, the horizon not yet seen.

More than that, though, he loved sitting as the sun went down, waiting for the inevitable flame. As the dusk settled, kids would run around with sparklers and enthusiasts would send bottle rockets floating into the sky on impossible parabolas. Growing shadows would slip around him, and it would get cold, colder than he was used to at summer’s height. The sun would set over his right shoulder, though he was facing the ocean, because the Pacific here was to the south, not the west, an impossibility that seemed like a riddle designed to trick the unwitting in a fairy tale.

The beach was where he should go. The kids’ laughter receding behind him felt so wonderfully normal to him, a string tied around a finger so one wouldn’t forget something important. (Did anyone really do that?)

He couldn’t go down to the beach, though. He couldn’t watch the fireworks, even though by all accounts it was meant to be a clear night and one could see tiny explosions all up and down the coast from that beach. He wanted to. He hoped to. But he knew he had to go home. It couldn’t exist as both alive and dead in his head forever. He needed the answer.

He fished around in his pocket for his keys. The walk was only a few blocks, but he found himself taking his time. The lights in the Korean barbecue across the street were already dimmed, the owner having closed for the holiday evening when anyone with any sense would be down on the beach, feeling particularly American. The Jack in the Box up the street still glowed against the growing twilight, but the parking lot was deserted. Anyone who wanted jalapeno poppers had likely had them hours ago.

He was two blocks away. He’d know soon enough. He ducked inside Jack in the Box, ordering the usual.

He slid his suitcase in one side of a booth, then sucked in his breath and crammed himself into the other side. The table cut into his gut right against his belly button, and when he exhaled, he closed his eyes and winced. He didn’t make a sound. It was uncomfortable, but you got used to it. You got used to a lot of things living like he did. He exhaled very slowly.

Staring out at the city from here, holding a double bacon cheeseburger dripping grease, he could see his apartment. The lights were all off, but of course, they would be. He wondered if anyone had tried to break in, had actually managed the trick, only to be run off by its snuffling and scrabbling, by its insatiable need to just be near someone else, by the ache it opened up just from looking at it. It was revolting, but to look upon it was to be overwhelmed with pity, to know that you were on the hook for as long as you lived to make sure it lived, too, even though it never grew, never changed, just stayed, as it was.

He loved this city, but he hated it. Any excuse he could come up with to leave, he took. Any time he wanted to run away, he did. Alaska or the Maldives or Belgium or the oil fields of North Dakota, it didn’t matter. He went, and he took pictures, and he sent those pictures in, and then he dallied. He’d spent a whole week at a hunting lodge near the Canadian border because he had a little money, and the only way to keep from going home and having to sit near it all night, to hear it struggling for breath and opening and closing its many eyes while you tried to just fucking watch TV for two seconds, was to spend all of that money and stay far, far away and hope it died.

“Not going down to the beach tonight?” asked the teenager who’d been tasked with manning the counters. He appeared to be the only employee on duty.

“Nah,” he said. “You’ve seen one firework, you’ve seen ‘em all.” It struck him that was the sort of thing his father, who despised most things, would have said.

“You down there for the fog fireworks last year?” He nodded, and the teenager continued. “Man, that was fucked up.”

“You live around here?” he said, barely remembering the normal rules of human interaction. They had grown rusty after years of disuse.

“Yeah. Anaheim and Pine?” Rundown apartments. Maybe the kid was older than he took him for, had his own place.

The thought occurred to him in that moment that he could give his houseguest away, like it had been given to him. Someone that young, living alone, might want a pet, might want a friendly face to come home to. He could be rid of it. All he had to do was talk the kid into it. He just had to open his mouth and say the words: “Hey, would you like a cat?” Just get him to agree, sight unseen.

He couldn’t. He sat, mouth hanging open, burger halfway in, staring at the kid as he wiped down the counter, humming along with the radio. The kid looked up and laughed at the way he must look like someone playing an elaborate game of freeze tag. “You mind if I turn this up?” he asked, nodding toward the speakers. “Love this song.”

He could only nod. Music might be good. Somewhere, the fireworks began to thrum.

The kid reached under the counter, and the whole restaurant filled with a song he hadn’t heard in ages. Big Star. “You Get What You Deserve.” The kid was whistling along, doing a little dance with his rag, and in an instant, he understood that the kid was gay, that his parents weren’t okay with it, but that he was just fine, living alone in a shitty apartment but making a life of it and working at the Jack in the Box. Being around it had given him this sense about people sometimes, people who might be just lonely enough to let something else creep in and take over, slowly but surely. “Try to understand what I’m goin’ through,” the kid sang, and his voice was incredible, really, something not to be wasted. “But don’t blame me for what folks will do.”

He watched the kid dance and sing. The kid’s life was all in front of him. He couldn’t do this, couldn’t make the kid have such a burden when he’d already likely screamed his way out of his old life and into this one. But to be free…

Boom boom, said the fireworks somewhere, and there was a dim sense of muted applause carried on the breeze.

The song ended, and the kid hit a button somewhere, so it played over again. “You like Big Star?” the kid asked, in the way of teenagers who’ve just discovered a band everybody else knew about long ago, because life is long.

He crumpled up his detritus and put it in a wastebasket. “Love Big Star,” he said. “You like that, try Fountains of Wayne. Same idea, more modern.” It struck him that Fountains of Wayne was only modern if you counted the 2000s as modern, which the kid surely didn’t.

The kid nodded his thanks, and he took a deep breath. The kid’s eyes were so hopeful, so filled with something like joy, probably thinking back over all the things that led him here and finally feeling free, a mountain goat with a toehold who could see the rest of the way up the cliff. He would be killing all of that off.

“Would you like a cat?”

The words were out of his lips before he even knew what he was saying. It was like he had been seized by some future version of himself that was on top of that cliff and extending a hand down to him.

“Excuse me?” the kid said.

“Would you like a cat? I’ve got one I, uh, am looking to adopt out. And you seem nice. And if you live at Anaheim and Pine, you might want a friend. Sometimes.”

The kid grinned. “Thanks, sir,” and the whole world rushed into that moment, converging on the head of whatever he said next, “but I’m allergic.”

He was sure his eyes started to water with tears, but maybe that was behind the mask he wore to keep those tears from showing. Instead, he smiled, nodding. “Well, too bad. Maybe a dog.”

“Maybe!” the kid said, and he returned to his work, bumping the music even louder.

 

 

The wheels of the suitcase bumped along the sidewalk behind him. His steps became smaller, both because he was winded from the walk and from the giant hamburger and because he was trying like hell to not go back there. He wondered idly what would happen to it if he just dropped dead of a massive coronary right here, right now, like his father had. He was old, but he wasn’t that old, yet. He had a long, long life still ahead of him. Even if he opened that door and found it dead, some part of him understood it had been too long. It lived inside of him now, snuffling away, clawing at weaknesses in the wall.

The keys went into the lock easily enough, and he twisted the door open, putting on the light. He didn’t want to say anything, wanted to use his inside voice, in case it was just asleep, rather than dead. He set the suitcase just inside, looking at the massive pile of trash that covered the floor, the empty boxes and trash bags from aborted attempts to clean and discarded fast food containers and old magazines and newspapers he’d bought from days he thought important to remember with children he would never have. “Obama wins!” shrieked the L.A. Times from yellowed type across the room.

He was holding his breath. He had been from the second he set foot on this block, he realized, and he slowly, carefully exhaled. Breathed in again. Exhaled. Breathed in.

The house was eerily quiet. There was no noise, no sound. Just… him. Breathe in. Breathe out.

And then somewhere, one of those giant fireworks, the ones that simply flash once in the sky, a camera going off somewhere in the distance, let off a terrible, echoing boom. The building rattled, even this far away.

The sound settled into the walls, and once it was done ringing, he heard it. The soft sound of paws scrabbling against cardboard, trying to get across the oceans of trash to him, hearing him. He heard a watery meow, the soft snuffle of its constant cold. He felt the cheeseburger rise in his throat, but it couldn’t get past the mask, so he could just vomit and be done with this.

He saw it. It was just a kitten. It was just a kitten. Headed for him. The tiny little paws navigating the trash piles it had lived in for so long expertly, the calico coloring all up and down its body. From here, in the semi-darkness of the room, it looked so harmless.

He choked back a sob. It got to his shoe and rose up onto his pant leg and started to climb, mounting his body with surprising agility. Its meow still sounded like it was trapped at the bottom of the ocean, transmitting across the great void.

The closer it got, the more of its eyes it opened. First the two one would expect, but then another right next to the nose caked over with mucus, and then a much smaller one just below the bottom of its jaw and a large one in the middle of its forehead and another (just off-center enough to make one nauseous) where its cheek should have, might have been, and one in its left ear. And its mouth opened and inside was another eye, one you couldn’t see right away, but one he knew was there. It landed on his shoulder, and it nudged its head against his, and it was wet all over.

How long had he been weeping?

It perched there, riding, not falling, perfectly balancing, all the way to the couch, no matter how much garbage he had to kick out of the way. He realized with a start that he had left the door wide open, but everyone was at the beach. No one would be coming to visit or even take his things. He was trapped in here, alone. He turned on the TV, desperately looking for a movie, as it meowed and meowed right in his ear. It was hungry. It had been without food for four months now, and probably water, too.

Sullivan’s Travels was on. He removed the creature from his shoulder, setting it in his lap to pet it. It seemed to like that enough to purr, a purr that sounded vaguely of a ship’s anchor being hoisted.

Onscreen, Joel McCrea laughed at Looney Tunes. He reached down and covered the creature’s face with his hand, easily surrounding it. His hand closed, beginning to squeeze. He felt the skull give way, the blood squirt into his hands, the meowing end as tears spattered his face. He let out a roar he’d been holding in for 15 years, and he squeezed harder and harder, closing his other hand around the body and twisting, breaking its back.

He released the head. It opened all its eyes one by one, then climbed up his arm, toward his shoulder, its wet paws leaving little tracks. It was hungry.

He stood, the laughter from the TV mixing with the applause down on the beach. The fireworks show had ended, and Independence Day could be put in a box for another year. He set the creature down on the couch and went into the kitchen to find it something good to eat.

 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emily St. James is the author of the upcoming novel Woodworking (out 2025). She is also the co-creator of the fiction podcast Arden and a television writer. Her non-fiction writing and criticism have appeared in Vox, The A.V. Club, The New York Times, and many other outlets. She lives in Los Angeles with her family and an ever-changing number of cats.

Beaudelaine Pierre

BEAUDELAINE PIERRE


PARABLE OF THE CIRCUS

 

Consider the following: 

I forced my son to ride to church 

with me,

a fine Sunday morning of worship services, 

untouched, yet, 

waiting for rest in a viral show of hopelessness. Our COVID-19 

isolation was too much to bear. 

It reached its peak the time 

city churches with much noticed vacant seats were slowly opening up their door 

in the heat of summer 2021. 

My daughter used my credit card in 

ordinary unnoticed pleasures, 

and my son met his friends only in Fortnite wars,

We needed help.

 

Last time I was at a church service and shall I say, 

some American version of it, 

the worship service, a group discussion, 

was battling the question 

“Have you ever doubted God?” 

in the lit candles of the Sabbath 

I have I said loudly, 

from a bare and steadfast soul, 

and from a certain pride, 

the gray shadow covering my soul. 

A big mistake, a sin, 

I quickly realized. 

The churchgoers haven’t. 

Churching I sighed wasn’t my thing. 

Just so, 

to see myself too ambiguous and too impure to instantly clean up for God or 

make it on time to church or 

to understand the right language. 

The language touch and felt from naked hearts can reach its end.

 

That morning my son and I returned to church 

I was giving myself away to the duality of things, 

their double edges and yang and yin, 

and to the cohabitation of light and blackness. 

On our way I warned my son whose vigil oil runs down madness like: 

the church is outdoor. 

I don’t care he screams, 

Nothing I hush back. 

Our morning enterprise was a diktat, after all. 

An usher standing at the main entrance, 

the church’s ordinary cornerstone and in the moment untouched, ushers: 

Take the next right, 

that she accompanies with a cheerful okay sign. 

A scream of another sort I returned with beatitude. 

I was burning out the pride, 

greeting the church’s boundless ark, vault, and scents. 

 

I finally packed the car in a corner of the church’s parking lot, 

asked my son, wait a minute, and

towards the usher I walked: 

where’s the worship service? 

We just have to walk straight from the parking lot and, 

she added in flux, 

near the food distribution area. 

I didn’t know there was a party. 

As my son and I found our way to the church service, 

I noticed a not so strange play of circumstances: 

jumping castles, inflatable trampolines standing up 

and performers rolling one-wheeled cycles, 

all of that lightening the outdoor. 

Like a lit candle of its own, 

my son suddenly voiced something I was painfully trying to contain inside my chest: 

isn’t this a circus show?

Equally unexpected

from the bright and jovial atmosphere, 

the worship team raises their voice, 

pure and humble and un-circuited above the fake castles, 

“Here I am to worship, Here I am to bow down,” 

a viral reminder 

no matter the circus show, we were at church.

 

We landed on our seat my son and I six feet apart and 

in between us, 

the notice of a young man as dark as dark charcoal standing tall and shoulders up in the middle

of the assembly. 

He is calmly pacing and lightning up the space like 

he was le maître des lieux

My son in his corner cloaked his face in his hoody on this bright summer day. 

May the young man shine on him! 

Truth be told, halfway through the worship service

my son stood up to walk his way, 

head down though, 

towards the party stand for a bottle of water, 

something out of his ordinary. 

The bright young man, 

tall as a castle and as dark as my son, 

was by this time dragging his feet here and there for all to see 

and holding in his fingers a screaming bag of hot Takis. 

The young lord lost his grace from being le maître des lieux 

to a light that has gone turbulent and too bright and very quickly flailing. 

I looked at my son, 

a sort of splendid torch, 

a clear and placid light I got hold of and, 

for the moment, my soul to rest. 

This is the irony of loss, of search, 

of hopelessness: a brief candle can disclose our end very quickly, 

and darkness, 

the shortness of our light.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Beaudelaine Pierre, journalist, scholar, and novelist, writes about her native Haiti and her adopted Youwès. She is the author of You May Have the Suitcase Now (New Rivers Press, 2021); and also, previously, of Testaman (Bon Nouvèl, 2002), La Négresse de Saint-Domingue (Harmattan, 2010), and L’enfant qui voulait devenir président (Harmattan, 2012). She is the co-editor, with Nataša Ďurovičová, of the trilingual anthology How to Write an Earthquake / Comment écrire et quoi écrire / Mou pou 12 Janvye (AHB, 2011). Her essay “I Live Under TPS” is featured in Unbound: Composing Home edited by Nayt Rundquist (New Rivers Press, 2022). Pierre is the 2022-2024 College Arts and Humanities Institute Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. 

Rachel M. Hanson

RACHEL M. HANSON

Winner of the 2022 Walter Nathan Essay Award


WEIGHTED

It was early enough yet that the morning still felt like night when my dog cornered a doe. The crashing sound of it all was terrible. She must have been picking at the best new grass at the corner of our eight-foot wooden fence, and when my dog came upon her so suddenly she’d little recourse, no momentum to speed her jump. She clamored over the wooden planks, my dog at her hind legs. I was angry for a split second, but this is my dog’s instinct and there’s no getting it out of her, or if there is, I wouldn’t know how to do it. I look beyond the fence for the deer, now standing in my neighbor’s yard looking right back at me. I feel ashamed for not thinking to inspect the yard before letting Blue out. My shame grows when I see the doe limp away. My partner comes outside, awakened by the racket, and I walk past him on our porch steps, through the kitchen, and to the living room window. The doe limps across the street and disappears into the woods not yet cleared to make way for another new, huge, and ghastly house, crammed between the older homes like mine—small and sturdy bungalows of the fifties. For now the magnolias and oaks, rhododendron, and the invasive kudzu with its long roping vines gone rampant here in Western North Carolina, live undisturbed. 

“She probably landed wrong. Like we do sometimes,” my partner says gently. “You know, like when we jump and come down just a little off and it hurts so bad you limp, but then it goes away. I bet it’s like that. She’ll walk it off.”

I acknowledge my partner with an agreement, though I don’t quite buy this comforting notion. Maybe it’s the pandemic and all the death, maybe it’s this southern land, maybe I’m still numb and unable to get optimism back after four years of Trump. 

When I talk to my friend, Lena, who is completing her clinicals in nursing school, there is a weariness in her voice I’ve never heard before. Not even during the worst river trips she and I guided, the longest and hottest summers spent dealing with difficult clients, have I heard her sound like this—and she’s only been in clinicals for a few weeks now. She tells me some people who lie in the emergency room dying wish they could go back and get vaccinated. 

“We all make bad choices sometimes,” she says, “It’s sad. People die knowing they made a really stupid choice.”

I get off the phone with Lena and walk to class where I teach behind a mask and look at my students in masks, and I know how much easier my job is compared to the medical workers trying to save the dying, the many dying, day after day. I try not to recall pre-pandemic times when I could read my students’ faces because it seems wrong to wish for something like that when I know my friend is watching people die on the regular. And still, I find myself unnerved at work. Like many universities, mine has not given me the choice of teaching in-person or not, and I find myself unable to muster much push-back to the administration. If I’ve learned anything about the value of human beings from higher education administration, it’s that while faculty may have traditionally been a prioritized amenity of the college experience, we have certainly become a low-end one, now more than ever. College stopped being about education a long time ago.  

 

*           *           *

 

My partner and I married out West because I couldn’t bring myself to do anything so important in the south where we live. I’d never wanted to come back to the south, having been a teen runaway from this region two decades ago. But I’ve learned a job is a job, and academics can’t be choosy. If I hadn’t come back here, I wouldn’t have met Jonathan. We were both first generation college students, both grew up poor—he in a nice family, me not so much. We both moved to Asheville for our first teaching jobs—both contingent when we began, though that is no longer the case. Part of me, the romantic part I suppose, is convinced that I came here to meet Jonathan. Though Asheville has become one of those dreamy places for tourists and destination weddings, I just couldn’t do it. I needed thin air. I needed the safety of the desert 

Before our courthouse ceremony in Santa Barbara, Jonathan saved up money so we could spend two days hiking on Santa Cruz Island. A place that feels more deserted than like a national park. Old farm equipment, fencing, oil pumps, and pipes are spread about the island, rusted and wrong. We hiked from one end of the island to the other, about thirteen miles, and met only two other hikers venturing out on the same route. Two lovely girls, celebrating one’s twenty-seventh birthday. We toasted her with whiskey before sneaking away to catch the sunset alone, almost newlyweds looking out on the Pacific Ocean until the pink and orange of the sunset gave way to night and the twinkling lights of sailboats and cargo ships. What a strange feeling it all gave me, sipping on poorly mixed hot chocolate and whiskey, leaning up against a man who loves me so much he’s taken to reading about desert lands and water rights in the southwest so he can understand more about the spaces I love. 

Both nights in camp, pygmy foxes roam around looking for food scraps. They aren’t just confident, but saucy, their fluffy tails bigger than their tiny gray bodies, their snouts delicate but ready to go sharp at any moment. We fall asleep watching them bounce about on the first night. Such quiet creatures, flitting through the night, coming alive with the cool of night, like Sacred Datura opening for the moon.

We spend our last morning on the more-populated side of the island where there are over thirty large campsites, unlike the four small ones in the backcountry, a fox waits his turn at the water pump. He wasn’t spritely as the other foxes had been, and it was strange to see an animal wait in line alongside us. One man started to cut the line and I asked him to wait, pointing to the fox who was clearly hurting, panting sickly, or maybe just old and ready to pass on. The man stopped short, seemingly annoyed, but let the fox have his turn all the same. I couldn’t look away from the fox’s little body as he drank from the puddle at the pump—his movements delicate without the sharpness of his fellow species. Jonathan took my hand in his and moved us to the dirt road. As we walked toward the ocean, toward the ferry that would take us back to Ventura, I said, more to myself than to him—

“Everyone dies.” 

I’d been saying that to myself for the last few weeks after having to put my cat, Fairbanks, down. It happened quick. One moment he was playing in the sunshine, rolling back and forth, and the next he was seizing. Having grown up in rust and violence, hungry for food and love, I know pain intimately, and I can still honestly say that nothing has ever hurt me so bad as having to put my animals down. During those last moments, Jonathan thanked Fairbanks for all the love he’d given to us. When the vet injected Fairbanks with the mercy drugs, I was on my knees so I could be face level with his as he lay on the exam table. I want to think he knew I was there with him, but I have my doubts.

 

*           *           *

 

I’ve been getting up in the quiet waiting for the light and the limp doe the last few days since Blue chased her over the fence. In the darkness, I’m pulled back in time to another morning waking at dawn in the back seat of my car. It was cold—the desert cold of early spring. I reached past the front seats and turn the key in the ignition, set the heat on full blast, nestled back under my sleeping bag. I waited until I was nearly too hot, then squirmed out of my covers, slipped into my flip-flops, opened the door and hastened to the trees just off the side of the road for the bathroom. As I was unfastening my pants, my fingertips going cold fast, I noticed a dead deer just to my right. I screamed—she’d taken me by surprise. Her pelt looked as though it had melted over her broken bones. I ran back to my car, hopped in the driver seat and drove towards town. 

I’d driven to Boulder, UT from Salt Lake City to re-certify my Wilderness First Responder, a requirement of the summer job I had as a river guide in the Grand Canyon. The timing of the course was bad. The timing for all things has always been too tight in my life—it’s my own doing. If I move fast enough, let myself be consumed in labor, then the past won’t be able to catch up and make me recall my Tennessee girlhood stuck in one drafty house or another, the bones of them aching from the wet air, my body feeling heavy with the density of it all. Lately though, I’ve grown tired, and find it difficult to jump from one thing to another. Lately, my memory isn’t letting me move forward, but pulls me backwards. I wake up from nightmares that I live in the south, and then I remember, pushing through all the confusion of sleep, that I do live in the south. The first time I had the nightmare I was unnerved, took a shower to shake it off, and then drove myself to work early. I saw the hills, the orange sunrise light peaking over the tips of the Blue Ridge just after I drove over the French Broad River. I took in a deep breath—it is beautiful, this place. And then I’m back sitting in one of the many yards of my childhood. I’m hiding behind an oak tree, leaning heavy and breathing deep, looking at the hills to know something good. And with that memory, I’ve burst into tears while driving down I-40, no longer telling myself I’m okay, instead asking aloud to no one, “How will I get out of here? How will I get out of here?”

On the first night in Boulder, Utah I slept in my tent near the community center, but there was something about the place that freaked me out. I woke up early and packed up my car. I drove to the outskirts of town where I could get a cell signal and called my friend, Danielle, for no reason other than to remind myself I wasn’t as isolated as I felt. I tell her about the vibe of the place, how I hadn’t expected to feel so weird here—I’ve always loved Southern Utah. 

“Something feels bad here.” 

“Come home. Just keep driving out of that town and come home.”

“I can’t. I have to recert the WFR or I won’t have a job this season.”

“Fuck the river. You can find other work.”

I’ve thought of quitting the river so many times, even back then I’d been contemplating what it would mean to give up the Canyon. I probably should have quit then, stopped pushing through things that made me feel bad—harassing men who withheld training, withheld decency. Even the good guys just made it that much worse to get stuck with the bad ones. I could go an entire trip and feel safe, happy even. But the bad trips seem even worse, every moment weighted down with the knowledge that I was stuck in the Canyon for seven to twelve days with unsafe men. Though I stopped guiding full-time years ago, only working a handful of trips each summer, it took me nineteen years to realize that no matter how much experience I had, no matter how many trips I led down the river, no matter how good I ran a rapid, I would never be safe from the misogyny plaguing the industry. Worse, I wouldn’t be able to protect the next generation of girls coming up. 

On my last trip of what would become my last season, the swamper, a young woman, not much older than I’d been when I started, approached me. She’d waited until the night’s work calmed and the other boatman had gone to bed, then she sat across from me on the back of my boat where I was sipping on a cocktail and listening to the current run fast. She took a few sips of beer and then looked at me directly, her eyes meeting and holding mine.  

“Do you know how you were talking about some of the stuff JP did when you started here. Being nice and everything and then going bad. The trying to touch you and bothering you, staring at you all the time, making you feel weird. Not letting you learn to drive because you wouldn’t let him touch you?”

I did remember saying that, even though I’d consumed far too much vodka that night before we launched as a way of calming myself after going off on all the bullshit I’d seen over the years—the way men got away with making the women feel small. 

“Yes. It was a hard time for me when I worked with him back then.”

“And he eventually apologized to you, said he was sorry and that he had learned how bad it was to be that way with you, that he would never do that kind of thing again—not to you or anyone else.”

I nodded, feeling sick to my stomach as it dawned on me just how stupid I’d been to believe him, to offer forgiveness. 

“Well, he’s been doing that stuff to me now, too.”

As this very smart, very impressive young person sat in front of me drinking a Bud Light and squirming as she recalled the moments where she’d been made to feel unsafe, I felt the incredible urge to scream. 

            “Fuck,” I rubbed my hand over my face, feeling the sweat and grime of the day, feeling the grime of the last nineteen years, “I can go with you, we can report this together, if you want?”

            “Not yet. Maybe soon, if I have to work with him again. I bet I can handle it, but if I can’t, if it’s bad maybe then...,” her voice trailed off. 

The reality is, reporting probably wouldn’t do much anyway. It’s not like the company is every really going to do anything about him. JP’s been here forever—practically grew up with the owners. They let him get away with all the drunk stuff he pulls all the time. What’s sexual harassment compared drunk driving a bunch of tourists down river? As I listened to my young friend, the river dancing along underneath us, I understood that I was finally finished with this job that had always given me a reason, given me the means, to spend the time I craved in the desert. I just couldn’t justify it anymore. 

I wasn’t even ten years into my river-career when I called Danielle that day on the side of the road outside Boulder, Utah. I wasn’t ready to let it all go, scared not to have work, scared to let go of a place I loved even though it came with so much bad. I wish I hadn’t been so scared. I wish I had driven away and let the WFR go, let the guiding go. But I didn’t. I drove back to town, to the community center, ready to spend the next three days learning wilderness medicine that was highly unlikely I’d ever put into practice in real life. 

It was an odd group of folks taking the class. I was the only woman there and I felt nervous about it. They were not the group of river runners and guides I’d been expecting. Mostly they were folks who seemed like they just wanted something to do. One man brought his daughter to the class. She looked to be about thirteen but dressed as if she were a pioneer, minus shoes. Her bare feet bothered me. It was too cold. Her father wore hiking boots and was bundled in thick flannels. She wore a light cotton jacket over her dress and clung to a cloth doll. She stuck near her father and barely spoke, smiled at the older woman who was cooking for the class. I assumed, given the area, that her father was a fundamentalist. The instructor of the class, who seemed to be a kind man, a safe man, was friendly to the child and made sure she knew there was enough breakfast to go around. I didn’t have to ask the girl what the instructor did—

“Is school on spring break?” 

I knew it wasn’t. Most likely her schooling would never be traditional, would never amount to much beyond keeping house and tending babies. Her role was to serve the men around her. As I glanced at the girl shyly spooning oatmeal into her mouth, it occurred to me that she might be rebelling against all the bullshit. Maybe she was causing trouble at home and that’s why her father had brought her along. It made me sad. Keeping women uneducated is just another way of setting them up for oppression. That I also knew without asking. My parents had had their own version of religious fundamentalism, and I’d also been kept from school and was told domesticity and childbearing was why God made me. There was no point in educating me, because my purpose in life didn’t call for it. 

I could have talked to the girl, though I imagine her father would not have approved, but I didn’t want to. It was too much, too close to a reality I’d left behind me in Tennessee nearly a decade ago. I didn’t want to know another girl whose life was likely to be one lived in oppression. I hadn’t been able to save my own sister, and this girl, well, there was nothing I could do about it. I left breakfast early, went out to my car and opened up my laptop. My thesis was coming due and we had another twenty minutes before the class started. I looked at the lines I needed to edit. The sun was coming down hot—that beautiful desert sun. I closed the computer and leaned back to feel the heat on my face, whispering to myself again and again—There’s nothing you can do, there’s nothing you can do.

 

*           *           *

 

We can live anywhere and we can die anywhere, but different places speak to different people. I think of what that means for my history, my memory, and my desire to be as far from this Southern region as possible—this is not my place, but it is the only place for others. And I think about what it means for the women I have known or at least known of, women connected to my life or my community in one capacity or another. Some of the women I find myself thinking about are those who have crossed my path peripherally. Like the girl back in Boulder, Utah. My thoughts have been preoccupied with these women lately. Maybe it’s all the bullshit in Texas—the republicans waging their never-ending battle against women and what they do with their bodies. How many women will be forced to bear children they never wanted? How many young girls, still children, will be forced to give birth because this country is full of men who are determined to write laws that break their bodies? Men and all their breaking, all their controlling, all their violence. Fathers, brothers, priests and preachers. And too the righteous woman sitting with righteous men on the highest court in the land. It does not bode well for most of us. 

That special kind of morality that allows one person to decide that their belief about what another person does or does not do with their body, is more important than the person making up that body, well—that shit is everywhere. It’s in Texas, the state of my birth and where I first learned of violence, in Tennessee where I grew up, and in Utah, the state that gave me home. And still, I’ve come to believe that place is everything. If I was pushed own some kind of belief, I’d say I believed in rivers and in dirt, in the desert. 

Kristen, who had been my freshman roommate, drove over a curb and popped her tire on the way to a party the year before I graduated. While we struggled with the flat, a complete stranger watched from his apartment window across the street. We must have looked silly trying to break the lug-nuts, taking turns steadying one another as one of us bounced on the x-shaped wrench jutting from one lug-nut than another. We managed to break two, but sat down on the curb to take a break before going after the others. Kristen, who rarely came out with me, was not pleased. She lit a cigarette and muttered something about fucking Salt City and its massive curbs, and something about me being bad luck. This was the second time we managed to have car issue that month. Comparatively, a flat was better than the tow we barely avoided the last time—the last of my paycheck covered half, but I still don’t know how Kristen came up with the rest of the money. She refused to call her parents, and I didn’t have any worth calling, but in the end, she had her car and her parents never knew how close she’d been to getting it impounded for parking it in the wrong zone. 

Mark Hacking was quiet when he came across the street to help with the flat tire. He said very little and seemed nice enough. He was a bit round, bald, maybe in his thirties. Later, when the story of his missing wife broke, he gave the performance of a loving husband, concerned for his pregnant wife, Lori, wanting her to come home. But he knew she would never come home. He’d shot her in the head with a rifle, wrapped her in the mattress, and threw her in the dumpster. She was found at the landfill days later. Why? Because she’d discovered him in a lie, in many lies. He’d told her he’d been accepted to medical school in North Carolina, though he’d never finished his undergraduate degree. He told her a lot of untrue things. She probably cried herself to sleep that night after telling him she was leaving him. And then he killed her. 

I called Kristen at her parents’ house to talk about the murder and that day the murderer changed her tire. We were both smoking, both sipping on sodas on either end of the phone call. Something about that sameness gave me some comfort. 

“Well, people are fucking assholes, even the nice ones, sometimes especially the nice ones. You just never fucking know.”

Kristen said fuck a lot, and I found that comforting too. 

“Um,” I started hesitantly, “do you think I could come to your parents tonight?”

“Yeah, you can stay the night. We can skim my romance novels for all the dirty parts.”

I sighed, grateful. “That sounds perfect.”

 

*           *           *

 

I’ve had many manual labor jobs, including the river, where the management let me know that most sexual harassment was just teasing and shouldn’t be taken seriously, but if I was being sexually harassed I needed to learn how to stand up for myself and make it stop. As I sit here writing these words the thought I’ve had so many times, said many times, stays with me—another refrain. Men hate women. Men hate women. 

I know that women hate women too. Perhaps it’s a learned disdain for how they are treated—if you don’t align yourself with other women, if you aren’t a feminist, then maybe men won’t hand you the same treatment they give all the other kinds of women. If you can convince men, and yourself in the process, that you are one of the boys, then maybe you’ll be as good as one. Maybe. 

When I was quite young, not so long after running away from home, a woman I looked up to told me that it was mean to make a man stop at a certain point when it came to sexual intimacy. 

“There comes a point where men can’t help themselves and trying to make them stop is just mean.” 

The man who raped me was eight or nine years older than me. I liked him. We hiked and drank beer, cuddled in his hammock. When we went to his room and started making out, I said I couldn’t. I said no. He stopped. Said okay, but didn’t stop. For everything in my body that knew what was happening to me was wrong, that led me to madly run down the street the second it was all over, I could hear that woman’s voice—

“Men can’t help themselves.” 

 

*           *           *

 

When I was little and living in Texas I had a neighbor. Her name was Annie, and when she died it was slow—years in the making. She’d damaged her brain when she tried to take her own life. Carbon Monoxide poisoning. The details of her attempted suicide are fuzzy. I wrote about Annie some years ago, an essay in which I considered her kindness, and the oppression she lived under day in and day out. I’ve been thinking about her again because I’ve been thinking about all the women I have known who have been stifled—a life without agency or life lost at the hands of violent men. 

When did it begin, my awareness of this violence? I think it was Annie. I was four when I knew her, a year or two older when she suffered carbon monoxide poisoning. I think I was ten or eleven when she finally died. Her husband, a preacher, was a brutal red-faced man. 

When I was fifteen living in Tennessee I worked on a small tobacco farm with my older brother, the farmer, and his nineteen-year-old son, and a nineteen-year-old man who dated the farmer’s daughter, Dana. They had a child together—she was seventeen. I’ve written about Dana in the past, too. Her boyfriend murdered her with a shotgun the first and only winter I worked shucking tobacco plants. At first the boyfriend ran, but quickly turned himself in. I saw a brief news clip. She was trying to leave him, wanted to move away for school and didn’t want him following her. He killed her while she sat in the driver seat of her car. He shot her from the outside, pressing the gun against the glass. She must have been trying to get away. At her funeral, I had the hopeful thought that maybe there had been mercy. Maybe she hadn’t seen it coming. Now I wonder what it was that made him feel so untouchable that he didn’t feel the need for restraint, that he helped himself to the life of a young woman who simply wanted to live away from him. 

 

*           *           *

 

When the whole country, the whole world, is being ransacked by sickness and death, it’s hard to avoid the thought of death and dying and loss and grief and the overwhelming sadness of it all. It brings things up for us—those of us waiting for the end of the pandemic. I take inventory of all the ways in which I’ve known violence, death, and grief when I’m walking my dog on the trail by my house, when I’m looking out the window before dawn has appeared. I wonder if thinking this way is also a condition of living back in the region I swore I’d never return to. This space, despite so much beauty, presses me down even though I work daily at not giving over to the heaviness I feel in here. I remind myself my early encounters with all this darkness started in the south, but it didn’t stop there. Everyone dies, and anyone can die anywhere.

After Annie died, after Dana was killed, after I fled home as a teenager, determined to escape the violence of my own family, I met a man who shot his wife to death on a calm street in Salt Lake, and two years before that, Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped and held in the foothills behind my apartment. 

 

*           *           *

 

The other night I saw a dead black bear on the side of the road. The second one I’d seen since living here. Deer, elk, antelope, racoons, opossums, coyotes, armadillos—those I’m used to seeing dead on the roadside. And each one bothers me—every time. The black bear though—I have no words. All this encroachment, the fast-paced movement on our dying planet. 

I hit an opossum once in the dark driving across Kansas. I cried. People think them ugly and horrible, but they are docile and gentle creatures, baring their teeth with a hiss when threatened, when afraid. Last year, I read about a man who took a golf club to a baby opossum and beat it for no reason. Just because he could. I’m writing about a wolf who was shot by a hunter for no reason, other than he could. I wonder how much violence would dissipate if men didn’t feel confident and assured in what they can do in the world.

 

*           *           *

 

This past summer, a young woman from Florida went missing. Her body was found weeks later. Her fiancé killed her. He could, you see, she was small and he wasn’t. Now people are talking about her death, and now, once again, everyone is talking about “Missing White Woman Syndrome.” When a white woman goes missing she becomes a national obsession. When murdered Indigenous women, Black women, Brown women, Asian women go missing, we rarely hear their names, the circumstance of their cases, on the news for even a short period of time. At least the conversation is happening, yes, but I worry it won’t last. When more women of color go missing will their disappearances get coverage, or will they be set aside until another white woman goes missing, again forcing the conversation about the obsessive coverage of those who are deemed to matter and those who matter less? It’s not an unfounded worry or an unfounded question—it’s a one people ask about their loved ones who garner no nation-wide coverage every day.

Of the hundreds of Indigenous women who have gone missing in the Utah adjacent Wyoming in the last few years, none of their names have garnered the attention and recognition that Smart’s had then and even now. When I think of who makes up the police force, who makes up the justice system, who sits on the courts, who matters and who doesn’t, who the media cares about and who they don’t, I find myself walking from one room to the other. I pace knowing that it’s not enough to feel bad, to go outside and close my eyes, feel the heat of the sun and tell myself there is nothing I can do. 

In a country built on a foundation of racism and the genocide of Indigenous peoples, it’s hard to be surprised that missing women of color, their stories, are represented less in the media. Violence against women is commonplace because women are just not the kind of people who matter enough. For all the learning and teaching and believing that somehow change is possible, we have not learned how to change fast enough. We move slow and pride ourselves on our snail-paced-progress that has always left and continues to leave so many people waiting for justice that never comes.

Ours has never been a country of kindness. 

 

*           *           *

 

I write about wildlife, rivers and desert lands, mountains and mud because that’s how I try to make sense of the world, and maybe that’s because the land has been gendered too, like the constant legislation of women’s bodies, our lands bridled again and again. There is a connection between the destruction of the planet and the bridling of women’s bodies. Our lands are dying, our water polluted, rivers dammed and broken—like the Colorado, every gallon claimed and taken before it can reach the ocean—leaving it a pathetic trickle in Mexico. Is it easy dismissal our dying planet because we are so used to seeing it exploited and strangled? And where is the root of such things? 

When the colonizers came to this country they already saw women in nature, had already gendered the land, but they certainly leaned into that way of seeing and being and thinking more so than ever. It’s not really such a surprise then that the land and the wildlife living upon it are so easily dismissed—and that, to me, is particularly weighted. What it tells me about women is that we’ve never mattered enough, and if women have been historically connected to the land through metaphorical language, then we may all just be doomed. Or maybe not. Polluted water, dammed rivers, wildlife and plants decimated by climate change could potentially force a reckoning because it’s not just women’s lives that will be affected, but everyone lives. Still, in these pandemic days riddled with illness and a significant portion of the population refusing life-saving vaccines, and with the near useless Senate, I’m having a hard time letting myself hope for much.   

Still, tomorrow I’ll sit down and plan another lesson. I’ll look at my students in their masks, and we will talk about literature and its various ways of representing life. I’ll ask if it matters, this representation. We will discuss and we will look for hope because it’s too horrible not to. After class, I’ll sit at my office desk and open another worthless email from the administration and read their surface level announcements about the progressiveness of our university. I’ll think about the banners flying above our library to symbolize our inclusivity and our acknowledgement that this campus is housed on the stolen land of Cherokee peoples. And what, beyond these banners of acknowledgement, real and truly tangible things have we done? 

I’ll think of the first student meeting I had after my first nonfiction workshop here at this school. We discussed revisions for the essay she was working on, an essay that detailed the terrible treatment she received by the Title IX office when she reported her assault. I read her pain and remembered how a white male colleague told me during my first month on the job, “Assault isn’t a thing on our campus.” He sits on the school’s faculty senate now. 

I’ll pack my bag for the day and go home to my partner who I know gets bogged down in the inhumanity he discovers in his own research—currently economic disparity and labor inequality in West Virginia. He will be making dinner, our animals bustling about the kitchen to eat up whatever mess makes its way to the floor. I’ll laugh at his terrible singing and feel grateful for our laughter, for the light in this world. I’ll feel a little bad, too, because I too often take for granted that I’m so lucky to have this light and this love.

In the morning, I’ll inspect the yard carefully for deer before I let my dog out.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel M. Hanson’s essays can be found in Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, North American Review, Best of the Net, American Literary Review, and many other literary journals. Her poetry was selected for Best New Poets and has been published in The Minnesota Review, Juked, New Madrid, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship in Nonfiction at Colgate University, Rachel holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Utah, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Asheville. 

Genta Nishku

GENTA NISHKU

Runner-Up of the 2022 Pink Prize for Poetry


EMBOUCHURE QUESTIONS THE PAST

 

i.

​​I deleted all adjectives.

Everything became [       ].

 

Subject to dictation, I copied words.

We learned to answer when called.

 

Someone was [  ], said nothing.

What did they mean by voice?

 

I moved my mouth, called your name,

no sound escaped.

 

The body, instrument for the voice,

like the oceans at the mercy of waves.

 

They held their tongues. I made myself mouth.

Your name changed shape.

 

I tried to mouth again. Again.

 

A Sunday, in other words, is called regret.

 

ii. 

Language took a different color.

Frozen like ice, grey-white.

 

In air too sparse for sound,

we held face to face.

 

Every new sentence became longer.

But longing, on principle, requires labor.

 

It’s the fault of the gale. Admit it. 

The swimmers had taken cover, 

Us, alone, braved it without narrative,

 

Or plot.

 

iii.

An isolated cove, then. A clear, turquoise water, then. 

 

Drowned bees on the water, surface tension held only by hope. 

 

The olive-covered hills, property of capital. Market it: the most [        ]

on the continent. Language takes its revenge. Yesterday, you were victim. 

 

I wanted to say something definitive, but I arrived too late. 

The mouths had been put away. Ears stuffed in drawers. 

 

Did you see me? Did you see my lips move? 

 

And the wind, hissing, and the branches, breaking.

And the rattling walls, the collapsing statues.

 

Headless, no longer mouthed. 

I voiced it to you, you kept it secret.

 

Worded it 

to yourself. 


MONTSERRAT SCREAMING

 

after a sculpture by Julio González

 

i.

 

Take inventory. Body: absent. 

Face: facade. Expression: shriek. 

Remove the adjectives. Iron is left,

welded until soft, the shape of a death 

mask, pliable evidence of suffering. 

Tell me, Montserrat, whose story is this? 

Who hears you now? Who sees the burned 

of your flesh? What frequency captures 

the empty of your scream, that echoes, 

forever, against the cold of your metal,

your body articulated into absence, 

your pleas to the gods who carry 

the names of men. Against their unspeakable, 

the challenge of your presence, Montserrat.

Who denies you now? Who claims you

voiceless? Ungoverned by their time, 

their laws, you become a pendulum 

unswayable, despite season or latitude.  

 

ii.

 

For Julio González, the shrieking human face was the most sublime expression. 

He sculpted, and painted, screaming head after screaming head. Their cries frozen in straight lines of abstract faces, the cries silent, but the expression so pained, so distinct from all other human experience, that no one looking could escape without seeing the screams. His screaming subjects are women, common and plain, kerchiefs covering their hair, knotted by their throats, concentrating our attention on the mouth. Lonely colorless figures, they clamor to be heard, Montserrat he named them, the common name, the one he forged out of iron, unglorified parable of all wars, grotesque twist of the mouth, a mouth filled with empty, a mouth’s unuttered scream.

 

iii.

 

Once, I heard of women

connected by invisible

threads of sorrow: 

a scream across lands &

oceans. Over there, hands

held out in supplication, 

over here, the wailing 

gone mute. They called

them kore, they called 

them montserrat, called

them hopeless, waiting 

ones, declared their 

speech untranslatable.

Have you never felt

all the ways to say 

lament? 


A HISTORY OF TEETH

 

A tooth key used as metaphor

means so little. Why delay the facts? 

The rich always knew how to hold 

power, manifest it as beauty. Teeth, 

ripped from the poor, volunteers, 

they’d say, into the mouth of ladies 

& gentlemen. Who speaks then? 

Whose macabre jaws give voice to 

the gospel, the constitution, the decree?

In the market for human teeth, losers 

inherit smiling gaps & distorted speech: 

onomatopoeia of the hopeless resounds 

in abscessed mouths. Do you hear it? 

It says, this is not a mouth, but a gape.

This is not a mouth, but a clot. Not a 

mouth, but sound: empty and coagulated.  


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Genta Nishku lives in New York and was raised in Tirana. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Bennington Review, Washington Square Review, Barzakh, B O D Y, CHEAP POP, and others. Find her at gentanishku.com.

Hannah Dierdorff

Hannah dierdorff

Winner of the 2022 Pink Prize for Poetry


EXTENDED SONNET WITH TURKEY VULTURES

 

inside the apartment complex, i practice belief in death

the way I once believed in god—the fall

from the balcony, the red bolt through the body,

then the holy emptiness, the self erased, cleaned.

six hawks in the distance, spiraling. turkey vultures

maybe. too far to see. the morning is a mirror

in which i do not recognize myself. carnivorous,

cadaverous. hidden litanies of death trailing everything

i name. i've seen the casualties of desire—scraps

of fur on october roads, bones and trash bleaching

in the weeds. chick-fil-a cup, rusted hub cap,

plastic sheetz bag. how to speak the word love

in a landfill. how to praise the body that continues

to eat. a rooftop vent flickers in the sun, exhaling

exhaust into a tree. i tell myself i'm learning

to touch the shape of my life like the gray trunk

of a beech in which a scarlet tanager sings

shureet shureet.


A BRIEF LESSON IN RIMMING


AN APOSTATE’S ABECEDARIAN

 

All fall i complain to you about the light. Two days

before the solstice, the optometrist explains the irregular

curve of my eyes. Astigmatism he says but i think stigmata:

desire converging to a point of pain on a saint's

exalted palms or feet, the sudden bloom of blood from

francis's side mirroring the wounds of his beloved christ. In

giotto's painting, beams of light extend from a

hovering crucifix through the kneeling francis as

if his body is just another window, a glass frame for

joy and sorrow to pass through. i never

knew the word miraculous even when i still

longed for a shadow i called lord to touch

me in the night. In the new year, you and i climb the cliffs

near summersville lake, your body above me in a blur

of opaline light. My neck cranes back, rope

passing between my hands as you ascend, the sun's

quiver piercing my eyes. Why this grief as you

rise away from me? Ice breaks open on the lake's blue

sheen. In the painting, gold rods pin his body into place,

thanks the saint's only reply. What ties us together is wholly

unholy: a dirty green rope knotted at our hips. i am

vicious and infested with vice. My vision muddies

when you bite my neck under the dark's stars and signs, your

sex pressed to my pelvis where god never came.

Yes, every second a supernova explodes. Some

zeal asks for pain in the absence of touch. Even at its

zenith, can tenderness say enough?


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Originally from Spokane, Washington, Hannah Dierdorff is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, where she taught poetry and writing. She is the recipient of the 2022 Dogwood Literary Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cut Bank, About Place, Arkansas International, Willow Springs, and elsewhere.