Review of Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Underground National by Sueyeun Juliette Lee. Factory School, $15.

Reviewed by Thomas Fink

Underground National, Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s second book, consists of six sizeable poems, the two shortest of which each span six pages. The book’s dedication casts what follows in a political frame: “For all who’ve suffered the multi-generational consequences of nation-building. May the shapes of the future arise from a renewed imagination.” Specifically referring to the two postcolonial Koreas, their diaspora, and the dream of reunification, the poet probes facets of this suffering and its complex causes, harbingers of renewal, and questions about how “shapes of” a better “future” are thwarted or cultivated.

The opening poem, “Korea, What Is,” spans 34 pages, each one featuring a unit or two of prose blocks, verse, or computer photo. Lee’s “Notes to the Text” speaks of a “density of materials” that found their way into this poem and documents source texts ranging from the CIA’s World Factbook, news articles in The New York Times and Time, global affairs experts’ editorial texts, blogs and other websites, and postcolonial scholarship. Frequently, “texts” have been “altered. . . through erasure, lineation, or rewrites of short phrases.” Lee’s collage method sometimes presents various attempts in the source texts to say “What” “Korea” “Is,” and sometimes pulverizes them beyond ready contextualization. Further, the juxtaposition of disparate points of view undermines the ability of premature, rigid, narrow, or ahistorical definitions of a people or a political structure to gain authority.

Regarding the movement toward a desired collapse of the current North Korean regime and possible reunification, the poet cites a prediction involving seven phases, with three of them missing:

Phase one: resource depletion.
Phase two: infrastructural failure.
Phase three:
Phase four:
Phase five: active resistance.
Phase six:
Phase seven: the formation of a new national leadership.

These omissions suggest the poet’s resistance to any U.S. pundits’ smug graphing of precisely how the fate of both Koreas and possibilities of reunification will “play out.” While an end to the military dictatorship of Kim Jong-Il and his family is surely a desirable outcome, there is no guarantee that “a new national leadership” would be a distinct improvement.

South Korea’s vulnerability, of course, is not confined to the North, but also involves its position on the world stage. At various points in the poem, there are allusions to South Koreans’ mistrust of U.S. military presence in their nation: “’whose armored vehicle crushed two schoolgirls to death.” One passage actually comes from a New York Times article about incidents early in the Korean War: “who won a warm spot in the hearts of the populace when he entered this capital as a liberator nearly three months ago, now is regarded with suspicion by many.” For 60 years, doubts about U.S. intervention in Korean affairs have surfaced, and this must be particularly unsettling for a poet of Korean descent who was born and has always lived in the U.S. A noted Korean farmer-activist and martyr, Lee Kyung Hae, is quoted as declaring that “human beings are in an endangered situation” because “a small number of big WTO members are leading an undesirable globalization. . .”

It is arguable, perhaps, that Lee presents multinational corporate platforms enabling Korean youths to fashion a semblance of identity and a tacit sharing of national pride on the basis of culture: “Kim Tae Yeon is “Single” Again Girls’/ Generation leader and I got konglish lyrics. . ./ about to take a drastic change as a viable option/ for Kangin Come Party with Se7en in Atlanta/ featuring Lil Kim/ through a fancam at the Gimpo Airport. . . ./ Kim Yoo Jin Joins After School + Diva Teaser.” However, such collages can also underscore the triviality and ephemeral quality of pop cultural topoi fostered by Web 2.0’s blinding speed, as well as the implication of a widening generation gap—hardly conducive to national unity.

Various references to the suicides of pop stars, a former South Korean President, and “’the suicide capital of Asia’” indicate that social and economic pressures—and perhaps the very problems of national identity and nation-building—are troubling the mental health of the more prosperous Korea’s citizens: “Lee Seo Hyun left a note saying sorry to his parents as well as to his fellow church-mates. The reason for his suicide: failed stock investments, a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of borrowed money”; “’But Teacher! What if you have so many money in debt and not good job? Then maybe making suicide is best choice’.” The false plural “many” in the borrowed language of world commerce underscores a threatening destabilization of currency’s unitary flow.

One might be buoyed by “a ‘united Korean anthem’ created by blending the melodies of the nations’ anthems seamlessly. . . to promote Korean re-unification.” However, any idealism risks corruption, as Lee indicates on a page near the end of the poem by interspersing snippets of Kim Jong-Il’s Juche (self-reliance) philosophy about “man’s” “position and role as dominator and transformer of the world,” the narrative of a young woman’s abduction by an older man, and a theorization of “the spread of a political order,” colonialism, as inscribing “in the social world a new conception of space, new forms of personhood, and a new means of manufacturing the experience of the real.” Though homegrown, Kim Jong Il’s “manufacture” of “the experience of the real” for his citizens might be as masculinist and coercive as that of the colonial powers that preceded him, and indeed, he probably learned strategies of control from the occupiers.

Perhaps to signal aspirations, there are images floating through different parts of the poem (and returning twice in a later poem) of kites, which were used by the Korean hero Admiral Yi to relay information that helped turn back a Japanese naval assault in the late 16th century. Lee makes the kite a trope for the longing for a liminal experience:

A cross-kite. My link to the sky, pinned up into wafting blueness there. Grafted together, folded like a paper coat, a hidden oath like a never worn golden ring. Wait—I thought this was the beginning of my skin. ‘[T]hat may be an indication of what lies ahead.”

Kites: between two impossible states. A tug and pull enforced by sky’s restless dreaming, contrary wakefulness of earth, nerve-like. Flicker feeling in the flesh, cast free but held.

In these passages, among the most lyrical in a poem incorporating disparate kinds of discourse, the “link to the sky” seems a desire for access to a space that affords the imaginative reconstruction of a homeland for diasporic subjects. This includes finding an opportunity to pledge fealty to a nation, to wear a precious token of fidelity, but this is difficult if the terms of the “oath” or “vow” are unknown. These subjects exist in the “impossible state” of disjunction between their own lived experience and that of their ancestors’ existence in a nation-“state” that is “impossible” to re-enter, as postcolonial history has changed it so extensively. To relinquish tense “wakefulness” on earth and to surrender to the kite’s “dream” of travel to origins may seem available in the “flicker feeling in the flesh,” captured by alliterative frissons. However, the phrase, “cast free but held,” reminds us that the kite will not transport the body; the individual will either limit the kite’s trajectory or will let it go and see what happens. “Korea, What Is” does not anchor “Korea” to any definition. Various scraps of definition and processes of de-definition are held aloft to catch divergent “winds.”

Another potent poem of nation-probing is “(the underground national didn’t blow up) for want of love.” In this text, short and medium-sized paragraphs tend to be the norm, with lines of verse used more infrequently. The title foregrounds ambiguity. If parentheses are seen to separate the title’s two units, it suggests two divergent themes of a near-explosion and something occurring due to lack of love. And perhaps the reversal of where parentheses usually go—around a second phrase or clause—emphasizes this doubleness. However, if we read a continuity into the two parts of the title, then we may assume that a blow-up has occurred despite the existence of love. Further, “underground national,” the book’s title, seems to signify Kim Jong Il’s “nation-building” gesture of staging “an underground nuclear explosion near P’unggye on October 9, 2006,” as the Korean Central News Agency reported, and yet “underground” also suggests a covert resistance to Kim’s regime.

The poem supports this ambiguity by interspersing images that might relate to the problems of love relationships with fragments hinting at numerous aspects of the explosion and contexts surrounding it:

A plenary approach between two foreign bodies, what the sky dreamed as we all fell still. Confluence of isolations, most certain. I am confused, dumbstruck ((deadly pale))—it tickles when I touch you there, there. “I am not quite comfortable.”


“was born into this system and is in a sense a prisoner of it himself”


A tectonic pulse, another way to imagine a breach, or what else stands against the DMZ.

Intimately placed “bodies” and nations are “foreign” to and perhaps “’not quite comfortable’” with one another. Love is “explosive,” not only in an orgasmic sense, but in the vulnerability it creates. The pulsing “underground” of each lover’s unconscious encourages one “to imagine a breach” with consciousness and a “DMZ” thwarting mutual recognition of the unconscious impulses of the two. Subterranean communication disrupts the best intentioned efforts of conscious dialogue. Perhaps lovers are “born into [a] system” of signification that may imprison them in a paradoxical “confluence of isolations.”

The most obvious subject of the quoted fragment in the middle of the passage above is Kim Jong-Il, who inherited power from his father and might not have insight about how to transform his “system” into something that would diminish the culture of fear and improve the country’s dire economic situation. Further, he may not know how to communicate with the international community (or with the South) in a less reactive, more nuanced way than flexing nuclear muscles.

By placing in relation numerous sub-contexts within the situation of the underground explosion, Lee suggests that provisional understanding of the historical dynamic comprises a resistance to any conceptual reduction. She gives us indications of the violence of the explosion, its impact on local citizens who “had no idea anything was wrong” and on the environment, the sense in the North of “a slow starvation on a mass scale” yet “no sign of a verging popular revolt,” the North Korean government’s assertion that the explosion constitutes “’a great leap forward in the building of a great prosperous powerful socialist nation’” and “an ‘historic event that brought happiness to our military and people’,” and international responses and forecasts of reprisals: “’and the international community will respond’”; “risking even further isolation.” Attention to all these particulars is neither partisan nor disinterested; Lee evinces a distinct love for future realizations of the “national” through “underground” and gradually unearthed speculation and action. To return to the dedication with which I began, brutal power relations involved in colonial and neocolonial “nation-building” is precisely what the movement toward critical articulation of the national intends to overcome.

Review of Ana Bozicevic

Stars of the Night Commute by Ana Bozicevic. Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009.

Reviewed by Mary Austin Speaker

Ana Bozicevic was born in Croatia and emigrated to New York City when she was 19. Although it is dangerous to make presumptions about the way one’s biography inflects their poetry, I think it’s helpful to consider the conditions of Ana Bozicevic’s native country when she left it. Croatia’s is a history of conflict in which voices speak over each other. Stars of the Night Commute, the author’s first collection of poems, suggests that since her emigration she has been learning how to write her own history while rejecting the very idea of writing history. Bozicevic’s poems offer a record of a mind continually working against an understandable past. They are non-narrative yet intimate. They are, at times, scenic, although the rooms she creates are not the actual rooms of the poem, but they may in fact be the rooms that you yourself have waited in. Say the room has a table with a white table cloth. This could be any room, but the way Ana Bozicevic directs our attention to the tablecloth suggests that this room exists for everyone. We are constantly going back to it and yet we never know exactly what we are waiting for. Everyone has one of these rooms. Ana writes, sometimes, from this room.

Fanny Howe has written of bewilderment as both poetics and ethics—a bewilderment born of “an irreconcilable set of imperatives. . . a double bind established in childhood” that results, inevitably, in uncertainty. If Fanny Howe has carved out a space for a poetics that is ultimately unquantifiable, and which offers a practice of living and writing as a way of revering the unexplainable, Ana Bozicevic’s poems certainly participate in this tradition. She achieves bewilderment through abrupt shifts in syntax and tone (this reader’s favorite being the excited address of a nostril, that humblest of body parts), as well as a stubborn refusal of the power of accepted beauty. Light, birds, each of these are teased, off-handedly rejected, just as they are reclaimed—but it is the poet’s attention—not the inherent characteristic of the thing itself— which defines the beautiful— how the thing itself is seen, and Ana Bozicevic’s book understands the fickleness of a bewildered attention.

Bewilderment is not lamented— it is celebrated in all its raw, staccato energy. The poems in Stars of the Night Commute disrupt, they bother, they tease, they nudge and cajole and apostrophe. We are not to be hypnotized (although some poems are inarguably gorgeous). We are not to fall lamely under a sonorous spell (although some poems use sound masterfully to prick our ears). We are supposed to pay attention, and if we don’t recognize what’s been placed in front of us, she’s betting on the fact that we have, regardless, understood a mood, a tone, a something, and that, without the architecture of more linear poetry, is exactly what makes her work an experience unto itself. Her poems laugh at themselves, and they laugh at you. They also weep at themselves and weep at you. And complain and instruct and adore and puzzle.

The poems of Stars of the Night Commute play with our notions of the utterable. How does one convey beauty without commodifying it, betraying it? How does one write about violence, even war, without betraying them? Perhaps one has to obliterate in order to build something new. Or perhaps one simply has to provide enough disruption along the way so as to offer meaning in discrete packages— like chapbooks.

M.L. Rosenthal’s Genius of the Poetic Sequence posited in 1986 that the sequence was ultimately poetry’s most lasting and vital form, and the steady growth in critical attention to the chapbook in recent years might very well confirm Rosenthal’s supposition. Ana Bozicevic’s work seems to grasp this notion implicitly—most of her book was presented first as a series of chapbooks, each with a discrete tone, endeavor, subject, and the poems themselves often operate this way as well. Why not try a poetics that allows for the outcome to be at turns musical, spastic, unpredictable, thrilling? The drama of how a tone offers its subject can be, it would appear, a shield against a subject’s perceived (tired) meaning. Ana Bozicevic’s poems are punctuated by exclamation points in unexpected places, wrinkled with asides from the poem’s recesses, and even deliberately broken up by words that have lost meaning due to overuse and overkill. This dance between the things of the obviously poetic— birds, light, small animals— and the things of the pedestrian life— VHS tapes, has-beens, commuters— serves the poet well to provide enough static for the reader to understand Stars of the Night Commute as a thing very much of the world in which we live. It acts out claim at the book’s outset, that the poem “can no longer be remote.”

So how is intimacy expressed amid this cacophony of things? It springs from the same place we find intimacy in our daily lives. Often over the course of this collection, the poems resemble scraps culled from a conversation between two people, each of whom expects something of the other and in this way the book itself is sort of like an eclogue— one voice perpetually interrogating the other— but the voices switch roles, obliterating a graspable sense of a speaker, yet never evading a sense of expectation— indeed, intimacy does not exist apart from expectation. Reading Stars of the Night Commute offers a paradoxical reading experience—a tone that suggests an uneasy, cajoling vulnerability is coupled with a syntax which at turns holds the reader at bay (like one who has only just approached an ongoing conversation) and invites her in with the sudden slowing of attention that provides the opportunity for a peculiar, personal music that is at once apart from and very much surrounded by the world:

(O traveler. Grey star.

From your hat, when you upend it,
your small family upturn their faces.)

And morningly
nebulae, red-throated
waterbirds,
typestrokes of
fish

What is expectation in a book of poems? Ana Bozicevic might deny that she sets up any expectation at all. Or she might view expectation as an opportunity for subversion, a kind of poetic bait-and-switch that diverts the reader’s attention with the spectacle of humor, ridiculousness, jokes, while sneaking in the things that are most difficult to say, or even opening up opportunities for us to discover them ourselves. This sidling up, this inadvertent conveyance of meaning allows us to participate in the author’s bewilderment, to experience the world the way we do when we have just grasped a joke— the moment of recognition, the psychological sense of inclusion, the bubble of laughter making its way to the surface.

Review of Michelle Taransky

Barn Burned, Then by Michelle Taransky. Omnidawn Publishing, $14.95.

Review by Lindsay Kathleen Turner

Selected by Marjorie Welish as the winner of the 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Contest, Michelle Taransky’s first collection of poems, Barn Burned, Then, takes its title from a haiku by Masahide: “Barn’s burnt down / now / I can see the moon.” Structured into two sections, “Barn Book” and “Bank Book,” Taransky’s work places us immediately and fully into the space created by loss and its aftermath: lines are spare and usually quite short, images are as bare and fragile as the half-burnt rafters of the half-present barn, and throughout the book a certain repertory of words—drawn from both financial and agricultural registers—repeats and recurs, as if the repository of language itself had, along with its storehouse, gone up in smoke.

Indeed, the operating principles behind Taransky’s poems seem themselves to be informed by an economy of loss, by the tension of scarcity. Meanings are questioned and revised as line follows line, and in the absence of an abundance of words, many of Taransky’s are called upon to operate in several possible positions at once. Take, for example, the opening of the poem “Barn Burner, If”:

What lies down here
Does not call for
The plan

Its facts of carve
and split something […]

Here—as with the book as a whole—the meaning of the lines shifts dramatically depending on whether or not we read continuously from the title into the poem, as grammatical structure invites us to do, or whether we discard this structure in favor of a standard separation between title and poem—and, thus, a stable statement of “its facts” rather than a situation of if/then contingency. But even the “facts” seem undermined by the sort of anthimeria characteristic of Taransky’s work: the evocative “facts of carve” becomes the destructive action “carve and split,” and we are left with no “fact” at all to fall back on.

But it’s not only the meanings of words that Taransky works to destabilize; on both semantic and grammatical levels, the experience of reading Barn Burned, Then is not unlike the attempt to keep one’s balance on a galloping horse described—or, more accurately, replicated—in another poem in the collection (titled, joltingly as well as perhaps jokingly, “How To Keep / Your Balance / On A”). Returning to “Barn Burner, If”: the poem ends with the conclusion of the conditional construction begun in its title:

If ovate
Then

… Blaze the
Bricks will

I don’t stop for

Then the yearling
Loses touch

Here the conditional is strangely doubled, however: the blaze, already figured by the book’s title as occasioning force, is now what follows an empty space and is contingent upon the “if ovate” as well as the previous “barn burner.” By the end of this spare poem, it is impossible to determine where the if/then construction begins or ends, which “if” follows which “then,” which force affects which entity; the space of the poem is one in which grammatical structures serve to question the ideas of causality and contingency they evoke. In other words, the emptiness opened by the loss of the barn becomes the site of an intense and unresolved investigation of language.

The examination of the space of loss at the core of Barn Burned, Then, however, is not solely a problem of language. If the poems’ structural and linguistic ambiguities function to further their creation, their semantic ones point to something gone awry both inside and outside the book. The fact that certain words are called upon to sustain multiple meanings is not only an act of semantic disturbance; it is also a chilling way to evoke a certain cultural moment: the literal destruction of farms, barns, homes, and lives in the wake of contemporary economic failure.

In the “Great Foundation I Dug Out,” Taransky writes of

a once

dead barn swallow—

now full of change

and falling

it is an anvil

stuffed with wild

weeds I saved to open up

an account

In these eight short but impossibly knotty lines, it seems that both language and economics have collapsed into each other, and collapsed in general: the destroyed barn names its now-dead denizen, the natural “change” from life to death bears both the echo and the weight of the nickels and dimes that could have saved but have in a certain sense destroyed both swallow and barn, the bird itself becomes a kind of repository, a fragile “safe,” and the speaker’s “account” is in the end both a financial and representational problem. Indeed, a partial list of the words that echo, doubled and redoubled in meaning, throughout the book points to the extent to which writing and language are implicated with a destructive economic system: change / exchange, prints / imprints, counts / count / account, tell / teller, bank, safe, note / notes. Elsewhere in the book, in the same way that the verb “to tell” (a story) becomes (bank) “teller,” the verb “to add” (as one would one’s life savings) becomes, terrifyingly, “adders”: the close association of registers is clearly no benign condensation.

Barn Burned, Then is, then, ultimately both a politicized examination of language and a linguistic—and remarkably lyrical—examination of the political. This double action is not ultimately surprising, given that Taransky locates herself clearly and deliberately as drawing on the work of both Language poetry and of Objectivism; the first section of the book begins with epigrams from George Oppen and Charles Bernstein. What is perhaps more surprising is the quietness with which Taransky mounts her critique—remarkable given the scope of her project and especially refreshing in a first book from a younger poet. Even as it multiplies meanings and referents and further pulls apart a world already almost destroyed, the book rarely fails to evoke a certain closeness and smallness of scale that remain accessible through and to the poems: take, for example, the end of “Barn Burner, If” (“Then the yearling / loses touch”) or the delicacy with which the barn swallow cited earlier appears and falls.

It might be possible to trace this intimacy of the concrete back to Williams, or back again to the haiku tradition already mentioned. Barn Burned, Then also brings to mind the work of Lorine Niedecker, a poet deeply and personally impacted by economic depression and loss of home and property; what Rachel Blau DuPlessis wrote in The Kenyon Review (spring 1992) of Niedecker’s work—that in it “the haiku-lyric… may even offer its own barbed commentary on monstrous, overweening cultural ambitions”—seems equally appropriate to Taransky’s. But in any case, Taransky’s book is less an illustration or evocation of other schools or other writers, or even of its moment of political and linguistic crisis, than it is—in the wake of destruction—the construction of a solid and satisfying “statement // to take the barn’s place.”

NEW! Poems by G.C. Waldrep

G.C. Waldrep

NATIONAL GALLERY

Why does everything
have to be
a Native American
burial ground.

I have not set fire
to any visiting poets.

You look through
the kaleidoscope, and
Russia looks back.

Ants the size of
people. Little church
biographies.

Swine flu on campus
means nothing
much. Wood ducks
fly through it.

The bank clerk
pretends to examine
the watermark.

Flagstone, crisp
as a cathedral apron.

An idea of residence:
we live here.
Lichens drift past us
in the swan boats.

There are no rules
for theater. Toppling
into the eulogy:

Interferon, various
prostheses made of wax.

Darfur is not
a medical experiment.

Visible spectrum.
Your left hand opens
in real time.

Sand dunes, sand
storm. Faint crescent,
puma, cloudy sky.


EPITHELIUM

Try thinking of Jamaica
as a search-&-rescue mission.

The third thing is
the noumenal, by which
we mean advertising
when we aren’t around.

A tentative dislodging.
Man-in-boat, man-in-
cave formation.

Marsh grass. Shallow.

The president announces
new household gods.
I burned myself
trying to light the fire.

There was this weird
noise. And we got there,

the little prayer flags
beating time with capitalism.

No, the book report
is not a lyric form, unless
it’s a book about
constellations, or sand.

The largest unbranched
inflorescence is the titan arum.

Nothing new is hiding
in the trees, you said.

A living dog being better
than a dead lion,
we left the child in peace.

NEW! Poem by William Pettit

William Pettit


The Opposite of a Dog


The scars of boredom
On this constant heap

Add some white wisdom to her suffrage
If turned around and sent aloft
From dug cube under marked stone to omnipotence
As the white roses on that soil bloom and pass

She stays with me and my songs
What a godly companion
What a furry beating

NEW! Poem by Tomaz Salamun

Tomaz Salamun


SUTRA


What is the sea? The sea is the forehead.
What is the forehead? The forehead is the night.
What is the sand? The sand is the dawn.
What is the dawn? The dawn is the king.
The king is the donned man.
The donned man carries the burden.

What is the sack? The sack is garbage.
What is garbage? Garbage is the wheel?
What is the color? The color is gas.
What is the gas? The gas is the child.
The child hugs the Bible.
Smash his Bible.

What is carrying? Carrying is delight.
What is delight? Delight is Bach.
What is the wisdom? The wisdom is silence.
The silence is number four.
Four, crossed and encircled.



Translated from the Slovenian by Michael Thomas Taren and the author

NEW! Poems by Ali Lanzetta

Ali Lanzetta

the invention of water

. . . our last page waits with cold wings furled, can't stand a cold angel, shut up like cherry-buds. we relate by smelling cut grass, grass on one side of the path dappled, dappled grass on one side where the morning hasn't turned the water out, we are waterwheels turning with dreams left running, wasting, turning our weeks over like soil, like eroded fields of sweet found red places we hold in memory of ripeness, we hold in our palms like baby birds, write the numbers in our palms with the juice of. afraid with the shame of children, stitching twigs and stems to hold the gaps and gullies together. palming the wet ground to make sure we're not growing dreams we can't pronounce, dream composers who say play soft, play loud, play one, two, three, four again, again. the pained grace painted on our collarbones, stone lips mysteried by ellipses, the infertile seedlings lined up, sprouts lifted up out of the garden to feed birds who hang on reaching branches, old moments reaching the reach of thieves, creeping under closed doors, seeping into wine vats, fluttering in by dusted sunbeams are found floating belly-up in our glasses, sunken in the pulses of peppermint, ginger, thyme, fire-blue flowers that fall. the partial story pressed between pages of us collected, our handwriting fades, our bent letters still laced across the doorways like poppy-pods, the theater of our averted eyes revolving around the past like strung stars, both burning and restrained, filling the distance. rotting plums, stitched to our paper crowns, crown me with your pasteboard pomegranates and turn me under, harvest me, tell me i am here and you are there. let our bones fall back to the ground.



bird-colored glass: an installation


red side of september mom's belly ripening up like the last apple, october scarecrow decorate dead grass pumpkin gut scooped out with a wooden spoon for smoothing, spanking, stirring. splinter-palm grains of pine drying in the sun. wrapped in yarn in blankets november, papery crimson stir of memory november, bare branch witch-finger in needle-rain november, heavy yellow moon harvest the last of the leaves and the wind and a flat glass bird-girl is born. first hard lemon winter light to look through, suspend a winter bird against the storm windows, twist of black sky tilted with the weight of first things, suspending time. birch bark. sharp-tipped. chancy. skinny arms held full to empty. black sky fills with clean stars like april rain in a slatted barrel.


hurricane lamp and emergency candles waiting in the antique icebox with the punchbowl. elaborate raw wooden walls waiting for bird. pictures drawn in knotty pine, ghost-branches lopped off, old wounds make knots to inherit, good topsoil-colored eyes and big brother has nightmares about, red fox chase a boy though the garden, hit over the head with a frying pan, flung over the moon and gone. down the short wooden hallway glass bird sleeps like a puppy, little folded wings limp in dreams of running the yard to flying. unable to sustain taller breaths between dreamgrass and brown belly, pesky inability to maintain little ribcage horizontal to sky, birds float down the edges, undone shoestring walls of, the dream keeps coming but doesn't get there. here, where bird learns almost. learns early. is not afraid of falling.


biography of bird is written in the path through the orchard in apple seeds. biography of bird is spelled wrong, word-combining, letters dyslexic, scratched in the mud with bare toes, hourglass-textured, circus-colored. biography of bird is buried in faded photos of the family couch for nobody to find. ask and mom won't tell. mom whose belly swelled up for autumn, for sunshot maple leaves raked up, for the dying of things, for the branches poking cold nimbly fingers at the skyline like reaching at in sleep, as in a dream, as in a muddle, as moth-eaten map, premonition of tumbling, of things pulling apart, just slightly. biography of bird a swallowed flower, or a muffle for the garden asleep under snow

NEW! Review of Maile Meloy

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy. Riverhead Books, $25.95.

Reviewed by Katy Einerson

Maile Meloy’s second short story collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It seems to hover quietly above the threshold of some immanent yet unnamed private disaster as her characters repeatedly gasp for balance in their tangled lives. The individuals in each of her eleven stories struggle with impossibility—wanting while having, remembering while forgetting, constancy amid change. They are caught on both sides of a widening chasm, knowing that a flutter of movement, any decision, offers only uncertain gain and the irrecoverable loss of possibility.

Meloy takes the title of her collection from a poem by A.R. Ammons, which she also offers as an epigraph:

One can’t
have it

both ways
and both

ways is
the only

way I
want it.

Ammons’ poem seems to insist on collapsing Hamlet’s classic skeptical dilemma, however futilely, and Meloy in turn places it in the sphere of modern American realism. The compact intensity of Ammons’ poetic voice is traceable in Meloy’s own narrative style: she writes with a certain assured concision as she exposes her characters’ inner psyches with illuminating selectivity. Her realism is an emotional one; as an observer she is poised and precise, her narration omniscient and deeply honest. Her stories unfold as though unhindered by artifice—as if they had already existed when she found them.

Meloy’s versatility emerges in this collection as her narrative voice takes on the perspective of a dejected factory worker coping with the death of his best friend, an affluent doctor on a family ski trip, a lonely ranch hand in love with an out-of-town lawyer, a wealthy and aging Argentinean aristocrat, a nine-year-old girl entangled in her mother’s unstable relationship, and the grieving father of a murder victim, among others. The backdrop is largely American and nearly half the stories are set in Montana, Meloy’s home state. Meloy’s Montana has an intensely private quality to it, as if it is hiding from some larger American stage. Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is marked by a fierce, almost reclusive interiority. Her characters appear most frequently in the midst of their domestic lives. We find them at home, in their kitchens, like Alice in “Two Step,” crumbling at the thought of her cheating husband, not once suspecting that the woman who has come to comfort her is her rival. Or they are small families traveling together, like Sam and her father on a summer canoeing trip in “Red from Green,” or Everett and Pam cutting down a Christmas tree with their little daughter in “O Tannenbaum.” Or we simply find them alone, like Chet Moran feeding cows in winter in “Travis, B.” and Steven Kelley in “Lovely Rita,” orphaned and glumly employed at the local power plant.

The collection is consistently more isolating than it is intimate. In “The Girlfriend,” Meloy’s most outwardly troubling story, a man, Leo, confronts a young woman behind the closed curtains of a Montana hotel room. She is the girlfriend of his daughter’s killer, and despite an already guilty verdict, he has pulled her into this dark, enclosed space, still searching for an explanation for his daughter’s death. Leo’s grief boils into imaginary violence as he fantasizes about attacking the murderer in court, hearing “the satisfying pop of the trachea, the sudden flow of blood.” The eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Sasha, is an obstacle he cannot negotiate. She offers him sex, which he first refuses, repulsed. But as the senselessness of his daughter’s death seizes him, he becomes manic, manipulative: “He had the wild thought that if he did fuck her, he could control her. And if he could control one small part of the situation, he might come out the other side a man who could live with himself, a man who could sleep. Or he might destroy what life he had left.” He no longer seeks justice, even revenge, so much as selfish peace of mind, and he is willing to take it at any cost. He hunts it with a leonine energy that at times overshadows his paternal sorrow, thrilled with “the excitement of the chase, of discovery.” The discovery he finally unearths is more crippling than he’d imagined and pins him even more acutely in his grief, leaving him nothing but empty time, “decades . . . for him not to forgive himself.”

Loneliness and abandonment find their echoes in every story. In “Red from Green,” Sam, a young teenage girl, embarks on a canoe trip with her father, uncle, and a witness in one of her uncle’s court cases. The witness, Layton, takes an interest in Sam and develops the beginning of a friendship. One night as Layton, Sam, and her father sit around the campfire, her father abruptly rises and goes to his tent. Alone with Sam, Layton’s attention becomes physical and, to her, frightening. She escapes to her tent and the incident passes without remark. When the trip is over Sam continues to be troubled by her father’s leaving. Had he meant to desert her? Did he know what would happen? In this story Meloy captures the uncertainty of adolescence—the notion that somehow, somewhere, something has been gained and something lost. Sam finds herself sliding along a continuum, between the green of innocence and the red of experience. Her newfound experience is perhaps made more disquieting with the consciousness that it was not one she forged for herself, but one she was abandoned to.

Even Meloy’s most domestic settings lack familial warmth. The precarious subtexts of marital and sexual relationships figure prominently in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, and it is in the face of adultery that her characters seem to most fully want it both ways. She exposes simultaneously who her characters are and who they’d rather be. In “Two Step,” Alice and Naomi talk over tea in Alice’s kitchen on a wintry Montana evening. Alice is distraught and suspects that her husband is being unfaithful. The dance becomes verbal as Meloy seamlessly establishes dramatic irony: Naomi is her husband’s lover and she is there under the guise of a comforting shoulder, with a slightly perverse desire to discover how much Alice knows. When the husband comes home the kitchen floor seems to fall out and each character is left to grapple for footing in the now unfamiliar space. Alliances are uncertain and disaster seems to be edging in when the husband takes Alice in his arms and twirls her around the kitchen, leaving Naomi to slink out the back door and into his car. Stability is pitted against fulfillment; the desire of one can never fully extinguish the other, and each character is left to wait and hope.

Dialogue plays a provisional role in Meloy’s stories, and the relationships she constructs seem to question the plausibility of honest human communication. Well-founded trust is hard to come by. “The Children” is another story of a husband torn between the comfort of familiarity, the pleasure of fidelity, and the satisfaction of his private desires. The opening epigraph surfaces once again in the context of this story, as the husband lies next to his wife while thinking of his lover. He repeats the poem to himself, which his daughter had brought home from college:

“Both ways is the only way I want it.” The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only one way? . . . He held his wife and felt himself anchored to everything that was safe and sure, and kept for himself the knowledge of how quickly he could let go and drift free.

In an odd way, Meloy seems to link the pursuit and fulfillment of desire with shame. Her characters hide what they want, and are frequently embarrassed by it. Fielding, the husband in “The Children,” cannot bring himself to disrupt his family with his affair and expose himself to his wife’s and children’s judgment. Similarly, Augustín, a wealthy Argentinean aristocrat, is in love with a maid in his eponymous short story, and goes to propose to her upon finding her after many years. When he was younger he had been “too afraid of his teenage daughters to offer her marriage.” But this time it is she who is unwilling to expose herself to the hatred and ridicule of family and society, preferring the honest work of providing for her son. It is not so much a tone of judgment that Meloy adopts in these stories, but rather an exposure of the sincere difficulty of pursuing personal happiness in the face of public disapproval. This fear of disrupting the status quo seems to be what drives her characters so deeply inward.

This profound inwardness can at times create an almost claustrophobic atmosphere. Meloy writes of Fielding, who is thinking of his lover, “All he wanted was to preserve that feeling, of the two of them alone together, and make all obstacles to it go away.” This continued desire to retreat and hide from society becomes oddly stifling, especially in the context of the wide-open Montana horizons. But opening up and self-exposure are dangerous games in Meloy’s fiction. Strangers and outsiders are frequently presented as threats to whatever fragile stability her characters hold on to. Layton in “Red from Green” is one such dangerous outsider. “O Tannenbaum” also clearly identifies outsiders as ominous and menacing. The family stops along the side of the road for two hitchhikers, another couple, who went out cross-country skiing and lost their car. Pam, the wife, wants to drive away and preserve her family’s self-contained security. Everett, her husband, reasons you “can’t leave people in the snow” on Christmas and they take them in to help look for their car. The tension mounts as the two strangers reveal their names as Bonnie and Clyde. But even as the passengers prove themselves to be physically peaceful, another threat arises as Pam notices sexual tension between Bonnie and her husband. Memories of her husband’s previous infidelity come back, and we are again in the milieu of uncertain marital relationships and the ubiquitous threat of instability.

“The Girlfriend” is of course another example of the dangers of outsiders, as Leo’s daughter is killed by a man who breaks into her home and attacks her. But the collection’s subtle agoraphobia goes deeper than a simple fear of strangers. In “The Girlfriend” especially, it is Montana itself that seems dangerous. As Leo thinks back on what he could possibly have done to prevent his daughter’s death, he considers the possibility of having kept her on the East Coast for college and not letting her move to the University of Montana to study forestry:

If they hadn’t sent her at fifteen to the outdoor course in Wyoming that convinced her to want bigness, ruralness, westernness. Leo designed sky-blocking office buildings for a living, and wondered if forestry was a direct challenge to him. . . . He had argued with Emily about her choices, to test her resolve, but her gray eyes would only get solemn and sure, and her chin would lift stubbornly. . . . Even as a child she wanted vast forests, not gardens.

Montana’s bigness and openness translate into vulnerability—its wide open spaces offer no protection and nowhere to hide.

The threat of personal and familial invasion, interplay between fragility and stability, and the precariousness of decisions in Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It propel Meloy’s stories forward with fixating energy. Meloy has a gift for vivid, natural storytelling; her creation of suspense is effective and subtle. At about twenty pages each, her stories neither rush nor drag and always manage to mesmerize as they unfold. Meloy’s intense study of her characters remains perhaps the most fascinating aspect of her stories—she seems to pin them like butterflies on a bulletin board for momentary scrutiny before pulling away, leaving them to whatever secluded existence they have carved for themselves, and leaving us with riveting and absorbing fiction.

NEW! Poem by Dawn Marie Knopf

Dawn Marie Knopf


HIGH TEA


Sits the city centre known as
Poor's House of Cactus the beacon

both the ladies & the queens said so

they met among the saguaros out
back in their purple robes against

the light from the amber & dead

hills beyond Manteca beyond
their season they declared we

are the purveyours of grande culture

we are the narwhals of grande culture
we are the turquoise on the Stetson

hatband of grande culture who

by our headlong battle to save
the sculptures from the Comstock

the flood shining with spun discs

of Pyrite but also the rarest & most
genuine in the California lode

no we would not hold out our hands

NEW! Poem by Stuart Friebert

Stuart Friebert


SHOES

The donkey-skinned pair God ordered
Moses to remove before treading holy soil.

Did he sit down to do so, or perhaps
lean on his staff, bend over unsteadily

to pull them off, the sun’s rays already
reaching him from below the horizon,

his eyes closing like fists, his hair caked
with mud? Was he dying to know how long

he’d been dying, but afraid to ask? If he’d
laughed to lighten the moment, he’d have

been alone with his laughter, heading toward
a grave full of slush and snow – I read it could

have been snowing! At this time in my own
little life, busy getting older, I’m willing to

accept anything too, and so on and so forth.

NEW! Poem by Günter Eich

Günter Eich

APPLICATION

Some knowledge
of damming wild creeks,
familiar with
health insurance measures
for apprentice weavers,
unafraid
of electric current,
also able to handle animals,
adept at business correspondence,
especially, praise God, Manchurian,
Tocharian and in
the stenography of filthy
eagle-owl calls, an
all-around talent,
appropriate
to a position of leadership
in the submarine business.


Translated from the German by Stuart Friebert

NEW! Poem by Elliot Figman

Elliot Figman


PLEASE EAT PLANS


A statement is no match for it. Not when calls again
pleased a little better than Harry knows this much true.
Truth will rear it. Justice will suffice. Slide please slide
the little waiter calls. Caftans submarines adjudicated matters
none this ripe must do. Names may readjust norms.
Skin butchers lie in ruins. Please draw closer closet
turn that corner an unhurried attitude what’s
it for won’t sell. Froth with pleats when all streets have
is clothes. Calves encounter lambs. Just now shook its lawn.

NEW! Poem by Kelli Anne Noftle

Kelli Anne Noftle

MATING RITUALS

You feel listless as underthings
unravel. At the bottom
of an ocean, near her neck
where the collar dips—some of the habits
you acquire are ancient.
On the one hand, you’ve been
cannibal, pausing only
to swallow light and motion. (It happens
so quickly, it’s already over.) In the other hand—
her jaw. Her eyelashes, rhinophores, and that other
sensory sublimation by which you grasp only
through tangled weeds, against the under-
belly of waking, your insides, out.
Your heart, a slipknot of mucus.

And this question: if all the corresponding regions
make her sigh, then how did specializing
in your own desire become
so stereotypical, homo sapien?





Adult sea slugs are all hermaphroditic, though they still require partners to copulate. Some will engage in long elaborate courtships, joined together in intercourse for extended periods of time.

2 poems by Laura Wetherington

Laura Wetherington


In the day I dream in future tense: past sedative plus perfect

the present is a pasture:
a funny joke about pointers. it points to itself.
my vagina is a closed circuit television.
but how can one question with a period.

there is no narrator, no barrier.
I know how to see with my cells.
oscillate does not mean vacillate. both could mean masturbate:
my vagina is an electrical engineer.



Quiet people are crazy in bed


All orgasm is just me clapping for myself on the inside.
We are sound waves reverberating in the chambers of our skin.
We are sound whales crooning the universe in.

NEW! Poem by David O’Connell

David O’Connell

SGT. BRADLEY TALKS EMERGENCY PROCEDURE

We come to when he says raise
all shades, when he says snipers
will take high ground, will be
our eyes, and when it starts,
he says, stay down, says
all hands on heads and single
file when you exit; it’s
standard op, he says, too many
backpacks and experience has taught us
they’re innocent until the bullet’s
in your chest. Here’s the word
that means lock down. Here’s the room
where you’ll huddle. Here’s the only knock
that means it’s safe. Anticipate.
Drill. You think you won’t,
but every study shows
you’ll lose your head. I don’t mean
to alarm, he says, but
three hours plus a day right now
those kids are playing games
that train a boy to squeeze off rounds
like this, this, this. And this is how
it happened in Moses Lake, and this
is what they did in Jonesboro, and this
is all you didn’t want to know
of Littleton—the homemade fractals,
the detailed schematics. And you,
he says, are our best defense.
Paunch and bald patch, sag
and bad dye, we’re cataloging long
coats and sullen stares, running
the percentages, calculating second-story
drops and the density of fire doors.
Our minds are buzzing television.
We can almost hear the story
spinning off the perpetual machine.

NEW! Poem by Ben Mazer

Ben Mazer


He saw the birdwatcher in the distance
raised the gun to his head, the woman yelled
"oh lord" the animals scattered and he fired.
A sameness of birds flew off in his direction.
A smart sheep learned to see a human dying.

Then he was headlines, a bullet's report.
Quotes of friends who'd seen his rise to fame.
A few appearances and a private library,
only the chief librarian never answered.

His poems stirred the old feeling underground
where love still made its signal word for love
and silent with their truth they passed around
declaratives like cheaper currency,

the coiling of the wind in groves of autumn,
an old vagrant fogging wiping and looking in.

RIP, Vic Chesnutt (1964-2009)

The world lost a rare light when Vic Chesnutt passed away yesterday. He has left behind some of the most incisive, poignant, and mordant songs of our time. It's no wonder why so many people who love language and the possibilities of language were drawn to his songs. He was also an incredibly sweet and gentle person, but could be fiery as well, especially when talking about politics, which he followed closely. He gave innumerable outstanding performances, including one singular event with Forrest Gander in The Chapel at UGA.

Unfortunately, he also left behind $70,000 in medical bills, despite having health insurance. Please consider following the above link to help his family. Hospitals and debt collectors don't simply walk away from unpaid bills; they'll go after his estate, his house, etc. until they get their money.

NEW! Poem by Ben Mazer

Ben Mazer


Cookies and Lamictal

The undershirt of my imagination stinks
with always persuading sheerly by tone
the remembered dipsticks of our latter winter
when to atone for me you went alone
to veering vetters of the current cutter.
I want to see, want to see Tyrone
Power play Philip Marlowe.
Cut straight to the bone
I am not write. Won't be this winter.

Two poems by Don Share

Don Share


DED (Dutch Elm Disease)

The town came round and said
Our tree must come down--
Like a bell without a clapper,
This yard without its elm.



Nesting

Good luck, to find a feather,
Less so, the whole bird.
So why read about "nesting"
When you don't love me anymore?

NEW! Interview with Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander

Interview

Forrest Gander is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Eye Against Eye (New Directions, 2005), Torn Awake (New Directions, 2001), Science and Steepleflower (New Directions, 1998), Deeds of Utmost Kindness (Wesleyan, 1994), Lynchburg (Pitt Poetry Series, 1993), and Rush to the Lake (Alice James, 1988). He is also the author of a novel, As a Friend (New Directions, 2008), and a book of essays, A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, & Transcendence (Counterpoint, 2005), as well as several volumes of translation, most recently Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho (New Directions, 2008). The recipient of many awards, including fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Howard Foundations, Gander serves as Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University. Andy Frazee conducted this interview over e-mail, from October 2008 through February 2009.

From your first book of poetry, Rush to the Lake, to your most recent, Eye Against Eye, there has been a movement from what we might call discrete lyrics to longer sequences or series. In A Faithful Existence you write that "if we approach [human experience] with a different model, we will ask different questions." Although in that essay you are discussing scientific methodology, if we assume that the discrete lyric and the sequence are two different models, two different poetic methodologies for approaching experience, what do you see as the differences in the questions asked?

Maybe it’s something like marriage, the sequence. The wham-bam impact of the discrete poem has endless variations of course, and I like them. But there’s something compelling about a commitment over time to a singular development, a signal promise that the serial or long poem draws from writer and reader. And then subtle connections—rhythmical, thematic, syntactic, imagistic, sonic—deployed across wider intervals. There’s both a faithfulness and an erotics in the sequence which appeals to me. Prolongation and delay, the extended play.

Also, facing the same poem every day—rather than starting a new one—is another kind of challenge for the imagination, like high monogamy. You prod yourself to keep it, as Miles Davis would say, on the one. It demands all your resources to keep it going, to keep it transformative, surprising. The first sequence I wrote was “Life of Johnson Upside Your Head” in Lynchburg, my second book. After researching unreleased recordings of Delta blues musicians at the Library of Congress, I spent a summer in Hog Jaw, Arkansas, near Lead Hill, in a cabin miles from paved road. I paid visits to communities where many Delta musicians had passed—Memphis, Three Forks, Robinsonville. On those rural dirt roads, you often find yourself walking up one tire rut and talking across a low mound of rock and weed to someone in the parallel rut. You’re always a car’s width apart and so conscious of conversation as a kind of call and response. On foot in the country, your perception is more telescopic than it is in other places; there are multiple levels of borrowed scenery. You see the person you are talking to and the scrim of trees on the other side of her and the field through the trees and hills beyond the field. All of this is to say I’m interested in perceptual rhythms and how they change in different situations. And I’ve felt I could best explore the complex of those rhythms in sequences. In “Mission Thief” from Eye Against Eye, it’s the Mission District of San Francisco. In “Carried Across” from Torn Awake, it’s Mexico City. Taking on place as event requires some room.

You've described your recently published first novel, As a Friend, as a work "that may escape genre description—a melding of poetry and prose, incantation and narrative." How did the book come about, and in what ways may it be (or not be) an extension of your poetic work? What does this melding of genres achieve that couldn't be achieved through any one genre?

From the late 70’s on, the lyric has been under sustained, healthful critique. These days, the focus on line break seems to have been eclipsed by a focus on juxtaposition. Many poets are as suspicious of conspicuous musical prosody as of any equation between truth and beauty. While notable poets are writing beyond conventional genre boundaries, some influential prose writers—David Markson, Carole Maso, and John Wideman come to mind—veer toward poetry. I’m more interested in writing, period, than in genre. For most of my writing life as a poet, I’ve been keen on the line, on how perceptual and emotional registrations might be sharpened by line break or by the staging of line across page. In my books from Deeds of Utmost Kindness to Torn Awake, I was particularly absorbed with developing emotional and intellectual depth through polyrhythms, stacked clauses, and multiple voices. I drew from a wide range of lexicons, from my background in geology to my obsession with photography, from the rollercoaster experience of fatherhood to the erotic life of adults. For all its limitations, expansive lyric prosody can unleash a deep and complex realm of feeling, one that often seems to characterize my actual experience of being awake in the world. But I’m interested in other strategies and in other inquiries. I worked on that slim novel, As a Friend, for nineteen years. It was hundreds of pages long, I stripped it down, I built it up again, I flailed through I don’t know how many versions. It took me nineteen years to figure out how stop trying to write like “a novelist” for one thing, and to figure a way for myself.

In A Faithful Existence you discuss the Mayan belief that "the final apocalypse, the one they predicted for our time, would be brought about by … hubbub, commotion," which I relate to the inundation of information we receive through the media and the quasi-art of advertising. What do you conceive as poetry's role in such an environment?

Nietzsche called himself a teacher of slow reading. I think poetry itself is a teacher of slow reading and that in our age of spectacle, poetry is often that anti-spectacle summoning us to insight. I’ve always felt that in the silences within poetry, a transformative inquiry opens.

In a 2007 interview conducted in Sarajevo, you responded to the question "How is it to be an American nowadays" in this way: "As I was assembling the anthology [Ten Significant American Poets]… I noted that the last sentence in Ben Lerner's biographical note reads: 'He is currently ashamed to be a citizen of the United States.' I think he speaks for many of us."

As I think through and write this question on the morning of Tuesday, November 4, 2008—Election Day—I wonder what relation you see between poetry and political life. Your poetry doesn't seem as overtly "political" as, say, Adrienne Rich's often is—or, as another example, Juliana Spahr's. What do you see as the political role of poetry? Is it primarily one of being "the anti-spectacle," the source of "transformative inquiry"? How may your political views come into play in your writing—or, to re-phrase the question, how do you see them expressed in your work?

Ben Lerner’s work seems to me exemplary in this respect and others. As for my own, I think the politics are intrinsic if not overt. “Life of Johnson Upside Your Head” is a paean to the delta blues musicians of the 1930’s, but it’s likewise a depiction of a racist and segregated south. I’d say its politics are implicit in the angle of attention. In “The History of Manifest Destiny” in my book Science & Steepleflower, I reference language and scenario from Archibald Menzie’s Journal of Vancouver’s Voyage in 1792 to highlight the astonishing presumptions of the Europeans who, with unremitting brutality, aimed to render a new world of plants, animals, and human beings into commodities. In Torn Awake’s “The Hugeness of That Which is Missing,” a dehiscent narrative of flickering faith takes place in the radioactive desert near the Pahute Mesa Test Site. And in another poem from that book, “Carried Across,” I braid Spanish phrases into a meditation on “national, ethnic, linguistic affiliation” in the construction of the word “we,” that designation that every cultural group uses to distinguish itself from “them.” To me, all these poems are political even as my choice to explore material through inquiry and implication is itself a choice with political dimensions.

More recently, the first long poem in Eye Against Eye, “Burning Towers, Standing Wall,” links historical violence to America’s 9/11, drawing into encounter the way the past and others, even the dead whose marks we can still read, fill out our experience of now and self. An anonymous reviewer for Publishers Weekly, not always noted for the depth of its analysis, read “Burning Towers, Standing Wall” as a poem that “examines Mayan architecture in Mexico, turning the visible stones, their ‘mutilated stelae’ and ‘rubbed out glyphs,’ into a plea for patience in the face of violence….” I’d agree and say I consider that my work is generally political, and that the intensive way I reference the so-called natural world is political, and that my focus on the domestic is political, and that my choice to translate Mexican and Latin American writers is political. There are sundry valid approaches. Not every poet needs to pound a gavel to convene the light.

Another sequence in Eye Against Eye, “Late Summer Entry,” is based on the landscapes of photographer Sally Mann, and you’ve discussed elsewhere how you observed Mann at work, both on shoots and in the darkroom. Considering your poetry’s attention to the natural world, how may have working, not only from another artist’s landscapes, but also from her process of making, have complicated the kind of attention or perceptual rhythms your work seeks to embody?

I’m on a plane from Arkansas as I write this. This morning, sitting under a hammered tin and wooden cross in a Christian bakery, the only place I could find with internet in my wife’s hometown, I read a review of As a Friend in which the reviewer quotes the phrase “dark as a hedge.” I remember scribbling that phrase in my notebook in Sweet Briar, Virginia, while Sally Mann was making a very long exposure of a hedge that she suspected would transform, as it did in the last gasp of Shenandoah Valley light, into totemic blackness. In my sequence of poems on her photographs in Eye Against Eye, there are lines derived from observations that her husband, Larry, made while Sally was working, and rhythms, images, and insights elicited from our mutuality. And in all my writing, I find fragments of those arousals to which I was privileged by invitation to share others’ visions along with their sensitivities for experiencing those visions. I’ve written work for books with a number of artists including the photographers Raymond Meeks and Dan Borris and the Frisian painter Tjibbe Hooghiemstra. And recently I’ve been working with Lucas Foglia, a photographer documenting utopian communities across the United States. Lucas not only photographs the people of those communities, but he lives with them and tapes conversations with them. I wrote “Moving Around for the Light: a Madrigal” after studying Lucas’s photographs and listening to hours of tapes he recorded. I’ve always loved that sketch in Conversation on a Country Path when Heidegger talks about the significance of actually, literally, sharing a vision with someone.

It seems like this idea of mutuality relates to what, at the Symposium on Literary Translation held at the University of Georgia, you called translation’s “fruitful contamination.” How does this notion of shared vision inform your translation work?

It may be interesting to think about both those terms—mutuality and contamination—in terms of biology and evolution. One angle in recent evolutionary studies stresses the importance of cooperation and mutuality, not just competition, in the development of innovations. Although I just referenced Heidegger in response to your last question, I am completely suspicious of Heidegger’s search for “purity” and “origin.” I remember reading KKK literature when I lived in Arkansas and seeing how their arguments about racial purity are couched in misconceptions about “pure bloodedness.” The fact that DNA from former parasites, early in human history, has become integrated into our own DNA makes clear that not only is there no such thing as racial purity, but there is no such thing as species purity. We are mongrels one and all. In translation, two languages infect each other in such ways that the product, as the philosopher Ortega y Gasset once noted, might be another genre altogether. The promise for literature is that something worthwhile might be created through that contamination, something vital that didn’t exist before in either language.

Along with writing about singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt, you’ve also written liner notes for his album Is the Actor Happy?, as well as performed with him. How did that friendship develop, and how may each of you have influenced or “contaminated” the other?

A musician friend of mine, Brady Earnhart, turned me on to Vic’s first cd, Little. I don’t remember the sequence, but over the years, I wrote to Vic, I went to see him in concert, and once, following Peter Gizzi to the front of the stage, I got in a fist fight with two people who were rightly mad that we had wormed our way in front of them, and I ended up backstage with my tongue bitten almost in half. Vic would stay at our place when he came to Providence and I have sweet memories of listening to him and his scuffle band practice in our so-called dining room. I was happy to write the liner notes for Is the Actor Happy? when the record company asked me. Like the music of John Martyn, who just died last week, Vic’s has became a part of my life. Last time I was in Athens, Vic was working on a soundtrack that he’s doing for a film by the German director Sebastian Schipper. And he was head over heels about a Willa Cather novel that, for some reason, had provoked him to write all his songs in the “I” voice, as he called it. When he showed me the text of the lyrics of a new song on his computer, I wasn’t surprised to see that his desktop image was that poem by Wallace Stevens that begins “Clear water in a brilliant bowl,/ Pink and white carnations. The light…”

What are you working on currently?

I’ve just finished up a couple translations. One is a short book of fiction, Diary of Hepatitis, by the Argentine writer César Aira. He’s an astonishing guy, a recluse—although he agreed to meet me once at the tiniest bookstore in Buenos Aires—and the author of more than 70 novels despite that he must be about my age. He gives his books to small literary presses in Argentina because he makes a living on foreign editions of his work. New Directions has published several of his books in great translations by Chris Andrews. I’m not sure where I’m going to send Diary of Hepatitis. It’s more novella than novel. And it could pass as prose poetry.

I’ve also finished up a book by Pura López Colomé, the Mexican poet whose collection Santo y Seña, which I translate as Watchword, won Mexico’s biggest poetry award, The Villaurrutia Prize, in 2007. It’s a complex, powerful, sometimes almost hermetic book written at a traumatic moment in the poet’s life. I feel her being at stake in every poem.

I think I’ve also brought to term a manuscript of my own poems and haibun that includes photographs by Raymond Meeks, Lucas Foglia, and the great Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide. My concern, in this book, is with internationalism, borders, dialogue, perception, and the rhythms of experiences as they are registered in different topographies. It’s also an inquiry into the concept of “foreign.” It’s a book that won’t fit into any genre category, which is what I wanted. One of my models is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.