Interview

The Haunted Quality of Poetry: An Interview with Norman Finkelstein

by Joe Safdie

In 2018, Norman Finkelstein published an odd collection of poetry titled From the Files of the Immanent Foundation—odd in that it detailed the history of a secret organization as bureaucratic as it was gnostic, “a network of spies and secrets, / an infinite arcanum of hierophants and fools.” In a Broken Star followed in 2021; this book introduced the character of Pascal Wanderlust, who both is and isn’t the subject of a quest narrative. Now a third book, Further Adventures (Dos Madres Press, $23), completes the trilogy, weaving connections between Pascal and the Foundation.

Finkelstein’s oeuvre has always been “sensitive to the overlapping traditions of Jewish mysticism, radical poetics and post-modern thought,” as J. Peter Moore wrote in a collection of essays about his expansive body of work. Finkelstein has published thirteen books of poems and six volumes of literary criticism, and is a professor emeritus at Xavier University, where he taught for forty years. One of his central themes, according to the Poetry Foundation, is “the tension between secular and religious world views”—a subject that he discusses, among others, in the interview below.

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Joe Safdie: Norman, thanks for doing this. I want to talk mainly about Further Adventures, but I don’t think that’s possible without talking a bit about the two books that preceded it, From the Files of the Immanent Foundation and In A Broken Star. My first question involves that word “further”: when did you know that you weren’t quite finished with this journey, and is there a chance that it’s still not finished? You say in the Afterword that time itself is a problem in this poetry: Is there a difference in how narrative time is structured in this book from what was established in the previous two?

Norman Finkelstein: When Further Adventures appeared, I was fairly sure the story of Pascal and the Immanent Foundation was done. But recently, I’ve returned to it, perhaps out of a desire to fill in some of the gaps in the narrative. In any case, my experience in writing these poems has been similar to my experience in writing Track. I thought that Track was over once the first volume was published, but months later I found myself writing what became Columns, the second volume. At a certain point I knew there would be a third, and I also understood that it would not be interminable (as, say, Nathaniel Mackey’s work seems to be). So I thought From the Files was one book, and in a sense it still is—it can be read as a stand-alone work—but when The Adventures of Pascal Wanderlust came to me, I gradually realized that Pascal had something to do with the Immanent Foundation. I wanted to return to that world and somehow pull it all together. Hence Further Adventures, which is both prequel and sequel to the earlier books.

As for “narrative time” in this work, well, it’s tricky. By the end of Further Adventures, we can see that there is a definite narrative arc, a chronology. Pascal’s story intersects that of the Foundation at various points in time. But I also think that events in the poems occur in a phantasmagoric version of what Walter Benjamin calls jetzeit, “now time,” time at a standstill that has transformative, explosive potential. And there is also mythic time, cyclical time: Characters are themselves, but also avatars. There are archetypal resonances. There’s a forward trajectory but also a constant movement backward, a return to origins.

JS: In the Afterword to Further Adventures, you mention the 12 x 12 form (twelve stanzas of twelve lines each) as an instance of your “stanzaic numerology.” Could you say something more about form in this book, and in your work generally?

NF: Obviously I’m not a “formalist” as that term is conventionally understood. I’m acutely aware of measure, of end stop, enjambment, caesura, but most of my work doesn’t “scan” in terms of standard English meters. I love rhyme, but I use it sparingly, and when I use it, it tends to be off-kilter. But I’ve always been, if not a formalist, a structuralist. “Stanzaic numerology” is a notion I keep in mind that helps me structure my poetry. I first became aware of it writing Track, where lines, stanzas, and sections are all “magically” determined by recombinatory numerical procedures. “Stanzaic numerology” is fundamental to my shaping of verse, from couplets, tercets, and quatrains to more indeterminately formed poems in cyclopean and granitic blocks, in which many voices can be contained. Song and sculpture. Even as far back as my first book, Restless Messengers, I was deliberately riffing on the structure of the Romantic ode.

I believe in what Robert Duncan calls the “form of forms.” But the Objectivists are also important to me, and following them, I tend to dislike poetry that sprawls. Writing Further Adventures made me acutely aware of the productive tension between lyric and narrative, or in operatic terms, aria and recitative. So, I move among many possible structures, guided by voices, sensing what’s called for, and paying careful attention to what used to be called “numbers,” poetic units.

JS: Well, as Pope wrote, “Most by numbers judge a poet’s song.” Now that we’ve covered “Further,” how about “Adventures”? You recall Pascal’s aphorism “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” but much of the adventure of this narrative happens in a room like that, doesn’t it? Do you see this as mostly a philosophical inquiry à la Gnosticism—or is the quest simply to keep going, to write the next poem?

NF: The search for gnosis implies a quest, but it’s not a search for the Grail, or for transcendence—though in the Pascal poems, there is always a sense of going “beyond.” I suppose you can say it’s a philosophical or spiritual inquiry, but that sounds too abstract for me. In Further Adventures, we learn that Wanderlust came into being as a failsafe, and has a mission—restore the Immanent Foundation if, as proves to be the case, it is destroyed (or implodes). But Gnosticism involves seeking self-knowledge, thus our hero’s understanding of psychic being constantly grows, even if many episodes reveal Wanderlust to be something of a schlemiel.

Where does all of this take place? Not only in Pascal’s room or mind—this is, after all, a series of adventures. I have any number of models, from The Fairie Queene to Epipsychidion to “The Comedian as the Letter C” to Song of the Andoumboulou. Arthur Green calls the Zohar “sacred fantasy,” a term that can apply to my work, and that of quite a few other poets who are writing quest-romance.

JS: There’s a certain “boys’ life” feeling about some of this narrative. In the Afterword, you mention Lovecraft and Neil Gaiman, and even, in connection with Augustus Sprechenbaum, the Marvel Comics character Dr. Strange. I wonder who else you may be conjuring here (or, as you say, “data mining”), and how these many voices correspond with Pascal’s late desire “to be free of all the ghosts.” You’re obviously paying homage, but is there also something else going on?

NF: Allusion has always been crucial to my poetry. Wallace Stevens says that poetry is the scholar’s art, and I’m all in. For a long time, I have thought of my work as a poetry of commentary, and the midrashic impulse is essential—it generates meaning, and I hope my readers are willing to play along. And I’ve come to move between “high” and “pop” culture. Some years ago, Mark Scroggins and I were imagining a mash-up of the life of Hart Crane with Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, merging Crane and the narrator of that story to make a single character; that made its way into the story of Bob and Pete in Further Adventures. Now who is going to figure that one out? But if they do, I think it will add to the pleasure of the text. Then there’s the Guide; at some point I realized that he bears a striking resemblance to the Silver Surfer. So, Pascal might wish to be free of all the ghosts—I think, psychoanalytically, we all do—but it’s impossible. Poets make use of that, and I love the haunted quality of poetry.

JS: Getting back to quest narratives briefly, though, who is the villain here? The Foundation was certainly nefarious, but is there an antagonist against whom Pascal and the others play out their complexities?

NF: In these poems, the antagonist lies within the self. That’s the case for Wanderlust, and even for the Foundation, an overreaching, schizoid organization if ever there was one. We are the Deep State, and our task is to go ever deeper. I wrote much of From the Files while doing my training analysis at the Cincinnati Psychoanalytic Institute. Consider the implications!

JS: I think I’ll refrain from that task, thanks! But psychoanalysis brings up the question of autobiography, and there are more than a few passages where I thought you were writing about yourself—most obviously as the “arch-mage” in the prologue, but at other times as well. In what sense (or in how many senses) is Pascal Wanderlust you, and in what sense is he an invention of (or an adventure in) narrative? Is he or you “the poet”? The narrator? The Accountant?

NF: I have thought about the place of the self in the poem for a long time. For me, poetry, even lyric poetry, is not primarily self-expression, and I could cite a number of poets who variously attest to this. Look, for example, at the beginning of Yeats’s “A General Introduction for My Work.” For Yeats, the poet “is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.” I consider that an aesthetic ideal, so I try to write a richly affective, intellectually curious poetry that is not mainly about the self. To be sure, there is something of me in Pascal, in Sprechenbaum, in the Accountant, and so on, just as there are parts of novelists in their characters. And I deliberately inserted a voice, or figure, of “the poet”; he mentions himself at various points. The one character I am not, however, is Sprechenbaum’s cat—he is based entirely on my cat, Kitzel.

JS: I’m sure Kitzel appreciates it. I also wonder about oppositions: Pascal is both male and female (like the king and queen in the alchemical beaker?), but as you’ve said, the “adventures” might be internal as well as external; I sense as well an argument between Gnosticism and skepticism, an “Interminable / internal debate” as you have it in “Behind Every Poem.” Does Blake’s “Without contraries is no progression” come in here at all? It’s probably naive to think about resolution of any kind these days, but this is narrative poetry: does it just circle around, wandering in time?

NF: I interrogate several binaries in Further Adventures, and gender is only the most obvious of them. A debate between Gnosticism and skepticism? Maybe idealism and empiricism, or imagination and reason. The ratio of reason to magic, to borrow the title of my selected poems—my work has always measured that. Blake’s notion of contraries is certainly operative; I think of my poetry as dialectical, or dialogical. The narrative may come to an end, but the commentary never does.

JS: Thanks for doing this, Norman; I read all three books with great pleasure, and hope they find a wide audience. I have one more question for you, because your latest book of essays, To Go Into the Words (University of Michigan Press, $34.95), has just been published as well. Do you feel any tension between writing poetry and critical prose? Is there a state of mind that seems more conducive to one or the other?

NF: To Go Into the Words is a selection of my essays, mostly on contemporary poetry, going back to the 1980s. I’ve always been a “poet-critic”: after all, I have a doctorate in English; I was trained as a literary scholar; and I enjoy writing about poetry. As a poet, I have always felt a need to examine the work of my contemporaries and predecessors in an effort to understand its importance to me. What in the work resonates for me? What can I learn from it? If the qualities I admire in the work inspire me, I want to explain those qualities to other readers, so that they too can appreciate them. This is also why I started Restless Messengers, my poetry review blog. I want to argue for the importance of certain poets—why I think they should be read.

My poetry and my criticism are often in creative tension. I’ve written two books about Jewish American poetry, and Jewishness, of course, is a deep current in my poems. Track is in dialogue with On Mount Vision, my critical book on contemporary long poems that deal with the sacred. And there’s also this: When the poetry is lying fallow, I can usually manage to write critical prose. I can continue to think about poetry even when I’m giving my own work a rest. Then the time returns when I feel something stirring, I hear a promising phrase. And it’s back.

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We Make Things in Translation: An Interview with Angela Rodel

by Karen Noll

It was music, not language, that pulled Angela Rodel toward the East. She was already fluent in German and Russian when she heard the voices of Bulgarian folk singers live in concert as an undergraduate and decided that she needed to hear more of those dissonant harmonies and unusual meters. Her accomplishments as a scholar, a linguist, a teacher, and a translator are impressive, and she will talk about them—but when the topic is music, there is an added timbre to her words, and the ways that music enhances the art of translation are certainly not lost on her.

Rodel has been living in Sofia, Bulgaria for more than twenty years. After obtaining degrees in Slavic studies, ethnomusicology, and linguistics from Yale and UCLA, she now translates literary fiction and is the Executive Director of the Bulgarian-American Fulbright Commission. Her awards as a translator include honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN America, AATSEEL (American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages), the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, and most recently, the 2023 International Booker Prize for her translation of Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (Liveright, $27). Newly published this year is her translation of Vera Mutafchieva’s novel The Case of Cem (Sandorf Passage, $21.95), which we discuss briefly at the end of the interview.

Originally from the Twin Cities suburb of Burnsville, Minnesota, Rodel occasionally visits the state; she and I met in a public library space there to talk about music, poetry, Time Shelter, the art and business of translating—and, of course, the importance of public libraries.  

Karen Noll: It seems to me that in recent months, translation and translators are getting a lot of attention in the literary publishing world. Have you found that to be true?

Angela Rodel: Yes, absolutely. I have been a translator since 2005, and I was actually a full-time professional translator for about eight years. In my experience it has changed, especially in the last couple of years, thanks to people like Jennifer Croft, who is one of Olga Tokarczuk’s translators from Polish. There is a movement on social media—#namethetranslator—that has been gathering steam. In the U.S., support has been growing for the idea that translation is its own art rather than only playing second fiddle to something more important.

It’s interesting—with the publication of Time Shelter, my name is on the front cover of the U.S. edition, but it’s not on the front cover of the U.K. edition, so I think there are differences depending on the markets. Within the U.S. there has been a concerted effort by organizations like ALTA (American Literary Translators Association), as well as by individual translators, to call out situations in which a translator has not been named. There was just a big brouhaha at the British Museum where an exhibit about China featured poetry in translation. So, yes, I think it’s becoming recognized that translation is an art of its own. 

It’s a little bit ironic, though, because this moment of recognition corresponds to the rise of AI, which will change the work of translation. I’ve played with some of the AI programs, and they are quite good with grammar. They’re not so good with register, which tends to be uneven, and they’re not so good with rhythm. But we can’t ignore them, and we translators should probably think about how we’re going to use them as a tool, how we are going to integrate them into our practice, because I don’t think we can bury our heads in the sand and pretend this technology doesn’t exist. We might become something more like glorified editors in the future—I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but we’ll see, we’ll see.

KN: How about the writers’ strike—the Writer’s Guild of America and the struggle to be fairly compensated and recognized. What are your thoughts?

AR: Yes, yes, creative work is work. When people think that just the joy of creativity should be the reward for doing it, it’s like—well, no, you should pay us as well! There is joy in it, but creative work should not be coming only from people who can afford to be creative; that’s not a society we want to live in. It’s hard to make a living just as a freelance translator. The only reason I was able to do it was because I lived in Bulgaria, where the cost of living is less expensive than it is here or in western Europe. Creative work is work that should be compensated as such, and I think we are seeing that idea get stronger in many, many different fields. 

KN: Who have your clients been over your years in translation? Obviously this project was a literary client, but are there other non-literary clients that are more lucrative and that sustain your living costs so that you can afford to have literary clients?

AR: Well, now I have a day job—I’m actually the head of the Bulgarian Fulbright Commission, so I only translate things that I want to translate now, like literature. But when I was a full-time translator, I discovered you can’t translate literary fiction all day, every day. It’s too exhausting! So I did have other clients: I did some legal translation and a lot of academic writing. It helped pay the bills. I did not do medical translation, but that is pretty lucrative.  

It would be very difficult to survive exclusively as a literary translator. I think maybe people who can survive on literary translation alone are working with a number of different languages—and big languages, like Spanish or Russian—so there is enough interest in publishing that maybe you could make a living out of it. But for a language like Bulgarian, I can’t imagine that you could make a living out of translating literary fiction no matter how much people were willing to pay you; you can’t do it fast enough or well enough. 

KN: Oh, I have a question about Russian. I did a bit of reading about the sister languages of Russian and Bulgarian, and I found it fascinating. Can you offer a quick course for the uninitiated?

AR: It’s sort of like Spanish and Italian—they’re cousins. They’re both Slavic languages, Russian and Bulgarian. They are not the same branch of the Slavic family, so they are maybe second cousins, not first cousins like Russian and Ukrainian might be. If you know one, you will understand a lot of the other, like someone who knows Spanish and hears Italian—they can pick out things. 

I actually studied Russian at good ol’ Burnsville High School in Minnesota: One of the French teachers—I guess she was inspired by perestroika—started learning Russian and offered it, so I took Russian for two years in high school. Then I went to Yale, where there is an awesome Slavic department, and since I always loved Russian literature—I was that depressed teenager who read Dostoyevsky—it was perfect for me. I studied Russian very seriously at Yale for all four years, but I didn’t want to be a major (though I think I was only two credits short); I had started out in Comp Lit, but I thought the people were too pretentious, so I went for linguistics, and I have my master’s in linguistics as well.

When I got interested in Bulgarian in the early 1990s, mainly through Bulgarian music, nobody was teaching it; there wasn’t the big wave of immigration that there was later. But if you’re a person who likes languages, and if you know Russian, then so many of the roots are the same. The way the languages work is the same. So I basically used Russian to learn Bulgarian. It was a good jumping-off point.

KN: Were you ever a professional translator of Russian or German?

AR: No. Maybe I was just clueless, but it wasn’t really a thing. Nobody really mentioned translation as a possible career. I mean, there must have been very high-level literary translators at Yale, but I was always interested in reading in the original language. I remember reading Mario and the Magician by Thomas Mann. I read it first in English, and then I read it in German and was like, “Whoa!” It was so much better in the original. Maybe I ended up coming across a bad translation, and that inspired me to go back and read the original. 

I wasn’t really interested in or plugged into translation as an art or a profession until I was living in Bulgaria. I had done a full year as a Fulbright-Hays scholar, and I was supposed to go back to graduate school at UCLA, and I was thinking, you know, there are no jobs in academia. And Bulgaria was such an interesting place and it was an interesting time, and I thought, “Okay, I can stay here. What can I do?” My husband at the time was a writer and a musician, so people we knew would say, “Oh, I’ve got this poem. Can you translate it?” I realized there was a niche: There were not that many native speakers of English that knew Bulgarian well enough to translate it. And I kind of had a talent for it. I enjoyed it—as a linguist, it was a puzzle. So it was in Bulgaria that I realized there was a huge need for this and that I could actually make a living from it. It was only later that I got plugged into the U.S. literary translation community—thanks to the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation. 

KN: And music was a spark for your interest in Bulgarian as well—and specifically women’s voices. 

AR: As Bulgarians are a Slavic people, Bulgarian music has much in common with Russian and Serbian music, but since Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire, it also has lots of things brought by the Ottoman Turks. So it’s this awesome mix, the best of eastern and western folk music. And the women’s singing tradition is totally unique. They sing super loud in a chest voice—if you have done musical theater, it is like belting—but that’s how they sing all the time. And they use these really interesting dissonant harmonies that are not typical of western music. They aren’t thirds and fifths that we like; they are seconds, and they sound very dissonant but also very powerful.

During the Communist period in Bulgaria, some musicians took this folk tradition and basically married it to western art music; they kept the vocal style and harmonies and then added a three, four, or five-part harmony. There was a brilliant composer named Filip Kutev who realized what should be saved from the tradition and what should be added; he kind of souped up the tradition with western compositional techniques. Now there are choirs that are world famous; they won a Grammy in 1990. To me it is the most beautiful music in the world, but I’m a little biased. That was the music that I went to Bulgaria to study—both the traditional style and the new choral tradition. 

To tie it back to translation, I think it really helps being musical. There is so much music in a text—there’s rhythm, there’s intonation, there’s the sounding of the language. It’s funny, I was at a translation seminar in London and there were a dozen of us from all over Europe working in different languages, and every single one of us was a musician! I would say it’s not a coincidence. People who can hear the sounding of the language, the melody, the rhythm—that is all a very important part of literary translation.  

KN: Maybe this is a good place to transition to a few questions about

Time Shelter—I know that Georgi Gospodinov has said he likes to smuggle poetry into his prose, so it seems likely that your musical approach to translation makes you the right fit to bring his work into English! There are specific phrases in the book I especially loved, such as “through the trumpets of tautology.” [129] Was the original Bulgarian phrase also lyrical? This happened a lot as I read: a beautiful phrase made me wonder whether the original phrase was smuggled poetry.

AR: Sometimes we make things in translation—like an alliteration—rather than find an exact match. But “through the trumpets of tautology” is actually alliterative in Bulgarian, so that one worked! But yes, as a poet, this is so important to Georgi. In his previous novel, The Physics of Sorrow, there was a case where he was really drawing attention to the sound of the language. In Bulgarian the word for “the” is placed at the end of the noun, so you would say “book the” instead of “the book.” And it is a hard “tuh” sound like “tuh, tuh, tuh.” Georgi placed a series of these “tuhs” in sequence so that it sounded like somebody falling down the stairs on their butt—sort of “bump, bump, bump, bump, bump.” It didn’t really work with the sound of “the,” so I did it with a “d”:

          Dear Young Man,
          There are moments in a person’s life that are never forgotten. Today, with trembling hands you untie the knot of your scarlet Pioneer’s neckerchief, replacing it with a red Comsomol membership booklet. This is a symbol of the great trust the Party and our heroic and hardworking people have in you.
          Be decent and daring in word and deed! Dedicate the drive of your youth and the wisdom of your mature years to that which is dearest to all generations – the Homeland!

This is yet another stellar example of socialist-speak, though I now see that it is a mouthful. But I wanted to keep this sound play, and I remember looking to see what the German translator did since it might give me some ideas—we always look at each other’s stuff. And he totally skipped that line! I gave him a hard time. For me, so much of the beauty of Georgi’s writing lies in those sound plays and word plays—so when I can, I try to save them, but sometimes I have to use a different sound or if it doesn’t work exactly in this sentence, I will see if I can find something that will work in a different sentence so the text will have that element of musicality that Georgi had intended—even if it’s not exactly the same word or phrase.

KN: How about the title of the book, Time Shelter. It seems to be a single word in Bulgarian. Is there a translator’s story there?

AR: It is interesting, because in Bulgarian it’s Vremeubezhishte, which mirrors the Bulgarian word bomboubezhishte, meaning bomb shelter; the words for time and bomb have the same musicality, the same syllabic structure, in Bulgarian. So the English title works really well in keeping the audible correspondence between time shelter/bomb shelter. But this does not work so smoothly in all languages. French apparently does not work at all, and the book’s French translator (whom I know and who is wonderful) was practically tearing her hair out. The German had to be altered as well—Zeitzuflucht doesn’t call up connotations to shelters like bomb shelters. In Italian it turned out really cool: Cronorifugio. So it depends on the language.

Titles are an extreme version of what we go through with every sentence—the tension between the form and the content. Georgi’s previous book I translated as The Physics of Sorrow; the word in Bulgarian for the last word is tuga, which has the element of sorrow, but it’s really more like melancholy than sorrow. But I feel melancholy just rhythmically sounds terrible. And also, we associate it so much with Freud, and I wanted something Slavic, something guttural like tuga. So I ended up choosing sorrow, and Georgi agreed, but there are naysayers out there who thought that either we should have gone with the more “accurate” melancholy or come up with a completely different title.  

KN: I also wanted to ask you about words where you chose to use the Bulgarian and to italicize them using the Roman alphabet instead of the Cyrillic. In some cases, like foods that are Bulgarian specialities, I understand why you might make that choice—shopska salad. But other choices did not make sense to me—satrap, bacho, brate, horo, ajvar, hajduks. 

AR: Hmm. Well, in the United States at this point, there is a tendency to discourage any kind of footnotes in literary translation. If you look at old translations, there are footnotes everywhere, but the idea now is that it pulls the reader out of the text—it’s distracting; it can kind of be pedantic; and do you really need to know this much about a single word? 

So most publishers want translators to minimize the use of footnotes. We can put in what’s called a stealth gloss, which is trying to define the word in the text so the reader can just translate it on their own. But there is also this idea that we don’t want to domesticate things too much; we want to have a little bit of the flavor of the original language. And even with writers who are writing in English, like Khaled Hosseini, who wrote The Kite Runner—he teaches you about a dozen Pashtun words. For example, he calls the father Baba, and you just learn it as you go. 

I think those two things together—the fact that it’s becoming more common to have foreign words in a text to keep some flavor of the original, and also the fact that we don’t want a lot of footnotes—are informing current translation practice. The publisher of The Physics of Sorrow refused to let us use any footnotes, so with Time Shelter, Georgi and I just assumed that we couldn’t, but they sent me some of their other translated books and we were like, “Hey! These have footnotes in them!” So we used them, but rather sparingly; I think there’s maybe ten footnotes in Time Shelter. 

We decided that if it was something that was a one-off and we could explain it easily and lightly in the text, then we kept it, like with the mare’s milk, kumis—and that’s not even a Bulgarian word, it’s old Bulgarian, like a central Asian word. Or if it was something that we thought was important—like rakia, which is the brandy that comes up over and over—we thought the reader can learn this, and that the reader should learn something about Bulgaria when engaging with the work. 

You don’t want it to be an encyclopedia entry. I teach translation, and Bulgarians who translate from English into Bulgarian are terrible with footnotes: My students might give a whole recipe in a footnote, and I’m like, “Guys. Really? If the reader is that interested, there’s Google.” It’s too distracting—you can’t put that in the text. 

And of course, sometimes I think something is clear, but I have lived in Bulgaria for way too long, so the editor might say, “What the hell is this?” And I’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, that’s not a thing that everybody knows.” Between myself, Georgi, and the editor, we decide whether we should slip something into the text, translate it into English, or do a footnote if we really need it.  

KN: At one point you use the French word vous to explain the polite form. Is that because there is no polite form in English?

AR: Yes. Bulgarian, like all Slavic languages, has this difference between the formal you and the familiar you. It’s often important in literature because it shows the relationships between the characters. Sometimes if the characters talk about it specifically, then you can use the French word vous-ing someone, because English speakers mostly know that. Or you can use madam or sir or some other kind of workaround so that it’s clear that it’s a formal interaction. Then if it switches between those two characters, they will start using their first names. 

I always tell my students that we will get to the fun stuff like dialects and stylistics, but that first they need to think linguistically about the structural differences between the two languages—and honorifics are a big difference. Also, the way Bulgarian uses verb tense is completely different, so we have to look for where those grammatical mismatches exist. You need to find ways to elegantly work around the differences. 

KN: Also, the words lass and lassie really grabbed me. Why use those instead of girl?

AR: Because those are old-fashioned words from Bulgarian folk songs, so I want the English to sound correspondingly archaic and folky. There are few words in American English that register in this way, but when it’s folky in the original, I think you have to find something. In American English we flatten register, and everything is informal, so it’s hard sometimes. British English offers more variety, but I’m not a native speaker of British English, so I can’t use those sorts of things. 

If Georgi had used the average Bulgarian word for girl, I would have used girl. But he uses devoika, so I felt like I needed to try something that would give it a little of that flavor. 

KN: Another phrase that really struck me was in the passage with a Frankenstein analogy about creating something from many pieces. Your English takes the words dismembered and remembered and chops them up to isolate the word member—a word with so much power in the context of communism. I was curious to know what the Bulgarian looked like.

AR: The Bulgarian has the same play. And actually chlen is really interesting in Bulgarian because it has the meaning of member as party member but it also has the same sexual connotation as the English member, so I got lucky with that! I had to do some finessing because the two extended words—dismember and remember—didn’t quite coincide, but it worked well enough that I could use it. 

There were other places, however, where Georgi had a terrific play on words but I was like, “Ugh, that does not work at all in English.” This is a thing that AI is not going to be able to do very well. 

KN: Only once in the novel—at the very end—did you choose to leave the original Bulgarian in Cyrillic. No Roman letters. No italics. No English.

AR: That last line is actually just Georgi banging on the typewriter. There is no hidden meaning, but we just thought it best to leave it in the Cyrillic, as the letters are beautiful.

KN: The narrator of Time Shelter is a trustworthy guide, and it seems to me that your choices contribute greatly to that trust. For example, after the narrator hears the sound of gunfire, he addresses the reader directly in the second person about this particular neighborhood in Sofia—“Just so you know where you are.” [188] It’s not a tour guide pronouncement, but rather a gentle touch on the shoulder. 

AR: Yes, what I love about Georgi’s writing is that even while he is writing about huge historical things, he has an intimate tone. I think what is so brilliant—and I think this is something the Booker Prize jury recognized—is that he is writing about issues like nationalism and how we deal with history, but it’s always a personal experience. His narrator here talks to you as a real human being, a conversation partner, so I really tried to make sure that the voice captured that tone, that it was a real person speaking one-on-one with the reader. 

I think that’s important also because Gaustine has a very different voice. He is not trustworthy—he is flamboyant and over-the-top—but we are processing Gaustine’s ideas through the narrator who is delicate and tongue-in-cheek. He has a good sense of humor, but it’s subtle and ironic, and I needed to capture that in the narrator’s voice. 

KN: The narrator often refers to Gaustine as being a joker, but he is also unsure whether Gaustine is joking or not joking. The language of irony is nuanced, and I wonder whether you ever had to ask Georgi directly, “Is this line a joke? Is he joking?” just to clarify before you made your choices about irony.

AR: Yes. Sometimes I was like, “I think this is meant ironically, but let me check to make sure!” For the most part with Georgi, I can pretty much assume that if I think it’s ironic, it probably is. But you know, it’s tricky. He speaks English well, so he reads my draft and offers insights like “I’m not sure this is clear enough” or “maybe we should strengthen this,” and that’s always so helpful. 

It’s interesting with Gaustine. He is an ongoing character who first appeared in Georgi’s poetry and then as a character in his second novel. He is a meta-textual character, so there’s always going to be a fair amount of irony, but Gaustine is sort of allowed to do things that Georgi, the writer, wouldn’t allow himself to do. It’s his alter ego for sure. 

KN: Early on we learn that Gaustine’s name is a merging of Augustine and Garibaldi, and the narrator finds it interesting that the first captures early theology and the second late revolutionism. I didn’t find a lot of theology in this novel. Did I miss something?

AR: That might be indicative of Georgi’s generation: He was born in 1968 and grew up under socialism. Where he does talk about religion—not so much in this book but in his previous one—is more about his grandmother, who would still read the Bible but would cover it in newspaper and do it secretly. I think she secretly baptized him and his brother, because it wasn’t allowed. So it’s a fraught relationship with religion and theology; as a child he was interested but also a little afraid, because it was something that was forbidden.

So for his generation—at least this is true of other Bulgarians that I know, especially intellectuals—their religion is art and literature; that could give you a sort of spiritual experience of something beyond yourself, because you couldn’t really be a religious person in Bulgaria in that era. I would say that Georgi is certainly a spiritual seeker, but maybe because of when he grew up and where, his seeking has been more in conversation with the western literary tradition and the western art tradition. 

KN: A very moving scene is when one of the clinic’s patients gets to meet the government agent who was in charge of spying on that patient when he was younger. 

AR: Oh, that is my favorite scene in the entire book.

KN: It is brilliant. The patient has lost his memory, but the agent remembers everything. The agent supplies the details, some very personal and painful, to help the patient remember his life, but clearly both the watched and the watcher have suffered over the years. I thought it was a brilliant way to humanize the wounds of the surveillance state, and the encounter—long after the surveillance state has dissolved—is healing for both. Georgi refers to the pair as the “closest of enemies.” [54]

AR: Yes, and the word “wound” is so resonant. Bulgaria as a society has not really found a way to talk about what happened in their country like Germans have about the Holocaust, i.e., how are we going to move forward and discuss this? Bulgarians have not had that kind of reckoning about the socialist period. There are some people who have very positive nostalgic memories about the socialist period; there are many who are very negative. And it seems like those two camps have not found a way to speak publicly. So I just love that scene because it makes it personal but also taps a nerve that the entire society is still struggling with. There is blame, but both of those characters—the agent and the dissident—were in it together. 

Until about six years ago, history books stopped at about 1944, meaning kids in school did not learn history past that date—because they didn’t know how to talk about it, they didn’t know how to teach it. Finally, the ministry of education said, Okay, we need to change our textbooks. And it was a big public to-do because some of the books were too positive about communism, some were too negative, and they tried to find a kind of middle path. But it’s a very real wound that is still being processed there. I think this story is so poignant because it shows that whoever controls memory has so much power, and that power can be abused. It is still a very real conversation in Bulgaria and in a lot of eastern Europe. Look what’s happening now in Russia with Putin: He wants to control the historical narrative.

I’m sorry, I’m going off on a tangent a little bit, but the Sofia mayoral elections are coming up, and one of the candidates launched by the anti-corruption, pro-Europe, pro-western parties is a guy whose parents were part of the surveillance state. I know him personally because he went to the American University in Bulgaria; he is a brilliant tech start-up guy who launched the first Bulgarian IT unicorn, and he is re-opening that whole conversation. It’s amazing. He is younger than I am and probably born in late socialism, maybe in ’85, so he is not somebody who benefited directly from the power structure of socialism, though his family benefited. So we are asking the questions: Is he worthy? Is he burdened by being from that family? Does he carry some blame? Are people able to judge him on his own merits? It is just such an interesting conversation. I hope he gets elected; he would be a great mayor. But there is a chance that he won’t because of his family’s history. These topics are very painful still in Bulgaria and in a lot of eastern Europe. They haven’t had the time to process it as a society. 

KN: I was moved by this encounter between the “closest of enemies” simply because the agent became the one who could release another human being from the dark place that is Alzheimer’s. So I read it as an incredibly healing scene. 

AR: But Bulgarians will read that scene very differently than you. They’ll see the power imbalance. They’ll see him with the potential to abuse that position. 

KN: Yes, and he did abuse it, especially when the surveillance was about sex and love. Are there any conversations happening about a film being made of Time Shelter?

AR: Yes. I haven’t been part of them, but I know that they are happening. So his agent is busy. I think it would be a great movie. 

KN: It seems that writing about memory is having a moment right now. Are there novels or films that Georgi has mentioned as having an influence on his thinking?

AR: We have seen many comparisons to recent things about memory, but I think Georgi looks to work of the past and not so much to contemporary literature. Proust and In Search of Lost Time—that’s who he is dialoguing with here, and Thomas Mann with the clinics, you know; when I was reading this, I went back and reread Magic Mountain. 

That said, what the author intends is neither here nor there once the book is out in the world. And I think so many of us are realizing that memory is who we are and how we make sense of ourselves. A big part of mind control is memory control. I think that was part of what the Booker liked about Time Shelter—that it is a literary exploration of themes that we need to start thinking about pretty urgently. Georgi is tapping into a collective angst.

KN: Geez, Magic Mountain is quite a tome for anyone to take on in translation prep!

AR: I know. And because I am a translator, I had to decide, which translation should I read? Because it has been translated several times and they’re different. Georgi uses some quotations from the novel and I wanted to see which one fit best for my translation. This is something that happens not infrequently when Georgi quotes from other writers; the way they have been translated into Bulgarian is not always the way they have been translated into English, and for his use of the passage it would make perfect sense in Bulgarian but not so much sense if I used the English translation! And obviously both are departures from the original German, but the Bulgarian translator was a bit fancy free with their translation…

KN: So you had to find the English translation that best captured Georgi’s reason for using it.

AR: Actually, we have some funny examples of this from Georgi’s previous book. He was joking about how it was very difficult to get access to anything to do with sex during socialism, so kids would read German underwear catalogs, or The Godfather by Mario Puzo; he said there was a scene in it that was very racy, but it turns out that the Bulgarian version was totally censored—it still had a little juice, but the English was way juicier. We had a good laugh about the watered-down version; Georgi was saying how they didn’t even get the full scene but it was still steamy for them! We actually ended up putting the censored version in the novel so that people would understand what Bulgarian kids were reading and thinking. Bouncing between different translations here and there, it can be funny to navigate those sorts of things. 

KN: Okay, I went down a rabbit hole with Thomas Mann translations and learned that his first translator was an American woman named Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, and that Boris Johnson is her great-grandson! 

AR: What?! I will tell Georgi, he will get a kick out of that!

KN: What are you working on now?

AR: I just finished a translation of a historical novel called The Case of Cem by a woman named Vera Mutafchieva. She is not alive any longer, unfortunately. She wrote mostly during the socialist period, and she was actually an Ottoman historian which is kind of unusual because Bulgarians have a very fraught relationship with their Ottoman past. Like most European countries, they define themselves as not-the-colonizer. But she was a well respected Ottoman historian, and a really great writer. She wrote a lot of historical novels. 

She wrote The Case of Cem in the 1960s, and it’s basically about Mehmed the Conqueror, who has two sons; when he dies, there is a war to decide which son will ascend to the throne. The younger son loses and goes into exile, then becomes a pawn for several countries wanting to limit the expansion of the Ottoman Empire; this is the late 15th century, when the Ottomans were becoming a threat to Europe. Instead of uniting and smacking down the Ottomans once and for all, the Europeans end up fighting among themselves, and the Ottomans take over the Balkans essentially and make it all the way to Vienna. So the question in the novel is, what if the Europeans had actually supported Cem, whose mother is Serbian, and what if they had pushed back in a united way against the Turks?

It explores alternate histories, but it is super avant-garde for 1960s Bulgaria. It is set in a court where you don’t ever hear from Cem but the reader is part of the court panel, and you hear from all the witnesses about different aspects of what happened with Cem and why he basically wasn’t supported by the Europeans. It is a very interesting structure. 

But also, there are contemporary resonances. Vera Mutafchieva’s brother defected to France during the 1960s, which made her life complicated, so this is a personal, parallel story of a young man in exile who gets caught up in political machinations that he doesn’t understand. And then there is this queer storyline: You never hear from Cem, but you do hear from a Persian poet who is Cem’s companion, and it becomes clear that they had a relationship. (How on earth this got published in 1960s Bulgaria is a mystery!) 

And it has a lot to say about what is going on with Ukraine now, because what the Ottomans did is divide and conquer. They paid off the Europeans to continue fighting among themselves while they took over southeastern Europe. This is what we are seeing with Putin. He is definitely playing that game with gas and energy and grain, basically playing Europeans off each other. I think there are a lot of lessons in this book, and it is very funny as well—she is a very good psychologist, so all these different historical characters come before the court. 

KN: Who is publishing it? 

AR: Sandorf Passage, which is a small literary fiction press. I am excited about it. It is a really fun book, a really interesting book, and it has been translated into almost every European language, including three or four different Turkish translations. English was pretty much the only European language that it had not yet been translated into. 

The author is an interesting character as well. Right before she died, she was exposed as a communist secret service informer, and she was kind of defiant about it. But, you know, her brother being a defector, she didn’t really have a choice. She herself had a hard life. Her husband eventually defected and left her alone with her two daughters. She passed away in 2009; I never met her unfortunately, but I know many people who knew her. 

KN: Like the narrator of Time Shelter, you are sitting in a place where you grew up, but you are a visitor after having been away for many years. What do you find yourself noticing, thinking, feeling about the passing of time? And if Minnesota were holding a referendum to select a decade to return to, which one would you vote for?

AR: It’s funny you ask that because my dad had a bee in his bonnet about having me clear out all my old stuff from his basement, so it really has been like a time shelter—I have been going through old photos from high school and college. But, hmm, the U.S. these days is an interesting place. The level of polarization is palpable. That for sure makes me sad. I also feel the U.S. has got to get the guns figured out—we cannot go on as a society with this level of gun violence. Living in Europe, despite all my daughter’s trials and tribulations in school, at least I don’t have to worry about her getting shot.

On the other hand, I feel like I notice many things I didn’t appreciate when I lived here. Like how beautiful the lived environment is—even where we are in now, this amazing public library that is beautiful and well maintained—living in a post socialist country, there is a sense that public space is not cared for as well. Eastern Europe still has something to learn. There is a legacy of being forced into the shared, the communal . . . I don’t necessarily want to, but I find I’m turning inward to my own home, my own spaces, and I feel bad because libraries are neglected in Bulgaria. Communal spaces in general are not well funded. So I appreciate that much more now when I come back to the U.S. and spend time in these sorts of spaces.

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Poetry Detonates Dualism: An Interview with Martine Bellen

Photo credit: Joe Gaffney

by Chris Stroffolino

Martine Bellen has been a quiet force in poetry for over two decades. Her second book, Tales of Murasaki (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), was selected for the National Poetry Series by Rosmarie Waldrop, and acclaimed collections from Copper Canyon and other small presses have followed; in 2015 Spuyten Duyvil released This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems. A contributing editor for Conjunctions, Bellen also has composed libretti for three operas, and her poetry has been included in numerous anthologies, most recently in the 2023 volume of The Best American Poetry.

Elizabeth Robinson writes that the poems in Bellen’s latest collection, An Anatomy of Curiosity (MadHat Press, $21.95), “are capable of the most agile swerves, demonstrating that a serious inquiry can sail on music and play, through myth and dream: here are the malleable, chewy realms of metamorphosis.” Fascinated by these agile swerves, I brought some of Bellen’s poems into the creative writing class I teach, and I am grateful to my students for a spirited discussion—some of their insights and questions, in fact, are incorporated into the following interview.

 

Chris Stroffolino: I want to begin with a comment you made in a recent interview with Indran Amirthanayagam, that you “work more from the surreal than from myth.” I feel the first poem in An Anatomy of Curiosity, “Bad Times at the El Royale,” works through a Hollywood mythology, wending beyond that and crescendoing to a dream sphere:

You and I are in the body bag, sleeping beside
a volcano that vibrates and reaches up us
like a fist through a throat, signaling
to a lifeguard to swim across ages
and currents, through celestial meridians,
toward our swirling sound bridge,
beautiful mind, plenary weave, a coat of every note.

While the sinuous flowing music is transporting, I am also struck by the peril, and I wonder if the prayer to the lifeguard is answered. Do you want to say anything more about myth and surrealism in this poem, or elsewhere in your work?

Martine Bellen: A number of things drew me to the movie Bad Times at the El Royale. In it, nothing is what it seems and no one is who they say they are, so some of the poem is about washing away who we pretend to be or think we are. Because of this, detergents and washing machines play a part, though as you suggest, the last section of the poem turns menacing and violent—the soundtrack switches. This happens to me often in dreams; suddenly, the scene pivots and I’m alone and have lost my ability to speak. So in An Anatomy of Curiosity, the loss of voice that can happen when you’re in danger and can’t call out for help is a strand woven into the design. One can have the experience of being unable to reach the bridge between self and others.

What I meant in the conversation with Indran is that myths, being ancient, shared belief systems, have bridges and gates, and my poems roam the mythic landscape while quilting (in the surrealist sense of juxtaposition) “our swirling sound bridge, / beautiful mind, plenary weave, a coat of every note.”

CS: As I reread the poem in light of your response, I notice “bridges” can be a noun (common and proper, since Jeff Bridges is in the film) and a verb, and I feel the gated community of Bill Gates as well—your imagining’s sudsy synesthesia indeed washes the language. I also love that you bring your Zen Buddhist practice into this capacious trans-denominational quilting while you roam; the rhythmic alliterative flow of variations on the word “prayer” in “Deafening Prayer” is an especially joyful example. How did this come about?

MB: I started “Deafening Prayer” around Election Day, when a radio announcer said that voting is praying. I hadn’t thought of voting that way before, but it’s so true: We send out a petition for who we wish will win the race in the same way we pray for anything we want. Then I asked myself, What isn’t praying?—I realized that everything is a prayer. From there, a fragmented inverted list poem commenced.

Also, since you mention both Bill Gates and Buddhism: While working on this book, I was sitting with koans, those riddles/questions in Zen practice that a meditator focuses on (a popular koan is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”). Koans are used to free one from dualistic thinking, the idea being that the experiential is unimpeded by the limits of language, but when we attempt to describe experience in language, we crash onto dualistic Earth.

Poetry is, I think, a type of language that can detonate dualism. And Zen priests and practitioners have a long history of writing poetry. In fact, anthologies of koans are structured with the koan, a short commentary, and finally a capping poem, which is the experiential insight. Most of the koans I was sitting with when working on An Anatomy of Curiosity are from The Gateless Gate, a collection of forty-eight koans compiled in the 13th century; when meditating, “gates” or barriers are passed through and the meditator moves on to the next one. So throughout An Anatomy of Curiosity, I have included various “gates” (though not Bill)—for instance, in “Myth of the Bluebeard-ed Bluebird” I write, “‘Going up,’ elevator operator chimes as he closes one gate” (remember old-school elevator gates?) and in “Monkey and Spirit Bird Triptych,” “It’s all about where you drop the garden gate” (that’s Miles Davis’s music space). So yes—bridges and gates are the infrastructure of some of the poems, connecting our island delusion.

CS: I do remember those elevators, and I definitely see your gates and bridges working in many ways to pass through barriers of dualistic thinking and create connections. In this light, I’d like to look at “Myth of the Bluebeard-ed Bluebird” with you in more depth:

            “Going up,” elevator operator chimes as he closes one gate.
“Going down,” is chanted at the far end of the elevator bank,
                                    the river bank,
                                                banks of earth sloping
from land to sea, from water wake
to streams of sleep
                                    from limbs to fins.

This short stanza brings so much into play: in the first line we sense the confinement of the elevator (symbol of progress, the ego at the wheel?), though the second line feels like a yin to its yang, and taken together with the first can possibly do “koan work”; its passive voice and its contrast of chant with chime suggests to me  that “what goes up must come down” but also implies an echoing. Then the next five lines dance away from the confinement of the “banks,” taking on a chthonic (rather than economic) connotation. The language also suggests multi-directional transport, both “up” and “down” stream, as if a “gateless gate,” or at least a wider sense of subjectivity, emerges. The poem continues:

In this myth, you want nothing more
than to land in a fully stocked big-box stationary store,
                        but the mall is poorly lit, and portals lead to floors
of canopied woods before deforestation and paper mills.

At first, this desiring “you” (inside the elevator that’s become a portal) seems disappointed or anxious, implying perhaps the death of our civilization, but also the loss of time-space coordinates—there’s no stationary place to land—but, in the next stanza, there’s an opening as myths mingle:

Nymphs flaunt their good fortune on escalators to faux fountains,
satyrs squeeze into try-on rooms,
whispering oaks, in maquillage, with roots of skulls and spine.

You cap it off with a shorter-lined lyric that, among other things, has me thinking about “countenance”:

The structure’s columns
mirrored
sartorial
wear
your countenance
bear
the ceiling
conceal the celestial, the cerulean.

To sum up: I wonder if this poem is structured like the koan anthologies you mentioned: koan, commentary, and then the capping “experiential insight.”

MB: Let me backtrack a bit to your reading of the lines

                                     the river bank,
                                                banks of earth sloping
from land to sea, from water wake
to streams of sleep
                                    from limbs to fins. 

as multi-directional transport—I love your sense of how the words interconnect and sound. I was also attempting to wake up the positive devolution we can experience as we fall back on our full selves, shelves of selves (folded in The Gap) in which there is nothing lacking and nothing superfluous—from limbs to fins, it’s all there.

Additionally, I’m very fond of your reading of the elevator as portal or time transport to our department store, a shared, common, ridiculous, fairy tale space in which it’s so easy to get lost (and is indeed never stationary). I believe those who design department stores intend for us to lose ourselves—personally, I have a hard time breathing when I’m in one. The poem “Mother Hubbard” also wends its way through a department store. And again, one gets lost.

CS: It’s interesting that both the poems you mentioned that include gates appear in the final section of the book: “Dream-Mares, Glue Traps, and Other Dark Matter.” When reading that title, it’s hard not to think of horses being made into glue as well as bridges becoming walls. What can you tell us about this section of An Anatomy of Curiosity?

MB: The book’s third section includes hauntings and threats. Readers might know a ’60s TV show called Lost in Space in which the family robot, when confronted with potential peril, would call out “Danger, Will Robinson!” The poems in “Dream-Mares, Glue Traps, and Other Dark Matter” don’t all have present dangers, but there is always something lurking—and yes, in these poems, horse glue might mucilage the broken lines. For example, in “Monkey and Spirit Bird Triptych,” spry spirit birds turn rogue and “suck out Monkey’s lifesaver hole”;  in “Confession,” poetry itself devolves into protolanguage, and in the absence of language, transforms into a kiss—though the kiss is the one that revives Psyche. 

CS: What you call “positive devolution” abounds in “Confession,” a virtuoso seven-page meta-poem in which I find, to borrow another of your phrases, “nothing lacking and nothing superfluous.” I’m especially amazed by its shape and narrative structure as it wends its way from crisis to quest to crisis to prayer to an encounter with the goddess Nyx before that “prodigal // Kiss.” Can you say anything more about the structure?

MB: Thanks, I’m so pleased you experienced that poem as tight and full also, as the tone is more conversational than most of my poetry. I tend not to write narrative poems, and not to write short-lined poems that proceed straight down a page, so I was allowing myself to explore a new field when writing this. Although the protagonist of the poem, Poem, is said to be losing it—and maybe in these dark days we’re living through, poetry is thought to have lost it—its breath is sustained, and even after the kiss, the breath doesn’t end with a period (nor does the poem). The short enjambed lines are an homage to sustained breath.

CS: I love the way you harmonize narrative and lyric impulses. On one hand, the reader gets empathetically involved with the drama of the inadequate, lost poem—searching for subject matter to give it direction so it can become a sacrificial victim in Nyx’s ritual—it’s a fructifying meta-myth with suspense and foreshadowing. On the other hand, the sustained breath of the short lines from the beginning (even in polysyllabic phrases like, “a born zigzagger, / topographically agnostic”) belies the narrative, or presages it dying into the lyric now.

MB: The lyric impulse, which is the final skeletal thread, definitely outlives the narrative one. Close to the end of the poem, as you note, everything devolves. To signal the loss of the narrative, there’s a quick sketch of the Canova sculpture Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss—which my husband, James Graham, kindly drew—that’s referenced in the poem.

CS: This is a brilliant and beautiful collaboration with your husband. In his sketch of the sculpture, Cupid’s face and body do not seem to be as defined as Psyche’s, which seems more muscular and active in the moment of embrace, but his wings evoke pillars of rope. Earlier in the poem, you had introduced the sculpture as a “wingéd marble man / revealed before a beauty / spiked into deathlike sleep.” At first, I had no idea this “beauty” was meant to be Psyche. Is the sketch meant to enhance the verbal description of the sculpture?

MB: I refer to Psyche as “beauty” since Psyche’s troubles arise because of her beauty. It’s great you see Psyche as active, as she is a journeyer in all her states; nevertheless, at this very moment Canova captures, Psyche is frozen because her curiosity, her inability to resist temptation, has gotten the best of her, yet again. The word “spiked” suspends the action as the last line of the stanza—that word is especially nuanced, waiting for viewers, listeners, readers to awaken and endow animation on Psyche, for Poem is nothing without its audience. 

CS: Yes, there’s so much in these three lines, even the connotations of “spiked” from drunkenness to drug needles to violence—it’s as if, in order to revive Psyche, James’s sketch is killing the personified poem (or at least its narrative).

MB: Killing or freeing. When we’re freed from our stories, Psyche is finally immortal.

Once the poem lets loose its narrative, it begins to wind down, the wind and breath set free:

in the poem
in the palace
with its storehouse
of candelabras
and crystal vases

is where all our pictures and sounds are stockpiled, from our lifetimes and perhaps also the karma of our ancestors and relatives, and even miscellanea from the gothic castle/landscape of Coleridge’s “Christabel.”

CS: Gothic, yes, as Nyx provides the necessary atmosphere, amniotic fluid for this poem in which miscellanea can become:

giant tigresses
romping through
narrow
atriums
into a ventricle of the heart

Although Psyche and Cupid are not as foregrounded in “Confession” as Nyx is, but more in the wings (as it were), they take center stage in the following poem, “An Anatomy of Curiosity.”

MB: The story of Cupid and Psyche is one I have been drawn to from a young age, and with “Confession” and “An Anatomy of Curiosity,” I wanted to get inside the pleasure of that story. I loved the intimacy of Robert Duncan’s writing on Cupid and Psyche in The H.D. Book and, like him, I wanted to extend my experience with it. I’ve always thought of it as a hybrid fairytale/myth, but I’m not sure where or how I first heard the story; it was first written down by Apuleius in The Golden Ass, but I surely didn’t read that rendition until college. What caught me is how Psyche is reminded to repress her curiosity, and when she doesn’t, the story gets especially exciting: she spills wax on her beautiful lover, flies too close to the sun.

CS: I love the way you introduce the myth in Chapter One of “An Anatomy of Curiosity,” while Chapter Two brings into play a more modern myth, as Psyche becomes an object of the sublimated curiosity of “scientific analysis.” The contrast between narrative and sustained breath you noted in “Confession” is similar to that of the figures of the Detective and Psychic here, as you move beyond antithesis to a syncretic joining of the discourse of Freudian “drives” with mythopoesis: “Hemispheres of land beneath a surface of chaos, Chronos.”

MB: The dualities we discussed earlier are echoed in “An Anatomy of Curiosity.” In Chapter Two, the deducing Detective (and don’t forget Oedipus Rex, which inspired Freud, is maybe our first detective story, or at least an early one) and Psyche/Psychic/Soul are dichotomous spirits in that mysterious “black box of the brain,” and we know Psyche and Pandora couldn’t resist boxes.

CS: And in Chapter Seven, as “questions arise from the stem of the body” and Psyche lights the candle that scares Desire away, language becomes as musical as the unheard music it’s ostensibly about:

Think of a dream seamstress, a songster, a siren,
            A shore breeze with wavy tresses
       Bowling out the beaks of pipers,
                 The hollow low notes that dip on the concave clavicle,
                                                            Wending viola strings.
       Think of a pattern cutter, a dreamstress,
                              Tree witness and earlobe globes
Nothing permitted, permanent
The writhen octopus
Or octave written in wind.

Meanwhile, I wonder about the connotations, the tone, of “Nothing permitted, permanent.” At first, I feel sadness and despair here, but then I sense a double meaning of “nothing” as a presence, as if the voice is not merely lamenting but also signaling and singing the immortality of Psyche, or at least celebrating music freed from the page, even if it’s transient and unpermitted—the sublime gospel of the blues. It also recalls the first line of the book: “I left my permission slip in a past.” Forever changes, permission slips (as if it’s revealed to be merely administrative). Was this Da Capo movement intentional when considering the structure of the book? Can the book’s last line, “Off an eyeblink         in a flame wink” be a koan?

MB: Those words “Off an eyeblink       in a flame wink” appear at the end of the book’s final poem, which is printed in German (I wrote the poem in English and Hans Jürgen Balmes translated it into German). So if one were dreaming through this life and this book, and this dream is in a language which one sometimes understands and sometimes doesn’t, and one hears/reads Flamme winkt der Luft and then in a flame wink, one might find oneself suspended between language, in the marvelous still, in the pause of poetry.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2023-2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The Have-Not Mystery: An Interview with Jim Feast

by John Wisniewski

Jim Feast is the author of several collections of poetry and a founding member of the Unbearables, an action-oriented literary group based in New York City that has also produced several anthologies, including From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream (Autonomedia, 2017). Feast has edited seven books by Ralph Nader and worked with legendary publisher Barney Rosset on his autobiography. His new novel Karl Marx Private Eye (PM Press, $16.95) pairs a teenage Sherlock Holmes with Marx and his daughter Eleanor as they work to solve a series of murders. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife Nhi Chung.

John Wisniewski: Why did you want to write a mystery with Karl Marx as the main character?

Jim Feast: I can give the question two answers, since the book was done twice. In 1985, I finished a version of the book and gave it to agent Susan Protter, who tried unsuccessfully to interest publishers. Thirty years later, I rewrote the book from scratch. 

I went to college in Chicago in the 1970s, which suggests why I first gravitated to making Marx a protagonist. In this time of campus upheaval over civil rights and the Vietnam War, many were consulting Marx and Bakunin for answers.  Moreover, many of Chicago’s literary giants were political activists, like Gwendolyn Brooks and Upton Sinclair, if not outright Communist Party members, like Richard Wright and James T. Farrell. On top of that, my poet friend Jerome Sala introduced me into the Boho circle around painter Lady Bunny, which included activists like Eddie Balchowsky, who had lost an arm in the Spanish Civil War and kept alive memories of previous anti-rightist battles.  

My wife, Nhi Chung, and I agreed that after we quit working, we would finish long-shelved literary projects. Once retirement came, she wrote her memoir Among the Boat People, about her escape from Vietnam and how she eventually reconciled herself to the past. After her book was published, I told her, “Now I’ll write my Vietnam novel.”

That’s only metaphorically true, in the sense that as her book deals with the aftermath of the Vietnam War, my mystery turns on the aftermath of the 1871 fall of the Paris Commune. The Commune occurred when there was a temporary working-class takeover of the city, which ended in a bloodbath. While Marx is labelled as one who believed in the inevitable coming  of a Communist society, after the Paris defeat, he lost much of his optimism about historical progress and began to entertain Russian anarchist ideas—including, as his collaborator Engels put it, the idea that once the communist revolution was accomplished, humans might drop industrialization and return to societies practicing the mutual aid of the Russian mir.   

JW: That’s all fascinating. And what inspired you to write this novel as a mystery?

JF: Having worked as a union organizer in Chicago and a housing organizer on New York City’s Lower East Side, I came to see the world as divided between haves and have-nots. I was attracted to American authors writing between the wars, such as Katherine Anne Porter and Claude McKay, who crafted a literature using the principles of the have-nots. While they wrote serious literature, I wondered whether their principles could be applied to genre fiction.

First principle: It is a sociological truism that the elite believe in individualism, in lone heroes like Phillip Marlowe, while the lower classes believe in collectivism, in the solidarity and group effort found, for instance, in unions, progressive churches, and feminist consciousness-raising circles. So, as I saw it, a have-not mystery must allow its detectives to be a collective—a bunch of characters conferring, making individual moves, and conferring again.

Second principle: Underclass literature must seize the themes, characters and plots presented by the elite and reconfigure them with mischievous vitality. To think of musical examples, between the wars, groups under the batons of Henderson, Ellington, and Chicago’s own Jimmie Noone took the stale tunes of Tin Pan Alley and remade them as vehicles for rollicking, free-spirited, collective improvisation. That’s something I think can also be worked through in genre literature.

In KMPE, I remake the figure of Sherlock Holmes, who in Doyle is an errant reactionary. As an example of this, remember that in the final Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, Holmes hunts down a secret society who come to England for revenge on a retired Pinkerton agent who exposed a wicked U.S. labor union, one Doyle modeled on the Molly McGuires. Here Holmes adopts the common (and self-serving) conservative idea that labor unions are nothing but conspiracies devised to fleece the workers and blackmail honest employers. Further, as the poststructuralist Catherine Belsey noted in Critical Practice (Routledge, 2002), Holmes has a major blind spot around women, who to him are indecipherable enigmas even his scientific method can’t fathom. Again, Holmes takes up the conservative stereotype of women as mysterious beings.  So in my book, Holmes is reconfigured as a coltish youth who is led by Eleanor Marx to see the errors in the conservative stereotypes affixed to socialism and women.

JW: Who are some of your favorite authors and poets?

JF: The third principle of have-not genre fiction was developed to perfection by my favorite author, Chester Himes. In his mysteries, Himes shows that you find the solutions to crimes not by chasing individual villains but by examining social movements, which are the real motor forces of history. In Cotton Comes to Harlem (Putnam, 1965), for instance, there are two counterposed movements: a group led by Black minister Reverend Deke O’Malley calling for Black Harlemites to return to Africa, and the Back to the Southland group led by white Kentucky colonel Robert Calhoun, who urges the same people to return to cotton plantations where, he claims, conditions have miraculously improved. It is by delving into these movements that Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones break the case. In KMPE, solving the crime involves studying the Serbian independence movement and the actions of a group of displaced Communards.

Of course, you might ask: What’s the point of trying to refashion genres in a way that embodies have-not values? If as a working conjecture, we say that in the future the human world doesn’t disappear in an ecological collapse, the only alternative is mass democratization, which includes in its sweep family relations, cooperative workplaces and government. As Jane Addams puts it, “In a democratic society nothing can be achieved save through the masses of people.”

While such a society is being born, writers can contribute to it by making clear its guiding principles. This is a collective task in which multiple writers in multiple groupings are engaged. I might mention, for instance, those associated with PM Press, such as Michael Moorcock, Cara Hoffman, Allan  Kausch, Marge Piercy, and Jonathan  Lethem; those connected to  Fifth Estate magazine, such as Sylvia Kasdan, Peter Werbe, Jack Bratich, and the late Peter Lamborn Wilson; writers in the Chicago Surrealist group such as Penelope Rosemont, Nancy Joyce Peters, and the late Jayne Cortez and Franklin Rosemont; or those associated with the group with which I am affiliated, the Unbearables, which includes such creators as Bonny Finberg, Yuko Otomo, Carl Watson, Wanda Phipps, Ron Kolm, Jose Padua, Kevin Riordan, and Carol Wierzbicki. These writers are working out a literature that upholds the principles of the have-nots, which include collectivism, a play with and traducing of desiccated elite symbols, tropes and rhythms, and the creating of artistic landscapes governed by the play of social movements.

JW: You wrote a collection of love poems to your wife, Nhi Chung. What was that like to write?

JF: I met Nhi in the early 1980s. For years, I had been slowly and laboriously producing poetry, but now, something new: I would be walking down the street when suddenly, a complete poem about Nhi would appear in my mind. These weren’t love poems. How could they be when we were both married to other people?  However, two years after we met, we had broken up with our spouses and were living together as we are today.

Nhi, who had come as an immigrant from Southeast Asia in 1980, knew little of American culture, but I knew even less about the Chinese world.  Chinese culture (or better, Cantonese culture), as far as Nhi is representative, is more sensual than American culture. It’s something I found in the deftness, precision, and fluidity of Nhi’s gestures, which appeared so graphically when she cleared away our living room furniture to practice tai chi. And it was in the music of the Cantonese language with its nine tones. To my mind, when Nhi speaks English, she has a complexity of emotional nuance in her voice that an English-only speaker like myself (without the tonal background) cannot achieve.

It wasn’t only Nhi that was so loveable; so also were aspects of Chinese culture she introduced me to. In New York City’s Chinatown in the 1980s and ’90s, there were four theaters showing Hong Kong films, which we attended almost every week. The best HK film noirs—none of which played in American cinemas—had a tartness and a view of corruption that was unflinching and invigorating. Take Arrest the Restless: A cop brings in a man who has brutally killed a prostitute. The police chief calls him to his office for a dressing down. “How dare you arrest the son of one of HK’s leading tycoons?” The killer is released, and the cop demoted. And there was a blinding originality in plotting. In Web of Deception, a woman is shot and it is thought killed. The killer doesn’t know the dead woman had a twin sister who just got out of prison and now takes on the dead woman’s role in a nail-biting masquerade. 

It was the hard-nosed suspicion of authority and exuberant creativity in this HK noir that curved my writing toward crime fiction. As it was Nhi’s cosmopolitanism (evident in her speaking four languages), her questing intelligence, open-hearted generosity, and the abiding grace of her movements and conversation that has made our shared life so many-sided and adventure-tinged.

JW: Does writing come easily to you?

JF: Writing was difficult for me when I was starting out, but in the 1980s, Dan Simon of Seven Stories Press hired me to ghostwrite health and political books. Eventually I had ten under my belt, written to deadline, and I could pound out pages like the classic science fiction authors.  

I was also editing. The most interesting assignment I had was helping Barney Rosset with his autobiography. Unfortunately for the speed of the project, Rosset was easily dissatisfied. After we’d spent the day painstakingly finishing a chapter, he’d get up in the middle of night and start revising, and when I came back the next day, he had thrown out all we had done. I felt like I was in The Odyssey, working for Penelope.

JW: Could you tell us about Help Yourself (Autonomedia, 2002) and Cool My Daisy (Appearances, 1998)?

JF: Help Yourself is an anthology of writings by the Unbearables literary group, which I edited with Ron Kolm and Alfred Vitale. Cool My Daisy is a tale I wrote about Rollo Whitehead, who is one of the imaginary characters, such as Tess Ventricle, Yoko Snapple, and Man Mountain McBrain, that the Unbearables created as fake, rowdy precursors.

Our group was founded in the late 1980s to battle literary stuffed shirts and engage in the type of madcap adventures recommended by one of our founders, Peter Lamborn Wilson, in his book T.A.Z. (Autonomedia, 1991). As an example of the former, we protested against the commodification of the Beats at the 1995 NYU Kerouac Conference, offering an alternative tour to the pricey one given by the college in which we promised, as Sparrow put it, ”to show you where Jack Kerouac bought his kitty litter.” As part of that protest, we held a Kerouac impersonator contest, which drew a lot of what bart plantenga called “wannabeats,” who found that to compete, they not only had to read a heartfelt poem, but also panhandle the audience in good old Beat fashion.

As to the latter, for ten years, led by Tsuarah Litzky, we did September readings with an erotic orientation on the Brooklyn Bridge, not in a bunch but spread out over the span, reading simultaneously, presenting an aural topography to passersby. In another event, this one organized by artist Shalom, rooted in the fact that we thought writers couldn’t appreciate visual art unless it was explained in words, Unbearable writers were blindfolded and led around the Whitney Museum while their artist guides described what they saw—that is, until we were booted out by security guards.   

Our readings could take unusual tacks. In our séance reading, complete with a smoke machine, we channeled the spirits of dead authors. Lorraine Schein evoked Sylvia Plath while wearing a cardboard stove on her head. Tuli Kupferberg appeared as Karl Marx from beyond the grave. (The whole session can be found in Joe Maynard’s Beet Magazine, issue 9). 

At our Unbearables initiation reading, we claimed aspirants, following in the footsteps of our imagined auto mechanic founder Whitehead, were stripped naked and put in a locked room with a pen, paper, a ball peen hammer, and a dented fender. At dawn, they had to emerge with a reconditioned fender and a poetic masterpiece. At the night’s high point, Sharon Mesmer stood on stage, swinging a censor and reciting the sacred syllables, “A, E, I, O, U” while initiate Jose Padua, who has since become a very moderate drinker but who that evening had a few too many, lay asleep on the stage floor. Classic Unbearables scene.

JW: Any future plans and projects, Jim?

JF: I have published two volumes of a trilogy about a literary group who get involved in solving mysteries—Neo Phobe and Long Day, Counting Tomorrow, both from Autonomedia—so I hope to do volume three. Working with new members Jason Gallagher and Gabriel Don, we revived the Brooklyn Bridge reading for one try. I wish we could do it again. Alfred Vitale caught the spirit of the event in a flyer: “Present this to any of the Unbearables reading on the bridge. Upon seeing this page, they will psychically shoot a burst of lust into your soul … you are then requested to embody that lust for the remainder of our trip across. Dance wildly around the walkway with strangers. Sing love songs to anyone … Run off the bridge streaking the parking lot at City Hall shouting, ‘I am the walrus’ or ‘Viva Las Vegas.’ Have an erotic time.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

In Myth and Paint: An Interview with Mary Jo Bang

Bang, Mary Jo (Carly Ann Faye) MAIN

by Tiffany Troy

A Film in Which I Play Everyone (Graywolf Press, $17), Mary Jo Bang’s new collection of poems, draws from David Bowie’s fever-dream of directing a film in which he simultaneously plays all the characters. Bang’s vast cast of characters—fictional, mythological, historical—are tasked with the same daily assignment, which is to make sense of a world where one feels like a perpetual outsider. These deeply observed poems explore what it is to find oneself trapped in a role—that of Daphne or Sisyphus, Ophelia or Hamlet—and discover that the only escape is through self-knowledge and imagination.

Mary Jo Bang has published eight previous books of poetry, including A Doll for Throwing (Graywolf Press, 2017), called “a haunting exploration of a past world whose terrors still ring true today” by Ms. Magazine, and Elegy (Graywolf Press, 2009), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; in the past decade she has also published  acclaimed new translations of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio that update these classics into a lyrical, twenty-first century idiom. She teaches at Washington University in Saint Louis.

Tiffany Troy: How does the opening poem “From Another Approach” open the door to this collection?

Mary Jo Bang: I think what felt right about letting that poem “open the door” was that it begins in media res. You could say that all poems begin by plunging the reader “into the midst of things,” if “things” equal the poet’s ongoing obsessions and preoccupations. That poem was written in November of 2020 during the first year of the pandemic when my life, like the lives of most people, was freighted with anxiety about what was happening—given the pandemic and, additionally, the socio-political situation in the country and across the world. Shut up inside alone for months, it sometimes felt that the boundaries between the world and the self were becoming even more porous than usual. 

TT: Absolutely. To me that first poem also touches on how the poet’s obsessions and preoccupations find their way into the collection—namely, a keen observation of the “line between the two blues, water // and sky, you and I,” and the feelings beneath what can be captured on film. Would you like to speak about how the title of your book, which is drawn from a statement David Bowie made, shaped your approach?

MJB: I’m not sure how I came across the Bowie quote, but when I read it, I immediately thought, what an apt description of the lyric poem—a film where all the characters are played by the poet. It has to be that way since there’s no one else there, only the poet and the blank piece of paper. Most of us agree that the lyric-I is a construct, but I began to see how everyone else in the poem is a construct as well. That “you” or “her” or “them,” the mother, the sister, David Bowie—they’re all characters in the movie that plays in your head and which you translate into text. The result appears to represent your way of thinking and your way of using language, but no matter how close the details are to your biographical life, within the confines of the poem, there is no “real,” only useful fictions that reveal your attempt to represent some aspect of yourself that may or may not reflect a reader’s experience of being in the world.

TT: Yes, and framing as a construct appears frequently, whether on the level of language or in the poems’ concerns. For instance, in asking “​​Why you are you and I am I,” the lyrical “I” and the addressee, the “you,” are subjects as well as objects. Likewise, the collection examines film culture and social expectations that enforce the performance of gender roles and identities (“toxic masculinity told her stepfather / it was safe to drive across water”). What does your notion of the lyric poem as a stage set do for you as the poet?

MJB: Treating the poem as a vignette or a scene from a movie allowed me to conceptually be in two places at once. I could create a speaker to serve as a character moving around on a set, speaking the lines I’d written for her, and at the same time, stand at a remove and comment on what it must be like to act and speak and think like her. It’s a type of dissociation—but one that mirrors the dissociative experience of being hypervigilant in a world where one often feels alien. And if you identify as a woman, and especially a queer woman, that world is also dangerous.

TT: The duality that you describe is very well done. I also love how the poems allow us to look inside the interiority of a character whose scripted performance may be very different from how the actor actually feels about the role.

MJB: I’m afraid the actor playing the role has no feelings about the role they’ve been assigned. They only do what I tell them to do and say what I tell them to say! Which reminds me of an interview I once read where someone asked Tom Perotta if he could go to lunch with any one of his characters, which one would it be—his answer was that he could go to lunch with any of his characters any time he wished to!

There is no impermeable barrier between the character and the author. The characters in these poems are different from me, the poet, in some ways—I’ve never been turned into a tree, for example, as Daphne was—but in other ways, we share some knowledge, she and I, and that’s why she’s in the poem, and why I’m playing her. Running away from Apollo, who won’t take no for an answer, and near the point of total exhaustion, she appeals to her father, the river god, to save her, and he obliges by turning her into a tree. Personally, I don’t feel like that is the type of help she might have been asking for! In fact, it cruelly makes permanent her perceived rigidity—her refusal to give up her virginity to Apollo—and now she is forced to be forever passive while Apollo gets to worship her leaves and use them to make his laurel wreaths. I don’t see the justice in that! And she’s been silenced, which is simply another way of being held down.

TT: You’ve written and translated several poetry collections. Was your process creating this book different from previous books?

MJB: In terms of process, it’s difficult to compare any two books. Some of my books have had a mechanism that tied the poems together. The Bride of E, for example, is an abecedarian collection where the letters of the alphabet provoked individual poems into being. In The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, each poem is an ekphrastic response to an artwork. In some ways, these poems are a bit like those in Elegy, which deals with grief, and a bit like those in Louise in Love, where I was explicit in my use of fictional characters. The title of this book is the only unequivocal gesture to the notion of fiction but that film (in which I play everyone) could also be a documentary. Or a hybrid docudrama. Or even a mockumentary!

TT: The degree of genre-bending achieved in the collection is reflected in the characters that take center stage: there’s Daphne, of course, in a distinctly mythological space. Then there’s Adam and Eve, Mistress Mary of nursery-rhyme fame, and the still photographer and the movie set doctor. The poems themselves carry further allusions, to Alice in Wonderland, for instance, or to Charles Lamb’s writings, which is another layer of interpretation, in which the real and the fictional blend and coexist. The poem “I Could Have Been Better” has quite a few people in it, from vastly different realms. Could you talk about how the poem is using them?

MJB: There are quite a few people there, I see that now! There’s the I, who’s lamenting her flaws and their consequences, which leads her to those two famous signifiers of error and disastrous aftermath, Adam who’s first, so alphabetically A, and Eve. Eve then morphs into Lucy, the fossil skeleton of a woman found in 1974 in Ethiopia, whose remains are believed to be at least 3 million years old, which is near the beginning of being human. She was found in a river basin area at the foot of the Ethiopian mountains, one of which becomes the steep hill up which Sisyphus, another icon of eternal punishment, is being forced to keep pushing a boulder, which cruelly rolls down the hill as soon as it reaches the top. That takes the speaker to a moment when a policewoman, following the procedure of checking on someone to whom they have just telephoned the news of a death, arrives to ask whether she’s okay. She’s not. The death, a consequence that’s clearly beyond repair, sends the speaker to the “bed [she] was born in,” conceived there by a flawed Adam and Eve. Against the tally of errors and horrific after-effects, the only consolation is that one has loved and was loved.

The poem then takes us to “another country”—an echo of the lines in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, which were quoted in an earlier poem (Part I of “Four Boxes of Everything”)—

    “The undiscovered country . . .

puzzles the will, / And makes us rather bear
those ills we have / Than fly to others
that we know not of?”

 The ellipses obscure Hamlet’s description of the undiscovered country as the one “from whose bourn / No traveler returns”—i.e., death. The speaker obviously did come back but left some part of herself behind. The woman to whom the speaker wanted to say, “I love you”—but can’t, because love is tied to the death—takes us to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, where the goddess of love, having been born as a fully grown woman, is seen arriving on a half-shell to a shore edged by windblown reeds. Venus holds her long hair over the place where, if she were Eve, a fig leaf would be. While the speaker would like to see “something change,” it can’t. Like Eve’s catastrophe, the speaker’s catastrophe is changeless. Venus won’t change either, because she’s trapped in myth and paint.

TT: The idea of the speaker “tracing each second back / to a biblical beginning” and being all right but only if you “discount” the present recalls Sisyphus’s unending “same daily / assignment” where the disastrous errors and linked punishment gets continually reenacted in the memory. Counting and numbers are recurring motifs not only in this poem but in the collection overall. How did you organize the poems into five sections?

MJB: My students frequently ask me about how to put a manuscript together, and I tell them all the ways that have been suggested to me, beginning with my teacher Lucie Brock-Broido’s advice, which was to first choose how many sections you want, but never more than four. When I asked why that limit, she said, “more than four is just… fussy!” I never questioned her wisdom, but when it came to arranging the poems in this manuscript, I was at a total loss. So, I did what another poet once told me he did, which was to give the manuscript to a poet friend and let them arrange it. I gave this manuscript to Timothy Donnelly, and he came up with the five sections—based, I believe, on the idea of a five-act play, suggested by the presence of Hamlet in the epigraph and in several of the poems. When he returned it to me, I found I had to move some of the poems around and flip the order of two of the sections, but at least I now had what felt like a scaffold. And the five sections felt useful and not at all fussy!

TT: What was it about five sections that felt useful?

MJB: In many of these poems, the speaker is seen in the midst of trying to make sense of the world while, at the same time, questioning how it is that one makes sense. How does the brain work; how does experience, especially formative events that to others may seem trivial, interact with the body and its hardwired brain? And how does all of that get further enmeshed with the social order into which one is tossed at birth? The speaker seems intent on piecing that together—not in the hope of determining causality, that’s not possible—but to somehow escape the weight of the continual rumination and the sense of detachment produced by it. There’s an intensity to that psychological accounting; the section breaks, I hope, provide some relief from that inquisition. And some periodic, if only temporary, resolve.

TT:  I admire that intensity in your work! Section breaks provide a reprieve from the persona’s inquisition, and line breaks achieve that reprieve on a microlevel. For instance, in “How It Will Feel Months from Now,” one of my favorite poems, the sight of the pink sliver of the sky, the sound of the opera singer’s high notes, and the yearning for the sky through time are described with exactitude and formal mastery. I enjoy the music of “The keys keep making the piano be” and the way it morphs into “As long as I have sight, I’ll see” in the following stanza.

Could you speak about the forms you deploy in the collection? Does the poem find its form or vice versa? Most poems in the collection are consistent in line length.

MJB: I use the line to measure out sound—alliteration, assonance, rhyme—and content, which sometimes takes the form of story-telling—this happened, this happened, this / happened. At other times, the content is meant to imitate interior monologue. Over the course of this manuscript, the line began to reflect the speaker’s characteristic speech (and thought) patterns. We all have a way of speaking, an idiolect, that is recognizably our own. It’s also possible that I adapted my line length to Dante’s since I was writing these poems while I was translating Purgatorio.

In terms of form, most of the poems are arranged in stanzas, a convention I find difficult to resist! I find stanzas to be visually satisfying. I do try to be sensitive to poems that don’t want to be broken and that work best as a block form, but they almost have to insist before I give in to that arrangement! There is a certain deliberateness with stanzas, an argument that this is exactly how things should be. It’s of course a fallacy because there are any number of ways the poem can be arranged. The first poems of this manuscript were originally written as 13-line prose blocks, a carry-over from the poems in A Doll for Throwing (Graywolf Press, 2017), which had all been arranged in justified prose blocks to echo the Bauhaus aesthetic, since the poems were in dialogue with that movement and particularly with Lucia Moholy, who photographed the buildings and products that came out of the workshops. With these poems, however, after a while, I began to miss writing in lines, and I went back and re-lineated all of those early poems. For me, a collection finds its own way. It may start out as one thing and end as something totally different. It’s only after I’ve written a number of individual poems that they begin to seem like parts of a whole.

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Trusting Your Own Bad Eye: An Interview with David Jauss

by Benjamin Woodard

Born in Minnesota in 1951, David Jauss is the author of four collections of stories: Black Maps (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), Crimes of Passion (Dzanc Books, 2014), Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories (Press 53, 2013), and Nice People: New & Selected Stories II (Press 53, 2017). He has published two poetry collections—You Are Not Here (Fleur-de-Lis, 2002) and Improvising Rivers (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1995)—and has edited several anthologies, including the craft collection Words Overflown by Stars (Story Press, 2009). His writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories and has won the O. Henry Award and two Pushcart Prizes.

Alone with All That Could Happen: On Writing Fiction (Press 53, $29.95), a collection of craft essays by Jauss, was originally published by Writer’s Digest in 2008. Recently, Jauss released a revised and expanded version of the book, adding in new examples and a brand-new essay on plot structure. Tackling point of view, story collection organization, epiphanies in fiction, and more, the collection is a gift for writers everywhere—a craft book that speaks deeply about technique while offering perspectives that sometimes push against tropes sold by instructors for decades. Once I got my hands on this new edition, I knew I wanted to talk with Jauss about what went into these essays, as well as how the book fits into our current climate of creativity battling AI art.

Benjamin Woodard: What inspired you to revisit these essays, and have any of your ideas shifted since the book’s first publication?

David Jauss: The main reason I wanted to revise and expand the book was to improve my essay on point of view. I can’t tell you how many writers have told me—in person, in letters, in emails, and Facebook posts—that it’s far and away the best essay on POV they’ve ever read. One writer even called it “instantly canonical.” But POV is a slippery, complicated subject, and the more I read and thought about it, the more I realized I’d made some mistakes in the original version of the essay. Also, in the fourteen years that the first version of Alone with All That Could Happen was in print, I came across numerous examples that would better illustrate the various POV techniques I discuss. 

I also wanted to update my essay “Autobiographobia” to address the bugaboo of cultural appropriation, which has become an increasingly controversial issue since the first edition appeared, and I wanted to add an essay on plot and structure, two subjects I felt were conspicuously missing from the first version. There are dozens of cuts, additions, updates, and changes in all the essays, but the POV essay is the most altered. The fact that it took me fourteen years to revise it to my satisfaction is proof that the original version was anything but “instantly canonical.” I hope the new version is closer to deserving that kind of praise.

BW: I will join the chorus in praising your essay on POV. It breaks down point of view techniques in ways that are easy to digest and appreciate. I have read and reread that essay, and it has spun me off to reevaluate some of my own writing. While talking about various updates, you mention adding to “Autobiographobia,” which discusses, among other things, moving away from the old chestnut, “Write what you know.” Have you experienced any pushback on this essay when it comes to the idea of writing outside of one’s culture and experience, and can you speak to whether there is a limitation one might face when writing in such a manner?

DJ: I have no doubt that many—maybe even most—fiction writers today believe writing about people whose culture and experience differ from theirs is “cultural appropriation,” a violation of the “copyright” those people have on their culture and experience, but no one has criticized my essay—at least not so far. My essay argues that writing about people whose age, gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, religion, politics, culture, and experiences differ from ours is a positive thing, just as reading about such people is. Indeed, I’d argue that it just may be the most important reason to write fiction.

What people call “cultural appropriation,” I—and most writers throughout literary history—would call “imagination.” As I say in my essay, I agree with Sherwood Anderson, who said, “the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others” and therefore bridges divisions between people. I see writing about “the other” as an empathetic act, a desire to understand other people and see and experience life as they see and experience it. Obviously, if you write about others merely to attack them and assert your superiority, that’s despicable and the fiction that results can only be reprehensible. And even if our intentions are good, we may of course wind up doing a bad job of imagining someone who’s different from ourselves, and if so, we should take our lumps from readers and critics and try to do better the next time. What we shouldn’t do is give up the empathetic attempt to imagine our way into the minds and hearts of others. We shouldn’t be content to “stay in our lane” and write only what we know.

If you don’t trust me, or Sherwood Anderson, maybe you’ll trust Toni Morrison. When she was teaching creative writing at Princeton, she always began the semester by telling her students to forget the conventional advice to “write what you know.” Instead, she said, “Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris?” We can’t entirely ignore our own culture and experience when we write—that’s impossible—but clearly Morrison believed, with Grace Paley, that we should write from what we know into what we don’t know. Just as reading a wide variety of fiction expands our understanding of other people, and of ourselves, so too does writing fiction about a wide variety of our fellow humans. 

BW: Your answer keys into one of the elements I find most impressive in the book—that being the sheer number of quotes and examples from other writers and thinkers that appear in each essay to support your points. You mentioned earlier the desire to add in new passages while constructing this expanded version of the text, and on a nuts-and-bolts level, I wonder if you could talk some about building these essays. I kind of imagine a file cabinet full of passages that you’ve gathered over the years. Really, though, how did, say, the new essay on plot structure come together?

DJ: All of my essays were originally delivered as lectures at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and it was my custom during each residency to choose a subject to explore for the next residency’s lecture. Often, the subjects of my upcoming lectures were suggested by something in my current residency’s workshop. For example, in one workshop, nine out of the twelve students turned in stories told in the present tense—sometimes to good effect and sometimes not—so I decided to write my next lecture on the advantages and disadvantages of present-tense narration. In another workshop, several students turned in stories that ended with high-octane epiphanies, so I chose epiphanies as my next residency’s topic. The examples I used for my lectures were taken primarily from whatever I was reading that semester.

When I collected the essays in the first edition of the book, however, I added numerous examples that I’d come across since I initially wrote the lectures. And in the new version of the book, I added many examples that I accumulated during the fourteen years since the publication of the first version. I also added numerous quotations about fiction from writers far wiser than I am. Ever since I started studying the craft of fiction fifty-some years ago, I’ve been typing up advice and insights from writers I admire, and although I don’t have a “file cabinet full” of them, I have accumulated nearly 1,000 pages of brilliant quotations that I’ve drawn from in writing my essays.

“Beyond Plot: Structuring Fiction” is the only essay that I wrote specifically for the new edition, but the idea for it began much like the others. A student in one of my VCFA workshops mentioned that he couldn’t understand why Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” was considered such a great story when, in his opinion, it was plotless. So I hit on the idea of writing an essay that compared and contrasted the structure of O’Brien’s story with the structure of Ha Jin’s marvelous story “Saboteur,” which has the same kind of conventional causal plot—a causes b which causes c, etc.—that “The Things They Carried” has but presents its events in chronological order. Ha Jin’s story is divided into five sections—the first introduces the story’s conflict, the next three complicate that conflict, the fourth brings the conflict to a climax, and the fifth presents the resolution. In “Saboteur,” the plot and the structure coincide. In “The Things They Carried,” they don’t—and given O’Brien’s subject and theme, they shouldn’t.

Plot is a far more complicated subject than most craft books suggest, and causality is not the only organizing principle for a plot. I’ve written a much more comprehensive essay about different organizing principles—and therefore different kinds of plots—that will appear in my next craft book, Words Made Flesh, which is due out from Press 53 next spring.

BW: I look forward to checking it out! It’s exciting to hear that more craft writing is coming from you, particularly amidst constant chatter about artificial intelligence and storytelling. It seems to me that strong stories require nuance that a program cannot replicate, but maybe that’s just my own naïveté showing itself. Have you thought about this subject at all? If so, do you think it is logical to fear algorithms when it comes to the stories we consume?

DJ: Today I watched a YouTube video of John Lennon singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Lennon never covered that song, of course, nor did he (or would he) don Major Tom’s space helmet for an MTV-style video. The video was created by AI. If I hadn’t known that fact in advance, I might have been fooled into thinking someone had discovered a previously unknown tape of Lennon recording Bowie’s song. So yes, I do think it’s logical to fear AI. If it can bring Lennon back from the dead to sing a song he never sang, it can certainly generate Hemingway stories, and given that Hemingway’s actual stories would be the source of the AI-generated stories, I think at least some of the fake stories could have the kind of nuance that we associate with bona fide Hemingway stories. If so, an unscrupulous publisher (and that’s not an oxymoron) could pass the AI stories off as legitimate “long-lost” works.

Even if a publisher made it clear upfront that this “new” book of Hemingway stories was created by AI, would we really want AI-generated Hemingway stories to take up shelf space in bookstores and compete not only with Hemingway’s actual stories but with everybody else’s actual stories? And much as I hate to say it, I believe they would compete. There’s already a strong market for fan fiction—witness the retellings and spinoffs of Pride and Prejudice that appear with Old Faithful-like regularity every few months—and I suspect the fans of Austen fan fiction would be just as willing to read an AI-generated version of the Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy saga. And I suspect there could also be a market for stories “in the manner of” many other much-loved authors.

And here’s another reason to fear AI: since AI of necessity uses what already exists in order to create something “new,” lawyers could have a heyday with copyright infringement suits. As I see it, anything that could possibly create a new revenue stream for lawyers is something well deserving of our fear.

BW: You spoke earlier about how many of your essays blossomed from experiences in the classroom and workshop. After writing (and revising) these and other essays, as well as teaching and editing for decades, is there one go-to piece of advice that you might offer someone just starting out when it comes to the craft of fiction?

DJ: If I were limited to only one piece of advice, it would be the obvious one: read your ass off. We learn how to write mostly via a kind of osmosis, unconsciously absorbing the writing lessons novels and stories teach us, and the more you read, the more you’ll learn. But there are a couple of other pieces of advice I feel compelled to add to this all-important one.

First, as the Russian proverb says, “Don’t trust your brother, trust your own bad eye.” Even if you know your brother has your best interests at heart, and even if you know you don’t see your own work as clearly as you should, you ultimately have to trust yourself, not your teachers, friends, or family. And not the authors of craft books, either, especially those whose advice tends to be prescriptive rather than descriptive. You need to discover the vast panorama of techniques and strategies that are available to fiction writers, so you can choose the ones that feel most appropriate to the characters and story you’re creating.

Second, as every boxer knows, if you step into the ring, you’re going to get hit—and often, and hard. To become a writer, you’ll need to weather a lot of criticism and rejection, both from others and—most painfully—from yourself. As the long-time editor Gerald Howard once said, a writer’s life consists of repeatedly vacillating between two contradictory thoughts: “It’s just not worth it” and “Don’t give up.” Do whatever you can to make “Don’t give up” win by a knockout.

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The Past Flickers in the Present: An Interview with Youval Shimoni

by Marcus Pactor

Youval Shimoni is one of Israel’s greatest living novelists. His ambitious, cinematic fiction weaves together the machinations of his main characters with an impeccable eye for detail and a prodigious knowledge of history. The Salt Line (Crowsnest Books, $29.99), his latest novel to be translated into English, offers a multigenerational and multinational illustration of the varieties of human cruelty and their seeds; the story features Russian revolutionaries and pogroms, Israeli wars and dissolution, revenge caravans crossing the Indian frontier, and much more.  

Shimoni won both the Brenner Prize and the Newman Prize for The Salt Line. He is the senior editor at Am Oved Publishing House and a professor at Bar Ilan University.

 

Marcus Pactor: Many of your characters aim to sever themselves from their pasts, the world, and even history. But no matter how deeply Ilya Poliakov, for example, wanders into the desert, he cannot escape either his past or his influence on future generations. How much of this theme of history’s inescapability did you have in mind when conceiving the novel, and how much crystallized during your writing?

Youval Shimoni: You are correct; it’s a topic that has interested me from a young age. We see someone in a certain situation, and, for the most part, we are not aware of the baggage he carries within. He too, mostly, is unaware—at least as the situation occurs. At this moment I’m replying to you about The Salt Line with its publication in English, and at the back of my mind, as well as my heart, is the French translation of The Flight of the Dove—my first book—and the exaggerated expectations I entertained at the time. At a deeper level in time is the image of myself that occasionally flickers amongst the central characters there, a twenty-two-year-old experiencing first love with a French woman he met in Italy and with whom he lived for a while in an unfurnished apartment, after which he returned to Israel filled with hopeless yearning. There are moments when he seems minute, as if viewed through the opposite side of a pair of binoculars, and there are moments when I’m transferred there, in his place, and that adult of my age becomes blurred and small in the distance.

We all constantly carry layers of our past and buds of our future, and there isn’t a moment when the underside of the layer is not attached to the past while, on the top side, a future moment is already being formed. These layers are not firm like those of an onion or the rings of a tree trunk but dissolve into each other. At times the past weighs heavily like a sack of sand in a hot air balloon, and at times the future is oppressive with the realization that one will have to keep one’s feet firmly on the ground—a grey and heavy future like Parisian wintery skies, another sight from that layer of time.

In Israel one is not only burdened with voluntary or involuntary memory baggage, or factors stemming from genetic makeup and environment, but with the baggage of Jewish history from which there is no respite even in the established state here. This history is not only present in history books, but in the traumas transmitted from generation to generation to the present time. It is apparent in every household, and not only among its dwellers but in the house itself; not only in the present but in the future that awaits us.

The best illustration of the abnormal situation in Israel is our homes, in comparison to other homes in the world—and not from a design point of view. Here, to maintain a sense of security for all house occupants, walls and a roof are not enough. It is mandatory for each apartment in a new building to include a special safety area, a room constructed of reinforced concrete resistant to the bombing that is anticipated in one of the coming wars, whose outbreak is clearly inevitable to all. That’s from the side of a future Middle East reality, while from the other side, that of the past, a mezuza that encases biblical scriptures is affixed to the doorpost of the apartment to provide the occupants with divine protection. Missiles, radar, and anti-missile missiles on one side, biblical scriptures on the other.

MP: Any one of your plots—Poliakov’s involvement with Russian revolutionaries, Amnon’s experience in the Lebanon War, or the caravan’s journey to plant phony relics, to name only a few—might have formed the basis of a lesser writer’s novel. A similar expansive and ever-complicating impulse seemed to be at work in your earlier novel, A Room (Dalkey Archive, 2016). What, beyond predilection, is the root of this impulse?

YS: I find it difficult to perceive as a whole what to me is a part of something far more complex. You mention A Room, my second novel: In it, there is a room with a group of soldiers on an army base, where an inane instructional film is being shot for various army units. I could have dealt solely with the dynamics in that room—characters airing their views about the army, male and female soldiers flirting with each other, bickering and making up and so on—but what interested me were the different worlds that entered the room with them.

In 1990 I returned to Israel from a stay on an island in Thailand straight to the Gulf War. My mind still was still preoccupied with the strip of beach lined with coconut trees, the expanse of ocean, the hut I lived in from whose window I could see a local family, and the danger of coconuts liable of falling on one’s head—coconuts and not Saddam Hussein’s missiles. I was called up for reserve duty in a filming unit, and I could not but imagine what landscapes the others around me carried inside their minds from other times, what hopes and disappointments, loves and frustrations, totally unconnected to the film—it was if they had all been squashed into one room without any opportunity for self-expression. 

I attempted something similar, although in a different form, in my first novel The Flight of the Dove; that book has two parallel plots, one appearing on the left-hand page and the other on the right-hand page. The first tells of an American couple touring Paris who arrive at the Notre Dame cathedral, while the second tells of a French woman who decides to end her life by jumping from one of the cathedral’s towers. These stories could have been told in one narrative, but I was interested in the meeting point of the independent plots—only in the very last line of the novel are they conjoined, the one offering a different viewpoint of the other and changing the reader’s viewpoint of both.

MP: The novel’s overall length belies the multitude of its short chapters, many of which are fewer than ten pages long. The beginning of a new chapter often takes us to a different protagonist in a different place and time to either begin or continue a different plot. How did you come upon and manage this massive interwoven arrangement?

YS: True, time and again the reader is led to a different character, time, place, and plot, and for the same reason: The plots overlap, intersect, at times unraveling each other, at times unifying. Is that not, in fact, the way we live with those around us and the plots of their lives, though usually with a narcissistic preference for our own plot that tends to blur all the others? For the most part, there is nothing more important to us than ourselves. Reducing all this complexity into one purposeful succinct plot I find less interesting as a writer, though I can enjoy writing of that nature as a reader.

MP: On the other hand, you narrate the pogrom and sandstorm sequences—two of the finest set pieces I’ve read in some time—without any other plots intruding. What led you to shift your approach for them? Also, the term “set piece” allows me to ask you: How has your background in film influenced your fiction?

YS: These two scenes are close to my heart (as is the Lebanon scene) despite their harsh nature. Describing a caravan of camels in the desert in the middle of a raging sandstorm was a challenge—imagining what my characters might do in its midst, not being able to see in front of them and staying close to each other so as not to disappear in the sand. Describing a Russian pogrom was equally challenging—not to make do with depicting the violent cruelty of the rioters, but also those who hid from them, fearing to come to the aid of the victims, even in the case of a family member. I tried to understand the emotional mechanism in play beyond pure fear.

I read much about those times and places before I felt able to attempt creating a set piece based on their content. Such was the case with the 1905 Russian revolution and the Taklamakan camel caravan. I read dissertations, history books, and the diaries of revolutionaries and explorers to be secure in accurately portraying a village pogrom, an assassination of a minister, and a desert sandstorm.

These are indeed cinematic scenes and certainly hark back to my film studies (which I didn’t complete) and to my love for the media (which remains to this day). Despite the internal baggage of the previously mentioned characters, to me there is nothing more concrete than a scene that unfolds to the eye from one moment to the next. I also derive much pleasure from the direct and immediate manner by which characters are depicted, without their inner baggage and parallel plots. I’ve been told The Salt Line is well suited to a multi-episode series adaptation and would be delighted if someone would take up the challenge—as long as it’s not Netflix.

I myself actually did very little in film: During my first-year studies, I attempted an 8 mm adaptation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” filming it entirely from the low angle of the insect. Gregor’s mother, father, and sister all spoke to him facing the floor level camera. (At the time it seemed to me a unique idea but later learned others more talented than me had already thought of it.) Later, I made a 16 mm 40-minute film in which I placed a few central characters on a Tel Aviv bus among the passengers, and there too I was mainly interested in what each one brought to the journey rather than the goings on in the bus. It was an unfledged effort that received a tepid reception from its few viewers and deservedly received a single screening.

MP: Tenzin and McKenzie’s scheme to create a religion for revenge is the most memorable display of your characters’ general cynicism about the roots and uses of religion. But I was struck by Poliakov’s brooding over Akavya ben Mahalel’s line, from Pirkei Avot, about a man being a putrid drop. I sensed a more implicit reference to Jewish sacred literature in the recurrence of birds, which reminded me of the proverb, “Like a bird wandering from his nest, so is a man who wanders from his place.” How would you describe the influence of Jewish thought and sacred texts on your work? Do you see yourself as a Jewish writer, an Israeli writer, both, or neither?

YS: My attitude towards religion is not solely cynical; my cynicism is mainly aimed at the unwavering certainty of believers in the fundamental religious narrative and its truths. Cynicism is accompanied by no small fear of those who wish to implement that narrative by the letter and make it a reality. Here in Israel, more and more people wish to build the third temple even at the price of an Armageddon involving all the surrounding Arab states.

In contrast, I have great respect for the writers of the Bible—not only for the quality of the language, but also because of the influence it has exercised over millions of readers, in essence shaping their futures, for better or for worse. The Bible consolidated nomadic tribes or ethnic groups into one body by creating a forefather—Abraham—and by positing an apparently divine right to an already inhabited land. From that story two kingdoms evolved, and after they were destroyed, the story persevered in exile, preserving the Jews as a nation even when they were dispersed over different continents. But it also aroused violent hatred towards them. Faulkner writes about this in “The Bear”: “forever alien: and unblessed: a pariah about the face of the Western earth which twenty centuries later was still taking revenge on him for the fairy tale with which he had conquered it.”

In truth, this fiction shaped history for over two thousand years, and one cannot but be impressed by its power—and shudder at the damage it caused and is liable to cause in the future. Even before prophesying an Armageddon, it grants Israel an apparent license to continue to rule over conquered territories and for settlers to make their home there—to dispossess the Palestinians of their land, to initiate pogroms in their villages, to burn homes, to kill.

The answer to whether I see myself as a Jewish or Israeli writer lies in the fact that many of the central characters of my books are neither Jewish nor Israeli. The Flight of the Dove tells of an American husband and wife and a young Parisian woman; part two of A Room concentrates on three homeless Parisians, and part three, a mythical high priest in the far east. The Salt Line is peopled by a cuckolded English veterinarian, an Italian archeologist eager to make himself world famous, daring and less daring Russian revolutionaries, an Indian caravan-bashi, and many more characters on different continents spread over thousands of kilometers.

I write about what activates my thoughts, imagination, and emotions, for the most part in that order. I first try to understand something about my life at the point in time I have reached, or the path the world has taken up to that point as I see it. This understanding involves creating an alternative plot in the imagination, intensified and more concentrated than the one taking place in reality, and incorporating the emotion the entire process arouses in me.

True, my works have more than a touch of the Jewish and Israeli milieu into which I was born and live, but not everything is delimited by it. The world is somewhat larger than the state of Israel and humanity somewhat greater than the Jewish people.

MP: Windows recur in your work at least as often as birds. Through them, your characters witness events ranging from pitiful to horrific, and those events drive them to various heartbreaks and degradations. How are you able to use and reuse this seemingly mundane image so that, over the course of the novel, its power accumulates rather than declines?

YS: I wasn’t aware of that—Poliakov watching the pogrom with his mother from the attic comes to mind—but I wouldn’t be surprised if you found other windows. I am interested in the aspect of being an observer from afar or from the side and that of intervening in an event in order to stop it or change the order of things. There is a marvellous piece by Kafka, “The Men Running Past”; in it, a man runs towards us on a nighttime street while another man chases him, and only we see this—should we act or find all sorts of excuses to stand still until they disappear from our eyes? There’s never any shortage of excuses.

A totally different window comes to mind. I spoke earlier about the island I had been on in Thailand. I chose a beach during the period when tourists don’t visit, and the huts erected for them go unused. There was no electricity or water, the doors hung on one hinge, and large lizards had moved in. From my window I could see the Thai family that was supposed to look after the tourists and had been left idle. In the afternoon, the mother would delouse her daughters’ hair with her fingers and crack each louse between her nails. In the evening, under the open-sided shelter intended for the tourists who had not come, an oil lamp was placed in a bowl of water on a table. It was completely dark all around and the masses of insects attracted by the light were scorched by the lamp’s glass covering and fell into the bowl of water. The man would make the water move with all the insect bodies and gaze at it like a sound and light show. But everything that seemed exotic in the beginning appeared less so a week later: The concern and love of the delousing act did not seem any different to every western mother brushing out her daughters’ hair, and the hypnotic state of her husband induced by the sound and light show seemed no different to any television screen gazer. Small things soon became apparent: when the mother was angry at her daughters and when they came to appease her, each in her own way; when the wife was irritated by the husband who for most of the day did nothing, when he was so kind as to respond to her requests, and when delight was kindled between them.

The boundaries of my window became more and more unclear, and there were moments when I felt as if I was a guest at their table. Had I remained there longer, perhaps I would have crossed the distance between the window and the open-sided shelter; that is to say, had I also been a different person.

MP: Nachman’s research leads him to believe that “the perception of time … decided [religious believers’] attitude toward death and marked their death and marked the difference between religions.” Do you also share this idea of a connection between religion, time, and death?

YS: Nachman, the father of the main protagonist, dealt with a subject that I too dealt with in the past and on which I published a lengthy treatise called “To Dust.” My argument, which focused mainly on the Bible, was that the solution of every religion in regard to man’s awareness of his mortality is based on its perspective of time as laid out in its fundamental narrative.

The Christian narrative focuses on the birth, life and death of Jesus, and the explanation it offers for his crucifixion—dying for the sake of humanity—grants the Christian believer life after death. The Jewish narrative, in contrast, describes in detail the continuum of generations that creates a nation, and the eternity promised in the Bible is not that of the individual but of the entire nation for all its generations.

Abraham had been put in the position to make the terrible choice between his single son and the seed of generations, and only when he chooses the second and is prepared to sacrifice his son is a ram sent to replace Isaac.

In Hinduism the perspective of time is far, far greater: Its cycles of creation and destruction last 12,000 years and since each year equals 360 regular years, each cycle in fact comprises 4,320,000 years. And if that isn’t enough, 1,000 cycles form one kalpa – 4,320,000,000 years—which is just one day in the life of Brahma. In comparison to all that, a day of the Hebrew god is less than a blink of an eye: “For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past” (Psalm 90). In the immense Hindu perspective of time, with its endless reincarnations, man’s greatest aspiration is not to live for eternity, but to stop being reborn, to escape the cycles of birth and death.

MP: I think readers of both The Salt Line and A Room will experience time not as a linear but a simultaneous experience. That is, your characters seem to live their pasts, presents, and sometimes their futures over and over again, and all at once. How do you create this sense of simultaneity?

YS: Literary giants have preceded me in this. Threads from various times and levels of awareness merge in Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness; Beckett’s Krapp listens to tapes from previous decades of his life as Beckett predicts his future. Faulkner not only made the famous statement, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” but in a 1957 interview described the present stretching forward to 2057 and back to 28 B.C. His protagonists in The Sound and the Fury are subject to flashes from the past flickering in the present, searing and splitting it and sealing their futures. In The Salt Line the consciousness of the characters is mediated by the narrator, and the flashes are prolonged, giving them a scope that is at times much larger than the daylight of their lives. The sense of simultaneity you mention is in fact a sense that each one of us is meant to feel, but fortunately don’t, because doing so for a lengthy time would make living impossible.

While answering you, I recall the experience of first reading Faulkner years ago and the young man I was at the time, still dreaming of making films, as well as the house I lived in outside of Tel Aviv with its yard containing two tortoises, a male and a female, and the loquat tree visible from the window—here right now an ornamental tree with yellow flowers can be seen—at the very same time I’m wondering how this interview will be received and if it will help The Salt Line (I certainly hope so), and on my right is a cup of tea becoming cold as I formulate the answer, a Denby cup whose rim is slightly broken, and I still recall how angry my wife Ayelet was, because I hadn’t taken enough care with the gift she had given me, and twenty years since I have kept it.  All these times exist in this moment, but for me to be able to answer you—and to simply continue living—I have to put them aside.

MP: Is there perhaps some hope despite history’s inescapability?

YS: When discussing hope, I would like to differentiate between people living in Israel and those living in other places in the western world. I harbor a deep fear that Jewish history and its consequences are liable to once again create a trap from which there is no escape. The Biblical fiction, without which the establishment of the state of Israel in its present location would not have occurred, had already caused two exiles and two returns in the past: one before the common era and one in the last century. The two ancient kingdoms that arose here did not last long, but the Biblical narrative that persevered for thousands of years fed a never-ending yearning in exile.

We are now in a situation where Israel is threatened from without and from within; by the millions of Arabs in the surrounding countries and by the split that is now dividing Israeli society. The split is allegedly over matters of law and government, but beneath it, and together with the tension between ethnic groups that Netanyahu rouses in order to extricate himself from the court cases pending against him, lies the deep disagreement between those who hold the Bible as divine truth and those who fear the tyranny of its fiction with all its laws and values, between those whose futures are tied to the past by an apparent divine promise of a mythical latter days vision preceded by an Armageddon and those who wish to forge their own future by themselves; between those who believe they are the chosen people of a god waiting for them to rebuild his temple in the place where mosques now stand, and between those who reject this false belief and its claim of superiority and choose to focus on the holiness of human life—Jewish and Arab.

In Paris the French are currently demonstrating over pension reforms, while here masses of people are demonstrating over the future of a state not yet a century old, alongside which a Palestinian state should have been established a long time ago for the millions who live under Israeli occupation.

One should not give up on the possibility of hope, even here in Israel. In the discouraging march of history (not only in Israel—world disasters such as climate change and others loom for all), one should aspire and work towards making each grain of time as positive as possible, positive for us and those who live among us—not perfect, but as positive as is in our power. Our power is not great, and sometimes it’s easier to become despondent or lazy and find all sorts of excuses, but under no circumstances should the attempt be abandoned.

There is always a certain consolation to be found in literature and other art forms, because even when the situation is gloomy and they too are gloomy, they allow their creators to work with the stuff of reality in the manner they wish, putting their own stamp on events and recreating a world on the page. They make it possible for readers to feel the threat has been temporarily contained between the covers, to detach from it and return home and gaze at the tree in the window, the one with the yellow flowers. At that very moment, a cloud is above it and in a short while will continue on its way.

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Mutual Unconsciousness: An Interview with Hiromi Itō and Jeffrey Angles

Photo by Silviu Guiman

by Karen Noll

Hiromi Itō has been writing and publishing poetry in Japan since the 1970s, and two collections published by Action Books in English translation, Killing Kanoko (2009) and Wild Grass on the Riverbank (2015), have garnered Itō widespread acclaim for her fiercely feminist voice. Now joining these releases available in English is The Thorn Puller (Stone Bridge Press, $18.95), an episodic meditation on caring for aging parents, a spouse, three daughters, friends, and oneself—in two cultures, in two languages, and on two continents (Itō has lived in both Japan and California). The Thorn Puller is marketed as poetry in Japan, although its U.S. publisher is calling it a novel, and some reviews in Japanese have focused on it as memoir; this blurring of genres perhaps speaks to the heart of Itō’s writing.

All three of Itō’s books published in English to date have been translated by Jeffrey Angles, who teaches in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University. Much acclaimed for his many translations of Japanese literature, he is also a poet who writes in Japanese, and in 2017 became the first non-native writer to win the prestigious Yomiuri Prize in poetry for his collection Watashi no hizukehenkosen (“My International Date Line”).  

The following conversation was conducted prior to an event featuring Itō and Angles at the University of Chicago.

KN: Itō-san, your writing is full of humor—sometimes witty, sometimes biting and sarcastic, sometimes warm, and sometimes just silly. Its aim seems to be to humble us in our humanity, not to blame or shame. How do you approach writing humor?

HI: Humor is very difficult. When I am writing a rough draft it is always very serious, and I try to dig out all of my pain: The painful part is the part I want to write. But, it’s also a kind of fiction. It is a very artificial process to make literature. I read the rough draft and then try to step out of it to see reality and dig out a space where I might add something to make it humorous. This technique—me stepping out to see reality then stepping back in to create a laugh—is actually a very good process to cure myself. This is the process I was using throughout my writing in The Thorn Puller.

In my earlier work, I didn’t really do this, but I did for this book because I was getting into rakugo, a type of Japanese comedy performance from the Edo Period (1603-1867) that features a single storyteller with one paper fan and one piece of cloth sitting on a large cushion telling a long comical story. My father had given me a series of cassette tapes with rakugo performances, and I used to listen to the tapes in my car. At that time my reality was quite harsh and I wanted to shut my mind down—I didn’t want to do anything. I needed to force myself to laugh.

Another reason I listened to the tapes was that I was interested in the narratives. You can get good books with old rakugo performances. There is a distinct Tokyo voice and dialect in some texts which also offer distinct Edo-Period tastes and classical topics—and I like that kind of stuff. Also, descriptions about the weather and nature are included. It’s beautiful. And since the spoken word was transcribed by a no-name someone who was not the performer, there is an exact presentation of every word, even including stuff like stuttering or repetition, so the transcriber had to figure out how to use written language for those sounds. You can imagine the actual sound and actual dialect, and you feel that somebody’s talking. I read it as beautiful literature. These transcriptions contributed a lot to my style.

Right after I was listening to those tapes, I published a book called The Disappointments of Women, which has all kinds of women’s voices because it is constructed as an advice column—somebody asks me about a problem and I answer it in rakugo style using Tokyo dialect. I am not a Tokyo dialect speaker, but I use the sounds and try to make it as funny as possible. One of my pieces in this series was used as the sample in a translation contest because it is so difficult to translate! The guy who won that contest is trying to translate the whole book into English now.

The tradition of comedy in Japan begins with kyogen in the 15th century, and then came sekkyō-bushi and then rakugo after that. These are comedy performances that were on the street or sometimes on a stage, but they were also related to Buddhism, so it’s all a kind of Buddhist literature.

KN: Jeffrey, can you speak to your work in translating Itō-san’s humor—especially in working with word play and onomatopoeia? I get the sense you have fun with it.

JA: It’s fun, but it’s also hard. When I did my first draft of The Thorn Puller and showed it to people, it wasn’t funny yet—readers said it was so, so serious. They didn’t understand the humor. So I did exactly the same thing you said you did, Hiromi, I went back through and tried to see where I could add laughter. I thought, okay, this is funny in the Japanese, why is it not funny in my English? Sometimes I had to adjust the language to be more casual and slangy. Sometimes I added a sentence or two. Or sometimes, if I couldn’t figure out exactly the right way to make a certain passage funny, I could make the passage right next to it funny. Kind of a zero-sum game.

Along with dialect, humor is one of the most difficult things to translate. Especially if you’ve got a scholar’s mind and you’re trying to get exactly the right nuance of the Japanese, which can become a problem.

HI: Yes, it is very difficult. I translated the Dr. Seuss books The Cat in the Hat and Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and it was really difficult to put his humor into Japanese. My translations didn’t sell well. Laughter is so different in different cultures. In Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away I remember being so surprised that the character of No Face burped in the English version. He did not burp in the Japanese version, but I guess that a burp is something humorous that Americans like.

JA: Humor is important in your work because it makes difficult subjects so much more approachable and human. As I was working on The Thorn Puller my own mother had an accident that left her no longer able to walk well, so I began to feel the world of this book; being able to work on it and have a little humor about the subject of caring for your parents was really helpful for me as I was going through my own problems. In Japan there is a genre of books called iyashi no bungaku, which translates to the literature of healing—I sort of hate the sappiness of most books in this genre, but there is something in your writing that is really good iyashi no bungaku, and that is one of the appeals for readers.

HI: Yes, but if my books were genuinely iyashi no bungaku, I could sell more. I add a lot of other things, I write too closely or too deeply or too much, so I don’t sell that well—but I can’t stop myself!

KN: You have written a lot about the idea of home; for example, the character Itō in The Thorn Puller, who grew up in Tokyo, begins to use the phrase “going there” instead of “going home” when she refers to Tokyo. How do you find yourself thinking about “ home” in your life as well as the lives of your daughters and parents and husband?

HI: I am now living in Japan. When I was living in California I was always thinking, “when I go home…” and home meant Japan. But since I moved back to Japan, I am feeling, almost every day, “when I go home…” about California. It’s both. Both directions.

JA: So for you, home is always the other place.

HI: I don’t want to say that, you know. But I have to admit that I always feel uncomfortable in the place I live “now.” My most recent book in Japan is about seppuku, and in it I strongly push the notion of home. It’s a kind of fiction in which my husband is dying in a hospital in California and says “I want to go home”; at the same time, my hometown in Kumamoto has a big earthquake, so as he is dying, everything about my home in Japan has collapsed. So maybe home is always “not here” and always has to be collapsed.

JA: The thing I think is interesting about your writing is that when home is that other place, it is a very productive place—you produce so much writing in which your characters are trying to figure out how to live in the world because they don’t feel at home. I just finished retranslating your novella “House Plant” to publish together with an older novella of yours, and this pairing will be very much about home—where is it, how we find it—and how difficult that concept of home can be for a new immigrant to the U.S. It’s a beautiful exploration of this question.

KN: The verbs you use when writing about plants work so organically that it hardly seems like “personification.” Plants simply are people: “green clumps growing restless”; “branches began to laugh”; “camphor trees had no ill intent”; and so on. A walk in the woods for you must be more like a busy train station than like quiet meditation. And plants are also immigrants in your writing—can you explain? Do plants “go there” or “go home”?

HI: Since I was a kid, I was interested in plants—especially the ones that came from outside of Japan. The reason was very simple: In the place I grew up there was nothing there. It was asphalt and concrete, a factory area in Tokyo. The air pollution was really serious at that time, so we couldn’t enjoy nature. I only found nature alongside the street in the weeds, and I learned in a kid’s encyclopedia of plants that most of the weeds came from outside of Japan. I really liked reading that encyclopedia. The Japanese word used in that book was kika shokubutsu, which is the same Japanese word—kika— the noun that means “naturalization” or “taking on a new nationality.” In other words, the weeds are naturalized citizens that take the nationality of a place they were not born in. Those naturalized plants became so familiar to me.

In my book Wild Grass on the Riverbank, the main characters in the poems are plants, so at the end of the book I wrote a glossary for the names of the plants. In Japan there is a dictionary for writing haiku that we call saijiki—it’s basically a dictionary of plants and animals and seasons and stars and weather, but its main purpose is connected to writing poetry, to honor the words that connect us to the earth and to our culture. Since I was a child I have absolutely loved this book. I wasn’t interested in haiku at all; I just loved the words in the book. It was the inspiration for my book: The Japanese title is Kawara Arekusa, and when you say Arekusa it sounds like the name “Alexa,” so Jeffrey used the name as a character in the book. And I played with these sounds to create words that sound like Latin plant names—kawaransis.

I was always interested in writing about the foreign plants that had settled in Japan. Then, after living in California, when I returned to Japan the plants looked totally different than before. I realized that all these plants are living as migrants, and I was living in California just like those plants. They were propagating too much, so the Japanese people wanted to get rid of them. But I was doing the same thing, having kids and propagating in a foreign country.

JA: I have become fascinated with weeds because of you, Hiromi! I am actually going to teach a class about weeds soon.

HI: Once I saw goldenrod in Michigan and it was so small—amazing. In Japan it was huge! It was taking all the nutrition from the soil, so Japanese local plants couldn’t grow. But sometime later, the goldenrod began diminishing, and Japanese plants got back the power.

As I have studied plants, I have seen that they have a system for living and dying that is not like the system of living and dying for humans. Plants can show us how to think in new ways when we are thinking about death. And so can the stars—but that is another, totally different system of living and dying.

JA: Like plants, stars will come apart and recombine in new fashions and then take on a new life. Where is the beginning and end of a star? Where is the beginning and end of a plant? You can’t draw a clear line.

HI: Don’t you think Buddhism is like that?

JA: Yes, absolutely. I am always thinking about this. It is my obsession now. 

HI: Stars? Me too!

KN: Your writing explores many aspects of Buddhism. Can you speak to how Buddhism creates meaning for you? And Shinto? And animism?

HI: I am interested in all of the branches of Buddhism, because of their poetry—I don’t care about the devotion part. I really don’t. I’m just interested in the sutras—the traditional texts, which are full of poetry and philosophy.

JA: Hiromi has been doing translations of Buddhist sutras, recreating them as contemporary Japanese poetry. When the sutras are written in Japanese, they are actually written in classical Chinese, but given the Japanese reading—so they’re in easy-to-understand daily language. Hiromi has been translating them into very contemporary language, and then also writing essays about them. She has quite a few books now like this and they’re really, really interesting. I’m hoping to find a publisher who be interested in publishing an English version with me.

HI: One is a translation of Shinran, the 13th-century priest who is considered the founder of Shin Buddhism. What he was doing in his writings is very similar to when Martin Luther translated the New Testament from Greek into German—bringing the text to the people. Shin Buddhism is one of the biggest sects in Japan.

JA: In The Thorn Puller, the central image is the Togenuki Jizō (Thorn-Pulling Bodhisattva Jizō) located in Sugamo, a neighborhood of Tokyo near where Hiromi grew up. It is clear that you are interested in the cultural history and cultural associations of Buddhist places and Buddhist ideas and what they mean to individuals. One of the things I found so interesting in The Thorn Puller was that many generations of the narrator’s family visit Sugamo Temple to pray, but it is really the connection between the women of different generations that makes that experience so important. I thought a lot about this as I was translating it—how faith and a desire for some release from suffering are so important, especially in the lives of women of the working classes.

HI: And then Shinto, poetry-wise, is very ecological. I like these texts so much, but everything is written in very old Japanese! When I first read Native American oral tradition translated into Japanese, I thought it is very similar to Shinto poetry translated into modern Japanese; if I translated a Shinto text using neutral words in modern Japanese, it would sound like Native American poetry. That’s how I got into Native American oral tradition. Jerome Rothenberg’s books actually led me to California.

KN: When you refer to Shinto words, which texts are you referring to?

HI: Oh, any kind of text like the Kojiki, which is a collection of ancient Japanese myths.

JA: It was the first book ever written in the Japanese language, in the 8th century.

HI: It was written in Chinese characters because they hadn’t developed Japanese characters yet, but the grammar and words are Japanese. And in it there are lots of songs. They are singing all the time, and it is these songs that sound very similar to Native American oral tradition. And there are a lot of plants in these tales, so much nature. Maybe you think that Shinto is a religion, but I doubt it. Religion for me is not that kind of stuff. If Christianity is a religion, Shinto is totally different. It’s another thing entirely.

JA: It’s more a way of being in the world.

HI: And Shinto was kind of polluted during World War II. I cannot grasp it. But for The Thorn Puller I was more interested in the medieval texts called sekkyō-bushi that come from a performance art, which was of course first an oral tradition. I wanted to shape my book like a sekkyō-bushi so I needed religion, I needed women who work hard, I needed men who are really weak.

In Japanese houses there are small Shinto shrines for praying to the god of fire or the god of the house, and there are also small Buddhist altars in houses for praying to ancestors. So it may seem like the Japanese have a sense of devotion—but I doubt it. The role of ancestors is very strong, and if I do something wrong it is a reflection on my life. You can’t do anything wrong because the ancestors are watching. Some of this relates to Buddhism, but the true Japanese feeling of devotion is far away from Buddha himself. It is more of a mix of ancestor worship and nature worship—how do you call it?—animism.

I was very interested in religion when I wrote The Thorn Puller, and when I began to shape the plot, I based it on sekkyō-bushi. Those stories have prescribed components—religion, women who work hard, men who are really weak, almost zombies—so I thought about who could be the main character, and who is a woman who works hard, and I realized it could be me! Then I thought about what the religion component could be, and I decided on Sugamo—the temple of the thorn-pulling Jizō—because I was so familiar with that place. So in the beginning I wasn’t interested in writing about religion other than as a component of sekkyō-bushi. More recently I have become more interested in Buddhism, but for this book my interest was more anthropology than religion. When I had children, I became very interested in anthropology. I studied a lot.

JA: Yes, definitely. You hone in on what people actually do in their rituals. I think the passage when the main character is reflecting, “What am I actually praying to when I go to Sugamo?” and she thinks, “Maybe the most important thing is the smoke”—the smoke that carries one’s wishes to the gods—is so interesting.

HI: Yes, I was happy with that part, too. I thought, “I’ve got it. Smoke!” Temple smoke and also my father trying to quit smoking, and my partner being completely disgusted by placing religious meaning on something as mundane as smoke. Of course, these conversations with my father and partner never happened. It’s fiction. But it is in character.

KN: Are you okay with the designation of this book as fiction?

HI: It is fiction. Poetry or a novel.

KN: But there are numerous ways the content overlaps with your life.

HI: Yes, yes, of course. Some Japanese readers think these are essays. Even a reviewer referred to the book as “essay work.” I do include elements that make them think in this way, so it’s my fault, actually.

JA: Well, it is true that the character’s name is Hiromi Itō.

HI: I have been writing essays as well over the years—about motherhood and pregnancy and food and how to grow plants—and most of my readers are women of my generation or a little younger. These essays are published in popular women’s magazines, but I was struggling with writing novels; I tried and tried but couldn’t do it. I kept thinking that a novel had to be fictional and not relate to me, but I kept coming back to stories that I experienced, that I was in—like an I-novel—although I hate the Japanese I-novel style. I was wondering how I could write fiction, and my solution was to accept that I am very good at writing about the teensy-weensy stuff in my life. I wanted to write honestly, “I think…I do…” so that my reader would think “We think…we do…” and in this way, the “I” was very important in the creation of a “we” so that all women can think, “Oh, this is my story.” I knew that I could do that in an essay, so why not in fiction? And I have been good at writing poetry as well, so why not put it all together—essay writing, poetry writing, and making a new kind of fiction.

JA: Now that there are more reviews available for The Thorn Puller, almost every reviewer says how interesting it is that suddenly, even in the middle of a sentence, the prose turns into poetry. It’s like the boundaries between genres falls in the book, and isn’t that fresh and new and exciting?

HI: Yes, but obviously this is not good in the bookstore! It is not good for a publisher. They want to pigeonhole things.

JA: I had lots of discussion with the publisher about what to put on the back cover, and we settled on “Fiction, World Literature, Japan.”

HI: A very famous novelist, Yūko Tsushima (the daughter of Osamu Dazai), wrote in a magazine, “This is NOT a novel!” So the publisher decided to call it “Epic Poetry,” but then in a later version the publisher did want it in the “Novel” section and changed it. Still some Japanese reviewers call The Thorn Puller essays, and one critic told me it is definitely an I-novel. In Japan we have a long, long tradition of the I-novel, so it is natural to use that category for this book.

I think that to avoid the problem of genre altogether, I leaned into oral narratives, which are very much like poetry. Really, when I think of ancient Japanese literary forms that I am drawn to—rakugo, sekkyō-bushi, Noh, bunraku—they all have narrative, poetry, music, and prose. This is what I love!

KN: You are referred to as a trailblazer for women writers in Japan, many of whom are blazing their own fires now in publishing, reaching audiences in Japan and internationally—Mieko Kawakami, Miri Yū, Yōko Ogawa, Kikuko Tsumura, Hiroko Oyamada, Sayaka Murata, Hiromi Kawakami, Yūko Tsushima, and others. Who among them are you reading and what do you enjoy about their work?

JA: Right now, the most interesting novelists and the most interesting poets in Japan are women. Overwhelmingly. This is a Golden Age for women’s writing.

HI: I am embarrassed to say that I don’t feel well-read enough to comment on these women writers. When I moved to California, I stopped reading contemporary literature. I spend all my time reading classical and ancient Japanese texts. Honestly, you might not even want to print my answer to this question, it sounds arrogant. But if you ask me about writers who are older than me, like Michiko Ishimure or Jakuchō Setouchi or Yūko Tsushima, I am more eager to open my mouth. I was very influenced by Taeko Tomioka—I loved her dryness with words, and I learned feminism from her—and of course Chizuko Ueno, the feminist sociologist. We are really close, and I admire her very much. But I began experiencing feminism before Chizuko became famous, back when we called it “women’s lib.”

I have been asked to judge several poetry contests, and I have noticed a big difference between men’s poetry and women’s poetry. I tend to choose men’s poetry, which is kind of all over the place. Women tend to write about their own worlds—their bodies, their relationships, society—while men write about the universe. So in my judging and also in my teaching, I have come to realize that gender distinctions in poetry are very real. I know that when I first started publishing poetry in the 1980s, I became a kind of star because I was writing about women’s bodies in a new and radical way. After that, women poets began to bloom. But now I am not drawn to that. Reading women’s poetry is like driving fifty kilometers per hour around town, whereas reading men’s poetry is like driving 200 on the freeway—suddenly the steering goes out and you wonder how you’re going to control this thing that’s out of control. That’s the kind of literature I want to write!

KN: Jeffrey, you were in Japan researching male bodies and love when you first fell in love with Itō-san’s work, which was very much about the female body. Can you speak to that initial attraction? How has your interest grown or changed over the years you have worked with her?

JA: Yes, I was in Japan doing research for my dissertation about representations of male-male love in modernist Japanese literature of the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s. So I was reading men who were writing about men, about their love for fellow men. I am gay, and I wanted to know more about gay literary history, but I found all the women in the work I was reading were depicted as boring, superficial, stupid characters who were just foils for the men. So when I started reading Hiromi’s book I Am Anjuhimeko, which offered the voices of ancient suffering through female mediums and shamanesses, it was completely amazing because it was unlike any book I had ever read before, in English or in Japanese.

I was also trained in gender studies, so I wanted to better understand and be involved with the real lives and real voices of women. My work translating Hiromi became the antidote to the sickness that was given to me by my own dissertation project. Then, as we got to know each other working on the translations, we became close friends, and I got to know her voice and how she sounds in English. I got to know her worldview, which in many ways is very similar to mine. At first I approached her work as “women’s literature,” but now to me it’s just “literature.” She has changed my thinking about the world a lot.

HI: I feel so lucky having this kind of relationship with a translator. We are family friends.

JA: It is a rare feeling. I have translated a lot of other writers, but my relationship with Hiromi is rare.

KN: I would like to ask you both about the poet Chūya Nakahara. His work seems like an important influence on you both—certainly in The Thorn Puller, but it seems to go deeper than that.

JA: Yes, I am working on a new translation of his work right now. This poet keeps on coming up in my life: Back when I was fifteen years old visiting Japan as an exchange student, I stayed near the town where he grew up. He is very popular in Japan, mostly among young readers in their teens and twenties, and he is one of the rare poets that you can find in absolutely every bookstore, everywhere in the country. He died young. He was very passionate. He wrote about love and longing, the yearning and nostalgia of it. He was very sentimental. He appeals to people who think of poetry as an expression of profound personal emotion.

HI: Yes, he is very sentimental. I was also fifteen when I got into his work, which in some ways is the base of my poetry.

KN: Hmm, “sentimental” is not a word that comes to mind when I read your work.

JA: Well, his poetry is very rhythmical. And honestly, the images are not so striking in his poetry—it’s really the language that is compelling. The content just happens to be sentimental.

Hiromi, I have always found it interesting that when you talk about writers who have influenced you, the first thing you talk about is style—not ideas or worldview, but style. The quality and the nature of the words is what’s really important to you.

HI: Yes, the ocean of the words. How to make them rhythmical, yes, rhythms and sound. That’s the most important thing for me. But it isn’t only sentimental love that he writes about. He also writes beautifully about home and about the seasons. So his poetry complimented my early obsession with the haiku dictionary and the many, many Japanese words that describe changes in the seasons. These changes are also so important in Noh theater and in Buddhist sutras. Nothing is the same. Everything is impermanent. Yes, I am a very dry writer—not sentimental. But I am very attracted to the seasons and to impermanence.

KN: In 2010, Rain Taxi published a review of your book Killing Kanoko in the form of a conversation between poets Lucas de Lima and Sarah Fox. Fox spoke about your use of myth, observing that in your work, “the mythic mirrors and absorbs the autobiographical.” Is that your sweet spot—when your personal life stories blend with myths you have read?

HI: I have always been interested in myth, or the essential stories. But when I was trying to write a novel, I felt like I couldn’t create good stories, so I was trying to use ones that already existed, like myths and old narratives. They have patterns. Sekkyō-bushi has story patterns like a mother kills a daughter, or a sister and brother have a profound relationship. These are the stories that I read a lot. I love them! I don’t get bored.

KN: Yes, these original, essential stories seem like they are always breathing behind your narrative. There is always a journey. Every chapter is its own journey.

HI: Yes, each reader can travel to the bottom of these journeys, where they find each other in a mutual experience or shared memory. It’s almost like common DNA or something. Across time and cultures, when we read ancient stories, we can find a mutual unconsciousness underneath. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Japanese myths, Native American myths, African myths—we reach this mutual place, we grasp it.

JA: This is the world of Carl Jung when he tells us that humanity interprets everything through archetypal stories and figures.

HI: Yes, archetypes is the word I wanted to say! Exactly.

JA: I also think that one of the key concepts at work in Hiromi’s writing is rooted in the Japanese word michiyuki—a theater word that refers to the part of a play that is the journey. A character is always going out on some kind of quest or looking for a solution to a problem, and travel or physical movement is always a part of the michiyuki. The word literally means “going on the road.” But not in the Jack Kerouac sense!

HI: No, I think it is in that sense.

JA: Oh, really? Then maybe his book should be called Michiyuki in Japanese! But anyway, your characters are always dislocated and going somewhere, even if they don’t know exactly where they are going.

KN: And those characters are always facing the visceral challenges of every journey with the humor of bumbling along, but with intensely serious purpose. I love the chapter in The Thorn Puller when the main character—Hiromi Itō—travels with a friend to the festival of Chūya Nakahara’s poetry driving a car called the Daihatsu Move. They stop along the way at the site of ancient samurai battle grounds at Shimonoseki where the ghosts of the dead still linger, haunting the Japan Sea coastline since the 12th century. And they visit the site of the temple where the blind biwa player encountered those samurai ghosts in the folktale about Miminashi Hōichi.

JA: I enjoyed translating that chapter so much, because that town where the characters stopped was where I lived as an exchange student in high school. I would walk past that temple practically every day. So that chapter was a part of my own personal michiyuki, both geographically and academically, especially with Hiromi’s quotes from Chūya Nakahara throughout the whole chapter.

There are so many lines of his poetry that I chose to italicize them in the English version, hoping to help readers see what was borrowed. One line in particular that was impossible to translate was yuya-yuyon, yuya-yuyon which is a fabulous onomatopoeic reference to swinging back and forth. This sound, these words, are not used anywhere in Japanese but capture perfectly the sound of the movement—back and forth, back and forth—like a journey, like a michiyuki.

HI: Actually, scholars have said that perhaps Nakahara’s yuya-yuyon comes from Chinese.

KN: Poetry and music shift so smoothly back and forth—yuya yuyon—in your writing and your performance when you read your poems. Chanting poetic lines is quite natural for you. Are there other ways that music is part of your writing?

HI: It is interesting that when I write poetry, I always choose to listen to music that is one instrument—piano or violin or cello. But when I decided to try writing this novel, I started listening to symphonies. I didn’t like listening to symphonies until then, but each time I listened, I would focus on single instruments like oboe or clarinet or flute, then think about how the composer put those single voices together.

JA: That’s how this book is put together—with different voices and pieces.

KN: And since each chapter is composed of many pieces drawn from literature and other sources, with notes about them at the end of each chapter, was your process to gather the pieces and plan the chapter first, or to start the chapter and wait to see which pieces leap into it?

HI: I didn’t plan it. I approached it in a scatter-minded way. Actually, I became more scattered as I went along! But in the end, everything would come together and I would realize that I was actually walking along only one road. Maybe I was just stopping along the road like michikusa which, hey, brings us back to grass and weeds and plants! The literal translation of this phrase—michikusa—is “road-side grass,” but we use it to mean loitering, or kind of slowing down to examine the grass. See how far we have wandered in this interview and then ended up back at plants?! That is my writing process. Very scattered. Michikusa. I do get criticized for this. It drives my students crazy.

KN: I have one last question, and it’s about suffering. The title of your novel contains the image of suffering—the relief from suffering—and even suggests that there is an agent who can control the relief of one’s suffering: a puller of thorns. Most of the individual quests and journeys in the novel contain some search for the relief of suffering, but I am interested in the one time you use the word saha—a word that means to “endure suffering.”

JA: Oh, that word was tricky for me. I struggled with it a little bit. Hiromi just uses the word saha in passing, but it is such a very specific word and there is not an easy way to translate it. So I thought I needed to explain some of the cultural baggage associated with that word. I expanded that translation and wrote about how saha means “the world that must be endured” in Buddhist thinking. And in the novel that’s what California represented for the main character. She returns to California to see the blue sky and thinks, “Ah, this is the world that must be endured.”

KN: Blue sky isn’t a stock image of suffering, though. Is there a paradox here?

HI: This word is used by criminals in Japan a lot. It is a Buddhist word—saha—but criminals use it when they are in prison to describe the world outside of prison. It is kind of a mixed feeling.

They realize that the suffering of the outside world is actually a source of joy. Saha is joy. I like this word. I also like the word ukiyo.

JA: Ukiyo is a very Japanese word—usually translated as “the floating world.” It is the world that isn’t quite permanent, that’s never anchored, always changing.

HI: It is also a Buddhist word. You experience ukiyo many times in your life and then you achieve satori—enlightenment. And then you don’t have to go to that other world anymore, you just stay in the pure land, but until then you have to live in the floating world of impermanence. I like this word. I am floating now. And I am enjoying saha as well.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

A Wild Vitality: An Interview with Jerome Sala

by Jim Feast

I met Jerome Sala in a college class in Chicago in 1970. We became fast friends and, always being hipper than me, he introduced me to many strange byways in poetry, art, and music. I moved to New York City while he continued writing poetry and creating new ways of presenting it in Chicago; in 1981, he was crowned the first “heavyweight champion” of competitive literary bouts in that city, in a format that pre-dated (and inspired) the poetry slam. A few years later, Sala moved to New York City, where he and his spouse, the poet Elaine Equi, have been a vital part of the city’s poetry scene.

Sala, who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University and works as a copywriter, is the author of eight books of poems, the latest of which is How Much: New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books, $20). Other titles include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books, 2017), The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier, 2014), and Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull Press, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Pleiades, Boundary 2, Rolling Stone, among other places, and he keeps a blog on poetry and pop culture called espresso bongo.

Jim Feast: It used to be noted how advertising and political platitudes were woefully diluting terms such as “democracy” or “freedom”; now, as you point out in poems such as “To Content,” it seems all language has lost significance. In response, your poems often take words from corporate jargon that never had any meaning in the first place and infuse them with a wild vitality. Is this one of your goals?

Jerome Sala: Definitely. Having worked as a copywriter for many years, I witnessed how sometime in the ‘90s, all types of creativity—music, video, writing, etc.—got dumped into a single category, “content.” Just as industrial capitalism gave birth to new abstractions such as “labor power” and “value,” the information economy now gave birth to this abstraction, and “To Content” is about this change. It begins:

you are like a word-picture-video flow
whose every element is special, but as part of a feed
(feeding whom?)
             also generic

a textual form of meat product:
like the old Aristotelian notion of “substance”
nothing in itself
but the something out of which all is made

Since, as you mention, language is losing its specificity, I try to bring attention to this through satire; I treat the insignificant, the debased, as a source of great truth. Philip K. Dick, one of my idols, once theorized that the Logos could be found in cheap ads on the back of matchbook covers—I play with this idea in my poetry.

JF: In “Corporate Sonnets,” a sequence of Browning-like monologues, you present a gallery of sham entrepreneurs, cutthroats, business nobodies, and flimflammers, revealing the souls of speakers who, by definition, have no souls. I wonder whether these portraits are taken from life or are invented to represent the corporate typology.

JS: When I first started writing “Corporate Sonnets,” I collected business clichés from email solicitations, work conversations, business magazines, online ads, and motivational books. The idea was to satirize the language by collaging these expressions—none of the poems were portraits of actual people. But I discovered something surprising as I wrote: though the sonnets were made of nothing but jargon, they started to seem, almost by accident, as if they were characters speaking—Browning-esque, as you mention, or perhaps even like the voices in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Here is the first “Corporate Sonnet” I composed:

I don’t know if I still have the bandwidth
to think outside of the box. I’m good at
identifying the low-hanging fruit
but innovation? Disruptive technologies?
That stuff may be for the millennials
to decide. Good luck to them. As for me,
well, there comes a time in all our lives
when you’ve got to just drink the Kool-Aid
and get with the program. Ok, sure,
you’ve no longer got the mojo
to break down any silos, but at least your
morale is no longer in the toilet.
I’m still entrepreneurial and proactive,
I’m collaborative, competitively priced and non-reactive.

The fact that this collection of expressions sounded like a someone baring their “soul” made me wonder if our souls were in fact made of clichés. In any case, when I performed the “Corporate Sonnets” at readings, it wasn’t just people who worked in offices that appreciated them; social workers, academics, and factory workers related to them too. It seems all walks of life are now defined by their jargon—and people are delighted when you make fun of it.

Today, cliché has invaded all realms of language. Sometimes I think that a dramatic play in which the actors communicate only in cliches might be both hilarious and poignant—it would “speak” to our moment in a particularly engaging way. As Umberto Eco quipped: “Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us.”

JF: In a dialogue with Jack Skelley on the Best American Poetry blog, you say that in your poetry you often take “the most fleeting instances of culture and write about them as if they were holy monuments.” In conversation, you’ve told me this nuanced approach to pop culture was something you witnessed in the Chicago art and writing scene, and I wonder if you can say more about that here.

JS: One of the Chicago artists I was thinking about was Kevin Riordan, who created the cover for How Much? and many of my other books. With a connoisseur’s eye for trashy culture, he takes pop influence into a whole new dimension, collaging imagery not just from icons, but more esoteric sources. My wife, the poet Elaine Equi, guest-edited an issue of LAICA Journal (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art) with Riordan on the theme of “discarded icons.” The contents of the issue, derived from ads, comic books, film, etc., wasn’t merely pop, it was obsolete pop—in a way, what was being celebrated was the fact that our culture is impermanent. Such an approach to pop culture is also influenced by punk, another strong force when I was growing up in Chicago. As an example of how Riordan’s pop collage approach has affected my writing of poetry, here are a few lines from “Hollywood Alphabet”:

I am an amateur alien living in Amityville
in a Batman costume, on leave from Babylon 5.
I can’t tell a cat from a canary from a Wes Craven movie from a
   William Castle movie
yet I get déjà vu when I think of Philip K. Dick dancing with Judge
   Dredd after dancing with a wolf.
T.S. Eliot once said that ethnographic study offered a form
   of empowerment for Everyman – that and exploitative cinema.
Well maybe he didn’t. . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

                                                            Hollywood, you see, is more
   about image appropriation than individuation—
as such it’s a Janus-faced town, a kind of Jurassic Park
where dinosaurs like Steven King, Freddy Krueger and Stanley
   Kubrick have gone extinct
quicker than you can say Herschel Gordon Lewis, or the Legend of Hell House.

JF: The approach of treating mass culture as if its icons “were holy monuments” is a perspective not unknown in universities—an environment you are familiar with, since you have a doctorate in American Studies. However, something not typically found in campus productions is the slashing humor you use in such works as “Let’s Hear It for Frederick’s of Hollywood.” Indeed, you often have a triple-barreled comedy, poking fun at the absurd solemnity of pop culture, the pretensions of academic studies of pop culture, and the sacrosanct classics of poetry, which also come in for some good-natured swipes. How did your use of humor develop?

JS: There are three influences I’d like to mention when it comes to satiric/comedic touches. First, I’ve always loved comedians such as Rodney Dangerfield, Jerry Lewis, and Sarah Silverman. Second is a very traditional literary mode, the mock-heroic—I’m thinking here of Swift and Pope, who, to achieve their satiric effects, would write about commodities such as makeup and earrings as if they were mystic, alchemical objects.

Third is having worked as a copywriter. Marx, a great satirist himself, admired capitalism’s tendency to profane whatever it readied for sale, and an ad writer experiences this process in a very intimate way. You work with the arbitrariness of words—anything can be made to mean anything else. From this perspective, not just pop culture but academic study of it can seem a bit pompous. Nevertheless, I value “theory” and academic criticism highly; such writing helped me get through my job as a copywriter by exposing the ideological clichés that fuel business writing (something satirized in “Corporate Sonnets” and many of my other poems).

Speaking of ideology, it’s funny how even a classic cartoon series like The Flintstones reflects it. Historical research suggests that Stone Age societies were communistic; in the cartoon series, though, the society we see is a thriving, industrial capitalist one. The beginning of my poem on this series alludes to this goofy transformation:

stone age
communism
turns
capitalist

owning property
working for the man
and loving it

natural
as a brontosaurus crane
or a purple
pet dinosaur dog
named Dino

JF: I see your work as addressed to a specific audience. In your early Chicago performance poetry, there was a raucous give and take between you and the audience, with listeners often taking lines as individual insults or jokes. Now, in less raucous days, the audience is incorporated in each poem; not only is a sketch provided of the persona speaking the piece but there is an implicit profile of the audience this speaker is addressing.

JS: Thinking about audiences reflects, I guess, a vain wish that what I write could extend beyond a strictly poetry audience. In the old days, Elaine and I performed to crowds that were literary, arty, and punk. This mix is called out in a playful way in an early poem, “In the Company of the Now People”:

I wasn’t going to talk about all you over-the-hill go-go dancers
but here you all are in your little white go-go boots
and there’s Joe Tiger and Lenny Leopard
along with the lady wrestler with a bone in her hair
and mamma mia what next?
a Dalmatian in a tutu?
it just makes me stop and think—
I must be in the company of the now people

I guess you could say this early work addresses the nightlife of the crowd. Later, I started addressing daytime life—office work, for example. The approach turned to satirizing business talk, or even business fashion, and the funny ways the drama of nightlife gets funneled into the banality of daily work.

I’m not sure whether such writing appeals to a specific audience or not, but, judging from response at readings, people seem to get a kick out of poems written with this goal in mind.

JF: Both you and Elaine are fascinated with everyday products and how they change over time, but there is an interesting variation in the way you write about them. In her poem “Monogrammed Aspirin,” for example, she examines with a phenomenological lucidity how she reacted to the change in pill shape of Excedrin. By contrast, in your Coke sequence, you reflect on the philosophical implications of product change. What do you make of your mutual love of these objects—and the difference in the way you approach them?

JS: I think what both of us find appealing in these common objects and products is their very commonness. We both believe, in keeping with that Philip K. Dick quip I mentioned earlier, that if you’re looking for secrets about the way a culture works, you need to look at what you are numb to—the banal items you encounter daily. As you say, Elaine’s approach is more phenomenological, literally—phenomenology is her favorite branch of philosophy. In her poem “The Thing Is,” for example, she writes about how objects lack “the inner life” once bequeathed them; they have become cold, reified things. Her writing, influenced by Francis Ponge, rediscovers the aura of objects in witty, often humorous ways. An unusual feature of her style is that her writing can be mystical, even visionary, and humorous at the same time. If Elaine’s work is more concerned with the “object” part of the commercial object, I’m more fascinated by the marks of commerce it bears. What caught my interest about the marketing of New Coke, Classic Coke, and Cherry Coke back in the ‘80s was how the flavor of each carried an ideological message: New Coke’s sweetness preached the optimism of youth (it was closer to Pepsi, a brand marketed as “young”), Classic Coke the seriousness of tradition, and Cherry Coke predicted our current moment, in which brands turn profits by marketing diversity.

JF: When we were in college, you introduced me to an older painter, Lady Bunny, and her Bohemian friends. The Bohos, I learned, had preceded the Beats and considered themselves the real outlaws. Your verse sometimes portrays this division between outsider groups. In poems such as “Beatnik Stanzas,” where you intone, “no madness / no angels /  . . .  / no gone daddios / no haunted lightning,” you look askance at the Beat zeitgeist; in other pieces, such as “The Stoners,” you speak of a more authentic underclass group that contains “rogue impulses.” I see this as you suggesting that even if some countercultural groups may end up seeming “square,” there will always be a group resisting the corporate program.

JS: What I was satirizing in “Beatnik Stanzas” was not the actual Beats themselves, who produced some of my favorite writing, but the commodification of their image (think of the classic sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis or Roger Corman’s wonderful film A Bucket of Blood). That’s why the poem is filled with goofy lines like “my visioned darkened / and I threw away my turtleneck / in a dream.” But the phenomenon you mention, one generation casting doubt on another, helped me see how what’s cool can become cliché within the space of a few years. In comparison, a poem like “The Stoners” displays a hint of optimism. As you suggest, it states that no matter how the image of “the rebel” is commodified, a new generation appears with a workaround; punk, for example, appropriated the appropriators—repurposing trashy culture for its own uses—and that appropriation has already been reappropriated, as might be expected. Nevertheless, when something becomes a cliché, there is usually a segment of the culture that abandons it. Lightning cannot be housed in a bottle. As Bakhtin wrote, “There always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness . . . All existing clothes are always too tight, and thus comical.” Or as “The Stoners” puts it,

How is it then that these flaneurs continually rise from extinction

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Are they something more than themselves—
rogue impulses without words or images of their own
but which nevertheless, like a flood
pick up people, houses and trees along the way
to a destination they never reach?

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Archival Woman: An Interview with Sarah Heady

by Greg Bem

Sarah Heady’s newest poetry book, Comfort (Spuyten Duyvil, $16), is a marvelous amalgamation of found material and poetic investigations of history and place. Heady’s work, as demonstrated in her previous collection Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills, 2013), often finds embodiment beyond the self, using poetry as a conduit for collective voice, cohesive culture, and critical inquiries of the world around us. In Comfort, the poet turns her gaze toward an important resource for women a century ago, a late-19th to mid-20th-century magazine of the same title. But the book is far greater than an archival gathering of texts; Comfort strives towards a deeper love for archives and a deeper commitment to cultivating and maintaining beauty through timeless expression. In this new book, Heady steps forward with a new and refreshing history of American women and the world surrounding them, and the result illuminates not only the past, but our own tremulous moment.

Greg Bem: Let’s start with the title, Comfort. As you’ve outlined in an afterword, the magazine of this title catered to “rural housewives” and served multiple purposes, from marketing snake oil to responding to the isolation of women throughout the U.S. How did you discover the magazine, and what was its role in crafting this collection?

Sarah Heady: Thanks, Greg—I’d love to tell the story of how Comfort came to be. During the summer of 2013, I spent a month at a residency in Nebraska called Art Farm. Ed Dadey, the residency director, was born in the farmhouse on the property, and he mentioned to me that the attic was full of decades-old newspapers and stuff, and that I was welcome to paw through it if I wanted. So one day I crawled up into that sweltering attic, and there I found a pile of musty, crumbling periodicals called Comfort. It seemed to be akin to Ladies’ Home Journal—a very gendered and “fluffy” kind of publication, but one that nonetheless gripped me because of its age. The issues that were salvageable I brought downstairs and started reading and photographing, so that I could continue to study them without further damaging them. I didn’t do this in an exhaustive or systematic way, just tried to capture the pages and pieces that were most evocative to me. 

A few months later, I began examining those photographs and working with the found language I had captured. The source material took many forms: advertisements, advice columns, serialized fiction, sentimental poetry, recipes, and tips on housekeeping, farming, gardening, etc. I would let my eye wander over the text and pull out fragments of bright or evocative language, and with them I would weave these dense, imagistic prose poems. Eventually I sought out other primary and secondary sources, mostly about the settlement of the American prairie, and bits of found language from those also ended up getting woven in.

I should say that about half of Comfort is composed of non-found-language poems—some of which I had written even before going to Art Farm but which came to feel like they belonged in the project because of their rural setting and their circling around questions of partnership, domesticity, and solitude.

GB: Can you talk a little bit about moving from the exploratory phase to intentionally creating a book? When did you know this work was going to become a book-length project—or was it certain from the beginning?

SH: Not at all! It took several years. The oldest material in the book is from 2010 and the newest from 2015, and it was not clear for much of that time that I was writing a single book. 

I definitely want to mention that I created Comfort within the bounds of my MFA program at San Francisco State University. Every stage of the project’s generation and discovery and refinement was supported by the courses I was taking, my teachers and classmates, and what I was reading. The first set of poems that became the kernel of Comfort was a project for an amazing course taught by Donna de la Perrière called “Mad Girls, Bad Girls: Writing Transgressive Female Subjectivity.” That was in my very first semester of grad school, and they eventually turned into a chapbook called Corduroy Road. A few of the pieces in that chapbook were written prior to starting the program, but grouping those poems for Donna’s class was the first time I had a sense of a project I wanted to keep writing into.

The summer following my second semester was when I went to Art Farm. So then I had all the Comfort magazine material in addition to this first set of poems, which started to feel related to the found text experiments I was doing not only with the magazine stuff but with other primary and secondary sources about the Midwest prairie. I continued to scope the project, as it were, figuring out what belonged inside the frame and what didn’t. In Barbara Tomash’s transformative workshop “Imagining the Book,” I gave myself the prompt to create a kind of abecedary in which I listed, for each letter of the alphabet, all the nouns that came to mind for the world of Comfort. This compendium of both sensory elements and abstract concepts became almost like a film or TV show “bible,” a guiding outline for the book—if such a thing could exist for fragmentary, nonlinear, non-narrative poetry.

After a time, when I had a sense of this world, I used every grad school assignment to write into Comfort as I was conceiving it—whether doing experiments with the found language I’d brought home from Art Farm or refining the non-found pieces. Truong Tran’s class on the prose poem was especially important for refining the form of the found text poems. I’d like to think my work itself is concise and concentrated, but I’m a maximalist in my process—I overgenerate and then go through many, many rounds of culling to end up with the final product. At its longest and muddiest point, Comfort was a 400-page compendium of fragments that I sliced and diced and reordered and shaped with the help of many readers, until it ended up as a normal 86-page book. I consider it a book-length poem rather than a collection. And it turned out to be my MFA thesis. 

I don’t say all this to imply, by any means, that an MFA is necessary to write a book, but I always appreciate when artists are clear and forthcoming about the material and social and intellectual conditions surrounding their process.

GB: Visually, Comfort has a rhythm to it; there is a wide range of the poems’ shapes and sizes. Formally, the text rotates between hefty blocks of prose and chiseled, scattered verse. The prose often centers on long lists—not exclusively lists of images or objects, but also states of being, relationships, observations, and consequences. The lineated verse, in juxtaposition, feels more personal, more human, composed of specific voices. Whose voices can be heard in Comfort? Should we be listening to, or for, someone in particular?

SH: It’s true that there are a few different registers of voice in the book, which tend to correspond to shifts in form. The prose blocks are where most of the found language lives, and because of the multiplicity of sources I used, they have a listing quality that is meant to imply a sea of individual voices/experiences/perspectives/moments that have been collapsed or coagulated or sedimented so that they become anonymous and collective. Most of the prose blocks are also literally missing a subject (e.g., “is running a small piece of sand soap through the grinder. is dipping brooms in hot suds. is tying a cord around a glass stopper.” I borrowed this specific form from Pattie McCarthy’s Marybones, although in her book the word “Mary” precedes each prose block and therefore attaches to the following barrage of predicates. “Mary” contains multitudes of characters held by that name and explored in the book: the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Mary Tudor, Mary Shelley, Mary, Queen of Scots, and millions of regular, non-famous women named Mary who have lived throughout time. In Comfort, the missing subject is meant to suggest even further the anonymity of women in the historical record. C.D. Wright’s technique of collaging documentary fragments, as exemplified by her books One Big Self and One With Others, was another big influence on Comfort as well as on Halcyon, the libretto I wrote about the history of a defunct women’s college.

The lineated verse in Comfort, as you note, has a more personal or singular tone and usually is written in the first person, though I can’t say there is a particular individual I had in mind—perhaps one voice rising out of the sea of collapsed prose voices, and yet still just another farm wife we don’t know a whole lot about. The only “character” per se in the book is someone I call the Seer, a sort of mystical figure based on a historical woman named Susan Gavan, known as the “Aurora Witch” to ghost-hunter-types. She was not a witch, just a woman who died young and inspired rumors much after the fact because her grave is isolated from the rest of the dead in the cemetery in Aurora, Nebraska. But in Comfort, the Seer is indeed a wild and powerful woman who sort of pulls the farm wives away from domesticity, into a more feral state of self-knowledge. And her voice comes through—mysteriously—at various points throughout the book. 

GB: The balance of the Seer reminds me of the role of the poet more largely in our world. As poet, as writer, where has the book of Comfort ultimately taken you, and what can your readers look forward to?

SH: Comfort contains a lot of the existential concerns and questions I had in my late twenties: should I “settle” into marriage and child-rearing, could I do those things without losing myself in the process, how might I manage all the piles of tasks associated with adulthood and not harm myself in the process? I didn’t consciously connect these themes to my real life at the time, but now I certainly do. I can see how, in delving into the found language of Comfort magazine, I was processing questions of domesticity and partnership as well as my own emotional relationship to labor, which is that I am a workaholic/overdoer by nature. 

Well, now I’m (happily!) married and the mom of a toddler, in spite of which I’m much healthier than I was a decade ago with regard to chronic busyness. My work now is to slow down and do less and be fundamentally okay with that. So I really feel like writing Comfort was part of a spiritual movement toward repairing some personal wounds, even though it’s a pretty impersonal book in a lot of ways.

As for what’s next—over the past several years I’ve turned my creative attention homeward, to the place I am from: the Hudson River Valley of New York State. I have a poetry manuscript in progress called “The Hudson Lines,” which documents many years of writing and riding alongside the Hudson River on the Metro-North Railroad. I’m also writing a book of linked essays about landscape and class in the Hudson Valley, which includes topics such as property, wealth, New York City, the river, poverty, accumulation, ruin, scarcity, archives, addiction, apples, beavers, September 11th, Dirty Dancing, whiteness, hoarding, mansions, bungalow colonies, young love, climate crisis, and, actually, the Pacific Ocean.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023