Tag Archives: Fall 2024

Estelle Meaning Star

Sarah Rosenthal
Chax Press ($21)

by Mary Burger

The pages in Sarah Rosenthal’s Estelle Meaning Star are dun-colored, earthen. The text is collaged, like a ransom note; individual words and letters appear cut from a manuscript and reassembled into short, irregular lines, without punctuation. A slender work, compressed to a potent distillate, the book begins with a procession of women who cradle wounded animals, “walking along / pacific rim”—a ritualized enactment of grief, but also of tender care and nurturance.

The Pacific Rim is not a single place but the nearly ten-thousand-mile perimeter of the world’s largest sea—the seismic, volcanic edge of the expanse that divides (and connects) east and west, water and land. The women’s walk along this edge resembles ancient funeral ceremonies, such as the procession across the Nile River to the temple of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut or the ceremonial journey down the Avon to the monumental tomb site at Stonehenge, each enacting the passage from life to death. It also brings to mind a post-apocalyptic scene from N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which finds imperiled survivors in a barren, ruined world trying to save their injured kin, or at least to honor their dead, as they flee from further cataclysm.

Rosenthal has written elsewhere that she composed Estelle Meaning Star from cut-ups of dreams she recorded while going through cancer treatment. The traces of her personal experience are sublimated and reconfigured in this work, where ritual and ceremony face down the forces of pain and grief. The origin of those forces isn’t explicitly named here; rather, we’re given hints of a post-industrial urban dystopia laden with passive consumerism, invasive surveillance, callous wealth:

         lethargic
TV-watching

…………………………………..

is a camera
catching me

…………………………………..

bulging leather wallets

Children exist here seemingly just to be disciplined:

order                  stops kids
wandering through hallways

At times, the menace in this world even betrays a resemblance to the spread of a cancer:

incision        squeeze
bitter pellets
from watery pink
tissue

Yet this isn’t a story of the irreversible passage from life to death. There are acts of resistance, pointed and defiant:

a jittery revolutionary
posting messages

More fundamentally, the suffering endured here enacts a transformation. The poem’s speaker—and by extension those she addresses, those who are with her—emerge in a new form, “another self / positioning.” The speaker gives a name to this self, which is not only her own self, but the collective selves of shared experience and survival:

my            name is Estelle I turn
on my center

…………………………………..

                               all names are
different versions of the word star

…………………………………..

try         the word star
provisionally she
who        all of us

This pivoting around the word star recurs throughout the book, an act of affirmation that connects the speaker and those around her to the primal forces of light and energy and regeneration, forces that seemingly withstand even the destruction that mars the poem’s world. This is not to say that suffering and death are erased, for the procession of women with their wounded bundles continues:

they carry mangled
animals to the far
    edge            put
the creatures to rest

But the water’s edge, the “pacific rim,” is also a place of transformation; the water accepts the dead as if reabsorbing them into the cycle of life. And the women’s attention and mourning are essential to this cycle—the dead don’t return themselves to the sea, but must be carried there. This relationship between individual lives and the collective is at the complex core of this work. In the concentrated potency of Estelle Meaning Star, Estelle survives and reconfigures her name and her self through the recognition that she is one in a vast world, not just of shared suffering, but of shared life,

twinkling with

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Worn Smooth between Devourings

Lauren Camp
NYQ Books ($18.95)

by Tiffany Troy

Like the animals that follow the order of nature, humans in Lauren Camp’s latest poetry collection, Worn Smooth between Devourings, follow the order of capitalism—thus, the speaker pays the mortgage “on the trees” and bakes muffins “in the middle of a great / battle we’re having with disappointment.” Readers might identify with that disappointment, which Camp portrays as the overgrowth of weeds, an anathema to a pristine and well-trimmed Victorian garden—a conflict that mirrors the poet’s inner turmoil about needing to pay the bills while wishing for more fulfillment than is allowed service workers, whose fate has been predetermined. Drawing from her own experience, Camp conveys how an unfamiliar landscape paradoxically allows her to become familiar with herself and adopt new ways of seeing.

Throughout the collection, Camp teaches readers how to “tell time” via closeups of personified objects (the “clock at the church kept to its ticking, its bells / with their sticky, poised hope”), and asks us to consider them in the context of the institutions (the church, the workforce) to which they belong. In doing so, she compels us to take a step back and reevaluate the way in which the landscape embodies our deepest longings (“Now I gaze at this / quarrelsome desert: barren / with discipline”). These objects, like the doll in Elena Ferrente’s novel The Lost Daughter, take on a life of their own, their limbs and appendages an extension of the reader’s. Like Ferrante’s protagonist, a middle aged Neapolitan woman who travels abroad and spends the majority of the time on the beach, Camp’s speaker enjoys an environment with a backdrop for free introspection.

The “devourings” in the book’s title refers to ecological concerns as well as the speaker’s personal struggles. Camp invites the reader to think about the body in motion, to see the way the reader must “leave the calendar” of our busy lives “to find sun familiar again,” contrasting a man’s ominous cat whistle with the coyotes “whistling about their beautiful lives.” Wildlife and the desert terrain recur as motifs throughout the book: As the speaker gets acclimated to the solitude of hearing “no one but pages,” and as “every inch / of our property dried out” in the “long stretch of knuckled nerves” of the landscape near her home, she considers the “absolutely unknown” of climate change’s effects. Camp chooses poetic forms that mimic our acculturation to the “slow mountains”; in “the river” we find “a yearning, a small seep, a lowest door” that we can step through so as to see eye to eye with “the mountains’ ashen edges / and ambition.” The powerful suggestion is that we might behold nature not as a metaphor, but in its reality of wildness.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Embodied Unconscious

The Feminine Space of Sexuality, Surrealism, and Experimentation in Literature

Edited by C. M. Chady
Spuyten Duyvil ($30)

by Robert Eric Shoemaker

It is possible to train roses to grow up and over walls, evading their presence. To climb. Escape. Be unruly. Language is the same sort of plant if nurtured. Organic and ravishing.
             —from “Unto Herself,” Interlude by Stephanie Michele

C. M. Chady’s recent anthology Embodied Unconscious: The Feminine Space of Sexuality, Surrealism, and Experimentation in Literature gathers a unique “community within a creative lineage”: experimental women writers affiliated with Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics reflecting on the fifty-year audio archive of the school’s famed Summer Writing Program. Transcriptions of lectures and panels from the program, along with introductory “interludes” written for the anthology, are presented with the aim of locating related historical and contemporary zones of women writers in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The book is divided into two parts: The first half is on language, poetics, and gender, while the second is more specific to gender and the unconscious, especially in Surrealism and Dada. Selected voices from the archive include Jane Augustine, Joanne Kyger, Erica Hunt, Bernadette Mayer, Gertrude Stein, Clarice Lispector, Mina Loy, and Lorine Niedecker. One can listen to the audio recordings of these talks at Naropa University’s library website for a multimedia experience.

The essayists collectively gesture at shared lineages of women writers to honor their importance, address their historical underrepresentation, and highlight their potential to inspire today’s writers. If language is gendered, the contributors agree, then creative writing can reorient language so as not to be “unconsciously repeating the world to myself,” in contributor Marlie McGovern’s words. “Our realities are shaped through language,” editor Chady concurs, and women in experimental literary traditions have constructed a space outside of “language that simply didn’t work” by using “innovation out of necessity.”

Through the interlude and transcript clusters along with writing prompts, the essayists document their creative engagement with the archive. Importantly, however, the anthology’s choices and methods are guided by voices and traditions that speak to each contributor rather than by a canon or a predetermined idea of what readers want; Augustine, represented in a substantial seven of the included fourteen talks from the Summer Writing Program, must have struck a chord with many of them. The book is thus meant to be a subjectively experienced guidebook to select parts of the archive, not a cogent argument about the whole of women’s experimental writing.

Situating the archive as a thing to experience certainly embodies Naropa’s approach to creativity and lineage—this is a meditation, not a thesis. Still, core to Embodied Unconscious is an argument for re- or un-defining woman-ness by becoming in writing, to borrow Simone de Beauvoir’s famous phrase, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” As the contributors each define their own woman-ness using the archive, we see how the category “woman” means multiple things to this group—and even to some essayists individually. But while defining gender and sexuality, placing texts in concert with identity, and identifying the poetic techniques and values that follow are all central to Naropa’s legacy, the tension between claiming space for women (as recompense for oppression) and un-defining spaces as supposedly for either women or men (in order to remove that gendered power dynamic) is palpable.

Fortunately, the anthology presents options for engagement with identity-based questions. Identitarian definition often precludes varieties of sexual and gender experience beyond the normative (e.g. cis and hetero), while the complete loss of categories can invalidate collective and individual experiences. The in-between of definition and un-definition, the becoming space, is the more fruitful area to explore, and Embodied Unconscious makes its home in that space, inviting the reader to wander its pathways without settling in one interlude or transcript.

One of the most compelling aspects of Embodied Unconscious is how the finer differences in poetics between the contributors and their chosen forebears hinge on what “woman” means and who carries which aspects of that label. Questions about the feminine and its presence in poetry are illuminating, inviting, and heartfelt when presented subjectively; when presented as objective truth, however, they can read as exclusive, incomplete, or even inaccurate. There are clear tensions here between waves of feminism; remaking the feminine and preserving versions of it inscribed by certain authors; using labels with different assumptions and intentions (e.g. queer and bisexual) to describe the same writers; modes of writing (some more scholarly and some more lyrical); and conflicting trends of progressive politics.

The most well-written interludes engage the lyrical identities of the writers voiced from the archive through the essayists’ own aesthetic modes, including feminist surrealism and eco-poetics. This suggests that personal connection with a poet through the archive can create a sense of discovery leading to creative innovation and an identity-based autonomous zone of community—or as contributor Stephanie Michele illustrates it in an essay on Mina Loy, “Wide open. Gold flecks clustered of imagination hanging by silk threads. Trace.”

Some engagements embracing multiplicity shine out. Michele composes her first essay in Gertrude Stein’s “language matriculated into a science” to illustrate her debt to Stein’s work and Stein’s importance to our contemporary literary world. This is a capacious style, an embodiment of Stein’s language-altering logic rather than a description of it, that remains critical and inquisitive, integrating quotations as italicized lyrics among the author’s own. Michele’s enjambment of Stein and herself allows her arguments to blossom without precluding anything or anyone else’s multiplicity: “a sentence is restless and multiple,” she proclaims. Further, she brings Stein and Google into the same space, recognizing what this anthology, born of technology (of recordings, of ghosts speaking), has the capacity to be.

In her second essay, Michele paints a dreamscape in which Mina Loy appears to her, for what better way to honor an ancestor than in their own tongue: “moon high, glazed light over a mountain’s skin.” Kathy Tun also crafts a lyrical take on lineage, arguing that women writers speak back through the archive to hopeful “understudies” who hear echoes of themselves in their words and ask to walk in their roles. In Tun’s extended metaphor of performing a part, mere imitation in the costume of Mina Loy or Lorine Niedecker becomes difficult: “how did an experimental artist respond to the call?” she asks. It’s time for the understudy, walking on, to become their own interpretation of the role and for the stars of the lineage to light her way forward.

Tun’s metaphor is an outstanding way to imagine the passing of the torch in the experimental tradition, but also begs the question of whether nonbinary or male writers might step into these roles with the same intentions. Such moments in Embodied Unconscious pose an imaginary that has multiple genders and invite non-female readers to embrace that imaginary for the interlude’s duration. These readers aren’t disallowed from women’s experimental writing—we’re encouraged to read beyond our gendered experience, and the expansive lyrical aesthetic of some essays pushes us to shift paradigms rather than grapple with identity labels—but some essays do not quite relinquish the categorical terminology that they use to undefine gender.

Chloe Tsolakoglou, for example, argues that it seems foolish to write from within dichotomies when experience is not gendered; using Clarice Lispector as the example of a “perfect combination of feminine and masculine,” she then reverts to a “feminine imaginary” as her target creative, illustrating how even when an author’s inclination is toward becoming both, the definition of both still rests on either. This is possibly a product of theorists like Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous, who were writing when these recordings were made; more recent queer and feminist scholarship dissolves the gender binary further, so it would be exciting to see Naropa’s archive reexamined with these dissolutions in mind.

Sex, gender, and other identity categories do not imply a readership or a writership; they position a poet in time in how they express themselves, but they do not dictate a static interest for later generations. This is why, of the options presented in the anthology, the selection of a poetic lineage by an energized acolyte is more exciting than the lying-in-wait of a lineage to be accessed by password; rather than gaining entry to a predetermined canon through identity, one can find kinship with the identity of a poetic ancestor queerly or even in tension, like the kinship with Robert Duncan and H. D. that Joanne Kyger mentions. The distance between these poles is a vivid subtext of Embodied Unconscious, a spectrum along which to place one’s own position in relation to poetics from all corners of the archive, to which no one roadmap or canon exists. Beyond the specific writers it engages, this book speaks to the very paths we travel to dream ourselves into a future. As Chady writes, “we contribute to the lineage as it becomes us, forever entwining us with ideas of the past, present, and future”— whichever future we can manage to embrace.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Satellite Image

Michelle Berry
Wolsak & Wynn ($19)

by Adam McPhee

Ginny and Matt, the protagonists of Michelle Berry’s new novel Satellite Image, realize it’s time to quit the city after Ginny is robbed at knife point. They buy a house after a single showing in a small town a short drive away; the house needs some work, but it’s nice enough, and it faces a ravine. Anxious to move in, Ginny looks their new house up online and sees an image showing what seems to be a body in the yard. She calls to Matt, and he confirms her impression, but suddenly the image updates, and the body is gone. Sure of what they saw but unable to find it again, they move in.

In their new hometown of Parkville—a nondescript Canadian locale perhaps geared in its genericness toward a wider American readership—Ginny and Matt host a dinner party, and the neighbors tell them that the previous owners of the house were a bit odd. The elderly couple kept to themselves and had an absurd number of packages delivered to their doorstep. Then things start getting weird: Someone is invading their yard space, moving their Halloween decorations, and eventually entering the house. At one of Ginny’s dinner parties—now a regular occurrence—this uninvited guest sneaks into the kitchen and rearranges the chicken bones on a pile of dirty dishes to leave a threatening message.

Berry withholds the solution to all the intrigue until in the book’s very last pages, a choice that doesn’t allow the protagonists much chance to absorb or react. Yet, as it keeps suggesting questions and refusing answers, Satellite Image maintains a steady propulsion that enlivens its mundane subject matter and linear narrative structure—an effect many thriller writers aspire to achieve.

Beyond its traditional genre elements, Satellite Image offers particular insight into the often-unsettling process of settling into a new home. The questions Ginny and Matt ask themselves aren’t so atypical: Why did the previous owners take all the lightbulbs but leave behind so many canned goods? What’s up with that window that doesn’t lock properly, that low overhang on the roof, the discrepancies between old photos and the way the place looks now? For Berry’s characters, these questions have consequences that may cause the heart to race, but for her readers they’re an opportunity to reflect on the sorts of things everyone encounters when they move somewhere new: the eerie idiosyncrasies of everyday life.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The Sentence Is the Portal: An Interview with Bhanu Kapil

by Suparna Choudhury

I first encountered Bhanu Kapil through BBC Radio 4 at my kitchen table in Montreal. Her voice was calm, each word carefully weighted. She was reading from her latest collection, How to Wash a Heart Pavilion Poetry, 2020), after winning the T. S. Eliot Prize. I was struck by the way Kapil connects bodily sensation to language, especially in relation to experiences of displacement and hybridity, and her words about home and hospitality drew me to explore the rest of her work. As a neuroscientist and writer, I’m interested in the interplay between biology and culture, and the embodied experiences of people at thresholds—and Kapil’s poems are investigations of these themes. Her words slice through strange intimacies; they get underneath the longings and losses of immigrants and unravel the fragments of memory and experience with greater precision than many scientific methods seem to do.

Kapil is a British-American author of Indian heritage; in addition to the T. S. Eliot Prize she has received a Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University and a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. Prior to How To Wash A Heart she published six full-length collections, including The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006), Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011), and Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2015), as well as several chapbooks. For twenty years, Kapil taught creative writing, performance art, and contemplative practice at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She returned to England in 2019 and is currently based in Cambridge as a Fellow of Churchill College.

Suparna Choudhury: When I first opened Schizophrene, I was alone on the grass in June, struggling with research questions about the city and psychosis—including how to make sense of psychosis. Schizophrene created a sudden spacious opening: a felt understanding that poetry is both method and language to study the psyche, a mode of inquiry. The words and the form cut things open; they are not just experiment-al, they experiment, they investigate. Does this resonate with you?

Bhanu Kapil: Suparna, thank you for your beautiful questions. Firstly, on “city and psychosis”—your language prompted the memory of a visit to the Chandigarh Architecture Museum, which houses an homage to Le Corbusier complete with faded originals of his correspondence with Nehru. In an out of the way corner, facing away from the flow of museum goers, I saw this fantastic thing, the “Hyperbolic-Paraboloid Dome of Assembly”:

I thought immediately of the Wertheim coral reef (crocheted in the hyperbolic plane) that I’d seen at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art earlier that year. Was I attending a workshop? I remember crocheting something inexpertly. I remember asking Margaret Wertheim a question about schizophrenia and the brain. A conclusion: the topology of the schizophrenic brain is hyperbolic. I am simplifying the conversation, but it was remarkable to me that there in India I encountered a third iteration of the term. Architecture and psychosis: discuss.

I spent long summers in Chandigarh, the city I want to answer your question with or through. As a child, I can recall the cadence of a Corbusean city block in which “the endless rhythms of balconies and louvres on its long facade are punctuated by asymmetry . . . geometry . . . the texturique” (from Le Corbusier’s planning notes). In the museum, I also saw the tapestry designed by Le Corbusier for the Capitol Building, replete with lightning bolt, cobra, and inverted red triangle, symbols of tantra:

How does this image fuse questions of psyche and city? It’s not a map, and yet it feels like a kind of map.

In the art museum next door, I attended an exhibition of ghost-animal, demon, and angel-human Mughal miniatures. From the windows, I kept glancing at the Corbusean plaza. I observed a baby Jesus in a yellow dress, an “angel on a composite animal” (as per a caption from the exhibition). I saw a concrete landscape of outsize abstract symbols, derived from theorems, decaying and water-stained in the sun.

Chandigarh is a post-Partition city, built as a new capital after the trauma of the short war. “Gold was polished with a tiger’s claw,” I read in another caption. I remember mermaids, the Buddha’s footprint indented with geometric flowers. There was a terracotta fragment of a hand holding a rotted wreath. Outside, there was a sky the color of butter. On my last night in Chandigarh, I went to a Mother Goddess ritual (puja) in a Shiva temple. A mendicant in an intensely violet sari and turquoise blouse, her hair in dreadlocks, took a central position on the green baize mat next to the fire (cobra) pit.

“Everything is folded here. Think more about what a fold is. Think more about color, geometry and the circulation of symbols in an architecture without end.” That’s a note from a blog entry now deleted, the documentation of that visit.

SC: I’m not sure what it is about your work, but sometimes it seems convulsive, creating openings through rupture. It feels fleshy. What is your relationship to skin—your own or anyone else’s?

BK: To think skin is to think its wounds, and to learn about wound care. I think of the legs of someone I loved, covered with silver scars. Dark brown skin. He died many years ago, but I still recall those scars which were also indents, flesh that had a story to tell.

If experimental writing ruptures skin, then to be clear, I don’t think that’s ever a good idea in actual life. In life, I prefer an intact boundary. Rupture is exhausting.

The sentence is the portal, the place that keeps opening. I am trying to write sentences so slowly that they might become something else. In this way, perhaps even the portal can re-set by closing itself, for as long as it needs to.

SC: There is something tentacular and deeply sensory in your work that ends up creating temporary shapes for homes—like molehills—for the feeling of displacement in your reader. I don’t mean that they are comfortable sentences: They get at disarray and dissonance in ways that feel impossible to articulate in everyday life, in ways that give expression to that vertiginous feeling that occurs when something happens—with an intimate partner, with an old photograph, with the remnants of a dream—that pierces the core of unbelonging. I drink up those lines because they make me feel understood. In that way, you create little homes, homes that have texture. (Perhaps because fault lines, the way I feel them, are taut and spiky, the opposite of silk or sand dunes.) How do you do that? Do you mean to?

BK: I am not quite sure, but it’s so helpful to read your language about something I don’t intend, or don’t imagine in advance. Perhaps the quality you describe happened, most effortlessly, on my blog, a quotidian space, a space to think about teaching but also to document the ritual time with friends by the river, or in other places. I wrote Ban en Banlieue right into my blog. These days, my writing feels private, minimal, undeveloped, and stilted. One thing that’s changed is that I am asking questions about home and belonging, but directing them at this other kind of reader, a non-genetic descendant, the person who might be reading these notebooks twenty or thirty years from now, at the limit or beyond the limit of my own life span. I hope that this other kind of poet might experience what you experience, Suparna. I wonder what a day will be like in 2079.

SC: Do you remember when we met in Cambridge on that sofa and I told you I’m from NW9? We felt strange in that room in Cambridge, and we talked about the bus and the roundabouts between Ruislip and Queensbury that we could both conjure up. You told me about your piece in The Yale Review that describes Kingsbury. I couldn’t believe you put my hood on the map. What does it feel like for you to return “home”? Is home north London?

BK: West London feels like home, yes, on the bus. And at the same time, having been in the U.S. for the bulk of my adult experience, I can’t say that that’s reciprocal. Does the home I am returning to experience suction? Can it smell me in turn? There’s no family home, for example, that I can slip into, and no way of recreating one that resembles the one we had.

An experience I had soon after returning really stayed with me. I was waiting at a bus-stop. The son of my father’s oldest friend walked by, someone I had seen on so many Friday or Saturday evenings of my childhood. He said a brief, polite hello, then kept walking. In that moment, which caused me brief, sharp pain, I realized that people and places and scenes and moments that had crystallized in my diasporic heart, or time, had faded at their point of origin. I had faded from the memory of the place I was from, something made complicated by my non-native, non-white British status.

That said, I feel a sense of home in the company of other poets. Diaspora poets feel like family. I’m grateful to know them and to be able to spend time with them in the unexpected present of being here again.

SC: Your writing exposes lines and cracks and the violence of living with/as fragments. How do you (or how should we) create moments of cohesion?

BK: Sometimes I think this is what a performance might do, more than the writing itself. I am thinking of the experience of collaborating with a young British-Pakistani writer/dramaturg/performer, Blue Pieta, and their own collective of musicians and movement practitioners. We’re rehearsing now for a performance at Soho Poly this Autumn, derived loosely from How To Wash A Heart, my last book of poems. In our rehearsals and emails and conversations, we openly talk of what it is to share imagery. Can ancestral trauma be discharged, through our bodies, during these performances which decrystallize images and let them flow as voice, the text that’s now a score and also gestures, dance?

SC: Do you still practice bodywork?

BK: My bodywork practice was a deeply moving and practical part of my life since my twenties. I am not sure, as someone who now identifies as a caregiver, that I would have the capacity to set up a practice in the UK. I did have a chat with a local salon about an unused room at the back of their building, and the potential to share it part-time with a local reflexologist. We’ll see.

Bodywork is exorbitantly expensive in the UK, and I’ve noticed there is less training or expertise when it comes to soft tissue or orthopedic approaches. I love to offer or receive bodywork at home—my table is always set up; I can see it from here!—and to think, that session would have cost a hundred pounds!

SC: Are you a heavy dreamer? Do you wake up with impressions, affects, details or all of it? Do they enter your work?

BK: I dream intensively, and I record my dreams. Each year, on December 31st, a “void” night, I dream for someone else, asking their permission first.

I am not sure that what I dream enters my work. A parallel daily practice is mandala drawing. I recently drew something I did not expect to draw: a person carrying a load of firewood on their back, entering the trees. I am writing a novel of the jungle, of walking into the jungle as a child and spending the night there, and somehow this figure began to speak, and spoke in my writing later that day, as if to say, follow me. So, there are elements of active imagination, or extended imagination, to writing like this. I think the issue with drawing from dreams is that I tend to scrawl them down very fast, so they are less legible when I return to my notebooks for an idea.

SC: How do you wrestle with ghosts? Ancestors, lost lovers, past versions of you, old homes?

BK: I haven’t, when it comes to my time in Colorado, shed a sense of ongoing loss. That loss is related to being with others in ordinary ways. Coffee with a neighbor in the morning, hooting like an owl as I walked down the alley with my dog—that was her signal to put the kettle on. Or, every August, another friend would come through town, and text me LAKE SWIM. Off we’d go to swim in a freezing mountain lake. My soul longs to swim in that lake, and to drink the delicious coffee.

Rachel Pollack, my former colleague at Goddard College, had this amazing card, The Ghosts of Healing. It doesn’t have that name in any book, it’s just what she called it, and it’s the last card she selected when she “blessed” my art deck, of her own Shining Tribe Tarot. Energies rise from stones in a cave, holding roses at their hearts, and without true shape. What is the difference between an ancestor and a ghost? My longing is to spend time with these energies and to receive them, to listen to them deeply, and to hold my seat in the face of anxiety and fear, a response to their arrival in the first place, as Rachel pointed out.

There was a past version of me who taught three three-hour experimental writing seminars a week for twenty years at Naropa University, or twice a year at Goddard. It’s been an adaptation not to be teaching in that intensive way, and at the same time, to figure out other ways to be with poets, or to be one myself. I am no longer sure if I am a poet in the way that I thought I was. I feel like a twelve-year-old version of me, sitting on the windowsill and longing to write.

SC: Sometimes I become such a stranger to myself when I speak my mother tongue. Is your tongue at ease in languages other than English?

BK: I speak broken Punjabi/Urdu/Hindi mixtures to a variety of people, but I feel ease and peace in the gurdwara listening to an archaic language, the poetry and sound vibrations of the Sukhmini Sahib being read/sung aloud. It feels good to have more of these mixtures around me/us than was possible or available in Colorado.

I understand the strangeness. The mouth formed its shape around the alphabet we spoke. What is a mouth?

SC: What is grammar [doing]?

BK: It’s absorbing something, then releasing it, like a cloth soaked in water.

SC: At Poetry Clinic, an epistolary apothecary of poems (at which you’re going to be resident poet soon, thank you!), the premise is that poetry can do something, something that will equip our imaginations to deal with uncertainty and suffering. What do you mean for your poems to do to people?

BK: I think I don’t mean or intend or pre-hope anything for my poems. Where they arc and lodge or fall or reach is not something I can ever know or predict. I’m hoping that the experience of the Poetry Clinic will be what you dream it is. How will we know?

SC: Your work and my current interests lead me to ask you: What is wilderness to you? What remains wild?

BK: The wilderness is a jungle at night. Night has fallen, or is about to fall, and it’s too late to turn back. You reach a puddle. Should you skirt it by taking a wider, less certain path through the trees, or go straight through?

Memory is wild.

That particular memory is a memory of wildness that I am trying to write. My epigraph comes from a poem by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Cecilia Rossi: “All night, I walked into the unknown rain.” That’s what I’d like to do.

Click below to purchase these books through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Into the Good World Again

Max Garland
Holy Cow! Press ($16.95)

by Catherine Jagoe

Poet Max Garland’s quiet and profound fourth collection uses themes of the pandemic—isolation, distance, time, breath—to approach the existential question of how to live with the knowledge that we and everyone we love will die. Into the Good World Again is haunted not just by the “lethal math of plague,” but by the brevity, fragility, and loneliness of human life. “Soon enough,” Garland writes, “the breath of air that shaped itself / into the syllables of my name will be elsewhere / and otherwise.”

In a way, Garland is a contemporary Metaphysical poet, and indeed he alludes to Andrew Marvell while keeping vigil in “What’s Left For You To Say?”:

this slag of earthly light, this world
enough and time to watch the one
you’ve loved the longest raft away.

Alongside his preoccupation with mortality, love, and religion, Garland’s cosmic vision encompasses both the galactic and the infinitesimal, the “300 million worlds / in the habitable zones of sunlike stars” and the “outer shell of the carbon atom.” Grit as a motif resurfaces throughout Into the Good World Again, a grit connected to both the small life forms that often operate in darkness (worms, zebra mussels, crayfish, morels) and to the “grit of the ongoing” in the human world, where change and suffering “may be the Bible.”

Time in this book is elastic and nonlinear, compressed to a mere blink (an image Garland uses in several poems) and infinitely expansive. It is destructive and consoling at once, since it softens jagged shards into “the rounded shape of the shining world.” Each human life contains ongoing pasts—and Garland’s own memories are conjured with extraordinary cinematic clarity in poems such as “Morels,” which uses mushroom imagery to link the shape of the now-dead elms of mid-century America, the atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, and the “small dark churches” with “convoluted steeples” of morels writhing in a pan.

Garland’s vivid evocations of place and time sometimes resemble those of Dylan Thomas; he works with controlled use of alliteration and judiciously chosen line breaks:

But there was no crossing the river without dead-
dragging home behind—caved-in creekbank,
brick thick Bible, the habit
of hunkering in the presence
of whatever glittered godlike and won.

His style is notable for a lucid musicality that feels hard-won, achieved by distillation. Fittingly, he lives in a city named Eau Claire (“clear water”), and his writing is similarly deep and crystalline, returning again and again to light, water, bedrock. The tone is typically controlled but illuminated now and again by glimpses of gorgeous lyricism: “Kingfishers, like exiled gods, / patrol the varieties of glitter”; “the landscape shook loose like a ribbon”; “light / through the windows was briefly honey.” There are also flashes of humor, as when Garland notices his peers’ aging skin “randomly splotched and riddled / as if scrawled by a drunken cartographer” or the mouse in his trailer who every night “climbed his sink pipe, / and sank his teeth into the soap.”

The closing couplet in “Ocracoke” encapsulates Into the Good World Again: “The deeper the listening, / the richer the world.” We are fortunate indeed that Garland is listening.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left

Robyn Hitchcock
Akashic Books ($26.95)

by Frank Randall

Some lifetimes are marked in music rather than time, where the pivotal moments are forever linked to a chance encounter with a particular song. The revelation of hearing Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis on the same cassette copy of Dick Clark 20 Years of Rock and Roll. The summer you spent your birthday card cash on a cutout bin copy of Let It Be, reckoning with the meaning of “A New Phase Beatles Album.” The pressure-packed week your older sister’s boyfriend loaned you both Bridge of Sighs and Are You Experienced and asked you to choose between Trower or Hendrix—because clearly, your answer would reveal the essence of your being.

My senior year in college, I wrangled a part-time gig at the town’s only record store, and the various employees (mostly other students) would take turns providing the soundtrack to our shifts. One employee had a record so rare the store had no copies for sale. It was a far-flung import that had somehow made its way to our shores, and on a good day, she would bring it to work to play. This was a mostly acoustic, introspective music, not quite belonging to any one genre; it used a language unlike any I had heard before, with lyrics sung in a British accent that cut new paths through the sonic landscape. It sounded like it was recorded behind the singer’s bedroom door, where I did my own hopeful strumming. Personal and peculiar—and absolutely essential—it was I Often Dream of Trains by English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. I begged my coworker to let me borrow it for a weekend so I could make my own cassette copy. She agreed, but only after I swore an oath to let no harm come to this precious musical testament.

Nearly forty years and many acclaimed albums, paintings, films, videos, stage digressions, liner notes, and comic strips later, Hitchcock has pulled a marvelous and relentlessly inventive memoir from his creative well. 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, focuses on the unforgettable moment in time when the latest release from the Beatles was the most important thing on earth—next to, of course, the latest release from the keeper of the keys to the universe, Bob Dylan. For an impressionable young person, new music had meaning like never before, and it was changing at an unfathomable, exhilarating speed. As Hitchcock recalls about first hearing “Strawberry Fields Forever”: “The Beatles are developing so fast, and yet, because my friends and I are developing too, this seems only natural.”

Hitchcock’s journey begins in pre-revolutionary fashion with him passing his teenage Sundays in the family driveway, wheeling a transistor radio around in his little sister’s doll carriage and listening to the latest hits on BBC’s Pick of the Pops. His move from a reasonably normal family home to the private Winchester College boarding school proves as unsettling as one might imagine for a boy of thirteen, but it’s a timely immersion into a new universe for a young introvert ready to embrace new sounds.

Limiting his coming-of-age story to a single year could have produced unreasonably narrow results, but Hitchcock uses this focus to his benefit, introducing us to the academic tradition and psychedelic ether in which his personality coalesced. His observations of key moments are alternatingly transportive (“Incense caresses the air, while John Coltrane’ s saxophone plays from one speaker and Hendrix’s guitar from another”), moving (“Occasionally, I still destroy my favorite things . . . and I still don’t know why”) and revelatory (“And I will become a songwriter. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ hooks me, ‘Desolation Row’ pulls me in, and ‘Visions of Johanna’ . . . more subtle, more engulfing: it becomes me.”).

By late spring, the Holy Grail of Highway 61 Revisited gives way to the long-awaited arrival of the Beatles’ most secretive recordings to date, the era-defining Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hitchcock’s crooked path through boarding school involves the influence of unforgettable schoolmates and tragicomic staffers, unexpected encounters with groundbreaking musician and producer Brian Eno and dream cameos by Bob Dylan, Donovan, and other colorful icons. As in his songs, he makes room for fictional sojourns, where the rules of strict biography are gleefully abandoned in favor of dream play and teenage fantasy—a fitting device to convey the convergence and emergence of young lives in 1967.

Like the best of creative memoirs, Hitchcock’s account helps describe how the simple and strange events in a young life turn out to become culture itself, seeding the history we all assume occurred without the assistance of countless anonymous players. For instance, despite having encountered dozens of references to the notorious Boxing Day broadcast of the Beatles’ film Magical Mystery Tour, here we finally have an eyewitness account that it wasn’t that bad a show after all.

We certainly don’t need a book from every musician wrestling with their status as a “cult artist,” but Hitchcock’s expansive coming-of-age tale effectively combines the intangible magic of the 1960s with actual events that help illuminate his work. For example, Hitchcock has always made room for vividly drawn water creatures in his songs, so to learn that his childhood home had a river running adjacent helps explain the frequent presence of these animals in his lyrics; why not make a song about your pet crayfish? Or the druids that you know dance among the ancient circle of trees on the hill overlooking your school? Or the UFOs that have collected your schoolmate along with his cheese? (Spoiler alert: This last was only a temporary and relatively harmless abduction.)

While often (and fairly) categorized as psychedelia-inspired, Hitchcock’s songs have never been limited to a particular genre. They careen from topical to romantic to surreal, and his knack for inviting absurd characters and fantastic situations into his music is on full display in 1967 as well. His inventive stage banter, rich with humor and showcasing his unique talent for the well-placed non-sequitur, has made his storytelling as delightful as his music over the years, and here it makes a seamless transition to the written page. Like any performer worth his salt, Hitchcock leaves us wanting more when he finally exits the stage of this memoir. He takes care not to burden us with unnecessary verses, nor does he commit the mortal sin of repeating the bridge, closing his micro-history with a strong chorus and tidy epilogue. The appreciative audience sends him off with well-deserved applause, lighters raised, hoping for an encore.

1967 is one of the epochal years that make us who we are, responsible for countless ripples of influence across culture. There are other such years, of course: Some musicians might need to write a book about 1976 with New York City as the setting, or coming of age in Minneapolis in 1984. But Hitchcock is a proud flag-bearer of 1967, revealing that annum to be as unrepeatable and unique as the author himself. In 1967, Hitchcock deftly captures the mercurial spirit of the time, and his luminous prose shows he’s not only a singular maker of music, but has been a secret writer of books all along.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

Diary of a String

Mark Francis Johnson
Spiral Editions ($18)

by Eric Tyler Benick

“Je est un autre” wrote Rimbaud, famously suggesting the writer’s inherent split as well as the larger aporia of selfhood-as-construct. It’s a split that is reflected in the literary reader: “Many readings are perverse,” Barthes claims in The Pleasure of the Text, “implying a split, a cleavage.” Barthes continues to explain that this cleavage rests in the paradox of literacy to know and unknow simultaneously, to both familiarize and estrange. Yet if reader and writer are doubles, and if both are cleaved not only in their solitary interaction with the material but in their spectral engagement with an other through the material, the bodies of literacy begin to fractal quickly.

In Mark Francis Johnson’s new poetry collection Diary of a String, the lyrical I is obfuscated not only by the relational estrangement housed in the act of writing but also in the quotidian estrangements of labor. In “Woody Excrescences,” Johnson writes, “What all is missing // and I have forgotten my life, / it.” Here, the poet explores a double loss (both missing and forgetting) as well as the inaccessible subsistence of this “it.”

As the Johnson lines quoted above might suggest, the pronouns used in Diary of a String are rhizomatic and irresolute. Just as Rimbaud’s I is an other, the poet’s selves show up in the conglomerate experiences of the outer: “‘They’ is clearly the voice of self-love,” he writes in “Also and Too.” By inverting the impressions of the pronoun, Johnson shows that the “inner life” is actually a breezy dialectic of further estrangements. He closes this section with an attentive apostrophe: “O sensitive parrot aware you / never encountered language.”

It’s a key point: Ecological wonders, subject to destruction by the Anthropocene, are spared its logocentric tragedies. In contrast, we know at this very moment there are microplastics in our oceans, intestines, and genitals, yet the shock of this knowledge is readily absorbed by language rather than by our actions. Johnson’s inverted pronouns and attention to the outer unfold this order of things; the aforementioned parrot is both “aware” and saved by its own illiteracy—not from death, because death is certain, but from suffering the slow termination of value we are daily subjected to, which we render and materialize through language.

Diary of a String is wrought by these questions. In “Date of Last Attack,” Johnson writes that “every hemorrhoid was first an idea,” which brilliantly takes the material effect of stress and strain and dematerializes it. We are no longer talking about the hard facts of the body but about the imperious design of language to impersonate experience. If Stein’s “rose is a rose is a rose” tautology works to unify word and object, Johnson’s ideated hemorrhoid exploits a more painful aspect to the realization that reality inheres in naming: Language is neither empirical nor consistent, and yet our understanding depends on it. The section ends with another shift to the exterior: “Take new little // fishes, destitute upon arrival no / recollection of offense. O fishes! // your use is to teach us / a fish is better off never / encountering its troubles.”

Interestingly, in this context “destitution” would appear to be more of an asset than a lack. The fish’s instructive value is expressed by its freedom from language, which constitutes a paradox: The fish is illiterate yet elocutes a model existence through that illiteracy. Note also how the notion of “encounter” is rooted in logocentric failure. Would many of us even notice the hemorrhoid without its semiotics, or does their very creation offer us access to an interiority that the hemorrhoid itself is entirely estranged from (leaving aside the question of whether the hemorrhoid is separate from “us”)?

Poet Ted Rees says that Johnson’s collection contains “the palpable sickness of the plaintive.” Yes, and worse, this sickness resists clear diagnosis. It would be easy to launch a polemic against the sickness of global capitalism in light of its demands on the body, its egregious contributions to war, genocide, and climate change, its molecular infections of commodity, etc.—but we would also be fabulizing a convenient bogeyman. Still, no part of the “world” is untouched by this illness, which at times feels moribund. If Édouard Glissant is correct to say that “every poetics is a palliative for eternity,” then might we see Johnson’s poems as addressing these miasmic illnesses of modernity, a mode by which to make sense of subjugation, exploitation, and destruction? Aren’t we who reject the frameworks of capitalism forced into some kind of palliative care against the terminal diagnosis of its forces? If the Industrial Revolution marked the decline of the sublime, how might we subvert the mechanized and colonized systems of our era to nurture all that it has taken from us?

Diary of a String offers constructive ways to consider these questions. Take the poem “One Hot Afternoon”:  

Very far from
day and night

due to wind? And the next “morning” I
-a spontaneous production of the earth

;no memory
disputes this-

am requesting a transfer. It’s given,
I speedily perish,

the
spontaneous productions of the earth get rarer.

Even while shattering the spatiotemporal, Johnson still cannot shed the language of labor, a language that continuously haunts his poems. His speaker is fully uprooted as a “spontaneous production of the earth” forced into the nihilism of commerce, where even the permission to die must be sought from some arbitrary superior. This final line—one of the most affecting in the book—is our diagnostic moment, our chance to reckon with the forced obsolescence of the sublime. One might recall William Carlos Williams’s observation “The pure products of America go crazy”; they certainly have, and they are no longer pure but beaten to shit by we who are also daily beaten to shit, who in order to be beaten slightly less must beat others to shit, until absolutely no part of us (and by us, I mean everything) resembles its natural state. There is no option of return, which anyway would present its own ethical problems.

So yes, “the / spontaneous productions of the earth get rarer,” and they will continue to do so until our collective illness is no longer tenable, our palliative efforts futile—until, as Williams’s “To Elsie” portends, there is “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car.” Meanwhile, books like Diary of a String make a laudable effort to focus our attention and our will on this dilemma.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

I Became Synonymous with Leaving: An Interview with Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones

by Erik Noonan

In her debut work of creative nonfiction, The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History (Rose Metal Press, $15.95), poet Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones takes the reader on a trip into two of the oldest forms of art—history and lyric—and combines them in a new way. The book’s subtitle might even describe a genre of its own, one that asks: What if your personal history weren’t only yours, but other people’s too?

The element missing from history, the self, is what the lyric is all about—even though lyric isn’t really any more personal than history. After all, the most intimate areas of life aren’t ours alone, but are experienced by many in ways that seem nearly universal. And yet the lyric creates a space for emotion and imagination, as history typically doesn’t. For example, when the poet Sappho writes, “If I look at you even for a moment, / my tongue stops moving and I can’t speak anymore,” whose gaze is it that looks back at the reader? The image is singular, but it’s no longer specific.

The Hurricane Book is therefore about Acevedo-Quiñones’s life, but it’s also about the lives of her forebears and family members, along with the history, politics, and culture of Puerto Rico. The book is organized in six parts, all named for hurricanes that struck the island. Each of the first three parts opens with a family tree, followed by a section titled “Historical Notes”; in the next three parts, the family trees are absent. The first three parts present bits of lore, memories, and hearsay about elder family members, while the rest present a fragmentary account of the author’s childhood, adolescence, and entry into adulthood. The Historical Notes consist of statistics and dates, but they are arranged so as to trace Puerto Rico’s trajectory from Spanish colony to United States commonwealth. The data themselves focus on disenfranchisement, the unequal share of resources, cycles of exploitation and neglect, insults in the media, and mass emigration—but also on the concomitant popular movements to resist and campaign either for statehood or independence and self-rule.

The structure of The Hurricane Book thus links Puerto Rico’s destiny and the author’s. The hurricanes serve as a metaphor for the tempestuous living conditions of the Puerto Rican people, and the conditions of the author as an instance of that populace (“a facsimile of a facsimile of a facsimile,” as Acevedo-Quiñones says). Storms are often used to convey meaning in literature—readers might recall Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Montale’s The Storm and Other Poems, the thunderclap in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or the meteorological opening lines of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities—and here they are an especially apt figure for Acevedo-Quiñones’s twenties. She spent these years “acting out scenes” in which “the drinking and the pills and the not eating” could only drag out “the feeling that I am not a good enough reason to get healthy.” As she reaches “an understanding that we all do what we can to hold still in the thrashing,” her recovery comes closer to the center of her being than her malaise ever did.

The style of Acevedo-Quiñones’s autobiographical sections is laconic in the extreme; one can feel the burden of history in every utterance, what it costs the speaker of so many historical lines about her community to say a few lyrical lines on her own behalf. “Like many people in their early twenties who have time to examine their feelings, I was confused and afraid,” Acevedo-Quiñones writes, and pretty much leaves it at that. Her direct prose offers a bracing sort of pleasure, although there are poetic flourishes as well—“If I was a house, I was a crumbling one, gothic-style, with a woman in the attic waiting to set fire to it all”—and when Acevedo-Quiñones writes in verse in The Hurricane Book, the emotions strike with gale force:

did you wonder
as you rocked me sleepless
through the ache
in indefinite darkness
what good a storm window was
when the rain came from inside

Acevedo-Quiñones received an MFA from Stony Brook University in 2019; in 2021, her poetry chapbook Bedroom Pop was published by dancing girl press, and in 2022, she was awarded a Letras Boricuas Fellowship by the Flamboyán Arts Fund and the Mellon Foundation. She lives in Upstate New York; we conducted this interview on Halloween of 2023, shortly after The Hurricane Book was released.

Erik Noonan: How are things going, Claudia?

Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones: I work a nine-to-five job laying out puzzles and Highlights magazines. I haven’t talked to anyone all day. I do book events, where I talk about things that frighten me. Then I’m back to Farting Cats, Volume Six. It’s a little jarring.

EN: Hopefully it will be less jarring to talk about The Hurricane Book. In the Author’s Note, you tell us that prose didn’t come easily to you. Your book is “a lyric history” but the language is exact, and the style is plain.

CA-Q: Right—I shy away from the figurative. I’m a literal person; I actually didn’t want “lyric” in the title, but the publisher wanted the subtitle to be “a history,” and because I felt uncomfortable with that—I’m not a historian, I’m not a journalist, I don’t know anything—they told me we could call it “a lyric history,” since there are poems in the book. That’s why those words are there.

EN: The paragraphs in this book are small, hard, and clear—like the diamonds your Beba hid from your father so that a nurse could put them in your ears after you were born. The form of your book reflects the facets of your life.

CA-Q: The only thing I was sure of when I started writing this was that I wanted it to be as direct and unadorned as possible. It ended up being formatted the way it is because I built on it. I actually started it in 2009 as a fictionalized version of my ancestors’ immigration from Spain in the 1600s. Then in graduate school I wrote a series of hurricane poems. Later I took a workshop where we only wrote fragments; my fragments ended up being connected to the hurricane poems because all I could think about was hurricanes.

Later that year (2017), I started writing the book in earnest. I didn’t intend it to look a certain way, and I didn’t have a final structure until shortly before it was published. I printed everything out and laid it out on the ground and saw how the pieces fit together. The bullet points at the beginning of each section didn’t come about until the end.

I felt uncomfortable calling the first draft a memoir, a biography, or a history. The only thing that kept me grounded was my habit of contextualizing everything I write—I’m insecure and anxious by nature, and I feel as if I need to justify everything. When there’s no truth in what I write that involves other people, then at least I can give you some information. If you don’t get anything else out of the book, or if you think I’m a liar, then you know that much is true. It wasn’t an aesthetic move. It was a matter of covering my tracks. I didn’t embellish.

EN: You explore your relationships with your uncles, father, and grandfather; later in the book, the sections “Keepsakes” and “Passenger Seat” deal with your mother. These parts show you at your most vulnerable. What was it like to write them?

CA-Q: Those two sections were the most difficult to write. My mother is the only person in the book I have a relationship with; the others are dead or I’m estranged from them. My relationship with my mother has been untraditional. I’ve always felt a sense of responsibility towards her, which is common among children of parents with substance abuse and mental health issues. It felt necessary for me to write about because it shapes who I am. But I was also trying to protect her.

While I was writing the autobiographical fragments, I struggled with my conflicting needs: to say and not say. Keeping secrets and staying quiet about certain things has protected me and others. I wrote down everything I knew, then edited. There are things I didn’t keep because I didn’t think they were necessary; it would have been cheap to use them. But I still revealed a lot, and that was difficult, because I didn’t talk to any close family members or friends about this stuff. My mother is the only person I had serious conversations with as I was writing: I asked her about her experience in mental institutions, and I asked her about her relationship with my father. Even though she gave me permission to write about these things, I don’t think she’s aware of how much detail is in the book, or how much I left out. I’m not sure how that comes across to her.

So I’m glad you pointed out those sections as seeming more vulnerable; they felt different as I wrote them. It feels strange to be so naked and concrete; I don’t have poetry to protect me. In a poem you can be direct and autobiographical, and people will still react as if the “I” of the poem were a convention—“the speaker,” a character, rather than you yourself. There’s something about the lines and stanzas in a poem that protects the writer. The person who wrote this book—I don’t know her. I don’t think I could do this again.

EN: Do you think the truth-telling in The Hurricane Book will have consequences for you?

CA-Q: I agonized over it for three years, ever since Rose Metal Press picked up the book. The manuscript I sent them was actually fifty pages shorter; I’d already taken out a lot of the material they asked me to add.

EN: Did they know?

CA-Q: No, but they wanted all the things I’d removed.

EN: They wanted you to trust your instincts.

CA-Q: Right, and that’s cool. It was scary. Most of the conversations I have about this book are focused on fear—I’m afraid of what people I’m no longer in touch with will say or do. But a lot of this process has been a matter of relinquishing control; I can’t decide how other people feel about it. I can’t manage what they do or dictate what they say. Some of my family members are writers, columnists, people who have a platform, and I have no idea how they’ll react. I’m confident I strove to be as generous and honest as I could. I hope I’m portraying people, not good people or bad people.

EN: So much for fear. What about courage?

CA-Q: I dedicated the book to my grandparents and my mother, and I included the saying con las tripas en la mano, which is something my grandpa used to say. The literal translation is with my guts in my hand. Whenever I was nervous about speaking in public, or anything scary I had to do, he would say, “Do it with your guts in your hand.” Meaning even if your innards are spilling out, keep going. That’s courage.

EN: You started life as a hydrophobe.

CA-Q: Yes. Now I love water.

EN: At the conclusion of a section about childhood, your stepmother is bathing you, and she says, “You’re fine, water”—

CA-Q: —“won’t kill you.” 

EN: It’s powerful.

CA-Q: Stopping with no explanation gives it a certain weight, even if I don’t mean anything else.

EN: If your family members talked to you about the book, what would they say?

CA-Q: I would expect the ghost of my grandfather to ask me about royalties and say he doesn’t care about the rest. “What did you get paid for the job?”

My grandmother would make sure the names had been changed, and she would buy ten copies, and not read it, which I would be grateful for.

I can see my father writing a long essay to tell his side of the story and contest what I’ve set down. It’s hard to imagine. Today is Halloween; I feel like I’m trying to be a medium that can channel the living, because I haven’t involved them in the process.

EN: You write, “Secrets are our family members too.” What’s the opposite of a secret?

CA-Q: Common lived experience. Whatever is the case on the surface. No, I can provide a more articulate answer: I think the opposite of secrecy consists in the everyday. What you count on, what you live with. It’s knowing who a person is, the way their shoes sound, the cadence of their steps. Knowing what someone’s going to cook that day. It’s the expected, what doesn’t surprise us. The happiest periods in my life have been the ones when nothing took me by surprise. Secrets were all around, but I wasn’t aware things were hidden from me. I don’t come from a place where we talk about what bothers us.

I don’t know. I’m speaking to you right now, but I’m in my grandmother’s closet. That’s what I’m picturing.

EN: What else is in there?

CA-Q: Photo albums, wigs, pearls, and sewing kits.

EN: Did you take any of those with you?

CA-Q: I did not. My cousin got them. I got a lot of the photos, though.

EN: You write “A father is a legend.” [41] What is a mother?

CA-Q: A mother is a legend too, but instead of Odysseus, she’s Penelope. She stays behind, fends off the suitors, and takes care of the child, who also wants to leave. She does all this while working at her loom. They’re both legends, but they represent different archetypes.

EN: As a younger person, you liked Operation Ivy and Bright Eyes. Who else?

CA-Q: I went to punk shows and became friends with my stepbrother’s friends, who were into music and played in bands. They introduced me to a lot. That was the time of Dashboard Confessional, Yo La Tengo, Fiona, Tori, and PJ. Lilith Fair vibes. Also Iggy Pop and Television. I still love them. I moved to New York because I watched a documentary about 1977 that featured Television and I thought their  music was incredible, I’d never heard anything like it. They’re still one of my favorites to play on the jukebox, because they have fourteen-minute songs.

EN: How about poets?

CA-Q: Elizabeth Bishop. She only published a hundred poems; I can relate to playing your cards close to your chest. Louise Glück. Natalie Diaz. I love economy, control, and space.

EN: Do you read Puerto Rican poets?

CA-Q: I’ve been wanting to, because I feel removed from Puerto Rican literature—I’m stuck in the Nuyorican Poets Café. Most of the Puerto Rican authors I think about are the ones I read in school. I wasn’t thinking about them as I was writing this book; they’ve come to me after the fact. When Hurricane Maria passed through, my cousin sent me books by Puerto Rican authors—my uncle helps run a press, and I know indie presses are publishing a lot there—but I’m not very aware of what’s going on right now.  I’m getting back into it, but I feel like I should have been doing this the whole time. I do think Puerto Rican poetry seeps into all aspects of my life as a reader and writer.

EN: Do immigrants give their culture to their children, or does it get lost?

CA-Q: I think the second generation is different. I don’t have children, so I’m experiencing the phenomenon that second generation kids undergo: trying to regain, or get reacquainted with, certain aspects of their parents’ culture. You see people who grew up in homes where mainly English was spoken saying later in life, “Wait, I’m also from this other place.” They reclaim parts of themselves that their parents didn’t—how do you say it?—inculcar.

EN: Inculcate. I think it’s a cognate.

CA-Q: Yes, inculcate. So a lot of this experience is a matter of trying to bridge a gap. There’s a difference between people who put a barrier between themselves and the place they’re from because they want to, and those who have no choice, who grow up in the next generation. This can be especially confusing when one is Puerto Rican, because technically I’m not an immigrant—geographically I am, but I’m a U.S. citizen. My leaving the island means I can vote in a presidential election, whereas I couldn’t when I lived there. I can now develop the half of myself that liked Operation Ivy and Bright Eyes. I’m all over the place with this.

EN: Maybe “all over the place” is the place to be. The Hurricane Book deals with Puerto Rican people’s views on the question of independence. Did you think about invisibility while you were writing it?

CA-Q: Yes, a lot. My job was to bring to light the things I had kept hidden, as well as aspects of the relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico that I was not even familiar with because of the barrier I put between myself and the island, and the barrier that stands between the U.S. media and the Puerto Rican media, and the things that are hidden from Puerto Ricans by the Puerto Rican government and the Puerto Rican media. There are all these layers, all these degrees, of invisibility.

As I wrote this book, I realized I was in the dark about so much—something as simple as the names of five Puerto Rican poets working right now. I don’t know what’s going on on the island, and I don’t know if it’s because of the geographical distance, but I want to find out. There’s a part of me that’s still there, and I don’t want to let it go.

I’ve also been thinking about how invisibility has helped the status quo—how it has kept communities in need from receiving aid in a timely manner, or receiving aid at all. The fact that water and food sat abandoned in a field because no one knew where to send them; the fact that people had to write “help me” on their roofs because there was no way for them to go anywhere; the fact that an island measuring a hundred miles by thirty-five miles couldn’t get electricity for a year—all this is horrifying.

If invisibility weren’t so essential, things might have turned out differently. I recently saw pictures of the Puerto Rican governor laughing as he looked at a parking lot full of trucks loaded with bodies being taken to the morgue, cracking jokes about how the corpses smelled . . .  and this is while he was claiming that not a lot of people had died. If more people had seen those pictures, maybe they would have voted for the progressive candidate. But that’s the governor of Puerto Rico, a Republican. Most of Puerto Rico is Republican, which is crazy, because they can’t vote for the president, and their one representative can’t either. 

EN: You write, “I became synonymous with leaving.” [56] What would be the antonym?

CA-Q: Good. I would be a good daughter, a good citizen, a good granddaughter. My leaving was a betrayal, even though my family was supportive of my move to the States.

EN: Is it really called vendepatria? Did your father say that to you seriously?

CA-Q: Yes. It was a judgment, and it was a joke. But now the number of people I speak to in Spanish is limited to one, because of the barriers I’ve put between me and one side of my family. Here in the United States I have Puerto Rican friends, but a lot of them speak Spanglish. I’ve lost language every single day, and I don’t feel capable of writing in Spanish, because I spent so much of my early years in the U.S. trying to assimilate, trying to change the way I wrote.

Writing in Spanish is different. My high school essays and short stories were florid, baroque; there was a music to them. I would take my time. I snapped out of it when I got here, however, so I’ve been writing this way for half my life now. I don’t even dream in Spanish anymore. No one tells me it’s shameful, but that’s the way I feel. I was a different person back then. Plus, I’m by myself. It would be different if I had moved here with a family—my mother, both parents, or a sibling. My sister moved to the United States and she and I speak English, even though she doesn’t speak English with her family.

EN: It seems like there’s more opportunity to publish multilingual writing these days.

CA-Q: There’s so much opportunity. I’m trying to figure out why I don’t write in Spanish. What am I afraid of? Is it that I think I’m not allowed, that I’ve lost the privilege? This is a fight I’m having with myself. I am speaking the language of the colonizer, the people who invaded, but in this way I resemble my grandfather; he was in the nationalist party, but he was also in the U.S. Army. We live a contradiction. It’s a very strange experience, because you have access to both. It’s hard to live in both.

EN: Some writers who use different languages respect writers who use English. Some oppose English, and/or quit using English, and switch to their first language. Or all of these, or none.

CA-Q: I don’t know if I can write in Spanish the way I do in English. I haven’t tried. But life is long.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024

The Swans of Harlem

Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History

Karen Valby
Pantheon ($29)

by Charles Green

Karen Valby’s compelling new history tells the forgotten story of Dance Theatre of Harlem, a Black ballet company that gave dancers of color the opportunity to perform and star when most doors in the industry were closed to them. Formed in 1968 by Arthur Mitchell after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the company was soon performing around the world, playing before Queen Elizabeth II and David Bowie and meeting celebrities like Mick Jagger. Celebrated as groundbreaking dancers at the time, DTH is not widely known today. During the pandemic, five of the company’s founding ballerinas reunited for regular Zoom sessions to reminisce and share their legacy with the world; Valby’s book compiles their stories.

Although all five dancers shared a love for ballet, each came from different backgrounds. Lydia Abarca grew up in the New York housing projects, having abandoned any hopes of actually performing. Sheila Rohan, from Staten Island, initially lied about her age (she was twenty-eight) and claimed she had no children in order to join the company; when she finally told Mitchell, he gave her a slight raise and was more lenient if she showed up late. Gayle McKinney-Griffith, the daughter of a mechanical engineer, grew up in suburban Connecticut; she would later become the company’s ballet mistress. Marcia Sells was from an elite Black community in Cincinnati whose family hosted DTH when they were on tour. Karlya Shelton-Benjamin, the only Black dancer in the Colorado Concert Ballet, was inspired to join DTH after seeing Abarca on the cover of Dance Magazine.

These ballerinas worked incredibly hard both on and off-stage. On tour, they would have to unload their own equipment from the bus and often prepared makeshift stages by pouring soda on the floors to make them sticky. They learned how to dye their ballet shoes and tights brown, experimenting to find shades that suited each of them.

Mitchell was a fiercely demanding personality, pushing the dancers to perfection; he was also verbally abusive, frequently berating the dancers about their weight. On one tour, he sniffed at each dancers’ hotel room door to tell who was baking their complimentary pastries. He also drove away board members and advisors who dared suggest improvements to his vision; despite his talent and ambition, he was his own worst enemy. Yet Mitchell worked well with children, letting the neighborhood kids take lessons in their street clothes, showing them how dance techniques could help them jump higher in basketball, and breaking down street dances into ballet moves.

Valby goes into great detail about the five dancers, even presenting entire chapters in their own words. Abarca, however, seems to be the main character of the book. It makes sense, as she was the “star” of DTH and her story is one of the most dramatic. After leaving the company, she taught Michael Jackson the moves for the movie version of The Wiz; following her dance career, she married and took administrative jobs, falling into alcoholism before her daughter helped her back to sobriety. Indeed, The Swans of Harlem begins with Abarca’s granddaughter confused after a school presentation where classmates honored current ballet star Misty Copeland, wondering if the stories she had heard about her grandmother’s pioneering performances were true. By spending so much time on Abarca, the book almost unwillingly turns her into a Copeland figure, a lone history-making woman, whereas the dancers of DTH shaped history as a group.

The bond between these women, even decades later, is powerful to witness. In several Zoom sessions, Abarca shares deeply personal stories, including of having an abortion in 1968 and of Mitchell once kissing her after an event. When the others are asked if they felt resentment for Abarca getting so many of the lead roles and being Mitchell’s clear favorite, they defend her, knowing it was not her intention to steal their thunder. There is also frank acknowledgement that Mitchell preferred lighter-skinned and thinner dancers; even while he wanted to promote and celebrate Black dancers, he was influenced by traditional white ballet.

In 2008, DTH went on hiatus for five years due to financial difficulties. During this time, publicity heightened around Misty Copeland as a groundbreaking Black ballerina, which contributed to the company becoming forgotten. (The dancers and Copeland meet at several events, and while Copeland gratefully acknowledges them and the dancers are gracious about her stardom, some awkwardness and resentment is evident.) The five dancers contemplate other reasons for their erasure as well, noting the tendency many women have to downplay their talents and how Mitchell encouraged them to consider their individual accomplishments as the company’s.

Well-researched and written with an easy, flowing style, The Swans of Harlem gives a platform to these talented women who have been hidden for too long. It also raises questions about race, gender, and publicity in the arts, and reminds us that even now, few dancers of color belong to U.S. ballet companies.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2024 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2024