Donald Hall
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($22)

by James Naiden

This is Donald Hall’s sixteenth collection of poems in six decades, although he has also published books of prose—including three memoirs—and edited several anthologies. A graduate of both Harvard and Oxford, Hall’s education prepared him well for a notable career as a poet, and that he has had. Born in 1928, he has also been an editor and interviewer (most notably at Paris Review) as well as an interviewee, questioned by Peter Stitt for Paris Review in 1991, and more recently by Garrison Keillor on Minnesota Public Radio, sitting beside Robert Bly, Hall’s fellow poet and lifelong friend. Hall has also been an academic, the longest stint at the University of Michigan, where he met Jane Kenyon, who became one of his most gifted students and his future wife.

Hall’s poems resonate with joy and sadness, and also detached self-skewering—for example, as a widower in the decade and a half since Kenyon’s death from leukemia, he has produced rueful social commentary in “Ric’s Progress,” a long poem in free verse worked over for twenty-five years. This is a near-ribald narrative of a protaganist and his succession of significant others, one with the improbable name of Twosie, and finally Molly with whom he is monogamous and happy, although no longer young. Excessive alcohol consumption, bad tempers, vandalism, adultery, and other unfortunate business are all motifs of “Ric’s Progress,” as can be seen in these four illustrative lines:

For some, adultery
peppered the casserole cookery of middle youth.
Or at least it plotted the day; or at least its danger
And sport attested: We are alive.

While this long poem reads well, neither Ric nor any of his successive amours evoke much empathy. Hall is much better in shorter poems. For example, “River” (originally published in The New Yorker) is a lucid ghazal fraught in tercets of terrible beauty:

In a dream this August night in St. Petersburg,
I see the years lapse like Cyrillic letters
into the calm and receptive waters of the Neva.

When I was twelve years old in Connecticut,
helmeted soldiers sieging in acres of snow
surrounded Leningrad and the implacable Neva.

They warmed their hands and jackbooted feet
over the golden ashes of Catherine’s Palace
inland from the former St. Petersburg’s Neva.

Home from eighth grade I read in Life how trucks
slipped over frozen Lake Ladoga into the city
and starvation ebbed by the enduring Neva.

Poems such as this do not spring from mere reading, but from the inscape of traveling and from imbibing, then distilling, one’s own life in perspective.

The title poem, describing a room in his ancestors’ New Hampshire farmhouse where the poet has lived year-long for four decades, has a special vibrancy, the syntax seemingly effortless—although from Hall’s admitted work habits, we know that much revision and tinkering go into a poem long after a first draft is achieved. Such torque is no doubt evident in the first strophe of “The Back Chamber”:

Here is the house’s genius: pram and bedstead,
Heart-shaped Valentine candy
Boxes, oil lamps, a captain’s chair,
And Ben Keneston’s underwear,
A century ago
Folded away in case it came in handy,
By prudent family dead.

Finally, if the poet can recover from grief and other misfortunes long enough to laugh at himself, he also pokes fun at conventions. For instance, does one have to be “certified” in order to be a good poet? Here is the entirety of “Creative Writing”:

Translating Virgil, eighty lines a day,
Keats never did pick up his MFA.

The Back Chamber has unexpected insights, charms, droll observations, self-mockery, and well-earned wisdom. Hall is a serious writer, yes, but he has learned not to take himself too seriously—a view many a younger artist might embrace.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

VERGES & VIVISECTIONS
j/j hastain
Knives, Forks & Spoons Press (£14)

STORAGE CASE
John Martone
Otoliths ($24.95)

by Jay Besemer

It’s a good time for visual poetry. The genre is expanding its influence through an increase in practitioners, and innovative composition methods are constantly being discovered and adapted. Publication technologies have advanced and become mainstreamed for more poets and publishers interested in mixed-genre work. Some of the factors that used to limit the large-scale dissemination of visual work (color printing costs for image-based poetry, for example) are circumvented or minimized by the online environment and the accessibility of desktop publishing software. Not only does technology come into play in the production and publication processes, it also provides a field for complex and fertile poetic association. For visual poetry especially, the conceptual coordinates of Self, Spirit, Body, and Techne can manifest in unexpected, innovative explorations that lead audiences to new insights of their own.

A visual poem cannot be reduced to a single, standardized interpretation. The textual and pictorial elements (and the implied aural elements) are equally necessary to a full reading of the piece. Although it is possible for audiences to engage the elements of some visual poems separately, to do so would yield a very different experience from that gained by taking the piece as a whole. This is a good thing, because it exponentially increases the potential impact of any one poem. This multidimensional capacity allows visual poetry to be a particularly suitable environment for grappling with the spiritual. In a 2007 essay introducing the catalogue for an exhibition of visual poetry from the Avant Garde Poetry Collection of the Ohio State University Libraries, John M. Bennett suggests that “visual poetry is especially useful for dealing with and presenting this multivalent/multiconscious experience of the world.” If a spiritual experience is “multiconscious,” visual poetry has room for it.

Rather than discussing the emotional impact of the spiritual, or attempting to describe a spiritual experience, some visual poets are able to transmit a spiritual experience directly to the viewer through image and text. Both John Martone and j/j hastain use combinations of text (or text fragments) and image (or image fragments) to craft poems with an undeniable spiritual turn. Yet one cannot say that their work is “about” spirituality or emphasizes a subjective, “airy” spiritual experience over the daily work of living an engaged life. Spiritual ways of knowing are grounded in a physicality that works on a number of levels. Because the poems of both authors are also physical objects—autonomous creations apart from and a part of their books—there is a resonance between the “body” and the “spirit” of each piece (as there is for their authors and audiences). The inherent multivalence of the medium also provides an even greater range on which the works can interact with one another.

The pieces in j/j hastain’s Verges & Vivisections are composed of abstract photographs taken by the author, with strips of original text superimposed upon each image. Occasionally the visual elements are cut and recombined through collage, but the text remains linear. Progressing through the book is a bit like walking through a chapel or a conservatory whose walls are made of stained glass. At once luminous and grounded, ecstatic and serene, these untitled poems seem dimensionally larger than the space they occupy on the page. This format is easily able to contain and convey the complex information hastain desires to present to reader-viewers. Often, this involves the evocation of spiritual themes through earth-centric imagery/text. Some pieces are aided by the presence of a narrator specifically addressing an imagined audience. For example, the poem on page 57 places the following text upon a seductive background of light and dark vegetable whorls:

it matters that it was only
in the moments and places which had no map
that I finally felt
kindred to
earth

Although it is by no means clear who the “I” refers to, its presence in the text places the audience closer to the author than is possible for Martone’s volume, as we will see.

Verges & Vivisections is deeply involved with the process, conditions and exigencies of “becoming human.” Becoming human entails forming a relationship with the spirit. It also demands a relation to earth, cosmos, death and sex—reconciling the body to that which operates within and without it. Flesh bodies meld with planetary bodies and are mapped onto spirit bodies, text bodies, bodies of thought and knowledge. Through processes of growth and change, we develop spiritual insight. This book is a busy, energetic place, crowded with lovers, monks, angels, shamans, animals, plants, gems, and hybrids. These act upon and influence one another in setting as varied as the players themselves, through alchemical and cosmic interactions, or through earthier cycles like menstruation or rot. In an inversion of the standard poetic use of personification, hastain often presents body as spirit, or in terms of spirit, rather than the other way around.

The question of the body, voice, and hand of the author is especially immediate for Verges & Vivisections. hastain is a trans/genderqueer poet whose work makes hir specifically trans embodiment a setting for spiritual and physical evolution. In some ways this collection shares some elements with more traditional poetries in which the presence of the poet is immediately and powerfully felt—the narrator’s “I” is one example. However, the embodied self, though present, is not emphasized. This is not a book about identity. The self in hastain’s work is plural, many-throated, difficult to contain in one pronoun. If the actual body is in flux—more malleable than often assumed—what insight does it offer the spirit? To those for whom the spirit is something eternal, the tension here can be especially compelling.

In John Martone’s Storage Case, the author’s presence is not invoked or implied through the the text. The collection is divided into three smaller books, each bearing its own dedication. In a way, the named dedicants provide the only direct, overt evidence of the author’s presence, albeit through a sort of associative back door. This presents a contrast not only with hastain’s collection but with Martone’s own text-only works—like his haiku and related forms—in which the embodied self and the poem are more intimately aligned. In those poems, we see the poet experiencing the world within a spiritual context, filtered through his own body’s movement through life and his surroundings. Yet in this volume, he himself (as a body, a narrator, or a character-surrogate for audiences) is absent. For example, in the grouping “1965/2010,” fully-identifiable fragments of pages from a copy of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men are included in roughly ten of the thirty-one compositions; other fragments of the same text are also present, but these do not include identifying information such as character names or famous bits of dialogue. Although it is possible that George and Lennie are adopted surrogates for Martone and/or reader-viewers, this is only one of the more obvious ways to “read” these poems. The text fragments themselves function as elements of pictorial composition, with the toasty golden hue of the aged pulp pages glowing in counterpoint to the more basic black and white of the surrounding poem elements in that section. These warm-toned shapes also resonate with the golden Buddha statue images in later sections. The choice to read the actual words in each poem as part of the intentional whole—as elements contributing to a kind of meaning—is left to the viewer and the occasion.

In Storage Case, the question of spirit is obviously harder to answer through the coordinates of body in space and words on page. Instead the key theme here is transmission. A specific type of message might also be implied here, especially when looking at this book in the context of Martone’s full body of work. Considering the Buddhist affiinities of collections like Ksana, it is plausible to associate radio transmissions with Buddhist teachings. It is said that the full benefit of a formal Buddhist teaching is only possible through direct transmission—hearing it from the teacher. Interestingly, for those who cannot take a teaching in the physical presence of the teacher, listening to a recorded teaching is acceptable—at least, it is considered to be more effective than reading a transcript of the same teaching. Looking at Storage Case in this light gives us some insight into Martone’s particular approach. Connecting the transmission of spiritual lessons with transmission of radio messages brings up a rich array of possibilities.

This connection is made most deftly in the section titled “radiograms.” Through the appealing visual metaphor that gives this grouping its title—vintage green and yellow message forms produced by the American Radio Relay League for use by amateur “ham” radio operators—we can join Martone in a sort of “what if” game. What if Buddhist teachings were sent in code over these networks? Juxtaposing pieces of the actual forms with images (or partial images) of Buddhist statues, commentary and terminology, Martone seems to suggest what this might look like. Mixing in the “dot-dash” of electromicrographed chromosomes suggests further connections between the transmission of spiritual teachings, genetic information, and other coded messages. Here is one important link between Martone’s collection and hastain’s; the latter evokes similar associations, using a kindred multivalent poetic language.

Are we “hardwired” for spiritual growth? Is the relationship between technology, identity, body and spirit even more complex than popular thought proposes? How are we to best analyze our relationships to the technologies that have become pervasive and life-changing—from within, or without? Can a spiritually rich life be lived in harmony with both nature and technology? Where does one end and the other begin? The Internet has enabled a whole range of identity-defining media, while simultaneously nurturing several poetries that go well beyond (or sidestep entirely) the expression of identity or selfhood. Perhaps this paradox is what the Internet really is—or should be—about. And what about other “wireless” technologies: tablet computers, smartphones, wi-fi and the coded software applications that drive them? How does the body/self/spirit/technology equation play out for users of these tools when personal information and physical location are potentially available to everyone from data-mining corporations to Great-Aunt Melba? A vast conversation along these lines is ongoing, in various other poetries, and in other media and contexts. But visual poets like hastain and Martone, who can confidently engage these complexities, provide a particularly valuable and fertile segment of the discussion.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

Technology, Spirit, and Embodied Self in Recent Visual Poetry 

VERGES & VIVISECTIONS
j/j hastain
Knives, Forks & Spoons Press (£14)

STORAGE CASE
John Martone
Otoliths ($24.95)

by Jay Besemer

It’s a good time for visual poetry. The genre is expanding its influence through an increase in practitioners, and innovative composition methods are constantly being discovered and adapted. Publication technologies have advanced and become mainstreamed for more poets and publishers interested in mixed-genre work. Some of the factors that used to limit the large-scale dissemination of visual work (color printing costs for image-based poetry, for example) are circumvented or minimized by the online environment and the accessibility of desktop publishing software. Not only does technology come into play in the production and publication processes, it also provides a field for complex and fertile poetic association. For visual poetry especially, the conceptual coordinates of Self, Spirit, Body, and Techne can manifest in unexpected, innovative explorations that lead audiences to new insights of their own.

A visual poem cannot be reduced to a single, standardized interpretation. The textual and pictorial elements (and the implied aural elements) are equally necessary to a full reading of the piece. Although it is possible for audiences to engage the elements of some visual poems separately, to do so would yield a very different experience from that gained by taking the piece as a whole. This is a good thing, because it exponentially increases the potential impact of any one poem. This multidimensional capacity allows visual poetry to be a particularly suitable environment for grappling with the spiritual. In a 2007 essay introducing the catalogue for an exhibition of visual poetry from the Avant Garde Poetry Collection of the Ohio State University Libraries, John M. Bennett suggests that “visual poetry is especially useful for dealing with and presenting this multivalent/multiconscious experience of the world.” If a spiritual experience is “multiconscious,” visual poetry has room for it.

Rather than discussing the emotional impact of the spiritual, or attempting to describe a spiritual experience, some visual poets are able to transmit a spiritual experience directly to the viewer through image and text. Both John Martone and j/j hastain use combinations of text (or text fragments) and image (or image fragments) to craft poems with an undeniable spiritual turn. Yet one cannot say that their work is “about” spirituality or emphasizes a subjective, “airy” spiritual experience over the daily work of living an engaged life. Spiritual ways of knowing are grounded in a physicality that works on a number of levels. Because the poems of both authors are also physical objects—autonomous creations apart from and a part of their books—there is a resonance between the “body” and the “spirit” of each piece (as there is for their authors and audiences). The inherent multivalence of the medium also provides an even greater range on which the works can interact with one another.

The pieces in j/j hastain’s Verges & Vivisections are composed of abstract photographs taken by the author, with strips of original text superimposed upon each image. Occasionally the visual elements are cut and recombined through collage, but the text remains linear. Progressing through the book is a bit like walking through a chapel or a conservatory whose walls are made of stained glass. At once luminous and grounded, ecstatic and serene, these untitled poems seem dimensionally larger than the space they occupy on the page. This format is easily able to contain and convey the complex information hastain desires to present to reader-viewers. Often, this involves the evocation of spiritual themes through earth-centric imagery/text. Some pieces are aided by the presence of a narrator specifically addressing an imagined audience. For example, the poem on page 57 places the following text upon a seductive background of light and dark vegetable whorls:

it matters that it was only
in the moments and places which had no map
that I finally felt
kindred to
earth

Although it is by no means clear who the “I” refers to, its presence in the text places the audience closer to the author than is possible for Martone’s volume, as we will see.

Verges & Vivisections is deeply involved with the process, conditions and exigencies of “becoming human.” Becoming human entails forming a relationship with the spirit. It also demands a relation to earth, cosmos, death and sex—reconciling the body to that which operates within and without it. Flesh bodies meld with planetary bodies and are mapped onto spirit bodies, text bodies, bodies of thought and knowledge. Through processes of growth and change, we develop spiritual insight. This book is a busy, energetic place, crowded with lovers, monks, angels, shamans, animals, plants, gems, and hybrids. These act upon and influence one another in setting as varied as the players themselves, through alchemical and cosmic interactions, or through earthier cycles like menstruation or rot. In an inversion of the standard poetic use of personification, hastain often presents body as spirit, or in terms of spirit, rather than the other way around.

The question of the body, voice, and hand of the author is especially immediate for Verges & Vivisections. hastain is a trans/genderqueer poet whose work makes hir specifically trans embodiment a setting for spiritual and physical evolution. In some ways this collection shares some elements with more traditional poetries in which the presence of the poet is immediately and powerfully felt—the narrator’s “I” is one example. However, the embodied self, though present, is not emphasized. This is not a book about identity. The self in hastain’s work is plural, many-throated, difficult to contain in one pronoun. If the actual body is in flux—more malleable than often assumed—what insight does it offer the spirit? To those for whom the spirit is something eternal, the tension here can be especially compelling.

In John Martone’s Storage Case, the author’s presence is not invoked or implied through the the text. The collection is divided into three smaller books, each bearing its own dedication. In a way, the named dedicants provide the only direct, overt evidence of the author’s presence, albeit through a sort of associative back door. This presents a contrast not only with hastain’s collection but with Martone’s own text-only works—like his haiku and related forms—in which the embodied self and the poem are more intimately aligned. In those poems, we see the poet experiencing the world within a spiritual context, filtered through his own body’s movement through life and his surroundings. Yet in this volume, he himself (as a body, a narrator, or a character-surrogate for audiences) is absent. For example, in the grouping “1965/2010,” fully-identifiable fragments of pages from a copy of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men are included in roughly ten of the thirty-one compositions; other fragments of the same text are also present, but these do not include identifying information such as character names or famous bits of dialogue. Although it is possible that George and Lennie are adopted surrogates for Martone and/or reader-viewers, this is only one of the more obvious ways to “read” these poems. The text fragments themselves function as elements of pictorial composition, with the toasty golden hue of the aged pulp pages glowing in counterpoint to the more basic black and white of the surrounding poem elements in that section. These warm-toned shapes also resonate with the golden Buddha statue images in later sections. The choice to read the actual words in each poem as part of the intentional whole—as elements contributing to a kind of meaning—is left to the viewer and the occasion.

In Storage Case, the question of spirit is obviously harder to answer through the coordinates of body in space and words on page. Instead the key theme here is transmission. A specific type of message might also be implied here, especially when looking at this book in the context of Martone’s full body of work. Considering the Buddhist affiinities of collections like Ksana, it is plausible to associate radio transmissions with Buddhist teachings. It is said that the full benefit of a formal Buddhist teaching is only possible through direct transmission—hearing it from the teacher. Interestingly, for those who cannot take a teaching in the physical presence of the teacher, listening to a recorded teaching is acceptable—at least, it is considered to be more effective than reading a transcript of the same teaching. Looking at Storage Case in this light gives us some insight into Martone’s particular approach. Connecting the transmission of spiritual lessons with transmission of radio messages brings up a rich array of possibilities.

This connection is made most deftly in the section titled “radiograms.” Through the appealing visual metaphor that gives this grouping its title—vintage green and yellow message forms produced by the American Radio Relay League for use by amateur “ham” radio operators—we can join Martone in a sort of “what if” game. What if Buddhist teachings were sent in code over these networks? Juxtaposing pieces of the actual forms with images (or partial images) of Buddhist statues, commentary and terminology, Martone seems to suggest what this might look like. Mixing in the “dot-dash” of electromicrographed chromosomes suggests further connections between the transmission of spiritual teachings, genetic information, and other coded messages. Here is one important link between Martone’s collection and hastain’s; the latter evokes similar associations, using a kindred multivalent poetic language.

Are we “hardwired” for spiritual growth? Is the relationship between technology, identity, body and spirit even more complex than popular thought proposes? How are we to best analyze our relationships to the technologies that have become pervasive and life-changing—from within, or without? Can a spiritually rich life be lived in harmony with both nature and technology? Where does one end and the other begin? The Internet has enabled a whole range of identity-defining media, while simultaneously nurturing several poetries that go well beyond (or sidestep entirely) the expression of identity or selfhood. Perhaps this paradox is what the Internet really is—or should be—about. And what about other “wireless” technologies: tablet computers, smartphones, wi-fi and the coded software applications that drive them? How does the body/self/spirit/technology equation play out for users of these tools when personal information and physical location are potentially available to everyone from data-mining corporations to Great-Aunt Melba? A vast conversation along these lines is ongoing, in various other poetries, and in other media and contexts. But visual poets like hastain and Martone, who can confidently engage these complexities, provide a particularly valuable and fertile segment of the discussion.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

Mary Biddinger
Black Lawrence Press ($9)

by Roxanne Halpine Ward

Mary Biddinger’s chapbook transports St. Monica from her historical context as the mother of Saint Augustine and patron saint of abuse victims, alcoholics, housewives, and mothers, reimagining her life in the modern day as a 20th-century Catholic girl with an abusive marriage looming in her future. Peopled with nuns and May processions, shirtless boys and Camaros, the poems evoke the lush dichotomy of innocence and temptation, purity and desire, that is particular to a Catholic school education. Monica is both “the girl with hair tucked behind her ears,” taking notes on Shakespeare, and “the girl with hair in her face,” cutting class to smoke with the boy she can’t stop thinking about. This tension between good and bad suffuses the chapbook, but neither persona satisfies Monica fully, caught between what’s expected of her and her emerging sexuality. When the older Monica, now a wife and mother trapped in an unhappy marriage, looks back on her youth, we’re never sure which she regrets more: being too bad or not being bad enough. Either way, she yearns to go back and do things differently, but even a modern saint is unable to change her own story. Monica knows how to “proceed as planned” no matter what obstacles arise.

Far from the holy matron described in saints’ books, this Monica is just as confused, angry, and turned on as the rest of us. Biddinger’s tight and vividly detailed narrative poems speak to timeless themes of adolescence, regret, and desire, enlivening a historical figure and religious icon while painting a nuanced portrait of a character who is every bit as imperfect and fallible as everyone else.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

Marina Blitshteyn
Argos Books ($10)

by Vladislav Davidzon

Reviewing a new volume of poems by a bright young Russian-American poet, one retreads through a host of taxonomic issues. To condense the debates of an entire critical discipline into a telegramattic brief, the literary output grouped together until the sobriquet of “Russian-American poetry” is plagued by a host of problems: intertextual interpretation, cross-cultural communication, theoretical translation, mimetic mirroring, and—not least of all—bilingual language competency. In short, one faces all the conflicts inherent in the duality of steeping one’s tea in two pots simultaneously. Matvei Yankelevich offers us a shrewd analysis of many of these issues in his essay “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!” (online here) when he points out that “what would appear to be a small coterie is really a prism reflecting most theoretical debates between poetic schools that exist in the American as well as in the Russian context.”

The bright young Russian-American poet under review here is Marina Blitshteyn, a Moldovan born, Jewish woman (and none of these descriptors are incidental; all appear thematically in her intently autobiographical but not immodest poems). Reading her lightly cadenced first book,Russian for Lovers, one would do well to remember some of the heretofore-mentioned debates; though of course set away at a wry angle from theoretical antecedents, Russian for Lovers is lyric-romantic in a certain tremulously innocent Russian vein, and plain-spoken modernist in another. Though there are fairly different sorts of poems in the book—dialogue poems, a poem with a large oval circle the length of the page with the Russian word for lake in the center, a Summer Travel-Graduate Degree-Wedding-Tenure timetable—the common denominator is Blitshteyn’s attentiveness to internal rhymes and sinuous flow.

The book is arranged as a phonetic and romantic primer for a lover, teaching him not just the outlines of runes but the ideas and forms they are entwined with. Each poem riffs off a letter in the Russian alphabet, and each follows the shape, rhyme, “feeling” or sound of a letter. The morosely pneumatic M stands for “my little mother.” C or CCCP (pronounced like an s in Russian, with the poem interrogating both sounds and meanings) is for “sister/system,” or when we learn our letters through the prism of Communism. That old union of soviets may not be what she made herself out to be—communism is not a utopia / fellow travellers say / communism is a sure sell / communism is a sister city—though she knows what she wants and we should “make sure / make sure / communism gets her way / somebody pull her hair.”

And then there is Ж, the voiced postalveolar fricative, which is “already tightening under the tongue / that pressure to drum or run / already cracking the mark into parts,” and which begins the chanting of the anti-Semitic refrain ЖЫД ЖЫД ЖЫД (though the correct spelling of “Zhid” in Russian is ЖИД, unless I am missing another meaning the poet intended). Although it is about being called a racial slur, the poem is not self-pitying, preachy, or pedantic. The incantation is repeated “until it numbs its meaning” but is it is recuperated and refracted by a self-willed act of negation at the end of the poem, even though it is “still hard buying the translation / believing in it enough to say / I’m already a new constant / I know my American name.”

With her primer of the elemental letters and lessons of love, Blitshteyn has composed a lovely debut book of poems. I for one am expecting my next lesson eagerly.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

DEAR FAILURES
Trey Sager
Ugly Duckling Presse ($8)

WHERE WE EXPECT TO SEE YOU SOON
Michael Ford
Ugly Duckling Presse ($10)

by E. Marie Bertram

Trey Sager’s Dear Failures and Michael Ford’s Where We Expect to See You Soon are unlikely bedfellows. In fact, they’re not really bedfellows at all, except that both chapbooks were recently published by Ugly Duckling Presse. Where Ford’s collection is written in a form he invented called the “89”—the lines, stanzas, and syllables in each poem end up factoring to the number 89, a move that would make Marianne Moore’s tricorn hat spin with delight—Sager’s collection follows a looser, less mathematical design, with each poem addressed, in epistolary fashion, to one in a series of supposed failures. But when it comes to what their respective structures contain, both are shot through with a peripheral but palpable nostalgia and a subtle, driving generosity.

For Ford, the nostalgia comes in parcels laced with counsel, brief correctives directed less at anyone in particular and more toward the good of the city, the self, or all who might listen and make good of it, as in “The New Atlantis”:

They
sailed the wrong kind of ship—The kind that
sinks—Men—patches of brown cloth—cross-
ing the river—with the limbs of the
dismantled theater—in the dead
of winter—they built an earth—A still
life with people walking through—On-
ions—half-peeled oranges—bowl of loose
flowers and everyone you know

They did this, built a new earth with artists’ hands, because

On dry land—everyone was dead—
Cattle grazed—in the shadow of the
ferris wheel as—the landscape blew
away—Billboards advertised—the seve-
ral regrets—of citizens who
fell—and fall—like acrobats into
the sea—

What couldn’t—or wouldn’t—last on dry land is given a second chance here in open waters. The wooden ship, “the patches of brown cloth,” are remnants of the past—yet, in this new Atlantis, they clearly replace ferris wheels and billboards, a sort of inverse progress also responsible for trading the many regrets of Icarian citizens in favor of a “bowl of loose / flowers and everyone you know.” In the title poem, Ford is feeling nostalgic again, though this time he advises

a briefer language—something pass-

ing through the letters from the dead—carr-

ied in a canvas bag—by train—
and horse-drawn cart—A greeting written
over the scene—rowboats pushed awk-
wardly ashore—in a cooler sea-
son—

There’s a regular sense in Ford’s work of the small stuff of everyday life billowing toward the epic, a grand narrative that might offer some version of redemption, or at least momentary relief. For Sager, though, the past is less a corrective for how to live and more a touchstone for how to continue living, as in “Dear Charles”:

After a huge blizzard in the late seventies, I jumped off my neighbor’s roof
into what I thought was a cushy, six-foot pile of snow,
but it was actually a row of bushes camouflaged by the storm.
I fell through the bushes all the way to the ground, and the snow above me caved
in all around me.
I started screaming, but I was alone and no one could hear me,
so slowly, like a woodchuck,
I climbed my way out.

Sager’s sure-footed language makes this fable completely believable, and the speaker’s whimsical, woodchuck-like instinct to survive seems to carry over into the chapbook’s other poems. This is a speaker who, in “Dear Nostalgia,” says things like

Last night I ate a huge pot brownie and took my dog for a walk.
While he ate street grass, I began thinking about the over-simplicity we have
conferred upon dogs.

and then, in “Dear Me”:

After some time, we wandered around and found some privacy behind a few trees.
But gusts of wind curled through the pine branches, and as we tossed small handfuls of
my mother’s ash into the air,
the wind spit her dust back at us, onto our faces and hair,
and into our open mouths.

To braid what’s humorous with what’s moving, and vice versa, takes a deft hand, and Sager’s got it.

To be sure, each poet has a tendency to challenge readers in ways that don’t necessarily pay off. Ford’s constant use of the em dash renders it inert in places, which is a shame, and his fidelity to the “89” means some words get distractingly spliced at the end of a line. Sager risks coming off as too erudite with his numerous literary allusions, which, in turn, threatens to undercut the sincerity that seals so many of his poems like wax on a folded letter.

But all that’s forgotten when, for example, Ford writes, at the end of the title poem:

— And the world is
right there—in blue rags—nailed to a tree—
Because I’m human—I draw pic-
tures of my own hands—I build my house—

of things—I have no other use
for—but which I value nonetheless

or when Sager, in “Dear Modifications,” closes with the following lines:

Plato, in the Republic, says that poets must be exiled.
Shelley calls poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the word.”
I remember the blue jay’s eyes, looking up at me through the foot-length ferns
like I was going to kill him.
Just the exact opposite, I thought, cradling him in ski gloves.

For being such structurally different creatures, Ford’s Where We Expect to See You Soon and Sager’s Dear Failures both slug you squarely in the gut, and each has a dogged decency that’s difficult not to welcome.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

In the past few years, around the middle of December, I’ve noticed a new wrinkle in the weather-related small talk of early winter: in the course of conversation, someone inevitably mentions how much milder it seems than in decades past. “There hasn’t been much snow,” one of us (usually a native) will say. That’ll be quickly followed by the observation, “Most of the lakes don’t even look frozen yet,” by someone else. Then, a third person will inevitably wonder aloud: “You think the lakes are going to freeze enough in time for the art shanties?” And in the absence of a deep chill, hearing this is the surest sign that you’re entering midwinter.

For many of us, the Art Shanty Projects have become a meteorological touchstone, which is perhaps the highest tribute that can be paid to any phenomenon in this part of the country. If you’re not aware of this unique Minnesota happening, Art Shanty Projects is a regular January art event on Medicine Lake in Plymouth, about ten miles west of downtown Minneapolis. Founded in 2004 by two artists, Peter Haakon Thompson and David Pitman, the annual festival invites dozens of artists to build a village’s worth of ice-fishing shanties with various themes—Knitting, Karaoke, Shackleton, and “Wonder” are just a few of the many shanties that have cropped up in the past—and then invites the public out on the ice each weekend to explore them. It’s gotten bigger and bigger every year; there were upwards of 16,000 visitors this year. There are lots of people living in Minnesota who hate winter—transplants and natives alike—but I have met very few people who have experienced the art shanties and didn’t consider them, at the very least, a real high point in Minnesota’s often-wretched winter months. Much of the press you’ll read about Art Shanty Projects, especially in national media outlets, hews pretty close to the “oh, those quirky Minnesotans and their quirky little projects” line of thinking. But this approach doesn’t capture the enormity of our arts community’s affection for the project—even, I suppose, their reliance on it during a tough part of the year.

Diminutive descriptors like “quirky” don’t do justice to the sheer scale of the recent art shanties experience either. The shanties have expanded enormously in the past few years; it’s difficult to think of any cultural event that’s gone from fringe art outlier to well-attended cultural staple in such a relatively short amount of time. But then, they’ve always been more accessible than a lot of public practice-oriented art creations. The project is deeply rooted in the vernacular culture of the region, as most anyone who’s spent some time in Minnesota has at least some understanding of the culture of ice-fishing. That accessibility is, in some respects, precisely what makes it increasingly difficult to mount as a large-scale event. You can only fit so many people safely onto a frozen lake; likewise, the shanties themselves are small structures, built to house just a handful of people at a time. Despite these built-in limitations, the festival is growing exponentially.

Last year, for the first time since the project’s inception, the shanties went on hiatus. The complexity and growth of the project compelled planners to take a year off, regroup, and plan for the future. Maybe not coincidentally, 2010-11 was a brutal slog of a winter, and the fact that there were no officially sanctioned shanties made the season’s harsh extremes seem that much more relentless. I heard reports all winter long of renegade art shanties showing up on various lakes and carrying on, albeit without the mandate or sanction of the Art Shanty Projects organization. These may have been just hallucinations—I was never able to confirm such happenings personally—but news of ad hoc shanty villages didn’t surprise me. Such is the devotion of the loyal.

According to festival organizers, the plan from here is to hold the event biannually—so, the full Art Shanty Projects will be back in 2014, after which the event will rotate to other metro-area lakes. Next year, during what they’re calling a “disperse year,” shanties will proliferate in a decentralized fashion, with small clusters of them inhabiting neighborhood lakes throughout the Twin Cities. On the festival website, this dispersal is described in part as “a return to ASP’s roots and spirit of experimentation.”

The push-pull between accessibility and experimentalism has always been a key element of the project. As accessible as the shanties undeniably are, there is something of an outlaw spirit to the festival that can be quite unruly—and not always welcoming. Most participants and visitors over the years know well the experience of opening the door to a strange art shanty, looking inside, and being met with something approaching scowls by its inhabitants. Fine. You just go to another structure nearby and see what’s going on in there. The sheer variety of contributions over the years has made all kinds of interactions possible, from the weird and frankly quite creepy to celebratory and scream-at-the-top-of-your-lungs fun—and in some cases, all of that at once.

This past season’s event felt somewhat different, offering a more interconnected experience than it had previously. Given the mild temperatures, the shanties were clustered close together near the shore, in a layout particularly suggestive of a small village. I noticed more families attending, and the fact that it was so temperate outside made it easier for people to walk around and interact, instead of darting from shanty to shanty, bundled in layers of Gore-Tex with their faces completely covered against the cold. Their proximity to shore made the shanties easier to access—years past have found the structures quite far out, in the center of the lake, a freezing ten-minute walk from the parking lot. This year, there seemed to emerge a narrative self-consciously tying all the shanties together into a shared civic space—more like an actual, functioning little community than the free-for-all of previous years.

Some will applaud this openness and accessibility to the general public; others, no doubt, yearn for the woollier, more anarchic manifestations of past shanties, with their more exclusive subculture of artists and true believers. Neither group is wrong; this is just the natural course of things, as projects change and grow over a period of years and become more successful. Art Shanty Projects is one of those rare, grassroots cultural experiences that truly has become bigger than the sum of its parts. Wherever this trajectory takes it in coming years, and whatever the festival eventually becomes, it has already come to inform the way a sizeable chunk of the collective arts community of the Twin Cities interacts with winter. At the very least, it’s safe to say the festival has outgrown “quirky” at this point, evolving into something much more significant on the local cultural stage. And while it probably is hyperbole to say that without the shanties, we couldn’t deal with winter, they sure make the season a whole hell of a lot easier.

Click here to visit mnartists.org now!

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

The Great Leader
Jim Harrison
Grove Press ($24)

Songs of Unreason
Jim Harrison
Copper Canyon Press ($22)

by Mark Gustafson

A prolific writer of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, Jim Harrison is undoubtedly best known for the last of these. The recent, almost concurrent publication of his poems, Songs of Unreason, and of his novel, The Great Leader, is a convenient occasion to consider them side by side. While the boundary between these literary genres is more or less porous, when one writer writes equally well in more than one genre it raises an interesting question: does the author’s sensibility predominate, or does the form—or, if that is too difficult to discern, how do the sensibility and the form correlate?

Harrison’s new novel takes the form of detective fiction, which the main character dismisses as “those childish recipe books of mayhem.” Sunderson, a grizzled detective in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, retires from the force but wants, unofficially, to pursue one last case. A man known as the Great Leader heads a quasi-religious cult of well-heeled followers, whose money he demands and whose underage daughters he has sex with. The trail leads from Michigan to Arizona to Nebraska and back. Instead of catching the criminal, a convenient accident happens, which ends the book with a fizzle.

Like most of Harrison’s protagonists, Sunderson is a real piece of work. A self-described geezer, divorced, a booklover and history buff, obsessed with brook trout, in awe of birds, he hates snowmobiles and likes classical music and renaissance art, and is passionately attuned to Native American history and culture. Maybe most importantly of all—and again typically—he has an insatiable appetite for good food, alcohol, and sex. Sunderson’s creator is all of this (except for divorced) and more.

Even though they lapsed into schtick years ago, Harrison’s novels have remained accessible and entertaining with their crazy yet predictable mix of coarse and delicate, vulgar and sophisticated, ugly and beautiful, sensual and intellectual, all in familiar landscapes. Increasingly, however, Harrison seems frozen in an adolescent fantasy, something akin to “Wayne’s World”: guys spewing grandiose observations and relentless inanities, showing inordinate self-regard, and experiencing a “Schwing!”—Sunderson’s corresponding term is “nut buzz” (with variations)—whenever a “total babe” appears (even in their thoughts).

In The Great Leader Harrison takes this predilection one step further, and seems to dig in. Consider the second most important character, Mona. She is sixteen, a goth, a “world-class hacker,” beautiful, wounded by sexual abuse (Lisbeth Salander, anyone?), and improbably articulate and thoughtful. Sunderson sees nothing especially inappropriate about looking at her naked and being her substitute father at the same time. “To peek or not to peek, that was the question.” She repeatedly catches him, but it turns out she likes it. “I don’t think you’re a pervert,” she says. “You’re the best friend I have.” At one point, Sunderson describes how Mona hugged him, and then he “slid his hand down onto her bottom,” they kissed “and he backed his tongue away from her emerging tongue.” He’s inordinately proud of his restraint, as though that makes all the difference.

All the women in this book are, sooner or later, willing recipients of this priapic retiree’s sexual attention, whether he’s following an unknown female in a grocery store or dropping a fork to look up another’s skirt. He doesn’t blame himself, but rather the biological imperative: you know, boys will (always) be boys. Even as he is caught in that powerful grip, at the same time he is like a god or a king.

So too the Great Leader. Sunderson thinks: “He certainly is an effective predator. I’m a bit mystified by his interest in females that are too young.” In the interest of research, he starts Lolita but finds it “nearly unreadable,” given the “perverted nitwit bapping a thirteen-year-old girl and covering up his crime with layers of intricate thought and language.” Sunderson is oblivious to his own convoluted cover-up, convinced that his behavior is on the right side of the line. The Great Leader is a pedophile; Sunderson is a small step away from that, and a predator as well. What is most disturbing about this novel is that instead of focusing on their overlap, Harrison plays up their differences. Although he quotes Arendt on the “banality of evil,” again and again Sunderson fails to connect the dots. His own foibles are just so much harmless mischief. Even Mona the sixteen-year-old declares: “I’m a big girl not one of those kids King David is fucking with.” The self-delusions and rationalizations extend from the characters to the author, as Harrison gives himself a pass.

Bizarrely, the story ends with a kind of reunion with his ex-wife, and they serve as Mona’s parents. “They would never be the kind of family that would live under one roof but they would be close.” Moralizing aside (even though Harrison invites it), from a literary standpoint this is the kind of conclusion that fiction allows even while it is positively unbelievable.

The sheer self-indulgence evident in Harrison’s prose has less room to spread and to feed on itself in his poetry. Songs of Unreason is far more beautiful, complex, and compelling. It is not driven by character or story, as his fiction invariably is, but by psychological necessity, which takes us to a deeper level than The Great Leader ever could.

This is humanist verse, with obvious debts to Rilke, Whitman, Lorca, Paz, Issa, Neruda, and others. Nothing is excluded as subject matter, yet Harrison’s bruised consciousness inevitably circles back to considerations of outer and inner, action and reflection, culture and nature. “Chatter” begins:

Back on the blue chair before the green studio
I’m keeping track of the outside world
rather than the inside where my brain seethes
in its usual mischief. Like many poets
I’m part blackbird and part red squirrel
and my brain chatters, shrieks, and whistles
but outside it tends to get real quiet

Axioms abound. “You carry with you all the places you’ve ever been.” “The world is not what we thought it was.” “It is life’s work to recognize the mystery / of the obvious.”

Harrison grapples with and broods over life and death. He says, “In the loveliest landscape / the tinge of death. . . is in the air.” Metaphors for death include night, a thunderstorm and an “invisible / lion not stalking but simply waiting, the solution / of the mystery I don’t want to solve.” The statement, “In age we tilt toward home,” logically leads to the oldest metaphor encompassing both existence and non-existence: water. “Out of almost nothing, for practical / purposes nothing, then back as ancient / children to the great nothing again, / the song of man and water moving to the ocean.” Wonder and gratitude are not far from this awareness of death. From “Debtors”:

. . . I’m alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of land, its destiny.
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?

The novelty of this book is the long poem, “Suite of Unreason,” which appears sans serif, on verso, opposite the individually titled poems. But it also reads like a series of short poems, similar to those in After Ikkyu. For example: “The violent wind. / The violent wind. / The violent wind.” Or: “The day was so dulcet and beautiful / I could think about nothing. / I lost my head.” The juxtaposition of the paired poems is effective and pleasing, whether or not the correspondence is always clear.

“Unreason” in the book’s title points to another main concern. Rather than pursuing T.S. Eliot’s raid on the inarticulate, Harrison just lets it be. The big questions are unanswerable, at least in words. Water helps: “The only answer I’ve found is the moving / water whose music is without a single lyric.” Animals also figure in here. “The Great Mother has no ears and hallelujah / is the most impossible word in the language. / I can only say it to birds, fish, and dogs.” “A Puzzle” begins:

I see today that everyone on earth
wants the answer to the same question
but none has the language to ask it.
The inconceivable is clearly the inconceivable.
Bum mutter, teethchatter, brain flotsam,
we float up from our own depths
to the sky not the heavens, an invention
of the murderers. Dogs know the answer
by never asking the question but can’t advise us.

It ends: “Words are moving water—muddy, clear, or both.”

Harrison, as if to absolve himself, twice uses Thomas Merton’s phrase, “birds of appetite”: “flitting here and there singing about sex and food, / the girl bending over with her impossible target, / or will it be foie gras or bologna and mayo?” It’s biology again. “There is a human wildness held beneath the skin / that finds all barriers brutishly unbearable.” In “Greed” he mentions not only his wife and daughters, but also lovers, his memory of a sexy aunt, and his hope “that the wind will blow harder up the girl’s / summer dress.” It’s a glimpse of his novelistic world. But akin to his earthiness, his groundedness is plain in the poem “Brutish”: “The shit of the world has to be taken / care of every day. You have to choose / your part after you take care of the shit. / I’ve chosen birds and fish, the creatures / whose logic I wish to learn and live.” The unacknowledged problem is that one can lose contact with some of the ethical responsibilities of being human (which seems to be Sunderson’s—and Harrison’s—main shortcoming in The Great Leader).

Throughout most of his career, Harrison has maintained a workable equilibrium between the lyrical and the narrative. As The Great Leader leans toward the genre-end of the fiction spectrum, he seems to lose his bearings to some degree. Or maybe it’s just his way of dealing with “the shit of the world.” Meanwhile, Songs of Unreason treats the oldest of poetic and philosophical subjects, the lyrical form bringing out what we can only take as Harrison’s core sensibility. He sits alongside Heraclitus, there on his bank of sand, viewing “all this impermanence and suffering” and watching the river flow. “Only the water is safe,” he writes, the dangers and mayhem averted or avoided, at least for now.

Click here to purchase The Great Leader at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Songs of Unreason at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

INTERVIEWS WITH LEE BRICCETTI, GRACE CAVALIERI, JANE CIABATTARI, AND NOREEN TOMASSI

by Daniela Gioseffi

“It’s a man’s world,” as the song goes, but Daniela Gioseffi has identified a few women who refuse to sing this tune. Lee Briccetti, Grace Cavalieri, Jane Ciabattari, and Noreen Tomassi have devoted tireless hours to cultivating a literary culture that extends beyond their local community. Indeed, the four women in this interview have overcome cultural and personal hurdles to ensure literature’s place in the national consciousness.

LEE BRICCETTI

Lee Briccetti is the long-time Executive Director of Poets House in New York City. She has helped to shepherd it from a small facility to a grand library and auditorium with both an adult program and a children’s program. Under her leadership, Poets House developed the Poets House Showcase, an annual exhibit of new poetry books, as well as Poetry in The Branches, a national outreach program that assists public libraries throughout the country in providing poetry services. Lee Bricetti has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Award for her own poetry and been a Poetry Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her first book of poetry, Day Mark, was published in 2005 by Four Way Books.

Daniela Gioseffi: It must be difficult to be both an executive director of a facility like Poets House and a poet with personal concerns for your work. What are the difficulties involved in doing both simultaneously?

Lee Bricetti: Poets House has been at the center of my creative life for twenty-two years. Though making an organization will always be more public and collaborative than making a poem, both activities have a craft. My life at Poets House has demanded intense partnerships, a long view, strategic thinking, and has routinely exposed me to new poetries. During our recent capital construction period, building a permanent home for Poets House—which was tantamount to the poets in the gladiatorial arena with the real estate industry—the pace of business at Poets House created a less than balanced personal equation. Sometimes it is necessary to give everything to make a project work. But now I am finally making new poems and, as I tell my friends, rebuilding the person who can write my poems. I like to think of this period, as Dickinson writes (or almost) as a “midsummer in the mind . . . her polar times behind.”

DG: You’ve hosted great poetry programs by accomplished poets. Do you find that being steeped in contemporary poetry makes it difficult to write your own?

LB: Tuning one’s ear to great poetic voices from across different cultures and times only expands one’s sense of what language can do and what a poem can be. Personally, I have a need to make poems. Being engaged in this larger conversation with poets from different parts of the world has inestimably enriched my sense that we make our home in language.

DG: As an Italian American woman, how did you escape la vita della cucina, the traditional Old World role of the woman tied to the kitchen, and how did you become executive director of Poets House, what background prepared you for it?

LB: At some point, years ago, I drove by my old high school and saw a sign for the 15th Annual Lasagna Dinner benefiting the school’s literary magazine. When I did the math, I realized that I had started the tradition. You never know what will be worthy; and I never knew in high school that what I was doing—directing plays or running the magazine, inventing community dinners to support them—could become a practical, professional path. Later, I picked up tools as a town planner in upstate New York and as an urban planner in New York City working on low-income housing issues. A generous supervisor took me under her wing and showed me how to write my first grant, and that, and the engagement with long-range planning, gave me an unusual starting place for my Poets House work. But surely, the most important training for a life in public service has been coming from an enormous extended Italian-American family—juggling loyalties and negotiating with the many personalities and voices.

DG: What is your hope for the future of Poets House?

LB: All over the country non-profit organizations are built by boards and donors—by people who care—to create deeper civic engagement. Non-profit organizations like Poets House create options in the cultural landscape, and the cultural imagination, that would not otherwise exist in the market economy. Since Poets House has a sixty-year lease at its new home in Battery Park City, my rose-colored glasses see it thriving far into the future; and thriving will always mean inviting the broadest spectrum of people possible into a deepened relationship with the art of poetry and engaging communities in the support of this mission-based work.

What do I hope for Poets House? That it may give joy to many even as it changes, as poetry changes, and that it will continue to bring together diverse practitioners, making a place brimming with conversation, in Battery Park City and online. During the opening of Poets House’s new space, almost from the beginning, people sat down to read in the library as if they had been thirsty. For me, seeing this engagement with the collection, with reading, in our new home was joyous. I had an even keener sense of arrival when I saw a teenager with tattoos and a nose ring studying Giaocomo Leopardi all afternoon.

DG: I imagine that being steeped in all the philosophical thoughts and imaginative worlds of poetry, day after day, has given you a stupendous education in the art of poetry.

LB: That “precarious gait some call experience” can also be called an education. Poets House’s programmatic focus for the last twenty-five years has been on poets reading and discussing other poets . . . and it has been a remarkable education. A program in 1990 that Susan Howe presented on Emily Dickinson changed my reading life and introduced me to the radical consciousness of Dickinson. Our many years of co-sponsoring The People’s Poetry Gathering with City Lore helped me understand more about poetry’s roots in oral tradition, chant and song. But throughout the years, Poets House’s international programs continue to make my world bigger. Stanley Kunitz, (along with Elizabeth Kray, the co-founder of Poets House) said poetry is the most remarkable historical recording device, telling us what it feels like to live in a certain time and place.

JANE CIABATTARI

Jane Ciabattari is the author of the 2002 short-story collection Stealing the Fire. Her short stories have been widely published and nominated for O. Henry and Pushcart awards. Ciabattari served as president of the National Book Critics Circle from 2008 to 2011 and then as the organization’s Vice President/Online, in charge of the Critical Mass blog and social networking. She also serves as an executive board member and secretary of the Overseas Press Club, and is former board chair of Women's eNews. A past president of the Women's Media Group, and a member of the Authors Guild, PEN, and The Century Association, her articles and book reviews have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, NPR.org, The Paris Review, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Poets & Writers Magazine, and Columbia Journalism Review.

Daniela Gioseffi: You’ve had and still have a very impressive and varied career as a writer. How did traditional women’s roles influence or challenge your career as a writer, editor, literary critic, and as the president of The National Book Critics Circle?

Jane Ciabattari: I was raised in a traditional family in the Midwest—I'm a fifth generation Kansas descended from abolitionists. I went to public school and won a National Merit Scholarship to Stanford, where I studied creative writing and married Mark Ciabattari, an Italo-Finn from Butte, Montana who was a bit older. (Happily, he's also an author, and still my husband.) Mark and I were adventuresome. We essentially swapped roles for thirty years or so. I was the major breadwinner, working as an editor, a journalist, a Parade columnist, and always writing fiction; he was the primary parent raising our son Scott. It worked for us—I was interested in the world of work, which seemed exotic, given my mother's role as a homemaker, and Mark was a nurturing dad while doing graduate work and writing.

I often attended the National Book Critics Circle awards ceremonies in New York, and always enjoyed them. I come from a family of folks who pitch in, so I ran for the NBCC board once I had been reviewing for several years (regularly for the Los Angeles Times, Kirkus, The Washington Post and others). After elected, I chaired the Autobiography and then the Fiction awards committees, served as VP/Membership, and helped then president John Freeman and tech VP Rebecca Skloot launch Critical Mass, the blog. I was elected president by the board in 2008. (I served three years, was elected twice.) During my last year on the board (2011-2012) I was back to Critical Mass and keeping an eye on NBCC Facebook and Twitter.

DG: Do you find that your executive positions take tremendous energy and time away from your writing, or does it help to fertilize your own work?

JC: Of course I lost writing time. No question. I wrote most of my early short stories and the novella that was my thesis (and published in Redbook) on Saturdays. I've had tremendous support from writers' colonies like MacDowell and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I still have weeks at VCCA in the fall that are sheer heaven, working continuously. On the other hand, I've witnessed all sorts of human behavior in the course of my work. My stories often are inspired by place, and I've traveled all over.

DG: Is it more difficult to be a woman in a directorship or editorship than it is to be a man, do you think, or do you find that a superfluous question?

JC: I wish I could say that's a superfluous question. At the Examiner, as a woman in my early twenties, I was surrounded by traditional guys, most of them in their forties and fifties. Some of them made my life tough; others saw my merits and promoted me and supported me. I learned a lot. Among other things I learned to empathize with women AND men of all ages, and I learned to be flexible. Later, on the road as a Parade columnist, covering international affairs, Washington politics, and the movies, I sometimes seemed to surprise the heads of state, politicians, and film stars I was interviewing when I showed up. In particular I recall a group of NATO leaders, including a Norwegian general and the German Secretary General at the time, who seeming bemused that I was asking them such knowledgeable questions; the Secretary General asked who had been briefing me. But I had the clout of eighty million American readers behind me.

DG: What is the allure of reviewing books? Does being a reviewer make you hypercritical of your own writing?

JC: I love good literature. Always have. I grew up reading books from the library. My parents subscribed to The Sunday New York Times, so I was reading book review sections in our local paper (the Emporia Gazette, where I got my start writing a weekly column when I was 14), theKansas City Star, and the NYTBR. Being a reviewer helps me see what works and what doesn't. As a fiction writer, I've been thrilled to recognize (and learn from) the work of NBCC award finalists and winners like Jennifer Egan, Jayne Anne Phillips, Bharati Mukherjee, Jane Smiley, Roberto Bolano, and dozens of others.

DG: How do you feel about the new digital electronic age in publishing? Does it provide more or less opportunity for writers?

JC: I don't think we'll be able to turn back the tide. I just try to keep up with the currents. The past decade has been earthshaking, no doubt about it. But we're still a nation of passionate readers, and we still need gatekeepers or curators to guide us toward what's worth our time. I have talked a lot about these changes over the past six years at writers' conferences, at NBCC events, at the BEA, on university campuses, and every six months the picture changes.

DG: What are some of the changes you’ve instituted in the National Book Critics Circle, and what is your hope for the future of the NBCC in this digital age?

JC: I'm pleased to have been part of the founding of Critical Mass in April 2006 (with John Freeman and Rebecca Skloot). The NBCC has been an online-only organization ever since I've been on the board, so I see digital as a huge advantage for a tiny nonprofit funded almost entirely by membership dues. Also, during my tenure, I hired David Varno, the NBCC's web manager. I developed NBCC discounts for members from literary quarterlies and other places. We started doing that this past winter, beginning with Granta, Pleiades, Poets and Writers, TinHouse, now expanded under new president Eric Banks to include the Paris Review, New York Review of Books, Open Letter Books, and I just brought in Selected Shorts. We’ve been setting up a Wiki for the members-only NBCC Guide to Freelancing Markets, updated annually by former board members. The National Book Critics Circle got its first ever NEA grant while I was president, and that's something I worked hard on. Ditto: expanding the events nationwide, in the wake of John Freeman's energetic barnstorming as president. I tried to keep up that momentum with NBCC events at AWP, BEA, PEN World Voices, and book fairs and festivals all over the country, from Brooklyn to Portland to Virginia and Texas and at iconic bookshops like Canio's, Prairie Lights, City Lights, and others. Upgrading the website, under Tech VP Lizzie Skurnick. Hosting three years of NBCC finalists' announcements and awards finalists' readings and awards ceremonies, with the incredibly hard-working Barbara Hoffert as awards chair. Passing the baton to the highly qualified Eric Banks, the current president. And all the hours of online and in person book discussions. There is nothing like arguing passionately with twenty-four fellow critics.

GRACE CAVALIERI

Grace Cavalieri is the author of 16 books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently Sounds Like Something I Would Sayand Navy Wife (CreateSpace 2009 & MiPOesias 2010), The Poet's Cookbook (Bordighera Press, 2009), Anna Nicole: Poems (Casa Menendez, 2008), and Water on the Sun(Bordighera Press, 2006). From 1977-1997, Cavalieri produced and hosted "The Poet and the Poem," a weekly show that presented 2,000 poets to the nation. She now presents this series to public radio from the Library of Congress via NPR.

Daniela Gioseffi: What got you started in radio, and how did you come to find yourself producing the country's most widely syndicated radio show about poets and poetry? What roles did The National Endowment for the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation play in getting this program off the ground?

Grace Cavalieri: I co-founded WPFW-FM in 1977 partly with a $40,000 grant from the NEA Literature Division to put poetry plus eight other art programs a week on the radio. It was not until the 1990s when I had more support from NEA. In 2004, I received an additional $5,000 grant from NEA when Dana Gioia saw the value of poetry on air. Along the way, I applied for personal state arts and humanities grants that I always poured into radio. Witter Bynner came in 1989 with a single grant from the Library of Congress to send my regional series national (a trial balloon.) When I went to the Library after retiring from the 20-year show on WPFW in 1997, the Witter Bynner foundation started supporting the series annually. Each year I reapply. I am not a line item on anyone’s budget.

DG: You now keep your interviews online at the Library of Congress (LOC). When did that process begin and how far along is the transition?

GC: I have interviewed or presented approximately 2,500 poets in 34 years. Only recent shows are on the LOC website. There are one thousand at the George Washington University Special Collections. Approximately five hundred are held at the Pacifica Archives and Program Service. Most of the shows have raw (not produced) recordings still at the LOC on hard drives and tapes.

DG: You’ve interviewed some of the world’s most famous poets, including every US Poet Laureate for the last few decades. Which were your most notable interviews—ones that stick out in your memory or remain especially meaningful?

GC: Ginsberg (1977) was the most difficult, as he had been up all night marching in a protest and was cranky. Also being a woman from the suburbs with children and being a Navy wife did not bring me much love from his world. I might have been politically aligned, which I was, but I could not carry a sign proving it. We became friends later. The poet Wilfred Cartey from Trinidad was a blind poet and he was the last of the “Negritude movement.” When he finished talking with me, we were both in tears. I’ve loved all the Poets Laureate. They are happy to share themselves in the bright light of that appointment. W. S. Merwin’s interview this year was a highlight of my life as a radio host.

DG: For how many years have you been doing the show and how widely syndicated is it? Can people lobby their local stations to carry it?

GC: The show will celebrate 35 consecutive years on-air in February 2012. A big landmark! It is given free to all public radio stations and I have no idea who takes it. Station carriage changes, but I imagine from 30 to 50 stations carry it. There is no way to chart it, because some stations tape it for educational use, some download and play at random, some take the series as sent, some miss the feed and write me to get CDs. It is something I cannot control. Now NPR distribution is all automated so it is a computerized setup where stations can pick programs from a “Content Depot” like grapes from a vine. Each season, I send shows up weekly and they hang there for six months for the taking.

DG: Have there been some funny incidents that stand out in your mind, or some embarrassing moments that you'd like to correct or share?

GC: A million mistakes! On WPFW, Henry Taylor was on-air. The wiring got fouled up and the front door buzzer and speaker came over the air. So everyone who was trying to get in the station, came through on my show and Henry braided it all into his poetry. It was fantastic performance art. Brodsky started every sentence with Nyet! and No! Then he’d agree with me. So, I edited out all the No’s and had a reel of fifty No’s; and on the final program, he sounded quite affable. Everything that can go wrong, in 34 years, of course, did. At one time, our radio station was located in Chinatown in D.C. and a celebration of the Chinese New Year interrupted my audio. Even a sound proof studio could not shut out the fireworks. A.R. Ammons showed up for an hour-long interview and reading without his books (thank heavens I had them). This happened quite a lot. I never arrived empty handed.

DG: How much preparation do you have to do for each show?

GC: If I am interviewing a U.S. Poet Laureate, I read every single word written: prose, memoir, poetry. I do that all summer as these interviews occur each October. This is enjoyment for me. As for other poets, I know their most recent books and probably former works.

DG: When did you yourself start writing and publishing poetry?

GC: As we all know, poets are born brain-wired a certain way and every poet I know wrote as a child. I’m no exception. I started writing poetry because language was how I understood the world. It was a paradigm that made everything matter and in forms that were safe to hold what I felt. I sent poems out as a young adult, but not until my 4th child was born did I write and send poems out every day. That was 1964. My current process is that I write a book of poems and then the characters won’t go away so I write a play from that. This is the case with my last five plays. They were books of poems first. Yet, the play becomes nothing at all like the poetry. However, the characters have been born there.

DG: Does that the radio show has helped or hindered your own writing?

GC: Public work does not cut into personal creativity. They are streams from the same river but with different destinations. I get a huge energy transfusion from listening to poets read their works. But that does not belong to me. I go into a different room in the house inside myself to plunder my own secrets and language for poems. If anything, hearing another poet is a sacred experience I enter, but I can honestly say this does not influence my own work.

DG: Lately, you've been working on having your plays produced. Tell us about those, where they've been done, and what has pleased you about their productions.

GC: Well, I am a product of the “Hippie” theater movement of the ’60s. In 1968 I had my first play produced in Baltimore’s Corner Cafe (a branch of Café La Mama.) It was the heyday for theater, even using storefronts and cafes for stages. I had ten plays produced in succession, all one-acts . . . which was the vogue then. . . along with Sam Shepherd, Leonard Malfi, many interesting writers. I had one show billed with Joe Orton at WPA Theater Off -Broadway in 1977. But, with four children I could not play in that sandbox continuously. It takes hands-on attention and I had to meet the school bus each day at 3:00 pm. In the mid-70s I saw my first full-length play win a national award, produced several times on both coasts. Then a hiatus until the mid ’80s with that same play in NYC. It has just been published in “Scene4 International Magazine of the Arts:” The Sticker Tree,” all these years later. In the 1980s I formed an association with NYC’s Xoregos Performing Company, and through my writing grants, several plays have been mounted with professional actors. I have had twenty-three plays staged since 1968 all over the country. They usually are tried in NYC such as “Hyena in Petticoats” in 2006—then it went to Durango Colorado. After trials, “Quilting the Sun” went to Greensville South Carolina and is now being produced in different South Carolina cities in preparation for the Spoleto festival. Also harking back to the ’70s and ’60s, I have worked with Baltimore composer Vivian Adelberg Rudow in writing texts and lyrics for songs and opera that continue to be produced and recorded.

NOREEN TOMASSI

Noreen Tomassi became Director of the Center for Fiction in New York City in 2004. She began her career in Play Development department at McCarter Theatre at Princeton and was director of the Literary Arts and Theater programs at the New Jersey State Council for the Arts and a past president of Arts International. Her books include Money for International Exchange in the Arts and American Visions/Visiones de las Americas. With Jane Alexander and Birgitta Trommler, she co-created What of the Night, a theater piece based on the life and work of Djuna Barnes, produced by MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel in Spring 2005.

Daniela Gioseffi: How did you come to be director of the Center for Fiction, and how did the Center for Fiction come about as an institution and facility?

Noreen Tomassi: When I took the job as executive director in fall 2004, The Center was still called The Mercantile Library of New York. The “Merc” was founded in 1820 by a group of merchants who wanted to create a library for the use of their clerks. I believe I believe I was hired because in my interview I laid out a vision for a Center for Fiction in New York City, and this perfectly aligned with the Board’s interests in moving the organization into the 21st century.

DG: Describe the facility’s functions and programs. What is its raison d’etre?

NT: The Center for Fiction is the only nonprofit in the U.S. solely dedicated to celebrating fiction. We work every day to connect readers and writers. Time Out calls The Center “one of the top three reasons to stay in Manhattan for literary events,” citing the innovative panels, lectures, and conversations that take place in our beautiful building on East 47th Street. We also feature workspace, grants, and classes to support emerging writers, reading groups on classic and contemporary authors, and programs to help get kids reading. We recognize the best in the world of fiction through our annual awards, and we operate an independent fiction bookshop on our ground floor. We are also an important piece of New York City history, continuing to build our renowned circulating fiction collection, begun before the advent of the public library system. In the future, I would like The Center to be known nationally and internationally as the pre-eminent place for lovers of fiction, both readers and writers, on-line and here in NYC. I’d like to be able to support more writers early in their career. I’d like to have a residency program for accomplished writers. I’d like us all to think about fiction more expansively—novelists writing for TV, as Tom Piazza does for Treme; multi-media work and innovative e-books; immersive fiction/gaming, and more—and I’d like The Center to be known for having unbelievably great, earth-shatteringly great, literary programming here in our building, at other sites, and in all media.

DG: What are the biggest challenges in shepherding the Center for Fiction’s work and existence? I imagine it is difficult in these hard economic times.

NT: It is hard—and has been especially hard for all non-profits since 2008. But it’s hard for everyone. The goal is to find enough people who love the art of fiction enough to support a center—the only Center for Fiction in the entire country—in these rough times. Charitable giving is always a very personal choice and when money is tight, the trick is not to convince random people to give, (That never works!), but to find the institution’s “family. ”In our case, these are the people to whom writing and reading matter terribly, who really want to help writers, who want to get more kids reading, and to whom it feels natural and right to help maintain a meeting place and oasis for fiction lovers. We find more and more people like that every year, and that’s heartening.

DG: As an Italian American, how did you escape traditional notions of Italian femininity, or la vita della cucina (the woman in the kitchen)? Were your parents and family encouraging of your education in literary arts?

NT: My grandmother spoke almost no English and a number of my cousins were born in Italy and still live there (in Milan and Rome). Neither my mother nor my father, nor any of nearly 40 aunts and uncles on either side, were college-educated. So I can’t say that my parents encouraged me to continue my education in any field, though they seemed more or less glad that I graduated high school. That said, my mother was a voracious reader and wrote quite good poetry, mostly on religious themes, and encouraged me to read. Because most of the adult men I knew in my extended family worked seasonally in the trades as masons or carpenters, nearly all of the women worked outside the home to provide a basic steady income. My mother learned bookkeeping and worked in the office at a car dealership. Many of my aunts worked the assembly lines at the GM plant or as cashiers in retail stores. So I don’t know that I had much of a sense of the woman solely as "keeper of home and hearth.” It’s true that these women made homes, created holidays rich with tradition, were the primary care-givers to their children and did all that in addition to working. But, I don’t know that that was specific to Italian American families of the time.

From very early on I decided to learn how to be financially self-sufficient while doing work I would love and I suppose I think of myself as a career woman. That said, check in with me on any Christmas Eve and you’ll find me in the kitchen furiously cooking my grandmother’s recipes for my son and nieces and their families. I doubt there’s anything I love more than sitting at that long table among high chairs and toddlers and teens and my son and nieces with a glass of red wine and a meal I cooked for them on the table. La vita della cucina is something I value very much!

DG: You studied literature at Skidmore, not arts administration. Does being director of the Center for Fiction inhibit your own writing, or are you still doing writing of your own? How does being around the richness of these programs affect your inner life?

NT: I’m not a terribly structured writer and am full of admiration for people who say they write n words or n pages a day without fail. I need to have an idea or project I love. I was wildly in love with Djuna Barnes for three years. Thought about her day and night, couldn’t stand to be away from her. I do note that What of the Night, my last big project, ended just as I was taking this job, so it’s possible that the amount of energy and passion I put into The Center is getting in the way of my next big literary love affair. (Though I am having a little flirtation right now, so who knows?)

I hope that the programs mean something to our audience, enrich their lives. There have been a number of books lately—the wonderful Montaigne, or How to Live; Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, and A Jane Austen Education to name just a few, that suggest that great literature can teach us how to be better human beings. I’d like to believe that’s true, that anyone who reads Jane Austen can’t be a bad human being, but there’s lots of evidence to the contrary, isn’t there? Think of the writers who disprove it. Naipaul, for example, is a fine writer and obviously a thoughtful reader, but it clearly hasn’t been advantageous to his inner life. Pound read Dante and Leopardi, but was a wreck of a human being. So why spend 60 or more hours a week, week in and week out, if you don’t believe reading makes for a better, richer inner life? I guess the truth is that despite the evidence, I do believe it. I have faith. Reading is better than not reading, books can be sacred objects and libraries sacred places, and my inner life, such as it is, and certainly my outer life, my everyday existence, are made better by fiction.

DG: What aspects of your position do you find the most fulfilling, and which are the most challenging to that sense of enrichment?

NT: I love writers. They are endlessly fascinating to me and for the most part are a pleasure to be around. So the programming is my greatest joy, matched only by working on the awards we give—The Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and the Emerging Writers Fellowships in particular. I can’t begin to explain how satisfying it is to sit down with the first 25 pages of a debut novel submission and think— “Ah, this is it, the real thing, this is a writer I’ll still be reading with great pleasure 20 years from now.” I also love talking about books, which makes lingering with audiences after events and leading book groups a lot of fun. And I love my Board. I hope other executive directors don’t hate me too much, but I honestly do think I have one of the greatest Boards ever—committed, thoughtful, supportive, and full of humor and grace. My Board Chairman in particular (Peter Ginna of BloomsburyUSA) is a godsend. The biggest challenge continues to be how to do all we do with such a small staff. People are generally amazed to hear that there are only a few full-time people working here. They are all talented, dedicated people, but still . . .

DG: Is there something else you wished I’d asked you that you’d like to expound upon? Please feel free to add anything else about your work and life that you’d like to articulate in closing.

NT: The question I'm most often asked at dinner parties seems to be whether I think people will still be reading books twenty years from now, whether the next generation will be willing to immerse themselves in a novel or whether short pieces of prose on screens will be all that interests them. I, of course, believe they will. More people are reading on this planet than ever before. and new technologies will make great books even more available around the globe. Not everyone will want to become a voracious reader or a person who "lives by fiction" as I, and many members of The Center, do. But that's always been the case. Some people care more about music or dance or finance or painting—or golf, or baseball. But the fact that more people are literate and more people have access to the written word means that more people will fall in love with reading. Whether books, in their current form, survive is a different question and I don't have an answer for that. I don't think anyone does. I do know that as much as I love real books—paging through them, the smell of them, the look of type on paper and the beautiful covers, it really is what's inside them that counts. The stories matter, not the form in which they're delivered. And, I don't have any doubt at all that people will keep telling stories and reading them as long as there are people around.

Daniela Gioseffi is the founding editor of Poets USA and ItalianAmericanWriters.com. She is the American Book Award winning author of fourteen books of poetry and prose.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012

by Jim Cohn
Internationally acclaimed poet Anne Waldman is well known as a force in poetry. She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks’s Church In-the-Bowery, working there for over a decade; she also co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where as Distinguished Professor of Poetics she continues to work to preserve the school’s substantial literary/oral archive. A recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, Waldman is the author of more than 40 books, including Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, 1975), Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews, and Manifestos (Coffee House Press, 2001), and several volumes of selected poems. She has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such works as Marriage: A Sentence (Penguin, 2000),Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin, 2004), Manatee/Humanity (Penguin, 2009), and the monumental anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press, $40), a project that took 25 years to complete. We discussed the book on April 2, 2012, the poet’s birthday.

Jim Cohn: You began work on Iovis in the late 1980s; Book I appeared in 1993. What were the circumstances that gave birth to your writing? Did you conceive it as a trilogy all along?

Anne Waldman: The plan was always a trilogy, the classical triad. Outer, inner, secret, Heaven, Earth, Man (which is the triad of the haiku), Nirmanakya, Sambhogakaya, Dharmakaya (realms of form, light, and emptiness—a Buddhist triad), and so on. Aeschuylus’sOresteia, Dante’s Commedia. Endless complicated triads. H.D.’s War Trilogy as well, a deep bow of gratitude in my project to the power of her epic, written against a backdrop of war. I was also thinking in terms of a feminist plan of explicating the male, usurping with the female and the hermaphrodite, and then resolving in something transcendent beyond gender perhaps. And personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing—and third: the act/act of vocalizing. The subtitle “Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment” came with “Book III: Eternal War” but seemed to serve the entire project with its implication of unmasking layers of “concealment.” I wanted an expansive form that would make a demand on my time—tithe my time—at least a quarter century. That would be a record—a slice of history—for my son and his generation. It was interesting to publish IOVIS gradually, as it un-wound and progressed. Iovis is the generative of Jove, Zeus, and I was seeing how everything is of the Patriarch. The actual title is “The Of-Jove Trilogy,” and came from Virgil’s line “Iovis omnia plena,” all is full of Jove. You need a trilogy to cover the subject.

JC: The physical production of your 1000-plus page epic poem, as an object, a relic, is no small achievement. With its highly visual formal arrangement of words and image on the page, the sheer duration of the ink-based performance pushes the envelope of printing. How involved were you in actual book’s layout and design?

AW: I like the idea of the object, the relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that activates a sound and light show. I was completely involved with the design and production. I wanted the Balinese figure dancing on the front cover. It’s as I envisioned it, actually, once I knew they would not be able to do afford a three-volume book-set. I was both amused and horrified by the sheer size and heft and decided to embrace it, rather than feel embarrassed. The tome feels like—and carries the burden—of 25 years, the years spent on writing it and the actual documentary time-frame of the poem, which is very different, say, fromManatee/Humanity, an ecological narrative, which is meant to take place over three days, although it took three years to write. I was extremely fortunate to have, in my editors at Coffee House, a very supportive team. I was pleased they supported the image of the “plutonium pit” from Rocky Flats. And the drawings. And the skewed spelling. And all the rest: circles, triangles, stars, musical notation.

JC: What is the relationship between the “abstracts” or “narratives” that begin each section ofIovis and the “poem” that follows? What models, if any, did you follow in doing that?

AW: Essentially it was meant as a guide for the reader through the twists and turns of the poem, to locate place, site, event, state of mind. I always appreciate the prose abstracts or summaries to Dante’s Cantos, not his I believe, but preparatory maps, and then wanting to include other events and details important to the poem but in a different mode or genre, somewhat like thealap in an Indian raga, where all the themes are laid out, was useful. Victorian and other period novels carry heady explanations in their chapter headings. Perhaps a didactic thrust but essential to guide the reader though this long montage-trajectory (as one reviewer said, Iovis is “not for the faint of heart”) and have a kind of documentary “voice,” as it were, which is another path of the rhizome. As in the Commedia, I used the first person with all its avatars and split personalities and doppelgangers, and the abstracts helped ground whoever the consciousness of the poem is. Clearly an amalgam.

JC: In the opening prose section at the beginning of “I Am The Guard” you write of your founding of the Kerouac School with Allen Ginsberg and note your Jovian intention regarding the male poets you admired: “The challenge of the elder poet-men is their emotional pitch she wants to set her own higher than.” Do you think Iovis achieves this higher “emotional pitch”?

AW: I would hope so. I think it goes higher in pitch because of the advantage of distance, and of a feminist outrage. And my vocal chords reach the high notes of “coming after,” so to speak, in the multiple guises that foreground the female, rather than having her reified as with Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams. There was a way “she” gets lost in their epics. That clear-sighted seer is sidelined, she’s not enough real flesh and blood with her own throbbing poet-consciousness. The feminist consciousness in Iovis wants you to see where she has travelled—to the complicated tin and cardboard slums of India, to a survived yet struggling land where a whole generation (my own) is decimated (in Viet Nam). In his extraordinary The H.D. Book, which importantly explores the role women played in the creation of Modernism, Robert Duncan sites the discordant note—“the rant of Pound, the male bravado of Williams, the bitter anger of Lawrence”—and calls them “purposeful overcharges” and speaks of theirs as a therapeutic art. I would agree. And we would share that. But the feminine principle of putting makeup on empty space seemed absent, and I was also driven to create also (albeit with my male comrade Allen Ginsberg, as well initially with the very strong poet Diane di Prima) a zone such as the Kerouac School that would embed what I call the architecture of the feminine, that is the “environment,” the space that allows gestation and generation. There’s reference in the Tao Te Ching (6th century BCE) to the “dark female-enigma” which is called the “root of heaven and earth,” and this text says this spirit is like “gossamer so unceasing it seems real. Use it: it’s effortless.” The environment is always there, waiting.

JC: I’m also thinking of the letter from “B.B.” which suggests you rely more on personal history rather than political or geological history in the making of the poem—and in doing so, create a different kind of poetry than the “masters.” Although you obviously included this letter to argue the point that you had achieved a greater degree of accessibility to the reader, do you believe that Iovis is actually any less dense or complex or arcane than those modernist long poems by Pound, Olson, Williams, etc?

AW: No, I would say it is as dense, but also invokes “’istorin” (the root of the word “history”) as a mode to explore the political history of this slice of war/lifetime. How infuriating it is to be continually born to war that continues one’s whole lifetime, even as one protests it—what futility. It is perhaps a more public epic in this regard, and carries a ritual vocalization. And I was concerned with certain modalities of sound and enactment, as in the tribute section “Pieces of an Hour” to John Cage. And influenced, as well, by Buddhist and Balinese rites and practices.

JC: The multipersonae of a traveler of the physical dimension, as well as others, suggests a central concern of the poem. Travel grounds the traveler in the poem’s wired global scale, its worldwide interplanetary scope. Can you share a few of your itineraries while you were writingIovis in terms of those specific locales that drove you to write sections based upon what you learned being there?

AW: I referred to India and Viet Nam above, because I have felt a strong link to those places and their cultures and their role in my own life and poetics. I first travelled to India in the early 1970s as a curious spiritual pilgrim and “took refuge” and began a Buddhist practice with Tibetan teachers, but I was also enamored of India culture—Vedic chanting, the Bauls of Bengal, and the raga as an expansive form inspired aspects of Iovis as well. But the reality of being offered an infant to take back to the U.S. with me by a family in Bubaneshwar was a startling and poignant “luminous detail” that conjured an extreme and hard reality. I couldn’t comply but I could tell the story. That area along the Bay of Bengal also suffered terrible floods after I left. In Viet Nam—traveling primarily in the North—there were few people of my generation left, they had died in what they call “The American War.” I felt a strong karmic link to my own generation, how much blood on our hands, protest as we may? My father had served in World War II and that was still palpable as I explore in the book, Korea was more distant, Viet Nam was virtually in the living room and in the streets. There’s an earlier “History lesson for my son” on Viet Nam and then the later pilgrimage, “Dark Arcana: Afterimage or Glow.” The trip up the Yangtze (“Tears Streak The Reddest Rouge” from Book III) was a revelation. This section comes out of notes from that trip. The gates of the Three Gorges Dam were like the gates of hell, the river itself the Styx. This monolithic dam misplaced whole villages and cultures, drowned important sites and historical artifacts, and was an ecological disaster as well.

JC: The 7th-century BCE Greek poet Archilochus wrote of being a poet and a warrior, which became a model for Homer. You seem to have taken that as your own investigation into concealment of women when you wrote: “I am both therapon.” Can you discuss how you came upon this multi-alternative “I” and how you placed it within the book’s heroine?

AW: Yes, the negative capability of “both, both.” And the warrior and poet, indeed—cutting though the underbrush and detritus of civilizations and layers of psyche with her stylus-weapon-scythe. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet might join in here as well. But interesting you pick up on “therapon”—Greek for an “attendant” and related to the word “therapy,” also a wonderful double entendre: there upon. “I am there upon.” I am upon this work, I am upon my subject, so to speak. I think of Robert Duncan’s title “Before the War” not as relative to temporality but as standing, facing, in front of the war.

JC: I’d like to ask you more about your views on male energy because it is so central to the work. On page 61 of Book I, you write:

Don’t mock me as I avenge the death of my sisters
in this or any other dream
In order to make the crops grow
you men must change into women

On page 62 you write:

The poet . . . tries to write in anti-forms without success. But the boy, her son, guides her through her confusion . . .

On page 111, you argue:

I wanted you in agreement that women invented the alphabet . . .

and on page 122, you explicate the epic journey

to the underworld & steal the secrets of the male energies that rule there . . .

On page 154, you posit a distinct male position where

The “male” here is more dormant deity, integrated into a transcendent yet powerful hermaphrodite. . . a “double” . . .

Can you elaborate on the mechanism of male energy you hacked into in Iovis and how that may or may not have evolved over the twenty-five years you spent writing the poem?

AW: The psychological mechanism was there to be exposed in a way, and there was also the need to transcend to the hermaphrodite, help the male “get” there—explore the “both both” of sexuality and eros and how eros moves, ascends beyond gender construct. I think Iovisexplores identity in this way, instructing—correcting—the male on how to behave so he too can get free of the habitual patterns of the warring god realm, the need to always hallucinate an enemy and thereby justify his bellicose existence and lust for blood. Which also goes to the greed of plunder and loot and empire. So I watched that over 25 years, and the only power I had was in my poetry, tracking the deeds of the patriarch. But I was also tracking the life of my child, my world, my lives, my elders, the school I had helped create—a temporary autonomous zone of sanity. The dark trajectories forced the poem into being in a sense—maybe I would go mad if I didn’t track Rocky Flats, from demonstrating in the ’70s to the present with the nuclear plant decomissioned and yet the soil still toxic with plutonium, visiting Bhopal to see the residues of the Union Carbide genocide in 1986. We see how “the fix is in, the fix is in” continues to manifest in the ugly scenarios playing out in Iraq and Afghanistan. Criminal wars. A million Iraqis dead? You have to wonder and weep and rage over this horrific pathology. And the new human-less weaponry—drones and surveillance—more mechanisms of concealment. All those horrors, and how they are inter-connected and how we are “before them,” and can’t ignore them. And expose the agendas of Halliburton and so on. Quite exhausting.

I hope people of the future will go to this poem for some of the history, as well as for the imagination and beauty that counters and chides and is still in a wild place. I experience Iovis as—ultimately—a generative project. The boy guiding through confusion is key here as well. Who inherits this larynx? Who comes after us to clean up the mess? Who might sing of the darker times?

JC: You mention the Occupy Movement of 2011 in Book III. Iovis has a kind of 3-D political activism—its interconnected themes of war, feminism, and language. The poem has been described in a Publishers Weekly review, as your “attempt at a new world history, a radical re-creation myth, an homage to Blake's epics and Pound's cantos, and a mystic or matriarchal answer to the male-dominated civilization (Jove or Iovis, the male god).” Do you agree with that?

AW: Yes, I would agree. There is that tri-partite braid you mention. And it might be the language the poem finds is the answer. That our need to reimagine our world through the vibratory larynx, that’s what matters. Re-awaken the world to itself. Through ideas, pictures, sounds. Hold the mirror up to “nature.”

JC: Your own Vajrayana Buddhist practice was front and center in Book II, “Rooms”, and is woven throughout the trilogy. You wrote of your fear of “passion toward others, toward anything” and how the room of mind you lived in “was a prison.” Were there particular moments over the twenty-five years of writing the poem that informed your personal goal of attaining some kind of freedom—“this poem is the occasion of my complete LIBERATION”—in this lifetime?

AW: O dear, I sound arrogant. If you speak of your own liberation or enlightenment, clearly it hasn’t happened! Still too much ego. But certainly writing this work over a long period of time was liberating. I got all that mental projection and montage and history and sense perception OUT in front of myself where I could shape it. There’s an aspiration to keep working free of “small mind” in the Iovis project which also reflects an allegiance to reflection, contemplation, and following the breath of yourself and others, including the “plants and trees and so on. . .” and seeing poetry is also a means of liberation, in that I am awakened to this life and its beauty and mystery and complexity through the graces of a “making” of language. And there are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them. And it can be grand and vast and you can create a realm where you can dwell for a while. Where things are perfect symbols of themselves, no manipulation. And that connects to me to the Buddhist view. From that perspective we can wake up on the spot, be conscious of our world, think of others. Not push ahead on the line, hog the road, and so on. Most of us have glimmers of that. Little gaps in our “me me” monkey mind consciousness.

JC: You include numerous personal letters throughout Iovis, but none speaks as potentially critical of the poem as one by your longtime Kerouac School colleague Anselm Hollo. Hollo argues that “the poem needs to be more than just raw material to present to an . . . audience, in ways intentionally or unintentionally designed to cover up weaknesses in the writing. . . .” How would you respond to post-publication criticisms of the work that in fact there are vast numbers of pages in which a radical syntactic linguistics is at play and meaning is at-one with no-meaning?

AW: I took Anselm Hollo’s ars poetica to do with a critique of reading the telephone book, or some such performance strategy, more conceptual in purpose. I suppose the best response is to let Iovis find its readers and place in the spectrum, which it seems to be doing. I have great confidence in its many surprises, delights, and strategies, to use that male word. Even humor. There are intentional spaces for “raw” material, but so much of it has been worked through the “poem machine.” I see endless permutations are possible as well with how one might read it.

JC: You discuss sexism and the Beats in a long letter to Jane Dancey, in which you state that the biggest problem with the Beats was “the inattention to women and often sexist attitudes about women that undermine some of the early writing.” You follow that with an interview with poet Joanne Kyger in which she states something very real for any experimental writer working under the radar: “No one’s going to tell you you’ve got it.” What would you say is the heart of the long-term personal power that fueled Iovis?

AW: Yes, exactly, no one asks you to do this. And the male-poet compadres are not always helpful. It took Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg too long to see what a great poet Joanne Kyger is! But indeed, no one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction—a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn’t mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that. You are deliberately making this work for yourself—to see your own mind, to learn something, to wake up, to observe the work can be arranged, shaped, held, transmitted.

JC: You are a poet “enamored of syllabaries, alphabets, the phonemes of old tongue & groove.” You also mention how the reference point of your writing of the epic was the mantra “War, gender, language” (“Lacrimare, Lacrimatus: ‘Dux Femina Facti’”). Can you discuss your appreciation of Gertrude Stein and her “include it all” poetics in the making of Iovis?

AW: Yes, as much that could be included. I did have to cut about 100 pages at Coffee House’s insistence. They would not have been able to bind the book. It was also unfinished pages in draft that weren’t as strong. The epic is a story of your time, your wars, your heroes. For her it was Susan B. Anthony, Picasso. Stein is a champion of her own continuous present mind-grammar. The world is constantly reflected in her patterns and associations, and she is miraculously liberated by a lack of restraints. She could use the intimate things in her life, and also simple objects, names as well—where they are “reduced” to language in relationship to itself and flattened out quite democratically—so that in an interesting way they become neutralized. She wrote freely and yes, maybe things are coded, but she wrote a great many works, dense and demanding. You feel her liberation when you hold and read her notebooks in the Beieneke Library at Yale. The assertive child-genius.

JC: The “Spin or Lace It In Story” piece In Book II exemplifies the poet’s role in retelling “traditional myth”—its relationship to “phenomenal obstacles the imagination conjures & vivifies. . . .” It seems to call attention to the centrality of imagination. Can you discuss the roots of this story? Is it from a film?

AW: It’s the spider woman myth, from Navajo/Diné, Keresan, and Hopi Native peoples. A kind of creation myth, a survival myth. In this version she’s a “spinster” with “no man to touch her,” as I say. She’s probably Grandmother Spider Woman. I wanted to invoke the sense of her “spinning,” and spinning a tale, this tale—this epic—as well. The artist as solipsistic, complete-unto-her-self, letting “the centrality of imagination” as you say, come and unravel. Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration. Other characters such as Copper Man appear, and all the natural (including cobweb and gossamer) elements. I think I retold this story while being in a retreat. I was indebted to Paula Gunn Allen and her book The Scared Hoop. She was raised on the Laguna Pueblo and was an important thinker (anthropologically), wanting to restore a sense of the gynocratic to Native Amerian history, and myth. The centrality of the feminine.

JC: You begin Book III, “Eternal War,” with an introduction in which you write, “The sending and receiving practice of tonglen I recommend again as it is the crux of this project: take negatively (sic) upon oneself, call it out, breathe out the efficacy. Practice empathy in all things. Pick a cause and tithe your time relative to the half-life of plutonium.” What is the place of tonglen in your conjectures of “future . . . radical poetries”?

AW: Tonglen is taking it all in, including it all, as Gertrude Stein recommends, but for the scope of Iovis it’s all the toxicities of our world as well—the ugliness, violence, disparities, the suffering of all kinds and degrees, of others near and far. Your compassion travels beyond your own inner circle. And then you breathe out an alternative version where you mentally and emotionally and psychologically purify the poisons. So indeed, the generative idea is in the crux of this practice and of my propensity toward poetry, which is a practice of the imagination. We humans need to do better with our vast minds and alchemical powers. Future radial poetries might be more symbiotic with the rest of consciousness.

JC: There are exquisite sections of Book III, such as “G-Spot” and “Matriot Acts,” that would be the apex of most poets’ careers. And then there is “Problem-Not-Solving,” which really was the highlight of the entire poem for me. Can you talk about how your activist work at Rocky Flats in 1978-1979, as well as all your tireless antiwar, antinuke rallying over the years, came to be seen in this formulation of “problem-not-solving”?

AW: As for the activist work, it just goes on, and it seems to be more and more about how to preserve Archive, how to preserve culture, how to hide the treasures so that they can be found at a later date and re-activated. For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future. So Iovis has that potential. And it was written for my son Ambrose Bye so that he could see where I had been, and he could see something of the world that he would inherit. This is the Kali Yuga, remember, according to many traditions a dark age, and we will need some paths and trajectories through it. “Problem-not-solving” keeps the potential to actually solve. Solve is close to salve—balm, a healing ointment—and also to salvare, to save. That little “not” (knot) could be eliminated. And there’s that active “ing” in “solving.” The situation in Israel/Palestine is the most crazy-making, suffering-inducing “knot,” perhaps the greatest conundrum of our time. We need a Peace Tzaress in the cabinet. We need a world-wide Department of Peace. The will is just not there yet, the other way is still so darkly lucrative. Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.

Jim Cohn is director of the online Museum of American Poetics (poetspath.com), which he founded in 1998. His most recent books are Mantra Winds (2010) and Sutras and Bardos: Essays and Interviews on Allen Ginsberg, The Kerouac School, Anne Waldman, Postbeat Poets and The New Demotics (2011). He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2012 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2012