Tag Archives: spring 2024

Over the Edge

Norbert Hirschhorn
Holland Park Press (£10)

by Warren Woessner

Poet Norbert Hirschhorn’s parents fled from Austria just before the Holocaust and resettled in New York when Hirschhorn was ten. He went on to become a social services physician who was honored for developing a treatment for cholera; later in life, he started writing poetry and has published several books. His latest collection, Over the Edge, is not an easy read, but it is compelling. The edge that the poet and his parents go over is from normal life as survivors (albeit temporary ones), toward Hirschhorn’s visionary descriptions of what may be waiting on the other side. (Hint: It is not heavenly peace.)

The section of poems entitled “853 Riverside Drive (New York City)” offers an unflinching memoir of death and its precursors, depicting the anything but hopeful strivings of a young emigrant. Hirschhorn helps his mother with the laundry, where he would “edge over to the waist-high / parapet, and imagine myself flying to the next building / over. It was my first sense of suicide.” He is not alone:

Sitting at my 8th grade homework in the alcove by
The kitchen I smelled something strange. I turned.

To see my mother sitting calmly, wearing her new
housecoat, her chair facing the gas-oven door.

Hirchhorn’s father leaves the family but eventually returns to die at 853 Riverside Drive. The poet reviews his father’s body for the last time before it is “lowered into the ground, followed by / dirt, rocks, prayers and perpetual darkness”; in the next stanza, Hirschhorn the medical student compares dissecting a corpse to carving a Thanksgiving turkey. Perhaps as a sort of atonement for his disrespect for his father, Hirschhorn includes a poem titled “Tahara,” a formal death Jewish ritual:

the body laid in a plain pine box.
The family kissed his head in reverence.
Tahara, a gift to the bereaved, done.
The body now ready for burial at sundown.

Some of the most arresting poems in Over the Edge describe conversations with death as vivid dreams, as in the last lines of “The Call,” where we get both sides of the story:

Please, give me some ease.
None to be had.

Then let me ask you something.
Go ahead.

Why does it take me so long to leave the house?
You know, forget this, forget that, recheck the stove,
Go back for the umbrella . . .

You’re afraid you’ll die.
I am afraid.
Good then. Let’s go.

In “I Dream Of Him In Lightness and Dust,” Hirschhorn calls up death as a rather suave fellow, but one the poet would rather not meet:

Before me now, arms outstretched.
I want to fall on his breast, panting, crying,
bury my face in his sweet-smelling neck.

Instead, we press our hands together,
my right hand between his, his between mine.
For this is the manner, this is the custom

how the dead greet the dead.

Dramatic in the best sense of the word, Over the Edge is written to be spoken and meant to be heard. With a physician’s candor and the complex perspectives of a child of survivors, Hirshhorn offers a roadmap to a vacation that few of us want to take.

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

Never-Belonging in Tandem with Light: An Interview with Tiffany Troy

by Rose DeMaris

To open Dominus (BlazeVOX, $18), Tiffany Troy’s full-length poetry debut, is to enter a world that is both recognizably earthly and potently mythic. Here, the epic, eternal essences hidden within the most prosaic acts (consuming ketchup), scenes (arguing in a courthouse), and relationships (familial or otherwise) are revealed through Troy’s alchemical mix of voice and form. The book’s speaker is an honest, sharp, and subjugated “I.” Sometimes she is “Baby Tiger” and sometimes a “tamed wolf without fangs” beaten down by the cruelties of capitalism, corporate America, and paternal masters both human and divine. An overworked attorney, she’s the daughter of an immigrant father and a faraway mother who, despite feeling at times like “every girl who ever thought / maybe she had wronged the world by existing,” retains a capacity for incisive observation, keen feeling, and adaptive mutability fueled in part by “life-affirming brekkie” and steaming cups of Earl Grey. Troy’s poems never hover delicately above despair; indeed, there is a deep and wondrous aesthetic refreshment in their refusal to do so. And it is precisely “through the thick residue of the window pane” that her lines reveal light, and become it. Baby Tiger is akin to one of autumn’s “frowning sunflowers burdened / by the weight of their golden mane” who “cannot help / but peek up and beam.”

In addition to Dominus, Troy is the author of the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press) and has published her poetry, criticism, and translations (primarily of Latin American women writers) in numerous journals and anthologies. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, an Associate Editor at Tupelo Press, and Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review.

Rose DeMaris: The sense of place is so vivid in this book. “Ilium” is a place name used in Dominus, but it includes a broad spectrum of settings, from Flushing, Queens and Burger King to apartment interiors and subway trains. It’s a kaleidoscopic world you’ve built with words. How does your own relationship to “place”—whatever that might mean to you—and to New York City inform this work? 

Tiffany Troy: Dominus’s sense of place derives from the exuberance of a speaker in a city that feels new and full of possibilities—it is impossible for her not to geek out at the tiramisu at Columbia University or the double whopper at Burger King, chase after the mallard ducks at Flushing Meadows Corona Kissena Park, and take in the metallic sheen of the Gowanus Canal and the glass bottles at Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn. Kenneth Koch begins “To My Twenties” with the lines “How lucky that I ran into you / When everything was possible,” and Dominus is informed by that bubbly sense alongside the neoclassical architecture of the courthouses, which are solemn and meant to establish awe. This is the setting where the characters grow up, a world where the corporate and professional coexist with the natural. 

In thinking about Ilium as “place,” Dara Barrois-Dixon recently sent me “Kurt Vonnegut’s House Is Not Haunted” by Sophie Kemp in The Paris Review. In this essay, Kemp writes: 

Slaughterhouse-Five is set in Dresden and Luxembourg and Outer Space and also Ilium, New York. Ilium, it is argued by most Vonnegut readers and scholars, is probably Schenectady. It appears in several of his other books. Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and a few different short stories. Here is how Ilium is referenced, in one passage of the Slaughterhouse-Five: “Billy owned a lovely Georgian home in Ilium. He was rich as Croesus, something he had never expected to be . . . In addition he owned a fifth of the new Holiday Inn out on Route 54 and half of three Tastee Freeze stands.”

What a coincidence, right? As with Vonnegut, my Ilium is drawn from the rich cultural heritage of a town I’m familiar with, and it focuses on its identity as an ethnic enclave from the insider’s point of view.

Place is critical to the development of some characters who are “out of place,” being immigrants or children of immigrants. Transportation literally moves people to and from jobs—the seven train runs from Flushing-Main Street to Times Square-42nd Street, for example, while also reinforcing the hierarchy of the boroughs: Manhattan is glamorous with its skyscrapers and Museum Mile brownstones, Long Island with the Hamptons and foliage at Oyster Bay.

Chun Wai Chun, principal dancer of the New York City Ballet, recently shared a reel that began: “You think all the Chinese boys run laundries and are watchmen when they grow up? We want to be policemen, firemen, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, and sellers.” I identify with that statement and its double-bind maze of what we colloquially call the “American dream.” As someone who grew up in Queens and traveled to school in Manhattan, I am interested in writing Dominus to capture that sense of never-belonging in tandem with light.

RD: Ilium is also, of course, another name for the ancient city of Troy, a real place that is also part of Greek mythology. And there is a mythical quality to the way you work with names. The speaker is sometimes named Baby Tiger, or Shepherd Girl, or Little Maria (she identifies with Saint Maria Goretti). There’s also Master, the father figure to whom the book’s Latin title refers, and Grandpa Pindar, Friend, The Nurse, The Doctor, etc. Sometimes you use familiar terms like papa, mama, brother, grandma. And sometimes you use people’s actual names, like Ilya Kaminsky, Monica Youn, or Machiavelli. How does naming or not naming people work to propel your writing? Do the pseudonyms free you up a bit by providing some distance or a playful quality?

TT: The speaker’s various alter egos (“Baby Tiger,” etc.) are popular with readers, and the diminutives (“baby,” “girl,” “little”) in the two-word nicknames aid in creating a sense of endearment, or a proximity with that which is at once familial and youthful. There is something epic or heroic about the speaker figuring her way out of the Wonderland of the court, hospital, church, or corporation, where the bureaucracy has adopted its own lingo that often conceals what is truly meant. Characters with titles as names, like Friend, Doctor, or Nurse, explore the perils of taking that abstraction in corporate-speak too far because in treating people as statistics or resources, the characters literally become their title or position. Then Grandpa, Mama, Papa, and God, are blood or adoptive family that ground the speaker. They are wiser than the speaker in that they have experienced the world which has both “made” them and “maimed” them in some way, to borrow Margo Jefferson’s term for it from Constructing a Nervous System. Mary Jo Bang calls Maria Goretti a kind of “icon of pure goodness that acts as talisman,” and I feel Grandpa Pindar and Mama especially fulfill that role; their kindness is imbued with their personalities as the speaker’s fictional family pays homage to their role in the literary pantheon.

The specific names referenced stem from that same aesthetic consideration of the New York School, where names are the “violets that cannot be pinned upon the crucible.” Naming people there, like naming mythological characters, creates layering in this fictional city of Ilium where the imaginary (Procne), the historical (Maria Goretti), and the present (Monica Youn, say) can coexist.

RD: The lines in which Monica Youn features are memorable and moving, as she appears as a source of comfort: “what must I do to find my Goldacre / besides downing a Hostess box. / But I have waved goodbye to my sweet tooth, and // all I feel is my body, parts of it, like my thumb / in my mouth / my fingers pulling up a video of Monica Youn, / my wet ears on my phone, as I rock myself with shut eyes.”

This leads to another facet of your book I’m curious about: its abundance of food. From clam chowder and bagels to sausages and diced fruit, the food in these poems has many dimensions: it’s a source of nurturing (“Master feeds me at the red lights”) and of relief from pain: “each day I come up with an excuse for my sugar larks and plunges.” A Twinkie is “a Key to our repressed psyche,” and eating can be a means of psychological survival—”I swallowed to not be swallowed”—or an expression of ire: “I gobbled down two sweet clementines aware that my rage // was bubbling up.” Sometimes it’s tied to moments of humor: “Baby Tiger’s Adversary took a long nap from food coma after lunch.” Food is a link to culture: fish is “laced with emerald /. . . in fortuitously red plastic bags” at the Chinese market, while ketchup is a “symbol of solid American pragmatism.” And it’s a link to “memories of downing defrosted frozen fruits, their sugar already gone” and to a longed-for mother “frying rice with a smile” on “iPad wallpaper.” Food is sustenance received—”warm hot Swiss Miss”—or eked out, to the detriment of the giver: “I squeeze my breasts for milk / before collapsing from fatigue.” Even the speaker and her father are described as the “tongue” and “teeth” who must work together; the relationship at the very heart of the book is like a mouth. Can you talk about why all these edibles and moments of eating found their way into your poems—is there a relationship between consuming, digesting, releasing, and poetry?   

TT: I have been a huge fan of Monica Youn’s poetry for close to a decade, and she has been a role model of what Asian American poetry and law poetry (or poetry by lawyers) can look like. I of course owe the idea of the “Twinkie” to her Library of Congress reading of “Goldacre” from Blackacre.

Food is tremendously important in Dominus because it is the nexus between the thinking speaker and the speaker as animal. The need to eat literally stops work. Baby Tiger, Little Maria, and Shepherd Girl are united in their love of chocolate and fast food. In one way, that makes perfect sense, because somehow these characters believe that by consuming the American happy meal they might attain a family that has been broken apart and shattered all over the world. So the Swiss Miss is a red herring. The life-affirming “brekkie” (a Timothy Donnelly import) sings the tune of a pathetic heroic where so much hope is not staked upon people but on sausage with eggs from Pop’s Diner, for example.

Food is a metaphor of the man-eat-man world of Ilium, where you are sized up the way a hunter might size up a prey. In Dominus, the speaker is hungry most of the time, and we see the speaker escape it with the plump, “sweet clementines” or the “fish laced with emerald.” Food can also be sinister: the twinkie (which I mentioned earlier) as “a Key to our repressed psyche” is a symbol of a kind of deracination that leads to the question of “just who am I”? The self also appears as food in “Squirrel on an October Late Afternoon”; “the swell of my nipples, that yellow muck / of bacteria, the crust of my skin crispy, // my garment tied with rope girding / an equator of red.” Here, at the “height of my suffering” is the body under attack by the body itself, in conjunction with drugs that are ingested, and their aftereffects.

There is a movement both across the collection and within poems in thinking about food as a vehicle of thought. If you think of the first section, “When Ilium Burns,” as the act of consuming and digesting, the last section, “Plus Ultra,” would be a release. As Juan Mobili observes, there is a panning out concurrent with the maturation of the speaker. You see that between the “Hymn of My Fair Lady Boss,” where the speaker must shed the blood of the lady boss to prove her valor. By the last poem, the “life-affirming brekkie” is no longer about “chomp[ing] them down” with ruthlessness. What is left is instead a desire to repay “kindness with kindness.”

RD: Yes, the book’s structure of sections takes readers on a journey as the speaker changes. Regarding the structure of the poems themselves, you write in a dynamic variety of forms, some of which are strict. “A Twinkie’s Love Song,” for example, is a ballad in iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme, and “Metamorphosis as Cassandra is a rhyming sonnet with lines of ten-ish syllables. What’s your process for determining a poem’s form? Do the words come first, or does a form invite language? 

TT: It depends. By that, I mean, forms in poems like “Sea Floor” start off with an image, such as that of the “Heineken and cigarettes the / hakuna matata of loss.” The speaker was devastated by that sight. From that sight, I built it up with the imagery of deflation. The form, which takes place in conjunction with the breakdown of language, draws heavily from Myung Mi Kim’s Underflag (Kelsey Street Press, 2008) and Penury (Omnidawn, 2009) in thinking of how the elements of speech can be repeated across, up-down, and diagonally. What results is a map of the “Sea Floor,” of what can be found by the speaker’s mind which “wanders to the sweet thread named surrender.”

Other poems take up a form that mirrors the briskness and breadth of the modern-day cityscape, like the kaleidoscopic quality you mentioned earlier. I actually created collages of the photographs I took through the seasons, of The Thinker, Alma Mater, Maria Goretti, the sun, the clouds, and the trees. Katie Marya says that “order is a performance” that “feels good because we can’t perform like that in our actual lives,” and I found that the modified quatrain form with the second and fourth line indented, after poems by Timothy Donnelly’s Chariot, helped me capture that sense of wanting to see the “sublime before the sea stirs.”

The origami frogs and the metallic flamingo generate this breadth and briskness that contrast, for instance, with the more austere poems in couplets like “Holy Saturday” where the crisis of the self in the perception of: “The clutter around me shows how the cockroach/ to be exterminated is me” defines how much can be said (in line length) and what can be said (as time is running out). I think I was interested in dressing down (as opposed to up), in contrast with the iconographic Holy Saturday or the idea of specializing in a specific field. 

Sometimes, as poets do, I become obsessed over a combination of things. “A Twinkie’s Love Song” is essentially Twinkie meets the albatross in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I decided to run with it, and the ballad form is of course riveting, and gallops forward stridently, and so there the language is formal, and more playful in the sense that it draws from an eclectic mix of fables and histories to answer the question: Just “who am I, sheared of my golden mane?” Here, of course, food takes on the sinister quality, as a name for Asian-Americans who are yellow on the outside and white on the inside, having been fully assimilated into “American” society.

There is a limit, of course, to the information that poetry can contain. Sometimes the speaker’s excitement in going to Court overflows the poetic line and becomes prose, as in “Elegy to the Foolish and Undignified.” Poems that take a defined form are more time-consuming to write, but at the same time, poems without a defined form are harder to revise, in the sense that the form has to feel true to the emotion, diction, and direction that the poem is going. That’s why “Train” underwent several iterations and drafts before finding its final form.

RD: Though there is a limit to the information a poem can contain, your work illustrates that there is no limit to how much it can transmit in spite (or because) of the constraints created by the line and by form. How did you find poetry? What is next for you as a poet?

TT: I love that idea, because the formal constraint placed on language is often quite freeing and can create neoformalist poetry of great merit, even if at times poets like Aimé Césaire feel the need to topple that. He writes, in Return of the Native Land, that “you could say that I became a poet by renouncing poetry. Do you see what I mean? Poetry was for me the only way to break the stranglehold that accepted French form held on me.” This is in line with an Audre Lorde quotation: “The Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house.” I feel that’s so true, and I suppose I often worry that my poetry isn’t too conformist.

Many English classes led me towards poetry—I read Paul Laurence Dunbar in middle school, Dante and Nabokov in high school, and so on—but I did not study poetry in earnest until my sophomore year in college. I took a class taught by Joseph Fasano called “The Crisis of the ‘I,’” which opened my eyes to just what stories poetry can tell. My favorite poem is Larry Levis’s “The Widening Spell of Leaves.” I admire how the poet looks at “that spell, that stillness,” through his encounter in a foreign country to reflect upon his personal history, political history, and the history of difference in the United States. Then there is the idea of the self as persona, as in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (Ecco, 1992).

I realized pretty quickly that I was happiest among poets. Though I was not as learned or as good as my peers, I enjoyed writing tremendously. In college, I was lucky enough to study with Deborah Paredez, Dorothea Lasky, and Alex Dimitrov, and they taught me how to think through form and the poetic voice, and how it’s okay to love the here and now through art. Through them, I was introduced to poets like Myung Mi Kim, Carolyn Forché, and Kenneth Koch, and they still shape my poems to this day. I am grateful for poetry and its blessings.

As with most things, to quote the wooden board at my workplace, “There is only one way to success—it’s called hard work.” The truly dazzling host Malvika Jolly recently asked me at a Powerhouse Arena event organized by India Lena González what my dream was, as I approach my thirties. I said something asinine like winning the lottery, but ultimately what I most want to accomplish as I grow from student to teacher and gain recognition for my creative output is to be there for others as my teachers have been there for me. While I’m not there yet, I am beginning to see the labor in editing as work that sharpens my appreciation for the beauty of life I am not privy to.

In terms of what’s next: I am working on a series of essays about being me and alive. These essays (“On Accent,” “The Sound of Rain,” etc.) helped me understand who I am, but also sent me down a spiral of “sad-and-sadder.” After all, it is pretty depressing to see myself as a diasporic writer who may never belong or be accepted by American society. Luckily, one of my best friends suggested that I incorporate humor into my essays, and I was able to do so by thinking through “the extraordinary” through the Netflix series Extraordinary Attorney Woo. In this new phase, I hope to better capture the uniqueness of the sounds of Queens as a borough and the multidimensionality of the immigrant community of Flushing in my new work.

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

Polymath

The Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, Author of The Joy of Sex

Eric Laursen
AK Press ($34)

by Richard Kostelanetz

As an independent scholar, Eric Laursen spent many years working on Polymath, a thick biography of the protean Alex Comfort (1920–2000), who became famous for his 1972 smash hit The Joy of Sex, an illustrated manual that sold millions of copies worldwide. But before this unexpected bout with celebrity, Comfort was a widely published poet, a novelist, a certified physician, a contributor to anarchist publications in both England and America, a research biologist, a pioneering influence on gerontology (the study of aging), a literary critic, a prolific book reviewer, and a popular BBC broadcaster, even though he spoke much faster than the typical on-air personality. (Bits of his fast-speaking for the Beeb can be heard on YouTube.)

Comfort was also a pacifist whom George Orwell famously dismissed as a Nazi dupe during World War II; their disagreement on the necessity of war was the subject of a 2018 book by Laursen, The Duty to Stand Aside. Courageously inventive as an activist, however, Comfort developed a precursor to pirate radio during the Suez Crisis of 1956. As Laursen tells it, “Working almost entirely in secret, with no collaborators, he broadcast a nightly radio message calling on listeners to protest the invasion and demand that Britain unilaterally scarp its nuclear arsenal.”

Essentially, Comfort was a respected public intellectual, moderately influential in a variety of fields, until he and a sympathetic publisher produced The Joy of Sex—“produced” because so slight was his input that the cover of the initial 1972 edition has it “edited by” him with his degrees of “M.B. and Ph. D.,” as though it were a medical book. Only later did Comfort claim authorial credit, which was given, though the reader can be grateful that the subtitle “A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking” replaced the one in Comfort’s original draft: “Cordon Bleu Lovemaking.”

Joy has three themes, two classic and the other fashionable. The first, reflecting Comfort’s libertarian anarchism, holds that no one has more authority than anyone else to tell you how to do sexual relations. The second, denying religious and other proscriptions, expands this legendary sentence: “Chastity is no more of a virtue than malnutrition.” The third, reflecting its era, opines that sex should be fun, even if “love” doesn’t accompany it. No previous book on the subject so successfully disseminated these themes.

To support his title of Polymath, Laursen intelligently surveys Comfort’s literary and scientific work that appeared in a few dozen books. As a critic, Laursen regards I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion (Crown, 1979) as Comfort’s very best book. (Out of print, it can be hard to find in used bookstores and libraries, though scans of the complete text can be found on the internet.) Laursen also takes seriously Comfort’s poetry, though it had more presence in 1940s England than anywhere else or since.

For students of publishing, Polymath is useful for chronicling the calculation and career of a bestseller. Conversely, it documents the obstacles that Comfort encountered in publishing his other books, which, before and even after the success of Joy, appeared primarily from small literary presses, mostly now forgotten, and from specialized scientific outlets.

Comfort moved to Southern California in the wake of Joy, becoming a nouveau American millionaire celebrity. Whereas English media sought his advice on several subjects, here he was asked only about sex, to his annoyance. In Gay Talese’s 1981 book on sexuality in America, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Comfort is memorably portrayed as an overage visitor to swingers’ clubs; other commentators have described his schemes to minimize his personal income taxes. Uncomfortable in the U.S., Comfort moved with his second wife back to England, where he suffered the first of several debilitating strokes at seventy-one and died just after his eightieth birthday (it remains unfortunate that he didn’t get to test his gerontology ideas against his own eighties and nineties). Though he influenced many people in many ways, he did not have protégés; his sole heir and executor was his only son, the journalist Nicholas Comfort. But undoubtedly Alex Comfort led a unique and protean life that Laursen tells well in this nearly 800-page book—it is doubtful that anyone else will ever tell it better.

What some may find odd about Polymath is the absence of any acknowledgment of Comfort’s American analogue, the writer Paul Goodman (1911–1972), who resembled Comfort in many ways. Both were anarchists for life; both were published by Dwight Macdonald in his magazine Politics in the 1940s. Whereas Comfort worked in medicine, Goodman was an unlicensed psychotherapist who co-authored the substantial 1951 text Gestalt Therapy. Just as both published poetry and fiction as well as nonfiction, so both had many publishers, because their work was essentially noncommercial and their interests nonpredictable. Until Goodman published his popular Growing Up Absurd (Random House, 1960), likewise around the age of fifty, his books were little known, but after Absurd went into a second printing, Random House released books of Goodman’s poems, lectures, and much else (until he was dumped). They probably never met as Goodman was too indigent to travel to Europe, while Comfort didn’t often come to the U.S. until the mid-1970s. One radical move for a future writer would be a double consideration of Comfort and Goodman, literally parallel lives; the experience of one libertarian life would surely illuminate the other, even though they never collaborated.

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

Night of Loveless Nights

Robert Desnos
Translated by Lewis Warsh
Winter Editions ($20)

by Geoffrey Hagenbuckle

In 1922, the Surrealist prodigy Robert Desnos (1900-1945) threatened his friend and fellow poet Paul Eluard with a knife while speak-walking and sleepwalking, singing under hypnosis or in dreams. Though Surrealism’s dream kingdom has been watered down here in the U.S. to advertising, in his 1929 poem Night of Loveless Nights, Desnos imbued love, death, and jouissance, the “little death,” with that tragic magic of his signature themes. A new edition of this truant poem marks the 50th anniversary of its translation into English by New York School poet Lewis Warsh (1944-2022).

Through an epic drift of shifting moods, motifs, and styles, Desnos constrains or expands Surrealist automatism to include the alexandrine, one of the strictest self-conscious classical meters in rhyme. It’s a form close to prose, at which Desnos excelled; he notoriously composed lengthy automatic prose poems such as Liberty or Love! as well as the deftly opiated novel The Die Is Cast. In Night of Loveless Nights, Desnos splits the difference, displaying endearingly enduring twelve-beat rhyme amidst idyllic lyric while breezily tossing off kiss n’ tell bagatelles in a single languorous love song or run-on billet doux.

Unlike its appearance in the ’70s, the original French text of Night of Loveless Nights is included in this new edition, but if it reveals that some of Warsh’s version seems forced, it’s not from oversight or ineptitude, but rather from compelling the strictest of regimes to meet its own demands. Following Desnos, Warsh teaches rigorous classical verse to lilt, laugh, and utter nonsense (“utter” here being both superlative and verb). Reachy malapropisms arc from the recondite and recherché to the heteroclite and Byzantine:

Like the clouds evening parties are born without reason and
die with this tattoo on top of the left breast: Tomorrow

In its first manifesto, Surrealism stuck to avant-garde schemes without glimpsing lateral or equal dispersion strategies to come. Desnos’s reply to the position he inherited as Surrealist seer was to outdo even his fellow enragées:

One day I met the vulture and the sea hawk.
Their shadows on the sun did not surprise me.
Much later I made out the chalk on the ramparts
The carbon initial of a name I knew.

In its second manifesto, André Breton excommunicated Desnos for essaying rhyme and fairy tales; acting after that as a sleeper agent, Desnos is perhaps the more adored of the two today. His death at a Nazi concentration camp in 1945 makes it all the more important that readers revisit him today, with fascism alive and smelling rank in the age of its technical reproduction.

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

Fugue and Strike

Joe Hall
Black Ocean ($17)

by Greg Bem

The grotesque yet inquisitive poetry of Joe Hall returns to the limelight in Fugue and Strike. The book has six sections and opens with a short sequence, “From People Finder Buffalo”; its vital poems on the economy and police violence instill in the reader a sense of the core protections of the structures that impose upon our communities and threaten our collective livelihood.

Fugue and Strike bursts from the seams through its two largest sections, where Hall brings together distinct series of poems that tackle one large theme: labor. The first, “From Fugue & Fugue,” falls in the lucid tracks of other serial works like John Berryman’s The Dream Songs and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, where Hall’s distinctive, deranged, and blunt imagery centers the whirlwind lives of the American working class. The poems in this sequence are some of Hall’s most experimental, their language derivative of both machine-like repetition and the manic bracing of daily stress:

I consider debt, each word, each poem
an easter egg, w/absence inside and inside absence
you are hunger, breathing this time and value
particularized into mist, you are there, at the end
of another shift

Following the fugues, the hypnotic and didactic series “Garbage Strike” sheds light on the history of sanitation worker strikes from the 1600s to the present. Across international cities including New York City, Oaxaca, Buffalo, Tokyo, and Memphis, Hall’s poems dig deep into the folds of garbage, trash, refuse, and output on a massive scale. These are stories of people deserving of the spotlight, of ecosystems of everyday life. Hall highlights the work of society’s perceived lowest working classes, those the systems want invisible or forgotten:

I want the history of lurching waste flows and accumulation, the labor of carriage and decomposition, the production of intensified difference and hierarchy among workers, and the rebellions of those laborers: Mudlarks; dirt-carters; loaders of horse-corpse barges, dung ships, and containerships; workers in ship-breaking yards; emotional garbage sorters and haulers. What if it was a celebrated labor? To disassemble the titans.

The book closes with a cluster of three standalone poems, “I Hate That You Died,” “The Wound,” and “Polymer Meteor”; each confronts loss separately while getting to catharsis collectively. In the final poem, Hall closes the book with statements on rigorous criticism, outreach towards sustainability, and our persistence through cycles of production:

Given that we, flesh, are affiliated with so many polymer immortals, I would like to suggest we imagine future time as present weight in order to see the world. If long after our bodies die, the case of a cell phone lives on into the thousands of years, its mass multiplied by (all that) time, would be unliftable. It would break your floors.

Like the contemporary American working-class poetry of Ryan Eckes, Robert Mittenthal, and Tim Greenup, the poems in Fugue and Strike foster a sense of irony combining labor and solidarity. Hall may not be overtly Marxist in his words, but he consistently throws punches against capitalism. His tones are derived from a spectrum of monotony and crisis with speakers engaging in moments of reflection amidst toil, explosions, brutal reckonings, and epiphanies.

As his fourth full-length collection, Fugue and Strike feels more mature than Hall’s previous releases; form across the collection feels neatly fitted despite the sprawling subject matter. Balancing personal stories with historic retellings, the book bears an academic level of research and contains an extensive bibliography. Coming out of a world of education and pedagogy, this poetry may serve for many as a kaleidoscopic keystone into the relentlessness of work, the void of commodification, the hope of solidarity, and the necessity of revolt.

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

Byron Matters: Lessons on the Life and Death of a Romantic Poet

by Mike Dillon

April 19, 2024 marks the bicentennial of the death of Lord Byron. The devastatingly handsome British poet—“mad, bad and dangerous to know,” in Lady Caroline Lamb’s memorable words—was only thirty-six years old when, weakened by his physician’s incessant bloodletting, he died of fever in the tidal marsh town of Missolonghi (or Messolonghi), Greece, far from the boudoirs and scandals of London and Italy that made him perhaps the most famous man in Europe after Napoleon.

Byron had journeyed to Greece to lend his fame and money to the Greek War of Independence, which erupted in 1821 after four centuries of Ottoman rule. Though he is still regarded as one of the essential Romantic poets and remembered for his wildly picaresque adventures, Byron’s life-long opposition to political and personal oppression may be his most enduring legacy—and it bears special resonance in our own era, when the torch of democracy flickers in an ill wind.

The Greek War of Independence attracted liberal Philhellenes in England and across Europe, much like the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War more than a century later attracted liberal sympathizers in the U.S. and on the continent. Fifth-century Athens was the wellspring of self-government the American Revolution drew from; Byron looked to the new American nation (and especially its already iconic leader George Washington) with envy and admiration. 

After the drowning death of his friend and fellow poet Percy Shelley in 1822, Byron cast about for the next chapter in his life. He even thought of venturing to South America to aid freedom-fighter Simon Bolivar in his campaign against the Spanish Empire. But Byron chose Greece, where he had traveled as a young man, embracing the Greek cause as his own. As he wrote in “Journal in Cephalonia”:

The dead have been awakened — shall I sleep?
   The World’s at war with tyrants — shall I crouch?
The harvest’s ripe — and shall I pause to reap?
   I slumber not; the thorn is in my Couch.

Byron outfitted Greek fighters and exercised a strong hand in strategy and the training of troops. His leadership skills and command of detail, let alone his money and fame, introduced the needed gravitas to cool the friction between Greek factions.

Byron’s death in Messolonghi shocked the English-speaking world and galvanized Greek resistance to the Ottomans. In his 1924 study of the poet’s final years, Byron: The Last Journey, Harold Nicolson wrote: “Lord Byron accomplished nothing at Missolonghi except his own suicide; but by that single act of heroism he secured the liberation of Greece.”

Yet if Byron’s ten-month Greek adventure is a coda tacked on to one of the most colorful author biographies of all time, his fateful journey to Missolonghi is the fulfillment of what had come before. A prime example occurred on February 27, 1812, when Byron rose to deliver his maiden speech in the House of Lords—a speech that deserves to be bold-faced in any account of Byron’s legacy.  

Byron, a titled young man of twenty-four educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, proceeded to defend the enraged weavers in the north of England who, in one of the first acts of rebellion against the Industrial Revolution, went about destroying the new textile frames that were taking away their daily bread. The Tory government called in the troops and the House of Commons proposed a bill calling for the frame breakers to be hung. When the bill moved on to the House of Lords,  Byron’s speech, worthy of Voltaire or Swift, addressed the protesters’ violence:

But whilst these outrages must be admitted to exist to an alarming extent, it cannot be denied that they have arisen from circumstances of the most unparalleled distress; the perseverance of these miserable men in their proceedings tends to prove that nothing but absolute want could have driven a large, once honest and industrious, body of the people, into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves, their families, and the community.

Then, with supreme facetiousness:

In the foolishness of their hearts they imagined that the maintenance and well-doing of the industrious poor were objects of greater consequence than the enrichment of a few individuals by any improvement, in the implements of trade, which threw the workmen out of employment, and rendered the laborer unworthy of his hire.

Towards the end of his impassioned address, Byron drove the point home:

I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never under the most despotic of infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country.

With a child of privilege speaking out in defense of the angry Luddites, the bill was watered down to the point where hanging was no longer an option. In the next century W.H. Auden famously wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen”; sometimes, however, as in this case, the eloquence of poets does.

Byron’s poetry, for generations all the rage, has slipped in the critical canon, but there are still good reasons to read his work. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is the sourcebook for the brooding, mercurial introversion later dubbed “Byronic,” as well as a marvelous travelogue of the Mediterranean basin through the eyes of the young lord. His unfinished satirical masterpiece Don Juan—with its whip-smart, easy-going handling of ottava rima, a difficult form—might be considered an avatar of rap: “I want a hero: an uncommon want, / When every year and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / the age discovers he is not the true one,” the rhapsodic tale begins; it proceeds, through sixteen cantos, to eviscerate the pomposities and hypocrisies of the age.

Byron’s copious letters, too, reveal the brilliance and insouciant wit, often self-deprecating, that tugged paramours of both sexes in his direction. It’s this wit, in fact, that allowed him to look up from his deathbed at the mournful faces gathered around him and mutter, in Italian, one last Byronic quip: “O, this is a beautiful scene.”

Missolonghi, a small town on the Gulf of Patras, is sacred in Greek history for its role in the War of Independence. Following a siege by the Ottomans, after stout resistance, starvation, and sacrifice, Missolonghi’s terrible suffering culminated in a massacre two years after Byron’s death. The atrocity captured Europe’s attention, much as Byron’s martyr-status had, and strengthened the cause of Greece’s freedom. At the entrance into the town is the Garden of Heroes, honoring those who resisted Ottoman rule; Byron’s marble statue stands there, in the place where his heart was buried. Byron’s body was shipped back to England and interred in the family vault in St. Mary Magdalene Church in Nottinghamshire, having been refused burial at Westminster Abbey (though a memorial stone was finally placed there in 1969).

This July, the Messolonghi Byron Society will host its 48th International Byron Conference to mark the bicentennial of Byron’s death; the conference is titled “Byron: The Pilgrim of Eternity,” a moniker Shelley hung on his quicksilver friend. Among the array of scholarly topics on the agenda, a discussion of Byron’s ongoing afterlife is prominent. The society’s three-story building bordering the sea is the north star of Byron studies in Greece and plays host to scholars, classroom field trips, and curious travelers.

It’s no surprise that Byron vociferously opposed the removal of the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, and he wrote a long poem, “The Curse of Minerva,” declaiming his position. More than 200 years later, the Elgin Marbles still reside in the British Museum, and are the subject of white-knuckled negotiations between Britain and Greece for their return. The ever-present past carries on. As does the urgency of these words from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which should resonate in our own chaotic times:

Yet let us ponder boldly; ‘tis a base
Abandonment of reason to resign
Our right of thought, our last and only place
Of refuge — this, at least, shall be mine.

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

Childcare

Rob Schlegel
Four Way Books ($17.95)

by Stephanie Burt

I woke up today intending to review Rob Schlegel’s new collection—his fourth, shortest (by line count), and maybe his best. Then I couldn’t find the book for hours, because one kid’s D&D backpack, a bag of dog food, my own undone dishes, and a scheduled Zoom call got in the way. When I finally found Schlegel’s volume, I realized that my distracted, distressed, and familially challenged mood fit the book I wanted to recommend. Childcare is a book about parenthood, household maintenance, and daily life; about maximum distractibility and post-quarantine forced togetherness; about our manifestly required (but secretly fragile) emotional resilience in an age when capital and mass media tell us to find individual solutions for collective problems. Are we too busy making grilled cheese sandwiches to address the tragedy of the commons? Or vice versa? What will my words do for my kids, if anything?

Such questions have shown up, for decades, in poems by moms (Rachel Zucker and Bernadette Mayer are two shining examples) but they’re pretty new for poems about, and by, dads, whom adults expect to work independently and outside the home, and who don’t normally, if they are cisgender, come with the same umbilical connections to young children. Schlegel knows time spent writing is time not spent preparing that grilled cheese, and Schlegel’s kids know it too: “Daddy, my daughter says, / When are you going to stop?” “Poetry / Is pointless, my son says. If you write that down / I’ll kill you. I fear he fears / The attention I give it.” What poet parent has not felt that fear? Who has not asked, as Schlegel does, “When will I reach the people I love?”

If such lines—however quotable—sound bald, or abstract, or all too accessible, it’s worth mentioning the elegance and the sophistication in this volume too. Schlegel has learned spareness, abstraction, and accessibility from Oppen (who provides an epigraph), Niedecker, and Dickinson. He’s also learned how to bring readers deep into his own fact-studded idiosyncrasies, quick images (a baby is a “little herring”), and the sounds he makes when he’s alone: “The rolling hills of Pomeroy / Bring the locals local joy.” The diary, the flatness, and the divided attention between what the kids need and what the poet desires place Schlegel in a delightful—and young—tradition, among recent books about domesticity by poets such as Chris Martin, Nick Twemlow, Dobby Gibson, perhaps Dana Ward.

To their disarming ongoingness, to the “competing / Sorrows of parenthood,” to fears about being a man and raising men (“my son pinning the future against the wall”), Schlegel adds white space, concision, and the uncomfortable, imperfect elegance of a careful craftsman sharing a rough draft in the knowledge that making it smoother will ruin it. Those spaces are his self-divisions, his irresolvable quarrels with himself: “I’m two people— / One not speaking to the other.” Like the Bon Iver album he namechecks, Schlegel adds an explicit sense of multiple generations, but where Justin Vernon imagines “I am my mother on the wall,” Schlegel frames his own worries in response: “I’m angry at my father for aging.” His clipped lines suggest he feels the rebuke that sensitive adults get when we remember how privileged we remain: privileged just to have enough to eat, let alone to take care of our kids, to find time to read, to be alive: “I tuck my son into bed. / I wish I had better parents, he says.” Schlegel, and I, hold such wishes for our children too, wishes the poems work hard—and sparely—to name. All of our kids deserve better than we can give them, but they get, at best, you and me.

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

A Double-Tongued Troubadour: An Interview with Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

by Jim Feast

A self-described New Romantic poet, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is also a publisher, art and literary critic, eco-activist, impresario, filmmaker, and visual artist. He is author of nineteen books of poetry, most recently a collection of sonnets and collages titled Doppelgängster: Self-Portraits in a Funhouse Mirror (MadHat Press, $21.95); his work has also appeared in anthologies ranging from Best American Poetry (Scribner, 2023) to Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry (Lamar University Press, 2022).

Wright, who published the long-running all-arts magazine Cover in the previous century and now publishes Live Mag!, has received the Kathy Acker Award for his publishing and writing. In the following interview, we discuss how all the doubles and others in his life as a poet add up to a singular, ongoing practice.

Jim Feast: My first question stems from a conversation we had about one of the poems in Doppelgängster, “Truth vs. Meaning”—you said that poem was “off to the side” of the main themes of the book. So, could you clarify what those main themes are?

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright: The themes, motifs, and icons that appear in the collages and poems engage a muse. My subjects represent a search for individuality within a context of membership in a family, a tribe, and a relationship. Romantic love, sex. A pioneering spirit harkening to my upbringing in West Virginia and Arizona. And being hep, defined in some older dictionaries of slang as “someone who could swing on any scene.” I wanted to be that someone. A merger of the Beat’s forbidden fevered pitch and the New York School’s breezy, cosmopolitan elan.

“Truth vs Meaning” presents a larger-than-life character, a sort of Everyman called “Mr. Universe.” It hints at political strife, personal responsibility, and selflessness, but after a bravura beginning, the character fumbles—he is after all, “outré” himself, eccentric but prepossessing. Never quite fitting in and yet bearing within himself nobility, agency, and aplomb. Like a troubadour, he is staying in someone else’s castle, or as this poem has it, he finds himself on a set, as if in a dream.

JF: How do the themes inform your process?

JW: Themes help structure the poems and propel them along. They color in the persona and become like characters in a play, providing an anticipatory tone. Double entendres and conundrums vibrate. Phrases blur momentarily before snapping into focus, as when “a naked siren and a burning fire engine” are contrasted in an ironic exchange. Such super-packed images hint at Symbolism but generate new, contradictory meanings. Going back to “Truth vs. Meaning,” a false choice is offered between related—but separate—ideals. 

JF: Your poems are full of complex interplays and inlaying—I have to ask how you put them together.

JW: You “hear” a phrase in your mind and go: get up some steam, mumble along trying to say something, a twist here, a turn there, and invent, record, note, steal, personify—“November is packing its brown valise.” I’m attuned to alliteration, music, rhyme, cadence, association, appropriation, even affectation—I use everything in the craft box to keep going with white hot volition.

Then you can rearrange lines and edit bits here and there. Sometimes the initial impulse is erased in the revision. Some poems are really opposed to being written in one rush. Still, poems that need too much editing probably aren’t worth it. As Ted Berrigan, my mentor, said mercifully, “A poem doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to work.”

JF: In “Les Fleurs de Nuit,” you use the phrase “lead by dreaming,” which brings up a key dimension of your writing. You often begin with an evocation of a time and place: “Old dandelions tip / white hats to the wind.” Surprisingly, such evocations are followed by dream images: “We were toys in Babeland.” Can you comment on your combination of nature poetry with surrealism?

JW: That title began as an allusion to Baudelaire, but it’s also an unintended metaphor for dreams. That poem is unusual for me in that it has six dreams in it leading up to the final couplet, so it all fits together. I like to stick a dream in a poem if I can. It’s like an ingredient that most recipes can use—and inherently authentic. 

Sometimes nature suggests a lesson. In “Rough Patch,” after “Old dandelions tip / white hats to the wind” comes “What’s above, calls / on what’s below.” We want to rise to the call. Nature becomes a stand-in for the muse, I think. I look and listen and maybe hear an inspiring line of description in my head. Images are the bones of a poem, and lyricism is the heart. From there you can jump-cut to other quotidian or ethereal elements.

“Learn by doing—lead by dreaming” is a misquote that I worked up. The poet is often seen as a dreamer. I think people look to poetry and dreams for the same things—magic, prophecy, and wisdom. One could also say learn by leading. The poet is fulfilling a shamanistic role in society, so there is often a moral bedrock revealed or an ambition pursued. Poetry has a spiritual quality people seek, especially as organized religion fades and leaves a vacuum. This is not new, but it is dire. The original Romantics saw nature as a gateway drug to the sublime. 

People can be drawn to poetry for information as well as for an emotional reward. So I research topics and make the poems informative. It’s also good to balance adages, epigrams, encomiums, and dictums, such as “lead by dreaming,” with natural elements. It’s okay to make statements: “Let us be measured by devotion.”

I keep my eyes peeled for some connection with the natural world that suggests a simile such as “the wolf moon goes down like butter.” My poem “Temporary Sanity” starts off with a stanza that observes the natural world:

Winter’s white heart steams.
Venus pins night to the sky.
A few stars are hung out to dry.

And then I switch tracks, introducing the persona/observer who moors the collection: “On call at the dream hospital, / my gang of bells rings.” From there the poem goes into a persona-driven New Romanticism, interacting with the muse: 

Listen. Your canals can hear
my eyelids beating time
into wings of gold foil. 

This nod to classic Romanticism deepens the texture, mixing into and counter-balancing the jaunty banter. The poem is an embodiment of their juncture, their jouissance (and, yes, there is sexual content).

In the final couplet, the poem returns to the wider world it began with and ends up personifying nature: “Snow only really talks / when it starts to melt.” It suggests that to commune with our inner nature and each other, we must let down our guard. It also hints at the specter of global warming.

JF:  Your poems often feature playful reversals and scrambling of cliches and commonplaces, which to me suggests a rejection of the dead language of banality. The line “I always led from the back of our class. / . . . It wasn’t / our thing to be official” suggests this rebellious stance began in high school.

JW: Yes, e.e. cummings and his nonconformity changed my world in high school. Playing with language is key for me. And I like that you say “commonplaces.” One can convert the cliche to make it a touchstone, a common denominator between the audience and the abstracted landscape of the poem. My classmate at West Virginia University, Jayne Anne Phillips, told me not to use cliches in 1972, but it only made me more aware of them as a class of phraseology that could be mined. Palindromes, anagrams, typos, malapropisms, mondegreens—all these offer new ways to “crack” the code, break the rules, refresh language, and find new meanings when combined with subjects that range from the personal and ordinary to the political and environmental. 


JF:  You mentioned your use of a persona. This persona, moving amid the reverses and outpourings of your vivid language, seems a slippery fellow, yet he also anchors the proceedings.   


JW: He’s very slippery, but also revealing. The persona is upholding a set of principles, adhering to a standard as the troubadours did, and spreading knowledge of proper behavior for a courtier (see Paul Blackburn’s translations). Ted Berrigan’s “Code of the West” exemplifies this impulse to transcribe the tenets of the tribe and identify its boundaries. 


You have to lure a reader and then steer them through the poem using both conventions and inventions. You pack meaning, knowledge, and experience within the artifice of whimsey, lyricism, and imagery to create insight. And frankly, there’s an entertainment aspect audiences go for.


Myths are another inspiration/ muse source: “Hello, Sybil. Old fortune teller.” Orpheus, Pinocchio, Santa, Cupid, Hippolyte, Circe—my persona hangs out with the myths to become a legend. Ed Sanders wrote about this with regard to the myth-making of Charles Olson, that he could do it “safely & without duplicity.”

The central thrust is simply discovering an order while pursuing varying threads to a conclusion. As my old landlord used to say, “Work hard, have fun.” Celebrate life and contribute. 


JF: Your poems are chock full of amazing epiphanies; have any come via a personal epiphany? 


JW: A breakthrough moment came in an Alice Notley workshop. She instructed us to write while she read some texts. My effort became “Malaise in Malaysia,” and you can see the word play there, the alliteration, assonance, and anagrammatic quality. It was a revelation about how a poem could be stitched together from various patches of language to make a crazy quilt.

JF: Your poetry also draws language and metaphors from many different realms, and as a publisher, you created Cover Magazine and then Live Mag!, both of which combine art and writing from various fields. I see in the publishing a link to your poetry’s all-embracing tendency. 

JW: All-embracing—I like that. Ted Berrigan was rather “all-embracing.” In 1978 he told us young guns at St. Mark’s to start a magazine—publish your friends and some poets you really admire. I’ve been doing that ever since. Publishing has encouraged me to reach out to writers and widen the horizon.

My girlfriend told me one should read twenty poems for every poem they write. I never had better advice. Running a magazine means you really live with poems—choosing, designing, proofing. Reviewing is even more insightful; you see patterns emerge in others’ writings that may later become part of your own lexicon. The magazines are especially helpful in creating events and maintaining community. Writing art criticism also hones my language skills.

JF: You have often spoken of your poetry as part of the New Romanticism. Can you describe more about this movement?

JW: It’s about extending beauty and experiencing passion. At Brooklyn College (where I studied with Allen Ginsberg and William Matthews), I became enchanted with Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sydney, who brought the sonnet, the persona, and a proto-Romantic impulse to the forefront. (I was also having a torrid affair and was deeply in love; my muse liked that.) I learned about Romantic symbolism such as the “blue rose” and discovered John Clare (one of John Ashbery’s favorites). The Romantic impulse never goes away. A lot of erudition started going into my work, and that continues. 

There was also a New Romantic moment in the late 1980s that included fashion, classical music, and art, and I felt tied in with that. Lord & Taylor ran an ad in the Times that blared “New Romantic” and I used it in a workshop I taught. I thought we needed a better tagline than “New York School Third Generation” or “St. Mark’s poets.” And I still believe the emotional tenor of the Romantics is built into our poetry DNA, as is Surrealism. I find New Romantic qualities is in the work of contemporaries like Elaine Equi, Will Alexander, Bob Holman, Dorothea Lasky, Sampson Starkweather, Kevin Opstedal, and Andrei Codrescu.

JF: Another thing that gives your poems traction is reference to family. You say, for instance, “From my mother I inherited // easy grace and savior faire.” In the poems, this network of relations includes friends and colleagues, too.


JW: Before I got to New York in 1976, my family moved a lot as my father climbed the academic ladder. So, we were a tight family, but I had to keep making new friends, and I was keen on knowing the latest slang as a point of entry.

I saw the New York school mentioning their friends all the time, and it worked for me. I’m in awe of my circle: “What dudes we be, / skimming masks of glass / across a bourbon sea.”

JF: Some poems in the book are paired with your drawings and collages. It’s almost a chicken-egg situation: Did a picture inspire a poem, or did the poem lead to the visual art? How do words and images interact in Doppelgängster?

JW: There is a recurrence of iconographic/archetypal imagery that appears in both my text and visual work. Sometimes the two overlap, but they’re not usually created simultaneously. Pinocchio is a natural “persona” for me to identify with—along with many others who have appeared over the years—so Pinocchio appears in both a poem and artwork. Other subjects include Tinker Bell, Aladdin, chimeras like the mermaid and the gryphon, and mythic characters. 

Once I have a motif, I tend to recycle it from time to time. The cuckoo clock is an example of a motif I was repeating both in verse and imagery. Lori Ortiz, who designed the book, made the pairings based on feeling and tone, as well as subject.

So I would say these are parallel practices. There is a collage quality to my poems—juxtapositions of images, shifting scales and perspectives. A palette of varying textures. Rhyming shapes. Different directional focuses. The collage is built, and the poem is too—with a lot of pondering, structuring, and conjuring.

JF: In an artist’s statement you sent me in an email, you say these poems bring two aspects of your personality into juxtaposition, yielding “self portraits partially created by admitting an ‘other’ self (a doppelgänger).”  Do you anticipate psychic benefits from this doubling?  


JW: Hopefully. [Laughs] You can only see yourself in a reflection in a mirror, a lover, or a muse—or in self-reflection. Self-reflection is another way of developing character, and you can find this ‘other’ self by trying to meet the challenges a poem requires. One deals continuously with the duality of being one among many, the observer and the observed, and to the extent that these two interact, the more the poems live.

The poem is an instrument that looks into your soul—both writer and reader. 


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