CLEAN CARTOONISTS’ DIRTY  DRAWINGS
edited by Craig Yoe
Last Gasp ($19.95)

BEST EROTIC COMICS 2008
edited by Greta Christina
Last Gasp ($19.95)

EROTIC COMICS
A Graphic History from Tijuana Bibles to  Underground Comix
Tim Pilcher & Gene Kannenberg, Jr.
Abrams ($29.95)

by Paul Buhle

In his monumentally hefty collection and commentary No Laughing Matter: Rationale of the Dirty Joke, Gershon Legman noted that sex humor is hardly ever about sex, so much as dishing out degradation. But a large handful of the jokes he collected strike me as quite good, usually because they dole out wholly justified revenge by women against men (impotence jokes, small penis jokes, etc.), or because they treat satisfying and unharmful behavior as perfectly fine (so long as no one is hurt or really humiliated, anything goes). The humor is found in the foolishness of sexual embarrassment about ourselves.

This is the spirit in which the ill-famed Tijuana Bibles produced 50-75 years ago continue to look a lot better than almost all other comics pornography. The dames of these booklets are, generally speaking, quite chipper, and the men are depicted as foolish for all the usual reasons. Also, the satires of movie stars, politicians, and other comics are often sharp and topical, amounting to a sort of Doonesbury with sexual acts. The underground comix artists of the ’60s and ’70s, determined to overthrow existing censorship, went back to this source in more ways than one, adding more cartooniness and shunning the pseudo-realism of professional porn. Undergrounds such as Snatch, Jizz, Wet Satin and Tits 'n Clits were all pretty funny, and Gay Comix actually reframed what comics are and what they do.

In the ’80s and ’90s came the era of alternative comics and the rise of soap-opera porn typified byOmaha, The Cat Dancer and the diverse offerings of Fantagraphics’ “Eros” line. For all we know, many independent comics publishers might not have survived without this line of goods. The belated critical acceptance of comics as an art form no doubt inspired Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's recent pornographic epic Lost Girls, which achieved prestige for displaying sex in ways that the Tijuana Bible artists would have considered impossible. Escaping legal retribution used to be the game; now publishers of erotic comics vie for window displays.

Best Erotic Comics 2008 brings us up to date. Actually, the work herein was originally published from 2000 onward, but the mood is distinctly modern. Organs and process predominate, and humor or social critique of any kind are less present than sexual transgression (not all of it compliant). This is not a happy book, although a majority of characters obviously enjoy themselves. The art is impressive, in a mostly depressive way: we see a world of near-hopelessness and sex as costly consolation, perhaps a mirror of the prevalence of STDs and the specter of impossibility that haunts that erotic leitmotif, the pleasurable but chance encounter. A fair share of the happier congresses seem to be about the displacement of power in favor of women, and in that sense, except for the emerging and often central role of lesbians, it may not be entirely far from the Tijuana Bibles after all.

Still, the seriousness of the work in Best Erotic Comicslies in vivid contrast to Clean Cartoonists' Dirty Drawings. Anthologist and editor Craig Yoe, a former manager of the Muppets, is a sort of modern Legman, a collector of visual impressions and a compulsive filer-away of odd art. Here he has gathered dozens of naughty pieces by well-known comics artists and cartoonists, mostly from the 1920s-60s, many hitherto unpublished. As Yoe notes, mainstream cartoonists from Rube Goldberg to Charles Schultz—including Carl Barks, Will Eisner, Mort Walker, Hal Foster, Hank Ketcham, Chuck Jones, Al Capp, Jack Cole, Jim Steranko and Roy Crane—repressed their quiet urges to draw hot stuff in their funny papers and comic books. Only a few, like Don DeCarlo, did it for a living, and even then the ladies kept some of their clothes on.

When seen as a group, unfortunately, a lot of the women depicted here look too much alike—tall, busty and brazen—although it’s nice to see Brenda Starr naked, something her artist (Dale Messick) wanted to do for a long time. Worse, too few of these artists are women and even fewer nonwhite, but in the mainstream, these categories were small until very recent times. The important thing is that their art is, in most cases, exemplified their individual styles—none of these artists are imitating someone else's idea of nakedness. Clean Cartoonists' Dirty Drawings thereby helps make sense of what has been missing from the mainstream all along.

Robert Crumb writes in his Forward to Yoe’s book that its contents might have been better left secret, the wild id of the artist that never got beyond his drawing board. Aline Kominsky Crumb has a somewhat similar comment in her Foreword to Erotic Comics: she looks back to the Men's Magazine era of the 1920s–’50s and its extension into the underground comix that followed as the Golden Age of porno-humor, exuberantly sexual, by obvious (if unstated) contrast to the last few decades. In short, and once again: perhaps less is more.

But this would be a conclusion that the authors of Erotic Comics are not at all likely to share. In one sense, the book is an updated version of Maurice Horn's Sex in the Comics, published in the more innocent (or censored) year of 1985. Both versions are global, with heavy influences of the French (naturally); apart from graphic updates, the new volume includes S&M material that Horn and his publishers were probably too fearful to handle. Thus, the often unclothed ’60s heroine Phoebe Zeit-geist, who originally appeared in the Beat-oriented pages of the Evergreen Review, seems tame when compared to an entire section of “Bondage Babes.” It's all out in the open, and though the authors add helpful commentary, mainly biographies of the artists, the ordinary reader is not likely to pay much attention to it.

Which is a shame, because overall Tim Pilcher and Gene Kannenberg, Jr. (both comics historians, a Brit and an American respectively) have constructed a well-organized overview of the erotic comics genre. Pilcher discusses right off the bat Picasso's famous "Dream and Lie of Franco," lending the rest of the book an art-world respectability and planting the seeds of its modernist thesis, summed up in Viennese architect Adolf Loos's pithy dictum "All art is erotic." The authors go on to chart the development of erotic comics from the turn of the century's "saucy postcards" (the prolific Edwardian Donald McGill will be a revelation to some) and hardcore but satirical Tijuana Bibles (amply discussed with a range of examples) through the Men's Magazines and subsequent underground comix that continued pushing the envelope on sex and social mores. Pilcher and Kannenberg are detailed in their histories of these artists and their cultures, and occasionally discuss technique as well (pin-up artist Bill Ward's intriguing use of white-out, for example) while not being oblivious to the rampant sexism that underlies so much of this work.

Erotic Comics concludes with a discussion of “Abandonment Abroad,” and while it features some Latin-American art amidst the Europeans, it would be a better survey if comic artists from Africa, parts of Asia besides Japan, and other parts of the world could be seen here. Even more, we could wish for more women artists, whose ideas of erotica might be as distinct as the few pages devoted to Women's Liberation-era comics (i.e. Wimmen’s Comix and Tits and Clits) suggest. Perhaps this is the proper job of future Best Erotic Comics volumes. For now, the books on the shelves do at least provide a glimpse of the range of possibilities.

Click here to purchase Clean Cartoonists' Dirty Drawings at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Best Erotic Comics 2008 at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Erotic Comics at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

MAHMOUD DARWISH, EXILE’S POET
Critical Essays
edited by Hala Khamis Nassar and Najat Rahman
Olive Branch Press ($25)

THE BUTTERFLY’S BURDEN
Mahmoud Darwish
translated by Fady Joudah
Copper Canyon Press ($20)

by Robert Milo Baldwin

Best known as the poet of Palestinian resistance, Mahmoud Darwish has a poetic range far wider than his politics. While resistance to Israel may be the engine for part of his work, the pain and isolation of exile is the fuel. In Mahmoud Darwish, Exile’s Poet, fourteen essays examine both his work and how an existential if not permanent exile is woven, if barely, with dangling threads of hope. As Darwish himself says, “be present in absence.”

Born in a village in Galilee in 1942, at age six Darwish fled with his family to Lebanon in the 1948 war, only to return a few months later to the new state of Israel to find his village gone. Growing up in Israel, he lived under the legal status of “absent-present alien” despite having been born there. For publishing and reading his poetry, he suffered house arrests and imprisonment, until his self-imposed exile to Egypt in 1970. From there he moved to Beirut, only to be expelled with the PLO in the 1982 Israeli invasion. Finally, after the Oslo Accords, he returned to Ramallah in 1996 to live in the occupied West Bank, where he later endured the 2002 siege of the PLO headquarters. As one essayist asserts:

What space can the poet claim after the loss of a supplanted homeland except the space of a poem? Poetry is the closest thing to granting a sense of belonging for the poetic voice that poses it as a question.

Darwish has written as he has lived, with the emotion of exile perhaps best described by Edward Said:

Exile is never the state of being satisfied, placid, or secure. Exile, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is “a mind of winter” in which the pathos of the summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable.

If we, as Americans, wonder why Hamas lobs rockets from Gaza into Israel, consider how we, as Americans, reacted to Arabs flying planes into the Twin Towers—we invaded two countries. If Darwish and others still long for their homeland, sixty years after losing it, why should we be surprised? The nearly powerless defiance of Palestinians is symbolized as much by young boys throwing rocks at tanks as it is by Darwish’s famous early poem, “Identity Card”:

Write down I am an Arab
You stole the groves of my forefathers,
And the land I used to till.
You left me nothing but these rocks.
And from them, I must wrest a loaf of bread,
For my eight children.

In the Arab world, poets are considered persons of vision and prophecy, feared not only by Israel but also corrupt Arab leaders. With only exile and no homeland, Darwish has often re-invented ancient myth, as if the reshaping of myth itself might become a new homeland, a “land made of words.” In so doing, he may astonish those in the West ignorant of how much common ground we share with the Arab world, such as Darwish’s allusions to Adam, Jericho, the Song of Songs, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus. As Darwish well knows, poetry sometimes allows a journey between different cultures and languages. By reshaping ancient stories, Darwish has attempted to form a bridge between cultures, so that a new version of an old story becomes “a counter-text, a kind of replacement of the original text by a new understanding, thus enabling the reader to confront the canon of the ‘other’ with a newly established or newly affirmed canon of his own.” Consider how Darwish retells the story of Adam and Eve:

Like Adam, the [poem’s] speaker even cedes a part of his body to make the creation of his female companion possible. The new Eve, Adam’s companion who is thus emerging and who receives her name through the poet’s creation act, is none other than Palestine.

This religious imagery has also been adopted by other Arab poets, some of whom draw a parallel between the crucifixion of Jesus and the injustice against Palestinians. If such imagery, for some, might quickly dissolve into anti-Semitism, Darwish asserts that the victims of the Holocaust do not have a monopoly on victimhood, and that the reshaping of myth is intended to remove us from the assumptions we’ve made about them and their “suffocating knowledge,” and to expand the dialogue among us all. For those who might question the intent of such a dialogue, it bears repeating that Darwish, as a young man, fell in love with a young Jewish woman—even though he later recognized such a love was “impossible to live,” and “located in sites impossible to inhabit.”

Where this leads, at times, is to the powerlessness of poetry, as if it has no value. Yet Darwish has never ceased to write, acknowledging that “the poet cannot but be a poet,” for he must “put himself in the wind and madness,” even if action is demanded over aesthetics. Yet the alienation of exile never leaves, as Darwish says so eloquently:

Perhaps like me you have no address
What’s the worth of a man
Without a homeland,
Without a flag,
Without an address?
What is the worth of such a man?

For Darwish, this no man’s land is one in which “I cannot enter and I cannot go out.” The bitter irony is that the refugees of the Holocaust resulted in the refugees of Palestine. This reality is often at the center of Darwish’s thinking; he rejected the Oslo Accords because it would lead to the apartheid of two separate states. Unlike Hamas, which seeks the destruction of Israel, Darwish apparently advocates “Israeli and Palestinian coexistence in a binational state with equal rights and secular citizenship.” In other words, he seeks the right of return to his homeland, with the full rights of a citizen to vote and otherwise participate in self-government.

Such political views often overshadow Darwish’s accomplishments as a poet. In The Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Fady Joudah (a Texas physician born of Palestinian refugees, and a member of “Doctors Without Borders”), the best poems are not so much about exile or oppression but the wonder of life, as in these lines from “Sonnet I”:

If you are the last of what god told me, be
the pronoun revealed to double the “I.” Blessedness is ours
now that almond trees have illuminated the footprints of passersby, here
on your banks, where above you grouse and doves flutter

In some poems, Darwish adopts the persona of a female narrator, as in “Housework,” saying, “A rain made me wet and filled with the scent of oranges.” In “Two Stranger Birds in our Feathers,” a woman asks a stranger to slowly undo her braids, saying:

Tell me some simple
talk . . . the talk a woman always desires
to be told. I don’t want the phrase
complete. Gesture is enough to scatter me in the rise
of butterflies between springheads and the sun. Tell me
I am necessary for you like sleep, and not like nature
filling up with water around you and me. And spread
over me an endless blue wing . . .

While poetry of politics and protest may wither past its time, the poetry of love can be timeless. What Darwish does is join the two together, as in “I Waited for No One”:

And go with the river from one fate
to another, the wind is ready to uproot you
from my moon, and the last words on my trees
are ready to fall on Trocadero square. And look
behind you to find the dream, go
to any east or west that exiles you more,
and keeps me one step farther from my bed
and from one of my sad skies. The end
is beginning’s sister, go and you’ll find what you left
here, waiting for you.

Perhaps Darwish’s poetry is best described by a line from “Maybe, Because Winter Is Late”: “a guitar that has opened its wound to the moon.”

Click here to purchase Mahmoud Darwish, Exile's Poet at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase The Butterfly's Burden at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

Conducted in Turkish and translated into English by Figen Bingül 

Adalet Ağaoğlu’s works are significant not only for their rich content, surveying the dialectic between the individual and society, but also for their technical and stylistic innovations. One of Turkey’s leading writers, Ağaoğlu has written about the social upheavals of the Republican era, namely the period of Westernization resulting from reforms and the struggles of individuals during this time. She has also dealt with issues relating to the intellectual’s confrontation with him or herself and with society.

Born in 1929, Ağaoğlu first achieved prominence as a playwright, writing for various theaters during the ’50s and ’60s. In the early ’70s, she began writing novels; the first, Lying Down to Die (1973), was heralded as a groundbreaking departure from the classical Turkish novel, and her first short story book, High Tension (1975), won the Story Award of the year. She has continued winning major prizes in Turkey ever since. Ağaoğlu was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by Ohio State University in 1998.

My English translation of Summer’s End (Talisman House, $ 18.95), one of the author’s major novels, has just been published. Summer’s End is a good example of Ağaoğlu’s works, as the main theme is the search for individual happiness amidst the harsh realities of society. Taking place in an Eastern Mediterranean town at the end of the ’70s, the novel deals with issues springing from modernization and social conflict. While transporting the reader to a region with unmatched natural beauty and historical and mythological richness, Ağaoğlu analyzes her characters, affected by the political upheaval in the country at the time, as they struggle to find meaning in their lives.

In this interview, conducted late last year in Instanbul, Ağaoğlu talks about everything from the Turkish avant-garde to the political problems facing her country.

Figen Bingül: Your 1980 novel Summer’s End is now being published in the U.S. Why did you choose this specific novel for American readers?

Adalet Ağaoğlu: For America, or let’s say for the Western world, I chose this book because it talks about a region in the Eastern Mediterranean that has had a connection to both the East and the West, and the conflict between secular and religious cultures today. Since Turkey is a country whose three sides are surrounded by sea—the Mediterranean, the Aegean, and the Black Seas—we are considered to be a Mediterranean country. However, when the Mediterranean is mentioned, especially in literature, it’s mostly about the Aegean shore which neighbors Greece. But there’s a different reality in the Eastern Mediterranean, which stretches from Alanya to Iskenderun, to Mesopotamia, to the Middle East. The Western Mediterranean was already Westernized long ago; for foreigners to understand Turkish society, they need to know about the Eastern Mediterranean, too. Also, historically there are many cultures that have prospered here. Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman civilizations have left many traces in this region. You can see many Roman and Byzantine ruins; there are bridges from the Roman era even in the forests. A portion of the Silk Road, along which spice caravans from Mesopotamia and Egypt passed, was located in this region. And according to mythology, Cleopatra lived here at one time. I talk about all these things in this novel, which in a way represents the cultural diversity and the conflicts of Turkey.

FB: It has been 27 years since this novel was published in Turkey. And during this time there has been a change in the Eastern Mediterranean, too. You predicted this change in your novel in terms of modernization, the building boom for the sake of tourism, and you voiced a concern that the natural beauty there would be ruined. Now, when you compare today with that time, do you see that your predictions have come true?

AA: I wrote this novel because that region had extraordinary natural beauty; it is located on the skirts of the Taurus Mountains, and in time, people from the mountain villages have come down here as part of a migration from villages to cities. And therefore, the change here has happened suddenly. The mountain people suddenly saw women in bikinis, men in shorts, when they came down to the shore. The conflict in the Western Mediterranean is not this strong, because in the East, the education level and economic level are much lower than in the West. So I predicted two things here: that the region’s nature will be ruined because of over-development, and I also said that there will be a great clash of sexual mores. You know, in the novel, there is an abandoned old house standing next to a huge motel construction. And now, that shore is full of resorts. Also, the highest rate of rape has been in this region. I had sensed this back then. After the ‘60s, people began to have cars, and this gave them mobility. People from Mid-Anatolia were able to come down to this shore directly, through Konya to Alanya. Back then people used to change their clothes on the beach, however the villagers did not even show their legs. This was the clash of sexual mores I saw. There has been great trauma for these people when they have been exposed to nudity—trauma that could be the subject of a novel. I think what I have predicted has come true.

FB: You have talked about “the geography of a novel” as opposed to “the novel of a geography.” What does this mean?

AA: For the last few years, I have been talking about this in my lectures. Is it the life of the author or the life of the novel that determines its geography? I think that it is more meaningful in terms of literature to say that the life of the novel determines its setting. It’s easy for an author to write about his life, the setting he lives in, the places, the food, the weather, and so forth, but if I’m going to talk about the conflict between secular and religious groups, then the life of the novel should choose the setting. And for this novel, I discovered the setting through living. We had a house in this region for many years. And I knew that that the nature there would not stay the same.

FB: You immortalized that place with this novel.

AA: Yes, I hoped to do that. I said: this place will be ruined by the huge development projects, but this novel will survive. There are numerous descriptions of the natural setting in this novel, unlike my other works. I also wanted to have the politics in the background, not in the foreground. In most of my novels, society and politics exist at equal levels; here, I preferred poetic language because poetry suited that nature. It is the life of the novel that chooses the setting. For instance, I chose Vienna for another novel of mine. What do I know about Vienna? I am a Turkish author who knows about her country, its geography. On the other hand, Turkey is now trying to get into the European Union, and in our history textbooks it’s often recounted how the Ottomans came as far as the “gates of Vienna.” Even though the Austrian Empire was weakened at the time, they got help from the French and the Polish, and they repulsed the Ottomans. I find this similar to our situation today: we are now waiting at the gates of the European Union just like we did at the gates of Vienna. This is also about the denigration of Turkey by the West. They’ve always seen us as a religious state. However, secularism and Westernization started with the reformist period of the Ottoman Empire. Also, the repelling of the Ottomans from Vienna came about through the cooperation of the Western countries. Now, they want to repel us from the European Union. I wanted to talk about these issues, so I chose Vienna as the setting for my novel.

FB: You’ve said, “This novel wrote itself,” about Summer’s End. How so?

AA: I wrote this novel at the end of the ‘70s. The protagonist is a woman whose son has been killed during the political upheaval that took place in that period. She has separated from her husband, but they support each other. These people are in the minority; they are intellectuals. The coup d’état that happened in 1971 isolated the intellectuals. On the one hand, there is grief for her son’s death, on the other hand her isolation and loneliness. Six people—she, her ex-husband, brother, and friends—come together at this remote, quiet place for a vacation. This woman is in such a terrible state that she doesn’t want to write anything—she is a translator who writes once in a while—but even though she doesn’t want to write, things around her, the momentary realities, and her imagination compel her to write this story. It all starts when she sees an abandoned old house and someone walking there; and throughout the vacation, she slowly imagines the story of the people who lived there. The associations evoked by nature, even the waves, bring back her memories and make her write this novel in her mind. She completes it when she goes back to the city. The potential in her finds a way out.

FB: You frequently talk about the ‘moment’ in Summer’s End.

AA: Yes, I always wanted to write novels spanning short periods of time, the novel of a moment. Summer’s End is like that: the narrator writes the novel starting from the moment when a woman is seen under the shower in the garden. I especially expressed this in this novel. My first novel, Lying Down to Die, takes place in a hotel room. It is a novel that spans an hour and twenty minutes. In another novel of mine, ROMANTIC: A Vienna Summer, the story originates from the moment of seeing a retired history teacher. And Summer’s End is a novel about many associations—there are numerous citations from foreign authors like Chekhov and Lermontov. I wrote it without knowing it would be called a postmodern novel. Back then, there was no mention of postmodernism in our literature. Years later, in a study done at the Turkish Studies department of Leiden University in Holland, they examined this novel, and, after evaluating it extensively, they concluded that it was a pre-postmodern novel. Later on, postmodern writing developed in Turkey, too—of course, imported from the West.

FB: You are known as one of the innovators of the modern Turkish novel. What did you change in the classical novel?

AA: I was tired of classical novels. They always used the present tense and the past tense, nothing further. I was not satisfied with the limited usage of grammatical tenses. I thought we needed a multi-tensed narrative, a multi-leveled narrative. Also, there was a genre which was popular at the time called the “rural novel.” It took place in villages or the countryside. There weren’t many “urban novels.” And if there were, they were only about Istanbul. I wasn’t happy with the classical novel, and I wasn’t satisfied with stream of consciousness writing either. This was Freud’s influence upon writing in the West, and then we adopted it. They wrote the parts in the stream of consciousness in italics or underlined and so forth. I thought: might it not be possible for me to write without doing these things, using my own language? When I tried to do this in my first novel, the critics found it odd, because I had used all styles of narrative together: memoir, dream, poetry, letter, and play. Then I also wrote a book of dreams. Dream narration is a different form of narration. What kind of language should you use to describe a dream? I used all grammatical tenses simultaneously. And also, Turkish has a special type of past tense, used when you pass on some information you’ve heard from others, and called the “indirect past tense” or “story past tense,” which other languages don’t have. I used that, too, in my novels. This is how I attained a multi-leveled narrative. I wanted to change both the style and the setting of the novel. I wrote the urban novel by playing with time and using different narrative styles together.

FB: Besides being multi-leveled, there is no definite ending in your novels. Do you refuse to be an omniscient author?

AA: Very true. I have always felt that the classical novel prevented the reader from thinking for himself. I want the reader to have a share in the story I tell. I want his imagination to work, too; I like him to create. I am not a godlike author, I do not know everything. I started writing with plays for theater and radio. If I could have done what I wanted in theater, I would have continued. But theater is a collective art, and there is censorship as well. I thought the novel was a better channel for me to express myself. It is a freer creation—well, of course, there has been the issue of banning books, but still, you’re all by yourself while creating it.

FB: You reject being a godlike author, and you have also said you do not write for the ideology of feminism, and you don’t want to be called a “woman author,” either. What sort of an author can we call you then?

AA: I don’t like to be categorized within any literary trend. I knew that when I wrote ROMANTIC: A Vienna Summer that they would categorize it as a postmodern novel. I even put a note at the beginning of the novel asking the reader not to think of this novel in terms of predefined templates, but determine what it was for himself. And about not being a feminist writer: I believe we write for the sake of the human, we write to understand and describe the human. We have to understand men as well as women. We see mostly a one-sided view for the sake of defending women’s rights: the woman is mostly portrayed as the good one, good mother, good wife, while the man is evil. But this is not about being good or bad. Two sexes live together in a society and there are conditions that shape them, making a person what he or she is. We have to understand these conditions to understand why they are the way they are. If a woman is repressed, why is that? What makes a man macho? I wrote a novel called A Chill in the Soul which takes place in bed, while a man and a woman make love. They both have their own baggage accumulated over the years, their own histories. Of course, as “women authors,” we have experiences a man cannot have, such as giving birth, menstrual pain, and so forth, but my writing is about uniting people. And I always look to answer the “why”.

FB: You’re one of the most prolific and eminent authors of Turkish literature, but your books have never been bestsellers. Why do you think that is?

AA: I think that the consumption economy disintegrates people and estranges them from themselves. I know that a book is a commodity and a tool for making money. But it is not a t-shirt or a kind of cereal. It is an intellectual product, and it never made me happy to see intellectual products on the market emptied of their content. I never wanted to be like that. I see production as a matter of continuity; I wouldn’t want to be here today, gone tomorrow. My publishing house included my works under the classics. They are being taught in schools. I’ve never been a bestseller, but I’ve never made a publisher lose money, either. When they ask me, “How do you regard the bestsellers?” I say, they taste like hormoned fruits. They look shiny and attractive, so one can’t resist buying them, but they taste nothing like real strawberries. I always say, let there be some writers to meet the demand of those who look for organic food.

FB: Is that how you became “a reader’s writer?”

AA: This is how it happened: I was accepted as a playwright in the beginning. Then my first novel, Lying Down to Die, was not received so well by two of the leading critics of the time. And in our literary world, when those two critics did not like your work, you had no chance to survive as an author. However this is not how it happened in my case because despite the negative reviews, readers liked this novel, both in terms of style and intellect. And when the critics realized this, they changed their mind. So I became a reader’s writer. It’s the reader’s appreciation, really. I believe the responsibility of an intellectual is not to go down to the level of the majority, but to raise the level together with them. Also, populism is not for me because I try to understand why the majority is what it is. I don’t expect everyone to embrace me. I accept loneliness. I think we have to question the human mind. We always consider the human mind as something sacred—of course it’s important; we wouldn’t even be able to have this conversation if it weren’t there. However, the same human mind makes inventions to enable massacres. We need to look at things that are exalted, held sacred, too. And also, there are the impossibilities and hardships that make us create and produce. I am a skeptic by nature. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t bother to write. It is always provocation that underlies creativity. Just like the invention of the wheel and fire.

FB: If we can say that there is an inclination to imitate the West in Turkey, has your work ever been compared to those from the West? Have you ever looked up to a Western author?

AA: I certainly might have been influenced by some. I loved reading. I read both native and foreign authors as much as I could. Of course, I had a language barrier. Even though I studied French in college, I cannot say that I understood everything in French, such as philosophy books. But I could read the plays, since dialogues are easy. I remember I was deeply affected by Camus; I have thought about him a lot. This may have had some influence on my writing, but I don’t know anyone that I looked up to. When I published my first novel, they said it sounded like Virginia Woolf or Christa Wolf. This was really strange because I had no idea about their works; I had not read any of them. So I didn’t like these comments. Let me tell you an incident about this: I was 22 years old when my first play was staged for the State Theater in Ankara. I had just graduated from college. And after the final act, I received a big applause—so much bigger than a male playwright would have received. It was as if they were saying: “There it is! The Republic of Turkey has produced its modern Turkish woman!” I felt that I was being presented as the victory of an ideology, and I didn’t like it. So I refused to get on the stage; I didn’t want to be shown to people as if I were a doll. I always wanted to be myself.

FB: Only one novel of yours, Curfew, has previously appeared in English, and it was published by an American university press. Even though you have produced such important works, why are you not translated more into English? Is this a common problem with Turkish literature?

AA: Believe me, I don’t know the answer to this question. Curfew received very good reviews, but it wasn’t printed a second time. On the other hand it has become a course book at Columbia University. I don’t know anything about this business, really. Maybe I don’t have a good agent. I think your agent should be able to comply with the new trends worldwide.

FB: Can we say it is difficult to translate Turkish into Western languages?

AA: Let’s face it, Turkish is not a common language, I mean the language of the Republic of Turkey. Otherwise, there are many Turkic languages. It is sad that many authors who have come before me are still not translated. But there is an interest now in Turkish literature because of the possibility of Turkey entering the European Union. And also, Turkology professors used to know more about Ottoman literature; they were unfamiliar with the new Turkish. There occurred many changes in our language and Turkologists were confused. During the transformation from Ottoman Turkish to the Turkish of the Republic, there were many additions and new concepts, so it took a long time for Turkologists abroad to learn about these changes. Other than this, I don’t know why I haven’t been translated, because there are some new authors who are not widely read in Turkey, but they are translated in such a short time. This still puzzles me. I don’t know how this mechanism works.

FB: You received an Honorary Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1998. Would you tell us about it?

AA: It was really surprising, because I didn’t even have one book published in America. I was told that Ohio State historian Carter Findley nominated me for this. He had listened to one of my conferences in Turkey, and he was interested in my view about fantasy in literature. My book of dreams had been published recently and I had talked about the contribution of dreams to history. So they evaluated the nomination and bestowed me the award. It’s funny because I had resided in Columbus when my husband was working on his Masters degree at Ohio State from 1957 to 1959. When I went to OSU to receive the award, I had to give a thank you speech. So I told them that I thought they gave me this award because I had helped my husband type his thesis forty years ago!

FB: You’re dealing with so many serious issues, but you never lose your sense of humor.

AA: I am humorous by nature, I am playful. I can laugh at myself easily. I also swear at myself very often. I can see both sides to events—like the comedy and tragedy masks. I told you about uniting things. Things are not all tragic, nor all comic. We should always find the comedy in sad things; this is the only way to bear tragedy.

FB: Turkey is now facing new challenges in terms of secularism. Are you worried?

AA: The latest elections shocked the people who have believed in secularism. But this doesn’t mean anything. Instead of saying, it’s bad, we should look at why this happened. I wish societies were not under any kind of guardianship. The Republic of Turkey has experienced many coup d’états for many years, and it’s still under guardianship. I am against this. It is a republic, and governments should come and go by elections. I want a constitutional state. I don’t want a military government for the sake of secularism. And I cannot say that I approve any government. What we call belief turns into idolization. Someone who believes in the Koran turns it into an idol; you can’t touch it. To adore the military is the same thing. We have to understand the reasons for these beliefs. To be able to live in a humane society we have to have education, harmony, and communication. If everything had been left to elections within the Republic of Turkey, we might have been somewhere different today. We have to have the right to ask why things happened the way they did. Wherever there is an action, there is a reaction. This is the dialectic. I believe life is very strong, and in the end it will find what’s best for itself.

FB: Just like you say in the opening sentence of Summer’s End: “Everything finds what is true for itself.”

AA: Yes, this is the summary of it all: “Everything finds what is true for itself."

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008

 by Kimberly Burwick

The best place to get Kevin Goodan to discuss his poetry is where he’s most comfortable—at home, in nature. Goodan is currently the resident writer at the Robert Francis House in Amherst, Massachusetts, or “Fort Juniper.” He’s in good company with the many writers who have lived there; poets such as Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg have walked Fort Juniper’s modest three acres and have resided in the 20’ x 22’ cabin built of hurricane pine in 1939. Outside the cabin, Goodan sharpens his swede saw and stacks the quickly disappearing woodpile before we begin our interview.

Goodan grew up on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana; though not native himself, his stepfather and three brothers are tribal members. At the age of nineteen, he established himself in the U.S. Forest Service and worked as a firefighter for ten years. Goodan moved to Amherst in 1999 to attend the University of Massachusetts MFA program. His first book of poems, In The Ghost-House Acquainted (Alice James Books, 2004) won the The L.L. Winship/ PEN New England Award in 2005, and a chapbook, Thine Embers Fly, was published by Factory Hollow Press in 2007. His second collection, Winter Tenor, will be published by Alice James in May 2009.

Kimberly Burwick: Kevin, when I first read your work the thing that struck me was the way you use the idea of distance. Seeing as you’re from Montana, do these things have any kind of relationship?

Kevin Goodan: I think it’s a pretty strong relationship, because in a way I’m not where I would actually like to be. So there’s a sense of exile, I think, in the poems. I love it out here, but there is a distance from things that are known. Or things that are cherished. Looking back on it, this probably plays a major role in the poems.

KB: Do you think these poems could have been written back in Montana?

KG: I don’t think they could have been written in back in Montana. I think I had to leave or else my writing wouldn’t have matured. I kind of knew that. I had had good teachers in Montana, but I had them as teachers for six years. It was time to go somewhere where things were different and strange.

KB: Was New England the first place they were different and strange or did you travel to other places first?

KG: I went to other places; I spent time in Ireland, and Northern Ireland, and a little bit in Wales. But that was before I felt confident in writing. When I decided to come to Massachusetts I knew that I needed to write, that I had it in me to write, I just needed to get out of Montana and away from family. It’s hard to do anything when you have 300 relatives watching over you in a small town.

KB: Your poems also invoke the idea of a vanishing point—sometimes explicitly, as in “If I’m Not A Garden.” Is there a relationship there?

KG: Well, I wanted to write the way painters paint, and they all have vanishing points. At least the painters that are important to me, like the Impressionists and so forth. And so that’s what I wanted to do with language. I wanted to paint the landscape as I saw it. Like the way Van Gogh painted Saint-Rémy.

KB: Aside from the actual, tangible world, do you write towards a theoretical vanishing point?

KG: Looking back at things you can say this is what I was doing here or this is what I was doing there, but when I’m writing, I don’t know. I’m trying to push the language as far as it can go and trying to get to something that’s unsayable in the poems, somewhere. And maybe that’s the vanishing point, that place where the essence of language is beyond language.

KB: You talk about pushing language toward the unsayable, but I’ve also noticed you have an amazing capacity to give language to the natural world—as in, for instance, “In The Lexicon Of Rain.” How do you envision language in such poems?

KG: I don’t know if I can answer that.

KB: Let me put it to you differently. Without getting into something like personification, do you think the things you see outside—trees and plants, for instance—have their own kind of language?

KG: Trees do have a language. Which isn’t any “new-agey” idea—they actually do communicate. In a forest when one tree gets infected by some type of bug or spore it actually sends off pheromones to the other trees that tell them to beef up their immune system. It’s not a codified language, but they do communicate.

KB: Is that something you’re trying to tap into?

KG: A little bit. Other ways of knowing the world.

KB: In your readings, you talk a lot about a woman who was the last known speaker of a particular language.

KG: That’s Vi Hilbert. She was the last speaker of Skagit, which is part of the Salishan language base, and I grew up on the Flathead Reservation, which is the eastern-most tribe of that language group. They're called Flathead or Salish; my stepfather is a tribal member.

KB: Did he teach you Salish when you were a kid?

KG: No, he didn’t. He was part of the generation where the parents did not teach their kids Salish because it was easier for them not to know it. If you know anything about the history of going to Catholic schools and so forth, then you know that if the kids spoke native languages, they were beaten. And so to save their children from that, the parents decided to raise them so that they would only know English.

KB: Looking back, do you wish you were taught Salish?

KG: I don’t know if it would have helped me; it may have confused me more, because obviously I’m the whitest thing on the face of the earth. I knew that I wasn’t ever going to be a member of that culture. Besides, I have a hard enough time with English as it is.

KB: You do, though, have a love of Latin.

KG: Yeah, that comes from being Catholic.

KB: How does that work its way into the poems?

KG: Danged if I know, I try to keep it out! Sometimes there’s terminology in other languages that are the things that work in the poem, and that idea doesn’t transfer well into English. So, that’s why I borrow terms from Latin or German or Portuguese.

KB: Have you seen a Latin mass?

KG: I did once when I was a kid and it scared me.

KB: When you put Latin into a poem, are you trying to preserve something in that language even though it’s a dead language?

KG: Maybe, but I think with the ecumenical history of Latin, it ups the ante for the rest of the poem, because the rest of the poem has to be able to hold up to those terms.

KB: It doesn’t seem like artifice, though, it seems related to the ways you explore death—your use of Latin terminology ends up being an artifact of death along with the other images.

KG: Sounds good to me. I don’t really think about how I’m using other languages when I’m writing the poem. I just put down what is available to me.

KB: Does it ever make you feel strange, talking about the poems?

KG: Yeah. I’ve never been good at theoretical discourse or analytical this and that. That’s never been important to me. What’s important to me is what happens in the work, and growing with the poem or the story or the novel that I'm reading. And trying to take from that something that I can use in my life.

KB: You say you don’t think about the poem as you’re writing it, but your poems have a lot of energy, they’re incredibly dynamic. So what happens in the body as you’re writing? Is there a rush of any sort?

KG: Oh, I think there’s a rush; there’s also a lot of coffee that’s been drunk beforehand. In some of the poems, to borrow a term, there has to be some sense of rapture. It doesn’t happen in every poem, but I strive toward that. Maybe the poem at the end gets to a place of stillness and maybe rapture works into that, maybe rapture is a kind of paralysis of the spirit. But that’s what I’m working toward, at least inWinter Tenor.

KB: In your chapbook, Thine Embers Fly, you have a poem titled “The Flame-Front I Maintain Is For This Tinder Only.” This is a word that comes up again and again here and in many of your poems. What’s so special about that word?

KG: It’s this. It’s what is here, now. What is, in the poem, trying to pinpoint. That word is like a pin holding things down. This thing. This tinder. This. It makes the transitory world for a moment hold still. At least in the poem.

KB: Also in that poem you write, “The harsh, the true, / A brightness not the world, / A blinding, like voice surging through keys.” How does music figure into your writing life?

KG: I’m constantly listening to music when I’m writing, and sometimes the mood of the composition I’m listening to helps lead what I’m writing or allows it to contain the mood of the music. In that regard it’s an integral part of what I do. I can’t write in silence and I can’t write when there are random noises around, but with music I can. And I also pay attention to—because I used to play traditional Irish music—certain aspects of the music.

KB: Is it Irish music you listen to when you write?

KG: No, I usually listen to something like Arvo Pärt.

KB: It’s an interesting poem because it ends, “where the fire feasts upon the patterns of other/weathers,” so, you start with “This Tinder Only” and then you get to “other weathers.” How does that transition occur?

KG: It’s like reaching for what some people call the ineffable. The poem works towards trying to catch that unsayable thing. It begins here, because everything begins here, in this, and then moves towards that. So the poem is a movement outward or inward to the idea or realization of other weathers, that there are other things out there that we can’t see. Even though we can’t see it or codify it, it dominates our lives.

KB: In another poem, “Come Take These Words From Me,” you write, “I look out and know my place, / I, because of love.” It seems there’s a dialogue going on between I and love.

KG: I think most poems are a situation of dialogue even though the person or the thing or the non-thing that a writer is speaking with might not be responding. Dickinson once called her poems her “letter to the world.” There weren’t any replies back.

KB: Weather is really important in your poems. What your first memory of weather?

KG: Sitting after a rainstorm outside my window on the roof of the porch listening to the semi trucks go by and whine on the wet pavement.

KB: How old were you?

KG: Three.

KB: In your poems weather tends to be something that brings the soul into place. Was weather ever something traumatic?

KG: Well, when you fight fires weather is pretty important because if you don’t pay attention to it, your soul’s going to be crispy. So weather has always been an important thing for me. I’ve been lucky to live a life where it is important, where you can’t change your environment into something more friendly to you. And it does change, it’s not always nice.

KB: I’ve seen you get really excited about storms. Is there something about watching weather patterns come into being that works its way into the poems?

KG: Well, I think that storms that have a certain violence to them make life more tangible. They alter things. Lightning certainly alters not just the thing it strikes, but everything around it. Or a really strong wind or a blizzard or something like that. So yeah, I pay attention to those and I like when there’s turbulence because it changes the constant.

KB: You joined the U.S. Forest Service in Montana at the age of nineteen. What were the circumstances that lead you there? Did you think of this as a long-term career?

KG: I started doing it because they were short of people in 1988, because of all the fires in Montana. And also, someone once told me that I would never be able to fight forest fires, that I wasn’t strong enough. So I decided that I would prove them wrong. Initially, I didn’t think of it as a long-term career, I thought of going into teaching and this would be one way to pay for college.

KB: The Lolo National Forest in Western Montana is over two-million acres, and has an eco-system that is influenced by both continental and maritime climates. How do you approach a fire which fuels off of such diverse forest land?

KG: Very carefully! It depends on what the fuel type is. If you’re in an area that has a lot of flashy fuels, but also has some kind of canopy, some sort of overstory that’s continuous like an open pine stand and it’s on a steep slope like the Mann Gulch Fire, you have to be very, very careful. You wouldn’t think so, but you do. In the thicker, more dense areas, you approach the fire differently, because it will be slower moving. Unless you’ve got a storm cell sitting on top of you.

KB: What did you do in the off-season?

KG: Starved. And washed dishes. Went to school. And went to Ireland for a while.

KB: How did these winter experiences tie in with your fire life?

KG: I don’t know if they really tied in until later. In the midst of these things I was thinking they were all separate aspects of living, and now, they are all sort of combined. I think I went to Northern Ireland for the violence and because I needed the adrenalin that fire gave me. I needed the risk. I needed that thing going on in the brain. And that’s why I went there, to prolong that endorphin high.

KB: Growing up in Montana, you’ve had many long, long winters, but you don’t seem to be a person who minds that. What happens in winter in terms of writing?

KG: Since you don’t fight fires in the wintertime, winter is a time for writing. And initially I was forced into that, because of fighting forest fires and so on. So it’s become the habit. Most of the work gets done in the winter.

KB: I know that you were an only child until the age of nine, when the first of your half brothers came along. In what ways does being an only child figure into the writing?

KG: I don’t know if it figures in or not. That’s a good question. My brothers are all in the military and I’m sort of the weird one doing what I’m doing, so in a certain respect I always felt like I didn’t really fit in. And maybe that sense of “outsiderness” has helped me with whatever I do with writing.

KB: You mention the word “brother” a lot in your poems. Is this a reference to your actual family or is it something more that that?

KG: It is probably more than that… at certain points I am speaking through the poem to my brothers, but often it’s about something larger than immediate family. I think in certain respects we all are connected with each other. Even the things that aren’t human, there’s always something to connect with.

KB: You weren’t able to join the military.

KG: No, I wasn’t. My lungs kept me out. They said my lungs weren’t fit for military service, so I went and fought forest fires.

KB: I don’t know if it’s going too far to call you a sniper of language, but in some ways it feels like you ambush the natural world.

KG: Don’t let the earth-first folks know that! But that could be. I’m trying to capture things as I see them, and so in a way I suppose you do have to ambush the world, to try and capture it at that moment as much as you can—to make it visible, to make it visceral, to make it tangible for the reader.

KB: Take us into your writing room. What do you have in your writing space?

KG: There’s a desk, or a table. A window. A typewriter. And some paper.

KB: You don’t type on a computer?

KG: No. I use an old 1923 Royal portable.

KB: Why?

KG: Because I like the physical action of typing and hearing the keys hit the paper. And it also makes you focus more on the words you’re going to put on the paper, because if you make a mistake, you can’t just hit the delete bar. You either have to take the page out and start over, or you have to use the wonders of white-out. It makes me focus more and it makes me be more intentional with the words I put on the page.

KB: Do you write by hand as well?

KG: I do. I usually write down notes and fragments of things. And at a certain point, when I feel there might be enough fragments that I can put together that will lead me somewhere—maybe they won’t even be part of a poem, but they will lead me somewhere—then I will sit down at the typewriter and type.

KB: When you finish a poem, do you feel exhaustion or relief that you can move on and do other things?

KG: It depends on the poem. The really, really good poems, the “god-given poems,” those make me exhausted when they come up, because they are few and far between. The other poems are kind of like doing your homework before you can go out and play.

KB: Before we began this interview, I saw you outside sharpening a saw. How does physical labor figure into writing?

KG: That’s important. I believe you should have a well-rounded life. I don’t want to just sit at a desk my whole life. But physical labor, like cutting trees or digging ditches, also lends itself to what I write about, which is the natural world or the occupations that have to deal with the natural world.

KB: Let’s talk about your first book, In The Ghost-House Acquainted. I’m wondering about the poem “Something Like Blood.” In many ways it seems different from the other poems in the book. It almost has the fragrance of springtime and trauma.

KG: Yeah, that was one of the first poems that I wrote as an undergraduate and it’s the oldest poem in the book, so it probably does feel different because it is the beginning of things.

KB: You have a line, “My mother touched my hand.” And towards the end of the poem the speaker says, “I tell myself I will act / man enough for my mother to kiss me / when I come home with nothing but my hands.” How does your mother factor into the poem?

KG: Well, it’s really a poem that deals with a bad father. A mother is always going to accept what you do even if you fail—that’s what mothers do. And so for me to go fishing and come home with nothing to show for it, and yet to be strong enough to accept that and strong enough to accept a mother’s tenderness at a moment of failure, that to me was important, because I was starting something that I didn’t know if I was going to fail at or not: this whole writing business.

KB: In a lot of the poems it’s as if you take the reader by the hand and give them a pair of binoculars and have them focus specifically on something, and then immediately you change perspective and have them focus on something else. If you were a reader of one of your poems, how would you put together these images?

KG: I think it’s a situation of juxtaposition. Your mind puts together the things that follow each other. So once I understood that, or once anyone understands that, the poems can go wherever they want and the reader will follow even if there’s no narrative; if there’s just images, the mind will create a story about those images. It might be an irrational story, or a story that even the reader can’t understand or put into words, but it’s there, they all link together.v

KB: Almost all your poems deal with the world in a really tangible way, but “Trees of Heaven” gives us an alternative landscape. Is it a realistic poem?

KG: Parts of it. Sometimes snow is not very nice. And sometimes in situations of mourning you do lay everything out that remains of a person.

KB: The “you” in that poem feels particularly assaulted. Was that your intention?

KG: I don’t know… sure, I’ll go with that. I didn’t have a particular situation in mind, but I had a friend in high school that got shot and killed in a bar fight, and it could have been that. It’s slowly been leaking into the poems that I write, he has. And so maybe that was the impetus.

KB: The “you” in many of your poems seems like it could be not only many different people, but a divinity of sorts. Is it a multifarious you or is it ever specific to any person?

KG: Well, I think you hit upon the answer, that it’s multifarious. It’s a blank or a vague you—it’s you the reader, but it could be other things as well. You’re not able to pin it down all the time.

KB: In many ways you collapse the distance between the reader and the speaker.

KG: I hope so. That’s what I would like. I would like them to see the things that I put on the page the way I saw them when I put them on the page.

KB: However the “I” in your poems is arguably stronger than the “you.” Is it always you or an imagined speaker?

KG: I like to say that it’s me, I like the fact that you’re making me stronger than you. It could be another situation, but usually it’s me. I think.

KB: In The Ghost-House Acquainted is the title of your first book. It’s clear that you become acquainted with death in the poems, but what else do you become acquainted with throughout the book?

KG: Life. Well, there’s always the search for things beyond the world. Often times I feel that maybe God is here, he’s just put down in shorthand and we have to capture little pieces of him or his language, which is the natural world.

Click here to purchase In The Ghost-House Acquainted at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2008