the Prairie Schooner blog

A lively performance

This is the first in our occasional series featuring writers writing about favorite magazines that have gone out of print. Sally Brown Deskins writes about Contact, a San Francisco literary journal, as she prepares for an evening of literature and performance: “Lit Undressed: The Spirit of the Female Beats” (RNG Gallery, Omaha, March 31, 8pm), a benefit for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts; and accompanying art exhibit, “Les Femmes Folles.”

It has been called “a noteworthy conservative literary magazine,” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti; a San Francisco magazine that ran “astronomical projections of red ink…dropping around $70,000 in the five or six years of the magazine’s existence,” by historians; a “beautiful, prestigious avant-garde quarterly,” by Anne Lamott; and a magazine published “so the Beats could be shown how to write proper prose,” by its publisher. To me, Contact:  The San Francisco Collection of New Writing, Art and Ideas (1958-1963) is insight into the creative mind of my grandfather, a man I never knew, Contact publisher and editor William H. Ryan.

There are only a few collections nationwide of the publication, and only a few people who’ve written about the “flamboyant man, insane, brilliant, wildly funny, sometimes a royal pain in the neck, and just about the most loyal friend any of us have ever had…devoted to the publishing of great, good writing” (Lamott, 1986). 

Through the grace of my mother who recently gave me a box of Contacts she’d kept since my grandfather’s passing in 1986, I now explore through his creative eye what he considered important and inspiring, to grasp even a little of who he was.

Apparently he was a man who picked up a publication that had been on hiatus for more than a decade, a magazine originally published for the first time in 1921 by William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon (a biography of whom was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1959: Robert McAlmon:  Expatriate Publisher and Writer, by Robert E. Knoll). The name of the original “was to signalize a new concept of life among literati, about the denizens of the moderns with whom we were acquainted, in whom lack of contact with life was most typical in our opinion.” Contact broke-up in the 1930s, with poet McAlmon continuing the tradition as The Contact Press in Paris and Williams hanging around busy with home life.

In the meantime, my grandfather was born in Des Moines in 1928 and after many college and a few military stints, landed a job “when I happened to use the lobby of the Popular Mechanics building for shelter and ended up working there.” After a move to California, he “spent a good deal of time working for the stumbling, new, amusing and amazing television industry,” and worked for another now-defunct magazine, Pre-Sell, in San Francisco in 1957, the same year Allen Ginsberg read “Howl” at City Lights Bookstore.

Soon thereafter, he opened Tides Bookstore in Sausalito and re-instigated Contact, describing it in the first volume:

…Contact does not intend to take sides—not literary sides, not political sides, not moral sides—except that we are on the side of Humanity, whatever that means. Presumably, however, we would publish an inhuman author should he present us with a magnificent work of inhumanity. We will publish fiction, articles, poems, plays, photographs, drawings, cartoons—anything, anything that makes contact with the ugly, agonizing, beautiful, satisfying world we’re caught in. That world extends from the remotest chamber of the human spirit to outer space; so we shouldn’t find ourselves fettered with limitations.

Indeed, these magazines are rich in diversity of writers and artists, from prisoners to award-winning playwrights—and genre and subject matter, from dancing, artistry and childhood to death, religion and capitalism. 

The first volume introduces Contact with a seemingly juxtaposed array of work: poetry, a spread of Van Gogh drawings, humorous letters from a Japanese professor and from author Norman Mailer, an explanative essay on the trendy Zen religion, two modern romantic short stories, and two plays printed with scribbles, notes and cross-outs, for the readers to view the writer’s process.

The second and third volumes are full of the same splendidly diverse contributions from knowns and unknowns—“The Final Revolution” about the “technicization going on in many, many fields”; an essay by John Updike, “What is a Rhyme? (T.S. Eliot, with Customary Equanimity, Confronts Mother Goose)”; an anti-nationalist essay, “The Decline of the Left,” by C. Wright Mills.

Women writers showed their stuff in the third volume including a humble, subtle poem by Denise Levertov, “Under the Tree,” of drinking wine under one tree “among the dark multitude.” The third volume closes with drawings, “Etching and Dry Point” by Beth Van Hoesen.

The next three volumes from 1959-60 begin with the cover featuring a photo of Louis Armstrong, “A Goddam Jewel.” The work in these volumes continue to display the editor’s insight and amusing vibes with “Inner Liberties,” (Peter Viereck, Volume Four); “I Stink” (Allen Sharp, Volume Four); “Socialism Reconsidered” (Norman Thomas, Volume Five); “Mafia of the Heart” (Nelson Algren, Volume Six); a couple of poems by Tom McAfee: “The Matriarch” and “Youth and the Tragic View” both from Volume Four.

Illustrations capture each story’s essence, whether silly, reflective or political. “The Red Chair” by  Sally Haley, accompanies a poem by the same name by Dachine Rainer, part of a project by the Portland Art Museum, combining poetry and painting. Wrote Contact: “…Not only did poet and painter gain insights into the problems of an allied but deeply different craft—the exhibition proved also that the excitement generated by the exposure to other art forms is one of the best kinds of creative stimulus” (Volume Four).

Of particular intrigue is the spread in Volume Six: “Art of the Imprisoned:  This portfolio was selected from nearly eight hundred paintings and drawings viewed by the editors at Folsom and San Quentin state prisons in California. We thank the custodians of these Institutions for their cooperation.” The ten pages of prisoners’ selections show black and white drawings of emotive line quality (one showing nude men seemingly forced into group showers), peculiarity (one with a woman’s body, a horse head and feet, and a dragon tail), and loneliness (one of an empty neighborhood street; two of faceless embraces). Completing the series is a haunting poem written by Caryl Chessman, who was executed May 2, 1960 at San Quentin, entitled “The Images of Execution.”

The entire Volume Six revolves around this notion of “The Criminal Man” with contributions from formerly and presently imprisoned writers such as Alvah Bessie, one of the members of the infamous blacklisted “Hollywood Ten.”

Wrote the editors of the edition: “… more than learning, we have been moved.  Moved by the material we are publishing here and moved also by some that we couldn’t publish—letters, conversations and tours of our institutions and punishment. We hope to move you through contact with our collections of new writing, art and ideas.”

Instead of an editor’s letter in Volume Nine, there’s a telling introductory statement by John Erskine, entitled “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.” He wrote: “…If I give you poison, meaning to give you wholesome food, I have—to say the least—not done a good act; and unless I intend to overboard all pretence to intelligence, I must feel some responsibility for that trifling neglect to find out whether what I gave you was food or poison.”

The last year of publication, Contact went monthly. The magazine seemed developed; its writers advertised novels and regular columns. Of particular humor and note is the “safari of editors”—apparently my grandfather and other Contact editors ventured to a ghost town in Nevada called Contact, in an attempt to buy the town and revive the economy with slot machines and establishing an art colony there. It was considered a “lively performance” which “made us (the community) more aware of the noted literary publication” with “irreverence and good humor” (San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 1962, “The Nevada Safari Of Contact Editors”).

Contact, critically and internationally acclaimed at the time, ceased in 1962 after the group went broke; Ryan went on to edit for various publications such as Next, Esquire, Swank, and California Magazine and another of his creations, T.U.B. (The Unborn Book) a newsletter of excerpts from rejected novels. Contact was probably his most notable creative accomplishment, which he began when he was thirty, my present age.

I have gathered a sense of the magazine as a humbling, futuristic success at gathering art, writing and ideas from a variety of people—published and unpublished; American and non; free and un-free. 

To me, my grandfather was absent, ill, but sent letters every once and a while—and he is now a continued enigma, a longing space of my existence. I now know him through his writing. But I know him mostly through the writing of others.

Japan, ever-present

Reflections on memory, history, culture, and hybridity in the wake of Japan’s recent earthquake and tsunami, by Mari L’Esperance

“The pain of one part of humankind is the pain of the whole of humankind. And the human species and the planet Earth are one body. What happens to one part of the body happens to the whole body.” —Thich Nhat Hanh (in a letter posted on the web in response to the earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan)

When a writer must contend with what lies beyond her control (and that is, of course, much of what she experiences in life), what is left for her to do? Certainly she can deny it or choose to accept it. Often she must also write about it—must make meaning, through language, of events and her internal responses to those events that elude meaning, refuse to be explained or adhere to logic. For this post I’d initially thought to write about my mixed heritage (Japanese, French Canadian-American, Abenaki Missisquoi Indian) and how this racial and cultural “hybridity” inevitably influences me and informs my poetry in ways that are often impossible to name. Although compelling in theory, it was a soupy, unformed idea, at best. Over the ensuing weeks I played with it some more.

Then, on March 11 an 8.9 earthquake and devastating tsunami struck the northern Pacific coast of Japan, irrevocably changing so much for so many. As news and images of the destruction streamed through and across the Internet, I became aware on a felt level that more than the earth’s axis and an entire coastline and its inhabitants had been violently transformed. Physically, psychically, and emotionally, something in me had also shifted, broken open (like the earth herself?), and begun to rearrange and reform itself, and continues to do so days later. Such shifting and reorganizing occurs all the time for any one of us, mostly beyond our conscious awareness, and speaks to the hybridity inherent in all experience—across time, locations, identities, relationships, and cultures—as our individual and collective psyches rearrange and reshape themselves in response to a myriad influences, both internal and external, chosen and imposed.

As it was for many others, my initial response to the events in Japan was one of horror and disbelief; then a gnawing, obsessive panic (Was my family safe? Were my beloved temples and shrines unharmed?) was followed by deep sorrow and a pervading sense of hopelessness that threatened to overwhelm me. For me, Japan is mother, literally and symbolically; place and parent are one and the same, indistinguishable, interchangeable. Japan is the place of my birth and my late mother’s homeland and holds tremendous meaning for me—culturally, spiritually, aesthetically, and emotionally. My motherland had suffered a tremendous rupture and, on a psychic level, so had I. Immediately after the quake and in the hours and days following, I found myself feeling queasy, light-headed, destabilized, disembodied, and otherworldly. In my own way I, too, felt like I’d taken a full body blow from a giant, internal wave and had been sent reeling, tossed about in the wake churned up by my rattled psyche.

Since the earthquake, I’ve communicated with family and friends in Tokyo, Kamakura, and Yokohama, mostly via Skype and Facebook (which I will never complain about again). With phone service down and electricity out or only intermittently available in many areas, the Internet was a critical lifeline after the quake. Thankfully, my loved ones are well and safe and I’ve been reminded of what an interconnected world we now live in—how we perceive and metabolize one another’s lives and experiences in ways we could not have dreamed of before the arrival of the Internet. A crisis of this proportion also reminds us immediately of how interdependent and interconnected we are and how we take so much for granted under “normal” circumstances: fully stocked grocery shelves; ample water, electricity, and gas; smoothly operating transportation and communication systems. A disruption in any of these exposes us to our vulnerability and helplessness.

The quake and tsunami shook me awake and got me thinking about hybridity in a different way than I’d initially considered. It stimulated my thinking about hybridity of experience and psychological phenomena across history, generations, and cultures. I thought about trans-generationally transmitted trauma and how such trauma is re-experienced by successive generations in different and similar ways and also affects the world at large (Hurricane Katrina comes to mind as an example). In recent days I’ve considered how the earthquake and its aftermath have not only affected me personally, but are affecting a generation that survived World War II (such as my 73-year-old uncle in Kamakura, who vividly remembers the traumas he endured as a boy in that war), as well as subsequent generations who did not directly suffer war trauma, but have experienced flavors of it through their parents and grandparents and in the days since the quake. During World War II the constant air raids, disease and food shortages, the massive firebombings of Tokyo and other Japanese cities that killed tens of thousands and destroyed entire communities, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with their deadly legacy currently playing itself out at the stricken nuclear power plant in Fukushima, and widespread devastation and deprivation seared the psyches of the Japanese people for decades to come. (To get a sense of this experience, I encourage you to watch the gorgeous, poetic animated film “Grave of the Fireflies” or “火垂るの墓, Hotaru no Haka” [1988], pictured at left, which film critic Robert Ebert has called one of the “greatest war films ever made”; it will break your heart.) When I see images in the news of entire communities and miles of coastland wiped out by the tsunami, leaving a sea of rubble in its wake, or of bewildered, displaced seniors warming their hands around a kerosene stove, I’m reminded of the war and how these experiences are all connected in our psyches, in our very cells.

After the earthquake my mind made an intuitive sweep of Japan’s rich and turbulent history. I thought of the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships” (in Japanese, 黒船, kurofune—so called for their menacing black hulls and smokestacks belching clouds of thick, black coal smoke) on July 14, 1853 at Uraga Harbor (part of present-day Yokosuka) in Kanagawa Prefecture. Watching post-quake news and seeing black smoke rising from burning boats, buildings, and damaged oil refineries naturally reminded me of these early assaults, like a series of great waves, from the west on Japan’s cultural and psychic integrity. Although I was not alive when Perry’s ships dropped anchor off Japan’s coast over 150 years ago, the psychic memory lives in me on a cellular level, as it does in every person of Japanese descent. The same can be said for post-tsunami images of raging fires left to burn themselves to ash—images which took me back to the firebombings of World War II: sweeping, out-of-control flames raging red and orange against total blackness. I recalled my mother’s life during the war; at the time a school girl in Kamakura (located on the coast a 50-minute train ride southwest of Tokyo), she’d recount for me having nothing to eat for weeks on end but rotting sweet potatoes, walking to school in winter with her feet wrapped in rags, and terrifying air raids at all hours of the day and night. After the earthquake my uncle in Kamakura told me he was in Tokyo (where he’d traveled to pay his respects at the family cemetery plot) when the quake struck. As trains were stopped for a time, he couldn’t get home until early the next day, then had to walk a good part of the distance because his local train line was still out of commission. He said the journey reminded him of walking with his father (my grandfather) from Tokyo to Kamakura during the war when trains had been derailed by air raids and power outages.

Hybridity is not simply an intellectual, academic construct; it is real, ever-present, and permeates all of us on many levels, no matter who we are, no matter our experience. As a Hapa poet, I find these ever shifting layers and dynamics provide infinite richness and depth for my imagination and my poems. The Japanese hold interdependence and interconnectedness as core cultural values, just as Americans value self-sufficiency, independence, and individualism. Despite all that their small island nation has endured over the centuries, it is these values and the cultural and social integrity of the Japanese people that will carry them through one of the greatest natural disasters in human history. And, by virtue of our shared humanity and natural impulse to reach out, connect, and comfort, we will help them as well as continue to hold them in our minds and hearts.

 

About Mari L'Esperance:

Born in Kobe, Japan, Mari L’Esperance is a Hapa poet whose first full-length collection The Darkened Temple was awarded the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2008. Jane Mead has written of it: “… L’Esperance enacts the process of defining a self out of fragments of cultural and personal history, the traumatic disintegration of that self, and its subsequent painful rebuilding: by turns narrative, chantlike, fractured, and lyric, these tender, terrifying, and frank poems fight their way into song.” An earlier collection Begin Here was awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize. L'Esperance's poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Poetry Kanto, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Whale Sound, and elsewhere and have been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University and the recipient of fellowships from the New York Times, Hedgebrook, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, L'Esperance lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

Between panic and revision

On the occasion of the release of Lit From Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing, co-edited by Dinty W. Moore and Kevin Haworth, we include here an interview with Moore, conducted by Devin Murphy (creative writing PhD student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and editorial assistant for Prairie Schooner) during Moore’s visit to UNL last fall.

 Dinty W. Moore’s memoir, Between Panic and Desire (University of Nebraska Press), was winner of the 2009 Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize. His other books include The Accidental Buddhist, Toothpick Men, The Emperor’s Virtual Clothes, and the writing guide, The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. In addition to editing the internet journal, Brevity, he is on the editorial board of Creative Nonfiction and is coordinating editor for the anthology Best Creative Nonfiction. He currently heads Ohio University’s Creative Writing BA, MA, and PhD programs, and is the president of Associated Writing Programs. 

 

Devin Murphy: How do you prioritize your writing life?

Dinty Moore:  It gets squeezed, but even before graduate school I made it a job. I set aside so many hours a week for writing and that’s what I do, and I have to be there. I’m a university guy so it works out that I do that first thing in the morning. I get up, make my coffee, and sit in front of the computer. I do that before I do any other stuff so there is always some space for it. 

Are you working on anything right now?

I’m working on a very short book which is essentially a lot of quotes from other writers for a publisher that specializes in Buddhist books. The quotes themselves aren’t Buddhist, but the book is going to be called The Mindful Writer, so it looks at how those quotes resonate with some of the thoughts about mindfulness.

Then I’m working on another book of nonfiction that is really, really at the very beginning stages.  So when I say I’m working on it I mean I have seven to eight pages written and thirty pages of notes, but that’s where books start. This one is sort of a riff on The Divine Comedy and Dante, and sort of an attempt to do a 21st-century, quirky, funny, weird nonfiction look at heaven and hell, and how our views of that have changed and where they fit into our society now. Since, you know, we are a very different people then we were five hundred years ago. 

Once you finish a book project, does something of that project remain with you and inform your writing, or do you have to clear the slate and start from scratch? Here you are dealing with Buddhism again a decade after you wrote The Accidental Buddhist.

When I finished The Accidental Buddhist—and I was lucky because it did well, it still sells, ten years later, which is a nice thing—I got a lot of offers to do Buddhist books, and a couple of Buddhist publishers approached me to do Buddhist books. And I probably could have carved out a career, and been more successful, at least in terms of numbers of books sold, if I just kept turning out Buddhist books because of branding and audience. But I just didn’t have it in me. One of the things I like about nonfiction writing is that you can have a short attention span. If something fascinates you for three weeks you think about it for three weeks and write a very short essay. If something fascinates you for six months then you just immerse yourself in it for six months and write a longer essay. And if you have two or three or four years of fascination in something and if you have the patience and energy to explore it, then you say, I’m going to write a book about this. But then you turn the page, and say, now I’m interested in something else. So I felt like I said what I wanted to say about Buddhism in The Accidental Buddhist, said more than I wanted to say because I’m not an expert. So I turned down those offers to develop other projects until recently, when this one came up and I thought, “I can do that.”

It was your lack of expertise in The Accidental Buddhist that was the real charm of that book.

Well, I remember thinking about Walter Mitty at the time, and Plimpton did it too. There is a certain energy to not being an expert and throwing yourself into whatever it is and saying, I’m going to try to understand this. The reader can identify with that. If you are trying to reach your reader on a certain level, and you are a wide-eyed, nascent stumblebum, who is just trying to make sense of things, that is a pretty good voice on the page too. 

When you find yourself working on these long projects, when do you know it’s going to be a book, and how do you find your binding element or narrative arc so it’s cohesive and not just a series of loosely connected events?

The moment where you realize it’s a book comes and goes. I’m convinced at the beginning of the book, and then three or six months into it I’m like, “What was I thinking?” Then I rediscover it again. Then I lose it and rediscover that narrative arc. I usually think I have one, then near the end of the project when I finally have fifteen or twenty chapters, and they are still all rough, I realize the one I had won’t work and I’ll have to come up with a new one.

It’s an iterative process. I’m not the first writer to say that. I started as a journalist, then when I got interested in writing literary work and work that would end up in literary magazines, I started writing fiction, and did my MFA in fiction, and it was magical to me to realize that you could start a short story and have no idea how it was going to end and that the characters would dictate to you eventually, if you could find the way into the characters.

It’s not quite the same in nonfiction, but I still have that leap of faith. I don’t quite know what my voice is going to be in this book, I don’t really understand the structure, I don’t really understand what the payout will be that will make a reader or publisher care, but if I work on it long enough, I’ll discover it. Whether it is an essay or a book, that’s the way it works. So instead of the characters dictating to you where the book is going to go, and where it will end, it is the material that dictates where the book will go and where it will end.  But I can’t know that upfront. I think other writers do, but I don’t.

So once you’ve been immersed in it for a long time you can start feeling your way through it?

Both immersed in the material and also immersed in trying to put the material on the page. I love revision. If you give me two hundred pages of rough draft and send me off into a room for a year, I’m the happiest boy on the planet. I’ll revise for the rest of my life if you let me. I don’t like generating new material.

I’m curious to hear you say you don’t like generating new material.

Yeah, it’s hard, it’s scary, and it’s painful. It’s like yanking hairs out of your beard one at a time, one word at a time until you finally have a chapter. Then playing with that chapter is fun, it’s like sitting on the floor and playing with Play-Doh.

In your essay “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge: A Google Maps Essay,” you mention that at this point in your career, you’ve done several immersion books similar to what Plimpton did. And you just mentioned how scary it is to generate new material, but it sounds like that might be one of the most fun parts of your job.

Well, it’s fun to go out and meet people, and it’s fun to have people tell you their stories, and they will tell you their stories. And it was fun to hang out at Buddhist monasteries for The Accidental Buddhist, but then you have to write it up, and that’s what’s hard. You have to make that work on the page.

Now I’m curious what you think the role of courage is, in this kind of writing.

I think in any literary writing the role of courage is important, whether it is poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. In any art form there is a leap of faith that the individual can make a statue, a painting, or write a poem that’s actually going to stand by itself and be worth looking at. The idea that I’m going to start this project without knowing how it will work out, but if I just show up every day and work on it that it will work out…I mean, those are two big leaps of faith. I guess a third leap of faith is somewhere, somehow an audience will see your painting, read your poem, buy your book, which drives so many of us crazy. But I guess that is what is so exciting about it. There are no guarantees. If you loaded trucks for a living, you show up in the morning and load the truck and you know the job is done. But with writing, you load the truck and have to hope someone says that it’s a well-loaded truck before you get the emotional pay off. 

You mentioned other forms of art, and I’ve looked on your Flickr account, and know that you are serious about your photography as well.

I love photography. I think I love it because it’s storytelling, it’s artistic expression, but it’s not my career. It’s fun. I have a good lens and a good camera and I spend a lot of time looking for things to take pictures of that aren’t obvious. I try not to take the average tourist pictures. But beyond that it is just fun. I’m not selling the work, I’m not submitting it to my tenure committee, so there is much less pressure involved. I love taking pictures.

Does that ever feed into your writing or is it just a release?

It’s just a release. I mean, I loved, as a fiction writer, finding a character and imagining what his or her story was. And you do the same thing in nonfiction, you just can’t imagine it, you have to discover it in other ways by talking to or watching people. And I photograph people more than anything else because I like taking pictures of people and imagining what their story is, so I guess there is a link there in my writing.

As entrenched as you are in nonfiction writing, you’ve mentioned starting as a fiction writer several times now. In my research on you, I came across many references you make to your appreciation of Kurt Vonnegut. So how has someone like Vonnegut fit into your writing career?

You know, like everybody in my generation I discovered Vonnegut as an undergrad, and he blew my mind. I thought, Oh my goodness, how can he be so irreverent and so funny and say these things. And I never grew out of it. I now work in a department of English literature and I’m not sure he was taken seriously by a lot of my colleagues, but I still take him seriously. I think he was a genius. I don’t think anyone else can write like him.

Vonnegut has that real dark humor, but I think your writing is really light yet touches on heavy subject matter. Is that something that plays in naturally when you write? Are you trying to bring a dose of humor, or is that your personality coming to the page?  I guess I’m asking about how humor plays out in your work.

I’m going to step back and say that I think that finding your voice as a writer—and I think this is true of all genres, it is certainly true of nonfiction—finding your voice as a writer is really 80 percent letting your natural personality come out on the page, and maybe 20 percent is: I’m writing this, and do I want to dial this up a little bit, and dial that down a little bit. But I really feel like that is the way to find your authentic voice—to find your authentic personality and let it bubble up out of the work.

So I tend to crack jokes. I tend to especially crack jokes when I’m around uncomfortable material, and I tend to have a black Irish humor, which is me in real life. So the extent it shows up in my work—that is just my personality bubbling up through. I feel like I was lucky when I finally figured out how to do that. When I look at my earlier work I see that here I was trying to be Carver, here I was trying to be Thurber, and here I was trying to be Woody Allen, and none of those were me.

Is it interesting to look back on being a student of craft now that your own books on craft are used in MFA programs?

Discovering that there was a craft was kind of exciting to me. I went to graduate school to be a fiction writer, and I was already thirty years old, but I was still very naive. I still had these goofy notions that you were born with genius and being a writer was just having a great idea. And maybe, maybe, maybe somehow I would stumble into a great idea. Then I realized how much of writing I could break down. You can mechanically look at how a scene works, and mechanically look at how a chapter works, and mechanically look at how suspense is built, and to a certain extent how humor works on the page. I was like, oh great, I can actually get better. I can learn this stuff. Though it’s not to say that writing is like being a mechanic, as there is still a lot of mystery in any art form, but what I’m saying is that they are both existent. There is still that mystery of where these ideas come from, but there are also these deliberate steps you make when you are revising a story and you say, Wait a minute, I know how to do this.

So when you are working as an editor and working through the slush pile, what really excites you, and when do you know you have something you want to publish?

For Brevity, it is a slightly different equation because the pieces have to be so concise that they rest a lot on the moment: where do they begin and how quickly does the trouble get complex. For Brevity the pieces rely a lot on language. Every single word choice has to be very sharp. Every single pause and hem has to be edited out because you have only seven hundred and fifty words, often less.

In the longer essay it comes down to subject matter and voice. So I’m reading the first couple pages of an essay and I’m understanding it’s about growing up in a poor rural family in Ohio, or growing up with a sister who had a fatal disease, or I’m reading a piece and realize it is about a broken marriage; I have to ask, Where is the promise in the first page that the writer is going to make me think about this differently? I know having a sick sister is sad, but if all this is going to tell me is that having a sick sister who dies young is sad, where is some other facet—how is the writer going to make me think of this differently?

Then there is finding something appealing in the way the writer is telling the story:  the voice, the sentence structure, the lyricism, the Carver-esque brusqueness, whatever. There is no subject you can’t write about because it’s been written about before, but the minute you pick a subject that has been written about before, which is almost all of them, then you have to think, what is my fresh take on this?  Maybe not at the beginning, as you may discover that fresh take on draft fifteen, but in the end there has to be something fresh. 

I have one final and random question for you.  I’ve read that among all the many things you’ve done prior to getting into writing and teaching, you were a zookeeper.  How did that come into your life?

It was a summer job as a high school kid. It was painting fences at the zoo, and I was pretty responsible. While everyone else was off in the woods smoking dope, I actually painted fences, and the boss figured that out, so he brought me back the next year for the summer. And as each of the zookeepers would rotate off for three weeks for vacation, he’d say: you’re going to go help Leo up at the elephant barn this week, or you’ll be down at the monkey shed this week, or I need you over at the kiddy zoo helping with the goats this week. That went over two summers when I got to be the fill-in zookeeper. Then I got to be the night watchman, who got to take care of the animals when the zoo was closed. So I’d wander around until midnight checking on the animals, giving them their water and their food. It was wonderful!  Especially at night. The zoo at night is when the animals come alive because the sun is gone and the crowd is gone. 

About the interviewer: Devin Murphy's work has appeared in the Greensboro Review, The MacGuffin, PANK, and Many Mountains Moving, among other journals and anthologies. The Linkage of Bone, which appeared in last summer’s Missouri Review, is the title story of his recently completed collection of linked stories.

The old, weird America

Poet Grace Bauer, who served as guest editor of Prairie Schooner for the “Baby Boomer” issue (Fall 2009), interviews David Wojahn. Wojahn’s Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004 was published in the Pitt Poetry Series and named a finalist for the Pulitzer. He is a professor in the English Department of Virginia Commonwealth University.

Grace Bauer: First of all, congratulations on having your poem, “Mix Tape to Be Brought to Her in Rehab,” chosen for this year’s Best American Poetry. I was happy to include it in the “Baby Boomer” issue of Prairie Schooner and am happier still that it will be included in the anthology.

The poem addresses a serious, one might say tragic, situation, and the mix tape of songs seems to be a kind of offering – of comfort? Connection? Maybe hope? Perhaps a reminder of shared, and happier, experiences? Can you talk a bit about the genesis of the poem – and the process of composing it?

David Wojahn: Well, rehab facilities and psych wards are pretty cheerless places, and in the 1980s especially I made a lot of visits to people who were staying in them. So the poem recalls some of those excursions, as well as the peculiar culture of that era—hence the Reagan and Miami Vice references. It was a pretty cheerless era, in my experience…

At the end of the poem, when the “you” gives the woman the mix tape, you’re right in thinking it is meant as an offering, a consoling gesture, however inadequate. You have to remember that mix tapes had a home-grown/hand-made quality about them that isn’t replicated in the digital era. Unlike playlists on i-Tunes, you made them in real time; you thought about the sequencing of the list on both the A and the B side of the cassette; you hand-printed the song list; and cassettes were fragile and temperamental things; the acetate  would snarl or break, the case would melt if you left it in a hot car.

And if you played a cassette on a tape deck or on a Walkman, you could always see how the acetate spooled, getting smaller or larger and circling madly when you fast-forwarded or rewound. Somehow that sense of endless circling became a kind of commentary on the content of the poem and a guide for helping me to structure it. The “you” and the woman of the poem have gone through this hospital routine again and again, it’s a tiresomely circular ritual.

And I also intersperse the narrative structure of the poem with song titles, names of music groups, and song lyrics, and it’s all music I could conceivably have put on a mix-tape in 1980-something. The music references—and it’s a lot of them, Robert Johnson, The Smiths, James Brown, Richard Thompson and a great but forgotten group from the period called the Screaming Blue Messiahs—become a sort of counterpoint to the narrative. But at the same time they act as a skewed sort of chorus: another kind of circularity. My model for this, oddly enough, was Thomas Hardy, who tends in many of his poems to include refrains which are a biting commentary on the poem’s action. So one line of the poem, “the years the years” is there because it echoes a refrain in Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain.”

Mind you, I don’t always think about all this when a poem gets started, but in the revision process it’s something I’m very mindful of.

From the “Buddy Holly” poem in your first book, Ice House Lights, to the “Homage to Blind Willie Johnson” in the “Poltergeists” section of your New and Selected Poems (Interrogation Palace), music and musicians have made regular appearances in your poetry. The list of musicians you’ve “covered,” over the years is an eclectic kind of who’s who. And Mystery Train puts musical icons – and iconic moments in the history of American music -- front and center. Can you talk about your passion for/interest in music and musicians? Are you a musician yourself? What has music given you as a poet? Why do you think you keep returning to that subject matter?

Well, as Lou Reed puts it in a Velvet Underground song, my life’s been saved by rock and roll. It’s been saved by poetry as well. And I say this without hyperbole. Writing poetry is such a pleasure, a consolation, a challenge. And popular music offers me a similar pleasure and consolation. I love rock and roll and subgenres of it such as punk, rockabilly, ’60s soul. And I’m especially drawn to music that for want of better terms gets called roots or Americana: the old ’78s collected in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Hank Williams and the Louvin Brothers, delta and urban blues, brooding singer-songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Jon Dee Graham, and those deliciously feral figures like the late Captain Beefheart and Pere Ubu. They’re the dead and the living representatives of what Greil Marcus calls “the old weird America” and they all just enthrall me.

I reference these artists mainly because I feel someone needs to pay homage to them. And because their songs are always playing in my head, they help to shape the poems I write as well. The title poem of my new collection, World Tree, juxtaposes material that comes from Siberian shamanism and popular music; it’s really a sort of autobiography in the form of dead formats—my 45 years, my 33 & 1/3 years, my cassette era, my digital years. The poem is mainly comprised of sonnets, but the songs that get referenced in it seem as important a structural device as the choice to cast the poem in the form of sonnets.

I wish I were a musician, but aside from playing in teenage garage bands, I’m really just a fan.

Poems about music and musicians are well represented in the “Boomer” issue of Prairie Schooner. Part of that was my choice, of course, but my choices were influenced by the work people sent me – and when I solicited “boomer generation work” – a lot of music-related stuff came pouring in. So, it seems like a fair number of “the best minds of our generation” share your/my fascination with the subject. In her essay on boomer poets included in the issue, Dorothy Barresi suggests that sometimes references to music, and other pop culture phenomenon, are part of what she calls an “iconic nostalgia” and “are merely passwords, the magic argot that opens the doors to a club baby boomers already belong to.” She has a point, yet I might argue that for many poets – you included – exploring the history of popular music becomes an exploration of history itself – a lens to explore the larger culture. Can you talk about how you see that exploration working in your own poems? In the work of other poets?

I thought Barresi made some very astute points in her essay, and it’s true that we sometimes have a kind of Pavlovian response when we hear iconic songs from the Boomer era: we may not immediately salivate and wag our tails when we hear a guy in a labcoat ring a bell, but we do all nod and tap our feet when a Stones song comes on the Muzak while we’re grocery shopping. And since pop music is often designed first to be a commodity and only incidentally to be art, Boomers are fertile ground for crass manipulation by advertisers. But I for one feel positively violated when someone uses an Iggy Pop song as the soundtrack of a car commercial.

But pop music has always reflected the coursings of history. The Childe Ballads were often the newspapers of their time, the latest information about topical stories and scandals. But they’ve somehow alchemized over the centuries into documents that are haunting and timeless. Many of Bob Dylan’s early songs of political protest (some, not all) will surely stand that same test of time. That function—to begin in the topical and end in the timeless—is often the function of poetry as well. Homer is, after all, basically a war correspondent; and Hopkins’ “Wreck of the Deutschland” is, as they say, based on material “ripped from the headlines.”

I don’t think I’m unusual in the ways that I let music inform my poems and their sense of public history. I think of the way poets such as William Matthews, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Michael S. Harper have written on jazz, and of the similar way in which younger poets like Dorothy Barresi, Lucia Perillo, David Rivard, Mark Halliday and especially Kevin Young have  used references to blues and rock and roll. 

Let’s turn from “subject matter” to questions about form and structure. Much of Mystery Train is written in fixed forms – especially the sonnet – a choice some might find odd for a series of poems about rock and roll. Can you talk about that choice?

I wrote the title sequence of Mystery Train (which has 33 sonnets, a villanelle, and a bad sestina) during a year when I lived in Spain. Instead of writing poems about bullfights and going to the Prado, I found myself getting very nostalgic about American culture, and so the poems of the sequence started to emerge. I’d been writing longish narratives and getting tired of that mode, so I resolved to write in a shorter form, and the strictness of the sonnet was especially appealing in that respect. And I thought there was an interesting irony to writing about pop culture in a form as venerable as the sonnet. And the sonnet is just such a delightful, comforting and always-fascinating form to play around with. It’s so flexible, capacious, sly.

Can you talk about poets who have used musical forms/structures in their poems – I’m thinking of blues poems, jazz poetry (written for the page) as well as rap/hip hop and more performance-oriented work.

Well, some performance work doesn’t translate to the written page. Blues lyrics and hip hop lyrics have a better chance of making the leap, since they’re forms that follow some pretty strict prosodic conventions, but there’s not a lot of that material that can stand on its own as poetry. But the blues, jazz, and (increasingly) hip hop definitely have influenced the subject matter and certain of the strategies of modern and contemporary poetry. The blues influence you see early on in poems by Langston Hughes like “The Weary Blues” and “Too Blue” and still see today in poets like Terrance Hayes. And there are countless poets who have written about jazz. Poets who try to write poetry reflecting jazz composition are slightly rarer, but there were some terrific poems of the latter sort written in the fifties and sixties by figures such as Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman. Hip hop’s not my area of expertise, but I recently read a terrific book by the young poet Kyle Dargan called Logorrhea Dementia—it’s about alienation, cultural collapse, and urban madness and hip hop’s the secret soundtrack of that book.

Final – and undoubtedly silly – question : if you could be any musician in history for a day, or night, who would you be? And why?

You mean, besides Bob Dylan?

Modern-day Persephones

Interview with Amy Riddell, by Marianne Kunkel

   

Amy Riddell is the author of a chapbook, Narcissistic Injury, published by Pudding House. Her poems have appeared recently in print in Birmingham Poetry Review and Peeks and Valleys, and online in Blue Fifth Review and Prick of the Spindle. She is a professor of English at Northwest Florida State College.

 

MK: In your beautiful poems “Persephone Lost” and “Bluebeard’s Daughter” (Prairie Schooner, Winter 2010), you bring new meaning to common myths. What drew you to revisiting these stories? How do you stop from worrying that everything that can be interpreted from mythology hasn’t already been done?

AR: Like many people, I love myths and folktales. The story of Persephone, especially, resonates for me. I have a close family member who was abducted and survived, but the trauma of that experience has understandably impacted her entire life. In my poem, I wanted to focus attention on the suffering experienced by modern-day Persephones like my family member and girls like Jessica Lunsford, a 9-year-old from Homosassa, Florida, who was abducted, raped, and murdered in 2005. The details reported in the news were heartbreaking, among them the fact that she was alive when her kidnapper buried her.

Bluebeard is a figure that resonates with me because my father has married many women (about seven) and to my knowledge has victimized more than one of them. In fact, he is serving a 30-year sentence in a Florida prison for the kidnapping and attempted murder of one of his wives. In the poem, I wanted to explore survival because to survive takes an act of will. So I gave Bluebeard a daughter and let her find her way into the goodness that life offers. I also wanted to talk about the transformative power of artistic expression. Even though I allude to a folktale, the poem is very personal to me. I find that folding new stories into old ones helps me create distance and connection at the same time. Violence alienates and isolates. Stories create bonds and community. They are powerful medicine.

In many lines in “Persephone Lost,” such as “the sun in this story was only the sun,” you seem so accepting of difficult subject matter, almost as if you were saying, “This is just the way things are.” And yet your compassion for the poem’s main character is obvious. How do you achieve such a powerful balance of matter-of-fact language and underlying compassion?

In the version of the Persephone myth with which I am most familiar, Demeter can find no one who will tell her what has happened to her daughter until finally the sun takes pity on her. In contrast, for Jessica Lunsford and for many other victims and their families, there is no supernatural or divine intervention. The line is an expression of my despair that at times there seems to be no defense against these horrific crimes against children. As far as how I achieve a balance, I am not sure. I suppose it is in the choices I make about what I will tell and what I will show. Also in how I tell – simple, declarative statements -- and how I show -- the specific details I choose to present.

You end both poems with striking images that represent a character’s arrival, both small and enormous, into a different place. What’s behind your choice to conclude both poems with strong imagery? Would you ever suggest a different kind of ending for a poem?

In one, I wanted to show the horror and brutality of the character’s death. In the other, I wanted to show the character’s transformation and transcendence. So my choices had to do with what I wanted the reader to see.

You are the author of the chapbook Narcissistic Injury, published by Pudding House. What is your No. 1 piece of advice for writers attempting to publish a chapbook?

Research. There are a lot of chapbook publishers out there who do not place calls for submissions in the regular places such as Poets & Writers and NewPages.com online.  For example, Pudding House doesn’t solicit submissions but does accept them year round. Pudding House also has a chapbook competition. Dancing Girl Press is another chapbook publisher that doesn’t solicit through advertisements but does have an open reading period, usually once a year. Research can be as simple as doing a Google search or looking for journals that review chapbooks. For example, Prick of the Spindle is an online quarterly journal that features reviews of chapbooks in each issue. Names of publishers can be found there. Other chapbook publishers that I know of are Slash Pine Press, Yellow Jacket Press, and Finishing Line Press. Most of them have an online presence and will accept submissions electronically. The online resource Everywritersresource.com has a pretty comprehensive list and is another good resource.

Not only do you write poetry, but you are a professor of English at Northwest Florida State College. As a resident of the Sunshine State, which offers numerous outdoor activities, in what ways do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

I teach at least five freshman composition classes a term and spend many hours grading essays, so getting exercise is crucial to my mental and physical health. I live near the Gulf of Mexico and its beautiful white sand beaches. Walking along the shore is one of my favorite things to do. I also practice yoga. I am a beginner, but learning. Growing in my practice, and yes, stretching myself bring me great joy.