the Prairie Schooner blog

Complexities of fear

Interview with Michael Boccardo, by Marianne Kunkel

[Note: Back issues of Prairie Schooner—from the current issue back to 2003—can be accessed via Project Muse and its subscribing institutions.]

 

Michael Boccardo's work has been published in or is forthcoming from Hayden's Ferry Review, Rattle, Kakalak, and Poet Lore, among others. He is a recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and received an honorable mention in the 2009 Joy Harjo Poetry Competition. He also serves as an editorial assistant for Cave Wall.

 

MK: You wrote your haunting poem “Close to Home” (PS, Winter 2010) from a second-person point-of-view. Some writers say that by doing this, you risk readers seeing the pronouns “you” and “your” and thinking, “This isn’t me or how I feel.” But my experience of your poem was extremely positive. What’s behind your decision to write this poem from a second-person point-of-view? More generally, what advantages does writing from this point-of-view lend a poet?

 

MB: Until you asked this question, I hadn’t realized how many of my poems were written in second person. For this particular piece, however, I felt it was imperative for the reader to relate to the poem. We live in a world where crime hits us from many different directions thanks to the media:  newspapers, television, internet. It’s a part of our everyday lives, and so I feel that, as a whole, no one is immune from it. If you ask almost anyone on the street I’m sure many will admit that they or someone they know was a victim of some type of crime, regardless of the severity that I’ve touched on in my poem. The advantage here is that I show people a reality no one likes to face, but everyone can, in some way, relate to. On the other hand you also have that community of people who believe that violence will not touch their lives, that they are, in fact, immune from the horrors we hear about on a daily basis. So you could almost say the “you” in the poem refers to those who distance themselves from that other world, those who insist it’s “you” these atrocities happen to and not them. 

In this poem you describe a small community—an impressive feat for a 38-line poem! You refer to a man and his mother, a teenage girl, a grandmother, a father and his daughters, and others. I sense that the poem’s list of criminals and victims could go on and on; what were your reasons for describing particular people and how did you manage to write just enough on a seemingly infinitely large subject?

 

The idea for this particular poem was sparked from a murder that took place in the area where I live. In fact, the man who was arrested for the crime was picked up in a restaurant parking lot beside my place of employment. Hearing about this the next day, I couldn’t help wondering if this same man, who only hours ago took the life of another, had walked past me as I was assisting customers. A simple man who was dressed like everyone else, spoke in a normal tone. Just your ordinary, average guy. Crime writer, Ann Rule, worked next to the serial killer Ted Bundy for years and never knew he ended the lives of so many women. It just goes to show that even the most nondescript, normal looking man or woman can be capable of something unspeakable. The ones that I write about in “Close to Home” are, to me, some of the most horrific, those committed by relatives or a spouse, the people we trust with our lives.

 

“Close to Home” may make readers anxious to the point that they, in your words, “exhaust in fear.” Do such images as “afterbirth slicking her thighs like garters” and “the frail stems of three girls swaying / like sunflowers” that, on a purely poetic level, are gorgeous help to strengthen or complicate this fear?

 

Fear, like most emotions, has its complexities. It can make us behave in unpredictable ways, react to situations in a manner that may startle others, as well as ourselves. But I also believe that fear is an emotion steeped in curiosity. Think of how an audience responds during a horror film. Their instinct is to bury their face in their hands, and yet, they still risk a peek at what’s playing out on the screen. For many, there exists a morbid attraction to the cruelty that happens in our world. We want to know why and how and who. On 9/11 we sat riveted to our televisions during one of the most terrifying moments in history. As much as we wanted to, it was impossible to look away. Our fear prevented us from flipping off that switch.

 

I doubt that a home like the one depicted in “Close to Home” could hold your ideal writing space. What is your current writing space and how is it different from your ideal writing space?

 

I’m definitely one of those writers who needs quiet surroundings, so I usually stick to my own home. Since I acquired a laptop three years ago it’s given me the freedom to write anywhere I want, but regardless of the room, I have a fondness for sitting on the floor. It’s one of those writer’s quirks that I can’t supply a sound explanation for. Ideally, I imagine a nice, quaint cottage near the coast with a decadent view of the ocean and a cat curled up on my desk.

 

A lot of a writer’s success is based on luck. What great poet can you recommend that Prairie Schooner readers have probably never heard of?

 

I can’t say that most readers aren’t already acquainted with the work of Dorianne Laux, but I would kick myself if I didn’t mention how much she has influenced the way I look at my own poems. She unveils a unique beauty in many of the everyday events we often take for granted, and the result never ceases to amaze  me. A name that some readers may not recognize, but should seek out promptly, is Rhett Iseman Trull. Her book, The Real Warnings, is a collection I return to many times when my own poetry gears become corroded. She is a rock star poet whose imagery gets beneath the skin and lingers. If you haven’t heard of her yet, you will.

Of the wild mind

Interview with Michael Hettich, by Marianne Kunkel

[Note: Back issues of Prairie Schooner—from the current issue back to 2003—can be accessed via Project Muse and its subscribing institutions.]

Michael Hettich's most recent book of poems, Like Happiness, was published by Anhinga Press. A new book of poems, The Animals Beyond Us, which contains the work appearing in the winter issue of PS, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press. He lives in Miami and teaches at Miami Dade College.

MK: Part of the charm of your four poems “Widow,” “The Ghost,” “The Mother,” and “Doubles” (PS, Winter 2010) is their reliance on understatement. In “The Ghost,” for example, you segue from one subject to the next using the casual word “Anyway” and you conclude “The Mother” with the sentence, “And that was all.” These add a light, playful quality to intensely serious and sometimes dark poems. How do you go about crafting this balance?

MH: The poems that were published in Prairie Schooner are all part of a manuscript entitled The Animals Beyond Us, which will be published by New Rivers Press [in October, 2011]. All the poems in that book were written as quickly as possible; in fact I set myself the goal of writing 150 poems before I turned back to any one of them to revise. I did this to try to break into a new voice (of sorts) and to try to discover new material. I had just had my most recent book, Like Happiness, accepted for publication and I felt that I'd ended a period in my writing and life and needed to try to find new ways of discovering what I needed to say. So, as I said, I wrote fast and didn't look back. This was liberating and fun—easy—and when I reached 150 poems I found that almost half of them were interesting enough (to me) to warrant revision. But I tried not to revise too much, since I had come to feel that my revision process had become stale, resulting in poems that felt overly familiar in their strategies and content. They weren't wild enough to hold what I was after (without knowing it yet).

Also, in composing those poems (in their first drafts) I set myself a few rules: move quickly, think by association, avoid stanza breaks, and use a loose four-beat line.

I like your sense that the poems rely on understatement, though I wouldn't have used that word. I think of them as avoiding the kinds of transitions we often (or I often) rely on to build the rhetoric of meaning (so called) a poem articulates. Without the connections such transitions impose, the poems seemed able to find their own music, and whatever meanings that music implied, in ways that felt satisfying and true to me. Perhaps this lighter rhetorical scaffolding allows the poems to achieve that sense of understatement.

I also think I allowed these poems to retain a kind of awkwardness (for lack of a better word) I would probably have worked into more conventional music in my earlier work.

Dogs, cats, and birds play central roles in your poem “Widow” and cats reappear in “The Ghost.” What unique quality do animals lend to poetry? What poems about animals do you love and inspire you to include animals in your poems?

This is a hard one to answer. It's an interesting observation, but I can't say I've actually thought about it. Birds have always inhabited my poems, but come to think of it, not that many animals—until now—have done so. And as I said, this new book is called The Animals Beyond Us. The obvious answer would be that animals other than humans seem to be (and are) so much less afflicted with the kind of self-consciousness that keeps us from being truly present in the world. But then again, as Edwin Muir pointed out, without that kind of consciousness we would hardly be in the world at all, or at least not the world as we know it, as humans. So maybe it's just the mystery of their being in the world with us, sharing that world with us and being so strange to us and full of their own wild life (even when they're domesticated). And what is "the wild mind," anyway? Can we find a way to bring it into our poetry? Might poetry itself be a kind of "wild mind" on the page? And I love the way we glimpse a wild creature sometimes—with a fleeting sense of its presence that immediately vanishes into its own world. The effect is like poetry itself, sometimes.

I see from your website that in addition to writing poetry, you write prose and sing. Of musical performance, spoken poetry or prose, or written poetry or prose, do you consider one more powerful than the others or are they powerful in different ways?

I think they are all powerful in their own unique ways—and I think that their power is unique and specific to their form(s). Having said that, my goal as a writer would be to create poems that are able to fully realize their power as artifacts on the page and as spoken (or read) aloud. That is, I want my poems to be scored on the page in such a way that the reader will hear them much the way he/she would if I were to read them aloud. My problem with a good deal of spoken-word poetry is that it feels dead and slack on the page and requires performance. Since I like to ponder, reread, and revel in nuance, this kind of poetry holds less interest for me. It doesn't feel fully realized to me.

I also love collaboration and have worked a lot with musicians (my son in particular) and visual artists. I do believe, though, that the "products" of these cross-genre collaborations are often more interesting for the artists than for the viewer/listener!

You have lived in New York, Colorado, northern Florida, Vermont, and Miami. Must a writer be well-traveled to touch a wide range of readers through his or her creative writing, or can imagination make up for a lack of traveling experience?

I don't at all believe that a writer must be well-travelled to speak to readers. I think it much more important that a writer bring a unique and specific focus of attention to his/her place and situation. In fact, perhaps we all travel too much; perhaps there's not enough deep knowledge of place in our writings—a result of too much travel, too little careful observation/knowledge. As Gary Snyder says, "know the trees." And who does know them, these days? I mean with a depth of understanding. Something that may be a bit interesting in response to that question, though, at least as it relates to my work: I "locate" myself very much as a person from the north—New York and Colorado and New England. That's the landscape I most identify with. But the images and hauntings that enter my poems more often come from the landscapes of northern and southern Florida—perhaps because, even after many years, these landscapes seem unfamiliar and surprising to me.

In your lifetime you  have published 12 books and chapbooks of poetry; congratulations! What projects are you currently working on? 

Thanks for your congratulations. The fact is, I work on writing for a few hours almost every day, so it's sort of a natural accomplishment. As far as projects, as I said my most recent book, Like Happiness, was published last fall, and I've just finished editing my new book with the New Rivers editors. Last summer I started a new manuscript, tentatively entitled Listening to Owls, since I love to do that—since they always seem to be saying something urgent but just beyond our understanding. I started the book just as the oil spill disaster unfolded last spring/summer, so I think the poems are deeply influenced by that grief, though that may not be apparent in their subject matter. My goal at the outset was to write long poems—20 pages in some cases. And some of them are still long, but at least one of them broke apart a month or so ago, into about 15 smaller poems, an odd experience, and I suspect some of the others might do that, too. So that's the poetry book I'm working on right now. I'm also gathering my energy to finally write the book of essays that have been in the back of my mind for years—about poetry, hearing, wilderness, walking, music—a huge jumble of things I want to try to get at. So I'm taking notes, filling a big box with articles and ideas—for something that may well never happen! And, as a smaller project a visual artist and I are getting ready to start a collaboration. Mainly, though, I'm working on the Owls.

Meddling grannies

Interview with Richard Spilman, by Marianne Kunkel

Richard Spilman has published two collections of short fiction, Hot Fudge and The Estate Sale, and a collection of poetry, In the Night Speaking. His short story, “Where He Went Under,” from the winter issue of PS, won a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award.

MK: Your story “Where He Went Under” tells about the self-destructive transformation of a failed stockbroker into a successful painter, a transformation that is encouraged by the main character witnessing the drowning of another man. How did you approach describing the art of painting? Did you pull from personal experience, research, or figure out the basics of painting as you wrote?

RS: I have no personal experience of painting, though I have friends who are artists. Luckily the fellow in my story is not a good artist but one who has found, through the midwifery of the drowned man, the volcanic core inside himself that can turn even technically bad art into powerful expression.

All the technical details I researched, which means any practicing artist would probably find something to object to.

After so much suspicion against the main character’s reasons for not immediately helping the drowning man, your story ends with the main character demonstrating almost a kinship with the drowned man as he imagines himself “falling and the water swallowing me up like flames.” Was this powerful conclusion your original intended conclusion?

When I changed computers last year, I lost some of my old drafts, so I can’t tell you exactly what my first ending was, but it was pretty close to the published one. I tend to come to my endings early and then find my way to them like a hiker trying to find his way to a landmark without the help of a map.

That can lead to problems. Often my “powerful” endings are the darlings that (following Faulkner) I must kill in rewriting.

Frequently near the story’s end you expertly, even humorously, capture the outside struggles of many successful artists—hangers-on, critics, and artistic labels such as when the main character states, “This, I’m told, makes me an expressionist, and it’s nice to know, as the top of my head breaks loose from its moorings, that there is a name for the malady.” Many writers struggle with the (mis)labeling of their work, and feel outside pressure to label it themselves; what advice can you give them?

It is foolish for a writer (or any artist) to expect to be understood, and anyone who seeks to be understood will inevitably become the servant of other people’s perceptions. Given the fact that we all want to communicate, this seems wrongheaded, but it is the truth. Every reader will rewrite your story to his or her own specifications, and there is nothing you can or should do about it. Content yourself with the fact that many readers’ misunderstandings create a story better than the one you wrote.

In “Where He Went Under,” it is not until the aftermath of the man’s drowning that the main character is inspired to paint his best work. What are ways that you motivate yourself to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

If I had to motivate myself to write, I would be in deep trouble. The only question of motivation, for me, comes when I need to re-re-re-rewrite. Five or six drafts always seem like enough and never are. 

The only advice I can give for writer’s block is to allow yourself to write badly and to write piecemeal. As G.K. Chesterton noted, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” If you don’t give yourself permission to write crap, you won’t write anything worth reading.

In the first class I ever taught (Composition I) there was a woman in her twenties, a very earnest person. She got an “A-” on her first paper; the next received a “B”, the one after that a “C” and the next one a “C.”  We talked for some time trying to figure out what could be the cause of her trouble. Finally, I asked her to describe her writing process. I said, “Tell me everything. If you use a pencil instead of a pen, I want to know. Everything.”

She said, “Well, first I take out all the papers I have written for you, and I look at what I have done wrong.”

I interrupted her at that point and said, “Burn them.”

She was indignant. She wanted me to take her seriously. After all, my comments must be there for a reason.

They are, I told her, but after she had paid attention to them, close attention, she needed to forget them and trust that she had internalized what was necessary for her. I had a time trying to convince her of this, but finally I said, “It’s like having your grandmother looking over your shoulder as you write.” Somehow that worked, and since then I have used that anecdote with students dealing with writer’s block because, usually, they will be able to identify some unrealistic demand that they are making on themselves—some granny looking over their shoulder.

You not only write short stories, but poems as well. In what ways is your writing process for the two genres similar? How do the commonalities between writing poetry and short stories compare to those between writing short stories and longer fiction?

There are probably more commonalities between poetry and short stories than there are between short stories and novels. You can write a short story that has no characters, no plot (William Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”). It’s a little harder to write one with no setting because, like a poem, the short story needs those physical details to tell us what it is really about.

Of course, my poems tend to be narrative, so it may be that as a poet I am just a short story writer with pretentions to grandeur.

I do advise short story writers to try poetry. The poem won’t let you get away with a lot of blather, and it forces you, for the most part, to find drama outside of dialogue.

 

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.

 

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?

What are the odds on Greta Garbo’s quitting pictures?

by Timothy Schaffert

With the Oscars approaching, we salute Col. Barney Oldfield (pictured here with Clark Gable), who wrote about his career as a movie reviewer in a 1937 edition of Prairie Schooner. “Since 1930,” Oldfield writes in “I Go For Free,” his PS essay, “my records show that the old eyes have scanned 2800 of the Hollywood feature-length pictures, not to mention in excess of 4880 shorts, 76 dramatic stock performances, 117 tent rep performances, 17 circuses, 22 carnival midways, 18 legit shows (in N.Y.C., Chi., Hollywood, and hinterlanding through my home town), and 216 vaudeville bills (units and standard vaude acts). Last year Film Daily said I was the busiest look-see in the country, having ‘caught’ 413 of the 427 eligible films for their critics’ poll within the prescribed year. I have since seen the other 14.”

This commitment earned Oldfield a place in the “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” comic, for having seen every movie released in 1936 and 1937, as a reviewer for the Nebraska State Journal.

Oldfield also proved notorious for his attire, which he describes in his PS essay as “a definite mixture of the deuce turn in a standard vaudeville bill and the movie idea of a song plugger. My coat is usually the type to startle the biblical Joseph, the trousers come fully four inches above the waist, and the shirts are so bad that even O. O. McIntyre once wrote that they were the loudest in the country.”

(In Peekaboo: The Story of Veronica Lake, author Jeff Lenberg writes of a visit Oldfield made to the set of Bring on the Girls in 1945, and Lake’s appraisal of Oldfield’s flashy sports coat:“My God, did you lose a bet to make you wear that damn thing?”)

Oldfield (who was born in Tecumseh, Neb., in 1909) would later host a radio show about the movies, serve in World War II, train war correspondents, appear on game shows, and start a major scholarship fund with his wife Vada Kinman-Oldfield (which includes an award at the University of Nebraska Medical Center to promote innovations in Alzheimer’s research, named for Oldfield’s friends, Nancy and Ronald Reagan. Oldfield repped Ronald Reagan as a publicity agent for Warner’s.) For more photos of Oldfield, with Lucille Ball, Gary Cooper, and other film stars, visit his page at IMDB.com.

Here’s more from the 1937 Prairie Schooner essay:

In one day as many as a score of people buttonhole me to ask if Eddie Cantor gets all that money for the show himself or does he buy the rest of the talent, if Mae West weighs only 115 pounds, what are the odds on Greta Garbo’s quitting pictures, who does the double somersault from horse to horse with the Al G. Barnes circus, how much  money can the guy who runs the weight-guessing machine pick off in a good day…

… Into the office come good-looking blondes, fond mamas with small daughters, soda squirts who have learned the first three lessons in a local tap-dancing school and wonder if there’s a chance for them in the new Connolly picture at Warners, and hasbeen legit actors with scrapbooks which they use to panhandle. Some want to get into the business, some want autographs of actors or actresses, and don’t know how to do it by long distance, and others just want to do you out of photos in the files. A photo of Robert Taylor once made them happy, but it takes Tyrone Power now…

… Grift boys from the circuses that caught up with them, or pitchmen who want the lay of the land, or carney press agents who want to know where to put a fix locally, all come in for tips and favors. Some are swell fellows; others are dopes and strictly on the gouge…

… But to John Public I go for free and get paid a salary for it (the biggest little joke of all). “Yeh, I get in for nothing.” Like hell!

Keeping out of step

Interview with Katie Chase, by Marianne Kunkel

Katie Chase’s short fiction has appeared in the Missouri Review, Five Chapters, Narrative, and The Best American Short Stories. She's the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Michener-Copernicus Award. She grew up near Detroit.

MK: Your story “The Sea that Leads to All Seas” (Prairie Schooner, Winter 2010) largely takes place in post-9/11 Chicago. As a story about, among other subjects, displaced homeland, what about Chicago appealed to you as a setting?

KC: It was an obvious practical choice, in that I'd just moved from Chicago after living there three years and I’d heard close-hand of stories like Hassan and Mohamed’s. So much 9/11-related literature takes place, inevitably, in New York, but the effects of 9/11, in a very real and devastating way, reached much further, further even than the second city. Chicago is an extremely livable and diverse city, attractive to many immigrants, with great art, music and literary scenes. It's interesting that you phrase your question the way you do, because I suppose for me, coming from the economically devastated state of Michigan, and for many other young people in the Midwest looking for the economic and cultural opportunities of a big city, Chicago stands as a beacon.

Frequently in the story the main character allows others—both her mother and boyfriend—to rest their heads on her breast. This powerful image not only emphasizes the main character’s readiness for a child, but positions her as a mother figure representing home, echoed at the story’s end when you write that a character who has returned home “belongs to his mother.” Did you orchestrate these head-on-breast moments deliberately or did they emerge naturally as you wrote? 

I did consciously double that image (in the writing, the scene with the dental student came first, and so far as I can remember, emerged there fairly naturally), but I didn't exactly carry its meaning to its full conclusion in my mind, not to the extent you've so thoughtfully elucidated. I thought of it more in terms of character—Larissa sees David as, emotionally, needing her more than she does him; she believes she has the upper hand. Of course, in the scene with the mother, it is Mohamed who “orchestrates” the gesture during the shoot.

Your characters seem so purposely developed and undeveloped, as seen, for example, in your choice not to unveil the dentist’s name until late in the story and through the voice of the main character’s mother. What would you say is the ultimate role of Hassan, a friend of the main character’s ex-boyfriend, whom by the story’s end hangs in a kind of identity limbo when you write, “She has never made of him a messenger, wants to believe him still a friend”?

Hassan, Mohamed’s brother, seemed important as a contrast. His ready presence and his interest in Larissa helps to emphasize that in accepting Mohamed's advances, she made a choice; she wanted him. At the detention center, while Hassan has more or less committed the same “crime” as has Mohamed, that he is not abused, physically, and is released, allowed to stay out his visa, might allow the reader to presume some things about Mohamed's actions while detained. Larissa is an only child, without her father. Above all, it seemed somehow important Larissa have a relationship with a man that was not sexual, but that still blurred the lines. I imagined Hassan’s willingness to be on her side as based, to some extent, on his attraction to her, and I wanted her to feel some discomfort from that.

In this story the main character struggles to make sacrifices and lower her romantic expectations. Can you share some of the sacrifices that you have had to make as a writer? Is failure valuable for writers?

Where to begin? Every day that I wake up early to write before my day job I sacrifice sleep; every weekend that I spend writing I sacrifice fun. In following the writing-related opportunities I've been lucky to have had, I've lived places I never thought I'd live, and up till now, I haven’t settled in a place intending to call it home. I’ve held maybe one job longer than a year, something not exactly helpful in securing employment in this economy. I don't own an iPhone or an iPad or expensive shoes or clothes. I'm being a little facetious, because I don’t really regret any of it and surely it can't all be blamed entirely on writing. But putting writing first has been so central to my life thus far that I can’t really conceive of who or where I’d be without it. I don't know if failure is valuable for writers, but rejection, and being seen as, or even feeling, a little out of step with the rest of the American population, are pretty much inevitable, so you have to be prepared to deal somehow with them.

What resolution might you make for 2011 that pertains to writing?

I'd love this year to finish a draft of the novel I started recently. Resolutions feel too tinged with wishful thinking and too often aren't carried through—and I'm not the fastest, most efficient writer—so I'm thinking of it more in terms of continuing the habit of bit-by-bit, day-by-day.

This adopted language

Interview with Mihaela Moscaliuc, by Marianne Kunkel

 

Mihaela Moscaliuc’s poetry collection Father Dirt won the Kinereth Gensler Award and was published by Alice James Books last year. Her translations, reviews, and articles appear in the Georgia Review, Poetry International, Pleiades, and others.

 

MK: Your four poems in the fall 2010 issue of Prairie Schooner are exceptionally descriptive, a quality that is so pronounced, perhaps, because of your long, sweeping, almost prose-y sentences. What is behind your decision to write in long sentences, and do they serve the same purpose for each poem?

 

MM: That is funny, because I don’t think of my sentences as being all that long. Some of my lyrical poems and persona poems make intentional use of clipped sentences and disjointed syntax, but in the more narrative poems I favor what I think of as standard-length sentences. If anything, I would love to be able to push my sentences a lot more, twist their spines, make them take exciting detours as they move horizontally to fulfill the demands of the line as well as vertically to carry the sweet burden of narrative. I love what C.K. Williams, Gerald Stern, and Carl Phillips do with their sentences.

 

While learning English, in Romania, I diagrammed way too many sentences not to appreciate full articulation, the implications of subordination and coordination, the clout of modifiers. Plus, I worked—and am still working—hard to take hold of this adopted language, so being able to sustain its sensuality, its music, feels important. And it feels particularly important at a time when the three-second attention span, which translates into a three-word sentence, prevails. I see it in my students’ writing, and it frustrates and saddens me. I have a feeling that if I deprived them of 90 percent of the English language—make it evaporate—most won’t even know it’s gone. 

However, while I pay close attention to sentences, I write line by line, often letting the line and its internal music dictate the direction of the sentence.

 

The descriptiveness has to do with my poems’ need to establish a tangible or clearly imaginable sense of situatedness. The poems of Father Dirt, to which the ones appearing in Prairie Schooner belong, are, for the most part, poems of memory and exile that speak through the particulars of the geographical, cultural, and/or emotional landscapes they inhabit.  “Annunciation,” for instance, moves downwards slowly, accruing all kind of details because it needs to be able to capture this one Roma woman’s life, the particulars of her situation, but also give a taste of the discrimination and traumas Roma experience in Europe. As I write this, in late August ’10, France is deporting Roma families to Romania and Bulgaria, and racism against this minority continue to escalate throughout Europe.  

You depict issues of female sexuality and reproduction, especially in girlhood, with measured steeliness and compassion. Where do you find inspiration to write these female characters, and how important are the supporting roles of feminized non-human entities, such as the female “history” in your poem “Cold War Redux”?

 

I grew up surrounded by women who were strong, feisty, but also vulnerable—or, rather, made vulnerable by a culture that believes strongly in gender difference, and by a communist regime that expected women to maneuver industrial aggregates just as men do, as well as “contribute” at least two, but preferably five children to society. As a teenager, I knew many women my age, as well as my mother’s age, who tried to abort and consequently suffered public humiliation, were fired or expelled, jailed, forced into becoming informers, or died during botched procedures or while trying to perform the abortions on themselves. The women of my Romanian life were also incredible networkers, as one had to be in order to survive. In the 1980’s there was almost nothing on the shelves of our supermarkets, so women (as well as men) spent a considerable amount of time trading things, bribing, performing in-kind services, inventing yet another recipe for beans or potatoes. My grandmother, a fortuneteller, became our main food provider. And I grew up with women who loved and found comfort in the proximity of each other’s bodies—we walked around naked, shared beds and intimate clothes, talked about our menstruations, waxed each other, cared about our looks. Until very recently, my mom’s footwear comprised only high-heels and I don’t remember her ever stepping out of the house, even to take out the garbage, before putting on her makeup. So, plenty of material. Feminized non-human entities: In Romanian, nouns are gendered, and “history” happens (?) to be feminine: o historie. I guess these assigned genders color the way I perceive and conceive of certain realities.  

 

The final lines of your poems in this issue are, for the most part, surprising, powerful and even violent. People occasionally describe a poem’s ending as “quiet”; what is gained by a “loud” ending? Do you have a favorite poem with a particularly memorable last line?

 

I never quite know where the poem will end up when I start writing. There are a lot of false endings—punch lines that prompt the poem into being, places where I think the poem will or should end—but it’s very rare that they stay on as the poem undergoes revisions. I’m not sure why the four poems in this issue have loud endings, and I haven’t thought of them as loud until now—are they loud?—but it might have to do with the revelatory quality of my endings. I groom my poems for a long time, sometimes too long a time, hoping they’ll give me something in return, something I didn’t quite know or didn’t know how to articulate, and that usually happens at the end of the process. However, I also love endings that are quiet or that privilege inconclusiveness, ambiguity, or that shift gears. They’re just not for my poems.

 

In addition to poetry, you regularly write scholarly articles, reviews and translations. What do you do to get into the “writing zone” and does your preparation vary depending on the type of writing that you intend to do?

 

They all feed each other. I came to writing poetry through the practice of translating poetry and through the desperate need for respites from scholarly work (as I was toiling on my doctoral dissertation). Scholarly articles and poems require blocks of time—which are harder to come by with a full teaching load and a three-year old—but the reviews and the translations elbow their way in even during busy times, providing just the right fix.  

 

 

Be witnesses.

Interview with Philip Terman, by Marianne Kunkel
 
Philip Terman's most recent collection of poems is Rabbis of the Air (Autumn House P). New poems appear in the Laurel Review, Tar River Poetry, and Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust. He is a co-director of the Chautauqua Writers Festival.

MK: The first two of your three poems in the fall 2010 issue of Prairie Schooner, “At My Grandparents’ Grave” and “At Auschwitz-Berkanau,” rely heavily on negation. In the first poem, you describe a scene by listing what it does not look like, and in the second poem you deny the poetic quality of images as you are illustrating them. What is gained by avoiding more obviously straightforward statements in these two poems? 

PT: Excellent observation. Both of these poems, of course, make reference to the Holocaust--the Auschwitz poem in an obviously direct way, and the grandparents' poem only at the end, which surprised me as I arrived there in the process of composing the piece. The strategy of “negation” is an attempt to not romanticize, yet both poems, I think, try to say that the natural human connection (in the “grandparents” poem that between the speaker and the subjects and the relationship between the grandparents, and in the Auschwitz poem the appearance of the frog, which reminds the speaker of his daughter)--the source of the poetry--the “presence,” the opposite of “negation” is strengthened.

It seems likely that the “negation” is connected in that way:  it is, as Adorno and so many others have said, “barbaric” to write after such enormously tragic events, but as poets and citizens we must chronicle them in our own way, we must, if the “muse” (or whatever it is that directs our poetic visions) calls our attention to them, be witnesses. Auschwitz-Birkenau is that part of the camp that has been left untouched--the other part, the main camp, has been turned into an archival museum with educational displays, but Birkenau, or Auschwitz II--three kilometers away--is as close to how it was--barbed wire, open fields, the dilapidating barracks, etc, and therefore more affecting to me. It’s of course impossible to stand and walk in that place without being moved, yet there’s also that sense of inexpressibility: you don’t and you do want to articulate a response to being in such a singular place. I wanted to both write about it and resist writing about it, and the contradiction itself is the source of the poem. I wanted to be strict about just listing observations, but that list, in its rhythm of going deeper into the connection the language was drawing between me and Birkenau, more and more became “poetic,” exactly what I was attempting to resist, and thus heightening that tension. The speaker is trying to keep out what is normally construed as “poetic”--i.e, the lyrical, the beautiful, the transcendent--of course, the last thing one wants in a poem about Auschwitz is the beautiful and transcendent. Yet the speaker’s rhythm leads him into connecting the scraps of “nature” and,  therefore, “beauty” that he finds at the end of the poem--the “glassy eyes of the green frog” leads him to remember how he would look for frogs with his daughter at his pond at home, and so “poetry” in its romantic, lyrical, and perhaps nostalgic sense--rears its “ugly” (pun intended) head, and so the speaker has lost: the “beautiful,”  in fact, does enter into a poem that supposedly wants to chronicle “no poetry.” Perhaps it’s simply human to want to find some scraps of beauty even in the most desolate of circumstances, just as the “husbands/and wives would search through//barbed wire for each others’ eyes.”  It’s impossible to eradicate our human capacity for love.

As “At Auschwitz-Berkanau” is an attempt to not romanticize the Holocaust, “At My Grandparents’ Grave” wants to work against the traditional notion that visiting someone's grave has a larger, more romantic “ulterior” motive. I wanted to say that my mother and I only went to the grave to remember her parents--not to romanticize them by turning them into great lovers or sages. Perhaps, in the tradition of W.C. Williams, (“so much depends…”) what it wants to say is that their simple lives—“kibbutzing in the kitchen,” “sewing buttons on a dress”--is itself poetic--that the fact of their survival--in the light of their being Jewish immigrants for Eastern Europe and that they could very well have--had they not immigrated--been victims of the Holocaust--is poetic enough. Again, the “negation” reinforces and provides counter-weight to “presence”—what’s not reinforces what is.

All three of the poems appearing in the issue are arranged in three-line stanzas. What does a three-line stanza offer you as a writer that, say, a four-line or block stanza does not?

 

The three-line stanza, the contemporary non-rhyming (and, one could say, “lazy”) terza rima seems quite pervasive, and I suppose I'm not very experimental in my forms. I envy those who are, and I'm trying to work with alternative ways of presenting lines and stanzas, of using the page space. But I'm usually more concerned with the narrative and music of the poem, and admittedly I often would rather not spend time monkeying around with arrangement. One could, of course, spend hours and hours experimenting with arrangement! I'll admit that that doesn't interest me as much as getting the story and music right (perhaps one characteristic of the more narrative oriented poet). One reason for the three line stanzas, I think, is that there's a natural tendency to think in “threes”--it's a magical number for some reason, and perhaps the poetic urge picks up on that. I occasionally write poems that use the “block stanza,” but those are mostly shorter poems--perhaps no more than twenty lines. If a poem gets any longer, I like to let some air in, and slow it down some, thus making the stanzas and lines more prominent. I also think that how poets use language leads them to gravitate towards certain forms. Also, crafting any regular stanzaic pattern creates some surprises--there's going to be several line and stanza breaks that are more interesting than others and that the form itself produces naturally.

The epigraph to “At Auschwitz-Berkanau” is a quote by Theodor Adorno rejecting the existence of poetry after the Holocaust. You then, through poetry, give new meaning to remnants of, and our cultural memory about, a concentration camp. In contrast to Adorno’s quote, do you have a favorite quote about poetry that you find motivating and affirming?

 

Yes! I find many quotes to be “motivating and affirming”--one is Kafka's “writing is a form of prayer.” Another is from a James Wright poem:  “There must be something beautiful in my body./I am so happy.” Perhaps these two representative quotes together form a great part of my poetics: the spiritual and the earthly.

Congratulations on your most recently published poetry book, Rabbis of the Air (Autumn House Press, 2007). The book’s cover image—of a gnarled tree branch in front of gauzy clouds and a bright blue sky—is striking. How did you decide on the image? As a multi-published author, what would you say is the role of the book’s cover image?

 

Thanks for your observation of the book’s cover. I can say that the cover was designed by Kathy Boykowycz, who is the designer for Autumn House Press. I absolutely love the cover, and she did a wonderful job with that image. The image, to me, reflects the two qualities mentioned in the above response: the spiritual and the  earthy--which I think the book is attempting to struggle with. Though of course the old adage of not judging a book by its cover is true, I think the cover provides opportunities for another art form--and artist--to come into play; to add another dimension to what’s inside. Writing being such a solitary activity, I love collaborating with other artists whenever the opportunity arises, and the cover is an opportunity for that.

You wear many hats—poet, co-director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, contributing editor for the literary journal Chautauqua and English professor at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. What position brings you most joy and has this changed over your career?

 

I'm excited about each of the poetry/literary projects I engage in. I think of writing as a kind of factory: we need many components to keep it running: the writing of it, of course, (which, admittedly, is my primary concern), but writers need communities--opportunities for networking: classes, readings, journals--and communities need writers to chronicle/witness in creative language what it's like to live in a certain place at a certain time. The literary word is everywhere. I'm particularly interested in fostering writing and writers who may be in the “woodwork,” as it were. All it takes is to provide a space, perhaps a class or two, an inexpensive publication, and writers will appear—often with poems and stories that are as good as anything else written anywhere.  It heightens the quality of life in the community, and lets writers know that they're not alone in their struggles.

Cereal boxes and sympathy

Interview with Goldie Goldbloom, by Marianne Kunkel.

Goldie Goldbloom's short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, and the anthology, Keep Your Wives Away from Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires. Her novel Toads' Museum of Freaks and Wonders won the 2008 AWP Novel Award and is in its second printing in Australia (as The Paperbark Shoe). She has a story in a forthcoming anthology of emerging Australian writers. She also won the Jerusalem Post International Fiction Prize. Goldbloom lives with her eight children in Chicago.

 MK: In your story “The Telephone of the Dead” (Prairie Schooner, Fall 2010), a wife and dead husband negotiate the power dynamics of their marriage even from, in the husband’s case, the grave. As you wrote the story, did you aim for readers’ sympathies to lie with one spouse over the other, or was your intention to portray both parties, as is often the case, as equally flawed?

GG: Wait. Don't dead guys automatically get everyone's sympathy? I'm going to have to go back to the drawing board on this one...

Initially, I wanted both parties to be fairly equally flawed, a crankily married couple familiar to most of us, but then I began to play with the ways memory is distorted over time, especially under pressure, and I was intrigued by the ways in which the wife comes to really hate the husband and only remember bad things about him, and the way the husband loses touch with the reality of his family. I don't pay a lot of attention to where a reader's sympathies might lie because I just want to write it the juicy way it happens.

Hey, do you think if I pay attention to where a reader's sympathies might lie, I could sell more of my stories?

My favorite line in “The Telephone of the Dead” is, “He hadn’t graduated from magical thinking,” which refers to the main character’s husband’s mentality that their house cleaned itself and that his ironed shirts “arrived from the Garden of Eden.” In the case of clever one-liners such as this one, do you brainstorm them separately and eventually find homes for them in particular stories, or do specific stories call for their unique creation? 

There's something about writing a fresh story, especially one with a slightly skewed perspective, that has me laughing my head off as I write and those kind of one-liners bubble up all by themselves. They are indigenous to the story and the mood I am in when I am writing it.

Of course, I have a pretty weird sense of humor, and what makes me laugh often doesn't make other folks laugh. That might be because I don't watch TV and all my life, I've had a lot of space to amuse myself. I find myself very amusing, but I am told I am really very boring and incredibly sad at telling jokes. You might as well have a bloodhound on illegal pharmaceuticals do the telling.

It is no surprise that, as a mother to eight children, your descriptions of the children, Polly and Ronnie, in “The Telephone of the Dead” are dead-on; for example, when you describe “a ring of mustard yellow baby poo on the leg of [Polly’s] onesie.” Slightly surprising, however, is that school-age Ronnie does not have any speaking lines—why?

One of my concerns with writing this story was accurately giving a sense of a person moving through the stages of grief, because even though "The Telephone of the Dead" is funny in a way that makes me laugh (there's a warning in that), it's also serious. It's a story, after all, about one woman's life after her husband dies suddenly.

After my own mother died, I had the odd sense that no one spoke for many weeks. Obviously, they did speak, but I was so absorbed in my own experience of grief that I did not notice what they were saying. Ronnie speaks to his mother, but, from her perspective, nothing is said. He takes care of himself and is not asking anything from her, so she can let him fall off the map...an uncomfortable mirror of her husband's eroding memory of the world and his family.

You have served in a number of roles in your lifetime—schoolteacher, librarian, cook, midwife. When did you find extra time to read, and what was the book that started you down the writing path?

I think that most writers are also obsessed readers (think reading by moonlight). It's part of the job description. All those kids from elementary school who used to read the backs of the cereal box and the instructions on the toilet paper and the warnings on the toaster ovens, they all grew up to be writers. Like most other writers, I can't remember a time when I didn't know how to read, but choosing a favorite book is a wee bit like choosing a favorite child. Even if you have one, it's unkind and impolitic to say.

And truthfully, it was my grandmother who started me on the writing path. She wrote me a letter a week for over twenty years, and I wrote back. She encouraged me to be her "eyes in other places" and she asked me leading questions about what I had seen. Saying I'd seen a cat on the roof was not enough. Oh god, how I loved her. When she died, the telephone exchange operator came and regaled us with stories about how Gran used to call her up to chat in the middle of the night. And tell her the most outrageous lies, I mean, stories.

You are a successful writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Do you have a preference for one form over the other? Is it easy to decide which project goes into which form?

I love writing fiction. It makes me happy in my bones to take stuff that everyone knows and twist it and mess it up and turn it every which way until it's something really unfamiliar with bits of familiar sticking out everywhere. Non-fiction can be fun if you don't have to write the truth all the time.

Interview with Goldie Goldbloom, by Marianne Kunkle.

 

Goldie Goldbloom's short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, and the anthology, Keep Your Wives Away from Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires. Her novel Toads' Museum of Freaks and Wonders won the 2008 AWP Novel Award and is in its second printing in Australia (as The Paperbark Shoe). She has a story in a forthcoming anthology of emerging Australian writers. She also won the Jerusalem Post International Fiction Prize. Goldbloom lives with her eight children in Chicago.

 

MK: In your story “The Telephone of the Dead” (Prairie Schooner, Fall 2010), a wife and dead husband negotiate the power dynamics of their marriage even from, in the husband’s case, the grave. As you wrote the story, did you aim for readers’ sympathies to lie with one spouse over the other, or was your intention to portray both parties, as is often the case, as equally flawed?

 

GG: Wait. Don't dead guys automatically get everyone's sympathy? I'm going to have to go back to the drawing board on this one...

 

Initially, I wanted both parties to be fairly equally flawed, a crankily married couple familiar to most of us, but then I began to play with the ways memory is distorted over time, especially under pressure, and I was intrigued by the ways in which the wife comes to really hate the husband and only remember bad things about him, and the way the husband loses touch with the reality of his family. I don't pay a lot of attention to where a reader's sympathies might lie because I just want to write it the juicy way it happens.

Hey, do you think if I pay attention to where a reader's sympathies might lie, I could sell more of my stories?

 

My favorite line in “The Telephone of the Dead” is, “He hadn’t graduated from magical thinking,” which refers to the main character’s husband’s mentality that their house cleaned itself and that his ironed shirts “arrived from the Garden of Eden.” In the case of clever one-liners such as this one, do you brainstorm them separately and eventually find homes for them in particular stories, or do specific stories call for their unique creation? 

 

There's something about writing a fresh story, especially one with a slightly skewed perspective, that has me laughing my head off as I write and those kind of one-liners bubble up all by themselves. They are indigenous to the story and the mood I am in when I am writing it.

 

Of course, I have a pretty weird sense of humor, and what makes me laugh often doesn't make other folks laugh. That might be because I don't watch TV and all my life, I've had a lot of space to amuse myself. I find myself very amusing, but I am told I am really very boring and incredibly sad at telling jokes. You might as well have a bloodhound on illegal pharmaceuticals do the telling.

 

It is no surprise that, as a mother to eight children, your descriptions of the children, Polly and Ronnie, in “The Telephone of the Dead” are dead-on; for example, when you describe “a ring of mustard yellow baby poo on the leg of [Polly’s] onesie.” Slightly surprising, however, is that school-age Ronnie does not have any speaking lines—why?

 

One of my concerns with writing this story was accurately giving a sense of a person moving through the stages of grief, because even though "The Telephone of the Dead" is funny in a way that makes me laugh (there's a warning in that), it's also serious. It's a story, after all, about one woman's life after her husband dies suddenly.

 

After my own mother died, I had the odd sense that no one spoke for many weeks. Obviously, they did speak, but I was so absorbed in my own experience of grief that I did not notice what they were saying. Ronnie speaks to his mother, but, from her perspective, nothing is said. He takes care of himself and is not asking anything from her, so she can let him fall off the map...an uncomfortable mirror of her husband's eroding memory of the world and his family.

 

You have served in a number of roles in your lifetime—schoolteacher, librarian, cook, midwife. When did you find extra time to read, and what was the book that started you down the writing path?

 

I think that most writers are also obsessed readers (think reading by moonlight). It's part of the job description. All those kids from elementary school who used to read the backs of the cereal box and the instructions on the toilet paper and the warnings on the toaster ovens, they all grew up to be writers. Like most other writers, I can't remember a time when I didn't know how to read, but choosing a favorite book is a wee bit like choosing a favorite child. Even if you have one, it's unkind and impolitic to say.

 

And truthfully, it was my grandmother who started me on the writing path. She wrote me a letter a week for over twenty years, and I wrote back. She encouraged me to be her "eyes in other places" and she asked me leading questions about what I had seen. Saying I'd seen a cat on the roof was not enough. Oh god, how I loved her. When she died, the telephone exchange operator came and regaled us with stories about how Gran used to call her up to chat in the middle of the night. And tell her the most outrageous lies, I mean, stories.

 

You are a successful writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Do you have a preference for one form over the other? Is it easy to decide which project goes into which form?

 

I love writing fiction. It makes me happy in my bones to take stuff that everyone knows and twist it and mess it up and turn it every which way until it's something really unfamiliar with bits of familiar sticking out everywhere. Non-fiction can be fun if you don't have to write the truth all the time.