SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: THE BURDEN OF LIGHT

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Picture 1


from THE BURDEN OF LIGHT: POEMS ON ILLNESS AND LOSS
Edited by Tanya Chernov
Selected Poems From the Anthology By Sivan Butler-Rotholz:



ELEGY FOR THE STILL LIVING:
FATHER CANNOT STAND STILL

[My father taught me] every time you breathe in,
say thank you. Every time you breathe out, say goodbye.
                                                                             —Li-Young Lee

The thing about my father is I wear my sadness like the inside of a jar.
How can you not see inside of it? How the slightest bit of air destroys me.
How I love him so much          I struggle

                           to love him

                                                                    at all.



GENESIS

i. The thing is, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX and in this way the world was created.

ii. Definitions

“Wife”:           The person I love most
                         in the world.

“Death”:         He is not here
                         in this hole
                         in the ground
                         piled with dirt
                         and seashells.

“Mother”:       Inlaid tongue.

“Wedding”:    When I was young I liked to play ‘wedding’ and my father would walk me                          down the aisle and it’s a good thing he did then because
                         Flowers are like that.

“How”:            We go on

“Flowers”:      Are not stones.

“One God”:     Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us.



Today’s poems are from The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss, available by donation on Smashwords and Amazon. These poems appear here today with permission from the poet.


The Burden of Light: Part poetry anthology, part field guide, part multimedia art collection, The Burden of Light offers its readers companionship through the darkest days. With work by artists who have confronted serious illness or grief in their own lives, the poems and artwork in these pages hold the power to touch the heart, stir the mind, and heal the spirit, each in its own way. These pieces illuminate the vital force of our humanity, while encouraging us to reach out to others in need.

With 100% of the proceeds benefiting the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance, even a small donation from one has the power to affect change when added to the contributions of others. Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in America, yet this cancer is largely preventable when detected early. By supporting the groundbreaking work of the NCCRA, we’re all helping to promote regular medical screening and fund the research needed to develop better tests, treatments, and ultimately, a cure. Just as The Burden of Light is designed to help readers move forward from trauma, so too will donations help those currently experiencing serious illness.


Editor’s Note: Yes, yes, today’s poems are a first here on the Saturday Poetry Series in that they are written by your faithful editor. I am honored to be featured in this anthology alongside a plethora of talented artists, including SPS-beloved poet Peggy Shumaker. But beyond sharing a little of my own work with you here for the first time, I wanted to share with you this important collection.

Whether you purchase it for your Kindle or download it as a PDF, you get to decide how much you want to pay for this anthology, and 100% of the proceeds benefit the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance. Via the Kindle edition or PDF you will find links to listen to the poets read their poems aloud, for an added layer of experience and immersion. This is a thoughtful, powerful, philanthropic endeavor with the power to both move the reader and effectuate change.

Check out the full anthology for more poems by yours truly and many more talented poets writing through their own experiences with illness and grief. Please donate what you can, and then go forth and read!


Want more from The Burden of Light?
Download the PDF via Smashwords
Purchase the Kindle edition from Amazon
Listen to “Elegy for the Still Living: Father Cannot Stand Still”
Listen to “Genesis”

Because Misogyny

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Because Misogyny

By

Kirsten Clodfelter

 

Because misogyny: Elliot Rodger.

Because misogyny: Every man who Elliot Rodger calls to mind. Every man who has let the whistled catcall of hot momma morph in his mouth to stuck-up bitch when that tried-and-true method of objectifying a complete stranger fails to get him laid. Every man who has complained of being friend-zoned as if the act of being decent – as if the act of simply treating a woman like a human being – is all it might take.

Because misogyny: Equality as radical. Empowerment as weapon. Feminist as feminazi. At some point, doesn’t a lifetime of incidents of domestic violence, of rape, of murder, of torture, of withholding count as its own Holocaust? The terror George W. was hunting to finally justify that war?

Because misogyny: Filmmakers Woody Allen and Roman Polanski are lionized as their own type of victims. Misunderstood. Brilliance over ethics. Over empathy. Art as disassociation. As inculpable.  Steubenville mourns ruined football careers. Playboy lauds Neko Case only as a woman in music.

Because misogyny: A talented, well-meaning poet attempts to process trauma through art and gifts a new voice to the wrong protagonist of this story.

Because misogyny: A friend posts an article on Isla Vista, and someone comments, “Come on, ladies, take one for the team,” as if women weren’t just murdered over a man’s sense of entitlement. Have ever been murdered over a man’s sense of entitlement. As if a person’s right to humor obviously trumps a person’s right to safety. To comfort. But actually, not really person. Woman.

Because misogyny: A comedian co-opts #YesAllWomen at our expense without bothering to be subversive or challenging or even funny, and when these jokes fall flat, are returned in echo, these men recoil at the thought of reflection and rush to fill the silence with their own extraordinary reasoning, take solace in the certainty that they are the exception, never the rule.

Because misogyny: An older male colleague whose name I don’t know finds me in an adjunct office one afternoon, my belly ripe and low-hanging and nearly ready for the picking as I organize papers before class. He takes a long look at my ring finger – bare – before he asks, Is the father in the picture? I am too stunned to smile, to extend my hand for a strong shaking, to chirp through my teeth that, where I come from, we usually just start with hello. Instead I nod and choke the yes from my throat to his brightening. That’s good. His approval offered as a talisman, the balloon of relief inflated almost to bursting, as if the whole of my daughter’s personhood, her very legitimacy, is tied to this. As if there is nothing worse he could imagine for my child than the thought of me raising her on my own.

Because misogyny: My kind-hearted, pro-equality father comes to visit and still occasionally says things like, Sometimes you just have to shut up and let a woman pick the curtains, like there is one secret, and this is it. Nevermind that in our cramped apartment, curtains are a luxury. Nevermind that a blanket – gifted to me a decade ago for my high school graduation – hangs covering our daughter’s bedroom window. Nevermind that it’s my partner, the dad, who most often sits with our toddler to fix her hair, who possesses the fashion expertise for best pairing her cute, coordinated outfits, who successfully executes DIY home-décor projects he scores from Pinterest while my own crafting attempts usually disintegrate rapidly into unrecognizable piles of hot glue and yarn.

Because misogyny: That my partner does these things for our daughter, that he makes pancakes good enough to put your favorite hole-in-the-wall diner breakfast to shame, that he doesn’t hesitate to run the vacuum, that he asks my opinion and considers my feelings in front of others – sometimes earns him less-than-favorable labels. Whipped. Weak. Pussy. Because that’s the greatest insult we can think of: To tell a man he’s acting like the lesser sex – like a fucking woman.

Because misogyny: We are asked often if we’re going to try for a boy. Not if we’d like to have more kids, but specifically this, because no matter how hilarious or adorable or delightful our daughter is, no matter how much love we lavish or how big our hearts swell or how soft our voices go when we talk about her, that pronoun must in some way indicate that she might still not be enough for us.

Because misogyny: Men who meet the minimum expectation of how to treat other human beings feel charged to speak up for themselves when these daily injustices finally grow into too heavy a burden for us to carry quietly, as if it’s they who are oppressed, rushing to remind us it’s #NotAllMen, because it’s easier when there’s distance, easier to step back or away than to lean in, easier to act as aggressor than ally.

Because misogyny: I’ve heard, But he was drunk, as if it is an absolution.

Because misogyny: I’ve heard, But she was drunk, as if it is an absolution.

Because misogyny: Before there was a sweet baby or a partner who lifts me up with his kindness, a man who was once my husband felt entitled to hide our car keys or laptop from me during arguments. To throw dishes or destroy my things as if this was a fair compromise for keeping his hands off of me. As if there was still so much for which I should have been grateful. And it was this entitlement that finally called our friends forward to share – with concern, hesitation – that from the mouth of the man who had vowed his love, and always, I was a worthless waste of space, dumb, a child. This entitlement is pervasive, endemic, impossible to escape. It is here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. So many heres that there isn’t enough time or space to name even the smallest fraction. So many heres that my own barely make a dent. Are hardly worth blinking an eye over.

Because misogyny: A mutual friend once visited in the middle of the day and told me to pack a bag and come with her, worried that I was no longer safe living with the husband. Of escalation. Days later, she explained that his mother – a woman I both trusted and adored – had heard the charge of verbally and emotionally abusive in my kitchen and waited until I’d left the room to whisper her own solution: I needed to grow up, to stop acting like such a baby. C’mon, ladies. Take one for the team.

But I won’t.

***

Kirsten Clodfelter holds an MFA from George Mason University. She has contributed writing to The Iowa Review, Brevity, Narrative Magazine, Green Mountains Review, storySouth, and The Good Men Project, among others. Her chapbook of war-impact stories, Casualties, was published last year by RopeWalk Press and is now available for Kindle. Clodfelter writes and lives in Southern Indiana with her partner and their awesome, hilarious daughter. KirstenClodfelter.com, @MommaofMimo

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MEGAN MORIARTY

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Moriarty Author Photo

LOOKING AT US LIVING
By Megan Moriarty

Through the binoculars, we saw us
moving through the foliage.

The world was on rewind:
a herd of horses ran
backwards across a field.

Yellow leaves kept climbing back
to their branches.

“What’s the opposite of fall?” I said,
and he said “Spring.”

Then it was August, then July,
then June. The sun kept
leaving and coming back

like a boomerang that no one
ever had to throw.

Snow appeared
on the ground, then it started
unsnowing, the flakes
travelling upwards.

I knew that soon
we wouldn’t know each other

so I asked him
what the opposite
of stay is.

He stood there,
his hands on his hips, thinking.


Today’s poem was published in the Summer 2011 issue of Rattle, and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Megan Moriarty grew up surrounded by water in Staten Island, New York and currently finds herself surrounded by mountains in Hillsboro, West Virginia. She holds an MFA in poetry from Virginia Tech and is the author of From the Dictionary of Living Things, a collection of dictionary definition poems.

Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is magic, full of fantastical invention and a vivid, playful story life. I am reminded of the work of Nicolas Destino, a beloved poet here on As It Ought To Be. What wonder, what imagination, what playfulness of concept, what love of ideas mirrored in the written word.

Want to read more by Megan Moriarty?
Buy From the Dictionary of Living Things from Finishing Line Press
Indiana Review
Vinyl Poetry
Jointed Autumn

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: LOUISE MATHIAS

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Louise Desert headshot

THE PROBLEM OF HANDS
By Louise Mathias

And how to fill them
is the problem of cigarettes and paint.

First time I felt my undoing
was in front of

a painting—Sam Francis, I believe.

Oh, his bloomed out, Xanax-ed California.

I liked the word guard, but you know

we made each other
nervous, standing too close

for everyone concerned. All art being

a form of violence
as a peony
is violence.

Here you come

with your open hands.


Today’s poem previously appeared via the Academy of American Poets and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Louise Mathias grew up in England and Los Angeles. She is the author of two books of poems, Lark Apprentice, which won the New Issues Poetry Prize, and The Traps, released in 2013 from Four Way Books. She lives in Joshua Tree, a small town in California’s Mojave Desert.

Editor’s Note: As my faithful readers of this series know, I am a sucker for a poem with a killer ending. In today’s piece, it is the penultimate moment that takes my breath away: “All art being // a form of violence / as a peony / is violence.” What a stunning phrase. Followed by the gift of release, of promise: “Here you come // with your open hands.”

Once again I have Dr. Poet Jenny Stella to thank for bringing today’s poem to my attention. Viva la poesia!

Want to read more by Louise Mathias?
Verse Daily
The Traps from Four Way Books
The Rumpus
The Offending Adam
Everyday Genius

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ROSE NIELSEN

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theresa1


WATER-WITCH
By Rose Nielsen

As April mist blew chill against the rocky beach,
the wishing pines, the trembling birch and cedars
leaned out as if to catch a glimpse of Mary Lake’s
ice petticoat swept to shore on last night’s tempest.

Divining rod in hand, stem pointing at the lake,
Y hugging at my hips, I felt no tug;
I thought the misty air, the soggy forest floor
must be too drenched to dowse a single source.

But when I looked again and saw the leaning birches
reach out their limbs, each one a pair of arms
held out to greet the lake, I turned the stem to point
toward me and felt the tug as it divined a hidden spring.


Today’s poem appears here today with permission from the poet.


Rose Nielsen is a writer, poet, musician, and a physical therapist in a small mountain town in British Columbia, Canada. She also teaches biology and English at the local community college. She recently received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared or will be appearing in RiverLit and CV2; and she is working on a novel and on a collection of poems about water and the bonds humans hold with it.

Editor’s Note: Rose Nielsen’s poetry reminds me of Alaska’s Poet Laureate, Peggy Shumaker, a favorite here on this series. These poets share a love of the interconnectivity of nature and the written word. Simple, yet rich, and working on the micro level, with sounds lulling and inspiring us, with images clear as if painted by brushstroke.

As tomorrow is Mother’s Day, I dedicate today’s selection to my Mama. The woman who taught me the wonders of water, witchcraft, nature, and poetry alike. For my mother, and for Mother Earth, the Great Mother of us all.

Want to read more by Rose Nielsen?
River Lit

Sentience Matters: Farmed Animals as Hypothetical Beings — A Thought Experiment

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Our Fellow Drivers As the Analogs of Animals

by

Gabriel Gudding

 

We project onto our fellow drivers some variance or subset of deficiency: a malignancy, a stupidity, a naivety, a cognitive primitivism, an imbalance of emotion – even a subjectless egoism and a moral insufficiency. And sometimes just a flatness of being: such that when they are not malign or annoying or stupid, other drivers are to us simply drab, ignorable.

If at a stop sign our fellow driver delays too long, it’s as if he somehow becomes responsible for damaging a part of our datebook. If he broaches his turn too early, moves out of order, causes gridlock by the selfish insertion of his car into the crux of an intersection, or if he otherwise does this or that selfish thing to ensure his own timely departure from a tangle while deepening the entanglement of others, what does he become for us?

The being in the car becomes more or less stupid. And since the creature is somehow both mindless yet competent enough to drive, she has to be cunning; and as she’s cunning she must be greedy, impatient, and petulant. The driver, in short, becomes a jackass. And though she’s freighted with her own disability, and her car is anchored by the weight of the gargantuan idiot inside it, her automobile somehow moves. Eppur si muove.

And despite the fact that these idiots manage to fare forward, reverse, accomplish the turn, and are able, while piloting a shining 3,000 pound craft at great speed, to not strike my car or thunder onto someone’s lawn or burst through a store front, off a bridge, or smear children across a schoolyard – we still think them dense. Despite their being, in short, preternaturally skilled at least at avoiding that always potentiate cascade of errors that’ll result in the taking of life, despite their being human and in many cases able to afford cars far more expensive than ours, they are still base, stupid, and selfish. And how much patience must these drivers possess immersed in a clanking river of flat metallized beings? It has to be substantial, each one of them melded in by a funneled herd of imbeciles with whom she cannot communicate except by an occasional, desperate hand gesture, or the monotone blat of a horn. So even though the being piloting the vehicle has a strong measure of personhood, has a not insufficient modicum of patience, has a calendar, an appointment, a disease, a watch, a family, a conviction, an income, and certainly a mind, this driver whose face and body we cannot see, has a flatness, has an existential drabness, is stupid, an annoyance, an obstacle, a thing.

How is it that by merely cloaking the human body in sheet metal, hiding the shapes and movements of this person’s body and face, we can so readily animalize members of our own species?

Is that question not instructive? If we can with such facility do this to members of our own species, famed (among ourselves anyway) for our brilliance, by erecting a painted sheet of shaped metal between us, think about how easily — and how erroneously — we’ll do this to others who are hidden behind the varying shapes of their very bodies, their skin kinds, their fur types.

Consider how many cognitive and biographic characteristics we cannot perceive about nonhuman animals but know they must have. Think about the astounding things they can do and make, the kinds of courage and types of awareness they must possess, the pains and sorrows they must suffer, but for which we give them so little credit. And now consider how many characterizations we project onto those nonhumans who are most exposed to our brutality, farmed animals, who suffer under us in their supposedly foreign and unfortunate shapes, with their supposedly dim and uncaring minds, and whose worries and hopes are hidden even deeper in the cognitive shadows behind their brows.

We treat other animals like we do our fellow drivers: as flat and hypothetical beings. A hypothetical being is one that we can see exists but whose existence is insufficient in itself to merit full inclusion in our attentional space, insufficient because it does not to us have an interesting mind. And it does not have an interesting mind because it stands in the way of our wants. Instead of recognizing our chauvinism, we would rather fill the entire world with hypothetical beings who are outright mindless, dull and stupid.

We are, in short, stupid about the stupidity and beauty of others. We well know there is something in us that can reduce our study of others, whether human or nonhuman, to the contemplation of their outer shape and locomotion. Small things of the human body have for us a colossal algebra: furrows in the lips, skin around the eyes, pigmentation in the cornea, translucence of the hair, smells of the torso and throat, thickness of the adipose tissues, the depths of the muscles, shapes of and on the skull, sounds made by the body, and the way a body creates meaning in its movements and via marks made by its hands. These minute differences can often determine which of these beings are for us merely hypothetical and which are friends and family and lovers. Isn’t that astounding? And though it is an algebra that has nothing to do with the worth of others as beings with bodily and mental sovereignty, we allow ourselves to be ruddered by flecks of skin and color, such that the ridiculous clutter of small forces arrayed across even the image of a human face or a human body is irresistible to us.

After being vegan for now four years, I still marvel at how readily humans underestimate the cognitive and emotional lives of nonhumans. This capacity for diminishing the inner lives of other beings has of course a material and ideological purpose in our contemporary world. Dairy farmers, for example, rationalize the practice of stealing newborn calves from their mothers by insisting that cow mothers, as one put it recently, “don’t give a second thought to their calf once it is out of their sight. We as dairy farmers, on the other hand, put a lot of thought into calf care.”[1] The effortlessness and triumphalism necessary to ascribe apathy to a mammalian mother while declaring, “on the other hand,” to care more for that calf (a calf he intends to kill) than her mother is as shocking as it is stupid.

If we can occasionally glimpse that we are this stupid and this erroneously begrudging about members of our own species, I wonder if we could consider how selfish and inane we are when we knowingly put our own pleasures before the needs, families, horrors and sorrows of the other beings whom we refuse to see as fellow travelers.

[1] David Heim. “Calf Care Part 1: Why Do Dairy Farmers Separate Calves from their Mothers?”

http://heimdairy.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/why-dairy-farmers-separate-cows-and-calves/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plotting Against Plot

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czyz

Plotting Against Plot

by

Vincent Czyz

Last fall, the sky October overcast, I walked to a field half a block from my apartment in South Jersey. Trees were beginning to catch fire with fall color, the air was cold enough to feel through a padded suede jacket, and the light was a feeble gray. Just as my sneakers made the transition from asphalt to grass, a flock of sparrows maybe fifty yards distant rose from the field I was entering. Wheeling, the flock flattened into a cloud, rapidly thinning and elongating, then contracted again until it bulged weightlessly in the middle. There was an astonishing ripple effect as one bird after another perceived an abrupt shift in direction and aligned itself with the new axis of movement more gracefully than any pattern of falling dominoes.

After this performance, which suggested a unified whole rather than anything that could be called a group effort, it occurred to me that the novels that have stayed with me—the stories and novellas, too, that have had the greatest half-life—have startled like the unexpected flight of that flock. At least that’s one of the things they’ve done. On another level, the works I most admire have, metaphorically speaking, made visible the physics of motion. Diagramming the gift of overcoming gravity with vector arrows and overlapping arabesques, they’ve sketched a cartography of flight. Most of all, the best fiction seems to have something in common with one of those incomparable things Whitman said incomparably well:

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

In order to believe in the winged purposes of those sparrows, you have to let the flock sink past retina and optic nerve, you have to move beyond the equations that describe ratios of weight to force, the rate of wing-beats and the lift generated. In order to feel the spirit of Zen articulated by Alexander Pope (who presumably had never heard of Zen)—“whatever is, is right”—you have to find in yourself something that corresponds to the synchronized maneuvers of those birds.

In other words, the way I’m divvying things up, the best fiction speaks to the senses, to the intellect, and to our subjectivity—quaintly dubbed “soul” or “heart” depending on the spin you prefer. Not necessarily in that order.

The result of this seems to be that I gravitate toward work that’s been praised for its strong language and striking imagery while generally being chided for its weak storyline. But why should poets have exclusive rights to make insight and observation the strength of their pieces?

While most literati will probably agree readily enough in theory that there’s nothing wrong with a plotless novel (“Plot is old hat, of course, went out with frock coats and whalebone corsets…”), in practiceeditors and agents still get fidgety when a manuscript without sufficient narrative momentum comes across their desks. University presses generally take on these riskier propositions, while the larger reviewing bodies—if they bother with them at all—bury a column or two of commentary in the back of the publication. By and large, American readers, unlike their European counterparts, still seem to think a novel without a goose-bump-raising storyline for a backbone is like a screwdriver in which you can’t taste the vodka. A few years agoa literary agent, acknowledging the need to pay attention to market demands, told me, “Ulysses simply wouldn’t be published today.” And then there’s the former colleague of mine who maintains that “story isall that matters because that’s all you remember after you’ve read a book.”

The agent is probably right; I like to think my colleague is wrong. When I think of Moby-Dick, for example, the first thing that comes to mind has nothing to do with the narrative; the first thing that comes to mind is the tone of the novel, the mood Melville created. The book returns in fragments. I remember the tenor if not the actual words of Ahab’s one-sided conversation with the severed head of a sperm whale although, yes, a few lines do put in verbatim appearances (Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. Tell us that secret thing that is in thee.). I remember Melville’s poetic meditation on the whiteness of the whale (herein you’ll find the rudiments of Jung’s theory of a collective unconscious). I remember the cook’s speech to the sharks, in which he theorizes that an angel is nothing but a shark well-governed; I remember Ahab categorizing all visible objects as mere pasteboard masks and swearing his men to abet him in his hunt for Moby-Dick (recalling Milton’s arch-rebel, exiled to darkness visible, exhorting his fellow angels to take revenge on heaven). If you say, “Yeah, but what happened?” sure, I can give you a reasonable outline of what happens. But if you ask me whether or not you should read the book, I wouldn’t try to sell you on an aging, peg-legged sea captain chasing around a white whale so he can get in the last lick. What happens isn’t nearly so much the point as how it happens and how we, as well as Melville, interpret not only events but their contexts.

A novel that hits all three areas—physical, intellectual, and subjective—Moby-Dick doesn’t have much plot to speak of; in 500–plus pages, the action can be reduced to a one- or two-page synopsis without leaving out anything vital. Melville’s descriptions of New England and the sea are more than adequate to satisfy the reader’s sensory appetite. While discussions of cetology and whaling are the most obvious examples of discourse aimed more at the intellect than at the viscera, there are far more subtle instances: noting a series of odd coincidences in the early chapters, Ishmael senses more than mere chance at work and, beating Jung to the punch again, suggests a concept of synchronicity. The book as a whole is aimed at some “ungraspable phantom of life,” is obsessed with the inscrutable depths of the sea—surely an allusion to the mysteries of the soul or psyche (choose your spin)—with the inexplicable lure of the color white, with the undefinable symbol of the whale, “be he agent or principle.” And then there’s the friendship between Queequeg and Ishmael to infuse Melville’s metaphysics with something warm-blooded, an emotional handhold for the reader.

No, plot doesn’t figure in as one of the things that make this book memorable. Rather it provides a loose framework for the things that make the book hard to forget.

If I’ve overemphasized Melville, let me hasten to add there are numerous other books that give plot short shrift but have lingered with me long after the last page was turned.: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has even less of a storyline than Moby-Dick; it’s nothing but a travelogue in which a map of the interior darkness (eventually popularized as “the unconscious”) overlays a continent that is home to practices both disturbingly familiar and frighteningly alien to European trespassers. We can also add, I think, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, William Gass’s The Tunnel, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Paul West’s The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, Haldor Laxness’s Under the Glacier, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Henry Miller’s Sexus, Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, and Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, to name just a handful.

What I want, I suppose, is a prose body with a poetic soul. Of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with telling a stirring tale or weaving an intricate plot—quite the contrary, a good story is an undeniable asset. Nonetheless, plot alone will not carry the day. Indeed, plot, even in a novel, seems to me very much secondary. If a novel doesn’t open more than one door of perception, if it doesn’t speak to us the way music does, bypassing the mind’s “reducing valve,” if it doesn’t resonate in the nebulous region that gives rise to dreams, it’s a heap of feathers fit for stuffing a pillow, it’s not a bird in flight.

 

***

Vincent Czyz is the author of Adrift in a Vanishing City, a collection of short fiction. The recipient of the Faulkner Prize for Short Fiction, he has also won fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. His fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, Louisiana Literature, and Camera Obscura. His essays have appeared in Boston Review and Logos. He was the 2011 Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction at Rutgers-Newark. (“Plotting Against Plot” originally appeared in AGNI and is reprinted here with permission of the author.)

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JENNA LE

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Jenna Le photo

By Jenna Le:


MOM’S COCKS

Mom grew up beside the Perfume River in Vietnam,
in a brick house overrun by chickens.
Those horny-footed fowl were always
rubbing their feather-padded genitals
against sofa legs and children’s shoes
as if they were fit to burst. Mom laughs

as she tells me how they ground
their pelvises against her leather sandal,
stuporous with misdirected lust—
How strange that she
is talking to me about sex
in this casual way. She’s returning to her roots

as a child who lived among
unmannered beasts. And I, through hearing her words,
am returning there with her: I
am the aggressive rooster; I’m the hens
cowering behind the outhouse; I’m the much-abased,
much-abraded, Size Four shoe.


THREE SHORT POEMS ON A COMMON THEME

1.

Staring at you across the room, my body seemed composed
of nothing but eyes.

Even my mouth
watered, like an eye.

2.

I couldn’t sleep a wink all night: my brain agitated its solitude
like a washing machine

filled with copies
of your immaculate white shirt.

3.

In the morning, I went out and bought a book of your poems.
It’s a poor substitute for a straightedge, it’s true,

but you won’t
sell me your curves for any price.



Today’s poems are from Six Rivers, published by NYQ Books, copyright © 2011 by Jenna Le, and appear here today with permission from the poet.


Jenna Le was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a daughter of two Vietnam War refugees. She received a B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University and an M.D. from Columbia University. She has worked as a physician in Flushing, New York, and the Bronx, New York. Her full-length poetry collection, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), was a Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller. Her poetry, fiction, essays, book criticism, and translations of French poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as AGNI Online, Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, Measure, Pleiades, and 32 Poems.

Editor’s Note: Lyric, narrative, accessible, and unafraid, Jenna Le’s Six Rivers opens along the banks of the Perfume River, in a scene that pairs mother with sex and “horny-footed fowl.” The relationships—between mother and daughter, between ‘here’ and ‘there’—are rich and complex, with the poet embodying her mother’s past, her roots, and the “much-abased, much-abraded, Size Four shoe.” Throughout the book love and sex, personal, familial, and cultural history, healing and death are all explored as we travel with the poet along the six rivers of her life. Le allows herself to be vulnerable and imperfect, and so we relate to her, root for her, are drawn into her vivid world. A keen seer and a captivating reporter, it is no wonder that, at times, the poet feels she is “composed of nothing but eyes.” Hungry for life, hungry for love, it is no wonder that “Even [her] mouth watered, like an eye.”

Want to read more by and about Jenna Le?
NYQ Poets
Mascara Literary Review
The Nervous Breakdown
The Toronto Quarterly
Sycamore Review

Cash

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

 

Cash
By John Unger Zussman

My grandfather loved horses and gambling more than he loved my grandmother, so he spent a lot of time at the racetrack. From time to time a small envelope would appear in our mail addressed to me, bearing the elegant raised blue return address of his butcher shop. Inside, I would find a brief note; a crisp, new hundred-dollar bill; and a clipping from the Racing Form with the winning horse circled. Its name would inevitably be Big John, or John Henry, or Johnny Diablo, or some other variant of my name.

I treasured these little missives, even though my mom always whisked the bill away immediately, to be applied to my college fund or piano lessons or the furnace repair. I liked that I received these winnings more often than my brother or sister—and not just because horses named John were more common than ones named Rick or Marcy. I liked that the money simply arrived, without my having to make my bed or earn an A or give a recital. I liked that my name alone was enough to bring my grandfather luck.

My grandfather has been gone almost forty years. Which might explain why a few years ago, when I first slipped a crisp, new hundred-dollar bill into my sister’s birthday card, she broke into tears.

Copyright © 2014, John Unger Zussman. All rights reserved.
This essay was written in response to a “Readers Write” prompt in The Sun literary magazine. An edited version was published in the April 2014 issue.

A Review of James and Jonathan Humphries’s Windham’s Rembrandt

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Windhams Rembrandt Humphries

A Review of James and Jonathan Humphries’s Windham’s Rembrandt

By Ira Kelson Hatfield

Several years ago, I found myself working weekends as a tech in a local drug rehab center in the Midwest. I was nineteen years old and fresh out of a three-year stint working food service. As far as experience… well, I got in on account of my father knowing one of the therapists. I remember that first day of work, sitting in the cafeteria for about twenty minutes and filling out the necessary paperwork that would make me an actual employee. After that, I was tossed unceremoniously out on the floor, amongst the patients, with little more than a good luck.

Over the next year or so, I became privy to a world whose existence had previously eluded me, and, as far as I can tell, still eludes the vast majority of that part of our society known as supposedly normal. There was a language there amongst the patients. In fact, it went beyond a language. It was a culture—unique and held together by the knowledge that addiction has a set of claws. Claws that did little to differentiate between class, age, or race.

For those fortunate enough not to find themselves working in such a facility, Windham’s Rembrandt, a memoir shadow written by Johnathan Humphries about his father, offers a doorway into the heart of this secret subculture. The book starts out much the same way as my experience, with James Humphries being dropped into the Texas penal system as an art instructor with next to no direction.

Humphries describes his first penitentiary stint as “a bit medieval,” commenting on the experience of putting his identification in a bucket at the front gate to be hoisted up to the guard tower for verification. He details his environment in the sharp detail of an artist, drawing the reader into the steel and wooden world he inhabited. The world he enters is one of distrust and false calm, and we see his artist’s eyes expressly in his description of the first class he teaches at his second institution of employment, referred to ominously as only the Psychiatric Treatment Center: “Steel cables and wheel bearings sang in a hissing exhalation, which ended in the heavy metallic downbeat of numerous doors closing in concert.”

At the Center, Humphries sees boys who grew up down the street from him mixed in with the kind of hard and ruthless looking men he had perhaps more stereotypically expected to see in such a place. He learns to discard his definition of a convict. He discovers an entirely new culture with its own set of norms and rules. It’s a harsh culture, one built upon aggression, fear, and ignorance. In the midst of this primal subculture, he is given a key piece of advice from another teacher named Mary Oliphant, “Never turn your back on your students,” she warns. “What they can get into, they will get into… and then some!Oh, and always be prepared to give positive advice whenever asked.” These words frame the way Humphries approaches his students throughout the remainder of the book.

From the beginning, Humphries lets the reader in on his insecurities, asking himself if he will even be taken seriously. Often times he is not. He points out that while they make no trouble, many of his students only come to class in an effort to get out of working outside. This lack of respect is mirrored in the practical jokes he must deal with. A swastika-laden Mickey Mouse is painted during a busy class and hung in the hall to incite violence. A papier-mâché .38 pistol is stuck in the face of a visiting Texas education agent. A tarantula is snuck into the room and dangled over Humphries’s face. As he draws the reader into the complexities of his world, Humphries details his frustration, and, more importantly, the lessons he learns in dealing effectively with an otherwise ignored subset of society.

From his pioneering experiences at the Ferguson Unit with a population of mostly first-time offenders all the way through his harrowing time at the Psychiatric Treatment Center, Humphries reveals to us increasingly dangerous encounters until the story’s pinnacle, during which he meets a convict named Albert—a mute giant imprisoned for cutting a woman into small pieces, piling up those pieces, and covering them with sugar and flour. Humphries dictates these surreal experiences with the straightforward and brusque diction reflective of his years of military service.  During his first interactions with inmates, Humphries describes the similarity in prison staring contests to the unwritten marine code he was accustomed to, “Men are always sizing one another, and when a man cannot look you in the eye he is either hiding something, not talking you seriously or is just plain blind.”

The skepticism with which Humphries is repeatedly confronted reminds me of the first time I met an art therapist. For the first several months of her employment, I too was skeptical. One afternoon I observed a patient as he attempted to draw a picture of a wolf—a representation of his addiction—his whole body shaking from alcohol withdrawal. In my mind, this had no real purpose. Later, I saw one such man pin up the picture he had drawn to represent his own addiction and, with each complement, he began to gain the confidence he so desperately needed to keep going. It was at this point I finally realized my own lack of awareness about the healing benefits of art therapy and started to give credence to the field as a whole. In much the same way, a great deal of respect from his colleagues is gained when, with continued patience and perseverance, Humphries manages to coax two words from Albert—the first words anyone at the facility has ever heard him utter.

When Humphries is questioned by a staff member as to why he’s willing to speak so freely to a former contract killer with a history of violence, Humphries replies, “Well, he feels comfortable in my class. So if a student wants to express themselves to feel better, why not?” Humphries remembers the experience, writing, “Something about what the E&R [Education and Recreation] man said didn’t sit well with me. I knew the men in prison had all done some sort of wrong, but there is more to a man’s nature than his actions.” This sentence is perhaps the best indicator of Humphries’s outlook as he wades through a prison system brimming with unique, complicated stories, each connecting somehow to the others only to, in the end, reveal a greater overarching message of humanization.

A champion for the voiceless prison population of the 1970s, this memoir creates as close an image as can likely be had of Humphries’s time in the Windham prison system. Perhaps the most powerful element of this book, however, is the peculiar mix of empathy and militant seriousness concerning the prison system and those locked away inside of it. The authors successfully create real people in a real place—complex prisoners who are rendered neither as misunderstood victims nor as irredeemable villains. Each man is his own self, a new story with its own title. The way Humphries draws these characters echoes back to the advice he was given from his colleague early in the book: He does not trust the men he works with, but he encourages them every chance he gets.

 

James and Jonathan Humphries, Windham’s Rembrandt. CreateSpace, 2012: $14.99 (print)/$8.99 (digital).

***

Ira Kelson Hatfield is a creative writing major at the University of Southern Indiana.  His poetry appears in the Apeiron Review, and he is an avid collector of hobbies.