SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JEHANNE DUBROW

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By Jehanne Dubrow:


EROS AND PSYCHE
Sculpture by Antonio Canova, 1787

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(Today’s poem originally appeared in AGNI Online and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of four poetry collections, including most recently Red Army Red and Stateside (Northwestern UP, 2012 and 2010). Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. She is the Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House and an assistant professor in creative writing at Washington College, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Editor’s Note: There are some days when I can’t help but think, “This is a damn good poem.” Today is one of those days. Today’s piece is rich and multi-layered. A poem which functions like Pandora’s Box—which it references—letting its good and its bad out with each lift of its carefully wrought lid. There is love and there is death. There is the threat of violence and the reality of violence. And all of this is enrobed in visual art—in painting and sculpture—and then again in a reportage style that nearly conceals the poem’s confessional nature. There are beautiful moments of lyric: “and both of them gone marble;” “Bodies make a space for gods to intervene,” and there is the myth which informs the piece like a hidden puppetmaster who knows exactly when to remind us of the strings. Dubrow even gets away with using the word “butterflies,” proving herself a powerful enough master of her craft that she can get away with what most of us cannot. This is a damn good poem.

Want to read more by and about Jehanne Dubrow?
Author Website
Poem on American Life in Poetry
Poem on Verse Daily
Poem on Poetry Daily
Reading on NPR

Her Body Desires the Instrument

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Eating_the_Heart_First_Cover

Her Body Desires the Instrument

by Clare L. Martin

She elongates herself;
presses the instrument

against her body,
as in the dream

that comes to her
and comes to her—

The old guitar crumbles.
Strings fall in tonal

disarray. The wooden
neck becomes chalk,

and is crushed in her grip.
She longs to be soothed

by melodies which flutter
from her mind

to her lips,
to her fingertips.

She feels percussion in her spine,
reverberating in muscles,

charging them.
A rhythm resounds

that could vanquish
the dark spell.

Her body desires
the instrument

and she despairs
without accompaniment.

 

***

Clare L. Martin’s debut collection of poetry, Eating the Heart First, was published fall 2012 by Press 53 as a Tom Lombardo Selection. Martin’s poetry has appeared in Avatar Review, Blue Fifth Review, Melusine, Poets and Artists and Louisiana Literature, among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web, for Best New Poets and Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net. Her poems have been included in the anthologies The Red Room: Writings from Press 1, Best of Farmhouse Magazine Vol. 1, Beyond Katrina, and the 2011 Press 53 Spotlight. She is a lifelong resident of Louisiana, a graduate of University of Louisiana at Lafayette, a member of the Festival of Words Cultural Arts Collective and a Teaching Artist through the Acadiana Center for the Arts. Martin founded and directs the Voices Seasonal Reading Series in Lafayette, LA, which features new and established Louisiana and regional writers.  More information about her work can be found at clarelmartin.com

Sex In Siberia

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DSR_Final_Cover

Sex In Siberia

by Meg Pokrass

My imaginary man lives in Siberia. We touch down on each other like  helicopters. I smile, move my mouth around him—offer a warming hut, a place to explode.  When he bursts, storm clouds open.

Southern California boasts mild, featureless people. The Weather Channel’s talking heads, all botoxed and baby-fatted in their cheeks, ramble on about radical snowstorms in New York State. I paint leaves, collect Styrofoam in buckets. Driving downtown for wrapping paper, I count the fake blonds wearing two dollar Santa Claus hats.

My parents divorced and nobody yells anymore, but that is no longer important. I want a Siberian life, a Siberian husband. One whose hair changes from brown to light.

My dog seems worried, and so he and I take long walks. Sweat trickles down my back. The dog pants miserably. I promise him that someday, we’ll skate alongside a large man who loves Labs.

In December, I slump into bed early, imagine what it will be like—Siberian sex. Better than any other kind—so cold outside, so warm under the covers. I ball up socks and rub them where the man would go. We’re there, and he is teaching me how to taste snow.

 

***

Meg Pokrass is the author of Damn Sure Right, a collection of stories. Her second collection, Happy Upside Down, will be released in the fall of  2013. Meg’s work appears in PANK, McSweeney’s, The Literarian, storySouth, Smokelong Quarterly, Gigantic, Kitty Snacks, Wigleaf, The Rumpus, Yalobusha Review, Gargoyle, and Roadside Curiosities: Stories About American Pop Culture (University of Leipzig Press in conjunction with Picador, 2013). Information about her work can be found here: http://www.megpokrass.com.

Okay but Seriously, Stop Blaming the Victim

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Okay but Seriously, Stop Blaming the Victim

by

Kirsten Clodfelter

As a feminist, I admire Hanna Rosin. I enjoy the important work she’s done in co-founding DoubleX, and I regularly teach excerpts of her essay, “The End of Men,” to my undergraduate composition students. As a new, breastfeeding mom, I’m appreciative of her refreshing, my-body-my-choice approach to the Breast is Best agenda. This made Rosin’s response to The Feminist and the Cowboy author Alisa Valdes’ recent blog post (since deleted but cached here), in which Valdes revealed the terrifying abuse she suffered at the hands of the book’s “hero,” all the more surprising and disappointing.

Valdes’ memoir details her dissatisfaction with feminism and its “dreary shroud of lies,” all while lauding a man who forces her into submission, helping her to see the way things are, according to Valdes, biologically supposed to be. As Rosin points out in her initial review of the book, some of the scenes with the controlling cowboy are definitely “creepy”; the red flags have been raised.

But after Valdes comes clean about the cowboy’s aggressive, intimidating behavior, the headline of Rosin’s next Valdes piece is disaffected and bored: “The Cowboy Abused the Feminist. What a Surprise.” In this article, Rosin writes, “Many of us skeptical, desiccated feminist types suspected that submission would mostly just lead to being submissive and that the long-term result would be something less than happiness.” This criticism of the submission Valdes touts isn’t wrong. However true it may be, though, it’s not an adequate reason for glossing over the issue of domestic violence.

In her book, Valdes rejects second-wave feminism and instead aligns herself with the theory of “difference feminism,” celebrating her newfound femininity under the guidance of her macho boyfriend. Any person, a so-called “reformed” feminist or otherwise, who has been victimized, manipulated, or brainwashed by an abuser (and in Valdes’ case, it seems, over a long enough period of time for that behavior to become normalized) does not deserve a cavalier, yawning, here’s-my-shocked-face brush off from anyone, but especially not from someone who is herself a feminist.

Rosin appropriately takes Valdes to task for “publicizing a book that is encouraging women to submit themselves to a romantic formula whose end sum is ‘painful, controlling, emotionally abusive, crazymaking,’” and this is truly an important part of the conversation that we should all continue to address. Had Rosin taken the time to speak with Valdes, though (and I can’t say for sure if she attempted to reach out to her), she would have learned that, according to her conversation with Max Read at Gawker, Valdes now readily acknowledges that she’s written “a handbook for women on how to fall in love with a manipulative, controlling, abusive narcissist.”

Rosin closes her article discussing the possibility of Valdes writing a follow-up, which she may use as a platform for processing some of the cowboy’s reprehensible actions. Rosin is quick to silence that voice, “But as the cowboy would say, Alisa: Stop. It’s over.” I agree wholeheartedly with Rosin that Valdes is doing a grave, dangerous disservice by continuing to promote this sham of a love story in any way, but I think what we’re seeing in Valdes’ string of recent, controversial blog posts following the memoir’s release is an attempt to reconcile the abuse she’s suffered. How, then, is it helpful or kind or ethical to tell Valdes to put a lid on it?

If we attached that “What a Surprise” headline to the provocatively-dressed eleven year old in Texas who was gang-raped in November of 2010 or to the blackout-drunk high school student in Steubenville who last year was sexually assaulted and peed on as she was carried unconscious from party to party by members of the football team, there would be, and rightfully so, a loud and raging outcry.

So why the cold shoulder to Valdes? Is it that she marketed herself as a disgruntled product of the worst parts of feminism and used her memoir to push an anti-feminist agenda? In his article for The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky writes that even after revealing the abuse, “In comments on her [blog] post, Valdes insists that she still rejects the feminist ideology that prevented her from trusting men. She insists she still stands by her claim that ‘feminism stole my womanhood.’” Are Rosin, and other writers and article commenters discussing this issue, feeling some flicker of validation in light of this development? If Valdes claims that feminism directed her to believe that men were un-trustworthy, and then it turned out that she couldn’t trust that powerful, manly, dominant cowboy after all, is this supercilious attitude a consequence of haughtily thinking that, well, those feminists were right?

But as feminists, as people who champion for women—for their equality, for their freedom, for acknowledgement of their value—do we really want to shame someone who rejected that ideology (and, arguably, just a small but vocal minority within the feminist umbrella) with a big dose of, hey, that’ll teach her? The feminist community should be a safe space for the many women who don’t have one, not an exclusive, snobby club only for people who subscribe to a very particular and rigid set of ideals about the movement. My experience with feminism and, in speaking with my friends and colleagues, many other men and women’s experience as well, is thankfully nothing like what Valdes has described. Regardless, to turn up our noses at her now only helps prove her point.

Some of the worst comments I’ve seen from readers of Rosin’s article and others around the Internet suggest that Valdes is making up the whole thing as some type of twisted publicity stunt (because certainly I can think of nothing that might sell a love story more than traumatizing abuse). Others, rather missing the point, demand that in light of submitting to her abuser, Valdes’ “feminist card” be revoked. The most offensive demand that Valdes “shut the fuck up” and call her an idiot, an attention-seeker, and “an embarrassment to humanity,” and then there’s just the ridiculously obnoxious, such as, “Giddy-up, bee atch.” Are we not better than this? When we find out a woman has suffered through a violent relationship, do we really believe that the appropriate response is to tell her we guess that means she really isn’t a feminist? Or worse, that she brought it on herself? That she deserved it?

In September, Mary Elizabeth Williams smartly shut down the idea that Rihanna should be castigated for her reconciliation with abuser Chris Brown; yet when Valdes writes a book in which she professes her love for a man who she later begins to realize is abusive, or even after that, when she reflects on her complicated feelings for her former abuser and denies some of the worst conclusions being drawn about him (a pretty common consequence of a long-term, abusive relationship), the common response seems to be annoyance that anyone, least of all Valdes, is surprised by this information.

Valdes is being shamed when what she needs is a supportive community that won’t stand for domestic violence to rally around her. Where is the calling out of the publishing community—her publisher, agent, and editor who read early drafts of this book, who surely must have seen the obvious, early warning signs of manipulative, controlling, and dangerous behavior that many reviewers have already mentioned—and still elected to market the book to women as a beautiful romance with a fairy-tale finish? (To be fair, Max Read at Gawker has at least mentioned this issue of mutual accountability.)

Tracy Clark-Flory recounts some of Valdes’ abuse in her article at Salon, detailing in Valdes’ words from her initial blog post that the “cowboy became emotionally and physically abusive, and during one fight ‘simply dragged me down the hall to the bedroom, bent me over, and took me, telling me as he did so that I must never forget who was in charge.’”

Yet both Berlatsky and Rosin, in their respective articles, describe this particular incident from Valdes’ now shattered love story as “something close to rape.” As Valdes has told it, however, dragging a woman down the hall during a fight and then physically entering her body while you remind her who’s in charge is rape. Are people choosing not to call it that because then they’d have to show more outrage?

Regardless of whether or not we agree with every decision Valdes has made up to this point or with the way she’s choosing to communicate parts of her story currently, she is brave for speaking out about her experience. The message of Valdes’ book is, frankly, reprehensible, but voicing the truth about Steve Lane’s twisted behavior—possibly at risk to her own physical safety—so that others who might still read her book have a more accurate understanding of what was really going on is commendable.

One thing that I imagine would be the helpful for Valdes at this point, as with any abuse victim, is a little empathy. What is certainly not helpful are other men and women, other feminists, rolling their eyes in light of this news. If this is the so-called “feminism” that Valdes felt she had to run away from, honestly, can we really blame her?

 ***

Kirsten Clodfelter holds an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. Her work has been previously published in The Iowa Review, Brevity, Word Riot, Narrative Magazine (as the runner-up in their 2011 30-Below contest), Rock & Sling, and Hunger Mountain, among others. She is a regular blog contributor at Fogged Clarity, and she writes and teaches in Southern Indiana. You can read some facts about her at KirstenClodfelter.com.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JEANANN VERLEE

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Verlee-RH

GOOD GIRL
By Jeanann Verlee

Every morning I sit at the kitchen table over a tall glass of water swallowing pills.
(So my hands won’t shake.) (So my heart won’t race.) (So my face won’t thaw.)
(So my blood won’t mold.) (So the voices won’t scream.) (So I don’t reach for
knives.) (So I keep out of the oven.) (So I eat every morsel.) (So the wine goes
bitter.) (So I remember the laundry.) (So I remember to call.) (So I remember the
name of each pill.) (So I remember the name of each sickness.) (So I keep my
hands inside my hands.) (So the city won’t rattle.) (So I don’t weep on the bus.) (So
I don’t wander the guardrail.) (So the flashbacks go quiet.) (So the insomnia
sleeps.) (So I don’t jump at car horns.) (So I don’t jump at cat-calls.) (So I don’t
jump a bridge.) (So I don’t twitch.) (So I don’t riot.) (So I don’t slit a strange man’s
throat.)


(Today’s poem originally appeared in Thrush Poetry Journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Jeanann Verlee is the author of Racing Hummingbirds (Write Bloody Publishing), recipient of the Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal in Poetry. She has also been awarded the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in The New York Quarterly, Rattle, failbetter, and kill author, among others. She is a poetry editor for Union Station Magazine and director of Urbana Poetry Slam in New York City. Verlee wears polka dots and collects tattoos. She believes in you.

Editor’s Note: Today’s is a very of-the-moment topical poem exploring what it is to live with a chemical imbalance. From intimate confessions of the poet’s innermost fears to the broader rationale behind stabilizing one’s self through medication, today’s is the kind of raw, honest poem that requires no small amount of courage to share with the world. We thank you for sharing, Jeanann.

Want to read more by and about Jeanann Verlee?
Jeanann Verlee’s Official Website
failbetter
killauthor
rattle
pank
wordriot

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JACKSON HOLBERT

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KITSCH WITH RUPTURED RHYTHMS AND PRESENT TENSES
By Jackson Holbert

Perfection, of any kind, is not what we are after,
And the poetry we invented hasn’t been invented yet;
We know human folly like the backs of our hands,
And, because of this, we want to discard armies and fleets;
When we laugh, respectable senators dismiss us with laughter,
And when we cry the little children are already dead in the streets.

             * a response, in admiration, to W.H. Auden’s Epitaph on a Tyrant



(Today’s poem originally appeared in Thrush Poetry Journal and appears here today with permission from the poet.)

Jackson Holbert is a senior at Lakeside High School in Nine Mile Falls, Washington. His work has appeared in Thrush Poetry Journal and A-Minor Magazine.

Editor’s Note: Today’s is a poem that considers, in a few short lines, the quest human beings find themselves on, the struggles of the poet, politics, and violence. An honest poem that does not try to be more than it is, and yet speaks to all that comes before it and the realities we are faced with. The last line functions much in the same way as a sonnet’s volta, and I find myself reminded of a line from a Pablo Neruda poem: “and the blood of children ran through the streets / without fuss, like children’s blood.”

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: “THE ALL BLACK PENGUIN SPEAKS” BY ROGER BONAIR-AGARD

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THE ALL BLACK PENGUIN SPEAKS
By Roger Bonair-Agard

Courtesy of UrbanaPoetrySlam’s youtube channel.

Editor’s Note: I had the pleasure of seeing Roger Bonair-Agard read at a recent poetry salon, and I was blown away. This man is an incredibly talented poet and a dedicated human rights advocate. Influenced by everything from hip hop to steel drum music, from American Culture to Caribbean, from racial tensions to human sexuality, this passionate performer is an inspirational boundary-pusher who schools poets on both the page and the stage. Keep an eye out for his forthcoming book, which is sure to be epic.

Want to see more by and about Roger Bonair-Agard?
Roger’s Journal
Blue Flower Arts
“Like” Roger Bonair-Agard’s Page on facebook

Justice Scalia or: How I Learned to Stop Ranting and Love the Assault Weapon

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Justice Scalia or:

How I Learned to Stop Ranting and Love the Assault Weapon

by
Juliet L. Ensign-Neary

Twenty-seven words, and our interpretation of them, have dominated the national dialogue since the December 14, 2012, mass-murder of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. (Adults were also murdered that day, but society owes its children a special duty of protection and ours is failing miserably.)

The NRA, the GOP and Fox News are advocating for even more guns. In the words of NRA executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” On the other extreme are those who want a complete ban on civilian-owned firearms. The most reasonable solution is probably somewhere in the middle—a limitation on ownership of some weapons, with strong licensing and registration components.

So, why is this “reasonable solution” not already in place? Why does Congress not pass a law? Well, it is just not that easy, folks.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:  ”A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It is a plain, well-constructed sentence, seemingly devoid of ambiguity. However, in a society where debate can be had over the definition of “is,” nothing is really simple.

President Obama has vowed to make new gun control legislation a priority in his next term. However, any legislation passed by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives is unlikely to have any substantial impact on the manufacturing, sale, or ownership of firearms. In fact, gun control in the abstract is somewhat unpopular, even among Democrats and Independents. Assuming some gun control measure can be passed, it must then pass constitutional muster by the judiciary.

In a common law system, citizens are expected to know what the law is, and to conduct themselves accordingly. However, to reasonably expect citizens to understand and follow laws, there must be some predictability as to how those laws are interpreted by the courts. Facilitating this predictability is the doctrine of stare decisis, commonly referred to as precedent. Generally, lower courts are bound by the decisions of higher courts, with the U.S. Supreme Court being the final authority. The body of judicial decisions, particularly that of the U.S. Supreme Court, must guide the crafting and implementation of future legislation.

There are three decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court which shape our understanding and enjoyment of the Second Amendment:  (1) United States v. Miller; (2) McDonald v. Chicago; and (3) District of Columbia v. Heller. ___________

In United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), the Court held the possession of firearms not necessary for a common defense, as part of a well regulated militia, is not protected by the Second Amendment. ———Miller specifically dealt with a weapon purported not to be in use by the military, at the time. ————

McDonald v. Chicago, 561 US 3025 (2010), extended Second Amendment protections to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment. ———- There is similar precedent regarding other civil rights, and this case is not particularly alarming, in and of itself.

However, it is Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion two years prior to McDonald, in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), that created two enormous obstacles for advocates of gun control. ——- In Heller, the majority held the Second Amendment confers an individual right to possess a firearm for self-defense in the home. Specifically, the Court held requirements for trigger locks or the disassembly of lawful firearms, in an owner’s home, amounted to a total prohibition of that entire class of firearm. ——–

Historically, Justice Scalia has insisted the best interpretation of legislation should come only from the ordinary meaning of the words. However, in Heller, Scalia conjured the right to bear arms for personal self-defense out of nothing. His Honor posited that the first clause of the Second Amendment states a purpose for the second clause, but does not limit the second clause in scope. It is a highly unusual rationale for this most literal of judges. Surprisingly, Scalia also supported his ruling with references to the Second Amendment’s legislative history, a practice he typically vigorously eschews. (It is worth mentioning that Scalia contorted himself similarly when concurring with the Court’s 2010 holding in Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission.)

The U.S. Supreme Court will be the final authority on the constitutionality of any new gun control legislation. Under our common law doctrine of stare decisis, the Court has already settled three important tenets:  (1) individuals have the right to have keep and bear war-making weapons for self-defense, despite having no connection to a militia; (2) the use of trigger locks cannot be required; and (3) owners cannot be required to keep their weapons disassembled or even unloaded. In fairness to the Congress, what controls are left?

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: OSIP MANDELSTAM

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“HEAVINESS, TENDERNESS . . .”
By Osip Mandelstam
Translated from the Russian by Eugene Serebryany

Heaviness, tenderness—sisters, your traits are alike.
Honeybees drink a rose that is tender and heavy.
Someone passes away. Once-warm sand cooling down . . .
They are carrying yesterday’s sun in a shroud.

Heavy honeycombs, webs of tenderness—
Lifting boulders is easier than repeating your name!
All that remains is one care in this world,
A golden care: how to flee from the burden of time.

I drink clouded air; I drink it like dark water.
Time was plowed up, and a rose became earth.
Like a slow-moving vortex of soft tender roses,
Heaviness, tenderness—sisters—prepared the wreaths.


(Today’s poem originally appeared in AGNI Online and appears here today with permission from the translator.)

Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) was born into a Polish-Jewish family in what was then the Russian Empire. He became one of the great poets of the Russian Silver Age, with a keen sense of the melodies of spoken language. He often spoke a finished poem before, or even instead of, writing it down, and many of his lines became proverbial. He was persecuted in the Soviet Union for his political views, especially a 1933 poem satirizing Stalin. He died in Siberia while being transferred between prison camps.

Eugene Serebryany grew up in Moscow, Russia. He attended Yale University, where he studied translation with Peter Cole. He is currently a graduate student in biology at MIT.

Editor’s Note: It is not easy to translate poetry, to capture the lyric, the sonic, the original meaning and the hidden. But in today’s translation Eugene Serebryany has done a masterful job translating not only the words, but the essence of Mandelstam’s heartbreaking lyric. Serebryany studied under one of modernity’s greatest translators, Peter Cole, and his natural gift coupled with superb training shines through in today’s piece. As for the poem itself, Mandelstam captures the experience of loss in a way that exemplifies the gift international poets often have for wrighting art from mere words. At once loss is both devastatingly beautiful and devastation itself.

Want to read more by and about Osip Mandelstam?
AGNI Online
Prague Writers’ Festival

My Favorite First Line

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103883667My Favorite First Line

by Jordan A. Rothacker

When I think of my favorite first lines in literature, there is one that haunts me most often. This particular line is from a fairly recent read in my life with books and yet it casts a shadowy influence backwards into memory and forward into future reading and writing. The first line I am referring to is from Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky.

It’s so simple:

He awoke, opened his eyes.

 Just five words. Two more than “Call me Ishmael,” which is also one of my other favorites. And I really like the first line of One Hundred Year of Solitude (“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon that his father took him to discover ice”), which could not be more different. So what is it about this line by Paul Bowles, five words that start a novel of 246 pages. A novel set in Morocco, from the city of Tangier out into the desert, about a husband and wife, Port and Kit Moresby, and how environment and Otherness can threaten a relationship more façade than truth. The book is in three sections, the first called “Tea in the Sahara.” The sections have chapters and the chapters have subset. Subset one of chapter one is nothing more than this “he” from the first line waking up, groping for grounding and awareness of consciousness.

Port and Kit are traveler’s, not tourists, “The difference is partly one of time… whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another,” as Port explains in chapter one’s second subset. So why this beginning for a book about westerners, Americans, finding themselves when faced with Otherness in Morocco, a novel that verges on travel narrative? The second and third lines make the first more ominous and relevant to the travel experience: “The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he had just come. If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and space, he also lacked the desire.” And each subsequent line continues to explode the first, He awoke, opened his eyes.

This first line isn’t just utilitarian; it isn’t just a necessary sentence to get a man awake with his eyes open so in further sentences we know he is awake with open eyes. It serves two other functions that are clear to me. It creates a mood, a mood that extends through the rest of the subset. It is cinematically third person and intimately engaging and relatable. The other lines that follow continue this. And what’s the point of creating this mood? That is the second function I see. The Sheltering Sky is about travelers, Port most specifically. This subset, beginning with these five words, is about that feel of perpetual limbo the travelers can thrive on. Each waking, each eye-opening, is a moment of where am I, who am I (for who I am is often in relation to where I am), and what is going on. And the room in which one wakes is the traveler’s weigh-station, a physical expression of the bardo that sleep can be. The “he” of The Sheltering Sky’s first subset (Port) is waking to the world, the dream from moments ago is fleeing from him memory, but he knows in a few seconds he will know where he is, and he is savoring the ambiguity. He can hear his wife in the next room and realizes he was entering another level of consciousness. This wonderful process begins with five words.

Since The Sheltering Sky was Bowles’ first novel and first attempt at a novel, I have always felt that these five words were exactly how he began the whole book (like Haruki Murakami saying in interview that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle began from the image of a man making spaghetti and the whole story flowed from there). As the novel begins with these five words, Bowles’ identity as a novelist begins with these five words, and with the birth of Port’s consciousness in these five words we actually have the birth of the whole character. This is also the birth of the reader’s experience of reading the book.

When I started this essay I mentioned that this line casts a shadowy influence backwards into my reading memory. What I meant by this is that when I finally read The Sheltering Sky this first line reminded me of other wonderfully similar first lines that I had read before it, but had been written and published after it. Mostly I find these opening lines in one of my favorite living writers, John Banville. Two works in particular begin in this fashion, with haunting and brief first lines of Doctor Copernicus (1976): “At first it had no name”; and Shroud (2002): “Who speaks?” Both lines make you want to keep reading like few other short first lines could. Like Bowles’ opening line to The Sheltering Sky, they might not actually say much, but they begin a conversation, a wonderful conversation that takes hundreds of pages to finish.