SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JACK SPICER

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SECOND LETTER TO FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
by Jack Spicer

Dear Lorca,

When I translate one of your poems and I come across words I do not understand, I always guess at their meanings. I am inevitably right. A really perfect poem (no one yet has written one) could be perfectly translated by a person who did not know one word of the language it was written in. A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.

It is very difficult. We want to transfer the immediate object, the immediate emotion to the poem – and yet the immediate always has hundreds of its own words clinging to it, short-lived and tenacious as barnacles. And it is wrong to scrape them off and substitute others. A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. The words around the immediate shrivel and decay like flesh around the body. No mummy-sheet of tradition can be used to stop the process. Objects, words must be led across time not preserved against it.

I yell “Shit” down a cliff at the ocean. Even in my lifetime the immediacy of that word will fad. It will be dead as “Alas.” But if I put the real cliff and the real ocean into the poem, the word “Shit” will ride along with them, travel the time-machine until cliffs and oceans disappear.

Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection – as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, “See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!” What does one do with all this crap?

Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.

I repeat – the perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.

Love,
Jack

Copyright © 1975 by The Estate of Jack Spicer.

Jack Spicer (1925-1965) has been twice before featured on As It Ought To Be. For his bio and other samples of his work, click here and here.

Editor’s Note: This is the third time Jack Spicer has been featured here on As It Ought To Be. Today is the third, and also my thirtieth birthday. Jack Spicer is among my favorite poets, and After Lorca among my favorite of his works.

With After Lorca, Spicer invented a fresh and innovative art form. The book (originally a chapbook, printed and distributed locally in the San Francisco Bay Area, as was Spicer’s way) notes that it is published “With an introduction by Federico Garcia Lorca.” Of course, Lorca had been dead some twenty-one years by the time Spicer published this book.

The above letter lies somewhere between the boundaries of poetry and prose, somewhere between the world of the living and the dead, somewhere between poetry and creative nonfiction. And within the letter itself is a sort of manifesto of Spicer’s. His thoughts on language, on art, even critique of the writing of his compatriots – a not altogether un-Spicerian thing to do. Under the guise of a letter to Lorca, Spicer is able to share with his audience an insight into his mind and his craft while simultaneously doing something with language and art that had not been done before.

Today’s post specifically struck a chord with me in relation to my own evolving craft. I specifically want to dedicate today’s post to As It Ought To Be Editor Okla Elliot. Okla has been kind enough to help me revise my poems for submission to graduate school. Throughout this infuriating process he has reminded me over and over to put concrete objects into my poems and that they suffer from too many abstract ideas and images. I think Okla would agree with this statement, if only in relation to my work, “Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection – as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences.”


Want to read more by and about Jack Spicer?
EPC / Buffalo Author Home Page
Poets.org
Poetry Foundation


Looking Beyond the Surfaces in David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself: a Road Trip with David Foster Wallace (a Not-Really Review by Raul Clement)

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I.

Let’s judge a book by its cover, shall we?

The book in question is David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself: a Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, and it is the first work resembling a biography of Wallace since his death by hanging in 2008. As such, it is an odd start – less a biography than a casually edited transcript of a week-long conversation between Wallace and Lipsky – but for right now it’s all we’ve got.

And perhaps it’s fitting that Wallace get to present himself in his own words. Words are, after all, what we come to Wallace for – that unique and explosive alchemy of high and low, of literary and pop, of slangy and technical, of intimate and cerebral. Or as Lipsky describes it in his afterword, placed oddly but cannily before the main text of the book (in imitation of Wallace’s experiments with form, but also so as not to have the reader’s final impression of Wallace be of his tragic death):

“He wrote with eyes and a voice that seemed to be a condensed form of everyone’s lives – it was the stuff you semi-thought, the background action you blinked through at supermarkets and commutes – and readers curled up in the nooks and crannies of his style.”

So ordinary and not. Somehow extra-ordinary, ϋber-ordinary, able to tap into the unarticulated places that we all share.  “A condensed form of everyone’s lives,” emphasis on condensed as contrasted with everyone.  Or as Wallace himself expresses it:

“If a writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart they are. Wake the reader up to stuff that reader’s been aware of all the time.”

This waking up is what we – or at least I – come to great writers for. But for this existential alarm clock to go off, we must see ourselves in the writer. He must be everyone.  And it is the job of the biographer to tease out this everyone – to emphasize the ordinariness over the genius which allows the writer to express it. Genius, if it exists (and is not just the product of concentrated effort), is why we are drawn to writers; ordinariness is what allows us to apprehend genius. Even in a book as seemingly hands-off as Lipsky’s, the agenda of teasing out the ordinariness behind the genius is present.

And we need look no further than the cover to find it.


II.

[Note to the reader: this is not a review in the traditional sense. If you want the subjective opinion of a stranger as to whether this book is “good” or not, there are dozens of those in major newspapers, magazines, and journals around the country. This is, rather, an analysis of the rhetorical project of Lipsky’s book as I see it.]

In the cover photo, Wallace sits in a study or office with his dog on his lap. An innocuous photo, but let’s think for a second about what it means. A dog is middle-American – you could even say middle-world. People of all races, ages, countries, and income backgrounds own dogs. Man’s best friend. The idea here is that Wallace, for all his “tortured brilliance,” is ordinary. Relatable. If you don’t believe me, check out the countless profiles on Wallace which use his dogs, his habit of chewing tobacco, and the fact that he wears a bandana not to be hip but because of his sweating issues, as proof of his ordinariness. Check out Lipsky in the introduction, describing his first impressions of Wallace’s house in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois:

“I’ve also been surprised to find the towel of Barney, subbing as a curtain in his bedroom, and the big poster of the complaint singer Alanis Morissette on his wall.”

But lest the reader forget that, for all his ordinariness, Wallace is in fact extraordinary (and note the word surprised in the previous sentence; Lipsky is surprised chiefly because this ordinariness is unexpected), this scene is set in a study.  A reliquary of thought and creative production. He is surrounded by books. Stacked sideways and at crazy angles, presenting a view of the artist as someone who can’t be bothered with the details. Not pretentious, however – the lone book spine we can read is The Encyclopedia of Film, which while no doubt a substantial volume, is hardly Wittgenstein. This could very well be coincidence – and I’m not saying all these details are calculated – but it achieves the desired effect of the cover as a whole: to make the extraordinary relatable, to make genius ordinary.

If we share so much with a brilliant mind, the cover suggests, perhaps, by a kind of transitive property of human intellect, we too can be brilliant.

Now let’s move to the title. Although. Of course. You. End Up. Becoming. Yourself. I’ve broken it down into discrete language units to emphasize how important each is in conveying the central idea of the book. Appropriately enough, the phrase comes straight from Wallace’s mouth – a toss-off line in the context of a book-length interview, but one which takes on new weight when made to stand alone on the front cover and, in doing so, to speak for the book as a whole.

Although: This gives the effect of an ongoing conversation we are just now joining. A classic postmodern technique (yes, at this point we can say that: classic postmodern), the idea that narrative has no beginning or end – and it is one that plunges us into the moment and creates a sense of casualness that a more rigid structure would deny.

Of course: creates a rhetorical bond between reader and writer. “We both know this,” it says. “Now let’s think about it together.” This is a technique Wallace uses frequently in his nonfiction and some of his best fiction (see the narrator of Infinite Jest), a position which implies the reader is every bit as smart as Wallace. That this is a lie – we wouldn’t be reading him if he weren’t somehow smarter, more alive than us – is beside the point. It’s a lie that flatters us and makes us feel at home in the text.

You: Just as the slightly awkward abutment of the two prepositions although and of course creates a sense of naturalness – which in turn seems honest, and therefore inspires trust – so does the familiar pronoun you. You is the same thing as one, but in place of this stiff, academic generalization, we have a word that points at the reader and includes him in the generalization. Like of course, it establishes a rhetorical bond: the you here is closer to we than it is to one. It is, in fact, all of us.

End Up: I’m going to skip over this for now, since the important thing is how it plays off of becoming. I will say, however, that it has an informal quality that fits with the title as a whole.

Becoming: This book is a process. While it chronicles a road trip, it is also a trip toward the self. Wallace’s self, yourself. The interesting thing is that this self is not a birthright – it is a destination, somewhere you end up. This is another postmodern idea, the self as constructed, but with a twist. You don’t create the self you would like to be – though there is a great deal of that going on in this book – but the self you need to be. Or maybe it is not created at all, but discovered. As in Wallace’s writing, postmodern techniques are used for old-fashioned ends.  Moral ends.

(Here, for reference, is the excerpt on the back of the book, which I feel comfortable including under the umbrella of the cover:

“If you can think of the times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings.  The ability to do that with ourselves…I know that sounds a little pious.”

Everything is here. The casualness, the self-awareness – “I know that sounds a little pious” – the idea of self as active creation. As moral duty.)

Yourself: We are along on this process of self-discovery with Wallace. Anything that happens to him happens to us. His problems and questions are ours. As such we relate to genius – become it, in fact – which is precisely the reason we read the biographies of extraordinary people to begin with.

We want to understand why we are not them, sure, but we also don’t want to lose the dream of becoming them.


III.

How do these themes carry forward into the book? At first glance, Lipsky’s biography appears to be the product of laziness – a quick cash-in on the Wallace legacy. As mentioned, the book is essentially a direct transcript of a week-long conversation between Lipsky and Wallace during Wallace’s tour in promotion of Infinite Jest. Lipsky’s intrusions are minimal. I will quote a few at random, not so much for their content, but so that you get a sense of their flavor.

A few section headings so that we know where we are:

“First Day,” one reads, “David’s House, Tuesday Before Class, In the Living Room Playing Chess, His Dogs Slinking Back and Forth Over Carpet.”

Bracketed asides contain additional thoughts of Lipsky’s – sometimes purely informative, sometimes meditative, sometimes undermining – about Wallace or the subject at hand:

“[Hums while playing chess: not tremendously good at chess; strong, however, at humming]”

Or later, as they discuss why Wallace won’t take an advance on his work:

“[This remains chess: as if I’m trying to trick him into castling prematurely.]”

But mostly they talk: about the way literature works, about the perils of fame, about what it means to be human in an age of nonstop self-gratification. To readers of Wallace, these will be familiar themes – present in almost every word he wrote. But they also talk about Bruce Willis movies, Wallace’s boyish crush on Alanis Morrisette (endearingly, Wallace keeps calling one of her songs “I Wanna Know” instead of “You Oughta Know”), about Wallace’s desire to get laid on tour and his disappointment that it hasn’t happened yet.

Again: ordinariness combined with extraordinariness. The conversation flows between these two modes with the naturalness of, well, a conversation. Lipsky is more archivist/editor than writer. His interruptions have the informative purpose and staccato style of editor’s notes. What this does is allow us to be there with him.

If Wallace, in his writing – and Lipsky and his editors with the design and format of this book – makes every attempt to have us feel that his mental journey is ours, then we are also Lipsky, along for the ride. By using the road trip as the book’s organizing principle, Lipsky not only literalizes the internal journey (just as the external journey is made metaphor by the title), but he furthers the impression of Wallace’s ordinariness. Road trips traffic in the mundane: hotels, Denny’s restaurants, time spent cramped in rental cars or waiting at baggage claims. Bad pop radio, hours with nothing to do but talk.

Bond.

And bond they do. At first, Wallace is guarded. He gives the answers he thinks Lipsky wants. He is careful to downplay the impact of his newfound fame and his excitement over the book tour. Part of this, as he states repeatedly, is a way of making sure he stays grounded. But it is also a calculated attempt to seem humble and unpretentious. Here is one of Lipsky’s asides:

“[He has sized me up as a guy who likes “laying”… I now know he did this sort of thing as an approach, and I can see it here, his trying to guess what people, what I wanted.  That’s who he is too: trying to read people.]”

This is not to say he is being dishonest. Rather, it’s honesty with a motive. The simple and miraculous thing that happens in the course of this book is that the motive seems to drop away – or maybe it simply changes, from manipulation to communication. Wallace begins to trust Lipsky. Compare this to the earlier talk of getting laid:

I really have wished I was married, the last couple of weeks. Because yeah, it’d be nice to have somebody to um—you know, because nobody quite gets it.  Your friends who aren’t in the writing biz are just all awed by your picture in Time, and your agent and editor are good people, but they also have their own agendas. You know?  And it’s fun talking with you about it, but you’ve got an agenda and a set of interests that diverges from mine. And there’s something about, there would be something about having somebody who kinda shared your life, and uh, that you could allow yourself just to be happy and confused with.

It’s probably naïve to think that this version of Wallace is any less calculated than previous incarnations. Wallace is too smart for that. But the effect has changed. We get, more than any other place in the book, a deep sense of his loneliness. It’s at this moment we fully feel the death not of Wallace the writer (extraordinary), whose loss we already feel or else we wouldn’t be reading this biography, but of Wallace the human being (ordinary). The book has achieved its rhetorical goal, not through any calculated and – in the most literal sense – superficial means of cover artwork and title, but by allowing Wallace the room to speak. To become himself.

And it’s therefore not surprising that in this moment, when we are closest to the felt impact of Wallace’s death, he seems at his most alive.

Andreas Economakis

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flickr photo by Edward Hall

Henry the Corpse

by Andreas Economakis

One day when I was a kid I went for a walk in the old abandoned rock quarries by my dad’s house in Athens. I came across a neatly wrapped white package, about the size of a cigarette box. It was so perfectly taped and pristine white that it instantly grabbed my attention. I picked it up and started unwrapping it. I’m not sure what I expected to find. It was certainly something of value, or it wouldn’t have been packaged so carefully, so meticulously.

The inner part of the package was carefully covered in gauze. I felt something solid and at the same time soft on the inside. As the last piece of the gauze came free I found myself holding a slightly decayed severed finger. I stared at it unbelieving. When it finally occurred to me what I was holding, I dropped it the way someone drops a scalding pot they have accidentally picked up. My body shuttered and I felt ill, a deep nausea reeking havoc from my stomach all the way through my neck and up to my eyeballs. I turned and ran as fast as I could. I imagined Satan’s hounds chasing me out of the quarries, sharp, slimy teeth snapping, nipping, slicing at my legs. I barely made it home in one piece.

As the years rolled by I forgot about the finger, though a deep-rooted fear of severed limbs and detached body parts remained imbedded in my subconscious. I avoided thinking about chopped or damaged body parts. That all changed when my girlfriend Lisa started medical school. Lisa’s severed limb and damaged body stories became more and more gruesome as the days and semesters rolled by. At first there were the high trauma cases from the emergency room she frequented, images of dangling limbs, bashed-in faces, small clean bullet holes, overdosed teenagers and prostitutes with needles broken off in their bruised arms. To the wide-eyed crowd that were Lisa’s and my friends, these tales were like gasoline to the imagination, fuel to creativity and opinion, an apotheosis of our general belief that society had gone to hell and we were all scavengers in a right-wing, conservative, out-of-our-control chaos. Okay, maybe that was my opinion back then. Mostly, the stories were gory imagery to image-starved minds. I listened transfixed, a reaction akin to looking at a fresh car wreck on the side of the highway.

None of Lisa’s body part stories was more amazing to me than the one of Henry. Henry was the corpse that was assigned to Lisa and 3 other med students in her anatomy class. I pictured a cold, Stanley Kubrikesque room with 15 or so naked corpses in various states of aposynthesis on chrome metal tables, white and green-clad youngsters hunched over them like curious birds, touching, poking and cutting them open under the pulsating neon light. Black blood tricked down polished metal grooves into clean orange buckets. Everything was geometrical, emotionless. Indeed, I wasn’t too off in my imagination, as Lisa confirmed many of the props in her class.

At the beginning of the term the university provided every four students in the class with a fresh, recently deceased corpse. These cadavers were mostly older in age, the youngest one being about 40 or so. Cold and stiff men and women were laid out on metal tables, under bright neon lights. As the semester progressed, the students cut open, dissected and pulverized the portions of their cadaver that corresponded to the subject they were currently studying in class. They started with the head, sawing open the skull and pulling out the brain, Hamlet-style. The brain was then chopped up into little pieces and examined under a microscope, Freud style. I think all the pieces that were examined were placed into some sort of orange bag or container that was kept along with the remainder of the corpse in the refrigerators that the bodies were stored in during off hours. Not a single piece of the body was left untouched, the hungry scalpels and saws of the eager-beaver students slicing and dicing every inch of the poor cadaver’s body.

Lisa and her 3 classmates named their corpse Henry. Naming corpses is a tradition for med students, kind of like adolescent boys naming their penises. Speaking of Dick Cheney, evidently Henry was hung like Godzilla, something which attracted the envy of all the other students who obviously had to cut open less well endowed stiffs (pun intended). Nary a day went by that I didn’t hear about Henry’s amazing schlong. Indeed, I think I developed some sort of jealous paranoia of Henry. I mean, how could I possibly compete with a dead man’s willie?

I wondered if penises grow after one dies, like nails and hair. Probably not. But then again, what does it matter to someone who’s already hung like John Holmes or Gousgounis (the Greek John Holmes) or Tom Jones. A friend once told me that she had slept with a famously well-endowed celebrity and that he was a lousy lover at best, despite his huge member. I’ve heard this from other folks who’ve been with guys with large johnsons. Did these modern day Dirk Digglers miss the lesson that the motion of the ocean is as important (if not more important) than the size of the ship? (ever notice how guys with small peckers keep using the “it’s not the size of the ship” saying?)

Kidding aside, I know that Henry satisfied Lisa in ways I simply could not. Henry satisfied her scientific curiosity, her medical mind. One thing is certain: there was a lot of penis to cut into when the lesson on genitalia finally came around. The other students looked at Lisa’s stiff with envy. Lisa came home that night all smiles. As usual she had that sickly sweet smell of formaldehyde on her. She sat on the couch and rolled a cigarette, telling me all about her amazing day with Henry’s super-sized dong. I tried to control my jealous feelings.

As I pondered how a morbidly jealous lover should respond to such a barrage, my eyes caught sight of something pinkish-brown and fresh-looking on Lisa’s Doc Marten boot. I leaned in for a better look but could not make out what it was. I pointed at the object and asked Lisa what was on her shoe. She looked down and burst out laughing. “Ha! That’s a piece of Henry’s penis!” I ran to the bathroom all dizzy and nauseous while Lisa picked off the piece with a napkin. Henry had forever invaded my life. My nightmares of severed limbs and dissected penises would haunt me ever more.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

“Close to Home”: Film Commentary by Karim Abuawad

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A few months ago, as I was looking for a good film streaming on Netflix, I came a across the Israeli film Close to Home (2005). I rarely watch Israeli films (after all Israel isn’t famous for its filmmaking industry) but after reading the little description one gets on Netflix, I was sold. The film was advertised as the story of Mirit and Smadar who “are both serving their mandatory terms in the Israeli army, charged with the mundane task of checking the papers of Palestinian civilians.”

After watching the very first scene of the film, I began to see the disconnect between the film itself and its advertisement. In that scene, a Palestinian woman, in a little booth slightly bigger than a fitting room, is asked by a female soldier (Smadar) to undress so she could be inspected. As a new soldier in the IDF, Smadar is accompanied by her commanding officer who instructs her on how to search the Palestinian woman’s belongings, from inspecting the woman’s lipstick to sending a random piece of paper Smadar finds in her purse to the “censor.” Right from the beginning, I realized that there’s nothing “mundane” about this. In fact, within a few minutes, with very little dialogue, the film shows how an extreme version of Foucauldian biopolitcs gets normalized. So much so, that when the commanding officer leaves the room, Smadar can only think about telling her officer that she was given the wrong boots, asking her how she should go about fixing this mistake.

In Israel’s Occupation, the Israeli Foucauldian scholar Neve Gordon (professor at the Ben-Gurion university of the Negev) uses Foucauldian biopolitics to examine the control mechanisms put in place in the Occupied Territories. He writes:

“By means of control I do not only mean the coercive mechanisms used to prohibit, exclude, and repress people, but rather the entire array of institutions, legal devices, bureaucratic apparatuses, social practices, and physical edifices that operate both on the individual and the population in order to produce new modes of behavior, habits, interests, tastes, and aspirations. Whereas some of the civil institutions, like the education and medical systems, operate as controlling apparatuses in their own right, frequently attempting to further the project of normalization, they are simultaneously sites through which a variety of other minute controlling practices are introduced and circulated.”

Thus, these mechanisms of sorting and controlling individuals always go hand in hand with a “process of normalization,” where individuals under control as well as those who control them become so accustomed to the situation that they can’t conceive of it being any different than what it is. The effect isn’t just a stalemate, but also a society in which institutions of control gain an almost holy status; they become off-limits to criticism.

What is interesting about Close to Home is that the film does conceive of a form of resistance to these mechanisms. While Smadar goes on with her work, doing precisely what the officer asks her to do, in the next booth, there’s a sign of resistance, as we see another female recruit arguing with the officer saying she refuses to go on with that kind of work. When she repeats her protestation saying, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” her officer tells her, “you have no choice!” The soldier is later disciplined, but she proves the officer wrong: she does have a choice.

The film doesn’t dwell on this form of explicit, conscientious resistance. When Mirit and Smadar are assigned on patrol around Jaffa Street in Jerusalem (basically looking for Arab-looking pedestrians, asking for their ID cards, and then registering them) the focus shifts to mere boredom. While Mirit tries to do her job properly and register every Palestinian she sees, Smadar shows an interest in hanging-out, going into stores, chatting with people, etc. Smadar’s boredom and her neglect of her duty puts her in constant danger as she tries to avoid being detected by her commanding officer who drives around in a patrol car making sure the new recruits are doing their job properly. It’s clear that putting individuals under control and those who control them on the same plane would be simply wrong, but as the sequence of scenes where Smadar hides in alleys from her officer shows, institutions of control tend to swallow even those who run them.

This film, I think, falls short of explicitly criticizing the status quo. However, it does a great job in showing the efficacy of state apparatuses when it comes to normalizing extreme measures taken against a by and large civilian population. As Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s short story “The Tunnel” shows us, you only need to turn on the lights in order to make people forget that their train is going through a never-ending tunnel.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MARIE HOWE

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WHAT THE LIVING DO
by Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss–we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.


Marie Howe is a noted American poet. Her first book, The Good Thief, was selected by Margaret Atwood as the winner of the 1987 Open Competition of the National Poetry Series. In 1998, she published her best-known book of poems, What the Living Do. The title poem in that collection (featured here today) is a haunting lament for her brother with the plain-spoken last line: “I am living, I remember you.” Howe’s brother John died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989. “John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic entirely,” she has said. In 1995, Howe co-edited, with Michael Klein, a collection of essays, letters, and stories entitled In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. Her honors include National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships. (Annotated biography of Marie Howe courtesy of Wikipedia.org, with edits.)

Editor’s Note: This poem was by request. If you have a request of your own please feel free to post it as a comment.

A special thanks to my mother for, yet again, turning me onto a poem that I instantly revered.

I read this poem first out of context, without the knowledge that it was about her brother’s death, and I loved it in its own right. I love the concept of these day-to-day things that we do as humans- that life is made up of errands and waiting for the weather we prefer. And I love the image of the poet catching a glimpse of her reflection and being in love with it- I have yet to meet the mirror I can pass without delving into a bit of narcissism.

Then we are given a gift. We are given the context and background from which the poem stems. We get to know that this poem is about her brother, that he has passed away from AIDS-related illness, that the poem is addressed to him and held up against the backdrop of their relationship and his death. And then I re-read the poem and suddenly it has a new life, a new light. Suddenly we know why it is important that the sink is clogged, that grocery bags break, that one notices how much time in life is spent waiting for better seasons and wanting more love. It is important because the narrator of the poem is alive, and she is painfully aware of what it means to be alive in the face of the memory of one who is not.

And what does it mean to be living? For Howe, in this poem, it means that after she takes note of the external world, then of the desires within all of us, she looks at herself and loves herself, loves that she is living, and knows how precious a gift that is when she remembers her loved one who is not.

Want to read more by and about Marie Howe?
MarieHowe.com
Poetry Foundation
Poets.org

Andreas Economakis

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The Mysterious Guest

by Andreas Economakis

The invitation came as a surprise, not so much because I hadn’t heard from my dad’s friend in years, but because the words “Black Tie” were written at the bottom of the card. Promising a cruise around the San Francisco Bay in celebration of his daughter’s wedding, Leon’s invitation both excited and troubled me. I mean, how often do quasi (wannabe)-rebel airport shuttle-driving-black-sheep-of-the-family penniless filmmakers get to go on a fully funded cruise around the bay, around Alcatraz, with an open oyster bar? I love oysters! But Black Tie… Why, for the love of god, would anyone want to party in a hangman’s noose? I didn’t even own a tie, let alone a black one. Buying one, along with a suit, would be a problem with only $233 in my bank account. That was my complete fortune, the by-product of a sluggish ‘80’s economy and a belief adopted in college that this was a world of “us and them,” and I was the “us” on the dark side of the tracks (or maybe the “them,” depending on how you looked at it…) And to cap everything off, I couldn’t even rent a suit. The rental fascists would probably want a credit card…

I ran my dilemma by my girlfriend Marisa. She, possessing the perfect dress, a sense of purpose in this life (she was in grad school), and a desire rivaling mine to be on that boat, did not find my dilemma to be troublesome at all. “Why don’t you go buy a cheap suit at one of those cheap malls?” she asked me. The word “cheap”, offered up twice without a trace of hesitation, seemed an indictment of my ways. Nonetheless, I clung onto that word like a shipwrecked sailor clutches onto a buoy. It was actually a brilliant idea! We calculated that the suit and tie would cost around $50, max. I had an old white button-down shirt from high school (a little small and touch yellow around the collar, but otherwise presentable) and my Doc Martens just needed a shine and a little Super Glue, so… this could work!

I decided to give fuel to my intentions, setting off right away for the mall. Wearing my best pair of shorts and flip-flops (it was summer), I rode my bicycle down the hill, across the train tracks (literally) and into the dilapidated side of town. Here people surely knew the value of the buck. Prices were posted clearly, as if for the blind. (Ever notice how in really expensive stores the price tags are oh so small? Quite the opposite here). I could simply float by and let my eyes do the shopping.

I guess you could call the building I selected for my consumerist outing a “mall.” It was a large, square, brownish building, circa late ‘60’s, when architects must have been so wasted or corrupt that aesthetics were tossed into the wastebasket. I charged into the building, convinced that I would find my suit here. I hate shopping and I was not going to take no for an answer, in this, my first (and hopefully last) shopping foray of the year. Besides, I am a certified agoraphobic. I had to get this experience over with as fast as possible. Swallowing deeply, smacking my cottonmouth lips and hiding behind my slick $5.99 shades, I plunged inward, the image of free oysters in the bay a powerful elixir.

I quickly realized that the problem was of Kafkaesque proportions. There were vendors in every store, lots of them. Perched like vultures, claws at the ready, they waited for fresh meat to stroll on in. I glided by these stores looking at the big banner prices nervously, a trickle of salty sweat gliding down my face, my eyes stinging, heart pounding. Does a bunny rabbit hop into a circle of hungry wolves for a carrot? I think not. Sweaty hands crumpling, kneading, clutching the $73 in cash that I had in my pocket (a fortune!), I started losing hope.

At long last, I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Turning the last corner of the mall, a depleted, post-apocalyptic clothing store appeared before me like the cave in Nazareth. Inside the cave, a bored, sleepy vendor swayed at the counter. I paced back and forth in front of the store, pretending to be on route elsewhere, eyes forward. I was casing the joint peripherally, not wanting to betray the slightest interest to the dazed vendor inside. If she even peeped my way I would have left running, my flip-flops flip-flopping down into the distance down the mall’s imitation marble floors. Nothing. The woman was a certified narcoleptic. I took a deep breath and staggered in, feigning apathy. I headed straight to the suit-rack. The woman looked up, nodded and returned to her magazine or whatever she had behind the counter. This woman was the best sales person I have ever come across.

The rack, a bit thin but totally in my price range, offered Italian cut styles in the $50 to $70 range. Excited, I pulled a black suit off the rack and ran my fingers along the fabric. A sharp crease cut like a Rhodesian Ridgeback’s raised hair down the front of the trousers. “Not bad,” I thought to myself, opening the jacket to see the make and quality of this fine garment. Pepe. That’s all it said. Pepe. Cool, I thought. Minimalist. I pictured a fancy Italian designer, girls dripping off his arms, playing blackjack in my suit in Monte Carlo. Pepe. It had a certain flair. I glanced at the sleepy vendor and she pointed to the dressing room. I stepped inside the dimly lit fluorescent white room and dropped my shorts. Before long I was all dolled up. Trousers, tee-shirt, jacket, flip-flops. David Bowie would be jealous. The flip-flops would have to go, but otherwise, not bad!

Excited, I burst out of the dressing room. I found a stiletto thin mod black tie, the kind favored by the Madness crowd and slick gigolos. I stepped up to the counter. Wanting to show a certain sense of class and style, I inquired about the care of the suit and what material it was made of. The woman looked at me like a deer in headlights. “Huh?” is all she said. I inquired again, slowing my speech a touch. She grabbed the suit roughly and found the tag. 100% Polyester. “Plastic. No wrinkle,” she added, sensing my confusion. We both nodded our heads in appreciation. Excellent, I thought. She tallied up the bill. Just under $70. I was on my way!

The day before the celebrated cruise, Marisa and I were invited to our friend Katlin’s house in Marin. Her parents were out of town and Katlin was throwing a wild party, one at which I would probably pass out, most likely in the jacuzzi. Marisa suggested we bring our cruise outfits with us, knowing my predisposition to crash at parties and my paranoia of road-trolling police. Proud of the fact that my Italian suit was wrinkle free I jammed it into a small bag, scoffing at Marisa who thought I was nuts. Unlike me, she went to great lengths to fold and prep her dress, a gift from her rich grandmother. All packed up, we headed over to Katlin’s in our beat-up old Volkswagen, the windows rolled down so as to not asphyxiate from the exhaust leaking in through the vents.

Katlin’s party was a total blast and before long I found myself all dazed and relaxed in the jacuzzi. I vaguely remember gazing hazily at the twinkling bay through the eucalyptus trees, day-dreaming of the cruise and all those oysters. It was late and most of the guests soon left the party, spending hours trying to back down the suicide dead-end road. The rest of us curled up like cats with the spins on some couch or plush carpet in the house. Marisa dragged me out of the jacuzzi and within seconds I was passed out in the guest bedroom, evidently snoring up a storm (so a pissed Marisa bellowed the next early afternoon).

We spent the next day swimming, barbecuing and generally working off the nasty hangover that pounded the inside of our skulls like a jackhammer. Marisa informed me that we had to start getting ready and I sprung to action. I yanked my suit out of the tiny plastic bag and my heart sank. Big problem! My wrinkle-free suit was terribly wrinkled. So wrinkled that a giggling Marisa dragged Katlin into the room and they rolled around the floor laughing, tears streaming down their faces. I was pissed. Worse yet, I was at a loss. How could I go to the cruise like this? I would be the laughing stock of the boat. My dad, an impeccable dresser, would hear the news from Leon and I would be exiled even further from the family, a black sheep with a mangy coat. I pleaded with the laughing twins for assistance. Wiping her eyes, Katlin said she’d help.

She re-appeared with an ironing board and iron, which she handed to me inquiring if I could handle the task. “Hah,” I said haughtily. “Of course I can iron!” Any moron can iron. I grabbed the weird contraptions and spent the next 5 minutes trying to unfold the damn ironing board. Marisa was in the shower, so I was on my own. A naked Marisa found me ironing in my underwear, the very image of genteel manliness. I had already finished with the pants and was now battling the jacket. The wrinkles on the lapel were stubborn. I decided to turn up the heat on the iron and really zap the hell out of those wrinkles. We were running terribly late.

The smell of burning rubber should have been my first clue. By the time I realized what had happened, it was too late. I had burned an exact replica of the iron into the left lapel, the burn mark spilling over onto the main part of the jacket. Pepe’s subtle fabric had melted under my barbaric hand, emitting malodorous fumes and a nasty sizzling sound. I yanked the iron off just in time, that is, just before a hole formed. I crashed down on the chair, clutching my head in despair. My $68 suit was ruined! Sensing my despair and a threat to our carefree cruise around the bay, Marisa came to the rescue. She smoothed the burn mark with her pig’s hairbrush and a wet cloth, pronouncing the problem gone, or at least, subdued. “Everyone’s gonna be drunk and it will be dark anyway,“ she added to console me. Indeed, when she held up the garment you could barely notice the burn mark. Only when she spun the jacket a bit and it caught the light just so could you see my handiwork. I slipped the suit over my too small shirt, leaving the top button of the shirt unbuttoned so as to not strangle myself. I raised the knot of the tie up to my throat, put on my ancient Doc Martens and admired myself in the full-length mirror. From afar, with the lights dimmed, I looked pretty good. I decided that my tactic for the night would be to stay at a good distance from the other guests, quietly slurping oysters in the semi-dark. Mysterious. Yeah, the mysterious guest was my modus operandi for the night.

At the boat entrance Leon and his family welcomed the guests aboard. Marisa and I approached cautiously, my body language turned so as to minimize the impact of the iron tattoo. I couldn’t fool anyone. Leon’s eyes went directly to the burn mark, then drifted up and down Pepe’s creation. “You dressed up!” he said, giving me a kiss on either cheek. Marisa and I clambered on board. Everyone in our age group had dressed casually. Only the fogies were in suits. I ripped my coat off, loosened my tie and sucked down a half dozen oysters. Alcatraz sure looked beautiful that night.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

Interview with Mark Smith-Soto

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine


Smith-Soto's 2003 Collection

[The following interview and introductory remarks were originally published in Cold Mountain Review in 2006.]


Mark Smith-Soto is difficult to classify. He is a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature, a playwright, a poet, a translator, the editor of the International Poetry Review—and he fills each of these roles with style to burn. It would certainly be a lapse not to mention his Latino roots, but it would be an even greater one to define him by them. His work appears in Nimrod, Carolina Quarterly, The Sun, Poetry East, Quarterly West, Callaloo, Chattahoochee Review, Literary Review, Kenyon Review, among others. His books include the chapbooks Green Mango Collage and Shafts, and the full-length collections Our Lives Are Rivers (Florida University Press, 2003) and Any Second Now (MSR Press, 2006). His short plays have been published and produced locally in North Carolina and nationally.

The following interview took place in Greensboro, NC, early October, 2005.

Okla Elliott: You’ve taken an unorthodox path to becoming a poet—you earned a PhD in comparative literature at UC-Berkeley and went on to become a Spanish professor.  It was only later in life that you focused more on your creative writing.  What were the reasons for this choice, or was it even a conscious choice at all?

Mark Smith-Soto: I’ve thought of myself as a poet since I was a boy. In the Costa Rica of my childhood, poetry was an important part of any educated person’s life whether you were a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer. In my mother’s family, poetry was always highly regarded, and some of my earliest memories are of my mother or my uncle or my grandfather quoting a poem by Ruben Dario or Sor Juana during after dinner conversations or while on a drive to the beach. But if from my mother’s side of the family I inherited a love for literature, from my father the lawyer I inherited a strong practical streak, and very early on I realized that I was not the sort to starve for the sake of my art. By the time I entered as a freshman at the University of Maryland, I had made up my mind to become a teacher, very consciously having decided that it was a profession both congenial to my temperament and more likely than most to give me ample time to write. As it turned out, I was only partially right.  Scholarly endeavors ended up requiring much more of my creative energy than I anticipated, and while I never stopped writing poetry altogether, it definitely took a back seat to the business of getting my academic career on its way. I should add that from early on I found it a lot easier to publish articles and books on other people’s writing than to discover anyone willing to print my own poetry. Had it been otherwise, I might have gathered the courage to dedicate myself more fully to my vocation as a poet. Of course, it may have been for the best that my early poetry did not get accepted for publication. Looking at it now, I feel that most of it was imitative and immature, and I am glad I was not encouraged to continue in that same vein.

OE: How has having studied Latin American literature changed your creative sensibilities?

MS: The first poetry I learned to love and to recite as a child in Costa Rica was in Spanish, of course, writers such as Jorge Manrique, Sor Juana, Ruben Dario and Gabriela Mistral who were often quoted at family reunions, parties, and at dinner-time conversations. But there was no formal study involved, I just absorbed the rhythms and music of poems I found beautiful often without fully understanding them. I could not begin to say how profoundly this early experience shaped my creative sensibilities. I would not be surprised if everything I write or even think might not be traceable back somehow to that primal apprenticeship.  When it comes to the actual study of poetry and its influence of my work, I should say that although I continued to write for a while in Spanish when I first came to the U.S., I very quickly fell in love with the English language, which I learned in part by memorizing poems by Poe, Frost, Wordsworth, Yeats and many others. In high school and then as an English major at the University of Maryland, it was primarily through the reading and analysis of English-language writers that I fully began to understand what poetry was about. Later, as a graduate student, I came to know and love Neruda, Lorca, Storni, and many other Spanish-language poets who I can only hope have left their mark on my work—as they no doubt have on my soul.

There is one aspect of my work which no doubt bears the mark of poets such as Neruda and Vallejo who were unabashedly political in their writings. With occasional exceptions, modern poets in English have pretty much shied away from the expression of social and political concerns, as if, in the fashion of Oscar Wilde’s butler in The Importance of Being Earnest, they did not think it polite to listen to the sounds of sorrow all around. While it is not typical of my work in general, I have written through the years a number of poems with a specifically socio-political intention, and I might well have written more had I not found it nearly impossible to publish them in literary journals. Luckily, I discovered an outlet for some of those pieces in The Sun, a thoughtful rather than academic magazine which does not consider an ethical sympathy in a writer to be, and this is Wilde once again, an unpardonable mannerism of style.

OE: Some of your poetry seems very informed by your Latin American heritage, but much of it shows none of that influence at all.  Your work doesn’t seem defined by your ethnicity.  In what ways does your personal heritage enter into your work?

MS: It took me a long time to realize I was a Latino writer.  Although in Costa Rica people use both the father’s and mother’s family name, when we came to the U.S. in 1958 my American father simply dropped the Soto from his children’s surname. Because my skin is not particularly dark and because I spoke English without much of an accent, I soon became accustomed to being seen, and seeing myself, as just another Smith.

My family’s economic position was relatively comfortable, and I did not have to grow up suffering the kind of privations, oppression and prejudice that informs the work of many Hispanic poets in this country. Unlike Luis Rodriguez, I don’t bear the scars of inner city gang life, and unlike Gary Soto or Tino Villanueva, I am not a product of the Southwest that often has oppressed and exploited its Chicano and Mexican populations. The Nuyorican experience is as foreign and exotic to me as any other aspect of Manhattan.

Still, as an American kid who lived with a Spanish speaking mother in the house and who felt close ties to the family I left behind in Costa Rica, I was never in danger of losing sight of my Hispanic background even if that awareness never became politicized for me. In fact, with one or two exceptions, all the poetry I have written with a Hispanic theme is not so much “Latino” as it is familial, that is, it is personal rather than intentionally political.  I do believe, of course, as the cliché goes, that the personal is political, and in so far as the poetry I’ve published inspired by my Costa Rican experience might bring to the consciousness of my readers the fact that they are holding in their hands the work of a hyphenated American of the Hispanic sort, in that sense, I am pleased to be perfectly political.

OE: You have also recently begun writing short plays.  What is the connection between verse and short dramatic pieces?

MS: The language of poets, to borrow a phrase from Yeats, is a dialogue between self and soul, and their poetry offers us a chance to eavesdrop on this vital, essential conversation.  But there is an aspect of myself as a human being that only comes into its own when I am in the company of others, when I am in conversation, in dance, in laughter with other people. Writing plays satisfies a need I feel to delve into the dynamics that human interaction.  I love the way we humans give ourselves away every time we open our mouths, the way our choice of words, the way we scratch our heads, the long or short steps we take across a living room all can signal the state and nature of our souls, which we imagine we keep deeply hidden.  Of course, poetry and playwriting can go hand in hand, and when they merge seamlessly as they do in Shakespeare, the most obvious example, they can attain heights of expressivity that can only be called sublime.  It is commonplace to say that plays in verse are now anachronistic and have no chance of being produced, but I have written one short verse play which won a prize in a national contest and will soon be published.  This has been very encouraging, and I expect to try it again before too long.

OE: What specifically about the 10-minute play excites you?

MS: It has been a good way for a beginner like myself to break into writing for the theatre because the initial investment of time and energy and soul are not so great as to be daunting. Similar to trying your teeth on a few short stories before committing to taking on a novel.  It brings home to you how brevity really is the soul of wit.  “Less is more” can be a difficult lesson for writers who are accustomed to lean heavily on language to carry our meaning.  A mere ten minutes of stage time to work with teaches you quickly that what can be well expressed is often less important than what can be left unsaid, and that a well-placed gesture can suggest a story beyond words.

One important advantage to the very short play– your chances of actually getting your work produced are much greater than with a full-length piece.  I have had six put on locally myself.  More and more community theatres have found that an offering of six or seven ten-minute plays can be very appealing, especially to younger audiences with ever shorter attention spans.  Here in Greensboro, the Playwrights’ Forum presents two such evenings each year, always to very respectable houses.

And, finally, well, it’s liberating to write in a form that’s new, whose parameters, requirements and limitations are still in the process of being discovered.  I mean, the ten-minute play as a subgenre has only been around for a few years, so, in a sense, those of us practicing it now are in on the ground floor, shaping it, determining what its nature will be.  It’s a relief for a poet and would-be playwright not to have to labor under Shakespeare’s shadow for a change!

OE: Do you think you’ll ever write fiction?

MS: As for fiction, well, I have been an insatiable reader of fiction since my childhood, and am seldom without a novel in my hand, whether it be a P.D. James or an Elizabeth George, or a Dickens novel I finally have gotten to, or the latest by Kazuo Ishiguro.  But much as I regret to say so, I have no talent for narrative whatsoever.  My few attempts have taught me that to create a fictional world—to evoke the minutiae of every day life in an exciting and engaging way so as to provide the necessary context in which character can be explored and understood—requires a kind of creative patience which has been denied me.  So no, I think the world is pretty safe from any attempts at fiction from my pen.

OE: Your newest collection of poetry, Any Second Now, due out in spring 2006, contains many political poems. Would you discuss the new collection and your choice to include so many political poems?

MS: Publishing my first full-length book of poetry took me some thirty years, and I had almost despaired of getting a second collection accepted when Main Street Rag Publishers fished me out from among the finalists in their annual poetry competition and offered me a contract this year.  In preparing that manuscript, I got together every poem I had ever published in literary magazines and every poem I felt deserved to have been published by someone somewhere and then looked to see if I could find a way of giving the collection a sense of overarching unity.  I couldn’t.  The problem was that I have many voices in my head, almost distinct poetical personalities, if you will, in the fashion of Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese modernist who went so far as to publish his work under several different aliases.  There was no way, ultimately, that I could impose some artificial thematic superstructure on those poems.  So what I decided to do was to divide the manuscript into four sections, each one representing one of the principal “voices” in which my poetry tends to come to me, and hope that my readers will intuit how these disparate parts conspire in the creation of a coherent whole.  The title, Any Second Now, suggested itself as possibly the one preoccupation that underlies almost everything I write, and that is a sense of urgency about the element of time in which our mortal selves unwind.

As for the overtly political themes in the section I titled “President In My Heart” I can only say that if, as the saying goes, the personal is political, then what interests me above all in these poems is rather how the political is personal—that is, how am I, how is my own humanity—complicit in the political and social realities which I decry?  Of course, I have often through the years enjoyed writing direct political attacks in limericks on figures like George W. Bush and his ilk, but I do not consider them serious poetry because writing them did not teach me anything about myself.

OE: With Nation Books’ 2003 publication of Poets Against the War, which included such luminaries as Marvin Bell, Rita Dove, and W.S. Merwin, and which met with great success, do you feel that there may be a place again for the political in the literary?

MS: Yes, of course, there always has been and always will be a place for the political in the literary.  That fact has not always been recognized, but it is undeniable.  Even in the U.S., where we so often hear the complaint that poets live at a remove from the sorrows of the everyday life around them, writers through the years from Whitman to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Bly to Carolyn Forché, among many others, have penned powerful work with socio-political concerns.

But I am not bothered that in this country we have few poets of the first rank who have written overtly political poetry.  You have to consider how the pragmatic, mercantile and utilitarian forces here oppose a crushing weight against the pursuit of spiritual values that writing poetry represents.  For a person in the United States to embrace the identity of a poet—which miraculously still happens!—rather than that of a football player or an Exxon executive or a lawyer or a Bible salesman is to take a political stand.  In such a context as ours, to write a few lines of poetry about a rose should be understood as an intrinsically subversive act.

OE: You recently received an NEA grant.  What plans do you have for the near future?

MS: Only one: I want to write!

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: MARGARET ATWOOD

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine




IN LOVE WITH RAYMOND CHANDLER
by Margaret Atwood


An affair with Raymond Chandler, what a joy! Not because of the mangled bodies and the marinated cops and hints of eccentric sex, but because of his interest in furniture. He knew that furniture could breathe, could feel, not as we do but in a way more muffled, like the word upholstery, with its overtones of mustiness and dust, its bouquet of sunlight on aging cloth or of scuffed leather on the backs and seats of sleazy office chairs. I think of his sofas, stuffed to roundness, satin-covered, pale blue like the eyes of his cold blond unbodied murderous women, beating very slowly, like the hearts of hibernating crocodiles; of his chaises lounges, with their malicious pillows. He knew about front lawns too, and greenhouses, and the interiors of cars.
     This is how our love affair would go. We would meet at a hotel, or a motel, whether expensive or cheap it wouldn’t matter. We would enter the room, lock the door, and begin to explore the furniture, fingering the curtains, running our hands along the spurious gilt frames of the pictures, over the real marble or the chipped enamel of the luxurious or tacky washroom sink, inhaling the odor of the carpets, old cigarette smoke and spilled gin and fast meaningless sex or else the rich abstract scent of the oval transparent soaps imported from England, it wouldn’t matter to us; what would matter would be our response to the furniture, and the furniture’s response to us. Only after we had sniffed, fingered, rubbed, rolled on, and absorbed the furniture of the room would we fall into each others’ arms, and onto the bed (king-size? peach-colored? creaky? narrow? four-postered? pioneer-quilted? lime-green-chenille-covered?), ready at last to do the same things to each other.


Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author, poet, critic, essayist, feminist and social campaigner. In addition to being a renowned poet, she is among the most-honored authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award seven times, winning twice. (Annotated biography of Margaret Atwood courtesy of Wikipedia.org.)

Editor’s Note: I was slow in coming to love prose poetry. I did not quite understand it as a literary animal, the lines between prose poetry and flash fiction blurred, and I often found its lack of line breaks and chunky prose format difficult to get through. However, over time I have come to see prose poetry as a beautiful art form, unique and worth celebrating in its own right. I found this particular piece in Great American Prose Poems (Scribner Poetry, 2003), which is an excellent book to peruse if you are curious about, or unfamiliar with, prose poetry.


Want to read more by and about Margaret Atwood?
MargaretAtwood.ca
Poets.org
Poetry Foundation

An Eastern Love Story

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

قصة حبٍ شرقية
An Eastern Love Story
Composed by Naseer Shamma


Iraqi musician Naseer Shamma playing the oud with one hand in honor of Iraqi war victims. Naseer Shamma is said to have invented this technique to help Iraqi war victims play the oud, inspired by a friend of his who has lost his arm in the Iraqi-Iranian war. The large number of Iraqi-Iranian war victims prompted the invention of this technique to help amputees play the oud. Naseer Shamma continues to use this technique in many of his compositions to bring attention to war victims in Iraq and the world.

While Naseer Shamma is popularly known for devising this technique, experts credit a number of musicians, most famously, the Iraqi Salem Abdul-Kareem. However, in both cases, it is said to have originated in Iraq during the Iraqi-Iranian war.

More Shamma clips:

Inta Omri
In this clip, Shamma uses the technique throughout the piece. The piece played is from Om Kalthoum’s Inta Omri (You Are My Life), originally composed by Mohamed Abdul-Wahab.

Baghdad As I Love It
From Land of Darkness.