July /August 2015

founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

July / August 2015

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume ccvi • number 4 CONTENTS

July / August 2015

POEMS amy newman 311 Howl paul batchelor 319 The Discoverer’s Man anthony madrid 329 Lear’s Shadow Limericks Illustrations by Mark Fletcher derek beaulieu 339 KERN 1 KERN 2

PETHETIC LITTLE THING tavi gevinson 343 Introduction emily carney 347 The Feeding bag lady, boxed Illustration by Esme Blegvad naomi morris 351 Fuck Stuck Illustration by Rachel Louise Hodgson tyler ford 352 Too Much kendra yee 353 Doubt Hugs Me britney franco 355 Inward Illustration by Minna Gilligan jenny zhang 356 How It Feels tova benjamin 369 Kaparos Illustration by Kendra Yee kirby knowlton 372 stop bath catchlight viewfinder Illustration by Allegra Lockstadt alex-quan pham 377 When I Spoke Illustration by Ana Hinojosa nova 382 emotions /feelings marla miniano 385 Sea Salt Illustration by Caitlin Hazell lily cao 387 Memento Illustration by Leanna Wright

RUTH LILLY POETRY PRIZE PORTFOLIO

391 No Doctrines alice notley 395 The Anthology This Fire The Elements Are Loyal Stalker My Sea Iconography License From My Forehead To a New Sex

THE VIEW FROM HERE anders nilsen 409 Poetry Is Useless ai weiwei 412 On Poetry sally timms 414 Poetry Out Loud rhymefest 417 My Life Is a Poem momus 420 Written in Rock Candy

COMMENT john wilkinson 427 Drift and Pop: On Writing about W.S. Graham

contributors 434 Editor don share Art Director fred sasaki Managing Editor sarah dodson Assistant Editor lindsay garbutt Editorial Assistant holly amos Consulting Editor christina pugh Design alexander knowlton

cover art by julie murphy “Undiscovered Creature Choreography #11,” 2015

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Poetry • July / August 2015 • Volume 206 • Number 4

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amy newman

Howl

For Toni Keller

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by wedding planners, dieting, in shapewear, dragging themselves in cute outfits through the freezer section for the semifreddo bender, blessed innovative cloister girl pin-ups burning to know the rabbi of electricity in poverty, obedience, in the dream stick of opium and the green Wi-Fi fuse, who marveling and cramping and wired and allergic lock themselves out of their apartments in the trenchant imperfect delight of early day, who bared their minds to bar friends by the train in twilight and saw tiny figures like fireflies splendoring apartments Botoxed flat like canvas, who passed through universities with sensual indulgence addicts devoted to the indefinite space of maps and science labs while the committees shifted paperwork, who left the university from a numbing homesickness for the rez and the old alcoholic lover family father temper crack methamphet- amine birdsong, who galvanized in excitable need and microdermabrasioned took the lonely exit ramp on the nature, constitution, and forces of matter, who failed their enzyme multiplied immunoassay technique not once but more than once because some guy came into her room talking about publishing, hash and vintage cardigans, drunk to the abdominals looking for speed crank coke & codeine, who took Molly and mint and Motrin and methaqualone naked in the unhappy light of Saved by the Bell on the hotel flat screen, with spring of 1924 beautiful imaginary wheat stalk wanderlust nylons travelhope, not allowed to explore alleys or ride the rails or hitchhike either because of the magnetic pink and with all the years of training spread out boundless the rules and safety tiresome before them, Paradise papery Wisconsin-Madison visionary blue green cross- hatched for elevation maps baked wild open unspoiled lands of

AMY NEWMAN 311 Lake Kivu & Congo, ardent delirious combustible desire to go astray rove stir evolve princesslike, who busted out against parents’ wishes clattered cross-county in a Model T with another girl to see the iron pyrite fool’s gold The West and the finally wide open-legged Pacific zones, who wrote letters anyway to old boyfriends before setting out on the breathless orange high desert confusion with gold carrying canvas buckets for the extra water for the car, who talked all night in the tourist camps and were up with the sun and snappish with hunger, the navigators in terror of the steep mountain road refreshing the radiator with water inhaling the rust steam fragrance of open road red oxygen metal and a lunar happiness, whistlingsinging bowwowing mooing at the glamorous elations of altitude and the hayburner no handcuff no hush money open whangdoodle fiery western sky deposits of gold and silver lost stories gun-toting candlemaking dance hall prostitute stowaway freedoms not to mention ball bang bareback gamahuche cowboy, who listened while the mechanic romanced over velocity and atonement die-stampings on sheet steel and drop forgings while the diner waitress ground out pies and pies and pies, wandering nylons suffering while the word of engagements and new babies began its bone descent by mother’s phrasing and martini lunch date with the old school of the hot comb and the inner ear, who broke up with boyfriends and walked tap heels on streets for dentist’s appointment a doctor’s appointment an interview a newspaper grocery dinner tomato, who found the sublet which for what she was making she could afford but the roommate had trouble with rent alarm clock rooster cock boyfriend, who saw her clothing was available in size 00 so it was time to disap- pear entirely, who took a job selling print invitations to promoters where the desk was dusty with coke Aunt Mary Aunt Nora Aunt Hazel and also dust,

312O POETRY who took the cab to the Upper West Side to deliver the express mail package of rocks and rocks of powder for the boss in his high- ceilinged mirrored walls, comatose blonde sylph and suits of bright licorice acrylic fibers, who watched the mistress arrayed in pelts panther drunk and ringed with minerals achieving her highest human form, who leaving in the elevator sad at her scuffed boots of the underclass felt the mirror reflection of her mother repeating little lamb who made thee dost thou know, who considered the elevator’s speculum dilating her cataract radio- scope telescope manifestation, who listened to the TODAY show while she Kindled exasperated on an exercise bike in the new pink Manhattan Island 22.7 square miles of dawn, who carried her infant in a baby sling she designed herself out of thrift store fabrics, who wept because caesarean was a term for last resort, having felt cheated by the dictionary of the pain of real meaning and deliver- ance of child into atmosphere, who anyway flamed ardent and breathless in illuminated swinging as she sang lulling smooth neurons already waddling inside the babygirl’s palimpsest brain, who watched the girl with highlights blow her boyfriend and then blew her boyfriend and then copulated analytically with a stranger waiter painter truck driver in a sorcery of forgetfulness, who philosophized in the meadow flowers on her back to the sound of black flies stirring the leaves and let herself be touched by the rude one so she could see the show without paying and lost that beautiful little gold earring she’d never see the likes of it again, who contemplated such disappointments again for the tenth time the twentieth thirtieth time the earrings whooshing the Cleopatra shouldered sighs the exchange while everywhere boys are having sex and playing basketball afterward and laughing, who is up nights and days peeing restlessly endlessly with nothing but cranberry cranberry cranberry eucharist for the body’s

AMY NEWMAN 313 unyielding sciences and the UTI of the Punishing Boy God who decided who wins, who felt the embryo always crunching futures with crushing weight of the fixed decree by which the laws of the universe are pre- scribed the bitch of necessity the bitch of chance and the DNA overlord, who drove her two babies wild into the lake to what she imagined was whiteness, who from curiosity and an old curse tried the spinning wheel in the coldest room of the castle and spilled drops of blood on the snow, fell into a sleep that would last a hundred years, until, what else, a boy kisses her, who lost her virginity to the three bad playing cards in cardboard plastic coated false love the slippery wet Jack of Text Messages the forcible Jack of All Fours the odd can opener of need filled by the One-Eyed Jack who finally demystifies though it turns out not only slightly painful but truly unpleasant, followed by all the new information, who tore at it with an honest brutal mad need stripping herself this once of the manicure of propriety and sweetheart headband of the high school dance for his long-form journalism of a cock and ferocious butcher meat smell, who blonde as a lit match in Denver watched him enter and stare and took the stare not seeing yet inside the iris a splash of sweetened road that turned with pills magic grass breasts bridge rooftop roadside bedside blindside shenanigans honey, who took iconic photographs on her Brownie camera recording two myths across the street from her house, arms around each other, C.C., secret hero of this poem, lover and marble statue muse, hot Dickens reader — props to the memory of her innumerable pots of spaghetti while the boys with shining minds could wander at night, who blonde as an aristocrat felt him watch her withhold her soft imaginative thighs while another guilty child bride tumbled sweet on a trampoline it was intoxicating,

314O POETRY who fell deeply for his car thief master love railroad seducer inhaled the marvelous heartbeat divine heat broke fed it and waited like the road was a closed door to the doctor’s office and Russell Street the anteroom of creation and love before it went mad haywire, if it ever would, who made cacciatore with the chickens used in the Payne Whitney Clinic trials because they were 14 cents a pound, who tired of Sheila and the Upper East Side waiting for revolution among porcelain and jumped out/through/out the window to mainline all seven stories, literally broke the window she wanted out that much, who suffering as a muse in the limestone of ancient outlandish Tangier may have believed in God but even so wasn’t going to discuss it with a bop poet on the telephone, who hymned the confusing magnetic pink lozenge and painted whore bluesy blue-note secret-love-note whole-note half-note passages bellydancing gentle hip sliding doumbek thrum belly counterpoint shimmyshimmywhimseyfuck, who skirted her soul’s furnishings in the lazar house of man poetics, its closets filled with vests and ties, who imprisoned for apostasy chained up delivered the child squallish and reddening into the ballot of time, who studied painted photographed, raised children and pined, bought kreplach & Whopper Jrs dreaming of three square family kingdom of the push mower and powdered milk, who rode the welfare road trip of pouring innumerable thermoses of coffee, feeling the freedom wind-in-your-hair of wrapping sandwiches in wax paper, who studied and prayed and wrote in diaries and platinumed hair gleamed gloved hands stewed rabbit in blood and wine like a priest and shot the baby out in blood over everything, who worked stable and domestic and artful and innovative and sac- rificed nothing, fig trees excitedly massively blossoming not that one that disappointed Jesus for not ripening, who star-spangled lost in her housebound Eden cursed with orchards

AMY NEWMAN 315 and a million gossipy daffodils, writing& nursing & not on the lists as he dipped a pen quite elsewhere repeatedly, crying purring the distance openmouthed, who burned her novel this actually happened destroyed a second Bell Jar dedicated to him call her impossible but the leap from it must have been split-second maddening rapturous, who blew him three times and then his friend because it was hard to say no when you say no nobody likes you as much when you say yes or even whatever you are loved into momentary relevance existence, who begged twenty dollars from each friend to pay for a secret abortion, her man needing the child but not her to show his father manliness by imperialism of the womb and eventual abandonment like any suburban mall, who protested the clinic shouting who themselves got abortions at that same clinic (they had to, don’t tell their husbands) came back and then protested again for the unborn (but they can’t afford another child) but it should be illegal for the poor, this article was in Esquire of all places, America where is your logic, who stained the host’s linens mad crimson lipstick boy-crazy stigmata her animal flesh gash her crown of suburban thorns completely honest about need, who sketched the body tangible medical painted portraits and lived inside, who should have been on the road but for the uterus repeatedly renewing its lease convincing energy affirmative right honey that’s right honey right there, who gave a light touch delicate hand beautiful chisel cheek blonde wave Mother Image Madwoman chick and ignu driving inward toward an isolated, lonely peace, who brewed serious coffee during the murder and scrambled eggs while disposing of the body, the detective as best man and silence thereafter, still unpublished, who hid his shoes hating to but still he left her for Colt 45 malt liquor Johnnie Walker Falstaff Beer,

316O POETRY and lived the biography filled however with biographies of the others for which she made a home flashbulbed in silver their likenesses and tried love in living room, attic, slanted redeemable love their fingers articulated like saints, who after the understandable and recognizable desire loveshape would then expand, against his will and this was a shame, this lie abandonment anger congenital analgesia against hope plan bug- out for ten years, returning in her saffron clothes her flat dimension the mother saint devotion song of spiritual angers lovingly pressed into an incense cone of spirituality, her image carved by apostles among the lonely goat forgotten sheep infant in cozy rags framed by any window to be honored in her eternal loneliness, Amherst’s Evergreens’ First Congregational’s cupola and conser- vatory hothouse echoing pure song and archway and hymnal restraint, Daisy who bends her smaller life to his in her fenced-in field within which the horse can gallop wildly as she likes, grieve her your best girl with a still, restrained, almost annoyed sigh, what voice in what wilderness, minutest cricket, most unworthy flower I will never be tired — I will never be noisy I will be your best little girl — nobody else will see me, but you — but that is enough — limitless- ness, wilt thou say, ah, ladies, good night, good night, good night ladies — and who therefore know the biology of the soft matter and the clus- ter of creation in its salty stellar lonely archive is matched by the sweet violence of thought, who transubstantiated across the desert with both of them finally under the deep clear her blonde beauty and the celestial betrayals arrayed stellar, Andromeda chained naked to a rock, the Pleiades shedding to doves to stars, to recreate young artists’ castling brains over the mountain’s whelp of monks in open out-of-bodies absolute ascent, the madgirl and saint unrecognized and writing madrigal in bedroom and recipe in library and songs during class and sketching

AMY NEWMAN 317 sunflowers for what’s left of us, and remains magnified sanctified we should be allowed Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba Acanthus whorled and dense and impos- sibly real multiplying in fields an abundance of sunflowers serious beauty, with blooming, ridiculous with blooming, arriving and opening in endless profusion forever.

318O POETRY paul batchelor

The Discoverer’s Man

His handkerchief, a pin or coin he’d touched, a button from his shirt, a feather caught on his coattail — such tokens would fetch a price ... Men came to shake his hand, or rub their warts upon his famous skin; young mothers held babies for him to bless with luck or wisdom — could he ward off the pox? — while others pressed bribes for the questions they would have him ask. One woman, facing down a blush, gave him a scrap of cloth, and asked that he get blood on it: she would return next day to pay him if he would care to nominate a fee ... ? Blood of a witch! Can you believe such a thing? I think you may be worldly after all.

Boy that I was, I can only guess at what he must have made of me; and he, tricked out in a high-crowned hat, Geneva cape, staff, spurs, and bucket-top boots — he might have been a landed squire or country magistrate ... You think us credulous? Of course you do. So young, so quick to judge! Friend, these were days of comets in the air, various auguries, marvellous tempests, sights on the sea — that we might have a witch nesting among us was not the strangest news we heard. Proceedings would begin at dawn, he said. Next day we found ourselves at the chapel house uncertain who had summoned whom.

It fell to me (though why is more than I can say: I had not then addressed a congregation) to tell how, ever since her husband’s death, Old Bess had shunned society; how week on week her vacant place in church would be remarked;

PAUL BATCHELOR 319 how she had made a stranger of herself so long that when she turned to her next neighbour, begging a bowl of curds, she was denied; how she cursed him for this; and how his child sickened and died soon afterwards. I took my seat light-headed among murmurs of approval, part of the crowd once more, strange to myself for all my eloquence, and some three-and-ninety witnesses rose to give their evidence ...

But then: “Ask not what mercy justice can afford until, as civil law requires, you hear the witch condemned out of her own mouth.” So: officers must be sent to search her home — he called it ten to one that they would find trinkets such as beads or crucifixes or other trumpery; meantime she must be stripped and should the devil’s marks be found about her (sure enough, two bitch’s teats hung down between her secrets and the fundament) then she must be kept from sleep and meat and watched most constantly. Old Bess confessed at first light on the third day. He seized on me to write her testimony:

On First of May, Year of Our Lord Sixteen Forty-Five, Elizabeth Bell confessed she kept Familiars including, but not restricted to, a Greyhound called Vinegar Tom, a Ferret by the name of Littleman, a Shrew called Peck-in-the-Crown, and also a most verminous Mouse called News; and having summoned up and suckled them she sent her Imps to spread the Dropsy, and to kill

320O POETRY Richard Tayler’s Horse and Michael Edwards’s Swine. And freely she confessed to having met all hugger-mugger with divers adjacent Witches in other Towns (we took their names) who caused the Justice’s son to stray and drown in the Sea-marshes God have Mercy.

He took me by the arm: we stepped outside. The magistrates were due within the hour. Bell’s list of names would carry him through Essex to Suffolk, Norfolk, Kent, and Bedfordshire — might it please me to accompany him as scribe? The wages would be modest, but I could expect to witness many true and strange effects: he had himself observed a Kentish woman who mothered lambs; and once, contrariwise, had seen a goat delivered of a human shape — evil rambled among us! England was plagued with Satan’s emissaries! We must pluck them down and let the good news be proclaimed in smoke. “Such names,” he said, “no mortal could invent.”

Touch a needle: watch it scent about, quivering after its true north, uncertain, not to be trusted till it settle — such was I. God knows, a man’s life has few turning points — say he forsakes his father’s dearest hope to answer his vocation; or say he marries for love, so losing his inheritance: do such acts constitute a free election? Look to yourself: How many decisions brought you to this parish, minister-to-be? Fewer than you might care to think! We are as we were made. But standing there holding the widow’s words in my two hands

PAUL BATCHELOR 321 I knew chance had at last combined with choice.

That evening, waiting in the middle wood for Alice to appear, I turned it over: whether to sell, with scant words and poor sighs, her dearly-bought affections; whether to leave her suddenly on what must seem a fool’s errand ... There was a stand of laurel we had made our meeting place; I had prepared some words that balanced a worldly wish to prove myself against my promise to make Alice my wife. I sat, then stood and paced about, then sat once more. Then lay and studied stalks and blades. Then thought to pass the time by picking simples for a posy that might sweeten our farewell; but, bending to my task, disturbed a woodlark’s nest.

The buzz and fluster of a woodlark’s flight — scissor and stitch at once! I followed his swerve north where the woods run out to open fields and the coal path spools down to the harbour — there I lost him. Where was Alice? I looked out over meadows yet to be laid up for mowing, ponds and cherry orchards. Hedgerows lined the road I meant to climb next day. How paltry my equivocations seemed, and how unmanly, how unmannerly, to stay and parcel out over-subtle reasons, such that I could not ask her to allow, much less approve ... Better to leave at once. I met with him at dawn. We headed east.

They say there is a bird, the osprey, the fish hawk, so majestic it can mesmerise its prey, subduing it without a touch:

322O POETRY a fair example of authority. But whether, as the book says, the firmament “sheweth the handiwork of the Creator” (who “sets a tabernacle for the sun” which is a “strong man coming from his chamber, friend to the bridegroom,” yes?) was all one to him. Not that he had a narrow nature, not that he made a painful study of his life; but I marvel that his mind could entertain nothing but proven truths that, being few, huddled together like beasts in a storm.

Yet he was merciful, and stood upon these points: that we should not accuse another soul nor force confession from the examinate by violence. Our methods must be nice. Sometimes to keep them waking was enough — if they would sit or offer to couch down we would desire them to walk about — and the swimming test was only used at such time of the year as when none took a harm by it. The man was so averse to witnessing a spectacle of pain that when our work was done he would not suffer us to tarry long or watch the execution; how can you call him, as is the fashion, cruel?

Cruel. You say as much, the way you shift and smile, and study the rugosity of the damson stones you’ve ranged about your plate — your very attitude accuses us! And still you smile. Well, I shall take your part. You think our evidence the product of ill-disposed constitutions, silly souls whose fancies, working by gross fumes and vapours,

PAUL BATCHELOR 323 led them to believe themselves such people as their confessions blazoned them to be; as for the Discoverer, as for me, why, you judge us busy men as I suppose, troublesome fellows out for gain, or else frighted by devils of our own design —

am I not right? Ah, child! Had you but seen the welcome and good entertainment we received ranging from town to town without control, when his name ran on ahead like hope itself pausing to wait for us at a turn in the road or on a stranger’s lips ... to have but heard a crowd of russet-coats imploring us to such alms-deeds, such tender ministries ... well. Unrecorded is not unremembered. One night (now, were my goodwife still alive I would not speak of this! And this but one example drawn from many: I tell it in confidence that you will keep it close), one night, I say, a girl stole to my room.

She was, she said, with child (and showing signs), her first, she said (as I could well believe for she was barely more than child herself), and having neither mother, sister, nor any female companion, and being much afraid of what her father, should he find her changed, might do, had come to me. In brief she was affected by a strange disease: and now, before I well know what is happening, she has untied a ribbon, pulled down her blouse, and shown herself — her pale skin lapped by candlelight, butter-gold, flawless; except her breasts were dappled here and there with gray-green blemishes — and she:

324O POETRY “Might these be fairy rings? Am I bewitched?”

I stood aghast like you, helpless and mute — she takes my hand — her breath on me, her bright eyes on me all this time — and draws me near until, as a flower at the end of day closes upon a raindrop, my fingers close upon her trembling warmth ... But — one more glass, sir, one more glass of wine before you go! Now, I insist: the parish will be yours tomorrow. God and his people will forgive a little cheer ... Suppose you sit once more — why, yes, there if you like, where you can see my herb garden ... I planted it the year dear Alice passed: in summer you will wake and drowse to delicate perfumes ... A glass I say!

There. Now let me beg your further judgment. I mean John Knowles. You must have heard the name — he was notorious even in his youth when he was summoned, twice, before the synod. Pastor of Brandeston? That was his title, though if he sought to make a fair show in the flesh such is the devil’s business! An old man? Certain as I am I, but young enough to play the knave with us, making us run him back and forth three nights and days together before he would confess to having sunk a sailing vessel out of Ipswich ... and yet when it came (after much wrestling, not to begrudge our toil) the fall was swift.

Drag a man from his last-but-one defence — and then stand down. Have patience. He will yield. Permit his vanity one bauble — he is apt

PAUL BATCHELOR 325 to cast it back at you, for pride achieves its final flower in authoring its own defeat. I say his was a free confession. Did it not grieve you to have made fourteen new widows in a quarter-hour? (I waited his reply.) No, he was joyful to see the power his imps possessed. Did you not fear the gallows or the stake? No, for he had a charm to keep him free. And do you now repent your wickedness? No. Cruel malice was his chief delight.

His was the only execution that we witnessed. Before he was brought out, they cut his tongue (“We must have no more juggling from you, John”) and stripped him to his shirt. They fastened him with shackles and a steel brace to the stake and hung a bag of powder round his neck. Then officers stacked reed and faggots about his body, and set fire on the reed — the wind being high, this took no little time — and as I was so jostled in the press I saw no more until a great flame rose (the crowd fell silent then) that sparkled and deformed the visor of his face — and so at last the powder caught, and he gave up the ghost.

How enviously life clings to its toy and then casts it aside! Broiled black, puffed up, Knowles suffered great extremity in his death, which notwithstanding he had borne with patience — and it seemed the people were impressed by this for as they went their ways some doffed their hats, causing my companion to cry out that Knowles was scandalous, that he had carried himself

326O POETRY as though he were the holy sacrament even unto the stake, and that they had done right to send the wolf back whence he came; and while he spoke, I noted his pale brow and the unseasonable bloom upon his cheeks, for these were signs. He died within the year.

Know this: the instrument whereby God called so many to knowledge, so many to salvation; the man of letters that readily could give in any matter of controversy a godly learned sentence; the man of law who persecuted in excess of two hundred and fifty witches — of whom more than half were duly executed — passed peacefully in his bed of a consumption, not greatly troubled in his conscience as you may have falsely heard, nor was he once suspected. And with great zeal he went about his godly work some two years unmolested until the Lord in mercy gave him rest.

I tried to see a life continuing the trade, taking our method north through Lincolnshire, perhaps to Scotland where the savages busied themselves designing ever crueller tortures — was this my mission? To enlighten them? — but no: I made for home with tales to tell, took up my father’s ministry and in time persuaded Alice to forgive my leaving her. Some discoverers, seeking to be justified, have published tedious apologies, but such comes too near tendering a confession. Our sanction may be found in the Book of Exodus twenty-two, eighteen. I have committed

PAUL BATCHELOR 327 (and need commit) nothing further to record.

What comes back now most clearly, and most often, is not the tidy, disembellished funeral (he wanted neither psalms nor solemn bells, no rosemary to ornament his coffin), much less my undeniable disappointment at learning that he was — not quite low-born, yet something shy of a true gentleman — like me a minister’s third son (and his mother French! She had escaped, he said, the massacres in Paris); but walking out together that first morning, our work before us, when we found the verges lit with new-blown colours — bluebells, cornflowers, eyebright — like intermeddling voices, so I thought, each one contending with its neighbour to be heard.

My companion walked in silence. (Hours would pass before I found the nerve to enquire towards what his silence tended, and when at last I did, his answer was so short and quick — “The days to come” — I did not ask again.) The sun dazzled my eyes, and I allowed myself to fancy we had left the road behind and were ascending into the blue ether, England disappearing far below. Already the syringa was in bloom, its scent so concentrated in the dawn — open the window: this herb, breathe it now: the smell is like the sweat of a young girl who runs in a summer meadow, is it not?

328O POETRY anthony madrid

Lear’s Shadow

Outside the laboratory, there are three types of limerick: the boneheaded ones, the witty ones, and the ones that are neither boneheaded nor witty — the sex stuff. For some reason, no one can like all three. There is an irresistible law of human personality that causes people to enjoy exactly one of the types and to scorn the others. I am no different. My heart and mind belong to the boneheaded ones. This is not owing to any idea or strategy. I never chose to worship Edward Lear. I do it helplessly. It is one of the things I do helplessly.

•

“Witty” is a flexible term. Where I come from, we reserved it for delight-provoking speech that included some admirable show of intelligence or knowledge. By this reckoning, a great deal of delight- provoking speech is not witty. The following specimen is delightful to me, but it is not witty:

There was an old man of Toulouse, Who purchased a new pair of shoes. When they asked, “Are they pleasant?” he said, “Not at present!” That turbid old man of Toulouse. — Edward Lear

Someone could say it’s clever. To which I shrug. It is clever; there’s a technical ingenuity involved, OK. But the beauty of the thing has everything to do with the slight incongruities of asking a person if his new shoes are “pleasant,” and of that person’s responding that they currently are not. This is a very choice example of the “right wrong thing.” The wrongness is right.

•

Samuel Johnson famously describes Falstaff’s humor like this:

ANTHONY MADRID 329 Falstaff is a character loaded with faults, and with those faults which naturally produce contempt. He is a thief, and a glutton, a coward, and a boaster, always ready to cheat the weak, and prey upon the poor; to terrify the timorous and insult the de- fenseless.... Yet the man thus corrupt, thus despicable, makes himself necessary to the prince that despises him, by the most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is more freely indulged, as his wit is not of the splendid or ambitious kind, but consists in easy escapes and sallies of levity, which make sport but raise no envy.

That last sentence is deep. I got some satori when I first read it. It hints at the generosity involved in playing the fool. To forego admi- ration, to raise no envy — these are essential to buffoonery.

•

Consider the Marx Brothers. Consider Harpo. When he paints the ambassador’s butt with glue, he does it without malice, without in- tellect. His every move seems an exercise in perversity. A letter is delivered to His Excellency, Rufus T. Firefly. Harpo snatches it, opens it, scans it, and then with a great (but silent) show of disgust and outrage, crumples the letter and throws it on the floor. Chico steps in helpfully: “He gets mad ’cuz he can’t read.” Easy escapes, sallies of levity, acting “like an idiot.” Using words incorrectly for no reason. Starting in, over and over, like you’re about to tell a story, and then saying nothing:

There was an old person of Sark, Who made an unpleasant remark. But they said, “Don’t you see what a brute you must be, You obnoxious old person of Sark!”

The “error” of addressing someone as “you obnoxious old person of Sark.”

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But I perceive a difficulty. Many if not most of Lear’s limericks are more delightful than actually ha-ha funny. It’s the same with Lewis

330O POETRY Carroll. Through the Looking-Glass has one funny chapter in it: the Humpty Dumpty bit. Everything else is gold, nobody’s disputing that, but it’s gold for other reasons. Or, to return to Lear, the following limerick seems unbetterable to me, but it’s not ha-ha funny:

There was a young lady whose eyes Were unique as to color and size; When she opened them wide, people all turned aside, And started away in surprise.

But if it’s not ha-ha funny, why am I laughing? Problem.

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Many craft details contribute to Lear’s limericks being effective mouth toys. I define an effective mouth toy as a small polyhedron of language that is revolved more in the mouth than in the mind, and which causes unintelligible pleasure — pleasure without ratiocination. Lear’s gallop-y handling of the anapests (note: NOT the “inher- ent” gallopyness of anapests) contributes to this. The arrangement of short vowel quantities and multisyllabic words in the second lines, contrasting with the long vowels and monosyllables that dominate the first lines, e.g. —

There was an old person of Tring, Who embellished his nose with a ring ...... There was an old person of Rheims, Who was troubled with horrible dreams ...... There was an old man of Dumblane, Who greatly resembled a crane ...

These graces are seldom imitated. Indeed, anyone searching modern limerick books for Lear’s fun-to-say-ness will encounter sorrow upon sorrow. (All my personal copies of modern limerick books are heavily battered from having been treated just exactly as Harpo treats the letter to His Excellency.)

ANTHONY MADRID 331 •

Lear, for the most part, uses plain rhymes. Stunt rhymes of the sort I find everywhere in my own limericks do not come up very often in Lear. He mainly says beard | feared; tree | bee; nose | suppose; Berlin | thin. Out of the 212 limericks that are rightly considered the stan- dard set (The Book of Nonsense in its 1861 version and More Nonsense, 1872), only 3 percent of the rhyme pairs are on the model of scratch it | hatchet and bonnet | upon it — where a single word is rhymed with two or more words. And there are at most a half dozen cases of “out- rageous” rhyme pairs:

There was an old man of th’ Abruzzi, So blind that he couldn’t his foot see ...... There was an old man of Kamschatka, Who possessed a remarkably fat cur.

Whereas, of the six limericks that follow the present notes, I observe that roughly half the rhyme pairs are offbeat. There are imperfect rhymes, there are outrages, and there is even one case — funeral | tune or I’ll — that I believe Lear would not have touched, awake or asleep, drunk or on acid. These facts are a cause of regret to me. They show that my rhyme praxis is tainted with modern assumptions about rhyme — viz., that rhymes ought to make some show of originality. That they ought to be admirable in themselves.

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Finally, a word about the illustrations. They are the work of Mark Fletcher. Mark and I have never been in the same room together. I have never once heard his voice. I didn’t even know what he looked like until I saw the photo of him that was published online along with our first round of collaborations, in B O D Y. He is a mighty artificer. His pictures do that Lear-like thing: they translate textual elements that are inert in themselves into comic ex- quisiteness. I would urge the reader to study what happened to the concept “a Bible collage” in limerick no. 74.

332O POETRY Limericks

There was an old man with a backpack: No body could beat him at blackjack. When they said, “Let us win!” he would finger his chin, And then beat ’em to pieces at blackjack.

Illustrations by Mark Fletcher

ANTHONY MADRID 333 36

There was an old man from El Paso, Whose rodeo stunt was to lasso A gazelle and a buck, load ’em into the truck, And then pass through the tolls of El Paso.

334O POETRY 39

There was an old person from Burnside: His garden was good ’til his fern died. He threw it a funeral, and said, “Play a tune, or I’ll Sink in despair, since my fern died.”

ANTHONY MADRID 335 74

There was an old man from LeSage, Who was making a Bible collage! But he needed a scissor, ’cuz Nebuchadnezzar Looked more like the Wizard of Oz.

336O POETRY 82

There was an old person from Evanston, — And he certainly wasn’t a pleasant one. When we said, “What’s your deal?” he replied, “I just feel That you people are boring and meddlesome.”

ANTHONY MADRID 337 87

There was an old person from Bucktown, Who was filling his pillow with duck down. So he snatched up a wad, and then, using a rod, Started priming that pillow with duck down.

338O POETRY derek beaulieu

KERN 1

DEREK BEAULIEU 339 KERN 2

340O POETRY PETHETIC LITTLE THING

tavi gevinson

Introduction

What you have here are poems, artwork, and essays, most by self- proclaimed angsty teens, and some by adults who were once angsty teens and still kind of feel like angsty teens. I wanted to hash out the fear so many of us have of writing and reading poetry, which is really a fear of seeming like an angsty teen. I wanted emotion and watercolor and tiny handwriting, void of any self-aware cringing or patronizing pity-smiling, but not commendable only by virtue of its sincerity. Below is an essay I wrote about all this when I was fourteen (I’m nineteen now) — it’s very hard not to edit it, but that would be sort of counter-intuitive to this whole thing.

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When I was twelve, I discovered Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, and fell asleep to a Jack Kerouac box set while babysitting. I began carrying around a small maroon notebook at school, and it became one long poem comprised of streams of consciousness that ran through my mind during the school day. I recall a lot about freight trains, crumbling suburbia, daydreams that exceeded the realm of junior high into America’s greatest expressways, and how the truth is the truth and you can’t hide from it, man. (It was around this time that I also created a shrine to Dylan in my bedroom.) When given free writing time in Language Arts, I always went with poetry and was first to raise a hand when it came time to share. One unintentionally erotic freeform piece was written from the point of view of Dylan’s harmonica. Another was called “How to Lose Yourself.” I’ve since torn up and thrown out both the school notebook and personal maroon one, and made a clean break from Dylan. When I was thirteen, I discovered Sylvia Plath and Riot Grrrl, and fell asleep to Hole’s Live Through This every night for a summer. I began carrying around a tape recorder with LTT in it at school, and read Pretty on the Inside lyrics while sitting out in gym class. That summer I got an electric guitar and tried writing songs myself. One was about a misunderstood witch, one was about a man who kept eighteen dresses of his rape victims in his closet as souvenirs, one

TAVI GEVINSON 343 was about Snow White and beauty standards. (It was around this time that I also created a shrine to Courtney Love in my bedroom.) I didn’t go to camp or on a family vacation but felt like I was traveling far and wide into the depths of my own mind with the drone of the amp in our basement, where I scrawled sheet after sheet of feminist rage and graphic descriptions of scars. I wrote “WTF? why was i so disturbed ... ” on one song because I was sure someone would find it and wanted them to think I’d written it a long time ago and wasn’t actually that grotesque. By the time my freshman year rolled around, I shoved those loose papers in a drawer and headed off to high school. In ninth grade my writing — for school, my blog, my zine, myself — became more frank but not more truthful. It was apathetic, self-deprecating in tone, always including disclaimers and apologies for sounding cheesy or pretentious. I got a C on the Spoken Word unit in English class for turning in ironic poems about how Buttercup from Powerpuff Girls was my childhood hero and how great cats are. They might’ve made good surf pop lyrics, but I knew they were bad poems. I knew I had it in me to write good ones, but tried writing only one with more personal subject matter. Public speaking and performing have never been hard for me, but when I delivered this one “serious” poem to my class, I stopped myself before the last line to apologize for the lame ending, then to apologize for apologizing, then to laugh at myself. I felt like a mother apologizing for a toddler who said something inappropriate but true. Or like someone taking back some honesty they’d drunkenly exposed the night before. I wanted to take away from the humanity in what I’d written by laughing at it. It wasn’t a matter of my classmates’ opinions but my fear of reading my poetry out loud, in case doing so would give validity to feelings I hadn’t ac- knowledged for a long time because it was just too much of a hassle. Writing poetry was at times therapeutic, but it also opened doors to places I didn’t want to go. ’Cause, well, the truth really is the truth and you can’t hide from it, man! It’s embarrassing to think I spent so much time and emotion and thinking on writing that wasn’t quality or at all original. Bob Dylan probably legally owns FreightCenter and the rights to referencing their industry, and there has to be someone, somewhere, (many people, everywhere), who also rhymed “red” with “dead” as an adolescent.

344O POETRY But it’s more embarrassing that I got embarrassed! For as many clichés as I spewed, I meant every word. I had this fervent conviction that no one before me had felt this way or that way, and I shouldn’t have loosened my grip on that feeling upon learning that it also happens to be the most common conviction among all adolescents. I don’t think the way I wince at the thought of those old notebooks gives enough credit to the girl who poured so much into them. Is it fair to a younger version of myself to dismiss everything I was feeling because it didn’t make for “good art”? In a way, it was better art than whatever I do now, because I at least cared about it. In any form of creativity, self expression, or art, you’re giving away a little part of yourself. You’re confessing and owning up to insecurities, desires, ideas embarrassingly ambitious, ideas embarrassingly normal. You’re owning up to being a real person. Who wants to be one of those? It must take a superhuman to admit to being human.

TAVI GEVINSON 345 Untitled, 2014 by Esme Blegvad emily carney

The Feeding

I am tired of people combing their hair and dripping in gold.

Too much lacking the raw of a natural fondness, and I’m bloated with a craving; pack afewthings.

Three times I’ve loved ya.

I am tired of wanting you.

Of dressing myself. Of putting myself forth at every spoonful of cereal or artificial glory.

I am rabid with a consciousness, teeming with an illness coagulated with thought, BUYing your art magazines your red pants your new soles.

Porn is free! Did you know that? Porn is free.

EMILY CARNEY 347 bag lady, boxed

there is a plasticity to the soul that can fit inside sweaters but not inside drawers. how many times can one watch the same porn video before one feels that they have become that porn video. how many times can you attempt to untangle a cross. i bought a black dress today — long, and covered with sequins in the timorous shapes of stars. when i paid for it i imagined myself sitting in it on a curb drinking beer with you, so tell me what came first, the beer or the dress. you put my broken buddha lamp in the hall today because it “just didn’t fit.” i put you on the right side of my neck during a sex dream for the same reason. pisces is the blue cheese of the zodiac signs. are you a gemini? rose-covered curtains give me anxiety and black gauze has the polar-opposite effect. does styrofoam turn you on? it is narcissistic to assume that anything likes to be liked by you. it is narcissistic to assume that anything matters if you don’t. i would like to be a man ray photograph more than i would like to be a person. i would like to be the glass carnival wallpaper at your lips more than i would like to be a person. would you fuck me against your window, even though it is phobic to be naked in public? i have a feeling that although you are a poet, you think that poets are phony. i have a feeling that it’s all a joke to you and i like it, but i am not similar. your lips came to me in a dream, red and shiny like cartoon wool. your lips came to me in a honda and i loved them away, and i pushed them anyway. i wanted to be a porn star, your father wanted you to make boxes. we both felt upset about the wanting. we both learned that it is important to feel guiltless about smashing guitars. i am a 5 p.m. person who buys cardigans to look like trash. you are a 9 p.m. person who likes both kinds of nylon against your fingers. i couldn’t concentrate in yoga because i was fixated

348O POETRY on how much you’d like the ass of the girl in front of me. i’m starting to believe that purple hair is cliché and i don’t like it. i let myself get wet in the rain today because i wanted you to be proud of me. when are my poems going to stop you. this is just the long string of molecules. this is just the long.

EMILY CARNEY 349 White Boots, 2014 by Rachel Louise Hodgson naomi morris

Fuck Stuck

Do I fuck you or hate you? It feels wrong in every limb But I do it anyway ’Cause it feels right when you’re in.

Your generosity is perverse And confined to your bed The only thing you’ve given me freely Is head.

NAOMI MORRIS 351 tyler ford

Too Much

do you remember the first time you were called annoying? how your breath stopped short in your chest the way the light drained from your eyes, though you knew your cheeks were ablaze the way your throat tightened as you tried to form an argument that got lost on your tongue? your eyes never left the floor that day. you were 13.

you’re 20 now, and i still see the light fade from your eyes when you talk about your interests for “too long,” apologies littering every other sentence, words trailing off a cliff you haven’t jumped from in 7 years. i could listen to you forever, though i know speaking for more than 3 uninterrupted minutes makes you anxious. all i want you to know is that you deserve to be heard for 3 minutes for 10 minutes for 2 hours forever.

there will be people who cannot handle your grace, your beauty, your wisdom, your heart; mostly because they can’t handle their own. but you will never be and have never been “too much.”

352O POETRY kendra yee

Doubt Hugs Me

KENDRA YEE 353 Untitled, 2014 by Minna Gilligan britney franco

Inward

My eyes are on yours Looking for my body in the dark pools of your pupils And my mind is in a dark suburban town Where the milkman delivers clanking bottles To the homes of disenchanted Gen Xers.

You label me an old soul but I digress. I am the broken bones you find on a beach On your lonely vacation, too worn down to Provide an exact time frame. Ageless.

I could have been lying dormant as An existential crisis since the late seventies When you made a suicide pact with the neighbor You would never see again Or preceding the birth of the universe.

Buddhists say that there is a source of And path out of suffering. But they do not know, do not say How to save yourself from a cycle of Emotional disconnect, of perpetual floating

On the sands of time, How to embrace introspection’s anchor Like a long-lost brother.

BRITNEY FRANCO 355 jenny zhang

How It Feels

There was a girl in my middle school no one really liked. She told everyone her uncle had sexually abused her and that she had an older boyfriend who was a freshman at Yale, and yes, they did more than kiss. People said terrible things about her — that she was lying about her uncle, that she just wanted the attention, that her boyfriend was made up, that she had never seen a penis in her life, that the reason why she so frequently stared into space with her mouth hanging open was so she could remind everyone what her “blowjob face” looked like. At the end of the year, she didn’t come to school for a few days in a row. The rumor was that she tried to kill herself with a plastic spoon (the especially cruel said it was a plastic spork she got from the lunch- room). It was officially (unofficially?) the most hilarious and pathetic attempt at suicide anyone had ever heard of. I didn’t find it funny, but I did rush home after hearing about it, grabbed a spoon from the kitchen, locked myself in my bedroom, and there, sitting on my bed, I pretended to slit my wrists with the spoon, pushing it against my vein. Is this at all meaningful? I wondered. Remember in the teen flick Heathers, when Shannen Doherty’s character, Heather 2.0, informs Winona Ryder’s character, Veronica, that the school’s numero uno loser Martha Dumptruck attempted suicide and failed? When even one’s failure to live is a failure ... is there anything more poetic? In the movie, Heather rushes into Veronica’s living room during “pâté-hour” and announces gleefully, “Veronica, have you heard? We were doing Chinese at the food fair when it comes over the radio that Martha Dumptruck tried to buy the farm. She bellyflopped in front of a car wearing a suicide note.” “Is she dead?” Veronica asks, horrified. “No, that’s the punchline. She’s alive and in stable condition. Just another case of a geek trying to imitate the popular people in the school and failing miserably.”

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356O POETRY Do popular kids write poetry? The popular kids in my high school were the cliché teen movie jocks and cheerleaders who bitched and moaned through every poetry segment we did in English class. “This is just weird and makes no sense,” was a constant refrain. Or: “Yo, this person needs to chill out. It’s just a tree/bird/building/urn/body of water. Like it’s really not that big of a deal.”

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Darkness is acceptable and even attractive so long as there is a thresh- old that is not crossed. But most people I know who suffer, suffer relentlessly and unendingly no matter what sort of future is proposed (“it’ll get better/it won’t always be this like/you will start to heal/ I know it’s such a cliché but you really will come out of this stronger in the end”).

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Why is it so humiliating to go on and on about something that means a lot to you only to be told, “Wow, you spend a lot of time thinking about stuff, don’t you?” Or: “So, you’re one of those people who analyzes everything, huh?” Or: “That’s kind of dark.” Or worse: “Um ... OK.”

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My school’s Martha Dumptruck frequently submitted poems to our literary journal of which I was on the editorial board. I thought her poetry was terrible. I was so embarrassed for her. What I knew about poetry in high school was that it was both hard to understand and completely open to interpretation. I was told that a poem could really mean anything. Poems could have grammatical mistakes, they could give a fuck about narrative or the space-time continuum or reality as we knew it. Poetry was an attempt to dig into the buried stuff inside a person’s psyche. It used dream logic instead of the logic of our waking lives. Poems were sputtered by demons not sprung out of morality. In other words, poems were deep shit, and they were also anything at all (this became clearer the further I strayed from

JENNY ZHANG 357 my high school’s poetry curriculum): a single word (lighght), sym- bols and signs (Hannah Weiner’s code poems), phrases that a child learning to speak might say (a rose is a rose is a rose), words that have been uttered a zillion times (I love thee / you), a blank page, a collage, an erasure, a Google spam filter, whatever. But if that was the case, if poems could be anything at all, then why is the default to cringe whenever someone writes a poem about their feelings? Even worse if that someone is a teenager? Even worse if that someone is no longer a teenager but nonetheless thinks about themselves with the kind of intensity that is only acceptable between the ages of thirteen and nineteen?

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Last year, someone commented on my Instagram that I had a responsibility to the young (mostly) women and men who were using the hashtag #noonecares. The comment was under a picture of me standing on the pier of the Williamsburg waterfront, days before I slipped into the kind of bland, unexciting-to-describe, low-grade depression that I mostly masked from my friends and family by not leaving my apartment and making excuses to duck out of every social obligation. It was several weeks of lying in bed, holding in my shit and piss for hours until I reached the tipping point (leakage happened occasion- ally) because I was too depressed to get out of bed — the thought of moving across the room and down the hallway to get to the bathroom seemed like a particular kind of hell that I could not agree to. A few months later, when I was no longer in the I’d-rather-shit- my-pants-a-little-than-climb-out-of-bed phase of my depression, I became curious about what having little-to-no will to live looked like for other people. I browsed the hashtag I had used in the caption of my photo, “First taste of daylight in 72 hours #noonecares,” and quickly spiraled into the territory of self-harm hashtags: from #noonecares to #noonecaresifidie, #wanttodie, #whatsthepoint, #depressed, #hurt- ing, #help, #ihatemyself. I scrolled through the photos for as long as I could stomach it, which was not long as it was primarily pictures of slashed up arms, razors floating in the toilet with captions like, “the last of my stash ... if I get 100 likes tonight, I’ll flush them.” Why are some people’s feelings so repellent and others so madly alluring? As a fourteen-year-old, I wanted to be someone who was destined to die beautifully like Shakespeare’s Juliet — freshly fucked,

358O POETRY dead before ever having the chance to know what it’s like to despise the person you once loved. She died just as her love for Romeo was ascending, becoming heavenly. In the throes of love, infinity seemed like a good idea. Pain looked so good on her. It immortalized her. Juliet was my suicide idol — hers was a suicide to aspire to and I couldn’t even get close. Like so many other fourteen-year-old girls, I was told that my problems were minor, my tragedies imaginary, and worst of all — I was told I hadn’t lived enough to really want to die.

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The failure to move someone with what you think is the tragedy of your existence. I don’t know, or just another way of saying #noonecares.

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That thing where we imagine what would happen if we died and our dead, needy souls could float above our own funeral, watching the people who didn’t love us as we wanted to be loved, in attendance, weeping, blaming themselves for not having tried harder to save us, for not having been more generous, more attentive. Why does it give us such satisfaction to imagine them saying, “I should have been better to you. I should have never treated you this way.” When a young person dies, they are forever immortalized, forever grieved, but what happens when we are too old to die young? Or if we can’t commit to dying a physical death but still want to reap the joys of being mourned, which I guess is just some way of saying: I need proof that my existence matters.

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There was this other kid who was universally picked on in my high school. He had epilepsy and talked with his mouth a little crooked. The jocks (there were jocks) would purposefully bump into him in the hallway, knocking his books onto the ground and kicking them so he had to scramble to pick them all up again. “We’re just having some fun,” they said whenever a teacher came out to investigate. No one really had the energy to stop the mo- mentum of cruelty anyway. Then, during my senior year, it was

JENNY ZHANG 359 announced over the loudspeaker that he had suffered a severe seizure in his sleep the night before and died. Everything is embarrassing, everything seems like a facsimile of the real thing, whatever that might be, if it even exists. My whole high school went into mourning. I lost track of the red faces, the number of students who wanted to share their personal story of how he touched their lives, what a good person he was, how he represented the spirit of our school and our town. It was an exciting day ... to be so close to something so genuinely tragic, a rare instance where showing feelings in public was a good thing, as valuable as being an asshole had been the day before. When someone dies, we go searching for poetry. When a new chapter of life starts or ends — graduations, weddings, inaugurations, funerals — we insist on poetry. The occasion for poetry is always a grand one, leaving us little people with our little lives bereft of elegies and love poems. But I want elegies while I’m still alive, I want rhapsodies though I’ve never seen Mount Olympus. I want ballads, I want ugly, grating sounds, I want repetition, I want white space, I want juxtaposition and metaphor and meditation and all caps and erasure and blank verse and sonnets and even center-aligned italicized poems that rhyme, and most of all — feelings. When I was a teenager, every little moment called for poetry. I mean, I’m still this way, except at my age it’s considered inappropriate and embarrassing, if not downright creepy.

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The first time I was exposed to Tracey Emin I was twenty-four and discussing misspellings and typos with my boyfriend at the time who had brought home a bunch of Tracey Emin art books from the library. Her work often contains “mistakes,” like her monoprint that says, “retier softly” in little kid chicken scratch above a drawing of a naked girl on her knees. We loved her sloppiness. We loved how little she seemed to process her emotions before turning them into art. “I’d rather eat processed food than have processed emotions,” I wrote once in my notebook after reading a transcript of her film,How It Feels, where she describes in great detail the trauma of her first abortion: “I felt something slip and as it slipped I put my hand there and what I held between my thigh and the palm of my hand was a fetus,

360O POETRY kind of mashed-up fetus ... ” We loved the crudeness of her drawings and embroideries and monoprints and neons. I loved her self-absorption. I found it so incredibly generous — to be just as ugly as anyone but to emphasize that ugliness over and over again, to let yourself be the subject of your art and to take all the pummeling and the eye-rolling and the cruel remarks and the who cares? and the that’s not art that’s just a scorned woman unable to let go. Her pain was so alluring to me. I stared at the pictures of her depressed bed with the sheets all bunched up and stained with her bodily fluids and dried up menstrual blood and the psychic weight of psychic bedsores from not being able to lift oneself out of there. I had a bed too and it had been the site of my depression so many times in my life. I slept on my own dried blood as well and wore the same underwear so many days in a row that the discharge from my cunt had built up and become so thick that it essentially glued my pubic hair to my underwear and every time I had to pee and pull down my panties I would give myself like a little unintentional bikini wax. My boyfriend and I were particularly enthralled with Tracey because at the time we were courting each other with misspellings and typos. It was the early years of auto-correct on phones. We both had flip-phones whose range of saved words were much more limited than iPhones now. “I miss you baby and my twat is still ringing” became “I miss you bikes and my twat is still ringing.” “Come home and I’ll make you ramen” became “Come home and I’ll make you robb.” “I will wait for you after class my pamplemousse” became “I will wait for you after class my samplenourse.” “I miss you bikes” was mistyped one time as “I miss you bikers.” “Bikers I’m preparing a very good robb for us” became “bikespspspspspspspspsp I’m preparing a very good robb for us” because I accidentally hit the s key too long. We built our private little world through these mistakes, and like everyone else falling in love we tried to become one entity, impenetrable through our arsenal of inside jokes, through a language that other people could not understand or use.

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The year I fell in love, I wrote a story about my relationship with my little brother and sent it to my mom. She wrote back:

JENNY ZHANG 361 I just finished read whole story. It is very funny and touchable, plus nice pictures. you should e-mail this to Johnny too. I was laughed a lot. I wish I can translate this to Chinese. Maybe one- day I will.

Love, Mom

I rarely have the impulse to correct someone’s mistake, or misspell- ing, or mispronunciation, or misusage. Every time my mom speaks in English, she makes a mistake. She pronounces tissue “tee-shoe” and once, in the middle of the night, when she was sick with the flu she woke violently sneezing and asked my dad to get her a “tee-shoe,” and so he got up and pulled a T-shirt from the drawer, thinking she was cold. Later, I tried to teach both of them how to “correctly” pro- nounce “tissue” and “T-shirt” and I truly, truly, truly felt like a scum- bag.

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But I have to get back to Tracey Emin and her misspellings and her intensity and her nakedness. I mean her literal nakedness and her emotional nakedness, both subject to such revulsion and praise and fascination and snap judgment and boredom and ugly patronizing and overt cringing. I look at the photo from her show I’ve Got It All where she’s sitting on the floor, legs bent and spread, wearing chains around her neck and little messy braids tucked behind her ear. She’s shoving bills and coins and miscellaneous bits of junky flotsam and jetsam. Her tits look unbelievably good and her legs look tired and she’s looking down at all this garbage and bills and the moment cap- tured is in a sense so completely trashy and gleeful and celebratory and excessive and weird, but in another sense, the photo is so much that it becomes a statement against allowing others to tell your story, against those who would insist on your victimhood. When I look at that photo, I don’t pity her at all. I love her. She is the first poet I have loved. And her scratched out poems are the greatest poems I know. One of her monoprints is a drawing of a naked girl standing in front of a nondescript black puddle, and next to it, the words:

362O POETRY pethetic little thing

Aren’t we? At least those of us who still risk revealing ourselves in public? In How It Feels, Tracey narrates through a voiceover her struggle to make art after her abortion:

Ah ... I gave up painting, I gave up art, I gave up believing, I gave up faith. I had what I called my emotional suicide, I gave up a lot of friendships with people, I just gave up believing in life really and it’s taken me years to actually start loving and believing again. I realized that there was a greater idea of creativity. Greater than anything I could make just with my mind or with my hands, I realized there was something ... the essence of creativity, that moment of conception, the whole importance, the whole being of everything and I realized that if I was going to make art it couldn’t be about ... it couldn’t be about a fuckin’ picture. It couldn’t be about something visual. It had to be about where it was really coming from and because of the abortion and because of conceiving, I had a greater understanding of where things really came from and where they actually ended up so I couldn’t tolerate, or, or, err, I just felt it would be unforgivable of me to start making things, filling the world up with more crap. There’s no reason for that. But if I couldn’t fill the world up with someone which I could love for ever and ever and ever then there was no way I could fill the world up with just like menial things. That’s art.

I guess that is what is so embarrassing about being a poet, that you might be filling the world up with more crap. That your pathetic little thing is not interesting to anyone but yourself. When the warehouse that housed her piece Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 — a tent with all the names of everyone she slept with embroidered on the inside — burned down, journalist Tom Lubbock wrote in The Independent,

But it’s odd to hear talk about irreplaceable losses. Really? You’d have thought that, with the will and the funding, many of these

JENNY ZHANG 363 works were perfectly replaceable. It wouldn’t be very hard for Tracey Emin to re-stitch the names of Every One I Have Ever Slept With onto a little tent (it might need some updating since 1995).

If even internationally recognized artists can be invalidated with just one, “um ... OK,” then what about the rest of us? #noonecares

•

The quote I kept seeing again and again in all of these Instagram self- harm and suicide hashtags: “No one cares unless you’re pretty or dying.” But there were others as well:

I hope my last breath is a sigh of relief.

disgusted by my own self

I remember everything that you forgot

do you ever feel worthless

please please please let me die in my sleep

This is how you make me feel, like a black mass of nothingness, an ugly space filled with my own sadness

I fucked up I failed — it was my disaster — my choice — I just didn’t expect to feel so bad — so foolish and so afraid of ever being touched.

All of these but especially the last one remind me of Tracey Emin’s artwork. There’s a part in her essay “You Left Me Breathing” where she writes about the dissolution of a relationship:

You left me — you left me breathing — just half alive — curled up like some small baby seal, clubbed half to death — you left me alone — you left me breathing — half alive —

Half alive is not dead — stains on the shore, blood seeping into

364O POETRY the water, but definitely not dead. I tried to think of and remember the times when I had cried, not just tears that ran down my cheeks, but the breathless sobs of overwrought, uncontrol- lable emotion.

I don’t know if we, as a culture, feel compelled to extend much sym- pathy to those who are half alive. Half alive is not dead.

•

In her neons, Tracey Emin takes a material that has long been associ- ated with seediness to communicate some very adolescent feelings. Neon is cheesy, neon is tacky, neon hangs over love motels off the highway that charge by the hour, neon blinks in the part of town where the riffraff linger, where ne’er-do-wells pass each other on street corners, where people who might be there one day and dead the next hang out. Tracey’s neons hang out in galleries, glow bright in Times Square, and they cycle through a moving range of teeny emotions, from the hopeful, Fantastic to Feel Beautiful Again, to the moody, Sorry Flowers Die, to the bratty, people like you need to fuck people like me. Some of her neon messages are crossed out, i know i know i know, while others literally appear as indecipherable scribbles.

My favorite neon is the one that simply says:

Just Love me

•

Is there anything so inadequate as the words “I love you”? Is there anything so perfectly capable as “I love you”? “O!” I said when my boss at my first real job working as an union organizer told me, “We don’t do midriffs here.” “O! Okay!” I said. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “you look great and you should show that off on your own time. But just as a rule, we don’t do midriffs at work.” “O!” I said when a boy I waited all year to meet again in Paris told me, “I want to elope with you,” while we were on a train from Paris to Nice. We spent three days eating sandwiches from the garbage bins outside of cafes. We tried to go to an outdoor movie

JENNY ZHANG 365 screening of Terminator 3 on a cliff that overlooked the Mediterranean Sea, but it was twenty euros to enter and we were nineteen short, so he hoisted me up onto a tree — “O!” I said, “I’m gonna fall,” — and took off my underwear and scrunched it up into the pocket of my dress because I had an urinary tract infection and needed to pee every twenty minutes, my diseased urine dribbling through the leafy branches. “O!” I said, “I hope I don’t accidentally pee on someone’s head.” Afterward we said goodbye in the doorway of the studio I was subletting in the Bastille — he was leaving to go back to Scotland and I was leaving to go back to the US — and just as I was beginning to mourn what I had to leave behind, I heard a knock at the door and it was him again. “It would be easy to fall in love with someone like you ... difficult in fact not to,” he said, granting me my lifelong wish of being my own protagonist in a movie. “O ... ” I said, “I won’t be able to forget you.” “O!” I said when I saw my grandmother for the first time in three years, chilled by how old she looked this time, too old to dye her hair black like how she used to and how the hair dye she used was so cheap that it would run down her scalp and the little black drip marks would remain on her forehead for days. She was too old to curl her bangs by wrapping them around an empty can of Pepsi and then taking me and my brother out to the store to buy more with her Pepsi can roller on prominent display. O! I was mortified back then. “O!” I said when her nose started bleeding as soon as she saw my brother, and I noticed how small she was sitting in that wheelchair, how at every stage we occupy a different throne and hers now was that of a sick old person. “O!” I said, “you must,” when she said she wanted to make one last trip to the United States to see us, even though I knew she would never make that trip. “O!” I said when she told me she likes to have conversations with me and my brother in her dreams. We come to her and we are just the age we were when she took care of us and lived with us in New York. “O! Yes, I remember,” I say to every memory she details even though I do not remember any of it. “O!” I write in my poems sometimes with nothing to follow but it is wonderful to use that letter and that excla- mation mark. It is wonderful to try and say anything. O maybe no one really does care. Maybe it is humiliating to attempt anything. I sincerely don’t know why poetry can be mortifying but tattoos can be cool. I think everyone wants to make something touchable, but most of

366O POETRY us don’t out of fear of being laughable. I’m not saying I’m fearless. My mom used to ask her mom to touch her earlobes so she could fall asleep. When she immigrated to New York and could no longer fall asleep at her mother’s house in Shanghai, she started asking me and my father. I remember one time I said, I don’t get it, why do you like that? Let me show you, she said, and she rubbed my earlobes until I couldn’t help but close my eyes. I started to see differently. I think we were spooning. Or I had my head in her lap and she was sitting upright against the bed. “Do you see how good it feels to be touched there?” she asked me. I did.

JENNY ZHANG 367 Wading, 2014 by Kendra Yee tova benjamin

Kaparos

This chicken is atonement with wings trapped in the Rabbi’s fist The hen shall meet death but I will enjoy a long, pleasant life This chicken is a squawking substitute he swings over my head until it swells with my sins This is my vicarious offering This chicken will be held accountable so I can be forgiven Zos chalifasi, zos tamurasi, zos kaparasi

“I once met a girl from Russia [who had been molested] and I told her: so? What, do you think you’re the only one who has been molested? You think your mother and your grandmother made it through their teenage years without being molested? So what, they stopped life, they wouldn’t raise a family? Why are you so fragile?”

This chicken is a kapara: a cover-up We bring it to the slaughterhouse filled with soft stinking piles of poultry The Rabbi severs its trachea quickly with an incredibly sharp perfectly smooth blade He slides it across the esophagus and neck arteries to ensure it does not suffer as it dies This chicken symbolizes the urgency of repentance or the importance of tradition or the tradition of shifting transgressions instead of taking responsibility for them

TOVA BENJAMIN 369 “You think nobody is allowed to touch you? What are you, holy? So you were touched! That’s it. What’s the transgression? Keep it in context. It’s not a big transgression that’s been done against you. Are you that damaged? You’re not that damaged, cut it out.”

Once the chicken is dead it is released to bleed and stain the ground with collected sins It is customary to cover the blood with dirt before the chicken is inspected to ensure the internal organs are healthy and not damaged You’re not that damaged Each year the practice is repeated You think nobody is allowed to touch you? Each year the chickens hang and hold sins This hen shall meet death but I will enjoy a long, pleasant life

This chicken and I are atonements with wings trapped in sweaty fists and swollen with sins This chicken has been whirled around heads for generations while women have been touched for generations. What’s the transgression? This chicken and I have been hanging from these hands for generations This chicken is my exchange

370O POETRY Holding the holy’s sins This chicken is my substitute forget my misgivings staining the ground with tradition that covers over the blood with dirt until all is forgotten

TOVA BENJAMIN 371 kirby knowlton

stop bath

most of my regrets have to do with water, light filtered through shower curtain, your skin like yellowed paper. i sat on bathroom tiles cold like clammy hands i didn’t want to hold and waited for you. i didn’t think to be embarrassed then.

neither of us could sleep that night. the floorboards creaked and only now do i feel guilty about sneaking into bed with you.

but that was months ago. in a room i’ll never see again parts of us have begun to die.

they say that every seven years your body replaces each cell it has ever known.

soon i will be new again.

some nights in my dorm room i wake up crying and there’s nothing humble about it. when moonlight spills across my bed like ilfosol-3, gets caught in my throat like a soreness,

it isn’t because i miss you. rather, the dark room at my old high school where i used tongs

372O POETRY to move your picture from one chemical bath to another. in a room i’ll never see again your face develops right in front of me.

KIRBY KNOWLTON 373 stop bath, 2014 by Allegra Lockstadt catchlight

under the gervais st. bridge, our voices domed like a cathedral. shoulders dipped in sunlight, a baptism of sorts. we came to take pictures. searched for subjects like graffiti on piers, what my mother calls angel rays in the sky, that yellowed, humid glint in your eyes. maybe i ran out of film or my batteries died because when we finally found our shot, you used your iphone. neither of us have a right to decide what is holy. i told you i was almost a catholic baby, a half-lie i wanted to be true if only because i knew you would be disappointed. there is no glory in either of our doubts: your face when i talked of prayer, how walking across that bridge back to your car, i remembered that what gives a photo life is artificial light.

KIRBY KNOWLTON 375 viewfinder

i thought you had a summer home in barcelona because i had seen pictures of you in front of la sagrada família and knew your father had money. so maybe that’s why when i first met you i didn’t know what to say, someone too worldly to have anything to learn from me.

then there was your halloween party where i managed not to be in any of the photos. perhaps it was for the best.

upstairs, on a couch i’ll never sit on again, an image of us has started to yellow: me, blushing because jamie lee curtis’s breasts are on screen, and you, nervous because all your other guests left us alone.

nothing happened. at least for another year or so.

sometimes it’s hard to guess how long film needs to be exposed. i wanted to get the colors right.

376O POETRY alex-quan pham

When I Spoke

When I spoke the words I am gay I had let them fester like blood on a prison cell wall. I hadn’t known that they would free themselves.

They scaled the swollen gutter of my throat, and shot themselves right through Uncle Andy’s diaphragm, holding the air in lungs hostage so he had no words left of his own. He could only unfurl his vinegar lips to sputter silent thank yous across my brow.

I kissed the darkness three times, because it stole those three merciless words from me before my Mother could.

She told me that I would never survive a New York winter:

Mother, painted face and gossamer cheeks. It wasn’t you walking down the hall to Economics, when you heard a familiar voice, a voice that told jokes you always laughed at in class, and he said: I can tolerate faggots, but if they flirt with me, I wouldn’t hesitate to beat them down.

I swore that was the best joke I’d ever heard, because my stomach laughed itself into hollow tree trunk, and then nothingness.

Mother, painted face and gossamer cheeks,

ALEX-QUAN PHAM 377 Fix My Boy, 2014 by Ana Hinojosa you wouldn’t know that I hated him more than he hated me.

Let me tell you what makes me measure my existence by the pauses, when the silence between each stammering heartbeat screams like a head snapping forward.

The taste of gangrene is much too sweet, so it’s better to slide my fingers across my swollen gutter throat, aching for that ticking pulse to just stand still, when each throb of the heart will dance to the cadence of euthanasia.

But the rabid pounding against my ribcage, fists upon flesh, bare-chested, is the wielding of hammer and chisel. He is a blacksmith,

And it is he who wrought my personhood.

ALEX-QUAN PHAM 379 3

I can’t tell you who I am.

But I can tell you that as I sat in that lavender bedroom, when my Mother spit that quivering prayer, fix my boy, fix my boy, I knew then, the worst combinations of words always came in threes. But I, made of only jagged elbows, clicking jawbone and slivers of teenage torso,

I pieced each slab of soiled skin back together, and I hissed at her, I am consummate and I am beauty and you cannot fix what is not broken.

And I can tell you that once, a woman christened me Angel and told me what my Mother couldn’t, that the venom in my veins was only stardust. She had all of her Angels turn their eyes up to that slice of heaven and we screamed yes yes yes until we became phoenixes, rising from the ashes of our yesterdays.

And I can tell you that my little brother has the voice of weathered sidewalks, rich

380O POETRY with the cracks of prepuberty and smooth like innocence unsullied. And his I believe in you could sing every spilled breath to sleep.

I can tell you that my Mother could very well be right when she told me I would never survive a New York winter, because I am only jagged elbows, clicking jawbone, and slivers of teenage torso. But there is one thing I know for certain: that boy, who let those three merciless words scale his swollen gutter of a throat, he is a blacksmith, and he has taught me everything.

ALEX-QUAN PHAM 381 nova

emotions/feelings

In the beginning was the word and the word begat a moment; a laying on of hands to carefully tear the pages from my spine. This is one of the small ways in which the spirit has come to know flight. Much like how bitter medicine can be good for us, I keep still and listen. Every part of what I keep safe in journals, on my rainy day music playlist, in my chest and whispered inbetween my palms before bed is expertly conjured out of me and laid bare in another’s voice. The woman on stage holds my entire self in her breath, telling my whole life in her rhythms. She leapt out of an anthology/left behind a country/stepped out of her anxiety to read me before a room full of strangers. She came here; all open heart and steady hands with her art in her voice, to speak existence, and is this not the best thing? The best thing life could have given me is the love I carry for this old griot magic, poetry. Ever since I was thirteen years old and too caught up in my teenage angst to appreciate that I had not even begun to scratch the surface of “why is my life so hard?” I was drawn into a new world where words hold infinite power. The words that belonged to a song, a preacher, or even an amazing book could do more than a lot but not quite enough. The way poetry revealed itself as meaningful was gradual, like learning a word or phrase for the first time and then suddenly seeing and hearing it everywhere afterward — making you wonder if it had even really existed before you stumbled upon it — but making your life and worldview that much richer now that it had been found. I found that poetry, especially the kind that one experienced from the writer’s own mouth, was as familiar and as inviting as a memory; these doors in our minds are forever open and all it takes to usher us back in is a smell, a sound, a story. Something deep inside me takes flight each time I am fortunate enough to witness an amazing poet at work. It always feels like discovering a song that narrates my life perfectly or even a church sermon that, uncharacteristically, touches me but even better — that allure of plain speech sprinkled with met- aphors, rhymes, and poetic devices containing mutual experiences that form the inimitable human connection between art and audience. During different parts of the show, each of us looking up at that

382O POETRY stage is played back to ourselves. It’s healing to hear. It’s soothing to know. Knowing that I moonlight as a poet, to do as they do, is a balance between bouts of anxiety and a wholesome exercise in bravery. At the very least, I have to acknowledge the courage involved in gathering myself — my honesty, my hurts and my triumphs — to share with people. In being my harshest critic, that one fact always has to be given its due, regardless of how much others or myself are picking me apart. “I’ll never be perfect but at least now I’m brave,” sings Alicia Keys in “Brand New Me,” and it resonates. Beyond the charm of an applause, a beaming audience, and some recognition, the silver lining in having to share some of my worst parts and foulest times is the simple gift of knowing that I survived whatever it was enough to be able to speak on it. That is the magic and maybe the attraction that turns the spectator into the inspired, the inspired into the poet, the poet into the performer, and the performer into the spectator once more. Even when I find myself at a point where my mind and heart are struggling to process a series of experiences into things that can be made sense of, there will always be a poet who my soul can trust to articulate me perfectly. It makes me feel so good to know that being a poet means that one can give so much of themselves — can create so much feeling in others without losing any part of what makes them special. The gift is endlessly multiplied in the sharing.

NOVA 383 shallow body, 2014 by Caitlin Hazell marla miniano

Sea Salt

On our first trip to the beach together I cut my foot on sharp rocks lining the shore and watched the ocean lick the crimson clean off, the salt on my tongue a slight distraction from the deep blue, the wide open, the playground sting. I’m sorry my flesh is softer than it has to be, my skin thinner than yours. I’m sorry there are parts of me I have scrubbed raw, hurt; I only wanted to be polished, untainted, good as new. I’m sorry I didn’t see the waves crashing, didn’t see any of this coming; I’m sorry I wasn’t careful, or strong. When the sea soaked up my blood that day I thought maybe it needed to drink too, needed to kiss, needed to need. I thought maybe you had always been right — when you drain my body of tears you also drain it of salt and dust so that you can shrink me down two sizes smaller and I can fit neatly into your life without taking up too much space, so that you can carry me with you wherever you go, to cities and mountains and valleys and all the oceans you’ve never explored. Tell me, please, if you find something. Tell me if you need me to search, too. Tell me if there are places you still have to visit, things you still have to unearth. Tell me if there’s any way to love you, deep blue and wide open, soft and scrubbed and thin, flesh and skin, shrinking bones, raw parts, any way at all, without letting myself bleed.

MARLA MINIANO 385 Treasures, 2014 by Leanna Wright lily cao

Memento

I give a piece quite near away, then another, one and two to three and say good-bye with some dismay.

We might have been twins, I born in May and she of the blistered January colored like the vibrant cray- on, clinging on to toys of the day, as mine become that of history. “Again,” she cries and I obey.

I hold the script of the gone by matinee: before I ever found a scar, a yawn, a he; past the years I’ve spun to macramé.

Soon I must go, and she will stay, dwelling under the apple tree. never to wander blind in first foray.

Sentient air, lead her not to disarray. She flails. I walk. We are matching memory. I have things she never will, a little say. So I pull away and board the last ferry.

LILY CAO 387

RUTH LILLY POETRY PRIZE PORTFOLIO

No Doctrines

In a recent interview with 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize recipient Alice Notley, Adam Plunkett remarked that:

Any honest introduction of Alice Notley should acknowledge that you can’t quite introduce her. She has written too much, for too long, in too many different ways, and if any principle explains her work, it’s what she calls “disobedience,” a refusal to comply with any movement or style or idea or identity.

It feels impossible to introduce Notley by this account, which is underscored by the poet’s having published some thirty books over forty-five years. Impossible, that is, until you think about that word, “disobedience,” which illuminates her work, as well as the role of a poet generally. It’s a long word, as English goes, and has a long history. It appears in the fourteenth-century English romance Arthur, in the works of Lydgate, Shakespeare, Milton, and Edward Gibbon, and also in Benjamin Jowett’s landmark translation of Plato. It’s a literary word par excellence, yet it’s an everyday one, too; it retains traces of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, though it can denote everything from routine teenage rebelliousness to urgent headlines about Occupy movements and whistle-blowers. The word covers a wide range of serious ethical considerations, and at the same time smacks of mere impudence, willfulness, loss of allegiance. The question to be asked is: Disobedient to whom? A government, a tradition, no doubt; but mainly, those who disobey are questioning interrelations in our society. It is disobedient to assert that wisdom and justice don’t become virtues by the fiat of majorities, or of those who hold power. When Thoreau said that it is “not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize,” he implied not only that disobedience op- poses complacency and passivity, but that the work of disobedience is never done, that in fact it both precedes and outlives us. In that sense, disobedience is like literature, and poetry especially. It’s no wonder that Disobedience is the title of one of Notley’s books, as well as the subject of an accompanying essay. In “The Poetics of Disobedience,” Notley describes an impetus to push back

391 “against the pervasive idea that one must not protest what everyone else has named the Actual — how can you fight Reality? — against the psychology of belonging, of aiding and abetting.” This descends from and deepens Wallace Stevens’s argument in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” that the imagination serves as a potent force to push back against reality; for Stevens, as for Notley, “a possible poet must be a poet capable of resisting or evading the pressure” of reality as we know it:

The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

That last sentence helps us further appreciate Notley’s poetry, for her work, which began as a kind of spiraling away from that of the mostly-masculinist New York School poets, is greatly textured by the sounds of our words, and the accretion of descriptions of daily life. Her poems, like Frank O’Hara’s, say, or Kenneth Koch’s, are won- derfully wild with provisional thinking and rethinking. Like a New York School poet, Notley realizes the first person singular “as fully and nakedly as possible, saying ‘I’ in such a way as to make myself really nervous.” The result is poetry that is nimble yet edgy, nervous but assertive. At the same time, her work is fully distinct from that of her male colleagues: in her lines we encounter a feisty “female narrator/hero,” to borrow a phrase from “Homer’s Art,” a prose poem that proposes an alternative to the age-old practice of male poets telling public stories “for men about a male world.” Notley’s poetry isn’t simple, and if at first you have trouble reading her work, bear in mind that she conceives of herself as disobeying even her own readership. There’s a wonderful comedy in that; and after all, comedy, disobedience, and poetry all require serious vigilance and attentiveness. Ultimately, she demonstrates that disobedience is, like those other things, a pleasure — even an entertainment. Reading Notley is great fun because there’s humor and wryness at every turn: there’s “probably nothing more disobedient,” she says, “than being a comic poet, since no one’s ever sure if that’s good enough.”

392 I don’t have to Because To be contrary inexplicable Is the light burst that will change us ...... Don’t cry when you’re supposed to Don’t react Don’t re-anything Or play right Don’t do right Don’t do Wrong Don’t do right Break all the unwritten laws Destroy the song — From Close to Me & Closer ... (The Language of Heaven)

Fighting words, these: “I don’t have to.” If, as she proposes, poets are those who break all the unwritten laws, then she has refreshed and embodied Shelley’s defense of poets as unwritten legislators of the world. Notley’s oeuvre is large, possibly because

It’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against ... everything. One must remain somehow, though how, open to any subject or form in principle, open to the possibility of liking, open to the possibility of using. I try to maintain no continuous restrictions in my poetics except with regard to particular works, since writing at all means making some sort of choices. But no doctrines.

Behind the multiplicity of voices and visions in her writing, there’s

393 a capacious and heartening egalitarianism, much like Walt Whitman’s — perhaps inherited from him, though channeled through a contemporary voice.

I invented a voice for myself when there had scarcely been any female poets, and then a voice for myself as a young mother. I allowed my children’s voices in, and then the voices of all my friends, the people on the street, anyone, really, who hadn’t been in the poem before was welcome, to the extent I could hear them. I knew I couldn’t hear everyone, but I tried.

Could there be anything more Whitmanic, more American, more vitally important to our own time, than to let voices in ... to listen? In the true American vein, Notley’s work has created and nour- ished a line of deeply democratic work in poetry and prose that is as extensive as it is uncategorizable. This explains why her work has been fresh year after year in a career spanning four decades. Like Whitman, she is simultaneously one of a kind and a poet for each of us: an exemplary, humane, surprising, and ultimately essential writer. — ds

394 alice notley

The Anthology

No tone of voice being sufficient to the occasion Flash that’s all, that we’re here. Are you ever sarcastic and unlikeable Mentally we are the cast of one epic thought: You. How many of you sweep through me, as I ride the métro leading you, because I have to and not be poignant oh who’s written anything poignant since ...

An old woman of indeterminate race, in white hat and scarf, no teeth staring back at me. He sounded brittle and superior last night, do the dead do that; Grandma had a plethora of tones of voice compared to anyone in this anthology. Our anthology, he says, being mental is complex as hell. How do you keep track of your poems? Any- one remembers what they like, but you have constantly to emit them ... Everyone’s at me, Drown it out, thinking of an icon emerald-throated.

I see the alley house at night dark I’m trying to be pure again, but I want all the tones. When you’re dead you can have them ... thick marine dark from the fencelike oleanders and a moon calling to white boards. Enter. Lie down in your own bed, in the room where Momma found a scorpion.

ALICE NOTLEY 395 This Fire

No one loves you more ... more ... more ... There were sincere lies everywhere placed directly before the next step. Does everyone pretend, part of alive I am proposing words — All structures have crumbled in earliest death. I’m crossing the yellow sands It’s so hard to know without relating it, to you shaping a heart, take hold of me and someone says I don’t get it! You don’t have to have love, or you do, which? I don’t think you do; before the explosion? I was here without it and have been in many places loveless. I don’t want you to know what I’m really thinking or do I, before creation when there might be no “I knew” Everything one’s ever said not quite true. He or she be- trays you; why you want to hurt me ... bad Want to, or just do? Treason was provoked everywhere even here, by knowing one was one and I was alone, a pale hue. The sky of death is milky green today, like a poison pool near a desert mine. Picked prickly pear fruit and I tasted it, then we drove on, maybe to Yarnell. These outposts where I grew up; I didn’t do that I have no ... identity, and the love is an object to kick as you walk on the blazing bare ground, where ... sentimental, when what I love, I ... don’t have that one word. This fire all there is ... to find ... I find it You have to find it. It isn’t love, it’s what?

396O POETRY The Elements

You must do battle with Eros I am more worried about space, pressed for details collapsed in chaos with my sword holding up the sky the girl said. They cared not for love lying ever that they loved But I your leader wounded in gender and bleeding for Eros fought it away from my true beginning as now.

Always climbing that hill in several ways. One goes past the Baptist Church and through the ugly trees, houses I only visualize in dreams you have no right to pursue me to my origins man as bipolar as the one candidate, forgettable as the other. We once lived in a postwar barracks blue heated by a black stove of assumptions Eros a youth admits no equal; Aphrodite the slut; Chaos is whom I admire that keeps forgetting love in favor of this terrible mixity I am for example ... these poems. Out of the pre-beginning a different beauty. They want you to confess something like in church, that a man will save you. But I am your leader savior and poet I am your general out of the desert thee most ardent void precursor of love Eros approaches again not the man but quality sculpted genitals arush with the words of unreason: I will never die. Which I is I if I can remain chaotic I’ll tell you who you are that you’ve never anticipated, but know the only one. Without a thing. To be is not to have; nor to belong; nor to have been born. You are not the child of earth. Beauty still thy name.

ALICE NOTLEY 397 Are Loyal

Okay part of it’s here. See it,

I want you to see my brother, dead smiling in a red short-sleeved shirt, You look so much better I got through. How does time work for you? I can see where — when — I felt bad. Goes past. I’m not in it any more But this change hasn’t happened in time — a kind of before and after but no ... continuum. You look brilliant! I never let you down — he says — did I? It wasn’t possible, Why not? Sisters and brothers are loyal,

we are the primal particles. I saw how we connected to make a shape in the eyes of the beholder who chose it: But we are not that. What I see is free to change its outline. My story: the shadow of one. Why did I shrink into a story? It’s easier to talk as a person, but why? I guess we decided to, talking. Coyote throws the stars up into the sky.

398O POETRY Stalker

The light so thick nothing’s visible, cognoscenti I knew them, stupid apes. Real apes know more Before we said apes. I know how to be you better — a stupid voice. You must find a mind to respect — why? There was someone with ear buds, speaking gibberish who wouldn’t stop walking beside me; freckle-spattered. I had to ask the métro attendant for help; she extricated him from me ... I respect his chaotic speech, mild adhesive force because it makes no sense. I am back on the alley, discovering adults are un- trustworthy: someone’s lying ... about a fight between a teenage girl and boy — he pushed her hard — first she badly scratched him, she’s worse, his mother says. I’m back at pre-beginning, I don’t want to go through that again. There is no sexuality in chaos, there’s no style, nor hope. I want style — apes have style, people have machines. Show me something to respect This bleuet growing out of a wall on rue d’Hauteville. I picked it and pressed it in a diary. Every once in a while I respect a moment. I am back at pre-beginning: I don’t want to care beyond this ... sudden hue in the sand, yellow or spotted with an hallucinated iridescence. The one who is stalking me ... there has often been someone stalking me. My destiny. He’s gone, stay here in this, I can’t be harmed if I’m the only one who’s thought of being here. Aren’t you lonely? I don’t know.

ALICE NOTLEY 399 My Sea

What I lose you let me, accusation always gets one in. But I want to talk like the dead remember that town where we went or how do I know when I’m just a soul — not when I’m leading? A soul can lead, fight and kill; in the sketchy rain there, but you can’t kill where we’re dead. That’s the best thing — no one has any power. How can I lead you without power? We want to find out ... Drop everything? — there’s no gravity. Are you grave? There’s no bravery. I’m going to lead you into a you you don’t know ... Most people want to go. There we risked being wrong but that was a linguistic quality, or you could have brought us to hell. Outside of gravity, instead, is the house. It wasn’t built with raisins. The light there, but what’s it for? For eyes. He called me “Four Eyes” now I have billions. It’s a house on the coast Is it the House of Answers? I will continue to reason for you, living on no particular income deep in my soul. The house has a basement I didn’t know about connecting to My Sea, Mare Meum. The answers break with foam and wild pearls. The wind is me too — you know who you are — where’s the desert? The sea came back to this land, to the abandoned its lover. The kind of sea you can’t drown in. You can want to coincide with me for I am the soul your leader the clear rock of kind mind, senseless. Senseless free will — the only thing here.

400O POETRY Iconography

The image wears large round glasses opaque blue bigger than her upper face I don’t know what she means. You image He stood there elected. In your eyes — he would escape from the auto parts store to come home and read.

As I see him dead he has black hair and brown eyes he doesn’t have to wear glasses because he’s dead.

I haven’t seen a desert lily in twenty years but knowing they exist thrills me. One year I went home and they were everywhere powerful, blooming to exist and in my eyes. As I could be that And I’ll always see it. Presidents are scum compared to desert lilies. Oh all right, Daddy says.

The dead talk this way playing but they don’t need to write lines — this line of thought. I still don’t quite know what your poems are like. Immediate — but complex. Lily? As complex as that? As complex as us. We are seeing you ... As we speak and see, together, thinking it. Do the words relax you? We are them, reading. Being dead is like reading.

ALICE NOTLEY 401 License

None of it’s there that you cared for, so familiar furniture and paintings. The medals aren’t there either I’m still there but it isn’t; I’m here; sword, I have sword — imagine — and disguising protect- ive the ancient helmet. Her head was cut off nonetheless. The man brought the head along to the doctor: the head said to. Shouldn’t we bring the body I asked in case he wants to re- attach them Oh, the head hadn’t thought of that.

What do you have instead of a body, there? We have a wholeness of perception what we are asking you to do for us, write down our poems creates a body. Otherwise our body ... isn’t that we aren’t sensuous ... but we decohere, you must understand that the universe is always developing or changing its face — body — whatever; we have always been it but it’s never quite right ... pilot’s license;

my pilot’s license is a fossil, you said. We need yours. We need your license.

When Momma first, the very first hallucination that the decompression tube in her stomach was black ... It isn’t black I said over the phone well I thought it was she said, not being fanciful, and I was in a motel in Colorado at the time. Whose head was it really I repeat. For we never leave here and nothing fossilizes but stonelike mossy patterns might be made, colors transformed

402O POETRY walk to the hospital, everyone’s mad at me, who cares? It was my whole soul transported and all its certainties that I existed, beneath all the legends, otherwise as joy.

ALICE NOTLEY 403 From My Forehead

He seems to be in front helping me look out of my foreheaded self. Listen to me:

prone night. I was its actual first child cutting a path with my sword through its vapors. Then I subdued night until the desert was clear and a disk shone above. I am the hero of the struggle between despair and illumination, which is not a shaky buoyancy but claritas. The name of life or that you see at all. Just look. If you kill yourself nothing will happen. No choices but pedestrian actions a lying story: you have done nothing. You can be a detail — a scurrier — garbage you leave, a fit of nerves, propagating that. The front of my looking out pulls

beauty taking me taking you. The scab in the sky is gone. We have to go beyond our calculations and the small words. Why a golden fringe on shirt come quickly riding the best horses. And nux is what night the worthless was, as I sang, We don’t have to believe the petite poetries. Hooves are pulling us across the yellow sands: lost in a word, led in a word I got there. I can never turn back, you see and you can never turn back.

404O POETRY To a New Sex

Somewhere out of antiquity someone work with me. When transferring a thought, the connectors and clauses recede: you get it. I got it — The rest of the language, beauty and play I am your master, the thought says — I disagree

I’m thinking about the church where we held my brother’s funeral. He says, I was there: it hurt me; you cried too much; I don’t mind later. I just want to be with you, the thought says You mean thee thought or his thought? The rocks are like stars, gully full of stars. If I go with anyone anywhere, if they’d think sweetly to me. No one hears. Relax your shoulders.

I’m singing to you over and over “to a new sex.” Sometimes it seems like there’s a lizard for each rock necklaces of lives, there’s room for an infinity of minds. Thoughts. Anywhere. Enter my head if you wish. No ends or purposes Prevailed fortunes. I have a destiny. My death will not complete it.

ALICE NOTLEY 405

THE VIEW FROM HERE

“The View from Here” is an occasional feature in which people from various fields comment on their experience of poetry. This is the thirteenth installment of the series. anders nilsen

Poetry Is Useless

ANDERS NILSEN 409 410O POETRY ANDERS NILSEN 411 ai weiwei

On Poetry

My father, Ai Qing, was an early influence of mine. He was a true poet, viewing all subjects through an innocent and honest lens. For this, he suffered greatly. Exiled to the remote desert region of Xinjiang, he was forbidden to write. During the Cultural Revolution, he was made to clean the public toilets. At the time, those rural toilets were beyond one’s imagination, neglected by the entire vil- lage. This was as low as one’s condition could go. And yet, as a child I saw him making the greatest effort to keep each toilet as clean and as pleasant as possible, taking care of the waste with complete sincerity. To me, this is the best poetic act, and one that I will never forget. My father was punished for being a poet, and I grew up in its consequences. But even when things were at their most difficult, I saw his heart protected by an innocent understanding of the world. For poetry is against gravity. Reading Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, and Vladimir Mayakovsky at a young age, I discovered that all poetry has the same quality. It transports us to another place, away from the moment, away from our circumstances. In my own work, the process of creation always requires the understanding of aesthetics in relation to morality, to the pureness of a form, or to a personal language, one which extends us clearly to another. Many of my projects have poetic elements. In 2007, I brought 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel, Germany, for documenta 12. For many, it was their first time traveling outside of China. This was Fairytale. In 2008, we researched, under extremely harsh and re- strictive conditions, the aftermath of the Great Sichuan Earthquake and unearthed the names and birth dates of 5,196 student victims, otherwise buried forever. I used to say that Twitter is the perfect form for poetry. It is the poetry of society in the modern age. In engaging social media and the forms of communication it makes possible, again and again we find ourselves deeply moved with emotion. By anger, joy, even feelings that are new and indescribable. This is poetic. It makes today a unique time. To experience poetry is to see over and above reality. It is to dis- cover that which is beyond the physical, to experience another life

412O POETRY and another level of feeling. It is to wonder about the world, to understand the nature of people and, most importantly, to be shared with another, old or young, known or unknown.

AI WEIWEI 413 sally timms

Poetry Out Loud

I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. — From London by William Blake

I had no idea where I was going How I lived or what I did here The yawning gulf between Hangs like a rope from a wooden beam. — From City of London by the Mekons

Being neither a poet nor much of a lyricist, I feel like something of an interloper writing here in Poetry. For the last thirty years or so as a singer in the fundamentalist punk rock art project the Mekons, the occasional lyrics I have managed to cobble together make use of the long-standing Mekons’ technique: blatant theft and collage. It’s an old folk and blues method and if it’s good enough for Bob Dylan then it’s good enough for us. A Mekons songwriting session takes fragments from many sources: poetry, fiction (thank you, Herman Melville), nonfiction, lyrics from traditional songs where scraps and lines scrawled in Sharpie are bashed into shape by the band’s mag- pies until something emerges that retains only a whiff of the original intent. It’s an effective way of working for a band who tries to write only when we are all in the same room and whose members are scattered across the US, the UK, and Siberia. Natural (a record we released in 2007) was “a celebration of ritual, paganism and sacrifice” which we apparently wrote “after drinking whiskey all night, listening to the rocks and the Stones, tuning into strange, old frequencies, and reciting lines from Darwin and Thoreau,” according to our press release at least. But you will find within it lines from or nods to Yeats’s “broken boughs and blackened leaves,” Baudelaire’s “hunters lost in pathless woods,” Emerson, the Talmud, and I Ching along with several others who may remain in copyright and therefore nameless.

414O POETRY Due to lack of time and money, Mekons recording sessions are quick affairs with little or no rehearsal. Often I sing the final version of a song a few minutes after the lyrics are finished and handed to me at the microphone. I then have to make sense of their meaning and how they fit the music. A singer has to use the sound of their voice and their phrasing to create an atmosphere, a little world, out of a few lines — and a singer for the Mekons has to do that with next to no preparation. My voice isn’t particularly malleable or ornate, and I have a limited vocal range, but I’m lucky to have good tone and an ability to project emotion in a low-key way. It’s doubtful I could work this way had I not spent so much time reading poetry aloud as a child.

Look up and see the casement broken in, The bats and owlets builders in the roof! My cricket chirps against thy mandolin. Hush, call no echo up in further proof Of desolation! there’s a voice within That weeps ... as thou must sing ... alone, aloof. — From Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Competitive poetry recitals were my first public performances, starting when I was about six years old and lasting until I lost interest, in my teens, after seeing David Bowie on Top of the Pops. Speech and drama festivals still take place all over the UK, though some seem to be part of a dying tradition. My local Wharfedale Festival is in its 109th year but now struggles to find entrants for its verse speaking classes. Perhaps the appeal has waned; children have other more exciting things to do with their time and would rather not stand in drafty Victorian halls with their peers, reciting the same John Clare or Emily Dickinson poem to an audience of invested parents and a few pensioners looking for something to do on a rainy Saturday afternoon. My drama tutor, Angela Wayman, a strict woman who resembled a sexier version of Margaret Thatcher, would drill me after school in the stylings of Gerard Manley Hopkins or the structure of a sonnet. She would open the Oxford Book of English Verse, pick a random poem and I’d attempt to deliver it without stumbling over the words or messing up the meter, and with as much feeling as I could muster on a first reading.

SALLY TIMMS 415 Nowadays I couldn’t tell my iambic pentameter from my sprung rhythm, but when I open a book of poetry, if I am alone when I do, I always read the poem aloud to an imagined listener. Isn’t that the intention, that the words are written to be heard? The techniques I learned “speaking” verse back then are the bedrock of my singing now: how to convey the mood of the song, where to place the emphasis, where to leave space, where the rhythm falls or where to battle it slightly for effect, how to use my voice in a way that brings the lyrics to life and adds a new element — all these things feel like second nature. The leap from reciting Hopkins to singing a Mekons song seems a short and easy one.

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring — When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush. — From Spring by Gerard Manley Hopkins

A sparrow falls through dawn-air-mist Set in stone, searching for a signal. — From White Stone Door by the Mekons

Whether it’s finding the right tone for the spidery Mekons lyric that has just been thrust in front of me, reciting Dylan Thomas, Ivor Cutler, or some filthy limerick in the van on the way to a gig, or watching Jon Langford (fellow Mekon) stand behind a full-size cardboard cutout Dalek while reading John Donne’s “The Good- Morrow” in a shrill, metallic voice as part of our Metaphysical Dalek Love Poetry series, poetry and Mrs. Wayman’s stern eye continue to exert their subtle influence.

416O POETRY rhymefest

My Life Is a Poem

Chicago is a poem written by Edgar Allan Poe. It is beautifully tragic, with its political corruption, murder, suspense, segregation, and economic disparity. “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, / Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” All the while, creating from within it are many of the most prolific artists, athletes, and world figures humanity has ever encountered. My mother was a poem written by Gwendolyn Brooks. Fifteen years old from Chicago with a baby of her own to raise, she was simple but profound. Strong in spirit yet subtle in approach.

Young, and so thin, and so straight. So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her. But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men, ...... And the rest of things in life that were for poor women. — From Jessie Mitchell’s Mother

She was searching for love in a world of rejection. She found her gifts through the wisdom that only age, experience, and letting go of the past could bring. My father is a poem written by Maya Angelou. He is a character that is harsh if you have a one-dimensional view of the world, but gorgeous through the lens of a dynamic soul.

How to find my soul a home Where water is not thirsty And bread loaf is not stone I came up with one thing And I don’t believe I’m wrong That nobody, But nobody Can make it out here alone. — From Alone

RHYMEFEST 417 He was abused by his father, he abused alcohol, he abandoned his only child and walked a twenty-eight-year journey through home- lessness, yet he has kept a healthy sense of humor and aspires to more. This stands as a testament to his good nature. I am a poem written by hip-hop. I was born from the poetic lives my parents lived and was raised in a tragic city. My story unfolds under the crumbling infrastructure of Chicago’s Southside. I saw words everywhere and my attraction to them was magnetic.

Hands to the Heavens, no man no weapon, formed against, yes Glory is destined. Everyday women and men become Legends, Sins that go against our skin become blessings. — From Glory

As a young man I tried to process every word I came across: col- orful graffiti written on walls, trains, and buses, placed in strategic positions for all to see. Dilapidated billboards and signs sat above mom and pop stores that seemed to oddly make their businesses more familiar and welcoming. I listened to the rhythm of conversations, realizing as a child that words and rhythms are two separate entities that work in tandem to create beauty. In fact, I never called what I’d absorbed as a youth poetry; in my neighborhood it was called hip-hop. It was a culture of youth expressing our frustrations, showing our gifts and celebrating life through break dance (b-boying), music (DJing), visual art (graffiti), community (knowledge), and my favorite element, rap. Rapping became an avenue to vent my anger as a teenager without resorting to violence; it was an acceptable means to show the world my affinity for words; it was a positive way to gain attention and perhaps even a career path. Through my elementary and high school years I was a mystery to my teachers. I never turned in any assignments and made failing grades even though they always saw me writing in class. They would tell my mother, “We see him doing the work, he just never hands it in.” The only thing I was working on were raps, perfecting the organization of words. I was memoriz- ing long verses, learning to write in my head without using pen and paper. To this day I write music in my head, then transcribe it after its completion.

418O POETRY I ended up dropping out of high school and I never completed college. The only thing that I’ve been consistent with is words. I’ve lived by the belief that we should choose our enemies wisely, instead of our battles. For in an enemy, all battles can be predicted. My enemy was, and continues to be, mis-education. Words have lead me to a Critics’ Choice Award, Grammy, Golden Globe, and Academy Award for cowriting songs like “Jesus Walks” and “Glory.” Words have blessed me with a career. Words are my su- per power. I use them to heal, I use them to build. My words have led me back to Chicago to help create a program called Donda’s House. I teach gifted young people who possess the same dedication to words. I want them to connect their hip-hop to the world’s poetry. Words can create worlds and I’ve discovered that poetry cannot only be read, but lived out. My life is a poem.

RHYMEFEST 419 momus

Written in Rock Candy

I love the artistic use of short bursts of language. Give those a name and a role, though — “poetry,” for instance — and you risk rebuild- ing some of the things their freshening surprise ideally threatens to destroy: guilds, codes of conduct, etiquettes, habits. Language is forever threatening to become sclerotic: a boring, re- petitive, normative, legitimizing thing, a descriptive system with prescriptive and proscriptive aspirations. But language is at its most charming when it abandons the will to power and substitutes pure play. A lyric Paddy McAloon levered into an early Prefab Sprout song springs to mind:

Words are trains for moving past what really has no name. — From Couldn’t Bear to Be Special

If that were poetry in the most limited definition, it would be mere words on a page. But the way I remember it, the elegant phrase is hollered out, slowly yet violently, on a vinyl record. It sounds like an existential cry of pain, but there’s a giddy sense of freedom edging through. The irreducible otherness of things has a fierce beauty that language can never capture. And maybe language can be a beautiful thing-in-itself too. There’s poetry in my family: both my great-grandfather and his father won the bardic crown at the Hebridean festival known as the Mod. As a child I played with the silver laurel crown, draping my head with its ripped blue velvet covering. Sadly, as a non-Gaelic speaker, I can’t read their poems. One, I’m told, is about the steamer my great-grandfather piloted up and down the Clyde. He must’ve scribbled his verses on the bridge. In that sense, he wasn’t a professional poet, even if the crown conferred the qualification of “bard.” Writing lyrics for songs, I feel as if I’m continuing an amateur tradition in which words are just one element in a whirling and impure confluence, a confection of many media. Here, words only come alive when animated by a specific voice, and instruments, and visuals. When I was first impressed by glam rock figures like Marc Bolan

420O POETRY and David Bowie, it was partly their physical beauty that snared me: they had an obviously charismatic sexual grace, a way of dressing and of moving that appealed enormously. But they also used words in an intriguing way: over atonal stride note clusters, Bowie would sing el- egaic cabaret songs (“Sake and strange divine / You’ll make it”) while Bolan would write fairytale doggerel (“Light all the fires, it’s the king of the rumbling spires!”) In retrospect, such stuff was the next logical step from childhood pantomime and the poems my mother would read me — caution- ary or lunatic tales by Hilaire Belloc and Edward Lear concerning Matilda or “The Dong with a Luminous Nose.” When I was twelve I heard two pieces of poetry set to music that absolutely boggled my mind. One was “Façade” by Edith Sitwell, with jazz-age music by William Walton. Mr. Head, my music teacher, sat us down in a dingy classroom and played the whole thing on an enormous wooden record player. I particularly liked the lugubrious passages:

Cried the navy-blue ghost Of Mr. Belaker The allegro negro cocktail-shaker: “Why did the cock crow, Why am I lost Down the endless road to Infinity toss’d?”

The music — a spectral waltz — was absolutely integral to my experience. It meshed perfectly with Bowie’s pantomimic readings of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. The other revelation was hearing a brass ensemble accompanying a reading of Eliot’s “Prufrock.” One of the housemasters at my board- ing school had written it. The injection of evocative words into a colorfield of sound was exactly what I loved about the music of Bolan and Bowie, but Eliot’s lines mingled the known and the unknown much better, melding a universal melancholia with glimpses of privi- leged and exotic interiors:

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room.

Soon I would be written through like rock candy by the phrases of

MOMUS 421 poets. Poems didn’t just supply musical phrases, but narrative tricks that other media pulled off much less elegantly. Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” for instance, demonstrated that a poem could be a dramatic, icy-spined monologue with an unreliable narrator:

I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands As if alive. Will’t please you rise?

Robert Lowell’s “I watched for love-cars,” or “A savage servility / slides by on grease,” or “Renoir, paralyzed, painted with his penis” showed me how powerful the confessional mode can be. And in case romanticism carried me away, Brecht’s brilliantly unsenti- mental Handbook for City-Dwellers spoke in an ironic voice of cold objectivity:

Without looking at you (I apparently fail to recognize you, Your particular manner and difficulties),

I address you merely Like reality itself (Sober, incorruptible, thanks to your manner, Tired of your difficulties), Which you seem to me to be disregarding. — Tr. by John Willett

I was haunted, too, by the brilliant non-sequiturs of Auden’s “The Fall of Rome”:

Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.

And Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which seductively suggested that perhaps we (poets? or human beings in general?) are only here

for saying: house, bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit-tree, window — at most: column, tower ... but for saying, realize,

422O POETRY oh, for a saying such as the things themselves would never have profoundly said! — Tr. by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender

But Rilke — with his conflation of poets and humans, and his celebration of an apparently sacred duty to name the nameless — strays perhaps too far into the hubris of professional poetry. Today I might draw just as much verbal pleasure from a Tumblr feed called Curatorial Poetry, which presents “found poems” from the pages of art catalogues:

Very exotic foliage, resembling palm trees, with oversize par- rots and dragonflies. The upper portion of the box contains a pattern of white stars. Printed in pink and varnished green on a yellow ground. Very faded.

That’s all I need, and my brain races.

MOMUS 423

COMMENT

john wilkinson

Drift and Pop: On Writing about W.S. Graham

What is it to go into an abstracted state? When I find myself abstracted or lose myself in abstraction, my self blurs at its boundaries but nonetheless retains a capacity, an enhanced capacity to accept whatever comes across. Memories, freaks, phrases, and passing thoughts escape judgment as to whether they deserve retaining. Even if they hover and unravel trains of thought, they do not cancel or dislodge anything already contained or passing through this elastic “abstract scene.” Contradictions and other dissonance which would become jarring if sentience rose to active reaching, can coexist so long as the mind stays abstracted. What sustains such abstraction may be consti- tutional, environmental, or even economic. Woolgathering ... (Here I go) transhumant shepherds ... Cornish downpour ... Let me pause and drift a little as in the automatism of reaching for a cigarette. In such a sentence, between intentionality and its ab- juring, my “I” has been minimally embodied, even while an act de- ploys according to script. I hesitate (for to hesitate is entailed in some kinds of abstraction) to choose whether I situate my abstraction inside or outside, whether the “me” is dispersed within my abstraction or merely a point roaming it, or if I am a psychic skin surrounding it, or what fades at its extremities. Or is the uninterrupted nexus of automatic behaviors: breathing, walking, reaching, what reflection, always belated, comes to acknowledge as the self? What then abstracts? Is abstraction consciousness released from the automaton? Something outside or something within? Imagining a cigarette break, the smoker I once was tells me abstraction can be learnt — or relearnt, since so much of childhood is abstracted or its negative, bored. Until recently, the garden I look on from an upstairs window as I write had been little more than a backdrop I glanced at or walked through, a present pleasure scarcely noticed, and if I paused outside, it would be to crop an herb, or sometimes in early autumn to gather apples, pears, medlars, damsons, or plums. But I am woolgathering in an English idiom. Abstraction and pastoral have an affinity in England. In autumn the abstract garden gives way to use-value, to selective picking, although some purposeful activities can trigger an abstracted state — a woman pauses with an apple halfway to her

JOHN WILKINSON 427 mouth, or stands with her hand resting on a fork as she listens to an attendant robin. A different yield of plums distinguishes the years, but I shall find it hard to remember what flowers flourished or were disappointing this year, to predict which return with a certain season, or even to identify what was planted recently and where. The garden’s visual intricacy offers a welcome depth for my study window, and sometimes wildlife is noticed in its seasonal passage: migrant birds, the dragonflies and damselflies, squirrels, and an infrequent muntjac deer. The cooing of wood pigeons makes for a persistent background noise by day; but there are no bats at twilight this year, perhaps near- by building work has dislodged them or they have been afflicted by a fungal disease. I have become late middle-aged. And I admit a marshy bleakness is more typical of an English summer than my bucolic fan- tasy. Although I am woolgathering, wooly clouds can be sharp-edged with sun setting behind them. It is possible to remain abstracted and nonetheless reflect; these mental states can dress themselves to coincide. That’s where I am. The turning of abstraction like a crystalline and involuted space, set in motion by birdsong, or a continent away by jazz leaking from an apparently vacant warehouse in Brooklyn, coexists with flashes of insight, sidelong links, assessments of risk and practical decisions — although these may be carried out by that embodiment of autonomic and learned behavior others give the name I bear. Abstraction might comport with habit. Abstraction and reflection in lockstep. Now it is twilight and there is a poem I am called upon to read, a poem calls on me to read it. How can a poem call from its perfected internal space? How could my being here for this poem have been anticipated in its advent? This is a poem I have read many times because I wanted to or because professionally I had to, a poem I have talked about in classrooms and informally, a poem my wife read at a celebration of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s life on September 26, 2009, as a little program folded into my book and bearing Eve’s face re- minds me. At my sister’s funeral in 2012 I read a few lines from a poem by the same poet. This aquamarine book of his New Collected Poems feels eventful in itself, collecting my reading of these poems over three decades, if not in this particular edition; it accumulates too my reading of other poets who have felt close to this poet, his friends and contemporaries, or those drawn close through later discovering this work as I did. In a state of professional reading, I could scrutinize

428O POETRY each word and its relations with surrounding words, both within the particular poem and across a wider range, searching out tracks others have left through their records of reading. I could listen intently and might sound aloud some lines. I could read with others in a class. And if engaged in inquiry I might seek earlier versions of the same poem, thinking how it has changed and why, or thinking what writing on poetics might extend the scope and heft of these poems, enriching, contesting, exemplifying. But for now I hover about questions of time and space. The spaces this book constructs are bleak, beautiful, and rock-obstructed in a way unique to a landscape the poet dwelt in, even while its spaces are drawn toward “pure” abstraction. When I incline to write about the scope of these poems, inclination goes beyond metaphor to the landscape I shared with my sister in childhood. Although my feelings about the poems are intimate, they are experienced by a person coexisting with the person who eats, works in his study, and suffers the loss of those he loves. It is the I which is another whom this poem entreats. Scope, for this person brought into being in its space, sends tense cables and grapples and sinews through the me- dium bringing him to life, and as he reads he feels reconfigured, as though by the dragged vertices of a psychical simulation in 3-D modeling. Such scope does somewhat envisage a Scottish poet in his Penwith peninsula ordinariness, encountered in these poems where he fetches coal and blags drinks, but more urgently entreats me into being from across the page where the poet writes; Graham scratches or taps like a prisoner hoping to hear an answering tap as the start of a communicative code. The time of these New Collected Poems by W.S. Graham may be variously the poet’s and mine and others’ in its details and waymarks, such as the seasonal flowers; but it is also abstract in its swiftness, its suspension, its gathering and its dispersal, abstract in its disclosures. Still, I fear I shall betray this poem, as I open my professional armamentarium. Can my reading still be interlaced with abstraction, can I leave off for a moment, look away from the page in honoring a bidding that commands my attention down toward the poem’s narrowest interstices? Pausing in a caesura I feel the song again, opening beyond boundaries; attention opens into abstraction.

•

Last summer with the previous paragraph I stopped, and now resume

JOHN WILKINSON 429 in a wet and mild winter, with the improbable blossom of a winter- flowering cherry in the foreground of my gaze. That is what there is to it, a tree commands attention and releases it. I hear the surprisingly violent crepitation of a woodpecker at work beyond the next garden. It is time to write about “Dear Bryan Wynter” by W.S. Graham, this poem I have looked at through the seasons, a poem not addressed to me but, its title announces, to a painter. I recall this poem was written soon after the painter’s death in 1975. Memory of an involuntary kind is characteristic of abstraction, a feature separating it from a meditative discipline of “emptying”; how far though can concen- tration and external reference be tolerated by abstraction, without puncturing the reverie? (Is abstraction a return to being held in a maternal reverie? Is a fact a thorn?) Can abstraction permit a systolic- diastolic rhythm, an expansion and contraction? I am not yet ready to write about this poem. Fortunately I recall this was not the first time Graham addressed Wynter in a poem (or seemed to), and I shall write about “Dear Bryan Wynter” after finding a way of approaching through an earlier poem. And rather than saying I shall “write about” a poem by W.S. Graham, I shall write toward the poem. I can zero in on what I wish to say, although that may change as I go along, through an indirect route resembling a direct address to objectified texts, an exercise in close reading. Here, though, reading aims to comprise a practice toward, a set of gestures of recognition abstracted and refigured in the interest of entering the communicative space of “the object / Adrift stationary in its Art law.” This practice can serve a further thinking through of what the poem adds to my self, although such traces may stay hidden between the lines. I want to follow the dynamics of W.S. Graham’s peculiar lyric art-making, with its thickets of words, its abstractions, and the way it stages the poet along with contriving an addressee out of features abstracted from a person dear to him.

•

When a child, I did not enjoy the privilege of being visited directly by an imaginary friend. My imaginary friend spoke from my sister’s mouth, since from an early age she rapped fantastic inven- tions, prompted by the monkey puzzle trees abundant in the south of Cornwall where we lived. “Monkey puzzle tree sing song” was the formula which launched her raps, spurred by the sight of a tree

430O POETRY from our car window. Catching sight of these trees (more kitsch than natural in their bungalow front gardens) sparked improvisations that may have been germinative for my poetic imaginary. Propinquity of loved language is a precondition for lyric acts, once invited and trans- lated into the space of internal propinquity. This sort of constructed linguistic space is not at all the same as the repertoire of phatic speech shared in the company of someone loved, loss of which feels like a deprivation, recurring in frequent small aftershocks. But a person’s death does not shut down communication in that space of internal propinquity that concerns a poet; such a shutdown would only follow the withdrawal of the Muse brought into being by the space the Muse brings into being. For me that space has had a spatial analogue in Cornwall, as I have come to recognize since my sister’s death, and an aural analogue in her monkey puzzle raps. W.S. Graham’s poetry overlays an imagined Cornwall geographically and sonically, and its propinquity to that space tears me apart and gives new names and shapes to the vertices plotting my imaginary. Space though is not to be reduced to place, although they can coincide. I hear wind surge through the high trees in this flat inland country and become abstracted, the child stands beside a boathouse in high wind. Space constructed either through linguistic propinquity or by abstraction from empirical particulars does not prevent new particulars from breaking through. Yesterday a kestrel landed on a jardinière by the kitchen window where I was making tea. This was a flash, an instant, a freeze-frame, before the bird flew off. The day before a jay presented itself on an eye-level branch, obtruding its incompa- rable colors of mild pink-gray and brilliant blue. Does too sudden an incursion puncture and collapse the insidious or constructed space? The jay’s song (or outburst) is no thread into reverie, but a harsh interruption. Can abstraction be violent or can it entertain violence? Why does abstraction in painting lead Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian to mysticism and Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell to sav- agery? Are these definably different kinds of abstraction, and do they produce different spatial formations? Do they stage different selves in a viewer; who is evoked in a response to them; whom do they entreat? Painters often embrace analogies between abstraction and music, and a founding myth of abstraction in modernist Western painting derives from Kandinsky’s account of his first abstract painting as directly inspired by a Schoenberg concert he attended in January

JOHN WILKINSON 431 1911. The sound of lyric poetry induces an abstraction which com- promises the urge of language toward its self-abnegation in what it denotes; it makes language both more abstract and more substantial. Recognizably organized sound does gentle violence to language’s signifying. Even so, flurries of fantastically dense information de- manding fleet receptivity can accompany the visual, sonic “object / Adrift stationary in its Art law.” How we read fluctuates between temporalities and focal lengths. When returning from infinity, staring out of the window, back to what Graham caused to be set on an octavo page, the adventitiousness of wildlife in a city garden might help in understanding a further move made in Graham’s late poems, beyond objectified abstraction toward a communication at once intimate and strange, in a space suffused with an unaccountable love for creatures and things. An elsewhere is established in a restored materiality. The work of abstraction in its less expressive modes induces us to reflect on our own situatedness. I thought I had been reconfigured as another when reading Graham’s poems, but find that other is better memoried than the drifter, the woolgatherer. More myself. Notwithstanding this recoil into reflection, I still am pressed and impressed by the density of foliage, of paint, of verse, intensified in an intricacy of refigurement that can bracket beyond its spatial di- lations and extensions, the determinants of my gender and culture. Constructed space extends past the edges of the poem or canvas; after abstraction has suspended symbolic operations, the restitution of a foxglove on a wall can concentrate a shocking affective power. “Dear Bryan Wynter” cannot bring back a friend made inaccessible by death, but it does restore creative agency through refiguring the friend who was there in the poet’s imaginary even before he became Bryan Wynter — refigured in the fullness of time and space where we find ourselves among the poem’s ends.

•

At the bus stop a teenage boy is body-popping. His body does not move but is all in motion. The backward flick of a wrist sets muscles dancing in clusters, glissandi, echoes, waves. The stolidity of us who are set on going to work sinks us sadly in the moment, while the body-popper’s body loves its pure potential, and the indifferent light and the dull eyes turn toward him and recognize this is morning, not

432O POETRY the commuter time of 7:18 am, and morning is an opening to which we are obtuse. Before leaving bed I might stretch, but the indulgence of stretching has now been adopted into disciplines of health linked to readiness to serve at a moment’s notice, or to stem physical decline. The body popper’s is a discipline of joy. It is a gratuitous discipline that gives the bus stop line a joy in beauty and a transient sense in everyone of his or her possible beauty, however locked down or smothered. When gales were high I would struggle against the wind to the boathouse at the top of the beach, a wooden structure cupped against the cliff face in, as it were, a niche of winds. Before it the air pressure could at times achieve a perfect balance of extreme forces so that I could lean my bodyweight in any direction and remain tremblingly still.

JOHN WILKINSON 433 contributors

ai weiwei* is an artist. He resides and works in Beijing, China. He is an outspoken advocate of human rights and freedom of speech. paul batchelor* has published a chapbook, The Love Darg (Clu- tag, 2014), and a book of poems, The Sinking Road (Bloodaxe Books, 2008). He lectures at Durham University. derek beaulieu is the author of KERN (Les Figues Press, 2014) and is the Poet Laureate of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. tova benjamin* is a poet, student, and ex-chassidic Jew. She lives in Toronto. esme blegvad* is an illustrator from London based in Brooklyn. Her comics and drawings can be seen in Rookie, Vice, and The Rumpus. lily cao’s* works have appeared in Hanging Loose, 5x5, and Rookie. She studies chemistry and English at Washington University in St. Louis. emily carney* is a twenty-three-year-old poet and artist. mark fletcher* is an illustrator living in Colorado Springs, Colo- rado. He designed the cover for Anthony Madrid’s book, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (Canarium Books, 2012). tyler ford* is a twenty-four-year-old transgender writer who is passionate about helping others to become their best selves. They live, love, and learn in New York City. britney franco* is a fifteen-year-old staff writer and weekly dia- rist for Rookie. She lives in New York City. tavi gevinson* is a writer, actress, and founding editor-in-chief of Rookie. Tavi most recently wrote her second cover story for ELLE and starred on Broadway in Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth. Rookie Yearbook Four will be published by Penguin Random House this fall. minna gilligan* is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. She works largely with painting, collage, drawing, and words.

434O POETRY caitlin hazell* likes to time her music to fit situations, and enjoys looking out for the small things in life that people usually miss. ana hinojosa* is an Hispanic, Minneapolis-based comic artist and illustrator whose work mainly consists of bright pastel colors, young adults, and social issues involving race and sexuality. rachel louise hodgson* is an artist based in England. She likes to draw playful pictures of girls with saggy boobs and red cheeks. kirby knowlton* is a student at the University of South Carolina. She enjoys good books, bad music, and spending time by the lake. allegra lockstadt* holds a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and works as a freelance illustrator, designer, and interdisciplinary artist. anthony madrid lives in Chicago. His first book is I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (Canarium Books, 2012). marla miniano* is a writer and book editor for a leading publishing house in Manila. She is currently working on an illustrated poetry collection with two fellow Filipina artists. momus* (Nick Currie) was born in Scotland in 1960. Since the early eighties Momus has been releasing literate singer-songwriter albums on independent labels. He has published books of specula- tive fiction and appeared as a performance artist, offering “unreliable tours” and “emotional lectures.” naomi morris* is an English student in South London. She is a staff writer for Rookie. julie murphy* lives in Chicago where she draws pictures, edits video, and illustrates for clients. In 2014, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events hosted her first solo exhibition of drawings at the historic Water Tower. amy newman’s* most recent books include On This Day in Poetry History (forthcoming) and Dear Editor (Persea Books, 2011). She teaches at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. anders nilsen* is the artist and author of, most recently, Poetry Is Useless (2015) and Rage of Poseidon (2013), both published by Drawn & Quarterly, and The End (Fantagraphics Books, 2013).

CONTRIBUTORS 435 alice notley’s* upcoming books are Benediction from Letter Ma- chine Editions and Certain Magical Acts from Penguin. She lives and writes in Paris, France. nova* (Leohang Masango) is a writer and poet based in Johannes- burg. As a student of anthropology, she is deeply passionate about feminism, social justice, the excellence of Africa, literature, and the arts. alex-quan pham’s* favorite word is river. They resist the colonial- ist, capitalist, white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy through writing, learning, loving, and healing. rhymefest* (Che Smith) is a writer, artist, activist, political organizer, and teacher. He has won a Grammy, Critics’ Choice Award, Golden Globe, and an Academy Award. He co-founded Donda’s House in 2013 with Kanye West and Donnie Smith. sally timms* was born in Leeds, England. In 1985 she joined the Mekons as a full-time member and has regretted it ever since. john wilkinson’s selected poems, Schedule of Unrest, appeared from Salt in 2014. His new collection, Isoscapes, will be published by Omnidawn in early 2017. leanna wright* is a visual artist, educator, and student from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a staff illustrator for Rookie. kendra yee’s* hands are always stained with ink. She is a Toronto- based artist currently studying illustration at OCAD University. jenny zhang* is the author of Hags (Guillotine, 2014) and Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (Octopus Books, 2012).

* First appearance in Poetry.

436O POETRY

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THE POETRY FOUNDATION PRESENTS July&August Events Reading A Celebration of International Poetry: New Generation African Poets Amy Lukau, Tsitsi Jaji, Ladan Osman, Viola Allo & Warsan Shire Thursday, July 9, 7:00 PM

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Reading Pop-Up Poetry: Short Performances & Lectures by Chicago Poets Art Institute of Chicago, meet in Gallery 100 111 South Michigan Avenue Wednesday, July 15, 12:00 PM Hannah Gamble Wednesday, July 29, 12:00 PM Jamila Woods Wednesday, August 12, 12:00 PM Jacob Saenz Wednesday, August 26, 12:00 PM Parneshia Jones

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