This week-The Writer’s Center is participating in the 13th Annual Fall for the Book Festival. Check out the Web site at fallforthebook.org. Events will be all over D.C., Northern Virginia, and Maryland.
We will be hosting The Emerging Writer Fellowship Reading this Friday, September 23 at 7:30 pm. The Emerging Writer Fellows were chosen from among 80 applicants and are funded by a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts.
The Readers
Ellis Avery is the author of The Teahouse Fire, a novel set in the tea ceremony world of 19th Century Japan. Her second novel, The Last Nude, is inspired by the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and comes out in January 2012.
Christopher Goodrich teaches English and Play Directing at the Academy of Musical Theatre, Northwood High School, in Silver Spring, MD. His chapbook, By Reaching, was published in 2007 and his first book of poems, Nevertheless Hello, came out in 2009.
Angela Woodward is the author of The Human Mind, a story collection, and the novella End of the Fire Cult, about the boundaries between two countries created by a husband and wife. She lives and teaches in Madison, WI.
Come out and support the Emerging Writer Fellows! Join them and TWC staff at Food, Wine & Co at 7272 Wisconsin Ave. after the reading.
Showing posts with label Fall for the Book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fall for the Book. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Sunday, September 27, 2009
James Ellroy
James Ellroy put on quite a show last night. Many thanks to Fall for the Book for helping us put on such a great event. Here's one photo from the event (taken by FFTB's photographer whose name I didn't catch). I recorded it, and as soon as I master Mac's editing tools, I'll post what I have on this blog.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
An Interview with Brian Teare and Charles Jensen
Today we feature director Charles Jensen's interview with poet Brian Teare. This is a follow up to yesterday's post: an interview with Paula Bohince. Teare and Bohince will read from their work at George Mason on Thursday at 3p.m. at the M & T tent just outside the Johnson Center.
Brian Teare is the author of the award-winning The Room Where I Was Born, as well as the forthcoming volume Pleasure and two chapbooks. He has received Stegner, National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell Colony poetry fellowships.
The poems in Sight Map and The Room Where I Was Born are often concerned with erotic situations, but more than that, they are built from language that is erotic in nature—your words and lines have a richness, a fullness, and a texture that tends to reinforce their meaning. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship to the erotic and what you find poetic there?
Well, poetry and the erotic have always had a pretty intense relationship—it’s there in the lyrics of Sappho and Archilochos and Catullus, it’s there even earlier in Gilgamesh and the Homeric epics. Desire as an occasion for song, desire as an occasion for action—those are some of the classic situations from which poetry arises. In that desire often gives the poems their occasions, my work’s no different, and Sight Map in particular is a book whose center is desire—for certainty in love and in faith. It’s lack of certainty that gives the book its shape, which is also pretty classic. As Anne Carson writes of Greek lyric in Eros the Bittersweet, “Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole” left in the lover by their desire for the beloved. Looking back on them, I can see that a lot of the poems in Sight Map are about desire at a physical distance or a psychic remove, and their atmospheres depend upon how emotionally and physically unsettling distance is—whether that’s distance from God or from the beloved.
However, I like that you point out the language of my poems creates “a texture that tends to reinforce” their erotic situations. My day-to-day relationship to writing is based on the pleasure I take in its materials, both its graphic and sonic aspects. I like the look of letters arranged into words, lines and stanzas as much as I like the actual sonorities created by phonemes and syllables hooked together to make words hooked together to make lines, ad infinitum. And though the visual aspect of a poem eventually becomes as important to me as its soundscape, I tend to draft poems by following an aural rhythm—both alliterative and prosodic—and it’s my hope that an essential quality of what I’m writing about adheres in the actual feel of the language. Hopkins called it inscape, the essential quality of the subject as captured by his prosodic system, but I’d hesitate to lay claim to anything so systematic. Sometimes I think writing is desire’s own experiment: doesn’t desire itself desire a tool with which to articulate and understand itself?
The Room Where I Was Born is a dark collection, building on the innocence and horror of the fairy tale tradition, the gothic, mythology, and even Biblical violence. At its heart, it feels like it is full of love, but a ruined or broken kind of love. Sight Map feels like a true departure from this in its embracing of the natural world, and more directly of a love that transcends: “Between two who love each other there is no room for doubt.” How do you see the idea of love working in these two collections?
I know for sure that I was thinking about love while writing Sight Map. The first three sections were written while in a long-distance relationship, me on the East Coast and him on the West. Since I had been the one to leave the Bay Area for a semester’s residence at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, and then part of a summer at MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, I was at first very conscious of feeling responsible for the ways in which the relationship started to unravel almost immediately, something that you can literally see in “To Be Two,” whose first two sections imperfectly “zip” together to make the third. In that final section, “the veil/is torn, but not sundered,” so there’s hope of repair—but as the reader discovers by the book’s last section, that hope doesn’t last. “Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus” is the end of that relationship and the beginning of others.
But I was also thinking of other loves while writing Sight Map. And if one of my essential conflicts is that I am always ambivalent and awaiting a release from doubt, these two loves still seem to me like what I love most completely and what I love with least generosity: the natural world and the theology I was raised with. Given that, at least for me, there was a lot of slippage between the objects of devotion in any given poem, I came to think of the book as a love quadrangle:
poet beloved
God site/nature
I thought of the book this way very early on, and was very conscious that this was like the four corners of a page; I thought of these words as the frame for each page, and part of the journey of the book was negotiating the charged field created by these words. On the one hand, I know I began to visual it this way because of Brenda Hillman’s poem “A Geology” (from Cascadia); on the other, her pages are framed by four words which are always changing and which only sometimes repeat. I felt productively stuck within my own unchanging predicament, largely because the site itself often changed, doubt waxed and waned, and eventually the beloved went plural.
As for The Room Where I Was Born: I couldn’t say if I had love much in mind while writing it. From the distance of the at least seven years since I finished it, The Room… seems to begin as a book about the impotence of being a child—not being able to affect the course of one’s own fate, being subjected to adult desires and emotions—and the rage over that powerlessness. I see it then develop into a story about the person who emerges from abuse carrying its legacies of impotence, rage and a deep need for love. What follows is a lot of sex, betrayal, violence, shame, and power games. If there is love between men in that collection, it arrives at the end, hard-won, always too much jerry-rigged, tenuous and unsustainable. I see these lines from the last poem in the book, the fourth section of “Circa,” as perhaps more accurate of the whole: “a boy slipped the skin//of the literal until there was no house/could hold him, goodbye.” I was at that point in my life more trusting of and in love with art than with men.
Both collections work extensively with sequences and long poems, which I really admire. First and foremost, I find your work to be so expressive through—and innovative with—form. In the first section of Sight Map, the pieces arrive sort of fragmented or broken, but the last piece in the section, “To Be Two,” ends in an overlaying of some fragments, forging a “full” piece from pieces. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how form guides your work, or how you arrived at this essential use of form and sequence.
I do believe that each poet’s sense of form, like water, finds its own level—part of the difficult maturation of the poet is in learning to allow the mind to shut up so that the ear can hear the poems, which are often quite different in form than we want or expect them to be. By the end of Sight Map mine seemed to have settled somewhere between a two-page meditative lyric and the sequence, though lately I’ve found that my individual poems hit eight pages with increasing frequency. And while I’ve always had a hard time writing anything truly short, I haven’t really interrogated my recent tendency toward sequence and the longer poem. My gut response is an image. You know how, with some dogs, you’ve never seen them really run until you’ve given them an acre of field to run in? Some of my poems feel that way to me: they need range in which to be magnificent.
It wasn’t quite this way during the writing of Sight Map, which I began to write my way into with much hesitation and uncertainty. When I arrived at Bucknell, I was very conscious of trying to find a way out of the poems of my second book, Pleasure (which is finally coming out next year), which I had already largely finished. The first poems I wrote—“Emerson Susquehanna” and “To Be Two”—didn’t seem like finished poems to me; I put them aside for a month thinking they were too attenuated and sketchy, that I wasn’t hearing the poems correctly. It wasn’t until I sent them to a friend who said, “Hey, these are really good,” that I began to take seriously what I’d begun to do.
And though I was quite aware of the formal “gamesmanship” of certain poems, like “To Be Two” and “Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus,” in which I set up procedural rules to help guide the poem’s composition (something I’d done in Pleasure as well), largely the forms were intuitive, their prosodies breath- and ear-driven. In “listening for the syllables,” I was definitely given permission by Charles Olson’s ideas about “projective verse”: “to step back here to this place of the elements and minims of language, is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical.” I love that he marries precision and intuition within the syllable, and it’s there that my own ear yokes Olson with Hopkins: the linkage of syllable to syllable with precision and intuition is my own version of inscape.
Along with nature and love, Sight Map embeds itself in the tradition of the journey, or the journey. You’ve titled sections with coordinates—objective signifiers of place—and one with the word “Pilgrim.” The pilgrim is one who travels for faith, for discovery, or out of an irresistible compulsion to meet God. The poems themselves have a reverence and respect for nature that borders on the religious as well. How is the notion of faith at work in this book for you, and what did you, as the poet, discover in your journey to write it?
After being raised in a devout family and having gone to Catholic school, I left the Catholic Church when I was a teenager, when I figured out I was gay. For a long time I didn’t think about God or theology at all, but when my first love died of AIDS, I found myself completely unprepared for his death. This is what Pleasure is largely about, facing his death by going back into theology as a gay man in the age of AIDS. Of course I was in mourning, which is not an especially good time to try and develop a relationship to theology: being matter seemed like a terrible curse, and God seemed malevolent and silent, and there was no sacrifice aside from human life. But I nonetheless started to get interested in Gnosticism, in the significant loopholes it provided the Christian upbringing I’d had.
Sight Map really began when I went to the well-stocked library at Bucknell to browse and find something to read: I’d arrived from California in a landscape very cold and full of snow, and the weather was a good excuse to start a reading project. It was in browsing the stacks of the library that I came across a complete edition of Emerson’s Journals, which inspired me to begin reading the Transcendentalists, who despite my education, I had really never read before. “Emerson Susquehanna” came from reading his journals during the blizzards of that winter and experiencing quite viscerally the difference between my childhood theology and that of Transcendentalism. Without Jesus, there was no suffering sacrificial incarnation, no mediator between man and God, no material Godhead—it was as if flesh had been released from the habit of pain. This was at the same time comforting and odd, fairly unbelievable. It was a release from what Emerson called “the God of rhetoric,” but it was also challenge: what now? “It isn’t//mastery I’m after,” I write in that poem, “It’s certain//other terms/than my own//I wait for.” The book’s journey starts that; all the poems unfold from that first poem.
Another piece that really moved me in Sight Map was “Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus.” You’ve “braided” some lines, phrases, and images in this piece so that the storytelling has an echo that reminded me almost of the work of prayer, but it’s perhaps a more “contemporary” form of prayer that involves sex, the erotic, profanity, and God. I find this a recurring motif in your work, the pairing of what you might call the sacred alongside what many would consider the profane, yet you seem to have an equal reverence for both. Can you talk a bit about the interaction between the sacred and the profane in your work?
My favorite Gnostic text is “The Thunder: Perfect Mind.” There’s a receipt from 08/05/01 tucked in my copy of James M. Robinsons’s Nag Hammadi Library, and this impromptu bookmark opens the book to “The Thunder: Perfect Mind.” It reminds me that I’ve been reading this text for about eight years without exhausting it. Why? The text is likely spoken by Sophia, the feminine principle of divine wisdom, and her voice does this beautiful job of embracing dualism and then shattering it.
In its vatic breadth and its ecstatic yoking of opposing forces, “The Thunder: Perfect Mind” reminds me at times of Leaves of Grass, at other times of Rumi, and in doing so it also reminds me that the tradition of visionary poetics has profound ties across cultures, across centuries. “I was sent forth from the power,” she begins,” and I have come to those who reflect upon me,/and I have been found among those who seek after me.” First she establishes her source and power, and then her relationship to the reader: “Be on your guard!/Do not be ignorant of me.” And then she begins her litany:
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin…
I am the silence incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the word whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.
This text embodies my own sense of the relationship between sacred and profane: they often share the same name. Even with its origins in mystical theology, this is nonetheless an explicitly political position—as it was for Whitman—and in my case, this means it’s also pro-feminist and pro-queer. My becoming a poet at all was made possible by feminist and Gay Liberation writers like Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg, and I find the legacies of these writers to be the most obvious connection between The Room Where I Was Born and Sight Map: a refusal to be shamed, a deep pleasure in the erotic, and a desire to give language to a sexuality that has often been denied language.
Some reviewers have pointed out that the fourth section of Sight Map is the least theological, an observation that gave me pause. And though I agree that after “Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus,” the poems are less obviously spiritual, I still find their insistence on the unity of experience to stem implicitly from spiritual belief. The argument of “Abandoned Palinode for the Twenty Suitors of June,” for instance, rests on the claim that sexual experience might lead to spiritual change: “you fucked them all…and you,/in the center of your life, finally changed,/both within your language and without.” Given my personal history and subject position, I can’t discount the transformative potential of sexuality, especially given its ability to make changes wordlessly, on an unlanguaged level of consciousness it takes work to get to, to bring words back from. To say it another way: why does our culture believe that sexual violence radically transforms a person, while a loving sexual experience doesn’t? I have always believed one of poetry’s jobs to be the demonstration of truths that counter our culture’s dependence on convention. Which is why I’ve been thinking about “The Thunder: Perfect Mind” for the past eight years and have just put the bookmark back in the book at this passage, which strikes me as a good definition of poetry:
For what is inside of is what is outside of you,
and the one who fashions you on the outside
is the one who shaped the inside of you.
And what you see outside of you,
you see inside of you;
it is visible and it is your garment.
Brian Teare is the author of the award-winning The Room Where I Was Born, as well as the forthcoming volume Pleasure and two chapbooks. He has received Stegner, National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell Colony poetry fellowships. The poems in Sight Map and The Room Where I Was Born are often concerned with erotic situations, but more than that, they are built from language that is erotic in nature—your words and lines have a richness, a fullness, and a texture that tends to reinforce their meaning. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship to the erotic and what you find poetic there?
Well, poetry and the erotic have always had a pretty intense relationship—it’s there in the lyrics of Sappho and Archilochos and Catullus, it’s there even earlier in Gilgamesh and the Homeric epics. Desire as an occasion for song, desire as an occasion for action—those are some of the classic situations from which poetry arises. In that desire often gives the poems their occasions, my work’s no different, and Sight Map in particular is a book whose center is desire—for certainty in love and in faith. It’s lack of certainty that gives the book its shape, which is also pretty classic. As Anne Carson writes of Greek lyric in Eros the Bittersweet, “Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole” left in the lover by their desire for the beloved. Looking back on them, I can see that a lot of the poems in Sight Map are about desire at a physical distance or a psychic remove, and their atmospheres depend upon how emotionally and physically unsettling distance is—whether that’s distance from God or from the beloved.
However, I like that you point out the language of my poems creates “a texture that tends to reinforce” their erotic situations. My day-to-day relationship to writing is based on the pleasure I take in its materials, both its graphic and sonic aspects. I like the look of letters arranged into words, lines and stanzas as much as I like the actual sonorities created by phonemes and syllables hooked together to make words hooked together to make lines, ad infinitum. And though the visual aspect of a poem eventually becomes as important to me as its soundscape, I tend to draft poems by following an aural rhythm—both alliterative and prosodic—and it’s my hope that an essential quality of what I’m writing about adheres in the actual feel of the language. Hopkins called it inscape, the essential quality of the subject as captured by his prosodic system, but I’d hesitate to lay claim to anything so systematic. Sometimes I think writing is desire’s own experiment: doesn’t desire itself desire a tool with which to articulate and understand itself?
The Room Where I Was Born is a dark collection, building on the innocence and horror of the fairy tale tradition, the gothic, mythology, and even Biblical violence. At its heart, it feels like it is full of love, but a ruined or broken kind of love. Sight Map feels like a true departure from this in its embracing of the natural world, and more directly of a love that transcends: “Between two who love each other there is no room for doubt.” How do you see the idea of love working in these two collections?I know for sure that I was thinking about love while writing Sight Map. The first three sections were written while in a long-distance relationship, me on the East Coast and him on the West. Since I had been the one to leave the Bay Area for a semester’s residence at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, and then part of a summer at MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, I was at first very conscious of feeling responsible for the ways in which the relationship started to unravel almost immediately, something that you can literally see in “To Be Two,” whose first two sections imperfectly “zip” together to make the third. In that final section, “the veil/is torn, but not sundered,” so there’s hope of repair—but as the reader discovers by the book’s last section, that hope doesn’t last. “Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus” is the end of that relationship and the beginning of others.
But I was also thinking of other loves while writing Sight Map. And if one of my essential conflicts is that I am always ambivalent and awaiting a release from doubt, these two loves still seem to me like what I love most completely and what I love with least generosity: the natural world and the theology I was raised with. Given that, at least for me, there was a lot of slippage between the objects of devotion in any given poem, I came to think of the book as a love quadrangle:poet beloved
God site/nature
I thought of the book this way very early on, and was very conscious that this was like the four corners of a page; I thought of these words as the frame for each page, and part of the journey of the book was negotiating the charged field created by these words. On the one hand, I know I began to visual it this way because of Brenda Hillman’s poem “A Geology” (from Cascadia); on the other, her pages are framed by four words which are always changing and which only sometimes repeat. I felt productively stuck within my own unchanging predicament, largely because the site itself often changed, doubt waxed and waned, and eventually the beloved went plural.
As for The Room Where I Was Born: I couldn’t say if I had love much in mind while writing it. From the distance of the at least seven years since I finished it, The Room… seems to begin as a book about the impotence of being a child—not being able to affect the course of one’s own fate, being subjected to adult desires and emotions—and the rage over that powerlessness. I see it then develop into a story about the person who emerges from abuse carrying its legacies of impotence, rage and a deep need for love. What follows is a lot of sex, betrayal, violence, shame, and power games. If there is love between men in that collection, it arrives at the end, hard-won, always too much jerry-rigged, tenuous and unsustainable. I see these lines from the last poem in the book, the fourth section of “Circa,” as perhaps more accurate of the whole: “a boy slipped the skin//of the literal until there was no house/could hold him, goodbye.” I was at that point in my life more trusting of and in love with art than with men.
Both collections work extensively with sequences and long poems, which I really admire. First and foremost, I find your work to be so expressive through—and innovative with—form. In the first section of Sight Map, the pieces arrive sort of fragmented or broken, but the last piece in the section, “To Be Two,” ends in an overlaying of some fragments, forging a “full” piece from pieces. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how form guides your work, or how you arrived at this essential use of form and sequence.
I do believe that each poet’s sense of form, like water, finds its own level—part of the difficult maturation of the poet is in learning to allow the mind to shut up so that the ear can hear the poems, which are often quite different in form than we want or expect them to be. By the end of Sight Map mine seemed to have settled somewhere between a two-page meditative lyric and the sequence, though lately I’ve found that my individual poems hit eight pages with increasing frequency. And while I’ve always had a hard time writing anything truly short, I haven’t really interrogated my recent tendency toward sequence and the longer poem. My gut response is an image. You know how, with some dogs, you’ve never seen them really run until you’ve given them an acre of field to run in? Some of my poems feel that way to me: they need range in which to be magnificent.
It wasn’t quite this way during the writing of Sight Map, which I began to write my way into with much hesitation and uncertainty. When I arrived at Bucknell, I was very conscious of trying to find a way out of the poems of my second book, Pleasure (which is finally coming out next year), which I had already largely finished. The first poems I wrote—“Emerson Susquehanna” and “To Be Two”—didn’t seem like finished poems to me; I put them aside for a month thinking they were too attenuated and sketchy, that I wasn’t hearing the poems correctly. It wasn’t until I sent them to a friend who said, “Hey, these are really good,” that I began to take seriously what I’d begun to do.
And though I was quite aware of the formal “gamesmanship” of certain poems, like “To Be Two” and “Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus,” in which I set up procedural rules to help guide the poem’s composition (something I’d done in Pleasure as well), largely the forms were intuitive, their prosodies breath- and ear-driven. In “listening for the syllables,” I was definitely given permission by Charles Olson’s ideas about “projective verse”: “to step back here to this place of the elements and minims of language, is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical.” I love that he marries precision and intuition within the syllable, and it’s there that my own ear yokes Olson with Hopkins: the linkage of syllable to syllable with precision and intuition is my own version of inscape.
Along with nature and love, Sight Map embeds itself in the tradition of the journey, or the journey. You’ve titled sections with coordinates—objective signifiers of place—and one with the word “Pilgrim.” The pilgrim is one who travels for faith, for discovery, or out of an irresistible compulsion to meet God. The poems themselves have a reverence and respect for nature that borders on the religious as well. How is the notion of faith at work in this book for you, and what did you, as the poet, discover in your journey to write it?
After being raised in a devout family and having gone to Catholic school, I left the Catholic Church when I was a teenager, when I figured out I was gay. For a long time I didn’t think about God or theology at all, but when my first love died of AIDS, I found myself completely unprepared for his death. This is what Pleasure is largely about, facing his death by going back into theology as a gay man in the age of AIDS. Of course I was in mourning, which is not an especially good time to try and develop a relationship to theology: being matter seemed like a terrible curse, and God seemed malevolent and silent, and there was no sacrifice aside from human life. But I nonetheless started to get interested in Gnosticism, in the significant loopholes it provided the Christian upbringing I’d had.
Sight Map really began when I went to the well-stocked library at Bucknell to browse and find something to read: I’d arrived from California in a landscape very cold and full of snow, and the weather was a good excuse to start a reading project. It was in browsing the stacks of the library that I came across a complete edition of Emerson’s Journals, which inspired me to begin reading the Transcendentalists, who despite my education, I had really never read before. “Emerson Susquehanna” came from reading his journals during the blizzards of that winter and experiencing quite viscerally the difference between my childhood theology and that of Transcendentalism. Without Jesus, there was no suffering sacrificial incarnation, no mediator between man and God, no material Godhead—it was as if flesh had been released from the habit of pain. This was at the same time comforting and odd, fairly unbelievable. It was a release from what Emerson called “the God of rhetoric,” but it was also challenge: what now? “It isn’t//mastery I’m after,” I write in that poem, “It’s certain//other terms/than my own//I wait for.” The book’s journey starts that; all the poems unfold from that first poem.
Another piece that really moved me in Sight Map was “Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus.” You’ve “braided” some lines, phrases, and images in this piece so that the storytelling has an echo that reminded me almost of the work of prayer, but it’s perhaps a more “contemporary” form of prayer that involves sex, the erotic, profanity, and God. I find this a recurring motif in your work, the pairing of what you might call the sacred alongside what many would consider the profane, yet you seem to have an equal reverence for both. Can you talk a bit about the interaction between the sacred and the profane in your work?
My favorite Gnostic text is “The Thunder: Perfect Mind.” There’s a receipt from 08/05/01 tucked in my copy of James M. Robinsons’s Nag Hammadi Library, and this impromptu bookmark opens the book to “The Thunder: Perfect Mind.” It reminds me that I’ve been reading this text for about eight years without exhausting it. Why? The text is likely spoken by Sophia, the feminine principle of divine wisdom, and her voice does this beautiful job of embracing dualism and then shattering it.
In its vatic breadth and its ecstatic yoking of opposing forces, “The Thunder: Perfect Mind” reminds me at times of Leaves of Grass, at other times of Rumi, and in doing so it also reminds me that the tradition of visionary poetics has profound ties across cultures, across centuries. “I was sent forth from the power,” she begins,” and I have come to those who reflect upon me,/and I have been found among those who seek after me.” First she establishes her source and power, and then her relationship to the reader: “Be on your guard!/Do not be ignorant of me.” And then she begins her litany:
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin…
I am the silence incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.
I am the word whose sound is manifold
and the word whose appearance is multiple.
I am the utterance of my name.
This text embodies my own sense of the relationship between sacred and profane: they often share the same name. Even with its origins in mystical theology, this is nonetheless an explicitly political position—as it was for Whitman—and in my case, this means it’s also pro-feminist and pro-queer. My becoming a poet at all was made possible by feminist and Gay Liberation writers like Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg, and I find the legacies of these writers to be the most obvious connection between The Room Where I Was Born and Sight Map: a refusal to be shamed, a deep pleasure in the erotic, and a desire to give language to a sexuality that has often been denied language.
Some reviewers have pointed out that the fourth section of Sight Map is the least theological, an observation that gave me pause. And though I agree that after “Sanctuary, Its Root Sanctus,” the poems are less obviously spiritual, I still find their insistence on the unity of experience to stem implicitly from spiritual belief. The argument of “Abandoned Palinode for the Twenty Suitors of June,” for instance, rests on the claim that sexual experience might lead to spiritual change: “you fucked them all…and you,/in the center of your life, finally changed,/both within your language and without.” Given my personal history and subject position, I can’t discount the transformative potential of sexuality, especially given its ability to make changes wordlessly, on an unlanguaged level of consciousness it takes work to get to, to bring words back from. To say it another way: why does our culture believe that sexual violence radically transforms a person, while a loving sexual experience doesn’t? I have always believed one of poetry’s jobs to be the demonstration of truths that counter our culture’s dependence on convention. Which is why I’ve been thinking about “The Thunder: Perfect Mind” for the past eight years and have just put the bookmark back in the book at this passage, which strikes me as a good definition of poetry:
For what is inside of is what is outside of you,
and the one who fashions you on the outside
is the one who shaped the inside of you.
And what you see outside of you,
you see inside of you;
it is visible and it is your garment.
Monday, September 21, 2009
An Interview with Paula Bohince and Sandra Beasley
The Writer's Center is pleased to co-sponsor an event at Fall for the Book this week: Poets Paula Bohince and Brian Teare. The reading will take place on Thursday, September 24 at 3p.m. at the M & T tent outside the Johnson Center on the campus of George Mason University. Today we've got an interview with Paula Bohince (interviewed by workshop leader, board member, poet and sometime XX Files writer Sandra Beasley). Tomorrow, Director Charles Jensen interviews the other poet at the event, Brian teare. If you can get out and see these two wonderful poets, you should. Paula Bohince is the author of a poetry collection, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, which was published in 2008 by Sarabande Books and received its inaugural Aleda Shirley Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Literary Imagination, The Kenyon Review, Slate, and The Yale Review. She has received the Grolier Poetry Prize, the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Amy Clampitt Resident Fellowship, and a 2009 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught at New York University, the New School, and elsewhere, and she was the University of Mississippi’s first Summer Poet-in-Residence. She lives in Pennsylvania.
I'm struck by the depth and complexity of your first collection,
Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. What are some of your key influences--professors, beloved books--and how are they reflected in these poems?
Thank you, Sandra, for saying that. I’ve been lucky to have had a number of incredible professors, including Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Marie Ponsot, Mark Doty, Lynn Emanuel, and Agha Shahid Ali. I think, for brevity’s sake, I’ll concentrate on Galway Kinnell, who was my MFA thesis advisor at NYU and whose presence might be most evident in the book, both by his books and his teaching.
During my last semester of graduate school, Galway and I would meet weekly in a coffee shop near school. We’d go over my poems line by line, side by side, and talk about word choice, about simplicity, about creating a musical line, about thoughtful description. I remember making a lazy description of a snake moving through grass, and he said very gently, “You know, poets have been trying for centuries to describe the way that a snake moves.” And we were both quiet for a minute. That moment felt very humbling and generous to me. He made me want to go more slowly, to be more thoughtful. In the book, I describe a snake in “The Gospel According to Paul,” and I thought about Galway when writing it. After those meetings, after school ended, I wanted to begin fresh. The only poems in the book that began in graduate school are “Trespass” and “First Day of the Hunt.”
I learned so, so much from Galway and his kindness toward me and my work, from his time and attention given to my rough poems. I thought of him often during the writing of this book and continue to do so, especially during revision when I have those WWGD questions. Wondering what he’d find necessary or obfuscating. How he would respond to a particular music. I feel such kinship, via his poems, with his vision of the natural world. I always return to his books when I’m feeling lost, when I need to be grounded in the qualities that I want my poems to have.
One of my most beloved books is Jane Mead’s extraordinary The Lord and the General Din of the World. I had first read it in my senior year of college, and it completely changed the way that I approached poetry. It seemed utterly open, vulnerable, and questioning. You know those books that resonate with you so much, on a level you might not even be able to articulate? That was, and continues to be, Jane’s book for me. It was the book that I literally carried around for years, trying to absorb its lessons, both on how to approach poems and how it might be possible to live.
There have been so many other collections that have been influential, but I will always be grateful for this particular book for its continual effect on me. And to have my book also come out with Sarabande, which has been amazing, and to have Jane’s words on my book…I never could have imagined.
Your first book has an unusually specific framing story, as reinforced by this gloss on the back cover: "...Spanning decades, and set on a decrepit, inherited farm in Pennsylvania, the daughter and father navigate the poverty of their environment and their own troubled relationship. Details of the father's murder are gradually uncovered, and we eventually learn that he was killed by a trusted laborer." At what point in the composition and accumulation of these poems did you decide that would be the thematic focus?
Both ordering and the use of the framing device of the mystery came very late in the writing and organizational process. I’d been writing the book from 2001-2006, and I’d viewed the manuscript as a collection of elegies: the lyric I couched in both a remembered and dreamed Pennsylvania. It wasn’t until the summer of 2006, shortly before I moved back to Pennsylvania from New York, that using the idea of an unfolding mystery formed. The poem “The Apostles” and the “gospel” poems were written during that summer; these four poems are the only ones, in my mind, that speak directly to the crime presented in the book. After I had written “Prayer,” I felt that the poem may work as an opener, but I wasn’t writing any poems with a sense of how they’d eventually connect.
“Eating Fish in Pittsburgh” was one of the earliest poems written, as was “The Fatherless Room.” After the vast majority of the poems were written, as I began thinking about order, a particular poem would find its “partner” poem, and so pairs and clusters began to form. Thinking about a seasonal progression also helped create another kind of arc. It was difficult for me, nearing the book’s completion, to try to present a story that “made sense” for a reader. That was a real leap for me: imagining someone reading the entire collection and what questions they might have and what answers I should try to provide.
When you are reading selections from the book in a live venue, how do you adapt to an audience that doesn't have access to the "full story" of the collection?
Giving readings has been such a pleasure, and I especially enjoy looking out into the audience and connecting with people as I read from the book. I usually begin by saying something like, “This book takes place on a farm in Pennsylvania and concerns itself with the sudden death of a father.” After that, I usually ignore the narrative of the book and read poems that I think work individually and are sonically interesting and different from each other. I’ll usually read poems in the general order in which they appear. Usually any talking I’ll do between poems is to offer a kind of break for the audience. I might briefly explain how I got an idea for a poem, or maybe a tidbit of my family life, i.e. my father’s hunting in “First Day of the Hunt” or a phrase my mother would say in “Still Life with Needle.”
I was intrigued (and ultimately, impressed) by the inclusion of the acrostics in this collection--a form more often associated with wordplay, versus such a grave subject. How did you gravitate to the form?
I’d never written acrostics before, but maybe four years into writing this book, I was exhausted. I was exhausted by the emotional work of getting into the headspace necessary to access these poems. I’d begun to feel, as the poems accumulated, that I’d been building a house and then living in that house solely occupied by my father and myself. It was wrenching. I honestly feared that I would never be finished writing the book. I needed a door out for a while, and I wanted to write in a form because it felt like a way of being less alone in the writing process.
I thought, hmm, sonnets? Nope. I write terrible sonnets. So I tried one acrostic, which I believe was “Acrostic: Outhouse.” It felt like a gift, it came so easily. I tried another. And then another. All but two acrostics that I wrote during that time made it into the book. At the time, I told myself that I would write acrostics about lighthearted subjects to get away from the book. Well, that didn’t happen, naturally, but it was one more poem, and then another, and then another. I’m actually very grateful to those acrostics, which provided a kind of ease and encouragement that I needed to push through the rest of the book.
Many thanks to Sandra and The Writer’s Center for the opportunity to answer these great questions. It’s been a pleasure.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Olney Theatre, HBO, and Fall For the Book
So I'm going to be using a slightly different format for the blog for a while. I won't be posting everyday (these days are busy). Today I'm going to name three really cool upcoming or ongoing things that have all come to my attention today.
First,
Tomorrow night, Feb. 21 at 8 PM, the film “Taking Chance,” based on a memoir from the Operation Homecoming anthology, will premiere on HBO. Starring Kevin Bacon, the film is also an Official Selection for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
Written by Col. Mike Strobl, USMC (ret.), the memoir recounts the escorting of the remains of a Marine killed in combat in Iraq to his burial in his hometown. Strobl, who co-wrote the screenplay, is played by Bacon. Strobl’s memoir was published in magazines, newspapers, online, and later in NEA's Operation Homecoming anthology. The memoir is not available at this time as a stand-alone book; our anthology is the best source if you wish to read the work. Separately, this memoir was included in the Academy-Award finalist documentary Operation Homecoming, read by Robert Duvall.
HBO has developed a Web site for the “Taking Chance” film: http://www.hbo.com/films/takingchance/
Second, exciting news for Writer's Center members. We've formed a partnership with Olney Theater in Olney, MD. Check out Mark Twain’s only play, with a discount!
Jean-Francois Millet is a brilliant but unrecognized artist who can't sell a painting to save his life. With the help of his madcap bohemian friends, Jean decides to stage his own demise to revive sales. However, in order to keep an eye on his success, he re-emerges as his imaginary twin sister. Authored by Mark Twain in 1898, this play was recently discovered by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and updated by David Ives. Join Olney for a farce that will have you laughing loud enough to wake the dead.
A WASHINGTON-AREA PREMIERE!
Special offer for Writer’s Center members: Take $10 your ticket! Use code WXC219 online at www.olneytheatre.org or with the Box Office at 301.924.3400 and save $10 on each ticket you order. Limit 4.
(Restrictions: Not valid on previous purchases; cannot be combined with other offers; subject to availability).
Third, and last, Fall for the Book at George Mason University is hosting a discussion forum over at its Web site. Do check it out right here: http://fallforthebook.org/.
First,
Tomorrow night, Feb. 21 at 8 PM, the film “Taking Chance,” based on a memoir from the Operation Homecoming anthology, will premiere on HBO. Starring Kevin Bacon, the film is also an Official Selection for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
Written by Col. Mike Strobl, USMC (ret.), the memoir recounts the escorting of the remains of a Marine killed in combat in Iraq to his burial in his hometown. Strobl, who co-wrote the screenplay, is played by Bacon. Strobl’s memoir was published in magazines, newspapers, online, and later in NEA's Operation Homecoming anthology. The memoir is not available at this time as a stand-alone book; our anthology is the best source if you wish to read the work. Separately, this memoir was included in the Academy-Award finalist documentary Operation Homecoming, read by Robert Duvall.
HBO has developed a Web site for the “Taking Chance” film: http://www.hbo.com/films/takingchance/
Second, exciting news for Writer's Center members. We've formed a partnership with Olney Theater in Olney, MD. Check out Mark Twain’s only play, with a discount!
Jean-Francois Millet is a brilliant but unrecognized artist who can't sell a painting to save his life. With the help of his madcap bohemian friends, Jean decides to stage his own demise to revive sales. However, in order to keep an eye on his success, he re-emerges as his imaginary twin sister. Authored by Mark Twain in 1898, this play was recently discovered by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and updated by David Ives. Join Olney for a farce that will have you laughing loud enough to wake the dead.
A WASHINGTON-AREA PREMIERE!
Special offer for Writer’s Center members: Take $10 your ticket! Use code WXC219 online at www.olneytheatre.org or with the Box Office at 301.924.3400 and save $10 on each ticket you order. Limit 4.
(Restrictions: Not valid on previous purchases; cannot be combined with other offers; subject to availability).
Third, and last, Fall for the Book at George Mason University is hosting a discussion forum over at its Web site. Do check it out right here: http://fallforthebook.org/.
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