Metamorphic Imaginaries: A Conversation Between H. L. Hix and Dante Di Stefano

DD: In the introduction to The Gospel, you note: “This book is not ‘creative writing’ or ‘imaginative literature’ in the sense that applies to those works [books about the life of Jesus by Saramago and Coetzee]. I did not ‘make up’ anything here. I selected, arranged, and translated all the material, but I invented none of it: everything in The Gospel derives from ancient sources, nothing originates with me.” It strikes me that much of your work (and especially your more recent poetry collections such as American Anger and Rain Inscription or even books like Demonstrategy and Lines of Inquiry) blurs the boundaries between poetry, prose, criticism, philosophy, translation and so on; sometimes when I read one of your books, I think perhaps there are no boundaries between these modalities of engagement. You always bring me back to Benjamin: “all great literature either dissolves a genre or invents one.” Could you talk a bit about The Gospel, and your body of work, with some of these thoughts in mind?

HH: Thank you for this generous question, itself a robust modality of engagement that sees a continuity between The Gospel and my previous books.
Because the fact is so easy to forget, it’s worth occasionally reminding ourselves that genres are made up. Genres are not what philosophers call “natural kinds,” distinctions that exist in the real world independently of us, and that our categories then correspond to (or fail to correspond to). Instead, our categorizing creates and sustains genres, and they never “pull away” into an existence independent of our conceptualizing. They’re invented, not discovered, and they’re not very tidy: a novel isn’t distinguished from a short story by the same principle that distinguishes a novel from a memoir. Our genres don’t “cut literature at the joints.”
Which makes them susceptible to questioning. I would string the pearl you offer from Walter Benjamin with this pearl from Audre Lorde: “For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.” And this from Amartya Sen: “We can not only assess our decisions, given our objectives and values; we can also scrutinize the critical sustainability of these objectives and values themselves.” All three, like your question itself, point toward an urge that drives all my writing: not merely to renegotiate one particular agreement or another between us, but to reveal, and thus to make available for evaluation and revision, the “metastructure of consent” (Lauren Berlant’s term) that has been governing all our agreements.
So you’re right to pose the question of genre to The Gospel. To read for the gospel exclusively by haggling over what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote is to grant the metastructure of consent that says those four texts and only those four texts contain the gospel. But that metastructure of consent is constructed, not observed. It doesn’t describe a quality inherent in those four texts; it imposes a rule on my behavior, setting limits to what I should read and how I should read it. The Gospel is a way of asking what that rule hides from me, a way of asking what I can see if I don’t follow the rule, that I can’t see when I do follow the rule.
The fact that several poems in the Ill Angels’ first section are addressed to your students leads me to ask you a version of the same question. If you talk to students all day in class, in that modality of engagement, how important is it to talk to them also in another modality of engagement, in poems? And how important is it to you to address a particular person or group in a poem?

DD: It’s both of utmost importance and of no importance at all. In some sense, any addressee is merely a trope, part of the poem’s furniture and frame. Sometimes when I reread a poem I’ve written I feel like I’m speaking to myself in a small empty room and sometimes I feel like I’m speaking to all the round earth’s imagined corners.
I do speak to students all day long in my job as a schoolteacher, and sometimes those conversations are poems, sometimes those conversations die into poems, sometimes poems die into those conversations, but most of my students will never read the poems I write. Still, addressing my students in a poem shows that I care for them deeply—it’s a form of prayer for their wellbeing and future success. Deep attention is the highest form of love; embodying and engendering deep attention is the work of poetry and the work of teaching.
The greatest two words in all of literature are the epigraph to E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End: “only connect.”
After the birth of my daughter, it became very important to me that in the future she might read my poems and understand something about her parents that might otherwise remain hidden to her. In a very real sense, my wife and my daughter are the ones I am always speaking to in any poem I write.
Who do you see as the ideal audience for The Gospel? Who is this book for?

HH: The glib answers to this question—It’s for everyone! and I write for myself—do point toward something that I think is not at all glib. I myself experience an awe before the world and a wonder at experience that could be called “religious” because they convey a sense that in what meets the eye there is more than meets the eye. But I haven’t found (yet!) an institutional form or a heroic figure or a codified set of beliefs adequate to that awe and wonder. I wrote The Gospel for myself, then, in that the awe and wonder I feel invite continuing exploration in preference to settling on (or settling into) a received framework. And The Gospel is for everyone in that of course I’m not the only person who feels awe and wonder, or the only person intent on continuing to look toward what I can’t yet claim to be looking at.
While we’re thinking about who is speaking to whom, the first poem in Ill Angels, “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen,” ends “This is the part where I take your hand in / my hand and I tell you we are burning.” If angels are messengers, as the etymology of the word suggests, does the “I tell you” in that last line alert the reader that the speaker is one of those ill angels in the book’s title?

DD: I hadn’t thought of that possibility, but I think it’s a smart reading of those lines. The ill angels from the title are the ill angels from Poe’s “Dream-Land,” which begins: “By a route obscure and lonely, / Haunted by ill angels only.” To me, “Dream-Land” is a “fantasia of the unconscious” (to borrow a phrase from D. H. Lawrence); it’s a poem about journeying deeply into the self in order to turn outward more ardently. These ill angels are the legion woes that amass in the four chambers of our hearts as we go through this life; they are our dead, our regrets, our wounds, our arnica and eyebright, our hopes, our dear ones—they hold out the possibility of seeing ourselves the way a stranger does, unfolding in moments. In some sense, all the personae speaking through these poems, and all those spoken to, are these ill angels.
On an entirely different tack, I was reading in The Atlantic about Thomas Jefferson’s redacted New Testament, which he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Jefferson’s version expunged all the supernatural elements from the gospel. Your version adds miracle upon miracle from the ancient source material. We have, for instance, the baby Jesus taming dragons on the flight into Egypt, a trip during which he collapses distance and time. I was delighted by these stories, especially the ones from Jesus’ childhood. Has your conception of Jesus (as character, as metaphor) changed during your selection, arrangement, and translation of this material? What can we learn from the Hixian Jesus? How does this Jesus speak to our era?

HH: Jefferson was very concerned with the operation of things. How did things happen? How do thing happen? How will things happen? That concern invites historical and scientific accounts, which are especially good at answering those questions. An answer to how things happened should leave out miracles. There are no miracles in the domain of cause and effect.
I value historical and scientific accounts, and I am interested in how things happen, but I am even more interested in what things mean. I share Jefferson’s sense that the answers to those questions should be coordinated as far as possible, but I don’t share his strategy of coordinating them by only asking how things happen. I share Jefferson’s assessment that how things happen is an important concern; I choose not to follow him in making it so exclusive a concern.
A person who wants to know how things happened (what actually took place in the Middle East 2,000 years ago?) or how things happen (how do political institutions and religious institutions shape one another?) should get rid of supernatural elements in the narratives. A person who wants to understand what things mean might decide to attend to those supernatural elements, with the possibility in mind that they have more to do with significance than with cause and effect. Historical narratives are really good at answering how things happened, and scientific narratives are really good at answering how things happen. Literary narratives are really good at answering (or, I would say, at addressing) what things mean.
I don’t for a second think that a real goddess named Athena really appeared in the guise of Deiphobus to trick Hector into squaring off with Achilles, but I don’t take that or any of the other supernatural elements out of The Iliad, because I’m not reading The Iliad to find out how things happened; I’m reading it to find out what things mean. For me, it’s the same with reading a Gospel. I don’t believe, as an historical record of actual events that really occurred between physical entities, that baby Jesus tamed dragons, any more than I believe, in that way, that Beowulf slew a fen-dwelling monster named Grendel. I don’t think the writer who recounted the baby-Jesus-taming-dragons story in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew is offering me, and I’m not reading that particular story for, an historical record of actual events that really occurred between physical entities. I do think the writer of that story is signaling me that Jesus is exceptionally attuned to what today we might call the more-than-human world. I’m not any more worried about whether baby Jesus really tamed actual dragons than I am whether Gregor Samsa really turned into an actual giant beetle. So, I’m happy to stock The Gospel with lots of miracle stories: bring ’em on!
Miracle stories or not, literature remains connected to real events and real people. We’re engaged in this conversation as a deeply contentious election looms, and I’ve written one book called American Anger and another called Counterclaims. I just want to hear anything and everything you have to say in relation to your lines “Here in America, trauma and rage / dovetail, become birthright, counterclaim us.”

DD: The poem that those lines come from (“National Anthem with Elegy and Talon”) is about the intergenerational impacts of mental illness and domestic abuse, as much as it is about notions of national belonging and the experience of living in the United States in the early twenty-first century.
As many writers have noted, due to systemic racism, widespread misogyny, income inequality, a variety of broken social institutions (the public-school system, for example), and so on, daily life in America has been traumatic for many people for a long time. Fear, pain, and hopelessness accrue into rage and/or apathy (American Anger charts some of these tributaries). Any degree of safety and comfort we might experience as American citizens is underwritten by violence at home and abroad; this violence makes demands upon us all. No wonder that, in W. C. Williams famous formulation, the pure products of America go crazy, driven by a “numbed terror / under some hedge of choke-cherry / or viburnum, / which they cannot express—.” The Trump era has rendered much of this suffering, anguish, and violence far more legible to far more Americans than ever before.
In the beginning of Counterclaims, you note: “Poetry offers instead a field in which transformation becomes intelligible: a metamorphic imaginary, a landscape of renewal. The new self enters the world first in and as imagination. The new self is made by making.” Huge swaths of American life run counter to a metamorphic imaginary. I feel my self being constantly unmade, as a consumer, as a citizen, as a man; the feeling of that unmaking might be where a commitment to poetry begins.
Thinking of this kind of unmaking calls to mind the claims that the canonical gospels make on western readers. Reading The Gospel was a profoundly moving and unsettling experience for me, mainly I think, because of the way that you redress the deficits caused by translation inertia and gender tilt. You speak about this at length in your introduction to the book, but I was wondering, if, for the purposes of this conversation, you could discuss those aspects of the text?

HH: Thank you for drawing attention to these two concerns, which were very important motivations for my undertaking The Gospel. The concern I call “translation inertia” is that a great many word choices in existing English translations of the canonical Gospels have become fixed by convention, even though the English language is continually changing (as are human societies in which English is spoken). Those word choices have become static, even though the relationship between the Greek word being translated and the English word used to translate it is dynamic. 
I give a few examples in the introduction, but the list could be expanded. To follow up on one example that is only mentioned in the introduction, every previous English translation I’m aware of translates the Greek word christos as Christ, an obvious enough choice since the English word is a transliteration of the Greek word. But that “obvious” translation distorts something very important. The Greek word does not only refer, it also describes. In this it resembles, for instance, the English word president. “The President” refers to an office or to the person who holds that office, but it also describes the office or person as one who presides. The noun president relates to the verb preside, and the noun christos relates to the verb chrio, to rub a body with oil or dye or ointment. The English word “Christ,” though, doesn’t have a correlative verb form; it only refers, without describing. To capture that missing descriptive element, in The Gospel I translate christos as “salve,” which does function as both noun and verb: I can salve a wound or apply a salve to a wound. So “salve” describes as it refers, the way the Greek christos does, but the English “Christ” doesn’t.
The impulse to contest gender tilt is slightly different. Insofar as The Gospel is at all successful in resisting translation inertia, it is to that extent closer to, truer to, the original language of the sources; insofar as The Gospel succeeds in resisting gender tilt, to that extent it compensates for a limitation of both source and target language.
We recognize a problem with, say, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, a limitation in its depicting God as a thickly-muscled, light-skinned, heavily-bearded male, and we recognize a similar problem in referring to God as a male, and assigning God masculine roles such as father. The Gospel is an experiment in not doing so. I didn’t figure out a way to get The Gospel to pass the Bechdel Test, quite, but I hope its approach to degendering references to God and Jesus at least helps it not flout the Bechdel Test!
On a lighter note, I nominate you for President of National Poetry Month, and for “emotion recollected in tranquility” I substitute “a world less rickety, ricocheted with uncompromised shining.”

DD: Then, I’d recommend replacing “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” with your lines “…it is our work to send you careening / from consciousness to consciousness like tumbling down a hill.”
One of the stories from early in The Gospel stayed with me:

Walking once with xer mother across the city square, Jesus saw a teacher teaching some children. Twelve sparrows flurried down from the wall, bickering, and tumbled into the teacher’s lap. Seeing this, Jesus laughed. The teacher, noticing xer laugh, was filled with anger, and said, What’s so funny? Jesus replied, Listen, a widow is on her way here carrying what little wheat she can afford, but when she gets here she’ll stumble and spill the wheat. These sparrows are fighting over how many grains each will get. Jesus didn’t leave until what xe’d predicted had occurred. The teacher, seeing Jesus’ words become accomplished deeds, wanted to have xer run out of town, along with xer mother.

There’s so much to note and wonder about in this passage. We glimpse Jesus’ sense of humor, but its architecture remains a mystery. We see a link between Jesus’ clairvoyance and the clairvoyance of the sparrows. And I am left with many questions. Why is he laughing at the sparrows? Why does Jesus wait to see his prediction come true? Why doesn’t he help the widow? And so on. I will think of this anecdote every time I think of Jesus; it has subtly altered my perception of the metaphysics of the world presented in the Christian scriptures. What moments from The Gospel stay with you? What moments have altered your perception of the world presented in the Christian scriptures? And, out of personal curiosity, what’s your take on the passage I quoted?

HH: There are a lot of reasons to love that story, I’m sure. A couple of resonances are particularly strong for me.
One is by connection with Kierkegaard’s take, in Fear and Trembling, on the Abraham and Isaac story. Against the reassuring moralistic reading of the story that highlights God’s substitution of the ram for Isaac, and takes the point of the story to be something like Never fear: no matter how bad things look, God will rescue you, Kierkegaard foregrounds God’s command and Abraham’s obedience to it. The takeaway Kierkegaard registers is more like God is not bound by your judgments of value; God does not have to act the way you think God should. I hear something similar in this story, a reminder not to get too lazy or too cocky in thinking that Jesus just performs my vision of what’s right. Maybe Jesus is a rounder character than that, and maybe my vision of what’s right isn’t finished and perfect yet, but needs continuing adjustment and refinement.
Another resonance for me is with contemporary events. In the story, the teacher, confronted with truth, does not respond with self-correction and grateful embrace of truth: he responds with rage, and an impulse toward violence against truth and the bearer of truth. The teacher in the story seems to me to share a temperament with Trumpist America, the rage and violence being acted out against the truth of racial injustice, and against the bearers of that truth.
We live in an era where “facts” and “truth” are being constantly called into question in public discourse. For a collection that feels securely “grounded” in “real life,” Ill Angels also seems ready without warning to venture into surreal or dream worlds (“Because all the animals are kings and queens, / I wait for the rain to paint me”). How do those worlds connect for you? How do you want them to connect in the poems?

DD: William Blake’s visionary phenomenology inspires me. In one of his letters, Blake famously wrote: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.” Most of the times, I see the green things in the way, but I want the tears of joy. I want to learn to bear the beams of love. I want “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” Poetry trains me in this direction: in a poem, I hold open the palm of my hand and hope for infinity with its skylarks and lambs and caterpillars and lions and oxen and owls and, even, its poisons…
I think Blake would have loved your translation of the Sermon on the Mount as much as I do; this sermon forms the heart of any version of Jesus’ teaching. You translate, for example, the famous “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” as “Graceful, the unassuming: they will inherit the whole earth.” Could you discuss your translation choices for the beatitudes? Also, how does the additional material you included change the sermon itself?

HH: I’ve been dissatisfied for a long time with “blessed” as the translation of the Greek word makárioi in the beatitudes. It has been the obligatory translation ever since the King James: everyone translates it that way. But there’s something deeply misleading in that choice. Blessing comes to me from outside. I’m not blessed in myself, but blessed by something. Which allows for blessing to be transactional, part of a system of reward and punishment. It sets up “for” as the translation of the Greek hóti, to suggest that the blessedness derives from what comes after the hóti: the meek are blessed because they will inherit the earth, their blessedness consists in their inheritance.
But that’s not the flavor of the Greek at all. Makárioi is the collateral form of mákar, the primary meaning of which is the disposition, the well-being, of the gods, by contrast with that of humans. Its other uses are extensions of that primary meaning. Mákar is a godlikeness. It inheres in me, arises from within rather than being bestowed from without. It’s not a change of state imposed on me by something other than myself, it’s who I am. In the usual English translation it’s a transaction: if you are meek then you will be rewarded for that meekness by inheriting the earth, by which reward you will become blessed. But in the Greek the quality of being mákar is attended by inheritance of the earth. In the usual English translation, the value of being meek is utilitarian, teleological: it’s good to be meek because of the good results it brings. The value is in inheriting the earth. The usual English translation makes being meek a sound investment, and makes the rationale that runs through the beatitudes “rational self-interest,” the profit motive. In the Greek, though, the value of being meek is intrinsic, deontological. 
I’ve tried other approaches. In a previous version of the beatitudes, the one in the sequence called “Synopsis” (in Legible Heavens and then First Fire, Then Birds), I used “replete” for makárioi. In The Gospel, I chose “graceful.” Maybe better, maybe not, but what I was aiming for was restoring the implications of the original that makárioi inheres in the person and has value in itself.
The beatitudes work by repetition. The intense repetition in your “Solo” feels like the intense repetition in A Love Supreme, which “Solo” cites (and there are numerous other jazz/music references throughout the book). But “I am beyond professing music now,” one of your speakers says in a later poem. How do experiences of music and other art forms relate to your work as a poet?

DD: Music and the visual arts nourish me as much as poetry; both artforms suggest a range of possibilities for what a poem can be (picture a poem as expansive and effusive as a Mingus composition, a poem as repetitive and minimalist as a Philip Glass piano etude, a poem as gesturally complex as a Jackson Pollock canvas from the drip period, a poem as Baroque and phenomenologically complex as Velázquez’s Las Meninas).
The work ethic of Jazz musicians inspires me. The romantic images of Sonny Rollins woodshedding to the wind on the Williamsburg Bridge and Charlie Parker playing for the cows in a pasture belie a daily and total commitment to their art that is common to all of the artists I most admire.
The goal for me is to be always engaged in poetry, to dwell in poems the way I might dwell in the red ochers and umbers of a Caravaggio or the blazing hues of a Basquiat.
Another moment in The Gospel that moved me occurs after Jesus goes to the Mount of Olives and then returns to the temple to teach; the scribes and pharisees bring before Jesus a woman caught in the act of adultery for whom Mosaic Law mandates death by stoning. The scribes and pharisees ask Jesus what they should do with this woman. Jesus’ lengthy response turns into a Whitmanesque (and Blakean) view of divinity and humanity—the godhead in the biosphere: “This is wholeness of life, to know oneself in and of the whole.” I am thinking of the section that runs from “I am the first and the last” to “I am xe who cries out and xe who hears the cry” (104-106). What do you make of Jesus’ discourse at this moment?

HH: I share your attraction to that passage, which comes from an amazing text called Thunder, Perfect Mind, part of the Nag Hammadi find, that gives a first-person address by a female deity. It does have that quality you point out, that is familiar to us from Whitman and Blake. I think what I am drawn to is the contrast with our more usual epistemology. That dominant epistemology (whose champions would include Descartes) posits that everything is in principle explicable to the human mind, everything is subject to human reason. But what if that’s just not true? What if nothing is subject to human reason? Who am I then? How do I stand in relation to the world? This passage seems to me to take those questions seriously.
That passage doesn’t fulfill the usual preconception, the norm that has come to be associated with gospel writing. “Brief Instructions for Drawing…” is not a “My love is like a red, red rose”-type love poem. (Nor are the love poems that follow it.) What impels the veering away from that “normal” approach?

DD: Because of the misogyny embedded in the courtly love poem, the English and American poetic tradition has always invited a subversion of the power and clichés associated with erotic and romantic themes; Shakespeare’s sonnets are, of course, a huge pivot in the tradition.
In my own life, I’ve found that nothing has been more productive and more challenging than the love I share with my wife. Being in love is a choice, full of daily unromantic tasks and realities. Being in love is a political and moral act; for me, writing about love should be too. Being in love is both the most transformative and the most mundane experience a human being can undergo. To return a phrase of yours I quoted earlier, love offers us “a landscape of renewal” like the field offered by a poem. In a poem and in love, a new self is made by making.

HH: A related question arises for me in relation to your “Epithalamion with References to Philip K. Dick, Paul Klee, and Gene Roddenberry.” Your titles seem to equal parts orientation for the reader and disorientation. What is the relation for you between a poem and its title? What do titles do for you?

DD: Sometimes a title is like a light switch in a darkened room; it’s the first place you go to illuminate a text. Sometimes it’s a dimmer switch. Sometimes it’s a circuit breaker. Sometimes it’s a live wire, exposed and sparking. Sometimes it’s not wired into the structure of the poem at all. Sometimes it’s a satellite, a dose, an antidote.
My titles tend to be expository, subversive, allusive, and metapoetic. I’d like any title to orient and disorient simultaneously.
The Gospel constantly reoriented me as I read it. The passage I mentioned (about the discussion between Jesus and the scribes and pharisees) also recalled the ways in which The Gospel nuances (challenges, confirms, reorients) my understanding of gender and misogyny in the Christian scriptures. Is The Gospel a feminist text? Did your synthesis of the source material reorient your understanding of gender and misogyny in the Christian scriptures?

HH: Readers will have the final say on whether The Gospel is a feminist text, but my intention was to compose it as a feminist text, and my hope is that it may prove to be so. I take this as a criterion: if there is gospel—good news—that any given Gospel (Matthew’s or Thomas’s or mine) tries to give an account of, that good news is equally available to all persons. If it’s good news for white persons but not for persons of color, then it’s not good news at all. If it’s good news for men but not for women, then it’s not good news at all. I don’t claim success, but I did attempt to incline my Gospel in the direction of that feature of the gospel. It’s the impulse behind the gender-neutral pronouns for God and Jesus, and the coinages such as fother and xon.
An impulse behind a work is susceptible to personification as a muse or spirit. Asked who has been appointed in heaven as presiding spirits over this book, I would guess John Coltrane and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Who have you requested as presiding spirits?

DD: Those are the two greatest saints in my litany. Others for Ill Angels would include: Marc Chagall, Katsushika Hokusai, Cy Twombly, Frida Kahlo, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Elizabeth Cotten, Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong, John Fahey, Django Reinhardt, Robert Johnson, Chet Atkins, Jerry Garcia, Mississippi John Hurt, Sleepy John Estes, Hounddog Taylor, R.L. Burnside, Akira Kurasawa, John Ford, Sergio Leone, Christopher Smart, Christopher Gilbert, William Blake, Lucille Clifton, Wanda Coleman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Thérèse of Lisieux, Theresa of Avila, Augustine of Hippo, Søren Kierkegaard, Li Bai, Federico García Lorca, Kobayashi Issa, Matsuo Bashō, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jorge Luis Borges.
Some fictional spirits I’d invoke: Prince Myshkin, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, Pierre Menard, Bartleby the Scrivener, Malte Luarids Brigge, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Zebra, Helen Dewitt’s Sybilla, Tom Bouman’s Henry Farrell.
In your author note at the end of the book, you mention your retelling of the Book of Job in First Fire, Then Birds and your redaction and translation of a sayings-gospel in Rain Inscription. How did writing those poems prepare you for writing The Gospel? Why do you consider those texts as poems, but you don’t consider The Gospel a poem? How would you compare your book God Bless with your project in The Gospel? Aren’t both projects conceptual poetry? What makes a poem a poem? Where do selection, translation, and arrangement end and invention, imagination, creation begin? (Note: I’m also thinking of some of the things you say in Demonstrategy and As Easy as Lying here.)

HH: Just to reiterate: thank you for this level of engagement, putting The Gospel into a context that includes my previous work. It is an act of intellectual/spiritual generosity, and I am grateful.
For me, this relates to the question we broached above, about genre: maybe my sense that genres are not tidy boxes only reveals how bad I am at keeping my writing in those boxes! But it also has to do with how much of my life experience is mediated experience. I spend a far larger portion of my waking day reading books and scanning screens than I do gazing at where two roads diverge in a yellow wood or listening to gathering swallows twitter in the skies. Consequently, as an attempt to come to terms with my life experience, my writing is more curatorial than diaristic, more about selection and arrangement than about production, more to do with composition than with invention.
We love magical origin stories for our works, according to which the poet or evangelist is the vehicle of a Higher Power—the Muses, or God—who speaks through the writer. But even pop-culture bromides such as “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” work at debunking the magical origin stories. As a poet, I find it liberating to eschew such origin stories: I perceive myself as having more agency if I’m working, not only hanging out, waiting for a visit from the Muse. And the texts themselves of the canonical Gospels indicate that their writers selected and arranged material from sources: in that regard, my Gospel is simply following precedent.
In addition to “mediated” cultural presences animating your poems, there are “immediate” physical presences. Apples, for instance, recur throughout. But it doesn’t feel to me like apple-as-mythic-symbol; it feels more Cezanne-ian or something…

DD: You’re right, there is something impressionistic (or post-impressionistic) about the way the apple recurs in my poems. I love the geometry of apples. I love the sound of the word “apple” and the almost endless number of varietals and their evocative names: imagine an orchard of Empires, a bushel of Jubilees, an Autumn Glory held in the palm of your hand. I’ve always loved apples and being in an orchard. My friend owns an orchard and I helped him plant many of the trees in it. My father dreamed of owning an apple orchard. My grandmother always used to make homemade apple sauce. I don’t employ the apple out of nostalgia, but I am drawn to it; it’s a deep image for me, as it is for many other people. 
Last month, I was reading As Easy as Lying, your collection of essays on poetry published by Etruscan Press in 2002. At one moment in that book, you mention that nobody reads your first book anymore, Perfect Hell (Gibbs Smith, 1996). Of course, I immediately bought a copy. I was struck by the way Perfect Hell contains all the wilding seeds that would orchard your oeuvre…Even The Gospel is there, and yet, in many respects, it’s a very traditional debut featuring short lyric poems. This assessment isn’t meant in a derogatory sense; it’s an amazing book, for the dialogue opened through your titles alone. And the poems! (I love “Another Winter, Farther Away” and “Reasons” and “1 Is the Point, 2 the Line, 3 the Triangle, 4 the Pyramid”). The point is, I would never guess that the poet behind Perfect Hell would one day write Chromatic or Rain Inscription or, indeed, The Gospel. Could you talk about your journey from Perfect Hell to The Gospel? How has poetry changed for you? How has poetry changed you? How has the poetry world changed?

HH: One way to respond to this would be to connect it to our earlier discussion of the beatitudes. Perfect Hell tries to perform (its poiesis is) ergon, the root of such English words as work and urge and orgy. The Gospel values mákar more, and seeks to do/be makários. That long-lost me wanted to secure a place in the world, and apparently thought he could. These days, the perplexity more present to the present me is how to let go the world.
When I was writing Perfect Hell, the metaphor of building would have seemed apt to what I thought I was doing; nowadays, the metaphor of mushroom-hunting seems more applicable.
There’s a moment in the Investigations when Wittgenstein says “The real discovery is the one that makes us capable of stopping doing philosophy when we want to.” In my Perfect Hell days, I wanted to be capable of doing. In my Gospel days I want to be capable of stopping doing.
Both books, Perfect Hell and The Gospel, aspire to the attention-to-everything that gives your poems such precision! (“… filigreed like the grip / of a cavalry officer’s pistol / in a black and white western…”) How does one sustain such precise attention?

DD: In As Easy As Lying, you mention that we might think of the training of a poet in the same way that we think of the training of an Olympic athlete (as an ongoing everyday process). You mentioned Fear and Trembling earlier and Kierkegaard’s insight from that book comes to mind: “faith is a process of infinite becoming.” The ongoing training, the infinite becoming, that manifests sporadically as poetry demands this kind of attention. Paradoxically, attaining this type of attention, if not sustaining it, drives such training and becoming forward.
Put more simply: to invoke the awe and wonder you also mentioned earlier, there is so much to love and to uplift and to be stupefied by in this world, there is so much strangeness and grotesquery and astonishment to be undone by in this world, how can a poem not recognize such richness (and such lack)  in all its intricate particularity?
In your excellent book on W. S. Merwin, you mention Merwin’s notion that one should find a poet or two to read exhaustively and repeatedly.  Besides Merwin, who have been those poets for you? Also, I know we share a love of G. M. Hopkins. I was wondering if you could share some thoughts about him?

HH: I’m sure we all have our lists of those poets whose work has had an especially transformative effect on us, and/or whose work has been an especially lasting presence for us. Hopkins is definitely one of those poets for me. I’ve tried periodically, though so far unsuccessfully, to write an essay about why Hopkins was transformative for me and remains a lasting presence. 
At least one element of my response to Hopkins, though, has direct connection with The Gospel. I was raised in a religious tradition committed to the doctrine that divine inspiration has ceased. God spoke through the writers of the books of the (Protestant Christian) Bible, I was taught, but then, once those books were written down, stopped speaking. (I take the point to be, not that God is capricious or has withdrawn from involvement with humans, but that the Bible is complete and sufficient.) But when (in second-semester British Lit, sophomore year, sitting at the plywood desk in my dorm room) I read “The Windhover,” I felt that it was not so. This was the first clear moment of my departure from received religion, the sense “The Windhover” secured to me, that I could not have put into words at that time but did experience viscerally: that inspiration had not ceased, and that if any words were the words of God, those words were. 
My religious beliefs are quite different now from how they were at that time, but Hopkins still exemplifies for me the principle that if I want to address what is “higher” than myself, I need to “elevate” my language. If I want to be in touch with what exceeds me, I’d better “language up.”
I hear in your work that same impulse to be in touch with what exceeds you. It’s hard not to take your question addressed to your daughter as a question any poet might ask, so I ask it back to you: “… these lines might not survive / their own inception, but so what?”

DD: For me, as for you, and for most other writers I am sure, we cannot live otherwise. I read and write because I know the truth of John Donne’s “Since I die daily, daily mourn.” I choose to live in the word because it allows me to enter more fully the greater mystery of being alive, in all its unbounded ecstasy and deep sorrow. My reading and writing lives lend me the discipline to try to move beyond the manifold vertiginous fictions of the self, to continue a turning outward, to love more, to more fully be.
What impact has translating, selecting, and arranging The Gospel had on your poetry? What project are you working on now/next?

HH: I hope they have informed one another, been integrated and reciprocal in their mutual influence.
By received distinctions (such as the genres we discussed earlier in this conversation, or disciplinary divisions as they are codified in university departments) my work is a discombobulated mess. And maybe that assessment is accurate! But I experience as unified and coherent the life commitment that received distinctions identify here as poetry, there as translation.
It all feels of a piece to me.

Lizz Schumer and Anne Leigh Parrish Talk About Trust and How Stories Connect Us

I met Anne in that strange, liminal space so many of us are these days: Online, while planning a virtual event reading for my latest book, Biography of a Body. We share a publisher, Unsolicited Press, who matched us up as co-readers because so much of our work explores similar themes. But while I write personal essays and hybrid poetry that delve into what it’s like to be a woman in the world through a highly personal lens, Anne’s fiction brings to life richly painted characters who feel like people you already know. In A Winter Night, we meet Angie Dugan, 34, a social worker struggling with her career, her anxiety, and her difficult family. But like so many of us, she’s also looking for a love she can lean on. Many of the themes in this book — substance abuse, mental health, how much we can trust each other, and whose feelings are worthwhile — feel so pertinent right now, as so many of us grapple with those same issues in isolation. Anne and I talked about what readers can find in this book and how it fits into our broader context.

Lizz Schumer: First, I am always fascinated by titles. The fact that the story is set in the winter certainly tips me off as to why A Winter Night fits on one level, but can you expound a bit on why else that tile works for this book in particular or how you came to it while writing?

Anne Leigh Parrish: I grew up in the Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York, where A Winter Night is set. Winters were long and hard. On a psychic level, winter felt like a retreat, a need to withdraw and seek protection, but it also was a chance to be quiet and reflect. I often sat at my window and watched the snow fall, thinking of the world being covered, lying in wait, preparing itself for the next season. I felt like I did that, too. I waited for time to pass, and my eagerness for what came next was my way of preparing for it.

LS: Without giving too much away, substance use is a major theme in this book. I wonder if you can talk about how you decided to incorporate it, what sort of research you did in order to depict it accurately and thoughtfully. Why do you think it's such a compelling topic, especially now?

ALP: A lot of my characters are train wrecks, and the reason many of them go off the rails is because of alcohol and drug use. These things make someone unreliable, despite his best intentions when he’s sober. My research is personal experience. I have been close to people similarly afflicted, and trying to understand them, and not be harmed by them, spurs me to write about them. With the stress of the pandemic, the economy, and the presidential election, I have to think a lot of us are struggling with substance and alcohol abuse and trying not to jump down our own dreadful rabbit holes.

LS: Similarly, I noticed that weight, food, and the body type of your female characters was also very heavily featured. It struck me that you describe your characters as attaching a lot of value to their size and the food they're consuming (or not consuming). Why do you think that's such a driving force in our culture, and what inspired you to focus on that element?

ALP: Angie Dugan, my thirty-four-year-old protagonist, carries a little too much weight. She’s the only one who cares about this, but she imputes the concern to her love interest, Matt. Early in the novel, she reflects on the fact they haven’t yet slept together, and she wonders if her weight is to blame. I think Angie represents many women in our culture, regardless of what number pops up on the bathroom scale. Men are judged by how much money they make; women by how attractive they are. Angie’s self-doubt is so deep, so hard to soothe and bolster, that even when Matt tells her how great she looks, she doesn’t believe him.

LS: I saw a lot of my own late grandmother's elder care facility in the one where Angie works, which was really touching. I loved the emphasis on the residents' stories. In one scene, two characters talk about the fact that we all tell ourselves stories and that stories keep us human. As a writer, why is it important to you to tell these people's stories, and how do you think storytelling draws out our humanity, in general?

ALP: The purpose of writing — of any art — is to remind us of our common humanity. Stories hold us together across space in one generation, and across time from one generation to the next. The stories we tell ourselves are how we navigate the world. They’re our own private religion and mythology about how we became who we are and why that’s important. Often these stories are based on lies which defend us against how we believe others see us. We take these stories and soften a painful past and brighten an uncertain future.

LS: Similarly, there's a scene in which several of the characters talk about whose feelings are worth protecting. That's such a fascinating idea. Can you talk more about how we make that decision in our lives, and how that sometimes drives our relationships with others?

ALP: I think we learn to view and characterize people through the lens of their weaknesses, or what we perceive as their weaknesses. This speaks again to substance abuse and how it warps not just the perspective of the user, but also the perception of those who have to deal with it. In Angie’s case, her father has a long-standing problem with alcohol. He drinks — or drank, since he’s put much of it behind him now — because he knows how badly he disappointed Angie’s mother, Lavinia. Lavinia suffers a lot, too, but because she just carries on and does what’s required of her, the vibe she gives off is one of strength and being secure in herself, even if she’s not. Angie comes to see that she tends to protect her father because she thinks he can’t take care of himself, when he can. And she tends to overlook her mother’s pain and unhappiness because she functions at a higher level.

LS: I love the complicated relationships in this book, especially those between men and women. Do you model those after anyone in your own life? Who are some of your influences when crafting these relationships between people?

ALP: I’ve been married almost forty-four years, and that’s a long time to spend both observing and experiencing marriage and romantic love. My own parents never seemed to talk about anything important, which contributed to their getting divorced. Many people didn’t open up to their partners back then, probably because it wasn’t encouraged or accepted. I don’t know. My husband and I strive for candor, though we don’t always get there. There’s so much under the surface the other person never sees, yet somehow knows is there. This creates the presence of enormous complexity which both keeps a relationship interesting but can cause strain, especially when other things in life, like careers and what’s going on with your children, go against you.

LS: The meaning of reliability and the limits of how much we can really rely on one another (as well as what it means to go too far) are also explored in depth here. What about that theme interested you? Why do you think it's such an interesting one to explore?

ALP: How much you can rely on someone really comes down to how much you can trust them, assuming they’ve shown themselves to be fairly steady in the first place. We learn this first as children under the care of our parents. Mine were reliable in some ways, and unreliable in crucial ways, especially when it came to affection and offering moral support. They were very wrapped up in themselves, and I never trusted their affection for me, as a result. In Angie’s case, she knows her father loves her unconditionally even though he can’t be counted on to be where he says he’ll be. Her mother is the opposite. She doesn’t hand out affection, though she feels it deeply enough, and is always on time. So, I think it’s a study in what it means to be reliable and more importantly, how. Will one reliably show affection? Kindness? Pay the bills and do chores? Some people are better at some of these than others, and Angie’s is trying to figure out just where Matt falls on this spectrum.

LS: There's a line in A Winter Night that "love is giving someone a chance," which I think is a beautiful sentiment. I'd love to know if there was a particular moment in your own life, or during the creative process, that led you to that idea.

ALP: Angie is constantly confronting her doubts about people, especially Matt. It’s easy for her to assume the worst, and figure he’s just another guy who’s let her down, even when he’s speaking and acting to the contrary. He admits his mistakes then goes on making them, and this drives her crazy. I was proud of her for not falling into the trap some women do, where they tell themselves that the man’s failings are her fault, that she didn’t believe in him enough, or give him enough confidence. Matt asks her flat out if she’ll give them a chance and she sees that she has to, that people don’t come with guarantees. It’s a risk she simply has to take.

LS: One of the things I found fascinating about this story is how timeless it feels. It could have taken place last year, or 20 years ago (a few technological tweaks notwithstanding). Was that intentional?

ALP: I can’t say it was, but I’m glad you found it so. It’s a huge compliment, really. I want my stories to last and not be nailed down to the current time, because life always moves on. The situation Angie finds herself in is timeless, I think, because it’s universal. She wants to find love and has been burned. She has to put herself on the line and try to overcome her doubts and not be all starry-eyed and unrealistic. It’s a hard balance to strike, finding that boundary between oneself and another person, especially because the boundary is always in motion, always shifting.

LS: Let's talk a bit about the writing process. Can you give us a little insight into how this book came to be, and who some of your greatest influences were while writing it? Who are you reading these days? Are there authors your readers might enjoy as a dessert course after finishing this one?

ALP: Well, I love Alice Munro and William Trevor. They are my major influences, and I’d suggest both as dessert to the main course of A Winter Night. As to my writing process, I never outline. Instead, I just roll forward then pause and reread what I’ve got, trying to sense the subtext and direction. I also start pulling out plot threads that need to be resolved or carried through. The one thing I must have always have in hand as I go — or even to begin a story at all — is to know how it ends. Then it’s a matter of building to that point, filling in all that’s blank before then.

Bringing a Collective Experience to Light: A Review of Melissa Febos's Girlhood

Melissa Febos opens her new essay collection, Girlhood, with a collage of visceral images of pain inflicted on the body—bloody knees, burned arms, skin rubbed raw. The opening essay is a lyric barrage of beautiful language and poetic image. In the essays that follow she looks back through a scrutinizing lens on her adolescence. Our very grown-up narrator takes us through the years she spent swimming in the ponds of Cape Cod, through most of her early sexual experiences, and into her late teens and twenties working as a Dominatrix in New York City. Using lyrical language and a meandering structure to move through her memories and experiences, the book also contains illustrations by Forsyth Harmon that highlight some of the most beautiful lines in the book.

Many of the places and scenes will be familiar for those who read her first book, Whip Smart, a memoir about being a dominatrix in New York City, and her essay collection, Abandon Me, about her father, her biological father, and a love affair gone wrong. But Ferbos’s voice and authority feel very different in this work. While the outside research and frequent metaphor were a large part of her second book Abandon Me—Girlhood moves from memoir to theory, and back again, with a new voice of authority. 

Febos sets up the problem that she investigates in this collection, the conditioning of a patriarchal society, and really defines it for the reader in her opening Author’s Note:

“This training of our minds can lead to the exile of many parts of the self, to hatred and the abuse of our own bodies, the policing of other girls, and a lifetime of allegiance to values that do not prioritize our safety, happiness, freedom, or pleasure.”

I read this quote with intrigue, but did not feel this until I was well into her second essay, “Kettle Holes,” where our early-to-develop narrator is expelled from female social circles and sexualized and bullied by young boys. A rush of middle school memories returned to me. Friends whose names appeared on the bathroom stall with “slut” written over it in black sharpie markers, lying about periods and tampons and getting to third base, either because we wanted to give people the impression that we had, or because we wanted to give people the impression that we hadn’t.

She builds on this girlhood narrative in the third essay in the book, “The Mirror Test,” taking the reader on a graceful weave of early sexual exploration—safely on her own—and the harrowing experience of her external sexual experiences. Is it painful to read? At times, yes, but in the sense that she is bringing a collective girlhood experience to light, it feels freeing to see that pain and discomfort that is so rarely addressed put down on the page. Febos takes her time to explain that her experiences were not particularly unusual, she was not raped nor did she experience a specific isolated incident of trauma, but instead, she portrays through her narrative a system of patriarchy that young woman endure which is normal, everyday, and troubling.

My best friend and I, both straight white Midwestern women, spent much of our twenties attempting to unpack our early relationships and sexual experiences as newly college educated grown-ups. Why were we so insecure? Why didn’t we trust men to treat us well? Why did we fear other women—who might see us as a threat, who might be jealous or callous toward us? Where had all of this come from? This questioning and investigation is just the work Febos is doing in Girlhood. Our thoughtful narrator is pulling apart the threads of these early experiences and giving us a context for understanding them. Much of the book is woven narrative, careful to never leave us too long in those dark moments. She regularly moves into a mode of what I can only really explain as autotheory.

Arianne Zwartjes explains in her essay, “Autotheory as Rebellion” (Michigan Quarterly Review) how mixing theory with personal narrative has power: “In one way, autotheory is the chimera of research and imagination. It brings together autobiography with theory and a focus on situating oneself inside a larger world, and it melds these different ways of thinking in creative, unexpected ways.” While Febos is working her way through her girlhood experiences, she is also reaching out to other woman, seeking their stories. She pulls these characters into her own story and brings their voices to the page. She tells us about psychological research and anecdotal research and in doing so paints a much more layered experience than her story alone could accomplish. She doesn’t stop there. She also examines literature and movies to highlight the experiences we see and read about in the media—arguably forming our ideas and beliefs as much as our own experiences. (Her critique of the movie Easy A, a teen comedy from 2010, was easily my favorite.) This analysis from our patient, if not urgent, adult narrator is leading slowly toward her goal—an understanding of what happened to her and what it means.

In her Author’s Note, Febos explains another hurdle for the content of these essays—“For years, I considered it impossible to undo much of this indoctrination.” This struggle becomes more evident as the book progresses. The narrator becomes a young adult, who struggles with addiction and works as a dominatrix. She engages in relationships with women and men, some of them pretty dysfunctional. She does not give us easy answers, because she doesn’t have any. Her process of investigation, much like her other two books, makes her writing compulsively readable—we want to find out what she finds out. And in so many ways, for me, the reading experience is personal. Her lived experience as a young woman in America was too familiar. I didn’t have a stalker in my early twenties, but I knew other women who did. I didn’t feel forced to give a boy a hand-job when I was twelve, but I did for many years after. Even where her experiences were outside my own, they were achingly close to the darkest parts of the stories that shaped my understanding of sex and relationships growing up.  

The adult Febos introduces us to her fiancé Donika, who acts as a bit of foil to our narrator. She questions the normalcy of the early experiences and pushes more investigation into her past. She offers an alternative way of looking at the “events” as Febos decides to call them, that live in her memories. The investigation seems to come to a head in the penultimate essay, “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself” when Febos and Donika, along with a friend, go to a “cuddle party.” The seventy-six page essay traverses many topics, but the cuddle party drags us into the uncomfortable experience (at least for some) of physically being close to strangers—proof that Febos didn’t just mentally push herself to understand the lasting effect of her girlhood experiences, but physically tried to find situations that would help her undo them as well. As I read through some of the cringe-worthy experiences, I could help but think, Oh wow, my therapist would be proud of her! And perhaps this is part of the gift of this collection, she is doing a lot of emotional work, that many of us haven’t had the time or energy to do. It is the cuddle party that leads to Febos’s brilliant exposition on “empty consent”—a term that says so much. Febos explains:

“I see two powerful imperatives that collaborate to encourage empty consent: the need to protect our bodies from the violent retaliation of men and the need to protect the same men from the consequences of their own behavior, usually by assuming personal responsibility. It is our shame, our embarrassment, our duty alone to bear it.”

Giving a name to the expression of “yes” when what you really mean is: “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” or “I want to say no but I don’t want to hurt your feelings or make you angry” was an especially powerful moment in her investigation.

Febos’s narratives continuously circle back to her youth. She raises the stories that dotted her girlhood over and over again. This continuous re-visiting mirrors our own memory, how they can pop up again and again, and allows her to reframe the narratives in new ways as she moves towards understanding. There are many moments that shine in Febos’s often lyric language and vivid imagery, but one that stuck out for me was in “The Mirror Test.” The narrator has gone to a liberal hippy summer camp, and she finds the camp director is a tattooed young woman, beautiful in overalls and a shaved head. She says of meeting her, “When she looked down at me, though I was terrified, I felt more seen than I’d ever felt under another person’s gaze.” Seeing an empowered woman through Febos’s eyes was a striking moment in her story. While Febos cannot literally go back in time to comfort her young self, she seems to have found a way to offer comfort, and a way forward, for her younger self, and for all the rest of us who lived through those troubling and isolating girlhood years. 

Moving and Mesmerizing: A Review of Robert Wrigley's Nemerov's Door

Nemerov’s Door is a collection of eleven autobiographical essays about poetry. It is both moving and mesmerizing. Themes that pop up throughout include family; mortality; politics, nature, man’s relationship to nature, and most essentially, poetry: what it is, how to read it, and why it matters. In form the book is a hybrid: part poetry/part prose; part academic essay/part autobiography; part bildungsroman/part ars poetica; part nature diary/part spiritual meditation.

On the day I received the book, I decided to wade in, reading just one chapter before bed. Instead, I didn’t put the book down until two hours later, having read ten of the eleven essays. You might say that this a book about rivers that pulls you in like a river.

There is an element of hodge-podge among the essays, as if Wrigley threw essays in to fill out the book. You’ll find essays here about My Fair Lady; Frank Sinatra; arrowheads; the Salmon River in Idaho; and the book concludes with a wonderful long poem to Wrigley’s children, largely about Idaho and the state of the nation. But the core of the book, and my favorite part of it, is a series of close readings of the poetry of a handful of modern American poets: Richard Hugo, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Etheridge Knight, James Dickey, and Sylvia Plath.

Early on Wrigley writes that none of these essays would exist if it weren’t for his being a teacher and it is easy to imagine him as an excellent one. About halfway through, I began to feel like Dante being led down the corridors of poetry by Virgil. As a teacher, Wrigley is plain spoken but enthusiastic, esoteric without ever being scholarly or dry. He’s madly in love with poetry and unafraid to say so. (He describes his entry into poetry at age 21 as walking into a cathedral he had passed many times with disinterest). He has an excellent ear and is keenly attuned to the music of poetry which he describes as the condition of poetry. He describes poets as working with the “fierce concentration” of a “ditch digger” or “mountain climber.”

Wrigley doesn’t suffer much hubris. He is aware of his status as a privileged white male, stating in his essay on Etheridge Knight that out of the 39 poets included in Donald Hall’s anthology Contemporary American Poetry, 0 are black women; 1 is a black man; 4 are white women; and and 34 are white males. “Based on the evidence I had at hand, [I deduced poets] were pretty much all white men.“ It is significant then that of the five essays dedicated to close readings of modern American poets, one is devoted to a black poet (Etheridge Knight) and one to a woman (Sylvia Plath).

I entered the Plath chapter with some skepticism, with a feminist feeling of “ok, show me what you’ve got,” but Wrigley did well with the subject, calling the poems of Ariel a kind of “hyper-lucid and incendiary suicide note” whose emotional content is “sheer force” written by an “agonized consciousness” (90) living in a state of “terrified introspection.” Such, he writes, was her “electrified suffering” and the “strange ecstatic horrors” of her situation that she exhibits a “monstrous sensitivity” like Van Gogh’s. In a line that’s flat out funny he writes that if Sylvia Plath were a character in one of his son’s NBA video games, “her every drive on the basketball court would be trailed by flames.” In the last days before her suicide, he writes, “She was on fire. She was in another place. She had left the rest of us behind. She felt more than most of us ever will for any reason....She [was] seeing into the heart of things.”

With the possible exception of the beautifully conducted close reading of Richard Hugo’s “Trout” (“The Music of Sense”), “Nemerov’s Door” is the book’s most powerful essay and is itself more poem than essay. That eponymous essay is a meditation on Wrigley’s relationship with his father, a car salesman with little aptitude for poetry. In the essay father and son blur, passing in and out of each other like ghosts. The “door” of the title is the door of poetry the poet’s father almost supernaturally leads his son to. It’s a mystical essay brimming with love, the strangeness of life, and the fluidity of generations. “Somehow,” he writes, “in all of this you are yourself and you are your father and you are the small boy in Nemerov’s ‘The View from an Attic Window’ coming into the knowledge of time and mortality.”

But what makes the book most mystical is Wrigley’s John McPhee-like appreciation for nature. One of the book’s most striking moments is Wrigley’s description of waking up on a beach with his son and seeing the sky bent down low over them “all eyes and personality,” as if the cosmos were a curious and gentle creature intimately staring at this sleeping man and his son. Another is his description of waking up on a rock in the wilderness to find a group of coyotes staring from a distance, wondering whether he was dead or alive. Another a description of coming upon a bear in the wilderness rearing on hind legs transfixed by a host of yellow butterflies in front of its nose. These glittering images and many more are scattered across the forest floor of this book.

You will get the most out of this book if you are a poet or at least seriously interested in poetry, but in truth, any sensitive person—especially any person in love with the idea of disappearing negatively capable into nature—can be pulled into these essays as easily as into a river you won’t mind floating—or drowning—in.

This Present Moment: A Review of Alan Michael Parker's The Age of Discovery

“For Now”, the opening poem of Alan Michael Parker’s The Age of Discovery, is an invitation, rather, an invocation to the reader as the muse whom the poet aims to court. It segues into “When Everyone Wrote a Poem”, a celebratory roll call of the quotidian. That quotidian is the launching pad that jettisons these poems into discovery of the present. The poet’s age, past the middle, I assume, is the book’s age of discovery. Looking in the rearview mirror to perceive the present.

Parker’s collection is all now. Wherever and whenever the speaker travels, is this present moment. Even when the poet is engaged in reading of Neruda and his mistress’ memoir, Matilde Urrutia is singing now, not then. It is a moment of discovery.

The deeper I read into this collection, the deeper I wanted to go. Parker’s concerns are modern life, automation, displacement, the natural world and God. The mundane magic of the poems, their drifting from voice mail to Polish cupcakes to blue as a unit of measure, captured me. Maybe it was their diction, colloquial and conversational. This poet is always talking—to us, himself, a lover, his future self as a hummingbird—mostly to himself.

Parker’s skills are most apparent in his charming handle on simile: “The dogs snooze on the sofa like session drummers. Like hipsters, the houseplants wait for whatever” and “limoncello viscous as the night.” His shortish lines hug the left margin and are often in uniform tercets; no experiments with white space or punctuation. A poem with almost entirely 3-line stanzas might include one or more quatrain or singlet. Form is secondary to the poem. 

“Two Men Disagree, and Row Out to Sea”, opens with “The boat was right for their anger.” This first line, echoed later, has a nursery rhyme bounce and allegorical feel. Its repetition of phrase, of recast line, is reminiscent of a villanelle if Mother Goose had penned a villanelle. Throughout the book, Parker uses repetition deftly. Although the phrase and words that reappear vary, the device creates a familiar pattern and welcome echoes. In the title poem, “and someone” becomes a meme partnered with actions and ways of being that resonate with the speaker and lay bare our connectedness.

Where Parker stands out is with surreal imagery, such as when he writes that watching a painting “was like being a plum”. Or this opening stanza from “Half the World Is Ours”:

Why all the secrets
sewn into the lawns
and into the fields
and into the clouds with needles of light?

Parker has an excellent ear for rhythm and sound that he uses to good purpose. In “The Trains All Arrived”, the stanzas count down 3, 2, 1, in the cadence of a locomotive. The varying meters in these lines from “When I Am a Hummingbird” bounce from iambs to land on a spondee.  

I love the dog who leans
matter-of-fact in her need
and the big smile of the small Pit Bull

The speaker isn’t always alone in these poems. Characters in the poems are often strangers.  The character of the driver in “The Ride” is “a girl who needs a listener”, as she blathers on injecting serious news she must share. Overall, this collection is conversational in tone; big news is dropped in like mail through the slot of the front door.

There is a lot of delight and humor in The Age of Discovery. Comparisons might be made to Billy Collins or Ron Koertge, but Parker is more relaxed than Collins and more acerbic than Koertge. Any sweetness tasted here is mellow, warm, never cloying. Parker’s poems are freewheeling. Less confined to regular lines they may veer into a heady space or the sky or the heart. “Later, Love” opens with “Who among us has just had sex?”

I believe this speaker. As a young reader I gravitated towards James Baldwin and Carson McCullers. It was the authority in their voices, in short stories, novels, essays, that drew me to them. Parker’s voice has a similar effect on me. Out of the blue statements, magical thinking-like, surrealistic, yet I believe them. I hear that voice most loudly and assuredly in “Neruda on Capri”, an 8-part poem. It is the center of book literally and figuratively. It is part narrative, part meditation and borrows lines from Matilde Urrutia’s memoir.

On the heels of “Neruda on Capri” comes “A Fable for the Lost”. I wondered if it is a commentary on the preceding poem. After the less formal shape of the Neruda poem, this “Fable” is bold on the page with tercets leading with anaphora, opening phrases that act like an incessant kickstart to what the fable might possibly be about.

The litany of “Egypt, North Carolina” takes a turn in the second unprayer-like stanza:

Soon, it will be my time.
I’ll take out the trash,
ill-fated as any Pharaoh,
and stand myself in the can.

“The New World” follows with the humming of a hymn and an unknown woman crossing herself. The world, or at least the speaker’s reality, becomes an ark for this collection of the public that is a diner. Parker holds a taut line here where we, prodded by TV—a character in this poem—cannot surrender our suspicion that someone has a gun.

“When the Moon Was a Boy” repeats phrases and we hear another nursery rhyme at its core.

and he wanted to give the sun a pear,
and he wanted to give the wind a pear,
and he wanted to give the rain a pear,

The speaker in these poems has been around the sun long enough to know what daybreak can bring. “Hold still, the whole scene says, before the sun drives in the first nail”, he writes in “Aubade with Two Deer”. Lacking nostalgia, the poems have a knowing wisdom that is sometimes self-mocking and at other times exquisitely, magically sage. Knowing what daylight can bring, means knowing what it has brought. These are twilight poems. Anyone who has had a colonoscopy understands the twilights that its process and its anesthesia evoke—being of an age to have the procedure and the quasi-existence of the twilight sedation where one is sort of aware, but not really. Therefore, Parker’s “Psalm”, which is akin to a Shaker hymn, is a perfect ending for this collection. It is a bedtime story, a kiss goodnight.

The Body Remembers: A Review of Jeannine Ouellette's The Part That Burns

Jeannine Ouellette is no stranger to pain and chronicles it most beautifully in her new memoir, giving name and form to the multi-faceted circumstances that have produced her exquisite trauma. The Part That Burns holds a light up to these events, crystallized over time, and marvels at the rainbow prism that radiates outward. While pain needn’t necessarily be productive, it is ever present; Ouellette demonstrates through strategic structures how her past trauma—and the generational traumas before her—live alongside her, shaping her choices throughout marriage and motherhood. And though healing might never be comprehensive, she demonstrates it can be clawed, bit by bit, out of life’s indifferent hands.

It is first obvious and required to say Ouellette’s imagery alone make this book worth an afternoon of careful contemplation. “A flat disc of moon hung like a nickel, slicing open black water with a sharp tunnel of light.” The colorful streaks of pool balls rolling down a sidewalk. Her father, not a swan: his bones “not hollow inside his flesh.” One might be tempted to think the beauty acts as a shield, softening the atrocities she chronicles in these aesthetic metaphors, bright details and a vibrant world both situating and de-centering the ugly. But another reading is this simply is Ouellette exulting, as any survivor might, in both the glory of the world around her and her ability to make it her own. A world that has given her a bad hand of cards is still home to pontoons on the lake, and Wyoming wildlife, and children.

Ouellette’s slim memoir recounts the events of her childhood and early marriage in conventional, standard prose, then returns to these stories in other chapters via series of vignettes, conversations with her daughter, and her ninth grade autobiography. Some are structured by different members of a similar theme: when organizing herself via various childhood dogs or songs that hit number one on the charts on their respective New Year’s Eves, she uses flesh and fur and Madonna to anchor us to her world. This cyclical structure echoes the cycles of generational trauma that flows from her grandmother to her own daughter but operates as a spiral, pulling us deeper into her understanding of the years of her life. She builds foundations of events in broad strokes, then returns later to sprinkle new detail, realized complexity, and a more full sense of self into the mix. How sobering, to read her molestation from her perspective as a four-year-old and then again as a mother, looking at her own toddler. We can collectively, but compassionately, wince at tenth-grade-Jeannine’s confidence at her Spanish abilities as she sets off to Mexico alone and at the calamities that ensue. Her own mother’s behavior often seems incomprehensible, until we learn her personal trauma includes being orphaned at seventeen, instantly losing two best friends (and, briefly, her ear) in a house explosion. Ouellette meticulously traces the ways our understanding of our pain grow and change when compounded and put into conversation with other experiences.

Some pages I wanted to cover my eyes and read between cracked fingers like one would stare at a smoldering car wreck—not to avoid them, but to shelter myself from the acute feelings she masterfully, and heartbreakingly, shares. Most jarring is her first postpartum sexual encounter, after giving birth to her daughter Sophie. We are transported to a hotel room: John, her first husband, has purchased crotchless lingerie for her, his parents are babysitting, and so deprived from six weeks of no sex, he is ready to “come like a freight train.” But between her cautioning him to be gentle and his first thrust, Ouellette sandwiches in the memory of her episiotomy. A doctor took a scalpel and cut “all the way through the thick, strong muscle of the vaginal wall,” rendering her unable to stand on her own for a week. (As someone who has never had a child, this alone is effective birth control.) Forty pages later, we’re back in the hotel room where Ouellette invites us to another turn of the screw. She tells us that she “slowly recalled,” when first looking at her body post-episiotomy, John had slid down the wall, paralyzed in ashen horror, staring at his young wife. She bloomed with a “swollen bruise the size of a grapefruit,” in so much pain she couldn’t breathe. John, we remember, had requested she keep the bodysuit on during sex: the crotch hole providing all necessary access, the black Lycra providing all necessary coverage. Ouellette ends the paragraph there. What else is left to be said?

During their marriage, Ouellette tells John of the various abuses she suffered at various hands over the years. He offers his pains and embarrassments in exchange: a bout of constipation, drinking as a teenager, and driving his former girlfriend to an abortion clinic. The juxtaposition feels intentional, with its chasm of magnitude so grotesque: John’s long-married, attentive, middle class parents shaped a stable childhood entirely unlike hers (which he unfairly wields against her in arguments that she does not defend). She could easily play the oppression Olympics, pitting circumstances against each other to crown herself the ultimate sufferer. And yet Ouellette is generally earnest and sympathetic about his problems: solemn that he did not go through with his first wedding, acknowledging his long commute, long work hours after fights. To readers more prone to anger, she displays remarkable empathy here. (Or, as someone who has never been married, perhaps this is what it takes to sustain decades of almost-love.)

And while it is true that one can be sympathetic to a spouse and still upset about her own problems, Ouellette savvily understands where actions speak louder than her beautiful words, both in her life and constructing her narratives. John’s frequent selfishness—displaying sorrow “for the pain of wanting and not getting,” his would-be affair, and neoliberal attitude towards sex—willing to go to a sex therapist, but says, “You’re frigid, and nothing will ever feel good to you,” when it isn’t working—builds the case for ending their marriage even before Ouellette guiltily admits to falling in love with someone else. As a child, when she tells her neighbors Mafia is killing her mom, they decline to help and retreat into their home. When she orchestrates a drive to Duluth and pleas for refuge for Rachael with her grandparents, they turn them away (Mafia is in legal trouble for abusing another young girl). What did speaking up do for her?

Pain and sorrow so frequently warp and deform their recipients, but for all her woes Ouellette is externally neither bitter nor resentful. Instead, she turns her attention inwards and fixates on her own brokenness. Ouellette is accustomed to suffering in silence, a practice learned from her mother who “closes the book” on the “particular sorrow” of her abuse. This silence is gendered, of course: it is almost redundant to explain the ways women are taught to be silent, about everything, especially for survival. This is why Ouellette curls her toes and bites her lip to avoid complaining during sex. Foreplay and her own pleasure, she tells her therapist, isn’t of interest. As a child, she is ‘grounded’ frequently and lives the life of a ghost, sleeping in the basement, making separate meals for herself. (And when she stays with a friend, her mother calls the police to forcibly retrieve her runaway daughter.) Most telling is in the basement of Trinity Lutheran. One member of the childhood sexual abuse support group is noticeably loud in discussion: she is moaning constantly, “a low, wet gurgle,” until tears spatter and stain her shirt. At the same time, Ouellette holds her breath to stop her body from vibrating, desperately focused on containing and suppressing her emotion. She hates this woman, she writes: “for being exactly like me—ruined—but letting it show.” She hates this woman for refusing to be silent.

Instead, Ouellette processes her world by escaping her own body, leaving the physical constraints of her circumstances. “I just pull myself through a doorway inside of me,” she explains after referencing her mother’s explosion, the tickle game with Mafia, and how jackalopes try to trick hunters to reach safety. She watches herself from above when she has sex with her first boyfriend; she dissociates: “my body is not me. I am connected to my body by a string.” Her mother takes long drives to nowhere, which Ouellette spends a chapter eulogizing: empty distance, barren country roads, the heft of the boat-like sedan encasing its inhabitants in safety. She eagerly searches for portals to another world in a canyon full of wildflowers. And she passes this practice to her daughter Lillian, who uses it after her own abuse. “My Self with a capital S—that’s what Mama says—would push against the boundaries of my skin,” the couch her boat, floating in the sea. Unanchored, unbothered.

Ouellette is keenly aware of the efforts healing requires to achieve only incomplete results, of the ways our bandages and scars layer on top of one another. From the way her new wedding ring, after replacing the engagement ring intended for the other Janine, catches on items around their home to how thick scar tissue finally replaces the pea-sized rock embedded in her knee, pain transmuted into new forms remains and adapts. She contemplates the metal pins in her mother’s shoulder. “Trauma is coded into our genes, mapped into our DNA,” she reads, to ask the question: can we eradicate our experiences? The ghosts of the past occupy the same physical space on our bodies and in our homes, lingering without a friendly neighborhood ghostbuster on the scene. Memories too are their own location that our minds visit, over and over, as she is plagued by thoughts of Mafia. Bravery, it would appear, is one solution; choosing love despite the circumstances. “Still, I had you,” she tenderly admits to Lillian. A decision once declined, now accepted. Despite the genetic propensity to inherit pain, abuse, fear. “Still, I have you.”

We receive an eponymous chapter in the middle of the book. “I am the part that burns,” Ouellette explains, as she tends to her fruitless garden; worries about toddler Sophie’s bad habits; confronts her mother about her childhood; remembers the explosive trauma her mother suffered; has her second child. She anxiously monitors all of her attempts at healing, knowing breaking the cycles requires growth, requires a venture into the unfamiliar. Repeated actions, her cycling through time, generate friction, fertile for a jumpstart. Her mother taps her cigarette before the explosion; she strikes a match on her marriage. “Fire starting is a felony, but workers need work,” she reasons. The burning, it seems, accompanies the healing; temperatures reaching a crescendo to melt and fuse broken pieces together. Cells and tendons knitting together to smooth over into a lumpy scar. Torn and whole, the body remembers. This memoir is her healing.

Beautiful and Contemplative: A Review of Ellen Birkett Morris's Lost Girls

Ellen Birkett Morris’s first collection centers around the lives of women—some lost, some found, and all searching for more. It’s this thread of longing woven through the stories that pulls them tighter and tighter, fine-tuning the tension and exploring the different ways women discover who they are as individuals, beyond their restrictive places in society.

Morris shows great range with her characters, from young girls to older women who “never planned to be obsolete.” As seventy-year-old Abby Linder says in “Harvest,” “The years had slipped away, and the person she had been disappeared with them, replaced by an old woman with wrinkles and bifocals, who men opened doors for or offered a hand up but nothing more.” In the story, despite everyone’s efforts to make her confront that she’s old, Abby finds a way to recapture her youth while visiting a friend at the nursing home.

By contrast, there is the teenager in the titular story, who lives in the same town as a thirteen-year-old girl kidnapped from a strip mall. Even though “creeped out,” the main character imagines her own disappearance would be a welcome surprise—one less reason for her parents to fight, and for her, “a change of scenery.” Dreaming about her new life she imagines captors who look like Archie Bunker and serve her cake, the worst aspect of it all being life “in some commune, forced to mix batches of granola and make homemade yogurt day and night.” Even as she ages, she sees the kidnapped Dana as “somebody’s prize.” This teen’s mindset—the naivete, the selfishness—leaps from the page, with the story ending at a startling moment. What’s impressive as well is that Morris is able to convey all of this in three pages.

One of the strongest stories in the collection is “Skipping Stones,” which is also the longest, at sixteen pages. Here we follow Terri through her last year of high school and her relationships with a boy she thinks she might like, his older brother, and a third boy who believes he’s entitled to take what he wants. Shadows of violence haunt the story, along with a depressed mom and the father who has abandoned Terri and her mother. At graduation, her father “sat alone in the last row and handed her an envelope with a $50 bill inside.” These are such small details—the last row, the fifty-dollar bill—but point to one of Morris’s real strengths: presenting understated moments so clearly they resonate with the reader. The reader knows from the details how awkward the father feels, and that handing over fifty bucks is no small act of generosity for him.

Another standout story, “Religion,” follows a thirty-year-old virgin who stumbles into a Lactation League meeting, and becomes so enamored with the bonds between babies and moms that she rents a breast pump in hopes of capturing the magic. Morris goes well beyond the story’s creative premise and into the loneliness, desperation, and hunger this woman feels. Once again, Morris has fine control of tension. As the story moves forward and the protagonist bonds with these new moms, one of them asks her to babysit, and while doing so, the character attempts to breastfeed. The instability of the woman, combined with the narrator’s empathy toward her, leaves the reader shattered at the end of the story.

Many of the stories here clock in at three or four pages, and the majority are under ten. While all showcase Morris’s talents for details, some of the shorter feel less fleshed out and more like character studies, albeit well-drawn ones. Overall, this is a beautiful and contemplative collection, exploring the supposedly simple lives of complicated women who survive grief, loneliness, and love, and emerge on the other side having found themselves.