New Proceedings

In transitioning to using this blog as our primary web presence, THERMOS has decided to divide up the year amongst its four editors and two guest editors, for 1-2 month periods, in 2012.

You can expect to see our regular features — blog poets, conversations — with greater regularity this year, as well as poetics statements, explorations of contemporary poetry, profiles of current poetry in specific cities, traditional blog writing, and reprints from our print issue, which is no longer available online.

Andy Stallings will start things off at the beginning of February. Please follow along!

First Books: A Conversation with Mark Leidner

Mark Leidner, along with a number of other THERMOS contributors, recently published his first book of poetry, Beauty Was the Case They Gave Me, with Factory Hollow Press. He was the first poet in THERMOS’s first issue, so we were happy to catch up with him for the conversation below.

TH: How did the center or heart of Beauty Was the Case change as you revised the manuscript?

I tweeted a lot while revising. The character limit and attention span of twitter edged me toward image and aphorism, away from monologue and narrative. Emotionally, the center is still unstable. Whatever personal joy or crisis I’m obsessed with, it see it everywhere in the book.

TH: How do you see your work in what’s happening now in poetry? Are there other first books out there that you feel like yours is friends with?

ML: Chelsey Minnis’ Zirconia, Joseph Massey’s Areas of Fog, and Dorothea Lasky’s Awe were all formative first books for me. I don’t know that my own book is friends with them though…

It’s hard to tell if any book is part of what’s happening “now” or not. In the subjective timeline of my own development, the above three books feel old.

I try to think of literary time as nonlinear. Everything and nothing is happening now, just like all time. As a mental experiment, I tried to treat Beauty like it was my last book instead of my first while I was writing it.

TH: What poems or lines from Beauty feel the most like what you’d like to do next? Why?

ML: “Blackouts,” which began in emulation of Minnis’ Poemland, is a long poem composed in a flow of one-liners. Maybe this is a tenuous connection (the poem isn’t very funny), but I love stand-up comedy and dream of someday performing it, so that poem feels similar in terms of grammatical timing.

There are also 2 long narratives, “Story” and “Memoirs of a Secret Agent,” which began as parodies of noir and action movies. If I ever write an actual thriller that sells for thousands of dollars, in these poems the seed of that dream will be visible.

TH: Counter: What poems or lines from your book feel the “youngest” to you, like they most show your development (though you remain fond of them)? Why? How?

At various times in my head, every poem in the book has pendulum’d  between amazing and terrible, mature and infantile, visionary! and hopelessly glib. In a way, the whole book feels young. Even my favorite pieces in it—I can’t imagine writing anything like them again. They feel like lost parts of me. The voice of someone mad with youth. When I let them go, I grew up a lot.

TH: If your book hadn’t been published by Factory Hollow, what would you have done? Revised the manuscript? Sent it out doggedly in that exact same form? Published it yourself?

When I wasn’t confident in my work, I tried to win contests. I thought if famous strangers judged my poetry to be the best out of an anonymous pile, that would prove its worth. But after losing so many contests, and feeling disappointed by the boring books that beat mine, I gained confidence in my poetry and lost it in the surrounding industry.

The best day happened when I felt confident enough to show my book to those outside the contest game. Through twitter & other online booty-slappin’ I got to know a slew of publishers. If Factory Hollow had not been around, I would’ve asked someone else.

I don’t think another publisher, however, would’ve been as familiar with and attuned to the spirit of my work. After my first conversation with Factory Hollow I had an epiphany that went something like, “Wow… why would you ever want to publish with anyone else?” Which led to a period of pure bliss as I worked with the editor and designer. I never had to compromise a single line, comma, poem, or design consideration. This is lucky and rare, I imagine.

Elaine Bleakney: from “For Another Writing Back”

This week, THERMOS presents new prose from Elaine Bleakney, whose writing has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, At Length, and others. She edits At Length’s art section and teaches creative writing at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida. (The painting in the piece is by Jim Mattei.)


From For Another Writing Back


One step and we’re on the platform. One step and we’re on the platform again. How another step goes down in the fast painting. Every time someone falls the Times has to cover the person who jumps in after—I know him. I know this time where he’s from, the town. The Times lights his face. Another man, someone I used to see by the lake, disappears with his thermos and gun.


I follow his boot marks in. Grass veers in ice under pine. We get to the blind. I used to hear a scrape before I went in, no stench in the boards—rot-black in sections, straight after straight toward being a stand. Nothing. Michigan. Where hours and lake wind wend.


Jim unrolls his painting on the floor. I catch myself: a grove in the middle of my chest or the shuttling luminous sound of the subway. Anyway, someone makeshift, riding. Jim trying to give me space inside his painting. He starts to talk: See this guy, then this guy again? They keep trying to make structures. Some of them aren’t plausible. He smiles. It’s okay.





*


Get out of my car, she screams. I don’t want anything from you. Our neighbor, I don’t know her name. He palms something from the dash then burns past her into the house.


She surfs. Seared into her salt-blonde hair. One Saturday she sits outside, selling paintings and things released from the house. White waves on orange sunsets. Paul buys off of her a board with a cylinder underneath for learning to balance. You set yourself on top then work in air until steadiness fills you. When? She’s stickered it—something juvenile, desired, and vexing.


Another morning she’s in a wet suit with her board and a leash drifting near her ankle, dripping into her door. How it makes waves, says the poet about a poem she likes. While we drink coffee and consider it. We lose ourselves in what we’re reading until we’re talking about men and women again.


Dripping into a door. The wrong door, how many times? At the one on Graham I stood rising and sinking, ringing his buzzer. He lived with two women. One with her room like the stillness in a magazine. The other in a gorge between her soiled and clean mountains of clothes. She worked in fashion. When anything went missing or dirty she caught their heat. Fumes from the nail salon at street level rose up and set in. The summer night the messy one cut the neat one’s hair too short. Overjoyed, she kept touching what was missing until we dragged her down for drinks.


*


This sand fails, says Carla. Too gritty. Not the sugar sand of the Gulf where she got the pineapple tatooed into her ankle. Before it, a snow leopard she saw on a wall, mouth filled with the lily. I had to have it, she says. Down my back. It took forever—the Spanish cut through this place and what about their blades? And the ones before them.


Timucua, ones who kept their dead closer than us. North of here, someone dug up the long wooden owl they made. Intact, eyes smoothed into dilation, the kind of dream-find my sister, the crew chief, wants where the pipeline will go down. So she can say stop. Somewhere in Wyoming before the ground hardens for snow. She gets to hold up her hand to the man in the gnawing machine, cordon him off, if the machine touches any evidence of people before.


She talks to him later, a nice one in the local bar. Maybe, if he doesn’t give off what’s famished, she shoots pool with him. He touches her shoulder. She doesn’t call me for awhile. Carla presses the pineapple at her ankle when I ask and says, I knew I couldn’t get his name in me.


A pineapple for the name of the Gulf-side bar where they met. He played there, she says inside their first gaze, its accuracy. How we tend to keep certain ones endless before there’s even any heat. Sugar sand sweeping against it. The potential of one other: after he cheated she couldn’t abide the sunlight where she said a few years before, I know it will end.


I knew it would end. A sound, a structure splintering back into itself. The white clapboard thing by the lake. We stacked canoes on the far wall. Children led by older children. Grass drifting out of the corner: no one else can see; can they see? What we are inside.


*


By now they’ve gone in, cut where the cancer could grow. Having grown once, having shown how her body could field such a growth, they advised this. I pass an abrasion in the oak. See what the rain did: some kind of fungus, budding, part of a drafting through the grove.


It can’t be called a bloom unless this word includes all the rage, change, and indifference. In the room after my first death I shut the door. Water trapped in the glass wasn’t water at all. What is lymph? I didn’t ask the adults. The river near Yarnell. Picking shards with her. How to isolate in the scatter what’s wrong? Then delimit the will to erase it.


The body. Marcela takes up clay after her second surgery. A medium foreign to her, disconnected from her project. Instead of lopping it onto a wheel she writes about being alone in back. Working shoulders, a head. It’s hard to maneuver. Kind eyes under a scowling brow. A long time before she emails: heartbreak. He was smashed by someone unloading the kiln.


*


The wave.


The waterwall when the plates off the coast of Japan shift, one determined under another. We watch from here. Elizabeth and John live near us. Steady under the arbor they started years ago. My mother used to do this, Elizabeth says, my family, families back in St. Louis. They moved their chairs underneath for the summer. The breeze would come or not, crafted through the draping green and stay.


It may take a hundred years to cool, for the shaken reactors in Fukushima to reach cold. The summer Elizabeth and John’s son was born it was too hot to move. He could hold his breath. Since a very young age he could hold under the water longer than anyone else.


An incomprehensible form of water. The helicopter hovers above Minamisanriku and we watch it eat. Houses, cars, masts snapped out of life. Maybe they remove the images of bodies or we’re too high or the people are removed and safe. Elizabeth and John hear from their son after John calls him at the wrong time. The night before he’s supposed to travel, laughs Elizabeth, a stiffness there, private; what repeats between them? Then the next week he’s arrived. He’s posted the pictures on Facebook. A blue in Sumatra unlike any other. And he’s found work, says John, making videos for a resort, spearing fish.


I buy a book by a Japanese poet translated into English. She writes in Japanese but gave up Japan for Europe years ago. There’s a feeling in the later poems that she’s gone through them, many relationships, to encounter someone else. What are you reading? asks Elizabeth. When I look away the room isn’t anywhere, floating and dim.


*


Up Wilhelmina Rise after school. Where a window would be gone, a section in the wall, a way or the wiring exposed. Mirah’s father did this. Something never finished. Her mother dyed fabric a deep vinegar blue in the yard while her friend, the poet, drank tea. Air across Mirah’s bed washed into dunes. Her stereo. Underneath we talked about everything, how a man could be dying for it.


Bewildered, one lover said to me, I want it more and more. Something in a family about not spending the night in a certain house. Then a divorce. Handsome. The long gaze at his body in a pool. Then a friend pressed against a wall, raped in a foreign city. Meanwhile falling in love. A dry kiss in a swimming office. The deadbolt in the bedroom door. She has her son install it, first thing after her husband dies.


Before he’s born I want one story for my son where I can be found. Once there was a tree outside our house, white splitting buds, a wax to the green going dark. You could tell by the color of the fruit what had happened. This is clear to me.


*


Then someone hits a dog on the road, moves her body into the grass. No other pups, or they all disappear. One attaches himself to a house, wagging at each door until the father inside says whoever lets him in, he’s yours.


We pass a hitchhiker and Paul says I would pick him up. When I see the young woman with the sign for food, money, help I imagine asking her in, letting her use our shower. A fresh fraying towel. But the idea shuts down. She smiles at my son. On the days I have the car I blow by her like a car.


So many of them have bicycles. They lean against the library until it opens. Then they tie or lock the frames, head into the air-conditioned computers and stacks. My son touches the mouse in the children’s section, its tiny red eye. Let’s find a book. When I hold out my hand he calls up through my heart. Handy, handy.


Sometimes they hold the door for us but we never touch. I meet another mother in the playground and she advances a theory: some of them aren’t as poor as they want us to think. She’s seen them standing at the corner all day, they get into a van at night. As if poverty can’t include this. Some of them have a hard time looking at me or I can’t look or we look at each other wild-friendly when I push him in the stroller crossing into Davenport Park. But it must be easier here, I tell myself. They don’t have winter. We don’t have it. The birds arrive.


One woman sets herself to the side then cracks between the eyes down to her teeth saying get your dog away from me now. I shift. Someone rifles through our unlocked car. A house on Dufferin has a sign with a pink bow in a window: Be Nice Or Leave. Above all else, writes the poet, people are bound to people by love, hate, compassion, fear, admiration, loathing. A list, his enclosure, and the way he sends us through its parts. A block away, brick steps and ferns attending a marker for the family who lived there before the house was firebombed. The Robersons. All the black families who lived on Gault.

An interview with Katherine Factor

THERMOS asked poet Katherine Factor a few simple questions, and she astonished us with this response. You can also find it, along with new poems of hers, in the latest print edition (#7). Send us an email if you’d like to purchase a copy.

. . . . . . . .

Minoans, Tar Sands, & Astral- Projective Verse

As I write this it is summer’s end, but because I am in my third year in residency at Idyllwild Arts, isolated in the phenomenal mountains and perfect climate of the San Jacintos, it means a day not too unlike my summer.

So I will all together answer the questions – 1). What’s a typical day like for you right now? 2). What have you been reading and thinking about? 3) How has the work changed since we published your poems, and 4). What’s your process like these days? –because everything is enmeshed.

First, I spend as much time as possible in dreamtime, a preferred place, made up by the collected mind in a field that is not mine but ours. Hero the cat ensures I return. I start the day opening doors for him and letting in the dayworld. In this case, a yard in the National Forest. Stellar Jays and squirrels argue over acorns; the sounds do not denote flirting.

Morning coffee brings reading, largely on Minoan culture. My instant oatmeal is a far cry from ancient grain and its storage, multiplicities of rooms found in the temples Arthur Evans had to call ”palaces”. Spiders shuffle webs high above my desk, making their own meanders. There are at least ten species, which means there were once more.

Encountering any number of elements, many are recorded. Since THERMOS published my poems, there is a much greater allowance of the occasional – What is the day telling me, what is its herstory, what are the aspects and who is my planet. What sphere is sending sounds, watched by what, where are my guides.

I indulge on the internet, inviting in my company: vertiginous diction, other poets I so admire, what might interest my students, how to make a magnetic shield for the future, neurotheology, the Tar Sands Keystone pipeline XL, the lyrics to Rocketman. (For certain, I’ve got to keep Bernie Taupin close, as antidote for whatever I ingest today.)

News of sustained civil disobedience by the No Tar Sands Action provides me strength in the realities of fossil thievery. With a bitumen extraction method already deadly to indigenous peoples of the Boreal Forest, the pipeline would span from Alberta to the Gulf for export of the nastiest venom that will leak, threatening the Ogallalla watershed with a crude we admit we don’t know how to clean up.

Over 1,200 arrests were made during 14 days of No Tar Sands Action. At this date, Wall Street cities enact an ongoing occupation, complete with media blackout. Using the body repeatedly, as arrests-as-message, I’m thinking of the durational – of Ernesto Pujol’s place art, social choreography, using the body to destroy the illusion of time. We need something on our side, a time control harnessed from Deep Time.

Poet Robert Duncan enacted sustained use of the body (see Passages), weaving fields and tearing fabrics.Like him, I am interested in polysemy, composition by current. Spirit’s organizational course now compensates for a live internet field full of fingerprints. Since those THERMOS poems, I am trying to treat all parts equally, which means there is a meeting of evil eyes. That I have to admit disturbance in the force field. In my altercations of the mundane, I am an Ariadne pulling threads.

So I’m sure to find a listening treasure, something to push mental steam into, rather then board a plane. Today – a rare set of online lectures given by Richard Koepsel. Richard is a walking archive, a Rosicrucian who runs Microcosm bookstore in Madison, where knowledge is a free currency. His talks are wonderfully intuitive, dense and so delightful in my pursuit of an etheric revival.

See me, then, trying to peer into what Evans thought he discovered as he reconstructed the adjoining rooms at Knossos? He built as he took, his excavation a versioning. The Minoans had a language we have not deciphered, why not retrieve Linear A, why not clairaudience.

Even if otherness fades in my workday, I become frustratingly aware I can’t get beyond my desire body. An initiate needs a patient application, so I take a walk. Am in total wonder of the Manzanitas, the fairy-talesque A- frames, and Jeffrey Pines that saturate with butterscotch smell.

But the elegy is never far from me. It thorns any idyll of mine. A car scuzzes by in my climb up Fern Valley. The postmodern pastoral begins a flash animation backwards in time to when we had battery cars, Tesla, and biodiesel at the 1900 World’s Fair. Even with my careful choosing of materials, violence – the unemployed abusive neighbor, news of a friend’s suicide, the endless wars – finds me.

I return to sit again, to take a swing at it. Thus I start some sort of Action Typing. Throughout the weekend, I will hide at home >fiddle with collage > shoot video> play with dangerous pinecones > cherish friends. I can’t be with them completely, so instead I compile notebooks of lines and ideas and data largely about when we were all together before, liquid group protected in the thermos.

As I finish this, a chain of text messages begin connecting and informing us of a birth happening. Kid Splendor is arriving, he will be named Eko, meaning Sound as well as its Greek root, “house”. I close my eyes and type for him a safe passage, an improving world for his upbringing. It filters in chromophores around Val’s dilating cervix. Eko will pass our departing friend in the Grand Hall.

Our emergent selves depend on sensory development. Yet the work has not changed in the way that it is participatory, a danceabout involved in its making. But now, what Olsen calls the ‘Single Intelligence’ nears Singularity. The projective nature of thought is in a lineage of ponderance in an infantile mind, one that asks to dance with the data, extract what Duncan followed: ‘the law which governs all’. Such an independent fuel source- requires an engaged meditation with interference, accident, and transmission. Conglomerate do I a series of hopeforms.

Recently I dreamt I was bumping into my poems, each idea a connecting wall, each one a room in the chambers.

When night encroaches, if I am lucky I stream live music or occupation, so an amateur remote viewing can take place. Like anything live, I can project an energy-story there by writing in real time into its happening. Culling the streams, language a sieve, I may or may not receive a poem – but the work insists it is mightier than our evident de-evolution.

My evening setlist:

Water plants > food on stove > ruminate > take burned pan outside> fire worry re: desert life> beam me up Scottie > encourage Hero to return the lizard he’s pawed inside > feel Fukishima > Rocketwoman things> wonder when Hero will learn to do dishes > draw the bath by first removing spiders > wrinkle and read > friendship theory > Hero soft hypnagogue> laser sounds

Drawing by Scott Nowak (1975-2011)

THERMOS Tabling in Seattle

Hey folks, we’ll be tabling at Seattle’s excellent small-press fest, Short Run, this Saturday from 10:30 to 4:30 at the Vera Project in Seattle Center. THERMOS has been graciously offered a spot at the table of Hoarse, Seattle’s niftiest literary magazine, so we’ll be squeezing entirely too many chairs into too little space and having a good time.

Come get our amazing new issue, meet other amazing zine makers, comics artists, and dedicated do-it-yourselfers!

Tabling at the NOLA Bookfair

Dear friends,

Thermos hopes those of you who are local to New Orleans will come and visit with us face to face tomorrow at the Bookfair. Editors Melissa Dickey and Andy Stallings (as well as their children) and contributors John Craun, John Bowman, Daniel Grossberg, and Erik Vande Stouwe will be hawking the brand new Thermos #7 — featuring an amazing interview and new poetry by Katherine Factor, translations of Amelia Rosselli by Diana Thow, and new work by Jeff Downey and Jess Laser.

Please stop by and say hello!

First Books: A Conversation with Daniel Khalastchi

A number of THERMOS contributors have recently published first books. Here’s a conversation with one, the inexhaustible Daniel Khalastchi, whose Manoleria was published this year by Tupelo Press. He’s had work in THERMOS twice (our first and fifth issues), and co-founded and edits the wonderful Rescue Press.

TH: How has having a first book out changed how you think about your writing?

DK: I used to think (when I was young, silly, naive, etc.) that having a book out would mean finally getting that Bentley I always wanted and having jobs thrown at me left and right. Yet, to be more serious for a second, I think I actually thought it would give me the chance to really explore poetry in ways any writer who hasn’t gotten their foot in the door may not feel able to.  But in truth, it’s made me more nervous about both the act of writing itself and my personal connection to the global megaphone. I find myself asking more frequently now, “what do I want to say/why would anyone care to listen to me/how come I suddenly have all these gray hairs?”

Writing has become more stressful, but I’m not sure I would change that.  Once Manoleria entered the world, I realized I had to stand behind it, and I had to keep moving. It’s easy to write a bad Danny Khalastchi poem. It’s been more difficult to write somewhat-bad-but-also-somewhat-interesting/possibly-good Danny Khalastchi poems since the book was released, and that’s what I’ve taken away most from the experience.  I don’t want (as a writer/artist) to ever be complacent. I’m proud of Manoleria, but I also know nothing is guaranteed.  Like many other poets with a book, I have to dive right back into the “prize” system. I’m back to getting rejection letters and small notes of “we like this but we can’t take it,” etc.  Though it would be nice to be like some of my fiction writing colleagues (money, agents, cocktail parties with jokes about astronauts!), poetry is the real art. It lasts. Since Manoleria came out, I’m just trying to make more things that will continue to do just that.

TH: You seem to be a various and prolific writer. Is Manoleria a capsule of a specific time, or of a specific mood returned to in the midst of many other projects?

DK: It’s strange to admit this as often as I do, but the initial draft of Manoleria was written on my typewriter while I had a residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  I had maybe a month left on the Cape, and I remember waking up every day with the weight of a brick-filled laundry basket pressing on my kidneys.  I was anxious and afraid that the time I had that winter/spring would (possibly) be the only time in my entire life where someone afforded me the opportunity to do nothing but write.  I read and wrote a lot that year, but everything seemed stale and young and (for lack of a better word) repetitive.

While my own writing was lying flat and shaved in my mind, the news from around the world was doing just the opposite to my body. A new election cycle was starting, we were in the middle of wars on multiple fronts, and information was coming in daily about torture and what these things truly (right word?) meant about being an “American.” Suddenly, I was energized. I wanted to try writing about these things, and I gave myself (possibly for the first time in my writing life) complete freedom to do so.

I had a painting by the artist Justin Richel over my desk, and I wrote every morning and afternoon poems that I didn’t really look at for three months. When I finally did go back and see what had come out of that specific time in my life, Manoleria was there. All packed up. All ready to go. I’ve worked on many projects prior and since completing that collection, but the actual writing of Manoleria was as uninterrupted and focused as I’m likely to ever get.

TH: How do you see your work in what’s happening now in poetry? Are there other first books out there that you feel like yours is friends with?

DK: The closer you read and pay attention to the “aesthetics” of a given press or “school” in contemporary poetry, the more you can become frustrated with what appears to be complete and utter writing towards the middle.  There is a lot of slapstick poetry in the world today, and that’s not something that really gets me excited.  Having said that, there are many first books that I would hope Manoleria could friend-request on Facebook and get a kind acceptance.  I’m thinking here of Arda Collins’ It Is Daylight, Shane McCrae’s Mule, Srikanth Reddy’s Facts for Visitors, Sabrina Orah Mark’s The Babies, Jericho Brown’s Please, and Nick Demske’s Nick Demske (a book that I’ll argue from the top of any building you put me on is not reckless humor—that book, and author, have serious heart).

I also think here of the work of Dora Malech, Caryl Pagel, Marc Rahe, Suzanne Buffam, and Robyn Schiff whose books/chapbooks/and individual poems continually inspire me and my writing every time I think/read/head to the typewriter.

TH: What poems or lines from your book feel the “youngest” to you, like they most show your development (though you remain fond of them)? Why/how?

DK: Juvenilia shines brightest when you least expect it to, and it keeps humming and glowing no matter what you try to do to eradicate it.  There is part of me that wants to answer this question by simply saying now, today, the entire book feels “young” to me. But I have a flair for being dramatic. To pick a single line or poem from Manoleria to illustrate this shockingly youthful ignorance may be hard, but I can do it. For instance, “Audible Retraction” is a poem I appreciate for its detail/drive toward the disturbing, but the last two lines (the rhyme of “flesh in my teeth and screw in/whatever’s in reach”) seem forced and heavy. Like I was more excited about the sounds than the image. In fact, I’ve never read that poem in public for that very reason.

I have other examples of where I believe I missed the mark in Manoleria, but in the end I think it’s okay that some words/phrases/poems/sections/structures feel young. It’s my first book. Maybe my only book. It’s a collection of poems from a specific time in my life and the world, and it reads (for better or worse)—I hope—like a documentation of that era.

Cheryl Clark Vermeulen: three poems

This week, THERMOS is pleased to present new work from Cheryl Clark Vermeulen.



 “I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.”
 -Lily Tomlin

I must now stop liking things and go to bed.
I like Sanford and Son and Minnie Pearl.
I like another childhood show
and Lucille Ball and Carole Burnett.
I liked Lily Tomlin a few weeks ago.
I like hardware stores and bookstores
that seem to be disappearing.
I like them so that they don’t disappear.
I like the cause for Eman al-Obeidy being heard
who barged into a Tripoli hotel with
international reporters to say she’d been raped
by Gadhafi’s forces. I haven’t yet liked
mirror neurons but I will. I don’t like suburbs
but see some likes as related to them.
I feel like I’m building something.
I feel that these mirrors are virtual. I like feeling
but feeling this breadth of emotions in one minute
is explosive and annihilating. To look up and see
who is organizing us. To look up what to like,
to look up and see my hand and my arm, my shoulder.
To look and give myself a ticket for loitering.
To be wading through the thought
of our schools becoming condos or the protest
I didn’t go to or the rally I didn’t attend.
I swear I was listening.





Mirror Neurons

I thought you were quiet. Said,
“You are so quiet.”
“I am?” you asked.

It may be that my silence has been tied
to your silence, yet I am talking.
So I think that you are silent.





Alpha & the Mainland

I don’t want to eat your hand.
Perhaps my dog does. Perhaps
I protect her or myself with this
stance before the harsh
storm barking. I’m barrier island.
Circling she must come
through me.



Cheryl Clark Vermeulen, author of the poetry chapbook Dead-Eye Spring (Cy Gist Press), received her B.A. in Spanish from Knox College, and an M.F.A in English (Poetry) from Iowa Writers’ Workshop. After living outside of Chicago, she moved to Boston in 1998, where she currently resides. Her poems can be found in Third Coast, EOAGH, Inertia Magazine, Dispatx, Propeller Quarterly, DIAGRAM, and her translations in Xchanges and the anthology Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico. She once had a tortoise named Gertrude.

First Books: A Conversation with Jen Denrow

A number of THERMOS contributors have recently published first books. Stay tuned for conversations with them here. First up is Jennifer Denrow, who appeared in our second issue and whose book California was published by Four Way Books in 2010.

TH: How has having a first book out changed how you think about your writing?

JD: I’m trying to decide if it has. Has it? I don’t think it has.

TH: How do you see your work in what’s happening now in poetry? Are there other first books out there that you feel like yours is friends with?

JD: I’m always trying to think about that: what’s happening now. Sometimes I will write down the first or last sentences in a book of poems and then do that to other books of poems and compare them. There’s something in the syntax of some of the poetry now—a directness that the language, filled with indefinite references, counteracts with.  Maybe it’s an intelligible indefiniteness—I feel like the poems are disclosing everything through the syntax, while at the same time creating, through diction, an environment where nothing can be known.

I remember in college—on the blackboard was drawn a tree and the word tree was drawn next to it to indicate the relationship between the signified and signifier. There was something in that equation that was important to how the world was operational. The way information was traded and what depended upon the clearest trade route possible. It feels different now, for me. Now that poetry’s direction/location/external material to which its pronouns (indefinite and demonstrative, with which I have a nice obsessive relationship) refer to is less clear, it doesn’t feel as vital—is it because some of the necessity of this system of referents is disappearing (perhaps due to living in a world that is largely comprised of virtual material—where the referent system is based on a binary model and yet, at the same time, is also over-meaninged)? Does this make sense?

I will give you some examples—here are a few of the books I have near me right now. Heather Christle opens her new book, The Trees The Trees, with a poem that has as its first phrase:

here is the hand      here is the hand

She goes on to give more information regarding the word here, but the initial understanding of this phrase is that the here is dangling in space, on paper, I guess, with no external referent. Within this construction, there is a sense of completion. For me, there is—there’s something unifying in presenting a word that necessitates additional information and, at least momentarily, withholding that information. This is the kind of thing that feels prevalent—what does it mean for us, for how we’re experiencing the world right now? Language, being used in this way, seems to indicate some kind of philosophical position, or for me it does. Is it that what is being said doesn’t need something physical, in the world, to which it corresponds? Have we moved beyond a system where that’s necessary? Maybe it’s the idea of indefiniteness itself. The way this takes shape in pronoun form is through words such as everyone, everything, none, etc, which feel like important words right now. Or maybe they’re just important to me—I can’t tell. I keep making the world to be this and maybe it’s just not.

Another book that’s here is Chris Martin’s Becoming Weather. The first line is:

Not that what
is is

which is given more context soon after, but the initial moment of the text resides in this same kind of indefiniteness, this uncertainty that feels like part of a collective experience. It’s not that what is is, but is something else entirely. Again, nothing feels like itself. It’s so hard to go through the world where something is so many things—it is at once nothing and everything (a collection of the experiences we’ve had up until the moment we arrive in front of it). There is something desperately associative about the way we come into contact with the world and what’s in it.

I have the new of issue of Skein here. Seth Landman has two incredible poems inside. One of them, “The Woods,” begins:

This one is about a soul.

The first word, this, refers to what? The poem would be my estimate, but perhaps not. There isn’t additional information given to ensure that, not immediately, anyway. So we have our this. It’s here again. It means so much because the way it has historically operated is not how it operates here. There isn’t a man standing in front of you saying This Way, and directing you toward an exit. It’s a referenceless this, one that seems to come out of some common understanding of the world. Space and time are occupied in different ways, what is close, isn’t; what is, isn’t.

In terms of how this obsesses me in my own work, I guess the first poem in California can be considered. Or, it may be easier with something smaller: “Things Reappear”:

Because the chair in front of you isn’t a base you don’t touch it when you pass by. The other players foul you for this.

See. What is, isn’t, but it also still is. It’s so hard to tell anything now. Everything means. And it means a lot. Also it is empty. The chair is the base that needs to be tagged because the players are there and they say it is, but also it’s not because it’s just a person standing in her living room. Basically this is what keeps happening through the book. Over and over again. Really in everything I write. I’m always trying to get inside the center of what something is, but I also need it to always have the possibility of being everything, or at least something else. It would be claustrophobic if I did understand something as itself. So I keep doing this thing where I need to arrive at a certainty through my correspondence with what is external to me, but I also need it to never be one thing. Is this about God, I wonder?

TH: How does what you’re writing now differ from what’s in California?

JD: Shoot. I don’t know if it does. It does. But it still keeps doing the same thing. Everything I write feels very overwhelmed, so I’ve been trying to settle that down in between thinking it and writing it—which for me is difficult because those two things don’t have a lot of time between them. I’m trying to make short lines. I don’t think I’m doing a good job. I want to. Short lines seem to, even if the content is overwhelmed, control some of the emotion that long lines can’t.

TH: What poems or lines from your book feel the “youngest” to you, like they most show your development (though you remain fond of them)? Why/how?

JD: The entire thing feels young to me. Most of the stuff inside of it is six years old, so I was a different me when I made it.  One time I got a letter from an old me. It was in February and that me was advising the February me to take a nap and then go for a walk, which is exactly what I was trying to decide between at the time. And I didn’t remember sending it, so it really was like a whole different person.  I guess the letters between Edgar and Charlie feel young. I was taking a class with Kerri Webster on the epic and our job was to write something long, and I loved Edgar and Charlie so much and wanted them to still be around, so I made that. I’m not sure I went into them enough—maybe now I would attempt their relationship in a more serious way. Oh, you know what—I saw Charlie. It was in February, too. He lives in this glass case at the Smithsonian now.

A conversation with Robert Fernandez

THERMOS editor Zach Savich introduces contributor Robert Fernandez’s lovely We Are Pharaoh (Canarium Books, 2011) and gives Fernandez a chance to share his thoughts on sublimity, the lyric, and Florida.

It wasn’t quite warm enough to sit outside but I sat outside and read Robert Fernandez’s first book of poems, We Are Pharaoh (Canarium Books, 2011), my bench bisecting school groups on their way to the greenhouse. Inside, they must have seen iridescent petals different to the touch than you think and sturdier, and the overflowing hanging bleeding hearts: Robert’s poems feel similar to that flora, forged of lush and crisp careening forms that show “Dionysian” and “relaxing” can be synonyms, that a “ring of keys” can be a “meadow,” that art can shimmer in “plates of hunger / & luminosity” with desperation that is also empathy. They left me, like good books do, unable to read for the rest of the afternoon.

Instead, I sent Robert some interview prompts—not questions, but concepts his book brought to mind. He responded to a few of them with incredible depth, and also sent us a poem from his forthcoming collection Pink Reef (Canarium Books, 2013). I’m pleased to present Robert’s thorough, thoughtful answers here, preceded by a poem from his first collection. Additional work by Robert can be found in Thermos #6, which also features poems by Julie Carr, Nik De Domnic, Shannon Burns, and others, available from thermosmag@gmail.com.

Zach Savich

Hell Me Down

We take stock of the forearms:
They are like red snapper, slick
And sharp; they are like glass.
You see I am falling through

My pleasure like an intimacy
Of mirrors rubbing against
The face and you cannot uncut
The stomach: it is a die.

Here is the heat because we must begin.
Red rainbow spread like a hawk’s gills;
Red rainbow tied off in its black holes
Which dot the ceiling because it is enough.

A nurse raises
Her beak from my chest:
All my vultures are warm
And with gold discs for heads,
All my vultures are form.

Lord find me,
Who is another? Where is the flesh
Of gain? Venture and thighs
Of gold and living glass?

I forget that I consented to wander
To wander by the pier; I consent
That I wander and am like paper:
A black kite wet with night.

Grid I am good and like the Aeon,
A child playing with colored balls.
In the hall because they know me,
The young ones, the eternally. They see

The stela in the flesh of my throat they divine
The throat-rod and its glyphs. Bright to burn
And nurse on cold marrow-like light:
It is midnight and I am speed cut

Into thirds of day; I am threes everlasting &
Hells of foment. Then I stand like eternal resistance
Like hell. No one who walks over this
Ground senses it is sound: look again:

We find ourselves on the shore
And the flame follows us it flows
Through our speaking it is here.
I have failed again, I am no longer I am failed.

I am first to run aground I am seen.
Let us style vital light: New moon again but I am light;
We are not otherwise we are seen.
How shall I stand how shall I be seen?

The morning curled around us like warm like
I am clasped by infinite waters, I am seen.

—from We Are Pharaoh

1. Tradition, the lyric

The lyric is a perilous topic, one that turns poets and critics into priests arguing for either the sanctity or insidiousness of the genre—if it can even be agreed that it is a genre. Let’s grant that it is possible to traverse 2700 years—from Archilochus to Shakespeare to today—and still arrive at a set of intact lyric conventions. Some of the most salient characteristics of the lyric might be: compression; the sense of an “I” speaking to a “you”; apostrophe; hyperbole; associative logics; distinct experiences of time (e.g. a sense of simultaneity/the ecstatic); refrain; heightened imagistic and/or sonic intensity; constructedness (formal, metrical, etc.). The lyric is non-narrative, non-dramatic, non-didactic.

While genres are indeed useful in establishing frameworks of intelligibility, in the end I’m less interested in cataloging and comparing traits than in posing questions about the lyric I can’t safely answer. For instance: Is it possible to think of the lyric as not only a set of genre conventions but as an accord that seizes on a given material—whether language, paint, or bodies—under the right conditions? Something is possessed by lyricism, it becomes lyrical. Or is the lyric a mode of revealing (say poiesis, i.e. the kind of making that appears identical to nature as springing-forth) in which things emerge in the light of their constitutive foreigness? Which is to say, is the lyric language that, while seeming to come as naturally (as self-directedly) as leaves to a tree, presents a surging, elusive world? Is the lyric-as-song simply language echoing its own immanent emergence and passage, language resonant with the bare fact that things are—that existence is—rather than is not? And can the lyric even be considered an event—something other than the mere sum of its parts—without overlooking historical context or losing its integrity as a genre?

Whatever the case, it seems reasonable, as Jonathan Culler has argued, to think of the lyric as more than just “overheard speech.” Lyric language might as convincingly be described (and accessed) as a kind of haunted singing which makes that which is most familiar to us, language, strange, and in so doing reveals the human being’s essential strangeness—reveals that one is constituted by difference and always at home in otherness. This would amount to a reversal of that problematic strain of the lyric that fatuously seeks to make the home and its inhabitants all the more intimate and familiar. We could speak of the lyric as an artifact capable of registering and transmitting the experience of modernity, of the lyric that poses alternatives to capitalism’s nefarious effect on the human capacity for valuation (namely, its reduction of everything to the status of a commodity). There is a sense of lyric language as the language of birth, joy, or upheaval; of love, intoxication, or praise (in line with which, we might consider the lyric’s relationship to things, to naming). While poetic genres like the ode, hymn, or elegy may deal more narrowly with these concerns, with each it still feels as if we’re safely within the terrain of the lyric. Of course, we shouldn’t smugly or recklessly employ the term if that means overlooking other practices or genres. And one wants to stay alert to the dangers of passivity and euphony, which as Celan pointed out “more or less blithely continued to sound alongside the greatest horror.”

Although the lyric is hard to pin down, it is clear that it would be rash to simply abandon such a rich and potentially transformative reservoir. I think that in We Are Pharaoh lyric language is often in conflict with itself. Conflict is in any case structured into the language of an epoch that pitches itself toward disaster even as survival (the preservation of both one’s life and one’s way of life) is held up as its foremost priority. The book’s particular forces and concerns attempt to mirror this logic. Units of sonic and imagistic intensity are either disparately constellated or constrained by formal logics and the logic of micro-narratives, initiating a struggle between erotics and necrosis, figures and their dissolution, or, alternatively, suggesting a desire for style as transformation, seeing as worlding. Perhaps the language’s intensity, as your email put it, is a function of its conflicting urges to erase, transform, and affirm itself.

Valuing tension in the poem has a bit of a controversial history. Nevertheless, in my work I consistently find myself trying to establish the conditions under which something like a struggle might emerge. Struggle is of interest to me in that, if it takes, it appears endless, ongoing, alive, and that it asks that the work submit to its own design and pursue its own values.

2. Grandeur, the sublime, who’s real

I’m less interested in grandeur as such than in embracing language as desire, abandon, laughter. To hell with anyone who feels it is their duty to discipline excess or ambition. This is, after all, art. Why feel guilty, ashamed, or frivolous for pursuing what kindles, spurs, and gives pleasure? Furthermore, it may indeed be possible to invest in questions of vulnerability and responsibility while also attempting to engage a spirit of joy and courage. When, at sixteen, Rimbaud says of the poet “Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!,” the “adult” in me winces, but I also remember that a sense of innocence and serious play are vital to both one’s work and one’s world.

As to the sublime: we generally understand it as a staggering, ineffable limitlessness, correct? I admit that I feel invested in poetic language as a coming up against or an unfolding of limits. These days the sublime would seem to be more relevant in a consideration of the apparatus of global power than the awesomeness of nature. Nonetheless, that coruscating fog of integrated military, economic, institutional, and media technologies may in fact be unthinkable (it certainly can’t be met face to face). Maybe it would be interesting to reinvest in a sense of the Romantic sublime, to seek out fresh astonishment in the presence of some visually arresting primordial immensity. The problem is that we’re so accustomed to spectacle that such immensities, if not immediately placing one at risk, are only likely to elicit the tourist’s array of uninteresting clichés and inanities. Dread (or a sense of uncanniness) is arguably a more productive starting point for thinking about one’s shared finitude. It presents itself in the poem as an experience of our exposure to a groundless and irreconcilably unfamiliar world. One takes up residence in the unknown and unknowable, sustained by supports/activities (e.g. language) that are inherently uncertain, at risk. These supports, which bear the burdens of the past, provide only a temporary ground upon which a work or world might be situated.

In technological modernity, we can track an ongoing sense of being haunted—by language, images, commodities, bodies. And yet it’s increasingly easy to feel, especially if one has a seat at the table, untroubled, fleshed, streamlined—all crispness, fluency, and versatility. However, it’s also very easy to feel—this especially if one does not have a seat at the table—like a zombie or an animal (I would say “ghost” but ghosts sometimes speak). I’m interested in the ease with which one can pass from fluency to paralysis (and in the difficulty of passing back again), as well as in the trouble of effectively articulating either (each, in different ways, are conditions in which language has withdrawn). If Pharaoh otherwise tilts toward grandeur, it’s less about grandstanding and more about exploring the liberating potentials of generosity, love, and, as I said, innocence and courage.

3. Landscape

I had actually recently been thinking about certain poets (Stevens, Crane, Bishop, Brathwaite) for whom there is arguably a relationship between landscape and time. We find ourselves in the poem, say, as in the petrified remains of history: language reveals itself as time and appears brittle or crushed or powdery—there is a sense of language as fossil, heaving, or dispersal. Or we are in the poem as in some intricately contoured present, a radiant immediacy of detail and sensation (“infested / with tiny white sea-lice…,” “fresh and crisp with blood”). Or we occasionally sense the presence of an inhuman outside and its non-time or other-than-time: “A gold-feathered bird / Sings in the palm, without human meaning, / Without human feeling, a foreign song…”

I grew up in Hollywood, Florida (the exact landscape of Larry Clark’s Bully). Whatever landscapes have been imprinted in me are Florida landscapes, Caribbean landscapes. Using the word “imprinted” (a very Romantic notion) makes me realize—this with the hindsight of seven years spent in the Midwest—that it does feel like some psychic plates were stamped with the repeated exposures to those skies. On the ground, there are ports, diaspora and ethnic communities, spectacles of wealth, wealth disparities, varieties of speculative investments—none of which would radically distinguish the place from any other but for the fact that all are glazed in a near-beatific tropic luminosity and in the candied light of a distinct South Beach nihilism.

Ironically, We Are Pharaoh is probably more directly indebted to these environments than is my second manuscript, Pink Reef.

from Pink Reef

*

I will reform,
re-encounter love’s law
I will follow
after the bright
seeds of marrow are
shaken from the thigh
& the thigh placed
on a stick in
the faceless gallery
I will devote,
for thou hue
thou gravel
thou hearse—
the blood oranges
so bright
because they are
against a white
background
the blood oranges
so bright
because they are
against a white
background
the blood oranges
so bright
because they are
against a white
background
the blood
oranges
cold and light
cold and light
cold and light

The question of landscape is no doubt also a question of boundaries, of limits and the varied efforts to differentiate what one is from what one is not. The dangers of such efforts extend from the interpersonal and political to the ecological. It seems to me that the poetic not only unfolds illusory integrities, it also makes the outside that is already inside more raggedly manifest.

With that, Zach, I’ll say my thanks to you and the THERMOS editors for the prompts and this forum.

–6.12.11

Robert Fernandez is the author of We Are Pharaoh (Canarium Books, 2011) and Pink Reef, which is due out from Canarium Books in the spring of 2013. He is the recipient of awards from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry. With the poet Mary Hickman, he edits the chapbook press Cosa Nostra Editions.