Four for Zach Savich by Brandon Shimoda

Brandon Shimoda’s The Girl Without Arms (Black Ocean, 2011) is a stunning book of visionary depth and mesmerizing incantation, particularly when read in connection with his preceding and subsequent collections, such as O Bon (Litmus Press, 2012). Generous and interesting: his responses to the interview prompts “Vision vs. Images,” “Abundance, Wreckage, and Insurrectionary Prettiness, & How Much Can a Moment in Poetry Bear,” “The Direct Address,” and “‘I Should Be Telling You about Maine’.” 

The Girl Without Arms begins “For a moment seems / the only way.” Let me thank Brandon for the moments that follow those lines in the book and for the moments below, each an only way. ZS

FOUR for ZACH SAVICH

by Brandon Shimoda

VISION vs. IMAGES

I lived for two months in a friend’s apartment in Seattle. I was in the midst of looking for a place of my own. It was the fall of 2008. My friend’s apartment was spacious, old, with white walls; consisted of books, bookshelves, tables, desks, plants: a perfect sanctuary. His was my transitional space. He was then in New York—I had the place to myself. Almost as soon as I had gotten settled, I started to see black shapes on the white walls, traversing the walls and the ceilings. Some pressed forth from the white walls, hung bunched like bags; others bore the weight of mounds of black dirt—moving slowly; others hollow, waiting to be filled. I took notes on their shapes and the immediate conditions. I referred to them as graves. They never touched the floor. I wanted them to. I decided—arbitrarily, confidently—that if they touched the floor, they would no longer be able to hold their shape; they would lose gravity and disappear.

As I write this—early 2012—only one of my grandparents is dead: my father’s father, Midori. He was born in Hiroshima (1910), died in North Carolina (1996). Two months after his death, we convened in Death Valley to scatter his ashes. A memorial cairn was built of rocks we each chose from the hill across which his ashes were scattered. Traditionally, there is the ritual grave and the burial grave. The ritual grave is where people gather to pray and make offerings. The burial grave is where the dead are actually buried. The ritual grave is public, accessible. The burial grave is often in the wilderness, remote. Sometimes even spouses and siblings forget where it is and thereafter never find it again. Fifteen years after my grandfather’s death, in November 2011, we convened again in Death Valley. This time, we were unable to locate the hill or the memorial cairn. The stretch of Death Valley between Boundary Canyon and the dunes seems to be nothing but hills piled with rocks. It possesses a separate memory. We ultimately agreed on a hill not far from the road, at the top of which was a scattering of rocks—a disbanded pile—and a hole in the ground the size of a small body.

I saw a dim shape forming on the wall between the foot of the bed and the wash-stand… Before sleeping or just on wakening, there was a solid shape before my eyes, no luminous cloud-pictures or vague fantasy, but an altar-shaped block of stone. When I was very young, I had a recurring nightmare in which I was being antagonized by lines—geometric lines—floating in white and depthless space though occasionally crosshatching a field of sand. I once screamed so loud I woke an entire hotel in Florence. I cannot explain what the lines were doing, only that they were horrific, behaved like a swarm. The poet Christine Hume told me once that her daughter—maybe 3 or 4 at the time—had a nightmare in which there was a single line on the ceiling. Or maybe there actually was one. The blind monk Hoichi was able to re-enact the entirety of the tragic Battle of Dan-no-ura by singing and strumming his biwa before a congregation of ghostly fires in a moon-black cemetery.

I was twelve when I first visited the city of Hiroshima. My sister Kelly and I walked ahead of our parents along the east bank of the Motoyasu River, between a stone wall sloped steeply into the water and a manicured hedge in front of the hollowed-out Genbaku Dome. It was Saturday, August 18, 1990. I visited again twenty-one years later, the first week of August 2011. It was the sixty-sixth anniversary of the bombing of the city, August 6, 1945. August 6 is also my birthday; I turned thirty-three. It was our last full day in Japan. Lisa and I were staying in a hostel near the Genbaku Dome. Lisa prepared a breakfast of fruit. At 8:15 in the morning, we stood with fifty thousand people in a park between two rivers and listened to the tolling of the memorial bell, a sound, with its encircling silence, I was not prepared for.

One idea proposed by the Manhattan Project scientists early in the development of the uranium and plutonium bombs—dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively—was to drop, moments before the bombs themselves, sirens emitting a deafening noise, so that the people on the ground would be compelled to look up into the sky, wondering what was making such a terrible sound, and with the flash from the bombs shortly after, be instantly blinded.

It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.—Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where on encounters them is language.

I don’t remember any of the flowers or trees, or their names, in Hiroshima, in the city or where we hiked on Miyajima in the Inland Sea. A description would be closer than what I might actually remember, though even that would be pre-verbal. My great-grandmother, Kawaki Okamoto Shimoda, could neither read nor write. She designed an insignia she used to sign official papers, including the travel documents she needed to immigrate from Hiroshima to Honolulu, in the early 1900s, when it was still legal for Japanese picture brides to enter the United States. The insignia appears to me, her great-grandson, far more complex a signature than the Japanese characters of her name would have been.

One month after my grandfather died, and a month before his ashes were scattered in Death Valley, my grandfather visited me. It was morning. I was sleeping on a foldout couch in an otherwise empty room in the house I grew up in. I was the only one there in the house. This was October 1996. I was asleep when a loud thunderclap woke me, and as I opened my eyes with a start and sat up, there was a surge of total light. Every light in the house had turned on. At that moment I felt first with my body something moving in the hallway to my left. I turned to see a dark figure mounting the final few stairs of the staircase, coming up into the hallway. The dark figure was that of a man. He was dark as if charred; later I would say he was like a man of ash. His hand was on the banister. He was rising into the hallway, facing forward, with his head tilted down. Reaching the top of the stairs and turning right into the room next to the one I was in, the man of ash, with his head tilted down, became clear to me. The man of ash was my grandfather. He was there in the house. All that had happened—from the thunderclap to the lights turned on to the man of ash rising the stairs into the hall to the recognition that the man of ash was my grandfather to my grandfather turning right into the room next to mine—had happened in a matter of seconds. I threw myself off the couch and into the hallway, and followed my grandfather into the room.

NOTE: Italicized passages from H.D. Tribute to Freud and Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project.

ABUNDANCE, WRECKAGE, and INSURRECTIONARY PRETTINESS & HOW MUCH CAN A MOMENT IN POETRY BEAR

I dropped out of my freshman year of college and burned everything I owned. It was the spring semester, 1997. I knew it was coming—as though foretold from without—so I gave away (sold, donated) most of my books, saving them from the flames. I did burn maybe two-dozen: Science Fiction seemed especially appropriate. Otherwise: everything ever written, printed, received; maps, notes, notebooks, poems, stories; drawings, collages, paintings—on paper, canvas, wood; letters, postcards, birthday cards, photographs of friends, family, holidays; cassettes, CDs, socks and underwear. I saved a few items of clothing, two small tape recorders and a guitar.

A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment.

My friend John Melillo—writer, musician—emailed me the above-quoted passage a couple days after we first met. It was September 2011. The passage is from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. I wrote back to John, I love the greased pivot between chaos and order—greased, now, by song. And the song being “like a rough sketch,” almost that the sketch of a calm and stabilizing center must remain a sketch, to keep its entrances and egresses—AWAY from that center—open, or else—what would happen if the sketch was realized? And I went on to write, I’ve always been interested—curious—about the compulsion towards the inventory or catalog in poems facing into an incomprehensible event—that the mind both reverts and confirms in prediction its automatic nature—an instrument, a counter, to which John wrote, I like what you say about listing/enumerating. The reduction into numbers of lists—or even the unstable numbers of a verse entirely against or outside “versification”—being the precise point between the abstract that calms and the concrete that confuses. Naming, counting, (rhythming, then) sees (hears) everything else as the same everything else (Thales: everything is water) (countable, skippable, matter not things). The sound bounces off things and echoes back as resounding/space…which of course very quickly dissipates into chaos. To which I wrote, I’ve been thinking about the “sketch” of that “calm and stabilizing center”—and how there is something absolutely HELLISH about that center, something psychotic (sociopathic?) about transmuting one’s experience into listing, enumerating. I read or listen to poets in those modes and moments of listing/enumerating, and think that though they might be achieving some small concentration of the SUN, they are also surely closer to TOTAL COMBUSTION—we don’t actually want to die peacefully, do we? We only say we do—or some people say they do. Because, how familiar is peace? There is always SOMETHING else. Anyway, that “sketch”—it truly confounds. And then went on to write, I’ve lost myself—I need a couple of deeply considered lines about clouds… The center, however, is like an eye inverting itself into a mouth. To which John wrote, I think that’s it, exactly, to ask, “How familiar is peace?” Because the center is always “a sketch” that adds itself to the conflagration, it is always an invention, just as unfamiliar as the outside it creates (and from which it ultimately comes). I don’t know if enumeration actually brings peace so much as the possibility of power—a sketch of power—a kind of controlled circuit: the familiar only becomes so because the new, unfamiliar, unconscious even, is held fast. I think the psychotic thing is that grasping, that tenacious tenuousness, at all costs—symbolically, of course, the cost is always failure/death. Nothing really changes about a situation because a circle is drawn or a center is formed—since it’s all the chaotic mashing of bric-a-brac against bric-a-brac anyhow. The thing about the list is that its very self-sacrificial tenaciousness/tendency is, of course, melancholic, messianic, and cold: to remain ordered in that way is a bit disturbing. To put it perhaps too simply (and I don’t even know if I’m talking in metaphor or reality at this point): it’s perhaps most RATIONAL to go insane—to GIVE IN—to events in the midst of war. Or, it’s insane to be sane in those moments. But if Hobbes is right and we’re in eternal war with everyone else all the time (and in war with time, too)…

While listening to the poet Joanna Klink read a poem in a gallery in downtown Missoula, Montana, in front of a large picture window, black but for reflecting Joanna’s back and the faces of the audience—on a quiet night in 2007—the poem intense and unraveling, propelled by exasperation, a deep concern for people entrapped, the amplitude of every person and thing from whom and from which each pulse has been snapped, all of us, love, herself, the poem, the precariousness of the poem in holding it all, the disaster in the attempt, the disarming beauty of it happening before us—I thought of my friend Phil, who I grew up with and who, one night many years earlier, attempted to throw himself through a large plate-glass window on the first floor of the Knights of Columbus Hall across the street from St. Mary’s Church in a small town in Connecticut. The window was also black. We were standing on the outside of the window looking in. It was winter 1992, or maybe 1994. It is not that Phil wanted in to the Knights of Columbus. He wanted to break the glass to give himself a shard with which to cut himself open. Nobody would break the glass for him; he was attempting to do it himself. The glass was firm. People were inside the Knights of Columbus, seen through the glass as amoebic prefigurements. Phil’s twisted face reflected through the amoebic prefigurements. He had to dismantle everyone there; his future was in the shard. He had to bleed everyone out. He did not want to die. He never wanted to die. He wanted to be relieved.

I understood my friend then as an organic integrity struggling—working—at the margins of his own being—not to mention at the margins of the world, which don’t actually exist; the center can be measured in concentric circles in mere inches from where any of us are standing—and thinking—believing—that since existence is in a state of continual expansion, how exactly like the black walnut tree in that field in central Missouri he is: amid destruction, self-destruction and chaos, not a single cell is out of place …

THE DIRECT ADDRESS

The poet Miklos Radnoti knew he was going to die. I said this to Josh and Zach—a different Zach—Schomburg; Josh—Joshua Marie Wilkinson—at a sandwich bar—a bar that sells sandwiches—in Tucson, Arizona, one night. Over sandwiches, simplifying. There was no doubt; Miklos could feel—could smell—the bodies closing in. Maybe that was the thing: there was no doubt, therefore how could there have been, in that knowing, faith? And who is that figure standing on Orion’s shoulders as he, Orion, rushes blindly towards the sun, standing with the hopefulness of someone who can speak directly into Orion’s ears through his or her kneecaps? It has yet to be proven that the underworld yields less of a fruitful life than the world above. Right? So it is maybe difficult to say who leaves who, who turns away from who, who loses out, who wins, who immediately perishes, and at the expense of which parts of the body. Even if I am staring directly into Josh’s or Zach’s kneecaps, not to mention into my friend in Seattle’s kneecaps, or Midori’s—Hilda’s kneecaps, Christine Hume’s, Christine Hume’s daughter’s, Hoichi’s kneecaps (inked with holy sutras), my sister Kelly’s kneecaps, the kneecaps of the Manhattan Project scientists, Walter’s kneecaps, Kawaki’s, Gilles’s, Felix’s, John’s kneecaps, Joanna’s kneecaps, Phil’s kneecaps—there’s no telling if either or any of them, or you, might dislodge a knee or leg or arm or two or four or six in my chest to free the final words.

“I SHOULD BE TELLING YOU ABOUT MAINE”

My friend Elisabeth wrote me a letter once from a cabin on an inlet near the coast of Maine. It was the cabin—down an overgrown path through the woods; in the summer fireflies and white campion—she lived in for a few years off-and-on. It was a single room, a bed, two tables—one large, one a desk—an enormous and old wood-burning stove, black, a couple of chairs, some shelves and a sink. The cabin sat on a slope of rock fogged into the tides. Growing up through the rock: Goose tongues hollying out like cloched fruit / Among deadstock / Mist has head and groundcover. Red / Flowers knocking green mud to the knee. I spent a week there in the summer of 2008. Things were not going well in my life. I was then living in Montana, soon moving to Washington. I needed to be in Elisabeth’s cabin. And to visit Elisabeth, who has always brought me back to the earth. My sister was getting married the following week, on a farm in upstate New York, and she had asked if I would officiate the wedding. I was feeling massively un-fit for the role, but could not say no to my sister. So I spent a week in Elisabeth’s cabin, drinking rhubarb whisky, working on a puzzle of boats in a harbor, and writing: notes for the wedding, notes I titled Disquiet, which would then become poetry, then eventually The Girl Without Arms. I started writing these notes in another cabin, in Rock Creek, Montana, where my friend Lucas was living. I had moved out of my house—or been kicked out, I don’t remember, exactly—and was sleeping on the couch in Lucas’s single-room cabin, this one on the bend of a creek. It rained for weeks. The creek was rising. With the creek at the door, I wrote two poems, the two that would become the first two poems in The Girl Without Arms. From them and there to these: I had in Elisabeth’s cabin, in addition to her books, which she kept on a shelf high above her bed, three books from the small public library, all coincidentally by poets named Robert: Creeley, Duncan and Pack, the last of whom I had studied Stevens’ Auroras of Autumn earlier in the year. It was by the test of their minds that I wrote the speech I delivered beneath a tree at my sister’s wedding.

Gordon Massman reviewed The Girl Without Arms on his blog, Gordon Massman’s blog—which, at a quick glance, seems to now be defunct—and in his review he mentions the above-quoted lines: Goose tongues hollying out, etc., saying, Regardless of whether hollying and clotched are actual words (they are not), I cannot imagine goose tongues doing that to fruit, nor mist with or without a head and groundcover. And I definitely do not have the power to understand this sequence of images. Goose tongues are commonly known as sea plantain (plantago maritima), a perennial, primarily coastal, plant, native to northern North America, including some parts of Maine. They resemble the tongues of geese. Gordon writes that he cannot imagine goose tongues doing that to fruit, though I don’t know what he means by doing that to, despite very much liking the possibilities there. The line is like: Goose tongues hollying out like cloched fruit: an action, yes—a performance—but not an acting or performing upon, at least not as I originally thought. Maybe it lacks a kind of truth—not finding itself in the upsweep. Gordon also questions whether hollying and clotched are actual words. Actually, he says they are not. He’s half right: clotched is not a word, and neither is it in the poem. The word in the poem is cloched, as in: cloche, white netting used to protect plants. Maybe Gordon misspelled it? And hollying, as in: holly, a shrub, with white flowers and red fruit. Maybe I could have drawn a picture? Actually, I did, or attempted to: I wrote a poem. Gordon could have said simply that the poem is shit—at least then his contention would not have been necessarily wrong. Actually, his main contention, at least in looking at these particular lines, is with what the poem has not offered, that is: taken away from him, as he says, I cannot imagine … And I definitely do not have the power to understand. I’m not sure how I feel about having written a poem that has elicited such feelings of deficiency in a reader—I am reaching especially into definitely—though I feel this is not exactly what hemeans. He’s also not saying the poem is shit—his reading his far more engaged than that. Though I don’t aim to be understood, I don’t know in which direction to turn when a poem fails the imagination, or when a poem enforces the assumption—even if false—that power must be summoned outside of itself—All truth is the transference of power (Ernest Fenollosa); or imagination’s failing is enforced, unwittingly, obliquely, or matter is not converted into energy, but into a kind of debilitating fog, even if momentary, and is there.

Once, about a month after first meeting Elisabeth, I absent-mindedly called her Liz. She had to remind me that her name was not Liz, but Elisabeth. I can still feel her look of terrible and accusatory disappointment. It was a moment of false familiarity—a moment which had divested itself of the need, for whatever reason, to pay genuine attention, which must be renewed, radicalized, in every moment, as the moments accumulate and overlap, faces and names and white nettings, white flowers, red fruit spinning through chaos and confusion to coherence. And yet, I am happy that Gordon—in whose name I feel the trawling of fog over the ripest goose tongues, tonsils even—gave some part of himself to this passage—among others that he did—in which I was also trying if not to summon power then at least find some sustaining reason in so much quickly escaping.

Elisabeth now lives in a defunct corn cannery in another part of Maine. She is a fiction writer, she writes stories. Hers elaborate a wondrous and rigorous human ecology. I have always loved her writing, Turgenev, Woolf, Faulkner, Kawabata, Benjamin, which doesn’t necessarily mean she was born in the 19^th century, though sometimes I think so. I turn to her writing—the record of where she is and what she is experiencing, the dynamic between living and sub- and supra-living things, in precisely those moments, though also as refracted through a wild and specific parallel incarnation of where she is or might imagine to be—in order to be more fully awake where I am in precisely these moments. This is not what we ask for, necessarily. This is what happens—and though we think about it, it remains rare, however total, then quickly dissolves. Elisabeth currently writes in what she describes as an eyrie, which I envision as the glassed-in bow of a ship. She also writes letters. I have a stack of letters I’ve received over the years; at least half of them are from Elisabeth. her most recent letter to me she typewrote on two separate days in January: the 13^th and the 16^th, postmarked on the 17^th. The letter I was originally referring to, when I started to write this response to your question, Zach, was actually not a letter at all. I was mistaken. It was a phone call. After visiting Elisabeth, after my sister’s wedding, after leaving Montana, after a few months of being in Seattle, after I had moved into a tiny studio apartment, in which my mattress was wedged into my closet, Elisabeth and I had a phone conversation, in which she said, I SHOULD BE TELLING YOU ABOUT MAINE … and then the phone cut out, and I was left to imagine what she might have said about Maine.

The first time Elisabeth experienced the phenomenon of phosphorescence in nature was during low tide in the inlet below her cabin in Maine. All the seaweed was exposed. She walked down to the water and everywhere she stepped, the seaweed lit up.

Wherever anyone is or however far or whatever anyone might be doing wherever they are, I can feel their presence in moments like these as phosphorescence. My life might be born of these moments, maybe, but also the energy with which they are shared, which amounts to an extension of the moments themselves: attention, again, by which the mind might empathize into being in and with the presence of others. It begins with one sharing at what they are looking. Also, for a brief time, the cannery canned blueberries.

It Changed Me: Interview with Samuel Amadon

Tercets. Confession/culpability. Does anybody get out? What does poetry change or does it? Drink.  History vs. Memory.  Five interview prompts for Samuel Amadon, inspired by his remarkable second book of poetry, The Hartford Book (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012).

Tercets

I finished my first draft of The Hartford Book in 2005, after beginning to work on it the year before. (This book, incidentally, now has the kind of story that pissed me off when I was writing this book.) The poems came flooding out, once I learned, from Richard Howard, that I could write them (poems about crackheads and hockey players, about my friends).  Richard guided me into how to do that, showed me what to hold the poems with. In the first draft, the poems came out in ten-line stanzas of even lines. I called them “slabs.” And they were the first stanzas I used where I really understood what a stanza was for: not for holding separate ideas apart, but for holding up something wild and inseparable.  I think before I thought the shift in content had to be hard from stanza to stanza.

Tercets felt right. Uneven. Unsettled. Falling down.  But the shift from slab to tercet was about revision: formal shifts, for me, are the only way to revise, the only way to crack the poems back open. Some of these poems went through other forms, syllabic patterns, and then came back to tercets. Others I left in alternating lines. As a reader, I want shifts–or need them–to keep me paying attention.

Confession/Culpability

It’s about performance. Being the voice, and looking at it, all at once. I feel a little guilty every time I read these poems. Like they’re stolen. I also must want that feeling. Hartford’s a small city. There aren’t that many places to go, and it’s tough to leave. Everybody’s always around everybody. If you owe a couple thousand dollars to your friend, you’re going to have to see them for the next thirty years. That doesn’t stop anybody.

Does anybody get out?

Well, if you don’t go back, then yes. Of my oldest friends, none of them are in Hartford. They went to college, left, and stayed away. Now their parents have all moved, and it’s pretty lonely over the holidays. Other friends of mine are still there. It’s a hard place to leave once you’re an adult. I mean you can be a barista in Hartford and have a decent apartment, go on fishing trips. You can be an adult working at the Mac Store. My friends paid $550 for a two-bedroom apartment, with two porches, a kitchen, and a dining room. In the nice end.

What does poetry change or does it?

It changed me. I mean what else was I going to do? What else could I do? There’s a point to it. You make poems and you get poems. You read poems and you get poems. Poets and books, it’s enough to fill a life up with. I don’t feel the same way about my Wii.

Drink?

When I was a bar back in Hartford, my friends were bar backs. There were five of us who all worked at different bars downtown. Every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night, I had to pick them all up and drop them off at the bars they worked at, because each of them had either lost their license or totaled their car (or both) from drinking in the last year. I moved to New York City and everybody looked sober to me.

History vs. Memory

In this book, they’re both for shit. I mean they’re both bent, faulty, and serving my purposes. I want to get where I’m going in the poem, and over time everything seems like it’s always been that way. Though, I always thought I’d messed up the Wells story—discoverer of anesthesia, died by slicing his groin vein open—but now there’s a play in Houston that tells that story that way. My dad thinks I should stand out front and read the poem.

You can hear Samuel read “Wells” here.

Of Durations, Of Endurances: Interview with Hillary Gravendyk

Tracks. Health/illness as narrative vs. health/illness as lyric. The sentence in prose poetry. Breathlessness. Four interview prompts for Hillary Gravendyk, inspired by her first collection of poems, Harm (Omnidawn Publishing, 2011), preceded by a poem from the book.

Appetite

I was promised only good things. Basket filled with honey or the equivalent of honey. A thicket of long pines rimming the strayable path. Animals rustling. Had a cloak but left my head bare. Warning left its signature. Whiter horizon, a splinter. Basket of clever birds. Crossed the threshold of every afternoon at once. You were a series of obvious errors. A room close as the inside of a mouth, a basket packed with nettles. Costumed heart. I made a delivery; you were made of appetites. Timberwood, tinder. So I waited in the slick sack of your belly. Flinched when the axe came through. Shed you like a wet coat.

from Harm

1. Tracks (as in “Mended my skin with barbed-wire” or “rural route across the cheek”)

This isn’t a term that I had particularly in mind when writing the book so it is interesting that you pulled it out of the poems–the one thing I’ll say is that during the process of waiting, having, and recovering from a lung transplant one is (perhaps unsurprisingly) made to feel increasingly like an object upon which things are ridden, written, etc. Constantly being attached to an oxygen tank by my “clear plastic leash” and having PICC lines and ports taped to my skin, one feels a little more like a landscape than a body. Doctors, nurses, loved ones all make their presence known on the field of my own body, and there’s this dangerous passivity that sets in.  Of course, a landscape isn’t passive, but we often perceive it that way when it suits our actions, at our peril. Tracks on the land, tracks on the body–they are markers of more than mere presence; they are markers also of harm.

2. Health/illness as narrative vs. health/illness as lyric

In an early version of my PhD dissertation I wrestled with this topic quite a bit.  It is my contention that illness, or at least chronic illness, isn’t really a narrative. Rather it is a collection of durations, of endurances. I tried to make an argument that chronic illness brings us closer to Bergson’s ideal temporality of the duree, in that it forced a subject to encounter bodily experience, bodily time, in advance of logical or rational language.  I’m not sure that’s right, but I do think the idea of that helps me point to the reason why I find lyric such a productive mode to express what one might consider the “queer” temporality of chronic and traumatic illness.  Lyric opens the possibility for an exploded language, one that can ignore the chronological and the narrative in favor of the associative and the expressive.  The poems in Harm work hard to produce a set of affective responses out of the shards of experience.  My own illness experience is characterized not by a narrative throughline but by the aporetic and the fragmentary.  Lyric, and experimental lyric forms, offer a place for these kinds of (il)logics to take center stage.

3. Uses of the sentence in prose poetry

The sentence is an exciting unit of thought for me. It provides a recognizable structure that yet manages to be flexible and fluid, to allow for strangeness and complication. Something about the sentence is soothing, it makes you feel as if your are following a path, not lost in a morass of language.  And I think that “path” allows the reader to entertain ideas, metaphors, and statements that are a little weird–that don’t necessarily make the kind of sense a sentence usually makes.  The sentence as a set of boundaries allows for the expansion of what we think we can know.

4. Breathlessness (as exuberance, as quiet, as airless)

Breathlessness is something I think about a lot because of its dual citizenship in the realm of the medical and the highly romantic. There are so many phrases that indicate passion, surprise, love, etc that revolve around the idea of losing one’s breath (ie “took my breath away” “left me breathless” etc) and I wanted my poems to connect those two worlds togethe–as they were, in a strange way, connected for me. Many of the poems in Harm are addressed to a beloved–sometimes that beloved is my husband, sometimes my illlness. As I literally lost my breath, I attended to my heart, I suppose.

About as simmering as they come: Adam Fell, I AM NOT A PIONEER

Exuberance and nostalgia. Punk rock. Is friendship political? Boredom, bodies, vision. Four interview prompts for Adam Fell. Inspired by his first book of poems, I Am Not A Pioneer (H_NGM_N Books, 2011). Preceded by a poem from the book. Second interview (here is the first such interview, with Robert Fernandez) that acknowledges do we sometimes read interviews to see how people get away from the questions and say whatever they want, which is what we want, too? This detective I know gets a confession, not by asking about the crime, but by mentioning [whatever]. Adam Fell’s first book confesses a “carload of sparrows” and “a field of black telephones ringing.” Is there a word for the opposite of nostalgia? Sure there is. He asks below. ZS

 

There Must Be Something Left of the Minotaur in Me

 

The children load me into the trailer,

padlock the tailgate, take the dirt road,

past the sanitation plant, the tannery,

the strip club where my friend

watched his student dance.

I put my arms through the grates,

feel dry wind, feel chaff and silt.

There is the long fence, there is the far complex.

I see the first fields maw, bristle-mouthed

wide with the wrecklings of cornstalks and soy.

I see the long, scuffed lines

of my friends being lead into buildings

by men with glowing sticks.

The workers greet the children,

unload me, laugh at their prodding,

at the glitch they make of my muscle beneath skin.

They tend me toward the line, toward

the funneling fence, the doorway.

I can hear the lowing of my friends around me.

I can hear the faint-dull puff of the bolt gun

at the temples of my friends already inside.

I can hear the collapsing, the skidding

of hooves on the draingrate, the hum

of the tangling machine lifting them to be slit.

I am nearing the doorway.

I am nearing the doorway.

A gray cloud catches in the sky

and our bronchia unrest, the men and mine,

and my friends ignore us.

The cloud stills, stalls the dry light,

brings the blunted shadow.

The men notice this.

They scuffle to look up at the sun,

bearable enough for their eyes to gather

into guarded piles for an instant.

I smell their eyes catch

like living motes in the light.

A uterine second of distrust.

This is the moment I needed.

I am not a pioneer,

I am just scared to my animal blood

of the doorway, of the men,

of what they will keep of me

and what will be grist.

I take my first step

and cannot untake it.

I gore my way through the men,

feel their stomachs give,

feel the razorwire,

the chainlink buckle before me.

I run.

The children scream near the trailer.

I run.

The gravel milling my hooves,

adding me quietly

to the dust by the teaspoon.

 

from I Am Not A Pioneer

 

1. Exuberance and nostalgia

 

I constantly learn interesting and enlightening things from my students, who tend to be eighteen, nineteen, twenty year olds, but one of the best, that came up in the context of discussing Black Swan Green, the torrentially funny, sweet, morally-complex novel, written by David Mitchell, is that when we look back and feel nostalgic, we’re mostly looking back at the world through the eyes and brains and hearts of ourselves when we were adolescents or toddlers. We remember this free, careening, colorful, waterslide of a time because we had no real grasp on the enormity and complexity of the human world, we had no real grasp on the moral grey matter of it all. I think that’s why older people can look back at the 1950’s and 1960’s and say how lovely and freeing and simple “the times” were. Or my students can look back at, say, 2004, and say how yippeeeee everything was. It’s because we cannot even begin to fathom as children how much of an emotional hurricane the present is for adults, we lack the ability to empathize with adults in any real way. Fortunately, for a good number of us, that changes though, our imaginations are never dumbed down enough so that we can’t imagine what it’s like to be someone else, or remembering what certain experiences in the past felt like.

There is nothing wrong with remembrance or yearning—god knows those are inside me too—but when remembrance and yearning are stranded and unable to push into future, when self-reflection is denounced and progressing is denounced and learning is denounced in favor of looking backwards, I get scared for the world. I think a lot of the poems in I AM NOT A PIONEER try to argue against nostalgia, argue against exuberance. There’s a poem in PIONEER, called “Makeshift Memorial” where the narrator actively lets the high school kids keep drinking shit rum and beer out by the frozen lake, despite the real, larger world swooping down on them fast. They don’t need to be finger-waged or It’s gonna get better’d. We all learn about the realities of the American experience soon enough, and then the really hard decisions need to get made.

That said, I’m wondering: Is there a word for the opposite of nostalgia? Not the disdaining of the past, but the looking forward to when you’re elderly, looking into the future and seeing simple times and joy? Sometimes, I imagine myself as I hope I am as an old man and I hope to god I’m a curmudgeon that knowingly winks at his curmudgeonliness, who swears into the air at Thanksgiving dinner, whose children pat his hand and say “Dad!” in exasperation with how untethered he is from polite social mores and niceties. I want to be the old man that looks angry as he todders out of his sliding glass doors to joyfully throw the errant whiffleball back over the fence to the neighbor kids.

Oh, those will be the days, my dears, those will be the days.

As far as exuberance goes, it just scares the hell out of me, because isn’t exuberance always a delusion? Or always a disguise? I feel like it’s those faces I trust the least, those smiling masks, those are the faces I’m waiting to unhinge their jaws.

 

2. Punk rock

 

I was a late bloomer to punk. In high school in the mid-late 90’s, I was a grunge kid. And, in fact, I’ve lately found my way back into In Utero and Nevermind again without any sense of nostalgia, just in undisguised awe of the emotionality and honesty it seems has seeped into these songs. Especially, In Utero, which is one of my favorite albums ever, and one I didn’t really like all that much when I first convinced my mom to buy it for me at Target the week it came out (I had to convince her “Rape Me” was not actually about rape, which was, in a way, a lie, and Mom, I apologize here.). I could talk all day about how powerful “Serve the Servants” and “Scentless Apprentice” are to me today, not to mention how poppy-field on fire “All Apologies” always has been.

And speaking of the old days: I actually just found, over Thanksgiving, my old poetry journals from high school and they’re filled with Smashing Pumpkins lyrics and Stone Temple Pilots lyrics. My brother, Tyler, who is four years my junior, has this hilarious, mis-memory about a poem I wrote in high school called “Mayonnaise” and he used to make fun of that title to his friends, and it has, literally, taken me 15 years to convince him he just saw a print-out of the Smashing Pumpkins song, and that I would have never, even as a kid, named a poem “Mayonnaise.” I hate mayonnaise. Both the condiment and the sound of the word.

It wasn’t until college that I really discovered punk music, but even once the light turned on I’ve always clamored more toward post-punk than actual punk. I’d much rather listen to Wire, Mission of Burma, Joy Division, Gang of Four. Those bands, taking ferocity and politics and emotional unhinging and fusing them with industrial drive, just fits my emotional core more. I’m always a bit too physically controlled of a person to get all bubble-gummy or get all dancey or thrashing, but emotionally, I’m about as simmering as they come.

The big musical influence on my poems in college was always Radiohead. though. I used to try to copy Thom Yorke’s lyrics from OK Computer and Kid A. The disjointedness yet complete emotional cohesion of them, these little four or five line powerhouses of contemporary confusion and imbalance. I strived for that but found my own strive, a little more narrative, a little less global implication, a little less co-option of  jingoism, to my more political poems, a little more snow than rain. I AM NOT A PIONEER, I hope, is political on a more personal level, considering we are all political animals and the choices we make inherently effect members of the communities we are a part of.

 

3. Is friendship political?

 

No. Not real friendship, real love, real family. They, as I’ve experienced them, operate in opposition to what I consider the tenants of American politics. No matter what political figure you support, you are being lied to. You just choose the leader who’s lies seem to fit best with your ideal version of society. I realize that that sounds infinitely cynical, but I think the key difference is that politicians know it’s all a game, they know that I bluff here, they cave there, I misquote you in an ad, you bring up my infidelity. And we, as American people, desperately need our politics to not be a game. Our very well-being means too much to be treated as pissing contest, a beauty pageant, a get-quick-rich scheme. I realize that some of these people are good and some of them want to make changes, want to better the station of everyone else, but once they get into the American political system, they find nothing but red tape, frustration, and bludgeonings from all sides.

(And that’s not even to say anything about the people with real power, the people really in charge, the executive boards of major corporations, the CEOs, the bankers.)

In my world, friendship has nothing to do with advertising, or putting on best faces. It’s about being one’s self and finding people who accept you and love you, despite your flaws, despite the fact that you may act like an asshole some times. The best thing that a friend can do is call you on your bullshit. And the best thing you can do is listen to your friends who call you on your bullshit. Then you hug, have a drink. That doesn’t happen in politics, though I wish it did. It’s constant trickery, advertising, soundbites, dumbing-down important issues, dumbing-down real people in the process, making them vote against their best interest.

Our politics is pretty much the exact opposite of how most people work and live through their days in this country. We all work with, live with, and love people who disagree with us politically and it works out just fine the vast majority of the time.

 

4. Boredom, bodies, vision

 

It’s not boredom that scares me, it’s distraction. Boredom creates a yearning for throwing one’s self out into the world, or building something emotionally inside of one’s self. Boredom tends me to access that strange, creative place   that the technological world, the rushing setting in my brain that considers our world so mundane, is so crushing to. I mean, how seldom are we truly bored any more? How often do we let Boredom take over and direct us to do something drastic and interesting about it? If we feel the slightest sliver of boredom, we go online, we spend time with The Internet, it’s hands all over us, it’s shouting and cooing and spreading and offering. We spill into the wi-fi, not the other way around. Boredom makes makes me begin a project, write, wonder, wander. Boredom and restlessness are so so often my best friends. Distraction terrifies me.

The other thing that terrifies me, and informs much of I AM NOT A PIONEER is my warm, living, terrible body, and the warm, living, terrible bodies of others. If friendship is not political, neither is love or lust, but we may, in our inevitable shittiness, turn political in the context of both. It’s something, like distraction, to fight back against, to throw our shoes at in protest. My girlfriend told me once that she had given up hope of finding someone that love the world and hated the world as much as she did. And that spark of hope, bless her heart, turned out to be me, I guess, and here I had a whole book written about how much I hated and loved the world, my world. You can’t really be ashamed of the world, but you can be ashamed of how human beings tend to act toward the world and toward each other.

During the years I was writing the poems that became PIONEER, I learned a lot about empathy, self-reflection, forgiveness, guilt. And I really only learned these things truly and forever because I made mistakes, had friends to call me on it. I made mistakes because of my body (I include my brain and heart in that word) and the specific sociological, philosophical, psychological experiences that helped shape it. I hope I AM NOT A PIONEER is an honest accounting of my warm body, my terrible body. It felt good getting all that bile out, all that love. It felt good discussing it out in the open and having to stand behind it as a piece of art, as an argument, as both a flailing out of fists and as a defusing of fists.

Thank you, Zach and Thermos, for the space and the thought and the prompts. It means a lot. Love, a.

Adam Fell was born and raised in Burlington, Wisconsin, and holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he teaches at Edgewood College.

Jeff Downey Interviews Paul Clark and Kyle Crawford: NebLib Poets Part Five

Innate Nebraskan Jeff Downey, whose poems once appeared in Thermos, edited and introduced this week’s poets who’re associated with sp ce, the Lincoln, NE, gallery/reading space/beer palace. Here he’s interviewing two of them, Paul Clark and Kyle Crawford, re: poetry, destruction, community, and Georg Trakl. 

JD: The first time I met with you guys to talk about poems you were calling yourselves simply “Writers’ Group” and convening mostly in basements. That setting, its punk feel, seemed important then. (I remember vividly the reading you hosted in an unfinished basement that ended with everyone smashing old electronics into the wall.) How do you see sp ce gallery as an extension or departure from that place and time?

PC: Well, we still call writer’s group “Writer’s Group.”  The room we convene in currently is smaller and shittier than almost any of the places we have convened in regularly in the past.  Things have been destroyed in sp ce, I count a bookshelf and a laptop as casualties to the studio.  Oh ya, and a gigantic fluorescent light that I personally smashed in a drunken rampage.  As far as talking about poems goes, we still do that a lot, too.

KC: “Punk” is an interesting term to use here. I think that one could certainly look at what we were doing and consider some of the elements therein “punk,” but I don’t necessarily think we ever set out to be perceived that way. Punk insofar as DIY and a general disregard or indifference toward anyone who didn’t “get” what we were doing, or those who may have seen it as illegitimate. I do, however, think it’s important to note that no one outside of our “friends” really knew what the hell was going on in the first place. It wasn’t as if we set out to create something for any sort of recognition, we just wanted to do something outside of the academic setting. So we did. Meeting in basements and giving readings in basements was simply the result of availability of a space that wouldn’t annoy any of our roommates. It was an excuse for us to be overtly supportive of each other and drink booze and to be merry.

The initial “readings,” as I guess we’re calling them for the sake of this discussion, were house parties with poetry going on in the basement. They were thrown together sort of last minute as I recall, and Dan (whose house we were having the party at) had a really dank, shitty basement filled with junk he didn’t care about. I think he saw destruction as an added incentive for people to show up. It certainly worked. I didn’t really take part in destroying things, I think I may have thrown a record at the wall, but who wouldn’t? There was a sense of attention within those early readings, though. Most people did actually pay attention to the work being read. Everyone was drunk and slightly intrigued to understand what the hell was going on. It wasn’t stuffy. It wasn’t academic. It was fun, and people saw that and came back time after time.

sp ce came about because I thought we could do something at least as interesting as whatever else was taking place in the community artistically at that time. Part of me probably wanted some sort of validation or legitimacy for my friends and their work. Hosting readings in basements only goes so far, and only reaches so many people. I was definitely curious to see what a more public reaction would be. The readings have certainly tamed over the years, but the vibe entered a new kind of seriousness once sp ce began. At least for me. But honestly, I’m not really sure if meeting in and giving readings in sp ce legitimized what we were doing within the community. It made me feel good about what we were doing only because we were still having fun and we had a consistent venue to promote things we supported and enjoyed. It also gave us the opportunity to branch out into other art forms and establish a wider sense of community with people who were sort of on the outside looking in because they weren’t necessarily into writing poems.

JD: What have you been working on lately, individually and at sp ce gallery?

PC: At sp ce I recently moved the purple couch.  Justin described the new layout as “ZEN AS FUCK.”  I’ve also been sweeping the floor more when I’m there.  As far as things that matter go, we try to scrape together some art, some music, and some poetry every First Friday.  Credit goes completely to Justin for that, although I have lined up some readers.  We also have Writer’s Group up there twice a month, and that is going pretty well.

As for me, for a long time I rarely wrote poems with titles.  In the past year titles have become dominant.  I’m just going to list a bunch of titles I’m infatuated with: KIDNEY LUST, VAST AS FUCK, WILL YOU WRITE ABOUT THE WHEEL?, I LOVE TREES & I LOVE SCIENCE, A PEEBLE FACIFIST, YOU’LL BE DEAD IN A DAY, YOU ARE MORAL AND I LIKE THAT, I LIKE IT IN THE CRAFT WHEN SHE SAYS “WE ARE THE WEIRDOS, MISTER.”, SOMBERTOWN, FLORIST OF THE YEAR, FERROZARA, EYE SOCKET, I WISH I HAD A MONTH, DO YOU WORK FOR THE C.I.A.?

KC: I moved to Boise, Idaho for graduate school in August of 2010. I gave my key to sp ce to Justin or Paul and headed West with the hope they would continue working toward whatever they wanted to work toward. I am fully supportive of what they’re doing, and think they’re staying as true as they can to whatever it is they believe in at this point. I don’t really have much, if any, input on what goes on in sp ce these days, but I definitely miss having the opportunity to be a part of something with my best friends.

As I said, I moved to Boise to start my MFA in poetry in August of 2010. Since moving here, I’ve been working on poems poems poems (surprise!). At this point I’m trying to establish some sort of poetic identity for the poems themselves. I get the sense that my poems are very closed off to the world in relation to their available access for a reader. We’ll call them closed shells. I’ve really started identifying myself more and more with poets who operated in this mode. Georg Trakl specifically. Rainer Maria Rilke said of Trakl,

“In the meantime I have received ‘Sebastian in a Dream’ and have dipped into it a lot: deeply moved, marveling, divining and perplexed; for one quickly understands that the conditions of this swelling and fading of music were irretrievably singular, like the circumstances from which a dream might arise. I can imagine that even someone close to him experiences these commanding views and insights as if pressed to panes of glass, as one excluded:  for Trakl’s experience moves as if in mirror images and fills his entire world, which no one can set foot in, like the space in a mirror. (Who can he have been?)”

Intriguing for sure, but I also find this mode to be somewhat frustrating and limiting. I recently read an essay by Robert Duncan called, “The Self in Postmodern Poetry,” where he articulates his process in a way that I would, humbly, try to describe my own:

“I work with what is the matter with this life in an alchemical operation seeking not the overthrow of the matter–though increasingly the theme of letting it all go comes into the works–but the transvaluation of that matter. I read and write, gathering darkness, I would say, deepening the rift. Here, this matter of self must be seen not as undergoing change–the word itself is in question. But I work only in question; mine is a questionable work.”

Establishing an identity for a poem has been very difficult for me at this point. I’m trying to experiment with different approaches, reading poets who I haven’t necessarily identified with as much, Mayakovsky, for instance, writes poems very differently than I do. Along with Trakl, his work is very important to me at this point in my life. Separating myself or my Self from the poem’s Self has been a struggle, and I would assume will always be one for me. I think it’s important for poets to remember Duncan’s position where he said, “The poem, not the poet, seeks to be immortal and must go deep enough into its mortality to come to that edge.”

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.

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)

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.

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.