AWP Highlights and Lessons on Evil

Christ what good times we had at AWP Chicago. For all you who missed it, we really slit those good times right up the belly; we danced on their entrails without even the slightest wink of remorse. We shed sangria-laced tears at poetry readings, ate Thai food as Marilynne Robinson spoke about evil, gave homeless men peanut-butter sandwiches, rode the el train through rooftops at sunset. We stuffed our chests with the sort of unconscious un-loneliness only known to big-city dwellers.

And maybe we learned some stuff too. Maybe we had some hard realizations about good and evil—epiphanies even. Maybe when Lee Martin read the scene of his first kiss, and extended that scene to include the awkward boner that resulted, we were reminded that those Hollywood-love-conquers-all scenes are bullshit. Maybe in every panel we attended, panelists expressed the need to explore the evil, the hidden, the uncanny. They encouraged us to uncover the sides of ourselves that we would rather keep covered—sides that (in Stephen Elliot’s words) we didn’t know we had.

Probably it was just me. My persistent unwillingness to relinquish idealistic views of just about everything makes me astute to such remarks. Remarks like “Writing is in NO WAY a noble calling,” (Stephen Elliot again—he really rocked me) and Ha Jin agreeing with Auden that “Poetry makes nothing happen.” They’re trying to help chip away at this tower of self-importance I have erected, but geeze it ain’t easy.

The point is: shit’s complicated. I’m in the process of overcoming my urge to ignore its complexity, so you should know that I left some things out in the above description of times had at AWP Chicago. You should know that I declined all eighteen of my mother’s phone calls; was disgusted at the sight of a filthy, oil-covered pigeon; thought almost exclusively about sex during at least one of the panels; saw a good friend more upset than she felt comfortable showing me; drove through my hometown in Missouri, a heap of emotional wreckage, and just felt irritated. I even stole a scarf someone left in the hotel lobby on the first day.

So there you have it, a larger slice of the AWP pie. We’ll spare you all the gritty details in the highlights below, but I would like to second the motion to clamp your jaw and go to the places you feel most uncomfortable—participate in the fucked-upness that is human experience.

ENOUGH OF MY BANTER NOW FOR THE MAIN ATTRACTION: 

AWP HIGHLIGHTS

Justin Bigos

• Erin Stalcup's kick-ass panel on "surprise" in fiction.
• Landon Godfrey's skull-and-crossbones scarf.
• iO/Catch Up/Lana Turner reading at the Chicago Public Library.
• Michael Martone's hair.
• The three or four young men who weren't trying to look like James Franco as Allen Ginsberg.

Nate Logan

• Deep dish pizza delivered to the hotel room
• Having lunch with poet-from-another-mother Brooklyn Copeland and her bf (my gf was there too <3)
• "Are there any horses in the crowd? / Neigh! / This poem is for you."
• The mummies and the Mongol diplomatic passport at the Field Museum
• Photobooth at Quimby's in the rain

Shannon Abbot

On the business of selling out everyone you know in CNF:

• Stephen Elliott: To write about a negative experience with someone, you have to actually forgive them first.
• Krista Bremer: Truth is one half of the equation. Compassion is the other. Remain as humble as you can about your recollections.
• Lee Martin: To be truthful about other people, you have to tell the truth about yourself.

Tim Boswell

• Seth Harwood saying the idea that publishers will not want your work if it’s already appeared as an e-book or podcast is a myth. Better to get your work out there and show it can generate interest!
• Stepping onto the skydeck at Willis Tower with only a glass floor between me and a 103-story plunge to my death. Terrifying.
• From a DIY publicity panel: Send a copy of your book to your most-admired writer. Send one to the president. Be audacious.
• Chicago deep-dish pizza. Lou Malnati, you have spoiled me for all other pizza.

Hillary Stringer

• From "Men from Venus, Women from Mars: Writing from the Perspective of the Opposite Sex," with Kyle Minor, Kevin Wilson, Reese Okyong Kwon, Alan Heathcock, and Jennine Capo Crucet: Society often does not allow male characters to directly address their feelings; instead, these male characters must perform actions that convey these repressed emotions to the reader.
• Creepy "art" videos in the elevator continue to ominously say/flash "FIN."

• From the panel "Finding Home-Immigrant Voices in American Literature," with Aleksander Hemon, Nami Mun, and Stuart Dybek: The readers of the past lived in a world of "in-betweeness," while the ideal reader of the future lives in a world of "overlapping belonging." It is increasingly difficult to argue that we live in a monoculture. Observing the "melting pot" of America enacted on another culture (in Dybek's case, the change of his Pilsen neighborhood from Polish to Mexican) can help a writer highlight aspects of their own culture before these traits are assimilated.
• "Lobsters" at the South Loop Cafe.
• From a panel on "Writing Class, Representing Socio-Economic Realities in Your Work," with Courtney Tenz, Josh Weil, Ru Freeman, Sabra Wineteer, and Sterling Holywhitemountain: Class in America is ignored, while in international fiction, class is an inescapable reality. Are we intellectually curious enough to address class in America? Do we instead confuse "class" markers, such as eating watermelon, with "racial" markers, and how can we represent a variety of experiences? Does the majority of American fiction only address the realities of the upper-middle class?
• From a panel on "Literature and Evil," with Ha Jin, Paul Harding, and Marylinne Robinson: Sentimentality denies both good and evil, while complexity is what enables writing to control the perception of evil and explore it.
• The mystery of the overpuss....lives on.

Laura Miller

• Beyond the Pulp: Genre & Literary Fiction: Kevin Brockmeier’s words: "Viewing things at a tilt produces an exactness of vision," and his list of Top 50 Works of Fantasy and Sci-Fi.
• Discovering the journal Unstuck.
• Free sangria at the McSweeney's reading, and the heartbreaking genius of poet Rebecca Lindenberg.
• Paper Weight exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago
• Poetics of the Essay Panel: The metaphor: Writing nonfiction is like bees gathering pollen to make honey.

Things I Should Have Done Yesterday*

First reading of the season! Thanks to ZVZ for the photos and Elishia Heiden for the poster. Sorry I missed it!

Tori Sharpe

Matt Davis

Chris Beard

The man behind the camera: Zach VandeZande

*Title shamelessly stolen from Walker Smart.

An Interview with C. Dale Young

Justin Bigos: I’d like to start by talking about beauty. I am currently taking a poetry workshop in which the teacher, on the first day of class, asked us: “Is beauty something you think about in your poems?” I was kind of struck by the question – as if a poet could possibly not think of beauty, not just in his or her own poems but in the poems of others. Carl Phillips has written in an essay, “The point of the poem is not to say anything about beauty, but to enact the vision of it” – “to see it.” So, the student now asks the teacher: Is beauty something you think about in your poems, in the poems of others?

C. Dale Young: Many have written about beauty, but I always return to Stephen Dobyns and his extraordinary book of essays Best Words, Best Order. In that collection, he has a phenomenal essay on the problem of beauty. In that essay, he quotes a passage by Dostoyevsky in which one finds the following:

"Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God setsus nothing but riddles. […] The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man."

I return to that quote often because I don’t know exactly what beauty is, and I firmly believe one cannot know it without the juxtaposition of the ordinary. Someone once tried to convince me you could only see the beautiful if you had seen the grotesque, but I disagree. I believe to see beauty one must also see the ordinary out of the corner of one’s eye. So, in the drafting, the getting the poem down, I do not think of beauty. But in revision I do, and at that point I am also keenly aware that to have beauty one must also have the ordinary. If a poem is filled with nothing but the beautiful, it becomes a kind of grotesque. In the end, I strive not for beauty but for elegance, remembering that elegance arises from simplicity and not from the beautiful. Reliance on the beautiful, reliance on detail, gives rise not to elegance but to the baroque, something which if taken to the extreme is grotesque.

JB: I like your emphasis on the common, the ordinary, even the peripheral. It does seem that poets who have an aversion to “beauty” may think of it as necessarily precious. And in that way the beautiful becomes “sentimental” – another word poets tend to hate. I think of your poem “The Bridge,” which begins, “I love. Wouldn’t we all like to start/ a poem with ‘I love’? I would.” The poem moves from this playful ars-poetica opening to a love poem, and the poem ends on the image of the speaker and his beloved holding hands, and how they look together like the Golden Gate Bridge. The poem definitely flirts with sentimentality, and in its flirting it feels defiant – and so the ending is a kind of middle finger to those who would deny – well, the things we’re talking about: beauty, feeling, joy, which are found in common, everyday life. So: what the hell is going on? Seriously, where does all this doubting of our own emotions come from? Is it worth thinking about? Or should we just get our work done and not worry about it?

CDY: It is, I would argue, a good thing to doubt our emotions and how they are used in poems. If the poem arises wholly from a single emotion, the likelihood the poem will be flat increases significantly. “The Bridge” started because many years ago I noticed that there were parallel lines in the word “parallel.” I just loved that. When I was much younger I falsely believed that the love poem was in essence a dead form; I believed this out of a kind of laziness when I was a graduate student. What I realized with time is that the love poem isn’t dead but just incredibly difficult to pull off. I wanted to write a poem about the fact I love so many things. I wanted to be playful. In the end, I believe it is the playfulness that allows me to pull that poem off. If I had opened the poem with what comes at the end, the poem would have spiraled into utter sappiness. For every force there must be an opposing force. Poems are much like that basic idea in physics.

An Interview with Kristina Marie Darling

Justin Bigos: First, thank you for visiting UNT this January to read your poetry. As I was listening to you read, I had the sense that your poems might be typographically playful. And indeed, when I had your books in my hand, I saw that they are. Are you more attentive to the poem as human voice, or as aesthetic object on the page – or something in between or other?

Kristina Marie Darling: That's a great question. When I first started writing, I saw myself as a lyric poet. I definitely believed that there should be a connection between poetry and an authentic spoken voice. After reading the work of poets like C.D. Wright, Myung Mi Kim, and Kristy Bowen, I became interested in writing poems that allow multiple voices to coexist within the same narrative space. For me, the use of typography is useful for differentiating between the various speakers, found texts, and types of rhetoric that inhabit my poems. I do believe that poems should be musical. But I'm skepticalof the belief that poetry is synonymous with a spoken voice. For me, poetry's great appeal is in the potential for dialogue between found texts, and between different types of appropriated language. I've found that typography in my own poetry helps to facilitate this dialogue.

JB: Some of your poems "take liberties with" the letters of H.D., those written to Richard Aldington and to Freud during H.D.’s psychoanalysis. I don't get the sense many people read H.D. these days. Why should they – not just her letters but her poetry?

KMD: I definitely agree that H.D. isn't as widely read as some of her contemporaries. This is a mystery to me, since H.D.'s work reflects many of the aesthetic concerns that define contemporary poetry. I see her as the first truly modern poet. Works like Sea Garden, Helen in Egypt, and Trilogy privilege tangible details over abstraction, yet they allow these concrete images to serve as a point of entry to discussions of love, death, and history. This is definitely something that contemporary poets like Srikanth Reddy, Eric Baus, and Lisa Robertson strive for. H.D.'s work is also wonderful in its matching of form and content. Tribute to Freud, for instance, offers a lyric account of H.D.'s sessions with Freud. The work itself is driven by the same associative logic that one would observe in psychoanalysis. With that in mind, I think there's much to be learned from H.D.'s work in terms of craft. Her aesthetic concerns align beautifully with those of contemporary poets, myself included.

JB: I’m interested in your claim that H.D. is the “first truly modernist poet.” Aside from her use of concrete imagery to enter larger human and historical discussions, what would make her modernist – and the “first” modernist? (Ezra Pound is tapping his fingers, waiting for your answer . . .)

We Have a Love-Hate Relationship with Lists

This is the only time of the year that it's acceptable for us to shove our reading lists in your face without you saying: "how dare you. how dare you tell me what i should be reading. like i don't have lists and lists of my own, piling up like uneaten pancakes. don't you see how many delicious pancakes i have to eat already? get yours out of my face."

Well it's 2012 now, and its time to eat some new lists. Here's some books the ALR staff devoured last year:

Inferno by Eileen Myles - Caitlin Cowan

Owning It All by Bill Kittredge - Ryan Flanagan

The Kids Are All Right by the Welch siblings - Jessica Hindman

Either Way I'm Celebrating by Sommer Browning - Nate Logan

Horse, Flower, Bird by Kate Bernheimer - Kara Dorris

The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia - Tim Boswell

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon - Hillary Stringer

The Facts by Philip Roth - Matt Davis

Songs of Unreason by Jim Harrison - Justin Bigos

The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier - Laura Miller

An Interview with Luke Hankins

Justin Bigos: Your first book of poems, Weak Devotions, contains a fifteen-part sequence of the same title. The sequence as well as the book contains much conversation with God, often interrogating His motives – even His very authority. What is the human cost of entering this mysterious place of devotion – as God once entered the mystery of “mortal flesh,” “his holiest act”? Is a “weak devotion” the closest we humans come to something holy?

Luke Hankins: Yehuda Amichai writes in his poem “Relativity”:

Someone told me he’s going down to Sinai

because
he wants to be alone with his God:
I warned him.

Indeed.

You ask what the human cost of entering “the mysterious place of devotion” is. In my experience, it is very high. And judging by what poets devoted to God throughout the ages have written, I think they would agree. But I don’t think anyone enters a devout life counting the cost—not even monastics and ascetics (which I certainly have never been). That’s because one can’t imagine or begin to comprehend the actual price until it’s already being exacted. Hopkins, in “Carrion Comfort,” writes:

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me?

The psalmist(s) of Psalm 42 write(s):

Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.

Some, from a perspective outside of religious or spiritual devotion, would undoubtedly say that the cost is high because the devout are fooling themselves, chasing after shadows and myths and confronting their own neuroses in the dark, working themselves into a frenzy seeking what was never there to begin with. This is certainly not a novel idea for anyone who has ever genuinely sought the divine. (E.g., see R. S. Thomas’ poem “Threshold.” Whom do you meet in the desert? Is it the Maker in whom you see all of your fears and all of your hopes embodied, or is it the Nothing in which you see only a reflection of yourown inexplicable being? And which is more terrifying?

Sarah Vowell Gives Reading at UNT

Best-selling author Sarah Vowell visited UNT last month, entertaining hundreds of admirers with her quirky-smirky take on American history. Vowell read from her latest book, Unfamiliar Fishes, an examination of how the year 1898 (when the U.S. became an imperial power, conquering islands in the Caribbean and South Pacific) was as crucial to the formation of the American psyche as the year 1776. As with her previous books, Vowell's wry, sarcastic humor is the real story here. She enlivens seemingly dead material (the history of Hawaiian Imperialism, anyone?) with astute observations of local culture (mayonaise and soy sauce co-exist in harmony) and hilarious tangents on how mainland Americans view Hawaiian culture. But as trivial as the jokes may seem at times, Vowell is always working on a deeper level: Her interest in the U.S. conquest of Hawaii is kairotic: at one point in the book, she subtly connects a palace in Honolulu circa 1898 to another in Baghdad circa 2003. Vowell argues that despite Americans' propensity to believe that we are a nation of isolationists, unsullied by colonial pasts like other world powers, our national identity has been one of conquest for some time.

What I find so refreshing about Sarah Vowell is that she doesn't seem to get caught up in the distinction between memoir and history. Her writing aesthetic implies that history is nothing without a unique living voice to tell it and interpret it. During the Q&A, she often brought up stories from her own life to explain why she finds certain historical figures so interesting. Vowell's body of work implies that history can only be interesting if we see history as a force constantly at work in our own lives. The biographies (and autobiographies) of famous men like Teddy Roosevelt are thus entwined--in subtle, surprising ways-- with our own life stories.

Review: Space in Chains

Space, in Chains by Laura Kasischke
Copper Canyon Press, 2011
$16.00


Space, in Chains is Laura Kasischke’s eighth book of poetry, and, again, she carries us into a world that is tangible and temporal, devastating and gratifying. As I read this book, I was writing about family, illness, and being bound to place and time. I often wondered, and I’m not alone, how the everyday, the deeply personal can be translated to engage outside readers. And here is one answer—this collection of poetry speaks to the chains around us, visible or not, from the smallest molecule, to the everyday, to the unthinkable loss of a loved one. Kasischke reveals these bindings through extraordinary imagery and inspired syntactic control, knowing the exact moment to reveal or disguise, to accelerate or tap the breaks, creating poetry of poignant beauty and intoxicating truths.

Well-known for her unexpected and evocative imagery, Kasischke’s images feel natural and strange simultaneously, familiar and disturbingly unique, lingering in the reader’s head long after the poem is read. One example is the beginning of the first poem, “O elegant giant,” which reads

“And Jehovah. And Alzheimer. And a diamond of extraordinary size on the
hand of a starving child. The quiet mob in a vacant lot.”

Like in a word association game, somewhere between the conscious and subconscious, seemingly random, familiar but unconnected ideas are brought together, given new meaning, and presented to the reader. Then the reader begins to put the pieces together, reading in awe, hungry for the realization that strange does not equal imprecise, that opposites are not mutually exclusive.

The title poem, “Space in Chains,” is caught somewhere between the urge to live, the struggle to find purpose, and inevitability of death. The poem begins “Things that are beautiful, die.” And a few lines later, “Hamsters, tulips, love, giant squid. To live. I’m not endorsing it.” But the speaker is endorsing love, living, and the ties that bind because at the end of the poem she calls to her little boy whose existence creates a reason to live, “Sweetie, don’t be gone too long.” The poem asks: Is this life worth the worry and sorrow? The answer is yes. This collection speaks not only to the knots that bind us in one place, or the “knot” that is the “mind” or the love of a child but the pleasures that are created by being tethered. These poems also speak to how we grow to love the tether itself, how being bound is a kind of freedom.

So why should you read this book? If you want poetry that speaks like ghosts and haunts the outer rims of your brain and your soul—If you want poetry that is magical and agonizingly real—If you want poems that probe the dark riddles of life, poems of wholeness, fracturing and fusion—If you want poems that ask hard questions and sound like songs, if you grieve and have grieved, love and have loved, searched and are searching, you should read this book. What else can I say? Space, in Chains is a collection of beautifully controlled strangeness and musicality, a collection of large and small punches to the solarplex. Buy it today and feel for yourself.

An Interview with Jynne Dilling Martin

Justin Bigos: I have just had the pleasure of reading the manuscript of your first book, We Mammals in Hospitable Times. The book does indeed seem to take on the larger animal experience on the planet Earth, and the voice you’ve given us is like the coolest anthropologist ever – brainy, fierce, sexual, and brimming with devilishly detailed observations and insights. Big question: what is it about poetry that provides the ideal space/form for this big mammalian brain activity?

Jynne Martin: I recently saw a portrait of the first zebra to ever arrive in England – George Stubbs painted it in 1763, and the zebra looks so confused, out of place, alone, yet watchful and curious – something burns in those big black dilated zebra eyes. This is often how I feel as I move bodily through the world – this life is so strange to me, holds so much beauty and so much sadness, and I don’t feel I am quite wired to belong here.

Something in the compactness and abruptness and weirdness possible in poetry feels like the right way to say this back to the planet. But I resonate with people saying this in any form, whether it’s Hieronymus Bosch or Chris Marker or the Log Lady from Twin Peaks.

JB: Readers will enjoy – and have enjoyed, in many magazines – your wit and humor. I laughed out loud a few times reading this book (which is rare for someone raised in Connecticut). In your poem “Beauty in Its Various Forms Appeals to You,” you describe the attempt to communicate with the “scowling stag beetle” and how even after developing a “common idiom of clicks,” “it could be months of small talk/ about hedgerows and larvae before sufficient trust was established.” The image is hilarious in part because of the tiny communication machinery you describe, but also because the poem ends so poignantly: “Clock click pause clack pause click: beloved things have been lost.” Do you find yourself drawn to a particular kind of humor? Are there certain poets you find very funny?

JM: Now you’re just trying to flatter a few bottles of Old Crow out of me – I wish I were much funnier than I am on the page. It’s so hard to be funny in poetry – we all put on our serious glasses when we sit to write or read it. IMPORTANT WORD ARRANGEMENTS HAPPENING PEOPLE FOCUS!

My favorite humor is simultaneously hysterically funny and deathly true. It exists on every page of Lydia Davis, in fragments of Stephen Crane’s Black Riders, occasional John Ashbery (especially my favorite collection Can You Hear, Bird?) and in the bodily form of Werner Herzog.

Review: Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“Can you live your whole life at zero? Can you live your entire life in the exact point between comfort and discomfort?”

This question lies at the core of Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. It manifests in the relations between fathers and sons, between time machine repairmen and their managers, between a time traveler and his slightly melancholy time machine, whose pixilated face is forever burned into the time machine’s display, “leaving, frozen into the screen, a kind of history, a sum total of her expressions fixed into a retained outline...the melancholy algorithm of her soul averaged and captured and recorded as a function of time.” Everyone in this novel is somehow lost, frozen in some way or another.

Yu’s novel was first published last year by Pantheon and recently received a paperback release in Random’s Vintage Contemporary line, and for a book that at its core is both hopeful and melancholy it maintains a relatively light tone. The novel is brief, weighing in at less than 250 pages, and if anything could have been much longer. But that is part of the charm. This is a tightly wound narrative, one that doesn’t linger for too long in the world that it creates.

Which is not to say that the world is obscure, that time travel is just a gimmick. It is integral to the telling of this tale. The novel could not exist without taking the metaphor literally. As the narrator travels through his own life, he travels through his memory. This is the nature of time travel here, for “every time a user recalls a memory, he is not only remembering it, but also...literally re-creating the experience.” At its heart, Yu’s novel is about the relationship between a son and a father, and the ways it has gotten off course enough that the father has literally become lost in time. Somehow, the novel manages to straddle the line between monologue and narrative. Yes, it lingers in its digressions, in its explorations of the “rules” of this universe. But if it lags, it lags only for a moment. If the momentum of the piece is hindered in the flashbacks, it is hindered only for a moment, and the lighthearted tone more than makes up for this.

Because the tone is where this work shines. For a novel that begins with an epigraph from Hume, that begins with a description of its narrator’s isolation, that is concerned with grief, regret and loss, the tone is surprisingly light. Page 27 of this text contains a huge chunk of fine print. The narrator’s manager is “an old copy of Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0” who “thinks he’s a real person” and invites the narrator for a beer even after finding out it’s only a program. The book revels in its metatextuality, but not in a way that offends the reader—the narrator has a conversation with what is essentially himself halfway through the book (which is unfortunately better when experienced than when described), and the book that becomes so integral to the plot is How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. This is experimental fiction at its best; irreverent, purposeful, tasteful and poignant all at t he same time. The combination of these traits is difficult to pull off, but somehow Yu manages it. And the success lies in his ability to jump from a conversation with that manager to a scene in which a girl uses a time machine to try to save her dying grandmother, who can’t succeed without fundamentally changing her entire life, the entire universe. It lies in Yu’s ability to weave together a narrative about a father and a son that masquerades as a pure science fiction novel that, at its core, is about a far more human issue—which is something not only the best speculative fiction does, but something that the best writing does.