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.