Jennifer Boyden is the author of The Mouths of Grazing Things, selected by Robert Pinsky as winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 2010. Her second book, The Deliverable Future, won the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press. [A number of poems from  her new collection will appear in the Spring 2013 print issue of basalt.—Ed.] She has been awarded the PEN Northwest Wilderness Writing Residency and has taught at numerous institutions, including Walla Walla Community College, Whitman College, the Sitka Center for the Arts and Ecology and Soochow University in Suzhou, China. She is a frequent collaborator with visual artists and is currently in the beginning stages of creating a new residency program called Grass Mountain to be located on the Oregon Coast. Jennifer and I conducted this interview via email in late November, 2012.

James Crews:

First, I wonder if you could talk a little about how you came to poetry. What sparked your commitment to writing poems that focus so heavily on environmental issues and the natural world?

Jennifer Boyden:

In terms of coming to poetry, I guess it was just the first language I experienced that felt electric and direct, it made sense. My friends joke about my near-total inability to make small talk, and poetry is nothing if not also devoid of that ability.

My poems focus on environmental issues because we live in a dying world, and part of how I understand my responsibility as a moral being is that I don’t feel like I can look away from that. The earth’s plight is a tragedy I am intimately involved with as both an individual and a cultural product. There’s just such a lot of it to reckon with, and on so many levels—every one of them a tension between danger and beauty, tenderness and violence. Kid toys with lead, Monsanto crops that are genetic nightmares, toxic breast milk, shopping as a pastime, clearcuts that are prelude to landslides, our old computers piling up in China where the metals leach into and wreck the water and soil, and plastic tops of organic milk that end up floating in the ocean where albatross scoop it up and feed it to their chicks until the chicks die, simultaneously stuffed with and choking on plastic. This is all just for starters.

I do understand that there are other things to write about, but all neural pathways seem to lead to an environment-related unease. But this is all thinky stuff. I also find that my ear responds to the sounds and rhythms of words left over from my days of thinking I’d grow up to be a biologist or naturalist. I like the language of forest, fur, teeth, and water—and how that stuff pushes up against the other world.

JC:

I’ve read your first book, The Mouths of Grazing Things, several times now, and I continue to be struck by the momentum you achieve and the risks those poems take. Your writing is so fearless. Has winning the Brittingham Prize for that book changed your life or the way you now approach your work?

JB:

I sent that book out for about ten years. Almost non-stop. I understood that at some point if it didn’t get accepted, I’d likely need to face a different reality. But then I’d think that before I accepted that other possibility, which was that I should stop writing and dedicate myself to something else, I should send it out again. Winning the Brittingham Prize validated my belief in my work as well as gave me permission to dedicate myself to poetry and writing.

One of the simultaneously marvelous and bewildering experiences of having been awarded that prize was that nothing externally noticeable changed in my life, but internally I suddenly felt I had a lot more permission to dedicate myself to writing. I’ve taken that permission pretty seriously, perhaps to an extreme. I’ve recently quit a tenured position because it did not leave me with significant enough chunks of time to write or think. To me, this is an important declaration of what I value.

JC:

Some writers abhor this question, but what’s your next project? Another book of poetry, or something else altogether?

JB:

For better or worse, I have several projects up next or ongoing. My second book of poetry is coming out in February under the University of Wisconsin’s Four Lakes Prize (your pal David Clewell’s book Taken Somehow by Surprise was the inaugural book in this series). It’s a much more environmentally agitated/ urgent book, very different from the first, and I like the sharper, less patient, ever hopeful voice.

I also have a book of essays I’d love to wrap up, but it’s a book about walking, and my walks keep getting longer and longer. I have finally accepted that whatever it is that I need to walk out of my system will take a very, very long time, so that book of essays will just have to be patient. As far as I can tell, I think the walking essays are my way of trying to understand the shape of the post-9/11 world, but for all the miles I’ve walked, I don’t think I’ve gotten any closer—maybe I should start running to get there faster? And then there’s the novel. Actually, two of them: one completed and one that’s growing pretty insistent, but I can’t dive into it until I wrap up my teaching position in a few weeks.

Beyond writing there is the gigantic project I’m excited about, which is to move to Oregon where I’ll be a writer-in-residence for a year before co-directing a new collaborative art, ecology, and writing program. So there’s all that, as well as the hope that this will leave some time to improve my fishing.

JC:

I know you recently spent some time teaching in Suzhou, China, and that you lived there with your family. How did you end up in China, and what was it like to live as a poet in what seems like such a proscriptive society?

JB:

My family and I went to Suzhou, China because it was time to evaluate what we were up to in Walla Walla—how it tied into our larger ideas of how we wanted to spend our time and what we wanted to be devoted to. We needed enough distance to be objective, and we couldn’t really get much further than China. Fortunately, my husband is fluent in Mandarin and has friends in Suzhou, so the move wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. Plus, I wanted to hang out in the bamboo groves of Li Po and Tu Fu’s old haunts.

I found living there harrowing, incredible, and relentless, but ultimately galvanizing. My students there often matter-of-factly stated they had no hopes of choosing their own academic paths, careers, regions to which they would be assigned, and so on. Some of them said they hoped to marry for love, but they doubted it would be possible. I can’t pretend to understand the nuances of Chinese culture, but I understand very clearly within myself when I am surrounded by paralyzed will, fear, and feelings of futility. I understand that when there is no nature left, there is no way to understand it, much less try to protect it and that this is also a form of brutality—to cut people from their own ground and to separate them from the sky. Sometimes when I proposed discussion topics, students would tell me that certain topics were too sensitive to discuss—things that to me seemed pretty basic.

My daughter is nine, so we spent a lot of time talking about what it means to have or not have freedom of expression. Somewhere along the way in these talks, we determined that, when we got back to the United States, because we would have freedom to make and to say things, we must. The simplicity of that framework changed our lives: because we can, we must. That was it. In the context of China (and since), this construct makes sense: we need to be more active as writers and artists and thinkers because we can. That’s what I mean when I say it was ultimately galvanizing. And once we’d made that decision and I knew it meant I’d have to leave the security of my job, other things suddenly opened up that I’m much more excited about, much as I’ll miss the place and people we’ve built relationships with for the past decade.

JC:

It sounds like the atmosphere in China had a profound effect on you as a writer and teacher—and as a mother too.

JB:

No surprise here, I’m sure, but Chinese education is a lot about conformity. For example, in a grade school art class a teacher might want students to draw a house. She would display a house that she drew, and would walk around the room pointing out where students’ houses went “wrong”—basically, where they didn’t look exactly like hers. The house that matches hers most closely would get hung up as a form of praise.

Most of my students seemed wrung out by their educations and the insanely intense years of high school where it is normal to study from 6 a.m. until midnight every single day for four years, to the exclusion of vacations, hanging out, seeing a movie, or anything else that might compromise their chances of getting into university. They are valued more for their class rank than for their individuality. By the time they get to university, they are exhausted and cynical about whether it was all worth losing their childhoods over.

Most students have no say in choosing their own majors, so even some of my Ph.D. students lacked the critical connection to content that’s so necessary in asking questions and recognizing a spark of potential in not knowing the answer. Because of this system, I spent a lot of time working to connect students’ interests to different areas of meaning within their literary disciplines or, for undergraduate students, in finding ways to apply their skills that felt rewarding. I guess this isn’t all that different from what I do as a teacher in the US, but I had to do it through a different cultural lens, so it required a different kind of approach which I found simultaneously intriguing and exhausting.

Also, my daughter went to a local Chinese school, and I wanted to support her creativity and imagination. She made a giant series of watercolor paintings, and we hung her work up gallery style in our apartment building and had an opening that we invited friends and students to. The students kept asking to see the “original” paintings that my daughter had copied from, and then were confused when I explained the paintings were the original. Then they wanted to know how anyone would be able to tell if the paintings were any good if we couldn’t see how closely it matched. For me, that experience was an extremely cogent articulation of cultural differences in understanding the role of creativity. It helped to frame what I feel so urgently now, which is that creativity must be understood as normative behavior, and that cultivating this for myself and others is essential.

JC:

You’ve been living and teaching in Walla Walla, Washington for several years now, but you’re about to relocate to the Oregon Coast in order to start a collaborative art, ecology, and writing program called Grass Mountain. What led to the genesis of this project?

JB:

When I was a freshman in college, I called home to find my parents’ number disconnected. They’d moved from the small farm where I’d grown up to a nearby suburb, and they hadn’t told me! It’s likely they’d told one of my siblings twice so thought they told me once, and I’m from a big, disorganized family, so this wasn’t as unusual as it might sound. Ever since, though, I’ve been semi-obsessive about place and aware of what it means to be without one to return to.

I used to think that when I died I’d be buried under a giant oak tree in the pasture near the lake where I grew up. But now I have nowhere to be buried—which I think is the same thing as not yet having made a home that resonates in the heart as the place the body belongs to. Restless, bereft, rootless—whatever you call it, I’ve struggled to figure out how to “make a place” that feels like a genuine extension of the world where I grew my imagination and childhood. But it hasn’t happened, which is, I guess, the great lesson of place. When it’s gone, that’s it.

My husband, however, can still return to the landscape of his childhood—the Oregon coast. These landscapes that call us back are as much spaces of the internal as the external, deeply informative and connective. We wanted to share this kind of connection with our daughter. When we were invited to help start a writing and arts residency program right where my husband grew up, we jumped at the chance. Not just for the place-based aspect of it, but also because it’s a very direct fit with our desires to be more fully dedicated to working together, and to making, writing, and providing creative opportunities for others.

JC:

How will your residency program be different from others in Oregon like Caldera, the Sitka Center and Signal Fire? What are your hopes for Grass Mountain?

JB:

Before we determine the exact shape of the program, we have a full year to live on the land, write, make art, and interview others who have done the same before us. We have a gift of time to get to know the land and the community, so that whatever we create will be responsive to the larger communities there.
That said, I am interested in collaborative projects and gathering unlikely people to make stuff together, and in projects related to environmental urgency. My hopes for Grass Mountain are that it will be a place of intensive making, and that there’s an appreciation for projects that are ongoing, accumulative, sometimes portable, and reflective of multiple visions, mediums, and ways of entering into an idea.

]]> http://www.eou.edu/basalt/2013/01/16/places-of-making-an-interview-with-jennifer-boyden/feed/ 0 http://www.eou.edu/basalt/2012/11/23/in-the-dark/ http://www.eou.edu/basalt/2012/11/23/in-the-dark/#comments Fri, 23 Nov 2012 23:53:11 +0000 daxel http://www.eou.edu/basalt/?p=575 by Christopher Buckley

In Memoriam: Larry Levis

Waking in the dark, Daylight Savings gone, I’m remembering the Biltmore hotel in L.A., killing the afternoon at the MLA in 1981, the hopeful with their haircuts upstairs being grilled like fish. I knew better then than to hope. I’m remembering that dark empty bar there Larry and I had all to ourselves; the pal I had tagged along with was long gone doing several interviews. The bartender poured us a hard, green Chablis from a jug at $3.19 a glass which unscrambled my nerves enough so I could ask about his work.  Yes, I said “work,” trying to sound as if I’d packed some scholarly resources in the inner pocket of my only sport coat, trying to sound objective, although I had committed at least a hundred of his lines to heart. I had met and talked with Larry a few times in Fresno when he was visiting Phil and Franny Levine: we’d exchanged notes through the mail and he had taken a couple of poems for The Missouri Review, but we were not close friends.  Larry had already talked with the people from the University of Utah, his only interest there, and was sitting back in the shadows as the rush to job interviews sucked the air out of the foyer.  I had no interviews at all so we were the only ones not scrambling between floors all afternoon, smiling for all we were worth at members of the search committees.

Larry looked up to the one blade of afternoon light slicing through a transom and said, in answer to one of my questions about his poems, that he was “trying to stop time,” casually, the way he’d say “Fresno” when asked where he was from . . . and that, to me, rang as true as a tree, or a shoe, made sense as clearly as a star burning through to this one blue dot in the outer precincts of the Milky Way.

I was treading water.  Thirty, I think, orbiting in the outer provinces of community colleges. What I understood about poetry would have fit on the back of a beer mat, space left over for a quote from Machado whom I had yet to read, who would later show me all that could be lost before the sea. Larry lit a Marlboro—we weren’t going anywhere—and, as indifferently as he tossed a match into the ashtray, told me I was a “good poet,” as if it were just a fact—that off-handed comment from him kept me going for years.

Job interviews ending, we met up with my friend just out from a full day of university interviews and one cocktail reception. The three of us headed up the street despite the procession of tweed coats walking back saying the nearby Ristorante was booked.  It was an old post office made swank with pastel couches and kidney shaped glass tables, a place I’d recognize twenty years later in a film. The maitre d’ stopped us at the door for reservations—a friend of a guy who’d married one of Larry’s sisters, who wasn’t sure he remembered Larry, and asked about his father, not hearing he’d died. When Larry told him, he raised his hand and we had a table before we could see we were in way over our heads. My other friend, fresh from what he felt was a very successful interview and given to moods of expansiveness, pronounced he was taking Larry and me to dinner; he was paying.  Nevertheless, I was ordering cautiously, and when I said I would have the ravioli I was told it was an appetizer, four pieces in a thin sauce at fourteen dollars, significant money then.  We each had a tiny veal chop to go with our few bits of ravioli, shared a bottle of the cheapest Multipuciano and when the bill came, my friend lingered over it like someone trying to translate a foreign language. Larry pulled out his wallet and started taking out what cash he had; I did the same, and together we pulled every dollar bill from our collective pockets to pay the check—that long ago, not one of us with a VISA card. 45¢ for a tip, we waved and stepped out quickly, still hungry, to the street, grinning with our impoverished escape.  Back to the hotel after 10:00, nothing to do, Larry asked us up to his room and I think we had a small glass of red wine while he called his wife Marcia on the phone.  We all were in good spirits and took turns saying hello before we headed off to our own rooms.

What do we ever know?  All I had, I thought, was time. Fifteen years since Larry’s heart stopped, and no simile for that.  I have some letters, notes in the loop and ligatures of his hand.  Phil has his Parker 51, Bruce Boston says he still shows up in dreams. And even in Fresno now, everyone sits out at tables in the Tower District with over-priced coffees and cigarettes.  Now, I can put everything on a credit card—the aroma of Parmigiano-Reggiano and pecorino, logs of salami, rising from Piemonte’s Deli over Olive Street, anchoring me in the world.

Day after All Saints Day, I’m awake in the dark, thinking of Larry—irony moves right along . . . I’m too old to be a Romantic, too hard-boiled about the heart, but soft around the edges nonetheless.  He’d shrug his shoulders and laugh to hear me advising my cats about the most prudent courses for their immediate lives. Today, I half way know who we were all that time ago at the Biltmore in L.A.—the miserable job conference where I did not even apply, where I went just to see people like Larry, to wear my one acceptable sport coat and blend in along the edges of those apparently on their way. I felt like a utility infielder lucky to be called up to the major leagues, briefly, as they say, “for a cup of coffee”—lucky to have an afternoon to sift through some of what I didn’t know, lucky to spend a few hours with Larry who could care less for the posturing and unvarnished pretense of it all.

I’m still talking about dust—I can look back and see it swimming there where the sun cut in above the bar. Near the end, Larry was reading Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, wondering if our lives were enough, if they ever measured up?  What would we change if we could?  I can always single something out, but have little to complain about at this point—just time, and the variables of dust floating off toward the predictable dark.   I’m here near the sea with all the air I can breathe.  Almost 65, every long-lasting provocation of the spheres spinning above my head—and you, Larry, my friend, out there somewhere, still ahead of us in the light.

reviewed by James Crews

In the glut of poetry books being published these days, it’s easy for collections like Michael Walsh’s The Dirt Riddles to get lost in the shuffle. Perhaps it’s also easy in our current literary climate for poets who choose to write accessibly about the natural world to fall by the wayside, for who can compete for the limelight if you don’t have a gimmick, aren’t published by one of the larger presses like Graywolf or Copper Canyon? The literary world seldom takes notice. Though I suspect that a poet like Walsh cares little for insular literary fame, his first collection—winner of the inaugural 2010 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the 2011 Thom Gunn Award for Poetry—should have garnered far more attention upon its publication. The Dirt Riddles, like Bruce Snider’s Paradise, Indiana, released earlier this year, focuses partly on growing up gay in the Midwest and examines the indelible mark the land has left on the poet. Michael Walsh came of age on a dairy farm in western Minnesota, but unlike many gay poets writing today, who often characterize their hometowns as places to flee, Walsh writes with relish of the land that made him who he is, and continues to do so. In “Flyover,” he says:

These poems ask us to look around, below and inside of the ordinary things of the world, and they don’t shy from speaking of family or nature—two subjects so many contemporary poets have spurned in favor of the “skittery poem” (as Tony Hoagland describes it), which seldom lingers long enough on a scene or object to give us a full impression of it—or of the writer. Over and over, Walsh references the “fossils” he uncovers, the fresh revelations he finds simply by walking out into the yard. He loves this land and its animals. In “First Kisses,” he confesses:

He is speaking ostensibly to a lover in this poem, but he’s also talking to his readers. He is literally kissing the earth he describes so that we might know the complicated, sometimes ambivalent relationship he has with what is his inheritance. Because his poems often take their time and actually employ metaphor and simile to surprise us, many of them slowly acquire what Ted Kooser has called “an overlay of magic,” without going so far as to exclude the average reader.  “Inheritance” begins with the line, “Rust blooms across my land,” and ends with this striking image:

It’s lovely language on the surface, but if we look deeper, we see that it works on another level too: the rust he observes on “nail points” has “pollinated” his hands so that he might write about it, reproducing it for others to see. Though the art of metaphor more often than not seems dead these days, Walsh proves that the right image at the right time can still stir the reader, can send a shiver up her or his spine in. Take “Buffalo Bones,” as another instance of the poet recounting an experience so clearly and accessibly to the reader that it becomes universal, as inevitable as myth:

Anyone who’s spent time on the prairie knows that the wind is capable of playing any number of tricks on the mind and that the land feels haunted by bison, which were slaughtered and decimated. It’s commendable that, even as Walsh speaks of dark matters, of the difficult aspects of growing up gay in a rural place, his poems never devolve into self-pity or melodrama; they skirt the boundary between sentiment and artifice and end up moving us again and again. Thus, he’s capable of writing a poem like “Bully,” whose harsh consonance and crystallized lines give us only what we need to understand what it must have felt like to have been tortured by someone the speaker was also inexplicably attracted to:

He also captures the challenges of continuing to live in a place where the simplest act—giving your lover a “peck” on the cheek in a gas station, for example—can breed instant, if unspoken aggression:

It should go without saying by now that these poems are simply a pleasure to read (and they are meant to be read aloud), their sounds in the mouth a delicate music very few take the time to conjure anymore. “Haying the Fields” finds Walsh yet again delighting playfully in the images of farm life and doing so with exactitude and unadorned, compressed language:

In reading the taut, lovely poems in this collection, one gets the sense that the land of his native Minnesota serves as a kind of nourishment for Walsh in the same way the Lake District compelled Wordsworth’s meditations more than two hundred years ago. There’s precious little to fault in The Dirt Riddles, though I must admit the title is slightly misleading: Unlike a good portion of contemporary verse, the poems in this book are not riddles at all. They are truths, both celebratory and at times sinister, carved intricately from the stuff at hand—from “Cord, hinge, tube, and bone,” and from “mud, apples, milk.” Perhaps Michael Walsh learned the intense patience and attention he gives to his work from the dairy farm of his youth, for his poems are as palpable, as rich a thing as milk itself. And he describes those milkings:

Walsh has left us with this testament of a life spent tending the land, and without a tinge of pretense or resentment. It’s been a few years since the publication of The Dirt Riddles, but I for one hope that Walsh is hard at work on his second book. Though I trust poems this subtle and deceptively simple take a good deal of time to write, I also know that there are not enough collections like this one out there—books that seek a much larger audience by daring to write accessibly about everyday life, repaying our patient reading with the pleasures of music and the kindness of clarity.

Whenever you enjoy finding your way through a writer’s entire work, reach the end of it because he or she is no longer alive, and you can only look back now, though wishing there were more, it seems inevitable that you will want to know something about the writer’s life. Have you ever wondered, for example, whether Wislawa Szymborska had any children?

In any event, I asked myself that question, a bit facetiously, when I finished reading “It’s a Genre! The Overdue Poetry of Parenthood,” by David Orr, published on the NPR website. Orr is a new parent, he tells us and I can well imagine the glow on his sleepy face. He has also been reading some recent poems about infancy, especially by young mothers. It wasn’t always so easy to find such poetry, he tells us; “until relatively recently, the poetry of birth tended to glide past the whole ‘birth’ part, usually skipping the newborn bits as well and sometimes giving childhood a miss for good measure.” He provides us with some exceptions to this rule from the Norton Anthology, avoiding for obvious reasons, I suppose, Ben Johnson’s “On My First Son.” Orr laments the fact that there is no poetry that depicts an infant for what it is: “a voracious poop machine.”

About the paucity of poems relating to birth, I really can’t quarrel. The younger generation of mostly female poets he cites no doubt have stumbled upon a new poetry of early parenthood. And there’s little doubt they owe a good deal to Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, whom Orr cites, though I think of these two as far more cautionary examples: one a suicide, and the other a critic of the very institution of motherhood.

Plath’s “Metaphors,” “I’m a riddle in nine syllables,” is a tiny, comic, and formal tour de force on pregnancy, but “Nick and the Candlestick,” with its apocalyptic imagery borders on the despairing. That the Nick of the title and the “you” addressed in the poem was Nicholas Hughes, a suicide in 2009, raises a very painful, perhaps unfair, issue about the relationship between art and life. As Faulkner is supposed to have said to his daughter on her twelfth birthday, when she asked him to forgo the drink that day and spend his time with her: “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.” Or put it yet another way: the poem “Nick and the Candlestick” and its subjects, pregnancy and progeny, may make a similar claim: life is short, art is long. But really, must art expose those who are, even in this case, more vulnerable than the artist?

Rich’s Of Woman Born was the most influential writing I read about parenthood thirty years ago, when I was a young parent. Two unsentimental moments from that book come immediately to mind. Why, Rich asks, do we congratulate a father whenever he is seen in public caring for his own child, when we would not expect a mother to do anything less? No one would ever think to congratulate her. That certainly resonated with my experience, and if it didn’t exactly shame me, I learned to regard my own parenthood with a healthy degree of self-irony. Then there is what the French woman said to Rich when she was in public, protesting the Vietnam War with her three young sons: “How long have you been working for the military?” Rich’s topic is the institution of motherhood; in this case, how the institution provides a patriotic service to the Military Industrial Complex. Yes, there is that aspect of parenthood, too, the State’s Selective Service claim on the lives of our children as defenders of morally dubious adventures or more accurately, as perpetrators of collective violence.

Plath and Rich were hardly alone. Why not include in that list of precursors Alicia Ostriker’s The Mother/Child Papers, much of Muriel Rukyser’s best work, and any number of Second Wave feminists who also wrote of parenthood? What about the fathers of previous generations? Kenneth Rexroth may not have written about birth, but many of his poems are for or about his children. Theodore Roethke and Richard Wilbur both wrote delightful poetry for and about children that suggests plenty about their experiences as parents: “We Biddly’s are Pee-culiar Bears.” Robert Bly’s children appear in a good number of his poems, and like Stanley Kunitz before him in “The Quarrel,” Bly addresses a child after a moment of apparent rage in “For My Son Noah, Ten Years Old.” Galway Kinnell dedicates The Book of Nightmares to his children and several of the best known poems in that collection are about being the parent of infants during a period of political violence. And then there are Kinnell’s old crowd pleasers: “Fergus Falling,” and “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” the latter never failing to evoke a gently knowing, “Aaaah!” among readers who are parents or aspire to be.

Don’t even imagine that I’ve forgotten “The Bath,” by Gary Snyder. Reading it years ago caused me to go misty eyed with the warmth of mammalian pleasure. Long ago, too, in the Virginia Quarterly Review, “The Bath” was praised as: “a joyful and dignified corrective to bodily shame, and the over-extended incest taboos that induce it.” Uh-huh. Today I’m more reticent about the liberties Snyder takes with the most intimate aspects of his family’s private lives.

As with sex, so with its primary purpose, childbirth: every generation discovers it as though for the first time. But in every generation, too, what seemed like a good idea at the time—in my own, for example, that the personal is political and intimate self-revelation brave—later feels more like a source of ambivalence if not outright embarrassment. Being the parent of a young child is in some ways the most shocking and sustained intensification of personal experience we will ever know in our lives, short perhaps of our own births and deaths. Marriage or becoming grandparents come in perhaps a distant second place. Sure, there are other largely negative extremes, but these that tend toward the affirmative are the more common. Such experiences certainly suggest themselves as likely sources for poetry. One moment we are young, in love, freer than we realize, and then in the next there is suddenly this third living human being who is dependent upon us for virtually everything related to its survival and success. Or its complete and miserable failure. Either way, we unambiguously enter into the instinctive life and the meaning of generation.

We don’t anticipate, though, how brief this episode of parenthood is, any more than we anticipate how all-consuming parenting will be from the moment we carry our baby into our home for the first time. We figure it out, usually, as the formal expectations of this role are fairly narrow and few, though we might protest that claim while caught in the midst of it all. But given the intensity of those demands, plus the additional demands of making a living, I’m surprised anyone has much time for a great deal of good writing about their children. That’s not to say there aren’t those who do, somehow, find the time, but one is just as likely to hear, “I haven’t a great deal of time now to write.”

For most of us today that intensity of parenthood begins to subside after 20 years, give or take. After which, children successfully launched, Nature is pretty much done with us. Prideful and often disastrous efforts to the contrary, our fertility declines and finally disappears. We’ve accomplished the one task Nature assigned. Now we are redundant. And though we’re often given a role later as grandparents, whatever else our lives might become, we must largely invent. We’re free again, but it’s a little crushing to our former pride of purpose. Plus, there’s no guarantee that adorable infant and toddler whose love for us is so innocent and absolute won’t turn into a venomous teenager, before getting that Neo-Nazi tattoo on her neck and decamping permanently for the opposite coast. Nor is there any guarantee that we don’t bear the blame for this state of affairs. Babies are the easy part. The making especially. “This Be the Verse,” comes later.

That is one reason for my own reticence about a poetry of parenthood, though perhaps not the strongest reason: wisdom comes later, if at all, though I’m sure my younger self would have disagreed. There is yet another caution that we ought to consider, and that I’ve already hinted at, and that even my younger self reluctantly allowed himself to be guided by.

After wondering about Szymborska’s status as a parent, a status for which the poet’s work gives little evidence, I began to wonder, too, about an essay Denise Levertov wrote on this subject long ago. It took a couple days of looking through bookshelves, but finally I put my hand on it. “Biography and the Poet,” from The Ohio Review, Number 48, 1992. Not precisely the same topic as Orr’s, as Levertov is concerned with privacy and restraint, though she touches on children as a subject of poetry. Late in the essay, she quotes Robert Creeley approvingly: “My love’s manners in bed / are not to be discussed by me.” Levertov comments on this at length and makes the crucial pivot to our topic here:

I’ve read many a poem that made me feel the author would have done well to profit by this maxim. But adults can object and defend themselves if they feel exposed and exploited as characters in someone’s drama of self-revelation; children cannot. Yet there are many poems in which a parent—and I have to acknowledge that, in my observation, it is most often a mother—writes of a child in ways liable to cause acute, even traumatic embarrassment when that child sooner or later reads that poem. These are poems—or images in poems—which focus on the child’s body, and in particular its genitalia. Imagine a shy adolescent finding in print a graphic description of his little penis at age five, its color and shape! Worse, imagine his schoolmates reading the poem and teasing him about it!…the poem should remain unpublished—at least until the child is an adult and his consent can be requested.

Someone might argue that Levertov is just old-fashioned and a prude. We are so much more honest today about our lives in this enlightened age that has made Sharon Olds’ poetry not only possible but popular. When Olds is writing in her most winning, comic, extended metaphor mode, “Blow Job (Vulgar Slang),” “Topography,” or in her hapless and hilarious poems such as “Adolescence,” or even at her most self-lacerating, “I Go Back to May 1937,” I can stand by her words, and defend them against any assault. But when the kids come up as a topic, I know I’ve walked into the wrong room. In a recent interview in Vogue, Olds expresses similar scruples, having waited a decade, “out of deference” to her children, to publish a book about the end of her marriage. She also wonders about how her frankly autobiographical writing might have contributed to the breakup of her marriage.

So, yes, Levertov is making a case (and I guess so am I) for a degree of restraint and self-censorship, but only as an act of sensitivity and consideration toward those who can’t yet defend themselves. I don’t know if the following is true or merely apocryphal, but I’ve heard that Gary Snyder’s son asked him not the read “The Bath” in public. If that’s true, I think we can be certain why.

Sure, there are poems that must be written, they are forces of nature, and one might wish that this were so of all poems. Still, Levertov’s point is clear. One could, for example, read David Orr’s blog and conclude that his daughter is “a voracious poop machine.” That’s no big deal to anyone who has spent several years of his or her life changing diapers, but to an 11- or 12-year-old classmate of Orr’s daughter it could be a tool of adolescent mortification. Worse, he’s made his own newborn available for public discussion here. It’s really kind of appalling in a way, despite the fact that he intended no harm by bringing up this happy topic. Hence, Levertov’s point seems well taken. It’s really not such a benign act to expose those innocent ones we love, assuming that the whole world will treat them with the same love and kindness as we do.

My own teacher, Richard Hugo, was a bit more blunt. He was speaking here about poems that assert unobjectionable personal virtues, among which we may include the category for the noble intentions of young parents and their especially gifted offspring: “When a guy turns to you in a bar and tells you he ‘loves’ his wife, you know he’s a god damn liar.” From an editor’s perspective, I know that the rash of blogs, interviews, and essays about the New Poetry of Parenthood will spawn a wave of well-intentioned imitators. In the next year or so I’ll read piles of poems by young parents (I wrote the same poems 30 years ago!) and what I will learn is that poets by and large are good enough parents, though sometimes they make hilariously stupid judgements, but no harm done, and their kids, too, turn out really terrific.

My own children made an uncomfortable point about this topic in their adolescence. I’d written plenty about them in poems, but fortunately published little of it. They, though, had come to recognize poetry as little more than an opportunity I took to exploit our personal lives as meaningful subject matter for poems. Until one day they squawked about it: “So, are you going to write a poem about this?” They were correct to mock me and I quickly learned my lesson from them. Which brings us back to Szymborska, from whom we might learn a similar lesson, and about whose personal life we might expect to know a great deal, given her fame and that privacy has become something very quaint. Reading her work I can assume a good deal about her concerns, the quality of her mind, her sense of humor, the regard she has for life and its inexhaustible absurdities, even her personal philosophy, but I know nothing about the intimate details of her personal life, as she betrays little or no information about those she loves. She is hardly alone in this. Her countryman Czeslaw Milosz similarly shied away from revealing the intimate details of his personal life. And yet, does anyone feel that their work is lacking for want of such detail? Perhaps the similar reticence of earlier generations, such as Levertov’s, is not a sign of anything other than respect for privacy. There’s really nothing wrong with that. Maybe some things should remain private. Not because we are ashamed or repressed, but because exposing others can have the unintended consequence of shaming them. This in no way diminishes us. After all, as writers we are hardly limited to close observations of our personal experiences as personal experiences, though that is the siren song of our cultural tendencies. Our eagerness to share, however, can have the opposite effect. It leaves little room for others, readers perhaps, and can, in its worst excesses (The Beats) lead directly into solipsism.

Kay Ryan is another poet whose reticence on this issue is made clear in poem after poem. Look far and wide through her new and selected, The Best of It, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a first-person singular pronoun. More often you will stumble upon a first-person plural pronoun, or a third-person or second-person pronoun, but even this is rare. A friend of mine commented on this phenomenon in her work: “We know absolutely nothing at all about her personal life, even as she writes poems that seem to be about grief. Was she ever in love? Does she ever make reference to her sexuality? Nope.” We really do expect to be able to find answers to such questions. Despite this, her poems, stripped down to the essentials, nevertheless are full of riches, and though they are spoken in a quiet, even private voice, they allow readers enormous space. As is “Relief”:

We know it is close
to something lofty.
Simply getting over being sick
or finding lost property
has in it the leap,
the purge, the quick humility
of witnessing a birth—
how love seeps up
and retakes the earth.
There is a dreamy
wading feeling to your walk
inside the current
of restored riches,
clocks set back,
disasters averted.

Ah, yes, there it is. A kind of perfection, generous and open, that averts the disasters of sealing off human experience into categories, or worse, into specific genres. The birth imagery is certainly the most vivid in the poem, but it connects itself to a broad swath of the experience of human affirmation.

It’s difficult to read David Orr’s blog, too, without seeing it less as a call to explore the territory of a “new” poetic subject, than as a symptom of a larger cultural phenomenon: the always conflicted territory of women’s bodies. After all, this is a political season that has been weirdly focused on the biology of women, from the Catholic Church’s conniption fit over insurance coverage for contraception to Rush Limbaugh’s grotesque attacks on Sandra Fluke to the “testy ideological exchange” between Hilary Rosen and Mrs. Mitt Romney to Todd Akins’ bizarre theories of “legitimate [sic] rape,” and all the outrageous claims in between. A recent review by Diane Johnson in the New York Review of Books, “Mothers Beware!” examines no fewer than four recent books that argue in part that, “women are being menaced by a new wave of maternalist fundamentalism.” Even a supposed third wave feminist like Naomi Wolff is making strangely retrograde and ridiculous claims such as the vagina’s neural connection to “the feminine soul.” Good grief, she goes so far as to detail her spiritual experiences with a yoni therapist, a retired investment banker who, for a “workshop” fee, massages female genitalia and in necessary cases performs sexual intercourse to heal the needy vagina, proving once again that there’s a sucker born every minute. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

In his NPR blog, David Orr cites two poems from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, “Infant Joy,” and “Infant Sorrow,” by William Blake. The Blakes we know were childless. And yet, working together, they made, early in his poetic career, these two enduring books of poems, editions of which were completed between 1793 and 1794. They were not his first illuminated books, rather they were preceded in 1788 by All Religions Are One. That is to say, the oppositions, the “Contraries” that organize the Songs, are built on the philosophical foundation of the earlier work, a “vision,” that Blake would continue to elaborate throughout the remainder of his life and work. The Songs are emblematic of his larger philosophical and spiritual concerns. Poised between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and a witness to the end of pastoral England, the demographic shift toward urbanization, and the economic shift to industrialization, Blake’s poems, even for (or about?) children, seethe with political and social content. This is hardly news to anyone. What concerns us here, though, is the poetry of parenthood, of infancy and childhood. Aren’t we standing today at the end of a historical era that Blake stood at the beginning of? Hasn’t the the pastoralism of Songs of Innocence given way to the industrial era of fossil fuels, the experience of which is global climate change? Be honest, given the political and social inertia of the past generation (ours), don’t our children have the bleakest future? Aren’t the savage ironies of Blake’s poems an ontological critique of the unholy alliance of religion and capitalism that betrays the vulnerable? Wasn’t he warning us? Blake wasn’t a parent, and yet children and their future remained a primary concern of his imagination. And it’s imagination and its philosophical foundations that make much of his work so powerful still. I think David Orr aims too low and children aren’t shit factories. Theirs is the only future any of us have and, from an environmental perspective, it’s a grim one. The stakes are huge for them, and our poetry at the very least must address that challenge. This sounds apocalyptic, I know. Or as Leonard Cohen would sing, “There’s a mighty judgment coming, but I could be wrong.”

I’m not, however, arguing against a new poetry of parenthood. Only that it isn’t new, it isn’t ethically neutral, it isn’t without unintended consequences that we ought to consider first, and it isn’t free from being culturally determined by race, class, or gender. And the consequences for our children and our children’s children are so grave that we might need an equally grave approach to these matters. After a decades-long slog in the furrow American poetry has plowed through smothering domesticity and self-disclosure, I hope for the emergence of a poetry more engaged in the condition of lives other than our own private, atomized personal lives. We have the powerful imaginative skills of the heart to accomplish this. Our circumstances require nothing less. Let’s give the kids a break.

Reviewed by James Crews

I highly recommend getting a hold of Bruce Snider’s latest collection of poems, Paradise, Indiana and reading it back-to-back with his first book, the Felix Pollak Prize-winning The Year We Studied Women, published in 2003 by the University of Wisconsin Press. These two volumes are not only inextricably linked in both place and subject matter; they are also each, in their own ways, an essential addition to any collection of LGBT literature. That said, Snider’s poems are also just plain good. Though his more playful debut sticks to childhood for the most part, exploring what it means to grow up gay (and simply to grow up), his second book—winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize—takes up an adolescence spent in the open landscapes of Indiana (“I could feel/the sky crush down on me . . .”). Paradise, Indiana also fearlessly recounts the speaker’s troubled romance with his cousin, Nick, who later commits suicide. But if the subject matter sounds too heavy, not to worry: Snider is a master of the quiet moment, his memory-driven narratives slowly unfolding until the accumulation becomes a kind of redemption, which is what all poetry should aspire to. In “The Girlfriend,” Snider captures just how hard it was to watch Nick’s girlfriend publicly grieve when the speaker knew him far more intimately; he closes the poem like this, looking toward nature to articulate his own unspoken grief:

After the rains,
tent caterpillars will fill the trees like snow.
Webbed and resinous, they’ll cover
entire limbs, multiplying as they feed,
a strange white silence
even kerosene can’t kill.

So much of Paradise (and so much of life) is about those “strange white silences” we can’t get rid of, and it is these silences, which keep the speaker and Nick from being able to name openly the desire that must have consumed them. This gorgeous book is, of course, an extended elegy, yet it begs the question: How does one memorialize a love whose memory many would rather keep suppressed? The poems themselves are the answer as they ponder what those left living in the aftermath of any tragedy must do to make some fractured sense of it all. But poetry—as Snider well knows—is, at best, a flawed copy of the real, and so he makes do, admitting over and over to the limits of elegy and of writing itself, especially when it comes to describing such a life-altering event, or the place one once called home. In “Heat Lightning Over Tunker,” he writes as always with stark honesty:

. . . Here the dead
know better than to ask for much:
mound of dirt, pine box. On the shore
there’s just another old fishing boat,
but it’s more than enough to cross.

Reading this book, I thought of the famous question posed to Russian poet Anna Akhmatova by a woman who recognized her, standing in the long lines outside the prison to leave packages for loved ones rounded up during Stalin’s purges. “Can you describe this?” the woman asks. Akhmatova replies: “I can.” The stakes may not be quite the same, but in our country, at this time, young men still risk their lives by acting on urges that feel all too natural, by coming out to families and friends who may shun them (or worse) for doing so. One has only to have been paying attention to the news the last few years for evidence of the suicides of several gay teens that prompted sex columnist Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller to start the It Gets Better Project, which shares testimonials to help show young LGBT people see that life might not always be so harrowing. In Savage’s September 2010 column for The Stranger in which he declares his intention to start the project, he writes about Billy Lucas, a teenager who hanged himself in Greensburg, Indiana after enduring severe bullying. Savage says, “Nine out of 10 gay teenagers experience bullying and harassment at school, and gay teens are four times likelier to attempt suicide. Many LGBT kids who do kill themselves live in rural areas, exurbs, and suburban areas, places with no gay organizations or services for queer kids.” Bruce Snider, in Paradise, Indiana, is doing his part. He has at last told his story, describing what must have resisted description for years. How does one ridge back from memory such an unlikely love? The poem “Parts” finds the speaker and Nick during one of the many cautiously tender moments they share throughout the book:

In the back of that car, all elbows
and mouths, we knew nothing

corrupts like happiness. We ducked
deeper into ripped seats, two boys

in the shadow of cottonwoods . . .

Though Snider shows us pockets in this rural landscape where a young gay man might have escaped, it’s as if the oppressive land itself is always waiting to take over and reassert itself again. “Closing the Gay Bar Outside Gas City” gives us what was once a refuge, but has now been abandoned, reclaimed by nature:

Even the magpies, locked in some
blood-sleep, stir in the eaves as if
to speak of patience and regret. Stains
from tossed eggs mar the sides, dents
from stones pitched through windows
boarded up where FAG and AIDS
are sprayed in flaking paint along
the front . . .

What is remembered desire, if not “some blood sleep”? Another poem, “Cruising the Rest Stop on Route 9” makes evident another risky escape for this speaker:

You lean against the sink, its faucet
dripping, trying to form a word, night
stalled between hand and zipper.

You know a man on his knees
can read the scored tile, torque of
his mouth filled with night and the marsh
fields’ dampness . . .

I hope Paradise, Indiana gains a wider readership than books of poetry usually do, if only to show those who make their lives in rural and isolated areas that there are writers committed to speaking for the voiceless, telling the necessary stories. It’s gratifying that Bruce Snider dwells in the past without so much as a hint of nostalgia, that he offers up both the beauty and devastation of small-town Indiana where, he tells us, “Even the buckeyes I picked/along the dirt road opened to soft gray meant, so much hidden/where you’d least expect it . . .” Snider has unearthed much in this volume, and it reads like a late torch-song (without the sentiment) for a speaker’s first love and the land that shaped him.

For more information about John Davis, please visit his website: http://johndavispoet.wordpress.com/about/

Finalists (chosen from 12 Semi-Finalists) for the Bunchgrass Poetry Prize 2012 also included:

Linda Foster of Grand Rapids, MI, “Scar”
Jade Sylvan of Sommerville, MA, “Future Of” and “I Am Driving Away from You”
Greg Chaimov of Milwaukie, OR, “Home Country” and “Stereopticon”

The winning poem will be featured in the spring issue of basalt. All finalists will have their work considered for publication either at our website or in the spring issue of basalt. All contestants for this year’s Bunchgrass Poetry Prize will receive a one-year complimentary subscription to basalt.

Guidelines for the Bunchgrass Poetry Prize 2013 will appear on our website later this spring. We encourage you to visit our blog at basaltmagazine.com for recent news updates, essays, reviews, and information.

We wish to thank everyone for their participation and hope that you will consider basalt again in the future as both contributors and readers.

by James Crews

Henri Cole’s Touch is a dark but redemptive book. These poems—many of them sonnets—strike an elegiac, confessional tone as Cole reconstructs his personal history through memory, dreams and observations of the ordinary in the natural world. Touch builds upon the mastery already in full display in earlier collections that include the excellent Blackbird and Wolf (FSG, 2007) and Middle Earth (FSG, 2003) which received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Cole has always turned toward nature for clues to our sometimes inexplicable emotions and instincts, but one admires the straightforwardness and simplicity employed often with heartbreaking accuracy in this new book, much of which chronicles his mother’s death. The following passage from “Sunflower” gives us an intact moment of communion between son and mother:

. . . “Nature
is always expressing something human,”
mother commented, her mouth twisting,
as I plucked whiskers from around it.
“Yes. No. Please.” Tenderness was not yet dust.
Mother sat up, rubbed her eyes drowsily, her breaths
like breakers, the living man the beach.

Cole seems most at ease when speaking of the body and does not shy away from depicting its luridness, or the violence visited upon it as in “Mosquito Mother”:

. . . Then I felt your subtle knife touching me,
as if I were just some part of the scenery, and we sat
like that a long time, your moist red crown all shiny,
as if from effusions: milk, blood, tears, urine, semen.

In this poet’s hands, even a mosquito bite can become almost romantic—and unquestionably sexual—because he knows, as insignificant as we humans are to nature and time itself, our bodies still follow the laws of nature. In Touch, Cole employs his characteristically concise line to get at the brokenness and silences that fill our lives. Here, just after his mother’s passing, he describes a fresh snowfall:

like linen unfolded
conjuring the domestic—
forces us inward
into fraught territories
of self and family,

instead of out into waves
at the beach or furrows
in the bronzing garden.
Fold one thousand
paper cranes at the kitchen table,

and the spirits will cure you,
a friend once advised . . .

These “fraught territories”—the zones between moments of beauty and moments of loss, perhaps—are the borderlands these poems map out for us. And when the collection moves into recounting the loss of a lover to addiction, we sense Cole’s powerlessness even as he gives in to the passion few among us can control. In “One Animal,” we hear the speaker uselessly cautioning himself:

And do not think—touching his hair,
licking, sucking, and being sucked in the same
instant, no longer lonely—that you
are two animals perfect as one.

The temptation, of course, is to justify all of our wildest desires and claim that we are simply following instinct. But humans, Cole suggests, with our flawed and distractible minds and self-inflicted addictions, fail as true animals again and again. We think too much; we cause ourselves too much needless suffering. As he says in “Self-Portrait with Addict”:

You won’t come to bed because you’re
doing amphetamines again. There’s no animal
that sleep-deprives itself like the human.
Please, I say, repeating the monosyllable.

Some readers might wonder how a speaker so seemingly self-aware could surrender to such a clearly destructive love, but Cole’s defense rests with each poem (“a little mirror to mull over/the question ‘Who am I and why?’”) in which he is (as we all are) “hunting the elusive laughing monster of contentment.” Though his work must necessitate an intense solitude and ascetic nature, Cole nevertheless confesses: “I want to be real, to think, to live.” Indeed, his poems reflect a tightly controlled extravagance that does not seek to offer us solace or comfort; we sense instead that he hopes to unsettle readers—and himself most of all—in order to better understand his place in a confusing world. And he knows that “to be real” is to live a life of regret and error just like everybody else, so that “the art of life/becomes, mostly,/the art of avoiding pain.” His work thus attests to what our self-inflicted suffering can teach us.

The sheer pleasure Henri Cole seems to take in the act of writing—that is, giving voice and form to the forces of human emotion—mitigates much of the sadness that colors Touch. His honesty and awareness allow him to speak as if from a still point the truth we all seek:

. . . But writing this now, my hand is warm.
The character I call Myself isn’t lustful, heavy,
melancholic. It’s as if emotions are no longer bodied.
Eros isn’t ripping through darkness. It’s as if I’m
a boy again, observing the births of two baby lambs.
The world has just come into existence.

Cole is always reaching for a deeper understanding of the world through poems that begin with his immediate surroundings but soon enough move into one of those “fraught territories.” Many of these pieces have little to do with the autobiographical, yet they resonate all the more. Take, for instance, the closing lines of “Hens”:

. . . There’s a way the wounded
light up a dark rectangular space. Suffering becomes
the universal theme. Too soft, and you’ll be squeezed;
too hard, and you’ll be broken. Even a hen knows this,
posing on a manure pile, her body a stab of gold.

As with much of Cole’s past work, these poems too shine with a welcome humility, which is that of the poet bowing down to the portion of the mystery he’s doing his best to bring to light. “Hairy Spider” reminds us of the insignificance of our daily joys and pains as the speaker muses:

. . . Can she see if I am climbing,
I wonder, or kneeling down here on the dock, day after day,
when it’s time for reading and writing again, and a hairy spider—
ingenious, bashful, insolent, laborious, patient—observes
a man no different than a lily, a worm, a clod of clay?

Touch brims with more than just observations, however; this collection fashions a language, much-needed in our tight-lipped culture, to speak of the useless divisions between love and grief, body and mind, animal and human. Yet again, Cole has unearthed the many fears and failings we all share, and as a result, this book is as intimate as “the sound of someone else breathing” just next to us.

Reviewed by James Crews

Heather Dubrow’s first collection of poetry, Forms and Hollows, opens with an extended elegy for her mother and makes use of a dizzying range of poetic forms—everything from sonnets and villanelles to a canzone and ghazal. These are some of the forms, of course, indicated by the title of her book, but their masterful use throughout suggests a speaker’s attempt to reign in and make sense of the chaos of emotions and a memory that is often enough for all of us “a noisy houseguest.”

Dubrow is one of those virtuosos we envy; she began her distinguished career as a scholar and author of six books of widely acclaimed criticism, the most recent of which is The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Johns Hopkins, 2011). Nonetheless, Forms and Hollows marks a generous and fiercely aware poetic intelligence, especially apparent in the aforementioned eight-part elegy that ushers us into her world. So begins the speaker’s interrogation of a life that once brought so much comfort:

Gangs of what-ifs cast shadows on white walls:
Sure, that pain may be gas, but it’s so near
where the tumor was. There’s the doctor in the hall—
Nervous questions. Cheerful answers. Yet doubts still rise.
For our doctors wear crisply ironed white lies.

As she points out over and over, our bodies betray us. The medical establishment can offer no answers, only “white lies.” It is these truths that keep us appreciative of Dubrow’s gentle touch, evident in poems like “Mourning in November,” which shows one of those the moments we have all experienced and perhaps faced alone:

Chattering into midnight,
I stockpile bromides:
Hard and shiny as acorns.

Though the prospect of disruption (“the baby teeth of another disaster/biding its time”) seems to lurk beneath even the most joyful of these poems, the many moments of humor and surprise shed light wherever darkness might collect too thickly. Taking us with her to Our Lady of Murano in Venice, to Sydney, Australia or La Rue Daguerre in Paris, Dubrow shows off an ability not just to catalogue what she sees, but also to filter it through a sensibility that is (refreshingly) more than willing to delight her readers and even (God forbid) make us crack a smile. Consider these lines from “Rue Daguerre, Paris”:

But if we navigate among
the detritus of dogs and ironies,
eyes neither wide nor more lidded than they should be,
Paris awakens us
to choruses
sung by flowerpots on balconies
and arias
by that alpha male of wines,
the Burgundy.

Essential to any first volume of poetry (or any good book, for that matter) is the crafting of a voice readers won’t mind accompanying for a while. And lucky for us, whether she’s talking about things as seemingly plain as cheese, spices or bread, Dubrow manages to surprise with her constant wit as in the last lines of “Homemade Bread: A Baker’s Dozen”:

The joy of kneaded bread:
Only one part of a man’s body
is so elastic,
so smooth,
so happy to be touched.

Forms and Hollows is also impeccably arranged, with one poem often flowing seamlessly into the next. Not enough poets these days pay that kind of careful attention to continuity or to the patient shaping of metaphor—yet another area in which this work exhibits its immense playfulness. In “Regret: A User’s Guide,” she returns to her central theme (what we hold onto, what keeps its hold over us):

Some memories scamper:
Walt Disney squirrels
with those adorable tails . . .

these rodents of mine
dine on the wires,
chew through dear neurons . . .

It is the unquiet mind, Dubrow suggests, that often intercedes to upend our best intentions, especially on those dark mornings when we waken, unable to fall back asleep and lie there, composing our endless to-do lists as if to stave off the pain of the past and the nagging doubts that come to disturb the present moment. We want to rise and be productive,

But rain insists,
memories siren the dark,
yesterday stains all lists.
And photos slide out of their albums
and stalk up the steps,
as tight with fury as a Van Gogh cypress.

“Divorce Papers,” the long poem that rounds out the collection, continues this meditation on the transience of love and its imprint on us, while also hinting of the joys to come with a new partner. Dubrow recollects with vividness and honesty the betrayal of a marriage she once expected to be an “Eden”:

Each snowfall celebrated
with ritualistic snow walks,
covering us
with melted stars.

Not knowing the borders
surrounding this garden
would sprout blades of knives
at the first sign of spring.

“The divorced meet each other,” she tells us, “in the hollows of monuments.” And perhaps those “monuments” she means are the places in the mind, worn smooth by time and use, where we cannot escape the memories, fears and ghosts we wish were “well bred enough to know they needed an invitation.” But no matter how long we have tried to forget our past lives, they always return to haunt even our most carefree days. The best we can do, Dubrow counsels in the excellent Forms and Hollows, is to become “immune to frostbite,” to make peace with whatever specters decide to show up and to delight in the small moments between their dispiriting appearances.

Reviewed by James Crews

Every once in a while a book of poetry will fall into your hands and—perhaps not expecting much at first—you read it in one sitting, breathing a sigh of relief that you have discovered a new poet (new to you, at least) whose work actually speaks to you. Such was the case for me with Connie Wanek’s aptly titled On Speaking Terms, published a few years ago by Copper Canyon Press. Wanek, a retired librarian from Duluth, Minnesota and 2006 Witter Bynner Fellow, has not garnered as much attention as she should for this lovely book. And she will likely be called a regionalist, that label most reviled by many writers. It’s true her settings hew close to the frigid landscapes of the Upper Midwest, but she sees these places, these lakes and rivers, so keenly that her poems trigger deep insights into nature, offering us a new way to look at our relations to the world. At a time when few poets explore the ordinary, Wanek gently reminds us what’s possible with simple, straightforward talk. In “A Sighting,” she writes of the owl spotted during a hike:

He must have just eaten
something that had, itself, just eaten.
Finally he crossed the swamp and vanished
as into a new day, hours before us,

and we stood near the chest-high reeds,
our feet sinking, and felt
we’d been dropped suddenly from midair
back into our lives.

Wanek is a master of recording the quiet moments—what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being”—but a streak of healthy playfulness also wends its way through many of the poems even when she’s tackling more serious subject matter. “The Death of My Father” opens unexpectedly:

He died at different times in different places.
In Wales he died tomorrow,
which doesn’t mean his death was preventable.
It had been coming for years,
crossing the ocean, the desert, pausing often,
moving like water or wind,
here turned aside by a stone,
then hurried where the way was clear.

Wanek’s stanzas are elegant yet spare rooms we step willingly into, surprised by what we find there, as in “Pickles,” which begins with the line: “I don’t need to say what they look like, do I?” “Confessional Poem” gives us a speaker’s experience as a girl, sharing her “white lies” with the priest in a literal confessional, but the poem soon takes a wonderful turn as she confides the things she wishes she could have confessed:

a silk cuff missing its button,
sheer stockings coiled on the floor,
shoes with heels like wineglass stems—
the hypnotic black-and-white images of film noir,
wherein all eyes followed a bad star
with uncontrollable longing.

Critics often sound poetry’s death-knell, citing a shrinking, almost non-existent audience and the ever-insular, esoteric nature of today’s verse. Surprise, surprise: Most people would read about lives like their own—what John Updike famously called “the human news.” Maybe this is why Wanek’s poems (especially when read in winter) feel like such a balm to me; in “First Snow,” for instance, she lets us join in on the fun as she performs a lighthearted re-imagination of Genesis:

. . . it was Eve who made
the first snowman, her second sin, and she laughed
as she rolled up the wet white carpet
and lifted the wee head into place.

Some will no doubt say that the poems in On Speaking Terms are too simple, that poetry should not be so relatable and pleasurable. They may find off-putting her insistence on turning her gaze toward jelly beans, Scrabble, popcorn and coloring books. These critics will certainly object to her reverence for the everyday. But what else is there? For those poets who aspire toward a wider audience—and for all her quiet ways, Connie Wanek is one of them—and for those who seek to bring the democratic joys of good poetry to readers outside of the academy, these poems are prime examples of the music always available to us when we can simply stop and pay attention. And if we take a look at the work of former U.S. Poet Laureates, or former Nobel Prize winners like Tomas Tranströmer, we see that it is their unique ability to make the quotidian seem suddenly extraordinary that endears them to readers worldwide and renders their work enduring.

In “White Roads,” we begin to understand perhaps how Wanek trained herself in her youth to see the muted beauty of a single place:

I seldom left my world then,
and little entered it. Too much was close at hand
to wonder what became of the sun all night,
the stars all day.
Or where the snow went that lay
so deep upon the roads.

May there be more so-called “regional poets,” patient enough to bring us books we can care about, poems that care enough about us as an audience to say clearly what they mean, to show us a full world, as Connie Wanek’s On Speaking Terms does, without flourish or pretension.