Language is where I was born, the home I lost, the apartment where I live now, the room I returned to when I translate, the city I visited when I studied German, the neighbor’s house I see from my window but have never visited. – Kaveh Bassiri

This year’s winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry prize is Kaveh Bassiri, for the chapbook “99 Names of Exile,” to be published by Newfound in Summer 2019. It was a pleasure to talk to Bassiri about the sound of language, issues of translation, culture, and more:

Laura Eppinger: The opening dedication of this chapbook is lines from “La Cantatrice Chauve” by Eugène Ionesco:
“He’s not English. He’s only been naturalized.
And naturalized citizens have the right to have houses,
but not the right to have them put out if they’re burning.”
This absurdist play is all about slips of the tongue, mistaken identity, miscommunications, and the limits of language in expressing ourselves. Are these themes you explore in your work?

Kaveh Bassiri: Yes, all those issues—such as “miscommunication” and “the limits of language”—are found in the chapbook. I am interested in the power and limitation of words. We try to harness the vitality of language, as it slips away and writes us. I am interested in how we find ourselves in language, how language defines us and determines our opportunities.

When you live in different languages, when you cross languages and cultures, these issues become even more obvious. Language is where I was born, the home I lost, the apartment where I live now, the room I returned to when I translate, the city I visited when I studied German, the neighbor’s house I see from my window but have never visited.

Ionesco wrote “The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice Chauve)” while trying to learn English. As I understand it, he used an English primer for French speakers, L’anglais sans peine (“English without pain or toil”) put out by the French company Assimil (as in “assimilation”). He first considered L’anglais sans peine as the title for the piece. English primers inform my work—the role learning English plays in becoming an American, with all its implications.

The quote from “The Bald Soprano” is both funny and dark. The play isn’t about assimilation or immigrants, but as a French playwright writing English characters, those themes found their way into the work. In our current climate, the quote seems especially apt for what many immigrants are experiencing.

Eppinger: The poems are evocative and no doubt sound beautiful when read aloud. Still, the shape of each poem on the page is striking—“Mihrab,” “Peeling the Seed (Part 2)” and the title poem come to mind right away. When drafting a poem, do you have a vision of how it will look on paper? Or is the sound of the words more important at first?

Bassiri: The form of the poem is very important to me. It is like the meter. You can’t avoid it, so why not consider it seriously? I am always searching for the proper container. Like many poets, I cast the poem in different forms to see what happens. For example, the prose poems in the chapbook were once lines of verse. “Majnun” was once a sonnet in fourteen lines.

For me, traditional forms like sonnets and more experimental forms like concrete poems have a lot in common. They are both containers that limit and shape the words. The container can be visual or aural. For example, with “Peeling the Seed” I wanted to have the visual sense of two different peelings, as if you are peeling the orange first (part 1), and then the seed (with the erasure in part 2). At one point, the original shape of the poem resembled an orange.

Sound also provides a container. I love soundscapes like anaphora. The poem “How to Build a Bomb,” for example, used the anaphora “Say …” In the end, I took most of them out. But the original directive formed the container that made the poem possible.

Eppinger:  I have this hunch that the alignment of the text in “Mihrab” is meant to evoke a prone posture of prayer. Am I right about that? Are the words of this poem praying?

Bassiri: Actually, with “Mihrab,” I was thinking more literally of the niche in the mosque wall that indicates the direction of Mecca. The wall is the page, and the direction is East. Persian is also written from right to left.

But, yes, it is supposed to evoke a prayer, with every two syllables being like the prayer beads of a Muslim tasbih—itself a form of zikr, a repetition of short utterances. Words are the mihrab.

Eppinger: That titular poem, “99 Names of Exile,” strikes me every time I read it. Racial epithets and concepts like “Dirty” and “Forsaken” are listed as three columns of text, ostensibly defining “Exile.” Both “Villain” and “Victim” appear on the list, one of many contradictions. Also listed: “Unspeakable, Unthinkable, Untouchable.” Back to the Ionesco—can exile be named?

Bassiri: It is impossible to limit the scope of what exile means or who a person in exile is. Exile encompasses many things.

We can do the same thing with the word “immigrant.” What do these words conjure in our mind? How have they been manipulated to limit or define immigrants and their experiences? I am hoping the use of alliterations like “dis” and “un” reinforces the absence, the undoing of the names, the exile that happens inside the words by pinning a label like “un.”

The inspiration for the poem comes from the 99 names of God in Islam. The names work as labels and attributes, encompassing a much broader range of words than one may imagine. We have “most merciful” and “most kind,” “the first” and “the last,” as well as “the avenger” and “the destroyer.” God is, of course, beyond any specific attribute. The best we can do is to produce a field of words for our idea of god.

Eppinger: I’ve read and reread “Invention of I” several times, drawn to both its power and its playfulness. The poem is broken into two sections, seemingly comparing one language to another.
Part 1 is set up like:
“In Farsi, if you take bread from a verb, you make history.

In English, for a perfect past, it isn’t enough to exist, you must have things.”

Part 2 takes this form:

“In English, we capture with an army of nouns.

In Persian, we guard them with the veil of adjectives.”

Clearly there is a lot more going on here than the feel of a language—culture, history, religion, geopolitical power and more are wrapped up into speaking a language in a specific time and place. Is it difficult to capture all these other forces that bubble up when learning or speaking different languages?

Bassiri: I do hope the poem conjures different possibilities in the minds of the readers. I don’t expect them to come up with the exact references, though usually I have specific things in mind.

A number of sentences start with a play on grammar. For instance, the Part 2 example you mentioned has to do with the use of adjectives in Persian and the emphasis on nouns in English. I remember one of my issues when I first started to write papers in English was the overuse of adjectives, as if I didn’t trust the nouns. I am always amazed by how many nouns there are in the English language. But the reference goes beyond just nouns and adjectives. In Iran there are many veils in our customs, not just the women’s hijab. For example, Iranians also use a complex web of civility, called taarof, that produces another layer in conversations.

One more thing I should mention is that the poem begins with “in Farsi” because it evokes the time I grew up in Iran and was learning English. The Iranian language is called “Farsi” in Iran.

The second part is a reflection of my life in America, where English is my main language and the Iranian language is called Persian. The debate over whether we should call my native tongue Persian or Farsi has been going on for a while. Many of my friends insist that we should use “Persian” because that is the name in English, the way we use German and not Deutsch.

But I’m not making any specific point about this politicized topic. My use is more a reflection of my personal experience of this change and the role the languages played in my life.

Eppinger: The speaker in your poem “Alarm” describes living in California while many of his family members are in Tehran, including a sister who has gone missing. It contains the line, “We contain no message, are no messenger.” What a devastating sentiment—to be exiled from the ability to decipher language, or from sense of purpose. Are grief and exile necessarily the same thing, or are they different?

Bassiri: Being an immigrant means different things to different people. Immigrants cope with the experience of exile in their own ways. For Iranian-Americans, the experience is determined by such socio-political events as the Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War (one of modern history’s longest conventional wars), September 11, the sanctions against Iran, the Muslim ban. My own experience has been shaped by all of these events, whether I’m talking about my sister going to jail as a political prisoner when I was young or about my wife not being able to join me because of the travel ban now.

Eppinger: I am wondering if you could talk about the influences you drew from while creating the poems of this chapbook.

Bassiri: For a long time, I didn’t want to write anything about my heritage as an Iranian or about being an Iranian-American. Maybe because I didn’t want to be reminded of or to engage with the negative media coverage. I also didn’t want to be an immigrant poet or to be labeled as one. I wanted to write like the great American poets I admired, such as Stevens, Eliot, Bishop, Plath, Ashbery, etc. I remember (to my embarrassment now) during a workshop with Merwin, he was trying to encourage me to study and learn from the great classical Persian poets like Hafez, Rumi, and Ferdowsi. I told him that I wanted to write like him and that I left Persian culture behind a long time ago and had no interest to go back.

It was during my MFA at Sarah Lawrence College that I decided to write about my experience as an Iranian-American, though I was uncomfortable. I am still uncomfortable. I don’t want to write what is expected. I don’t want to repeat the same clichés, be a spokesman for Iran or Iranians, or try to gain empathy or publication because of political circumstances. However, I also don’t want to deny my heritage or to avoid writing about something that matters to me. I need to write responsibly.

To write these poems, I experimented and found inspiration in many immigrant writers: Charles Simic, Li-Young Lee, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Agha Shahid Ali, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Etel Adnan. Gloria Anzaldúa is also a hero. African-American poets are among my greatest models—how so many expand the language while addressing important issues of identity and the socio-political condition in America. They are a great foundation for American poetry. I read widely and am influenced by many different styles, but reading poets of color gave me the courage to write the poems in this chapbook.

I have to say that, in the past few years, we have a lot of amazing young poets who are doing great work. I think they are redefining the shape of American poetry. I am in awe of all the talent. It is a very exciting time.

Eppinger: I agree! Finally, what are you working on now and how can we see more of your work?

Bassiri: First, I want to thank you for the interview and the thoughtful questions, Laura.

After working on the chapbook, I started to put together a manuscript built on the same themes. I am also working on another chapbook. My most recent poems are based on my visits to Iran in the past few years. I am not sure where they are taking me. For this year, I am focusing more on translation, however, including translating the poetry of a contemporary Iranian woman writer, Roya Zarrin, for which I got a 2019 fellowship from the NEA.

Laura Eppinger is the Managing Editor at Newfound Journal.

Cover photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

The post Naming Exile: an interview with Kaveh Bassiri appeared first on Newfound.

I was driven by the forces that create and break language: sound, migration, immigration, alienation, speech, accent, imperialism, place, longing, myth, consciousness, archetype, universality, magic.” – Shilpa Kamat, “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet”

Poet, visual artist, and educator Shilpa Kamat contends with the violent legacies of imperialism, her lived experience, language, and threats of erasure in her chapbook, “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet,” finalist for the 2018 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize. In “eleven,” mid-way through the chapbook, Kamat writes, “the demons were never/ evil just regular/ people who prayed.”  

The content of Kamat’s life—the experience of thinking across multiple languages, and being rooted in a particular lineage, Konkani, while having grown up elsewhere—is woven into the chapbook. She is concerned with nuance and layers, integrating her fascinations with magic and the sociopolitical without oversimplifying the past. Kamat is committed to exploring where magic still resides despite every violent attempt to erase it.

In the chapbook’s title poem, Kamat writes: “when she is done/ everyone/ uses plural in the singular/ stuffs their heartbeat/ into the first pocket”

Patrycja Humienik: When did you begin writing “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet?” Is there an image, idea, feeling that initiated the project?

Shilpa Kamat: Many, perhaps all, of these poems were written in an effort to transmute pain while at the same time, creating space for the experiences that often slip through the cracks of (personal, global) history. I was driven by the forces that create and break language: sound, migration, immigration, alienation, speech, accent, imperialism, place, longing, myth, consciousness, archetype, universality, magic.  

The “speech migration” poems emerged while I was writing in an old growth redwood forest a few years ago. My experience of my voice, of how I lost access to it in my childhood, emerged as I wrote. I should note that I am a highly emergent writer. The content of my life springs up.

The poems that span some of the history of my lineage (as well as my interactions with other histories) began in response to a painful discussion. I found myself exploring cultural pain, ranging from misunderstandings or micro-aggressions to outright oppression and cultural/linguistic erasure. I am rooted in a specific lineage, but I grew up in multiple places, and the histories of those places also inform my experience.  

Many of the Konkani and “Konglish” poems that I included in this manuscript are some combination of surreal and lyrical. I wasn’t sure what to do with them when I wrote them since the market for experimental Konkani poetry seems nonexistent. When I was pulling together this chapbook, I saw that there was finally a place for them to “fit.”

Humienik: Your manuscript generously provides snippets of Konkani history. Is poetry a way you stay connected to that history and lineage? Is poetry a part of your family history?

Kamat: I love the connective potential of poetry for many reasons, including the potential for exploring my linguistic and historical roots while remaining present.

As a toddler, I spoke fluent Konkani in each of my parents’ dialects. My experiences in school led to the silencing of my Konkani for many years. Although my parents never stopped speaking Konkani at home, I didn’t speak back to them in Konkani again until adulthood.

Now, my accent is somewhat Americanized, and I generally only feel comfortable conversing with my family members or with children—but I still think in multiple languages, and the connotations of Konkani words and phrases inform my daily existence. Even during the long period of silence that I mentioned, I explored writing and performing contemporary poetry in Konkani.

I want to keep my language alive in my world as well as to claim my own expression of it, which may differ from expressions in other regions. I resent the ways in which the beasts of monolingualism erase diversity and stifle creative potential. I want something better for the planet than the cultural/linguistic extinctions that we are facing (along with plant/species extinction). Poems and songs help.

Humienik: You contend with a large swatch of justice issues in the chapbook. You also named, as one of those many “forces that create and break language,” universality, myth, consciousness, and magic, indicating this as a place you naturally go. Can you say more about this fascination, and how you see these forces—magic and the sociopolitical—as connected?

Kamat: The sociopolitical intersects with magic only in the places where it doesn’t seek to constrain, to rigidly define, to contain within linear boundaries. Whenever people’s interpretations of language, of the world, grow too literal, the potential for magic fizzles. Fundamentalist attitudes neutralize this potential. Even radical/intersectional theories, for all their scope and idealism, can lose magic when their interpretations are overly rigid/polarizing. When trying to access the parts of the consciousness in which the potential for magic resides, nuance is essential.

There is magic in the social, in the natural—and when I say “natural,” I include the bodies and psyches of human beings. There is magic in the wisdom and worldviews of indigenous communities that forces seeking to dominate or colonize often strip away.

In navigating my work, I am aware of the play between Western philosophies that elevate diversity and Eastern philosophies that elevate oneness/union. There are stories of shapeshifters, of rebirth, in which superficial aspects of identity are revealed as ephemeral rather than essential. There are stories in which ancestry, profession, migration histories, etc. are vital. Frequently, those mired in a single orientation will condemn the other as “wrong”; I prefer to wrestle my way to the best of both.

Earlier, I described how the majority of poems in “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet” explore and transmute pain. I would say that there is a magic in moving through and beyond the pain of history, in inviting unheard or silenced narratives to express themselves, in creating new narratives or assembling bridges between narratives—however we can lead ourselves to wholeness, balance, renewal.

I wanted to break language so that fluent readers of English would experience the dissonance that those struggling to break into the language might experience.” – Shilpa Kamat

Humienik: I was drawn to the play with organic form in your chapbook—the way you use space between and within lines and also between letters. Do you remember when you began to play more with form in your work? Has form always been a fascination for you as a poet?

Kamat: I am a visual artist as well as a poet, so yes, I am as fascinated by the form of my words (and the ways in which their placement may inform readers) as I am by their sounds. Both image and sound can inform meaning, and I strive to understand and stretch these elements within the constraints of typed language.

When working with pulling sounds apart in “anoutofcontrolsilence” (from which I pulled the “speech migration” poems), I wanted to break language so that fluent readers of English would experience the dissonance that those struggling to break into the language might experience. I wanted readers to slow down, to pull together sounds in the way we all had to when we were first beginning to read. Speech precedes sound; by decomposing speech, I wanted to parallel the breaking of the world as old growth languages and forests alike are threatened. The form of each poem reflects my experience: its density, or its meandering, the way it breaks off. The content extends to contain collective experience as well.

My more “historical” poems explore form in other ways, such as the “glitter” poems (“It Became Theirs!” and its Konkani equivalent). I wanted the scope of these experiences or histories to sprawl across the page while also being contained by the page.  

Humienik: Do you find your visual art converging with poetry, or are those creative practices distinct for you?

Kamat: I often engage in interdisciplinary art, whether I am incorporating dance and/or visual art into a literary performance, illustrating my writing, or incorporating the written word into visual art pieces. There are specific questions that emerge when considering illustration as an art form. For instance, as I approach the illustration of my speculative poetry manuscript, I want to intrude minimally upon the reader’s imagination. But when my writing is entering my art rather than the other way around, the pieces are generally more abstract than representational—the writing, in a manner, becomes the “illustration.”

Humienik: How is this project in conversation with your current work? What are your current fascinations?

Kamat: While reading my works in progress, such as my verse novel or my speculative fiction YA novel, people have often commented that they are “global” or “international” in scope. I recognize that my upbringing in multiple countries and states, with multiple languages and dialects around me, informs all of my writing. Not all of my writing works with explicitly diverse content—for instance, I recently found myself working on a series of existential poems about old school arcade games. Yet, my background informs my worldview, which I believe must be present in everything that I write.

It has also been noted that I tend to infuse my work with mythical themes that are grounded in reality—in the title poem of the chapbook, for instance. I have written a children’s book centralizing the experience of a child whose parents are in the middle of a separation. While I was driven to write this story after years of working with separating families, seeing/hearing the emotional experiences and needs of children, the character’s turning to imagination/mythology to make sense of her experience is something generally unseen in books exploring “serious” content— but this is a place where I naturally go.

Humienik: What helps keep your writing practice alive? Do you have any rituals that help ground you in poetry? Do you have writing mentors, collaborators and/or a writing community?

Kamat: I always have several projects going on at once, and generating content is never an issue. This doesn’t mean that I can always manage to be consistent. I may be distracted by lesson planning, by the needs of family and friends, by the demands of my respiratory health when fires in the region are out of control.

There are times when my writing practice goes through periods of dormancy. The leaves fall off my projects; they are naked, subsumed by snow. Even then, there are ways to engage—touching the roots, working from the core, allowing the surprise of flower buds emerging on trees in the middle of winter.  

I find spiritual/connective practices vital. I do best when I am walking daily in nature. I may practice yoga or meditate or work with mantras. Ideally, I am engaging in some kind of centering practice and working on one of my writing projects (or a stand-alone piece) every day, even if only for five minutes.

There have been periods of time when I was writing a certain amount of words or pages per day, tracking the quantity. There are times when a poem or a project emerges spontaneously and times when I have to make myself sit down and get to work. I can enjoy writing in forests, but I frequently write indoors. Sometimes, I listen to music while writing, and sometimes I don’t. I find it important to be adaptable and to meet the needs of each piece.   

I appreciate being around other artists, engaging in artistic dialogue, and occasionally practicing with others. I find at a point that readership—any type of readership, even if it isn’t terribly critical—is vital to completing books and novels. I have a few MFA cohort members who are local as well as close friends who are visual artists and dancers, and I particularly appreciate their community. I appreciate the diversity of my networks; too much insularity of any kind can begin to feel debilitating to me as an artist and as a human.

I resonated with the centrality that Anzaldúa’s work ascribed to people who were previously considered peripheral/marginal: those of us who walk between multiple worlds, borders, boundaries …” — Shilpa Kamat

Humienik: Who are some of the poets that make up your poetic lineage?

Kamat: At one point during my MFA program, I worked on a short project presenting poet/freedom fighter/educator Rabindranath Tagore, recognizing that most poets around me had never heard of him. Most translations of Tagore’s work, including his own, do not adequately transmit the poetics of his original Bengali creations. I do not know Bengali, and I find that the English translations often have an archaic/formal tone that I need to read beyond to appreciate the content, which ranges from love poetry to critiques of imperialism. As a poet and educator who is concerned with social and ecological justice issues, I deeply resonate with Tagore’s transmission of spirit, even if I cannot understand what is reputedly the best of his poetry. I love his writing on education, that he never wrote a formal treatise, that he used his Nobel Prize money to fund his student-centered school in which young people learned outside beneath trees. I love that his art supported his teaching. And some of his poems do speak to me—but that is not the point.

I will also name Gloria Anzaldúa. I loved “Borderlands/La Frontera” when I read it in college. I was refreshed by the fusion of the “academic” and the spiritual, by the normalization of Spanglish (anyone who grew up with multiple languages in the home may relate), by the casual inclusion of poetics, by her reclamation of the indigenous and her unabashedly claiming her lived experience. I resonated with the centrality that Anzaldúa’s work ascribed to people who were previously considered peripheral/marginal: those of us who walk between multiple worlds, borders, boundaries; whose lived experiences are largely unrecognized; whose ways of knowing are not respected or understood by academia; who are on the “wrong” side of imperial power dynamics. I particularly appreciate her poetry that is channeled from the soul rather than the spirit. I would say that Tagore’s work is more rooted in spirit; in general, his poetics seek to rise and elevate while Anzaldúa’s descend and embody.

Shilpa Kamat is a writer, educator, and healing arts practitioner based in Northern California. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, where she was awarded the Marion Hood Boess Haworth Prize. She was a finalist for Tu Books’ New Visions award. Her work is informed by her intersectional identities, her spiritual journey, her diverse communities, and the natural world.

Patrycja Humienik is a trilingual Polish-American writer and performance artist. She works in service of underrepresented grad students and faculty at the University of Washington. Patrycja collaborates on performance projects with people in solitary confinement through letters via Dances for Solidarity. She was a finalist for the 2018 Kay Murphy Prize for Poetry. 

The post “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet”: An Interview with Shilpa Kamat appeared first on Newfound.

Rennie Ament’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, Sixth Finch, Redivider, Yalobusha Review, minnesota review, The Journal, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2018 Yellowwood Prize in Poetry from Yalobusha Review and a nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. She’s also received fellowships from the Millay Colony, the Saltonstall Foundation, the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in New York City.

Jamie Wagman: I would love to hear a bit about your writing life and your process. What’s influenced your writing? When did you first know you were a writer, and what has your journey as a writer been like? What delights and what scares you most as a writer?

Rennie Ament: Poem-wise, I don’t pay attention to semantics at first. I’ll give myself some kind of formal constraint (a sonnet, “e” the only vowel allowed, words can only come from a specific source text), but mostly I want to play in language and surprise myself. It’s fun to scribble gibberish until something sounds both strange and true.

Nonfiction is great for flipping through if your thoughts rut. Hildegard von Bingen’s “Physica” has been near me for a year now. Mostly a 12th Century catalog of herbal remedies, she also gives advice like: A mouse is hot and has insidious habits and devilish skills. Since it always flees, its flesh is harmful to humans and not much use as medicine. But, if someone having epilepsy falls on the ground, after he gets up, place a mouse in a vessel of water. Give that water to the person to drink, and wash his forehead and feet in that water. This should be done each time he falls and he will be cured.

—I love that book.

I’m always researching alongside the scribbling, but no one will ever know how long I spent reading about mouse water or whatever when I’m done. Most of “the facts” I collect invisibly buttress poems.

Growing up, my mom was singing unless in conversation or asleep. I knew dozens of folk songs before I could read. I liked the songs with nonsense choruses best. Maybe because of those songs and when they happened to me developmentally, my syntax leans musical?

Sort of related—since I can remember, when falling asleep sometimes I see a word floating above the bed in neon. DILATE or BUNKER or CORAL. The word changes, but the sensation is always the same: eventually, the word compresses, comes down into my mouth, and weighs my jaw down. I feel blissed out and pass out.

I started writing around when I learned to read. I liked the typewriter clacking and got steady attention for my stories in school. I wrote mostly fiction and nonfiction until college. Got lucky with my first poetry teacher. She was a human rights activist who could convince you a higher level of consciousness was attainable only through the reading and writing of poems (poetry is a cult).

In one class, I remember being asked to describe, plot-wise, what was happening in an Emily Dickinson poem. Had no clue. And that was embarrassing—to admit I didn’t explicitly get it. But I could taste how dense the poem was. CF bedtime word snacks.

What scares me? Describing beauty. I don’t run from flowers in life so why in poems? It must be connected to gender performance anxiety and not wanting to be a woman who writes about gardens. Wild—to be afraid of saying hyacinth. I have one garden in my book and that garden is a succulent patch.

What else? Inauthenticity, though I don’t know what it means to write an “authentic” poem.

What do I love: Cognitive dissonance. Oxymorons. Absurdity. Research. Learning through writing poems. Discovery in general. Trying to create my own shorthand.

I have my obsessions and they pop up in all the poems like a gopher infestation. Gophers hold things together. Or horses—Horses are forward motion.
— Rennie Ament

Wagman: Some of your work here has appeared in Hysterical, Bone Bouquet, cream city review, and Yalobusha Review. Can you speak to the creation of this chapbook? The title is “French Braid.” Why did you choose this title? Can you speak to the repetition of home and references to horses throughout your work?

Ament: Initially I thought, “You need to do your book’s hair.” Then I culled the chapbook from the full-length first collection I’ve been working on. There were ten sections in that manuscript at the time. “French Braid” is three of those sections braided together: short, skinny little poems about home interwoven with prose poems that respond to lines taken André Breton’s “Ode to Charles Fourier” plus a group of poems I think of as cascading poems—quatrains and tercets that break down across the page.

I wanted to see if the poems did better together. They did. I have my obsessions and they pop up in all the poems like a gopher infestation. So. Gophers hold things together. Or horses—

The horses! Horses are forward motion. My thoughts are, at their best, horses. The underlying word driving most of my poems is Go. My thoughts are, at their worst, also horses. Dumb and snuffling. I don’t know. Sometimes you gotta climb into a horse.

I write about home because I don’t understand what or who home is and I’m always trying to root while galloping.

Wagman: So many lines from “French Braid,” stay with me–from the line about sitting shiva for Pangea in “My People The Horse Thieves” to “I stopped reading men” in “Under the Never Failing Anesthesia of Banners.” How does gender function in your work?

Ament: I hate this question. It’s an important question. I wish this question on all male-identified writers.

A few women-identifying poets I admire say their consciousness is genderless on the page. Being a floating eyeball sounds freeing. But there’s something in me that also wants to slam the door on that option. I’m not a confessional poet (or a writer of apparently personal poetry—a better descriptor from Sharon Olds); I use vaguely conceptual, Language-oriented techniques to generate writing. But I still feel entitled to pillage my own life at will. Without access to subjectivity, I would feel rootless, ahistorical.

I’m not on a mission to write polemical poems about misogyny. But it’s useful to write with an enemy in mind. Who am I quoting?

Anyway, if you write about women you write about men you write about desire for men (if you lean that way) you write about power you write about powerlessness you write about systems of power you write about abuse of power and all the -isms enter the picture, hopefully.

Read Jehovah’s Witness religious pamphlets. Read piano tuning guides. Read an outdated copy of the DSM. Buy random, cheap used books. Stock up your language pantry.
— Rennie Ament

Wagman: What advice do you have for aspiring poets?

Ament: Read interviews with living poets you like and they’ll lead you to books and writers you’ll like.

Read as many poems in translation as possible!

Read Jehovah’s Witness religious pamphlets. Read piano tuning guides. Read an outdated copy of the DSM. Buy random, cheap used books. Stock up your language pantry.

People can’t help but rub their own taste all over your work. Don’t let one person’s hot take crush you. I’m floating in an Olympic-sized pool of accumulated rejections as I write this.

Wagman: What is the function of poetry today, do you think?

Ament: Poems should complexify, add nuance to, interrogate the status quo re?

Jamie Wagman is an Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and History at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana.

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“El Cerrito” primarily takes place in the stores, parks and landmarks of the Bay Area suburbs (like Albany, Kensington and Berkeley) where Al-Samarrai and friends wander, marking down their experiences and tapping into the local magic. The poet here often comes across as a kind of technician or historian, although her wandering is organic, each location seems to hold its own vast history and power which Al-Samarrai is able to tap into, inspect and explore.

In each section, the poet documents a new location and finds a new history. She takes the mundanity of each space and unearths what has been hidden underneath the surface. “El Cerrito” beautifully reveals these moments to the reader. I was often reminded of conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s project “Suite Venitienne (Follow Me)” in which the narrator follows a stranger through Venice, taking photos and detailing their movements. Only here it feels as if there is no real figure a step ahead of us. Instead, as if there is some unknown aura which moves the poet from one space to the next.

The first few pages of “El Cerrito” are almost deceitful. They keep the secret of the book’s later sections hidden incredibly well, because until the setting becomes the outskirts of Istanbul, I had assumed that we would remain in the Bay Area, wandering through various suburbs. Instead, Al-Samarrai abruptly (and almost metaphysically) rearranges the scenery.

Yet the structure and the objective seems to remain the same. Al-Samarrai remains a kind of historian/technician, entering these spaces and documenting their history as she tries to tap into the local magic. Where the suburban wanderings felt aimless and organic, the poet’s new trip feels more goal-driven initially, like she’s trying to reach Istanbul. Even then, we are only there for a moment before we again begin wandering these new suburbs. A familiarity soaks into this new environment and we return to that organic flow, drawn by the magic emanating from these locales and the movement of other bodies.

But now the scope of the book has become large and epic. The poet’s journey feels like a mutation of the hero’s journey (including a reference to Joseph Campbell himself), trimming the exaggeration and melodrama of the latter. With mentions of “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings,” it seems that the poet has taken fascination with these vast journeys. But here, the subject’s movement through time and space is not driven by some idyllic boon. Instead, the movements of “El Cerrito” resemble the flâneur, Al-Samarrai takes up a position predominantly occupied by white men (Baudelaire as the most obvious example) and changes it into something less passive and mythical. Al-Samarrai’s wanderer is involved, active, discovering what each of these places is made from, archiving their histories, tapping into their magic. She is not the apolitical observer that Baudelaire desired his flâneur to be.

In these poems there is a focus on the local geographies of the suburban landscape, with these overlooked histories unfolding in the periphery of something much larger. Al-Samarrai expertly and beautifully examines these various locales. And I can’t help but recommend this book to everyone. It’s a perfect example of how the artist should wander and observe, the new definition of what a flâneur should be.

Mike Corrao is a young writer working out of Minneapolis. His work has been featured in publications such as Entropy, decomP, Cleaver and Fanzine. His first novel will be released in fall of 2018 by Orson’s Publishing.

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“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” – Muriel Rukeyser

Poetry collection “Hunger” by Judy Jordan (Tinderbox Editions, 2018) is an honest, intimate account of a woman and her pain. The speaker in the poems faces homelessness after an accident that injured a spinal disk in the small of her back. When the hospital bills became too expensive and she fell behind on payments, the hospital seized the narrator’s bank account. Every dollar to her name is given to the hospital, leaving the woman alone, impoverished and homeless. She goes into the forest where she lives in an abandoned greenhouse, with hordes of plants and insects for Jordan to describe in detail. Our speaker is injured and unable to provide for herself, breeding a physical and spiritual hunger.

Jordan uses the protagonist’s unique situation as a playground for poetry and imagery, giving us thick, clamoring descriptions to guide us through this chaotic situation. Poverty, starvation, injury, isolation, botany, animals, nature, politics—there are no limits to the subjects that Jordan illuminates. One common theme throughout the poems is the community of nature. She never describes one animal or plant but sees nature as an intertwined society working together, reacting synchronously to the environment as a whole. Between these environmental descriptions and the unraveling background of the protagonist, one begins to better appreciate the beauty of the greenhouse and the protagonist’s relationship to her surroundings. Jordan creates a living, breathing setting for the reader to explore, through her accessible yet intricate landscape.

When Jordan writes, she catches the reader by surprise—one minute the words flow as they describe this splendor, and then you read a single, searing line that catches your eye. The work is profound while our speaker remains humble, directing the reader’s attention to lush imagery, telling us to focus on the beauty of the words rather than their author.

Jordan also plays with the classics; poems are titled “Io” and “Prometheus.” These are names from Greek mythology, and although the poems (according to my interpretation) followed one scattered story line, Jordan’s reference to Io is intentional. Io was a human admired by Zeus for her physical beauty, although Io rejected his initial attempts at seduction. Eventually, the two began an affair, and when Zeus’ wife Hera found out, Hera turned Io into a cow. This led to Io’s ultimate isolation and demise, a state that the protagonist of “Hunger” often finds herself in.

Although the pain and suffering of this character seem like the essential themes of “Hunger,” Jordan remembers to feed us the stunning words that we are hungry for. After all, they ease our pain. It seems as if Jordan wants us to relate to the injured character, to see her as a metaphor for life. Sure, we all feel pain and no matter the magnitude, it still hurts. Instead of focusing on all that has gone wrong, Jordan focuses on the beauty in the pain. This seems simple enough, but Jordan’s poetry is too complex to be so easily deciphered.

The entire collection is beautifully written, gripping and deep. The only way to discover how viscerally you will react is to pick up your copy and dive in.

Shane Hoyle, Staff Writer.

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The speaker diffuses bits of herself and her very visceral memories to a friend, lover or regular haunt, but it also clear she has absorbed parts of these people and places into herself as well. Indeed, the collection opens with a poem FROM a Goodwill, which is a perspective I’d never imagined correspondence from before.

A decades-long friendship is celebrated in “Letter to Kelly from the Memory of Har Mar Mall,” recalling scenes like:

Do ​you remember going public braless? I can’t
but I can’t undo the truth of flesh-and-blood photographs.
Rip them and the smallest shreds contain atoms of the youth.

Intimate recollections like this suggest that the speaker’s life has fused with the people in it on the atomic level.

“Diffusely Yours” is a work about locations and personal memories, but also the speaker’s own body. Again from “Letter to Kelly from the Memory of Har Mar Mall,”

Spider
veins remind me of heaven and they’re reality now
that I’m 30, joke age turned real.

These poems witness a changing and aging body, and yet the intellectual or emotional connections made along the way remain constant.

The memories shared throughout this chapbook could come across as inside jokes that most readers are on the outside of. But the language is so sharp that the specifics illuminated actually point to broader, even universal, truths.

I think my favorite in this collection is “Letter to a Wife from an Almost-Wife,” in the voice of a guest at the wedding of an ex. The speaker is sloppy but still elated.

We will always need mothers
because we can’t sew zippers ourselves, will
always love thrifting for the romantic salvage
& rescue vibes. I’m writing on your two-thirds
anniversary because every month needs fresh
champagne.

“Romantic salvage” is an intriguing turn of phrase and, I would argue, the nucleus of the project that is Diffusely Yours.

Kate Garklavs lives and works in Portland, OR. Her work has appeared in Juked, apt, Leveler, Tammy, and The Airgonaut, among other places. She’s the prose editor for the Submission reading series. She tweets @ueberkatester.

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post “Diffusely Yours” by Kate Garklavs Suggests We Are All Connected on an Atomic Level appeared first on Newfound.

All nine erasure poems in “Night Vision” come from the wildly popular “Cosmos” by Carl Sagan, setting a reader expectation of wonder at the universe.

Loss an destruction are detailed instead, through Wahmanholm’s gripping yet elusive prose. Wahmanholm tells a story of an unnamed protagonist and their cohort surviving an apocalypse of some sort, featuring a violet sky and a world where animals are dying. Poem “Jellyfish” describes the creature drifting to shore and being admired for its immortality and translucent body. “Beasts” speaks of some unknown pack of monsters surrounding the protagonist’s group, the “sulfur of their fur thick on my tongue, their musk thick in the roots of my hair.” Finally, the revealing poem “The Last Animals” explains that in this world, there are not many creatures left, and humans no longer experience thunderstorms, tides, or acorns.

The story is not simply about creatures and their disappearances, but about the gruesome experiences of surviving in this apocalypse. For example, “Fuse” is about the group waking up to find out that everyone has bombs in their stomach that might explode at any second, and “The Carrion Flower” is a poem about finding a body bag in the woods and watching it rot. The prose is slightly psychedelic and strange which can make the whole narrative a little hard to follow. If you’re willing to pour through the poems to solve the puzzle, it is guaranteed to be exciting and rewarding.

I was most intrigued when I realized that four of the twenty-one prose poems have the same name: “Relaxation Tape.” The poems are based on a giant voice or projection on a tape which sounds a lot like a guided meditation. But as the poems flow, the voice is said to be coming from “the loudspeaker sky.” Either this is a fact of life for characters in this universe, or the characters are slowly becoming less attached to reality, making them unreliable narrators. The whole chapbook only gets more interesting as you read on.

The erasure poems are simply beautiful and helped break up the thick pages of text with long spaces in between. My favorite, “The Ocean Calls,” includes the line, “We are precious tendrils of light. We may be a sun to someone. Why should we be utterly lost.”

“Night Vision” is challenging and carries a lot of poetic weight in both the dense prose or in the sparse erasures. Claire Wahmanholm’s chapbook is incredibly gripping, filled with small details that add much to the style and the narrative. As I reached the end, I decided that one read was not enough, and read through twice more just to begin to create my own conclusions and fill in the gaps. “Night Vision” does something truly powerful: it begins in Wahmanholm’s imagination and ends in mine.

Shane Hoyle, Staff Writer.

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In “What Do You Love About Haiti?” readers get to know a little more about Rusch. He travels, including time in Haiti during an earthquake. The powerful images here suggest he witnessed the aftermath of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in 2010, as Rusch states:

I’d never seen a dead body
before the earthquake. The earth
that day felt like something moving
underneath, in pursuit…
After the earthquake, I became accustomed
to the smell of death, no longer noticed it
clinging to my clothes, my skin. It became
the norm that houses should look like dioramas,
rooms exposed: staircases twisted and mangled,
kitchen tables tilting.

These words leave the reader uncomfortable yet compassionate. Indeed, uncomfortable yet compassionate is the theme throughout “Dualities.”

Issues with the narrator’s father are often present across “Dualities.” “Transitive Properties” exposes a father sexualizing his daughter, even when apologizing for sexualizing his daughter. Then in “Daddy Issues,” the narrator points out their own cliche of having an emotionally abusive father—for instance, a father who makes his young daughter grab her belly fat and tells her she was only beautiful when she was two years old—and how it had an effect on the narrator’s choice in significant others or lovers. It is shocking to hear horrific things parents can say to their children, but it isn’t too shocking to know it has a lasting effect on the child, even in adulthood. It is refreshing to see an adult analyze the past to see how they got to the present. This is the very definition of “coming of age.”

“Dualities” will keep you reading and while it may be tempting to live vicariously or play the voyeur by peaking into someone else’s sex life, these poems are more than titillation. Readers experience how these subjects grow from each experience. Rusch’s narrator gives up plenty of juicy, and sometimes painful, sex stories. In pieces like “Men Tell Me I’m Selfish” and “Querying,” a fearless voice discusses things from kissing to oral sex, and also the human growth that comes from sexual experience.

Pop culture injects a sense of fun into this work. “Erotic Jealousy” mentions those magazine or online quizzes we take to find out stuff we just had to know (or didn’t really need to know) about ourselves, and how sometimes those quizzes just don’t get us or give us appropriate answer choices.

“Facebook Knows” talks about what we all talk about. The advertisements we get really delve into our personal lives: what we search, what we talk about, and somehow what we think about.

I am not out, not even to myself, and yet a page for FtMs seeking to build muscle mass appears in my suggestions.

Safe to say, you can expect some entertainment or laughs in this emotional read. Still, growth and duality remain the focus of this collection. The narrator struggles with identity, sexuality and gender. This is a peek inside the dueling mind with dual personalities. On being born female with heterosexuality a foregone societal conclusion, and experience with bisexuality. Readers are made to to wonder masculine gender identity is a good fit. Then, unsure if it even matters. Does it matter?

“Dualities” won’t give us and easy answer but it also won’t disappoint. Read “Dualities” to interrogate what actually matters.

Megan Andreuzzi is an animal lover and a traveler from the New Jersey Shore. She earned a degree from Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, USA in Liberal Studies with a dual concentration in writing and a minor in theatre.

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The collection is divided into four sections: “(in)visibly femme,” “the garden,” “love notes to you” and “the binary of love & death.” While it is the nature of reading to start at one end of a book and conclude in another, the divisions and flow of this collection are probably better read as a circle. Every poem is part of a journey, but it’s OK if no single entry in “the new gods” is considered an ultimate destination.

We enter the collection on a strong note, with “organic material.” Some of the imagery recalls Plath’s “Ariel,” but the speaker here not only defies death but gender, then arises from the ash:

“i peel the fat parts of my
self away, toss them on

the dirty floor. watch
stinging flies buzz around  

the meat of me. I’m
deconstructed. i’m red hair  

like copper, blood so iron rich
my body is a foundry.”

“Deconstruction” here means not only the breakdown of a body, but the interrogation of what a body means. At the conclusion of this piece, the speaker’s gender may be partially “synthetic” or fluid, but this is a playful notion:

“… would it be  

easier if i turned to liquid?
and i sloshed in cups, pouring  

foam off the top. i’d take
the shape of tin glass bronze  

but never ugly plastic. never
wholly synthetic.”

To further explore the organic or synthetic nature of body and gender, Lopez returns to one origin story for all humanity in “rewriting genesis in my image.” The piece, dedicated to Joanna C. Valente, uses the language and style of myths and legends to celebrate the creation, re-creation, or re-birth of the speaker.

“i morph into eve become a mother goddess

an agender creation

i form adam from a loose molar
they become a saint in my mouth”

Where the first section, “(in)visibly femme” details the destruction or deconstruction of the body, “the garden” follows with lush images from nature for a possible reconstruction of body. The poem “rebirth” offers equal parts whimsy and metaphor:

“it’s okay that i’m read as a snake,
slithering on the wet ground, coiling
in the warmth of sheep’s wool.  

i transform every day.

i tried to live as a bird, wings opened wide, sun
on my face, wind blown
feathers, dusty beak,

was shot down.

i died as a rabbit, a
nuisance, a tribute to the woods.”

While “the new gods” examines what bodies mean, the collection also delights in what bodies can do. The third section, “love notes to you,” contains luscious descriptions, like the opening lines of “blistered tongue”:

“i burnt my tongue
with melted sugar  

today. the flinching
pain reminded me  

of the way you taste
when you’re fresh  

from a hot shower,
or my favorite,  

covered in salty sweat.”

Identity with body or gender does not have to be settled or static to find love or delight (in) a lover. My favorite poem in this collection is short and sweet and lives in the “love notes to you” section:

recipe for the self

i am chopped
parts suspended
in salty broth

pieces of everything

a universe personified

you are the gravity
that anchors me  

Finally (never finally), “the binary of life & death” mingles family wounds, the sensual memories from adolescence and the pop culture that shaped an era (’90s music, movies and TV are cited often). Personally, I yelped with recognition at mentions of the “Scream” horror movie franchise, and it is referenced several times.

This deconstructive and also delicious collection is available now from Bottelcap Press.

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post Deconstruction and Rebirth in the Poetry of Caseyrenée Lopez appeared first on Newfound.

“Anemochore” keeps no borders between visual art, poetry and even music. Stricker’s work here demonstrates a melding of ideas that flow naturally from page to page, evoking all of a reader’s senses.

Meredith Stricker fuses her work with her own experiences, including performances with musicians, her own work as an architect in Big Sur, California and her deep perspective into the value of poetry and imagery. The second part of the chapbook, The Be/s of the Invisible, was a collaboration with several other musicians that link the life of bees to the freedom in poetry.

Her chapbook “Anemochore” will be published by Newfound in spring of 2018.

Steve Mulero: When did you begin writing poetry and what were some of your influences on your early journey into poetry and art?

Meredith Stricker: Because my mother was a war refugee for whom English was a second language and my father’s family from Russia spoke in an archaic form of German, I grew up
in a household where several languages mingled in ways that were basically incomprehensible to me, except as a kind of music or rhythm that was deeply familiar, but also untranslatable.

Whatever one could call “normal” English was not a given since even the language my mother taught me had an accent. And so much remained unspoken. So, it always seemed natural to swim in the space between words. You could say poetry and imagery were a first language for me or a kind of mother tongue.

Also, there’s really no “normal” language for any of us. Which is why poetry matters so much in its rejection of “normalizing” in favor of the particular and odd and nearly inexpressible which we all hold in common in entirely different ways that poems, our senses and imagination can access.

I remember going out on the hillside where I lived in Oakland and talking to the trees and birds in this kind of in-between language. I have always been drawn to forms of poetry and image that are multi-lingual in this way and can be read inside and outside of English in ways even birds could understand.

How do birds understand us or we understand them in a poem? I don’t know, but somehow the poem knows.

“Anemochore” simply extends this process.

Mulero: The title of this chapbook is “Anemochore,” defined as a “plant that spreads seeds or fruit by wind.” Why did you choose this for your title? What tone and feelings did you want to elicit from the reader of your work?

Stricker: It’s a beautiful and odd sort of word. The Anemo– or wind part carries the sense of Anima also related to wind, soul, breath, spirit, so this felt important. And then it seemed to take the shape of a bee swarm or bee language forms that are core to the second part of the book, The Be/s of the Invisible.

Mulero: Is there a musical element throughout “Anemochore” as well? You include “adj. anemochorous / wind chorus dithyrambic polyspecies lyric” and in a later line, “are you a wind instrument are you breath / gone wild.” These lines emit a type of wild musicality. Is there a play-on-words to be found with the term Anemochorous?

Stricker: Those are really interesting questions. Yes! Music is very much part of this book.

All of The Be/s of the Invisible was created as a collaboration with musicians, bee-keeper and another artist for a performance in Oakland. I worked with musician Kumi Uyeda, and two other composer musicians using several kinds of instruments: piano, accordion, tonkori, cello, toy piano, melodica live with recorded voice, electronic music and video. I added visual projections and then half-sang, half-read the poems as a kind of chant.

The audience also was part of sound with a participatory score based on lines of the poems. In terms of these specific lines you mention, you’re asking questions that tune into sounds, which speak to how we hear as much as see a poem.

How reading a poem is multi-sensory: seeing-hearing-sensing.

I am particularly interested in the communal and performed sense of poetry. And here, the -chore of Anemochore sounded to me like the chorus of classical Greek where lines where spoken/sung and danced (choreography/chorus). Poetry was always mixed-media, multi-genre across many cultures. Performance brings this sense of chorus into current practice.

So, “polyspecies lyric” pretty much sums up the intent of book itself and probably the hopes of all of my current writing.

Mulero: Do you feel there is a comparison to be made between an anemochorous plant and how its seeds disperse by wind and how individuals spread ideas through language and their own voice?

Stricker: Yes, absolutely. Writing and visual art for me are more of a kind of open-ended research than self-expression and what I keep discovering is how the page is itself a field or habitat where the word-seeds move and that our lives, spoken and unspoken, are intrinsically interwoven with the lives of seeds, plants, rivers, clouds, weathers.

Mulero: How did you come to the photos and artwork in “Anemochore?” What is your artistic process when merging both poetry and artistic imagery?

Stricker: I always work with visual work in relation to writing. I don’t separate them. Even the shape writing a poem is more like a gestural drawing than a statement, say in filling in forms or information. Also, the written images in poems are continuous with images made of India ink, paint, collage, video and three-dimensional objects. There are the materials of the page and book then also installations in gallery space and performance.

There’s always this slippage between the verbal and non-verbal, gesture and sound, world and word.

The photo at the start of “Anemochore” comes from a performance at night in a field I did with dancer and collaborators. The movement of the light suggests writing or a kind of hive, which fits my sense of the book.

The Be/s of the Invisible came together when my friend Kumi said let’s do an hour-long performance in a few months and I noticed I was working on poems and images related
to bees and colony collapse disorder and that I could use these as projections throughout the performance. I made drawings and paintings of patterns of bee-flight used in communicating flower location to the hive. And these were projected and used as a graphical score in the performance. There was a lot of color; bees see colors — some of which are out of human range. Poems and images help us to see outside our normal range, closer to the vision of bees.

Mulero: The way you utilize space on certain pages offers a unique imagery of its own. Sometimes the words drip off the stanza and onto the next page. What inspired you to utilize such distinct formatting and design?

Stricker: I work as an architectural designer as a partner in a studio mostly on coastal sites in Big Sur. You make drawings or shapes that start on a two-dimensional page related to a living site with grasses and earth then translate the ink into built forms. We work with not only Euclidian geometries but also fractal forms leaves, shorelines and more, breaking the pre-set forms of a rectangle to curve or jag with the coastline.

This is very exciting! As we talk, I’m realizing how similar the page is to a landscape.

I mean, there’s actually a lot of space on a page. The white space is not just a backdrop for written lines any more that a landscape is the background to drop in a pre-set house design that doesn’t pay attention to the shape of the land, the existing biotics, the weather or light.

In the same ways that the words and phrase structure can move in relation to the voicing and shape of intuited thoughts in a poem’s physical surface.

In “Anemochore,” I began to discover what felt like fractal or dendritic forms the way tree roots and branches are patterned. And the Be/s of the invisible are meant to move like hive swarms or individual bees foraging.

Also, there’s the animism or livingness of the poems themselves the desire of the lines themselves as though these words want to bend or break off. Others need more space. They seem to want to exist as their own beings. And when you can feel and relate to that being, the poem or page feels complete.

Mulero: Do you feel that there is something lost in translation when words like “wall” (which you mention in the catalog of synonyms on page 11) are spoken only in reference to it’s the physical sense?

Stricker: Working with the habitat of the page as with other environmental work is political and communal. “Anemochore” addresses the brutality of the kind of Border Wall the current administration is attempting to force on us, or the Separation Wall imposed on Palestinian communities by Israel or gated communities or the Iron Curtain which separated my mother and countless others from their homeland and free movement. Also, the futility of any Authoritarian Wall. Or the utterly mistaken idea that we can wall ourselves off from the fate of honeybees as we use harmful pesticides or dump toxic materials into the biosphere and not poison ourselves:

“I’m breathing your oxygen you’re breathing my carbon dioxide

green world blue world red world my darling permeable membrane

there is no greater love than this

folded in involutes” – Meredith Stricker

I would not draw a line between human and other speech, say of trees or owls or at least I would hope to bridge that divide through poems, art and living with senses open.

Mulero: Do you have any advice for aspiring artists and poets?

Stricker: First to notice is everyone is aspiring, which kind of relaxes the pressure. No poet says to herself “Yeah, I’ve totally made it and know exactly what to do next….”

Also, just to write and make images on-goingly without expectation. Even for small amounts of time to keep the thread of your work alive in the midst of everything (self-doubt, drive for productivity, demands of paying jobs) that tries to pull you away from trusting what shows up on your page.

And be willing to work unstintingly, without measure. Poems may appear instantly outside our conscious effort but they are not efficient.

Bring everything in: sounds, scribbles, words, wordless. Bring in notes, spaces, noise. Then sieve out. It’s quite physical like sorting beads, feeling resonances.

Track the energy of your work: read aloud to self or others: keep the parts that feel alive, take out parts that feel wordy and grey (no matter how much you loved the ideas of them)
Hearing the poems outside the loop of your own mind helps clarify immediately.

Step out of your habits: work in collaboration with others. Find a band of poets, artists you can exchange work and perform with. Not as a big deal, just playing poetry, the way musicians play music.

Trust. Allow. Make things. Connect with others.

Stevie Ray Mulero graduated from Georgian Court University in May 2017 with a Bachelor’s Degree in English Creative Writing. An avid reader of poetry, plays, novels and short stories, Steve intends to transcend the way we consider ourselves and others, life, loss and reality.

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