An Unclouded Eye: A Review of IN OTHER DAYS by Roger Craik

Whether it’s the sprawling oak of a contemporary Odyssey, or a mere seedling like Stevie Smith’s Croft, a poem must earn its right to the name. Readability—that is, a rhythm of sorts to carry you through—is a given, along with originality and expressiveness; but for the thing to have substance, surely two qualities are essential: it should have integrity, it must have heart.

Roger Craik, Professor Emeritus of English at Kent State University, Ohio, knows this; knows his craft inside-out. The poems here are not dramatic, not intended to startle or outrage; they are not clever, tricksy poems delivered from under a mortarboard, nor are they prissily poetic or drowning in molasses. Disappointingly perhaps to thrill-seekers, polemic-eaters and those of a righteous or overly sentimental disposition, you will find here only poems that are considered and quietly commanding. There is an unobtrusive artistry at work in the construction of them, a building up of colour, detail and honest feeling. They will come back to you again and again; not to bite you, but rather to whisper glories in your ear, understated glories of remembrance and love.

Craik was born in England, in the county of Leicestershire which was, and is still, largely rural. The character of the place is effectively summoned in the early poems by the naming of villages—Peatling Magna, Peatling Parva—just as people from his boyhood are fixed in time simply by their names; wonderfully resonant names like Marjorie Marlow, Brownie Neave and, magnificently, Florrie Mist. Local history, personalities and events are casually dropped into the mix for detail and atmosphere, and to give us a real feel for the environment in which Craik grew up. Nostalgia can be precarious for a poet, it can all too easily soften the senses and distort the truth, resulting in a poem lacking backbone, lacking interest to all but the writer. But Craik is far too good a poet to fall into that particular trap; his is an unclouded eye reflecting experiences that are, perhaps, in some way common to us all. I’m thinking of the poem “Lewes,1966” where he is playing alone:     

The taut green
tennis ball spinning from my fingertip,
spanking the hot patio, half-volleying
up against the brickwork and

soaring in the sky all over England

to clasp itself in my palm
again and again and again.

The repetitive, trance-like throwing of a ball by a youngster contemplating the coming of a world of danger and possibility, represented by a vast sky, is a nice image skillfully presented.  

He goes on to recall a series of quiet moments of revelation, testament and emotional impact in a way reminiscent of someone pulling over in the car to take a moment, to reacquaint himself with those things that have contributed to his character; a sort of reset, I suppose. Among a fascinating miscellany, we learn of his travels in Turkey and of the detached voice of an old man calling on his god while walking through reeds in the mist, and of a moment of loneliness in Romania. There is an elegantly composed deliberation on the gymnast Olga Korbut competing in the ill-fated 1972 Olympics in Munich, and a lyrical hymn to Burrough Hill, with delicate reference to his self-realization. Craik moved to America in 1991, and “New Year’s Eve,1999” is an engaging contemplation of the old country and his ancestry peppered with fragments of family history, and ending with the exquisite “The last of the sun / is crimsoning into the world.” I was taken by a curious poem telling of an outsider moving in to the village and complaining of cocks crowing and cows (described wonderfully by a local as chorus girls) mooing, which contrasts with a rather sad consideration of an adolescence fueled by the songs of Leonard Cohen, his voice “graveling down the years”. 

That phrase prompts me to offer, without context, another of the author’s pleasing illustrations: this time his description of the pronoun “we” in one of his pieces:

Plump gelatinous
capsule of a syllable
smooth as halibut liver oil.

If that little aside doesn’t define a real poet, then I’m not sure what does.

Above all there is a subtlety, a hesitancy almost in these poems. A sense of the unidentifiable, of something behind the veil, is presented time and time again, and it’s a device, if you can call it that, which is hugely effective. This quality of suggestion is nicely demonstrated in the poem “That Early Evening” which sees the poet walking with a girlfriend along a disused railway line in his native Leicestershire fifteen years ago. He can still picture the cows and their calves lumbering over, these guileless creatures at the gate:

each one’s brimming luminous gaze
drawn to me, drawn to me, betrayed.

It’s oddly touching, and the inventive but entirely convincing language (the cows “in a jostling hotness, nostrilling hard”) catches the moment and enhances the mood beautifully.

This holding back gives way, as it were, only in the last lines of an affecting poem about his mother’s illness. He reflects one Christmas on the number of cigarettes she has smoked over these thirty years, and those she has yet to smoke. How they are:  

… slowly killing her, in the other room,
while I’m half-drunk on gin, writing this in tears.  

We get to hear more about his mother in the final poem of the collection which deals with her subsequent death and funeral in an almost conversational but deeply tender manner. It’s opening lines are a remarkable summing up of mourning:  

This is no grief I have ever known. 

It is as if
a child has drawn a wandering unbroken line

through all the days
I am still to live.

The honest simplicity of the words only serves to make them more meaningful, more entirely apt. They embody those very qualities mentioned at the top of this review.

Long after the work of more showy poets loses its sheen; after the cliches have worn themselves thin and the clever conceits have surrendered their fragile appeal, these nuanced and dare I say it relatable poems, with their thoughtful and sympathetic grace, will stay long in the memory. In Other Days is a finely drawn and unhurried remembrance magnifying the tangential and hinting at the quietly momentous. It is an impressive piece of work.

An Ever Present Love: A Review of The Breath by Cindy Savett

It is said that to lose a child is to lose the future. But just a few pages in, this collection of poems, these illuminated memories and imaginings convinced me that Cindy Savett’s daughter was not lost to her when she died at the age of eight all those years ago. As long as Rachel “… lingers, sounds out / the curvatures of my breath / with her phantom tongue…” then she is as real as ever, her all too brief existence immortalised in the souls of those who loved her. And with that love, you feel their future is assured.

The Breath is a series, an arrangement of stuttering emotion and almost mythical imagery summoning the poet’s departed child and relating her sorrow in an even and considered way which only magnifies its intensity. It is both a quiet release of anguish and a heightened recollection, skillfully composed and with an overwhelming honesty that urges you on to discover more about Rachel and her abiding presence.

A mother’s love is a mother’s love and is unfathomable, but of course the whole family carries the burden of such a devastating impact on their lives, each experiencing and coping with it in their own way. Savett gives us fleeting impressions of their responses, including the son who “… grips the whispers / around him, listens for the dead child and the stories / she once told him.” and the surviving daughter “clothed in the needles of old love.” Her husband Rob features prominently throughout; his strength and support, the unfailing and unconditional love he provides, as well as his own grief, are recorded touchingly. These four lines, from the poem “Of Rob,” are a nice illustration of just that:

Rob, iron weaver,
binds us down to the dirt,
loosens the acres
inside my breath.

As individuals, as a couple, as a household, Cindy, Rob, Alison and Sean are necessarily reconstructed by force of circumstance; their history, their very DNA adjusted to cope since Rachel’s leaving; since they:

… were a house
with sinking beams, set apart
from the many.

Within these pages, the work of a born poet, are what might be called momentary poems, poems of the here and now like entries in a diary which document Rachel’s reappearances over time, along with meditations and a kind of philosophical searching. The whole is a dignified lament and a potent, a near hypnotic insistence of the child’s continued presence. What appeals is the utter artlessness of the poetry: there is nothing contrived or mannered here; everything is natural, and the desired aim of conveying the heartache and the love is achieved purely through sincerity and candour. Every poem in the collection succeeds in doing just that. Consider the following, called “Faded, Rachel, Gone”:

When you fled
I threw out the bedclothes
and your shuddering scent, you

were the watchgirl who lay beside me
and split dawn’s light from the dark.

Me, aimless
dwarfed by your single last gasp.

There is a guileless sensitivity, an unselfconscious openness in these lines, where each word feels natural and right, serving to highlight the awful reality of the moment. That “shuddering scent” is almost unbearable.

Cindy Savett, who teaches poetry workshops in psychiatric hospitals, has previously published a full-length collection of poetry about Rachel, Child in the Road, so why another now, fourteen years later? The answer is abundantly clear in each of these manifestations of the girl’s continued reality. Rachel still breathes, still visits her mother, her father, the unfortunate siblings starting out in life with both the blessing and the pain of their sister’s memory, and Savett is eager to preserve these moments. Perhaps even obliged to do so. I can imagine that it took a good deal of thought deciding to share them with an unknowing public, but I applaud her courage in doing so; indeed, I am grateful for it.

The sweet memories, the comforting reminders and the very act of realising her daughter’s existence still, are positive and are generously sprinkled throughout, but unsurprisingly the tone is overwhelmingly that of sadness, a quiet melancholy no better expressed perhaps than in this rather piteous poem titled “Sublime”:

I track you, my endlessly dying daughter,
for the shadow in your breath, ragged prize
drawn from your mouth to mine,

and pin you shaken and pulsing
to the dirt. I stumble over
pieces of your gray iron coat

to my hour that howls,
my burying shovel twisted, my home
overrun by your hollow eyes.

This collection, without doubt the most affecting I’ve read for a very long time, is divided into what the author terms incantations, (and I can’t think of a better word to describe the ritualistic nature of the language used, the repetition, the weight attached to certain images) the last of which is but a single poem. It’s an intense summing-up of Rachel and consists of a series of epithets describing her “used-to-be-girl”, each followed by a figurative finger to the lips and a plaintive “silence”. It’s a prayer, an invocation, a quite beautiful calling out to her absent child.   

It’s not my place as a reviewer to comment directly on the personal tragedies and consolations of a poet, although it’s almost impossible in this case not to, but it is my job to evaluate the work resulting from them. Do the poems convey the reactions to those experiences in such a way as to draw the reader in, to give the reader insights, revelations of bare truth, that a more prosaic recording could not? Well, in respect of this equally powerful and tender collection, I can answer emphatically yes. Cindy Savett has let us in on her and her family’s grief, their strength, their togetherness with good grace and astonishing candour, and I believe that, as readers, we are all the better for it.

Bill Lavender’s My ID: A Genre Bending Narrative Memoir

Reading poetry can be a radical act of self-reflection. I find myself unpacking my own depths in the presence of a great writer’s fearless journey, whereas maybe I cannot find or accept that moment in other genres or therapies, medicines or practices. Like My Life Lyn Hejinian’s profound imagist memoir, Bill Lavender’s new BlazeVox volume My ID is opening those doors for me.

Lavender’s title poem near the start of the book is a list of firsts that begins with that nearly universal American act of getting a Social Security card as a teenager:

1965, I’m 14, at Evelyn Hills Shopping Center
SS office, where my mother brought me to get
my first card, and next door a wallet to put it in

We hear of the mundane, the triumphant and the embarrassing. We learn who he is by the images of a life fully lived and decades passing by:

VISA, permission to enter, end
of the phone book, second marriage
license, houses VI,VII,VIII, inheritance,
first last will and testament…

A “list of firsts” poem may be a brave and wonderful Proustian exercise but Lavender takes it to master’s level. The yellowed card is “a handsome artifact” and he uses it as the book’s cover. He lets us know he is not going to hide anything in his memoiristic prose poems.

He describes his father’s face in his sister’s portrait one of “primal ambivalence” in the finely tuned poem “Imagework.” “Structures” is a dream poem, both descriptive and analytic and “Grand Isle” takes us on a fishing trip. The ID and the id are both in play. This is the work of a writer in his 12th book. His writing is prone to analysis, sometimes psychoanalysis, and at its best his poetic and genre bending narrative memoir is gripping.

At the book’s center is “Tui: an Elegy.” It is a tryptic, bookends of a mourning process with a travelogue in between. The beginning and end are unpunctuated creating an unnerving staccato, and the travelogue in the middle introduces denser prose text. It is a journey about travel and loss, and the writer’s compulsive urge to document it all. His sure language and process succeeds in bringing the whole to us. “More and more life feels emptied like that” he says in recounting a memory of another travel journey in the midst of the one to Tui, Portugal. He and his partner Nanc have taken many journeys together. She is there in a way that is essential. Their feet land in the familiar place, “The big room where we used to have to ask people to move to make room for a dart game, was empty but for the bartender.”

“Time” is the collection’s most fearless work. Here Lavender recounts clear eyed seeing his oldest friends who’ve scattered and regrouped, the 30 years gone by and how to relate and re-relate to them in the present, again in an unpunctuated flow, a satisfying collision of memory, thought and action on the page.

The book’s final piece is a “magpie scholar’s” history of “La Police” both the origin of the word and the concept of the modern police force. It was originally written as a Locofo Chaps chapbook, sent to the 45th president on his 100th day in office. On first read this writing seemed tacked on to a collection which felt complete. Then I found myself discussing Lavender’s assertions, re-read it, and understood its place in a book about an ID card. “One is a thief unless one can prove otherwise. Thievery is not merely punished; it is prevented by this pragmatic measure. Have your identity card or go to gaol.”

In Bill Lavender’s ID, wisdom is the bittersweet prize of a life well lived. So much can change that simple pleasures become unfamiliar. This book is full of timeless empathy: “Poetry that ancient broken/ pottery of sound.” It is a gift to all who strive for sentience.

An Interview with Cris Mazza, Author of Yet to Come

Kristina Marie Darling: Your novel, Yet to Come, will launch soon from BlazeVOX Books. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?

Cris Mazza: I’d like readers to assume that Yet to Come can provide different gratifications or provide different responses from different kinds of readers . . . and that any kind of response or take-away is interesting to me. Among the various elements — for example the “setting” of the characters’ mid-lifespans being from the 80s to 2010, the aspects of male-victim spousal abuse, or the subplot of female sexual dysfunction — will come to the forefront in different orders for different readers. I wish I could hear from every reader to see which parts, characters, or story-lines spoke loudest. Basically, I always tried to write books that my mother could read and also my English professors could appreciate.

KMD: You’ve worked with many outstanding literary publishers over the course of your distinguished career.  What drew you to BlazeVOX Books for this particular text? 

CM: First, one of my former PhD students had a recent novel from BlazeVox, so I knew there was an appreciation for literature-off-the-beaten-path. Also, when I looked at the books, they each had a personalized size, shame and design, appropriate for the book itself and not a standard for all of their books.  I knew I would need a publisher sensitive to the repeated postcards in the book, which required the use of different fonts, an image of a postcard, etc. BlazeVox is open to a writer having a mental image and actual production input for what a book looks like as a finished product.

KMD: I admire your experimentation with form, which frequently encompasses templates that are not germane to literary texts:  postcards, lists of problems, handwritten notes, and more. What do these non-literary or found forms make possible within a given narrative? 

CM: I began doing this in earnest in my 2014 memoir Something Wrong With Her because my college journals were essential to the book containing a “me-then” who was not the same person writing the “real time” text. I realized I had to use images of the journals rather than retype the passages I wanted to use — to prevent myself from editing the earlier me. While researching my own cache of artifacts for that book, I found more: the handwritten notes, yearbook inscriptions, hand-drawn cartoons, etc., that I knew had to be seen and not just described. I think the book was able to be urgent and alive in more than one time-zone, from the “real time” text to 40 years earlier.

KMD: Relatedly, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the gender politics of genre. Is experimentation with — and challenging — received forms of discourse an inherently feminist act? Why or why not? 

CM: It traditionally largely hasn’t been. In the 70s and 80s when so much literary prose experimentation was disproportionately by male authors, a simple explanation was provided (I can’t recall the source): these men were rebelling against the established canon; but that canon, being predominately male, was not what women writers were moved to rebel against — they had to create their “canon” first. Instead, the mere act of speaking out at all, having a published written voice, was the initial “rebellion.” Then when I co-edited the “chick-lit” anthologies in the mid-90s, the publisher launched the project as a talent search for unknown or emerging women writers who were beginning more and more to challenge popular expectations of writing-by-women.

It’s difficult for me, personally, to say how the forms in my own writing is or might be a feminist or gender-related gesture because most of the writers who influenced me in terms of form were male since most of the writers taught to me in college were male; and yet the work of one of the female inclusions, Kathy Acker, for whatever reason did not speak to me. Female writers who later participated in my development, from Erica Jong to Alice Munro, were not experimenting so much with form.

KMD: As you promote YET TO COME, what readings, events, and workshops can we look forward to?

I plan to be in my car heading west, to California where the novel is set, and making as many stops along the route was I can manage to arrange. Anyone interested in an event can feel free to contact me. 

KMD: What are you currently working on? What’s next?

CM: Related to my answer about the insertion of image-artifacts in my work, I’m working on a series of linked essays that make further use of this technique, or using form to “concretize” what the essay is saying. This concept is best characterized by “Ask The Depot Commander” in which the narrative of my father’s recollections of his experience in 1946 Nuremburg, Germany — plus original photos he took there — is formatted to lie side-by-side with researched historical details that correspond to the substances of his memory. For example, he described giving an orange from the Army mess to a German man, whose wife and child ate one segment a day and made the orange last two weeks; this personal anecdote is juxtaposed beside original text of a different tone, explaining U.S. occupation policies that stipulated sharing food with German citizens was against military orders.

Each essay, with a different topic but involving my family, will have a form that suits its needs.

The Shock of the Election: Ruth Danon and Martin Ott in Conversation

Ruth Danon and Martin Ott engaged in a cross country conversation about their new books, which, quite coincidentally both took on the difficult period before during and after the 2016 election.

*

Martin Ott: Ruth, I have now read Word Has It a couple of times and I marvel at the apparent simplicity of some of poems but the complexity of the layering in them and strands that weave throughout, along with the structure of the different sections of your book. Would you mind providing insights into your narrative strategy for Word Has It?

Ruth Danon: Thank you, Martin, for such a good question. I’m not sure that “strategy” is the word I would use. In my work almost everything is a discovery – that is to say I don’t plan in advance. Some of what happens is a consequence of the working method I’ve adopted in the last 5 years or so. I try to write a small piece every day. Sometimes I’ll write a whole series of little texts that connect. The “word” poems were like that. Sometimes a poem will lead me to something I want to pursue. That explains divination in the last section.

The narrative structure emerged after Yuyutsu Sharma, the Nepali poet, who scouts for Nirala, asked me for a book. I headed to my house in the country, with a pile of poems and no idea what to do with them. I sat on the enclosed porch with the printed-out poems, and tried to understand what I had. This was summer 2016 and we were in the anxious period before the election. Many poems had a kind of foreboding in them. Other poems had a focus on the domestic. Bird poems seemed connected to the foreboding poems. I began to feel that I had been tracking something, not fully aware of what I was doing. I made piles that suggested a narrative progression. Then came the shock of the election. I had been moving poems around and writing new ones, struggling with what they implied. I saw that I was tracking what it was like to live through events as they unfolded. The poems were pushing towards the violence that erupts in the two final pieces about the Pulse nightclub massacre.

RD: That leads me to my first question. In your book, Fake News Poems, you operate, it seems, from a similar need to bear witness to what has been happening during this terrible time in our history. I’m curious as to whether you determined your constraint ahead of time or whether you found yourself writing these poems based on headlines and then just kept at it. I’m also curious about your working method and the state of mind that governed the way you approached the problem of writing political poems without succumbing to polemic, one of the many aspects of this work that I admire.

MO: Fake News Poems was an idea I had in a time when I and many other writers were having difficulty finding their voices just before the inauguration of President Trump. The concept of 52 headlines, 52 weeks, 52 poems was something I had at the beginning but I was also hyper-aware that the book needed to cover a range of topics: social, cultural, scientific, and political in order to not be one note. I also integrated parts of my life and my own struggles even I tried to capture the temperature of our country. The book explores the subject of truth more broadly than Trump, and he pops in and out of poems like a mythical creature almost. The best political poetry is like the best poetry in that it explores topics and uncovers mysteries in the muck instead of trumpeting certainties. In these poems, I also learn a little bit about the world and myself.

MO: Both of us have been writing for a number of years with multiple books. What challenges do you face as a mid-career poet in a landscape that seems to reward and celebrate new poets and their work?

RD: I admire and envy the new voices coming along who garner so much attention. I also welcome the opportunity to reflect on my own long relationship to poetry. I cannot think of a time in my life when I did not write. But until recently it did not seem to me that it was a “career.” Writing was something I did. I couldn’t live happily without writing. But it wasn’t a “profession.” Teaching was my profession. I did it well and I loved the methods I created. Developing those method felt like creating a living poem.

In grad school a number of people had told me to take my writing “seriously.” That was hard for me. In so many ways I did everything wrong. My first book came out in 1990. Then no book for a long time. In 2000 I got very sick and when I emerged from 8 years of illness and complications I had a different attitude. I knew I had to take writing seriously. I finished what became Limitless Tiny Boat. Soon after I was asked by Nirala for a book. That’s how Word Has It came into being. So now what? The next book concerns me more than competition from the young. The writing is what’s important. The challenge is to figure out where to go next, how to write something that genuinely matters to me.

RD:I wanted to return to your previous answer and ask you what did you learn about yourself and the world by writing Fake News Poems?

MO: My previous three books of poetry were similarly constructed and I wanted to take a departure from the work I’d done before, to take a few risks and push myself outside of my comfort zone. After the 2016 election, I found it near-impossible to write poetry without the anger ebbing through my work and I decided to use Fake News Poems as a way to navigate through my emotions, to open myself to the possibilities of headlines, instead of seething for an entire year. My own personal life also came into focus as these dynamics leapt into these poems, almost unbidden.

Freed of my normal writing process, I also discovered that wordplay and humor that I readily deployed in my personal life was accessible in this book of poetry. One news headline, “It’s Time to Do Nothing About Guns” from The National Review, I decided to transform into a surreal homage to guns and gun culture, replacing our children with firearms. I also explored my love of reading and writing science fiction, imagining workers trapped in large vending machines of multinational corporations, the tragicomic impact of technology in our loves, and a robot president finding his place as an entertainer in a Disney theme park.

One thing I struggle with as a writer working outside of academia is community. I’ve tried hard to build long-distance relationships via social media and attending conferences such as AWP as a way to feel closer to writers I admire and their work.

MO: What has teaching done for you to connect you more closely with poetry?

RD: I’m taking the question in two ways. I think you’re asking how teaching and poetry intersect. You are also asking about the relationship between teaching and the world of poetry. In other words, has academia provided me with a writing community?

Teaching has taught me a lot about poetry. I first taught creative writing at a community college in Connecticut. My students were Vietnam Veterans and mothers on welfare. I gave them an assignment. They went home and did it and came back with the most awful cliché ridden productions. I was in despair. I was reading Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams and I decided to have students write in class using the simple constraints Koch used with children. It worked! The students wrote wonderfully. I learned the usefulness of language and time as constraints. I’m now out of academia (a forced exit) and teaching completely on my own terms. I can focus on what interests me. Lately I’ve been thinking about lineation and its relationship to meaning. I recently re-discovered the brilliance of Robert Frost’s poetry. I hadn’t studied him since graduate school and never focused on the tricks he plays with line breaks and caesura. Teaching takes me outside of my usual paths of literary influence.

About community. Whatever community I have has come outside of academia, often through private teaching, informal writing groups, or social media. When my NYU job ended I had the good fortune of moving to Beacon, where community seems a bit easier to find. It’s easy to imagine that elsewhere writers are living rich lives involving endless gatherings of like-minded people drinking sherry at academic gatherings. Maybe there are happy writers living perfect lives. My academic life wasn’t like that. Life outside of academia is far richer than life inside.

A conversation like this makes me want to invite you to dinner right away. How about a little cross-country vacation?

Now, seriously, one last question.

RD: One aspect of your work that I admire (you allude to it in your last response) is how much of the world you bring you bring into your poems.. In your work you refer to your military experience. I wonder how the military prepared you (or not) for poetry. I expect you were quite young when you entered the military. Did you have ideas about writing or being a writer before then or was it something that came later?

MO: Thanks for allowing me to reminisce about my time in the Army. My experiences in the military were not common, I think. I was a linguist and interrogator. My friends in military intelligence discussed books and music, and one, Peter, provided me a reading list, like an instructor, when he saw the gaps in my education from growing up in a small town in Michigan. These books I devoured during these transformative years changed my life for the better, and opened up many doors and windows to a larger world.

When my active duty ended, I weighed several options in the intelligence community, and decided, ultimately, to attend the University of Michigan, where I got a BA in English and took my first creative writing classes. I’ve been blessed to make my living writing, as a copywriter and marketing communications professional, along with a colorful second career writing projects for film and TV, publishing novels and a short story collection, and always poetry, the medium I return to time and time again.

Ruth, I adore road trips and I may end up on your doorstep one night for dinner. Please look me up if you are ever in Los Angeles. It’s been a pleasure to get to know you and your writing better.

Energy, Entropy, and the Sunsphere: An Interview with Andrew Farkas

Andrew Farkas’ story collection Sunsphere is a funhouse of energy and potential energy revolving around the Sunsphere, a former World’s Fair tower that is now a derelict tourist attraction in Knoxville, Tennessee and to which Farkas brings iconic status. These nine stories engage and circle the mysteries of human relationship, the fine points of entropy, and the classic automotive joys of the Mercury Comet, among many other things. I was motivated to talk with Andrew because he and I share an affinity for story collections with broad scope and ambition.

Ron MacLean: What is the origin story or creation myth of this collection called Sunsphere?

Andy Farkas: In 2002, I was accepted to the University of Tennessee’s M.A. program in English. Beforehand, I’d never been to Knoxville and knew nothing about it. When I arrived, wandering through the city, I ended up seeing the Sunsphere for the first time. Since it’s kind of down in a little valley, this World’s Fair tower isn’t the imposing, awe-inspiring structure that you’d expect (like the Eiffel Tower or the Space Needle). Instead, it’s honestly kind of ugly and dwarfed by the buildings up on top of the hill. At the time, the park surrounding it was a wreck because it was at that stage of remodeling that makes me think it’s all been a lie, we’re not actually trying to fix anything, we’re just having fun breaking things. Looking at this kind of ugly, not particularly awe-inspiring structure, I immediately knew that I liked it more than any other World’s Fair tower because it seemed like a parody of all of them. And so I began doing research on the Sunsphere and the 1982 World’s Fair. Once I learned that the theme for that exposition was energy, I instantly connected that to the way the place looked now (having reached entropy), which led to me researching energy, entropy, and quantum physics (with a big thank you to my friend, Jim Westlake, for helping me out with that research). The stories mostly sprang from there.

MacLean: In Sunsphere, the narrative grounding is very different from story to story — with “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” or “Everything Under the Sunsphere” at one end of the spectrum, and “I Don’t Know Why” or “No Tomorrow” at another. Others fall in between. What for you is the core of a story? The fulcrum on which it balances, the nucleus that gives it energy? And how do you find/build/grow what surrounds it?

Farkas: Experimental work can be more idea-based, so I normally start with an idea instead of, say, a character or situation. “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” started with the idea of potential energy. There’s a ton of potential energy all throughout the story. The problem for Trevor is that he thinks there’s no way to access that energy because everything he tried in the past led to ruin. Now, whereas this story is a little more realist, I still started with an idea (potential energy) then expanded the idea (potential energy that can’t be accessed). So, I didn’t decide I wanted to write a more conventional story, I just followed where the idea took me. “I Don’t Know Why” is the same. Entropy is all throughout Sunsphere, but “I Don’t Know Why” is the entropy story. I knew I wanted to pack in as much entropy as possible. That led to the post-apocalyptic city of Knoxville being filled with white noise (for communication entropy) and chaos (the Sunsphere being deconstructed, the city impossible to navigate). Since it seems like everything is truly over, I thought, “Well, it’s the end of the world,” and so I started looking up potential ends to the universe (which is how each section of the story ended up with a subtitle that describes a different end to the universe). From the original idea, then, everything else springs. Since I’m not working in realism, I have no problem creating characters who represent ideas themselves. Though I would say normally these idea-characters of mine are critiques of the ways we turn others into paper cutouts of themselves, or turn ourselves into two dimensional robots.

MacLean: I’m smitten with Kat and Trevor from “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?” What would Kat say about Los Angeles? What’s her take on “No Tomorrow?” What would Trevor say about Knoxville? Did he ever get confused by the many names for a single street?

Farkas: Kat needs to keep moving, so she’d probably kick the driver out of the Mercury Comet in “No Tomorrow” because he’s going too slow. And plus, he’s in Knoxville, and she’d definitely rather be in Los Angeles, weaving in and out of traffic, finding the next power source. When we see her in “Do Kids in California,” though, she’s burned out because she was trying to channel all of the energy of not just L.A., but all of California at once.

Trevor might be attracted to Knoxville because of the Sunsphere, which he could end up seeing as the center of energy he’s looking for. As for a guy like him, he wouldn’t get confused by the street names because he’d convince everyone else to call the streets by the names he uses. Gene, from “Everything Under the Sunsphere,” however, can’t even convince himself what they should be called.

MacLean: What is an example of an uplifting, aphoristic billboard that would describe your best life?

Farkas: When I wrote Sunsphere, I was sitting between two very large pieces of paper, each with a very small sentence printed in the center of them, that came from the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. One said, “Somewhere better than this place,” while the other said, “Nowhere better than this place.” I think that space in between fits me no matter where I am. On the other hand, I also thought of a movie poster for Being John Malkovich (1999) that I had on my wall for a long time. It said, “Ever want to be someone else? Now you can.” I feel like writing, whenever it’s going well, allows me to be someone else.

MacLean: What makes an Andrew Farkas story a story?

Farkas: Since my stories are rarely about plot, I instead look for when the material has reached critical mass (as Michael Martone puts it). This is particularly the case in a piece like, “The Physics of the Bottomless Pit.” There are lots of different sections, most of which don’t connect to each other, except that they take place in a bottomless pit, or are about the bottomless pit. Once I build up all of this material, I look for the moment when it feels like I’ve explored this idea enough. Call it the Goldilocks moment. But even though there’s no real beginning-middle-end, when the story’s over, you have that satisfied sensation you get at the end of a Freytagian piece. The difference is, instead of riding the rollercoaster, you’ve been let loose in the funhouse and experienced all there was to experience there. If I’ve done my job, you look forward to going through the funhouse again.

MacLean: What makes a story an Andrew Farkas story?

Farkas: Definitely the voice. People who know me and who’ve read my work always say that they can hear my voice when they’re reading something I’ve written. People who don’t know me, but have read my writing, when they meet me, they always seem to say I sound like my writing. I think that happens for two reasons: 1) I am not at all a fan of “invisible style,” writing that works hard to make you forget about it so you only focus on the plot or characters. Plot and characters are interesting, but I want people to think about the language and the voice too. 2) When I’m writing, I constantly read my work out-loud. It isn’t done to me until I like the way it sounds from beginning to end. If I trip up at all while reading, I know I need to rewrite a sentence or a section.

MacLean: I am deeply concerned about Mr. Yang from “The City of the Sunsphere.” At this writing, what is Mr. Yang’s condition, and/or his proximity to James Agee, expressed in terms of Knoxville City Hospital room numbers?

Farkas: 42

MacLean: Can we discuss Freytag’s triangle and the obsession with classic story structure? In particular, can we find a way to undermine its dominance?

Farkas: I think the way you undermine Freytag’s dominance is by introducing people to work that doesn’t follow the triangle and hope it clicks with them. That’s what happened to me. When I was an undergrad, I had to read Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957). At the time, I hated it. I also watched Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995). I hated that too. But I’d been exposed to them. And they stuck with me. I found myself thinking about them, telling other people about them (usually how much I couldn’t stand them, though they perhaps were thinking that I, you know, doth protest too much), until finally I just had this compulsion to go back to them. Now, I love both works. And I’m really into work like Dead Man and Endgame (and pieces that fit into this outsider category). I expose my students to this kind of art all the time. One of the best compliments I ever received about my teaching was when one of my students asked if all the movies in the class were going to be weird, and before I could answer another student, who’d had me before, said, “Everything you read or watch in an Andy class is weird. But then you discuss it afterwards and it doesn’t seem so weird anymore.”

MacLean: What is your perihelion?

Farkas: Closer than you think.

MacLean: Given that your stories are structured non-traditionally, on what basis do you revise, and how do you know when a “story” is “finished”?

Farkas: Revision is actually my favorite part of writing. The most difficult thing for me to do is look at a blank page. So, at the beginning, I hate whatever it is that I’m writing because it doesn’t conform to how I see or hear the piece in my head. The worst thing for me to do, then, is to revise along the way. Unfortunately, all too often I do just that. At some point, however, I finally have to pound on my keyboard (I write on a computer mostly, with some handwritten notes on the side) until I have as many of the ideas out on the page as possible. That draft is horrid. I then print that draft out and pound on the keyboard while looking at the horrid draft, rewriting and normally adding more (though sometimes subtracting, but I find it’s mostly adding for me). I keep doing this until I get to the point where all I have to do is think about how to craft the sentences. This is my favorite part because the piece mostly looks the way I want it to look, it just doesn’t sound the way I want it to sound yet. I guess it’s rather like sculpting, if sculptors first had to collect the atoms to make marble, then they made a block of marble, and then they made the statue. I’m only exaggerating a little there. I then know the story is finished when I read through and everything sounds exactly right. Ideas and style/language are more important to me, I suppose, than plot and suspense. It’s probably no surprise that, in a culture full of people saying, “No spoilers,” I say, “Give me all the spoilers now and don’t dally.”

MacLean: “There is a way to battle the torrid world, a way to understand it. But somehow, I’m on the outside.” This line, from “Everything Under the Sunsphere,” is one of the most moving things I’ve read in a while. Why? And what is the way, for us hungry readers?

Farkas: At one point in “Everything Under,” Gene is trying to get into a shindig and he can’t find the way in. Later, when he’s describing this experience, he says he isn’t sure if he wants to be on the inside or stay on the outside. So not only is he alienated throughout the story, he has no idea what he wants. He blames the torrid world for this because as you raise the heat in a system you create more disorder. Gene thinks if the world were completely organized, then he’d know what he wants. This, of course, will never happen. But since Gene is constantly trapped in between, he’s not only alienated from society, he’s alienated from himself. Strangely, this makes it so he can battle the torrid world because the way to battle the torrid world is to be outside of everything. He’s in the ideal position, but can’t see it because he’s bought into the idea that alienation is bad. I think that’s why you find that sentence to be so moving. It’s tragic that Gene can’t see what position he has and use it for something because, in a lot of ways, the outsider is often seen as a loser. With this discussion, I also wonder if Gene might represent the position of narrative art that isn’t quite conventional.

MacLean: What is the most dangerous condition a human can contract through (accidental) contact with the Sunsphere?

Farkas: You might get proselytized by the Cult of the Great Golden Microphone. If you allow yourself to be blessed by the adherents, you will end up covered in glitter.

MacLean: What are you working on next?

Farkas: Right now, I’m working on a collection of essays called The Great Indoorsman. In each piece, I explore some indoors space (since I’m not outdoorsy at all), but I also connect my experience to something in the world. For instance, my essay, “Filk,” that appeared in The Iowa Review, is about old video rental stores, but it’s also about filk music (folk music inspired by the science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror genres) and the cult film Dark Star (1974). Just recently, 3:AM Magazine published “Wait Here?” an essay that’s a metaphysical investigation of waiting rooms.

Fake News Poems: An Enactment of the Role Art Plays In Our Bizarre Cultural Moment

On August 31, 2018, CNN anchor John Berman used a simple Radiohead lyric to punctuate one of his close-up soliloquies: “This is really happening.” Berman quoted these four words from “Idioteque,” an arguably lesser-known song from Kid A, released in the year 2000. From Thom Yorke’s pen to John Berman’s lips, the lyric is a message of reassurance and foreboding for consumers of American news.

Berman was not simply flexing his memory for alternative lyrics; he was nodding to art and its role in our culture—to filter reality; to help us see and believe the truth. Art is called to bear witness to the dystopian logic of a president who tells his followers, gathered at a rally of support, not to believe their eyes and ears, not to believe the news.

Martin Ott’s poetry book Fake News Poems – 2017 Year in Review – 52 Weeks, 52 Headlines, 52 Poems is an enactment of the role art plays in our bizarre cultural moment. Ott’s fourth collection of poetry, published by BlazeVOX Books on March 15, 2019, is a work of undeniable attention to these strange days.

The title contains Ott’s conceit. Each poem responds to one of the 52 headlines that form the table of contents. Sources are as varied as a Mondoweiss cartoon, Fox News and CNN headlines, and papers of record, including The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. The poems are arranged in weekly order throughout the year 2017.

Inventive in language and form, Ott calls the work “prose poems disassembled into verse.” The free verse lines are surprising, both muscular and flexible. They run long, then align in a block of prose, and then fall into short couplets or tercets. Ott’s use of internal rhyme is sparse and surprising. His themes are recursive, and the engaged reader can follow a theme through its fabulously dizzying course.

These poems retell, reframe, and recast the news of our world until it is as pervasive as a cockroach nesting in your skull. The cockroach appears in a Washington Post headline dated February 7, 2017, and becomes a metaphor for the “collective dread about the terrorist in our head.”

The first poem in the collection introduces a major theme of automation, inspired by a January 2 headline story on counterfeit library patrons created by renegade librarians to borrow and save beloved library books. The villain is automated book culling software, running its “tired algorithm of popularity.”

The final poem is a reconsideration of the automation theme. The hapless hero of a December 26 headline story is a man who assaults an ATM when it gives him more cash than requested, “a matter of principle and principal.”

Early in the year, the speaker recounts how librarians asserted their intellect on artificial intelligence. By the final poem, the assertion takes a more visceral and hopeless form:

There was no scenario where he would beat
the machine. It would calculate and enervate
his wealth. It would replace all his brethren
and commodify his health. Because it could
not make mistakes any fault would be his.

Between these bookend poems, the theme of automation extends to absurd stories about spying microwaves, dolls accused of espionage, and microchipped employees. The theme twists again when Mother Nature is the threat, and humans remain duty-bound to our tools, like the man mowing his lawn during a tornado, because “Grass has an agenda, / too.”

Truth in poem makes the unbelievable more believable. At least it fills a bit of the void left by the 24-hour news cycle. Either way, there is meaning to be found in these poems, from this poet, who scans the static for clear notes and reports in an unfailing, unflinching voice.

Appearing beneath the dystopian headlines, there is the speaker’s family, realigning after the fracture of divorce. The family is an artifact, alchemized through these poems. Parents vie for popularity. The children carry on with failed driver’s exams and successful basketball games, but the father fears the “pull of darkness,” found in the poignant consideration of a headline about the eclipse of August 21, 2017.

Readers of Ott’s 2013 poetry debut and De Novo prize winner Captive will be familiar with the “teenage interrogator” who appears again in Fake News Poems. These poems seem less tethered to the author’s lived experience than Ott’s earlier work, but the impulse to discover and define truth remains. Perhaps a poet, with the line’s expansive arsenal, is best equipped to interrogate the news.

There is much to appreciate in Ott’s new book, including various and unexpected takes on isolation, automation, mortality, invasion, escape, and politics. If the news is a riddle, a reflecting pool, a bunch of lies, or a hidden truth, Fake News Poems may be our best chance of making sense of it.