The Twittering Author

The particularity of a writer on Twitter: this is not People magazine’s best-dressed list or a dance competition, an improv comedy show or a submarine mission. These are words, the fodder and folly of writers and the element in which they should excel. We can only expect so much from Lindsay Lohan’s tweets, an update on her sobriety, at best. And, while, yes, Twitter was designed for just such exhilarating celebrity news, this social media is also a neatly crafted space for writers to test their wordsmithing skills. As for the metalsmith, the work becomes more difficult and more intricate with smaller objects.

Some authors — the more famous ones, mostly — have found an ease in creating public personas on Twitter. Neil Gaiman (1.6 million followers) and Margaret Atwood (270K followers) both excel at engaging with Twitter users and, essentially, being “normal,” link-sharing, retweeting people who happen to write bestselling books. These are not the Twittering authors who interest me.

No, I am interested in the lesser known. The writers I love tweet about nonsense. They tweet because it’s amusing. They tweet stories and dreams and observations that succinctly demonstrate why they write, that they must. They tweets shards of wisdom so sharp that I feel the dullness of my own tweets, and I hope that my RTs do not debase their gracefully worded morsels.

Let’s begin with the poets, who have less presence than the (always louder, longer, always clamoring) novelists. I present D.A. Powell, an award-winning poet and 2011 Guggenheim Fellow (2.2K+ followers):

@Powell_DA: I constantly doubt my vocation, even though I’m not a young nun.

@Powell_DA: Sometimes I forget my own esophagus

Powell’s last book of poetry, Chronic, garnered the following remark from critic John Freeman in the Los Angeles Times: “There are poets who show us the exterior world and poets who ferry news of their inner turmoil. Yet very few possess the double vision required to do both.” Freeman may as easily have been commenting on Powell’s Twitter account. Few writers (few anybody) have successfully used Twitter to interact with readers by exposing their vulnerabilities while maintaining a high standard of language and revelation — but Powell has. Sometimes, I, too, forget my own esophagus. The reminders of the little things, like esophagi, are exactly the gems I expect from a poet as great as Powell.

I would not be surprised to read either of these tweets in one of Powell’s poems. The former, a confession of doubt despite success, both reveals the poet as a real person — the tweet received 4 replies and over 10 retweets — and, in characteristic cheekiness, reiterates his cleverness as Powell turns only 64 characters into a commentary on life choices.

Enter Arda Collins (350+ followers), a young poet whose less prolific Twitter account nonetheless offers up:

@ardacollins: Vespers at Target.

@ardacollins: I just went into my toolbox and took out a hammer and I have no idea why. In a parallel universe I am doing something w. a hammer now.

In Collin’s first book of poetry, It Is Daylight (a Yale Series of Younger Poets winner), she excels at creating just the same unsettling dichotomies, a world (or a parallel one) that is both trivial and inexplicably captivating. What would Vespers at Target be like, I wonder — the combination of America’s religious past and consumerist future? In only 18characters, Collins conjures a wholly original scene that teems with images and sounds embedded in the readers’ memories, or, at least, in their imaginings of Target and vespers. I can see the choir in front of the lawn furniture, can smell the glowing scented candles.

And have we not all retrieved our hammers, our fountain pens, a roll of cellophane, and promptly forgotten why? Give a poet the chance, and she will create a new universe to explain our actions.

Will 140 characters ever be enough to tell a story? Probably not, but the poets, at least, have long found solace in compressed images and simple but weighty strings of words. Enjoy Collins and Powell, but when the tweets tease you or leave you with a lack, read their books.

*

In the next installment on tweeting writers: the unconquerable Blake Butler gives me pleasurable headaches, and Ben Greenman writes a lot of puns. . . .

Joe Wenderoth's No Real Light

I don’t get to read much anymore; or, when I do, it’s more often scholarly texts such as this. This is all fine and good until I can complete my doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition, which will enable me to find a job somewhere far far away and buy loads of nail buffers.

Still, as a non-academic academic, there is a cultivated divorce in me, and I miss my people — the first time I walked into a Borders (ha) after my initial PhD semester and picked up a poetry collection, I actually wept.

Recently, though, I hid under my pink desk and found Joe Wenderoth’s collection No Real Light (Wave Books, 2007.) Wenderoth is best known for his Letters to Wendy’s(Wave Books, 2000), which sold a legendary fuckton of copies and contains things about thick drinks and meat all like:

May 20, 1997

I’d like to have my muscles removed. Resume the inanimate. Wendy’s allows me to extract myself from the retarded narcissism of animal thrivings. I sit still in a warm booth and get thought. All movement wants, in the end is stillness. The animate is just the failure of movement to get what it wants — one sleeping body. The road to heaven is paved with meat: the road to meat is not paved at all.

Reading No Real Light is a different experience. Rather than being flashy miraculous as Letters to Wendy’s can be, this book gently and quietly peels the skin from the face in layers. You don’t even know. Given my schooling, I found this particular piece wildly appropriate:

 Advice To The Dissertator

Quit the brilliant dream plot and stand on knives
until all the god-costumes have been lost
and hang in Museums.
Exercise, then, upon the Museum Grounds,
knowing more or less what hangs inside
and why.

And on the nights when you can’t sleep and I can’t sleep and you’re all appetite or lack and my my, whose house is this that you’re living in, poems like “Luck” will save your ass with pretty screaming and you will be grateful. Really. Just get to it:

Luck

So a screaming woke you
just in time.
An animal’s scream, or animals’.
What kind of animal it was
doesn’t matter, and cannot,
in any case, be determined.
The point is you are saved.
Your mouth has been opened.

Heather Aimee O'Neill's Memory Future

I started reading Memory Future when I was moving out, in between packing boxes. I’d reward myself with a poem or two, until packing boxes became me, sitting on my air mattress, reading the opening poem, “Certainty,” over and over. The poem begins like this:

“Jess would ask Lewis Carroll for a word
for word translation of Jabberwocky

or Buffalo Bill where he hid the gold.
Laure-Anne would ask Mary Magdalene

if she and Christ were lovers.
Anthony would ask Him:

Will you help me?”

Will you help me? I read, again and again. To say that I felt understood would be an understatement. I felt comforted by these words, but at the same time, I felt unsettled, unsafe. And there is a realness to that emotional tug-of-war I appreciate.

*

I kept this book with me after I moved out, too.

I kept it with me while traveling through California, New Mexico.

In a way, these poems became part of me. Of course everything you read becomes part of you in some way in that it affects you, but there are few books out there I consider friends.

Memory Future came into my life at a time I needed it most, when I was traveling West, traveling alone. I left Orlando to find a home within myself, to be able to understand how to use my sadness and anger to create happiness. Whenever I felt alone in my emotions, I’d pick up Memory Future and read from it, and it felt like the person I always needed was there, listening to me. I remember reading “From the Platform” while I was on a train to New Mexico:

“But you look straight ahead into

the dark lines of the tunnel,
book resting on your lap, eyes
full of the hazel green in your scarf.

You could live without me.”

It hurts, accepting this “living without.” And that’s what I love about O’Neill’s poetry the most, the pain that comes forth through her strong, declarative language. Her language is muscular, but also flexible. She delves into the love present in all stages of life, from childhood to adulthood, and she depicts this love in a way where happiness and sadness rely on each other. Both can be heavy, harsh.

“Living without” can be especially harsh. But there is a freedom there, in that without.

*

I am back in Florida, now, trying to re-invent my idea of home again, from the inside (of the body) out (beyond the yard, the fence, the road).

I still keep Memory Future in my handbag, knowing those words are still there if I need them.

Today I looked to “Winter in Spain” for assurance in my belief that travel can help heal, that home is bigger than what we see, that home encompasses not only space, but time. That partnership is not enough to build a home, and neither is travel. Something else needs to be present alongside these things. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s beautiful.

“. . . We talk and light a cigarette,
because we can, until the quick collapse
of poles and planks and us and we begin
again. I press her hand to mine and watch.”

Tango Sweet and Slow: Patrick Rosal's Boneshepherds

I jokingly refer to Patrick Rosal as my doppelgänger. I was attending the AWP Conference in Austin, TX back in 2006, when a woman walked up to me and praised me for my reading. It was clearly a great reading because she was absolutely thrilled to have spotted me idly walking up and down the book fair rows in the convention center. She kept tugging at my shirt like she was going to rip it off of me and she kept staring at my name tag. Then someone else congratulated me on a great reading. Then another person. And another. Of course, I wasn't the reader they were congratulating. Patrick Rosal had apparently given a reading for Persea Books and what I was being congratulated for was all his doing. This has happened to me many times since then.

One particularly memorable instance was when poet Jericho Brown asked me if I still danced. I had no idea what he was talking about until I recalled a video I had seen on YouTube of Patrick and Ross Gay dancing in sync during one of Patrick's visits to Bloomington, IN. Ross and Patrick kick and slide in unison, smiling, clapping, and laughing as the music plays.

Patrick Rosal is a mighty talented person -- I've seen him elicit oohs and ahhs from an attendant audience, and I've seen him make people cry during his readings. I've seen him play a guitar, play the piano, sing, and yes, dance.

Even though I'm often mistaken for Patrick, it's one of those mistakes I gratefully embrace because I think his poetic work is marvelous and such is the case for his third book and latest poetic offering, Boneshepherds (Persea Books 2011). What strikes me about this collection is how skillfully the poems navigate between despair and love, between violence and music, between loss and transcendence. Such an undertaking requires skill -- to reign in the terrible and the joyful. Boneshepherds then, performs a tango of the greatest magnitude. The book is a dance of conflicts -- where the dancer who leads and the dancer who follows embrace closely and move in graceful syncopation. Where the sum of the two create such a beautiful movement.

Indeed, Patrick Rosal is a deft dance partner, offering readers his arm as he leads. Boneshepherds is organized in five sections with poems bookending each section. Imagine each section to be an act and for each act, the poems collectively dance to an orchestration with notes similar to those of the other sections. The poems that reside outside of the sections are the musical dance numbers that serve as a transition into other sections. I understand that I'm describing the book clumsily here, but it's useful to think of this book as a compilation of five dramatic dance numbers with shorter dances serving as transitional elements. They're poems that put the reader in a position to move. The book's first poem, "Boneshepherds' Lament" offers a primer as to how Patrick moves between conflicts. The poem opens with a grim tale:

A boy who played Chopin for my parents one afternoon
led another boy to the woods and hacked him in the neck
forty-two times with a knife
hoping squirrels would run off with the skull.

In the next stanza, the poem leaps to a lesson during the speaker's childhood:

When the fat-fisted teachers of my childhood spoke,
they told us the soul's ushered finally
to some bright space beyond a grand entry
where anonymity is a kind of wealth.

And in the following stanza, the synthesis of the two ideas generates the speaker's action:

So I aspired to be nameless and eternal
until the day I got enough balls to tell
those nuns and brothers in baggy cassocks
to go to hell, and in doing so, I was really committing them
to perpetual memory, the inferno being a place
where one's name is never forgotten.

In such aspirations, such commitments, we the readers are the beneficiaries. The poems that seed the pages of Boneshepherds are filled with memories and observations of mayhem and violence, but also joyful remembrances. We follow Patrick's footsteps and are rewarded by where his dance has taken us across the ballroom floor. As the first poem, "Boneshepherd's Lament" establishes the steps and the rhythm of the book.  The interplay between the two is the space where the speaker's hope for transcendence occurs. In this particular poem, the speaker finally reconciles despair with art as he examines a painting by Goya and observes:

In the far background, on a hill, a single figure of ash
appears to raise both hands, the human pose of victory
and surrender, and maybe what Goya wants us to see
from this distance aren't arms flung up -- but wings: an angel
waiting to transport the grave bodies off the battlefield,
over the bright hill where he stands,
where no one will see them in good light.

What is recognizable in the poems that populate Boneshepherds is that each poem is part of a precarious encounter between the haunted past and a joyful present. Patrick's speaker is constantly attempting to determine which idea leads and which idea follows.

As I mentioned, there are moments of exquisite joy in the book. One of the most endearing images from Boneshepherds is found in the poem "Tamarind," where the speaker, feasting on tamarinds with his cousin, Joseph, plucks a rotten tamarind and:

. . . a mass of ants [had] hollowed out
the tamarind and left its dry, fragile husk
intact, until I crush it open and set loose a delicate
rivulet of dark red running up my trigger finger and thumb,
swarming now my wrist, splintering several swift paths
around my elbow, a thin sleeve of fire writhing
around my forearm. I stomp both feet hard
to shake the critters free. Joseph, by now, has lost his mind,
laughing, and I've lost all good sense too.

The joy of the image is deeply personal for me. I can imagine Patrick jumping up and down frantically trying to shake free of the ants. I can imagine his face, a mixture of fear and glee. Such an image fills me with gratitude for the poet's generosity and humility, allowing himself to be rendered in ridiculous terms. Yet he maintains his poetic stance as he writes ". . . Today, I'm grateful / to dance beneath a tamarind tree / beside a two-bit assassin instead of the woman I adore." Even in the presence of maddening and ecstatic joy, there's the understanding that both joy and loss are engaged in their own dance.

I've revisited Boneshepherds several times since receiving the book and I'm struck by its resonating pleasure. It is a richly attendant book -- it is present. In Patrick's musical world, the poems hold us in a spiritual, emotional, and visceral embrace. In such an embrace, we are consoled. We understand, as Patrick tells us in "A Tradition of Pianos," that "in order to make Great Art, . . . we all, / at one time or another, suffer terribly . . . , / so we have music. . . ." The music of Patrick Rosal's Boneshepherds moves us to dance. Hold the poems close to your chest. Close the space between you and his words. Allow the words to move you across the floor. You'll be thrilled with where they take you.

A Conversation with Dorothea Lasky

When we asked Dorothea Lasky for five books that were similar to Black Life, her second collection of poetry from Wave Books, she immediately mentioned the late, great Biggie Smalls. As a native New Yorker and obsessive hip-hop fan, I felt like I needed to get to the bottom of this. I sat down with Dottie for a couple of minutes and asked her a couple questions about the black Frank White.

* * *

Mark Cugini: First and foremost, I think it’s worth mentioning that you said if someone liked Black Life, they’d probably like Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death. I couldn’t agree more, but I’m sort of curious — how do you think they’re similar?

Dorothea Lasky: I would say the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die is more like Black Lifethan Life After Death. Life After Death, for me, is more like my next book, Thunderbird. Nevertheless, Black Life is indebted to Biggie’s album because in both the speaker is a “Born sinner, the opposite of a winner.” And also, in both, the speakers give you the sense (I hope) that it was not a choice to be so, but more a condition thrust upon them by life itself. On a formal level, I am interested in how Biggie folds all kinds of language and voices (some so not his own that they can’t help but become so) into short, clipping lines. They have a casual air, but of course, they couldn’t be farther from casual if they tried. The essence of coolness.

MC: Oh, ok, that makes a lot more sense — especially the “born sinner” line. Not to get too liberal-arts-school here, but Biggie was raised by a single mother in a low-income neighborhood that was overrun with gang violence and drug use. I do think it’s obvious that the speaker in Black Life was thrust into situations where she lacked control, but those are instances of a different nature: it seems as if she’s addressing interpersonal relationships instead of class issues. If that’s the case, how does it end up that both speakers end up with such swagger? Does it maybe have something to do with owning their personal tragedies?

DL: Thanks for saying that about swagger! What an important word for what we are talking about. Of course, content and the socioeconomic background of poets affect how they craft their personae and what those voices say. I do think, however, that class issues and interpersonal ones are inextricable. Class is rife with everything we do and vice versa. Biggie, to me, is like any poet who takes pieces of life and weaves it into his work. He includes the people he meets and how these people affect him and what they say. I think this is where swagger comes from. It is the craft, the skill, the flow, that connects all of us as poets. The ability to take the muck of the everyday and make it beautiful.

MC: I completely share that sentiment about Biggie, and I think you’re absolutely right. Let’s talk a little bit about where your swagger is coming from: one of the threads that runs through Black Life is the deteriorating (mental?) health of the narrator’s father. Is this something that you had to were pulling from your own experiences? Do you think that makes your swagger similar or different to Biggie’s, and in which ways?

DL: A lot of the experiences in Black Life are from my own personal experience and I think this is like Biggie. But isn’t that true for all poetry? Or all writing and all art? Or all thought? Science is a set of ideas made by people. What poem isn’t at least in part based on the poet’s personal experience, even when we know that I in a poem is not always the I of the poet? I as a person haven’t done everything in the exact way the I in my poems does things, but he/she/it still comes from me. The mask is there on the face of the poet with the reading of the poem, but the eye come through however disfigured and distant the costume.  I don’t know, just yesterday I visited a friend’s poetry class and one of the wonderful students there asked if I ever felt embarrassed by the personal details I put in my poems. I told her that I wasn’t embarrassed, because for the most part there was a lot of mediation and craft there — a lot of control. Maybe the control has to do with swagger. To feel the pain or joy and hold it transfixed. To transfix a reader with the dead emotion, somehow alive and always alive with the listening/reading. That’s how I feel when I listen to Biggie. When I hear his voice, I know he is in some way still alive. Do you think this has to do with swagger, too?

MC: Oh, totally. It’s funny, I was listening to “Things Done Changed” (my favorite “first-song-on-an-album” in hip-hop history) and the last line of that song is “my momma’s got cancer on her breast / don’t ask me why I’m motherfucking stressed.” I always found that to be such a beautiful deviation: rappers are supposed to be cocky and full of bravado, yet here’s this incredible admission of weakness and self-consciousness. Do you think that’s the definitive difference between rappers and poets — that rappers are supposed to control this concept of “swagger,” while poets are taught to operate within their self-consciousness?

DL: That is probably my favorite Biggie line ever. That and “Girls used to diss me / Now they write letters ’cause they miss me.” The way he wraps the rhyme around to give us something so sweet and sad. I think that the admission of weakness and self-consciousness amidst swagger is what makes rappers and poets the same. There might be some places where we are taught to operate differently, but when we are writing poems, we operate language for exactly the same purpose. And I think that whatever places there are that make us feel as if we are not doing the same thing should be obliterated.

MC: If Black Life is Ready to Die and your next book is Life After Death, does that mean Puff Daddy is going to take all the poems you’ve cut and make a Reborn album? If so, is there anything I can do to prevent that from happening?

DL: If there is anything we can do to *make* this happen, then I would be very happy. He is a saint that Puffy.

Scary, No Scary Is Cleverly Costumed As A Hostess Cupcake

In fact, for the purposes of this metaphor, it is a Hostess cupcake. Out of the package, it presents itself as a gaudy, misshapen darkness, but it smells great and goes well with a cup of coffee. Its ingredients have familiar names, but it’s only a “cupcake” insofar as it invents its own vocabulary out of words we already know.

The collection is appended by an index of subjects, beginning with “Bats” and ending with “World, the.” The index serves as a catalog of recurring images and scenarios that aggregate layers of intrigue as the book progresses, as Schomburg constructs new worlds out of raw memory.

These worlds are bound by their own rules. The chair age precedes the table age, and so there is no table setting; the pond is inescapable with only one paddle; if there is a black hole present, someone will be pushed in without the slightest hesitation.

Scary, No Scary may be read either way.  Schomburg’s verse is always playful, and always deadly serious: “If we stand still long enough / a gigantic meteorite / will crash into our skulls and kill us.”

The paperback edition of Scary, No Scary has a single pitch-black page inside the front cover and immediately before the back cover, and the title poem invites the reader into a haunted house. The poems inside speak to intense loneliness, violence, and destruction, but they are also about love, simple kindness, and building boats out of eyelashes. The oppressive black exterior belies the complex nature of the white cream filling: there is careful nuance to the undeniably alluring flavor at the center of this foreboding cupcake.

A collection of quirky, surreal poems is fine. A collection of surreal poems as sincere, clever, and modest as these is remarkable. In three sections, Schomburg demonstrates his deft mastery of the well-wrought lyric sequence. The first time you see a hummingbird or a black hole, it’s charming.  The second time, these images have become touchstones in the midst of a strange mythology unnervingly oblivious to any distinction between the supernatural and the everyday. There is an extent to which anything is possible in these pages, but this strangeness is always tempered by honest-to-god humanity, which is utterly terrifying if you happened to choose “scary.”

Scary, No Scary is a wonderful book to have on your shelf, and an even better book to pull off and read while the spirits of the dead are rising from their graves. If you’ve missed a trip to a haunted house this season that’s OK, because this book is better. It’s immediately readable, hilarious and harrowing. It’s surreal and it all makes perfect sense. Read this book. When you do, when the hunched, old man invites you inside and gives you the choice, choose “no scary.” You’ll be glad you did.

Assorted Thoughts On Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me

-Mark Leidner is intensely clever.  This book is so dense with new ideas, so full of surprising juxtapositions that it puts many of the other books on my shelves to shame.

-These poems appreciate eloquence, but they understand that miscommunication is inevitable.

-The town I grew up in had woods and streams and swamps.  Reading this book reminds me of all the exploring I did as a little kid, mostly alone.

-While this book is, in many ways, a reflection of modern America, I’m sure that I’ll reread it in twenty years and love it just as much.

-These poems aren’t afraid of offending us.  They reflect the full spectrum of the real world; why can’t the most gentle man on the whole planet have a pedophile for a neighbor?

-Can a poem be socially awkward?  Awkwardly social?

-A sympathetic narrator ought to have doubts, regrets, shortcomings, etc.  I’m not looking for poems that claim to have all the answers.

-How many poets can write about sex without it feeling gratuitous or melodramatic?

-If I wanted to prove to a non-poetry reader that poetry is alive and well, I’d feel confident that this book could get the job done.

-It’s not easy to be funny.  Poetry that tries to be funny usually falls flat.  Leidner has a real gift, an effortless deadpan that makes his poems uncomfortable to read at times.  He’s got to be kidding.  He says he’s not kidding.

-Is it possible that someone could be content after reading the following two excerpts from “Romantic Comedies” and not feel the urge to read the rest of the poem, the rest of the book?

Everyone in his life has drowned and he hates dogs and she’s a collegiate swimming coach with a thousand dogs.

He is Norway but she is holding out for infinite fjords.