Fluid and Logical but Certainly Not Predictable: A Review of Timothy Stobierski's Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer

I think it is natural when a publisher accepts a book of yours for publication to become curious about who else they have published. The other books they have published tells you something, if nothing else something about your work. That’s what originally got me interested in Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer by Timothy Stobierski, River Otter Press had accepted my book, Bones Buried in the Dirt, for publication in January . . . but Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer was the first book River Otter Press ever published.

Now, the first thing I would like to say is that I really ended up enjoying this book of poems. I found the writing to be very approachable. That may not be a big deal for some of you, but I’m not exactly a poetry scholar. I like reading poetry, but I haven’t devoted the same kind of rigor to its study that I have to fiction. Really, I just like being able to pick it up and enjoy.  And, though the poems in this collection are skillfully composed, they still just let me sit back and enjoy.

When he was a young boy,
there was one promise he made
to himself, the same promise
that you made, that I made, that she made.

(from “Remembering”)

One aspect I enjoyed about this collection was the variety. Some of the poems possess simple and straightforward, honest emotion. This can be seen in this selection from “In the Maternity Ward”:

He can’t help it,
sniffs the newborn’s head;
there’s a slight smell of sweet musk—
fresh peached in spring.
His lips graze the child’s scalp,
nuzzle the vernal pelt.
How soft the flesh,
so prone to bruising;
it must be cradled,
tended with care—
but he’s a big man,
and the child is so small.

Others have such surprising twists and turns that it is delightful just to follow the flow of Stobierski’s mind. It’s an interesting mind, fluid and logical but certainly not predictable, as this bit from “Gastronomica” illustrates:

My girlfriend puts her heart and soul
into everything she cooks,
and it’s nice to know she loves me enough
to tear out those essentials and share—
don’t get me wrong—
but I don’t think she realizes just how chewy valves can be,
or how difficult it is to eat a waffled soul,
however much syrup is applied.

Some of the poems have humor, and some are softly dark. Some are strange, but some have a resonating simplicity. All together, these poems span an impressive range. Whatever you are looking for, it’s probably here. And, more importantly, along the way you will likely find things you should have been looking for without knowing that you should have.

Now, I do admit that poetry isn’t my first love. In fact, I often read it in secret so I can just enjoy the poems and not let anyone know that I’m not an expert. Regardless, I do read it and I do read enough to know what I like. That’s all I really needed to know for Chronicles of a Bee Whisperer, and that’s all I need to know to know that I like it.

An Interview with Matthew Dickman

MATTHEW SHERLING: What is your favorite meal & why?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: One of my favorite meals is a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. My twin brother, Michael Dickman, and fellow poet Carl Adamshick used to order that classic at a wonderful bar in Portland called Cassidy’s when Carl worked downtown . . . it is a perfect meal!

MS: What is currently your favorite album?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: My favorite album right now is 10,000 Maniacs “In My Tribe” (don’t judge me!).

MS: If you could wrap up your worldview in one sentence, what would it be?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: Worldview (at the moment) = “Lispector”

MS: How long have you been writing poetry and what draws you toward it?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: I have been writing poetry since High School. That’s about twenty years. One of the things that draws me to poetry is that through poetry (through art) I better understand myself, I better understand the world I live in. It’s also fucking awesome making something out of nothing! When we sit down (or stand up!) with a pen and a blank page it’s one of the only moments when we are absolutely free.

MS: That’s a powerful way to look at the practice of art. Can you describe your process when constructing a poem? How much editing / spontaneity is involved?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: Years ago, when writing poems, I would have complete control over the moment of a first draft. That is to say I would think of something to write about, do some research, and then write. Now it’s a more reckless experience. I sit down and begin to write with, often, no idea of what will be written. I’m moved to make something. I’m in love or sad or hopeful or have had too much coffee and so I want to let it out. What happens feels up to the moment. After that I redraft, I share it with friends and listen to what they have to say. Some poems go through numerous drafts. Others only one or two. The spontaneity is in deciding to build a boat. The editing is making sure the boat will actually sail. Though sinking sometimes feels good too!

Are there any poets who particularly inspire(d) you now or when you first got into the craft?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: YES!

Andre Breton
Dorianne Laux
Joseph Millar
Marie Howe
Yusef Komunyakaa
Dorothea Lasky
Pedro Mir
Diane Wakoski
Eileen Myles
Frank O’Hara
Bob Kaufman
Anthony McCann
Dunya Mikhail (sp?)

…to name only a couple that comes to mind today while the sun falls and night walks into Portland, Oregon…

MS: Cool! Your work seems to be considerably accessible. Is this something you shoot for? also, what is it that draws you to more ‘surrealist’ writers Breton and Haufman?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: I think the only thing I shoot for when writing is something that engages me. Of course it might not engage anyone else! Also, I believe all art is accessible, expecially if you accept a certain amount of mystery in your life…Writers like Breton and Kaufman remind me that the landscape of poetry is not the landscape of earth with fences and continents but outer space… way outer space!

MS: Can you say a bit more about your use of ‘landscape’? Also, how do you feel about ‘Objectivist’ or ‘Imagist’ poets who place heightened emphasis on the ‘thing itself’ // the “real”?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: Landscapes, for millions of years, have been both inner and outer (like belly buttons!) and our inner-landscapes affect the outer-landscapes we walk around on–as does our physical environment affect our emotional environment. Sometimes I can’t tell the two apart. The “thing itself” is never, of course, actually the “thing itself” once it’s placed into a poem or another piece of art. It has been translated, managed, slightly tuned to another frequency. A choice has been made by an entity outside of the “thing” or the “real” object removing that object from it’s (let’s say) first truth and placing it in another truth… the truth of the meaning-making artist using it or applying it in some way or another to her work.

MS: Can you tell us about your current project?

MATTHEW DICKMAN: I have a new book out this month, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, and am working on a chapbook with the poet Julia Cohen. The poems in the chapbook came out of seven days of writing together in Brooklyn. The writing based on questions we asked each other and random words.

One Can Feel His Presence and Hear His Voice: On Kathleen Rooney's Robinson Alone

In 1955, Weldon Kees — poet, filmmaker, musician, and artist — disappeared. His car was found on the Golden Gate Bridge. Kees’ body has yet to be found, but one can still feel his presence and hear his voice in Robinson Alone, a novel-in-poems written by Kathleen Rooney.

Rooney spent ten years working on the collection, as evidenced by its historical and biographical detail. Interspersed are snippets of poems, letters, and popular advertisement jingles:

A peach looks good

                                                            with lots

                                                of fuzz

                                    but man’s no peach

                        and never was

            Burma Shave

However, equally impressive is the collection’s skillful musicality and the complete picture Rooney paints of Robinson’s complex and contradictory interior life: his desperation to leave the Midwest and his disillusioned view of the city; his love for his wife and his growing frustration with her drinking; his haunting despair and his nagging dream of escaping into a bright new life:

Aware that to be a functional human being means
to deny death, but having lately suffered a loss

of interest in that fact, Robinson has taken to staying
inside — curtains drawn, phone off the hook.

Who was Robinson really? And whatever has become of him? In this collection, Rooney provides proof that “poetry” and “page-turner” can mutually exist, and that the best books don’t “set the score straight.”

They set our unanswerable questions to music.

A Kind of Mechanized Urban Decadence: On Johannes Göransson’s Pilot

Johannes Göransson’s Pilot (“Johann the Carousel Horse”), written in nearly equal parts English and Swedish, is a curiously named book.  The “Pilot” to which the title makes reference remains obscure, and the subtitle doesn’t (at first) seem to be of much help either. The poem entitled “Johann the carousel horse” is left blank. It appears to have a counterpart-poem, written in Swedish, called “Johannes Karusesellen,” but this leaves any Anglophone intent on puzzling out what to make of the book’s title stuck pondering the half-comprehensible Swedish of Johannes Karussellen.

In a sense though, this Case of the Missing Carousel Horse acts as a signpost for how to read this book: paying careful attention to the “other language” in this bilingual collection offers enormous rewards, even for those of us (most of us) without a lick of Swedish.

When I say you don’t really need to know Swedish to engage with the Swedish poems, I really do mean it. Take the first few lines of “Mjukstycket om att skära” (Google renders this as “Smooth passage of the cut”) and its English counterpart “A soft cut about spasms:”

Vi lär oss blindskrift
skriver ett brev till
presidenten grisar ut
retoriken detta är lyxkött

We learn braille
write a letter to
the president pig
out rhetoric this
is luxury meats

It doesn’t take much in the way of language-learning chops to get from “Vi lär oss blindskrift” to “We learn (us) braille (blindscript),” and in the process of puzzling this out the Swedish comes to look like English in a fun-house mirror, and vice versa. But these poems don’t ultimately behave the way poems in “translation” are supposed to behave, each facing the other quietly from either end of the recto / verso divide like Korean soldiers at the DMZ.

The Swedish and English poems in Pilot do much more than simply mirror each other. Swedish poems cross-pollinate with English poems and vice versa, such that adjacent poems behave less like mirror-images and more like pairs of chromosomes: counterpart poems don’t so much reflect each other so much as copulate. English poems take Swedish titles, poems in both languages borrow freely from the lexicon of the other, and the English poems, at least, seem to have been “infected” by some of the linguistic habits of the Swedish. The relentlessly concussive rhythm of these poems, appropriate to a book that concerns itself so frequently with “pounding,” “banging” and “cramming,” is aided in part by Göransson’s fondness for smuggling in Swedish-style compound neologisms into the English poems — see such poem titles as “Pig the losangelessoft mouth” or “Throughthronged and expensive.”

Ultimately the poems resulting from this all of this linguistic meiosis make for a swirling “carousel” of repeated phrases, motifs, and images, simultaneously evoking fecundity, decay, sexuality, violence and a kind of mechanized urban decadence. If that sounds like a lot, it is, but it’s really all there, over and over again. To pick an arbitrary example:

Technological transcendence

The shellshock will pearl
apart megaphones as tourist
catastrophies bang
on hospital dance floor
while los angeles
confetties in front
crameras hurt
in front the imperial
imagery depict a wound
seduction of a part
that cannot bloat

The poems in Pilot return again and again to these motifs, all of which (decay, death, sex, fecundity, urban decadence) represent or enact states of transition. Pilot lingers in these throbbing transitional spaces, just as it lingers in the space between English and Swedish, turning each poem into a kind of orgiastic, bilingual  “Threshold party,” unleashing and enacting a set of processes equally and invested in procreation and necrosis. Pilot is a living carousel, a linguistic swarm, a “losangelessoft” explosion of pearls, meat, and television; it is, finally, a bass-heavy “Exaggeration music” fit for the times in which we live.

A Place that Feels Divorced from a Sense of Home

Cityscapes, curated and edited by Jacob Steinberg, is an ambitious project. It aims to gain the perspective of an impressive amount of writers located in major cites not only in the US but around the world. I know that Jacob has lived in various places throughout his life and has recently made the transition from New York to Argentina. I feel like this contextualizes the project as a subject of not only intrigue but of personal importance. I believe that identity and place are inextricably linked and form almost a feedback loop unto each other. Place shapes identity and identity shapes your perception of your surroundings.

Within the context of new media and the Internet I feel as if one can adopt an almost global identity and feel connected to places and ideas that are divorced from one’s current surroundings. For example, a specific style has formed around new ideas of what literature is and what it can become. Some have called this culture ‘alt lit’ and others feel aversion to that moniker. Jacob’s project was originally titled ‘alt lit cityscapes’ but in the process of working with the diverse styles and viewpoints of contributors it was simply called ‘cityscapes’ in the end. However, whatever one wants to call the online literature scene there are discernable patterns of a homogenous viewpoint. Many writers in this ‘community’ experience similar feelings of alienation from their ‘irl’ surroundings and have sought out the Internet as their surrogate ‘cityscape.’

In Mira Gonzalez’s piece, ‘palm trees are not native to los angeles’ I feel as if she explores the disconnect between her city and her person, in terms of spatial relationship between herself, both internally and literally, in her external surroundings. Taking the title as a metaphor I feel like it expresses her alienation from Los Angeles. The feeling of being ‘out of place’ even though, if I recall correctly, she is a Los Angeles native. I feel like this piece really speaks to the alienation one can feel when confronted with the vastness of everything compared to one’s minor role within it. Mira writes:

lying on the sidewalk

on venice boulevard

i am able to perceive this
inconceivably large distance
between myself and the street

i am trying to become
two squares of cement

i am one fraction of the pacific ocean
compared to me everything is enormous

. . .

i am one unit of matter
moving through time
at this incredible pace

I like the imagery that is created in this poem. I imagine Mira lying on the sidewalk, almost comically, as other people that are also ‘moving through time at this incredible pace’ pass her by. I Imagine her trying to desperately feel a connection to her city, a connection to anything. Physically she is as close as she can be to her city, trying to join with the concrete, but she is not able to feel a connection mentally. She is somewhere far away. The poem then shifts. Because she feels unable to connect internally with her city she focuses on external, tangible, and objective things. ‘It is going to be 73 degrees today’ she writes without any implication of how she feels about that fact. It is just fact about her city, disconnected from any emotion of affection towards it.

In Megan Lent’s short story she expresses a different perception of Los Angeles. I really like the contrast between her piece and Mira’s piece. I feel like it highlights the subjectivity of experience and how your surroundings can either feel alienating or comforting or sometimes both. Megan expresses nostalgia for Los Angeles that is connected to memories and experiences that have been positive and also influential in the construction of self. She writes about ‘the best parts of Los Angeles’ through short vignettes that make up her perception of Los Angeles.

. . .[T]he ocean. The sky above it. The end of historic Route 66” sign. A blind man playing saxophone. Your best friend standing under the pier. Someone you love walking down the sand with you late at night… A painting that is all in shades of red that looks just like your hair and probably your heart… [A]nd you recognize that you are here, in this city, under this layer of smog, and stars, yes, you are here.

I enjoyed M. Kitchell’s contribution to this project. His piece is a series of webcam photos taken in ‘every place i’ve lived in since moving to san francisco a year ago.’ If I am discerning this correctly, I believe that this piece is showing different living situations within San Francisco. I liked how it shows the transient nature of trying to establish yourself in a new and unfamiliar place.

I particularly liked how Carolyn DeCarlo’s piece, much like Megan Lent’s, focused on not how the specific geography defines a place but how personal experiences and interactions with the people that you meet within the place are what shapes your perception of the city. She writes about the context of place in relation to a certain experience that she had while in a particular place. My favorite lines are

What I’ll miss is
your mouth full of donut
on a bench in Dupont Circle

The lines seem funny and sentimental and not dependent on place. ‘Dupont Circle’ could easily be replaced with any other location but the affection that Carolyn feels for the moment that occurred on Dupont Circle creates affection for Dupont Circle itself.

I liked Noah Cicero’s poems about living  in Korea. I found it interested and felt fascinated while reading about people’s subjective experiences in countries outside the United States. I liked the juxtaposition of the perspectives of writers that were natives of country with writers that were foreign transplants. I like how Noah writes in plain language, directly expressing his negative feelings about moving to a place that feels divorced from a sense of home. Noah writes:

I don’t like Koreans
I’m from Brooklyn
none
of the Korean
girls fuck with me

so I write this poem

I like the idea of using poetry as a form of expression to relieve feelings of alienation; To try to relate what is inside your head to the heads of other people. It feels difficult to do that when we are distinct bodies, and it is especially a challenge if there is a language barrier on top of the difficulty of trying to get people to understand what you are feeling.

I like how Noah’s second poem deals with a relatively positive encounter that he had with someone in Korea. I feel like the poem expresses a connection and exchange of ideas that directly affected Noah and his perception:

I tell another foreigner
that I enjoy eating
paris baguette for lunch

he respnds
that he has been to paris
and paris bagutte
doesn’t match the power of
french bread

. . .

I believed in the purity of  his words
I never went to paris baguette again

I’ve noticed these same sentiments being expressed in many different pieces throughout the publication. I like that people feel that human connection [or lack thereof] is what makes something seem good or bad to them.

This is a ‘long-ass’ publication at 290 pages and ideally I would like to discuss every piece in depth because they each feel special, personal, and different, perspective-wise. However, I feel like a ‘long-ass’ review would gradually lose the attention of you, the reader, and consist of me repeating myself a lot.

I highly recommend reading through the Cityscapes collection in its entirety. Overall, I would say that one of the most valuable things that I have gained from reading this publication is reflection on my own city and how I relate to it. I live in Woodbridge, VA, which is basically a city that people pass by to go to DC or Baltimore or any place other than Woodbridge, VA. I don’t feel a strong affinity for my city but since my external world is lacking in the things that I would want from a city I feel like I have immersed myself in a wonderful online community that I would consider my true ‘cityscape.’ There are many people in this issue that I have interacted with formed connections with online that feel just as dear to me as any ‘real life’ interaction. In my opinion, a conception of place has less to do with specific geography and more to do with the people that you chose to interact with. Anything and any place can become your city, regardless of physical location.

An Interview with J.P. Dancing Bear

KMA Sullivan: Recently I had the very good fortune to talk with J.P. Dancing Bear about his new collection Family of Marsupial Centaurs released by Iris Press. This mesmerizing collection of poems originally emerged from a desire to respond to friends on their birthdays and grew to a year-long project producing over 1400 pieces that offer a gifted poet’s integration of visual art, biographical information, and personal remembrance. Let’s take a look at the work and a few of Bear’s thoughts on the collection.

Saint HelenaAugust 10

you hear  the voice of  Federico Garcia Lorca  weeping: in every guitar: which are always of two minds: one searching for the strumming hands of a musician: the other desiring to  sing for everyone: and  does not care if it is discovered by the clumsy feet of a Galapagos turtle: which reminds you of Napoleon Bonaparte: in exile: where he took to standing on the back of a turtle: (one sailors had brought to solve the entire loneness of the Atlantic Ocean): because the turtle was so adept at ravaging the emperor’s vegetable garden: Napoleon had finally reached a compromise with something: he rode standing on the shelled back: in windswept mornings: hand in vest: reading the great philosophers: to his reptilian companion: at night: after the turtle would eclipse in heavy underbrush: then trundle over to forage the garden: the emperor would weep: having lost everything: again: even the slow moving turtle moon: with its wide O-mouth: mimicking the singing face: of a weeping guitar

 —for Mark Doty

KMA Sullivan: I have to tell you that because you are the only person I know who I address as “Bear” and because you show up in my email as “Dancing,” I declare your name: Best. Name. Ever. But I feel compelled to ask — what does the J.P. stands for? If you get asked this all the time or don’t like the question feel free to ignore!

J.P. Dancing Bear: I do get asked it a lot. Jerold Pierre. Just a mouthful. I used to just go by “Dancing Bear” when I first started, but there was a singer-song writer in Santa Cruz who used that name, and another poet on the east coast who apparently did so too. And then people who didn’t know me, kept calling me “Dancing” and I just decided that adding the “J.P.” at the beginning made things easier for everyone. Although, I still get the occasional address “Dancing” . . .

Tristan and IsoldeFebruary 27

together they marry: she is always reaching out: he, with his dandelion head, is afraid of weather: in their uneven seams of shadow small animals have made a home: first mice: he has a pair of entwined trees for an advocate— roots snaking this way and that: she believes in the power of wheelbarrows: she is a strong supporter of underbrush: many birds move into her hair: there is a storm on the horizon: light breaking everywhere: and then he realizes that she is not reaching but positioning her hands to protect him from a gust of wind 

—for Oliver de la Paz

KMA Sullivan: These poems are described in your introduction as at least partly ekphrastic. Could you talk about the role of visual art in the emergence of this collection? How do you think of the ekphrastic elements of the pieces as being in relation to the personal reflections about the friends whose birthdays are the springboards for these poems?

J.P. Dancing Bear: I used the artwork as the backbone. What would happen is on the occasional days where the writing workload was not too much, I would spend a few hours looking at art and would say have a feeling that it might be something I could use. I liked the various movements of surrealists best, probably because they were more malleable to the project at hand. So I had a bank of hundreds of paintings and sometimes photos.  Then I would go to each friend’s Facebook wall and read their recent statuses, their hobbies, their interests, favorite music, movies, and quotes. Then I would take my notes and find a piece of art that would best go with the them. This meant my idea window for writing was something of about 20 to 30 minutes. I would generally do this in the morning, then reread in the afternoon before posting. I would say this worked about 300 days out of the year. The other 60 I would struggle harder with the work, but the idea of loosing the challenge I had given myself would finally motivate me to finish.

Floating Away at NightMay 26

you see a boat: almost too white in the night: as if the universe had forgotten to tell it to dim: its reflection ripples and drifts back to where you are: and now this feeling of needing to be on it: as it noses further into the dark: beyond the few visible white crests of waves: and it’s not for the leaving that makes  you want to be onboard: not because you feel entrapped: it has nothing to do with escape or freedom: it is that brightness: slipping into the unknown: casting light where only the blackness of night is expected

—for Martin Vest

KMA Sullivan: In your introduction you mention settling on a form for this collection that you first encountered in CD Wright’s work. I am intrigued by your use of prose poem blocking while employing colons to separate thoughts. It feels as if you are imposing a type of lineation on an intentionally unlineated form. I love the tension you create with this choice. Could you talk about the ways in which this form supports the poems in your collection? What were you trying to accomplish through the form and do you feel you achieved it?

J.P. Dancing Bear: First off, the prose/colon blocking was probably about 90% of the poems; there were some straight-on free verse poems and a few gacelas, but they are not in this collection. At first, when I started the project I wrote mainly traditional prose pieces. I was satisfied completely with the end-result. Prior to this process, I wrote mainly free-verse, with an occasional venture into rhyme and meter or prose poetry. I’m not sure why I remembered two C.D. Wright poems “Song of the Gourd” and “Crescent”, it is probably because I had heard her read these poems and (because I generally consider sound above all else in my work) the form seemed a good way to build more sound into the prose work I was doing. I was instantly satisfied with the result and the style took over. When I was in the editing process, looking to submit work to journals, I rewrote a lot of the earlier prose poems into this form. I still use it to write some of my new poems.

Still Life with MandolinMarch 28

sound hole of seeds: a thumbnail moon to strum the strings of a lyric body: nourishment and lullaby: blue curtain night: greensleeves on greenleaves: ear twitch: god tonight the animals want to sup on the tender flesh of music: sprout tune: vibrate: glisten: blossom and root: fill the room with acoustic aroma: tart sweetness: seed queen: lean into lyric wondering: tendril and pluck: the musicians gather: fruit heart: they bow: they plead play in the new day

 —for Ada Limón

KMA Sullivan: While the poems you created are not entirely biographical in nature, they were inspired by specific birthdays and you have mentioned using biographical information such as hobbies and interests posted on Facebook, as starting points for the different poems. Did any interpersonal issues arise as a result of this? How much license did you feel comfortable taking in the service of the poems? And did anyone respond negatively to the poem written for their birthday?

J.P. Dancing Bear: In the total 1408 poems I wrote, there were two people who responded by saying that they didn’t think the poem accurately captured them. The feeling I felt is very much the same as when you give a gift to someone that’s “wrong.”  It’s a little more than embarrassing and I guess I should count my good fortunes that it didn’t happen more than that. The main reaction that I got from the poems were a lot of people were really thrilled by their poem and I still get messages from people thanking me for the gift. I think this has brought me closer to a lot of the recipients, as mutual fans, contemporaries and friends.

Nautical Still LifeAugust 11

you are watching on the breezeless deck: as though you have stumbled upon a still life: a square is mocking another square: because  it has  found a  life  boat: canvas bunches to make the outline of a face: you say quit casting shadows: but only more lines fall: you call out: the aura of oars: but they stand straight-faced: not a hint of laughing: even the flags are twisting: they dream of becoming boomerangs: almost  free enough to soar away: you test the rigging: yes—taunt enough: the oars are jealous: of the lifeboat’s rudder: everything is so anxious in its aspiration: you can see the sun starting to sink: red skies—those damn lucky sailors

—for Dana Guthrie Martin

KMA Sullivan: Could you take us through the process you employed in taking a set of over 1408 poems and cutting that down to 82 in the finished book? This seems a mind-bending task. Did some of your thoughts about the collection shift during the editing process?

J.P. Dancing Bear: I didn’t actually go back and begin editing the originals until I was half way through the project. At that point I started pulling the poems that I felt best about and began the normal editing process of evaluating word choices and phrasing. Then some of the decision process was made by poems being published and some of the responses I received from those published poems. When I was contacted by the publisher, I had a group of about 160 poems that had gone through the editing process at least once. I then read through them and picked the ones that I thought went best together. I’m still going through the birthday poems and editing them now, and more have been published since then. I now have a second manuscript of birthday poems put together and ready.

By DesignMay 17

someone  is  always  crafting  something: an  animal  built for travel: retractable wings: rudder: engine room: and wheels: here you  say love is the possibility of shapes: down a hallway and you are following ribboning lines: and you think about language: being fluid: flowing: here you say a language without love would surely die: someone is stitching fabric to a couch: one they have  imagined: framed: cut from wood: here you say love is building a place where your friends can relax—stay a while—and talk

—for Patty Paine

KMA Sullivan: The strict parameters you set for yourself regarding poem generation within this project are striking. Has that working process influenced your current creative process?

J.P. Dancing Bear: YES!  Since the birthday poems project ended, I started a Facebook group that has a weekly ekphrastic challenge. And so once a week, at least, I usually can sit down and write a poem to a painting. The birthday poem project also made me realize that writer’s block is a mental block writers imposes upon themselves for whatever reasons.

SymbioticSeptember 30

the woodpeckers are in love with  your new look: ruff of a burl: ball dress of wood: you prefer peacocks: the eyes of Argus: look out: o look out: for the predators of burrowing birds: nesting near hoops: in knotholes and grains: they flap at all intruders: you feel safe in their graces: this family of beaks and quills: you watch after the  fledglings:  when the parents forage: they nuzzle  in tight: under the eaves of your collar: sometimes the adults bring you a bouquet of dandelions: pulled out by the roots: you’ve developed a common language of life: you help preen their speckled bodies: they stencil your gown: in a pattern: percussing a code: a code: a code: of love

—for Julianna Baggott

KMA Sullivan: Can you tell us something about what you are working on now?

J.P. Dancing Bear: I just finished a year long project of 52 love poems based on a lot of surrealist artwork. And I’m still working in the Facebook Ekphrastic group, and out of that group I’ve realized a sub-project of “days” which started last year when I wrote a poem titled “Labor Day” and one titled “Father’s Day”. I’ve written four more since then and now I’ve realized what it is, I’ll finish it out. And I have a second manuscript of birthday poems now compiled.

KMA Sullivan: Thank you so much to J.P. Dancing Bear for offering his time and his poetry. Let’s finish with one more from Family of Marsupial Centaurs.

WritingNovember 19

today you sit down to write in long hand: you dress the part: in garb from another century: quill pen and inkwell: but this is only for mood and ambiance: you work through the process slowly: you build stanzas: intricate metrics and geometry: tiered lines: words with angles: each as valid as the other: spheres orbiting refrains: edges are created: sections are not X’ed out: so much as an exit to begin new ideas: you embody the poem: taking on its features and angles: or it becomes you: bringing to light those curves and corners you had not realized are there

—for David Yezzi

Identity Schisms: The Space Between Desire and Fulfillment

Earlier this year, budding Virginia poet Gabby Gabby released a new e-chapbook in .pdf format. First impression: Pretty Flowers is brief. Very brief. Discounting the cover, a postscript and two small illustrations of Virginia, the .pdf only has twenty pages of text (a mere 65 sentences) in a very large, peach font. The poem’s meaning lies compacted into so few words but with some reflection and re-reading, it expands outward like a haiku.

The chapbook begins with the declaration that the poet would like to visit every state fair:

I want to go to every statefair in the United States.

I donʼt think I really likestate fairs but I like theidea of being the type ofperson that likes state fairs.

I think if I tried hardenough I could really bethat person.

From this simple premise, the author touches on a variety of issues revolving around the concept of identity. She admits to feeling the angst of missing out on life, the need to travel in order to feel fulfilled. She ponders whether or not she would break her vegan diet for the sake of eating a corn dog, the staple food of state fairs. She confesses that she does not like state fairs, but likes the idea of being someone who does.

In a brief set of nine stanzas, the author’s self has already begun to unfold with some its complexities: let’s take, for an example, her vegan diet, which is inarguably trendy, and also a diet typically prone to questioning and prodding to determine authenticity – non-vegans seem to always know just enough about veganism to interrogate their vegan counterparts and find flaws in their adherence to the diet. In mentioning her veganism immediately contrasted by the need to eat corn dogs for the sake of ‘completing’ an image, that of the state fair-goer, Gabby has awoken this disparity between what we are and what we try to be in an interesting way. Just as non-vegans will ask vegans why they don’t crave meat when they’re at a diner, friends pressure you to be in the mood for a corn dog just by virtue of being at a state fair.

The questions of identity that the text poses are expressed in a very direct language, one that quickly progresses away from that initial intent to discuss state fairs into examining the relationship between space and fulfillment. A brief interlude wonders about the contentment of Michiganders, dealing with the division in their state:

I thought about howpeople on one side ofMichigan must really missthe people on the otherside of Michigan.

She also posits that Michiganders would likely know whether or not they were lonelier than, say, Mainers, regardless of having ever visited Maine. Here again we see the disparity between actually knowing what a label entails and what we expect of it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been to Maine or can feel the essence of the adjective ‘Mainer’: based on pure geography there is an expectation that we take as real and defining in terms of that category’s fulfillment.

Gabby then discusses Midwestern states and what their “square” shape implies about their identity. This geographical meandering progresses until we land in Virginia, the poet’s home state. Gabby externalizes her general discontent in life into the identity of her state, claiming it is outdated and boring. She envisions a more exciting life for herself.

Sometimes when I tellpeople that I live inWilliamsburg I let thembelieve that I live inBrooklyn.

I try to imagine myself inBrooklyn.

For some reason I amimagining myself passedout and almost nakedsomewhere in Brooklyn.

For some reason I thinkthat is a very ʻBrooklynʼthing to do.

It is also a very ʻGabbyʼthing to do.

We’re slowly working forward and unwrapping layers of questions about identity, namely, the disparity between who we are and who we would like to envision ourselves as being.

Despite its brevity, Pretty Flowers encapsulates one of the most complex problems in dealing with autobiographical writing: the distance that exists between the narrator of the text and the writer herself. We typically determine the level of intimacy or authenticity in a work based on the brevity of that distance. When the author effectively closes the gap between their real self and the persona of their narrator, we deem a work to be “authentic” or “intimate.” This is what is strived for in journals, diaries or confessional poetry.  If we determine that something in the text is not a substantiated fact of the author’s life, we cry “inauthentic” and demerit the work.

Gabby, however, is not just writing about her own life, but rather about the crisis of identity itself. As she projects the “Gabby” that she would like to be, she consistently reminds us of the fact that this projected “Gabby” is inconsistent with the real one, the one living behind the keyboard. The poet’s penname itself indicates a constructed identity: she has replaced both her legal first and last name with a repeated, disyllabic nickname that comes off ludic. What’s more, she incorporates that nickname into the text when she says:

It is also a very ʻGabbyʼthing to do.

The inscription of her own name into the text would constitute what Derrida designates the signature de la signature in his critical text Signéponge. As opposed to the signature proper, which expresses identity and serves as a written source of veracity (think of authorial rights, the name on the book cover), or the signature of style, that is, the use of a “set of idiomatic marks” that stylistically points to the author, the “signature of the signature” is the embedding of the author’s name into the text itself.  In this act of self-inscription, the writing becomes a reminder of the inherent schism I mentioned earlier.  As readers of poetry (particularly confessional poetry), we unconsciously bought into this narrator’s identity and left behind the question of authenticity; now we stumble upon a replica of the name on the cover inside of the text, and we remember that a real person, outside of the text, exists – one that perhaps does not conform perfectly to the narrator we’ve “bought into.”

Pretty Flowers pivots around this concept, constantly reminding us that these projections of what the “real” Gabby would like to be never manage to become anything more in the text than just that: projections. Rather than fictitiously portraying herself at those state fairs, eating corn dogs, or stripped bare on a bed in Brooklyn, the only literal action in the text is Gabby sitting at a keyboard imagining other realities for herself. The height of this game arrives when the author inscribes herself in the text, a signature that, according to Derrida, serves to remain and disappear at the same time — a mark that serves to affirm identity but also blur the lines defining it. 

Even on a linguistic level, the penname is built upon two syllables that position themselves on opposite ends of the vocal chart: the open ‘a’ and the closed ‘i.’ This cohabitation of opening up and closing off, the double motion of an identity that projects itself outward but also negates that projection in acknowledging the separation that exists between its potential and its fulfillment: that is what sustains the concept of ‘Gabby’ in the text.

Towards the end, we see the realization of this fusion of opposites. Gabby apologizes for the lack of “pretty flowers” in the text, a segue into a wrap-up where she discusses her romantic life. The ties between geography (that is, appearance) and qualities return in the form of the question: is Virginia a downward sloping or an upward sloping state? In simple terms, if you see it as a downward slope, you’re a pessimist; as an upward slope, an optimist.

Sometimes I look at a mapof Virginia and think that adownward slope could bekind of fun.

Kind of like a slip and slideor the side of a cardboardbox pressed up against agrassy hill.

Maybe I am an optimist. Atleast for today.

Identity is never simple. Optimist or pessimist? Our poet is both.