In the End, There’s Only Love: A Conversation between Dante Di Stefano and J.G. McClure

Dante Di Stefano: The Fire Lit & Nearing includes several self-portrait poems. I was wondering if you could begin with some thoughts on this type of poem. Why write a self-portrait poem? How are your approaches different in each self-portrait poem? How is the gesture toward self-portraiture different in poetry, art, and life (in the era of the selfie)?

J.G. McClure: I like the “Self Portrait as ____” format for its ability to efficiently establish and contextualize an otherwise absurd conceit. If in the title we get that piece of information to orient us—read this as a self-portrait—we’ll be able to immediately start making sense of what follows. Once you’ve given the reader that firm ground to stand on, you’re free to go where the poem takes you, zany as it may be. So the format allows a lot of freedom to explore different angles on the self: I have a “Self Portrait as B Movie Script” where I get to riff on my affection for campy 80s action movies, I have a “Self Portrait as Ego and Vehicle” where my ego is a tiny man driving me around like a motorcycle, another where I’m the reluctant keeper of an unruly dog named Sadness, and so on. The “Self Portrait” mode lets these otherwise very different metaphors work together in the same collection.

Besides, I suspect that any poem is a self-portrait to some degree. Borges has a lovely little parable tucked away in one of his books’ epilogues:

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

Whatever you write, no matter how different the subject or style or point of view, the one common factor is always you. Since you can’t escape it, you might as well have fun with it.

Your latest collection, Ill Angels, starts with two back-to-back epigraphs—one from Edgar Allan Poe, the other from the Beastie Boys—and many of your poems are presented as reactions to specific encounters with art or music or literature at specific times: “Reading Dostoevsky at Seventeen,” or “Reading Rilke in Early Autumn,” or “Love Poem Written While Listening to ‘Alligator Crawl’ Repeatedly and Misremembering Lines from Kobayashi Issa.” Could you discuss the ways in which you join allusions to specific times and places? Why situate your poems in this way? How about your blending of cultural references traditionally characterized as “high” (like Rilke or Issa) with the so-called “low” (like the Beastie Boys)?

DD: Don Quixote is as real to me as any friend I’ve had in the past forty years. A Love Supreme is as inhabitable in my memory as the first time I met my wife. The paintings of Marc Chagall appear as warmly in my mind’s eye as the face of my long dead great grandmother. Writing a highly allusive poetry allows me to celebrate all the lives fountaining through my own; those lives include the lives of loved ones and friends, and, also, the lives of the artists, musicians, and writers I love. I don’t like to make distinctions between high and low culture (although, of course, I know what you mean). Who’s to say that The Low End Theory or Paul’s Boutique isn’t as valuable a cultural artifact as Sketches of Spain or Philip Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts? To answer your question more directly, though, I just write about things and people I love, and experiences that compel me (most of which are bound up in some way with art, music, and literature.)

Speaking of compelling experiences, I admire the prose poems scattered throughout TheFire Lit & Nearing, particularly “The Cat,” which like a Russell Edson poem takes an absurd premise to its logical conclusion but does so with a straight face. Whose prose poems do you most admire? Why choose to write a poem in prose rather than in lineation?

JGM: I’m flattered that you thought of Russell Edson; I admire his work a great deal. Another favorite is James Tate’s “Distance from Loved Ones,” from the collection of the same name.

As I think about it, the Tate poem follows a similar trajectory: we start with a plausible premise, and then see Murphy’s Law going further and further as the speaker’s mother recounts the litany of escalating misfortunes that befall Zita. It’s so over-the-top in its tragedy that we can’t help but chuckle uncomfortably. Then we get what could be a mean-spirited joke about the elderly mother’s babbling: “My mother tells me all this on the phone, and I say: Mother, who is Zita?” Again we chuckle—all this, and the speaker doesn’t even know who his mom is going on about.

But then Tate springs his trap: “And my mother says, I am Zita. All my life I have been Zita, bald and crying. And you, my son, who should have known me best, thought I was nothing but your mother.” All that escalating misery, and our increasingly callous response to it, suddenly hits home, and we, like the speaker, have to recognize our failure of empathy.

If the poem ended there, it would be okay: a bit preachy, but fine. Instead, it follows this argument, too, to its logical conclusion: “But, Mother, I say, I am dying. . .” Now we understand that the failure of empathy cuts both ways: the son fails to recognize the mother’s crisis, the mother fails to recognize the son’s, and the distance from loved one to loved one remains uncrossable.

In Tate’s poem, as in Edson’s poems, the focus is on the story that’s being told. I think we tend to see prose as transparent, while poems call attention to themselves as made things. Of course in reality the form of prose mediates our experience of its content too, but we don’t really think about that–we’re used to reading prose all the time for information, without thinking about its form. So I think the prose poem is able to tap into that idea, to keep the reader’s focus on the narrative. For that reason I think it’s well suited to pieces like “The Cat,” or “Parable,” where the narrative is primary.

You’re the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018), and many of your own poems directly engage with political issues. For instance, “Words for My Twelfth Grade English Class, After Reading Malcolm X’s ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’ on Inauguration Day 2017” ends with this urgent call to action:

Still, the masts of the Niña, the Pinta,
and the Santamaria are burning
down our dreams as we pledge allegiance to
the flag inside a hood at Abu Ghraib.
Scalpel us out of apathy; take sides
with freedom, with fire, with freedom again.

Do you see yourself as a “political poet”? Is there a meaningful distinction between “political” and “non-political” poems, or is all writing political in some way? What is your view of the role of the poet in today’s social/political landscape?

DD: I don’t see myself as a political poet (or as any other type of poet, for that matter). It’s probably true that all writing is political in some way. From the time I first started reading poetry seriously in the late 90s, I’ve been interested in poetry of the political imagination; Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting, was an important early introduction to a global poetry of witness. Some of my favorite poets write directly political poems: Amiri Baraka, William Blake, Martín Espada, Miguel Hernández, Federico García Lorca, and Patricia Smith (to name a few). I do like to keep in mind John Ashbery’s caveat about political poetry: “there is not much ‘political’ poetry that I like for the reason that the political sentiments reiterated in it are usually the exact ones I harbor, and I would rather learn something new.” As far as the role of the poet in the social landscape goes, I believe that depends on the poet. There are as many different roles for poets as there are poets themselves. One role that most poets share is (to paraphrase Roethke) to create art that undoes the damage of haste.

One poem you’ve written that undoes the damage of haste is “The Cat.” In that poem you end with a wonderful sentence as the world skitters on the brink of apocalypse: “In the end, there’s only love.” Stanley Kunitz said, “All poems are love poems.” Do you agree with that?

JGM: Maybe? On one hand, it’s hard to read something like Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,”  with its comically extreme misanthropy, as a love poem. But on the other hand, maybe in some ways it is. To complain “the world shouldn’t be this way” is to suggest “there’s another way I want it to be.” So maybe in that sense, even the bitterest poems about this world are love poems to a possible alternative. Even in Larkin, I think we can see that. Take a poem like “High Windows.”  Cynical as the voice may be throughout, it ends in a place of almost unbearable longing for the things it no longer can believe in—a longing that feels, to me, a lot like love.

Resignation is as boring as contentment. Fiction writers know this: you can’t have a story where your characters just stand around talking about how great everything is. Likewise, you can’t have everybody standing around saying “Life sure is unpleasant. Oh well, let’s have lunch.” Whatever that is, it’s not a story. What’s interesting is yearning, the hunger for things to be other than they are. Or, when things are good, the tension that comes from the awareness that nothing lasts forever. Love poems dramatize yearning especially clearly. The lover’s complaint dramatizes the yearning for things to be otherwise (for the distant lover to be near). The “happy” love poem shows the joy of things as they are, but in the background is always the awareness that it can’t last (the near lover will eventually be made distant by changes in, or the end of, life).

But other poems can and do engage with yearning in similar ways, and in this way I can see how “all poems are love poems.” For instance, Alan Shapiro has a wonderful poem, “Old Joke,” which argues that the gods’ perfection, their “easy excellence, with nothing to overcome,” renders them incapable of the kinds of meaningful experience that we in our ridiculous, everyday miseries are able to attain. The poem isn’t about a lover, but in the broader sense, it’s very much a love poem to our human imperfectability.

Returning to Misrepresented People, I wonder if you could say more about the process of co-editing that anthology. Any anthology will necessarily accept some poems and reject others: there’s only so much page space to work with. Beyond that, part of the point of an anthology is that the work in it has been preselected: readers pick up an anthology partly so they don’t have to track down and read the mountains of relevant work themselves, but rather can skip straight to the “best” pieces. But on the flipside, this selection process—especially in an anthology specifically focused on questions of (mis)representation—brings up difficult questions about whose work does and doesn’t get amplified and why. How do you go about making these tough choices? How do you see the role of the editor in today’s world, where technology has made it easier than ever to disseminate one’s own work?

DD: Working on Misrepresented People was a learning process. Hopefully, I will have the chance to edit an anthology again with the knowledge I gained from the editorial process on this book. Misrepresented People began the day after Trump became president. I sent out a mass email to every poet I knew asking for work for an anti-Trump anthology. As the project developed the book became a way to explore the historical arcs of injustice and inequity of which the Trump administration is a mere symptom. I also wanted to create a book that would embody a concrete form of activism (the proceeds from the book are being donated to The National Immigration Law Center).

Halfway through the editorial process, which also involved securing a publisher, María Isabel Álvarez came on board as a co-editor and she did a tremendous job helping me make some of the hard decisions you asked about. We weren’t necessarily looking for “best” poems in this anthology. From its inception, I conceived of this project as timebound. So, we looked for poems that drew out different aspects of the current political moment, but also ones that spoke to systemic and historical forms of misrepresentation. Most of the poems were solicited directly from the poets included. There were a few open calls for submissions, but we ended up passing on a vast majority of the work that came in over the transom. We tried to take work from as diverse a group of poets as possible. Of course, not all our choices were perfect, and we passed on several great poems and poets. Having said that I’m happy with the choices we made, and I am tremendously proud of the anthology. I mean this anthology has sam sax, Fatimah Asghar, Kaveh Akbar, Natalie Diaz, Gregory Pardlo, Alberto Ríos, Alison Rollins, Dana Levin, Patricia Smith, Maggie Smith, Martín Espada…and the list goes on! I should add that I didn’t know most of these poets beforehand, but they were all incredibly supportive of the endeavor.

The role of the editor in the digital era is the same as it has always been: to create opportunities for other writers and to provide a platform where their work can be put into productive dialogue with the work of others. Although the internet and social media have allowed work to be more widely distributed than ever before, the digital ether tends to atomize some of the connections that a traditional print anthology or journal fosters and strengthens. As an editor for DIALOGIST and as an anthologist, I see it as my role to take seriously, and on its own merits, every poem that comes my way. I am particularly interested in publishing work that is far afield of my own, aesthetically and thematically. I don’t want to push a single approach to poetry; I believe in a descriptivist editorial stance.

On a widely different note, one element that binds the poems in your book together is the figure of Ellie, an ex-girlfriend, and the breakup that the speaker in many of these poems is working through. The book ends with “The inked blossom of poppies / and rue on her back.” This is such a beautiful and sad image to end the book on. Is this breakup autobiographical? If so, could you discuss writing through heartbreak? How much fidelity do you think a poet should have toward autobiographical detail? Does it depend on the poet? If so, why? How does the trope of loss and the figure of Ellie nuance other thematic and structural elements of the book?

JGM: Yes and no. I did go through an especially painful, seemingly never-ending breakup that acted as a catalyst for many of the poems, and “Ellie” is primarily based on one person (though there’s a bit of compositing). She really did have that tattoo. But names have been changed to protect the innocent, and facts have been changed or made up or left out as needed to make better poems.

I don’t think you need to have any fidelity to autobiographical detail as long as you’re not claiming to. Nobody has a problem with fiction writers making things up; there’s no reason to expect otherwise from poets. (Now if you’re saying “everything in here is true” and then making things up, that’s a different matter. But that’s an ethical issue, not an aesthetic one.) The job of the poet is to make good poems. That’s all. If the way to do that is through fictionalization, then fictionalize away.

Writing through heartbreak can be therapeutic, certainly. In the act of writing, you transform your pain into an aesthetic problem to be confronted on the controlled environment of the page. You take control of it, make something from it, and there’s a joy in that; Yeats called it “the gaiety transfiguring all that dread.”

But at the end of the day, my breakup is only interesting to me. If anybody else is going to care about the poems I write about it, those poems have to show readers something important in their own lives. Otherwise, I’m just indulging in the kind of solipsistic writing Addonizio and Laux parody so well in The Poet’s Companion: “Here I stand / looking out my window / and I am important.”

In this case, I think the breakup with Ellie is a microcosm for a more fundamental aloneness and a more fundamental absurdity that comes with being human. What made this particular breakup so devastating to me was that we were so close in so many ways, but still hopelessly separated in others. Our fights were about stupid, trivial things, as I suspect most lovers’ fights are. They meant nothing and they were inescapable. And no amount of love or good intentions could bridge that gap in the end. It’s a variation of Tate’s Zita problem: you, who should have known me best, didn’t. Couldn’t.

That fundamental separation is, I think, what the book is concerned with. The Ellie poems are about that, but so are poems like “The Astronaut,” which have no connection to her. In a way, I suppose the very act of writing poems is an attempt to bridge that unbridgeable distance—to connect with the reader even though you know it’s always only a partial connection.

In addition to “Words for My Twelfth Grade…,” Ill Angels includes several other poems about your experiences teaching high school. Your poem “Prompts (for High School Teachers Who Write Poetry)” was recently featured on Poets.org, and you are the winner of the 2019 On Teaching Poem Prize. How do you see the relationship between your work as a teacher and your work as a poet?

DD: Being a high school teacher keeps you humble. You’ve got to be tough and a little bit stupid to continue teaching in such a broken system. Teachers aren’t respected in our culture, no matter what anyone tells you, and even in a good public school like the one where I work, you are witness to systemic failures that are crushing. I teach students with learning disabilities, students from extreme poverty and abusive households, and students from great wealth. I teach unmotivated students and wonderful, striving, bright children who want to succeed. I witness deep pain and failure daily. It’s a heartbreaking job with little rewards, but I do my best to help all my students. I’ve always thought of the classroom as a poem I was composing period by period. Frost said: “a poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom.” I don’t believe that to be true for all poems, but I strive for that in each class I teach.

The job has provided me with a decent middle-class life, which has afforded me the leisure to write around my workday. It’s also kept me grounded; no matter how good of a teacher you are, on any given day an angry teenager might tell you to go fuck yourself. Teaching teenagers puts everything else in perspective. You can’t take yourself too seriously if you want to survive in the job. A sense of humor helps.

You use humor and a colloquial phrasing in a manner reminiscent of poets like David Kirby, Billy Collins, and Jeffrey McDaniel. Could you discuss the uses of humor in poetry?

JGM: I think it’s a vital and overlooked tool in the poet’s kit. When I first started writing, I got this idea in my head that in order to be a “serious” poet I had to write “serious” poems, where “serious” meant something like “joylessly clubbing the reader over the head with my very poetic despair.” But somewhere along the line I realized those weren’t the poems I wanted to read or the poems I wanted to write.

Remember the TV show Scrubs? I loved that show for the way that no situation was ever just one thing. The show was very funny, but it took place in a hospital, where sickness and death were constantly present. Characters you cared about died. Characters who deserved happy endings didn’t get them. Characters tried to do the right thing and it all went wrong and the fallout nearly broke them. But the show was very funny at the same time, and that’s what made it so poignant. The show, like real life, was full of humor and full of pain and you couldn’t disentangle them. When it’s done well, humor in poetry can work similarly, letting the comedy and the pain enrich and complicate each other to produce something more than the sum of its parts.

Ill Angels features a kwansaba suite. (The kwansaba, invented by Eugene B. Redmond, is a praise poem that formally represents the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa: seven lines per poem, seven words per line, and no more than seven letters per word). What appeals to you about writing in this form? What challenges does it bring?

DD: I love the fact that the kwansaba is a newer form. There are fewer models for what a kwansaba can be than, say, a sonnet. The only kwansabas I’ve read have been by Eugene Redmond, his daughter, Treasure Shields Redmond, Tara Betts, and Saeed Jones.

I’m drawn to forms because of the limitations they impose upon language, and because of the possibilities those limitations generate. By choosing a form you are also opening up a dialogue with the tradition from which the form springs, and that dialogue necessarily nuances the meaning of the poem you are composing. My kwansaba suite disregards the seven letter per word stricture of the original form. So these are really nonce kwansabas.

You have some interesting approaches to form throughout your book, but I was also struck by the wild ideas behind some of your poems. Two of the poems I enjoyed the most in this collection, “Reverse” and “Chaos Is Seattle in a Spaniel,” propel themselves forward through the momentum of their imaginative premises. In “Reverse” a relationship is imagined as if watching a VHS tape rewinding. In “Chaos…” a misfire from Siri leads the speaker to imagining a life on the molecular level. To write poems like these I imagine you spend a good deal of time daydreaming. What is the role of imagination and leisure in your writing process?

JGM: I’ve never thought of myself as much of a daydreamer, actually. “Chaos” came from a response Siri really did have when I was bored and playing with my phone. If I were better at daydreaming, I probably wouldn’t have needed to play with the phone in the first place. But lucky for me I did, and “she” misunderstood, and the rest came from following that premise where it led me.

“Reverse” came primarily from reading, I think. There’s a haunting image in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five in which his time-traveling narrator notes that when you watch an air raid in reverse, you see planes above a ruined city putting hurt people back together, reconstructing buildings, sucking the bombs up into the sky, and finally carrying them away where they won’t be able to hurt anyone again. Martin Amis has a novel in reverse which explores a similar idea to Vonnegut’s. Matt Rasmussen has a stunning poem in Black Aperture where we see a suicide in reverse. I can’t think of specific examples, but I’m positive I’ve seen the time-rewind device in various sci-fi movies and shows too. So what I did in “Reverse” was take that pre-existing device, apply it to a new situation, and see where it went. I think that’s largely what “imagination” is: not coming up with never-before-thought ideas ex nihilo, but rather combining bits and pieces of old ideas in new ways.

Ill Angels is your second collection. How did the process of writing your second book compare to your first?

DD: Like many first books, Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight collects poems written over the long period of my apprenticeship to poetry. The book spans about fifteen years, and there are many different textures, tones, and formal approaches on display in it. The second book was composed over a much shorter period (about two years). It was also accepted for publication immediately after I finished it and then I had almost two years to work on editing it before it was published. As a result, the second book is tighter, more organic, and more of a piece than the first one. I can’t say enough how impressed I am by the staff of Etruscan Press. It’s been a dream come true to work with them on Ill Angels.

Figures from antiquity and from the world of art recur in The Fire Lit & Nearing: Virgil, Homer, Catullus, Munch, Magritte, and so on. Could you riff on the allusive and ekphrastic gestures in your poems? Why include them? How do they nuance your examination of the contemporary and the quotidian, of sadness and longing?

JGM: However you feel about T.S. Elliot as a critic (and there’s plenty there to criticize), he sure has some zippy one-liners. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he writes:

Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I didn’t really understand that I was feeling the particular loneliness I explore through the lens of a Magritte painting in “Nothing Will Be Alright, But Thank You Anyway” until I explored it through the lens of that particular Magritte painting. And I didn’t really understand the painful banality of friends’ genuine attempts to comfort one another until I thought about the poem through the lens of that title, itself an allusion to a pop song.

Or in another poem, “Raleigh-Durham International,” the central drama of the poem comes from the speaker’s awareness that his little miseries aren’t worthy of the epic mode. He’s no Aeneas, and he knows it, but he can’t stop thinking about his experience in those terms, and the uneasiness about his own interpretive framework becomes part of the experience that he can’t stop thinking about.

In other words, I include the allusions because, to me, they’re an essential part of the experience. I include them because there’s no way not to include them.

That said, I think it’s essential to give the reader enough to go on. In “Nothing Will Be Alright,” I give enough description of the painting so that even if you’ve never seen it, you get the gist. Plus I give the name of the artist and of the painting, so that the reader can google it if they want to. In “Raleigh-Durham International,” I give the relevant narrative context from the Aeneid within the first lines of the poem.

I never want to do what Elliot so blithely does in “The Waste Land,” assuming that the reader has a detailed knowledge of Italian, German, and Sanskrit, not to mention literary sources including but not limited to Homer, Sophocles, Petronius, Virgil, Ovid, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, Gérard de Nerval… (Credit to Wikipedia for that list; I certainly couldn’t have pulled it out of thin air).

First off, it’s a silly assumption to make; probably only Elliot is familiar with everything Elliot talks about. Second, it takes an attitude toward the reader that I find rather troubling. The assumption seems to be “anyone who is worthy of my genius must know these things, and if they don’t, then the hell with them.” It’s a stance that assumes the poet is entitled to the reader’s time, which just isn’t true. If I want you to give up your limited time to read my work, I need to make it worth your while, and I need to approach you with a generosity that acknowledges the gift of time and attention you’re giving me.

The final poem in Ill Angels, “Words for My Unborn Daughter Written After Removing a Briar Patch from My Front Yard and Beginning with a Misremembered Line from a David Ignatow Poem,” wrestles with the question of why we write when we know that our poems, like ourselves, will likely one day be forgotten:

We’ll be buried under the births and deaths
to come, in one hundred years from now, flung,
as the thistles I just plucked from my shirt,
onto the ground and forgotten instead
like these lines. Why strive to immortalize
a gesture? Why not spin this transience
into a gift of crushed wildflower stems
pressed between the pages of Genesis?
Little root and seed, these lines might not survive
their own inception, but so what? …

There’s hope here, a refusal to quit creating despite the real possibility of futility. At the same time, though, the poem enacts exactly that process of forgetting: the Ignatow poem that inspired it is already misremembered before this poem even begins. Could you talk about why you write? Why do you choose to “strive to immortalize / a gesture”? Why through poetry specifically?

DD: I write because I love to read, and writing leads me into a deeper critical engagement with the art, music, and literature I love. It also leads me into a deeper emotional engagement with the quotidian, with the people and places I love, and with the experiences that are always washing over me, and I wish I could keep forever. I write because I love the world and I don’t want it to end. I don’t strive to immortalize a gesture, per se. I just want to be a small part of a conversation that is way bigger than me. Writing also allows me to meet and talk to interesting people like you, Jonathan, and that’s one of the great blessings of our shared vocation.

After my daughter was born, I came to see my poetry as something I could pass on to her, a chronicle of my enthusiasms and griefs. I don’t care if my work endures. The planet is headed for ecological disaster soon, and none of our literature may endure much longer anyway. I would like to leave my daughter something that might show her how much I love her and her mother, a record of who I’ve been at various times in my too swiftly fleeting life.

Los Ángeles at Ground Level: Letters To My City by Mike Sonksen

The poet Mike Sonksen knows more about Los Ángeles than almost anyone. It began when he was a kid, his father and both grandfathers introducing him to the sprawling city by taking him on destination drives. Due to his father’s love of architecture, having, “taught me about…Frank Lloyd Write from an early age,” Sonksen “had a natural interest in maps and geography.” Those drives fostered that interest, dipping in and out of distinctly planned and inhabited neighborhoods that made up the patchwork quilt of, not only the city, but Los Ángeles County.

In Sonksen’s new book Letters To My City (The Accomplices/Writ Large Press, 2019), he explores the city’s geography and architecture from the ground up, from his perspective as a third-generation Angeleño. The book is a collection of his poems and articles that span his 20+ years of exploring, not only the landscapes of Los Ángeles, but the people and cultures and histories of communities like Little Tokyo, The Eastside, Leimert Park and even Cambodia Town in Long Beach.

Early in Letters, Sonksen includes his remembrance of local human interest reporter Huell Howser in, “Huell Howser and the Gospel of Beauty.” Howser hosted “California’s Gold,” on local PBS, highlighting landmarks, small towns, places of interest or events in California that were not well known, including countless in L.A. and Southern California. In each episode Howser conducted impromptu and informal interviews with locals involved with the sites he visited. When the show debuted in 1991, Los Ángeles and California were beginning to take a serious interest in and find significance in its own history. Howser, according to Sonksen, “provided the common ground for people to relate and meet on,” especially in Southern California, where Howser lived, “like he did for my dad, grandmother and me.” Plus, “‘California’s Gold’ reinforced my own burgeoning interest in this history; I saw Huell as a messenger to stick to my own California dream.”

Along with the article, “Community, not a Commodity: The Ethics of Giving a City Tour,” the opening 35 pages or so of Letters To My City act as explanation of Sonksen’s aesthetics and why he tells the stories he does: Get the History Right, Sharing Authority and Debunking Stereotypes and the unofficial, The Right to the City.

The concepts of Mike Sonksen’s aesthetics are apparent throughout Letters To My City. He shares his authority by quoting long time Cambodian residents of Long Beach’s Cambodia Town in “Driving Down the 105,” as a way for them to tell their neighborhood’s history. When he profiles a person, such as the late dynamic Chicana writer from Oxnard, California, Michele Serros, he lets those who knew her personally, speak to who she really was.

When Sonksen entered UCLA in 1992, when native Angeleños like Lynell George, Ruben Martinez and Luis J. Rodriguez were publishing their journalism and narratives about L.A., and he was being taught by urban theorist and native Mike Davis, they helped reinforce his “interest in all things Los Angeles.” He learned about letting a place speak for itself.

However, Sonksen’s articles can leave readers of Letters’ wanting more specific, from-the-ground-up, portrayals of L.A. Too many lack depth in the content he’s exploring, where he ends up repeating himself instead of expanding on his idea(s). A good example is “The Cascades.” Here, language is used more as a summary, and where he needs to expand his ideas, Sonksen repeats information. “We notice on our left side a park with a well-lit hillside waterfall fountain. Quickly I turn left heading towards what looks to be a park.” As the centerpiece of the article, in sentence two, I want to know how this waterfall fountain ads to the neighborhood’s atmosphere.

Another example is when Sonksen says at various times throughout his articles, “as noted/said earlier,” and proceeds to only restate that same sentence as above, before immediately moving on to a new paragraph or point.

Yet, there are many engaging and rich articles that portray L.A. from the lived-in, ground-up perspective Sonksen’s acquired from a lifetime of personally engaging in L.A. Enough for Letters to join the narrative of correction written by native Angeleños, illustrating that Angeleños actually do care about their city, that there is a deep, rich history and [literary] culture there, that there are beautiful neighborhoods—in all definitions of the term—most having nothing to do with Hollywood, some with predominately “humble working-class people.” Sonken quotes Lynell George at one point in Letters, saying, “we know much more, it seems, about ancient cities and dead civilizations…than we do about day-to-day life in ‘South Central Los Angeles’…beyond the trope.”

Sonksen too, goes beyond the tropes, to portray the suburbs in “Something in the Water: Hip-Hop History in Cerrritos.” He quotes DJ Rhettmatic, remembering his childhood in Cerritos in the ‘80s, saying , “…their [his father’s employment’s] old building is actually on Valley…right next to the old Don Juan Mexican restaurant that used to be there on the corner…” His DJ crew, “…used to DJ parties at Don Juan during the early stages before the crew even manifested.” These are details about how culture was created in Cerritos and what kind of culture it was, that is now preserved.

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Letters To My City is most powerful when Sonksen explores what Los Ángeles is and reminds the reader what L.A. has. That’s where he’s at his best, inhabiting the same boundless enthusiasm for his subjects that he saw Huell Howser inhabit for his.

Sonksen writes many list and ode poems, full of local history and culture. In the poem “Ode to L.A. Women Writers,” he reminds readers “L.A. women writers are the masters of this ecology.” He then lists as many as he can, from Wanda Coleman to Octavia E. Butler, to Irene Soriano and Helena Maria Viramontes. In “Homage to Little Tokyo” Sonksen repeats throughout, “Little Tokyo is…” That device creates the sense of community pride that builds throughout the poem as he proceeds to describe the heartbeat of one of L.A.’s most iconic neighborhoods. “Little Tokyo is legacy businesses/Nisei witnesses.” he writes, tightly weaving in the community’s history as context for his sustained focus on the individuals who’ve shaped Little Tokyo.

Although his poems celebrate L.A., Sonksen casts a critical eye on the city’s faults and issues. “I Am Still Alive in Los Angeles!” an update to his most iconic poem “I Am Alive in Los Angeles!” opens Letters and sets the context for how the rest of the book is understood. The poem steeps the city in three of its pressing issues: affordability, traffic and environment. The opening dives right in: “I am alive in Los Angeles/even as the price of rent rises/and gridlock strangles central arteries…” But through it all, Sonksen says, “The community is a poem/in progress called Los Angeles.”

Los Ángeles, and cities in general, are by their very nature imperfect, always in transition to becoming something else, especially at the community level. It’s a city’s communities, Sonksen reminds us, that shape what a city is. And those communities are shaped by the people that live there. Those, he says in the title poem, who “pound the pavement, fight the good fight,” are civically engaged.

Though a fuller portrayal of L.A. would have included more communities in other parts of L.A. (e.g. the Persian community on the Westside or any specific community in the San Fernando Valley), as Letters primarily explores downtown to the east (the Eastside, SGV) and South Central to South L.A. County (Cerritos, Long Beach), it’s the ground-up perspective from which Sonksen portrays each community and tells their history, that creates the mostly intimate portrayal(s) of this often written about and vastly misunderstood city. By the end of Letters To My City it becomes apparent that this perspective is the only authentic way to truly understand Los Ángeles—or any city.

The Gain of a Deaf Republic

Much of the recent responses to Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic have rightly focused on its metaphors of silence and their tense relationship to political resistance. While such metaphors are crucial to the way Kaminsky imagines political resistance, the reduction of deafness to metaphor undercuts what I contend is a much larger project of “deaf-gain” that he explores in his volume. Deaf activists have long worked to undo reductive stereotypes of deafness as lack or loss by insisting upon it “as a means to understand the plenitude of human being.”[1] As opposed to a medical model of disability in which an individual is entirely reduced to their deafness, Deaf identity embraces deafness as a valuable part of biocultural diversity. Members of the Deaf community share rich cultures, histories, and languages grounded in deafness as a particular embodied orientation to the world. Such orientation enables a unique form of knowledge-making unique to Deaf people. But within the traumatic conditions of wartime, what does deafness afford? What is at stake in claiming “to be of deaf people” in the face of violence?

Deaf Republic reads like a two-act political drama in which lyric poems trace the experiences of citizens living under martial law. Armed militants come to occupy the fictional Eastern European town of Vasenka and ultimately murder a deaf boy, Petya, who spits at a sergeant during a local puppet show. As public gatherings become banned all together, Petya’s childish yet brazen act of resistance becomes one of martyrdom. One of the puppeteers, Galya Armolinskaya, rallies the townspeople around his death as the bloody symbol of the soldiers’ cruelty visited upon one of Vasenka’s most vulnerable. Here, Kaminsky considers how resistance can take unexpected, subtle forms. Some of the townspeople choose to be deaf as a strategy of silent protest. Deafness becomes a means of refusal: to speak, to hear, to comply, to resign, to forget. “In the name of Petya, we refuse,” the chorus of townspeople proclaim. Such an act feels deeply fraught, for able-bodied citizens seem to be performing deafness as “their only barricade” against tyrannical authority. Yet assuming deafness here is not tokenism nor the petty exploitation of disability for political gain. Rather, it is a communal act of mourning for and solidarity with the fallen Petya that animates their rebellion, that makes his deafness insurgency. Kaminsky frames deafness in explicitly crip terms: a politicized, community identity—mobile and adaptive— whose practices resist dehumanization and subvert authority.

Out of such meaningless violence is born a deaf community whose experiences shape not only their identities but their language. “The townspeople invented their own sign language. Some of the signs derived from various traditions (Russian, Ukranian, Belarusian, American Sign language, etc.). Other signs might have been made up by citizens, as they tried to create a language not known to authorities,” notes Kaminsky at the end of his book. Vasenkan deafness is thus characterized not by quietism but by prolixity—a ingenious talking back in the face of oppression that enables the townspeople to “testify” to the atrocities happening daily, poem after poem while the rest of the world “lived happily during the war.” In the form of printed representations of these signs, Kaminsky invites his reader to navigate a deaf poetics that deftly eludes the censorship of the soldiers. Scholars of Deaf Studies have argued that sign language’s rhetorical power lies precisely in its unique capacity to express complex ideas through visual-spatial metaphors.[2] We see this linguistic ingenuity both in the hybrid origins of the Vasenkan sign language, produced collectively by the townspeople living in precarity, and the hybrid forms of the poems in both verse and sign. Seemingly singular, localized signs come together in an embodied essay that expresses what might otherwise be silently witnessed during the occupation. When the traumas of war become nearly unspeakable, the hands unbound in turn speak volumes. The same hands that manipulated the puppets when Petya died. The same hands that, in retaliation, dragged the bodies of the dead soldiers to the back of the theater.

The first act of Deaf Republic traces the intimacies between Alfonso Barabinski and his wife, Sonya, who is pregnant when the military occupation occurs. After giving birth, Sonya is shot and Anushka, the baby girl, is immediately taken as Alfonso is hanged. The traumatic violence of civil war, this tragic family story suggests, is often intergenerational. Yet, as Kaminsky reminds us, cultural memory and forms of resistance also passes from one generation to another: “And yet, on some nights, townspeople dim the lights and teach their children to sign.” The Barabinskis are survived by Vasenka’s children, by the very language they helped to invent and share. Deafness remains a means of survival, the means of radically imagining “a peaceful country.” A deaf republic.

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[1] H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray. “Deaf Studies in the 21st Century: ‘Deaf-gain’ and the Future of Human Diversity.” The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education. Eds. Marc Marschark and Patricia Elizabeth Spencer. 2 (2010): 11.

[2] Bauman and Murray, 14.

What Does It Mean To Be Good? To Change?

Any rift in habit jolts us into consciousness. We’re not allowed to get comfortable — not that we were before.

Anna Meister, alumna of the MFA writing program at NYU and a former Goldwater Writing Fellow and Pushcart Prize nominee, is the author of As If, a Glass Poetry Chapbook Series August 2018 publication. Meister frames her poems in couplets, each poem untitled save for an asterisk, implying that the entire collection is one poem titled As If and each individual is a part of the whole. The choice to use couplets reinforces the inherent dichotomy in her subject matter: changing vs. staying the same; embracing vs. resisting; good vs. bad; meaning vs. meaninglessness. As Shira Erlichman puts it in her blurb for the chapbook, as if vs. as is.

Meister seamlessly takes us through the stages of change, depression, and self-love with poignant verse in her chapbook As If, a small but necessary book of the up-and-coming generation. This whole book — in both its diction and its themes — feels entirely relevant. There is a sense that the speaker’s struggles are societal, and a product of the pressures on her generation. She doesn’t shy from the mundane or the common: “Open Excel and tighten as trash / piles up in cover letter hell. As if / there’s a point to it all. Bent diploma, itchy eyes.” Instead, she uses the common as a means of revealing her frustrations and her truth.

Meister’s first poem opens with the main tension in the series: “Tell me the difference between / a change and an end […] my knuckles go white at the word open.” The speaker is fighting change, forcing her closing fist tighter. We know, off the bat, that the speaker is unhappy yet stubborn.

She asks, “What does deserve mean?” As someone who’s been in this position — depressed and wanting to change but resisting — I’ve thought about the meaning of the word deserve. It’s a bullshit word. No one deserves anything. You can work hard and fail or succeed, but to say that you deserve to succeed or that you don’t deserve to fail is entitled. Life doesn’t work like that. People are born how they’re born and bad things happen to good people.

What separates Meister’s poetry from any other verse with a what’s-the-point, nihilistic attitude is how comfortable the poet is with the colloquial. And how comfortable the speaker is with challenging her views despite her stubbornness. As If is stripped of that MFA snobbery that often seems to aim to exclude. The speaker doesn’t claim to know anything that we don’t, and doesn’t profess any holier-than-thou statements. The diction, too, is grounded. Take the title; it’s no coincidence that the phrase ‘as if’ seems shallow — it’s the catchphrase of the shallow character Cher from Clueless. Yet having an approachable slang phrase as the title invites us in, and from there we are guided into Meister’s deeper societal insights. The speaker in the poem is anything but shallow, despite the fact that she is modern and undoubtedly of this world.

In the third poem, the speaker states: “I ask to be good but don’t / know the taste.” So the speaker’s flirting with the idea of deserve; maybe you’re not entitled to anything even if you’re good, but being good may be enriching in and of itself. Maybe if you’re good you’ll allow yourself to be happier, because you’ll feel like that happiness is deserved. This line of thinking shows progress in the speaker. Still, the speaker’s questioning is flawed. When asking what it means to be good, she wonders, What does it taste like? (much like in the 9th poem, where she writes, “As if time can have / a taste”). Yet the desire to taste it is missing the point — it’s indulgent, focused on pleasure, on the senses, when the focus should be elsewhere — but where? The arc of this book is the speaker’s imperfect progress, which is accurate to life. She recognizes her issue, fights change, changes involuntarily, and overall, tries to be okay.

By the middle of the collection, the speaker’s attempt at goodness falters, warps: “Pills twist in my stomach as I repeat the good I know. I grow / less interested in salt, the wiped-down sink, sounds made by children.” The enjambment of the lines: “I grow / less interested…” illustrates the difficulty of positive change and the natural inclination of the speaker toward apathy after the overwhelmingness of depression and anxiety.

Further in the chapbook Meister weaves themes of longing and love — “all the ways we cheated death.” The speaker realizes that these bodily desires are coping mechanisms that inevitably distract her from positive change and from the goodness she desires, but still: these are her habits, and she clings to them as they push her under.

But does the speaker ever reach her goal? Does she embrace positive change, does she give in to being ‘good’? She realizes her sadness is “sewn-in,” that it’s out of her control, like “life / as a bunch of plants it’s not [her] job to water.” By the end of the collection, she seems to come out of her depression and into an acceptance of herself: “The mundane feels marvelous / when there’s no quicksand… More recently, a hallway always / brightly lit as if we didn’t deserve the dark… I have given myself permission to be / a monster in little ways.” She redefines her narrow idea of personhood, finally accepting the fact of mixed morality. However dissatisfying that may be, since Meister writes, “I don’t know what I’d hoped for.”

This book doesn’t have a clean ending, and that wouldn’t be appropriate; if it was a clean ending, it would be a lie, or the speaker would be dead. She’s still alive, changing, and dealing with those changes through to the end. To go back to her initial frustration: “Tell me the difference between / a change and an end,” the answer is that there’s no finality in change. Having a working mind and the clear intelligence that this speaker conveys ensures constant, inevitable change. This book is about change, yes, but it’s also about the frustrations and eventual begrudging acceptance of being alive all through the complex lens of hoping for joy, which makes its pages a haven for everyone who’s not dead yet.

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.

The Love of an Old Friend: Remembering Monica A. Hand

“Who are you?” Monica Hand asked me, the first time we finally got the nerve to speak to each other. Columbia, Missouri is small, and the literary community is tiny. As an undergrad, I’d go to poetry readings, open mics, and author craft talks. I was just as much of a book nerd as anyone else attending those events, but I was ignored in those places. Too young and maybe too black to be taken seriously by the older white crowds. I was shy, awkward, and sometimes too eager to run home to my fast-food leftovers to stick around and mingle with crowds that would rather look me up and down with their noses upturned than chat with me.

“Who are you?” she asked. “You’re everywhere.”

“Yeah, I see you all the time too,” I said. “I’m an English major.”

“And I teach here.”

Our conversation was brief, but since then, if we saw each other at literary events, we would exchange simple head nods or smiles in acknowledgement of each other. She saw me and I saw her: black women navigating white spaces to participate in the thing we loved—literature.

To be a black woman in America is to be the owner of many masks. I wear a diluted mask when I’m in places where I’m the minority: at work, shopping downtown, at literary events, and the like. It’s the mask I wear when I’m hyper aware of the space I take up. The mask I wear in order to survive. A mask Hand spotted from across the room and chose to approach with warmth.

About a year or so after our official introduction, Hand passed away. Her death was abrupt, causing Columbia to, at least for a while, pause and lament our friend, our teacher, our pair of fingers snapping for us at open mics. Things eventually picked up again, as life after another’s death tends to do, and I went back to my craft talks and author readings. Only then, without her familiar face smiling, or nodding, or simply affirming my presence there.

Hand gave us a final gift: just one week before she passed, she signed the contract for her second poetry collection DiVida to be published by Alice James Books. In DiVida, Hand addresses the idea of navigating white society. An idea we both knew all too well in Columbia and an idea every Person of Color must come to terms with in America. Hand explores this navigation as it relates specifically to black women with the help of two characters: DiVida, who wants to assimilate into white society; and her subconscious Sapphire, who doesn’t want to sacrifice her true self to appease others. Hand states that housing these multiple personas, these multiple masks, “masks the madhouse.” To be able to break oneself apart, to bend, mold, flex, and sometimes even break oneself into different masks to simply survive in a world that has only one view of you can cause craziness.

Sapphire attempts to save DiVida from this madness. Early in the collection, in “DiVida becomes Captain of the Lacrosse Team,” DiVida refuses to deny herself the love of Lacrosse, even if she may be the only black person on the team. Sapphire asks “Why you wanna play with people who want to slave you?” Throughout the book, Sapphire continues to argue that black women shouldn’t bounce between masks and be their full, unapologetic selves at all times, regardless of how uncomfortable it will make white society. In DiVida, we explore DiVida and Sapphire’s opposing positions and Hand forces us to grapple with the space that exists between the two.

With every move DiVida makes, Sapphire is in her ear, criticizing DiVida when she censors herself to tackle everything from getting pulled over by a police officer to chatting at a work event. Hand creates Sapphire’s warnings with a cadence that feels like they’re coming from the love of an old friend. These warnings serve as reprimands to DiVida for even wanting to survive a life amongst those who, she feels, want nothing to do with her. Sapphire speaks like an elder who has seen this play out in the lives of other black women before and she attempts to end the cycle here, with DiVida, on the page.

At times, DiVida’s voice wavers and cracks under both society’s and Sapphire’s pressure: in “DiVida submits to her Duende” we see DiVida reach a breaking point. Tired of succumbing to society, she allows herself to escape:

“she let loose the boogeyman / unchained the monkey on her back / Sapphire sucker-punches her in the gut / just to be sure / there is blood / there are tears…”

Hand captures the internal struggle of black womanhood in America through DiVida and Sapphire’s ongoing conflict. She leaves her readers to ask how much of DiVida’s actions are performative and just her being her true self. She then forcers us as readers to question our performative and actual selves—our unique masks—as we navigate our own spaces in society.

Leaning Into the Infinite by Marc Vincenz

All roads are travelled.
Vibration determines everything.

This life journey upon which one embarks, a path enveloped by vague mists & fractured contexts. Marc Vincenz’s Leaning Into The Infinite would be this journey recapitulated — an odyssey through language where allegory is served up as the cargo. It is a topography of conjecture, with Orphic allusions joined through a synthesis of loose & knotted linkage. The exploratory imagination is on full dioramic display here, a mosaic of exploration through the centuries, configured by a confederation of ideas & imagery.

The pathways that insinuate through foreshadowed imagery in Vincenz’s previous books This Wasted Land and Becoming the Sound of Bees, continue in Leaning Into The Infinite by way of a similar thematic momentum, with images of visions achieved via passage through the Underworld — through “Journey’s that do not end” —  with images of decay and renewal, of inertia, of prayers and cursings. The journey proceeds across terrains of questioning exile in a pursuit of language as it transcends the temporal realms.

The mytho-poetic narrative begun in Becoming the Sound of Bees echoes throughout these poems, both cryptic and intrepid. Uncle Fernando (as a persona of Pessoa) and Ivan, two wayfarers linked-up across their symbolic process, thread their way along the sinuous journey embarked upon, both of them recording various illusions and sundry events as they proceed. Counterparts-in-exile striving for their glimpses of the Infinite.

In prior books by Marc Vincenz, these various palpable instances of exile have been previously suggested, where the actors involved are impregnated with a transitory residency. Yet “what soul wants to dwell forever in exile, watching a tide rise & fall from the sidelines?” This would seemingly lead Uncle Fernando to suggest to anyone finding themselves in strange territory:

Let us lean toward the infinite with the sense
that somehow we lean toward ourselves
& let us preserve the flame that each night
may buzz in the memory of a sundrenched day,
so we might know what it means to be truly sad,
to be truly simple,
to be calm as trees.

Within the pages of Leaning Into The Infinite are deft hints regarding our evolutionary future; we receive kaleidoscopic glimpses that mesh in a process of particulars, sustaining a journey both inner and outer. And it is the water, “that engine of change”, and the a priori light which underpins all process and motion, that are the elemental redeeming allegories of infinite pattern & flux which fuel a “primal inkling”, the very phenomena that sparked the Romantics with their nature visions. Water and light, inextricably bound by the wave phases of eternity, provide the rhythms of genesis and renewal, of elemental action by way of substance & process.

A holy order interlocked
In its own unity.
And that everything
Was a sign or signature of something else,

The metaphor being the meaning
Behind matter and what mattered:

A code to be deciphered by those in the know —

Leaning Into The Infinite depicts a Dantesque narrative quest, where getting lost becomes the impetus/consequence of a journey taken through unknown terrains. Jungian episodics of retrieval and anticipation reveal the insinuating path through descent, plateau, and ascent. Wisdom beckons as the goal, handed down through riddles revealed across this world’s historical legacies.

Allusions to language’s purpose abound across these pages, leading one to ask: Might it be that language has evolved because of our continuous usage, “a language woven/ with rivers & skies”, and the “Language of Dawn”? By the ancient auguries done in the gaugings of bird flight, would there be reference to the poetic flights of language? Uncle Fernando indicates this to be so: “Take note. Observe everything. One bird at a time.”

It is himself as augur, the one who has originated a Dead Bird Theory of Everything in a kind of ontology based on the metaphor of a bird that dies, yet who reawakens through a quantum reassembly in its quest to know the Unknowable. He has further avuncular advice to the one on the journey of self-discovery:

Become
That bird
In space
In your own right

Even if “Few Birds Speak”, Uncle Fernando’s Dead Bird does speak, does notice, and does realize through its transformation, that it is destined to lean into the Infinite.

In his uniquely original book Meadowlark West, the San Franciscan poet Philip Lamantia, himself characterized as a “Shaman of the Surreal”, speaks about “the lyrical sublimity of birds”, where the language of birds provides a “mouth of poesis”. It seems likely that Uncle Fernando, that ontologically searching soothsayer, has embarked upon his own “homeward journey” in the second part of Leaning Into The Infinite, where he engages the “symbolique” of the birds with orthinic offerings. A mythopoetic ekstasis reflects Lamantia’s Ornithic hermetica and suggests itself in this Orphic utterance:

[Whoever is going to] make offerings
to the gods first [releases] for them a little bird . . . ,

Where wind-augurs observe the pattern of winged flight, &

Clouds scatter
and the birds hush,

Which seemingly echoes Lamantia’s

The language of the birds/ is never spoken,

Which also suggests a sense that

Their gestures speak with deep silence
flying hearts before they take off
and primordial gnosis takes flight

As every flight becomes a resurrection where

After death poetry shall have its morning of birds.

The embedded thematics of uncertain journeys, reflecting primal patterns that influence the landscapes of our acquired spaces, continue to direct our contemporary cultural shuffles. In the aftermath of the post-industrial state-of-malaise we currently are drowning in these days, will we attempt to rebuild a renewed world through the conscious reclaim of our corrupted language? Can poetry remake a world rapidly going to ruin through a fresh awareness of the language fundamentals that have underwritten humanity since ancient times?

To “Dream outside the dream” would be one suggestion towards any realization of what it takes to dream back into focus all that has produced this quotidian blur now engulfing us. Leaning Into The Infinite suggests a way forward, a renewal and return from the dark passages that collectively we have endured throughout our evolutionary stumbles. By chronicling the mythos, along with the pathos, of our human condition, the tribe who we are, both individually & collectively, can slowly rise upon the thermals like the birds. We might likely achieve a higher level through this greater process that could be our destiny. As that avuncular seer would have it,

Put yourself to useful work

and go forward. . . .