Precise Diction and Vivid Imagery: A Review of Joan Fiset’s Memoir, Namesake

Joan Fiset’s collection, Namesake (2015, Blue Begonia Press), has been described as a book of “memoir vignettes.” Indeed, the passages that comprise the book offer us brief glimpses into Fiset’s childhood and adolescence, ultimately giving us a fuller picture of the author’s life. More precisely, each vignette might be read as a kind of prose poem, as Fiset’s precise diction and vivid imagery allows each passage to stand alone, a tiny slice of life from a time long gone. Passages like “Ballast,” “Wonder Bread,” and “Standardized Testing” give a sense of 1950s American culture and the experiences of a young woman in that time. Nonetheless, each passage, or poem, draws upon or hints at the collection’s larger focus—Fiset’s mother—expanding our understanding of what it means for Fiset to be her mother’s namesake.

For example, in “Mirrored,” the speaker describes her childhood past time of sliding down the banister and a single instance of glimpsing herself in a mirror at the bottom of the stairs: “This face surprised me, a child rounding the bed on her way to some destination. The fleeting image lasted because the mirror was there.” These closing lines simultaneously propel us through the book with the idea of a “destination,” even as the words ask us to linger with this particular passage, to think about the layers of meaning in the idea of reflection. As readers, we understand that Fiset’s mother is the reason the mirror is there. In this way, this vignette of Fiset’s childhood experience speaks more largely to the purpose of the memoir as a whole—a reflection on Fiset’s identity through a reflection on her mother.

Thus, even in the passages that do not mention Fiset’s mother, we have the sense of her presence, of the ways she shaped Fiset’s world. Indeed, as the memoir goes on, Fiset’s mother becomes more and more of a figure in the passages, sometimes blocking out Fiset all together. In “Heartsick,” for example, we actually see a moment from Joan Stone’s point of view: “My mother comes out of the kitchen to comfort me. Years later she can still see me through the window in black-watch plaid. My cotton skirt filled with wind as I ran.” It is as if Fiset, the speaker, has filled her mother’s place, watching her child-self through her mother’s eyes.

As the memoir unfolds, then, the passages move away from innocent moments tinged by the shadow of some family strife until we begin to see a real conflict between Fiset’s parents, and between Fiset’s mother and the world’s expectations. Joan Stone, while present for her daughters, is different from the other mothers and wives around her. She teaches her Girl Scout troupe weird songs and arrives to Fiset’s fashion show in a poorly made dress. In “Entrée,” we learn that “There are sixteen bottles of ketchup in the refrigerator. They stand next to each other, some with an inch of ketchup or less.” This fact is odd, though perhaps not alarming. But the next passage, “S.O.S,” hints more strongly at the mundane paranoia of domesticity: “Turn off the stove; check then check and check it again.” Slowly, these moments reveal something deeply amiss with the mother and the family. In a late passage, young Fiset tells her father not to hit her mother, and eventually we learn of the breakdown that puts Fiset’s mother in the hospital, with shock treatments and medication.

Thus, Fiset’s true talent in this collection seems to be in her ability to slowly and deftly create a fuller picture through these tiny vignettes. While her language is honest and plain, she is never condemning of the figures she depicts. What is more, in revealing her mother’s struggle, Fiset also hints at the struggle of women to find and live out their own identities, perhaps especially in the 1950s and 60s, but also in today’s cultural climate. Before we learn of Joan Stone’s eventual breakdown, we learn of her remarkable early career as an actress on Broadway; she gave up that career to devote herself entirely to her family, to a husband whose love eventually fell short. In the end, we learn that Joan Stone finds true healing only through artwork: “She will talk of how her art grew out of her suffering, how it is the child within.” Thus, Namesake is itself an example of Fiset following in her mother’s footsteps, making art through the sufferings of the past.

While some of the passages do not resonate as powerfully as others, Fiset’s 2015 collection is filled with abiding, poignant concerns. In the selection of moments and images, one can tell that a master is at play. I look forward to reading her newest work.

Shame Will Not Have the Last Word: A Review of Jessica Fischoff's The Desperate Measure of Undoing

Recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren talked about losing her job as a teacher in 1971 when she became “visibly pregnant,” and a host of critics came out to call her a liar. That couldn’t be possible, they argued. Yet of course it was. The senator went on to say that such things still happen to women today, even though they aren’t specifically sanctioned by law. I’ve had several men tell me this past year that there is no pay gap in this country between women and men, even though all evidence and experience proves otherwise. Jessica Fischoff’s new book of poetry The Desperate Measure of Undoing is in large part a reaction to and reminder of these kinds of discrimination, and a message to those who refuse to admit, let alone work to fix, these ongoing misogynistic realities. Her book echoes the ways these issues repeat throughout history, even as many men refuse to notice or acknowledge them.

The book begins with the poem “The Fortune Teller.” The first lines read, “Give me your hand, I promise to be / gentle,” and offers hope to the reader later in the poem with “There is light /beyond the threshold, significant and pervading.” The tone of “we will overcome” is set. And yet the poem ends with “Nothing hurts that isn’t real,” cementing women’s realities in a world of patriarchal doubt, and setting up the inevitable contradiction that all is possible/all is limited.

The Desperate Measure of Undoing continues with hints of delicate power that insist on apologizing for themselves. The power of love, often seen as weakness, is portrayed here as uniquely feminine, and uniquely inadequate. Our world believes that love by itself is not enough to solve problems when really, it’s the solution to every dilemma we face. Love repudiates war, pain, dominance, all things that reinforce hierarchies meant to justify oppression. In “Abduction” Fischoff writes, “Body, forgive me this much love,” a cry of regret rooted in shame. In “The Museum” the author finds

…the picture
you painted for me of letters stacked so high

that the L bent beneath the weight of the O
and the V flattened where it fell against the E.
But love is not a word you need to read

from top to bottom
left to right
or out loud

In fact, the word “heart,” the universal symbol for love, is peppered throughout the collection, beating strongly as the most necessary and fundamental pulse of humanity.

Eve also figures heavily in this book, the O.G. of sin, the archetypal woman who, in the telling by the patriarchy, is the root of every problem in the world. Born in perfection and branded by transgression, she’s responsible for all pain we are now plagued by, and all women are her: worthy of blame; flawed; burdened; responsible. This myth is the genesis of our inevitable female self-conscious concern of never enough. If we are responsible for original sin, how can we ever be forgiven? How can we not long to go back to the beginning for a do-over? The poem “I’ve Been Spreading My Legs Like a Wishbone” tries to do this by re-entering the womb, unwinding time before sinful mistakes: “a thing can be opened without unhinging, / free me from this sentence / of splintering, weave me back into the rib.” The narrator yearns for re-absorption and absolution. A plea to the powers-that-be to allow us to shed this skin of wickedness.

Coupled with this inherent shame is righteous anger. “My Body is a Library” insists that “If all it takes to lose myself is burning the history that /brought me here, then hand me the match.” Fischoff will not allow shame to have the last word. If necessary, we’ll burn everything to the ground to gain agency, to claim power. To name the world properly.

The poem “Oh” begins,

Eve,

How often do you think of me?
The house now, the kids, and
Everyone needs to eat, I know how tired
You are to mother the world

Forgive me your skin

These stanzas serve as an apology to Eve for what we’ve done to her, for what we’ve done to ourselves. For taking on every job, every responsibility. If Eve is “mother[ing] the world,” then men are benefitting from her emotional and physical labor while using it as a means of subjugation. What of this could possibly require an apology? And yet we apologize, over and over again. For bumping into a stranger around a corner. For taking up too much space in line. For inconveniencing those who seek to profit from our pain. For everything. And if we apologize for everything, then apologies lose their meaning, their potency. Surely, we can’t be responsible for everything. And if we are, then ultimately, we are responsible for nothing.

So how does this resolve? How do we live in the contradiction? The poem “The Hold” looks for answers, claiming that “For years I felt my body suffer the ache of restitution.” Does this restitution ever come? Can it? This hint from the author, among others, suggests that societal structures must be reimagined for healing to happen, for healing to even be a possibility. The existing structures were created by men, benefit men, and are propped up by men. How can these networks built to exclude us do the hard work of inclusion without fundamental change? Fischoff maintains that they can’t. We must reinvent our institutions. People of all genders, races, backgrounds, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and ages must have their say in the creation of a new world. Until then, we have nothing to apologize for.

Considered Slantwise: A Review of Joan Fiset's How It Was in Scotland

If you want to see the Pleiades in the night sky, you must not look at it directly or all you will see is a faint smudge. But shift your gaze a little one way or the other, and all seven stars become clear. Much the same approach works when reading the poems of Joan Fiset in How It Was in Scotland. If you try to meet them head on, you won’t see clearly. But look to the left or to the right… 

Paintings by Noah Saterstrom, which accompany Fiset’s poems and to which she responds—more often than not obliquely—in this hybrid collection are also best viewed from an angle. The paintings are renderings of photographs from Saterstrom’s family albums and, like Fiset’s poetry, seem somehow incomplete, not quite finished. Often the people’s faces are smeared, and the settings softened so that they feel familiar, but not entirely so. Together, the text and the visual work in a way that does not reveal the connection unless they are considered slantwise.

Take, for example, a two-line poem that appears about halfway through the book:

a man kept calling Lucinda
up and down the stairs

The painting that accompanies this couplet shows a young girl in a blue dress and a white apron standing outside near the corner of a red building. Behind her, the scene is a bleary landscape reminiscent, perhaps, of Kansas with what could be a grain elevator in the distance. Her face is featureless except for the suggestion of a mouth and eyes. She has a deep shadow behind her and is wearing red shoes. Is this Lucinda?

That sort of question, that sort of correspondence between image and language is central to our reading. Even if, as in the case above, there is not an evident relationship, the fact that each poem—save the last, which is a variation of the first—has been paired with a painting, that they present themselves in the same way each time—poem on the left, painting on the right—suggests we are meant to take them in together, in union, halves of a whole.

There is also a thread of a narrative in the volume, an interconnectedness, as if we are turning the pages of a family album and seeing scenes changed by time, recalling them barely. Fiset’s poems capture those relationships and, in their spare way reveal the meaning of the memory. Two poems in particular stand out as exemplars.

In one, a young man poses in the unnatural way high school graduates are twisted for their important portrait. He wears a jacket and tie and looks away from the camera. Fiset captures both this moment and the uncertainty of the boy’s future:

voices croon from across the river
he gathers stray language
inside his hands

should words approach
blue eyes close

to silence
like the room

In the other poem, she expresses the grief of a man in a gray suit, head bent and hands folded, looking at a grave:

later
hands held
below the minute
seconds
understand

Other images of grave sites and mourners prompt Fiset to additional musings on death and loss, while photos of families dressed in bright spring colors invoke thoughts of life, rebirth, joy. Next to a picture of a mother and three children, all dressed in red, she happily declares:

this is summer
this is years and years

over the lake
returns so blue

look together into it
dreaming the hummingbirds home

Two of the children in that painting appear again in other guises and, perhaps, at different ages, helping to stitch together the collection as a continuous but not necessarily linear history. In some instances, though, the history, the lineage, is mysterious, as if there were secrets the poet has discovered. A man standing next to his car outside of a motel looking at a boy who may be about to climb into the back seat or has just emerged is depicted in two lines

faint sketch of a man
rarely mentioned

leaving us to wonder if this is the man we’re looking at, and, if so, just who is he and why is he rarely mentioned?

The only named character in the book, Lucinda, makes a second appearance several pages after we initially meet her. She is dressed in the same outfit, but her hair is braided in this one, and she’s carrying a book. The dark shadow of her photographer can be seen on the wall next to her. As is the case in the first poem, this one raises more questions about the girl than provides answers and seems to hint at her being ill-suited for this place:

Lucinda’s thirst
lengthened out to a ruler
to measure the kitchen inch by inch
no one moved to wipe up the mess
no one said a single word

In an interview published in Tarpaulin Sky magazine, Fiset explains that her writing is oftentimes an unconscious process, one that “is capable of calling forth, translating, and transforming ‘news’ from the unconscious in relation to lived experience—what one witnesses externally as well as internally. When form and content become one a synthesis and integration have occurred that can shock us into a deeply satisfying crucial kind of knowing, a fierce recognition that, for me, often cannot be explained.”

By focusing her attention on the Saterstrom paintings, Fiset is forced to translate very specific lives and experiences which may seem somewhat counter to the unconscious approach she describes, and yet the poems that make up this collection reflect the synthesis of form and content that shock us into a fierce recognition. Just as we might see ourselves in the blurry images of a family photo, so, too, might we find something vaguely familiar in Fiset’s poems which, like whispers or snatches of overheard conversation, trigger our curiosity and memory. The strength of How It Was with Scotland is that the poet and the painter take us to places we think we remember but which are ultimately unknowable.

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A Conversation with Poet and Translator Deborah Woodard

Deborah Woodard is the author of Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star, 2006) Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats, 2012) and No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911 (Ravenna Press, 2018). She has published several chapbooks, including Hunter Mnemonics (hemel press, 2008), which was illustrated by artist Heide Hinrichs. Her poetry has appeared in Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press, 2013), Filter, Handsome, Gargoyle, Shake the Tree, Zoland Poetry, and elsewhere. She has translated the poetry of Amelia Rosselli from Italian in The Dragonfly, A Selection of Poems: 1953-1981(Chelsea Editions, 2009), Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015) and Obtuse Diary (Entre Rios Books, 2018). Deborah teaches at Hugo House in Seattle.

In this interview, Deborah Woodard discusses her recent translation of Amelia Rosselli’s Obtuse Diary, a collection of the Italian poet’s early experiments in prose, as well as her own practice of poetry that often engages in oblique forms of translation.

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In Obtuse Diary, Amelia Rosselli refers to clarity as “a fake lake.” For me, the term “obtuse” conjures high school geometry, and I picture an angle moving toward the horizontal. The common use of the adjective is dull or slow, so the very idea of an obtuse diary is curious. How do you understand Rosselli’s use of the term?

The persona Rosselli develops in Obtuse Diary is obtuse, or slow-witted, in the sense that her development has been delayed by personal trauma that also had a distinctly public side. Rosselli was born in exile in Paris in 1930 to anti-fascist activist parents, Marion Cave (British) and Carlo Rosselli (Italian) who had fled Mussolini’s Italy. In 1937, her father and her uncle (Nello Rosselli) were assassinated by Mussolini’s operatives. Although Amelia’s time in Larchmont, New York, where Marion and her children eventually found refuge for the duration of the war, was stable and even happy, the trauma of her father’s death was a wound that never healed. When she settled in Italy after the war, first in Florence and then permanently in Rome, Rosselli was starting from scratch. She was the daughter and niece of heroes of the resistance, but she was also a rather isolated young woman, the ugly duckling who was, in truth, the swan.

In my view, Rosselli’s obtuseness was her way of resisting a post-war world that’s broken, but also shallow and materialistic. Coming up against these corrupt veneers renders her dim. “Clarity is a fake lake.” No way to see oneself clear through this mess. So instead, she envelops herself in protective dullness, or numbness. At the same time, she comprehends all too clearly: “She didn’t want to know that she was the target of many, and of the laughter of so many: she was unable to discern in the silence of other hidden ones a too-real furor of her own.”

You’ve been translating Rosselli’s poetry over the course of many years. What draws you to her work, and to the practice of translation? Your own work as a poet is often engaged in oblique forms of translation, moving among different discourse worlds or inhabiting borrowed texts.

Yes, I agree that I’ve always tended toward oblique forms of translation in my own work. That’s a really good insight, Eva. I feel fortunate that I also was able to be an actual translator, thanks to Rosselli. I stumbled upon her work, more or less by accident. I pulled her first collection, Variazioni belliche (War Variations) from a bundle of books a friend sent me from Italy, discards from her own library, that I’d stowed in a sideboard. I was looking for a translation project. Initially, I put the book back under the sideboard, but then I gave it a second look, and felt drawn to its extreme hermeticism. What made the poetry difficult, was also its allure. I never solved the mystery of Rosselli’s verse, and so I never moved on from translating her. Roberta Antognini and I have recently started work on Documento, Rosselli’s longest collection. After that, who knows?

Your most recent book of poems, No Finis; Triangle Testimonies, 1911, uses transcripts of the trial in which Triangle Shirtwaist owners were ultimately acquitted of murder. Your focus is on the aggressive cross-examination of workers, most of whom were young women who were not native speakers of English.

Each poem is a set of interrogations, fixated on details of doors and windows, keys and locks, a relentless questioning broken only by the workers’ own muddled recall of trauma. The poems are quite moving, the difficulty of speaking contrasted with the defense attorney’s insistence on answers. What drew you to evoke this horrific event, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire that killed 146 workers, from the standpoint of the trial?

I’d been trying to write about the American labor movement. My mother had worked as a labor organizer, and both my parents were socialists. I’m still trying to figure out the labor book, if, indeed, it’s a single collection. I mean, I say American labor, but part of what I’ve written so far takes place in Denmark, as I was attempting to collage and reconstitute an unfinished manuscript on economics by my father. The juiciest bits for my purposes took place in Denmark, oddly enough. Anyway, I was always somewhat aware of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, as a touchstone, and I started reading about it. Then, in 2011, I was in New York City—actually, for a Rosselli conference—and I went to NYU’s centennial exhibit on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. It was held on the first floor of the Brown Building, the site of the fire. At that exhibit, I learned of Cornell’s online archives of the fire, including the transcript of the trial of the factory owners. I considered other ways to address the tragedy—but the transcript pulled me in, and I ended up focusing on that. Then, with illustrations added by John Burgess, the sequence became a book. The poems, or playlets, as I think of them, seem to be a good length for bookstore and pop-up performances.

The trial revolves around a locked door and whether or not a key was hung beside it. Hence, the focus on locks and keys. I see the witnesses as empowered, despite the manipulations of Max Steuer, the defense attorney—himself an immigrant, though from an earlier wave of migration—who was able to adroitly switch up and manipulate linguistic registers. Though not likely a conscious strategy, and certainly erratic in nature, the witnesses’ linguistic glitches and digressions become a mode of resistance. They can delay answering questions and, at times, avoid them altogether. They aren’t reliable or helpful witnesses, as they’re befuddled (obtuse, like Rosselli’s narrator). My hope is that the playlet-poems can be performed in more than one way, and that the witnesses can win some of the time.

Borrowed Tales is a collection of prose poems that, while pilfering from diverse sources, including McGuffey Readers, case histories, biographies, and art installations, are not retellings but new and strange narratives.

I’d love to hear how you work with sources, using the sequence Gordon and Martha as an example. In this work, Gordon and Martha are siblings, and Martha is a quite daring graffiti artist. It’s a marvelous sequence—dizzying and inventive in its conjuring of Martha’s creative flamboyance and her “iridescent ambivalence.”

The names of your characters, Gordon and Martha, are nods to the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, known for his practice of removing sections from buildings slated for demolition, and documenting his interventions in photographs and films. Your work, though, is not about the artist, although images of abandoned buildings abound as we follow Martha marking space: her “arrows directed the eye, embedded themselves in sinking doorways.”

I am trying to figure the relation between Matta-Clark and your fictional graffiti artist Martha, and I am tempted to make a connection between Matta-Clark’s cuts and the graffiti artist’s ‘burning’ of walls – or between cutting and tagging. (“Tags covered what they did not own.”) Am I overreaching? How did you arrive at the character of Martha?

Well, though this wasn’t the plan, Borrowed Tales teems with children and young adults. Even Hamlet and Ophelia are probably rather young. Gordon and Martha radiate a light-hearted sunny energy, despite their trafficking in the grimy art of graffiti and Martha becoming a vampire at the end of the sequence. (I had a dream about vampires on the subway.) Gordon and Martha speak to my positive feelings about the brother and sister bond. There’s great loyalty between them, and I love it when Gordon says that “He knew his sister Martha was a genius.” Martha is the prime mover and principal artist and Gordon readily accepts this.

Glad that you like “iridescent ambivalence,” and please do overreach a bit when it comes to Matta-Clark and his techniques! I had already settled on the name “Martha” as I’d had a dream about one of my godson’s younger sisters, Martha, being pushed in her carriage over a little bridge, in, perhaps, Central Park. Given that dream, when I scissored apart “Gordon” and “Matta,” “Matta” was destined to become Martha. Under other circumstances, those syllables could have turned into, say, Mattie. But the die was cast. I must say that it was odd to learn, down the road, that Gordon Matta-Clark had a twin brother.

In the cosmology of Borrowed Tales, Gordon and Martha are the children of a woman named Lorna. I based Lorna on an actual person, a student of my father’s at Goddard College and, later, my sometimes babysitter. Lorna had given up a baby for adoption. After the death of my mother when I was ten, I moved to New York with my brother, to live with my father and stepmother. Lorna was in New York, working as a waitress. She brought me packets of Saltines from the diner where she worked. I felt that we had each suffered a loss, and that these losses couldn’t be talked about. They were taboo. I always wondered what happened to Lorna, and so she landed her own section in Borrowed Tales. She has given up Gordon but appears to be raising Martha. Somehow, Martha finds Gordon and they form an allegiance, but they never speak of Lorna, their mother. That’s taboo, though we don’t know why. What Gordon and Martha have in common beyond their sibling status is their penchant for creating and inhabiting imaginary worlds. They do so with considerable panache.

There are many wonderful moments in “Gordon and Martha,” but I’d like to ask you about one particular passage. At a certain point in Martha’s evolution as a graffiti artist, she ceases to tag. You write:

Martha’s early tags had influenced the hands of other writers. The tags were like cups of tea made up ahead of time that had grown cold.

The image of pouring tea—so cozy, domestic, a small gesture—is in stark contrast to the practice of tagging, often done in harrowing circumstances, and so central to the graffiti artist’s identity.

Martha seems to have come to the limits of what she could accomplish with tagging. So she turns exclusively to burners, or murals. As for the tea, it’s an odd image, I agree. It was probably my tea, to be honest, as, when one cuts images and notation into a poem, who knows what will persist. Such as a cup of tea grown cold. However, if I’d tried to think about what a young graffiti artist’s beverage of choice might be, it could have been cliché. Red Bull? Let me digress by saying that I love seeing hardboiled detectives in U.K. police procedurals put up the kettle for tea.

Graffiti art is also considered defacement and “bad” writing, so this brings me to your collection Plato’s Bad Horse. The book’s title alludes to Plato’s image of the soul as a charioteer trying to steer a pair of horses, one sensible and one impulsive.

The title poem raises the question of unreliable or ill-formed memories: “My memories have become too burred / to be of use, like horses that cannot be ridden.” In a later section of the book, you reflect on “mnemata-driven recitations,” spurred by the discovery, after your father’s death, of a manuscript in which he discusses memory devices and argues that they played a role in the writing of the gospels. You write: “Poems that had remained in draft for more than a decade, stalled by the gaps in my memory, began to emerge as I opened myself up to the repetition and variation of a few key images.” 

I am fascinated by this attempt to transform memory fragments into memory devices. I’d love to hear about your process of working with memories – described as “useless” in the title poem but in later poems appear and reappear as support beams.

In the following passage, you refer to the search for mnemata:

I had my own notes: guideposts, ditches of dark water in the snow.That day, I was going to buy some blue teal silk,so perhaps the mnemata could be bolts of cloth as well,……or in the basement,the wicker basket of gray clothespins….

The clothespins took on the gray of temple pigeons.  

Did your exploration of mnemata-driven structuring devices in Plato’s Bad Horse influence later poems? I’m thinking, for example, of your repetition and re-purposing of images in Borrowed Tales.

As a collection, Plato’s Bad Horse includes older ways of composing while ushering in the new. You’re focusing in on the most important aspect of the collection for me—namely, the start of collage in my practice.

My father, a professor of psychology and the son of a Presbyterian minister, had been writing a book about the gospels for some time. I learned what a book meant emotionally and materially through his living within the promise of his evolving work, a psychological study that wove together what he’d learned as a child with what he’d dedicated himself to as an adult. After his death, I kept rereading his unfinished manuscript. However, though my father wrote quite lucidly and directly, I found it hard to track the text, no matter how many times I read it. This went on for a number of years. It was quite frustrating.

What did sink in for me was that a mnemonic was a memory device. It could have been something like beads on a string that a story teller would finger, rather like rosary beads, in order to jog his memory, or he could click his fingernails together, or something like that (reminiscent of what people are doing at poetry readings these days!). I hypothesized that anything could function as a memory device: as a series of guideposts.

Consequently, I took up a pair of scissors, photocopied my worksheets so as not to destroy the originals, and put everything through a simple slice-and-dice collage process that I’d learned from the late Kathleen Fraser, with whom I studied for a brief but influential time at a writing conference in Santa Cruz.

Here’s the exercise I learned from Fraser. Take a piece of writing, generally typed, fold it in half and then scissor down the central fold and between the lines. Turn over all the half lines, so you can’t read them. They’ll resemble the little strips of paper one pulls from fortune cookies. Next, take a new sheet of paper and, selecting two half lines at random, tape them together to form a new line. Continue until all the half lines are taped to the paper. Then type up your new piece. Voila!

I remember Kathleen Fraser saying that she wanted to go home and put all the poems of hers she’d “never liked” through this process. This is what I did with my drafts. Paradoxically, splintering the drafts enabled ideas to cohere and psychic material to take more fully embodied form. I’m so grateful to my students, my second teachers, in respect to collage. Unbidden, they started revising their cut-ups, carefully teasing out narrative, shaping lines, and refining imagery. Revision was the missing link.

The mnemonics in the latter half of Plato’s Bad Horse and all of Borrowed Tales were created through this collage plus extensive revision. I also used it to compress and augment the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire trial transcript; though I didn’t cut lines in half, I added in my own material more sparingly, and I often restored narrative sequences. One thing that I haven’t mentioned in regard to this practice is that it tends to shorten and tighten texts. When I type up a worksheet of taped half lines, I select from it, going fairly quickly so as not to overthink. The trial runs to hundreds of pages, so condensing was key.

My last question is about your poem “Ghismonda in Calabria: A Tentative Libretto.” Ghismonda is a figure from Boccaccio’s Decameron, but you’ve placed your characters, including a reader and a translator, in contemporary Calabria. The narrator says, “Translation, my mind wandered, was not / that different from the stop-start of the Metro.” In this poem, are you reflecting on your own experience as a translator of Italian? A frequently quoted line from George Steiner is “Every language is a world.” How has your experience of Italian shaped your own creative work in English?

Overall, translating Rosselli has made me a more experimental poet. She writes in Hospital Series: “Life is a vast experiment for some, too /void the earth the whole into its knees / piercing lances and persuaded anecdotes, I sow you / world clasped by the laurel.” Lances are pierced and anecdotes persuaded. This opens up possibilities right there. Rosselli’s oddities have a certain heft. In one of my mnemonic poems in Plato’s Bad Horse, I wrote: “Some haystack it was, munching hay.” It never occurred to me before, but that line may be indebted to Rosselli’s. Both her lines and my own here give me a certain boost, though I can’t really tell you why.

Yes, I took a stab at writing about translating in “Ghismonda in Calabria.” The poem—which is not collaged, but which works with fragments found in my worksheets as another approach to accepting fragmentation—translates Boccaccio’s Ghismonda into a modern Ghismonda, or “G.” I was, in fact, helping the actual G (not her real initial) with a translation of an article. It was so much fun working with her in her airy study in Piazza di Bologna (which is in Rome, not Calabria. The place names make the poem challenging to track, I admit). I hadn’t been translating all that long at the time. To be able to work with “G” to bring a few paragraphs into focus in English did open up a world to me. As we were working, G’s daughter, darted into the room to model a series of bathing suits: “When we’re done, we crack the blinds, / we shift our chairs. We watch her daughter’s / rapid-fire change of bathing suits.” The translator is always auditioning new garb, seeking new ways to tweak the target language and to let the original text shine forth.

Rosselli is an incredible mentor. She can make a bank shot and yet somehow she is completely lucid, too. And she can write about the same themes over and over again without getting stale. How does she accomplish this? These are the questions that keep me translating her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, seriously, one last question.

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

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

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

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

The Jaguars that Prowl Our Dreams: An Interview with Poet and Novelist Mary Mackey

New York Times best-selling author Mary Mackey became a poet by running high fevers, tramping through tropical jungles, dodging machine gun fire, being caught in volcanic eruptions, swarmed by army ants, stalked by vampire bats, threatened by poisonous snakes, making catastrophic decisions with regard to men, and reading.

Here is my interview with her, focused on her decades of writing, particularly her latest poetry collection The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams.

How were you able to write in such a dream state, with such a flow of superimposed dreamlike images, completely sober? How do you get into the state of mind that prepares you to write this sort of poetry? 

In the mid 1970’s, I decided that I needed some way to access my unconscious that did not involve drugs or alcohol (none of which I use) or exceptionally high fevers. Running a fever of near 107 degrees is too high a price to pay for anything, much less poetry. I knew there had to be a better way, and gradually I found it.

After exploring various possibilities, I put together a method which permits me to go deeply into my unconscious, access the nonverbal parts of my mind, and come up with images, metaphors, plots, ideas, and other materials. Put in simple terms, I stand on the threshold between dreaming and waking. This is very much like the state we are in in when we first wake up in the morning. Usually we forget our dreams almost immediately. I have figured out a way to remember unconscious material long enough to go to my computer or one of my notebooks and write it down.

To what extent are the places you visited still wild? How do the people in Costa Rica, Brazil and everywhere else you visited feel about economic development and ecological conservation? Is it possible to accomplish both goals? 

Although Costa Rica has one of the best national park systems in Latin America, much of the rainforest that I lived in when I was in my twenties has been cut down. I was told a few years ago that 90% of what I saw in the late 1960’s no longer exists. I don’t know if this is true and I haven’t gone back to look because it would be too heart-breaking.

As for Brazil, the Amazon is still vast. When you fly to Rio from the US, you fly over it for four hours. In 2004, my husband and I went up the Amazon starting at Manaus on a boat usually used to carry botanists and other scientists into the jungle. We traveled 2000 miles in all and saw only 3 small villages and two towns, neither of which had populations over 14,000. There was nothing else except jungle and water and sky. Unfortunately, all of that is now changing at a terrifyingly rapid pace. The new President of Brazil has opened formerly protected parts of the amazon to logging and mineral extraction. I have no idea how much of that vast, species-rich jungle will survive, but I think we should all be alarmed by its destruction.

As for how the people of Brazil feel about economic development and ecological conservation, I’m not equipped to say. Personally I feel that it is possible to feed the world’s population and protect biodiversity at the same time. A new book entitled Nature’s Matrix describes this positive scenario better than I ever could. I recommend checking it out.

How do you decide which poems should go in each book? Do you just write poems until you have enough for a book, or do you link them together by themes? 

Arranging the poems in a collection is an important process. My poems naturally fall into groups. I write until I have more than enough for a collection. Then I cull out all but the best poems and put them into their groups. When I started selecting the poems for The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, I came up with 248 poems. Clearly that was far too many, so I went back and selected the best of the best. Jaguars now contains 132 poems, each­ selected with a great deal of thought about how it fits the whole.

I believe that my attention to arrangement was one of the reasons Jaguars won a 2018 Women’s Spirituality Book Award and the 2019 Erich Hoffer Award for the Best Book Published by a Small Press.

How would you describe the main themes of your collection? 

If I could simply describe the themes of Jaguars, I wouldn’t have needed to write the poems. Good poetry exists in a realm beyond logical prose description. It’s evocative, touching the mind and the emotions and the human unconscious all at the same time. So let me answer this question by asking a question in return: The title of my recent collection is The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams. The jaguar is the jungle’s top predator. When the shamans of the upper Amazon do their vision quests with Ayahuasca, they believe that they become jaguars prowling through the dream world. But we aren’t shamans from the upper Amazon (at least most of us probably aren’t). So let me ask you: what jaguars prowl your dreams?

How do you reconcile celebrating all of nature, all its wild ferocity and predation and death, and then celebrating kindness? 

That’s the great question, the one religious leaders and philosophers have tried to answer for thousands of years. It’s the question William Blake asks in his poem “The Tyger.” I can’t answer it. I’m a poet, not a philosopher. As poet, my duty is to bear witness to what is, not what might be. Wild ferocity, predation, death, kindness, love, beauty, tenderness, anger, greed, generosity, timid grass-eating deer and stalking jaguars all exist; and I see myself as describing, celebrating, and in some sense preserving them, for future generations in all their contradictory complexity.

A/MAZE: Words and Worlds of Kath Abela Wilson

In 2002, art historian Betty Ann Brown wrote Gradiva’s Mirror[i]—a surprising combo of scholar research and creative invention. She imagined a group of Surrealist women artists (the well known and the overlooked) having a conversation—their lives, work and aesthetic visions slowly emerging through their hypothetic dialogues.

Brown’s book comes to mind as I open Figures of Humor and Strange Beauty[ii], Kath Abela Wilson’s last published collection of poetry. No doubt, the author should be part of the convivium brilliantly ideated by Brown. I can see Leonora Carrington or Frida walking alongside her while she strolls between house and seashore—a short, familiar distance and yet, as she treads it, all parameters of time and space stretch, shrink, then dissolve into an eerie state of suspension, into a quasi-trance leading to perception shifts, epiphanies, metamorphoses and the impromptu, irresistible hatching of poetry.

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Frida didn’t like to be assimilated with Surrealism. She notoriously stated: “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” Wilson says of her poems: “Many have a dream-like quality perhaps but none are based on dream. They were all built from actual experience and depict events, sights, sounds and a few memories that were vivid in the present”.

Hence, she also expresses ‘her own reality’. Why do I call it surreal? It is a generic warning, a mere pointer signaling to the readers a particular weather, a rare feature they shouldn’t possibly miss. Hic sunt leones, dracones. Gentle dragons, friendly feline—not less marvelous.

What does surreal as an adjective—or Surrealist as an aesthetic tag—indicate anyway? Both terms suggest an enlarged range of perception, an enhancement of sensorial and cognitive faculties allowing body and mind to embrace a wider-than-usual radius of stimuli—what’s in sight or at ear’s reach, of course, but what is behind, beyond, above, underneath as well.

Altered state of consciousness? Enlarged. Not ‘another’ as ‘altered’ would imply. The same, only wider. Just as it occurs when we dream and our mind—the same—thanks to the dis-activation of few neural circuits is free to organize ‘real’ information into new gestalts, unconstrained by linear logic or similar grids and endowed, instead, with boundless creativity. Like a fairy or a god—omnipresent, ubiquitous, cognizant of future and past.

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The eighteen poems of Wilson’s collection aren’t based on dream… because they don’t need to. They belong within the same forma mentis, and the author makes it quite plain. They have “dreamlike precision,” “dreamlike assurance” and “the clarity of her favorite dreams”. The tableau they collectively paint is “a dream” she can “return to”. They translate the “interlocking dreams” happening when she is actually asleep, or they are conceived “in the dark before dream”—that thin pivot, that hinge where threads of daily experience come lose and a richer tapestry is woven. Like when at the far end of the estuary fresh and salted water reunite, stream and ocean converge.

What is this long dream-that-isn’t-a-dream about? As the poet affirms, it is rather crystalline. In the reading instructions preceding the poems she says that they emerged “inexorably, in this exact order,” and were polished over twenty years. Both the ineluctability and the polishing are tangible. The first one generates a tone of natural credibility, while the second creates contours of such definition that everything described jumps out of the page, tridimensional and haloed with light.

But what is the dream about? It reports—in eighteen takes, distinct yet intimately linked—the detail—or the synthesis—of a stroll from the poet’s house to the shore following an unvaried path—a street bordered by trees, a wooden staircase. On the beach there are stones and flotsam the poet is attracted to. She organizes them into shapes, giving birth to strange creatures she sometimes returns to the ocean, sometimes the ocean reclaims.

Every day the poet takes the same walk and, truly, that’s all—perfect unity of action, time, place, straight out of Greek tragedy. But not only those pilgrimages occur in a state of porousness so acute, that they open upon a landscape of infinite breadth and depth. As we said, they also don’t abide by dimensional linearity—they overlap, crisscross, niche within each other. They become a set of Chinese boxes, a Rubik’s cube, a charade. They are a labyrinth the poet inhabits with nonchalance, as not only she made it of her own design. She also holds the keys.

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There’s no risk of monotony, then. On the contrary, alertness is necessarily aroused as we try to follow the journey in its spirals and figure eights, paying heed to small clues that might be crucial landmarks, easing ourselves through adjacent yet discrete domains of experience. Alertness is required—attention, which indeed is the number one tool, the initiator.

On her path from the house to the ocean the poet pays attention to things. Very small ones—the imprint left on sand by the tiniest rock. Very large—“ocean and sky, unobstructed, as far as she could see”. Unobstructed, her attention, so intense that sometimes she has to “stop and stare,” trapped within a pose/pause, a “gap in her experience,” which is clearly the trigger of deeper insight. We can easily see her. Pause. Throbbing immobility, vivid calmness, vibrant instant of ecstasy.

She slows down. She stops whenever she feels like. She looks carefully and she keenly listens to sounds, but these walks are neither contemplative nor meditative. They are filled with purpose, active and determined, brave. They possess a festina lente kind of urgency. Calmly yet relentlessly, the poet forges something out of them—she molds them into the shape they firmly suggest, as if following a recipe.

No monotony or reiteration, no ritual—at least not in its ‘routine’ sense. No erratic wandering or sightseeing tour either. There is an arc traversing the spiraling motion, leading from point A to point B. There’s a learning curve, a dialectic process culminating, of course, with a change.

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It all starts with a spill of sorts. Poem III, “Journey”: “She had a flair for excess/that combined with a peculiar sense of direction/to produce, now and again/exquisite flights of imagination.” Final poem: “Now she was crossing the bridge/into a world that was the result of such excess. This was her poem”. This was ‘her book,’ born of the initial surplus. Of what? I believe it was language overflowing, seeking its written form—uncoated poetry in need of manifestation. The entire text is an intimation to write and a ‘how to’—therefore an ars poetica.

In the very first poem the author meets the muteness of stones. She feels “the heaviness of their silence” and “wishes to hear a voice”. It is rather a longing. It’s the engine that sets the journey in motion, then incessantly carries the pilgrim back and forth. She is eager to hear the voice of things apparently mute because she understands that they have one, captures echoes and fragments she can’t yet decipher. So her walks are a quest, a chase, an investigation aiming at making the elusive voice intelligible.

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Since poem I—“Her Wish”—she starts eating stones. What a perfectly surrealistic device. As she cracks the first one under her teeth, no doubt she breaks the silence—such gesture might well epitomize the book. Unsurprisingly, stones are a leitmotif. Stepping stones? Perhaps, or the pebbles Hansel/Tom Thumb disseminates in the woods to later retrace his path. Perhaps Rosetta stones, carved with hieroglyphs—old tongues that she can unlock if she tries. In poem VIII, “The Hawk”, the marks she sees on rocks become mouths, then doors, each one holding “the answer to some question”. Stones she accurately places here and there are anchors counterbalancing the danger of imagination unmoored (the initial excess).

Words Are Stones is the title of a well-known book by Carlo Levi[iii]. It suggests that language, pointedly the written one, should reclaim a weight of authenticity and meaning. Stones are words for Wilson. Authentic and meaningful. But she doesn’t set up her metaphor a priori. She discovers the ‘equation’ step by step, walk by walk. As she finds the stones and she observes them, as she brings them to her ear as if they were shells and she listens, as she carefully moves them then she puts them back, she discovers it. Words are stones.

They are also trees, birds, clouds, waves rhythmically crashing on sand. The universe daily crossed by the poet—door to beach to door—is full of calligraphies—an immense notepad cracking with subliminal information she urges to articulate. Patience, patience.

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Stones are anchors—they are one of the poles of a daring exploration of gravity. The poet lends the same regard, as we saw, to things small and things infinite—these last have their own hazards. As she studies a formation of clouds or a wide expanse of tree canopies, as—while lying on sand—she observes the world upside down, she is prone to levitation and out-of-body experiences that occur, she confirms, “with more than her imagination”. We know. Those drifts and simultaneities are part of the sur-reality that begins on page one. They result from the widened sensorial register we are invited to explore under the poet’s guidance.

She sees herself as well.

Not in the mirror, not in order to scrutinize her appearance about which, by they way, we are clueless, as the narrating voice isn’t qualified by any external markers. Who is she? We know her gender. Neither age nor relationships come into account (a ‘he’ has just a couple of minor appearances). We don’t know of occupation or preoccupations—nothing at all. She is what she perceives, deciphers and traces in the universe of great economy she sculpts under our eyes—essential and cogent like the paintings in the Altamira cave. She is playful like purple-crayoned Harold or Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll—like for them, though, her game is darn serious.

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So this secret and yet unforgettable ‘she’ sees herself quite often, thanks to a POV switched from the usual central axis to a flexible, shifting mode not confined within the individual body, able to place itself wherever it likes and borrow bird’s-eyes, grand angles—strange, portentous lenses also capable of simultaneously embracing discrete timelines. Hence, the self becomes reversible matter—both subject and object, viewer and viewed.

As the vantage point leaves the premises, carried away by a passing bird, leaping suddenly from the floor to the ceiling, from sand to clouds, the poet sees herself within a wider context— she can gage proportions and correlations. She perceives herself as part of the entire creation and becomes aware of the role she might take in it, since each element has an impact on the whole—easier to realize from a distance. So her disposing a stone here or there, checking on the trajectory of a leaf or approving of a flower’s site of blooming isn’t an act of mere arbitrariness. It’s the effect of a vision with more to it than meets the eye.

From “the thin curved cup of the moon” she spots herself on earth, among friends, walking a mountain’s rim. As she drifts above a group of islands she discerns herself on the beach, shadowed by a solitary bird. Through the eye of a heron staring at her, in the flashing light of a falling star, in the past, moving across the maze of her memories—she sees herself.

As she borrows these aerial, acrobatic, upside down perspectives, stones/words are what she needs to pose as anchors, fixed points securing the long yarn of a kite, the unfolding accordion of her notebook eager to sail into the blue. Perhaps, they are period marks.

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So she walks, and her walks lead to a discovering of voices, a deciphering of calligraphies—concrete languages made of mineral, wood, water, wind. The closest she comes to these markings, the most they open up and speak out. They become poems spontaneously writing themselves in the notepad she always carries along—though it might also linger on its own, endowed with autonomous life.

Lines are formed by the patterns of trees planted along the road—words accurately split by their gaps, punctuated by shorter saplings. They are traced by the “tracks left from small stones on the beach,” carefully noted and then dreamed about. They are made with silk cord tended between “key spots in her childhood where everything began”—these lines make good stories. Words are whispered in the chattering of pebbles, they resound within tree trunks, are buried underground. Of course, they are in the rise and fall of the waves—voices gradually more distinct, until they become her voice. As we said, the book is an intimation to write—and a ‘how to’.

How is a poem made? Well, it makes itself as she notices and then annotates what’s already inscribed within surrounding nature. Not the surface of it, but the inner language revealed when things crack open, when tooth meets quartz, mica, granite or slate. Once that kind of juice spills out, it marks the page of its own will. To hold a pen in hand is all right—careful, though, not to write a word and leave the page alone, “serene, unreachable”. Concave, it will be filled as a riverbed does.

Truly, no effort is needed. On the contrary, if the poet looks too closely at anything, it turns into a poem. Everything jumps at her with “too vivid clarity”. Sometimes she has to let poems go, allow black ink marks to abandon the page, float away. Close the notebook and return words to where they came from—ocean, earth, ether—let them circulate as they wish.

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Ars poetica, then—beginning to end—weaving the act of writing with the concreteness of body (bodies, all sort of them), tightly enmeshing it with motion and gesture (walk, kneel, lift, carry, dig, crack, bite), stating the meta-quality of poetry as it become reversible, as it shapes the author’s life while it takes shape.

Here, Mirella Bentivoglio comes to mind—critic, artist and one of the most eminent representative of concrete poetry. Her creative path presented an interesting shift—she started as a poet but, after a long hiatus, was suddenly compelled to ‘make’ poems with the objects she particularly loved—mainly rocks, trees, dirt and landscape. She created calligraphies out of the natural environment, barely modifying what was there—rather deciphering it with her marvelous gift of insight. Wilson’s process reverses Bentivoglio’s, starting from sculpture and visual art to turn into a written form—certainly a gradual curve yet subject at some point to an acceleration, yet pivoting at some point… perhaps with this book.

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Which is an art project, indeed. Quoting the last poem, last lines: “She was an illumination in her own book”. Twelve drawings intersperse the pages. They are small, yet they enlarge very tiny diagrams the author sketched on her notepad during walks, as she planned her ephemeral sculptures/assemblages of flotsam and stones. Often, the sketch is all that remains of the artworks. And the poetry connected to them, yet loosely, perhaps in dialogue with them, extracted from them, translating their essence into the next expressive means—language.

Tiny shapes, fluid, organic, spontaneous yet accurate, sometimes intricate—they might be accompanied by a date or a caption. A location—‘at the ocean’. Or just the word ‘ocean,’ suggesting topography, a map—some drawings look like one. Or else a dedication, an offering—‘to the ocean’.

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The world seen from above, from a distance or from different, simultaneous viewpoints—rather than from a frontal, circumscribed, eye-level perspective—instantly becomes a map. What a wonderful device—it gives meaning and structure to our journey, allows us to organize our progress, creates chains of causes and consequences. Nothing better than knowing where we came from in order to choose where we are going.

Thanks to her heightened attention, to her shift of perception and consequently enlarged vision, the poet is able to build an immense “tableau” out her daily-explored microcosm. Street, stairs, beach expand. They allow memories to slip in, also distant places, yet related to the here and now because she accomplished there the same acts she’s presently accomplishing. The hill where she first gathered stones as a child, for instance. Street, stairs, beach also dilate because poetry fits within them various moments of time, as if layering strata over strata of vellum paper, each engraved with different marks, upon the original diagram, multiplying its complexity and capacity. Poetry records the rock she once placed under a tree—the exact hour, location, the exact intention—and allows her to come back at a later date, finding it without fault. Poetry carefully joins the dots and her life becomes intelligible.

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Karen Blixen’s stork comes to mind—the iconic parabola that the Danish author relates in her famous memoir, Out of Africa. A man dreams all night of exhausting tasks he has to perform in a rush—such as digging a ditch, fetching wood in the forest, stacking it in the barn and so forth. Though he is compelled to complete them, many of the tasks seem vain. When he wakes up, frustrated and dead tired, he looks out of the window and sees what he has done in dream. Here’s the ditch, there’s the pile of wood and the rest. Out of curiosity, he mentally retraces the path he walked/run during his nocturnal ordeal. As he joins the dots, he sees that his perambulations traced the outline of a stork. They meant something. They made sense, after all.

As the poet’s mind flies “like a homing pigeon” to significant places of her past, she knows that “if a straight line were drawn from one to the other, in the right order, an amazing pattern would emerge”. And “it would be,” she knows, “the key to everything”.

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[i] Wilson, Kath Abela, Figures of Humor and Strange Beauty, Glass Lyre Press, 2018, 68 pages, $16, ISBN 1941783562

[ii] Brown, Betty Ann, Gradiva’s Mirror: Reflections on Women, Surrealism And Art History, Midmarch, New York, 2002

[iii] Levi, Carlo, Words are Stones: Impressions of Sicily, Hesperus, London, 2005 (first ed. 1955)