The Gavel’s Impact: On Wayne Miller’s We the Jury

This fifth book of poetry by Wayne Miller, a catalog and career spent making deceptively small observations and connecting the personal to the broad inertias of history, is not a volume that pretends to have answers. It does not propose an argument. It merely presents what is with an atmosphere of calm acceptance. Acceptance, of course, does not constitute agreement, and the poems in We the Jury embody critiques of human violence and American violence and how those relate to the slow violence of our dystopian present. At times, Miller pilots a morbid curiosity of biology, the distinction between “dying” and “dead.” The author juxtaposes this wider, more abstract philosophizing with more intimate fare: observations of personal loss, familial failures, images of renewal in the form of curious and needy children. Miller does not use this latter to dilute his book with something so misleading as hope. Rather, these poems unfold with the same sense of acceptance and acknowledgment as the rest of We the Jury: just as there has been a past, there will be a future. Together, these not-disparate elements showcase the current state of American humanity, a decrepit decadence that we share responsibility for even as it affects us. Despite the book’s ambitious scope, its language grounds the reader, rendering the poems and their big ideas relatable, accessible, in some cases indicting visitors to the page.

The book’s short, direct sentences work well to carry the heaviness of their meaning. With most poems made of short lines and broken into short free verse stanzas of varying length, these statements are given room to breathe, letting the collection become driven by atmosphere and implication. The author does not often have his poems deliver explicit judgment on their own, but their observations and presentation lead the reader to an intended conclusion—Miller positions his lens, and we see ourselves, from a handprint on a fogged window to contemplations of how the present will manifest as future history. The book is broken into four unnamed eight-poem sections (plus a cold open), and many of the poems are themselves sectioned, but the resulting effect is less about symbolizing ideas of division than about letting the poems’ straightforward observations and phrasing resonate into the blankness. Silence is a sonic tool, and white space has visual meaning, and Miller leverages these skillfully and confidently, directing readers’ attention to the spare yet self-assured language of his work.

We the Jury is a book best enjoyed in a single, reflective sitting—and surely repeat visits later on—from the collection’s opening pair of lines, which baldly couples capitalism and death, the author is, poem by poem, section by section, compiling new and recurring fascinations, directing attentions to unexplicated juxtapositions, delivered through profound and simple formulations. Though the focus and momentary topic are constantly shifting, the pace of the collection never feels rushed, thanks to the arrangement of lines and blankness, and the book achieves a unified, cumulative effect: no matter how we perceive them, the elements throughout this book are not unconnected. This is not a book about separation—IVF and rain and racism are all things that exist alongside one another.

In “Stages on a Journey Westward,” Miller reaches a contender for the core of the book: “Here in America / we are engines // drowning out what lies / beyond our interiors.” He quickly follows this section with an anecdote about a child defecating in a hotel pool. The attention given to intimate family moments, and the attention given to any subject that appears, shows that while individual things may capture our physical brains for a short time—often out of physical necessity—that doesn’t mean the rest of the world stops moving. This accumulation, “the weight of our entire existence”, comes to a head in the collection’s title poem. Just as all these topics exist simultaneously, all of us who live exist simultaneously, and the word “We” on the cover of the book, as well as throughout this poem, points us towards collective accountability. The world weighs on us, and we weigh on the world. In the face of dystopian stagnation wrought by our own humanness, any potential solution must come from the plural.

A Review of Naoko Fujimoto’s Glyph

According to Merriam-Webster, the word “poet” comes from a Greek word meaning “to make.” The poet is a maker. Naoko Fujimoto and her new graphic poetry collection Glyph (Tupelo Press, 2021) fully embody this meaning in a powerful and stunning way. Fujimoto has skillfully combined two art forms (word poetry and visual art) to create a third: graphic poetry. In Glyph’s introduction, Fujimoto describes graphic poetry as “trans. sensory,” meaning word poetry that has been translated into words and images, which invites and encourages the reader/viewer to transport the senses into a fuller experience.

In an interview on Poetry Today (a City of Highland Park PEG Access TV program), I learned that Fujimoto’s graphic poems begin as fully-formed, well-crafted word poems. She then goes through a process whereby she decides which words to remove and represent graphically. The title Glyph, meaning a non-verbal symbol, is apropos. The original word poems were not included in the book, because they are not of the form Fujimoto wanted to highlight in this collection. However, those who are intrigued by her translation process may want to google some of the titles to read the original word poems.

In Glyph, Fujimoto has assembled forty-five graphic poems. They are all strikingly different in subject matter and design, and each one is a mixed media feast for the eyes and mind: cutouts of various materials, original drawings, paint, pastel, ink, and words written by hand. Each layout is uniquely organized, designed with plenty of freedom.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Enough is Never.” I googled the original text of the poem (published in RHINO 2017) out of curiosity. There are only two lines from the original fifteen-line poem that appear in words: “I will take the trash out….” and “…enough is never enough.” The other lines have been translated into images, and here’s where it gets really fascinating. It’s not just an image-for-word translation but also an expansion of imagination that takes place in the process. The second and third stanzas of the word poem read as follows:

Our hearts, like rhubarbs,
liquidate in a garbage disposal.

Magpies bring pieces from the glass company
adding more stones to the riverbank.

Yes, there is a red-orange heart (organ) anchoring the upper left of the page with two large blood vessels resembling plant branches (presumably rhubarb stalks). But Fujimoto introduces a large pair of scissors not found in the word poem to cut the stalks, spilling blood and water to the bottom of the page. This liquid also represents the river implied in the second line of the word poem’s third stanza, as there are pieces of glass and stones filling the heart and draining out of the vessels.

The last two stanzas of the word poem as published in RHINO read:

We hear her lively laugh—
a neighborhood girl raises her sunglasses

with freckles on her clavicles,
her white dress flares.

At the bottom of the page in Glyph, there’s a female figure who raises a wine glass to catch the falling liquid. The freckles are on her white dress. Although there is room for interpretation in word poetry, this expands in graphic poetry where the specificity of words is reduced.

With expanded imagination and opportunity for interpretation, there’s a mysterious richness in each poem. The reader/viewer can find something new to consider every time they go back. One may never fully uncover all the significances constructed into the poems, since many of the choices in selecting materials and images are personal to Fujimoto. For instance, she reveals in the Afterward that paper from Matsukado Stationery Store in Takayama was used in “Grandfather’s Left Eye.” She says, “Since I was a young girl, my grandfather used to buy me origami and washi papers from that store.” I suspect there were many untold decisions like that made in other poems.

The full-color production of the book is beautiful, and because it’s at a magazine-size of 8.5” x 11,” the words are readable and the mixed media details are clearly discernible. Whether or not you have ever entered the world of the graphic poem, Naoko Fujimoto’s Glyph is an essential addition to your poetry collection.

Here and Away: A Review of Music for Exile by Nehassaiu deGannes

Nehassaiu deGannes is the author of two previous chapbooks: Percussion, Salt & Honey, published in 2001 (which won her the Philbrick Poetry Award for New England Poets) and Undressing the River from 2011, winner of the Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Competition. Chapbooks, of course, given their limited print runs & circulation most typically among fellow poets or people in academia . . . don't usually arouse very much interest from the mass-market of more casual/occasional poetry readers; even if they have garnered many prestigious literary accolades. So it is then that Music for Exile now warrants the designation of being deGannes' first real official full-length poetry collection: a kind of new beginning or proverbial opening-up to a wider potential audience. As a poet who is primarily also a well-known actor and overall theater-person, deGannes is able to cultivate a certain ironic distance from the notion of big Poetry with a capital "P" while also keeping the poems formally inventive, personal and also political (the latter is a rather loaded modifier here) all at the same time.

The "exile" of the title provides the first hint as to deGannes' unflinching exploration of the idea that in fact the personal is always political. Her experience of her own life is like a fragment broken off from the larger structure of the history of countless others she feels herself corresponding with in a number of ways . . . sometimes literally in epistolary forms, or sometimes as with the imagistic poem "Bessie's Hymn" it is more abstractly in terms of music and allegory: 

The door, I’ve been
shouldering

is ajar—a spoon of light, a threshold
of honey—

a cataract, a riot, a trumpet

Whether or not we recognize some of the characters/proper nouns in these poems as historical figures or they're names we've heard in the news before—or they may be people from deGannes' actual life or dreams she recorded—depends largely on where we are coming from as readers. There are no footnotes, but when deGannes summons a headline and/or piece of newsprint from the San Jose Mercury News about an unarmed man being brutally shot by police, this particular act & art of appropriation feels as organic as when the poet pulls any of her other and perhaps more traditional or to-be-expected poetic tools out from her toolbox to build something on the page that we can wander through. The headlines and the newspeak, if you will, cut harder and faster than your average lyric . . . suddenly the reader is kicked off the dreamy Parnassian fantasy cloud of poetry and thrust back into the present real-life political and overall social reality we are all slogging through today. Something about the all caps, too, girds the sense of outrage at the horror, obscenity, inhumanity and senselessness of racist violence. Also inhuman is the stock-ticker like stream of the enjambement and the strange indifferent details, the rather ornamental word choice ("erstwhile"?) which I guess we can assume was made by some journalistic underling:

AND FOUR HOURS LATER, AFTER OF-
FICER BRUCE UNGER PUMPED THREE
OR FOUR BULLETS INTO THE ERSTWHILE
FOOTBALL STAR AS HE RAN TOWARD
HIM, IT WAS CLEAR THAT SOMETHING
WAS CLOSING ON ROGERS FAST.
San Jose Mercury News

This appropriation causes a certain interesting rupture amid the poem-space of the page, it is basically collage, one of the oldest Modernist tricks in the book . . . yet here it suggests that poetry can be in fact located within a real-life political project for social justice, that the poet is bringing these perhaps all-too-soon forgotten injustices to light so that we may finally, fully remember, understand and ideally work together to prevent them from ever re-occurring. It is the poets' prerogative to find a way to do this without, perhaps, being too literal in any case . . . preferring the free play of language as melody, rhythm and image, inflecting it with personal experience while also demonstrating an assiduous knowledge of objective history. Sometimes the poems address the author's family or close friends or deceased relatives, and the writing is rather idiosyncratic while also being accessible and swift . . . somewhat colloquial at the threshold of attention where we first begin to see the poems unfolding before us.

Another interesting spatial event that happens right away in this collection is a kind of stylistic pre-empting of the traditional order of the book. A four-page poem "Letter for Khadejha" begins the book immediately after a quote from Kamau Brathwaite in the book's front-matter ("to be blown into fragments. your flesh / like the islands that you loved") and this is even before the official beginning of the collection: the table of contents and the rest of the sequence of the poems that make up the bulk of the collection occur only after this first poem grabs our attention. It's a compelling gesture, call it an overture if you like, or some kind of sneak-attack that defies or expectations:

Letter for Khadejha

Hummingbird    servant of hybrid Light
and of Asé   to the

twelve tribes which are scattered
abroad  Greetings

Caught your exhibit at the AGO this August
Entering the Millennium   Didn’t even know
you were there in the room at the end
of the corridor of British painters a few Henry
Moores   Picasso and some African masks

DeGannes starts things off with a sense of the everyday, and a degree of casualness, waving hello to her audience, with an almost-list poem that brings to mind any number of antique Modernist/Postmodernist styles, with some name-dropping of famous painters and a recalling of a stroll through a museum, nicely parallel the reader's stroll through this poetry, which can resemble a kind of museum. This idea would seem to go hand-in-hand, perhaps, with the idea of exile, or even of language: how an object could be in exile from it's origin, like language could be positively exiled, somehow, from it's original use or context, as it may be used anew to make more meaning in a new context, like that of poetry. The term exile develops a definite two-or-more-fold meaning here . . . being a poet may be a kind of automatic exile from mainstream culture, or even what we could even call the basic social contract. Exile could also just mean the act of leaving home, whether by choice or because of circumstances, putting everything suddenly behind you, or  the act of going elsewhere, anywhere beyond . . . growing up, moving on; some of this could be self-imposed in certain cases. The term may even resonate with us all as we find ourselves more and more exiled from our own reality . . . or what could be called a shared civic or political reality.

And while this book does in some parts enact an inevitably politicized expression of the author's real-life identity—there is no getting away from this really, ever, for anyone writing, especially these days—Music for Exile accomplishes it with much more grace and, as a book of course, without relying on or at all referencing social media. Ironically and unfortunately, it would seem that the tacit marginal utility of that particular style of poetry (which is not deGannes') is how it offers for the potential reader a comfortable proxy for any real-life political action; like the kind that might have even prevented the 45th President from ever getting elected in the first place. Instead, as New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino wrote in her 2019 debut book Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, on the surface we may think we're getting a more visible, tangible brand of "diversity" in any number of realms, like poetry online, in at least an aesthetic and/or pseudo-cultural sense . . . as one novel form of representation; though it is not in itself a step towards greater political representation for anyone. Given the distorted social dynamics of the internet & social media algorithms . . . how people get stuck in their echo-chambers, etcetera . . . this all comes usually at the expense of any greater IRL solidarity: " . . . solidarity [becomes] a matter of identity rather than politics or morality . . . the most mainstream gestures of solidarity are pure representation [ . . . ] and meanwhile the actual mechanisms through which political solidarity is enacted, like strikes and boycotts, still exist on the fringe." Poets end up helping social media tech giants (largely run by white men) become more and more influential throughout politics, and we the writers and readers become only further trapped, as Tolentino describes . . ." at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy . . . " because in the end, all we each may really care about at the end of the day is individual success, right? It's a pretty bleak portrait of human nature. In regards to the #MeToo movement, for instance, Tolentino questions the function of the hashtag, noting how it seems to erase the variety of women's experience. It is actually the difference between women's stories that matter: " . . . the factors that allow some to survive, and force others under—that illuminate the vectors that lead to a better world."

DeGannes may in her own way understand the problems of poetry better than anyone. A poem cannot, for example, get on a bus to travel to picket in a far-off state where people's voting rights are in jeopardy, nor can it repatriate stolen artifacts back from a museum which was probably bankrolled largely thanks to colonial violence. Poets are not politicians; politicians don't care about poetry. And the poets politicians hire sometimes are just there to trick us into thinking otherwise,  to model poetry as some sort of alternative leisure lifestyle that goes well with say, a bunch of other & more expensive consumer products we should really be buying more of to help the economy, rather than using poetry to awaken new ideas of how to restructure things like the economy . . . who knows? Music for Exile feels free from many of these common contradictions and hypocrisies, delving into the personal and the political. It is rooted in the present while also showcasing a certain recollection of a past that is not quite lost, but does seem to be perpetually in danger of fading fast from our public view, which could be seen as macrocosm for anybody's personal experience or family history. Exile can happen to anyone and often does, it's a state of being that can however be well-suited to poets, just like old Dante Alighieri. Similarly, we get the sense of deGannes owning up to the uncertainties she feels in her own life, the idea of a perpetual crossroads, at a fork, figuring out which way through the wood to go, making sense of it all via writing, and as readers we may even be able to read this book and make sense of our own lives in a more humane fashion. We may further learn that we are not alone, or that there is after all something we can do to help others feel less so.

A Variety Show in Two Acts: Terese Svoboda's Theatrix

Mary Pickford once called acting an “emotional exercise.” The audience also undergoes this wringing-out, a process that allows our emotional centers to react to imagined scenarios without consequence. Certainly we could apply this to the act of writing, as well as the act of reading. Research indicates that the tears we cry when watching a sad movie are chemically distinct from those that we shed in reaction to internal sadness. It is a dress-rehearsal, so to speak, for the real thing.

While I haven’t seen a live production in quite some time, reading Terese Svoboda’s latest poetry collection, Theatrix: Poetry Plays brought back so many of the sensations of witnessing live performance: the giddiness of the curtain rising, the suspension of disbelief granted the actors, and our activated empathy when they succeed. With her playful manipulation of language and knowing winks at our voyeurism, Svoboda draws us into the emotional peaks and valleys of her acts.

The cover art alone is arresting, featuring what appears to be a clay, humanoid model with mask-like face and gaping mouth, the torso buckled over withered, misshapen legs. The red right hand (apologies to Nick Cave) clutches the right leg, the left hand gripping the neck as though in pain. Through the nose protrudes a long tree branch. Most unsettling, though, is the right eye; the only one visible to us, it fixes us with an uncannily human, blue-eyed stare. Pinocchio comes to mind, a knowing wink at the possibility for untruths, our humanity rendered imperfectly, even primitively. What are plays, after all, if not artful lies? Acting an uncanny reflection of humanity?

In a collection punctuated with positively vaudevillian acts of drama and drollery, it is fitting that the title should be so rich and varied in meaning; are these “Poetry Plays” hybrid forms, ie. poetry/plays? Or does poetry play? I imagine Svoboda answering, “Yes.” In fact the poet is playing on every level, using props and ventriloquism to challenge our notion of knowledge and self. She works within a wide range of settings and modes, from HBO documentaries to the silent dramas of silverware. In variety show style, the poems shift from the tragic to the jocular.

The literal meaning of the collection’s title is supported by the appearance of a cast list, which preludes the collection. The first listed name is Stage Manager, as if the tech hands are in front of the curtain. Other entities include familiar faces and names: comedian Jack Benny, Debussy, and the corpse of Emma Goldman. At the bottom is a note: “Many non-speaking parts, or parts that can’t speak, or parts speaking inaudibly.” Svoboda uses brackets liberally, suggesting stage directions, asides, intrusions of outside voices, or even the whispers of prompters in the wings.

The collection is divided in two sections, with the first feeling more outwardly performative and the second more intimate. It is as if we, the audience are traveling from a proscenium to a black box theater, a theater-in-the-round, and even the red brick of the standup stage. Appropriately, the first poem in the collection is titled, “STAGE MANAGER: LIGHTS UP.” Nervous energy bubbles as bracketed lines bear the urgency of stage directions, and a voice asks, “What about this is false: the scale, the alien plastered to the wall in a green/you can’t see? the trust you place [like an acorn] in the seat?” The first question, “What about this is false” could be a sincere invitation to criticism, or a peremptory challenge, as in “how could you say this isn’t realistic?” It takes on a tone of irony with “the alien plastered to the wall,” as I’m picturing the inflatable green aliens we bring out at Halloween in my home. Who else is alien, but the audience member, the outsider who watches the simulation of human experience from a removed vantage point? Our trust as the audience is fragile, though offered willingly, bolstered by the careful attention of actors and stage hands, and sprouting under the blaze of immersive stage design and engaging acting. Svoboda, of course, occupies all these roles simultaneously, allowing these curiously selected voices to dance the dance of suggestion.

Svoboda is one of those writers whose work you just cannot skim. Whether it is her fiction or poetry, her writing rewards careful reads and re-reads. Like any script or play, one is advised to slow down and read the poems in Theatrix out loud, so as not to miss her wordplay and double entendres:

Waves of light breakfast glamorously/with English spelling,/a woman/peeling hair from her face,/waves turning [away] wet, lapping/lapis [humid],/a shore where hair sticks blue.

Under Svoboda’s nimble hands, poetry is as much a visual art as a literary one. Take “Silverware Dialogue,” which begins: “A fork and a spoon lie together/to spoon and to fork.” There are no knives here to abscond with said spoon, however, in fact neither utensil poses a flight risk; “It is as if we lie on a vast table/says the fork. Useless.” Though inert, the fork has needs, and pride to be hurt:

The table was laid, says the spoon/not me. Tines, my dear, are everything,/says the fork. My tines are retired./They spoon through course/after intercourse, the hunger being/incurable, inconsolable.

If I hadn’t read this out loud, it might not have occurred to me that I was reading a love poem. In fact, the more I read it, the more I pictured a married couple in mid-life, saddled with ailments, contemplating their purpose after years of “usefulness.” And suddenly I’m wondering if are we no more than implements, simple tools created to feed the consumption of others?

Block quotes do no justice to Svoboda’s attention to aesthetics. “Silverware Dialogue,” for example, naturally appears in couplets. “Scatter Force Two,” which opens, “We’re two girls and we’re left/and we’re right” makes liberal use of line breaks and white space. The first line is left-justified while the second, beginning with “and,” fits directly beneath “left,” with “we’re right” extending beyond the line above. This structural effect mimics the image of two girls walking side by side, but also emphasizes the double-meanings of “left” (abandonment or simply directional?) and “we’re right” (as in, “correct,” or simply standing to one side?). Certain repeated words, like “pink,” throughout the poem take on holographic significance, as turned this way a word like “bars” signifies a pub where you’d have a drink, and turned that way it makes us think of imprisonment. I’m suddenly thinking of the “prison” that some might consider femininity or gender identity generally, the “pink fools” that a woman might meet and abandon in a bar, and the way in which young girls lean on each other for support in the world.

As I read (and reread, and reread, and reread) Theatrix, I reminded myself that theater—indeed all live performance—is experiential. We may not glean every line’s full significance, or catch onto Svoboda’s particular cleverness and lightning-quick wit the first time. But like performance itself, this collection is astonishing, if occasionally befuddling. These poetry-plays are worth each and every read, allowing them to stretch into the stages (pun intended) of our lives.

I am reminded of Heraclitus, who stated that it is impossible to step into the same river twice. Like gazing at the surface of water, the poems in this collection may reflect my current sense of inadequacy as I wrestle meaning from each line. But where there is a preponderance of questions, one is assured there is vast depth. Next year, the poems will likely take on brand new significance for me. And perhaps this is the point of performance, the way in which we should approach it: as demonstrative of life’s complexity, an unearthing of wonder, and a startling realization of the contents of our own consciousness.

Fluid Geographies: An Interview with Laurel Nakanishi, Author of Ashore

P.K. Eriksson: It was so very refreshing to read about a Hawaii that felt like a real place instead of the tourist-seducing prose and photoshopped images the tourism industry pushes. As a person who has never been there, I enjoyed biting into some reality. Can you speak to how or why Hawaii inspired the book? What was particularly Hawaiian about its inspiration?

Laurel Nakanishi: Hawai‘i has been, and continues to be, such a formative and integral part of my life that it is hard for me to imagine writing anything that does not ground itself, somehow, in this place. I was born and raised in Kapālama — an area of Honolulu, on the island of O‘ahu. Although I am not Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) I have still been shaped by many Hawaiian teachers and values, in addition to the ecological abundance of these islands. Along with Kanaka Maoli influences, the poems have also been inspired by Hawai‘i’s multi-cultural heritage and my own background as a poet of multiple ethnicities. I try to trace some of these lineages in the notes section of the book, and point to some key inspirations under the sub-headings “Further.”

Eriksson: I found what appeared to me to be a distinctly Western US influence, a voice that recognizes the land and place and the things of place. In particular, Gary Snyder came to mind with your concrete imagery and Poundian line, and of course, both Pound and Snyder have significant Eastern influences. Do you feel connected to the poets that adopted the East or the original sources more? As a writer in English, do you feel torn by the influences of both the East and the West? How do you or do you even feel the pull to honor them both?

Nakanishi: I admire Gary Snyder a great deal, especially his attention to the natural world. He is pulling from a long line of writers, particularly Japanese poets, in whom I’ve also found great teachers. I do not feel torn between the literary traditions of the US and Japan, but I do feel the limitations of my access to Japanese writers due to my limited fluency in Japanese. I love the work of Sei Shōnagon, Masaoka Shiki, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa, and Matsuo Basho, along with contemporary Japanese writers. And while I try to read multiple translations, I know that much is changed in that shift to English.

Eriksson: The poems often seem to decenter the importance of human experience, particularly in poems such as “The Shark” and “Catalog.”  It seems intentional to draw one’s self as a writer and us as readers out of ourselves. Was this intentional or does it merely reflect your unguarded mindset? Why do you feel the need to give voice to the non-human?  

Nakanishi: I actually feel that these poems, and the others in the book, are very deeply rooted in the human experience. Although the focus of the poems is on the natural world, it is seen through a human lens which inevitably deciphers and warps what is seen and how that seeing is related. In “The Shark,” a fictional narrator has an affair with a shark and births a half-shark son. This poem, written in prose segments, explores the blurred lines between human and non-human, and the ways that our own children can prove to be quite foreign to us. In the case of “Catalog,” although a narrator seems to be completely absent, the descriptions of the animals are indelibly marked by human observation — in the use of language at all, and in that open sense of wonder that might characterize human observers. Instead of giving voice to the non-human, I see the project of these poems as attempts at interaction and connection with a greater ecosystem which includes both humans and non-humans.

Eriksson: Much of the second section of the book deals with family lineage and mixed family lineage in particular. Increasingly, this must be more the norm in America. I found your expression to be inclusive and so full of heart. What do you wish for us as a country where a strain towards purity is so often the test for identity?

Nakanishi: In so many different areas of our society, I see a pull towards binary. For many people, identities and understandings that resist clear categorization can feel frightening, or at worst, threatening. Yet, this habit of thinking and acting based on binaries can cause a lot of suffering, dividing us into groups: male/female, republican/democrat, human/animal, etc. I find this mode of binary thinking within myself, as well, especially when I question, “Am I Asian enough? Queer enough?” and “Where do I really belong?” But no one is never really just one thing. I believe that we are all a mix of different influences and entities, changing despite our desire to cling to one identity. I wish that we, as a country, could see past the binaries that divide us and begin to dismantle the systems of power that dehumanize so many for the benefit of a few.

Eriksson: Mānoa serves a significant role in the book, and its placeness speaks to story. Much of the collection, the longer poem “Mānoa” in particular, speaks to a worldview of water and its replenishing nature. Significantly, story plays out in novel and compelling ways to elucidate this place and seemingly life on Earth in general. What role do you think story could play in modern American culture, a culture which values pie charts, logarithms, and data over subjective human expression of story?

Nakanishi: Well, I often enter into a poem through the door of an image, and try to craft descriptions that are both precise and surprising. This grounding in the physicality of the world is a steady note in the series of poems called “Mānoa” (scattered throughout the book), and in the last poem of the book, the final “Mānoa.” Along with imagery and lyric musicality, it folds in narrative, research, and mythology. I was especially interested in exploring the mo‘olelo (story, history) of Kauawa‘ahila and Kauakiowao — a pair of siblings who escape their abusive step-mother and hide in Mānoa valley. This, and many other stories, are written in the land. Knowledge of a place in Hawai‘i must include knowledge of its stories. I love the depth and nuance that stories provide and the ways they link us to an ongoing history and relationship with a place.

Eriksson: While some poems press directly into a particular place, another poem speaks with much greater ambiguity about place, “Place(less)ness.” Does this ebb-and-flow of place seem more historical in nature or is that something more characteristic of this particular place, Hawaii?

Nakanishi: I wrote “Place(less)ness” when I moved to Nicaragua. As I adjusted to a new life in a rural town along the banks of the San Juan River, I was doing what I can only describe as “survival writing” — writing as a form of grappling with a new place, culture, language, and socio-economic reality. A few of these musings were later worked and re-worked into poems that appear in Ashore — “Place(less)ness” is one of these. I include this poem in the book because I think it serves as an interesting counterpoint to the poems set in Hawai‘i that are so clearly grounded in a sense of place.

Eriksson: What is your hope in writing poetry in this day and age? Why would you want people to read your poems and poetry in general?

Nakanishi: There is so much value on busyness now and countless ways to occupy our time. We may be swept away and swept away from ourselves, but poetry offers us a unique opportunity to slow down and look deeply at the world. I teach poetry writing to elementary school students. In my classes, I explain that poets are just regular people while one super power: they know how to notice the world around them. I love that poetry can take on so many different forms, and through different poems, we may explore new avenues of experience and build empathy for others. I hope that Ashore helps readers in the continental US and elsewhere to experience another (less commercial) side of Hawai‘i. And I hope that readers in Hawai‘i see the book as an invitation into writing their own poetry about this beautiful and nuanced place.

Incandescent Poems Filled with Sorrow, Regret, Wisdom, and Light: Lee Sharkey's I Will Not Name It Except to Say

Sharkey’s eighth and final book of poems—a single volume momento mori completed in the last weeks of her life in 2020—is divided into seven sections, each section comprised of anywhere from six-to-twelve poems collected and cordoned off by a unifying theme: 1) Sharkey’s seventy-something husband Al’s advance into dementia; 2) a set of short prose still lives about the Holocaust survivor and visual artist, Samuel Bak; 3) a series of ten ekphrastic poems exploring the paintings of seven German Expressionist painters: Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Otto Dix, August Macke, George Grosz, and Kathe Kollwitz); 4) poems about the Warsaw Ghetto depicting the horrors of Jewish genocide; 5) ghostly recollections of Sharkey’s long-dead mother and father; 6) one long poem about the imprisonment and murder of the Marxist philosopher Rosa Luxemburg; and finally, 7) late, last poems bearing witness to Sharkey’s own impending death (At 75, Sharkey died of pancreatic cancer, still writing, late in 2020).

Perhaps because she was dying as she wrote the poems, death is the book’s central theme and it appears everywhere, in every poem. Another major theme is empathy: empathy for Franz Marc’s blue monkeys gassed as guinea pigs and howling in pain, and empathy for the fate of all the animals in this world of predatory man, where men make mincemeat of the animals they are supposed to care for and discard and disparage the men and women they live among, such as in the Warsaw Ghetto where the Jewish body is stripped, raped, burned, spat on, clubbed, despised, and disfigured.

Another major theme is religion. In “Tashlich,” Sharkey writes, “I have Jewish feet and a feet-on-the-ground stubbornness.” The poems are sprinkled throughout with Jewish words, songs, and traditions. Sometimes Sharkey settles down admiringly into them, as if to caress the holy books, the Torah, dolls and figures, tabernacles, old testament narratives and iconographies. But she also sometimes turns her face away, rejecting these traditions, disappointed in teachings that prove ineffectual in a world where heinousness prevails.

Sharkey is an ekphrastic poet, deeply sympathetic to painters, especially the German Expressionists who took as their subject the horrors of war. (Sharkey’s mother’s cousin, Giselle, perished in the Lvov death camps.) Section Two is a long series of one-paragraph prose poems dedicated to Samual Bak, a visual artist who survived the Holocaust and lives and paints in his eighties in Western Massachusetts. The petite prose poems in this section are thin and delicate as eggshells breaking open to reveal the yellow planets of their insides. They are superb little still lives depicting pears, fruit bowls, sarcophagi, shadows, and translucent light, like miniature Jewish deities tucked in carved boxes beside bedside tables with lit lamps and narrow beds, the itinerary of everyday Polish-German-Jewish life laid against the context of chaos, the horror of death camps prowling in the dark, black forest beyond the door. 

Section Three’s poems describe a series of ten German Expressionist paintings. In great swirling slabs of red and blue, Franz Marc deplores the throat-slash and burn of bomb-sacrificed forest animals and the horrors of humans dying not in old age or by natural causes but by the inconceivable wickedness of war. One of the most powerful of this set of poems is Sharkey’s meditation on Otto Dix’s painting, “Dead Man in Mud.” In lines as powerful of Seamus Heaney’s “The Tolland Man” which describes the digging up of a body sacrificed in the Iron Age’s ritual killings, the poem captures the frozen spectacle of a dead man’s forearm and fist reaching up from the mud. Otto Dix stated that war is “a horrible thing” that he nevertheless “does not want to miss.” Sharkey also does not want to miss the horrifying images of war, for the frozen arm “pin[s] our eyes to the crime.” “Grief lives in the ground,” Sharkey writes. “It cannot be extinguished / joy nests in its arms.”

The next section’s poem-cluster focuses on the Warsaw Ghetto. In it, Sharkey describes the Holocaust grimly, naming it “X” as if “X” were the unsayable thing, the thing that is so invested with pain it cannot be named without one’s hair standing on end. In a play on Holocaust deniers Sharkey begins the poem: “x happened can we agree x happened / x happened and then fire happened / and then they fell into a red salt pool / in a sea of exile who was to take them in?” Again, in this poem grouping, Sharkey compares animal with human suffering, describing the ultra-efficient technology of murder; the well-thought-through slaughter of the death camps: “to study the butterfly,” Sharkey writes, “to chloroform it, pin it to the wall.”

Wanting to be remembered, wanting to record their beautiful lives for history’s sake, the Warsaw Ghetto Jews, sensing their coming deaths, dig with shovels in the dirt in the frightening poem “Thieves,” preparing a bed for papers and diaries, “every endless day detailed for retrieval.”  As if to soothe a frightened rabbi, baby or mob, by poem’s end, Sharkey arrives at  resignation and spring’s green, the promise of renewal. “Rage cedes to intimacy,” she writes, and from papers and diaries left like braille-heaped seeds of buried codes in the ground, “shoots” will grow, allowing poems to surface and paint “the ceiling between heaven and earth.”

In the fifth section, Sharkey remembers and eulogizes the ghostly forms of her remembered parents—perhaps a common preoccupation for those preparing to die. In three poems dedicated to her father and three to her mother, she depicts them: her father preparing to leave for work in the morning in his great coat fixing his fedora on his head in front of a mirror and her mother doing housework, fluffing a tablecloth, straightening the path of the cloth with a gentle tug and smoothing it flat on the table with practiced palms. In the tablecloth poem, Sharkey stresses how intently she studied her mother as a child: tossing a cloth that then sifts mutely down through air “the wings spread[ing] before landing/ the wings spread[ing] before landing.” The gentleness and silence in this poem between the tossed out cloth and its wing-spread, dove-like landing is typical of Sharkey, who packs silence into most of these poems, both by the soft sibilants that pour from her perfect ear and by the frequent double-spacing of the lines so the reader has to fall through a blank silent space to land on each next line. 

In Section Six, again in an ekphrastic poem, Sharkey eulogizes Rosa Luxemburg through re-imagining Virginia Woolf’s painterly Lily (from To the Lighthouse) and the real-life painter May Stevens’s portrait of the murder and then the cruel, sloppy, needless dumping into a canal of Rosa Luxemborg’s body. For her no-nonsense murder by German state paramilitaries, the radical-social-Marxist philosopher Rosa Luxemburg was struck in the skull with a rifle butt, shot in the head, and then flung into Berlin’s Landwehr Canal. In a side-narrative underscoring Sharkey’s hyper-sensitivity, the poem imagines Luxemburg nightly in her prison cell listening through a small crevice of window to the torture of a neighborhood child working itself up to a sobbing cry before the child’s heartless mother, absorbed in other things, slaps the child silent.

In the final section—in Sharkey’s most luminous, paper-thin poems—Sharkey details the strangling inklings and prophecies of her own fast-approaching death by pancreatic cancer. Never in fear, always in absorption, she spies the perimeters of her life, often depicted in biblical terms and narratives—and settles into her deathbed without regret or rage or blame. Again there is always the shadow of a God’s mercy bowing low over her; a flower seen through the window, and the strangeness of the afterlife seeping in—slow as blood, inevitable as sorrow.

If you step away, what are Sharkey’s poems like? To say these Holocaust-laden poems are grim understates. Nevertheless, pleasure abides. Blue and yellow flowers crop up unexpectedly everywhere, creeping through the edges of ladder-vines. At times, Sharkey rails like Job against the unjust might of God. At other times, as if speaking through an emotion “recollected in tranquility” in pain Wordsworth described as lying “too deep for tears,” she resigns herself before that might, saying “therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust.” Ironically, quietness presides in this paean to bombs and war, whether as static wonder or shock. The poems portray the stark gaze of the mud-buried man and the living gaze of the human poet-spectator, expression-ed in a state of wonder. 

I am a poet as well as a literary critic and one of my first thoughts on finishing these absorbing, incandescent poems filled with sorrow, regret, philosophy, wisdom, and light, was: why bother? I shall never write poems as good as these. But then I thought why not? What have I got to lose? As Sharkey writes, the bibles and vesicles of all literature lie sleepy in their beds waiting for spring to move and brush-heads to rise, ready to swipe with paint, in a “peace that surpasses all understanding,” blue skies blue again.

[Scene Change] Good Job: A Conversation between Terese Svoboda and China Marks

The grotesque Pinocchio-nosed image on the cover of my new hybrid text Theatrix: Play Poems was made by China Marks. We met at a wild 70th birthday party. She was part of a friend's study of geriatric artists — ha! laughs purple-haired China, geriatric? Recent exhibits are accurately titled: “China Marks, Not Quite Human” and “China Marks: Time Traveler”. Although I found this sculpture most appropriate for my title, it is her more recent work, primarily “sewn drawings” and “sewn books,” that has most inspired Theatrix. We share hybrid forms, the seductive line, visual wit, an interest in patterns, appropriation of found objects and images,  narrative drive, idiosyncrasy and flamboyance. Here is an excerpt from Theatrix: Play Poems published by Anhinga in March.

What? is your line

I think I’m panicking
I think I’m panicking
etc.
crying practice

[windowless]

quick, a dream:
one of you accuses the other

What? is your line
the gun is fake but you need a license

Miss Vulgarity comes forward in
a lack-of-bathing-suit competition

a different voice speaking “I”
to an “audience”

and rants: and you and you and you
and it wasn’t like that

brief interview with an innocent bystander
before the lover slash narrator finds his way over

floating along and then the queen says
women were at best queens then

WE

the chorus     too loud
but that is opinion
answers back: even the building is burning

[insert choreography]
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage

Men and Their Ways

As ornery and subversive as a video by Matthew Barney, Marks' broadsides, books, and text-based drawings both invite and repel interpretation. Some pieces exercise Oulipian restraint, using only text found on the fabric itself, but more often texts appear in bubbles, titles, commentary and dialogue that she sews into the image by a computerized embroidery machine. Her visual iconography is often  found re-imagining 14th to 19th century tapestries in the style of Max Ernst meets Donald Barthelme. Part of the fun is trying to decipher the original. She's rethought a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens of “The Battle of Anghiari” and a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and she doesn't hesitate to acknowledge her sources, providing a link to the original. But it's hardly an imitation or even “in the style of” — the original is the springiest of springboards.

Winging It

“I don’t know if the fellow on the left really wants his wings washed,” writes Marks, “or has something else in mind. But their eyes have met. The one bent over her laundry, who answered his question with another question, is waiting for his answer. Something deliciously fraught is going on. Whatever it is, we have a ringside seat.”

To me "deliciously fraught" suggests play. And there's theater in "ringside seat” that depicts situations of tension and conflict, like a circus, play, film or novel. Like me, she is in the audience as well as on the stage, often, as China says, “surprised, sometimes thrilled at what I see, or so bored and restless or unhappy that I make drastic changes, until my own jaw drops….”

Terese Svoboda & China Marks

T: Theatrix: Play Poems is not so easy to appreciate read aloud as my other work, although there's still sonic considerations. More of the play in these poems occurs visually, in the spacing and typography. I make visual decisions that are not completely foreign to yours. My choosing where to place a piece of text is similar to your positioning text where it sometimes "rhymes" with a brush stroke of sewing.

C: Of course there’s drama in my work, because I tell stories. I am a compulsive story-teller, ask anybody who knows me because I answer questions in the same way. Though I suppose there are other ways to do it, I not only draw, but also must draw attention to my art. Story-telling is a useful strategy for women, to get children to go to sleep or eat their vegetables and to keep men from killing us and to get people to spend some time looking at at my latest drawing, maybe even buy it. Women who lived to tell the tale were probably the best story-tellers.  It must be built-in to at least some of us by now. Look at you.

T: Are we engaged in Q & A?

C: We are engaged, darling, kiss me.

T: I'm puckered.

C: How/why did you come up with Theatrix? I mean, there’s theatrics, but capitalizing it and changing  cs into an x changes everything.

T: Best to cap a title anyway, and it's all about play: “trix” as “tricks:” and even the multi-colored breakfast food. It's also a portmanteau of “theater” and “-trix" — the suffix that turns masculine agent nouns ending into feminine. You get to re-hear the last syllable of “theater” and gender-switch it, a performance all on its own.

C: Didn’t notice the gender switch, very nice! And why do you think you were able to “cut loose” with Theatrix?

T: You, dear. All the sotto voce's, those mutterings, lie at the core of what's important. In that, I believe, we are joined. I no more put down two words on paper and I see sparks between them and the page and the space and sometimes each letter, yet I endeavor to thread a story through, with bits that remind the reader of his own story. Your storytelling is never straight-forward narrative either.

Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans

C: Never straight-forward. A curator said she’d recently noticed (after 7 years) that the man sitting in the flower in “Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans” had a black eye and wondered why. I said I didn’t know why. The characters in my drawings live their own lives. As I keep saying, I am only part of the process, a process that wakes me up in the middle of the night with suggestions, concepts, apercus, most recently to reset the direction of something I’d already been working on weeks, but it was right to do so. The drawing is much better already.

Then also, seduction, to pull the viewer close, using the dynamics of the plot, if there is one, decorative elements, workings of the stitches and sewn lines, textures, what’s matte and what shines, the very plasticity of my figures. I make these drawings to have access to this material.  I am the first to be engaged and then my drawings pull viewers in. But I make it up as I go along, revising endlessly, simultaneously making it and watching it happen under my hands. I give myself over to the process and it all comes from that, the interminable process..

You mentioned the spacing and typography in Theatrix. Made me think about the charged spaces between elements in my drawing, my decisions about grounds, possible colors and patterns, what typefaces to use for certain texts but not for others. Text can take forever, re-written as the drawing changes. I draw the more-or-less human figure. I believe that there is an intuitive homologous knowing when human beings look at drawings of human figures and a need to see such things.

T: The cover image on my book, although singular, evokes a multitude of animalistic and human identifications, crippled, deceitful, yet innocent. Is that complexity evident early on in your work? Monochrome you are not.

C: I am after as complex a truth as possible. Your play begins before it begins and begins several times more in Theatrix. And it is as if there is a giant hand (the artist’s mind?) manipulating the characters and speaking for them. Simultaneously cozy and strange. Reminds me of when I was a child and we used the back of a sofa as a stage, with stuffed animals as the actors…. moving them and speaking for them as we liked….

T: That's exactly it. I have used my own tiny theater experiences, the ghost-texts of Shakespeare, Beckett, and downtown experimental theater and “sewn over it,” with some animation (see “Cast”) of characters that are not usually animate because why — animists are pre-animatronic.

C: Theatrix, the morphing, the high-jinks, the this-into-that, compression and expansion of time, etc.

T: All those things you do as well.

C: The only thing is, it goes both ways: my current drawing is derived, not literally of course, but formally, from Theatrix, which is crammed with tricky bits. The little drawing I began to work on a while ago, has been punching well above its weight, requiring many revisions, waking me up in the middle of the night to work on the text and title, insisting I get up at 4 this morning to finish the sewing, maybe. Have to look at it again, but I think so… Still must write the text file, sew it out and sew it on, clean up the edges, make and sew on the hangers. Another day or two… But I need to know.           

My title is a cue for applause, but of course this isn’t a theatre.

Will this do? “Applause” Or does it need parentheses ? Or should I put it in parentheses but without italics? Please advise.

T: Brackets.

[Applause]