from an identity polyptych by Tameca L Coleman

“I do not know when reconciliation comes”

I do not know when reconciliation comes

“I thought there was a thing called forgiveness, and if you don’t want to forgive and if you don’t pray for that person, it never be right.”

An activist writes: “Reconciliation is dead,”
the captioned photograph of a beautiful Native woman
shouting, a red hand painted over her mouth.

I am reminded of a man who is dead now 
and who admitted to me 
the rape on his record 

before asking me 
to stand between him and community, 
some of whom knew, some who didn’t, to soften, I imagine the knowledge of his past

and I asked a friend who had been gang-
raped if they thought a rapist could be rehabilitated.

and I remembered the traumas in the bodies of those I worked for,
and wondered what kind of person I would be if I said yes.

My mother’s neck still shakes, and the only power she has these days is in safeguarding her broken body.

I had a friend who had smooshy feelings for someone, and for his warmth another man ripped his insides, and left him, asking if he liked that.

He had no one, so though he didn’t like that, he accepted the only security he thought could be found, and then the rest of them, too, had their turns. This is the price he paid for a home, he told me, and he thought that maybe he deserved it, the taking and tearing of his insides. He went back again and again. 

A lover once said, “Your body is not always yours. Let me have it.” 

A lover once said, “You are being preserved for me, and I will find you. Do you like to be raped?”

A lover once told me that I better not dare claim anything other than love, my placement in his bed secured by the rifle within arm’s reach.

A lover once told me about the “sanctuary” found where two men made all the children they saved trade sexual favors. She is nostalgic about this house, and speaks the magic of floor beds and shared scarcities. This world was somehow better than what she had before, and she sometimes wonders where those men have gone, and she sometimes craves small dusty spaces and booze and shared bread that’s already turning.

Someone somewhere will no longer catcall a woman and yell into her back that he’s talking to her because of the scream that scraped scars up my throat and out of my mouth.

Someone somewhere has eight long scars down his back for trying to force me to take a “picture” to remember him by.

Someone somewhere carries my mother’s stab wound.

I do not know when reconciliation comes. 

When you said, “You know, there’s two sides to every story. I guess your Mom did what she did and I just went off.”

I thought about how I hate violence,
and I thought about how we’re facing violence all the time, 
the perpetrators of the wounds we carry getting off
scott-free with the language of their gods in tow, 
beating us over our heads once again
with demands for forgiveness
songs we do not owe.

---

You can’t just read your way out of racism. And yet reading with that aim is a powerful and viable first step. And how strange when you pair that against a Black man and his partner creating a space for communing and intervention, full of informative and empowering books meant for the communities they come from, for the communities whose safe spaces are disappearing, for the communities who are being colonized and owned all over again.

The young man who comes to speak to us has grit in his teeth when he says “white liberals.” They are the ones who have money and they are happy to spend it here. Spending their money here makes them feel that they are doing something. They do not realize that even here, they are co-opting intent. They do not realize that even here, in their earnest desire to understand, they harm.

am i an ally?

you can’t read yourself
out of racism

but stacks of books line the desks
and tables,
the bedside dressers,

they line
the insides of my bags.

i take notes and carry
the weight of them.
i underline
and highlight. read       with yearning.
the more i read, the more i know
i know

nothing
i bend over the tables, my shoulders
curving over my heart, eyes
strain and water,
my chest heaves.
each book
is a silent soldier
armed to the edge of the pages’
slicing corners              see
see
see
how
my spine compresses.

see how
my fingers
bleed.

To Shoehorn a Cat: A Conversation with Reese Conner

Reese Conner is a poet, teacher, and winner of the 2020 Cider Press Editors’ Prize Book Award for his debut poetry book, The Body He Left Behind. His work has appeared in Tin House, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Barrelhouse, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. His writing has received the Turner Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Mabelle A. Lyon Poetry Award, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Reese teaches composition and poetry workshops at Arizona State University.

I first met Reese in 2012 in Tempe, Arizona, where we were both incoming MFA Creative Writing students at Arizona State University. In the years since, I’ve been fortunate enough to have Reese, not only as a peer, but as a trivia teammate, Dungeons and Dragons comrade, and breakfast buddy. It has been a pleasure to see Reese grow as a poet in the time I’ve known him, to see his work become more biting, more introspective. I admire Reese’s ability to mix humor and earnestness, for his ability to look at what others want to turn away from. You can preorder The Body He Left Behind, a heartbreaking book of poems about cats, grief, and the ways we love, from Cider Press or your local bookstore.

*

Dana Diehl: We’ll start at the obvious place. What, for you, makes a cat such an enticing subject for a poem?

Reese Conner: Firstly, and I cannot stress this enough, I actually like cats. Let me tell you, actually liking cats did some hefty lifting when it came to writing a book chiefly about cats. The truth is I struggle mightily to simply start writing a poem, which I understand is a common issue for writers, so I don’t imagine myself unique. One way I found to combat that looming failure-to-launch was to shoehorn a cat into every piece I could because it created an immediate investment for me — I cared about the cat, so it made it easier for me to imagine the reader caring for the cat, too. That, in turn, made it easier for me to imagine the poem being successful and, therefore, worth writing.

Secondly, cats acted as vehicle to tackle some pretty big abstractions. For example, I was particularly interested in the ways we prepare for, encounter, and react to grief. The dying or death of a cat allowed for a general exploration of grief, yes, but it also led to questions about what we are allowed to grieve, how much we are allowed to grieve, and who is allowed to grieve. In one poem, “The Necessary,” I make this quite explicit by ranking griefs in order of importance. The point is not that an objective measurement of griefs coming from an external source is actually valuable, rather the point is that the ranking of griefs is a powerful, tacit thing that we already do. And that becomes wildly hurtful when one’s internal, subjective measurement of a grief does not align with where others think it ought to be. In particular, this comes into play with the father in the poems, who deeply loves his cat but does not feel comfortable mourning a cat on account of traditional masculinity. Come to think of it, exploring the effects of masculinity by way of a beloved cat is essentially the SparkNotes of my book. Even though I gave you the SparkNotes, I still hope you read it, though!

DD: I think there’s this fear that in writing about pets we risk being “cheesy” or overly sentimental. Is this something you actively tried to avoid while writing these poems? Or were there other challenges you felt you faced?

RC: Hmm…this is a really good question. I was certainly aware of the risk of sentimentality because I had been warned, but I guess I never really worried about it. In fact, I like to think that I purposefully approached the sentimental because, while it is often regarded as “cheesy” and lowbrow and not appropriate in a poem, there is a reason it is so ubiquitous, right? It speaks to shared experience. It must. We have Hallmark cards and abstractions because they resonate with just about everyone. And so, since the collective “we” has a penchant for getting overly sentimental about our pets, it seems pretty valuable to explore why. Pushing that further, it seems pretty valuable to explore why it is considered overly sentimental do so, especially if it is so common. Why is it that there is a perception that dead or dying pets should not be worth the grief we give them? I’ve certainly felt it — there is a guilt associated with mourning a pet so powerfully, and, in my experience, that guilt is a reaction to the idea that it is just a cat or just a dog, again referencing that unspoken hierarchy of griefs. In my book, I guess I wanted to legitimize mourning a pet so powerfully by exploring why the sentimentality makes sense and why we shouldn’t look down on it.

DD: Please tell us about the process of writing this collection. At what point did you know you had a book on your hands?

RC: I want to preface by making clear that I do not necessarily suggest the route I took because much of it was flailing about and generally having no idea about a great many things regarding publishing.

All right, so the one talent I know I have when it comes to writing is my ability to get lost in the weeds. I am consistently proud of my moment-to-moment choices within poems. You know, diction, line breaks, the particular idea I am trying to get at, etcetera? I’m proud of those. I really pay mind to have a rationale for each of those smaller choices in case the never-going-to-happen scenario of someone publicly holding me accountable for one such choice actually happens. This means that I am pretty confident in each poem I have written because I have the bandwidth to consider a full poem at a time. Unfortunately, that talent for the microscopic seems to have adversely affected my ability to see the big picture, which made organizing all my poems into a cohesive book quite the task.

And so, my process was mostly to lean into my talent and simply focus on each poem as a standalone. There was additional logic behind this approach because the idea of ever winning a book prize and publishing a book felt impossible, so it made sense to devote my attention to publishing individual poems. I didn’t really realize I had a book until I had enough poems to make a book. At that point, I took stock of what I was actually doing in my work as a whole.

All right, to be fair to myself, I may be being a bit misleading about how little I considered a book-length work. It’s not that I had never considered what my book might look like. For example, I knew, even as I was writing standalone poems, that fathers and cats and domesticity were through-lines for my work. I also knew exactly what the first and last poems in my book would be, and I knew the important poems that needed to go in-between in order to make the narrative work, but I had the vaguest idea of where those poems belonged. Essentially, I felt overwhelmed. When I had enough poems to meet book-prize criteria, I slapped together an iteration of my book that was significantly longer and less cohesive than what it is now. It also had a different title that I consider embarrassingly pretentious in hindsight: An Expectation of Broken Things.

Anyways, at this point, a wonderful friend and fellow writer, Melissa Goodrich, offered to slog through my mess and to help me out. I owe an incredible debt to her suggestions on ordering, cutting, and even the title of the book. Truly, I cannot overstate how integral Melissa’s involvement was in making my book what it is. You should absolutely check out her fiction and poetry because she’s not just an organizing maestro, she’s a damn good writer, too. When I read through my book as assembled by Melissa, I knew I had something to be proud of (and I knew I had someone to thank).

DD: In the first section of the book, there’s a focus on the physicality of the cat: old cat made of bird bone and balsa, broken rubber bands / heavy as ball bearings. However, as the book goes along, there’s a shift to the human body, as well. How are the body of the cat and the body of the boy connected for you?

RC: I guess those specific bodies are not terribly connected for me. Bodies, in general, were an important topic in the book, though. I wanted to really wrestle with the distinction (or lack thereof) between the body and the mind, which I know sounds like pseudo-philosophical bullshit, so we can roll our eyes together. Still, I recall a time when I was young where I honestly did not consider the two things as separate. That has changed. Now, when I define “me,” I am thinking of my mind primarily. And so, I am very interested in locating that last time when I hadn’t separated the two, when my body was “me” as much as anything else. Exploring that transition as well as exploring how we often define others as their bodies rather than their minds were important considerations when writing my book.

DD: This book takes a stark look at violence, as it is inflicted both by and on the subjects of these poems. The speaker loves his cats, while simultaneously observing their potential for brutality, their propensity to kill. The speaker begins to see violence in himself, as well.

I love this line from “I Was Innocent After All”: She told me / I had been good incorrectly […]

And this one, from “The Necessary”: To be clear, he is not a monster. / He simply decided that progress / meant putting things / where they do not belong […]

What do cats, or other animals, teach us about being a monster versus being innocent? Is it possible to be both at once?

RC: I think animals can teach us quite a bit about both monstrousness and innocence, particularly regarding the nuance of intentions mattering while concurrently not mattering at all. For example, in my poem “Like a Gift,” I address this head-on when the speaker is holding his cat to protect it from the neighbor’s dog. The cat recognizes the danger that the dog poses and would likely prefer to run away, so being arrested in the speaker’s arms probably doesn’t sit too well with the cat. And so, the poem posits that at some point the cat’s instinct to run from the dog becomes an instinct to run from the speaker, as well. This, in turn, poses the question of whether the speaker is correct to “save” the cat from its own instincts simply because the speaker has good intentions and the power to impose them. If the answer to that question seems simple and that the speaker was wholly in the right, then I would offer another set of questions regarding at what point the cat loses enough agency for the loss of agency to matter; at what point micromanaging the cat’s instinct becomes a trespass; and at what point the intention to save the cat from itself becomes monstrous. Obviously, I do not think there is an easy, blanket answer to these questions, which is why I do not offer one in the poem and why I won’t offer one here. What I do know is that many people seem to think good intentions earn a clear conscience, end stop. I believe that mindset can be incredibly dangerous and is often incredibly condescending, which is why it is something I address pretty heavily in my book.

DD: What are some other obsessions in your life right now? Do you find that they influence or inform your writing in any way?

RC: This is not a “right now” thing, but I have been obsessed with movies, television, and music for as long as I can remember. Each influences and informs my writing in powerful ways. In fact, I would say that my primary mode of experiencing stories is not through traditional reading but through those other modalities. I used to be pretty self-conscious about that because I felt like I couldn’t be a strong writer if reading traditional texts wasn’t my main source of reading. I do not think this is as widespread as it once was, but there is often an elitism when it comes to types of writing and, therefore, types of reading. I wholeheartedly disagree with it, but I’m sure you’ve heard this mantra: “Those who can’t write poetry, write short stories. Those who can’t write short stories, write novels. Those who can’t write novels, write screenplays.” I have heard that exact quote in multiple workshops throughout my career as a writer, and it always stung. I get it, though. Follow that proposed escalation in quality of writing and you essentially find the converse of who makes the most money from writing. Considering that, I can understand why some would want to believe in that hierarchy. After all, you’re not going to make much money from poetry, so it would be nice to believe that it is the purist expression of the lot. So, while I understand where the cliché comes from, I adamantly disagree with it and, more than that, think its utter bullshit. Good writing is good writing.

On a lighter note, I will offer one movie, television show, and song that helped inform some part of my book.

Movie: In Bruges.

Television show: Dollhouse.

Song: “Night Moves” by Bob Seger.

DD: If The Body He Left Behind had a soundtrack, what are a few songs that would be on that list?

RC: “Independence Day” by Bruce Springsteen. “As the World Caves In” by Matt Maltese. “Father and Son” by Yusuf / Cat Stevens. “Prison Trilogy (Billy Rose)” by Joan Baez. “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin. “Divorce Song” by Liz Phair.

DD: Finally, what advice do you have for emerging poets trying to finish or publish their first books?

RC: Well, I’m not sure if I have any advice on how to finish a first book other than to write it in a way that works for you and to take every bit of advice on how to write a book with just the biggest grain of salt. There are so many “truths” about what you need to do in order to be a writer and, while I think most of them are well-intentioned, they often serve to gatekeep who gets to be a “real” writer. As a wise interviewee once said: good writing is good writing.

As for publishing a first book, I do have some advice, and you may take it with whatever sized grain of salt you see fit: submit. Honestly, that’s it. I know so many ridiculously-talented writers who are too intimidated to submit, too afraid of rejection to submit, or who just don’t quite believe the mountain of failure that happens behind the scenes for just about every successful writer. If you are an emerging writer and you have conviction in your work, submit more than you think is necessary because that is what’s necessary. Get as comfortable as you can with rejection because, unfortunately, what you’ve heard is true: publishing is a numbers game.

Lastly, and this has nothing to do with finishing your own book or publishing your own book, but I’m going rouge with some unrelated advice: urge your own ridiculously-talented writer friends to submit, too. Be the good kind of envious when they succeed and support them as fully as they deserve. 

A Conversation with Peter Ramos about His Book of Poetry, Lord Baltimore

Editor’s Note: Peter Ramos and Paul Nemser each have published books of poetry this year. Their conversation about those books is presented here in two linked posts. In this post, Paul Nemser interviews Peter Ramos about Peter’s book, Lord Baltimore. Peter Ramos’s interview of Paul Nemser about Paul’s book A Thousand Curves ca be accessed here.

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Peter Ramos’ poems have appeared in New World Writing, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, Painted Bride Quarterly, Verse, Indiana Review, Mississippi Review (online), elimae, Mandorla and other journals. Nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize, Peter is the author of one book of poetry, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVox Books, 2008) and three shorter collections. Lord Baltimore (2021), his latest book-length collection of poems, was published by Ravenna Press. He is also the author of one book of literary criticism, Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge (Routledge, 2019). An associate professor of English at Buffalo State College, Peter teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature.

*

Nemser: So many of your poems in Lord Baltimore are about night—for example, “Night Shift,” “ Night Gown” “Night Flight. What does night mean to you?

Ramos: Thanks for these questions, Paul. I’m happy to be doing this with you.

I’m not sure this answer will make the poems you mention any clearer, but I have long had two strong feelings about night—fear and excitement. My son is now 12, almost 13, and when I was his age, I was terrified of being awake when everyone else was asleep. But in the summer of my 14th year, I turned to reading in bed, late into the night, and that solved my fear of not being able to get to sleep with everyone else. In my mid-teens, and when I could drive, I would go out with my neighborhood friends to punk and new wave clubs in the city (Baltimore), though I lived with my family in the suburbs. That time (during my 11th and 12th grades) and those first experiences of city night-life were filled with great excitement, thrilling with new, original (to me) experiences. But I have also felt fear of the evening throughout my life. I think I turned to drinking in part because of such fear. There have also been times where I was clear-headed, present and at ease in my skin when night came on, and I felt a different kind of excitement.

Nemser: “Night Shift” is about seeing and working, sleeping and waking. Night comes, “truer than time,” with its own distances, its own light:

All day it was summer, an open melon
thrumming with insects and minutes.
Now something else jumps
bolt upright, awake. Moonlight roams
for a thousand miles.

Is “Night Shift,” in part, an ars poetica?

Ramos: Yes, I can see that, and as I implied above, it’s also tied up with my personal relationships to night, especially my sober, clear-headed ones.

Nemser: Night Gown” is unusual in your book as a poem in the third person. Why did you use the third person?  You have an epigraph from Emmanuel Levinas who saw the origin of ethics in a person’s encounters with the “face” of the unknowable “Other. Levinas said, “The beyond from which a face comes is in the third person." How did you become interested in Levinas?

Ramos: I wrote that poem long before I knew about Levinas. I use Levinas in my book of academic criticism, Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge (Routledge 2019), as a lens through which to view the translation of poetry. In this poem, I saw a connection with his passage about waking up as a way of actively and responsibly making the world come to life (as opposed to not waking by hitting the snooze button, say, and thereby continuing to let the world cease to exist). The poem, for me, is thereby like his discussion of the relationship of the self to the Other, which we decide to make before reason yet out of obligation. This, too, seems like a responsible way to make the world come to life. I think I used the third person because it seemed to me like an experience that many share, one not limited to me.

Nemser: “Night Flight” closes your book with what might be a first-person experience of the Other. The Other, according to Levinas, is “infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign.” In your poem, the speaker wakes at night saying, “Do it,/ that thing, again. He goes up into the attic and encounters “a Syrofoam/ head, anonymous/ wig-stand. I knew it…. The thought of this anonymous face “prickle[s] [him],” and he thinks of a street that runs “forever. You end with these lines: “I took/ that manikin head—/ frightening white// center of all things—/ for a sign, I took/ the matter as closed. Please talk about “Night Flight. What is the “flight”? What is the sign? Is the manikin really the Other or a mock-up? What are the matters that are closed?

Ramos: I’m not sure this will satisfactorily answer your questions. Like “Night Shift,” this poem runs ahead of me, in terms of its own logic, its atmospheric, uncanny plot. And I like that. I don’t want to know, completely, what my poems are about. To me, this poem seems to have its own understanding of time, an unconventional, dream-like presentation of it. I think there’s a hint that the flight is in the present moment, away from such a sense that the matter was closed. What does/ did the speaker take as closed, you ask. I think a sense that at the center of his world (especially since childhood) lies an enticing, alluring but ominous, even terrifying, and controlling fate-like power or entity. I wouldn’t call it the Other. I guess it’s fate, in the sense that I take Emerson to mean it in his essay with the title of the same term. I hope the speaker can activate more autonomy over his life.

Nemser: Themes from “Night Shift” are explored throughout your book. “Con La Mosca” describes the experience of waking suddenly and alone in a hotel in Frascati, not far from Rome. There’s a mix of dream and half-awake excitement. A stream of short, enjambed couplets, the poem flows through a current of history and free association, but events are described as if they happened almost at once. Aristocrats play “homo-erotic footsie” in marble fountains. In the hotel bar they drink to the death of Il Duce. In the ballrooms, women wear trappings of Eros—expensive heels, powdered cleavage, puckered lips. Outside there’s celebration, “corks/ & machine guns/popping off. All of this flow seems to be powered by Sambuca with a few coffee beans—a drink known as “With the fly,” “Con La Mosca. The poem ends with music, the speaker calling out a gentle crescendo as if he were a composer:  “Piano,/ piano, mezzo-/ forte. How much of this poem is memory, how much history, how much imagination?

Ramos: I think your questions at the end work well—parts personal memory (I stayed in such a hotel once), history, and imagination. Like “Night Flight,” this poem to me presents a kind of haunting, a scratching of some invisible unreasonable itch. To me the speaker seems possessed for an intense moment, as you put it nicely, by “a current of history and free association, [by] events [that] are described as if they happened almost at once.”

Nemser: Your poems have many different ways of presenting time. In a number of short, present-tense, prose memoirs, you often describe events that proved indelible. These poems are full of period detail from the 1960’s or 1970’s. Many depict generational conflicts or erotic encounters. Could you tell us more about the inspiration for these poems?

Ramos: Yes, but I’m a bit uncomfortable with the term “memoirs” as a descriptor for these.

Nemser:

a. “Can’t Get There From Here” is  a narrative of a teenage garage band denied access to their gig at a fair because of how they look—in an old car, in “black suits and ties, hair gelled up tall. They came to be cool, but are shunted from entrance to entrance till the car gets “hot as hell. Our eyeliner stings.

Ramos: In terms of pop-culture or period detail, this poem seems connected to the early 1980s. The poem is probably more autobiographical than others in that I was in a band in my mid-teens to early 20s and we grew up near a rural part of Maryland. I can identify with the speaker’s desire to fit into a sense of his home or place even as he clearly also wishes to register his defiance of its provincialisms. But in the poem, such defiance is also lambasted for its pretentiousness and innocence.

Nemser:

b. “Immigrant Song,” is about a musical war between the speaker and his father. Son puts on high-volume Led Zeppelin in his bedroom. Father is in his own bedroom, daydreaming back to his old life in Venezuela, but the noise from the son is too much. Father slams the door and turns on the Four Tops. Then in a moment of magic, a deeper past comes alive in the remembered time of the poem, the father’s father beating a tango rhythm on his coffin wall. For generations, the men in the family have used music to “stage our frustrated coups. What else can we do? We are not kings. These have been themes for men from time immemorial: battles between fathers and sons, old and new; the immigrant’s life—being from elsewhere but living in a strange land; how the dead speak to us and through us. Do you see your poetry as part of a musical lineage that allows you to know and overthrow the past?

Ramos: I don’t think the speakers can overthrow or escape their pasts in this poem. The father in the poem is transported to his own bedroom from the 1940s and then early ‘50s, and he enacts the same kind of Oedipal revolt as his son with his own father, and so on down the patrilineal line. The older I get the less I seem to know about my poetry. In my limited experience, I feel more calm, less antagonistic in my early 50s. My father was not violent, and he never taught me to fight, so this seemed like the closest thing to the father-son agon that I could use.

Nemser:

c. “Master Bedroom” turns these memoirs on their heads. It’s a present-tense, stanza-ed narrative of hallucination in the 1960’s. “A cleaned-up country sleeps beneath Sputnik and all the crown molding. The house has iconic features of what realtors now call “a mid-century gem”—constructed for soldiers who returned from WWII and started families. The married couple in the poem, however, live in a sci-fi horror movie combining paranoia, government experimentation, and wild sex. Characters appear and vanish as if in a masque. A field mouse in the heating ducts, crew-cutted scientists in the basement working on hallucinogenic truth serum, the couple’s grandparents, the women speeding on Dexatrim.

Ramos: Much of this poem is a meditation on the houses, fighter jets, drugs and pop-culture of that period. I grew up in the wake of the Vietnam War (I was 6 when the U.S. left Saigon), and I would see images of that war on TV as a young child; my earliest memories, which go back almost to language acquisition, are of the televised moon landing (a few years after it happened), hippies, the deaths of the Kennedys (Robert the year before I was born; John F. fresh enough that it was still in the air). As is hopefully clear, my father was an immigrant, but my mother’s family goes back generations in this country, and her father, grandfather and brother were all in the U.S. Navy, so my brother and I received all these forms of mid-century U.S. culture and institutions early. We grew up about 40 minutes from Washington, D.C., and our family frequently visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum when my brother and I were young. I don’t know why these things have such a strong hold on my psyche. Like poetry, they linger, deeply familiar but a little out of focus; they continue to haunt me. I think Rilke mentions in his Letters to a Young Poet that we spend much of our adult lives trying to distill and understand our earliest memories.

Nemser: Some of your poems are like paintings of a past that still exists in the present. “Hawaiian Tropic,” for example, is a portrait of desire, sensual and sensuous in its detail, perhaps tracing the path of the speaker’s eyes and mind as they glide over beautiful women lounging by a pool. “God did I lean/ toward them—and still do—. You emphasize these movements with changing line lengths and with line breaks.

Ramos: I like your description above: “Some of your poems are like paintings of a past that still exists in the present.” I don’t have much more to say about this poem.

Nemser: Lord Baltimore is the title of both your book and its longest poem. The title has several, mainly ironic resonances; for example, the poem conjures up the English noblemen who founded the Maryland Colony, the city of Baltimore—depicted as a rough, industrial, down-and-out, dead-end place—and the poem’s struggling speaker, who is focused on memories of one hot, “wretched,” Twentieth Century, bohemian summer in the city. Who and what is Lord Baltimore?

Ramos: For me, Lord Baltimore is the city, itself, a character in the poem, alluring, brutal, demystifying, or maybe experience, itself, which can rob us of our ideals. I just thought of Emerson’s essay of the same name (“Experience”). And in some ways, maybe the speaker sees himself as Lord Baltimore, but ironically, as you imply, cynically—a clownish drunken failure who bitterly mocks himself.

Nemser: Your long poem begins with an italicized epigraph introducing the city and the life of the speaker within it. When did you write the epigraph in relation to the rest of the poem? The epigraph made me think of the beginning of La Boheme, where the young artists in a garret in Paris in the winter are burning their books to keep warm. In “Lord Baltimore,” young artists swelter in broken-down studios with bad plumbing, bad furniture, kitchen cabinets that “pulse all night with bugs. But there’s a breeze through an open window, and a view: “The rusted, industrial blocks of Baltimore” are “all smoke and unloading, 9 to 5,” and by dusk the lights come on with an eerie, inanimate beauty. The artists indulge in “high talk, inspired. They believe their whole lives will be art and poetry. Then they realize that everything is crumbling. By day they taste the dust of idealism, and by night they have “a gathering unbearable thirst. What influences were you thinking about when you worked on “Lord Baltimore”? What is the relationship in the poem among dissolution, disillusion, craving, and beauty?

Ramos: “Lord Baltimore,” as is clear in the book, is a longer sequence poem. I had written a long sequence poem a few years earlier which appears in my first full-length collection, Please Do Not Feed the Ghost (BlazeVOX Books 2008), a poem called “Watching Late-Night Hitchcock.” I wrote the italicized epigraph in this collection, as well as a few others, earlier as individual poems. For me, the epigraph happens earlier in the speaker’s life and foreshadows what will come.

I’m not sure I can identify the influences for that poem. I’m sorry. I wish I could. I think all of the terms you use are present in the poem. I hope I wrote myself out of that poem. It was painful to live some of it, and it was difficult to write it.

Nemser: After the epigraph, the body of “Lord Baltimore” begins with an ironic line that has the feel of epic quest: “Here begins the journey to bread. You launch into a description of hellish jobs done in the toxic heat of that Baltimore summer. It reminded me of summer jobs I had in my teens—janitor in a crematorium, washing down the walls of an airless, ten-storey staircase in a newspaper plant, scouring huge I-beams in vats of hydrochloric acid and boiling lye at a plating company. Later, when I read about journeys to hell or knights crossing a wasteland, those jobs would come back to me—the stink and sweat and the sense of unreality. Is there an element of spiritual journey in “Lord Baltimore”?

Ramos: I think so. I think the following section alludes to a kind of spiritual journey:

I got out.
Walked for years, the flames
eating my skin
less and less, dumb and dazed,
afraid but steadying, toward no place
I’d ever known.

Nemser: In your section “Wisdom Teeth.” a grueling time with family and work and drinking merges into the surgeon’s gruesome extraction of in-grown teeth. The speaker woke up in a Percocet daze in an air-conditioned room belonging to a girlfriend’s parents, and now he asks, “Why go there now, why hold on to those bloody molars, your ingrown and bone-aching twenty-something teeth?”  What do those teeth represent in your poem?

Ramos: I think that, as with the rest of the poem, the speaker feels compelled (for some reason) to go back to that period of his life, despite or even because it was painful. To me, there’s a desire to hang on to it and a self-command to let it go, the latter the healthier option but maybe requiring the former first.

Nemser: Your book often refers to music. The long poem uses lines from the Neil/ Nilsson song, “Everybody’s Talking At Me. The singer feels blind and deaf to the people around him—“I don’t hear a word they’re saying. “I can’t see their faces. He seems alien, out of place, dislocated, but he dreams of finding his place. It’s an escape into weather, into turbulence, and a mastery of them. “I’m going where the Sun keeps shining through the pouring rain. He’ll be riding winds and “skipping over the ocean like a stone. Many of the poems in your book Lord Baltimore begin with alienation, displacement, dislocation. How do the poems drive toward a place like the one where the song-singer longs to go?

Ramos: I always associated Baltimore, and especially my life in my 20s in that city, with the film, Midnight Cowboy, and that song recurs throughout the movie. The “green” cowboy goes to a huge, alienating city and loses his innocence (not that I think of myself as a cowboy). It’s such a devastating and beautiful movie, and to me, the song sounds very much like something a junkie would fantasize about, a longing to escape through his powerful pain medicine (I think I once heard Harry Dean Stanton say the song was about heroin). I’ve never done that drug, thank God. But the sense of womb-like comfort and escape seems like (to me) what the speaker is longing for throughout that poem. Does he get there? The poet isn’t there yet, but he hopes to.

Nemser: The final section of “Lord Baltimore” zeroes in on “the only thing/ you remember now” from all the drinking. Hung over, the speaker went out, and the street was lined with people evicted from their apartments. “By their own cheap sofas, gold shoes and negligee, spilled boxes of glass jewelry in the gutter—the Call-Girls,/transvestites, tall and elegant still but without their wigs, in ratty bathrobes/ out without time to put on makeup, suddenly/forced to wander the streets in broken pumps—/a few in slippers—breasting the cold bright/ morning, all of them, moving on/chin-high and stiff-lipped. This is the image that stays with the speaker—a community of people cast-out, performers only partially costumed, neither who they were, nor who they were not, but “tall and elegant still. What do these people mean to you?

Ramos: To me, they are the strongest, bravest people in the book. As such, the speaker simply cannot understand them. How did they do it, he asks, amid such desolation, loss, humiliation, poverty. I think the speaker wishes he had that kind of courage and fortitude.

A Conversation with Paul Nemser about His Book of Poetry, A Thousand Curves

Editor’s Note: Paul Nemser and Peter Ramos each have published books of poetry this year. Their conversation about those books is presented here in two linked posts. In this post, Peter Ramos interviews Paul Nemser about Paul’s book A Thousand Curves. Paul Nemser’s interview of Peter Ramos about Peter’s book Lord Baltimore. can be accessed here.

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Paul Nemser’s third book of poetry, A Thousand Curves, won the Editor’s Choice Award from Red Mountain Press and appeared this past April. It is a collection from a lifetime of writing poems. He grew up in Portland, Oregon where he fell in love with poetry while reading in the storage room in back of his family’s tool store. He studied poetry with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and many others. His book Taurus (2013) won the New American Poetry Prize. A chapbook, Tales of the Tetragrammaton, appeared from Mayapple Press in 2014. His poems appear widely in magazines. He lives with his wife Rebecca in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Harborside, Maine.

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Paul Nemser: Peter, I enjoyed answering your questions!

Peter Ramos: Let me say that I, too, enjoyed this exchange, both asking and answering questions.

I see that you studied at Harvard with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. I’d love to hear more about that. They’ve been impressive to me since I first started writing more seriously back in college. I have a funny story about Lowell.

Nemser: 

Robert Lowell

I had a writing seminar with him in 1968 in my sophomore year of college. There were 10 or 15 people in the class, mainly undergraduates (e.g., Heather McHugh, James Atlas, Robert B. Shaw), with graduates such as Frank Bidart and Lloyd Schwartz often present. I wish I had taken more notes and could remember those days more clearly.

Lowell came to class quite regularly and was on time. Though he usually wore typical Harvard professor clothes, I noticed one or two times that he was wearing what seemed to be bedroom slippers. He sat at one end of the seminar table and began talking in a soft drawl. The class hung on his every word. He was seen as the great American poet of the time.

Lowell had a large head. He tucked his chin into his collar and looked down as he spoke or looked out over his glasses. He came into class, it seemed, with a plan of what he was going to discuss. He might read poems of other poets and talk about them and about history, he might talk about writing. Then he would devote the bulk of class to student work. I found his comments to be elliptical, expressed in his personal diction, hardly ever including specific editorial suggestions. He praised things he liked and was not unkind about things he didn’t like. Lowell allowed a fair amount of student discussion in the class. 

Lowell taught me to embrace the idea of poems written in rough form—forms that might seem unpolished or full of conflict. It was Lowell who first introduced me to early English Renaissance poets such as Wyatt and Raleigh and who led me to study Donne’s language and form. He also talked about writing drafts in strict form, then cutting them back to tighten them, freshen them, give lines an explosive force. Another point that stuck with me was Lowell’s remark about ambition. He said that many people can be good poets; only a few can be great poets; but you can’t be a great poet unless you try. For better and worse, this encouraged me to take bigger risks in my poems and take on hard, perhaps unattainable goals.

Elizabeth Bishop

I took Bishop’s poetry writing seminar at Harvard while doing graduate work in 1975. The seminar included both undergraduates and grad students. In 1975, I had read and admired her poems, and I had heard a lot about her, so I was eager to meet her. In class, she seemed very restrained—in her dress and appearance, her polite manner, her punctuality, her unassuming ways of talking, and the conscientious precision of her words. She kept to herself. I didn’t get the sense that she enjoyed connecting with students. She warmed more, and seemed pleased, when talking about animals.

Her writing was so strong and flowed so naturally. Her poems were models of how to observe the world closely and to write well from the beginning of the poem to the end. She conveyed this by assignments that sometimes involved a particular form, but also could be to imitate or answer another poem or to write about something specific or in a defined voice. Her comments on our poems and her fuller comments on poets she admired got across that poetry could emerge from care, precision, honesty, and really attending to what was there.

In the early 2000’s, after a work trip to Rio de Janeiro, I wanted to see Samambaia—“fern”—where Bishop had lived with Lota de Macedo Soares in the mountains near Petrópolis. But when I arrived, the front gate was locked, and there was no one to let me in.

I’d like to hear your story about Lowell.

Ramos: I had a psychiatrist in Baltimore back in the 1990s, and he told me he was an intern at Bowditch Hall (in McLean Hospital near Boston) and this wild-eyed guy with tousled gray hair named Robert Lowell was admitted. Apparently, Lowell was telling everyone that he wanted to speak with the president. No one believed him (not surprising—the patients there made such requests all the time). Somehow someone relented and gave him the phone. He immediately dialed the White House and spoke with John Kennedy and Jacqueline, whom he knew, of course. I asked my psychiatrist what the doctors did after that. He told me they revoked his phone privileges. 

I can picture the whole thing, though I never met him. I’m envious that you got to study with such famous, great poets.

Ramos: A Thousand Curves seems neatly divided into a number of themes or topics: a section with a speaker who is growing old and still very much in love with his partner; a section that seems to deal with a speaker’s relationship to his (I’m just going to assume that the speaker in many of these poems is a man, but there are exceptions) Ashkenazic family going back through generations (another assumption, and please correct me if I’m wrong); a speaker traveling and/or entering foreign lands, etc. Given these clear distinctions, it’s tempting to think you wrote these poems with themes in mind, but I’m also stunned by your original and powerful images, phrases and language—“Tree wings furl upward higher than birds” (from “Current”); “Chitters drown the radio jazz” (from “Song Over Song for My Father”); “Wasps fly at our teeth but miss and freak the screen” (from “End of the Century”); I could go on and on—which makes me think the poems began with these (images, phrases, language). I want to ask, did you write them from an idea that you then developed, or did you write them from the inside out?

Nemser: Almost always inside out. Usually, I just start writing and see where the poem leads. A poem might launch from anything or anywhere—experience, memory, dream, something I’ve read, a film, a song, something I’m thinking about, often something I can’t explain. As a result, editing is equal parts tightening, heightening, cleaning, but also letting the subject reveal itself. This can take years. All that said, life generates topics. I’ve been married to one woman for 47 years, so I frequently write about her and our connection over time. Also, some poems begin in response to other poems of mine, and if the response works, I may be on the road to a theme.

You’re right that I’m from an Ashkenazic Jewish family—from Russia (now Ukraine) on my mother’s side and from Poland and Lithuania on my father’s. My grandmother often talked about her life in Chernobyl. They left in 1913. My parents were born in the US, and my maternal grandparents, my parents, and I lived near each other in Portland, Oregon.

Ramos: I’m impressed by the way the poems in your collection travel through time and allude to ancient or elemental or enduring things—seas, the moon, love, the natural word, as well as Aubades—and things more current and/or part of American pop culture—popular bands and songs from the last 4 or 5 decades, including songs and albums from The Ramones, U2, as well as jazz tunes. I guess that’s less of a question and more of a statement. I’m a musician, and I’m interested in your relationship (in your life and in your poems) with music.

Nemser: Those ancient things are still here, still marvelous, sometimes in reach. So it’s no surprise that seas, the moon, love, nature, and waking in the morning show up in pop music and jazz—in every kind of music. I love music. No one in my extended family had voice training, but everybody liked to sing, the older people in Yiddish. I remember listening to Burl Ives when I was quite small. At five or six, I started listening to rock and roll, especially Little Richard and Elvis, and then doo wop. My parents listened mainly to standards—Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, and on TV, Perry Como, Dinah Shore. And they loved Broadway show tunes. I played violin for about ten years—classical music and Yiddish songs. I quit early in college. My girlfriend in college and graduate school was a violist who taught me a lot about classical music. My wife loves “early music,” especially Baroque opera. My son sends me to great music—usually popular music—that I didn’t know about before.

My musical tastes have always been eclectic, but here are examples: Bob Dylan, Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, Child Ballads, Hank Williams, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Yiddish songs my grandparents sang, surf music, soul music, Chicago blues, British invasion, Leonard Cohen, Donna Summer, The Clash, U2, Buena Vista Social Club, Prince, J. Balvin. In the 1960’s, my father listened to a few Bossa Nova records over and over. Decades later, working in Brazil, I fell head over heels for classic samba, Bossa Nova, Tropicália, forró—and more.

Many of my poems were written while music was playing. I love song lyrics. Songwriters can be poets, and poets songwriters. The Child Ballads are written-down songs. Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge (among many others) wrote with song in mind. Brecht wrote songs that Weill put to music. Vinicius de Moraes who wrote the words to “The Girl From Ipanema,” was a poet who wrote and sang his own songs. And then there’s Bob Dylan.

Ramos: As I wrote, you name the poets you worked with in your bio., but I’m also interested in other poetic influences. I detect some Paul Celan, especially in the Germany poems like “Letter from Berlin”: “All April first I’ve dreamt and redreamt/ that everyone’s feet are asleep.” Are you willing to cite others?

Nemser: I first read Celan in college years, and he’s been a significant influence since then, though he’s inimitable. The Bible has been a constant influence because I read it often. Beyond that, here’s an incomplete list: Homer, Greek tragedy, Sappho, Catullus; ancient Chinese poetry; Hafez; Dante; Shakespeare; Renaissance ballads and early Renaissance sonnets; Spenser, Marlowe, Donne, Marvell, Milton; Goethe, Schiller, Büchner: Edo period poetry in Japan; Ghalib; Blake and all the other Romantics; Dickinson; Whitman; Mandelstam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova; Lorca, Borges, Neruda, Vallejo, Drummond; Yeats, Eliot; Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes; Brecht, Ginsberg, Amichai, Heaney, Walcott, Milosz, Hayden, Rich, Zbigniew Herbert, Clifton, Szymborska. I’ve left out a lot; notably my teachers and my friends, who have been a huge influence on me. And I admire many many poets writing now whose work gets into my head, my heart, and my poems.

Ramos: I see your collection’s title appears in a poem called “Mil Cumbres.” Did you have in mind other explanations for this title, more metaphoric ones? I read it this way, especially given the way the poems in your collection cycle through separate but related topics and then curve around, toward the end, to the speaker and his beloved who continue to grow, spiritually and in love.

Nemser: Yes, I intended the title metaphorically. We have to deal with all kinds of curves. Often the curve brings a surprise. You think you’re going one direction, and suddenly you’re going another. There are the steeps and hairpins and revelations of a road like California Route 1. Who knows what’s coming or who’s going “around the bend”? The batter expects a fastball, the pitcher throws him a slow curve.

Curves are also pleasurable. We like to look at them, to run hands over them, to touch the curves in a beloved face. The natural world is made of curves—genes, flower petals, rolling hills, river bends. And, as you suggest, curves can return you to where you started.

Ramos: I really enjoy the way the future seems terrifying, hopeful, uncertain, and potentially dangerous in your poems. In “The Origin of Yet,” the speaker notes, “For moments/ we’re out of danger, afraid of nothing—when/ a rain that had never rained begins to rain.” Yet in other poems, there’s a promise of delight yet to come. Your poem, “Aubade,” ends with this lovely image of dawn: “Dockworkers pull the morning moon up by her arms/ to watch her slither on carts, or dive to sea and swim away.” Is this also related to the uncertainty of what is to come that your title seems to connote? In fact, I’d be interested in any of your thoughts on the way the future presents itself in your poems.

Nemser: As I’ve grown older, I’ve felt that I know less and less about the world. The fragility of the present and even the past adds to my sense of the fragility of the future. It can go in every imaginable and unimaginable direction—in a line, in a circle, in curves. And when a rain that had never rained begins to rain, it could bring pain and death or beauty and delight. As I suggest in “Felicidade,” we could end up on “a small, unspeakable/ shoal of chances of drowning// in joy.”

I do believe in mathematical and scientific truth, and in the ability of math and science to say useful things about the future. In fifth grade, I read a book about wonders of math, which had a picture of Pascal’s triangle. I’ve been thinking about probabilities ever since. As a lawyer, for example, I know that evaluating likelihood becomes a habit of mind. Weighing evidence and assessing credibility are all about likelihood, and many legal issues entail prediction. I suspect that these habits of mind influence my poems and what they say about the future.

Ramos: Your “In the Alley of Perpetual Industry” nicely combines elements of the sacred and profane

Our lips and eyelids burn away,
leaving all we crack open for holy,
all we mistake for decay.”

I always associate such combinations with T. S. Eliot and Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Are there other poets you are influenced by who make such combinations?

Nemser: By the 1970’s, I was deep under the influence of Neruda. His essay “Toward an Impure Poetry” made a big impression: “Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it. A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophecies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.” My poem “In the Alley of Perpetual Industry” seeks this kind of impurity.

Mixture of sacred and profane is in much of the literature I love. Once when I reread The Iliad, I was also going to action films like “The Terminator.” The carnage in both was immense, unthinkable, yet The Iliad explored dimensions of the sacred that the action films never dreamed of. The Inferno also is a mix; for example, the predatory scenes of falsifiers and betrayers near the center of Hell might fit in a horror movie, but The Divine Comedy is undeniably an evocation of the sacred. The profane and sacred appear together in everything from Shakespeare to Goethe’s Faust to Kafka to García Márquez.

Ramos: I’m ashamed that I have never written a good love poem, but you have many in this collection, poems that present an enviable partnership between a couple that enjoy ever-increasing love over the years. Have such poems come easily (as if poems come easily!) or have you had to learn how to write love poems. 

Nemser: I first wrote love poems around the time I married my wife in 1974. We’ve always had a lot to talk about, so our love has always been involved with language, and it has evolved with language. We’re both only children, and our son is an only child. It’s a tiny family, and we look to each other. There are hard times and happier times. Both can generate poems. Poems about love are no harder or easier than my other writing, but given how my life has gone, writing love poems has been inevitable.

Ramos: These are poems of beginnings and endings, mornings, evenings, and travels that lead the speaker back to a beginning: “Here I am” (from “What I knew and What I Had to say”), or “There was no way down” (from “Mil Cumbres,” as if one cannot return from such a height without being changed, as if the truly new transforms us, the old way hidden forever): or, “the squawk circles back like a crack in vinyl” (from “Field Guide to Mercy”); or “the god of endings hangs on his hinges” from “Janus”). Are these departures and arrivals themes you have consciously meditated on in your poems, here and in the previous collections?

Nemser: I am interested in beginnings and endings. I don’t remember not being interested in them. And I’m interested in appearances, vanishings, recurrences, periodicity. I don’t consciously meditate on arrival and departure themes in my poems. My mind just goes there, as it goes to themes of transformation. I feel all those themes in my body as it ages, and I’m attracted to writings about those themes: e.g., Genesis, the Book of Job, Lao Tzu, Heraclitus.

My two earlier books do explore similar themes, but both are crazy, myth-influenced narratives. Taurus is a wild retelling of the Europa story: A bull-gargoyle in St. Petersburg, Russia is possessed by a god, comes down off of his building, roams and works in the city, and falls in love with a mysterious woman named Europa. In Tales of the Tetragrammaton, set in Portland, Oregon from the 1950’s to the 1980’s, a woman whose life resembles my mother’s is visited constantly and bewilderingly by the unpronounceable name of God. 

Ramos: I’m so impressed by the unobtrusive rhyme and poetic forms you employ in many of these poems. Is there a moment in the composition of your poems when you decide to use such forms?

Nemser: Thanks. It all depends on whether I am trying to write in a strict, traditional form—e.g., with meter and end-rhyme or with required repetition. If so, I have to make that decision at the beginning and then try to stick to the rules, nearly all of which I first learned from Robert Fitzgerald’s wonderful prosody class in college. If I’m not writing in a strict traditional form, the effects just happen, usually by process of discovery in the editing.

Ramos: In your poems that allude to Japan, do you feel like you’re channeling or speaking back to Basho and others? I’m particularly fond of “May” and “Garden with No Boundaries.”

Nemser: Yes, I first read Bashō when my high school sold little haiku books in a bookstore in an alcove between classrooms. I read Narrow Road to the Deep North and other of Bashō ‘s haibuns when I was in college. In those years I also realized that the landscapes around Portland, Oregon and landscapes in Japanese poems and woodblock prints had strong similarities—fogs, torrents, fish, frogs, big solitary mountains, bridges, blue-gray seas.

My poem “Garden With No Boundaries” is a response both to Bashō and to Musō Soseki, the 13th Century poet, calligrapher and Zen monk who was the foremost garden designer of his time. While in Kyoto, I got to visit the Zen temple called Tenryūji, of which Musō Soseki was the first abbot and also the designer of the magnificent garden discussed in my poem. It was a joy to see how harmoniously the garden’s plantings, trees and water related to the temple, the mountains, and the famous bamboo forest not far away. Only later did I learn that the animating spirit of this place was Musō Soseki, whose poems, translated by Merwin, had long been on my bookshelves. The signs at Tenryūji had called him Musō Kokushi, another of his names.

Ramos: Does your location, i.e where you happen to be living, strongly affect your poems? I understand you live in two different places, depending on the season, I imagine.

Nemser: The particular landscape and atmosphere of a place enter the images in my poems and often take them over. Oregon, where I grew up, became imprinted on my brain when I was small, and it emerges when I write about childhood. My wife and I have gone to Maine for 47 years—first on our honeymoon—and it’s a beautiful, sometimes bleak, place with amazing views—ocean, forests, fast-changing weather, encounters with animals. Love, life and death reside there. Many of the poems in A Thousand Curves are set in Maine. Finally, I’m excited by travel. It’s about the unexpected. Wandering in a foreign place, trying to speak the language, jolts me out of the world I’ve known. I feel a new propulsion—I see, feel, remember more. Some experiences are written in fire.

"If there's a gap then there must be a witness": A Review of G.C. Waldrep's The Earliest Witnesses

Many of the poems, in G.C. Waldrep's collection, The Earliest Witnesses, were composed while walking. In a February 2021 poetry reading with Carcanet Press, Waldrep spoke of the realization that, after suffering from a chronic illness, he might never walk again. In "I Have a Fever and its Name is God," Waldrep is witness to an ailing body, "The nurses place bowls of fruit / around my prone body, / as sacrifices. Not to you, / they explain, / but to the heat you bear." The body becomes holy because of the fever inside of it.

Many of the poems read as prayers, which is not surprising knowing Waldrep's relationship to Christianity. In "American Goshawk," he writes, "The problem / is that I am not able to respond as you demand— / and you, it seems, are not able to respond as I demand, / or would demand. And so we wound one another." This may be an address to a fellow forest wanderer, but because of the first line, "I strode into the woods in a brute faith, certain the forest / would give me what I needed," I read it as an insistence to a divine source: please God, help guide me. The poems read very quietly: poems about the Eastern English landscape, about Welsh saints, about a very particular kind of remembering. There is, as William Wordsworth puts it, "a not unpleasant sadness" in the collection. The North American Goshawk reminds him, "I was no longer in love with my life, or with anyone's."  In "On the Feast of the Holy Infants Killed for Christ's Sake in Bethlehem," Waldrep starts, "It is banal to return to the past but a past is all I have" and finishes, rather brilliantly, with "What I love about the past is that it does not break. It is breakage. It is broken." The poems take on a Romantic melancholy. Similar to the Lake Poets and yet also a Whitman like ecstaticism for the body.

Waldrep's work is influenced by Michael Palmer, a language poet who writes, in "Notes for Echo Lake" (Codes Appearing), "Memory is kind, a kindness, a kind of unlistening." I read Waldrep's work as a collection of memories which serve to unlisten. In "[West Stow Orchard (III)]" he reflects, "That is the problem with listening, why stones refuse to do it, / categorically." Waldrep's poems aren't trying to forget the past, but to listen to the memories differently, perhaps both to the silence and the sound. In "West Stow Orchard," we find the speaker limping through an apple forest, "I held silence as in my palm, watched it stretch, flex" and then during this silence, this unlistening, he is able to contemplate time past, "Distance of was. Distance of legible syntax." Traveling with his two Canadian hosts, he is quiet again, "And so I drew from that place a reticence, as from the deck of reticence. It / lodged in my body, guest within guest." He is both a guest to these people and perhaps to this silent intruder in his body, which at times, feels like God itself.

In "Hephaestus in Norfolk," during a stroll under the East Anglican sky where rabbits are his only mammalian company, he writes, "This is all a paraphrase, a voice whispered / but when I asked 'of what?,' all I heard was the sky's / low and level drone" And isn't that the spirit he seeks? Isn't that what the unlistening is for? So, we may hear the space, the silence of our quiet gods. Of all the lines in the book, the one I keep repeating, palming over and over in my hand is in "On the Feast of the Holy Infants Killed for Christ's Sake in Bethlehem," the peculiar and wonderful line, "If there's a gap then there must be a witness." The book is titled The Earliest Witnesses and is a collection that reckons with a personal and collective past. A person who spends considerable time in an old castle. A person trained in music who, in "[Additional Eastnor Poem (III)]" is listening to the objects of earlier times, "history has no grammar, no melody; it is most / akin to the medieval drone." The poem is trying to figure out what winter's antiphon (a chanted sentence before or after a psalm) sounds like and the poet tells us, "Like a doll sewn from scraps of calm." How strange and fantastic. What is poetry but to surprise someone with the possibilities of language?

During the poetry reading, I asked Waldrep if some of these poems were eco-poems. After some debate about the definition of the word "eco," he came to the conclusion that, no, these poems were more conventional. However, I see them as ecologically focused. They are poems of landscapes, of hawks and owls, of stars and sky. But, more than that, they are poems of walking. A body walking through a castle. He spends much of the book thinking about Eastnor Castle, a place where, in "[Additional Eastnor Poem (1)],  he "catalogued & numbered the various smokes as they emerged/from the plain beyond the ridge.” In these poems, he often walks with a companion. Someone he speaks to, but never names. I am left wondering if it is the person whose life he is "not in love with" or if perhaps not a person at all, but a guide with a spiral notebook. He continues in this same poem, "Tell me more about the spiral book, I asked, but you would only / shake your head. 'I can't describe it more clearly than that,' / you said." The poem ends with a metaphor on faith, "We can't see most stars by day."

In an interview with Image Journal, Waldrep speaks of the difference between poetry and prose, "I’d say poems exhibit a level of tension on language interior to the sentence, rather than among or between sentences. . . If I can discern that tension, it’s a poem. If not, it’s prose." There is a tightness to Waldrep's work. A sense that the poem is building itself line by line. Sometimes, the poems don't move forward. They stick together. Lines glued within themselves. As I walked through the poems, I found a lovely definition of poetry, in "St. Melangell's Day Eastnor (1)"  to "Say a poem is like that, / a bit of silence the world acceded to, for a finite duration."

His work reminds me of the British artists Hamish Fulton and Andy Goldsworth. Both use nature as the medium for their work and in doing so create mystery. Parts of Waldrep's work I could understand and parts I could not. And yet, he creates a spiritual universe that I can understand very well. It is the mystery of poetry. In Fulton's work, he spends days walking, alone, silently and then presents images / maps / data of the walks. Goldsworthy takes fallen leaves and builds wondrous patterns with dark holes in the center. Waldrep's poetry falls somewhere between these two artists' work. He is asking us to walk quietly, to speak to the God inside of us and perhaps to find in his poems, these dark holes of intrigues: spaces not quite comfortable and yet places where we feel at home with ourselves.

As the poet would anything beautiful: A Conversation with Carly Inghram about her newest poetry collection, The Animal Indoors

Carly Inghram is a poet from Atlanta. Her first collec­tion, Sometimes the Blue Trees, was released from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2019. Her newest poetry collection, The Animal Indoors, is the winner of the 2020 CAAPP Book Prize. She currently lives in Manhattan and teaches kindergarten in the Bronx.

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Tiffany Troy: Can you introduce yourself to your readers of the world?

Carly Inghram: My name is Carly Inghram. I am a poet and writer. I am interested in the intersection of nature or the earth—physical things—and the spiritual world.

Tiffany Troy: In one of your poems, you write how the poet creates a woman who never appears in real life, that of a woman dancing for money on the train, as the poet would anything beautiful. How do nature and reality intermingle with each other and inform your preoccupations?

Carly Inghram: Really interesting line that you have pulled out. I do think it’s connected to what I’m saying. Like we can use things in the material world in order to find beautiful, or insert word there or insert object of desire there. Longing, craving, etc. I think we can use physical things in the world to create what is being longed for. The process of making is a very wonderful process, allowing us to create new landscapes and new places that we’ve been wanting.

Tiffany Troy: I found the tension between material and spiritual wealth very interesting in your poems. You have female characters who do not crave for gold, but personhood. The line, “She didn’t want gold like the powerful, she wanted it like the weak” reminded me of the Christian idea of how to be humbled is actually to be powerful. How does that inversion help you underscore the beauty of things beyond the price tag placed on them?

Carly Inghram: Lol at Christianity because that’s very much my upbringing. I feel like as a gay or queer or insert word here woman, I have a strong faith background. I feel some tension there like it didn’t feel like it belonged to me. I still felt like spirituality was alive for me and has always been a part of my life. Maybe strictly to the context of Christianity and maybe more broadly. I still love the practices of Christianity which is beautiful or can be at its core but inversions allowed me to see how in a similar vein, I can create or make truth in a certain way, and maybe we can make truth as we continue to see we are all connected and belong to this world.

Tiffany Troy: In the collection you also bring forward the dancing girl emoji which really roots the poem in the present as opposed to 100 years or 200 years ago. But you also talk about womanhood and gender identities and I feel like the idea of belonging runs throughout history. How do you play with the idea of what is virtual like what can be downloaded and the real?

Carly Inghram: Reading a lot of poets has been useful, because there's a lot of poets who do similar things or play with language in interesting ways. So I've definitely learned a lot from reading. Aside from that, skills I have learned from one of my favorite poets, Morgan Parker, who came to the MFA one time and talked about how she included the Real Housewives in her poems. She did not want anything of her world to be left out from her poems. I thought that was very impactful and that idea stuck with me.

The word “downloaded” is helpful because we, as people have a lot of information that is downloaded. There is a lot of given information via apps or systems that we live in. Via friends or just via everything like living life. There is a lot of downloaded information and part of the process of making that I have learned or inherited is to download that information. A friend just said this to me and it’s been on mind. There is no proper history because history is currently happening and we are in it.

Tiffany Troy: You have a lot of found quotes where the speaker filters what she is hearing. It becomes interior dialogue between the found quote. A lot of the time, the poet disagrees with what is being said. How do the quotes find their way into your poem and how do you transform it?

Carly Inghram: I was really interested in this question because the poet is me and loosely, a lot of the poems are me-based in a way that feels story-based. We are very much in it and we are continually inventing new things about ourselves. So I feel part of me as an invention. In this place in my life, I was realizing that there were parts of me that felt less like they belong to me that belong to us. It’s not like in my present I don’t identify with some of those parts which can feel tricky and it can feel hard to encounter old parts of ourselves because it’s like I don’t want to look at that past. I think that’s part of the tension.

It can be easier for me when I encounter a new person to play and project to them what I am remembering as an old part of myself.

Tiffany Troy: How do you move from the real and the everyday into the metaphysical or mythical, like the rivers, the waves, their paths, drowning and resistance? How do you craft your poems to go into completely different realms?

Carly Inghram: Again, you are very perceptive. Many of my poems are literally moving. I write while walking, on the train, and it is just something that interests me. I used to feel I needed to finish poems in one swoop, and maybe I still do that. When I do finish the poem in a single sitting, I’ll notice that I hit the end of the thought, the end of a story, or the end of what I’m feeling. I will notice that I need a kind of beat or some sort of measure and switch into a new channel.

In a similar way to repetition, I move in and out into different realms, mostly as a vehicle of sound. My late brother was a musician and I feel a lot of my writing is inherited wealth from him. I aspire to create music the way that he did. A lot of sound play can be useful to me when I have hit a stop. I use repetition as a vehicle to enter a new place.

Tiffany Troy: How else does repetition function in your work, and by that I mean, there is amplification, there is the inversion and there’s also a way in which the number of times a word or even a line is repeated seems meaningful.

Carly Inghram: I was thinking about this question a lot because I feel like it’s related to the sound pattern of how I think but also how I grew up in a certain way.

I can recall my mom just repeating and repeating things when it’s important so a large part is definitely amplification, so if I keep saying it, it’s important. Things that feel meaningful to me or I was surprised by, like I really like. Repetition is useful in poems and in writing but also in real life, in the physical world.

Tiffany Troy: In your work there is a prose poem where you talk about the crayon color, which talks about the actual color of a thing. But it also underscores the poet as a kid before skin color was a thing. Then there’s also the idea of color as an object, as in gold chains. And color as a subject, which is the way society views Black individuals. How does color shape your work?

Carly Inghram: My use of color feels very informed by my brother’s music. He loved the color blue, which was his favorite color. This drew me to using color in my work. As a person of color, I am also aware of color functioning in that way. When I grew up, my mother was white and my father was black. From a young-ish age, I was aware that in some ways I was strange or different. My writing in some ways is always dealing with that. My writing is aware that there’s though my Black friends tell me I’m not different, there is a feeling of difference I used to feel like I had to contend or battle with.

Nowadays, I like color as another means of creation or making. But there’s also a part of me that’s aware that color has a lot of different meanings for different people and can be really loaded as a topic.

Tiffany Troy: How does womanhood and the idea of approaching it with some trepidation, intersect with the idea of color in your poem? One of the lines from the poem right before your prose poem is “The store I’m in or this world keeps asking me if I want my receipt.”

Carly Inghram: That’s a great question. Finding my identity as a woman or queer woman or Black woman as connected was really useful for me, because it helped me see in my particular experience how other struggles are connected. Understanding and learning that all struggles are connected was really useful information. About the “receipt line”: part of my story at that time was that both of these identities are linked in a certain way to capitalism. In order to be a woman, for instance, they needed me to dress I certain way, I needed to have certain things, I needed to do certain things. All of these things felt very linked to the capitalist system. It was interesting for me to discover that things that I thought were just inherent qualities that belong to me are part of a larger system.

Tiffany Troy: One of the biggest curiosities I had is why would a work so interested in putting to question capitalist ideas also be obsessed with celebrities? I found your framing or take on the celebrities to be the most fun or interesting part of the celebrities section of your work. How does the idea of celebrity function in your poem and how does that in turn sort of reflect on like the poet as like an individual?

Carly Inghram: I’m super interested in celebrities because all of us experience the pressure to present in a certain way or feeling like there is an audience and how to present to and show up to those people. Like, I want to be liked, I want to be loved even. A lot of it feels tied to social media culture, or something that is literally programmed into us. For that reason, I feel like to be a celebrity and to have an actual audience feels like a really terrifying place to be. I find they can be interesting characters because I think I can often feel like with a literal like no audience, I can feel very viewed in a certain way, and so I think that's why I like to step into them as characters in the book.

Tiffany Troy: Why the title, The Animal Indoors? Why did you choose the title and how does it help the reader read your poem?

Carly Inghram: I find titling fairly tricky and it’s funny because identity can largely feel a little funny sometimes too. Sometimes the way I title individual poems will have nothing to do with the poem itself. I find titling a larger body of work tricky because I don’t think you can do the same thing. You actually have to find something that is encompassing.

Something that a friend helped me with in my other book was he read through the poems and found a poem and then used a piece of the text to create the title. I did the same thing with The Animal Indoors. I underlined different parts of the book I thought were useful or felt were most important to me at the time then tried to make titles out of them. The Animal Indoors ended up with an interesting title as we all just lived through a global pandemic.

Tiffany Troy: What are you working on today? Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world.

Carly Inghram: Recently I have been trying to write fiction, which has been fun. I’m going to see how it goes.

I have a friend of my brother’s who writes music and he shared his album. I was listening to his album and he very honestly shared his whole story. That’s very beautiful. I think there’s power in stories and sharing our stories. Our not as an exclusive our, but I think everyone sharing their stories is very freeing. So I wish everyone can share their story.

Poetry With Bite, Rohan Chhetri’s Starkly Honest Collection: Lost, Hurt, or In Transit Beautiful

This is the work of a serious poet, let that be said from the start, and a seriously good poet at that. Skilled in the art, certainly, with a feel for structure and pace, but more than that he is a poet with an absorbing story to tell, and the means to tell it in an honest and forthright way. You’ll find no whimsical reflections here, or first-world obsessions escalated to tragedy; rather, you will come across the real thing: poetry alive with originality and striking images; poetry with bite. 

A Nepali-Indian writer now resident in the US, Rohan Chhetri’s work is weighted with place and tradition. A chaotic world of violence and hardship, superstition and familial love is introduced graphically in the first few lines of the opening poem, and continues throughout with legend and hard reality effectively combined to illustrate day to day existence in environments of conflict and poverty. We very soon encounter a shaman arriving in a village blowing a trumpet made from a suicide’s hollow shinbone—music robbed from the grave; people making love as electrocuted crows smoke above power lines; a relative waterboarded and force-fed earth “until it plugs his windpipe”. These are just a taste of what to expect from a series of almost matter of fact, though expertly drawn, depictions of a world a million miles from the West’s perceived ideas of injustice or privation.

Chhetri’s skill is evident in the various poetic forms he adopts; some conventional, others more esoteric, but each successful in conveying his ideas. Actually, Ideas is perhaps the wrong word, because what really drives the poetry is memory: memory translated, shaped and re-imagined, presented as a kind of mythical autobiography. In the wonderfully descriptive “BORDERSONG” for example, we learn of a boyhood home downwind of a mosque, a temple, a grimy brothel; downwind of the severed heads of Liberation Front leaders hung from the branch of a guava tree; downwind of a peaceful kingdom’s border. We hear of a doomed affair in New Delhi, and the author’s fear of running into his lover again in this vast city, which becomes too small for two; and we are told, in a beautiful but deeply sad poem, of his meeting an old school friend, not seen for many years, outside a monastery in Phuentsholing. Sebastian, sitting red-eyed on a cold stone bench, is a declining ghost of the boy he once knew, where just looking into his face:

“…was a vertiginous drop down
the cool dark of an abandoned well, & him
a thin shade at the bottom among the bones.”

It is a touching piece, adeptly handled.

His memory is used to good effect in a particularly fine poem, “THE INDIAN RAILWAY CANTICLE”, which colourfully brings to life a three-day journey home he experienced as a boy. Rattling through a land blighted by drought, religion, fratricide…, with “the sun bearing down infernal since dawn, breathing fissures into the earth”, he writes of a farmer’s suicide, of avoiding the unwanted attention of hijras and witnessing an unpleasant incident at a station. There are hucksters, lepers, “language changing every hundred kilometres” and all the clamour and stench of a crowded train, relieved momentarily by “fragrant mist rising off harvest hay in the morning”. Reading this short poem, you might feel you get a better idea of the country than any amount of travel guides could ever tell you.

There is a rather nice lyrical interlude which tempers, like a cooling draught, the heat and harsh realism of the preceding in “FISH CROSS THE BORDER IN RAIN”. It sees Chhetri and his father going down to the river on an old scooter, with the elder singing because “the breeze makes him young in the face.” They watch on as men with lead batteries tied around their necks wade chest high into the water to stun the fish and scoop them, belly up, into nets, only for them to:

“wake older dreaming brief new lives huddled
in a foreign prison gasping at each other’s
gills blinded like a sack of mirrors”

Surely that simile is unimprovable.

If one or two of the references in this shortish collection seem a little bewildering to the average reader, (and I’m thinking here predominantly of the details of political unrest in the state of West Bengal) then this is more than made up for by the absolute transparency of the sense, the feeling inherent in any particular piece. I might have said senses, because you could almost have been present at the scenes portrayed, taking in the very air of the village, the city, the countryside, such is the descriptive power employed. This is a poet at the top of his game: inventive and candid, assured but not showy, expressive without resorting to the lazy, the easy choice of word that comes unthinkingly to mind. These qualities are never more apparent than in the quietly provoking “TOWARDS SOME DARK”. It begins:

“They came at dawn, three angels
in jumpsuits, & felled the two ash trees
in front of the neighbour’s house”

and goes on to describe how a patch of blue suddenly released gives rise to the thought that this is how we arrive at clarity—“through some clearing of the living.” The idea brings to mind memories of his grandfather dying:

“…pleading through
the final hours to please pull the fucking shroud
off his head. It was the yellow mosquito

net hung low above the bed
where he lay hallucinating, furious
we were trying to ease him towards some dark.”

And with the trees gone, the wind “flits on our porch like a young unremembered thing”; but “it has lost something, & doesn’t know it, sniffing about the heavy stink of sawdust & brine”

“…like it has stepped on so much blood
drying small wounds.”

There’s something about this piece which is really quite affecting in the way its imagery and sentiment come back, entirely unbidden, again and again. It’s a quality born essentially of truthfulness.

I had thought to open this critique with a detailed appreciation of a remarkable poem which struck me on first reading, and even more so on subsequent visits, as one of the finest I have reviewed for quite some time. “LAMENTATION FOR A FAILED REVOLUTION” is a bitter account of a “long summer of bullets” punctuated by episodes of such brutality, such shocking wantonness, as to be barely credible. I was tempted to quote freely from the text, but random lines would be quite inadequate to convey the bleakness of the whole. I will content myself merely with the following, a summing-up perhaps, or judgement on that unhappy period: “Every failed revolution is a child / learning the edge of himself / every revolution is a child / grown before fire”; and urge you to read this poem in full to appreciate the desolation within the piece, and the mastery with which it is related.

Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a grown-up collection; a considered, a philosophical evocation of a culture and a history little known outside of its borders. It is an engrossing, if often troubling picture deserving of the widest audience.