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.

A Review of David Salner's A Place to Hide

“Tsedekah…It is an old Jewish term. It refers to our obligation to right the injustice of society. I feel that obligation but don’t always know how to let it guide me.” These words are spoken by Virgil Pushkin Shulman, a resident, along with his wife Rosie and daughter Sylvie, of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, to his new friend Bill. Virgil and Bill have been recruited to work as “sandhogs” in the construction of the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River. The work is grueling and dangerous, but the pay is good. Bill is new to the city, and Virgil makes it his mission to help him out by offering him a place to stay. Bill is a man with a past which he must keep hidden because he is a fugitive from the law. In fact, Bill is not even his real name. Bill is Jimmy Little, the younger brother of Frank Little, a man students of history may recognize as the labor organizer for the IWW who was lynched in Butte, Montana in 1917.

How Jimmy/Bill winds up in New York City after running from the law in Montana is the subject of a stirring first novel A Place to Hide by David Salner. Not only does one man from one side of the continent become close friends with a man with an entirely different background from the other side of the continent, but they each have vivid and horrible memories which they share with each other, the one intimately involved with the Speculator Mine Disaster in Butte, Montana, which killed 168 miners, and in it’s wake resulted in the death of his brother Frank, the other intimately involved in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in Greenwich Village, in which his mother died along with 145 workers, most of whom were women and children. Both historically true disasters occurred only a few years apart, and a reader might do well to scan youtube and other sources for detailed descriptions of the disasters, as well as the construction of the Holland Tunnel. Through their shared sorrows and bitterness, Bill and Virgil find an unshakable bond centered on what it means to be a laborer in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Salner knows of what he writes. Like his main character Bill, he has traversed the continent working at a great variety of jobs, most of them as back-breaking and perilous as those of his characters. He has been a steel worker, miner, garment worker, and longshoreman, among others. His experiences are evident in his descriptions of the work environments in the novel, in which, detail upon detail, the reader is invited to experience the sweat, grime and near suffocation of working underground, be it under a river or under a mountain. Take, for example, the following description of the work of “sandhogs” on the Holland Tunnel.

“Together they began filling a cart from the dirt piled by the bulkhead. It was loamy and damp and had a brackish stink., which was unpleasantly multiplied by the high-pressure atmosphere…When the cart was full, they pushed it down the tracks to the other end of their giant work chamber, to a door where a man waved, shaping the words, “Hurry, push, push!’…it was heavy with sodden earth and the weight of the air…They turned back toward their bulkhead, where another man had positioned a new cart just in time to catch rocks and mud deluging down the chute.”

Add Salner’s many work skills and experiences to his skills as a writer, and the result is a winning combination of verisimilitude and lyricism. Because David Salner, as many readers might recognize, is an accomplished and widely-published poet and has put his experiences in four books of poetry, among them Blue Morning Light and his latest, The Stillness of Certain Valleys, which describe the hardships, frustrations, and camaraderie among workers. A reading of any of his poems quickly demonstrates an acute attention to the details of the world of work, whether it is underground or above. But, more to the point, the reader is witness to the great heart Salner has for the men and women he describes. That same devotion to detail and affection is present in A Place to Hide. In addition to Bill and the Shulmans, there is a cast of characters, fellow workers in the Holland Tunnel and the mines of Pennsylvania, as well as the inhabitants of the roach-infested tenement building where Bill and the Shulmans live, one of whom, a woman with an illegitimate child, becomes Bill’s lover. And, of course, there are villains, most notably a man named Arnoldson, who is constantly on Bill’s trail, eager to return him to a Montana prison. Some villains go unnamed, the vigilantes, gangsters, and the police used to suppress and round up strikers, who have earned the distrust of working stiffs throughout the broad landscape of the novel. Others have names writ large in history: John D. Rockefeller, John D. Ryan, the chief executive of the Anaconda Copper Company, Max Blank and Isaac Harris, the owners of the Asch Building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

It should not be surprising if even a quick look at A Place to Hide reminds a reader of such classic works of labor fiction as those of Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, or John Steinbeck. The history of labor is in large part a history of struggle and repression. Pressed between the bookends of the Speculator Mine Disaster and the opening of the Holland Tunnel, Salner makes us acutely aware of how difficult and arduous has the push in the arc of Justice been in the struggle for workers’ rights. It is Bill/Jimmy’s crime, for which he was handed a life sentence, to have led strikers, as did his murdered brother before him. What moves a man to take the giant step from grief to action is poignantly underlined in Salner’s descriptions of the aftermath of mine disasters, euphemistically called accidents by the powers in control.

“They found some bodies perfectly intact, huddled against those concrete bulkheads, intact except for fingers that were worn down to bone scrapping against the barrier as lungs filled with smoke. Bill had worked for days laying out what was left of the bodies… They carried stretchers…Some were as light as feathers even with the remnants of more than one man. They couldn’t tell how many were jumbled together.”

This is a story not only about the few characters who weave through the pages of A Place to Hide, but of every man and woman who has played a part in the advance of humane working conditions and freedom from preventable work disaster in America.

In a Boat About to Drown: A Story by Robert Lopez

Boats don’t drown. People drown. Boats sink. Something happens, then boats take on water, then they sink. They sink right to the bottom. The people on the boat try to keep the boat from sinking. They take measures. They use words like bow, stern, starboard and port. These words mean front, rear, right, and left. They use these words all the time, even when the boat is not sinking. When the boat is sinking they take measures. They make calls. They might even bail water. Then they put on lifejackets. Then they float around until someone comes by to pick them up. The people who come by to pick them up are called rescuers. They know to come by because they have been signaled. They are signaled through direct radio contact or by Morse code. Morse code, in telegraphy, is a series of dots and dashes that indicate different letters of the alphabet. S.O.S is the most famous code sent, which means Save our Ship. People say it doesn’t actually mean Save our Ship but what do they know. Mayday means the same thing. Why is not clear. It might have something to do with French. Rescuers are given positions of longitude and latitude. They say that rats are the first ones off a sinking ship, but unless they are extraordinary swimmers it does them little good. The rats are neither here nor there. The people rescued are called survivors. They are called the lucky ones. The unlucky ones are called victims. These are the people who are subject to float around with no one coming by to pick them up. Sharks attack them or the sun beats down on them or else it is freezing cold and they get what is called hypothermia. Hypothermia is a state of reduced body temperature wherein all bodily functions are slowed. Then they freeze to death. Then they are recovered. People can either be rescued or recovered. Survivors or victims. However, there are victims who are never recovered, their bodies. These are the people lost at sea. There are songs written about them. Boats are lost at sea, too. They are mentioned in the same songs. Drowning is different. Drowning is for people who can’t swim or who can no longer swim due to injury or exhaustion, or people who choose not to swim. Something happens, then they take on water, then they drown. They sink right to the bottom. The water can be deep or shallow, rough or calm. There is little difference. Water fills the lungs making life at first difficult, then impossible to sustain.

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Author’s Note: This was one of my first stories that appeared in an internet journal, somewhere around 2002-2004, maybe. Otherwise, it was 1956. Taint Magazine was edited by Michael Kimball and someone else I can’t remember and it featured the sort of languaged up fiction I’ve always appreciated. I do remember when it went belly up there was a note on its homepage, Taint what it used to be.

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.

Disparates: The Freewheelin’ Patrick Madden

free·wheel·ing /ˈfrēˌ(h)wēliNG/ adjective

1. characterized by a disregard for rules or conventions; unconstrained or uninhibited. (Google Dictionary)

Patrick Madden, the essayist, is freewheeling. To borrow the term from Bob Dylan and a technique from Madden’s book, I’ve defined what I mean. He’s unconventional, but his work is luminous:

lu·mi·nous /ˈlo͞omənəs/ adjective

1. full of or shedding light; bright or shining, especially in the dark. (also Google Dictionary)

In Disparates, his latest and third collection of essays, Madden introduces “disparate” both as a noun referring to diverse and incongruous things and as (a definition he embraces) having connotations from Spanish of “absurdity, inanity, frivolity; nonsense, claptrap, rubbish; balderdash, malarkey, drivel.” In other words, as he engages the reader, Madden is enjoying himself.

One of the joys for writers and readers of personal essays is to go where no one has gone before—or to go where everyone has gone before but to get there by surprise. A current finalist for the Foreword Reviews INDIES Awards, Disparates takes the reader on a voyage to new places and to old places by new means. As, in his words, “a longtime committed nonfictionist, one who teaches his students not to lie, [but] to select and shape their real experiences into literature,” Madden has a gift for uncovering timeless and timely truths in a wide assortment of ways that one can newly savor and appreciate. This book is diverse (very), whimsical and wise.

Before I offer up concrete examples, note that this assessment presupposes that book reviews should be useful. It should help you decide: “Yes, I really am going to read that book” or “Don’t give me Patrick Madden’s Disparates because I really will never have the time for it, not ever!”

So I want to help. More likely my words will incline you, not convince you, but I hope to incline most readers in the direction towards. Granted some people may hate the cognitive dissonance posed by variety in tone, subject, style, and authorship in a single volume; these possibly should not read Disparates (though it might be good for them if they did). If a sudden mood shift from a chortle to sober reflection or to itchy perplexity elicits anxiety in you, maybe don’t read it. If a single author’s voice near imperceptibly morphing into a completely different, first person, original voice of a totally different author raises worry rather than delight, then take a deep breath before proceeding, because Madden’s essays are all these things. But if you relish changing it up now and then and you take satisfaction in thinking about life’s little mysteries, enjoying the stimulation of different, sometimes juxtaposed moods and thoughts, then you will take satisfaction, maybe even some joy, from Madden’s book.

So how do I incline you?  Let me count the adjectives, at least as a beginning. Disparates is, yes, diverse, also creative, funny, poignant, thoughtful, absurd, polyphonic, erudite, and surprising. The verbs: it evokes, entertains, bemuses, engages, moves, and mindfully meanders.

But all of this is too abstract! The nouns: it is, well, hmm, this could be useful. Let’s say that Madden’s book comprises:

1. Two tables of contents.

2. A romp, complete with photos, through the possible adventures of writer Michael Martone’s water bottle and its remaining contents following a Martone university lecture. (Auction, anyone?)

3. A chapter called “Nostalgia,” with gnomes as its nominal subject, that may make you long for the good old days when more such essays were written.

4. An essay by guest writer Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas brilliantly extracted (and presented), a word here or a letter there, from a Madden mind excursion into late 70’s pop rock music.

5. Computer-generated “predictive text” mimicry of Madden’s own writing, sometimes sensible and sound, sometimes silly. (Which is this, for example? “We have always felt that existence is a strange amorphous miracle that means everything.”)

6. A truly lovely account of poetic vengeance taken on an unruly airline passenger via a baby’s dirty diaper.

7. A paean to popular lyrics that got me to listen to music by Toad the Wet Sprocket. (Now why didn’t I think of that name for my band?)

8. Essays buried in word search puzzles, very clever though mercifully decoded for those lacking the persistence to work through them.

9. A hyperbolic apology for minor errors appearing in Madden’s previous books that evokes the suspicion that all books contain many mistakes of little consequence.

10. An illustrated comical and communal effort to rewrite cultural proverbs: “Take time to smell the grindstone” or “You made your bed, now let sleeping dogs lie in it.”

11. An essayistic nod to Montaigne. And a photograph of Madden looking like Montaigne.

12. Some elements of style on “comma-then” constructions, reductio ad absurdumed.

13. A thoughtful rejection of widely accepted punk rock glorifications of mayhem and violence.

14. Pangram Haiku, kind thoughts, with photos.

15. “Freewill,” my favorite, and to which I’ll return.

16. And much more.

Many of Madden’s cerebral sprees are enhanced by the cameo appearances of other essayists. Martone, Cabeza-Vanegas, Joni Tevis, Mary Cappello, Lawrence Sutin, Jericho Parms, Amy Leach, Desirae Matherly, Joe Oestreich, David Lazar, Elena Passarello, Wendy S. Walters, Stephen Haynie, and Matthew Gavin Frank all offer words, sentences, paragraphs, or entire sections to Madden’s chapters. One admires Madden’s ability and humble willingness to recruit other voices at the risk of eclipsing his own, but can’t help but appreciate the generosity of the guest contributors in making Madden’s good book better, knowing that Madden will win most of the accolades. Having said that, occasionally it is impossible to tell where Madden’s voice ends and his co-author’s begins. Italicized text may give it away but not always. We know only that credit is given at the beginning of the chapter and in the acknowledgements, and from there we get to play a little literary detective.

Sometimes these other voices support a direction Madden is going (e.g., Leach); sometimes they stand in contrast (Oestreich); sometimes they are just there, existing on their own merits. For instance Michael Martone, whose water bottle dregs feature in the book’s opening essay, lends his voice in a later chapter to a Madden reverie on musical coincidences (those moments when the “music angels” seem to conspire to play on the radio the old song you were just thinking of, for example). Martone’s appraisal isn’t about music, however, but about accident and irony and coincidence viewed through the vehicle of vehicular accidents. Martone’s part, linked to Madden’s neither by coincidence nor accident but by design, highlights the “delicious irony” pointed out by his son when Martone destroys their car in an accident the day after the son receives his driver’s permit. In telling the story Martone serves up the added irony of him writing about car accidents while admitting that he forbids his freshmen students to write about their car accidents because these accidents have “not altered the world of its narrator in any meaningful way.” Martone accentuates the irony through his meaningful pronouncement: “Perhaps things were set in motion in my life all those years ago by the coincidence of two cars inhabiting the same space and time. It would be a good story but I would need to imagine the true vectors of the collision, the physics of consequence not coincidence.”

On the subject of auto accidents, I now, as promised, freely return to “Freewill,” the essay through which Madden freewheels with abandon, engaging, entertaining, and all the while making sense. Although I very much enjoyed almost all of the essays in this book, I found in “Freewill” most everything that I admire in Madden’s writing.

“Freewill” starts with a cassette tape and an anecdote about a different minor accident to an automobile in which Madden was a teenage passenger. This first paragraph is partly about the accident, partly about his friend who caused the accident and partly about the Rush song “Freewill.” But then, as with the wrongly chosen gear that caused the collision, it shifts in tone and topic, with Madden’s direct invitation to the reader, breaking some kind of fourth genre fourth wall, to “take an associative jaunt together…understanding that there is no whole to be comprehended, no essential destination, and that what you read is only a shadow and approximation, a selection and translation of the memories I have here revived or the thoughts currently and recently swirling around my head, so that it is no detour to think linguistically instead of narratively. It is the inevitable path of the essay.”

At this point Madden takes up the meaning of “erstwhile,” questions whether he used it appropriately to describe his friend in his story of the car collision, explains his former confusion between “erstwhile” and “ersatz” which streams him to memories of his college English professor Erskine Peters and then to a jazz drummer named Peter Erskine whom he tangentially links to a feature in an old music magazine about Neil Peart, Rush’s drummer, which provides another touchstone and completed cycle to “Freewill,” lyrics by Peart, the song on the cassette tape that was playing during the opening fender bender and now lies moldering in a hypothetical landfill.

Somewhere in all that Madden also manages to debate guest essayist Joe Oestreich about the meaning of Peart’s “Freewill” lyric: “If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.” I’ll leave the direction and resolution of that debate to the future reader of the essay (which by now, I’m hoping is you). Regardless, Madden’s “Freewill” has a little of everything: a good story, elegant and witty language, straight lines and deviation, humor, music, and thoughtfulness.

Disparates. Also Sprach Patrick Madden: I’ve tried to offer a disparate, helpful review of his work. Perhaps my allusions to Bob Dylan and Star Trek and Ricard Strauss merely suggest my age. But in the end, I hope a lot of people will read this excellent little book. If you love the personal essay, or are open to learning to love it, the freewheeling, luminous, disparate Patrick Madden is well worth the time.

A Decorous Way to Explode: An Interview with Avner Landes, author of Meiselman: The Lean Years

Control

Stuart: Martin Amis has this great line about early Roth, that he was “always looking for a decorous way to explode.” I don’t necessarily sense this in your meticulous writing but I do sense it in Meiselman himself. At one point he says, “Jews don’t believe in controlling emotions. Jews believe in controlling actions.” Meiselman might know this intellectually, even theologically, but it doesn’t always work out for him in that way. The novel deftly introduces this idea early on when you write: “After thirty-six years, Meiselman had reached a limit, a breaking point.”

Avner: Yes. Meiselman thinks the “breaking point” is that he’s done taking everyone’s abuse. In reality, the breaking point is that he’s done sublimating his emotions. Of course, this isn’t something someone simply decides to do, and, in Meiselman’s case, it swings too far the other way, where he suddenly can’t control his emotions or his actions. Most of us wrestle with this question of how do we know when to act on our emotions. We have to learn to hear what the world—people, situations—is telling us. It comes down to self-awareness, but even the most self-aware person will get it wrong some—or most—of the time, but we hope that awareness of getting it wrong will lead to a better outcome the next time. As the story progresses, Meiselman loses any ability to control his actions. Can he reverse this before the story comes to a close?

Fatalism

Stuart: There are so many strong observations in the novel about what I would call Meiselman’s fatalism; he’s doomed, he deserves it. When he has car trouble he thinks, “Meiselman would never pull over for Meiselman.” You counter this with a comical strain of American self-improvement: he’s reading Lee Iacocca and Sam Walton and Ray Kroc, he’s wondering what Colin Powell would do. Meiselman wants to change his luck, even though he thinks his “luck breaks even.” This is such a rich source of return throughout the novel. And in many ways it works for him. Toward the close of the book, he is playing to win. Where do you locate the origins of this, and how did you think about luck and self-improvement when writing the book?

Avner: Early on, when I thought about the book’s shape, I used Bruce Jay Friedman’s Stern as a model. In the beginning of that book, Stern’s wife suffers an assault and humiliation at the hands of a neighbor, although we’re never fully sure what happened. Stern determines that he will eventually have to confront the neighbor and defend his wife’s “honor.” I was taken with this idea of Meiselman identifying a possible moment of redemption or liberation, which he does right after suffering his own humiliations at the story’s outset. When writing the book, I believed that this was a make-or-break week for Meiselman. Everything would change or he’d be doomed to a life of repeating the miserable patterns that had defined his lean years up until this point. But when I finished writing the book, it occurred to me that maybe this isn’t a unique week, a moment when the light bulb went off. Maybe this too is a pattern, where Meiselman identifies an upcoming moment that will act as a test, a moment when he can take an unexpected action and change his luck. Meiselman says at one point, “Every day, every waking moment, we torpedo potential paths to redemption…” Maybe for Meiselman every week is a week like this one.

Jewish writers

Stuart: Meiselman is an orthodox Jew from suburban Chicago who works in a library, so let’s start crankily with what it means to be a Jewish writer. I’m thinking of recent takes on this question by critics like Adam Kirsch and Joshua Cohen, who generally conclude that it’s the non-Jewish lions – Updike and Franzen come to mind – who long to play the Jew, while writers like Roth and Bellow wanted only to be Americans. What does identifying as a Jewish writer mean to you? What does it mean to write a ‘capital J’ Jewish book; Meiselman is not a Jew because he likes pickles and Crossing Delancey — he’s a believer. What are your hopes in publishing such a Jewish book, an American book?

Avner: Roth, Bellow, and Malamud definitely influenced my writing early on, but I took the wrong lessons from them when it came to the question of being a Jewish writer. I appreciated that they wrote stories that were heavy with Jewish content and populated with Jews because this was their world. Even if one can argue that Roth, especially, does end up saying a lot about Jews and the Jewish experience in America —you and I have been discussing The Counterlife, to pick one huge example —it would be presumptuous to assume that this was his goal. Well, I made this assumption when I started writing. And I strived to do similar things with my own work. I wrote a story called "My Trip to Poland," about a formerly religious guy who goes on a JCC heritage trip to Poland with a bunch of retirees. He ends up getting drunk every night in the hotel bar with one of the Polish hotel workers, and too hungover to ever join the group for the tour of Auschwitz. Is that funny? Hell, yeah. But the story bothered me as I developed as a writer, because it had nothing to say about people and why they do what they do. The humor felt cheap and obvious. To paraphrase something David Bezmozgis once said, irreverence implies that something is revered, his point being, I guess, that irreverence isn't something a nihilist can pull off, and if we can't access a character's soul then it's tough to know what he or she reveres. Eventually, I grew as a writer and became more interested in the characters themselves, as opposed to using them as vehicles to deliver a message, Jewish or otherwise. Readers can feel free to identify me as such but they shouldn't expect any grand or guiding statements. I don't speak for Jews. I don't even speak for me when I write. I speak for the characters I'm writing.

Fertility

Stuart: Meiselman and Deena’s fertility struggles are a source of humor and pathos throughout the novel. This made for some colorful passages. “Deena ate mandrakes, drank willow water blessed by an Israeli seer, recited Psalm 145 daily, and visited the graves of rabbis. Deena’s barrenness, though, could not be cured, and frustration ended this routine.” Talk about what this plot line meant to you and what you were trying to accomplish.

Avner: It came from my reluctance to give Meiselman and Deena a kid. At the time I started writing the book, I didn’t have a child and wasn’t confident I could pull it off. But here was an Orthodox couple that had been married for four years, and, in that world, fertility issues are one of the only reasons why a couple like that wouldn’t have a child. In the end, this plot line did a lot of work of manifesting Meiselman’s delusions, starting with his blaming their difficulty conceiving on “Deena’s barrenness,” when it is his own sperm count issue that is the problem. Then there is his reluctance to consider adoption, his belief that genes are all that matter, and not because he believes in nature over nurture, but because he assumes adoption will paint him as a sterile, and, therefore, unmanly man. But the real question I hope readers will ask is, “Is Meiselman prepared in any way to parent a child?” On some deeper level, is this why he can’t impregnate his wife? The thought does eventually occur to him. 

Food

Stuart: When Meiselman acts out, it is often through eating. I would say he has a borderline eating disorder in these, his lean years. How did you think about using food (and candy) in the novel?

Avner: Meiselman eats the same bowl of oatmeal at breakfast every morning and the same peanut butter and jelly sandwich, bag of chips, and apple juice box for lunch. Every Friday night, Meiselman and his wife eat dinner at his parents. Mealtimes in Meiselman’s life, in other words, are ritualized, providing him with the order he strives for in every other area of his life. How else will he keep his impulses at bay? He has even come to expect certain types of conversations at each meal. Breakfast is lighthearted, he and his wife sharing news stories from the papers. Sunday lunch is for serious matters. As his wife, Deena, remarks at one point, “It’s fun watching you with your parents at Shabbat dinner. Everyone giving rundowns of their week.” In Deena’s mind, mealtimes are about connecting. In the book, however, mealtime usually ends up exposing the frayed lines of communication between the people sitting at the table. Because food can only occupy people for five, ten minutes. Then they are full. Then they need to do something with their traps, which usually results in talking and saying the wrong things. At one point Meiselman comes across the name of the actress Christina Ricci and we get the line, “Meiselman rented one of the actress’s movies thinking it was about football. Turned out it was about a miserable family sitting around a dining room table spewing bottled up grievances at one another.” This is a more accurate description of how mealtimes unfold in the novel. The movie is Buffalo ’66.

Our entire discussion could have been about food in the novel! But I’ll just add something about candy, or, more specifically, non-kosher food in the novel. When you grow up Jewish Orthodox, you are surrounded by people from your community and you have little awareness that most of the world doesn’t share your lifestyle. Food plays an outsized role in those moments when you make contact with the “outside world” and its divergence from how you live; ballgame hotdogs; commercials for candy; the bar and bat mitzvahs of cousins who don’t keep the laws of kosher. Through a child’s eyes, food, more than anything else, becomes the symbol for how the other half lives. So, yes, he acts out and briefly breaks free from his confinement through eating. But these forbidden foods he eats are also about his appetite for exploring new tastes. Change isn’t easy for any of us, and it usually does look juvenile.

Therapy

Stuart: I really enjoyed the resistance and acceptance of therapy in the novel. I'm curious how you see therapy functioning in Meiselman’s Orthodox community? You write that he doesn’t like people who think of God as your pal. Is a therapist your pal?

Avner: This book is a subtle love letter to therapy. Sure it engages in all of the stereotypes about therapy but only because they are all true and funny. Meiselman, we can all agree, is a prime candidate for therapy, the three-days-a-week variety. We learn he went in his twenties for a year, but, for an inexplicable reason, his mother took him out of therapy. From Meiselman’s memories of his time with Dr. Lin, we detect regret over his not having had more time with the doctor. It was having some type of impact on him, however small. Later, when it’s decided that he’ll return to therapy after an eight years absence, we sense his excitement but also his anxiety. He knows it’s what he needs to finally let go of certain things. But who will he be once he lets go of those things?

Now to answer your question about whether a therapist is a pal: It takes years and years of therapy to understand that the answer is no, a therapist isn’t a pal because what friend would put up with so much complaining; a therapist is a therapist.

Losers

Stuart: The Capitol Riots have gotten me thinking a lot about the history of losers. I read this provocative idea about losers recently, in an essay about how the Hebrew bible could be historical fiction to soothe a nation that lost. I was reading your novel at the same time and I couldn’t help seeing this “history of the loser” in Meiselman. I’m curious what you think about this idea in relation to Meiselman: “History may in the short term be made by the victors, but historical wisdom is in the long run enriched more by the vanquished  . . . Being defeated appears to be an inexhaustible well- spring of intellectual progress.”

Avner: “Soothe a nation that lost” seems to indicate a sugar-coating of history, which wouldn’t be enriching but impoverishing. But maybe a people, or a person, need both things along the way. We first need to feed ourselves a soothing explanation, something to get our breathing under control. Then, one day, we’re ready to confront what happened and deal with the cold, hard truth of it. That’s how I see Meiselman’s processing the history of his loserdom. So many books treat traumas as if their interpretations are clear-cut to the victims and readers. That they unlock a deeper mystery, explain motivations. (I want to be clear that I’m not talking about violent, severe traumas. We’re talking garden-variety traumas.) I’ve tried to treat the interpretation of the traumas in Meiselman’s past as something ongoing. At age forty, we’ll look at something from our childhood in a much different way than when we were twenty. We’ve identified other patterns. We’ve learned more about our own tendencies and the tendencies of others. Or maybe we’re not more enlightened and we’ve sunk even deeper into our own delusions.  

Subtitles

Stuart: Finally, the full title of the novel is Meiselman: The Lean Years. What made you decide on a subtitle? Was the book ever just called Meiselman?

Avner: There was a point late in the game when I considered dropping one of the titles, but my publisher, Jerry Brennan, urged me to keep both of them, and I’m glad I took his advice. The subtitle? I always thought calling a 420-page doorstopper The Lean Years was a solid joke, one that was even funnier when it was 550 pages. I also like the idea that we can look at this one week in Meiselman’s life and know that all of his years until this point have been lean. It does prompt the question whether fat years are on the horizon for poor Meiselman, a thought Meiselman has at one point in the book, although he can’t recall the biblical story and is unsure of what precedes what. But the book takes place in 2004, and Meiselman’s beloved, long-suffering White Sox haven’t won the World Series in 86 years, a streak that will end the next season. Why the Meiselman part of the title? Because this is not a parable. I want to make clear to the reader from the get-go that no matter what you may think of him, I’m here writing this book, standing up for him, when nobody else in the world will.