Objects – Pigeons, Vowels, and Teeth (Part I)

This month Superstition Review is presenting a three part Authors Talk by Mackenzie Polonyi.

Below is the audio file for her author talk and under that is the transcript.

Transcript:

Thank you for being with me here, for your intentional listening. My name is Mackenzie Polonyi, I am the author of Post-Volcanic Folk Tales, my debut poetry collection, which was a winner of The National Poetry Series 2023 and is under contract for publication with Akashic Books, 2024. In my three part series, I will be talking about objects and their possibilities, particularly notable objects from my forthcoming book: pigeons, vowels, and teeth.

In Laura van den Berg’s craft essay in Craft Literary, entitled Object Lessons: An Exploration, Laura writes first about orienting details (her examples: ‘Is a character inside or outside? Is it sunny or raining?’ They ‘ground readers’ and establish scene) and granular details (According to Laura, they are ‘hyper-specific, hyper-vivid.’ They ‘hold layers of time and meaning … and resonance,’ they ‘introduce questions and dimensions,’ and they ‘startle and destabilize’). The latter has the potential to develop or metamorpihize into an object. Here is Laura’s accumulative definition of an object; inter-knitting her own thoughts, theories, and conceptualizations about the presence, purpose, promise, power, and aboutness of objects along with those of Italo Calvino, Virginia Woolf, Charles Baxter, and Alexander Chee:

An object has the power to shift, deepen, and even reshape moments; it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic, a knot in the network of invisible relationships; it takes on a luminous halo; it contains worlds, troubled and fractured histories, unanswerable mysteries, forcefields of thought and feeling; it communicates the matter that exists beyond the limits of language; it is a mirror and a window and a refraction all at once, it extends both keys and questions, at once deepening and further unsettling our understanding of characters and their inner worlds; it evokes shaping forces, both known and unknown, visible and invisible.

Now, while Laura applies her accumulative definition of an object directly to the craft of fiction, it is also pertinent to the craft of poetry.

Today, in the first part of my series, I will talk about galambok, or pigeons.

In a poem called ‘The Shoe Maker’s Daughter’ from my forthcoming book, I write about how my grandmother, who suffered for years from dementia, would get vacuumed back into German-occupied and Soviet-occupied Hungary in dreams, reliving fragmented traumatic occurrences. Her dreamscape and my dreamscape coagulate or clot together and I try sending her warnings (of sexual violence and other psychological injuries and thieveries) by way of lily-of-the-valley, pollen, nectar, and pigeon. All are granular details, but only the pigeon materializes recurrently (enigmatic then epiphanic then enigmatic again) in ‘The Shoe Maker’s Daughter’ and throughout Post-Volcanic Folk Tales. I write:

‘My dream ripens like an angel-

trumpet into a prehistoric forest where her ubiquitous

nocturnal pings are lightning splitting deciduous beech.

Where soldiers’ stereoscopic scent-hound snouts

desecrate Southeastern wetlands, Northeastern wheat fields, proboscises

sucking bone-marrow from earth-built homes, ectoparasitic.

Kleptoparasitic––swarming willowing villages.

Rose-knobbed sugar bowls, jam pots, sauce boats, stale bread, spoiled

meat, women’s shucked bodies now belonged

to hives of field-grey then red soldiers.’

I provide context for my reader; showing my reader a woman’s reality in an occupied country, under authority of a hostile military threat. Later, I write:

‘She zeroes in on a distant

iridescent pigeon. Her private focal point

for survival. My failed holographic mail.’

and

‘She vomits

a stiff pigeon foot gripping a pinwheel bouquet of bile-wrinkled letters.’

What is the ‘special force’ of the pigeon, what is the ‘luminous halo’? What troubled and fractured histories, unanswerable mysteries, forcefields of thought and feeling does it contain? What keys and questions does it extend?

A mirror: A grand-daughter must stomach and reconcile the fact that she could not have protected, rescued, or safe-kept her grandmother; furthermore, she is a powerless presence still in her grandmother’s nightmares.

A window: In their present together, in day-scape, in belatedness, what are alternative spells, gestures, or measures of protection, rescue, safekeeping, and reverse-mothering?

A refraction: Perhaps healing is not in having had an impossible, inverted, retrograde alphabet of warning. (I am not prescient omniscient.) Perhaps healing, instead, is in helping a grandmother (from a generation of silence) tend to and find a language for a physical-psychical wound of the past in the future rather than wishing for its very prevention in the frst place. How is a pigeon a multidirectional ‘reaching’?

The vomiting is representative of the impossibility of receiving, internalizing, digesting the heraldic pigeon and all of the portentous correspondences from the future it gripped stiff in its foot. The bile is the immediate indigestion of it. My grandmother, in the poem’s many ‘heres,’ is empty-stomached; unknowing, uninformed. The sodden, warped, unreadable letters, however, are also simultaneously of her own past making. What words was she desperate to cast like stones into the future? How is the act of saying interrupted? Some questions, extended: A carrier pigeon generally summons up suggestions of arrival and departure, delivery, homecoming, but here, delivery and homecoming are non-existent, they are ‘nevers.’ There is a sense of deadendness. What can be said about direction? What can be said about a refugee’s sense of home; her rejection of home’s perceived rigid one-dimensionality? Her orientation, her balance, her splintered compass? Or that of the child of a refugee, or one raised like the child of a refugee? What do longing and returning mean? Along with such complications and complexities involved in weather-vaning home, trauma, additionally, often annihilates articulation. Is trauma-facing dialogue between grand-daughter and grandmother––especially tacking on the interpersonal or intersubjective distances notched by dementia––only possible then in a liminal subconscious dream state, in other words, a poem?

Here area few lines throughout Post-Volcanic Folk Tales in which pigeons manifest again:

‘Whenever I opened my blood-sucking beak,

you regurgitated homesick pigeon

milk like a tonic.’

‘Iridescent pigeons nest like nonsensical sentences in my

unbrushed bat roost hair.’

‘Here: I once measured volumes of your voicefall.

The water in my right ear is a pigeon nest,

the water is cooing what is lost.’

‘There is pigeon traffic between us.’

Poetry Blog: Jane Zwart

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in PoetryPloughsharesThreepenny ReviewThe Poetry Review (UK), and TriQuarterly, as well as other journals and magazines.

Jane’s Poem, “Still Life With”, originally published in Basalt:

Still Life With
There is nothing with which
you can still life.
Even so, the painter strives
in his atelier to ransom hams
from perishability
and greater his art
who can garnish the dish
gone off
with a blood-sozzled fly.
Less stunning are the lobsters
and fish in sequin sheaths
and mundane
is the unplucked duck
that dangles on the wall.
…
There is nothing with which
you can still life.
Even the veriest vase
in trompe-l’oeil
is subject to cracks
under lacquer
as sure as silver ewers cloud
and handmade goblets drip
because sand-made
glass is viscous,
a deserter
who waits and waits.
…
There is nothing with which
you can still life.
Even the twin halves
of fruits ferment
and peaches’ cheeks
go weak
as the jowls of a gran
who takes her dentures out.
Art cannot halt
this lavish thing
that pockmarks
lemon peels.
With life still so unsated
and so corruptible,
nothing, nothing
can still it,
shifty iridescent life.

Jane’s Poem, “Rarity”, originally published in The Shore:

Rarity
My sons, given crayon bins, mine for the rarities: cadmium
red and razzmatazz. Given a baseball diamond, they kneel
in a kibble of limestone, each sifting for chipped jewels,
each sure to come home with his fist of small stones, asking
to be told they are gems. Already they have learned to want
what is scarce.
              Blame me.
                       I want to draw such afternoons
a corral of colored wax. I want to rake a moat around them,
to defend as an island this trove of gravel, this now.

Jane’s Poem, “I read that the moon is rusting”, originally published in Wilderness:

I read that the moon is rusting
My son defines time--its river, not its measure--
as the way one event changes into another.
I am letting what my son knows of time
climb and turn a laddered wheel in my mind.
I am letting the river run the mill that changes
one kind of unknowing into another.
. . .
Once a student told me that her mother kept
vases of flowers long past their prime.
She thought them still beautiful, wizened tulips,
their petals knuckling into pecans.
. . .
I read that the moon is rusting. Here on earth
a breeze kicked up by passing cars
fans a dead katydid. Invisible thumbs shuffle
her wings’ gauzy underthings.
. . .
One event is turning into another. My son grows
tall but is still young enough to trail
a hand, offhandedly, in the current that carries him.
There is so little we can demand from time
but I would ask to be like a tulip, like a katydid,
like the henna-chinned moon:
one of those who, done or undone, changes next
into another kind of wonder.

The following is an interview conducted by Superstition Review‘s Poetry Editor, Carolina Quintero, on April 27, 2021. It regards Jane’s poetry, looking specifically at both her process and inspirations.

Carolina Quintero: Hi, Jane! Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview with me. It was such a joy reading your poetry. You have such grace with your word choice and craft… Motherhood is a frequent theme in your work. How has your writing evolved through motherhood?

Jane Zwart: Early on, having kids meant I wrote fewer poems, but that was a matter of time and mental space, not any shortage of material. On the contrary, the raw material I found for poetry multiplied wildly when my boys were born. Of course it did. Babies are fragile enough that you can see the miracles pulsing under their skin and gripped in their tiny irrational hands. As for toddlers, they tutor you in the ways language works and breaks, its patterns and exceptions; in picking up syntax, they are full of defiance and delight, and that’s a good thing for a writer to steep in. So I did, when my boys were little, rake in so many gems. But most of them I had to store for those years, that season. Which is why I labeled a folder “poem crumbs” and stuffed it with notes, giving myself something to mine when they got bigger, more independent. I’ll add this: as Wendell (11) and Ambrose (7) grow older, I find whole lines of poetry in things they say. I borrow their wonder. And their tenderness toward the world heightens my tenderness toward the world.

CQ: Your poetry is dense with imagery and concise with word choice. What is your process like to achieve these traits in your work? 

JZ: Well, thank you. The images come to me first, almost always, and I suppose that’s why the poems are, as you say, “dense with imagery.” Sometimes that density occurs collage-wise, through a bunch of images testing their angles and echoes against each other. But sometimes in a poem, a single image grows dense; the poem stuffs and coats the picture or object with so many hints and arguments. And this will sound foolish, but for me the process behind wielding imagery is looking and thinking. I owe my art history professors, Henry Luttikhuizen and Charles Young, a huge debt of gratitude for training me to do just that: to look and to think. I’m also indebted when it comes to word choice. To my parents, who filled our house with shelves and shelves of words. To other poets, who have sent me to the dictionary but who have also let me fall in love with perfectly ordinary words transfigured by their neighbors on the page. And to Roget.

CQ: What inspired you to write about time and its unpredictability?

JZ: The easiest way to answer this question would be to name writers I love who capture the way time snags, how the past and future breathe down the neck of the present, how history loops. I think of novelists first: Toni Morrison, W.G. Sebald, William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Virginia Woolf, David Mitchell. But of course the answer is also subjective, and for me it has to do with the awful mortality of all these people I love, the shortness of a life–which I hold in tension with the belief that our souls are not mortal but, rather, each breathed by God into the little husk of a self. I use poetry, then, to adjust my grasp on time. A poem slows time, a little, but it is also a way of loosening my grasp on the perishable world of people and things that I tend to hold too tightly. After all, to write something is to relinquish it as well as to preserve it.

CQ: What are your poetic influences as of late?

JZ: Amit Majmudar. All of his books–What He Did in Solitary is the most recent–have influenced me. Or at least I hope they have. Amit balances wit and weight so deftly; with him, “the work is play for mortal stakes,” as Frost put it. Amit, though, has also influenced me more directly–an immense kindness on his part. Over the past couple years, he and I have “mirror-written” a great deal, taking turns conjuring titles for which we both then improvise a poem, swapping them when time’s up. Put simply, Amit has taught me to write to fill in a given shape. Before, I always waited on the poem to sprout on its own. But there are many others, too. For instance, I love Catherine Pierce’s work so much that it borders on covetise. And her new book, Danger Days, has more or less converted my husband into reading contemporary poets to whom he is not married–no small feat. Who else? Well, Danusha Laméris’s Bonfire Opera is vivid and heartbreaking and heartmending, and having finished it, I still keep it in my bag for good company in long lines. And I return to Christian Wiman and Naomi Shihab Nye and Wisława Szymborska’s poems (Szymborksa’s in translation) again and again. Finally, I cannot wait to be further influenced by Kasey Jueds’s new book (I loved Keeper), Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell, and W.S. Herbert’s Dear Specimen.

CQ: What advice would you give to young writers? 

JZ: Read. Read the dead and the living. Read in translation. Read the work of writers who make you feel less lonely and of writers who feel like absolute strangers. Pay the world around you the sweetest, fiercest attention that you can, and take notes. Write. Write hoping that you outgrow your art again and again. Write as if you were unafraid. Write as if you were patient. Find your kin. Review books. Send fan mail. Register for the workshop. Attend the reading. 

CQ: What are you currently working on in your writing?

JZ: I keep writing poems, and I keep writing book reviews. I keep trying to figure out where to prune for clarity’s sake and where to embellish for beauty’s. I’m also trying to find a publisher for my full-length manuscript. The odds are always so slender, of course, but perhaps this latest incarnation of the thing–which the brilliant poet W.S. Herbert reordered for me, schooling me in manuscript construction along the way–will be lucky. I do think a little luck is a must. 

Be sure to check out both Jane’s website and Twitter.

“This Mournable Body”: Transference from Colonial Captivity to Democratic Domestication, a Guest Post by Palash Mahmud

There is a fish in the mirror, this very first line in the “This Mournable Body,” a novel by Tsitsi Dangarembga, distorts the reality that what you see out there, probably and/or actually, is not what it is; and opens up the truth that the “coolest cruising” of our expectations and the arrival of our promised land are always either suspended or ebbing. 

This Mournable Body (Graywolf, 2018 & Faber & Faber, 2020), one of the shortlisted fiction for the 2020 Booker Prize, is the last installment of her trilogy, Nervous Conditions (1988), which was enlisted in the list of BBC’s top 100 books that shaped the world, which she wrote at the advent of Zimbabwean independence but its narrative line was set during the colonial Rhodesia in the early 1960s when the nation and the land were going through the identity crisis, a story of Zimbabwean girl’s, Tambudzai Sigauke, enlightenment with that “it’s bad enough . . . when a country gets colonized, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end” and she started her struggle in pursuit of hope to liberate herself, at first, from the circle of poverty, darkness of ignorance and injustice of patriarchy; then to explore her identity as a colonized black African, in a broader sense, “the crisis of personhood” as Ms. Tsitsi Dangarembga said in an interview with Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

As a very practical woman and properly conscious about the reality of the world  Dangarembga had changed her territory of creative endeavor from literature – a psychologically charged and solitary work process for which she needed 400 dollar and a room of her own as Virginia Woolf prescribed – to film which requires a more physically engaged schedule, and took her eighteen years of seclusion, subsequently, to publish the second part “The Book of Not” (2006), set in the turbulent times of the Zimbabwe’s war of emancipation in the late 1970s when Tambu had gone through a feeling of indignant displeasure of the image of her sister Netsai’s dismembered leg and the encounter of uncle Babamukuru’s twinge spinal cord encamped with bullet “so to the scars of war were added the complications of Independence” in her life. 

As Nervous Conditions, the title was scrounged from the preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961)- a refutation of colonization and an anatomy of dehumanization – written by Jean-Paul Sartre, is an archetype of Old Colonialism,  “This Mournable Body” is the kaleidoscope of New Colonialism, the title is also sprung from the essay “Unmournable Bodies” (2015), a subjective reaction to the Occidental lamentation over the slaughtered journalists of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical Parisian journal, by Teju Cole who commented in conclusion  “that incontestability, that unmournability, just as much as the massacre in Paris, is the clear and present danger to our collective liberté.” 

Tambu, in Nervous Condition, equated education as the emancipation from poverty but when she was in Sacred school she saw the hidden perpetrator- her blackness as a source of her wretchedness whereas, in This Mournable Body, she equates the independence or decolonization as the flowerbed of personhood but at the different stages of her career she experiences tones of “fresh humiliations” of old bondage and gets the taste of “losing hope” of new freedom as an effect she realizes that the rejection of the dignity of personhood, in the political logic, is the root of her domestication and dejection.

The novel represents the ceaseless conflict between our expectations and reality both in an individual and the national level either parallel or reciprocally. In childhood Tambu thought her high achievement lay in the sacrifice of Shona, her indigenous language, in the name of imperialist language and education would give her prosperity and lofty social status. But her education seems to be a raucous failure when she writes a letter, in chapter 6″ to  her cousin Nyasha, a film maker in Germany as a fictionalization of Dangarembga’s real life, “to  break away from the implacable terror of every day” in Zimbabwe and tears it up thinking that “if you cannot build a life in your own country, how will you do so in another ” and she submerged into a more screeching misery that “the vegetables become too disgusting to eat, as first cooking oil then salt  fall off your shopping list… Every minute of each twenty -four hours taunts you with what you are reduced to.”  Surprisingly, Tambu, in chapter 11, sets her foot on the “new realm of impossibility” when her cousin returns Zimbabwe “in spite of her degree, in Europe” radiating the failure of continental dreams with such “liminal complexity.”

Tambu used to think that breaking the colonial servitude and racial segregation would give her the possibilities to devour her personhood, however, in her antique age after leaving a stagnant job at the advertising agency and taking an unbalanced refuge, constantly in the fear of deportation, in a hostel for young women in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, then she rents an economical cottage “to live” from a white widow. There she comes to learn (in chapter 7) that “the moon shadows have edges sharp as knives” in a close conversion with Christine (the niece of the white widow) that the independence she had got through her “fruitless war” with “full of lairs” is shining with “false hope” as like Tambu’s “worthless education intensifying” her ludicrous miseries and distresses. In chapter 12 where Tambu hears Mainini, her war veteran aunt’s testimonies of disappointments and violence that have been popped up from colonial war and domestic riots:

“Yes, sometimes we wondered why we went to war when we came back and everyone was shocked and began to hate us. …  Mainini pauses, remembering her little son whom she had left to fight in conviction that her risk was the down payment on a better life for both of them. … When the Rhodesian soldiers came, the young boy ran back to kraal… in order to prevent the Rhodesian butchering the entire herd. Instead, the soldiers drove bullets through the boy’s back… ripped his stomach open and spread his intensities on the sand that was mixed with cow dung.”

Tracey Stevenson, her previous employer, appoints Tambu in her ecotourism enterprise named Green Jacaranda Getaway Safaris in the farmland targeting the European audiences and prospects. In the thriving time of their tourism venture, then President Robert Mugabe’s “government at independence transformed much of the settlement into a home-ownership area” and “the trouble with the inheritance laws in the country” pushes them to find a new spot in the Tambu’s homestead and again she hears  a hyena’s laughing sound of the downfall of her economic security and mental discomfort in her head on; and the narrator says to Tambu: “The tourist brochures you composed said your country’s village women rub their cow pat floors until they shine like the cement floor. The brochure lied. There are no shines in your memory. Your mother’s floors are never shown with anything. Nothing ever glittered or sparkled.” These lines utterly open up the very naked lies of history that the liberators assured her the Promised Land but Tambu feels there is no true freedom she ever gets, only she has just transferred from colonial captivity to democratic domestication.

This “uneasy conscience,” Sartre commented in the preface, in “the system which depends on overexploitation, as you know, would be ruined.” You will see the similar kind of reverse colonization or the revenge of the past in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace in the post-apartheid South Africa. Who to blame elite settlers or “colonized minds?” The undisputable answer is not near to get. 

Tambu falls into the crisis of personhood, as like an assessment test, in the chapter 8 & 9, she becomes the person she was not and “exhaustion propels [her] over the border of the wakefulness into a sleep from which [she] half hope [she] will not wake.”  She feels an agony at her biology class at A level towards the older students who “were toddlers at independence” but have the privileges of manicures at the luxurious saloons and this tardiness make her to punish immorally and almost kills Elizabeth and she falls into a mental breakdown. At the clinic she expresses her embarrassment to Dr. Winton said: “I don’t have the things that make me better. I want to be better. I want the things that make me.” In an “anguished composition” of shame and sorrow Tambu feels a “weakness of contrition,” consequently, to deplete her tormentation, she seeks retribution from Elizabeth’s family by paying her medical bill to recover in chapter 17. But shockingly in chapter 18, Tambu deceives her sense of personhood spending all the savings for Elizabeth to her long cherished manicures and pedicures, to the cinema complex on Robert Mugabe Avenue, for enjoying the weekends in Harare Gardens and for “occult and spiritual divining” at Queen Victoria library.  The reader will taste another intense degree of downslide of Tambu’s morality in chapter 19 where she makes a transaction with her mother by promising a leg for Netsai, her sister, “as a kind of barter for the programme” of the finest organic tourism spot for the Westerns as if Tambu “bloated tongues spill onto the earth” where her “umbilical cord is buried.”


From the ebbing, the first part, to the arrival, the last part, most of the pronounced characters either young/old, black/white or central/peripheral are women and their contributions to creating and developing a nation and branding and uplifting the spirits of the traditions and cultures of a country which are very much unique in recent literary landscapes. Dangarembga shows us how Zimbabwean war-women like Christine, Netsai and Mailini have been bearing all the sufferings and the nightmares in their lives as the narrator says: 

The women from war are like that, a new kind of being that no one knew before… it is rumored the blood stopped flowing to their wombs the first time they killed a person. … so that the ancestors tied up the nation’s prosperity in repugnance at the awfulness of it, just they had done to the women’s wombs.” 

As like the representation of the spirit of Zimbabwean women, as Tambu boastfully says, they “shriek with grief and throw themselves around. They go to war. They drug patients in order to go ahead.” The reader will gradually come to feel the psychological tenacity a woman can go through in a life. To visualize these coarse episodes of women psyche, Dangaremga flares up some motifs of an army of crawling and creeping ants and spiders over her neck and across her skull; a growling and laughing hyena into her head and her flowing womb down her hip bones.

This Mournable Body was a title of a fiction until 28th of July 2020 but it is not a fiction anymore after 31st of July 2020 the day she has been arrested by Zimbabwean security forces only because she has violated the law against anti-corruption demonstration in protest of detainment of the Zimbabwean journalists who are reporting, gathering and protesting the President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government policies that pushing the fledgling country in the full destitution; and the authority has called the demonstration a  ‘planned insurrection.’ The novel is real now like her own life when she has, on the same day, tweeted: “Friends, here is a principle. If you want your suffering to end, you have to act. Action comes from hope. This the principle of faith and action.” And the tweet notifies us that literature is a political act itself as well as an artful product; and journalism is not a crime. The trilogy is a perfect blending of facts and fiction, Dangarembga has been carrying Tambu on her shoulder for thirty years, correspondingly, Tambu has been growing with her woes in pace with Zimbabwe’s cry of despair. Moreover, the narrative view of the second person merges the characters and readers with such a dexterity that will push you to feel as if it is your own private story. This Mournable Body is a phenomenal tour de force of human freedom and dignity, of women solidarity, of reality and its desperation, is a canonical and sublime knowledge of Zimbabwean history.

Guest Post: Annette Oxindine, Saying Yes: Wool, Feather, Chintz; House, Bridge, River

“In dreams begin responsibility.” Yeats’s epigraph to Responsibilities had been pinned to the bulletin board above my desk for so many years that it lost any meaningful connection to his actual 1914 volume of poems and, eventually, just lost meaning.  It had become a workaday adage at best, the kind you might find in a day planner designed to keep you beholden to your to-do list.  At worst, it conjured up one of those motivational posters of late capitalism—the kind you might find in a brokerage firm or university president’s office—in which a tanned, forty-something white male model dressed in a cable-knit sweater and a captain’s cap, unsoiled by sea salt or human sweat, looks intently at the horizon from the helm of a sailboat. In short, for me, Yeats’s words about dreams and responsibility had lost their soul.

Bee sitting on a flower

The epigraph In dreams begin responsibility got its soul back and began to fortify my own as a result of my engagement with the unflinchingly responsible work of living dreaming poets. This is a kind of thank-you letter to them. While the writers whose work sustains me are many, I want to focus on three who, in a very real way, made themselves responsible to the work their dreaming selves demanded of them. Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (2012), Patti Smith’s memoir M Train (2015), and Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2016), especially its title poem, have individually and collectively returned to me the transformative possibilities of the word “dream,” for I had stopped considering how an unbidden message from the deepest part of the self, rather than a willed “dream” (translation: a goal, one of the least inspiring words in the English language), could call one into being, and, in turn, make one profoundly responsible to one’s own being—and own writing.

“I don’t know where to begin because I have nothing to say, yet I know that before long I will sound as if I’m on a crusade.”  So begins Mary Ruefle’s brilliant shape-shifting title lecture from Madness, Rack, and Honey. “The phrase madness, rack, and honey came to me in a dream,” she explains.  What I find remarkable is that Ruefle’s dream seemingly contains no container for her words. They arrive disembodied: her dream, she tells us, “consisted solely of these three words.” It is these words—madness, rack, and honey—she wants to inscribe over the phrase “fine poetry” as it appears in an advertisement for Coach leather goods. In the ad, Albert Einstein’s grandson Paul, an “accomplished violinist,” serves as the well-pedigreed “clichéd portrait of a poetry-lover” who enjoys said “fine poetry” along with no-adjectives-needed “literature and philosophy” and, by implication, Coach’s luxury accessories.  Ruefle un-refines and un-accessorizes the phrase “fine poetry.” In so doing, she returns poetry to its flesh.  Taking her dream’s three words in reverse order, Ruefle analyzes the meaning of “honey” by reflecting on a centuries-old Persian poem she loves, although she cannot trace its author: “ ‘I shall not finish my poem. / What I have written is so sweet / The flies are beginning to torment me.’ ” Ruefle focuses on how the poem’s “ ‘figurative’ sweetness,” its honey, causes “ ‘ literal’ flies to swarm on the page or in or around the author’s head.” She proclaims, “This is truly the Word made flesh.” Ruefle believes that metaphor “is an event,” “an exchange of energy between two things”; metaphor “unites the world by its very premise—that things connect and exchange energy.” Such an assertion should make us realize that Ruefle’s dream phrase really is, after all, embodied: it is embodied in the physical matter that is her brain. In a later lecture, she explains, “When you hold a book in your hands you are holding a piece of cerebrum.”  Such vigorous attention to the material nature of being and writing is crucial to Madness, Rack, and Honey. As Ruefle moves from rack—“those flies are beginning to torment the poet”—to madness—poetry “creates sweetness, so that the flies might come and eat till it is gone”—she comes to apprehend that poetry is “inexplicably and exactly” defined in this line from a poem by Paul Celan: “To endlessly make an end of things.” It is the requiem that making makes that brings such haunting beauty and palpable sorrow to Ruefle’s book. But what animates it are its many secrets, its wonder, her unabashed delight in wondering rather than knowing: “I would rather wonder than know.”

“It’s not so easy writing about nothing,” says the mostly reticent cowboy in Patti Smith’s dream, providing her with the first words of M Train. We insist on persisting, her “cowpoke” tells her, as he points out the futility of “fostering all kinds of crazy hopes,” such as “redeem[ing] the lost” or recovering “some sliver of personal revelation.” Realizing she has been inside this dream before, Smith tells her cowboy, “Hey, I said, I’m not the dead, not a shade passing. I’m flesh and blood here.” He ignores her. To add to this insult, he denies that it’s even her dream; he claims it as his own. After Smith is fully awake, drinking black coffee in a favorite café, she can’t let go of the dream; the dream won’t let go of her. She writes the cowboy’s phrase on her napkin: It’s not so easy writing about nothing. She feels “a need to contradict him.” He has goaded her into writing. She muses, “I could write endlessly about nothing. If only I had nothing to say.” But Smith has everything to say. Her book is a long, beautiful meditation on what it means to stay present, even, and sometimes especially, in the presence of ghosts: “We seek to stay present, even as ghosts attempt to draw us away.” What keeps Smith from being drawn away, it seems, is her understanding that to write about everything is to invite the nothing in. M Train ends with Smith, in a dream, uniting the everything and the nothing in an intimate gesture of expansiveness that is at the heart of the book’s many internal and external pilgrimages: “I love you, I whispered, to all, to none.” Her “philosophic” cowboy replies, “Love not lightly”—although I can think of few writers who are less likely to need that advice.  Staying inside this dream, Smith concludes her book: “I am going to remember everything and then I am going to write it all down. An aria to a coat. A requiem for a café.” It is the book she has written, the book she has just given us, the book we hold in our hands.  It has heft. It is not a ghost—not yet. The last image in the book is of Smith “looking down at [her] hands,” the hands of the dreamer, the one who writes.

Whereas Patti Smith enters “the frame” of M Train’s opening dream and leaves it by boarding a train that returns her to bed, Ross Gay’s dream-messenger comes to him more urgently, by way of a “branch that grew into [his] window.” More interactive and less cryptic in its demands than Smith’s cowboy or Ruefle’s three-word phrase, Gay’s robin with “shabby wings” and “breast aflare” comes to tell him “in no uncertain terms” to“ ‘Bellow forth” his “whole rusty brass band of gratitude.” And so he does. In the poem “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” among the seemingly too-many-to-name things for which the speaker expresses gratitude are friends, strangers, ancestors, “the tiny bee’s shadow,” the woman he loves, the reader (many times), the “baggie of dreadlocks” he finds in the drawer of a murdered friend, a woman who sings Erykah Badu to herself on a bus, so very many things that grow in the soil, his own “knuckleheaded heart,” and the dream that brings his dead father back to him to play him like “a bass fiddle’s strings” until he wakes up “singing.”  Yet for all the Whitmanesque abundance and exuberance that pulse through the twelve-page poem, a retreating pulse seems to work like a constant undertow—beyond even the inevitable departure of the dead who are briefly returned to the speaker.  This undertow adds even more urgency to the poet’s song of thanks. When Gay announces to his listener that his poem is finally coming to a close—“Soon it will be over”—the word “it” morphs to encompass so much more. The speaker then recalls that “the child in [his] dream” said “precisely the same thing,” “pointing at the roiling sea and the sky / hurtling our way like so many buffalo,” stressing that “it’s much worse than we think, / and sooner.” But this prophetic child isn’t telling the speaker anything he doesn’t already know. He replies,

no duh child in my dreams, what do you think

this singing and shuddering is,

what this screaming and reaching and dancing

and crying is, other than loving

what every second goes away?

Goodbye, I mean to say.

And thank you. Every day.

Reading contemporary poetry in the Anthropocene can sometimes feel like one long goodbye. The dream-child’s seeming awareness of planetary loss—the “roiling” sea and sky headed for us—can make us nostalgic for a more personal mortality, the kind that makes young Margaret weep in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall.”

In my own loving-what-every-second-goes-away dream, cherry blossoms are falling to the ground in a park near a stage on which an aria is left unfinished. I don’t remember if the singer leaves the stage or if she just stops singing. Her song is taken up by the weak but joyful voices of an older man and woman who are heading into the distance, away from the stage and the fallen blossoms. Even before waking, I understand the couple to be my mother and father, although they do not look like them. I understand that they are leaving me and also letting me know I have to stay in the park: to listen. It is then that unbidden words come to me, words I understand I must use, can only use, in a poem.

The first book about loss that I read is a novel that isn’t really a novel. It was described by its author as a “play-poem,” and it affected me deeply. One of its passages to which I often return seems like a lullaby to forlornness itself:

What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry.

The passage is from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a book Mary Ruefle designates as “not one of [her] favorite books” even though her “memory of reading it” at the age of twenty-two on a “plotless day” with the ocean in the distance is one of her favorite memories.  I was nineteen the summer I pulled The Waves off a shelf in my public library, doing so with very little forethought: Woolf’s name was vaguely familiar, and I love the sea. That was enough. It was, I admit, not easy going at first. But by the time I was about a fourth of the way through that book, I knew I would never again feel alone in the world in the same way. I would feel alone a new way, connected to the aloneness of others, and that has made all the difference. In her lecture “Someone Reading a Book,” Ruefle describes in an even more positive way what a good book can bring to light: “We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things.” I find it touching that Patti Smith’s connection to Virginia Woolf came rather late in her life, and that Woolf’s walking stick, the penultimate Polaroid printed in M Train, prompts her to muse whether, if she continues to outlive everyone, the New York Public Library might entrust her with Woolf’s walking stick, which she would “cherish for her.” (If there’s ever a petition in support of Smith doing just that, I’ll sign it.)

I eventually wrote a dissertation about Woolf, published academic essays about her novels, and have been fortunate to have a career that allows me to teach literature. While I do not, as does Ruefle, tire “of having to talk about literature,” like her, “I didn’t begin writing because I wanted to sit in a room and talk about the construction of subjectivity” in the work of writers I admired—although I can be pretty good at that kind of talk on most days, and I do enjoy it most often, even sometimes enjoy writing about it.

But in dreams begin responsibility.  Was it a lullaby? Was it a requiem? What were the old man and old woman singing in the park?  I will keep listening. I will sing back. I will pay close attention to unbidden words. “I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth,” explains Mary Ruefle, “and I wanted to write back and say yes, house, bridge, river, hair, no, maybe, never, forever.”  And so did I. And so I have, and so I will.

Guest Post, Marylee MacDonald: The Man in a Room Alone

The “Man In A Room Alone” Problem (And How to Solve It)

Marylee MacDonald bio pictureAll of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.— from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées

Writing teachers often tell students that it’s Death To Your Story to place “a man in a room alone.” Is this good advice, or, like “Show. Don’t tell,1” advice that is applied far more often than is warranted? Let’s look at the pros and cons.

Mrs. Dalloway and the Ticking Clock

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway time moves millisecond by millisecond while Clarissa Dalloway’s thoughts flit from flowers to passersby to memories to the meaning of life. Many scenes in this literary novel have no dramatic action and no other characters or events to bump the protagonist off course. However, the author’s goal was not to write a page-turner. Woolf’s project as a writer was to capture the ephemeral moments of time.

Laying her brooch on the table, she had a sudden spasm, as if, while she mused, the icy claws had had the chance to fix in her. She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second year. Months and months of it were still untouched. June, July, August! Each still remained almost whole, and, as if to catch the falling drop, Clarissa (crossing to the dressing table) plunged into the very heart of the moment, transfixed it, there— the moment of this June morning on which was the pressure of all the other mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was that very night to give a party; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself.2

Clarissa Dalloway is doing what Pascal says is nearly impossible. She sits—and forces us to sit—within the glass bell jar of her own thoughts. The novel is both wonderful and (for many of today’s readers) incredibly slow. We’re stuck in nondramatic scenes where there’s little overt conflict. Characters rarely strive to reach a goal.

The Man In Bed (Alone)

No man is more alone—and no scene less dramatic—than one with a character awakening from sleep. One of my favorite novels— Paul Bowles’s Sheltering Sky— opens with a man in a room alone.

He awoke, opened his eyes. The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he had come. If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and space, he also lacked the desire.

If it’s truly a no-no to place a man in a room alone, how could I have read that novel and taken any pleasure from it? I’m not talking the movie version with John Malkovich, but the actual book from which the movie sprang.

But wait! Bowles’s 1949 novel about alienation and despair isn’t the only novel opening with a touseled-haired protagonist.

A Woman In Bed (Alone)

The High Road, by Irish writer Edna O’Brien begins with woman in a room alone in bed:

It rose, swelled, then burst and dispersed in a great clatter of sound. First it seemed to be a roar inside my head, a remembered roar, a remembered summons, but then through the warmth of sleep it became clear that it was a roar being uttered at that very moment, either in the room or on the landing outside. I thought I heard my name—Anna, Anna—being uttered with malice.

My hand went instinctively toward the bedside table only to find that there was no lamp, nor table where a lamp could be, and then slowly and unnervingly it came to me that I was not at home, that I had come to this place, this new place, and gradually I remembered my walk of the evening before, the strange town, a mountain, and now this intemperate roar while it was still dark.

Not only is this gal alone. She can barely remember how she got there.

An Epidemic of Amnesia

Walk down a bookstore’s aisles. Open novels at random. A good many (about an eighth by my count) begin with a character emerging from sleep. Not only that, but a frightening number of fictional characters have amnesia. I mean, really, how many people have you ever known who’ve had amnesia? None, I daresay. 

Authorial Choices

Why do authors begin their novels this way? Two reasons:

  • It’s efficient.
  • We’re overly fascinated with our characters.

Let’s look at efficiency. When a book opens with only one character, readers have only one name to learn. The author can get the story rolling without the distraction of other characters and without over-much attention to setting. The reader watches the character’s teeth-brushing, hair-combing and staring-at-a-face-in-the-mirror. (That, too, has turned into a cliché.)  Essentially, the author has one ball to juggle, not three or four.

But I think there’s another reason authors open with characters getting out of bed. Very likely we authors got to know our characters by yanking back the sheets and saying, “Wake up! Time to get moving.” Like nutmeg on cappuccino, we sprinkle on amnesia. It’s purpose? To add tension.

An author who kicks off a novel with a character in a room alone, or who writes scenes such as those in Mrs. Dalloway, risks losing the reader to boredom. (Sorry, Virginia Woolf.) Adding amnesia doesn’t help. Readers think, “I’ve read this before.”

Coming Up With A Plan

Once in a while, having a character in a room alone is exactly what the story demands. Just as in real life, fictional people need to make plans.  Often they start planning right after an action scene, particularly if what they’d been planning before has failed.

In Pat Barker’s Regeneration, a novel about shell-shocked World War I vets, Dr. Rivers is desperately trying to figure out a strategy to fix soldiers’ psyches and return them to the battlefield. In this passage, he’s in his office considering what kinds of treatments might work best:

The change he demanded of them—and  by implication of himself—was not trivial. Fear, tenderness—these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of what it meant to be a man. Not that Rivers’s treatment involved any encouragement of weakness or effeminacy. His patients might be encouraged to acknowledge their fears, their horror of the war—but they were still expected to do their duty and return to France.

After running through the difficulties of achieving his objectives, he comes up with a plan to try a new set of experiments. These involve “ice cubes, bristles, near-boiling water and pins.” If the reader hadn’t spent time with Rivers in a room alone, his new plan to try these experiments would strike us as cruel. Instead, when we witness his thought process, we understand that the experiments make ghastly good sense.

Calming Down and Processing

In the same novel the soldier/poet Sassoon has seen ghosts. He needs to process what he’s seen, and weighs the likelihood that Rivers will believe him or write him up as crazy.

The palms of his hands were sweating and his mouth was dry.

He needed to talk to Rivers, though he’d have to be careful what he said, since Rivers was a thorough-going rationalist who wouldn’t take kindly to tales of the supernatural, and might even decide the symptoms of a war neurosis were manifesting themselves at last. Perhaps they were.

Sasson goes to find Rivers, but an orderly tells him Rivers isn’t there and won’t return for three weeks. Sassoon, a man who ought to be talking to someone, faces this setback and must come up with a new plan. Again, he keeps his own counsel and makes his decision when he’s by himself.

Sasson went slowly upstairs, unable to account for his sense of loss. After all, he’d known Rivers was going…Sassoon collected his washbag and went along to the bathroom. He felt almost dazed. As usual he turned to lock the door, and as usual remembered there were no locks. At times like this the lack of privacy was almost intolerable. He filled the basin, and splashed his face and neck. Birds, sounding a little stunned as if they too needed to recover from the night, were beginning, cautiously, to sing.

As in real life, characters in fiction must let their feelings surface. It’s only when they’re alone—after the crisis has passed—that they can regain their equilibrium.

When characters have gone through an ordeal and we’ve seen that ordeal dramatized in real time, we should push them into a room alone. That’s when they can let their feelings surface, process what just happened, and plan what to do next.

Scene and Summary

Writers who want to capture a reader’s attention would do well to avoid the cliché of having an amnesiac character or one awakening from sleep. Similarly, if you write lengthy, nondramatic scenes with solitary characters, readers may lose interest. In summaries the opposite is true. Readers want to see how characters react and how they’re going to cope with what just happened.

Pascal was right about humankind’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. We can take it, but only when we’re not forced to sit for too long. Passages of soul-searching and rumination are better handled in narrative summary than in scene.

  1. “Show” refers to scenes. The action slows down and the clock ticks in real time. “Tell” refers to summary passages. These are also called narrative or expository passages. It means that the story is crunching events that take place over minutes, hours, or days into a compact ball. Summary passages don’t try to simulate real time.
  2. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway: (Annotated) (Kindle Locations 492-497). Unknown. Kindle Edition.

 

Guest Post, Dawn Abeita: Virginia and Flannery Together Again

Virginia Woolfflannery oconnor

Last year I went on two literary pilgrimages: Great Britain/Virginia Woolf, and Georgia/Flannery O’Connor.

The juxtaposition wasn’t intentional. My husband had work in London and I tagged along, walked around the tiny corner of Woolf’s London called Bloomsbury, then got a car and left him there working while I rambled around Sussex where she later lived. Which is to say that I drove down lanes with hedges that constantly swatted my side view mirrors to visit ramshackle houses with frowsy and riotous interiors.

As for Flannery, I’d long intended to visit her houses in tiny Milledgeville only an hour and a half through cotton fields from my house in Atlanta. Flannery grew up in one of its biggest homes, all white-columned plantation vernacular, and lived out her last Lupus-maimed years on a dairy farm outside town.

Inspired by my travels I reread them both. First Woolf, whose work struck me again with its (at the time) radically modern stream of consciousness and melancholy air: a sense that memory of the past flows over everything in the present, nearly obscuring it. Then O’Connor’s work where I was reminded of what gruesome, moral car wrecks they are (in one famous case, literally).

It may not come as a surprise to anyone else, but I was astonished to find that these two writers have something in common. It seems that both write mostly about cognitive dissonance, about people trying to fend off anything that threatens their sense of themselves as they believe themselves to be. In other words, the guarded space between what people think is true about themselves and what is true.

In Woolf, the characters are so involved in their interior world that the majority of the books Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse concern themselves almost exclusively with it. Out of curiosity, I sat down and pieced out how much dialogue there was in one long scene of Mrs Dalloway, the one where Peter Walsh stops by to see Clarissa upon his return to England from India. In my edition the scene runs for thirteen pages. Only about two hundred and fifty words (about a page’s worth) are dialogue that touches only on the surface of things. Like this:

Well, and what’s happened to you?
Millions of things. I am in love. In love. In love with a girl from India.
In love! And who is she?
A married woman, unfortunately. The wife of a Major in the Indian Army. She has two small children; a boy and a girl; and I have come over to see my lawyers about the divorce.
But what are you going to do?
Oh, the lawyers and solicitors, Messrs. Hubert and Gately at Lincoln’s Inn, they are going to do it. Tell me, are you happy, Clarissa? Does Richard…
Here is my Elizabeth.
How d’y do?
Hullo, Elizabeth! Goodbye, Clarissa.

Interspersed with this shallow conversation the remaining twelve pages contain the interior recounting of their respective dissonances – Peter’s that Clarissa had turned down his marriage proposal so many years ago and what she must think of his lack of success; and Clarissa’s that her life has not turned out well, that she is dry and useless whereas he is so alive and in love. The reader alone is privy to the clash between their various assumptions about themselves and each other.

In O’Connor’s work the characters are more involved in their exterior world, in trying to force it to cohere to their ideas of how it should be and their place in it. Their actions are determined by how forcefully they insist on their own assumptions, right up until those suppositions are revealed for the lie they are. It was part of O’Connor’s religious ideas that the world would provide a corrective to this misguided sense of self, that events would divinely grace the character with a realization of their true selves. Much of the time this grace is delivered ironically and only the reader realizes it.

Think about how in “Good Country People,” Hulga/Joy is full of noisy pride, seeing herself as different than her mother or the tenant farmer’s wife – that she is a more sophisticated, independent thinker – only to have the very assumptions she shares with them, such as that “good country people” are inherently trustworthy, lead to her literally and metaphorically losing both her false perspective and her false independence (ie: her glasses and her wooden leg).

This notion of cognitive dissonance may be useful as a key to understanding or creating character. Where does a character stands on this continuum of insight into the true nature of him or herself. And if false, does the character’s judgement turn outward, with little interior reflection? Or does it turn inward, with overly high regard for his or her own opinions. Or, perhaps, both. And more specifically, what contortions, mental or physical, do they perform to maintain their self-esteem?  Just something to think about.

PS: Despite this similarity in their concerns, the lives of Mrs. Woolf  and Ms. O’Connor could not have been more wildly divergent. One did her best work surrounded by the most inventive and amusing minds of her time and place. The other did her best work surrounded by screaming peacocks and lowing cows. I find their extraordinarily accented speech especially revealing of this divide.

Of course, being from the South, I find Flannery’s long A’s and swallowed O’s comforting. I only found this one recording of her, unfortunately not in conversation and so certainly the accent is flattened and so easy to understand.

And here the clipped and plummy voice of Mrs. Woolf also in a formal setting. When I listen to it, I have the feeling that I am translating from her English into my English, always lagging a word behind.

Guest Blog Post, Patrick Madden: Finding My Way

So without stopping to choose my way, in the sure and certain knowledge that it will find itself—or if not it will not matter—I begin the first memory.

— Virginia Woolf “A Sketch of the Past”

Patrick MaddenOne of the earliest writing lessons I learned (I refer to creative writing, not elementary school writing) is this: that I should allow my writing to guide itself instead of beginning with my conclusion already in mind. This is common advice, something you’ve likely heard yourself, but I repeat it here because I can remember how I struggled with it, how I tried to believe it in theory without putting it into practice. And I see again and again student pieces that seem to be transcripts (sometimes elaborations) of a predetermined narrative and meaning with no room for detours from “the point.” The writing in these is sometimes very clean, even beautiful, but it simply serves the goal, without being part of the process.

Now I would not say that I have arrived at any fully formed writing abilities, but I have learned to trust in the notion that I should write without knowing where I’m going. Whereas I once tried to express in words the lessons I’d already processed from highlight-stories I’d experienced, I now attempt to find or create connections between seemingly dissimilar things that flit into my consciousness coincidentally. The act itself is as fun as it is rewarding, and even when it fails, it gives me good exercise.

One recent example, among many, came to me as I was sitting in Montevideo’s Estadio Centenario watching the Uruguayan national team play a World Cup qualifier match against Ecuador. I knew I wanted to write something about Uruguay’s improbable and, frankly, amazing soccer tradition, going back nearly a century and including two Olympic championships followed by two World Cup championships, and I wanted to tie this to the team’s recent resurgence as a FIFA powerhouse. Soccer is a great source of pride for Uruguayans, and I, who’ve lived in the country for four years and who’ve married a Uruguayan, share the sentiment. But I did not want to write a straightforward narrative (“I went to the stadium to watch Uruguay play against Ecuador… It was a 1-1 tie… Let me tell you about Uruguayan soccer history…”). So I kept my eyes and ears open in the stadium for other entry points to help me essay the theme instead of simply writing the story.

I thought I found my hook when I was startled by a loudspeaker promotional jingle playing all through the stadium during the middle of the match. It was hawking ball bearings. How strange, I thought, that someone would think it worth their advertising pesos to blast such a commercial to a stadium filled not with auto mechanics or race-car fans, but futbol aficionados.

But just as I didn’t understand the advertising strategy, I couldn’t see how ball bearings and soccer could work together in my essay, other than in a superficial way (the one happened during the other). So I began to write. The sentences themselves suggested what might come next, and from the process of stringing words together I got to what I think is a halfway decent connection. I’ve not achieved literary brilliance, but I’ve discovered something I didn’t see before, and my essay is a new creation that never was in the world before. In any case, it’s reaffirmed the lesson about letting the writing find its own way, which I took so long to learn.

NOTE: The essay I refer to can be read at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, along with others I’ve written, at this link: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/dispatches-from-montevideo