A Poetry Squawk
By Ricardo Thomas Manuel Hernandez

“Poetry is a living fossil.” That’s a rather bold statement to make about poetry in the 21st century. Maybe it’ll be received as one poet’s abstract perspective on the poetry scene in the modern world, or as an opinion that might hold some validity if broken down using the lens of said poet. Perhaps it’s simply a title to get you engaged in a subliminal conversation: that poetry is an under-appreciated and under-sought out art form.

Think about it, how can an art form be considered as a living entity that owns many characteristics holding true to its ancestral roots, and that has come and gone and returned back into existence anyway? You might think to yourself: what is this guy smoking? And if asked I’d probably tell you something cosmic to view an art form this way—that and regularly attending poetry open mic series, slam competitions, curating and hosting poetry readings, as well as performing spoken word pieces to packed coffee shops, bars, bookstores and school auditoriums.

Let’s add the experiences of speaking with people of all walks of life about poetry with every opportunity that presents itself, and by then we might get to what ultimately led me down this road of thinking. Maybe it’s more along the lines of being a coping mechanism, as to say: my poetry and the poetry of others are worth the modern world’s time—if the modern world would notice that we’re very much still here.

Now in order to tackle the entire scope of this conundrum, of a one-time highly-revered art form becoming what I perceive to be a modern-day living fossilized art form, we have to define what a living fossil is and look at the first poems of the world. Where could they be found? Who wrote them? Why were they written? And do the first poems resemble modern day poetry at all? Also, when did poetry vanish (so to speak) from the public eye or ear for that matter?

To start, an organism that is a living example of an otherwise extinct group and that has remained virtually unchanged in structure and function over a long period of time (like sharks and horseshoe crabs) is considered to be a living fossil. There are two categories of living fossil: 1) those believed to have changed very little over time and still to retain a close resemblance to their older extinct relatives, and 2) those believed to be extinct, but to have been rediscovered in modern times.

It’s already sounding like a bit of a stretch but stick with me.

The answer in short as to where the first poems were written actually predates literacy, so technically they were not written at all, instead they were memorized and performed. It is here we find the art of oral tradition being where the first poems of the world existed. The art form was employed to remember historic events, genealogy, and common law. It also thrived in ways such as: instructing everyday activities, education, the telling of heroic tales in order to inspire young warriors, religious stories to continue the faith, as well as love songs and songs of common angst—all of which could be found in modern day poetry with renewed content and use of language.

Gathering this information and putting it into perspective you can see poetry has come a long way. So long that it was around before cuneiform-script was invented, before clay tablets and papyrus was used by ancient civilizations. Heck, I had a poetry mentor of mine put it further back in history, into prehistory, and to sum up his viewpoint on the matter I’ll paraphrase what was said one day in his workshop:

“The first poem spoken into the world had to have been from the caveman. Emerging from his dwelling to let out a great big sigh to the morning sun so as to say, here I am!”

I’m certain it sounds a bit abstract, or crazy even to consider, but it made so much sense to me and other poets alike—to know that something as small as a sigh to the morning sun from the dawn of man is oozing with poetic vibes.

Now let’s mix into the equation the personal experience (that I’m sure I share with many other poets) of speaking to people about writing poetry, or performing poetry on a monthly or weekly basis, and that sometimes (or quite often in my case) they would give the most inquisitive look and openly-question: do people really perform poetry still? Sometimes the question is: do people really write poetry still? And that could pang any poet’s heart to understand—that there are people who don’t believe poetry exists anymore, that poets don’t write let alone perform poetry any more—as if it is extinct!

So, to some, maybe poetry did vanish off the face of the earth—only to reappear now as Facebook invites to poetry open events from maybe a co-worker, past high school friend, or maybe you have a close friend that’s a closet poet who shoots you an invite to test the waters.

By now I hope you’re able to read the title with a different lens, a slightly different abstract perspective on the art form many adore. The rich history of poetry, the personal experience I have within the field, and the conversations I have with common folk that make me feel poetry in itself is a living fossil, an art form that has died many times over but yet constantly reappears throughout different cultures and regions of the world since its inception. One can easily argue the point that poetry is not a very lucrative endeavor, yet hundreds to thousands or even millions of poets have existed at every given time during human existence.

Poetry may not be as cool to some as sharks or horseshoe crabs, but I can assure you it’s up there. The layers of poetry are countless, and those who peel back the layers indulge in the beauty of all the spectrums of the human experience.

Ricardo Thomas Manuel Hernandez is from the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. With influences from early hip-hop culture, Ricardo is inspired by the written form of graffiti and the spoken word of rap. From painting walls under the street lights to hanging out on the corner kicking freestyle rhymes with friends, Ricardo found himself expressing the world around him through the arts. Today the spray can is no longer in hand, but he hasn’t put down the pen and pad. Ricardo is a veteran of the United Sates Air Force and served with the 71st Fighter Squadron. He is one of three host/curators for Poets Settlement Open Mic Series at Breuckelen Colony. Ricardo was named Brooklyn Poets‘ Yawper of the Year for 2014, and will be featured in the inaugural volume of the Brooklyn Poets Anthology (slated for release by Brooklyn Arts Press in 2017.)

A Poetry Squawk
By Sharon Mesmer
Author of Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place

Photo: Robert Fass

That’s a pretty dismal title, isn’t it? You might well wonder: Is she having a bad day? No, actually. This has been a good day. (Meaning, to be precise: “There have been bad days. This isn’t one of them.”) At the risk of telling you something you already know, it’s not that depressing once you understand that catharsis abides in the heart of suffering, and poetry gives access to catharsis: to release, redemption, renewal.

“Catharsis” is a favorite word of mine: it’s Greek — κάθαρσις / katharsis — and suggests purification/purgation. It was used by Aristotle in the Poetics. You know this, of course. I’m not merely pointing you toward to the difficult lives that poets — all artists — often lead, even though “suffering comes naturally to poetry” might lead you to think this is going to be about Lowell, Plath, Sexton, et al. No, don’t worry. I’m referring to suffering itself, only itself. And that suffering comes to poetry . . . naturally.

The First Noble Truth of Buddhism deals with suffering. It’s like Buddha was saying, “Okay, let’s get this one thing straight right off, and then you can get on with your lives.” There are Four Noble Truths, and Buddha’s first teaching after he attained enlightenment was about them. That first teaching begins something like this:

“ . . . birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering . . .”

(I might add: “getting what one wants is sometimes also suffering.”)

I was brought up Catholic. If the mind’s literacy is images then “Catholic” is a kind of Black Hole. But my version was Vatican II, a dark-skinned, dark-bearded Jesus in my first grade religion book (“God Is Love”), my grandmother’s candles and novenas, and loving, watchful saints (like Anthony, who still finds my reading glasses — though why a desert hermit would become “finder of lost things” remains inscrutable). One thing we learned was the value of suffering. Not like: suffer more, you’re Catholic. But like: divinity communicated to us by suffering, so suffering, then, is a language, the language we all speak. Jesus may have been a poet, depending on your prism (and your translation). In Alone with the Alone, his great book about Sufi mystic ibn ‘Arabi, Henry Corbin says that the root of the name “Allah” is “sadness”:

The etymology it suggests for the divine name . . . projects a flash of light on the path we are attempting to travel . . . it derives the word ilah from the root wlh connoting to be sad, to be overwhelmed with sadness, to sigh toward, to flee fearfully toward.

That bad word “religion,” by the way, comes from the Latin word “religare” = to bind, and is related, by its root “lig,” to the late Middle English word that we still use now, “ligament.”

So, surprise: A divinity bound to us by sadness, suffering. This suggests something sacred across the whole business. Nothing is not sacred. Nothing we experience is a mistake. Even the worst of it. Suffering was always already redeemed.

It’s hard to embrace this in illness. That’s why I taught a class at the Poetry Project a few years ago called “Cathexis/Catharsis: Writing To/Through Illness and Suffering.” I taught the class because I’d “suffered” a nervous breakdown and came through it without use of antidepressants (my choice; no disrespect). I wanted to share what I’d found in the poems and writings that acted as talismans for me during those two years. Also because, as I wrote in the description, illness and suffering are usually imaged as sites of trauma, feared as obstacles, rejected by a success-obsessed culture. But what if suffering were a language like any other that could be learned, manipulated and deployed in a powerful new way? As poets we all know this. We know to do this. But sometimes we forget, and I wanted to remember/remind.

Poetry both protects us (as a talisman) and breaks us open (as a catharsis). And a poem isn’t just cathartic; it is katharsis. You don’t need much to achieve it. As Reginald Dwayne Betts writes in “At the End of Life, a Secret” (from Bastards of the Reagan Era, Four Way Books, 2015)

The soul: less than
4,000 dollars worth of crack—22 grams—
all that moves you through this world.

The idea is for you to be moved. It may be through a labyrinth, but all Theseus needed was a skein of thread. What do you need?

To end, here’s part of a poem by Olga Orozco, an Argentinian poet who died in 1999. It’s called “To Make a Talisman,” and was translated by Stephen Tapscott. I found it in Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry, edited by Stephen Tapscott, but I believe it’s also in her Engravings Torn from Insomnia: Selected Poems (BOA Editions 2002, translated by Mary Crow):

Your heart is all you need,
fashioned in the living image of your daemon or your god.
Only a heart, like a crucible of coals before an idol.
Nothing but a defenseless, affectionate heart.
Leave it out in the elements,
where the grasses like a crazed nurse will wail their dirges
and it cannot fall asleep,
where the wind and the rain whisper their whips in blue cold blasts
without turning it to marble or splitting it in two,
where darkness opens warrens to all the wild animals
and it cannot forget . . .
let it wail its delirium in the desert
till only the echo of a name grows inside it, like a raging hunger:
the ceaseless pounding of a spoon against an empty plate.

Sharon Mesmer is the author of Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books, 2015), voted “Best of 2015” by Entropy. Previous poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (Belladonna Books, 2007), and Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998). Four of her poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition, 2013). Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, Paris, in French translation, 2005), In Ordinary Time (Hanging Loose Press, 2005) and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2000). Her essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other places. She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School and lives in Brooklyn.

By Jameson Fitzpatrick
Poet and author of Morrisroe: Erasures

To have sex with a man of a certain age in 2016 is to fuck into a continuum of gay male experience that transcends your own. It’s not time travel—the century doesn’t unturn itself—but the act of sex does put you in touch, literally, with a history that is both yours and not yours as a young gay man.

I say “yours” and “not yours” (meaning “mine” and “not mine”) because being gay can be a communal identity but not strictly a generational one. The concept of a queer family is necessarily metaphorical, wherein the points and modes of connection challenge the rule of biology. Queerness, meaningfully, is not a birthright—but nor does it exist in a vacuum, outside of time.

The history into which one enters upon claiming a queer identity today is not only the history of HIV, but it is a history that has been profoundly shaped by AIDS in the last thirty-five years. In the fourteen since I came out in 2002—seven years after the introduction of the highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) credited with containing the epidemic in the United States—I have often had the feeling of showing up to a party at the exact moment after something awful has happened, the festivities awkwardly resuming following a heavy silence.

Sex is one way, maybe, to try to understand what happened. When you have sex with a man of a certain age, you are, quite likely, having sex with a man who has had sex with people who died of AIDS, and who, even more likely, has mourned friends who died of AIDS, some of whom he maybe slept with. More than that, you are connecting to him in precisely the same way that, very likely, the friends and lovers he might have lost contracted the virus in the first place. I’m not a very mystical person, but there must be some meaning to this, I think: a historical re-enactment of sorts, but with better technology and the advantage of hindsight.

I hadn’t thought much about this until I fell in love with a man of a certain age, an experience I have already written about ad nauseum. Here’s a day about which I haven’t:

We’re at the Brooklyn Museum to see the exhibition HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. It’s Sunday, February 12, 2012 (which I only know because it is the day the exhibition closes, which is a Google-able detail in the future). It’s a historic show—the one in which David Wojnarowicz’s video “A Fire in My Belly” caused such a ruckus when it debuted at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery—so we couldn’t miss it. My boyfriend—a Man of a Certain Age—and I have been together for six months, though we have only been “official” for not-quite-three. I’m newly 22, a senior in college at the Large Private Downtown University where I will also begin grad school in the fall and later teach. I think this is the day I meet the poet Stephen Boyer for the first time, whom my boyfriend knows from Occupy and whom we run into leaving the elevator as we’re getting on. I like the exhibition, though it is more crowded than I’d prefer, being the day it closes and all, and also more white and more male in its representation than seems right. Towards the end of the exhibition, my boyfriend points to one of the works and says, “That’s Jerome!” He’s pointing to “Charles Devouring Himself,” Jerome Caja’s riff on Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son,” which Caja painted on an aluminum tray in 1991 using a mixture of resin, nail polish, and the ashes of his friend and fellow artist Charles Sexton. Caja died four years later, in 1995, the year HAART was developed, when I was five and probably hadn’t yet heard of HIV. He and my boyfriend had been friends in San Francisco, he tells me, in the queercore days—and so begins our first real conversation about his experience living through the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 80s and early 90s. While reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in grad school, he became convinced that if he finished it he’d die. To this day, he never has. After we make our way through the rest of the show, we go to the cafe for something to eat, where he tells me about other people he knew who died. The cafe is very cold and I grip my paper cup of coffee so tightly it is the detail of the day I will remember best.

After this, I started thinking about it a lot: men who lived through a certain age, men who didn’t and the art they made. Their work, like sex with older men, struck me as another way into this continuum of contemporary queerness. Can it be a coincidence that what would become some of my favorite art was made by people who died of AIDS-related illnesses—poets like Tim Dlugos and Melvin Dixon and Tory Dent, artists like Paul Thek and Mark Morrisroe?

I don’t know if I can answer that question. Maybe it’s just a historical accident of timing, or maybe this work is precious to me because it is finite, fixed. It will be what it will be. And I feel a sense of responsibility not to forget these people, my forebearers—people I might have known if I were thirty years older. And, since I’m a writer, to keep their voices in the room.

It was after going to HIDE/SEEK—the second time I’d seen Mark Morrisroe’s work—that I returned to the publication printed in conjunction with the retrospective of his work at Artists Space in 2011, photo-copied the image of ephemeral text printed on its last page, and began making erasures of it, moving around strips of white paper and obscuring different phrases to make visible the various possibilities still within the vocabulary Morrisroe determined at some unknown point in the past. (The work is untitled and undated.) My materials were cheap: printer paper and glue-stick; and my handiwork admittedly amateurish: gummy and grubby with inky fingerprints. Unsure what to do with them, I kept them in a shoebox until I returned to the project in 2014 to make a chapbook of 24 erasures—this time, the text retyped in Morrisroe’s original lay-out and then whited-out in the document.

The resulting poems, like the original text itself, are about sex and time, anonymity, pleasure, and the tug of pleasure’s eventual end—these phenomena that persist today more or less the same as when Morrisroe wrote of them.

History continues, of course. HIV is not only a historical event—it is a virus that continues to affect the lives of many people in this country, and many more around the world, even as it is no longer a proverbial death sentence for people who have access to treatment (a big caveat both in the United States and worldwide). In the two years since the chapbook was published, PrEP has entered the mainstream and at least one of my erasures—”Bare / back // goodbye / to / that”—is already outdated.

Time makes all of us mortal, regardless of HIV status. But we get to pretend otherwise sometimes—the length of a lay, or, standing before a painting.

The images below are manuscripts of three of the erasures for Fitzpatrick’s chapbook, Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus and LUMA Foundation, 2011).

Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of the chapbook Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus and LUMA Foundation, 2011),, which comprises 24 versions of a single text by the artist Mark Morrisroe, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Awl, BuzzFeed Reader, The Offing, Poetry, Prelude and elsewhere. He lives in New York, where he teaches writing at NYU.

A Poetry Squawk
By Sarah Wetzel
Author of River Electric with Light and Bathsheba Transatlantic 

“This must be where it all happens!” my friend quipped, examining the second bedroom of my apartment, the neat desk with several books of poetry stacked on one corner, bookshelves overflowing with books, many of which I’d even read. We stood at the room’s threshold, an air conditioner whirring softly behind us, light from the west-facing window reflecting softly off framed pictures of Rome and Tel Aviv, a small portrait of me that my father had painted.

I laughed, “You’d think, right?” She was referring to my writing life, but the truth was that almost nothing happened here. I’d written almost nothing in this cool quiet room or, in fact, anywhere in this or any other Manhattan apartment in which I’ve lived over the past eight years. If anything creative happened or happens, it’s almost always somewhere else.

It’s not that I haven’t tried. Several times I established strict writing schedules. For two hours in the early morning I would sit in front of my computer, cups of coffee going cold one after another on the desk. I’d sit for another two hours in the afternoon, this time with tea. I even tried moving my writing schedule to evening so that I could try it with a glass of wine and a slice or two of cheese. At first I attributed my writer’s block to the myriad distractions of home—laundry, shopping, rearranging the refrigerator, catching up on the news. But really, my husband and I are neat, eat most meals out, and between us create approximately 3.5 loads of laundry a week. I am, however, usually the first to hear of any natural disaster or terrorist incident.

Then I told myself that perhaps it was because I hadn’t created the “right space.” I tried rearranging my office, moving the desk from wall to wall, repainting the walls calming shades of peach and blue. I bought an antique green desk lamp with a dimmer and a new office chair. I tried writing in front of the window with a view over New York, though after inadvertently peeping into my neighbor’s bedroom a couple of times, I had to close the shades. Auden claimed, I read once, that only a maniac can write in front of a fabulous view. At least, I consoled myself, I proved I’m not a maniac. I tried writing on the dining room table, on the couch. I even tried writing in bed, which is where another friend of mine puts together all her short stories and reviews, her computer propped on her lap, a book or two buried beneath the covers. Every time I changed apartments, which I admit I excitedly do every two or three years, I’d tell myself that this time, this time I’ll design the perfect space. So far, it hasn’t happened. Not in Manhattan. Not in any of the cities I called home at one time or another during my adult life: San Francisco, Atlanta, Munich, Vienna, or even, for a long time, Tel Aviv.

I guess now is the time to admit that I spend several months of the year living someplace else. In January and February and for half of summer, I’m in Rome, where I teach at The American University. For another month or two I’m in Israel where I sometimes teach and lived for almost seven years after my husband and I married and where his children and our dog as well as several friends still live. And I travel, a lot. It’s odd but when I’m on the road, when I’m living out of a suitcase, I write. If I hazard a guess, I’d say that over ninety percent of the five hundred or so poems I’ve written over the past six years began in a city different than the one where my mail goes.

I do, of course, sometimes manage to write in Manhattan. But usually it’s in coffee shops and diners. I’ve also started a poem or two in The Museum of Modern Art and another few in The Whitney Museum. I’m writing the post you’re reading now in Big John’s Diner, a woman crunching noisily on a kale salad next to me, Amsterdam Avenue rolling past the window. I don’t think I’m alone in facing this kind of writerly block. One only has to spend a few hours in Starbucks or Peet’s Coffee, Poets House or the New York Public Library, to understand. Whether I’m in a cafe or a park, there are always one or two others hunched over an open notebook or a computer furiously penning a poem or starting a story. We’re everywhere.

Why is that? Or at least, why is that the situation for me? What is it about the space and environs of my Upper West Side place that makes it almost impossible to write there?

It occurred to me recently after reading the Russian literary theorist Victor Shklovsky’s famous essay “Art as Technique” (yes, I know, I’m thirty years late to it) that it might have something to do with what he calls familiarization. Familiarization, in his definition, has to do with habit and how habit affects how we see or, more importantly, don’t see things. That is, if we look at the same thing over and over, looking becomes automatic, it becomes habit. And habit, he stated, renders us blind. I only have to ask myself the following questions to recognize how this applies to me. Did I vacuum the bedroom earlier today? Did it rain two days ago or was it yesterday? Did I kiss my husband goodbye? When did I move my desk to this particular wall and why is the wall painted blue? Which country invaded which other country today? In this way, habit devours work, clothes, furniture, my husband and friends, even, I suppose, the horror of war. The noise of living subsides and so too, I think, does my ability to locate its surprise. Of course then comes Shklovsky’s famous plea for art because he believed that art is the antidote. Art, and in particular poetry, exist so that the reader, the viewer may recover the sensation of life; art exists to make one re-see and re-feel things. To quote Shklovsky, art exists to make the stone again stony.

Yet, if the artist’s task is to defamiliarize the familiar, how does the artist himself or herself continually see the world new? How does the writer keep the world strange so that it can become visible to the reader? Because I think this question is at the heart of my particular problem. When I am in familiar surroundings, my favorite playlist rotating on the stereo, sitting in my Herman Miller ergonomically perfect office chair, my mind goes blank, my imagination deadens. I need to be, let’s face it, uncomfortable. At least if I want to write.

Yet oddly enough, while many of my poems take place or begin in Tel Aviv, Rome, Madrid, Lisbon, Chicago, etc., the subjects of the poems often end up being something else. Of course the images or events I encounter, unexpected and unsettling, appear in the poems—a Bernini fountain rebuilt, a dead bird on an Israeli beach, Barcelona graffiti. But apparently, judging by the finished products, what I really wanted to write about was more personal, often abstract, even ephemeral: love and loss, my desires and dislikes, and, often, my failures. I’m currently finishing a third manuscript and a sampling of poem titles underlines this kind of displaced examination: “Otherlife,” “Girl on Roman Holiday,” “The Past as Beautiful as I,” “Postcard from the Expedition,” and, perhaps most tellingly, “The City Is a Metaphor for Everything I Want.” To put all of this another way, if memory and self are the tenors of my poems, place is their vehicle. Grace Paley said in a 1986 interview: “You write from what you know, but you write into what you don’t know.” I love that quote, though I think for me it might be the opposite: I write from what I don’t know, but I write into what I do, or, anyway, I write into what I am trying to know.

So I suppose I have designed my perfect writing space. Unfortunately, it isn’t at home. It isn’t, in fact, often on the same continent. Of course, when I’m on the road I also have to admit that I don’t dust, I don’t clean the inside of the refrigerator, and I can go weeks without doing laundry.

Sarah Wetzel is the author of River Electric with Light (Red Hen Press, 2015), winner of the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize, and Bathsheba Transatlantic (Anhinga Press, 2010), winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Sarah teaches creative writing at The American University of Rome. She spends a lot of time on planes, dividing her time among Manhattan, Rome, and Tel Aviv. Sarah holds an engineering degree from Georgia Institute of Technology, an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College. Learn more at  sarahwetzel.com.

A Poetry Squawk
By Laura McCullough
Author of Jersey Mercy and Panic.

Robert Frost said that poetry is about grief and politics is about grievance, and yet we often come to our poetry with grievances, old and new, personal or global, and it is sometimes easier to speak of them than it is to dig into the underlying sources of grief. In therapeutic circles, I’ve heard it said that if you are angry, find out what it is that hurt you, what has made you sad. Yet it’s easier to speak of the former—the what-happeneds and the who-done-whats—the legitimate issues of loss and anger, and much harder to delve beyond the mere facts to craft poems lush with the weight of grief, the sadnesses, the sorrows. How do we write, not out of grievance, but from and toward grief? How do we transform our losses into art even as we, sometimes, still wrestle with healing ourselves?

Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” is much loved for many reasons, but one of them, I’d suggest, is that the voice of an adult reflecting on the grievances a son may have against a father ultimately goes beyond grievance to discover more complex aspects of love. The boy had grievances; the adult speaker has grief. It is what makes the last lines possible and so poignant, the movement from “no one thanked him” through “the chronic angers of that house” to “love’s austere and lonely offices.”

Another poem about parents and children, Tony Hoagland’s “Lucky,” is in the voice of an adult child dealing with an elderly parent moving, it seems, towards death, perhaps hospice, and the poem explores the change in power relations over a lifetime. The child the speaker was clearly had grievances; in some way, it seems, the parent was cruel or punishing when the boy was young. Now, she has become like a child, and the speaker, aware of his old anger,  is trying nevertheless to care for her. He mistreats her mildly—holding her newly bathed body in the air a little too long because he can—but also wants to feed her ice cream to please her when she has so few pleasures left. This is not a poem that lists the ways a mother might have failed; it is ultimately a poem about failing and forgiveness, about the difficulty—which is a grief—in relationships.

The poem “Quarantine,” by Eavan Boland, combines political and historical grievance (the Great Famine) with individual grief (a couple dying in the cold as they seek refuge). The heteronormative line “And what there is between a man and woman” really could be written, “And what there is between two people who love each other” (or some more beautiful rendering—I’m making a content point here) because the universal anguish applies to all couplings, even non-romantic ones. This could, for example, have been a parent and child in this horrific narrative. The power of the poem, however, is its movement from a political grievance (“the toxins of a whole history”) to a smaller personal (albeit anonymous) grief (“The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her”).

In closing, one last look at grievance and grief in poetry. Jamaal May offers a beautiful example of interrogating grievance and going headlong into grief and sorrow in his poem, “Sky Now Black With Birds”, which you can watch him perform on YouTube. May explores racial violence and its repercussions, the difference between revenge and justice, anger and restitution and what it means to be human. This was fertile territory for Homeric epic in ancient Greece, and remains so for poets today.

Laura McCullough is the author of The Wild Night Dress, selected by Billy Collins as a winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize and forthcoming in 2017 from the University of Arkansas Press. Recent books include the poetry collection Jersey Mercy (Black Lawrence Press) and A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race (University of Georgia Press). Her other books of poetry include Rigger Death & Hoist Another (Black Lawrence Press),  Panic (winner of the Kinereth Genseler Award from Alice James Books), Speech Acts (Black Lawrence Press), What Men Want (XOXOX Press), and The Dancing Bear (Open Book Press).  She edited The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn (University of Syracuse Press). She teaches at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, New Jersey and the Sierra Nevada low-residency MFA program. She is the founding editor of Mead: the Magazine of Literature and Libations. Learn more at lauramccullough.org.

A Poetry Squawk
By Jee Leong Koh
Author of Steep Tea and The Pillow Book

While feasting on poetry workshops at Sarah Lawrence College, for some reason I thought I should imbibe some science. The science faculty was giving lunchtime talks on a subject not in their field of specialization, in the name of continuous learning. These informal weekly seminars attracted a modest but devoted audience of about 20 people, not a bad showing for a small liberal arts college. The free pizza might have helped too.

It was either a physicist or a chemist who spoke about the spotted knapweed, a pioneer species introduced into the United States from Eastern Europe. She found the weed while working in her garden and went online to research it. I followed her lead. My search turned up State Department and university websites aimed at American farmers. The websites, with titles like “Idaho’s Noxious Weeds” or “Invasive Plants of Wisconsin,” were similarly organized: Description, Prevention, Management.

Having just emigrated to the States in order to come out as gay and a poet, I was sensitive to the characterization of the spotted knapweed as an alien threat to native plants. You might call me touchy. The language of the description, so eerily similar on all the sites, started me thinking about what makes a plant a crop and not a weed. Human needs, yes, food, clothing, shelter. But also cultivation, which necessarily implies human culture. The difference between weed and crop is, in a significant sense, a cultural distinction.

As I was writing a series of historical persona poems at that time (“The Grand Historian Makes a Virtue of Necessity,” “The Emperor’s Male Favorite Waits Up for Him,” “The Connoisseur Inspects the Boys” etc.), I tried to stuff the knapweed into the mouth of a straw man. The first stanza went like this:

An Immigration Official Speaks on Pest Control

The spotted knapweed has dispersed from ten
counties to three hundred and twenty-six,
reducing the bluebunch wheat
grass and re-routing the elks.
Thirty-five states index it an invader.

Overrun by the weed of excitement, I took the draft to my writing class. I also submitted it for critique at Poetry Free-for-all (PFFA), an online poetry workshop I had belonged to for some years. The draft was justly torn apart. Neither dramatic nor a monologue, it was, as Ted from PFFA nailed it, “a book report.” Its attempt at irony was self-righteously polemic.

A PFFA exercise stimulated an overhaul of this initial draft. Challenged to write a poem in a mixture of different styles, I thought of weaving a personal narrative through the knapweed rhetoric, in alternate stanzas. I did not merely want to put a face to the debate, as immigration advocates would say; I also wanted to speak of my desires—to write, to love, to take root—fierce desires that seemed to justify anti-immigration fears.

A narrative would also give a shape, a momentum, to the poem, in this instance, the momentum of a journey through lower Manhattan that climaxes in a reversal of stereotypes, in an Asian male sexually penetrating a white man. At the time of writing, I was only vaguely aware of what I know now: the men I want to top are men I really like, and so, the apparent act of possession is, for me, also one of surrender. The clues to this lay in the last three stanzas of my next big draft:

In the train’s electric lighting, he searches for Matt
in the young white men and loves each one. The train sings.
33^rd Street. He comes up for air, and wades
to the tower block. Stopped by a dark-suit,
he scribbles his name, number and address at the front desk.

Small populations can be uprooted. If not, spray Picloram
but not near streams. Experiments are on-going to determine if
bio-agents work. A species of seed-head attack flies seems promising.

He sees Matt hunkered down in his trench. He pulls
the fighter out of his chair, out of the white office, out of
sight, into the bathroom, and closes his sphincter-
mouth on his mouth. He works Matt’s belt loose and turns him
round. Matt puts a leg up on the china bowl. He grips
the shaft of Matt’s torso and plants his rice. This is also his farm.

The writing, like the sex, was still very, very rough, but the two different styles, highlighted by different stanza sizes, played off each other nicely. Having banged down the slats of the narrative, I then examined the selection of details. The knapweed stanzas still felt too prosaic and choked. The next thing that overran my field of attention was W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.” Also a poem that deploys two different styles, it accentuates the distinction through alternating two different stanza forms.

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities,
And shapes upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

The song measure in the first stanza orchestrates phrase and line, giving the story of Thetis and Hephaestus the appropriate classical grace and gravity. The second stanza depicting the modern world is written in iambic pentameter. The longer lines slow down the poem in order to convey a menacing dread. Though my poem was non-metrical, I thought I too could deploy shorter lines to lighten the knapweed stanzas. Shortening the lines required weeding the stanzas, a very good thing as it turned out. I reworked the tercets into quatrains, with one phrase to each line, and with a shift in the middle of the stanza, like that of Auden’s octaves. For instance, the first two knapweed stanzas:

The spotted knapweed has migrated to three hundred
and twenty-six counties, reducing the bluebunch wheat
grass and re-routing the elks. Forty states index it an invader.

The weed winters in a rosette of deeply lobed leaves.
You can identify it in summer by its pink to purple
blooms in stiff, black mottled bracts on stem tips.

were compressed in the revision into:

The spotted knapweed migrates fast,
decimating the bluebunch wheat grass.
You can identify it by its pink blooms
in black-mottled bracts on stem tips.

The stanza moves more quickly, at a speed suggestive of the weed’s dispersal, and of the speaker’s barely hidden panic. When I posted the revised poem at PFFA, romac agreed with Lola Two’s assessment that “the italicized conceit is carefully phrased (it could easily have lapsed into textbook prose) and effective. An excellent example of ironic illustration.”

Here’s the final poem, first published in Mimesis 1, and then collected in my book Equal to the Earth (Bench Press, 2013).

Taproot

His words desert him this morning for downtown Manhattan,
carrying briefcases, newspapers and coffee. They do not speak
to each other. They’re thinking of memos, faxes and phonecalls.
They do not look at him, a Chinese wetback waiting to be picked
for a day’s work. Tiny jaws gnaw at him and he wants Matt.

The spotted knapweed migrates fast,
decimating the bluebunch wheat grass.
You can identify it by its pink blooms
in black mottled bracts on stem tips.

He hurries past fat black women prodding snappers which gape
on beds of ice, past the row of crones blistering next to their red
talismans and Iching hexagrams, their faces cracked
like parched ground, past the old men hunched over their paper
chessboards, rolling a cannon across the river or retreating an elephant.

Small populations can be uprooted
by digging and pulling. If they’re established,
spray Picloram at point five pounds
per acre when the plant is a bud.

He passes a boy practicing a Yao Ming hookshot seen on TV,
two young men outside Kowloon Trading stacking empty crates
into a van, the New Land Arcade that squats a quarterblock
and catches the eye with its tall, electrified gold letterings,
and clones of knickknack shops that claim Little Italy.

The weed is not just hungrier. Its taproot
secretes catechin which triggers natives
to kill their own cells. It is not just lean,
as one scientist puts it, but mean.

He plunges, two steps at a time, into Canal Street Station.
In the car’s electric lighting, he looks for Matt
in the young white men and lurches into them. The train shrieks.
Fulton Street. The grid has crazed into a maze dead ended
by tower blocks, to be traced with the red thread of a previous visit.

Trials are being carried out
to determine if bioagents work.
The weevil is a candidate. A species
of seedhead gallflies looks promising.

He pulls Matt, word made flesh, out of his standard chair, out
of the office and its mite dusted carpet into the men’s and locks
their mouths. He works his man’s belt loose and turns him
round. Matt pulls his tan shirt over his head and arms. The tenant bends
over his white boy’s blue veined torso. This is also his farm.

Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet Press, 2015), named a Best Book of 2015 by the Financial Times, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His collection of zuihitsu, The Pillow Book (Math Paper Press, 2012), was shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize Nominee for English Poetry. A book of essays, which includes “Putting Down Taproot,” is forthcoming from Ethos Books.

By Jacob Hardt
HIV Here & Now Poet and visual artist

I’m thinking about shit today. About what’s about to happen to me. About who I am. I want to be strong and I am afraid. I guess I’m looking for courage inside my self…outside my self…. And I remember certain things about my life. I remember times I’ve been sick. I remember my body torn up with AIDS, not being able to feed myself, not being able to walk. I remember hospices and shingles and morphine pumps…. Terrible pain. I remember being shot at and beat with guns, bad drug deals and overdoses. Lying in the streets waiting to die…. Wanting to die. I remember…. Being alone feeling lost and hopeless and being used by people. Rape. I’ve been in some hard places. I think about God at these times. Who is he what is he…. Why…. And when is it over. All these times being so close to my end…. Yes there is…sadness. Profound sadness. But with it a tremendous feeling of peace believing it’s going to finally end.

I guess I’m thinking about the bigger picture…who am I? Who I’ve been….How the fuck I got through.

It’s so easy to get caught up in everyday bullshit, things that really don’t matter in the end. Am I sexy? Am I this? Why don’t I have that? Is easy to be consumed with stupid selfish shit. I can say that when death is close none of that matters.

What dose matter are little moments, flashes of life that meant something special. People you love, first kisses, most important to me…. Kindness and moments of grace, when people did selfless things for me…. And I think…What have I done within my time? How many flashes will I be for somebody else?

I couldn’t be farther away from those dark times today. My life is…I am…Safe. I have no intention of giving up. I am sad but…I’m ok.

Let me tell you why.

Along my path there have always been kind people doing and saying kind things. People loving me…when I didn’t know what love was…. I usually didn’t see it but it was there. Good was there. Most of the time I was too broken or lost to understand how much it meant when guys didn’t expect me to fuck around and were still helpful. I thought they were stupid, who doesn’t expect or want something from me? There were counselors and nurses, sponsors and case managers….

Somehow I’ve always seen life as wondrous and have always found everything interesting, beautiful. For as long as I remember, the stars and moon were my best friends and kept me alive in scary places.

I’m probably rambling …

I guess I want to tell people how much I love them. How much those little kindnesses mean to me. How they saved me.

I feel lucky, like I’m on the advanced course of life and God thinks I can handle the hardest lessons. I can. Honestly I’d be so much less me if I hadn’t been through so much. I see people miss what’s important every day. And to me they sparkle like diamonds. I know every little act of love had the potential to change somebody’s life. Even saying hi to a stranger can change the tone of my day. I know that all people have the same feelings. I know people aren’t ever better or worse than anybody else. There is no evil…. But there is broken. Lost. Loneliness. Selfishness. People do and say awful things because they can’t see beyond themselves.

Most important I know there’s hope for everybody and if you spend time helping make it better for them…You will be free.

Kindness is the ultimate grace.

Grace…. There’s my answer.

I am so glad to be alive

EDITOR’S NOTE: My friend Jake is beginning a prison sentence this week. I do not want to go into details here (to protect both his privacy and his safety). but I can assure you that Jake is a man of good works. The picture above was taken at a going-away picnic for Jake in Central Park last week. Each of the men and women in this picture loves Jake and believes in Jake.

Jacob Hardt was born in Grand Junction, Colorado, but grew up on Santa Monica Boulevard  in LA and Polk Street in San Francisco. Working with the AIDS Office of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Jacob spoke on behalf of the Wedge Program, the first HIV educational program in existence that brought people with AIDS into classrooms (the program ran form 1988 to 2002), and Health Initiatives for Youth (Hi-Fy), an agency that provides health workshops for at-risk youth throughout the San Francisco Bay Area (his poetry and photographs have appeared in Hi-Fy’s Reality Magazine). Jacob currently lives in New York City where he pursues writing, painting, and photography.

A Poetry Squawk
By Rosanna Oh
Whose recent work appears in The Harvard Review Online

My interest in family tropes and allegory in literature—especially Greek mythology, and the poetry of Whitman and Wordsworth—arose from my own personal experience. Before I gained any awareness of myself as an individual, I was conscious of my role as the eldest child in my Korean immigrant family. As such, I was expected to be a role model to my younger siblings and an ambassador. These were not duties that an adult should outgrow, as some of my American friends would have me believe, but lessons on love and compassion that have guided my life and writing.

My father loves to say, “If you bite a finger, the entire hand hurts.” My family of five saw itself as extensions of one another. Family meant putting another’s need first. Family meant absorbing another’s pain, not causing it. These lessons served us especially well as my brothers and I grew up at our family’s grocery store, which my parents had built from nothing.

There were long periods of time during my childhood when the hurt never seemed to cease. Working at a small family business constantly had its own challenges, but daily encounters with customers, who were mostly white and did not consider us to be a part of their world, constituted the most memorable rite of passage. I remember my parents’ reactions of frustration as much as the racism or ignorance that provoked them. And I remember still the confusion and pain I felt, as a witness and participant, that eventually moved me to poetry. Reliving those moments through writing allowed me to control some of the helplessness. I wrote almost exclusively in the first person; my emotions, my perspective, took priority.

It didn’t occur to me that writing about my family could mean, to return to my father’s metaphor, biting the hand that fed me until graduate school. A professor asked during a workshop of my poem, “Is the point ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’?” echoing Philip Larkin’s “This Be The Verse.” The subject of the poem in question was a childhood memory: a customer had said, “Give this garbage to your children,” while returning what he believed was a rotten mango to my father. Recognizing that it was ripe, I had asked my father if I could eat the fruit, but he had refused my request, and had eaten it himself. My professor interpreted this gesture as greed, which had not been my intention at all; rather, the act was one of self-sacrifice. Later, I saw the language that justified my professor’s reading, in which the narrator saw herself as a victim.

Writing gracefully about my family’s life at the store has been a challenge. Even now as I write, I am conscious of what I reveal of my family out of fear of being judged in a way that diminishes either them or myself. A friend once pointed out Louise Glück, a hero of mine, as a master of sublimating personal and familial suffering into art. “She can use that knife,” my friend argued, “because she turns the knife on herself.” Over and over, the narrators in Glück’s poems seem to speak with a prophet’s urgency to get at the truth, which is often devastatingly sharp. And they do so with such original language that the reader’s overall focus is on the craft rather than the lives whose voices ring from the pages.

After that conversation, I continued to write poems about the store. However, I made sure that the speaker was not only miserable, but also self-loathing and guilt-ridden because I believed that this winning trifecta of qualities would endear her to the audience. But even I grew sick of her. Is that all what families did—suffer? Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if everyone stopped suffering?

So the question I had to answer as a poet became: how do I remain true to suffering but rise above it? And I found the answer in the people who inspired my journey as a writer: my family. As I reworked my poems, I recalled the many moments of joy we had shared—around the dinner table or during a long night spent finishing orders at the store. I remembered the laughter that followed the arguments. These moments, despite their smallness, revealed generosity and spirit that allowed my poems to grow, and reach toward healing.

Rosanna Oh holds degrees from Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Review Online, Best New Poets, 32 Poems, Unsplendid, The Hopkins Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She also has received scholarships and awards from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and the Academy of American Poets. A proud Long Islander, she lives and writes in New York City.

A Poetry Squawk
By Julie Marie Wade
Author of Six and Catechism: A Love Story

I started spinning four years ago because, like most people, I benefit from robust, aerobic exercise— and because, like most writers, I need a way to be busy with my body so I can be free with my mind. For years, I have swum and run to cultivate the simultaneous effects of the physical endorphin rush and the mental field day. It is a perfect storm. I have designed classes this way. I have written books this way. I am writing this post this way right now.

Here’s what makes spinning so spectacular to me: It is a high-heart-rate, repetitive-motion activity that I can perform with my eyes closed. While lightning may force me out of the pool and flash-floods may force me off of the road, spinning is performed in dark, temperature-controlled spaces at fixed times on stationary equipment. In such spaces, I can embrace the paradox of going nowhere fast. There are no lane changes to consider, no traffic to watch out for, no onerous battles with the elements. It’s just me, on my bike, with the classic rock or the pop song blaring, and I find that my mind also is traveling at warp speed.

I think every writer needs something to do that isn’t writing, some way to get outside the writing self in order to appraise that self, its wants and needs, and in order to feed the important work that self is doing. For me, spinning has made possible the best and most essential ekstasis of my literary life. When I say spinning makes me ecstatic, I mean it in every sense of the word. I mean, while riding, I am displaced, I am entranced, and I am joyful.

Now spinning may not be your Something Else, but no doubt, as you find the portal to your preferred ecstatic exercise, the writer in you will not be able to avoid drawing certain parallels between that thing you do that is not writing and that thing you do that is. Inevitably, by way of analogy—and writers have been blessed and cursed with a great capacity for analogic thought—you will find yourself mulling over what kick-boxing or late-night driving or French cooking or Zumba class has in common with the art, the craft, the practice of creative writing. How are these two things—the writing and the not-writing—linked?

I don’t always spin with my eyes closed, and when they are open, adjusted to the dark, I am watching the rider in front of me or a rider at the front of the room. This isn’t an act of voyeurism; it is an act of emulation. When I started spinning at the Hollywood Y, I watched Maria. I had always told my students in workshop: “Find the writer in this room who is stronger than you are now, whose work is more controlled and muscular than your own. Then, silently but diligently, apprentice yourself to that writer.” With Maria, I was practicing what I teach.

Maria is a stronger spinner than I am: sleek in form, precise in movement, and prodigious in speed, even while climbing the steepest simulated hills. I admire the way she has learned to lift her body but retain her speed, even with the addition of the body’s weight. To come out of the saddle, as it’s called, is simple enough—a basic maneuver—but Maria knows how to elevate with advanced power and balance, overcoming even the extra turn of resistance so her legs never stall or falter, so she carries the seated momentum with her into second position or third.

I have learned to ride the way I read, the way I encourage my students also to read—as a perpetual apprentice to someone stronger. In this way, I have become an intermediate spinner. By analogy, I have become an emerging writer.

The lexicons of spinning and writing also dovetail nicely. In both practices, the words tension and cadence hold particular significance. Most anyone can sit on a bike and pedal, but without ever increasing the tension (by turning the resistance knob to the right), your muscles will never grow, your stamina never increase. It’s easy and effortless, but as a consequence, unrewarding. Likewise, most anyone can sit at a computer and type: this happened and then this and then this. But if there is no passion, no conflict, no wrench of desire or threat that desire might be thwarted, how will the writer, the reader, the character or speaker ever learn, ever stretch, ever grow?

Writers increase tension by turning as well. The volta is not just for poets and not just for sonnets. I think of the volta, each volta, as a turning point in the poem, essay, or story. I also think of the volta, each volta, as a diminutive of voltage. Science tells me that as the voltage (read energy) increases between two points (read plot points) separated by a specific distance (read narrative arc), the electrostatic field becomes more intense (read greater tension, read more at stake, read “turning up the heat”). Spinners sweat, and writers sweat, too. That’s how we know we’re doing it right. That’s how we know we’re working to capacity and expanding what that term means.

The cadence of a poem or work of prose refers to tempo. The same is true in spinning. Specifically, we do cadence counts to calculate our revolutions per minute, our rpms. When we simulate going uphill or downhill, riding on a flat road with a head wind or a tail wind, crossing over potholes or weaving through cones, we expect the cadence to be different. We expect variation in speed proportionate to variation in terrain: the gravel versus the concrete versus the turf. And don’t we expect, and indeed require, similar variation in writing? Consider the pace of a manifesto, a rant, an elegy, an ode. Consider the mad dash toward the climax of a story, then the ruminative decline of the dénouement. Also, consider how we modulate our literary pedal-strokes: with enjambments versus end-stopped lines, with stream-of-consciousness versus single-word sentences. The writer’s cadence count involves syllables, stressed and unstressed—the practice of scansion sometimes. Think of the caesura and the double space. Think how punctuation can throttle, and also paragraphs—where we indent or don’t, where we break or block the text.

What the writer calls imagination, the spinner calls simulation, but in both cases, a blank page and a plain floor must become a world—every bit as difficult and believable, mysterious and authentic as the World itself. The writer and the spinner are perpetual apprentices to real-world conditions—and to the most artful simulacra of those conditions—that the art, the craft, the practice can provide. In both cases, emulation is our most powerful teacher. We can only learn by doing, but we do best by attempting what we have witnessed before. The writing teacher says, “We must taste that madeleine along with Proust and trust it was really there.” The spinning teacher says, “We must feel the road beneath us and trust it is really there.” In both cases, the literal nowhere we are going must be a mythical somewhere the mind accepts and the heart receives as its own. Then, and only then, can the real work, the real sweat, begin.

Or, in other spells: Be busy. Be free. Watch, watch, watch—then close your eyes and see.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of four collections of poetry and four collections of prose, including the Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2016) and SIX: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2016), selected by C.D. Wright as the winner of the AROHO / To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. A recipient of an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship, a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami. She is married to Angie Griffin and lives in the Sunshine State. Find her at www.juliemariewade.net.