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Poems like Christmas windows
I recently had the privilege of introducing the poet Bruce Bond for a reading he gave here at the University of Missouri. I was excited to offer the introduction, as I’m quite a fan of his work. Bond, a former TMR contributor, has published six books of poetry, and I’m told four more are forthcoming in the near future.
Perhaps the thing I’m most attracted to in Bond’s work is his gift for the image. I was in a workshop last semester where we read through Coleridge’s major poems. Towards the end of the semester, someone asked whether similar elements of fantasy or magical realism ever occurred in contemporary poetry. We were all at a loss to think of many examples. (Of course there are journals like The Fairy Tale review that publish poems which could often be classified in this genre, but none of us could come up with any one poet whose work consistently took on the magical or fantastical as subject matter). However, it eventually occurred to me that we have something very close to magical realism in the well-wrought image or metaphor, which, in the world of its poem, transforms the ordinary into the fantastic. The poems that accomplish this, in fact, are among my favorites—the ones that imbue the mundane with mystery, making the commonplace both strange and wonderful for the reader.
This is just what happens in Bond’s poems: the tap “drips like tiny hooves,” breath is transformed to “a car radio entering a tunnel,” birds over a crematorium are “a flock of needles,/ closing a rip in the sky’s cloth.” There is real pleasure in reading these poems. Partly this pleasure is the delight of the surprise itself. Reading his poems reminds me of the winter I spent in Paris as a college student when, around Christmas time, I stood outside of the Printemps department store with a crowd of children (and childlike adults) while the paper coverings were peeled back from each of the store’s window displays, revealing a series of enchanted microcosms: a flock of dancing ostriches, a gift-laden sleigh, a winter feast.
But beyond the surprising turns in Bond’s language, I also value the thing that such imagery accomplishes. It refuses to let us take anything for granted. Opening our vision to a world beyond the one in which we see only surfaces, it asks us to feel afresh, to approach experience—whether that of wonder or loss, curiosity or disappointment—with increased sensitivity. In an interview, Bond said that “art redeems us, redeems the moment, in part because it transfigures suffering.” Such transformations of suffering are essential to what I most admire in Bond’s poems. In “Wake,” one of the poems he read while he was here, the poem’s speaker describes his father on the cusp of death, his body already mostly “shut/ down like small cities when the power goes,/ just the enormity of starlight to guide them.” Like the small cities, the father’s body is vulnerable, stripped of its familiar controls, defenseless against the “enormity” of death. Of course this enormity is also the enormity of the unknown, of the “mystery”—as we later read—of that which lies beyond death’s threshold. The speaker stands at the threshold of something large as well, facing “the other half of life/ the part without [his] father in it.”
Christmas Windows
As readers, we understand the depth of that loss; either we have already crossed into that other half of life ourselves, or else the poem reminds us that one day we will. Here loss is registered, movingly, in the small things, an example of how something as unwieldy as grief is often experienced most keenly through the minutia of the everyday: a smell, a familiar food, a certain figure of speech—or as the poem offers, the memory of bacon crackling “like paper at Christmas,” a father knocking at his son’s door to wake him.
The poem tells us that “The living too leave their ghosts behind.” In his father’s absence of speech now, the son hears the ghost of the father’s knocking and that former, familiar summons. Just as the he was once, unwillingly, made to rise and leave the comfort of sleep, the speaker recognizes that he must, at this new threshold, relinquish the comfort of a father’s presence. In a reversal, it is the son who accepts that “it’s time,” for the father to leave—we have the sense of a release, a letting go of the father, when he speaks those words that were once spoken to him: “it’s time to go, it’s time.”
Earlier I spoke of transformations that occur in Bond’s poems. I should also add that in a poem in which loss is so skillfully rendered, the reader herself is transformed, even as she is moved. Bond may have put it best in his artist’s statement for an NEA feature when, speaking about the kind of poetry he is attracted to he also, I believe, characterizes the kinds of poems he writes: “work which achieves its evocative shimmer, its sense of multiplicity, urgency, and dynamism, from a memorable music and a rich layering of correspondences…In such poems it seems that language is determining itself at times, that it holds the torch, deepening our investments, opening up our range of thought and feeling, our sense of who we are and what we may become.”
Claire McQuerry is the Contest Editor of The Missouri Review.
Easy Victories
More good news from a recent contributor to TMR!
Scott Coffel‘s poems appeared in TMR 31.2, our summer 2008 issue. In the introduction to his poems, Scott wrote “poetry should resist easy victories or the siren songs of self-improvement.” So he knows that getting his first book of poems, Toucans in the Arctic, published last years was not a small accomplishment.
Even better, the Poetry Society of America has just awarded Scott’s collection the 2010 Norma Farber First Book Award. This is a terrific honor given to a first book of original poetry.
Congratulations, Scott!
You may purchase Scott’s book at Amazon or purchase the summer 2008 issue of The Missouri Review.
Why Audio?
Last week, as I edited one of the final audio recordings of the current issue of TMR, I remembered why I love audio so much. Usually, I contact the vocal talent, I’m at the recording session, or I’m editing some portion of the piece myself. When I was out of town in December, one of our interns, Jackie, had done the entire production for “The Way I Saw the World Then” by Elise Juska, which was read by Meg Philips, and I got to enjoy listening from start to finish.
This is why I love audio, why audio recordings of literature matter: it’s about storytelling. I love having stories read to me, where it’s just me and the voice of the reader, as if we were sitting together in a corner, away from the rest of the world and its worries.
My world, like yours I’m sure, has lots of worries. So, as a small remedy, I offer one of my favorite recordings–Brian Swann’s poetry feature from 32.3, our recent issue on Demons.
Concrete Poetry 2.0
There’s been some buzz in recently among tech circles about a new presentation system called Prezi. The idea behind Prezi is to construct presentations not around a series of slides, but rather in the form of a single huge map (reminiscent of a brainstorming “mind-map”) that navigate around, zooming in to individual images or items of text. It sounds unremarkable, but the effect is quite striking when you look at a sample, such as this design portfolio. This “deep zooming” navigation approach is not entirely new — others have been working on similar projects (such as Microsoft’s SeaDragon) and I suspect we’ll be seeing more implementations of this kind of information design over the next couple of years.
But in the meantime, Prezi struck me as a great tool for poets to experiment with in constructing a different kind of “hypertext” poetry. Prezi has the virtue of preserving a fixed textual structure (unlike dynamically generated or “interactive” online poems), while creating opportunities for very different kinds of essentially typographical effects — though the “deep zooming” enables the ability to experiment with scale in ways that would be impossible in print publishing.
You can sign up for a free Prezi account that gives you access to most of its vital features. If any of our readers develop any (perhaps even the first — I haven’t found any yet!) Prezi poems, please link to them in the comments thread for this post: we’d love to see what you come up with.
Craig Arnold Blog
For those of you following the ongoing search for Craig Arnold, the American poet who disappeared earlier this week while researching volcanoes in Japan, you may find his blog, The Volcano Pilgrim, of interest. Last updated April 26, just before he went missing, he describes his surroundings with a poet’s eye and clearly capture’s the feel of the remote Japanese island.
Turn Out The Bright Lights
Originally, I planned on writing some sort of Monday morning essay about The Missouri Review’s 4th annual audio competition. Which is important and you should enter (really!). But all week, I’ve been chewing over ideas that are, I think, related to our auditory experiences, and wanted to write about something I experienced last week that actually has a link with our audio competition. Just maybe, this post will come together in some sort of cohesive way. Maybe.
Last week, Orr Street Studios, located here in downtown Columbia, hosted two readers for their (mostly) weekly art series, Seeing Visions/Hearing Voices. On the docket were my friends John Nieves and Amina Gautier. John is a doctoral student here at Mizzou, and his poems have appeared in a slew of places, including Redivider, Fugue, Adirondack Review, California Quarterly and Florida Review. Amina is the most recent winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award and her story collection, At-Risk, is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press in September. More than sixty of her stories have been published, appearing in Antioch Review, Best African American Fiction, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Pleiades and Southern Review. Amina’s work has been honored with scholarships and fellowships from places like the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. Basically, it rocked.
(Which makes the fact that I was twenty minutes late even more embarrassing. I am always late to the Orr Street readings. I have no idea why. There was, however, plenty of time for Amina to flaunt the Lakers Game 7 win over the Celtics in my face. So I had that going for me).
Even stranger: Amina literally knocked the lights out. Twice.
Really! I think there was something goofy going on with the motion sensors or something, but yes, twice during her reading, Amina blew the lights out, something that she can proudly tell everyone for the rest of her life. Weirdly, if this had happened during the last scene of the story she read – “Been Meaning To Say”, which originally appeared in Southwest Review – it actually would have been appropriate (no, I won’t spoil it for you).
I would imagine that most of the readers of this blog have attended readings at least once, if not fairly frequently. One of the things that made the Orr Street reading wonderful was that I was listening to not just writers, but friends. Knowing how much effort Amina and John put into their work, how long it took them to get to this point with their poetry and stories, made the listening experience all the more delightful. A personal connection, a sense of intimacy with the writer’s process, the constant happiness creeping into your smile because you are witnessing the success of friends – their art out there in the world and expereinced live – made the reading all the more enjoyable.
Then there is the other thing: actually being a good reader. Amina and John delivered there, too.
What makes a good reading? Tough question. There’s actually much more to it than just the written word. I’m blown away by how frequently writers will stand up and not tell the audience “Hey, thanks for coming out tonight” or something simple like that. How often the reader will not notice the way the audience responds to the work. Haven’t you ever felt a reader lose his or her audience? The room gets too still; there’s an impatient politeness to the way we refuse to move or rustle; heads turn away, downward, minds on what to pick up from the grocery store on the way home. Even when I first started going to readings, I could sense when a reader lost the room. I figured this was rare: in fact, it’s far too common.
The poet Adrian Matejka was recently thinking about this, too: what about the etiquette of the public reading? Among other things kicked around was the poet beginning with reading a single poem by someone else; readers taking two minutes post-reading to be gracious and say hello to the strangers who come up and say thanks; and not hurrying off to the bar (and out the door) too quickly. What Adrian is curious about, I think, is the sense of the public reading not being such a one-way experience, but a collective experience of art and literature.
N+1 has famously blasted readings as incredibly boring. Sadly, I do partially agree: many readings are, in fact, quite mediocre. They certainly don’t have to be. Writers don’t know how else to promote ourselves, and the public reading seems to be a tradition that we just don’t think much about anymore: why do it, what is its purpose, and so forth. But I’m not ready to give up on them. A few years ago at Washington University, I heard Edward Jones read from his collection All Aunt Hagar’s Children. He seemed a shy man uncomfortable in public; his shoulders sloped and his eyes focused on the floor, saying very little when not behind a microphone. His reading? One of the fiercest and most visceral readings I have ever heard. He absolutely blew us away, metaphorically blew the lights out with this commanding, clear, beautiful voice that reverberated all the violence, tension, intrigue, and danger of the story he read. He took 45 minutes. He could have taken 45 days. No one in the audience would have minded at all.
Voices reveal. Voices reveal character, authority, confidence, charm, humor; voices give the story and the poems another element, an extra thing (joy? play?) that we go to public performances to experience. The best readers, the Aminas and Johns and Adrians of the literary world, know this. Even knowing it, when it works, when it really works, when the reading is that fantastic, we as readers – and listeners – are all the more grateful.
Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review