Thoughts on Ewa Lipska

1.

Ewa Lipska is usually considered a Polish poet. She was born in Krakow in 1945. She won the Koscielski Prize (1973), the Polish PEN Club prize (1992) and the Jurzykowski Foundation Prize (1993). Currently, she lives between Krakow and Vienna.

“Much of her work emerges out of the events of World War II, and interrogates social and political issues with a skeptical surrealism. Her most recent volumes—1999, Sklepy Zoologiczne (Pet Shops), Ja (I), Gdzie Indziej(Somewhere Else), and Drzazga (Splinter, 2006)—are influenced in particular by her friendships with Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal.” [Words Without Borders]

2.

What I love about Lipska is her sensibility, the way she wants to let history make her cynical, and yet somehow the avenue of the poem, the motion itself, undercuts the cynicism. Lipska was close to Szymborska and Wiesenthal—she shares a birthplace, a certain sensibility—but sees herself as unaffiliated with any school or national boundary. Her rejection of nationalism is linked to the belief that art depends on fidelity to authentic experience rather than virtue signals.

In “Preface: The Absurdity of Beauty,” found at the beginning of A New Century (Northwestern University Press, 2009), Lipska asks if the poet who witnesses something terrible is allowed to "describe what took place so unexpectedly"--and how? Must it be a dictation of facts or a recreation of aura? Recounting an accident, the witness of it, Lipska attempts to discern the poet’s role in "the dictatorship of the moment" when "things conjoined irrevocably, a terror of fate and coincidence":

“May a poet take advantage of fate in such a situation and describe everything that took place so unexpectedly and suddenly? May he or she dictate to a typist the defenseless facts, add some details, empathize with the victim? To die on a sheet of paper playing the main part, at the same time avoiding compassion that leads to the inevitable corrosion of words? Whom to be in such a situation? An onlooker, a stray wanderer, an agitator? Can you hear the fear and uncertainty when I bend my head over a sheet of paper?”

This understanding of the poet as both riddle-maker and truth-seeker recurs in Lipska’s poetry, challenging the quality of reported truth or eyewitness accounts, revealing a less solid ontology than we might wish at a time when fake news costs so much.

3.

In “Four Notes on Ewa Lipska’s Poems,” Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska notes that Lipska “deeply mistrusts wena, a Polish term used mainly in highbrow literature” to describe moments of insight or revelation. For the poet, wena is just the vein carrying blood—it is neither god nor collective pronoun; neither kingdom nor nation. So what matters to the poet, if not the nation or the ego? Nowakowska says:

“Since artists mostly suffer from hubris and bravado, art does not matter much, unlike love, which is the most important factor conditioning human life and endowing it with meaning.”

Nowakowska also cites the recurrence of fate as a powerful mocking force in Lipska’s poetry, and I think this is true, but I also feel like Lipska’s focus on helplessness isn’t fatalism, or a worship of fatalist systems and their associated determinisms, but a general bow to uncertainty—to the reality of things happening outside our plans, systems, and social sciences.

4.

“Although Lipska is sometimes considered as part of the "New Wave" group of the 1970s, she distances herself from such associations, preferring to operate autonomously. Over the years, her mistrust of the language of her daily surroundings, for her a language of masks and lies, has grown. In response, Lipska has developed an inverted language, which is confrontational and frequently ominous. Her poems are lucid, and in few words, she puts forth her own reality with gentle irony. Fascinated by human behaviour, she strips away the false meaning of words…” [Poetry International]

According to Robin Davidson, Ewa Lipska describes her poetry as a sort of "skeptical surrealism, meaning she calls into question even the surrealists’ claim that images are purified of social or political motive, for any system of art may give rise to a fascist aesthetic.”

This irreverence for systems plays out in a sort of hermeticism, a gaze which looks forward while also looking back, a sort of historical rubber-necking gesture which loosens temporality in her poems. Her use of cliches in poetry--her rupturing of them to forge an individual voice--reclaims language from ruins somehow. 

What does Lipska do at the level of the line? What part of her work fascinates me? A few short comments, acknowledging that I do not know Polish, and so my thoughts on translation and poetics are limited by this formal constraint.

She mobilizes the energy of the short couplet and tercet with impeccable images and metaphors. This is fairly constant in her work, and I study the brisk syntax of her lines like butter on bread in a terrible forest.

She begins a poem in the key of refusenik, as in from “No One” translated by Robin Davidson & Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska:

I agree to this landscape
which does not exist.

She interiorizes images associated with revolution, and lets them be altered by the motion into the body, as in “The New Century”:

We speak to each other in fireworks.
A groggy noun in the mouth.

She embraces the faux-pas of referring back to the title and explaining it in the final breaths of a poem—which, I have been told, is an amateur move in contemporary American poetics. See, for example, from “Number One”:

And so what
when love
a twig brushed by the wind
is always Number One
and leans toward us.

She ends the poem, “A Juicer,” in a single-word stanza with a period: “Yes.”

She works diaphoric metaphors for memory so well, so carefully, resisting simple equivocations, as one sees in “A Splinter” translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska:

Problems begin
with a splinter lodged in memory.

It is hard to remove it
much harder to describe.

Wood shavings fly. The apple cores of angels.
Dust up to the heavens.

She flexes the short poem’s form in ways that both suggest cliche and undermine it. Here is the entirety of “Indiscretion” as translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska:

Had she busied herself in time
with the systematic counting
of ship screws
it would not have come to this—
indecent acts of poetry.

She reexamines the idea of inheritance in the context of a barbaric European history—by dragging images through the poem, linking them to motions, anchoring them in dust—as one sees in “Helplessness.”

She brings divinity down to the earth of concurrent disasters which most gods and monsters want to stay above, as the longer poem, “Newton’s Orange”:

Now everything has become clearer.

God has admitted
to being only human.

5.

And yet I find some translations of Lipska preferable to others—for the way in which the seam of the poem is split. For example, “The Smells of Evil” translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska, keeps this critical couplet:

The valedictorian of the unenlightened star
gazing into the sky of hypocrisy.

But other parts of this translation feel less realized, less lush in their barrenness, than the translation by Susan Bassnett and Piotr Kuhiwczak shared below.

And here’s another Lipska poem by the same translators (which I found in my typed notes and need to source properly)…..

6.

And here’s Lipska’s “Dictation” in its entirety, with my clumsy apology for not being sure which translation this might be that I scribbled into my notebook…. Although many of her poems feel ars-like, “Dictation” does so on multiple levels, including the title—and I think this makes sense to anyone from former Eastern Bloc countries.

7.

And here is me, realizing my kids haven’t had lunch, and wanting to write more but also to end, to end, to end with Lipska’s words from the preface to A New Century, because they are instructive somehow—they speak both to our hunger for belonging and all the desperate, dehumanizing ideologies humans support in order to feel themselves part of something, kindred to a larger group of meaning and existence.

"The boundaries of the soul and the boundaries of countries do not overlap."

8.

2001

translated by Robin Davidson and by Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska

2001, dear Mrs. Schubert, is not only the beginning
of the new century, but also the number of my imagination.
As you know, for some time now my fiction
has resented my flirting with reality,
consorting with useless time.
I therefore inform you that the dead season is coming,
which, as usual, I am spending
on the short-term list of missing persons.

Lit mag cento: The Florida Review Vol. 43, No. 1

I expected the darkness
mid-revision, full of hints and pretty visions
fire-singed and thinned.
Whoever said getting older
to clear what can’t be cleared. I’ve started drinking
draining one thing, filling another, sometimes
the bullfrogs. No one keeps score
but the winners know—I touched
her pinkest helmet for luck.
And the warp of shadow.

I mean the tender
for you to take home, for you to
feel known and divided by fifty-six
millioned panes more and
there’s more that’s the formless
from the mind’s mud-gas
gushing like lust from the tank. I’ve dug
in the terroir-based knowledge,
like mass: all ritual & communion.
Outside, the sky, a soi-distant
dickhead before the walls of Jericho
and the warp of shadow.

[Amanda Hawkins, Dylan Weir, Lillo Way, Lyn Lifshin, Nicole Stockburger, Owen McLeod, David Rivard, Gerry LaFemina, David Rivard, Carl Dennis

Amanda Hawkins, Dylan Weir, Lillo Way, Lyn Lifshin, Nicole Stockburger, Owen McLeod, David Rivard, Gerry LaFemina, David Rivard, Carl Dennis]

21 ways to end a poem or leave your lover

1.

With a final action that echoes outside the poem, a closure with sensual details that stick to the skull and stay in the room. I think of how Mary Ruefle ends "Lightly, Very Lightly" with this picture of a woman listening to the slow tick of a clock hidden inside a drawer, a mysterious count-down that is both intimate and unexplained:

somewhere the lady of the house
puts the alarm clock in a drawer
where she cannot hear it
then tells the children to be quiet
and stands there listening
to its tick.

2.

With an image that undermines a prior assertion or statement, thus casting doubt over everything you promised. Deborah Digges ends "The Wind Blows Through the Doors Of My Heart" with the invitation of "quiet, a quilt spread on soil", followed by the statement:

But we will never lie down again.

A poem that sets up this image of a peaceful quilt, a respite, and then denies access.

3.

With a statement that circles back around to the poem's first tentative breath while amplifying the pressure of that breath until you wince. The fingernails have been pressing into your palm the whole time and you didn't realize it. How could you have known Minne Bruce Pratt would leave you with:

The poem as the locked room.

(See "The Relation Between Words and People: After KR Rilke", American Poetry Review.)

4.

With a short question that is answered in a fashion that echolocutes its way through the poem. I'm thinking of complex, numinous way in Kayleb Rae Candrilli ends the lengthy, three-column poem titled “You've Heard This Before, The Only Way Out Is Through" with: 

there is a razor in the apple
and the apple is the earth. Listen,
my nightmares are dreams in which
everyone walks in the same direction--
that rhythmic lockstep. Both of my
grandmothers considered abortion.
And can you imagine?
Being so close to nothing?

5.

With an inclusive question that invites the reader in deeper, as in Aimee Nezhukumatahil's sonnet, "Naming the Heartbeats", which ends in this expansive “we “ that binds the reader's reverie to the speaker’s:

And what is the name for movement we make when
we wake, swiping hand or claw or wing across our face, like trying
to remember a path or a river we've only visited in our dreams?

6.

With a powerful image that reinforces or weaves together previous images in the poem. I’m thinking of the sonic boom that ends Wanda Coleman’s “Etheridge,” and how last line’s image—and the action in this image—feels like a speech-act or a sound-act or a space between the flesh and the portrait, and how sacredness inhabits this image by offering a subversive iconography that leans (loosely) on biblical lexicons:

he kissed the reefer burning his thief’s fingers
leaned against that bitcoin’ hood and blimped the itch

his blaze interrupted the sermon and singed and singed the robes

7.

With a pivot word (or words) whose re-definition that brackets the conflict in the poem by flipping it, fleshing-out the synonyms intimately. As in synonyms for what touches us become intimacy. I'm thinking of what Jericho Brown does at the end of "Hero" with black and dark, and how it refers back to gratitude. Starting with the sixth line of this poem because it what Brown does is incredible:

I am most interested in people who declare gratitude
For their childhood beatings. None of them took what my mother gave,
Waking us for school with sharp slaps to our bare thighs.
That side of the family is darker. I should be grateful. So I will be—
No one on earth knows how many abortions happened
Before a woman risked her freedom by giving that risk a name, 
By taking it to breast. I don’t know why I am alive now
That I still cannot impress the woman who whipped me 
Into being. I turned my mother into a grandmother. She thanks me 
By kissing my sons. Gratitude is black—
Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death.
Thank God. It can’t get much darker than that.

8.

Ending with an I statement that repositions the poem's direction. The poem plods along and then turns, ending in a strange action with repositions the narrator or the subject in an interesting way. It alters the light of the poem. I’m thinking of Gerald Stern’s “The Far Edge of Kilmer,” which ends with a statement:

I am holding open the burnt door.

Or Johanne Dubrow’s ending of a poem with “I hold this punctured story to the light.” Notice how the 'I' statements assert something about the future as related to the present, and engage the use of poetry itself. Often this sort of ending can have a metaphysical touch; there is a sense of mystery opened in action which makes the closing feel less like closure.

9.

With a question that affirms the value of uncertainty. Mary Oliver's poem, "How Would You Live Then?", is composed entirely of questions from start to finish. She ends on a question that underscores the sense of wonder in both tone and form:

What if you finally saw
that the sunflowers, turning toward the sun all day,
and every day--who knows how, but they do it--were
more precious, more meaningful than gold?

10.

With a prophetic statement, repeated for emphasis. The way Czeslaw Milosz ends his "A Song On the End of the World" (as translated by his son, Anthony Milosz) makes the repetition feel like a doubling, not quite a repetition so much as an enlargement of the space in which the first admonition operated:

There will be no other end of the world.
There will be no other end of the world.

11.

With an object that comes to mind after various verbal acts of refusal. In a poem about refusing. Practice saying NO at different pitches. In different places. With different props. Insist with Anne Boyer that you are "Not Writing". Or not missing. Or not overwatering the flowers in an urge to save the world. Develop a rich tapestry of no's that you can't resist. Aim for the most irresistible no you can manage, and give it texture, sonics, beat, passion, lyric. The most magic no. Learn from Anne Boyer's "No". But end with an evocative (and solid) object.

12.

In a liminal, haunted space that re-visions the skeletal. See: leaves disembodied by dusk. There are no bodies between shades of light, in the space inter day and night. And yet this space is less liminal than that of the cardboard flower hatbox on the top shelf of the closet. Ghosts. Every poet needs one to have the last word. Once. I feel like what I mean to suggest here is cryptic. And there is something very odd about quoting the crypt, so I won’t.

13.

With a couplet of doubled metaphors, especially if the lines enact a light parallelism by beginning with the same word or article. I’m think of Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Daily”, which ends so beautifully (I can’t even talk):

The days are nouns: touch them The hands are churches that worship the world

14.

With the title of a painting or an opera or a musical composition. Zach Savich does this in his prose poem, "Chestnut City", which ends the first stanza with a quote from Cocteau and then ends the second stanza--and the poem--with the title of a painting:

Could go to sleep in the bushes and wake and it will be like a fairy tale only nothing will 
change. "Path Before the Bride Appears."

15.

With a culmination, an escalating crescendo effect. See Deborah Digges' "To Science", in which the extended metaphor climbs, spirals, and culminates in a sort of evasive conclusion:

for nothing. Just thinking of your hands
I can go wet, or dreaming, come
in my sleep, and wake to a day
in which all men are liars, wearing clothes.

16.

 With an ending that explains or qualifies the title. This is a motion that swerves back around and returns to the beginning. It usually requires a title abstract enough to demand unpacking. For example, Heather McHugh's "Meantime" suggests a sort of time; it begins in the past tense to describe 'how things were', which it does for three stanzas before ending in a single-word, separated, set apart:

thirteen.

This word converses with "Meantime," and expands on the temporality (not to mention that it packs the power of a two-syllable last line, alone, revelatory.)

17.

Ending in exclamation or ecstasy. How Gerald Stern ends “The Dancing” with a sort of exhalation, a creative and spiritual breath related to the invocation of deity:

oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

The dissimilarity of the words wild and mercy do so much to heighten this effect.

18.

 With a precise, complicated simile. I love how L. Eric Greinke ends “SONNET XI. Even as the poem bends” (from his Sonnets for Ted Berrigan) with a precise and complicated simile:

Like your thighs upon the sheet.

19.

With a command or imperative, instructing the reader (or the You) to do something. I’m thinking of Sharon Olds in “I Go Back to May 1937,” where the final line shifts the stakes and alters the emotional valence into a sort of wistfulness:

I want to live. I   
take them up like the male and female   
paper dolls and bang them together   
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell you about it.

There is no closure because the next action depends on something external to the poem, namely, the You. I feel like Louise Gluck uses this strategy often, and it creates suspense or mystery which hinges on implication.

20.

With gorgeous alliteration and maybe ellipses. Even though ellipses seem to be on the wane, I know a few editors miss them. And some poets have made them magnificent; have used them in ways that change the breath at the end of the poem, or even change what we allow ourselves to have received from it. I’m thinking of how Gwendolyn Brooks ends “Jessie Mitchell’s Mother” with this sequence of slant end-rhymes and then the alliteration in the last line followed by ellipses:

Forced perfume into old petals, pulled up the droop,   
Refueled
Triumphant long-exhaled breaths.
Her exquisite yellow youth . . 

21.

With a last line composed of monosyllabic words that change the speed and motion of the poem by sharpening it. I’m thinking of Louise Bogan’s “Women,” which ends:

As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.

Lit Mag Cento: Five Points, Volume 18, No. 2.

Cento from Five Points Vol. 18 No. 2

What is devotion?

Me here. You there.
The crockpot squatting

between us, the unspoken building up
in the rooms. There was

infinite suffering.
It had three minutes each
to describe itself

toeing into the light.
Many wept. I settled

for detachment,
leave roses at your feet;

loam and that Alabama clay, that hymn
that one can taste and not become

vigilant in retreat. Why think
of any of this now

you are so often silent,
lured from a cover of seafoam

like half-dressed game:
a single country dove

swearing it
is hope

[Elizabeth Spires, Elizabeth Spires, Adam Vines, Jeffrey Harrison, Kate Daniels, Kate Daniels, Adam Vines, Kate Daniels, Elizabeth Spires, Adam Vines, Gregory Frazer, Chelsea Rathburn, Elizabeth Spires, R. T. Smith, Gregory Frazer, R.T. Smith, Adam Vines, R. T. Smith, Gregory Frazer]

This is a part of a series of centos in tribute to lit mags I have to give away for lack of space. I wanted to imagine these poets in a room (though not limited to a stanza) and put the poems in each issue in dialogue with one another as a way to save what touched me. Formally, for the most part, I have kept the poets’ original line breaks.

You can support this journal by subscribing and sharing their work.

Lit Mag Cento: 32 Poems, Fall/Winter 2018

Some say no one can predict the rain.

In every interval is an archive,
or a revolved named after a snake
you notice only when you look away.

Of God’s determination to keep quiet,
it’s the garden spider who eats her mistakes.

That bird I thought was an insect was a bird
watching you being then, just then:
the surface pines and a damp June wind.

Bell-skirted, ruffled, pouf-sleeved
I overthink therefore I overam
this tempered halt,
its alien script across the sky,
the version of me you love is only
patched.

Unfilled wolf,
take yourself out of some context, an A sharp as
piecework.

Night:
come back.

I just like having someone there in the dark
and confetti, with torn moonlit
spinnerets,
shivering.

[Laura Sabbott Ross, Makalini Bandele, Hailey Leithauser, James Davis May, Eric McHenry, Traci Brimhall, Alessandra Lynch, Robin Myers, Emma Hine, Anya Silver, Eric McHenry, Robin Myer, T. J. McElmore, Emma Hine, Bobby C. Rogers,, Hailey Leithauser, Makalini Bandele, Bobby C. Rogers, Gina Franco, Bobby C. Rogers, Michael Bazzett, Hailey Leithauser, Amit Majmudar, Robin Myer]

This is a part of a series of centos in tribute to lit mags I have to give away for lack of space. I wanted to imagine these poets in a room (though not limited to a stanza) and put the poems in each issue in dialogue with one another as a way to save what touched me. Formally, for the most part, I have kept the poets’ original line breaks.

You can support this journal by subscribing and sharing their work.

Lit Mag Cento: Gulf Coast Fall 2017

Sometimes I find myself huddling
orchid-shaped,
in the one patch of soft, something
masculine
in the kettle of my chest.

I am sometimes
the knife singing an older song
falling between the walls. It is the dead,

this butter grip on the dark,
the distant self
like a daughter
too loud.

And neon carrot.
Powerslam. Chokehold.
The still-tender.

What I mean is once I was a boy
something
masculine 
in parks strewn with heads of rubbled statues,
coo-cooing

coo-cooing
is a kind of possession.

Waiting to be identified,
I wanted to know everything
about suffering,
an insect, its interior,
and who walks over blood and then knocks.

[Nicholas Wong, Jayson P. Smith, Sarah M. C. Baugh, Roberta Iannamico trans. by Alexis Almeida, John Gosslee, Jayson P. Smith, sam sax, Nicholas Wong, Sarah M. C. Baugh, Leila Chatti, Catherine Brasner, C. McAllister Williams, Sarah M.C. Baugh, sam sax, Roberta Iannamico trans. by Alexis Almeida, Philip Metres, Celia Bland, Celia Bland, sam sax, Rosemary Kitchen, Leila Chatti, Mitchell Jacobs, Kyle G. Dargan]

This is a part of a series of centos in tribute to lit mags I have to give away for lack of space. I wanted to imagine these poets in a room (though not limited to a stanza) and put the poems in each issue in dialogue with one another as a way to save what touched me. Formally, for the most part, I have kept the poets’ original line breaks.

You can support this journal by subscribing and sharing their work.

A time for epistolary forms among writers

Dear Erin, I’ve been thinking about what I would add to the list and I realized that being alone in my head and cut off from community begs for epistolary. The thing about anxiety is how it perches in the throat and then feels like a cobweb, the way it mimics symptoms of infectious diseases. It’s not a bird with feathers that perches in the soul—it’s a poacher that waits for the perfect target.

Dear Danielle, Your chapbook is blowing me away. I am so grateful for your existence and your words and the digital cosmos that tangled our paths. I am reading you every day and finding new winged things that taste of freedom.

Dear editors and staff of journals who nominated me for Pushcarts this year, you make every single rejection bearable. There will never be a way to thank you enough for believing in my writing or my words or my voice or whatever is believable about this girl who sometimes hardly believes herself and the fact of her own existence.

Dear Pidgeonholes Team, Thank you for working tirelessly to promote and support and publish writers. Thank you for all the things I have learned (and keep learning) about the challenges of editing a literary magazine, and the multiple balancing acts and considerations that go into decisions. Thank you for inspiring me and teaching me and letting me be a part of something beautiful that I value deeply.

Dear Robert Musil, I am still fascinated by you. I’m not sure you deserve this by which I mean time is so fleeting and you have a way of destroying it with your sentence structure—not to mention ethics entering every single reading decision of the pandemic-shortened daze. But living in the US and knowing how easy It is to reject complicity for our actions in the rest of the world, I feel I still need to read you in every possible translation of avoidance.

Dear Cockroach Who Saw Me Naked This Morning, I am so glad you were there. I am so glad we got to share that moment of silence and slight disgust together. I know where you hid and I won’t tell a soul.

Dear Noemi Press, I am so glad I got a subscription to your books this year. As a result, my poetics has been rocked, rattled, and reshaped by the incredible writers you publish. I needed that. I am still crawling through the aftermath.

Dear Louie, thank you for being a light in small tunnels.

Dear Rosebud Ben-Oni, thank you for curating and crowdsourcing such an incredible list of poetry publications for the Kenyon Review blog. This resource is a consistent trove of books that we can return to and read and share and support and it’s the best of literary community in action.

Dear Lana, I love your novel. And I understand how challenging it can be to make a choice under social pressure, especially when you know life is tenuous and every year might be the last and you are alone (so alone) in that knowledge and timbre.

Dear Random Sample Review team and poetry submitters, thank you for your patience as I learn to navigate a new system. Learning takes time. Learning takes patience. I am deeply humbled by (and grateful for) yours.

Dear Facebook, thanks for being a great place to share photos with family across the country and world until Trump won the election in 2016. Thanks for helping Trump win the election in 2016. Thanks for keeping many nice retirees in my life on a level of reality that wouldn’t be legal if it were a drug. Thanks for being a great space for humans to attack each other under the auspices of personal offense when I post something related to racism or xenophobia or homophobia in the South. Thanks for really enabling that level of hurt.

Dear Facebook, I’m not done. Thank you also for how you’ve cornered the market as a vector for the evil eye. Thank you for excelling in lo-fi judgmental nonsense. No one ever likes the articles or the poems I post—my audience tends to like 1) the photos of family or 2) the posts where people get into fights over how much racism is actually racism and the only people arguing are white.

Dear fellow rape survivors, it’s strange how random life can be. It’s strange how none of us deserve it and yet some of us have been taught to believe that we do. I re-vision my desire for revenge daily. I have to remember that my rape was not the only thing that ever happened in the world, even though it felt that way to me. I have to balance my belief in justice and carceral reform against the parts that want blood and vengeance. Surviving rape is like waking up and realizing that every single man around you is a threat, and every single friendly conversation is the interlude to violence. There is no safe space. There will never be another safe space. Surviving, for me, means knowing that rapists are everywhere in a culture that glorifies rape. The culture work is my revenge. It is also my only hope for justice. Patriarchy is at its most effective in its constructions of feminism as a reaction to men. I am not interested in visions that limit me to reacting and punishing—I am interested in visions that dethrone the male gaze and divest from masculinist models of violence. It is possible to believe that rape is horrible and prisons are also crimes.

Dear rapists, I see you. I see your smiling wives, your family portraits, your daughters playing softball. And I look forward to the day when our justice system includes a reparative component that focuses on making restoration and putting you in classrooms where you will spend parts of your week (every week) talking to young people about rape. We don’t have enough prisons for all of you. And we never will. I I’m ready for tools that don’t build the master’s house.

Dear COVID-19, I know that you don’t give a damn but I thought I’d mention anyway how much I despise you. Just to be clear. I despise you even more than I despise Donald Trump, and that may be ontologically useless but it helps me to say it aloud anyway. Fuck off, COVID-19.

Dear friends and fellow writers, it is a cruel time for new books. It is a hard time for those juggling childcare with working from home. It is a terrifying time for those with spouses or loved ones working on the front lines of the pandemic. It is a time of rampant nativism and xenophobia justified for historical reasons, and this applies to the literary community as well as the world at large. It is a haunting—and haunted—time. It is scary. It is scary in its repetitions and new rhythms of disappointment. every day I wake up and every day I crawl into bed after telling my children it is not as scary as it seems. It is a time when I need all the things Rebecca Solnit said about humans in times of trouble to be true. But I don’t know… I just don’t… I’ve always been accused of over-hoping and keeping my head in the clouds. Mammals look better in lyric.

Dear landfills, forgive me for the insane amount of trash I’ve been producing lately. There is no alternative. This is because we refuse to see one.

Dear mountains, I miss your wildflowers, your vistas, your interior-softening hardness.

Dear Mom, you’d never believe the shit that’s been happening since you left.

Dear panic, I hear you. Constantly. Daily. Every time I make a list for my family or try to start the letters I wish Mom had written before she died suddenly. Every inch of quiet between sirens in this crowded city. Every other breath.

Dear epistolary, I can’t remember why I started writing this but the azaleas have lit the street and the sun goes about her business as usual and more than anything anything anything I hope you give us a chance to do that.

"Brink of Life" by Khashayar Mohammadi

Today I am fascinated by Khashayar Mohammadi’s poem, “Brink of Life,” published in his chapbook, Solitude Is An Acrobatic Act, (Above/Ground Press, 2020). Because I am fascinated, I want to peer closer. So I will.

1.

Khashayar Mohammadi is an Iranian-born Toronto-based writer and translator. He is an immigrant who misses his first language enough to return to it, to keep it alive through translation.

I suspect that poets who translate have a different relationship to language than poets who do not. Sometimes I suspect the number of words a poet uses diminishes in direct proportion to the amount of time they spend translating other poet’s words; it’s as if each word becomes heavier or carries more. Or maybe it’s the opposite.

2.

The title of Khashayar Mohammadi’s poem begins on the brink of something—the brink of life—and we expect the poem to develop this, which also links to defining life somehow. You can’t be on the brink of something undefined. The word “brink” designates an edge, a boundary, a cliff, a limit.

It is a short, one-stanza poem—everything is given to us in eleven lines—and this compactness makes its structure visually significant. The architecture stands out in a way that it wouldn’t if this were a longer poem, if it asked more from the eye, if it were busier, if it spread its energy across stanzas.

There is no punctuation, no period at the end to denote closure.

There is one capital letter at the beginning, and the word “Children” is the only word that receives this sort of visual attention.

Children delivered like parcels
a body can reject an unwanted body

Right away, one senses the motion will blur the end of line from another, and this, in turn, will make it hard to distinguish which body is the subject. —And I love this. I love this. I love that the line doesn’t read “Children are delivered like parcels” because the absence of “are” is the absence of an equal sign, or an equivalence.

It’s amazing what the tiniest verb (or its absence) can insinuate. This absence shifts the weight of the address from a first person witness to a mystery. The speaker is there and not there. The speaker is thinking, and delivering images which connect.

The motion from the first line to the second line is seamless, but something happens in the middle of the second line: a tiny crack opens up, and the poet’s decision not to use a comma is (I think) a decision to keep the motion blurred, to keep the equals out.

Read it with a comma. The comma clarifies, or serves a sorting function:

Children delivered like parcels
a body can reject, an unwanted body

The poet’s lack of punctuation is accomplishing something here—it is making it hard to tell which body is unwanted, or what part is a parcel—it is blurring the container and the contained.

3.

Mohammadi disorients us again with the next line, an image that pulls away from life but indicates time, indicates simultaneity:

while dolls await in triage

He doesn’t say the babies are like dolls—he posits the dolls alongside, or in the same poem-space, as children and bodies. Just when I think he is going to clarify or make a distinction, the poet swerves, shifts into swift anaphora, piling metaphor atop definition:

a child as a gift leased from the hospital
a child compounds interest daily
questions questions questions

I linger here. I know that the brink of life is not going to be the line I expected. I realize that the motion enacted by the poem is actually altering the form of a brink, curving it, turning it into a circling motion.

figures abstracted in privacy glass
mirrors are ashamed of reflecting
no longer show the woman her body

I realize that the mirrors have more agency, more power to verb, than children.

I also realize that the dolls had a similar agency—the dolls could wait. The inanimate surrounding objects could do more, or act with more volition, than the children or the child or the unwanted body who are acted upon.

Even in the woman’s relation to the mirror, it is the mirror who can show—not the woman who is looking. The poet doesn’t tell us that she is looking. The poet tells us what the mirror is doing, or not doing, namely, showing.

And so I am at this brink, where life is not something which seems to belong to the human subjects, but to the surrounding objects.

I know the poem is almost over. I know I am further from an edge because there is no line, no delineation. Picking up where the poet left off—“her body”—I read through to the end:

a soul cemented in language through names
a life nestled within life in language

Here, her body is defined as a soul cemented in language through names. Her body is defined as a life nestled within life in language. There is no reference to fetuses or babies or children—it is the woman’s body who is centered in this final, circling motion (which the repetition of life in that last line helps to accomplish).

5.

I love this poem for the way it withholds comfort somehow. I love the way it leaves us alone, separate, and yet bound by a life which names us. I’m not sure if the poet intended a larger point about the role or importance of names—and I’m not sure I need that from this poem in order to feel it does important things.

“I want my poems to keep someone company,” Mohammadi said in an interview.

I suspect many of us live in that loneliness—in the relationship we build into the poem, and the hand it stretches across an invisible room, asking to be read, to be of use, to be felt.

This is the cover image from his chapbook. Because solitude is both titular and transcendent in Mohammadi’s work, I tried to see if it speaks to this “brink of life,” and the tension in that relationship. There is a man pushing a single tree a top a hill. Or the tree has fallen over and the man is trying to plant it or re-root it. There is something that wants to stay and someone that is doing unclear things related to roots which could go either way.

There is no brink, quite. But there is the aloneness. There are two forms of life, and each as alone as the other, and maybe this, itself, is the relationship.

You can follow Khashayar on twitter here or read his incredible translations online. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

"Voice" by Jennifer Horne: Wondering towards a mother's voice.

Today I’m fascinated by Jennifer Horne’s poem, “Voice,” which can be found in her chapbook, Borrowed Light (Mule On A Ferris Wheel Press, 2019). Read it slowly.

---

Voice

For burning bush, substitute smoking stump.
For tablets, this tattered notebook with your wisdom notes.

Waking to sunlight, the smell of last night’s bonfire in my hair.
You left my dream only moments ago.
If I leapt from bed and ran down the straight dirt road,
could I catch you?

Wraith-smoke. Spanish moss.
Coffee in an old diner mug, heavy as a serious thing.

All day the rain continues, and I resolve to do as you urged:
begin my true life, start now.

“You’re not afraid of not liking it,” you said.
”You’re afraid you’ll like it so much it will change you,
demand a life as big as you can imagine,
a voice to match.”

---

1.

This is the final poem in a chapbook that explores inherited light, or the way in which various forms of light can be an inheritance which shapes and speaks into the present. The poet’s mother appears frequently in these poems—and I think you can feel the way she is both the beginning and the going-forward of the poet’s voice, or what the poet needs to say.

From this chapbook, we learn that a mother leaves multiple forms of light in her wake. We learn that Jennifer Horne’s mother was a poet, a female that lived with unabashed zest at a time when any zest in mothers was suspect. I sense a tension between the mother’s uninhibited spirit and the poet’s, and this is part of the legacy the poet brings to the page to understand.

The poem begins in the middle of this exploration, in a soft repudiation of Moses’ patriarchal visions:

For burning bush, substitute smoking stump.
For tablets, this tattered notebook with your wisdom notes.

The poet is sitting in a space where something has burned, and she is looking not to the stone tablets of a male god but to the notebook written by a human mother. The authority of some man’s prophecy is replaced by the words and visions of a particular woman, and her reckoning with life.

2.

At the end of the second stanza, the poet wakes up from the dream and wonders towards the mother’s voice:

If I leapt from bed and ran down the straight dirt road,
could I catch you?

I love how the poet’s voice mingles with the mother’s voice. I love the stark brush-strokes used to depict both dream and waking, to dissolve a clear line between them. I love how the You of this poem is murky, almost incorporeal, and how this contrasts with the heavy seriousness of the coffee in a diner mug. And how Horne tacks back immediately towards the voice and what it asks of her:

All day the rain continues, and I resolve to do as you urged:
begin my true life, start now.

And I think of my own mother—the way she took up space with her laughter and lust for life—and how the things which embarrassed me about her as a child are the things for which I admired her as a woman.

3.

Having a passionate, bohemian mother, or one whose spirit plays a predominant role in the visions of the child, often means that her stories frame the world more convincingly than other authorities, including peers, media, and friends. I recognize an urge to record the world for my mother since her death, to substantiate her stories and warnings somehow, and to keep her alive in this.

Is this what it means to be my mother’s daughter? To keepsake her fascination with life, her insatiable hunger for new experience, her commitment to her sensuality? Am I holding the world for her in what Dan Beachy-Quick calls “the hut of the poem”?

4.

We have reached a point of awareness about agency, and how the words or images or symbols we lay over others may be a form of disrespect. It is easier to have these conversations in the abstract than the particular. Yet, as writers, we struggle with staying in our lanes, or trying to discover which ghost shares the lane with us, and how that intersects with permission to poem them.

What is the line between elegy, tribute, portrait, and appropriation in a context where each person is the sole arbiter of their own life?

Whenever I write my mother, I worry about theft.

I worry about whether I’m recreating her in the way I want her remembered. Or whether I am ruining someone' else’s memory of her by writing my own.

I don’t have any answers or rules. I don’t know my lane when it comes to my mother who was many things to many other humans, each of whom has a different claim to remembering.

5.

I return to Dan Beachy-Quick’s essay, “The Hut of Poetry” (found in his Wonderful Investigations: Essays, Meditations, Tales). He writes notes that a poem doesn’t have to be “funereal in its relation to death.” He continues:

“To read is the most common form of encounter with the dead. The dead on the blank page need not remain dead. Time in the page is different from time in the world….. Death in the poem is only a pause before rebirth. Death is but a delay inside the form.

Language offers a method of experiencing death without dying…The poem on the blank page houses a creative center infinitely larger than itself, than its own lined confines, but a power that has no useful ends without suffering the impossible limit of the poem’s form. The forging of limit through form is the poem’s most fundamental work, and the result of that work is that the poem becomes not a vessel of knowledge conveyed, but a dwelling where knowledge occurs.”

There is a sense in which form is actually what pushes through and re-visions death. I see this in Horne’s poem, in her syntax, in how she builds long lines like trails of crumbs in a forest where every child misses her mother—and all the bad things that happen to a child are linked to the lack of knowing which voice to trust, or what to believe of their own.

6.

In this hut of this short poem, the mother warns the child against fear—against reticence—against holding back from living a “big” life. Notice the role of the bigness here:

“You’re not afraid of not liking it,” you said.
”You’re afraid you’ll like it so much it will change you,
demand a life as big as you can imagine,
a voice to match.”

And so the poem ends with the mother’s words, which—when recorded, when heeded, when hallowed—become scripture or prophecy.

The book ends with this poem. The ghost has the last word about the future. Yet the ghost belongs, inextricably, to the daughter’s voice, to its bigness, to its motion forward.

To quote Dan Beachy-Quick again:

“But a home is never the world—a home is a separation from the world. A poem is never the world—a poem is a separation from the world. The world we read, and in reading see, never stays a world. Language’s gift to us is it’s failure. The enchantment of language is superseded in importance by its disenchantment.”

The mothers are gone. Neither the male prophets nor the wolves can help us. The poem is a temporary respite in which time and corporeality are overcome. The ghost is beautiful for this singular, liminal instant. She urges us to use our voice, to make it big enough to hold her—and big enough to wonder alone.

"The Structure of a Flower: Stem" by Andrea Rexilius

Today’s fascination is a poem by Andrea Rexilius. I found it in her poetry chapbook, Afterworld, published by Above/ground Press in Spring 2020. You can purchase a copy online. I’m sharing the text as it appears in the chapbook itself.

A title creates an expectation—it tells us what to expect from the poem. The title tells us that the poem will be about that structural part of a flower known as a stem. Notice that the poem is not analyzing the structure of a plant or a tree but of a flower—the flower is centered, the stem’s relationship to the flower is structural. This is what we are given from the outset.

And what we do know? We know the stem is the part which holds the flower-head aloft or connects the bloom to the ground, its source of nourishment. In some cases, the flower is also the vessel of fertilization which enables new flowers to be born.

But the poem does not begin with a flower or a stem or a stalk. The poem begins in a very specific moment—”the day the deer died”—and the poet’s first-person voice emerges in the space around this external death event which occurred in the world. The past tense of the poem begins with this pressure it puts on the present. We realize that the title is not going to play a descriptive role in this poem. And so we are left to wonder how this will work, and what the poet wants to subvert or re-imagine.

“I was alive in my house.” Period.

That period holds us back for a split second before the repetition creates a new sense of motion that pushes us forward, that qualifies what being alive in her house meant.

“I was alive in a watery field / of glaciers.” I love the use of repetition here, as if to thicken the onion layers, to both wrap and unwrap a globe around the speaker. The house changes to become a melting world, another grief, a silence which is someone liquid—and both coalesce in the speaker’s throat in this “realm of birchwood”, a surreal metaphor. The world inside the throat maps onto the outside world in a way that creates suspense.

The poet is describing a moment in the past and yet grappling with her presence in that moment. She will do this again. Several lines begin with “I was”. And there is a subtle and marvelous thing happening in my mind as I read the “I was alive” statements placed near the wildfires, the deer dying, the time before trees, the changing interior and exterior conditions; I am wondering what it means to be alive, or what it signifies to continue living in a circumstance where the words used to describe my condition, namely alive-ness, are not modified by surrounding circumstances.

The death of a deer becomes plural. The fires are no longer the work of imagination but the reality of a landscape. There is no border between being and having been.

And yet I am here, silent. I am reading a poem about stems which has become a poem about connections and borders which has become a condition involving water and silence in my throat. I am wondering what Andrea Rexilius wants from me as she continues this pattern of retracting and qualifying statements in a way that both undermines and develops them. It’s not a dialectic motion so much as seasonal one. It’s less systemic than loosely-plotted in a form of anticipated variance. I love the climate inside this poem, or the way that it’s motion creates a sense of climate rather than climax. But it is heavy.

It is heavier than the silence after a eulogy. It is hard to carry because, like many silences, it remains expectant. It wants words to fix, explain, and pour over. And all of this world-building or world-destroying happens in the first stanza.

How does Andrea give this poem such a strong sense of motion? Notice that there are three stanzas, that we are led to believe this will be a poem about stems, and that certain words & images are carried over from the previous stanza.

In the first stanza, we find “the realm of birchwood” in the her throat, and the stanza ends by qualifying this, by making it clear that the birchwood is on fire, and the fire is “lodged” in her “throat”, and it is making a hissing sound that fire makes which cannot be described as human. The outside world is drawn inside the poet’s throat into the space of speaking. We use our words to make sense. We use our voice to express the sense we make of an experience. We use our words to shout “Fire!” but the poet is not shouting Fire!—the poet is making the sound of wet wood burning, hissing.

Why do fires hiss? The sound comes from water being turned to vapor (or steam), and then being pushed out of the material under pressure. This pressure is “lodged", or living, in the speaker. It is a sound in lieu of words. It is also a form of silence, if we understand silence to be a space of unspoken things, or things we don’t discuss. But the hissing is important. Dead wood doesn’t hiss—it crackles. The hissing sound in the poet’s throat is the sound of living wood, or wood that holds water, burning. It is the sound of water leaving a living body.

The second stanza begins with an assertion: “There is no difference between the damsel and the savior.” I re-read that a few times for its blunt dismounting of saviors. The poet brings back the drought, this time as a “silence / resourced.” The line break after silence startled me a little; we already know that drought and silence are related, so when this word resourced appears, it thickens things. There is a tension inside the word resourced—in the idea of a source or origin being used again, in a motion that involves returning, and in the noun form of resource which is associated with mining and extraction industries.

The poet never mentions mining. She never says the phrase natural resource, and yet it insinuates itself somehow. There is the stem’s relationship to water—and the water centered in the poet’s body, in the speechless throat, in the life of the plant as well as the planet. There are no clear lines or boundaries to separate these sources of life from their resourcefulness or their absence.

And the third stanza returns with the same words, rubbing them harder, making small fires of the friction between their given meanings, the meanings acquired in previous stanzas, and how the poet expands them. The “damsel’s nightgown” is the night sky, the water is an ocean, the savior is what is “rooted.” The connection to the title is an opening, an extended metaphor that is modified in each stanza, and the closest we come to resolution is in the last line, which begins with an assertive “Only”, which feels insistent, and leaves us with a word, sanctum. This is an old Latin word whose meaning has thickened over time; it comes from the Latin, neuter of sanctus ‘holy’, from sancire ‘consecrate’.. It is a meaning-full world. It designates a sacred place, especially a shrine within a temple or church. It is also used to refer to a private place from which most people are excluded. It is a bounded word, a word that creates boundaries in its association with sacredness. But sanctum also refers to a refuge, a retreat, a safe place where one cannot be harmed.

What is the place of rest? We return to the flower parts—the root, the stem, the structure. The poet is not finished; an uncertainty is implicit in this Afterworld she is trying to imagine or to survive. I think we see a deep structural criticism in this poem as well as the book. I think Andrea Rexilius is trying to find boundaries, to look at parts, to discern responsibility and function when the borders of harm do not exist.

Eleven poetry writing prompts for pandemiacs

1.

From Venezuelan poet Natasha Tiniacos: "What is the body in the digital world...there is touching the screen of the computer to grasp the other one, the loved one, the missing one.... Is our online presence making us feel less or differently? Write about that.... Is a selfie autobiographical? Why don't you try to write a poem instead of taking a selfie, or take your selfie and make a translation in poetry? Ask yourself this: Is a selfie a projection of a person we want to be?"

2.

From Bob Hicok’s note for Best American Poetry 2010: "....there's a bacteria that eats plutonium. This amazes me, but I've never recovered from either the pinwheel or the whirligig. How they spin. How I spin. How every atom spins." A self-portrait with a particular bacteria. Or a portrait of the self as a particular bacteria with details about that bacteria’s existential dilemmas.

3.

A secret word, a favorite. And then a poem which dances around this word without ever disclosing it so that formally, for example, any end rhymes would rhyme with the word you can’t write. The withheld word poem.

4.

I remember that weightless summer after 1989 spent wandering around Europe with feta-cheese sandwiches and Romanian-speaking parents. I remember the first time I realized I could choose whether to present myself as an American or a Romanian to strangers in Paris. Identity could be renounced or re-programmed at will, hence the kindness of strangers who agree to play along with the presentation.

A poem about a part of your identity that feels slippery, that lacks roots in belonging, and maybe set this in childhood or a moment when you realized this. For example, being a Braves fan when visiting family in Georgia. Poem from the innocence rather than the fury that came later, the fury of never being anyone, of always being insufficient or half.

5.

From D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love: “And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.”

An epistolary poem to Lawrence that flips the metaphor and makes him the horse. Ride that metaphor into the ground.

6.

From Dan Beach-Quick: “Two types of poems (among many others): those whose lines build one on top of another as if to build into a tower (Kafka: the Tower of Babel would have been allowed if one did not need to ascend it in order to build it), and those that in every line dig down (Thoreau: My head is an organ for burrowing). No poem simply flat in the page; there are dimensions, expansions, progressions.”

Pick a subject, anything, a local gas station, a bench at the park, a favorite yogurt, and write a poem about it, a sketch. Make two versions: one a tower and the other a tunnel. Then read other draft poems and see if they are moving in the wrong direction or dimension. Run a little dimensionality check on drafts.

7.

From C.D. Wright’s personal instructional on compound words: “Although I take a special pleasure in compounds, whether or not they have been duly authorized: silverback, deepstep, lovegreen, pothead, eyestring, closeburn, shirttail, boneman, wristwatch, no words please me so much as the one or two-syllable noun. It appears at its best left unaccompanied by an article. At its best, shed of adjective.

A poem titled after an unduly authorized compound word that you want to explore. You can pull a Celanian twist and hyphenate the word (see “breath-turn”) to thicken it’s resonance in a way that refuses to be unpacked, or you can unpack the created compound in the poem itself.

8.

The subject of a scientific case study is unique and therefore not replicable. The study must include enough detail to document observations that enable other researchers to draw conclusions. A poem in the form of a case study.

9.

Joan Didion’s essay on notebooks alternates a passage from her notebook with explanation of her original motives for noting it. In this sense, she annotates herself. Annotations consist of explanatory notes. To annotate one's self is a dialogue, or an intimacy, when part of a poem. A poem or lyric essay in two columns where the right margin annotates the left.

10.

A poem addressed to an exterminator.

11.

An ode to a goat that is not inhabited by anthropomorphism, or by the need to humanize the goat in order to value its existence. An ode to a goat that celebrates what is goat-ness.

Scythe: An essay on hunger, expectation, blackberries, and poetry

1.

It is early April when we stumble upon the white flowers, their long, thorned limbs, a hillside of tangled thickets, a brambled bliss. I see blackberries, the possibility.

The kids sit in tall grass and chew on clover. They sketch five-petalled flowers and small leaves in their notebooks. They date the page, add a location: Our Blackberry Patch. It is the youngest who names it. 

We are on private land, possibly trespassing a space so forlorn even our breaths seem loud, boisterous. Nevermind that we drove thirty minutes to get to a lot where we'd discover a path rambling round a hill and then through a small forest leading us here.

Forget that this expedition, like most, is unplanned, a source of stubbed toes and ankles swollen by fire ant bites, a glorious accident—all of it. 

For the rest of the month, we make this pilgrimage twice a week just to check if the berries are ready.

By the end of April, the flowers have vanished. The kids draw raw thorns. The temperature warms.

It is May when the tiny green fists appear--the first berry buds--thousands studding the hillside like rhinestone shrapnel. 

We go in expectation. We carry our backpacks, our water bottles, our notebooks, our hope-eyes, our just-in-case bags and baskets. We are ridiculous. This is the pilgrim's plight--to look the fool while raving towards magic. 

By mid-May, the berries have turned a soft pink, a mottled early-redness, the dim fuschia of a second-aunt's powder blush. We discuss the fleshy berry made of multiple drupes. No one mentions the hours we've spent packing, preparing, driving, hiking, listening to terrible radio, doing the same things over and over, in the same place, with the same scope--only to arrive at the not-yet berries. The poem is Our Blackberry Patch. It is overflowing with not-yet berries. It is eating me alive. 

2. 

"Paper head, I prefer you
because of your emptiness;
from within you any
word could still be said."

This stanza from Margaret Atwood's "Paper Bag"  lives in a poem about making masks.

We poets are, I suspect, continually making masks and waiting to find ourselves in them. Losing, sinking, stumbling, missing the party, forgetting the event, conspiring with the headache.

There is a hunger that keeps us folding paper, making pages, avoiding people who are doing important and constructive things with time. This hunger is the servant of fascination.

The blackberries first blooms.

3.

Mommy is doing her fascination, the middle daughter tells a friend. Mommy isn't available to drive. Mommy is very distracted, and this is evidence of bad mothering in certain circles that never liked Mommy anyway. 

Today it is pickles.

Please understand that the pickle is actually a cucumber in translated form (which means it has spiritual powers) but also a verb with the power to astonish things. Please do not underestimate the power of staring at pickles. I am here for the god in the image of pickling. 

Fascination is transgressive. It is unpopular, anti-social, divise. It is a waste of time and idle hands.

Yes, it is a damned sin to follow the mole rat into the darkness and wait. But there is no other way into it, this fascination thing--there is no fascination that doesn't risk being wrong, seeming stupid, losing something. There is the watching and the waiting. There is no formula, no fascination machine, just the mollusk on the rim of a sink. 

4.

Midnight passes without trumpets.

I am still awake on the back porch. I am here for the stalk-shaped word that must arrive so I can reap what the page wants from me. When it arrives, the word is a scythe. 

Unlike the visionary who assembles a system in which to find safety, unlike the ideologue who uses imagination to create a fixed outcome, a predictability, you, the poet, are discovering something different every time. It is elusive, slippery, less than a vision, this slow dance of courting the poem's possibility. 

Matthew Olzmann once said, of poeming,: "Novelty is not enough to sustain our interest." The reader needs to see how we make meaning an intriguing object. It is not enough to dress the Barbie in a silver space suit if one isn't willing to offer her a story, a context.

If the poet must lie, let it be for something marvelous chased to the hilt, something worthy of a scabbard. A blackberry pie.

5.

"A lyric poem is a created and instantly destroyed world," said Marina Tsvetaeva. It takes patience to build something that only exists for an instant. The poem is like the human, present in uniqueness for an instant.

Dear poet, this has never been a question of ability or skill. Clearly, you are not the best poet. You cannot be the best of anything without fudging, lying, ignoring, erasing. 

You are not a politician or an elected official of the Poetry Republic. You have zero constituents. A reader is only there for a minute. Instead, you are someone who can't stop obsessing over words. You cannot represent anyone except the longing. You, in your lonely, should know that. You cannot be representative. You can only be the pen holding the scythe, the pinch-marks on the porch. 

This is not about the book or the byline.

It is the thing under the thing in padded slippers.

6.

Now that I have the word, now that the scythe has appeared, I must save it for the poem.

I must find the perfect nest for it to ruin.

If I can't find a poem, I will leave it in the graveyard, or use it as a title for an essay about a word I did not want to lose and yet failed to use properly. 

7.

I fail words all the time. In my mind, I tend a graveyard for lost poems, their bones and fragments, the lyrics that never rose from the page or found a way to settle in stanzas. There are so many footballs there.

As for the living poems, I worry about their health and safety, their longevity, their lifespan--especially the nocturnal dwellers with their tiny button eyes and furrowed brows. I worry about their avoidance of light. 

"How many poems will we actually be able to recall at the moment of our death ... or at the moment just before? And will they console us, anymore than we might already be consoled? Remembering is the poison ... "

- Brandon Shimoda, "Winter Dwelling"

Maybe the poems barely matter. And yet, like Shimoda, I find the writing irresistible. Like the god I can't really believe. Like the hummingbird with the fastest heart on the planet who must work so hard to restart it every morning that it sometimes just dies in its sleep.

8.

The sea the sea. The bone the bone.
Both are inside me when I read the words.
The book lends my life from the library
Or my life is the book on loan.

[Dan Beachy-Quick, "Homeric Philosophies"]

I owe the scythe to fascination. 

When I say fascination, I mean the awe that consumes our attention. An interest so ravenous it won't stop before revising the mental landscape, before bringing a mollusk to bear on a deity or a divan. The interior is altered to make space for ardor.

I mean the secret obsessions writers hide from any eyes that aren't a page.

I mean the sacrament of offering a wilderness to the notebook's cathedral, and all the private profaning one must undertake to properly worship something. I mean the field guide I made to save every tree and weed in the yard. I mean the narratives cut from my children's nightmares.

I mean the friction between fracking and fucking on the tongue, how both exploit the subject, and how this is not dissimilar from the way a poet touches the fragile places. How touch and torch are so close, and how fracking and fucking are both relations, operations, excavations.

I mean the way love has bent my body like a top-heavy tulip.

I mean Egon Schiele, Stephen Sondheim, Arvo Part and ashes to ashes though not quite dust. I mean dust is too easy, too shut.

I mean the figure of black dresses that have covered me like a personal font across a time-line, a chronology of blackouts.

I mean amnesia, paradox, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, the sad, raving nihilists.

I mean every plant I've killed with neglect, every friend I've loved best after losing, every way in which I'm better at elegies than tending or caring.

9.

Jericho Brown reminds us often, sometimes with a crown of flowers on his head, that the poem asks impossible, intractable things of the poet. "The poem is a poem because it asks us to reconsider ourselves and what we hold dear." The poem relies on "our ability to create emotion in people who were numb may be the greatest of our abilities, since this is what poets throughout history have been hated for."

Poetry is a discipline of desire. I don't want to stop, and I don't want it to end, so I find ways to brick it into my life. The poem wants relentless fascination, dedication, and interest. This whole thing is an argument for fascination that carries a shovel and scythe in its trunk. I mean something I've never had, namely, the slow discipline of waiting, the habit of paying one's respects to the possible. 

I mean I'm not finished. The poem wants a monk.

10

The monks chant. Iambic di-meters keep demons from resting in their throats and causing trouble. "Brother, we must die," recites a Trappist before throwing a few spadefuls of dirt over his shoulder.

Every day, the monks dig their own graves. What seems like a warning is disciplined anticipation. 

I want to wait for the poem like the monk waits for death.

I let a monk pray for me.

I pay a monk to pray for my dead mother.

I buy pansies in season to please her.

The monk welcomes the sins of mankind onto his shoulders. He then coddles those sins, he caresses and nurses them with chants and complines. The monk believes his songs will make the sins better, his words may raise the dead. He says he prays to lighten the burden of love for mothers who must worry about children. He says he prays to make it easier on God who stays busy loving so many. The cool part is that God lets him inch a little closer with each prayer. Contemplio, he says, is constant--every act of every instant is dedicated and divine.

Closer, closer….

11.

Every act of every instant is an open hand or enchanted pine straw. This is a fact.

Another fact no one talks about is that "the lion in God is the smoke in God is the whirlwind swayed by an image."

Traci Brimhall wrote this is an essay about her mother's death, an essay which sits with grief and its attendant guilt, the faithful partner in mourning a mother. Using second-person to extend the realm of complicity, Brimhall accuses the daughter:

"Her death hurt you. Her suffering never did. If the lion is also a devil, unbutton your shirt and feed him."

I don't think we can appreciate our mothers enough while they are alive and still wanting the best for us, still being pushy and interfering in the icons we'd made of independence. Perhaps it is this exorbitant individualism that leaves us without rituals or proper forms of expiation. 

Roman kids had to sacrifice animals on an altar in order to restore the familial bond with parents after death. I should be grateful that all I need to do is pay the monks to bless the water and mutter vigorously. 

But: the lion in God is the smoke in God is the whirlwind swayed by an image.

The love is the chord is the rage is the weft. The loss is the theft. The child is what's left to carry the ashes. The essay is the poem that couldn't handle it. 

12. 

"Again and again, I write to you regretting my tongue." Ocean Vuoung wrote this.

Ocean Vuong wrote an entire book about being a queer Vietnamese first generation immigrant, and this person--like the book--is a poem.

Poetry is the commitment one makes to longing. Poetry: this long love affair that competes with the rest.

And yet, every poem is the first one, every time is the first time, every verb is the first kiss, its spentness. All the awkward hesitation, curiosity, momentum, and suspense. It is erotic, this call to poem. 

The love poem takes what we imagine as threat or fulfillment and sits with it--the third thing that changes Eden. Lover, beloved, and that which came between them is what activates the poem and its longing. 

There is a love poem in that sidelong glance towards an unpleasant mother-in-law. There is a love poem in two-person tent crumpled in the trash bin. There is a beautiful, beautiful poem by Nicole Sealey called "Object Permanence":

There's a name for the animal
love makes of us, nomad, I think
like rain for the sound it makes.

13.

Our Blackberry Patch is the poem.

The pilgrims wait near the car, their backpacks solemn, the tingle of not-yet berries on their lips.

I am fascinated by what we’re doing, and what I’ll do anything to finish. What I love may be killing me. I’m not finished.

"Apologia"

Originally published in a journal that I asked to remove it. A poem that I love. A poem that meant the world to me.

Apologia

At 22, I disappeared for a minute. 

I did not respond when you called me. 

I wanted the death Alabama didn't offer. 
I did not want the local D & C option. I refused
the twilight sedation, the succor of a specialist 
doing the deed for me. 

I have no excuse for what 
I needed: to be 
guilty.

After visiting a former lover in Manhattan, 
I entered the Liberty Clinic, swallowed the first pill,
its origins French as the famous
green statue.

I swilled Mountain Dew to swallow
the final pill on the train for Coney Island.

I say Coney when I mean 
destination, the termination of pregnancy, the train ending 
in a carnival, apart. 

The gulls witnessed
everything. 

I stood on the boardwalk, marveling, 
dumbstruck by dizziness as something left 
this body, its warmth flooding my jeans. 

My hands shook like toy airplanes.

No doula or doctor or nurse or friend intervened.

No expert stood between 
my breath and the sky,
my breath and the clouds, clotting,
my breath and the unwanted baby,

my life

and the blood
on my hands, the certain solace,

a choice
I made with myself.
I did it all. I did everything.

I wore the silver mermaid necklace for years,
a souvenir.

Melissa Febos on writing trauma

Earlier this week, Lidia Yuknavitch tweeted Melissa Febos’ essay, “The Heart-Work: Writing About Trauma As a Subversive Act”, and gave me a reason to focus on the gendered discourse around trauma and memoir. Febos sets a familiar scene:

At a recent writers conference, during a panel of literary magazine editors, a female audience member posed a question about the potential audience for her story of trauma survival. One of the male editors rolled his eyes and shrugged. “I mean, I’m not sure we need any more of those stories.” The other panelists nodded in consensus: Stories like hers belonged on Oprah’s talk show, not in the hallowed realm of literary prose. Everyone knows we don’t need another one of those. The genre of victimhood is already so crowded. So gauche.

As if anything could be more gauche than the male writers who compliment female-identifying writers by describing their prose as “muscular” or dropping comparisons to Hemingway. As if we haven’t spent decades parsing the traumatic boredom of the American male novelist, studying its specific cocktails and alcoholisms.

Febos wrote this essay in January 2017, prior to the release of her incredible memoir, Abandon Me (in which she does exactly what she urges female writers to do, namely, tell the story that will kill you if you keep it). As Febos points out:

That these topics of the body, the emotional interior, the domestic, the sexual, the relational are all undervalued in intellectual literary terms, and are all associated with the female spheres of being is not a coincidence. What I mean is, this bias against “personal writing” is a sexist mechanism, founded on the false binary between the emotional (female) and the intellectual (male), and intended to subordinate the former.

Shame is at its most effective when urging silence. And shame comes to mind when I think of George Sand, who adopted the male pseudonym at the suggestion of her younger male lover, Jules Sandeau. George Sand, who dressed as a man in order to see without being seen. To protect herself from the predatory gaze leveraged against females by custom. After her death, Ivan Turgenev said: “What a brave man she was, and what a good woman.” 

Febos ends her essay by sharpening the pencil and preparing it to speak. Like Dorothy Allison, she offers encouragement as antivenom to silence.

We are writing the history that we could not find in any other book. We are telling the stories that no one else can tell, and we are giving this proof of our survival to one another.

What I mean is, tell me about your navel. Tell me about your rape. Tell me about your mad love affair, how you forgot and then remembered yourself. Tell me about your hands, the things they have done and held and hit and let go of. Tell me about your drunk father and your sister who lost her mind. Give them whatever names you want.

Don’t tell me that the experiences of a vast majority of our planet’s human population are marginal, are not relevant, are not political. Don’t tell me that you think there’s not enough room for another story about sexual abuse, motherhood, or racism. The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger.

You write it, and I will read it.

I need to hear this. And I’m heartened by this amazing episode of Brian Gesko’s Antibody Reading Series now available online. So we can all hear Lauren Van Den Berg, Melissa Febos, and Tracy O’Neill talk about writing, living—and writing.

Sun in strange places: A few notes on writing motherhood and consent

1.

We learn the world through body language. Toddlers absorb the physical gestures quickly, the socializations of averted eyes, pointed fingers, stiff smiles. Time is a character on the stage, an unspoken protagonist. Maybe time is also the narrator we write around.

2.

Here’s the thing: motherhood is the mantle of knowing your death will be devastating. Slow or sudden, there is no way to repair their world once you leave it. How many unkissed knees?

3.

From our mothers, we inherit lived minutiae. I learned how to fold shirts, make cobbler, clean the rim of a bathtub. Like Marguerite Duras, I inherited my mother's fear, her particular blend of worry, her relentless stoicism, her fear of germs, the need to disinfect. Also the "hysterical love" I pour on my children.

"We separate ourselves from people by writing," Duras observes. Our mothers represent a madness, a lunacy "that doesn't preclude love" in the child's role of witness. Growing into a mother whose fear is familiar.

4.

"I think motherhood makes you obscene," writes Duras. "A mother indulges all of her games." A mother, like her child, must survive the act of mothering.

5.

In Of Woman Born, Adrienne Rich articulates less gendered family roles for the future. She fleshes out a concept of community in which the child can be integrated into work, including a “new fatherhood” in which a man nurtures more. 

Seeing childcare as “enforced servitude”, Rich maintains that it can only be improved by acknowledging its value rather than debasing it. By elevating its status to something that even the high-status humans can do. 

Rich touches upon the solitary confinement of “full-time motherhood” and the “token nature of fatherhood” which gives a man rights and privileges over children toward whom he assumes only minimal responsibility. Her discussion on the “burden of emotional work” reveals the way rigid gender binaries prevent social change from happening--a nurturing father is seen to do “mother’s work”. And a mother's work is nothing.

Things have changed a little since Rich wrote this book, but only in the margins of heterosexual partnerships where this is made explicit, where this is a conscious effort.

6.

Borrowing from Barry Lopez's discussion of interior landscapes, I think Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus can be seen as an attempt to interiorize the landscape of expectancy in a world where female bodies have been rendered a form of public space.

7.

Then there’s the anger towards our mothers for looking to their husbands to fulfill their needs and making their own needs seem irresponsible or “emotional” . Examples of self-hatred include women who want sons, women who prefer male friends, women who can’t enjoy their bodies. We are steeped and socialized into this self-loathing because it is profitable. The way women hate themselves is a thriving market.

My obsession with cruelty. Susan Sontag, Simone Weil, and others. A religious impulse that flowered after having children. To know that love could be Kali, eating her children. Or Medea, killing them to protect them from the father's lack of love.

8.

Jacqueline Rose: “Motherhood is not knowledge or control. It may have to make non-stop decisions, but not according to some fetuses' logic of mastery.”

The mother’s right to life and experience is challenged by the cultural assumptions of what childhood should or should not include. The crime of exposure--of abandonment of a baby--is no longer limited to the infant but now extends into the entire developing life. There is no maternal instinct--there is the choice one makes to mother. There is the ongoing seesaw of it.

9.

In Beloved, Sethe kills her daughter out of love. Toni Morrison insisted on this. She insisted that it was love to kill a child in a world that conspired to kill her slowly, torturously, for entertainment.

10.

Elena Ferrante: “Men insert their thingy inside you and you become a box of flesh with a living doll inside.”

Was this the task of Freud’s hysterical patients--to exhibit all the fear and anxiety for a family who can then go on acting as if they are superior? And fine. Someone has to carry the terror and anxiety. Every family has its designated vessel.

11.

I need to write against the naturalistic fallacy that often undergirds patriarchal thinking. None of this is ordained by a god or by gravity—it is, like war, a choice humans make to normalize and accept certain patterns of behavior. It is also a choice that we must make to undo the damage.

A woman hides her body, hides her pain, hides her fear, because she is guilty. Because she asked for it. She is a mother. She is learning to live in the division we’ve established.

12.

There is no virtuousness in being a mother--there is merely a road one travels which changes the idea of destination, or destiny. As Jacqueline Rose observes: "it is the demand to be one thing only--love and goodness incarnate--that is intolerable for any mother and tears her mentally and physically to shreds."

13.

Obligatory childbearing and sacrifice is what Rose calls “the slave-owning version of motherhood,” an institution that has changed little over time. The decision not to mother is a basic question of consent--to have one’s body be used as a vessel. It is many other things as well, but it is never not this one: a question of consent.

14.

I love D.A. Powell for saying: “If the poet doesn’t risk absurdity, he’s not even in the game.”

Writing motherhood is this dance with an absurdity so astonishing one is tempted to call it God.

A list of places that like book reviews

When you’ve read too many incredible books and you need to write about it or talk about it and no one else has read that book yet or wants to chat at the pitch you think it deserves, there is this thing called the book review that you can try (see Julija Sukys’ how-to).

However, it is the case that some journals do not accept unsolicited book reviews. There is not enough life left in the hourglass to be sad about this. Instead, you can submit your unsolicited reviews to the journals that welcome them. I cribbed some links from the great list at Entropy but I also found a few places to add and a few journals that no longer seem to be operating or accepting reviews. Poets & Writers also has a list of book review outlets, but most of them are for authors or publishers seeking to have a book reviewed rather than for writers trying to publish a book review. I wanted to focus on places to submit book reviews. So: I did.

General notes etc.

I hope this saves you time and makes it easier to celebrate the work of fellow writers. What follows is a brief methodology that explains what was included in this list—and a few general caveats.

• Many academic journals don’t accept summer submissions.

• Most journals are looking for reviews of books published by indie or small presses in the last year, though a few journals make exceptions for time and self-publication. I tried to note these exceptions where I found them.

• The interview has become an alternate form of book review, a collaborative conversation in which the book’s themes are discussed with the author. This is especially wonderful in you choose to review books outside your lived experience. For example, VIDA notes that reviews by white, heteronormative authors continue to predominate. That is a gauntlet that many of us need to address in our reviews. We need to review BIPoC poets even if we are worried that we can’t do their words justice. The interview or conversation is an excellent way to highlight the works of writers that we don’t feel qualified to “review” given our inherent structural biases. As a result, many lit mags are looking for interviews. I’ve added those where I found them.

• Some journals have a running list of books they would like to see reviewed. Generally, the journal or press will send you a comp version for review. For the most part, journals don’t limit themselves to the reviews on that list. But… some do.

• Many journals especially value reviews of books by under-represented or marginalized persons. See the comment about interviews above.

• If the journal compensates, I tried to add this, whether money or in journal copy. Look for a $ sign if you’re looking for dollar signs.

• Journals often have different submission methods for book reviews. I tried to include the means of submission, whether by snail mail, email, Submittable, or an online system specific to the journal itself.

• I included word limits where I found them, though book reviews can run between 800 and 3000 words, depending on the journal. Micro-reviews between 300 and 500 words are also increasingly popular.

• I also distinguished by journals that want to be queried and journals that accept the review as a submission without prior querying.

• Unless the journal specifically addressed simultaneous submissions, I assume SS were fine and didn’t mention them.

---

Places to Submit Book Reviews (esp. poetry)

4squarereview: Online. Publishes poetry reviews quarterly. Send 1,000-word reviews of contemporary books of poetry to 4squarereview@gmail.com. Focus on books published by small and independent presses.

3: AM Magazine: Online. Publishes poetry reviews & general criticism. Submit by email directly to nonfiction/criticism editor, Joseph Schreiber at jmesch78@gmail.com. Special attention given to literature in translation; experimental, postmodern and innovative literature; unconventional approaches to LGBTQ themes.

32 Poems: Print & online. Submittable. Prefer reviews over 1,000 words for sustained exploration. “Avoid passive voice. (Don’t tell us what the poems are, but rather consider how they act on a reader.)”

Adroit Journal: Online. Submittable. Accepts both reviews and interviews, though currently preferring interviews. Includes a list of books the editors want reviewed. Short application for reviews and interviews here (don’t worry, it’s not a resume…just a list of questions about what you want to review as well as the request for work sample).

AGNI: Online & print. 1,500-to-3,000-word review essays “that lift us to your singular inquiry-driven vantage: show us what your chosen book reveals to you that only you can show”. Query Reviews Editor Rachel Mennies or submit review directly online through portal.

American Book Review: Online. Query by email.

American Microreviews & Interviews: Online. Query by email. 7-10 sentence reviews.

American Poetry Review: Print & online. Accepts reviews and interviews of poetry books. Submittable.

Another Chicago Magazine: Online. Accepts review of all genres. Also interested in innovative review forms. Submittable.

Apofenie: Online. Opening its book review section soon. Query or email submissions to apofeniemagazine@gmail.com. Specify genre and include a three-sentence biographical statement.

Asian Review of Books: Online. Query by email to editor@asianreviewofbooks.com with details of your experience, interests and links to writing samples.

Aster(ix) Journal: Online & print. Focus on amplifying the voices of women of color. Query editor by email on WOC-authored books.

Asymptote: Online. Query by email. Focus on recently published/ forthcoming titles translated into English.

Barcelona Review: Online. Under 3000 words. Email submissions and queries to editor Jill Addams at editor@barcelonareview.com. Be sure to follow email instructions on the website. “Material should be related in some way to the world of books and writing; creative non-fiction (e.g., personal essays) that fits with the review is welcome. Literary criticism and academic pieces are not what we're after.”

Bending Genres: Online. Accepts “microviews”, or short reviews, of poetry and hybrid chapbooks or collections. Submittable. Contact Reviews Editor Emily Bertholf for details.

Berfrois: Online. Email editor Russell Bennetts directly to submit or query.

Big Other: Online. Accepts a variety of book reviews including poetry. Submittable. 6,000 words max. Also accepts interviews under 6,000 words via Submittable.

Borderlands Texas Poetry Review: Print & online. Accepts poetry reviews. Editors partial to reviews that include more than one book. 1500 max for general review, though this can be longer for multi-book reviews. Submittable.

BOXCAR Poetry Review: Print & online. Accepts reviews of first poetry collections, no chapbooks, and interviews between poets. Submittable. Reviews should engage the text (ie. close reading) and may either be academic or personal in their nature. Between 500-1500 words. Submit reviews here. For interviews, focus is on poets who have recently published first book. Editors prefer conversations between poets who already have some familiarity with each other. Query by email at interviews@boxcarpoetry.com and indicate "interview" in the header.

Boston Review: Print & online. Accepts variety of book reviews, including poetry. No chapbooks. Submittable. 5,000 words max.

Calyx: Print & online. Focus is on reviews of books written by women. Also accepts chapbook reviews. 500-1000 words for collections and 50-100 words for chapbooks. Use online submission system.

Chattahoochee Review: Print & online. Publishes poetry reviews and pays $150 per review. Submittable for final reviews or, alternately, you can query at tcr@gsu.edu about the possibility of a particular review or review essay.

Clarion Magazine: Online. Submittable. Email the editors at clarion@bu.edu for more information.

Cleaver Magazine: Online. Open to all kinds of reviews. Contact editors directly. For fiction and nonfiction reviews and interviews contact Michelle Fost at mfost@me.com. For poetry, email  Claire Oleson at olesonc@kenyon.edu.

Cleveland Review of Books: Online. Microreviews not paid, but longer reviews receive modest compensation. Query by email. Includes a guide for pitching as well as list of possible books. Focus is on books related to Midwest or authored by Midwestern authors.

Colorado Review: Print & online. Submittable. 750-1,000 words.

Compulsive Reader: Online. Accepts reviews in all genres. Submit reviews to editor Maggie Ball by email to maggieball@compulsivereader.com.

DIAGRAM: Online. Open to short (400-600 words) and long (2,000-4,000 words) review forms. “We like reviews that play with the genre, transcend the genre, do something unusual or fun, or just plain rock. We are particularly interested in reviews using unusual or unique forms.” Submit to reviews@thediagram.com.

Diode: Online. Accepts poetry reviews and interviews year round. Submit by email to submit@diodepoetry.com. Send in .doc format.

Dublin Review of Books: Online. Send by email to info@drb.ie. Between 900 and 1500 words.

EcoTheo Review: Online. Accepts reviews of all genres. Prefers 1300-1800 words. Query and submit by email to Reviews Editor Hannah VanDerHart at hannah@ecotheo.org.

Empty Mirror: Online. Accepts a variety of book reviews and interviews, though focus is on poetry and literary fiction.. Submittable. Reviews anywhere between 300 and 3,000 words. Interviews up to 10,000 words.

Entropy: Online. Submit by email. 600-2,000 words.

Event: Print & online. Contact Reviews Editor Susan Wasserman by sending an email to event@douglascollege.ca and mentioning reviews. Have a pitch or sample ready and read the reviews on their blog to get a sense of what editors want in length and style.

Fanzine: Online. Submit review by email to submissions@thefanzine.com.

FIVE: 2: ONE: Online & print. Submittable. Under 1000 words. Submit under Nonfiction category.

Fjords Review: Online & print. Accepts reviews of multiple genres as well as interviews. Submittable.

FORMA: Online & print. Accepts poetry reviews. Put review and subject in the subject line of email and submit to FORMAmag@circeinstitute.com.

Full Stop: Online. Focuses on debuts, works in translation, and books published by small presses. Submit by email to reviews editors.

Gasher Journal: Online. Focus on book reviews for small press works only. 1,000-2,000 words. Submittable.

Gettysburg Review: Print. Only accept essay-reviews comparing multiple books.

Georgia Review: Print & online. No SS. Standard reviews which focus on one book (typically 3–5 double-spaced pages) and essay-reviews which compare multiple books on a theme (typically 10-20 double-spaced pages).

Gigantic Sequins: Print. Submittable. Pays in copy of journal.

Glass Poetry Journal: Online. Accepts reviews of poetry chapbooks, anthologies, and collections. Submit using online submissions manager and clicking “reviews” as genre.

Gravel: Online. Accepts poetry book reviews. Open during academic year for submissions. Submittable.

Green Mountains Review: Print & online. Accepts poetry and fiction book reviews. Submittable. For unsolicited reviews, make sure to include a cover letter.

Grist: Online & print. Accepts reviews of all genres published by indie or academic presses. Around 700 words. Also have lists of books they’d like reviewed. f you have an interest in reviewing for Grist, email Reviews Editor Sarah Yancy at schatela@vols.utk.edu.

Guernica: Online. Submittable. Accepts book reviews & interviews. Less than 2,500 words. Submit in Shortform Nonfiction category.

Harvard Review: Doesn’t generally accept unsolicited reviews but if you are interested in reviewing please write to reviews@harvardreview.org describing the kind of books you would be interested in reviewing and enclosing one or more recent clips.

Headcannon Magazine: Online. Email submissions.

Heavy Feather Review: Online & print. Accepts poetry reviews. Maintains list of books currently available for review. Email about any reviews or interviews.

Hoot: Online, or on the back of a postcard when possible. Less than 150 words. Must be of a recently published book (within the last year) published by an indie or small press.

Hudson Review: Print. No SS.

Identity Theory: Online. Submit by email to editor, Matt Borondy.

Iowa Review: Print & online. Submittable. Accepts unsolicited reviews during fall semester only.

KGB Bar Online Review: Online. If you would like to review a book, send a pitch to kgbbarmag@gmail.com. We encourage you to write to us before beginning to draft the review-essay. There is no strict word limit to critical reviews; depending on the title, they can range from under 1,000 words to much longer.

Kenyon Review: Online. 1,000 to 1,200 words. Written for a general-interest literary audience. $50 compensation for online publication. Submittable.

La Piccioletta Barca: Accepts interviews under 8,000 words.

Lantern Review: Print & online. Accepts reviews of recent poetry collections. Under 3,000 words. Submit via online system.

Latin American Literature Today: Print & online. Focus on reviews of contemporary Latin American literature, including poetry. 500 to 1,200 words. See book review style guide. Email reviews to Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza, Book Reviews Editor, at  book.reviews.editor.lalt@ou.edu.

Little Stone Journal:  Mostly poetry reviews. Under 2,000 words. Send as many as 3 by email.

Los Angeles Review: Print & online. Accepts fiction, CNF, and poetry reviews. 800 to 1,400 words.Prefers not to publish titles that have received significant media exposure. Include the book’s title, author’s name, name of the press, publication date, and ISBN in upper left corner before review. Include short 3rd person bio of reviewer at bottom of the review. Engage the book in reflection, social commentary, and/or thoughtful critique. No summarizing or book-bashing reviews. Email reviews to reviewassist@losangelesreview.org.

Marlboro Review: Print. Snail-mail submission. Doesn’t read subs during the summer.

Michigan Quarterly Review: Online. Under 3,000 words. Submittable.

Necessary Fiction: Online. Focus is fiction. Maintains a running list of fiction books for writers to review. Contact by email with requests at reviews@necessaryfiction.com.

Nervous Breakdown: Temporarily closed for book review submissions “but check back soon.”

New Delta Review: Print & online. Accepts book reviews and interviews. Submittable.

New England Review of Books: Online. Accepts all genre reviews. Pitch or query your review directly to editors@nerobooks.org,

New Orleans Review: Online. Accepts reviews of all genres. Also interested in reviews of books that have been largely neglected (often publications from small/independent presses) in the past 5, 10, 15, or even 20 years. 500 - 1500 words. Submittable.

New Southern Fugitives: Online. Pays $50 per book review. Under 2,000 words. Submittable.

On the Seawall: Online. Accepts poetry reviews. Submit or query by email (with work attached as a Word doc) to Ron Slate at seawallsubmissions[at]gmail[dot]com. 

PANK: Online. Accepts reviews of books of all genres and author interviews. Submittable.

Periodicities: Online. Open to submissions of previously unpublished poetry-related reviews, interviews and essays. Submit as .doc with author biography to periodicityjournal@gmail.com.

Pleiades: Print & online. 800-1200 words. Accepts submissions between Dec. 1 and January 1 every year. Submit using online submission system and mark genre as “book reviews for Pleiades”. Favorable to experimental reviews—reviews that borrow from creative nonfiction, adopt a unique form, compare something new to something old, etc.—as well as “retro-reviews,” or reviews that considered books published at an earlier time through a new lens, perhaps in context with newer books. Query Reviews Editor Taneum Bambrick you are interested in doing a three-minute review for online publication only. For a sample three-minute review, click here. 

Poet’s Quarterly: Online. Accepts poetry reviews and interviews. 500-2,000 words. Email reviews to reviews@poetsquarterly.com.Email interviews to interviews@poetsquarterly.com.

Poetry: Print & online. Poetry review essays. “We strongly prefer pieces that are not single-book reviews, but rather review essays that discuss two or three books in light of larger matters.” 1,200 - 1,500 words. Submittable.

Poetry Cafe: Online. Focus is on poetry chapbooks. Query editor by email for submission guidelines at risa@thepoetrycafe.online.

Poetry Flash: Online. Snail mail. Query first.

Poetry Northwest: Print & online. Accepts reviews for poetry collections, including longford. Query editors Aaron Barrell & Erin Malone at editors(at)poetrynw.org.

Porter House Review: Online. Voice-driven reviews. Under 2,000 words.

Portland Review: Online. Between 1,200-2500 words. Submittable.

Prairie Schooner: Print & online. 1,000 words max. Submittable.

Prospectus: Online & print. Reviews of chapbooks, full-length collections of poetry, short-story collections, first novels, and art books. The piece reviewed must have been published no longer than one year before submission of the review. 250-300 words and include the publisher’s name and cost of the book. Reviews may also appear on the Prospectus website. Email to Celia Alvarez at editor@hambysterpublishing.com.

Rain Taxi: Online. Submit reviews by email. Around 500 words.

Rhythm & Bone Press: Online. Plans to start accepting book reviews. Query editor by email.

Sabotage Reviews: Online. Accepts reviews for poetry chapbooks as well as anthologies and collections. 500-1,000 words. Read submission guidelines and submit by email to appropriate editor.

Salamander: Print & online. Accepts poetry book reviews. Online submission manager and limited reading period. Query reviews editor Valerie Duff-Strautm.

Sewanee Review: Online & print. Word count: 10,000. Submittable.

Sonora Review: Online & print. 3,000 words max. Submittable or pitch by email. Also accepts interviews under 4,000 words.

Southeast Review. Print & online. Accepts reviews from all genres of books by small presses all year. Prefer single book reviews. 800- 1,200 words. Submit book reviews by email to Reviews Editor at serbookreview@gmail.com. For interview submissions, use Submittable.

Southern Humanities Review: Online. Submittable.

Southern Review of Books: Online. Accepts reviews & interviews in all genres of books related to American South. Email at editors@southernreviewofbooks.com with a link to your writing (no attachments, please). Covers new books the same month they’re published, and avoid conflicts of interest when assigning review coverage (i.e., no personal connections between critics and authors).

Split Lip Magazine: Online. Looking for smart, compelling book reviews and author interviews (or interviews of people in the publishing industry). Reviews should be roughly 800 words and are published online within a month or so of the book publication date. Interviews from 1,000 to 1,500 words. Use online query/submission form.

Stirring: Online. Accepts poetry reviews. Up to 700 words. Submit by e-mail to Katie Culligan at
stirring.reviews@gmail.com.

Tarpaulin Sky: Online & print. Email review to reviews@tarpaulinsky.com. If you have never reviewed for them before, send a brief cover letter with review history and links.

Temz Review: Print & online. Query at thetemzreview@gmail.com. Interested in reviews of Canadian small press titles and works in translation.

The Bind: Online. A review site devoted to books by women and nonbinary authors. Preference for creative review forms. Pitches, queries, or completed reviews (creative or traditional) can be emailed to the.bind.reviews [at] gmail [dot] com.

The Cafe Review: Print & online. Reviews of poetry books. Payment is two copies of journal. Prefer brief reviews under 600 words. Submit by email to mgrumbling@thecafereview.com.

The Chapbook Review: Online. Reviews chapbooks in various genres. Contact using online form to query editors.

The Festival Review: Print & online.

The Nonconformist: Online. Submit reviews by email.

The Point: Online & print. 1,500-3,000 words. Compensation for print issue.

The Puritan: Online. Submittable. Focus on Canadian literature. Submit book reviews under “Essays”. Pays $100 per review.

The Rumpus: Online. Accepts fiction/other reviews & poetry reviews. 1,200–2,500 words. Submittable. For interviews, email Monet Patrice Thomas at monet@therumpus.net.

The Rupture: Online. Direct queries to rupture.reviews@gmail.com.

The Sun: Print & online. Accepts interview pitches. Submittable. Pays $1000-$2000 for piece.

Tinderbox Poetry: Online. Accepts reviews for poetry collections and chapbooks. Submittable. 500-800 words for a chapbook/micro/nontraditional review. 750-1000 words for a full length collection review. Reviews editor Sarah Ann Winn.

Tint Journal: Online. Reviews & interviews related to ESL writers. Between 700 and 3,000 words. Email submissions.

Triangle House: Online. Seeking book reviews and interviews for our their new quarantine blog, Housebound. Pitch by email at becca@triangle.house.

Triquarterly: Print & online. Only interviews. Pays $ honoraria.

Under a Warm Green Linden: Online. Submittable. Accepts interviews and reviews of poetry books. Over 800 words. SS discouraged but journal responds in less than 3 weeks.

Vagabond City Lit: Online. Accepts poetry reviews with special interest in chapbooks. 400-800 words. Submit by email to Bob at vagabondcityliterary@gmail.com

Valparaiso Poetry Review: Print & online. Submit review by email to editor Edward Byrne at VPR@valpo.edu.

Vitni Review: Online. Submit reviews by email.

Virginia Quarterly Review: Print & online. Between 2,000-2,400 words. Pays $500.

Washington Independent Review of Books: Online. Accepts pitches for interviews, pieces about books, authors, reading, and writing formatted as essays, commentary, lists, book news, event coverage, interviews, etc. We pay $25 per accepted submission; there are no kill fees. Email pitches to: editor@washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com. No unsolicited book reviews.

Whale Road Review: Online. Accepts poetry reviews of all lengths. 300-500 words. “We want to publish reviews of poetry and short prose in whatever forms you find them: full-length books, chapbooks, anthologies, albums, other literary journals, reading series, performances, unconventional literary events, etc. We prefer to publish reviews that were written because the reviewer fell in love with the work and needed to tell others about it. Please send reviews as an attachment (.doc, .docx, or .rtf) to whaleroadreview@gmail.com with REVIEW as the subject line.”

West Branch: Online & print. Query with a sample by email to westbranch@bucknell.edu. Reviews are compensated with money.

World Literature Today: Online & print. Send book review to book reviews editor Rob Vollmar at robvollmar@ou.edu.

A few outlets that focus on reviewing fiction

Fiction Southeast: Online. Accepts reviews of short story collections (preferably collections of flash or micro shorts). Also likes interviews with authors of short story collections. Submittable.

“It seems to me that the goal of the poetry critic is to bring certain books into the public arena, to serve as a conscientious curator to contemporary poetry.”

— Ada Limón

A few excellent ways into the poetry review

I can’t say enough about Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ list of “Poetry Questions” as a resource for reviewing books as well as individual poems. It is magic I keep close. Matthew Zapruder’s “Show Your Work” engages the specific act of “talking about” poetry on the page—and how this looks, sounds, and feels. On more immediate questions, I love Rae Armantrout’s “Poetic Silence” and Mary Ruefle’s “Notes On Tone” and Kazim Ali’s “Genre-Queer: Notes Against Binaries” and pretty much anything you find about reviewing that is available for free in the 2013 issue of This Evening Will Come devoted to reviews and reviewing.

A few inspiring & innovative ways to review or engage books

Aisha Sabatini Sloan, “Review of Renee Gladman’s Calamities” (Tsky)

Angie Sijun Lou, “Chen Chen’s Dreams: A Review of When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List of Further Possibilities” (American Poetry Review)

Anjali Enjeti, “Now You See Me: Three Asian-American Poets on Visibility” (Georgia Review)

Ander Monson, “The Skeptical Gaze” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Ander Monson, “Review of Manuel Lima, The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge” (DIAGRAM)

Austen Leah Rose, “Touching Time: The Poetry and Performance of Charles Simic” (Poetry Northwest)

Carrie Chappell, “Did Not Shave My Legs For This: A Conversation With Kristin Sanders’ Cuntry in Three Line Dances” (Fanzine)

Dana Levin, “I am Happiest, Here, Now!”: Arthur Sze’s Poetry of Witness: The Ginkgo Light” (AGNI)

Dorothy Chan, “Review of A Nail the Evening Hangs On” (Split Lip Magazine)

Francis Cannon, “Review of Taneum Baumbrick’s Vantage” (Green Mountains Review)*

Gabrielle Bates, “Review of Fanny Choi’s Soft Science” (RHINO)

Hannah VanDerHart, “Choosing Love As Asylum” (AGNI)

Jamison Crabtree, “Review of Carleen Tibbetts, DATACLYSM.jpg” (DIAGRAM)

Jane Huffman, “Dorah Malech’s Flourish” (Iowa Review)

Julia Bouwsma, “My Body Is A Holler: (Dis)embodiment and Landscape in Taneum Bambrick’s Vantage, Savannah Sipple’s WWJD and Other Poems, and Rosalie Moffett’s Nervous System” (Poetry Northwest)

Julie Marie Wade, “An Atlas of Unmappables: Jennifer S. Cheng’s Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems” (The Rumpus)

Laura Maher, “The Fragmented Quest: A Review of L.I. Henley’s Starshine Road (The Bind)

Madeline Wattenberg, “Mapping the Body in Jena Osman’s Motion Studies” (The Bind)

Marcos Santiago Gonsales, “Staging An Epidemic: What is AIDS to you?” (The New Inquiry)

Maria C. Goodson, “Poetry My Dad Would Like, And Why That’s a Good Thing” (Atticus Review)

Marlin M. Jenkins, “Equilibrium: Review Ending in a Found Q & A” (The Bind)

Oana Sanziana Marian, “In the Time that Remains: Reflections on the Poetry of Derek Mahon” (The Yale Review)

Sarah McCarry, “The Taiga Syndrome: Or, A Haunting” (TOR)

Sejal A. Shah, “Ritual as Resolution: Amarnath Ravva’s American Canyon” (Kenyon Review)

Stacey Balkun, “Fusion & Fissures in Conjoining by Heidi Czerwiec” (The Bind)

Robert Wrigley, “The Gift: On Sylvia Plath” (Fogged Clarity)

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A few angles into reviewing poetry books (i.e. questions worth asking the mind that has become a tree stump when staring at the page)

1. Theme. What is the book about? What does the poet want to do with this book? Keep this in mind while reviewing—a review isn’t about what you want from the book but about what the book wants to give. The question is how the poet accomplishes this.

2. Title. How does the title shape or relate to the poems? Is there a conceptual relationship the poet wants to establish or challenge? Are there any algorithms or equations being set up or displaced by or in the poems? How are the individual poem titles used to advance the theme or tone of the book? Are titles used to subvert naming conventions? If so, how and why?

3. Dialogue. Is the poet in dialogue with or conversant with other poets and poems? If so, which ones? Why? What other art forms or media does the poet introduce? How do these alternate forms of media inform the poems or thematic matter?

4. Address. Are the poems addressed to a visible "you" or an invisible one? How does the direct address shape the texture of time in the poems?

5. Repetitions. Make a list of words or images that are repeated. How does the poet use or rely on these images? What does the poet ask them to carry? What connotations are carried forward and which (if any) are carefully peeled off? Why? In what context?

6. Current events. Do the poems engage any current events? If so, how? Examine the context. Then examine it again.

7. Syntax is defined as the arrangement of words by which their connection and relation in a sentence is shown. How does the poet use syntax? How are conjunctions used? How is punctuation used, and is it performative?

8. Is any particular type of expertise being depicted or challenged in these poems? Are there any discursive considerations? If so, do the challenges occur at the formal level or at the level of grammar and syntax? Why? How?

9. Who is the I? How big or restrictive is it? Are any objects or places asked to stand in for an I or a We? How so?

10. Setting. Where are the poems set--does it vary or revolve around a single place that is fleshed out? How important is setting to these poems--is there a pastoral theme, an eco-poetic involvement, a regionalism? Why?

11. Lists. What, if anything, is being inventoried or listed?

12. Time. What is absolute and what is contingent in these poems? What is capable of changing? How does this relate to tone, if at all? How is time treated, whether by tense or chronology or cracks in both?

13. Organization. If the book is divided into sections, make a brief map of each section and where it goes. Stare at the titles and epigraphs and treat them as rivulets leading into the river of the text. How do they interact with the poems? 

14. Overarching threads. Have you included at least three good quotes from the poems themselves? How have you tied those quotes to your general observations about the book?

15. If you are reviewing a minority poet, try to engage the text at the level of formal concerns. This is a conversation I keep hearing.

16. Formalist close reading. Consider reviewing from a structuralist or linguistic or semiotic lens if you are comfortable playing tennis on that court. But don’t force the game. Don’t force a formalist lens on a text if you can’t actually see through it.

17. Aim for nuance rather than generality. Save the meta for the sermons. We are flooded by so many generalities and trends that sometimes it feels impossible to see the details.

A reading of "Lust Is Grief"

First published in the beautiful Virga, with so much gratitude to editor Laura Page. I’m including the text so that everyone can hear it.

I cut off the intro of my night porch reading of a poem first published in @Virgamag but I’m grateful to @TaraSkurtu & everyone out there right now. All the love for #InternationalPoetryCircle and my fellow mammals. All the broken terrified love. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/MNLMCx8prW

— Alina Stefanescu (@aliner) March 18, 2020

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Lust Is Grief

"Lust is grief that has turned over in bed to look the other way."

Donald Hall

"Don't Disappear" by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, up close, in context

On it’s face, “Don’t Disappear” isn’t extraordinary so much as sad, embarrassing, desperate. Yevtushenko’s final drafts of this poem appeared in 1977. It’s a poem addressed to a lover, and the structure is simple: six stanzas rooted around the anaphora, “Don’t disappear…”. 

The context

A love poem with a third party, or shadow, deserves a little context.

Y. married poet Bella Akhmadulina in 1954. They stayed married until 1959, but Y. couldn’t stand the attention Bella received from admirers. Jealousy, both sexual and literary, plagued their relationship. According to official rumor:

The marriage finally fell apart when Akhmadulina unexpectedly became pregnant. Yevtushenko did not want children and insisted that she terminated the pregnancy. Following the ensuing divorce, Yevtushenko said that their love “had not died; it had stopped being,” and he later attempted to win her back. Despite their difficulties, the pair did ultimately manage to remain friends, and when Yevtushenko married his last wife, Maria, Akhmadulina even came to help set the table for the wedding meal.

In 1961, Y. married Galina Sokol-Lukonina. In 1968, the couple adopted a boy named Peter. I can’t find information about when Galina and Y. divorced, so it’s possible that this poem was written to Galina with Jan Butler in the background.

Or to Irish translator Jan Butler, who was translating his work in the 1970’s—and whom he eventually married in 1978. They had two sons before divorcing in 1986.

Less than a year later, in 1987, Y. met Maria Novikova. They married in the same year. Maria became his fourth and final wife. They had two sons before Y. died in 2017.

*

And now, the poem itself. I’ll start with Albert C. Todd’s translation, because it’s the one that often comes up when this poem is mentioned. It is Wednesday and I am nit-picking. I wanted to re-read it in order to examine the ellipses. To see how Yevtuschenko’s use of ellipses changes the poem. And to compare the translations.

Don’t Disappear (translated by Albert C. Todd)

Don't disappear.... By disappearing from me, 
you will disappear from yourself, 
betraying your own self forever, 
and that will be the basest dishonesty.

Don't disappear.... To disappear is so easy.
It's impossible to resurrect one another.
Death drags down too deep.
Death even for a moment is too long.

Don't disappear.... Forget the third shadow.
In love there are only two. There are no thirds.
We both will be pure on Judgment Day, 
when the trumpets call us to account.

Don't disappear.... We have redeemed sin.
We both are free of the law, we are sinless.
We are worthy together of the forgiveness of those
whom we have unintentionally wounded.

Don't disappear.... One can disappear in an instant, 
but how could we meet later in the centuries ahead? 
Is your double possible in the world, 
and my double? Only barely in our children.

Don't disappear.... Give me your palm.
I am written on it-this I believe.
What makes one's last love terrible
is that it is not love, but fear of loss.

Rupert Moreton’s translation is richer somehow, more carnal, more intimate. It also works with a rhyme scheme that Todd likely abandons in his translation. It’s fuller. It’s thicker. It’s more formal and baroque and possibly prettier. Of course it builds this brocade over the same desperation, but in a classical mode.

Don’t Disappear" (translated by Rupert Moreton)

Don’t disappear… For if that’s what you do,
in pieces from your very self you’ll vanish,
betraying all you are for ever, too –
this basest fraud we only then can banish.

Don’t disappear… for it’s too easy and
we find we cannot resurrect each other.
Death pulls us in too deeply in its sand.
It’s careless to succumb to dying’s smother.

Don’t disappear… Third shadows cast away –
in love there are but two. The third’s deception.
And we shall both be pure on Judgement Day,
when trumpets summon us to that reception.

Don’t disappear… for sin we have atoned.
We are not under judgement, we are shriven.
Of course, we didn’t really mean to wound
our peers, so we deserve to be forgiven.

Don’t disappear. You can in but a wink –
but how then can we manage future meetings?
Of doubles – yours and mine – then can we think?
It may but happen in our children’s greetings.

Don’t disappear. So, give your palm to me.
I truly think you’ll find on it I’m written.
The final love is dreadful, for you see
it isn’t love – by fear of loss we’re bitten.

Image Source: Tarnmoor

A few notes on “showpiece dissidence”

How to determine when a poet is engaging in “showpiece dissidence”? What does “selling out” mean in the context of public poetry? Who is the riskiest risker? And who is merely mouthing the dissent that is trending?

I don’t know. I don’t know that we can know without rising to the defense of an ideology.

Y. never took a clear ideological position—he often straddled a line (or a nuance) to the point of estrangement from the Russian exile community. Joseph Brodsky, for example, resigned from the American Academy of Arts and Letters when Yevtushenko was made an honorary member. "He throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and approved," Brodsky said.

Or he doesn’t throw the right stones. He criticizes anti-Semitism and Stalin but not Marx. He questions the bonuses given to writers who celebrated Russia and the Soviet state but he stays loyal to the state, itself. He identifies as Russian, as a Soviet citizen, at a time when resistance requires the cutting of all ties. Or he solidifies a friendship with a cigarette stub. Or he works within the system and doesn’t defect. He gets published in major magazines. He receives state awards. He benefits from the right to travel abroad, one of the most coveted freedoms in the USSR and Iron Bloc states. The list of wrongs is long.

Y. was, in fact, a reformer, a reform communist rather than a revolutionist. His 1965 interview with Olga Carlisle makes this clear. Carlisle introduces the interview:

In 1965, Yevtushenko tells me that he still believes that a renewed Marxism might be reconciled with literary integrity; that the present system is not incompatible with human and artistic growth. This is an uncomfortable position today in Moscow, where a stifling Socialist Realism is the only sanctioned aesthetic doctrine.

As an idealist, an admirer of abstraction, Y.’s love poems to women never rose to the level of ardor that his love poems for Russia embody.

Can a poet be a patriot of place as well as a dissident? Would it have been better if Y. was a White Russian monarchist, a firmly-anti-communist dissident who rejected the whole rather than its particular?

Hitler hated the USSR too. We forget how close one totalitarianism nestles to another.

After Y.’s death, Dan Piepenbring suggested:

“..sometimes a poet can achieve that rare thing: popularity. All it requires is persistence, good fortune, and cultural conditions dramatically different from those of the contemporary U.S. At the height of his powers, Yevtushenko commanded audiences of thousands in the Soviet Union, where his readings gave voice to the hopes and fears of a generation struggling to come out from under Stalinism.” 

Whether Y.’s popularity came at the price of friends in high places isn’t always the appropriate question to ask. I say this because friends in high places impact the career of poets in every country—whether a democracy or a dictatorship. To different degrees, the anointment is there in the ointment of any public art.

(As for the problematic, Y., like many male poets of his generation, speaks from a socialization that marginalizes the lives and value of female or LGBTQ persons. I don’t hold him to a standard that didn’t exist when he was navigating the years of Soviet communism. Or rather, I don’t know what revelation can come from holding him that.)

"It's not enough to fight for freedom. We must also fight the misuse of freedom, and develop our idea of it. Most people don't care about freedom of speech because they don't have anything to say.” Y. said this in 2006, when he was still holding a candle of hope that Putin might usher in a new era for Russia.

Did he realize that religious nationalism would be the vehicle for consolidation of authoritarianism? How does a poetics of aspirational patriotism interact with propaganda to create a sense of complacency or fatalism? Why am I asking myself these questions aloud in a room without windows and a language with so few words for longing?