“Blind Date With Cavafy” Steve Fellner
Marsh Hawk Press, 2007, $12.50

“The Weary World Rejoices” Steve Fellner
Marsh Hawk Press, 2011, $15.00

Steve Fellner has published two books of poetry, Blind Date with Cavafy and The Weary World Rejoices. They could be a singular collection under the latter title.

From the very opening Fellner announces his subject and his approach… which fulminates in that appropriate title (snipped from a French Christmas carol, later translated by John Sullivan Dwight, an American): “The Weary World Rejoices.”

In “Miss La La” Fellner passes over a 1879 French circus aerialist memorialized visually by Dega:

Another of Fellner’s poem titles is “The Aesthetics of the Damned.” The title alone evokes the trope of a ship of fools or a set of the ludicrously dressed damned. One of Fellner’s speakers drinks straight from the bottle, another pretends to believe “fanged anorexic midget space aliens want to rape our pets,”–– the catalogue of speakers goes on from there: receiver of a suicide note, people waiting in line for God’s judgment, Satan “dressed in well-ironed khakis/and a pink Polo shirt.” It also comes up that we are one of the species “that has the capacity to fall in love with humans who look just like us yet strangely never love us back… that there may not be enough love in the world to write about.” Popcorn, Socrates, Li Po, Cliff’s Notes, Joice Heth, and Catullus get stirred into the mix.

Fellner likes epic scale. Consider these two sentiments from two separate poems which appear in different places of the book:

The Weary World Rejoices continues with Fellner’s highly terraced blend of pathos, cynicism, and romanticism. His songs of innocence and experience capture the homeliness of Birkenstocks. His poems – a kind of “Notes from Hell” ––include an uninspired childhood, the mall, hypochondria, and a styleless wardrobe and decor. There are poems that evoke a passed-around photograph of a deceased lover reduced to Internet bait, the U.S. mosque protestors, and oily birds. He is not one to subtlety evoke the muse and have her demurely pull back the veil of revelation. Rather, he has her throw aside the curtain like the Wizard of Oz dressed as a burlesque figure, hoist a tacky disco ball, and shout out across the heads of the audience, “One last round!” Of course it sounds more like ammunition than drinks. That statement is not condemnation –– but praise as ruthless as Steve Fellner’s poetics. In The Weary World Rejoices, Fellner braids together Walt Whitman, crystal meth, exclamation marks, Ritalin, car trouble, Matthew Shepard (half saint), Matthew Shepard (half lottery ticket).

Fellner is not sloppy. Nor is he a muddy writer, he separates the Absurd from the Surreal. The intentionally transgressive nature of his poetics is in-line with those of Jan Richman or Denise Duhamel. Not a racy as Tim Lui; not as romantic as Erin Belieu, Richard Howard, or Caravaggio. Though, in many ways alike, Fellner’s enterprise is less romantic than Caravaggio’s. One has a feeling he might refuse the final rise to metaphor and see, not the holy virgin, but—only the street whore-model; not the saint, but the untransformed sinner dolled up and posed. Fellner is oddly both Catholic and pagan – a bit like Blake with his songs of Innocence and Experience. One can also draw parallels to other poets: James Wright, Dereck Walcott, Alfred Corn, J.D. McClatchy, even Philip Larkin might be offered up. Fellner’s poems are a read for anyone with a heart, a creative eye, and a pang of sourness when faced with the broken things of the world.

In Fellner’s quest for merging the homily and the holy, I give him the last word:

The winner of the 2011 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize and former Stegner Fellow discusses his latest collection, Paradise, Indiana.

1. The Instructions by Adam Levin:  An infuriatingly big and brilliant novel.
2. Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White:  The Nobel winner you may never have heard of, White is Australia’s rightful heir to Virginia Woolf.
3. Remembering Babylon by David Malouf:  Another Australian, Malouf creates scenes in this novel that I can almost guarantee will never leave you.
4. Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt:  This, Grasshopper, is book length “essaying” in the true sense of the form.
5. Blue Nights by Joan Didion:  OK, so I could read her instructions on how to brush one’s teeth.  Still, the way in which she universalizes personal suffering could, perhaps should, summon the weary to form cults.
6. 

   Adam Levin - The Instructions

   Flap by Mark DeCarteret:  After Googling this poet, read his poems and try, if you can, to come up with a cogent argument as to why he is not more well-known.
7. Otherwise Elsewhere by David Rivard:  A poet who taps at the cold fragile glass of the lyric form, leaving behind a splayed beauty.
8. How To Live or A life of Montaigne: In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell:  A hymn to uncertainty.
9. The Art of Recklessness by Dean Young:  If you want some understanding of the aims of contemporary poetry, leave David Orr and Stephen Burt alone and let this slender little book lead into the necessary dangers.
10. Hard Ground photographs by Michael O’Brien, poems by Tom Waits:  A totally unrecognized “occupy” movement can be arranged simply from the notes of the once nameless and voiceless that grace the books final pages.

There never was a world for her/ Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

-Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West

He begins somewhere in the back of the bookstore.  The bearded guy who announced him looks befuddled at first until we all hear him approaching through the rows of real crime books.  “Is there a poem in here somewhere?” he’s saying aloud.  “Where will I find it?”  This sort of thing.  And then he’s among us, those of us sitting patiently in folding chairs—most attempting to look away to avoid eye contact.   Some poor man with an aisle seat gets the brunt of it:  “Is there a you and an I or are we one?” he asks an unsuspecting sheepish looking fellow, who is no doubt focused only on summoning enough courage to read his own poem when the open reading starts.   I’m focusing on the spines of books now, reading their titles, comparing fonts, hoping my friend sitting next to me doesn’t catch my eye or, worse, nudge my leg.   I don’t want to discourage anyone, after all.  When he gets to the podium everyone seems a bit more relaxed.  We’re waiting for the poems now, wondering if he’s found them, but what we get is a ten minute definition of the difference between the soul and the spirit—how our culture has the whole thing muddled, how one is reaching down and the other up.

***

I started writing poetry because at the age of nineteen the outside world no longer vibrated at the same frequency as my insides, which, in their seemingly fragile and unceasing trembling, rendered me a fixture on my parent’s couch for a stretch of about two months.  I had finished my first year of college with a growing since of Otherness, a feeling I had kept at a safe enough distance with a concoction of recreational chemicals for most of my adolescence.  The formulas weren’t working anymore, however; I was running out of combinations of self-medication and growing more afraid of what waited beyond the haze.  I still have the journals I was writing at the time.  I was pushing at the limits of language I had come to accept as part of life’s incompleteness; I wanted to write what was happening to me.  The words flap wildly like spasmodic wings on the page, like an injured bird trapped in a shoebox.  I love their energy still:  “I’m tired of my mind and the silence of stones.  I want to chew the world to pebbles,” I write on August 5, 1988. The mixed metaphors howl and snap at an unknown foe.  I don’t know whom I was reading at the time or if I was even capable of reading.  That would come later.

***

I want to write this carefully.  How after the spirit/soul guy finished his definition, which I realized then was a poem, a woman rose to begin the open reading.  She looked uncertain as she made her way to the front.  She took a folded piece of paper from her purse and carefully pressed it smooth on the podium, a gesture that seemed to calm her for a moment.  “I’m a bit nervous,” she said.  “I’ve never read a poem in public before.  You see, I started writing poetry because something terrible happened to me.”  It was clear now that if I were to laugh involuntarily it would be unforgivable.  I even thought about stepping outside to avoid such a social disaster, but I didn’t want to her to take my departure personally, especially after the words that followed.  “I was sexually assaulted two years ago.”

One is always hesitant to paraphrase the contents of a poem, and considering the context here, the stakes seem even more dangerous.  And yet I suspect that I will never forget the image of a “turd” swirling around the bowl while being coaxed by a speaking toilet to “take the flush”(the poem’s title).  This metaphor is, of course, hilarious, if only for its scatological innovation.  But to laugh?  I was not alone among the hunched figures attempting to ascertain the poem’s intent.  Her face, too, was hard to read; she seemed earnest, yet capable of ironic self-defense.  What if she meant to be funny and we didn’t laugh?  What if she was attempting to heal herself through humor?

***

I can almost remember the fever with which I would search out a phrase I had come across in my reading that I needed to find again as a way of making some sense of my own body in the world.  I knew, for instance, that the line “Worm be with me, this is my hard time” came from a Theodore Roethke poem, but, pie-eyed, I would pour over the pages of his collected just to find somewhere in the middle of “The Lost Son” the actual inked letters that corresponded to the shape in the middle of my chest.

The prolific poet sits down to discuss his roots, his process, and the importance of closure. During the course of this interview Mr. Hicok reads his poems “Making the list I will never make” and “Happy anniversary.”

“Boy with Flowers” Ely Shipley
Barrow Street Press, 2008, 978-0-9728-302-6-3, $15.95

Poet Ely Shipley

Ely Shipley’s Boy with Flowers won the 2007 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. I remember enjoying it; reading it through the first time, thinking how if I had been asked to suggest art for its cover, I might have suggested one of the 1905 paintings of Picasso . . . either “Boy with a Pipe” (lanky, androgynous boy in blue with a crown of flowers) or the slightly more austere, red shirted “Boy with a Frilled Collar.”

Gender is not something we discover one day by looking down and seeing a protrusion of flesh. But rather by our looking back up and saying , “Oh, I am a girl” or “Oh, I am a boy.” Gender comes from a deeper catalog of possibilities of escape and expression. Gender identification begins more like a trembling root finding its way in a hazy dream-state. Something more along the lines of Mallarme’s sleepy faun in “Afternoon of a Faun.” In Shipley’s landscape, the dreamy faun sings while finding himself floating between two worlds.

Boy with Flowers embodies and disembodies with ease. The poems are clear and easily accessible. Images of masks and juvenile entrapments balance against a larger set of images — of stories inching forward: tattoos, scars, blood veins, underground rivers, wire, sutures, letters carved into a tree, the light from a car’s headlights washing over a wall, coils of smoke, fingertips and kisses stroking and brushing flesh, branches, roots, lightning, ice cracking, water falling, . . . even songs. Shipley also writes of being surrounded.

…I want
escape. My shirt opened…
and now when I close
my eyes, a music box stars up and my breath

is that lonely ballerina, spiraling
faster before her circular mirror. And she sees
nothing because it is dark
or because her eyes are only eyes
painted across a face. Yet for a moment
I swear I hear her sing
over the music, the city, my pulse—
but its only the high-pitched, slow churning
of her feet, that wood carved tightly
around a metal spring, the way
the whole world turns and folds
around its invisible axis.

(“Breath”)

In another of the poems, the meditation springs from an aunt having a scar… her neck previously sutured after a car accident:

…It is the map to a place
I will never enter but wish to
trail with my fingers, read the Braille of her, follow

this story as the needle that once
reassembled her dug deep – little silver
diver plunging into water, then

up for air, sewing itself between two
worlds, here and there, me
and her, to stitch

all that can only be
seamless in the dark.

(“Horizon Line”)

Shipley writes of the heart and lungs working magically away in the dark. Of the heart desiring to escape. The image of water freely lapping at the shore brings comfort.

Here, another poem, that is a meditation of entering and heard singing:

…The woman
in the movie falls
in love but still feels
trapped. I know because
one night she makes love in the choir
loft of an abandoned church. The roof

seems as though it is peeled
open and the camera
closes in so I can look

down on her. It begins to rain,
and when she comes
the noise she makes, breathing heavily

into the man’s hair, which is long and sways
like a curtain back and forth across his face,
sounds like singing.

(“In the Film”)

Shipley also writes of desiring to penetrate, of wanting to be inserted into another, of wanting to be surrounded, even engulfed, by another’s sensibility.

For Shipley, the oracular is related to the moment of letting go; where the ineffable gushes into the physical — making a sound:

…I’ve been
dreaming…
I wander from room to room and in one find
my mother’s heart…
My mother must have left it by mistake, here
on a shelf. I want to lift it to my ear and listen to its beating.
I’m afraid to touch it, afraid I’ll hear only silence,
and the silence will carry me into its sea. I could drown in this
love for my mother. Inside the garden, a stone
fountain floats, from which water pours endlessly
from the mouths of fish and gods.

(“Fountain”)

Shipley writes eloquently of the vastness of childhood… and of the “child just nearing the age of loneliness.” Beyond writing of the singularity of laying aside childhood and of slipping into instances of reverie, Shipley writes of the singularity of mortal being and needs:

…tonight, I only want to be
the mouth

of a guitar, hollowed out
and bodiless
except for the balloon
of sound resonating invisibly

through air, and go on
pressing my fingers deeper in
to the neck, as if I could find
a shape inside

its voice as I choke
out its notes, its high-pitched
scream, its pop.

Shipley’s Boy with Flowers is a keeper.

A look into the mind of a great artist, and a great man. This one should be listened to in its entirety.

Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This evening I’m pleased once again to be joined by prolific songwriter Will Oldham. Will, thanks for taking the time.

Will Oldham: Thanks for hollerin’ at me, its funny cause I always think of it as fogg-ed.

BE: It can be pronounced either way, the ambiguity I guess is something that fits the name itself.

Well, over the past couple of months I’ve found myself going back to a lot of your older work. And perhaps it’s where I am in my own life right now, but a couple of your past album titles have just now struck me as particularly resonant. The first is: “There is No One What Will Take Care of You,” and I know one could interpret this as a suggestion to seek a truth outside of the divine. But I guess I’ve come to view the title as an assertion of the spirit of self-reliance you seem to embody. Can you talk about the title a little bit, and am I even close?

WO: I believe so, say the song “(I Was Drunk At The) Pulpit”—and the title of that record is something that I get worried about every now and again, just in terms of: Where did it come from and where did it take a person to have that stated so clearly? On some levels it’s sort of the braggarts version of the already bragging phrase “If you want something done right you have to do it yourself.” At the end of the day, you don’t have to want something done at all, there are not eyes watching over you, but there are not really eyes watching you either.

BE: That’s fucking insightful. So the compulsion to act and to do something great, if I might, must come from within, and no one’s expecting it; or, you have no obligation outside of yourself, you have that obligation, perhaps, to yourself?

WO: You make the world—with enough strength and enough luck you make the world that you live in. If you accept that there’s participation to be done and an existence to be had—I tend to think there is only one way I want to go through this existence and that’s with my eyes open and my chest out as much as possible. That’s how I’d like to.

BE: Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah, Will. Fuck yeah, man, I could not agree more, and this ties into the other album title I’ve thought a lot about, “The Letting Go.” It seems to me that every man or woman has to come to a point in their own life where they must learn to let go of guilt or anguish or triviality in order to progress and to move forward. I don’t know if that’s where that title came from?

WO: It seems like there’s a crucial time, which for some people can come way too early and can throw shit way out of whack, but there’s a crucial time in which you feel like your paying attention to the rules of others so much and, which is important because there is a lot of existence to get through and it would be stupid to try to get through it without some sense of cooperation and some sense of community, but at a certain point it’s letting go of learning what other people do and saying: From now on I’m going to take everything I’ve learned up to this point and go, and go forward with it. It’s kind of a turning inward with ideally some degree of faith and respect still to the outer world, but saying: You know, I’ve spent so much time looking out, now I’m going to sorta fly blind for as long as possible with the idea that I’ve been in training to live.

BE: Absolutely. I find one of my own weaknesses is I’m too impressionable, something someone says to me can circulate in my head for days and prove to be an impediment in my own life, and I’m only now learning to shut that out. I wonder if you ever experience that, or if at times in your life there are certain books or films or music that you try to avoid because your not prepared or you don’t necessarily want to go into that state of mind, or that place, or where that piece of media will take you?

WO: Oh for sure, all of the time. All of the time. But I don’t like the idea that that’s a willful ignorance, I like the idea that that’s not denying any kind of engagement. And so sometimes that means if I’m going to say no to this experience, if I’m going to say no to this book, then my defense mechanisms go into overdrive and I’ll say: Well if I have to say no to this book then I’m going to read these two books, or if I have to say no to listening to this musician, this artist, this record, this set of songs, then I’m going to listen to twice as many others to prove to myself that I’m not denying; because I don’t know the reasons why something is intimidating to me or disgusting to me and I don’t like feeling that way, either. I don’t like it when something turns me off, on any level. So, its a matter of saying: Well, I can either sit here and reject, or I can do double-time embracing of something else just to reassure myself that I’m not against the world.

BE: Yeah, and I don’t view it as a weakness in ourselves. I view it as if we are curating our moods, but that’s a dangerous game too.

WO: Its very dangerous because, as far as implying that we know what we’re doing for example, that we have perspective enough—by diving fully into something it requires a lot of denial, and denial is always dangerous even if all of your intentions are good and all your preparations are good; It’s still, when you make a choice your denying an infinite number of other choices.

BE: But that’s what you spoke about when you said you have to learn to trust your own perspective at a certain point, and stick your chest out and go “I’m going to go ball the fuck out.” (laughs)

WO: Exactly, you have to learn to trust your own perspective. And be prepared to change course if you have to, but the best thing you can do is to not make the wrong decision in the first place.

BE: Yeah, absolutely, given all the information you have and the trust that you have in yourself. This is kind of changing courses, but, and this would be a great comfort to me— Do you take comfort in the fact that, after you die there will be a chronicle of your life, of your writing and music, that will be preserved and stay alive for centuries, I imagine, in the future?

WO: No, well, I don’t…No, no, I don’t know… No. I don’t necessarily believe that, whatever… If, for example, if there were some kind of a revolution in which some political party or leader decided to destroy a large number of people that I had either an ethnic or ideological kinship with, who would want a presence in the world beyond? You know, the future is so uncertain; it’s just a joy to be around and be able to participate now I think, and to the idea of doing work as sort of broadening the navigable atlas of what can happen just during a lifetime. Again, no one will take care of you now and certainly no one will take care of you or you’re legacy after your gone in a way that you might find recognizable or trustworthy.

BE: I think… I’ve found writing and doing this Fogged Clarity thing that the work is a way of coping with kind of the minefield that is existence, and putting your head down and really working. I just talked to Michael Tyrell and he said the same thing, he said: Work is good, work is healthy; especially if you’re doing something that you’re passionate about.

WO: I mean, I think our brains are created to be used. They’re purpose is to figure out either physical, mental or emotional survival, and if you’re not figuring out one of those things then your brain gets lost.

BE: Yeah, and I think that’s exactly what it’s doing for a lot of individuals, particularly around this country. I know this has been said and it’s really passé, but I feel as if we’ve become hyper-stimulated and that a lot of individuals are kind of becoming sedated into ease.

WO: Yeah, hyper-stimulated and hyper-satisfied, exactly.

BE: It’s scary. That’s why you gotta keep pushing, keep moving, like we talked about. But what keeps… I mean we’ve touched on it but, your longevity impresses me as much as anything. What keeps you hungry, what keeps you pushing, why do you want to keep making music?

WO: Hmm, its the twin motivations of… Fear is definitely a big one all the time, but also, it’s reward as well. The sense of waking up in the morning and knowing that there is music ahead of me in the day is such an incredible feeling. If you have two choices: To wake up and have fear in front of you in the day or to have music in front of you in the day—and the more I engage with music the more days I wake up and know that that’s what’s going to be there, as opposed to fear. And the things that come with music, because of the people, and because of—I don’t know, whatever it is in music itself— because of melody and harmony and lyric. I’m thrilled at most corners that I turn walking down the street, I’m thrilled by most pages I turn when I’m reading a book thinking of what it’s going to show and what it’s going to make possible for tomorrow. Its wondrous I guess.

BE: That’s awesome. A human being, you know, who doesn’t make music can choose the music of the day over fear, and that’s a critical point that we have to get to when we lift our head from the pillow every morning: Am I going to succumb today, or am I going to emerge and act in harmony with my surroundings?

WO: Yeah.

BE: That’s really nice. Well, as someone who writes poetry, one of my greatest ambitions is to have a piece appear in The New Yorker, the publication that did a feature story on you a couple years ago. Can you talk about your experience with the magazine, and the interviewer, and how you thought the piece turned out?

WO: Yeah, the piece turned out— You know it was one of those things where, and it may even be in the content of the article, I don’t really know a lot of things how… With the work that I’ve done, because I dropped out of school, for example…

BE: Didn’t you go to Brown or Dartmouth?

WO: Yeah, I went to Brown for a few semesters.

And dropped out of school and decided to make my own way, I guess, and that was disappointing to my folks. And so I don’t know how to, you know, I haven’t known how to do things for my folks that reflect the appreciation or anything, any sort of respect, and that was something that I knew that they valued. And at the same time, once again, it’s a fairly simple story because a lot of it is in that article; one of the few interesting and satisfying pieces of writing on a musician that I’d ever read was in The New Yorker and it was about Merle Haggard from about 1992 or ’93 or something like that. And so when this guy contacted us to talk about doing a story, I thought, you know I don’t really like… Especially the story he was proposing was going to be super in-depth and he was going to do this research over the course of six months and it was very intimidating, especially because, I don’t know, I like to engage with the people that I’m involved with, and I was thinking like: this is going to be really dangerous if I’m around this guy whose intelligent and I can’t ignore him and so I’m going to engage with him but than also he’s going to leave and go do his thing and that will also leave this gaping hole in my existence and why would I, you know, if I’m making a piece of music one day and he’s there, what part will he play in the making of that music? I mean, its not like he is negligible, he’d be a human force who ideally is a creative and intelligent person, but do I want that in the making of this music or in any of the things that I’m involved with over the course of the six months?

BE: His influence is going to permeate your vision.

WO: Yeah, but still, you know every once in a while an opportunity comes up where I feel like this is not my dream but I can do something for the musicians I work with, I can do something for the record company I work with, I can do something for my parents, I can do something for my friends, whatever. So, it was one of those things where I was like: Ok, I’m going to try to do this because I know that this is something that does not, is not, going to come up many times, its going to come up and then go away. And also I had read the guys writing because he had come from The New York Times previously and I’d read his writing for a long time and liked his writing. But then he came down and, you know I really tried, and I just felt like it was just kind of devastating. Even, like I said, he was a nice, smart guy, but the experience was kind of devastating even just in the four days he was around.

BE: Was it kind of oppressive?

WO: It was kind of oppressive and, I like, also, I like to do things right, so that can be problematic. It means, if you have that tendency, you should only engage in the things you have the strength to commit to and that was not something that I necessarily had the strength or ability to commit to and I could feel it, you know, pulling things away from me that I needed, just for my own sanity if nothing else. So after what was to be his first of many trips to Kentucky and first of many trips to wherever activity was going on, I said that I needed to discontinue the process, and I sort of expected, not that I wanted this, but I sort of expected at that time that he would say: Well, this is about a tenth of the work I expected to put into this article, let’s just trash it. That’s what I expected, and like I said I didn’t necessarily want that, because at that point I’d raised the expectations and hopes of Drag City at the very least, and of this guy. But I was surprised some months later when we got contacted by The New Yorker saying they wanted to fact-check the story, and they are very intense fact-checkers and essentially they read or paraphrased the entire article to me over the phone so I could fact-check it, which was pretty great just in terms of a publication that takes that kind of responsibility, it was pretty cool. And I don’t believe they would have taken me as the end-all authority either, because I could have told them anything of course at that point. I think they double fact-checked numerous points. But I still… You know, I think he could have written a better article had I been more cooperative and he could have written a longer and more complex and interesting article if I had cooperated some more. So it had a kind of incompleteness to it, more like a snapshot than a real portrait I guess.

BE: But I guess, doesn’t that itself kind of fit your whole public persona?

WO: Yeah, and I guess the reason is because that’s kind of what ends of happening. I can engage and give only to the making of the songs and making of the records and making of the shows, and outside of that, I fall short. It’s not for… You know, I would like to be able to do more, I would like to be a superhero.

BE: Well, there’s only so much you can do. It’s funny that you mentioned making your parents proud or doing something for them, because Jonathan Franzen, one the reasons he obliged to the Time cover last August after he’d written Freedom is because his dad was never a man of literature, but he recognized the names like Updike and Cheever because he would get his Time Magazine with them on the cover. So it’s kind of neat that you mentioned that.

WO: Yeah, its the kind of thing where there’s not much else I can do. I’m never going to be able to show them a diploma ever, I’m never going to be able to introduce them to my boss or show them my retirement plan or anything like that, but at the same time I want them to know that they are… I do feel like they instilled in me a work-ethic that is invaluable to me and other senses of morality and a way of dealing with the world that are valuable that, you know, its hard for them to understand without something…

BE: Some connection to what they know, to what they recognize.

WO: Exactly.

BE: Yeah, well I read the article, I think it was my third or fourth time, the other day and it mentioned the mushroom smuggling and what not. Drugs as escape or inspiration?

WO: Well, I feel like we can be inspired by escape. Yeah, never as escape, maybe as departure… I guess I always feel like; I know there will be a permanent departure, a permanent escape and so all of the… My dad took a lot of pictures when we were growing up and he said: Always take a picture with somebody in it, if you go to the Grand Canyon or if you go to the Empire State Building take a picture with somebody in it, because you can get a postcard of the Grand Canyon or the Empire State Building, but make the picture valuable to you, make the picture unique to your experience. But also something that’s not just for you, but that… Say, if I’m out there in my mind, whether its on a musical thing or an emotional thing or a sexual thing or a chemical thing, the peak part of the experience is how it relates to other things to me, and it’s the kind of thing where I’m thinking: I want to write a postcard from this state of mind back to a loved one or something like that, you know, this is great because of the way that it relates to the rest of my life, not because of it in and of itself, but because proportionate to other things or compared to other things or in direct relation to other things in my life, its awesome. And that includes, you know, any valuable state of intoxication or inebriation or transportation, it’s like, it is a kind of escape, but it’s value is knowing that it’s not a permanent escape, so it’s not really escape, it’s this departure or orbiting, you know?

BE: Could it also be viewed as a postcard to your stasis consciousness to your sober consciousness?

WO: For sure, for sure. You know the only thing to worry about there is getting too insular. I’ve always felt like, I’ve always been afraid of the figures in literature or when I see someone who is mentally ill in real life or in great pieces of literature, like Bronte- style. You know I always think like, that’s because… You know I can see why someone could get into that place, either by weakness or out of survival necessity. Sending too many postcards from me to me.

BE: Yeah, that’s funny you say survival necessity, because essentially that’s what I’ve come to think—and I’m not conservative at all—that’s almost what I’ve come to think of some types of mental illness as. You know: I can’t deal so I’m going to retreat to, or submit to, say OCD or panic disorders. Even though it’s terrifying, it in and of itself is a way of coping.

WO: Yeah, and it’s either because the equipment that some of us are given is not sufficient or because the circumstances that have been laid upon us are too extreme, or the training, support, education, and experiences that have shaped us are not enough, and the best place to go is inside.

BE: Yeah, and now I guess that we’ve labeled it it’s easier than ever to find a niche if you will in the mental illness categorization.

WO: And easy to find… You know there are times when, you know, I’ve never taken a prescription medication for the purpose of long term emotional modification, but at the same time I know there have been many times when I’ve taken recreational intoxicants and thought: Oh, this is a fix, this really works, this is a repair. And if someone were to say, and you feel it yourself, you know this is actually not a long-term solution. But if someone were to say, like a doctor or something: This is a long-term solution, this is ok. I could see saying: Alright this is great, you know I’m going to stick with this for a while.

BE: This is changing course once again, but I wrote this line in a poem (laughs) and I see I have written here that “as someone once said,” but that someone was me…

WO: (laughs)

BE: I wrote that art is created in a seclusion lovers only dilute. What do you think about that?

WO: I think that there… You know, that that can be true because with some people art can be a step towards completion in the same way that a relationship with another person can be a step towards completion, and there are very few people, I think, who can handle both, or need both. You know, it’s a great, you know, I think many great pieces of work come from the idea of wanting to see a concept or an idea or an emotion through, and sometimes the communion with another person is so significant that if you tried to make the same concept real, but you already had this sense of completion, you would have a diluted piece of work; which isn’t to say you couldn’t make a different piece of work, but the drive of a single solitary force is different from the drive of a united force or a satisfied force. But at the same time there are some in music, there are some united forces that are super powerful, like for example when Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema were the Royal Trux or when Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash were a united front, they create a new individual that is not diluted by a lover or another, but it creates this insane double-wide (laughs).

BE: It’s furthered; the vision is fulfilled by the other person. But I also think that the relationship between art and artist is a form of intimacy and a form of communion, and perhaps those four hundred pound writers or poets or musicians find that intimacy within the work they create, perhaps with another part of their brain: the creative part.

Well, we’ve corresponded a little about Ray Kurzweil’s theory of Singularity, a concept that essentially states that most human beings will be inextricably linked to machines by the year 2045. I just wanted to discuss a bit about how Kurzweil’s assertion effects the individual and whether or not the concept of the individual with free will that we’ve spoken about so much tonight is in jeopardy given our swift evolution, especially in terms of the digital, in terms of technology.

WO: It seems like it’s in jeopardy… You know, using the term “jeopardy” implies a value system that you or I might have, but that the people who are now and in the future will very, very willingly… He seems to be writing even to the idea that this is something to look forward to, and that’s interesting and I think it’s kind of cool. But it’s not my frame of mind and I don’t think it will be, and in that way I am an outsider. But it’s obvious that people are embracing the idea of giving over more and more and more to artificial intelligence.

BE: There seems to be almost a sense of fanaticism in it, lying subtly beneath. I think that’s what scares me so much. And the people who are turning the wheels and pulling the levers… I have no say if there’s going to be an Ipod 300,000 you know. So I’m not in the discussion, I’m bringing nothing to the table, and am therefore just subject to whatever comes out.

WO: No, you don’t. But once again, we have this incredible equipment; our bodies and brains that are just not being utilized and it leaves people with a real sense of uselessness—purposelessness, directionlessness, uselessness—and you know melding with the machines is saying you know what: It’s ok to be useless, it’s not a bad thing, it’s ok, we’re going to get through this together. Its not saying: No you’re not useless. It’s actually saying: Yes, you are useless, your brain is relatively useless, your body is totally useless, but it’s ok and we’re going to work through this problem together. It is a problem, we’re going to work through it together, were going to have a lot of fun doing it, you know, come along on the ride, and everyone is like: Yeah, “thank God, ya know, thank God someone is saying something nice about this crazy feeling that I have. Because all it would take is for somebody to tell me something, tell me: You’re right, you are useless and I’d kill myself and I don’t wanna do that, I want it to be ok. And so they provide for us and say: We’re going to take care of this and all you have to do is sit back and upload yourself.

BE: Spot on.

WO: But I like the idea of the decomposition of my body, you know, to some extent I don’t mind the idea of the decomposition of my brain, although I won’t be aware if and when that happens of course, which is kind of a bummer. You know, since I was a kid I’ve always liked the post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies and identified with the sort of societies that exist when everything has gone a different direction. Not that I imagine that I could hold my own necessarily, I just think it sounds more fun to me. You know, I heard George Clinton on the radio last night say something like: Everything that is good is nasty. And you know, no matter how nasty three girls and a cup, two girls in a cup was, it wasn’t really that nasty because it was on a computer screen, and therefore it wasn’t that good, you know. If it was in the room with you, no matter what it is… It’s like, its better to smell your grandmother’s shit than it is to put her in a nursing home for example.

BE: You know I never thought of that, the excitement on behalf of the people advocating for technological progress and the fusion of A.I. with human beings, I never looked at it… That’s perfect, the excitement: “Oh here, here you go.” It’s a constant reaffirming of people’s doubts and even their own doubts in creating this stuff.

WO: Everything that our bodies and minds were created for, we’ve inadvertently, totally unintentionally, we’ve taken it away from ourselves so that we’ve become useless. Everything that your body is for, every bone, every ligament, every emotion that you have is created for certain purposes that no longer apply, and rather then giving up, they’ve created virtual uses for at least everything internal that you have, they wont create a virtual use for everything external. If there’s time left for our species there probably would be an evolution away from needing all of our little tendons and nerve endings and things like that.

BE: I don’t think the cohesion can be found, truly found, on anything but an organic level; the truth comes from within. That’s a fucking long lesson, but I feel as if it’s one I’ve learned. I’ve actually found, as I continue to grow and age, that I like spending time outside, particularly in the water, a lot more. I’ve gone swimming in Lake Michigan or Lake Huron nearly every day this summer and just played like a seal in the water, and I feel a wholeness, I feel a oneness, and it’s almost as if… It’s like absolution I guess, and it’s strange, but it’s true I walk out feeling cleansed psychologically as well as physically.

WO: It’s very true, yeah, it’s very true. But we have to accept that there are people who will, now or in the future, get that say from listening to a Justin Bieber song or a Bon Iver song or something like that and say like: Oh my God I never felt so clean before, I never felt so alive until I saw Justin Beiber play in Madison, Wisconsin. Or something like that, and it’s just like: No, no, wait a minute, No, no you don’t understand, and they’re like: No, no, I really do. And you have to say: Whoa they do, that’s their experience. But they are also the same people that would say: Eat a vegetable? Yeah, I mean probably at Thanksgiving I totally have, I have sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce.

BE: (Laughs) I’m thinking about that episode of The Office when Michael feeds Kevin the broccoli, stalk first. Do you remember that?

WO: No, I didn’t see that.

BE: You’re absolutely right (though), so I have to have a conviction that my sense of the emotion, and this might be selfish, is more substantive than the same evocation that comes from a Justin Beiber song or a candied yam at Thanksgiving.

WO: Or just have a sense that it’s, it’s our place. And our place may be… You know everybody’s place is going to be outside most prophecies, just because what we have in common with other individuals will always be the minority in terms of the world at large. But even in our own society to say: We are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is proven ever harder because of my existence. Because I like to swim in Lake Michigan or Lake Superior for the real bracing cold and cleaner water, I like to swim in Lake Superior and it’s all the more important to me because it’s not important to other people or something like that, you know? Not that you are positioning yourself or that we would position ourselves outside of another group, but because you can sometimes only see the value of something in relation to other things, or just accept the role that some people are created as negative forces, some people are created as pariahs, some people are created as leaders and some people are created… You know, its part of the balance. You know my place in this world is going to be somebody who does not appreciate The Singularity. But there’s nothing I can do about it, it’s not a choice I’ve made, there’s nothing I can do about the fact….

BE: You can only affirm yourself.

WO: I can only affirm myself, yeah.

BE: You know, I’ve gotta talk to you about something real quick, I’ve been mind-fucking myself over it since yesterday. I met this old lady at the post office that I vaguely know, and she’s kind of senile, but I was like: Yeah, I’m going to Oregon. And we started talking politics and I told her how I was kind of disappointed in Obama and that I felt like he’d abandoned the platform that he advocated so hard, and she got upset with me and I go: Well, you know I could bring real change or something. And then I stumbled over the way I said it and then I thought: Dude you sound like an idiot… Because I’m always questioning my own… I don’t know, there’s still a creeping sense of doubt. And she goes: “You don’t even wanna go to Oregon,” and I mean I don’t even know how that made sense at all, but it fucking scared me and it’s in the back of my head. Its like: Of course I do, it’s in my fucking heart man, I’ve wanted to do this for a very long time and I just let those little fucking stumbles, those little things fuck me up, and I can’t do that anymore man, I can’t do that anymore.

WO: Yeah, I mean it’s good that you’re not proceeding blindly, it’s good that you’re listening to other people. You know, pretty much every good decision that I’ve made, I will make the good decision, I will get closer and closer to that decision, and usually the eleventh hour is, no matter how much I’ve prepared for it, how much I’ve thought about it, the eleventh hour that decision becomes the wrong decision one hundred percent, and its repulsive or frightening or its just wrong. And then it takes every bit of strength and inner-reassurance and turning around to say “No, you know, this is like a nightmare, a waking nightmare where you’re testing yourself, and the only way you can earn what you’ve always wanted to do is by breaking through this eleventh hour doubt and doing it.” Then you deserve it. And it’s whenever you’ve said, you know at the last minute like: “Ah fuck it, fuck it, I’m unprepared” or whatever; that’s the worst thing you can do to yourself.

BE: You know, I got a tattoo at two o’clock today right over my heart that just says: “Keep Going.” Because that’s the only answer I’ve fucking found for anything after twenty-seven years and a month, that’s the only answer I’ve ever found: Just keep going.

WO: Yeah, and, you know, I don’t think he wrote it, but a song that Willie Nelson plays a lot and Jerry Jeff Walker played is “Pick Up the Tempo.” They say, “Time will take care of itself, so just leave time alone.” Just the idea that there’s no reason to ever back off or to yield or to give in unless it is out of kindness or compassion or to gain perspective, but for the most part it’s like, to ever say or to ever pretend that, or take the role… It’s already taken, there’s one thing that’s taken in your life and that is that time will continue and then it will end. And if you ever say that you want that job, that’s retarded, you don’t need that job, that’s taken care of, everything else is up to you. Time will continue then it will end. There’s no reason for you to ever say: “I’m going to end something,” because everything will end anyway. You just, you continue, run alongside of time, run apace with time, rather than say: If I don’t do this time will stop or an end will never come or an end will come sooner. It’s like no, no, no, that’s got nothing to do with it. You just do your shit, march on.

BE: Yeah, hell yeah. Hey Will, I’ve got a great admiration for you as a thinker and a musician and thanks so much for taking the time tonight, I really, really appreciate it.

WO: I really appreciate it as well. I’m glad you gave me another call.

“The Earth in the Attic” Fady Joudah
Yale University Press, 2008, 978-0-300-13431-5, $16

Poet Fady Joudah

Back in 2007, Fady Joudah’s first collection of poems, The Earth in the Attic was selected by Louis Glück as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. It is a book that will long continue to warrant reading.

Joudah was born in Austin, Texas, and currently lives in Houston. He is familiar with issues of immigrants and refugees. His parents were born in Palestine and, besides the United States, he spent formative time in Libya and Saudi Arabia. One biography notes, “Fady Joudah continues to lead a life of international engagement.” He has practiced medicine in Zambia and Darfur, with Doctors Without Borders; and presently he works in the emergency room of a veterans hospital in Houston.

The language of The Earth in the Attic is engaging and straightforward. Foreign, but not distant; much like a host of Southern writers – from Thomas Wolfe and James Dickey to Yusef Komunyakaa and Betty Adcock – that have written about their home as a far away psychological country. Joudah, like all good Southern writers, writes from the perspective of “Home is an epilogue.”

The landscape of Joudah’s poetry is made up of olive oil, tents, figs, sycamores, small bags of peanuts, squealing pigs, camels, hysterical chickens in the road, and sage tea. There are families with dreams and travel documents and a vision of life down the road (marriages, opportunities, states of emergency, and death). Unlike goats and ducks that may willy-nilly clog the road, people struggle with documents, borders, and heritage. Distances, seas, encampments, and land are all a part of the fluid landscape. Though the language of the poems is simple, they are often made up of small movements of non-sequiturs:

The carpenter
Dying of cancer in a hospital bed
… thought I was kind
And searched my nametag for a while

Then said: I know your people.
They’re good people they
Have suffered enough,
And the city is theirs—

The carpenter would be dead by morning.
And why

Did I think your hair
Would have turned white by now?
Like the Mediterranean, frothing at the shore.
And why
You asked for your hair back
Is why I kept it:

Like the city that is only mine
When I’m confused for another.

(“An Idea of Return”)

“Anonymous Song” tells of a person who refuses to evacuate his provincial village. Such is the abandoned state of some innocent, broken things of the world. Some of the poems take place in refugee camps – far from that part of the country where the best oranges grow. Refugee camps are places of rubber gloves, hired rifles, and latrine-malls.

The rice field birds are too clever for scarecrows,
They know what they love, milk in the grain.

…

Later, they will accuse you of giving up your land.

Later, you will stand in distribution lines and won’t receive

enough to eat.

Your mother will weave you new underwear from flour sacks.

And they’ll give you plastic tents, cooking pots,
Vaccine cards, white pills, and wool blankets.

And you will keep your cool.
Standing with eyes shut tight like you’ve got soap in them,

Arms stretched wide like you’re catching rain.

(“Scarecrow”)

An endless struggle is taking place on the surface of earth, the watery and stony planet given us to farm. If Home is Joudah’s epilogue, Palestine – a piece of earth tucked away in the spider draped attic – is never very far away:

Earth in the Attic

In the calm
After the rain has bombed the earth

The ants march out of their shelters
One long frantic migration line.

… Did they know the wind
Would airdrop new rations their way?

It’s always two or three
Ants locking their horns to the acid end

Over nothing—it seems
More than an impulse,

The debris plenty for all.

(“Pulse, #10”)

“The Dirt Riddles” Michael Walsh
The University of Arkansas Press, 10-155728-925-5, $15.95

The Dirt Riddles, Michael Walsh’s first book of poems, has taken several awards. But it is interesting, and to the credit of Walsh’s talent, that the awards were not in contests reserved solely for first books.

The Dirt Riddles begins simply enough: a youth coming-of-age on a dairy farm. The family business is one of tending to animals and plants. First loves are great loves: mother, landscape (per the attention of the wonder of a youth), father, grandmother, radio, river, and green. One quickly filters in a quick wash of iodine, the smell of manure, the permeating smell of living and deteriorating, cow, and the hermetically sealed sexuality of childhood. Walsh takes his time and is deliberate in his tone and pacing.

The poems have clear titles. They seldom are longer than a single page. They are neat: extremely well lined blank verse, sometimes in single columns, but frequently broken into symmetrical stanzas. Walsh is attentive to music. He edits to effective, restrained, sensual triggers. Prosodically, while not fussy, Walsh is accomplished. His comfort zone is in the aesthetics of a clear, contained column.

As for imagery, this is family farming not factory production. Fields, verdure, manure, hay, and rusting equipment unfold. There are cows, ditch flowers, buckets, pieced quilts, a belt, barn clothes, work gloves, zippers, screws, and chains.

Emotionally, the poems rise in intensity and effect throughout the book.

There are four sections. The first two are pastoral, but not cartoon. This may be vernacular flyover life, but real people inhabit the poems; and they have a son who does his part in feeding, milking, de-horning:

These flatlands float murky as negatives.
So much hasn’t been exposed: sun

cindering each night in alkali dirt,
darknesses asleep inside white cows.

… ditch blooms swarm the open road.
Frogs hop the gravel where a car drove by,

their eyes wide and itching in the dust.

(“Flyover”)

Degrees of exposure and hermetic seals play their place in the subtle tensions of the poems. What Walsh coins as “anti-pastoral” energies:

“Like a good beast / I jerk hard on the chain” (“Evening Milkings”).

Those energies become more acute in sections three and four.

In “Quilt Rags” the grandmother practices her sacred geometry in disassembling “feathery” fringed old blue jeans. The tension in the language escalates to the poems arresting final simile as she:

…razors the empty legs

down to spare parts, squares
and triangles for her quick pins.
The awkward crotch she cuts last,
pulls out the zipper like a gizzard.

(“Quilt Rags”)

One fine poem, “Camouflage” is ostensibly about a boy leaving his glasses behind as he hops into a community shower. Again pressure escalates quickly in the balance of exposure and the hermetics of a sealed self:

…the other boys
soap themselves in the spray

until the light inside
their skin is shining.

Steam blurs them strange
as X-rays of angels…

Then someone
bumps my hidden body.

One touch and we startle
scarlet, hair frightened

ankle to ear.

In “Paper Flesh,” another poem, a young father saves a stack of seared comic books from a house fire:

He couldn’t leave these stacks behind.
But the bright covers were already half-cooked,
dark as negatives, heroes and villains
singed indistinguishable.
He never read them again. I do
not for the stories so much as the scorch marks,
the faint pictures of that boy.

In “Pinup,” a boy and girl flip through a fashion magazine. The boy projects himself, at first as one of the female centerfolds in the photograph, and then

… I got comfortable
on the page, male again,
and watched his shaking
hand undo each
cold, steel button.

Poet Michael Walsh

Junk fuses into other rusty junk. “You can’t tell fallen branch from axle, / barbed wire from the vine that burns / like a fuse through the tangle.” Deflated inner tubes stick like leeches to the dirt. The poet says of “a black flower” that he doesn’t know if “it belongs or invades.”

In the jumble of aphids and rust

serial numbers breed with beetles
and seeds, bond to topsoil, my skin.

Another minute and they hive.
Another hour and they empire.

(“Junk Garden”)

One doesn’t stay hermetically sealed; eventually the world invades, leeches, and permeates.  Eventually, in the tumult, if lucky — in whatever the landscape, whatever the garb — one may find that they belong.