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Against the Death Drive: Queer Joy in Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities | Craft Essay by Dana Alsamsam

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In Jericho Brown’s introduction to Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, he aptly describes the collection and the speaker as “obsessive and curious,” filled with “humor,” “comic delight” and “a sense of wonder.” For poetry, these terms of praise don’t seem out of the ordinary but for poetry by a queer author that consistently and openly takes on queerness as a subject of inquiry, this description is not what we would expect. In the introduction to Michael Snediker’s Queer Optimism he says, “Melancholy, self-shattering, shame, the death drive…this queer pessimistic constellation—nonetheless have dominated and organized much of queer-theoretical discourse…Queer theory’s analyses of negative affect and ontological instability have been and continue to be both generous and generative” (Snediker, 4). He goes on to outline his project as clearing a similar space for inquiry into queer optimism. In this passage Snediker essentially says that queer theorists and critics of queer poetry have long concentrated on suffering. I will add that often the poetry about the queer experience itself, not just critique of it, has remained boxed into this category of suffering due to its conception as a culturally acceptable queer narrative. Chen Chen’s work pushes back against this in many ways. Brown goes on to say about Chen, “he won’t be satisfied with any answer until he has thoroughly reviewed every possibility, every option for becoming a more whole self…” In this lies a deep sense of optimism. The queer author who has struggled with family and society throughout his life still has the capacity for hope, and for becoming. Melancholy in this collection is not a permanent staple of queer experience, nor is it a staple of the poet’s identity. Though his struggle with strict homophobic parents shapes a good amount of subject matter, it is often presented with humor, wonder, or a vulnerable sense of reflection which leads to growth and becoming. This extends beyond a brief moment of joy or pleasure among misery and melancholy. Chen Chen’s work supports Snediker’s project of queer optimism in that the sense of humor, wonder, and curiosity are patient and sustained in the voice of the entire collection.

In speaking about this gap in critical work, Snediker says, “Hope is promissory; hope is a horizon. Shame, on the other hand, occurs in a lavish present tense. What if the field of queer optimism were situated as firmly in the present tense as shame? Even as scholarship on shame may arise out of generosity and hopefulness, this work, within queer theory and affect theory, provides shame all the more eloquent and vibrant a vocabulary, while leaving positive affect (itself lexically impoverished) to fend for itself” (Snediker, 16). Essentially, Snediker focuses on studying optimism in the present tense, not as a possibility, but as an actual occurrence in the moment that is as intelligible and as apt for analysis as shame or pessimism. He finds essential to his argument the “separability from the promissory” of queer optimism. In other words, he works against the idea that all queer optimism is not worth studying because it is only and always in the future and therefor fleeting and unintelligible. I will agree with Snediker to the extent that it is important to study optimism and its persistence with as much critical rigor as is used to study pessimism and its seeming permanence in the queer experience. I will disagree slightly or go further to show how Chen Chen’s collection shows promissory queer optimism as a rich sight for critical investigation as well. As is signified by the very title of the collection, the speaker of these poems is filled with hope and a desire for fulfillment despite struggle and sadness. Even though Chen’s optimism often relies on a future, or a promise of a future—this drives the sense of humor, wonder, curiosity, and what I will call the “life drive” of the poems on the level of content and language. Essentially, suffering is very present in this collection but it never leads to pessimism, it instead leads to motivation to live better, more fully, and with more love. The very idea that a future is possible is what makes the poetry and the speaker consistently and patiently optimistic. I will propose that Chen Chen’s collection is subversive in that it posits queer optimism as a consistent force and not the outlier, even though it is attached to a future and always intrinsically connected to suffering.

When discussing Emily Dickinson’s poetry through the lens of his queer optimistic project, Snediker says, “Dickinson’s understanding of happiness is inseparable from happiness’s encroachment on pain. Dickinsonian happiness and pain, however, are not simply antonymous. That is, they do not replicate the unproductive yin-yang of happy/sad, whereby one can’t have the former without the latter, or vice versa” (Snediker, 95-96). Essentially, Snediker’s queer optimistic reading of Dickinson relies on the idea that happiness doesn’t have to exist as solely the opposite of pain. In his reading, Dickinson often uses pains temporal qualities such as patience and persistence to describe happiness in unexpected ways. Chen Chen’s poetry is similarly illuminated when we accept that an understanding of the joy and wonder in the work is not separable from the speaker’s experiences of suffering. To place these things on a binary is to overly simplify them, and to, as Snediker mentions many critics have done, ignore the happiness in the equation because it seems obvious.

In the beginning of When I Grow Up…, before even the first section, there is a poem called “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential” that immediately invokes these ideas in simple lines with lots of white space. It begins, “Dreaming of one day being as fearless as a mango” (13). This line at once mourns the speaker’s lack of fearlessness and invokes hope and a drive towards the future where this is possibility. Later in the piece the speaker says, “I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised me to be. / I am a gay sipper, & my mother has placed what’s left of her hope on my brothers” (13). On first read, this is heartbreaking. The speaker feels that he has let down his mother and has been rejected from a family of “beautiful sons.” Why, then, does this line invoke laughter and lightness? The term “heterosexual neat freak” makes fun of heterosexuality, showing that the speaker is comfortable with his own identity to a certain extent. Additionally, the internal rhyme of “neat freak,” me,” and “be” is sonically delightful making this line roll easily off the tongue and feel almost bouncy. The second line makes a similar move with the internal rhyme of “sipper,” “mother,” and “brother.” Though the content of the lines is one of suffering, the comedic tone and sonic pleasure invoke a feeling of hope and uplifting.

Even in pieces that are filled with solemn and mourning, the poet is sure to pick us up. In “How I Became Sagacious,” a poem that details leaving home because of the lack of acceptance, he says “I wished for a place big enough for grief, / & all I got was more grief, plus People magazine” (28). This poem holds a deep hopelessness in content but we never forget the humanity of the speaker—even in the darkest moments, he finds the smallest things to live for, and offers readers a bit of light. This comedic tone comes in and out of the collection but is almost always used to relay moments of struggle, or to show a reflective speaker who has lived through and can now add humor to experiences of struggle. The short poem “Summer Was Forever” uses this same move in the lines “My parents said: Doctor, / married to lawyer. The faucet said: Drip, drop, / your life sucks” (19). The pressure from the parents is exemplary of the child of immigrant’s experience. The speaker, however, doesn’t quite fit the image of who his parents want him to be. Even in this piece which is clearly from the perspective of the speaker’s younger self, he already knows that he won’t fulfill this ideal set out for him. This line is immediately followed by the faucet telling the speaker “your life sucks.” This follows the above-mentioned comedic lightness of struggle but it also shows a mature speaker in the present reflecting and even making fun of this past self that was so steeped in tragedy. Because of this “I now” verses “I then” duality, we understand as readers that the speaker has made it through this struggle and come out not just unscathed but with a sense of humor and reflection.

This poem goes beyond the pairing of comedy with suffering to exemplify the kind of queer joy that is so powerfully optimistic. Retuning to Michael Snediker, he argues that in queer theory about poetry typically dismiss optimistic emotions like happiness and merriment because of their nature as evanescent. In his reading of Dickinson, he shows that the happiness should be attended to critically because the emotion can be formalized and prolonged just like pain: “So patient—like a pain, Patience is what renders the smile anomalous, by granting it (less an afterlife than) a life that exceeds the sudden break by which smiles ordinarily are known” (Snediker, 107). In other words, he finds Dickinsonian joy worth attending to critically through queer optimism because of its unusual quality of temporal longitude which works against usual ideas of optimism as passionate and not worthy of study. This is not the only premise on which Snediker argues for the critical study of optimism in queer poetry, but the temporal argument is prevalent. One of his primary arguments as mentioned previously is for studying an optimism which is not futurally oriented or promissory in nature. I will show in contrast that Chen Chen’s collection uses a joy that is passionate and fleeting, and often futurally oriented, but which is still a valid site for critical inquiry. For these poems that contain the wonder and curiosity of a child even when they are inhabited by an adult speaker, the future and its possibilities for queer love and joy are what allow the speaker to be optimistic of a better future and fuller self. The fleeting, passionate, and sometimes waxing violent moments of the collection are what lead to the speaker’s sustained and consistent life drive.

To continue with “Summer Was Forever, the poem turns when the speaker speaks about seeing the “local paper boy on his route” and begins showing what we understand to be his regular fantasies about this boy from afar. As the imagery spirals into the imagination it becomes a whirlwind of passion:

…I knew: we would be so terribly
happy. Our work would be simple. Our kissing would rhyme
with cardiac arrest. Birds would overthrow the cathedral towers.
I would have a magician’s hair, full of sleeves & saws,
unashamed to tell the whole town our first date was
in a leaky faucet factory. How we fell in love during jumps
on his tragic uncle’s trampoline. We fell in love in midair.

To begin, this whole section is in the future conditional, using “would” before the verbs. This construction shows that the speaker has a strong desire and hope for passion and love. He imagines a future in which this kind of love is possible. As the poem goes on, the “would” construction is dropped in “How we fell in love during jumps…” and finally the absolute of “We fell in love in midair.” This shows the imaginary as it comes true for the speaker and the love becomes a reality. The poem ends here on this light and optimistic note. The speaker and his lover are literally in midair, so light from love they fly off the page at the end of the poem. We hardly recall the beginning of the short poem where the speaker was feeling pressured and inadequate. The imagery that surrounds the pleasure in this piece also takes on an interesting pairing of pleasure with violence, almost as if the passion tips over into violence at its most intense. This dichotomy is set up with “terribly / happy.” Especially because it extends over a line break, the terrible nature of this happiness is emphasized. Then, the kissing rhymes with a lethal attack; the passion is so intense that it can kill. Birds a small, pleasant animal associated with song and spring, destroys cathedrals. Then we have the image of “saws” and a “tragic…trampoline.” This imagery of violence so closely associated with passion shows that this joy is fleeting and would usually be deemed not worthy of study. As previously shown, this joy is clearly related to a future-oriented promise because the experience here is an imagined one. In other words, the joy in this poem goes against all the traits that Snediker uses to deem Dickinsonian joy worthy of study. This joy is worthy of study for queer optimism, though, because the hope and drive for love and passion are what bring the speaker out of struggle. He no longer hears the faucet saying “your life sucks,” in favor of his fantasized love. Though the joy is not temporally sound, it is worthy of investigation as queer optimism because it moves the speaker through sadness and into hope.

Some of the poems do show joy in a specific present moment, and though these moments are not dependent on a future, they still act the same way. These moments of joy are what bring the speaker out of suffering and lead him to a maintain optimism. He addresses this idea himself in a poem titled “Poem” when he says, “Racked by doubt, but not yet / wrecked by it…” and later, “…doubled over / by dour, but not yet / doomed to it, I mope with / some hope, desperately open” (52). Even in doubt and dour the speaker self acknowledges that he is “desperately open” to any possibility of hope and happiness. In this poem, his desire to live fully is so strong that he becomes uninterested in death as a concept. Towards the end he says, “I / don’t want to know / how the book ends, / that the book ends…” This lack of desire to see the end of something shows a grounded voice of the present moment and its joys as well as a drive to live a full and joyful life. The poem ends with the speaker thinking that he should call his mother and ask her about her garden. The suffering and death that is ever present push the speaker to moments of joy and ensuring that he takes all possibilities to live fully.

It’s particularly impressive how the collection accomplishes this in poems that are overtly about sadness or tragedy and are yet, somehow, still optimistic. The poem “Elegy for My Sadness,” appears somber from the title itself. The elegiac nature of the piece implies a death and the poem is about the speaker’s sadness. When we look a bit closer, however, we see that if the poem is an elegy for sadness, sadness must be what has died. Chen writes, “I want to be a sweetheart in every moment, / full of goats & xylophones, as charming / as a hill with a small village on it. / I want to be a village full of sweethearts…” The construction of “I want,” though implying a quality that the speaker does not currently have, shows a drive towards a fuller self and a better future. Even in the deep throes of sadness, the speaker is capable of imagining a future where this is not the case. There is also the element of humor and sonic pleasure in these lines with “goats & xylophones.” The selection is strange and delightful and the internal rhyme emphasizes a bouncy quality. The poem goes on to show how the speaker’s lover comforts and supports the speaker in these moments of sadness. The love he is given makes him examine his own sadness: “You are just / in the same room with me & my unsweet, / uncharming, completely / uninteresting sadness” (37). These lines are particularly interesting because critical work on queer poetry, and queer poetry itself has often focused on and created robust arguments around sadness. As Snediker explains in his introduction, queer suffering already has a wide vocabulary and theory around it; it is joy and optimism that are deprived of this same critical thought. This moment, through this lens, reads as subversive. Chen essentially says that sadness is boring and chooses instead to focus on the intricacy and fullness of love.

This melancholy is not a permanent fixture of the speaker’s experience, nor of his identity, and he certainly doesn’t want it to be. The poem ends:

I wish I could write an elegy for my sadness
because it has suddenly died. I wish I could mourn it
by kissing you again & again while neither of us
can stop laughing, a kind of kiss where we sometimes
miss the mouth altogether, a kind of kiss
I think every single dead person
in every part of the world must crave
with violent impossibility.

Although in the moment this is said, the speaker is still very much inside of their sadness, the piece does not focus on that. Instead it takes on a vocabulary of desire with “I wish” structuring the beginning of the sentences. This sense of desire shows that the speaker is more interested in love and pleasure than in his own sadness. He craves a future where sadness can be pushed aside in favor of kissing and laughing. The choice to make “every single dead person” the subject towards the end is interesting. The poem itself is an elegy, but not for a person. Here we see a similar move that was made in “Poem,” where contemplating death turns the speaker to a distinct desire for life, a strong resistance to death without having lived fully. The speaker here doesn’t want to waste time on sadness when there is love being given to him. He imagines that the dead crave the kind of love he has right in front of him and this leads him to crave living more fully in the moment. The way this poem ends also enacts the hope for the future that the speaker has. Though the speaker is still experiencing sadness, the poem is structured so that it ends on love and happiness, even if it’s only a possibility. The reader is left with the lightness of a kiss where the speaker and his lover “miss the mouth altogether.” This structure privileges joy as the poem effectively “kills” the speaker’s sadness with an outburst of love. In another poem concerning death, “If I Should Die Tomorrow,” the speaker does not enact the archetypical motions of regret. Instead he speaks about what he will miss. The poems speaks about the pleasure of language and the pleasure of the body. Merely thinking about the possibility of no longer experiencing these pleasures, drives the speaker towards life and full living.

            It’s clear through these pieces that suffering and sadness are not removed from the picture in order to convey a consistent feeling of optimism. In fact, suffering and sadness are often starting points for these pieces, grounding them in the queer experience of being cast out by family or society. This suffering and sadness, however, never translates into pessimism. The speaker of these poems himself finds sadness and loneliness unproductive and trades them in for love, joy, and pleasure whenever possible. He says, “I am making my loneliness small. So small it fits on a postcard / a baby rabbit could eat” (24). He never avoids talking about negative emotions. He instead acknowledges them as true and uses wonder, curiosity, and desire for love to create a consistent optimism, to reach for an answer or many answers to his questions of being and becoming. In attending to the joy of this collection, even if it’s difficult because it is fleeting and passionate, I’ve found a fuller reading of what is possible in both the queer experience and in poetry. The capacity to study joy as fully as we’ve studied suffering can make way for more joy, for more queer poets and critics of queer poetry to engage with joy seriously, for it not to be written off as easy or obvious. When so much of the queer experience and queer poetry has been based off of melancholy and suffering, and when the path towards joy is rocky and uncertain, how can we call joy obvious or easy?

Chen Chen writes for his younger self, as well other young queer people who might never have seen any representations of queer happiness, who might need to see the possibility of joy to keep going. In this way, the work of looking at queer joy closely and rigorously is one of activism, of clearing a valid space for this kind of work and the positive impact it has. I’ll conclude with a quote from Chen Chen when asked what advice he has for young queer people who are struggling: “It’s important to say: your heartbreak is real. There is nothing wrong with you if you continue to feel heartbroken. Your emotions, including your sorrows, are real. Always. In my book, there is no “happy ending” to the conflicts between unaccepting, homophobic parents and a queer son. The lack of reconciliation is my reality. Maybe that’s your reality, too. You are still amazing and if you’ve had to make the choice—for your own safety and health—to cut off communication with family members, I see you, too. I love you, too.”

Works Cited

Chen, Chen. When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. BOA Editions, 2017.
Snediker, Michael D. Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Dana Alsamsam is the author of a chapbook, (in)habit (tenderness lit, 2018), and her poems are published or forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, The Shallow Ends, Gigantic Sequins, Tinderbox Poetry, Salamander, BOOTH, The Common and others. Critical prose appears in The Rumpus. Her work has been supported by a fellowship from Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.

The Wild Feminine: Five poems by Ada Limón | Craft Essay by Dion O’Reilly

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In the Christian myth, Adam names the animals. In “A Name,” the first poem of Ada Limón’s most recent collection, The Carrying, she remakes Eden. In Limón’s version, Eve names the creatures, making one wonder if in this Genesis, Eve is the first-born human, the maker of Adam.

When Eve walked among
the animals and named them—
nightingale, red-shouldered hawk,
fiddler crab, fallow deer—
I wonder if she ever wanted
them to speak back, looked into
their wide wonderful eyes and
whispered, Name me, Name me.

“A Name,” sets a high bar for the The Carrying by rewriting the Judeo-Christian narrative, claiming the woman as Namer. Moreover, the speaker wonders if the original woman “looked into/their wide wonderful eyes/ and whispered, Name me Name me.” This re-imagining not only transfers the power to Eve, but also shows how differently a woman might claim the world: not as an object on which to impose meaning, but rather as a source of meaning and identity. This poem, which turns Christian ideology on its head, is not heavy-handed in its feminist slant. It is not resolute, does not chant a received wisdom. It is important to note that the speaker “wonders” if Eve “wanted” the animals to “speak back.” Limón poses a question. Indeed, her question is rather magical and not a little plaintive. We sense the desire for this female bond with the wild. We allow that her need might be enough to inspire such a bond, while the repetition — Name me, Name me— implies an unfulfilled longing. 

This feminine ability to derive power from animals is unabashedly clear in the opening poem of Bright Dead Things. The Pushcart winner, “How to Triumph Like a Girl,” is a playful celebration of womanhood. The first line is disarming, initially characterizing the mares un-feministically as “lady horses”—  ladylike and prancy, not at all your stereotypical leaders.

I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. ears up, girls. ears up!
but mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
Summer inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.

As the poem moves along, we begin to discern the power of these “lady horses.” They have “swagger, after winning.” Then the weird and fascinating turn; the speaker feels an identification with the beasts because of their shared gender. Once again, the poem’s second volta asks a question: “Don’t you want to believe it?/Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see/the huge beating genius machine/that thinks, no, it knows,/it’s going to come in first.” This poem is a fun “Imagine” song, a kind of “I have a dream” manifesto, but with a subtle stratum. Limón’s speaker doesn’t ask the reader to believe a woman can be as powerful as a racehorse; she asks the reader if she might “want to believe it”—  a nudge, a baby step. Furthermore the question is framed in a transgressive manner, asking if the narrator could reveal her breasts (the source of human nurturance and nutrition) and instead of an offense or party prank, it might be proof of power and “genius.” Moreover, consider how she imparts “genius” to the heart, the organ conventionally associated with feelings— as if to imply feelings are possessed of their own intuitive knowledge.

In the April 2019 Writer’s Chronicle interview, Limón remarks that “there are two snakes in a poem, and in the end, one snake has to win…on some level one of the many underlying forces of the poem has to prevail…People are scared to make a choice or they feel like they want to embrace the mess and craziness of it, which is awesome, but in doing so sometimes they dilute [the ending of the poem].”  In much of Limón’s work, it is the feminine wild that prevails. Many of her poems deal with loss— death of the planet, death of family members, death of the conventional dream of being a mother. That “snake” of loss is often entwined with the competing snake of wild femaleness or with the pure beauty of the natural world. Inevitably the feral feminine wins. The choice is made. Sometimes, it is purely nature that prevails, but there are enough poems like the ones cited above to establish a strong connection between the feminine and the wild as a balm.

Take “Service,” from Bright Dead Things, in which the speaker is “fed up” with her traveling companion whom we take to be her boyfriend or husband: the speaker is not enjoying his objectification of his ex-girlfriend’s beauty. The speaker re-establishes her resonance with the physicality of a racehorse and then sets out to find her satisfaction in yet another animalistic bond:

Somewhere outside of Albuquerque, I was all
fed up with the stories about your ex girlfriend’s
Guess billboard in New York City, and to make
matters worse, I had to pee like a racehorse, or
like a girl who’d had too much to drink way
too far away from home. You stopped at a friend’s
body shop to talk about a buddy who was stuck
some place in Mexico. You were talking, pulling
strings and taking pulls off a brown bottle, and no
one told me where the restroom was, so I walked
back to where the hot rods were displayed like dogs
ready for a fight, baring their grills like teeth.
I was hungry, the air smelled like hot gasoline
and that sweet carnation smell of oil and coolant.
A girl pitbull came and circled me as I circled
the cars; she sniffed my ankles like I was her kin
or on some kind of rescue mission. You were still
talking, not a glance in the direction of me
and the bitch working our ways around
the souped-up Corvettes and the power tools.
The pet was glossy, well cared for, a queen
of the car shop, and when she widened
her hind legs and squatted to pee all over
one of the cars’ dropped canvases. I took it
as a challenge. That strong yellow stream seemed
to be saying, Girl, no one’s going to tell me
when to take a leak, when to bow down,
when not to bite. So, right then, in the dim lights
of the strange garage, I  lifted my skirt and pissed
like the hard bitch I was.

Again, Limón is asking a question: Why are females dismissed and ignored— relegated to the junk heap. Why is the term bitch derogatory when female dogs are loyal, protective, smart, and strong— like “a queen?” The speaker feels marginalized and ignored until she identifies with the powerful pitbull bitch and transgressively defines her territory by pissing in the junk. The speaker is far from home in an environment that is not helpful or friendly. The snake of oppression and alienation is conquered by the snake of animalistic female empowerment. Limón makes a clear (and humorous) choice, claiming to be a “hard bitch,’ and that’s why the resolution is so strong.

In The Carrying, Limón grapples with her fruitless attempts to conceive and what that means for a woman. In the final analysis, nature reconciles the speaker’s ambivalence and mediates the loss. In the last poem “Sparrow, What Did You Say?,” the narrator— who has spent a quiet day gardening— contemplates what her life would be like if she were capable of giving birth. She decides “I’m good at this, this being alone/in the world, the watching of things/growing, this older me…who spent an hour trying to figure out that the bird/with a three-note descending call/is just a sparrow.” She goes on to question what her life would be like if she had a child, would she “selfishly demand this day/back, a full untethered day trying/to figure out what bird was calling me/and why.” As usual, Limón asks the question without imposing an answer. It is clear the path for this speaker is to listen to the wild and pursue what she hears. This poem is not only a tribute to the redemptive power of nature, but also an ars poetica. The speaker, in the final analysis, re-dedicates herself to listening to the natural world and figuring out what to say about it. That process becomes her generative act.

Sometimes, without reference to distinctly feminist issues, the untouched landscape releases the living from pain or bondage. In “The Long Ride,” a doomed horse is a stand-in for the universal anguish of misdeeds and regret. The horse is identified with civilization, the city, and its discontents. The open pastures of Montana become the balm for human sin.

Ma’s in the wind-pummeled double-wide
waiting for the retired policeman
to bring the retired police horses
to the ranch. She’s at the window now
describing the rain, the two-horse trailer,
and also, how sometimes she and my stepdad
talk about death for a long time.
How imagining death can make it easier
to live and I agree and say, It’s called die
before you die. What is being delivered
here is a horse who’s had a hard life.
A large quarter horse named Seattle—
a horse with a city-name who protected a city,
who was spooked outside the baseball stadium
what a shopping bag wrapped around his leg,
a plastic thing versus a muscle-bound animal
in a busy crowd and a flash accident killed
a man. But then, I wonder, what for the horse?
Never to be ridden, stuck numb in a stall,
lightning bugs torturing the poor blood?
I bet that horse might have wanted to
died before he died. But not yet.
What is  what is being delivered here is release.
Today, his officer writer is finally retired too,
with an old badge on the dashboard
and a fine plan to drive all the way to Montana,
where the writer has bought a ranch for his horse,
Seattle. The rider and his horse, with his city name,
and his forgiven city mistakes, are charting
a clear new territory of absolution, and it makes
Ma and me happy. How good it is to love
live things, even when what they’ve done
is terrible, how much we each want to be
the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose
into our own wide open without a single
harness of sin to stop us.

The wild and the love of the wild prevail in this poem as they do in most of Limón’s work. Characteristically, there is no minimizing of earthly pain and suffering; pain is a strong, vivid, writhing snake throughout, but ultimately, healing imagery of the “wide open” end the poems with satisfaction. Limón chooses the snake of love, redemption, and the natural order.

On her Blogspot, Limón states “I think it might be harder for men to talk about their feelings, but when they do, we think they are being brave.” She goes on to discuss what it was like for her to be frank about her feelings:

I wasn’t just anxious. I was white-knuckling-for-the-take-off scared. For me, [Bright Dead Things] is the most personal book of poems yet. It’s raw in a way that I’m not used to; I don’t mean unfinished, I mean, “open.” Though the previous books of poems are certainly me, and expose all parts of me within them, this one doesn’t hide under anything. For starters, the poems never (or very rarely) change tense [sic]—the “I” in these poems is “ME.” I remember, while I was writing some of these poems, saying to myself, “Okay, what’s the poem you are scared to write?” and then trying to write it. I did this over and over again.

I would contend that Limón’s resolute commitment to choosing her snakes— revealing her feelings about loss, pain, womanhood, and nature— is a courageous choice, a revealing and vulnerable choice. Maybe, ultimately that’s what makes her poems both strongly female and also strong: she evinces the courage to open up, to deliver wildly-honest poems— to take a tough stand with finesse and craft, to be the “hard bitch” that she is and own it.

Works Cited

Buckton, Lisa. “Naming the Animal: Am Interview with Ada Limon.” The Writer’s Chronicle, vol. 51, no. 5, Apr. 2019, pp. 16-24.

Limon, Ada. The Carrying: Poems. Milkweed Editions, 2020.

Limón, Ada “Starting with A: On Art & Anxiety” Ada Limón. www. Adalimon.blogspot.com. Accessed 11 March 2019

Limón Ada. Bright Dead Things. Milkweed Editions, 2015.

The Holy Bible: King James Version. Dallas, TX: Brown Books Publishing, 2004.

Dion O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and a variety of other literary journals and anthologies, including an upcoming Lambda Literary Anthology. Her work has been nominated for Pushcarts, the Intro Journals Project, and was sent to the judges for the Folio Literary Journal Poetry Contest and her first manuscript, Ghost Dog, was a finalist for the Catamaran Book Prize.

A Visit with the Author of Visiting Days: An Interview with Gretchen Primack | Interviewed by Celia Bland

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We might say that Gretchen Primack was born at the right time – the right time for readers of poetry as well as for herself as poet.  The rise of internet communities that crave readable and issue-oriented poetry has transgressed boundaries that formerly defined poetry schools by stylistics, movements, gender and race.  A devoted and growing readership of poets, yes, but also readers new to poetry, has allowed Primack to write the poetry dedicated to the subjects she is passionate about.  Her 2013 collection, Kind, protested the slaughterhouses and factory meat farms of a carnivorous society; it brought her television appearances, huge audiences, and a fourth printing (a feat generally attained by only those poets who appeal to general audiences: Mary Oliver, Anne Carson, Billy Collins, etc.). Her new book, Visiting Days (Willow Books) – persona poems written from the perspectives of captives in the prison industrial complex —  is garnering even more attention.  Which is not to imply that Primack is particularly interested in fame or in worldly success.  Rather, she wants to get the word out, to raise her voice.  Following in the activist tradition of such poets as Audre Lorde, Etheridge Knight, Lucille Clifton, and Muriel Rukeyser, she models civic engagement as well as artistry.   Randall Horton, her editor at Willow Books, and a poet famous for, among other things, writing about his own experience of incarceration, describes Primack as “a poet who takes the task of poeting seriously.” 

The poems in Visiting Days describe men in solitary confinement, men working on assembly lines in the bowels of a prison, men endlessly folding sheets in the laundry (“Sisyphus knows this room…”), as well as the women who come, filled with love and dread in equal measure, on visiting day:

There was a jumble 
of high chairs in that corner when I got here, now just one 
facing the wall, the wall an under-the-sea mural, all of us fish 
in air. The choking poster rolls its eyes above the Bible table. 

Now the men come through, one of them you, and check in 
at the guard’s double chin, like everyone, like always, 
and like always for a moment I can’t look up. 

                                                            -Ingrid (Visiting Room)

The world “Inside” is vividly imagined and observed in these poems.  Primack’s years teaching creative writing and composition in prisons and jails give these poems a vivid veracity.  As Horton puts it in his thoughtful introduction to Visiting Days, “…people from inside have laid eyes on this manuscript, and each one was awed that someone not of their world took the time to understand their plight in a way that rendered them human.” 

What makes Primack’s readings electrifying is her deep identification with the people and animals she describes – one could even say “embodies” in her poetry.  An abhorrence of the American worship of personal comfort over communal responsibility informs her books.  “I don’t want to hurt things,” is how she puts it, and her poetry is as simple and as complicated as that.  Which is not to say that her poems are never allowed to get away from their didactic intentions.  She has internalized Robert Frost’s aphorism: “No surprise for the reader, no surprise for the writer.”  In Visiting Days, the surprise is less that a white woman, a middle class product of Oberlin and Sarah Lawrence Colleges, could write these poems, but rather that they are so poignantly believable. As poet Joseph Ross put it, “Where prisons destroy, these poems ignite the fire that poetry tends: the burn that makes us human.”

This interview was conducted soon after Primack first reading from Visiting Days to enthusiastic patrons of The Golden Notebook, the independent bookshop where she works part-time, in Woodstock, New York.

CB: Describe your process.  What’s the step-by-step for you of putting together a collection of poetry?  Do you get inspired and work night and day for weeks?  Do you work a little bit along for years, slowly accumulating enough poems?

GP: I’m not a disciplined writer, though I wish I were. So the easiest way for poems to come is for me to have an overarching project. That way I’m thinking about moving a project forward, rather than pulling lines and poems out of the air. The poems in Kind—which explores the dynamics between humans and other animals—came together over the course of about two years as I thought about what aspects of those dynamics I wanted to explore. Visiting Days took a bit longer, but there was the same idea: What do I want to communicate about prisons based on my experiences within their walls? How can each poem contribute to that?

CB: Talk about how you structure your books – how do you map out the progression of poems? 

GP: Only one of my books had an obvious progression, my most personal book, Doris’ Red Spaces. That one is more or less chronological. The other two, Kind and Visiting Days, have less obvious structures. Because they are each themed, the whole book is itself a structure. In the case of Visiting Days, I literally laid the poems out on a floor to find the right order, but the order I wanted had to do with diversity—almost an anti-flow—that could mimic the randomness of the prison environment. In other words, a poem by a mentally ill man in solitary confinement (which came first? we have to wonder) could be right next to a poem of a man working in the prison mattress shop, and the next poem might be about the joy of drawing a portrait in charcoal. Because that’s how it is in prison, of course—you have no control over who you are interacting with or alongside, and the structure of the book mimics that.

CB: Please describe the research you did for this book.  Did you interview people?  Visit certain places? Conduct correspondence with inmates or former students? Or was it primarily born of personal experience and observation?

GP: For the first six years I worked in prison, people would ask me if I was writing about it. I wasn’t. It felt too close, and I wasn’t there for material. But then I took a break from the work, and I felt almost compelled to write about it. (I missed working there and was in touch with many people who’d been released and had become friends, and it was as if the issues and memories combined to make the words flow.) So a lot of my “research” or “observation” was unwitting—years of engaging in a space of incarceration. Along with talking a lot with my incarcerated and formerly incarcerated friends, formally about their stories or less formally the way friends do, I read a lot of poetry and memoirs by people who had been incarcerated, and a few books by other outsiders who had experience working in prisons and jails.

CB: What are you working on now? 

GP: Absolutely nothing! I’d like the muse to come visit, but she’s off drinking a beer. It’s so much work, though, putting a new book like this one into the world—a job in itself—so I can be patient a little longer.

CB: I’ve had the opportunity to hear you read a number of times and you seem really comfortable in front of people, and to really enjoy sharing your poetry with the audience.  Are you actually enjoying giving readings as much as it seems you are?

GP: I love giving readings. I like the fact that I can put the poems in context, for one thing, and there’s always a fair bit of patter in my presentations. And I love Q & A to make things even clearer (and because I love a lively discussion). But I also enjoy the process of reading aloud, and I feel very comfortable in front of a room…maybe all those years of teaching, or high school theater roles, or…?

CB: How did you begin writing poetry?  When did you become serious about writing?

GP: I wrote poems as a kid and teen, but I wasn’t serious about writing then—though I was serious about reading. In my senior year of college, I took a contemporary American poetry class from the poet Bruce Beasley. I enjoyed Bruce’s teaching so much that I asked him to look at some of my contemporary American poems. They were just awful, really dreadful, but he was so kind and encouraging that he motivated me to continue. So wherever I lived, I’d find an evening poetry workshop. Eventually I took one at NYU with the poet Ruth Danon, and she urged me to go to grad school. She helped me push poetry to a more central place in my life, right alongside the activism that suffused my day jobs. Those two elements—poetry and activism—dovetailing, as they do in Kind and Visiting Days, feels very natural and satisfying.

CB: What do you see as the most important message of Visiting Days?  What kind of response do you want from your readers?

GP: I want to counter myths. The first myth is that everyone behind bars is the same, when of course it’s a collection of living beings every bit as individual as any other group. More myths: that everyone incarcerated is a monster; that justice is being served by each unique person’s placement there; that incarcerated people would never be productive/positive members of society; that they don’t wish to grow and change; that they don’t follow what’s going on in the world beyond the prison walls.

We like to believe that anyone we subjugate, human or non-human, is part of a nameless, faceless group that deserves what it gets. That lets us be cruel and lazy. It’s terribly destructive. It makes it easier for us to continue ineffective, inefficient, oppressive systems. 

CB: Do you feel you are part of a contemporary poetic community?

GP: Communities plural, maybe. I feel community with poets who have political/social content and no interest in posturing or ego.  I’ve found a lot of people like that through Split This Rock, the marvelous biennial festival that brings poets together in DC to celebrate “poetry of provocation and witness.” So that feels like a community of people spread out and coming together once every two years. Then there’s people who I live relatively close to and feel a poetic kinship with who also have no interest in posturing or ego. I wouldn’t mind having a more formal community—for instance, a writing group—but it’s wonderful to know that there are writers out there I admire and feel close to.

CB: Tell us about your upbringing – did you learn anything from your parents or the places you visited/lived as a child that shaped your vision today?  As an artist? As a citizen of the US or of the world?

GP: I grew up in DC, which gave me a sense of citizenship, and traveled a great deal internationally as a child, including a two-year stint in Uganda when I was very young. My parents were politically active, community-oriented, and curious about the world. I think all of this contributed to an understanding that I was not the center of anything but rather a tiny person in a large world. As a result, I don’t want to spend a lot of time staring at my navel, and I don’t connect to navel-gaze-y art or people very well.

CB: What do you do when you’re not writing?  What are your enthusiasms?

GP: I love being a vegan activist, I love cooking, I love eating, I love working at an indie bookstore, I love teaching, I love wandering woods, I love reading, I love being with people and animals I love.

CB: Why have you settled in the Hudson Valley of New York?

GP: I was living in Brooklyn in the 90s and went to visit a friend in the Hudson Valley, and that was that. It’s mostly ineffable, but the combination of low mountains, streams, trees, and ex-pat city folk is magical. I can ramble in the woods and go out for a tempeh sandwich and plunge into a pristine swimming hole and see an indie movie in one afternoon. And I’m close enough to dip into Manhattan to hear PFunk that same night. Okay, I’m too old to want to have a day like that anymore, but I could.

CB: What kinds of teaching do you do?  Who are your students?

GP: I generally teach college-level writing at maximum-security men’s prisons. But currently I’m teaching an NEA-funded poetry workshop separate from the college. I have taught a lot of academic writing and a little poetry and of late I have been teaching creative writing, either multi-genre or poetry, and that’s what I’d like to keep doing. What I teach isn’t mandatory, so everyone who signs up is self-motivated, and that shows in the quality of their effort and work and maturity.

CB: How do you think your new collection follows up on themes/issues developed in your previous books?

GP: I’m interested in exposing skewed power dynamics and the abuse they engender. In Kind, I explored the dynamic between humans and (other) animals, and the danger of human oppression of other beings. When we choose to see other sentient beings as faceless masses, weaker than ourselves and unworthy of respect, it’s easy to exploit them—and cause untold suffering and destruction. Visiting Days looks at skewed power dynamics, as well — this time between groups of human beings.

CB: Did you have a hand in the arresting (sorry!) design of your cover?

GP: I had a specific idea of how I wanted it to look, and the photograph by Andrew Lichtenstein and design by Nancy Leonard made that picture real. I wanted to show the part of a New York State prison uniform that displays the DIN—prison identification number—and at the same time covers one’s heart. And I wanted it to be an accurate color because I mention that particular green several times in the book.

CB: Was it difficult for you – as a white woman – to allow yourself to write persona poems from the perspective of incarcerated African American men?  What was hardest about this?  Easiest?

GP: The first minute I put pen to paper for this project, I began thinking about the license to write poems like these. I hope anyone writing across race, gender, identity, and/or experience would.  It is a challenge to do it right. Several things made it feel possible here: One, my years of experience in prisons; two, input from incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people; and three, the fact that I created an imaginary world. Real people can, of course, speak for themselves. This collection is inspired by many people I have known, but it doesn’t speak for them. The book owes a lot to fiction and theater, and people are less surprised to see novelists or playwrights writing characters different than the author. Still, in any genre, that should be interrogated and taken to task when done insensitively.  I do think that with humility, respect, research, experience, critique from represented groups, and attention to craft, it can be done well. I’m happy to say that I’ve gotten positive feedback from people close to this subject—incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their family members.

CB: Tell us about your publisher and editors.

GP: This relates to the previous question. One of the people I reached out to for critique on the manuscript is the poet Randall Horton, who is formerly incarcerated. I specifically asked Randall to tell me whether I as a white woman who has never been incarcerated was out of line in writing this, and I knew he would be honest with me. After he read it he called me and said, “You got it right.” Randall is the poetry editor of Willow Books, and he told me that Willow was interested in publishing the collection. This was a surprise because Willow was created to publish writers of color. But Randall and the publisher, Heather Buchanan, felt that the issues explored here made sense vis a vis what they are trying to do at the press.  I’m grateful to be part of Willow, and to have had Randall as an editor.

Gretchen Primack is the author of Visiting Days (Willow Books 2019), set in a maximum-security men’s prison, as well as two other poetry collections: Kind (Post-Traumatic Press)and Doris’ Red Spaces (Mayapple Press). She also co-wrote, with Jenny Brown, The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight for Farm Animals (Penguin Avery). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner,FIELD, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, and other journals. Primack has administrated and taught with college programs in prison for many years, and moonlights at an indie bookstore in Woodstock, NY. Learn more at gretchenprimack.com.

Celia Bland’s third collection of poetry, Cherokee Road Kill, is set in the Great Smokey Mountains of North Carolina.  The title poem received the 2015 Raynes Prize, and the book was reviewed in The Georgia Review, Blackbird and Rain Taxi.  Her essay on the work of artist Colleen Randall will appear in the exhibition catalogue for “In the Midst of Something Splendid” at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College in 2020. She is co-editor with Martha Collins of Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention (U. of Michigan, 2019).  She teaches at Bard College.

“serving the art we need and love”: An Interview with Christian Anton Gerard | by Jeremy Michael Reed

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Christian Anton Gerard is a poet, teacher, and, as evidenced by his poems, voracious reader. His books are filled with allusions to other poets, writers, and musicians, yet maintain a personal, self-interrogating center. At the heart of his books are people in tension with each other, learning from their mistakes, and, sometimes, failing again before finding a way forward. Time and again, his poems crack a joke, converse with Philip Sidney, and feel as contemporary as possible all on the same page.

His first book Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella was published by CW Books in March 2014, and his second collection of poems, Holdfast, was published this fall by C&R Press. You can buy a signed copy of Holdfast directly from Gerard here. A former editor of Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts (for issues 6 and 7), Gerard was interviewed by current Grist editor Jeremy Michael Reed.

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JMR: Thanks so much for sitting down over the internet with Grist for this interview!

I wanted to start by asking how you saw the role of self-address in your poems in your new book. You have these incredible moments that structure your poems throughout Holdfast like in “Pointed” where you turn the poem on the lines “This is neither self- / deprecation or self-pity’s well, reader. This is me / reading, too” or other moments when you refer to Christian Anton Gerard in the third person. What draws you to this use of self as character in your poems? Another way to ask this question might be: how do you see yourself in relation to confessionalism as opposed to (or in conjunction with) other poetry traditions?

CAG: Confession: I was listening to The Smiths in the the park with my now-four-year-old son. “Sweet And Tender Hooligan” came on and I started singing his full name, Ansel Christian Gerard, instead of Sweet and Tender Hooligan to be silly. He was acting hooliganish, but I felt guilty saying his name because he certainly wasn’t that kind of hooligan. He was two and obstinate. I started saying my name instead.

My name felt syllabically awkward, but somehow right because of those lyrics “…no he’ll never never  do it again. Of course he won’t. No, not until the next time.” How many times I’d said that before I was sober. The song’s narrator rationalizes its character’s horrific actions and creates a wild duality and weirdness (like most of The Smith’s songs) that are like a thing you can’t look at, but can’t look away from. I think I’m this way to myself sometimes, or have been, or am able to be, or could be if I don’t do what I need to do to treat my disease, my alcoholism. I’d never really wanted to write about my alcoholism because I didn’t know what that might look like, which was scary. When those poems started coming, I let them, but I didn’t know what to do with them or if I’d do anything with them. I’d been afraid of form before these poems, but never afraid of content. This was a first for me.

Mikayla Davis, a poet in the University of Central Arkansas MFA Program, interviewed me last spring for a class she was taking and she asked a similar question in regard to Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella, though Holdfast wasn’t out then, which is helping me as I think now about your framing of the question, Jeremy, so I want to give her a shout out here because some of this answer is rooted in the thinking produced by the interview.

Anyway, I don’t think my work can ever fully escape the “confessional.” The personae in Wilmot Hereare in many ways just as confessional for me as the poems in Holdfast. Much of WHCS is rooted in emotional truth and often physical.

Holdfast differs from WHCS in my mind, though, in a lot of ways. For one, Holdfast uses myself in the third person, which was a wildly interesting experiment for me that showed me I could see me in different ways than I might otherwise. Holdfast also contains the first work addressing my alcoholism and my recovery, whereas, Wilmot, in my mind, was often drunk. I didn’t drink and write. I tried it, but I couldn’t do that. If I was drinking, I was drinking. If I was writing, I was writing.

Many of Holdfast’s poems began when I was in the problem, but they were all revised in recovery, which helped me own the I, I think, because these poems demanded an honesty I hadn’t been able to give poems before, or maybe that I didn’t believe I was able to give poems before. I’ve come to understand I have been a man I have and haven’t wanted to be. I have been a man I didn’t know how not to be. I have been a good man and a bad man and all the kinds of man one might come up with judgments or levees to judge or levee against me. Being human is to be a both/and a lot, which is weirdly not often publicly acknowledged (poetry is always showing us this, though) because, I think, to do so means acknowledging the difficulty in labeling one or one’s work a certain way when so much of our culture wants to name and categorize.

Holdfast also contains more of the idea of poem as prayer and touches more of the spiritual (not religious, really) elements of living and understanding poetry as a power greater than myself, which is also why every poem in Holdfast borrows at least a line from another poem, song, movie, and the like.

I used to think I was a wide open person; someone who’d talk about anything with anyone. And I am pretty good at talking to people. I’ve learned, I often am able to talk about anything with anyone, but really I’m able to let others talk about themselves, and while I can (and do) talk a lot, I’ve found out that I’m immensley private about a lot of myself. This isn’t to say I don’t talk about myself, but that I’m adept at talking around myself. The difference between me and another kind of private person is that I don’t embarrass easily, which makes me seem as if I’m wide-open. Using my full name in these poems didn’t exactly feel like I was making a character out of myself, but rather able to confess myself to the page in a way that felt different from the “I.”

There are many things I sometimes am, but few things I always am. I’m always a poet, whether I always want to be or not. In Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, he writes that he has “slipped into his unelected vocation,” meaning he didn’t intend to be a poet, but he is and can’t deny it. He’s confessed it.

Confession’s a fascinating idea to me. Its connotations often imply secrets held internally and then disclosed to a private listener, someone who “won’t judge,” but will grant pardon or at least the idea is that forgiveness might be possible because of confession. Confession implies guilt and admittance. It connotes a level of “personal” that’s “not for everyone.” There’s also (what can be) the very worst kind of confession, the death-bed confession, in which the dying admits something to be relieved of its guilt before their death, but in doing so, makes the listener live with something they may have been better off not knowing.

Confession is/can be exceedingly selfish, selfless, and/or an infinite combination of the two. In writing, though, there’s this other way we relate to “confession.” Somehow, confession implies “the truth.”

In Mark Strand’s poem, “Breath,” the speaker says, “…the lies I tell them are different / from the lies I tell myself.” “Breath” is a poem I’m never far from, and maybe because of these lines. I interviewed Tarfia Faizullah once and asked her about her use of “the personal.” She said, I just spilled my coffee. There. That’s something personal.” Such a damned good answer. That moment helped me see that in a certain light, everything written is a confession.

I was more willing to be in process, in fact, to give myself over to process and understand myself as process only; the process of an alcoholic, a divorcee, a father, a new lover, a poet, a poet beginning to believe poetry just means making, to make.

Confession’s simultaneously a liberation and a form of containment. Religious or not, spiritual or not, the idea of confession, even at a base level like, “Yes, Ansel, I ate your gummy bears” (I’m working on having to confess this less and less) is, yes, an admission to others, but also an admission to one’s self; a kind of culpability that can tell us something about ourselves or our characters at that particular moment. An artist is always confessing because an artist is always making, which is a continual confession of love for the art and the love of the art’s craft. As an artist, I am liberated in my obsession with writing’s craft, but that same obsession is also a form of containment helping me know or come to know myself as a poet in relation to myself and others or others in relation to others or things in relation to things in any given poem.

In short, I’d say Holdfast owns the “I” more than WHCS, even when I’m in the third person, because I thought of these poems as opportunities to study myself andpoetry/making as these poems were made. I was much less worried about “having something to say” in Holdfast. I was more willing to be in process, in fact, to give myself over to process and understand myself as process only; the process of an alcoholic, a divorcee, a father, a new lover, a poet, a poet beginning to believe poetry just means making, to make. In Holdfast I worried more about making poems and less about making myself seem other than I am, though, non-negotiably, WHCS contains just as much of who I am, though I was able to hide from myself a bit more there. In moments when I couldn’t stand to look at myself in the mirror, I had the personae and their history to be the rock I slept against. I took that away from myself in Holdfast. No. I’m wrong there. The poems took that away from me in Holdfast, for which I’m more than grateful.

JMR: You use literary allusions, characters, and quotes throughout both of your books in nearly every poem, an aspect of your poems that seems to nod to a life lived through and alongside reading. How did you develop this interest in incorporating other literary characters or lines directly in your poems?

CAG:. I really like the phrase, “lived through and alongside reading.” Such a phrase, is, what I think Sir Philip Sidney (the reason for my Sixteenth-Century obsession), would have said about himself or claimed for anyone who would give much of their life to reading and writing. I guess I just did exactly what you asked about. My brain went to Sidney, who, like most of his contemporaries (and those writing after him) used lines from other writers and characters from other writers without pause. The early modern writers feel much in tune with what Eliot would later call “the presentess of the past,” that is, they weren’t worried about “originality,” they just trusted it would come if they imitated rightly. They also understood themselves as a part of a community and a tradition that was transhistorical. When they wrote, they did so as if those they’d read and loved were in the room with them.

When I was at Old Dominion, Luisa Igloria and Tim Seibles told me to do the same thing. When I was drafting a lot of these poems and I’d get stuck, I’d do what Richard Hugo suggests in “The Triggering Town” and give the poem a sudden turn by using a lyric from a song or a line from another poem or a character and then I got the pleasure of trying to make it work.

JMR: To many beginning writers, love poems can seem difficult to pull off without falling into the typical tropes of the genre. You even make a joke out of those tropes in your poem titled “Christian Anton Gerard to Her Sort of in the Style of a Teenaged Love Poem.” Both of your books focus on love in different ways: Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella focused on a discovery of love and tempestuous moments in a relationship, while Holdfast seems to be interested more in how relationships are shaped in order to be sustained over time. As you say in “Twenty-Something Poet Made a Mix Tape,” “Quintessential lovers… are always fucked, / the trying to love, a fiasco bigger than love itself.” Do you find yourself continuing to write bigger-than-love poems after the second book, and why have they been a form you return to?

CAG: Oh wow. I’m really in love with what you just said about the love poem as a form and a genre. I definitely find myself continuing to write bigger-than-love poems, or maybe it’s that I hope I can write as-big-as-love poems. Love is probably being alive’s most interesting thing to me. It’s so interesting to me that I almost hate writing the word because it doesn’t serve as a proper sign for the signified “thing.”

I don’t know that it’s possible to write bigger-than-love poems. Maybe the only thing bigger than love, for me, is poetry itself

When I was courting my now wife, the poet Heather Dobbins (with whom I’m more than fortunate and lucky to have and feel and share a love and life so big), I said soemthing once about not wanting to be cliché in my declarations of my love and she said, “clichés are clichés for a reason, and what could be more cliché than trying to say how in love we are?”  She’s exactly right. The challenging and exciting aspects about writing love poems are trying to figure out how to use cliché and skirt cliché at the same time.

I don’t know that it’s possible to write bigger-than-love poems. Maybe the only thing bigger than love, for me, is poetry itself, but even poetry, in its making, is, I think, an affirmation of love’s largeness and largesse. When we talk about love, we can (if we accept the most recent United Nations estimate) believe in 7.6 billion configurations of that emotion’s idea, and that’s if we just give one idea of love to each person. That’s a whole lotta love (and a whole lotta ways to configure how love feels).

I said earlier that I’m more than lucky to be alive. And I love being alive, which means I get to be in love with a lot of things and actually feel those feelings to my full capacity because I’m no longer able to feel so much I can’t handle it and turn to alcohol to shut me down. I have a lot of feelings and they’re really big and now I get to feel them, all of them, which is a gift I didn’t know I’d ever receive or that I ever asked for. I see this as a form of grace.

JMR: In your literary criticism, you have written about the role of apology or defending poetry, and the second part of Holdfast is made up of defenses of poetry (most of the time with that purpose in the poem titles). How do you see the argument for poetry in your second book as related to or different from your first book? Whose work are you reading among contemporary poets that you think acts as a great defense of poetry today?

CAG: Apologetics are wildly fascinating, especially for poets. It seems we’re continually up against the idea that “poetry is dead” or “that nobody reads poems, except for other poets.” If poetry was dead, it wouldn’t be made anymore. And when, exactly, was this golden age in which everyone was walking around reading poetry? Much of poetry’s history is the history of poets reading poets and learning from them how to make and then make differently, how to reconfigure ideas and emotions central to human identity.

My dissertation was a study of poetry’s defenses in the English tradition beginning with Sir Philip Sidney (though he’d point to Chaucer). I argue (and still maintain) “creative writing” as we know it today began with Sidney’s work and identification as a writer who taught other English writers how to read like a writer. I don’t know that the argument for poetry in Holdfast is different than in WHCS, but the way I make the “defense” gesture is different.

Rather than mashing up the historical Sidnean Stella with John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester to see what might happen if they’d been together, I started calling the poems “Defense of Poetry; Or…” because apologetics aren’t really about defending an art, they’re about making a space for more art in conversation with art that already exists. Calling the poems “Defense of Poetry; Or” was an experiment in what a poem could be “about,” or rather what all it could contain while it acknowledged its tradition and the art larger than it.

Working as an early modern scholar helps with content and hugely influences my work. For one, studying that time period allows me to see that my problems/feelings/not problems/situations aren’t entirely unique to me (I see the same thing in contemporary writing, but somehow the temporal difference between the early moderns and me makes it even more apparent), which frees me to write about myself and others who’ve come before me, or toothers who’ve come before me. I don’t know that I necessarily believe in inspiration. I think I believe more in what Shelley calls “the great conversation.” In “the great conversation” there’s no present or past or future, there’s just dialogue and craft lessons by reading and seeing others attempts and our own attempts and the understanding that being human is hard and easy at the same time. A both/and. I like understanding myself and understanding writing as a both/and because that disposition helps me understand others and the world I live in as a both/and, which makes living a bit easier sometimes.

Some contemporary writers I really love to read and return to that are both/ands (in no particular order) are Heather Dobbins, Marilyn Kallet, Tim Seibles, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Luisa A. Igloria, Terrance Hayes, Dorothea Lasky, Mark Strand, Charles Baxter, Cheryl Strayed, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Tim Sandlin, Arthur Smith, Annie Finch, Elijah Burrell, Karen Schubert, Shara Lessley, Paul Otremba, Rebecca Lindenberg, Timothy O’Keefe, John McDermott, Eula Biss, Sandra Lim and I could keep going, though I also do a lot of reading throughout the day from what I see folks post and what friends send me. Reading what friends post online and what I find in journals is a way I keep finding new work to read and new writers to keep reading.

JMR: In addition to your interest in self-address, love poems, and apology, Holdfast is also a book about being a parent and about addiction. Who are your favorite parenthood poets? Who are some poets who write on addiction or recovery whose work has helped you write about it?

CAG: The cool thing about this queston is that “parenthood” goes both ways.  There’s parents writing about their kids and kids writing about their parents and I’d call them both parenthood poems, or at least a lot of the time.

Geffrey Davis is one of my favorite parenthood poets. He’s also one of my favorite people, but that’s not what you asked. The poems he’s showed me and I’ve heard him read from his forthcoming book are, well, they’re just the most. But the same goes for his first book, Revising the Storm.

Sharon Olds is another go-to for parenthood, as are Ed Hirsch and Jill Rosser, Audre Lorde and Philip Larkin (Ha!).

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this question because it’s a really hard one for me in the sense that Holdfast is also all about influence and the poems show a lot of what’s influenced me in the past 10 or more years. But when I was writing those poems and reading, I didn’t know any sober/recovered poets, or if I did, I didn’t know they were recovered. I’m not claiming any type of originality here for my poems about alcoholism and recovery, I’m certainly not the first to write about the disease, but if I’m honest, I can’t point to specific poets who helped me write about recovery and maybe that’s because for a while I was worried if I started looking for their work I’d end up writing about recovery. I know this is a weird answer, but it’s the one I’ve got and it’s honest and I hope that’s enough because I feel like I should be able to name thirty or more people who showed me what recovery wrting looked like. I guess, though, I’ve read a lot of writers who didn’t recover, but suffered from the same disease as me and maybe those are influences.

JMR: As a poet who has both an MFA and a PhD and has gone on to publish two books, how has your approach to constructing or thinking of book manuscripts changed from your thesis and dissertation to your first book and now your second book?

CAG: In terms of drafting and revising, I don’t have the time like I used to to sit and draft for hours. I used to have to have at least an hour to “finish” a full draft. That was nice, but I find I’m actually more interested in what I’m making now that I don’t have that time. I write a sentence or a line a day. That’s my rule. At the end of each week or every couple weeks, I put them together and see if there’s any connection between them or some interesting relationship between them and then I start playing with what’s there on its own terms, not mine, because I am afforded the opportunity to see what’s there, not what I want to be there.

What that meant for full manuscripts now, or for the full manuscript of Holdfast, was that I had all of these things that I wasn’t sure how to order. I ordered the poems several times by myself, but each time it felt like a different narrative become dominant and I wasn’t sure that’s what the poems wanted. I gave the manuscript to four poets I love and trust and said “what would you do?” When I compared their orders, I went with the choices that overlapped. They almost all had a similar order and none of them were close to my original orders. They could see what I couldn’t because I was too close. They could see the intertwining narratives and interactions when I couldn’t, which is one of the greatest aspects of community.

When I originally ordered Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella, I had a similar problem, except that I knew I was working within the tradition of the dialogic lover’s sequence. Knowing that tradition got me stuck in the idea of chronology. I just couldn’t find a way to make the poems cohere without chronology until both Marilyn Kallet and Pam Uschuk (incredible poets and mentors to me) both ordered the manuscript a-chronologically and then talked to me about thinking patterns and memory patterns and how often we don’t think chronologically or remember chronologically, or write chronologically.

I guess the story here is the same. Knowing I have a manuscript, but not knowing how to order it means I have to ask for help, just like when I know I have a poem, but I’m not sure exactly how to get back into it for revision and I have to ask for help. Poetry makes me ask for help, which is good for me and keeps me close to the fact that it’s always bigger than me and that it will help me find ways to serve it, rather than me finding ways to make it serve me.

Almost every semester I show my students the covers of several books and then open the books to the acknowledgements page and say that every writer I know would rather have all of the names in the acknowledgements on the cover, but we can’t because “that’s not marketable,” so we have one name on the cover, though we all know none of the poems would be or be what they are if our art didn’t require we serve it and ask for help and perspective; a kind of help and perspective that comes only from writers working with and for the larger purpose of serving the art we need and love.

JMR: You’re a teacher as well as a writer. How has the writing of each of your books been shaped by and in turn shaped your teaching?

CAG: I’ve been really, really fortunate to have worked under writers who did their damnedest to help my poems get where my poems wanted to go, not where my mentors wanted them to go. I think workshop and MFA programs are what you make of them. If you write for workshop, then you’re not writing for your own work. If you’re not in a program that’s asking you to read widely, then you might not try to write in all those different ways.

One does, however, have to read and read and read and try and try and try.

The single most important thing all of my education has done for my writing is exposed me to a huge array of writers across time, identification, movements, genres, styles, subjects, forms, craft thinking, and on and on and on. The counterpart to reading widely is learning that, for me, if I don’t understand why someone is working in a certain mode, discussion with other writers often helps me understand what that person is trying to do, or rather what that person’s work is trying to do, which challenged and continues to challenge me to expand my desire for possibility in the relationship between form and content.

I think, more often than not, that, well, there are people who just want to complain and complaining about formulaic writing is a thing people can complain about. Okay. So what. I’d prefer to spend my time reading and talking to writers about reading and their writing and continue learning from them, which happens all the time in class with discussions with my students. I find I learn more about my own choices and boundaries and inabilities by talking about other’s work (which I all the time do as a creative writing teacher), not having others talk about my work. Therefore, if I can open myself to listening, I can try what I say about other’s work in my own and maybe I grow in the process.

One doesn’t have to have an MFA or a Ph.D. to be a writer. One does, however, have to read and read and read and try and try and try. For me, academia kept me disciplined when I might not otherwise have been and it still keeps me disciplined because I’m a part of a community, which is the most helpful thing to me.

When I read the essays of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and T.S. Eliot (yes, even Eliot) and Adam Zagajewski and Dean Young and Stacey D’Erasmo and Carl Phillips and insert infinite list of writers who write about writing in the U.S. in the 20thand 21stcenturies that I try to read and keep reading, what I’m seeing is not a charge to disavow the tradition of which we’re a part. I’m seeing every reason to acknowledge the tradition of which we’re apart and use it and read it and be emotionally honest on the page, and there’s no formula for feelings.

For me, teaching is the best job for me to keep working on craft and learning because my students challenge me and I won’t ask my students to do anything I won’t do. If I reveal a fear about my own work, say, short titles, for instance, which I was really scared of two years ago, then my students will say, Dr. Gerard, just do it, try it, that’s would you’d tell us. That’s the reason Holdfasthas a one word title and why many of the poems in it are shorter than in Wilmot Here, Collect For Stella.

JMR: Lastly, you feature a few poems in your book that allude to music and musicians, so I want to ask: if you were to make a mixtape for your book, what songs would you include for Holdfast?

CAG: Oh wow. Rather than individual songs, I’m going to go with artists who all have a a range of songs/records that I need in some way at least once a year: Prince; Ryan Adams; Cat Power; The Cure; Notorious B.I.G.; Stevie Nicks; Smashing Pumpkins; Tupac; Pearl Jam; Taylor Swift; Rappin’ 4-Tay; The Postal Service; Bob Dylan; James Taylor; Jim Croce; Bon Iver; The Civil Wars; Cyndi Lauper; The Rolling Stones; Joni Mitchell; The Counting Crows; Simon and Garfunkel; Whiskeytown; Diana Ross (with or without The Supremes); David Bowie; Carole King; The Smiths; P.M. Dawn; The Indigo Girls; Etta James; Michael Jackson; The Talking Heads, Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young); Van Morrison; Janis Joplin; Heart; Firehouse; Guns N’ Roses; Eminem; The Allman Brothers; Coldplay; Bon Iver; Tha Dogg Pound; Neko Case; First Aid Kit; Kenny Chesney; Sharon Van Etten; Fleetwood Mac; Tom Petty (with and without The Heartbreakers); Bruce Springsteen; and all the other writers and bands that aren’t coming to mind right now because that thing is happening when someone asks me to tell a story and then I can’t think of a story to tell.

—–

Christian Anton Gerard’s first two books of poems are Holdfast (C&R Press, 2017) and Wilmot Here, Collect For Stella (WordTech, 2014). He’s received Pushcart Prize nominations, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarships, the Iron Horse Literary Review’s Discovered Voices Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize and a Best of the Net nomination. His work appears in the anthologies, Truth to Power: Writers Respond to the Rhetoric of Hate and Fear and Thrush: The First Two Years, and in magazines such as The Rumpus, Post Road, The Adroit Journal, Orion, Diode, and Smartish Pace. Gerard is currently an Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. He can be found on the web at www.christianantongerard.com

Jeremy Michael Reed is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee. His poems are published or forthcoming in Still: The Journal, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere, incuding the anthologies Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing and Where the Sweet Waters Flow: Contemporary Appalachian Nature Writing. He lives in Knoxville, where he is the editor-in-chief of Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, associate editor of Sundress Publications, co-director of The Only Tenn-I-See Reading Series, and assistant to Joy Harjo. You can read his work at www.jeremymichaelreed.com.

The Shattered Novel: Rules of Fragmented Fiction by Samantha Edmonds

By

I tried to write a novel once. And I found myself despairing: how is it possible to string paragraphs into pages into chapters into novels? How to make something as unruly as a story fit into a linear narrative? Then, my first year of grad school, several things happened: a friend recommended Reader’s Block by David Markson; a professor assigned Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill; a classmate mentioned Speedboat by Reneta Adler. That’s when I realized: The novel is falling to pieces!

In other words, paragraphs are out. Fragments are in.

These three novels are exemplary of fiction that has shattered during construction. They don’t follow a linear narrative, but instead consist of scene-scraps and thought-splinters patched haphazardly together to tell a story. Reader’s Block describes itself as “nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.”[i] The narrator in Department of Speculation call her memories “tiny particles that swarm together and apart.”[ii] Jen Frain, the protagonist in Speedboat, admits she has “lost [her] sense of the whole.”[iii] Forget everything you think you know about novels. The fragmented form doesn’t care how something should be written.

*

Think these novels are too cool for rules? They’re not. The best fragmented novels—no matter how abstract—must use at least these three characteristics to be successful:

1)lSeeming randomness (which is actually patterned). At first glance, disconnected sections in the fragmented form appear without meaning. But these seemingly unrelated fragments aren’t the madness they seem; Guy Trebay, in his afterword to Speedboat, writes, “Although at times it can seem these miniatures are deployed…arbitrarily and in no special order, like the things one sees in dreams, they are in truth organized in subtle and inevitable patterns.”[iv]

For example, in one section of Speedboat a white girl brings a date of another ethnicity to a friend’s wedding: “[The Argentinian boyfriend] was very rich, with more profound good manners than any Anglo-Saxon I have met, but he had not troubled much with haircuts. After we had all swum awhile outside, the bride’s mother asked me in confidential tones whether I thought she ought to drain the pool.”[v] There’s a white space, and then the next section begins, “‘Well, you know, you can’t win them all,’ the old bartender said. ‘In fact, you can’t win any of them.’”[vi] There’s a tickle in the brain reading these sections together; they’re seemingly unrelated—the bartender is anonymous and has never been mentioned before—but then the reader understands that for all the Argentinian’s good qualities, his long hair and non-whiteness will forever be that by which he is judged. Understanding that, the bartender’s, “You can’t win them all,” suddenly takes on monumental weight. In other words, there’s nothing the Argentinian can do.

Department of Speculation is similarly patterned. The narrator, after recently learning about her husband’s infidelity, says, “Lately I’ve been having this recurring dream: In it, my husband breaks up with me at a party, saying, I’ll tell you later. Don’t pester me. But when I tell him this, he grows peevish. ‘We’re married, remember? Nobody’s breaking up with anybody.’” A moment of white space, then: “‘I love autumn,’ [the daughter] says. ‘Look at the beautiful autumn leaves. It feels like autumn today. Is autumn your favorite time of year?’ She stops walking and tugs on my sleeve. ‘Mummy! You are not noticing. I am using a new word. I say autumn now instead of fall.’”[vii] The narrator’s daughter is using a new word to talk about something old, familiar. Rather like the way people say “divorce” once they’re married, instead of “breaking up.” Offill doesn’t have to spell that out, however, because the patterns of her sections do it for her.

Despite their random appearance, these fragments are carefully ordered to evoke something strange and true in the associative habit of human thoughts—these patterns are vital in fragmented fiction. Lesser fragmented novels, random but without underlying patterns, wouldn’t be as successful.

2) Plot. In each successful fragmented novel, there must still be a plot, and the more familiar, the better. Of the three novels under discussion, Jenny Offill writes the clearest plot (a wife discovers her husband cheating), and I believe it’s for that reason I find this novel the most successful. One of the notable differences in the reading experience of Department of Speculation versus Reader’s Block, for example, is the extended moments grounded in scene in Offill’s novel. The scenes are straightforward, recognizable—even clichéd—as scenes in an infidelity novel: a confrontation with the “other woman,” marriage counselling, emphasis on the daughter, memories of their past. The story doesn’t attempt to do anything game-changing regarding the standard relationship plot; it’s already attempting to experiment in other areas (like form).

When I met Jenny Offill at the University of Cincinnati in 2015, I menionted her novel reminded me of Reader’s Block without the abstraction, and she said she was a fan of Markson. She added that, to her, the most notable difference between the novels was that, in hers, she only wrote two or three “random” abstract sections before returning to the plot, whereas Markson tended, at times, to write pages and pages of story-less lines and quotes before returning to a scene. For that reason, Department of Speculation is more accessible. The novel earns the ability to emphasize random asides and abstract fragments because in the scenes where there is plot, it’s astonishingly simple. By contrast, Reader’s Block is obscure, almost plot-less, making it the hardest to follow or experience as a story.

Without plots that are at once easily described and instantly recognizable, would the fragmented novel succeed? Could one write a science fiction novel this way, for example? An epic fantasy quest, in worlds not immediately our own? If not impossible, it would be extremely difficult—and may not be met with as much success. “Easy plots” give fragmented fiction the space to experiment in other ways.

3) Metafictionality.

A graduate student sits in a coffee shop writing an essay.

Defiantly adding “metafictionality” to her Microsoft Word dictionary, regardless of if it’s a word.

What David Shields said: “I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself unselfconsciously as a novel, since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now.”

Recognizing this as the best explanation for what seems—to the grad student—to be the biggest source of success in a fragmented novel.

The novels are aware of themselves as constructs, and doesn’t try to hide that—rather, they embrace it, display it.

Relish in it.

The narrator in Department of Speculation is a writer and writing teacher. Reader in Reader’s Block is writing a novel. Jen Frain in Speedboat is a journalist.

Metafictionality in fragmentary fiction offers commentary on what it means to be a novel, and what it means to try to write one truthfully today.

Example: in Department of Speculation, Offill gets to have her cake and eat it too in the wife’s confrontation scene with the other woman. The chapter begins, “She would not have let one of her students write the scene this way. Not with the pouring rain and the wife’s broken umbrella and the girl with her long black coat,” then proceeds to give criticism of the scene: “To begin with, she’d suggest taking out the first scene….she would ask for more details of the girl’s appearance…she’d point out that what’s interesting is actually the lead-up scene.” She then writes the scene exactly as she said she shouldn’t—in the street, in the rain, with the wife kicking a mailbox.[viii] Readers know she knows this scene is cliché, which makes it not cliché—or at the very least, enjoyable as cliché. The metafictional nod to the reader, the tongue in cheek, brings us pleasure where, in other circumstances, presented sincerely, many readers would groan.

If Jenny Offill gives valuable insight into what it means for a novel to be a novel today—everything has been done a hundred times, the only way to make something feel new is to say you know it’s not new and then do it anyway (by pointing out your work’s weaknesses, do they become strengths?)—then David Markson is attempting to capture the reality of writing such a novel. Reader’s Block is more metafictional than both Department of Speculation and Speedboat. The novel’s opening lines, “Someone nodded hello to me on the street yesterday. / To me, or to him? / Someone nodded hello to Reader on the street yesterday,” imply that while he decides in the third line to write in the third person, this is a novel about Markson himself. Indeed, he admits as much on the next page: “Granted, Reader is essentially the I in instances such as that.”[ix]

The Markson novel is the only of the three books to question what it is.

“A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak, minus much of the novel?”[x]

*

To me, the most exciting thing about the fragmented novel is that it gets at something “true” about living and writing that paragraphs can’t reach. We need fragmented fiction because life simply isn’t like a paragraph. It’s shattered, patterned, associative, all scraps and half-things and bright splinters—and, like these novels, so much the better for being broken.

[i] David Markson, Reader’s Block, (Urbana-Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2014): p. 193.

[ii] Jenny Offill, Department of Speculation, (New York: Vintage Books, 2014): p.3.

[iii] Renata Adler, Speedboat, (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2013): p. 10.

[iv] Guy Trebay, “Afterward,” Speedboat by Renata Adler, (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2013), p. 173.

[v] Adler, Speedboat, p. 40.

[vi] Adler, Speedboat, p. 40.

[vii] Offill, Department of Speculation, p. 50.

[viii] Offill, Department of Speculation, pp. 129-31.

[ix] Markson, Reader’s Block, p. 9-10.

[x] Markson, Reader’s Block, p. 61.

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Samantha Edmonds’ fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Day One, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, Indiana Review, Monkeybicycle, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Her nonfiction has been published in Bustle, Elite Daily, Ravishly, and more. She currently lives in Knoxville, where she’s an MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee. Visit her online at www.samanthaedmonds.com