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In Memory of Roberta Sharp, My Grandmother (1945–2018)

This is my grandmother Roberta Sharp’s eulogy, given at her memorial service. A mother, grandmother, aunt, friend, wanderer, and free spirit, she is loved and missed.

Bobbi Sharp

Hi, I’m Lindsey and Roberta Sharp was my grandmother. One of my strongest memories of her is the smell of her house: potpourri and cigarettes. It might be an acquired taste, but my sister and I love it. I don’t know where I’ll find that smell again—her particular blend. Anyway, one of the things Grama taught me was that potpourri doesn’t cover up the smell of cigarettes.

And she taught me all sorts of things, much of which was practical: Save the bows from presents to re-use; buy those bows and bags at a dollar store. It’s easier to keep a pair of scissors in every room than to go on a hunt for one pair of scissors. Slice a bunch of cherry tomatoes in half at once by sandwiching them between two Tupperware lids with rims. Always have chips and dip for company. Get your mammograms. Wicker furniture does come back. HSN and QVC have good deals on beautiful jewelry. Post as much as you want to on social media—we’re all on there anyway. Keep a clean house, which is maybe one of the lessons I have the most trouble with. Have two or three meals you’re known for. Do your job. If you’re stunning, be casual. Laugh impishly, and if something’s funny, laugh. Silence is golden. Alone time is necessary. If your son-in-law moves in with you, he’s easier to handle if you serve him Kahlua in his coffee. If you get a riding mower stuck with its front half up a tree, call Clark. Family traditions are important. If someone marries into the family, tell them how much you like them. No fight is as important as family—if you can be right or get along, get along.

Grama grew to keep her life simple because often, life upended itself. Among its many changes, she survived single motherhood, a tornado, and the death of her best friend, her younger brother, Gary. She remembered her parents in many ways, including marking their birth and death days on her Thomas Kinkade calendar.

She taught me to be honest and to let people know that I love them. She said “Hi Sweetie” whenever I walked through the door and liked all of my Facebook posts. She always told me she was proud of me, and I know she was proud of Ssangie and Sara, that they were starting out in life and hard workers, that Sara got a job in a competitive field and Ssangie bought a house on her own. She was proud of and happy for Aaron, Nikki, and Sierra, too, and loved learning how their lives are unfolding. She really wanted to know us, which is even why she liked getting us gifts, knowing what someone likes is one way of knowing them. Some of my favorite times I spent with Grama were as an awkward teenager, trying on clothes when she took me shopping for my birthday. At a time when it felt like anything I put on would be ugly, she helped me have confidence by spending time with me and saying it was all cute.

One of the main things I think she taught many of us? The view is where it’s at, go and take it in. On a beautiful day, go for a drive. If you have a dream vacation, go. Grama loved a view—especially a shared one, like with Grama Baumle and my mom and dad in Jericho, Arizona, on the ledge of a skinny road with no shoulder, where they had a flat tire that had to be fixed; or tracing the upper rim of Lake Superior with Mom and Cheryl, where music played on the beach and the sun didn’t go down until almost midnight; Glacier and Seattle, places that Sara and I had gone that she’d gone before, she’d send us pictures on social media of those places all the time. She knew Seattle so well, she went to the first Starbucks before it was a chain, and said she knew it would be big. She could tell Sara a story about every picture she brought home from her trip. One of my favorite memories of her was just driving home from Thanksgivings on the scenic route, or watching her watch all the cows in the valley below our cabin. Many of her trips were to visit her women friends, who were dear to her. And on her trips, she’d go anywhere—fearless, sometimes into the mountains in the dark to blow off steam, sometimes into cities, where she’d also park anywhere, an embassy, a mansion’s driveway; and when she reached a roadside motel, she’d ask to see a room before she decided whether to stay. It didn’t have to be fancy, but it did need to be clean. One of the views she liked best was from her porch at home. Maybe her favorite trip was her one with Mom and Cheryl to Tofino to celebrate her 70th birthday, her favorite view not the water or the mountains, but seeing her two favorite people happy together.

She loved when our small family was happy and together. I know because I’ve seen it, but also because she told me. She loved that Mom and Cheryl are best friends. She loved that my dad and Clark are their best friends, too. That through all this time and all these miles, all the views we’ve taken in, we’ve all stayed together. One of her last dreams was that we all had houses in a row. (Cheryl reminded her she’d been watching HGTV.)

She was one of my favorite people on Earth; now she’s one of my favorite people somewhere else. I love her very much.

Her biggest lessons didn’t come from the biggest trip or the prettiest picture. They are in simple moments, non-stories: my mom coming home from kindergarten and eating soup with her while they watched Bewitched. Her feeding marshmallows to her dog. Just sitting quietly in the car together and watching the world blur out into greens, blues, and grays. She took a complicated life and made it simple and satisfying by filling it with love. As long as Sara, Cassandra, and I weren’t fidgeting, playing near something fragile (like the glass frog), or making weird noises, we were loved exactly as we are. Maybe this is the lesson all good grandparents impart, but I felt it especially from Grama. Maybe because she was exactly who she was, sometimes stubbornly; she did what she wanted to do. She didn’t moralize, kept her judgments to herself (and maybe our moms), and let things go. Forgiveness wasn’t something one asked for—we just got it. I remember apologizing a couple hours after snapping at her one Thanksgiving and she looked totally confused—she’d already forgotten whatever it was. The people in Bobbi Sharp’s life were loved. She let us know it. We were loved. We love her very much. Her legacy will be how much we love each other for as long as we have and how we show it.

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I Prefer My Poets Dead: Why ‘Making It New,’ or Anything New, Is So Dang Hard

The movie you watch in English class when you have a sub is not called ‘Living Poets Society.’

Virginia Woolf on why we prefer our poets dead:

In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and absurd though these comparisons are, I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is impossible, I thought, looking into those foaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. One does not recognize it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet.

—A Room of One’s Own, p. 14

Stan, from Mad Men:

Everything good I have is from a long time ago.

When an earnest thread on Facebook emerged asking for good work by contemporary poets, I responded by paraphrasing the Woolf quote above. When the friend who started it asked me for recommendations, I came up with a list of favorites and highlighted what might be a best fit, only to have A Random Dude respond that Bob Dylan and Tom Waits were better than any contemporary “self-identified” poets. (Please insert eyeroll here and also a note that I am pretty sure Bob Dylan would lose it if he could no longer walk out to the “Poet Laureate of Rock and Roll” introduction you know he approved.) This annoyed me, but also gave me a good laugh, because clearly Random Dude, according to Woolf, who has earned more of my trust, might say he just longs for how Dylan and Waits were able to make him feel a long time ago.

With respect to Dylan and Waits, many of us can only keep our dead poets alive in our hearts. It’s what brings us such magical imaginings as Mary Ruefle’s “My Emily Dickinson.” It’s why some poets (asininely) opine about dying young, like Keats, or part of why Plath skyrocketed to fame quicker than some of her contemporaries. (Dead longer.) And it’s why those of us poets who still count ourselves among the living are awful cagey about the subject. “We’re working here!”: a rough translation of so many Twitter posts and essays on the non-death of poetry. The dead poets are rich compost people can use to make their daily lives flower and give fruit; us living sods’ works are the pile of eggshells, mown grass, and aromatic vegetables left in the back of the fridge too long, waiting to help. One’s a tool; one’s an eyesore that will someday be a tool. (And if you love Dylan, which, ugh, I do, you’ll know his “folk process” often involves churning up the words of obscure dead poets in his own lyrics, only to be called a poet while he’s living.)

Maybe it’s unfair that readers ask death of us to consider our poems as ones that have “passed the test of time.” But so it is. It’s nice to be a martyr.

As a modern (lowercase m) poet myself, I can even feel this way about my own work. Longing for old writing styles of when I felt or perceived differently—almost as if by another person. Often, poets at readings will say something like, “Many poets will tell you their new work is their favorite; I am no exception.” I guess I am an exception. Which I’m recognizing especially now as I begin work that is not for my debut collection, Rodeo in Reverse. I’m suspicious of new work; sure, loveable maybe, the sounds it makes especially, but I long to do work as good as my old work—and sometimes worry I won’t.

Yes, I worry I peaked at 17 when I wrote a sexy villanelle about hooking up in a car that inverted lines about volume, wheel, up, down; the lines were short—two or three words apiece maybe? My teacher, a favorite, not an effusive praiser, read it out loud to the junior class, which made me elated—my poem was good and maybe the junior class would not think I was a virgin. To me, it’d felt important not to seem like a virgin but also to try and be one then.

Been chasing the ghost of that poem, which is lost to floppy disk and trash heap, for years since.

And if nostalgic for my own past work, one might imagine the case for others’.

Maybe 5 years ago I read an essay on the internet that argued every book you read before age 25 affects you more deeply than those that come after. This is an unfortunate view. I’m not far enough out from 25 to a- or disa-gree, but I wonder how many people are able to read many books after age 25, by which time career and family and responsibilities are likely to be settling in.

I count myself among the lucky few and look at each blank page, each new title askance—in suspicion and flirtation. Who knows? This might be the one I’m looking for. If not, it still does its work in the compost pile.

Besides, dead poets have everything going for them but life, which is a great advantage. Whatever you make today will be old in no time.

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Poems I’ve Loved: January 2018

“After You Left” by Jean Yoon.

I died at the peak of my stardom

I slipped into a pleat in the wheat field

I considered shopping, then surgery

I wept into your turkey jerky silhouette

I married myself begrudgingly

This short poem in jubilat‘s most recent issue struck me for its sparsity and humor, which feels true to heartache and longing, at least to me. “(After you left,) I died at the peak of my stardom” has got to be one of the best break-up lines of all time, in pop music, poetry, or otherwise. But humor isn’t all of it, there’s more mystery here—how, in a world barely 3-D, someone can slip into a pleat in a wheat field, almost like a paper pocket on a collage or the back of a journal, disappeared yes, and also safekept. The beloved’s location is known, though the beloved herself is invisible. It’s “the” wheat field. Their silhouette, like Christ seared into toast, materializes in jerky. Meanwhile, the speaker is the subject; the beloved is only a clause. She dies, slips, considers, weeps, and marries—a kind of afterlife. She puts herself at the first of each line, each sentence. But the beloved is locked in a clause that becomes refrain, implied before every action the speaker takes. The beloved’s absence still comes before. That seems only right.

“Fat F*ck” by Diamond Forde.

what is a pig
if not unclean?          If not the ungodly

gristle buttering your teeth?

I got to see Diamond Forde deliver this poem as part of an audience at the Only Tenn-I-See Reading Series in Knoxville, and it killed. Her body of work was excellent, and luckily this one’s available online at The Offing.

This poem balances on the head of a pin the sexually explicit and violent language used against fat women in our culture. The “you” in the poem, someone who has deployed this abusive language is as distant as a street harasser, as intimate as a lover. The speaker chooses intimacy, the poet chooses to connect. At every harsh word, the speaker opens and blooms, like a wound.

The speaker moves the language and the action from her own onto the “you.” At first, funny, coarse, sensual:

I could reach into your fridge, tongue
the Hӓagen Dazs, stuff its lengthy
pint into my ever-eager mouth—
that’s the kind of sick bitch I am.

By the end, still sensual, the humor turned into a gyre of cleverness that spins out this stunner: “Tell me my belt wraps the world’s waist // then beat me with it.” Read the whole poem here.

“Discovery” by Wislawa Szymborska.

I believe in the refusal to take part.
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the years of wasted work.
I believe in the secrets taken to the grave.

This is not a poem I “found” this month, but instead one that’s been recurring to me over the past year. Many Americans are choosing how to engage, but how to disengage, to opt out, could be equally powerful if invisible. The biggest sacrifices may be those we never see. I love this Szymborska narrative poem about a scientist who works meticulously to delete every trace of a discovery. It begins: “I believe in the great discovery. / I believe in the man who will make the discovery. / I believe in the fear of the man who will make the discovery.” Read it.

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Misaphonia and the Needs of an Imperfect Artist

Recently, I discovered a writer I admire (who happens to be a friend) cannot stand mouth noises. For the uninitiated, mouth noises are those ones people make while eating. They include but are not limited to vocalized swallowing, an exhalation of “ahh” after sipping from a Coke, clacking a spoon around in a jaw, or scraping the tines of a fork against a ceramic bowl. When I found out, I howled. Another person on the good side of misaphonia. I also cannot stand mouth noises. Even when my dog makes them. I love dogs with abandon, but no infatuation can overcome this defect. Ask my husband.

When my sister and I want to get on each other’s nerves, we text videos of ourselves, internet animals, or our pets making mouth noises. (Lil Bub is particularly good for this.)

To concentrate, I require silence. Much like the fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock in The Phantom Thread, merely buttering one’s toast too loudly can ruin my whole morning:

“Please don’t move too much.”

“I’m just buttering my toast. I’m not moving too much.”

“You are. Don’t move too much.”

“Maybe you’re paying too much attention.”

“It’s like you just rode a horse across the room!”

(You can read an interview with the sound designer here that is fascinating. Apparently white toast and sourdough are the most annoying.)

I do not want to be this way and work hard not to be, but I cannot deny that my husband has eaten breakfast in the bedroom instead of the dining room for fear of interrupting my writing with crunching or clinking. (And it is hard work.)

In the movie, when Reynolds is hard at work on a wedding dress for the princess, closed in a room by himself for hours on end, Alma, Reynolds’ live-in girlfriend/model/sewist, makes the mistake of bringing him a tray with tea. What would be a kind act for a high percentage of humans is, in fact, an unkind one to someone in a flow-state. Or, as Reynolds says less politely but more succinctly:

“The tea is leaving, but the interruption is staying right here with me.”

Confessing that I relate is embarrassing but also a fact. People who are trained to be sensitive their whole lives (and who often enter creative professions because of this sensitivity) have a tendency to be, well, sensitive.* My sensitivity, which I regarded for most of my life as the worst part about me, is the part that poems and songs and empathy come from. It’s not good or bad. It calls me to who I am. I’m called to observe, so it’s difficult when the task is to ignore or let go.

I think of vocation, which we often call “a calling.” In the South, people often say “God called” them to do a thing, to stop doing a thing. It’s the best shorthand for what’s inexplicable but necessary. What calls you? When that calling is a siren song, the work can be done most intensely, and it’s absorbing but fatal. I once stayed up for three days seaming and rearranging quilt squares and writing poems. I felt satisfied and also like hell afterward. The come down is intense. Still, I miss that feeling. Alma loves Reynolds best in this mode, or maybe better put, is able to love him best then—caring for him, nursing him, snuggling him, being still. When he will not cease, she poisons him with mushrooms. Not enough to kill. She makes him sick so she can make him well. Maybe she makes him sick so he can be well:

“I want you flat on your back. Helpless, tender, open with only me to help. And then I want you strong again. You’re not going to die. You might wish you’re going to die, but you’re not going to. You need to settle down a little.”

It’s in sickness he sees how ugly the dress he’s made for the princess is. It’s in sickness he’s reunited (through hallucination) with his dead mother, whom he’s missed desperately for decades, whom his work honors. Of course, lovesickness is equally torturous and transformative. Figuratively speaking. I don’t plan on eating any questionable fungi.

Our work calls to us, and we need something (or someone) to call us from it.^

It isn’t easy to make space for another love in a life. In mine that’s a husband, a dog, a home. The work—doing it and thinking of doing it and preparing for it and reading for it and finding what belongs in it—can take up ceaseless days. It can take up all the flat surfaces in a house. It can invade meal times and the will to exercise and conversational skills beyond enthusiastic monologues and grunts. The work is selfish; it may be made for consumption but it consumes.

Still, the work, the part of the artist that needs to create, needs a protector. Cyril, Reynolds’ sister, protects his creative space and his time, eating silently, arranging his schedule, and breaking up with girlfriends once he’s through with them. Of course, I don’t mean a woman to deal with all the details; a protector could be a person in your life, or it could be an autoresponder on your emails. It could be Saturdays you’re unreachable. Un. Reachable. It could be as simple as a closed door. But the protector doesn’t suffer the artist’s complaints. The protector wears blood-red nail polish and, just like Alma, will knock the artist out when he tries to argue with her, “Don’t pick a fight with me, you certainly won’t come out alive. I’ll go right through you and it’ll be you who ends up on the floor.” It’s worth noting that Cyril is protecting Alma, not Reynolds, in this conversation.

Cyril likes Alma, in spite of their disagreements; however, Cyril can enter breezily and slam doors, seen as a necessity, while Alma, even tiptoeing or seductive, is seen as interruption. For artists, maybe, or at least for me, the protective part is like a sister, a relative, blood of my blood. We share DNA. The love that interrupts, however, is foreign, my cells don’t recognize it. It’s bewildering and requires attention, attention to its oddity at the very least. Not a muse. A necessary distraction. Or maybe, the work is the necessary distraction.

One kind of love draws us closer to the work, the other away from it. Both knock us out cold when we cross them.

Romantic love, other interests, responsibilities take time from the work, and they may not make the work better. But love demands we rest “open and tender.” It clacks its spoon in its teeth and goes dancing without us if we sketch dresses on New Year’s Eve. And love does respect the work; Alma rescues one dress from a ruinous end.

Rather than a New Year’s resolution centered on productivity, this year, I am wondering how to eat the poison mushroom delightfully and to appease the person who makes my omelet.

Work can draw us inward to the deepest place, protected and dangerous like a fable forest; but something (or someone) else must draw us out—call us out—homeward—serve us a dish we won’t forget.

A garment, a painting, a book; none of it is because of one person’s genius. It’s because of a genius spirit that dead mothers, lovers with toast, sisters with teacups, teams of women in white jackets with pockets for shears, and whole houses foster. In this way, I believe the film can be seen in a feminist light—showing the difficult work many women do to help a man create a single dress (though I’m interested to read more on gender roles in the movie).

Sometimes the myth of the artist, particularly maybe the writer, is one of loneliness. Sometimes I like to buy into this myth. It helps me to believe I’m so good or so rotten, as is my work. But of course a truly lonely person would be unable to write. Literacy necessitates a someone else and a before; it presupposes an after. Sometimes our friends are our sisters, sometimes our lovers, sometimes models or muses or ghosts we can’t conjure. They’re all here. To quote Oprah paraphrasing Maya Angelou, “I come as one, but I stand as ten thousand.”

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*This predisposition isn’t an inevitability, however. Sarah Bakewell notes in her biography of Montaigne, How to Live, for instance, “Even when Montaigne went off to his tower to write, he rarely worked alone or in silence. People talked and worked around him; outside his window horses would have been led back and forth from the stables, while hens clucked and dogs barked. In the wine-making season, the air would be filled with the sound of clanking presses.” (173) Terrible. Terrible.

^My husband read this statement and asked, “Why?” I do not know why; I only know this statement to be true. It isn’t as a muse, really, or for amusement—though I’m sure it can be either. I guess maybe to live a life?

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Poems I’ve Loved: December 2017

It’s the end of a year and fittingly and by happenstance, I loved (short,) end-stopped poems this month.

“[Remarkable the litter of birds]” by Emily Skaja

From the start I was told I was a powerful speaker I was told when & how I should speak
It’s true I made a feast of my own misery after all I was 29
I’d had a narrow escape from becoming Julian of Norwich

This poem transmutes again and again, but bookending in flight—the deathly flight of the city birds at the beginning, the bees stopped mid-pollination to be consumed—and disappearing acts—the “special crew” of people who sweep away evidence of violence, of failure, the beautification. I’ve been thinking a lot about disappearing acts over the last year, mainly women’s (which is touched on in this poem—the speaker asking “Is it antifeminist to starve myself over a boy?”); but this erasure of violence, male or natural or bureaucratic—the assistance in disappearing, the poem dawned that on me. Yes, dawned with a direct object.

The constant in the poem is the form, its stability and confidence, even with the punctuation erased. The lack of punctuation and longer lines is in tension with how the entire poem is end-stopped, which adds authority; it allows the pace to build, release, build, release, each line break a gasp for breath between punches. I love a poem about uncertainty and anxiety written with authority.

Meanwhile, the poet is doing something spectacular with tone: the outlook is bleak, it’s pretty much Handmaid’s Tale, yet, she inserts flowers, she has perspective and humor: understanding the reality of falling apart around 30 and how young 30 is and therefore how hilarious, in retrospect. (It makes me think of a conversation I had with a friend about someone so young he didn’t even realize he was young. That.) She does this swiftly–in the three lines above, saving her former self from the threat of Julian of Norwichdom (a state of being a highly literate writer nun). The poem confesses how writers “feast” on their miseries.

The speaker offers a sort-of epithalamium to marriages who watch her with bees in her mouth. The violence still happens, the hurt still happens, but it’s pretty. I wonder about this in a poem about the coexistence of love and violence; I wonder if maybe the only way people who are brutalized can control violence is through beautification or acknowledgement, sweeping the streets or opening a mouth full of a bees. Can one read a contemporary poem with bees in it and not think of Plath? Inserting that ghost into a poem and the poem still standing on its own is a miracle and a testament to the work its writer has done. Praise be for this one.

Read it in its entirety (it’s short) here, and start the New Year wondering whether you’d live your life over.

“Spell Against Gods” by Patrick Phillips

Let them be vain.
Let them be jealous.

Let them, on their own earth,
await their own heaven.

…
And when they call out
in prayers, in the terrible dark,

let us be present, and watching,
and silent as stars.

If you read my last post, you know how I came to Phillips’ poetry. But it’s not the poem that was most affecting that was my favorite this month. Instead, it’s another, more lyric poem from his same collection Elegy for a Broken Machine.

This near-litany shows the power of anaphora when used sparingly, when inverted. “Let them” repeats itself throughout the poem, syntax shifts to enhance its musicality, so the rhythm exists but isn’t tiresome. Like a bass guitar, it always comes in on time, heavy, but sparingly. “Let them” puts the stank on this poem. (Apologies to this poem.) I’m trying to learn to love anaphora again because I learned over the last decade of my life not to trust it: Its musicality can hide nonsense, unoriginal conceits, all number of ills. Just because it sounds good doesn’t mean its good. But in poetry, in my opinion, if it doesn’t sound good, it ain’t good either. “Spell Against Gods” meets the mark.

The conceit isn’t totally original: “What if gods had to deal with being human and we got to play god?” The gods in this poem are watching us passively like a TV, and so maybe they deserve our cruelty. The word “let” is a passive one, but of course, sometimes it’s the thoughtlessness, the casual cruelties, that cause the most pain.

I love what this poem does to stars, too. Often an image used as a sentimental symbol, “Spell Against Gods” is disgusted with them, how they stare down at us, with their heavens hunkered there, not helping. The description given is not what the stars are but an absence of what they could be, a profound disappointment: they don’t speak. A human might want to disappoint as the stars do, glinting like the tips of faraway knives.

Read the whole poem here.

“Too Anxious for Rivers” by Robert Frost

The truth is the river flows into the canyon
Of Ceasing-to-Question-What-Doesn’t-Concern-Us,
As sooner or later we have to cease to be somewhere.
No place to get lost like too far in the distance.
It may be a mercy the dark closes round us
So broodingly soon in every direction.

Grateful to Mario Chard for sharing this poem on Facebook. To be honest, I have not thought about why I love this poem at all. I just do, and plan on memorizing it in the New Year. Hope you’re 2017 “’twas the effort, the essay of love.”

Read it here.

Let’s ring in 2018 together. If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my editing tips, thoughts on the creative process, favorite poems, and updates on my book, Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

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Elegy for 2017: Right Poem, Right Time

My view during this instance of right poem, right time, and elegy

On my last day off, I was doing one of my favorite things: reflecting on the past year and planning for the coming one — essentially, writing. (In the third grade I created homework for myself. This is who I am.) The radio was on — some background music, the tea was hot, a chance of snow that never came; it was a woo-woo person’s cozy dream. I sat with my head tilted like a confused dog and stared; wrote and wrote. The radio program changed to Fresh Air, and I turned the sound down so I could remain focused. Yet.

I didn’t recognize the name of the guest, Patrick Phillips, immediately, but I did recognize the book he’d written, Blood at the Root. Terry Gross and Phillips talked about Forsyth County, Georgia, its history of racist violence, and Phillips’ upbringing there. I drifted in and out of the conversation, in and out of my writing. Specifically, I was reflecting on my father’s heart attack and open heart surgery.

Gross typically lands transitions (I take notes as someone who’s not), but in a bit of a stretch, in what felt like out of nowhere, she asked Phillips about his father’s open heart surgery. My head shot up. What?

She asked him to read the poem he wrote about it.

I hadn’t made the connection he was the poet Patrick Phillips. I had never heard this poem. This episode was a re-run, and what an odd coincidence it aired on the same day, at the same moment, I had been writing about my own father.

Writing is powerful in that it makes us pay attention: Phillips’ poem changed me, if only for an afternoon; my own writing put me in the place (literally) to hear his poem.

I sat at the dining room table, staring into the radio’s yellow fog — ON — and the feelings came.

This is the first sentence from the poem he read, “Elegy outside the ICU,” as it appears in his collection Elegy for a Broken Machine:

They came into
this cold white room
and shaved his chest

then made a little
purple line of dashes
down his sternum,

which the surgeon,
when she came in,
cut along, as students

took turns cranking
a tiny metal jig
that split his ribs

just enough for them
to fish the heart out —
lungs inflating

and the dark blood
circulating through
these hulking beige machines

as for the second time
since dawn they skirted
the ruined arteries

with a long blue length
of vein that someone
had unlaced from his leg.

To me, this poem shows strength in its willingness to observe, its looking at and saying what is. Like most courageous acts, this poem is evidence of vulnerability. (What he does with syntax is worth another post for another day.)

I did not witness any of this in my family’s experience. I saw my dad the night before his surgery and hours after — waiting, not watching, being my chief role.

*

In my family, someone cracking her knuckles who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone crying who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone missing an earring is an emergency. Painting a room only hours before guests arrive is an emergency. An actual emergency, however, is anything but.

Shortly after I found out my dad was having a “heart event” (his words), I learned from my sister that he had talked with her to make sure she could stop by and feed the dog dinner. In the same way in which he might if he were working late. It wasn’t until they told him he would need a procedure that he decided to alert us.

Certain members of my family would tell you this sort of stoicism is a show of strength; they loathe criers and huggers and direct conversation, and after three years of art school, I can’t blame them. But often stoicism isn’t stoic — a radical acceptance of reality — at all; instead, it feels like denial, the opposite of strength. Our weaknesses may be what allow us to weather a crisis. Weakness (if unconfessed) may be one sort of salvation.

Once doctors determined my dad would need open heart surgery, my sister leveled with me that it would not be overreacting to come home.

There, the situation was far from humorless: For instance, the night before the surgery, my dad had a second “heart event” much more painful than the first. (Not the funny part, I’m getting there.) As the nurse rushed to her computer coordinating with a doctor, checking whatever nurses check in these situations, my dad’s roommate kept calling for the nurse — not his nurse, using the call button, the nurse trying to stop my dad’s “heart event.” She told him time again to use his call button. Finally, peeved, she said, “What do you want?”

“Could you, uh, get me a Heath bar and some apple juice?”

*

After my dad’s surgery, it took me a while before I wanted to walk into the ICU to see him. My mom had warned us: He won’t look like himself. You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to. (He was unable to speak, and for the most part, he was asleep anyway.) When I walked into the ICU, I was nervous. He would be in Room 1. Room 1 was just inside the automatic doors. I looked to my right. There, my father, hair shocked gray, face gray-brown, swaddled in a bud of blue blankets. My eyes opened wide and welled with tears, made hopeless eye contact with the nurse, who whispered, “Your dad’s in Room 7.”

Oh.

The sight of my dad was still humbling — intubated, like a submarine full of portholes, swimming through what? the man who had carried me until I was too big to carry lying drugged on a bed, waiting to make certain small gestures as a sign of maturation, of health. But after Room 1, what a relief. He was the basic peach of many white people — not his colors, tanned leather and red, but a color of the living.

*

By the time my dad was moved out of ICU, my immediate family was exhausted and on each other’s nerves. One edgy, irritable, unable to stifle any comment or let any errant noise go; one traditional and a bit of a martyr; one cruel because she is the most fragile of us all. At one point I used pantomimes for eating cheeseburgers when my dad tried to blame my mom for his dietary habits. We are not people whose great strength reveals itself in times of trouble. But we are people who show up for one another. We sit in waiting rooms and endure rude doctors and frantically demand nurses switching shifts give showers pre-op and work our ways through mazes to find bathrooms and then attempt to relay directions. We drink and eat like gluttons because we are gluttons and know we will not eat like this again for a long time. Food has been there for us. For me, so has poetry. My dad’s life restored to us, given, gifted, like this poem was to me, except I would have never known the difference if the poem hadn’t arrived in my little house. This revelation, a paper dressing gown, leaves much to be desired, some embarrassment, more questions than answers — EKG, meter, heart, syntax, morphine, mystery. Enjambment for now instead of end-stop.

Phillips’ elegy for a father still living is really an elegy for a moment, a certain understanding of self and relation to mortality and parents. An elegy more like a notch nicked into a tree trunk or a glance at a watch — realization at the time it is: incredible and brutal and here already. It’s usually our understanding of time, our marking of it, that adds meaning and heartache. But an elegy isn’t just mourning loss, it’s freeing space for what is and what is to come. One year passes and another, like a lizard tail ripped off and growing back, comes to take its place. One view of the self passes and another, like skin over a scab, grows over. I love my family newly now; I love writing newly, too; love a never-ending autotomy; the elegy for what once was opens, like a cavity in a chest, like ribs, “just enough … to fish the heart out.”

You can listen to the full episode of Fresh Air with Patrick Phillips here.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my editing tips, thoughts on the creative process, favorite poems, and updates on my book, Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

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You Can Pre-Order My Book, Rodeo in Reverse

Cover of Rodeo in Reverse, now available for pre-order

My debut poetry collection, Rodeo in Reverse, is available for pre-order.

Cover art for Rodeo in Reverse, debut poetry collection

Billy Renkl created the collage for the cover, and Kate Arden McMullen designed this beaut. Isn’t it totally dreamy? When Kate sent it, I sent her a professional email back asking her to marry me. I know the cliché “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but I hate clichés, don’t you? Please judge my book by its cover.

In case you’re curious about the inside, though, if you like collage, I think you’ll like this book of poems. Here are a few endorsements:

When Sean Hill, author of Dangerous Goods, selected Rodeo in Reverse as the winner for the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize, he called it “the genuine article.”

When my sister shared it on Facebook, she said, “Not only will it be a great read (duh), it’ll make my coffee table look damn fancy .”

In the words of poet Marianne Boruch, author of The Book of Hours and Cadaver, Speak:

Abe Lincoln, Patty Hearst, Van Gogh, Mary Magdalene, Sonny and Cher, Buddha’s wife, Axl Rose, Bad Me/Good Me—all are radiant presences in this remarkable collection made of quirky, sudden shifts of observation and wise insight that enlarge the world. ‘Dog that won’t stop barking and all I can think:/ I don’t know anything about stars,’ the poet tells us. But history’s dark is here too, love’s humor and reason, a band on the radio not ‘holding grudges’ for once. My bet is you’ve never read poems like these: such surprise, curiosity, and wise-guy delight, such heart and—yes!—soul. Treasure this work. And this poet.

Pre-order it here.

If you want to stay updated on Rodeo in Reverse, sign up for my monthly newsletter, get my editing tips and thoughts on the creative process, and read my favorite poems.

Want to know how I landed on the title? Click here.

*In all seriousness, having writers and people I admire so much endorse this book, make this book, and edit this book, and friends who, before there was any telling it would ever be a book, offered all kinds of help and encouragement, is making for one of the most humbling experiences in my life. I’m grateful beyond measure.

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Poems I’ve Loved This Month: November 2017

Tulip poplar in full fall color: golden

“The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson.

“One way to put off loneliness is to interpose God.”

Corey Van Landingham posted this poem on Facebook. Like everyone else, I’m a fan of Anne Carson’s work — except I hadn’t read this one. It’s long and worth being long. I am glad I did not read it before writing my first book or else there would have been no first book to write.

In it, Carson’s speaker weaves together a biography of Emily Bronte, a trip to the moors with her elderly mother, and the time spent in heartbreak. To oversimplify, this is a break up poem. It’s also an ars poetica. Why do some people get hurt? Why do some people observe? Why become an artist? Why become angry?

Or, as the poem puts it: “What is prior? // What is love? / My questions were not original. / Nor did I answer them.”

And it’s these questions, unoriginal but essential, that map themselves onto the moors for the speaker, the curtains her mother wishes she’d draw, the “glimpses… of soul” the speaker comes to call “Nudes,” the idea of Bronte’s idea of God, the characters of Wuthering Heights, sexuality.

It was about this time
I began telling Dr. Haw

about the Nudes. She said,
When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?
Why keep watching? Why not

go away? I was amazed.
Go away where? I said.
This still seems to me a good question.

…

Why keep watching?
Some people watch, that’s all I can say.
There is nowhere else to go,

no ledge to climb up to.
Perhaps I can explain this to her if I wait for the right moment,
as with a very difficult sister.

‘On that mind time and experience alone could work:
to the influence of other intellects it was not amenable,’
wrote Charlotte of Emily.

The word “question” is repeated 12 times in the poem; the word “Nude” 25 times. There are 54 question marks. No answers in the poem, but glimpses of soul; the images those soul-pieces project themselves onto.

And in all of this, the self-indictment, the hurt feelings, the cold confusion of loving and no longer being loved. The line Corey quoted:

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is / to watch the year repeat its days.

Seriously. This one. Read it.

(Also Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite books and one of the few novels I’ve re-read.)

From “Oil” by Fatimah Asghar.*

We got sent home early
& no one knew why. I think we

are at war! I yelled to my sister
knapsacks ringing

against our backs. I copy
-catted from Frances

who whispered it when the teachers
got silent. Can’t blame

me for taking a good idea.
I collect words where I find them.

Read this poem on the Poetry website to see it in its true form (which I was unable to achieve here), or in the print edition (November issue). I think print actually enhances it a bit — all the white space, a full page, around each part presented in its glorious quiet, the threat and suffocation of the quiet, the whispering “bombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbomb” into sheets as a child whose “people might / be Afghani” post-9/11. This narrative poem, about identity formation, agency, and the collection of words, what one person can accumulate over a lifetime or in mere weeks, how the speaker scavenges for words, “know[s] that word’s not meant for [them] but [they] collect words / where [they] find them.”

This poem is a lesson in narrative poetry — how to hook with clarity and concision — and is the reason her book If They Come for Us is one I’m excited to read in 2018.

“Rastros Corporales: Blood on Canvas: Ana Mendieta: 1982″ by Leslie Sainz^.

… it is near-game, this tracking of pulse and surplus/
when your country says give, you drain despite the clots.

I actually read this poem first a few months ago and have returned several times since: it holds so many mysteries, reading it is intoxicating. Poem as lure, me as fish. I felt not smart enough to talk about it then, and probably am not now, but if I wait until I am, I’ll never tell you about it, which would be a major loss for you.

Another ars poetica. This ekphrastic poem ironically reminds me of a watercolor because of its form — impressionistic, unassuming: a prose poem with line breaks hatched in, as one might write in a notebook. (See the art it takes as its subject here.) But the form is interesting because of the tension it creates with its subject: both the Ana Mendieta artifact (paintings made in a performance art piece in which slid her forearms down blank paper) from “Body Tracks” and the images the speaker shares.

As the title suggests, the corporal is central here — even the dice are “tooth-shaped.” But the speaker floats from body to body, an imagination more than a self (or the imagination is the self, the body is what’s imagined and experienced), the “you” she’s speaking to slippery — a beloved but what kind of beloved — the kind you’d paint a canvas with blood for, the kind who would bleed themselves for country “despite the clots” — a country, a mother, a lover, the reader? Why choose?

The genius of the poem — much of it in the syntax, the accumulation of meaning or allowance for different readings through commas and breaks — is how specific it is while letting in so many alternate realities — the speaker and the “you” transmorph into “dehydrated eels,” “polizia nacional rolling tooth-shaped dice,” from experience into image into sound.

In the past few years, poems in columns that can be read in different order for different meaning have come into vogue (and some are truly great), but here readers get many of these benefits in a sleeker shell; there is constraint and restraint, but it’s masked in a certain ease. More tension. Despite the slipperiness of image, of language, this speaker doesn’t let anything slip, even “blood on canvas” looks effortless without knowing the performance, the life, the politics that put it there. Factoring in not only the painting but Mendieta’s life as an artist, her death (a suicide, an accident, or a murder by her then-boyfriend and fellow artist), and the feminist response to all of the above, and “Body Tracks” and blood imbue meaning.

^I already told you all Leslie Sainz is a genius and saint. I meant it. Read her work now and say you knew it when.

“Woo Woo Roll Deep” by Angel Nafis.

… You can’t tell us
shit. We always down for the miracle.
The regular-as-fuck dawn making brand new
the farm of our hearts.

This poem is a joy. Reading it is a joy, it displays joy, howling it aloud is a joy. Calling or IMing your girlfriends about it is a joy. (And as Toi Derricotte says, “Joy is an act of resistance.”) Here, I mean joy in its fullest sense: that belly laugh heartbreak, the tattoo of dead lovers, the combination of unabashed support, astonishment, touch, and eyeroll that is female friendship. In the world of this poem, the police still kill citizens, but “A week after the 314th police killing this / year, Jenna mixes up a tincture…” Everyone reads their Chani Nicholas* horoscope and collates her affirmations with their upcoming periods. Walls are painted “miss-my-daddy red.” There’s tea and crystals and hopes for solutions and superstition and no guilt. As a proud-of-herself weirdo, I love other proud-of-themselves weirdos, of which this speaker is certainly one. I bow to the light in this poem. Woo woo.

*If you are not already, you really should probably be reading your horoscope from Chani Nicholas.

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Title Changes and Impostor Syndrome

Concrete donkey statue behind a wire fence.

Hi. My name is Lindsey Alexander, and I’m here today to talk about impostor syndrome.

In August, I found out that my manuscript, after seven years of work (and rejection), will be published with Hub City Press as a New Southern Voices Prize winner.

Once the prosecco wore off, I dove into revisions. I reworked, rewrote, and tinkered with poems, based on the suggestions of my editor, Leslie Sainz, who is brilliant and who should also be sainted. (Follow her so you can read her poems first.) The biggest suggestion was to change the title. Leslie sent 10 new potential titles, and then explained several that piqued my interest.

After much fretting, I sent back the manuscript revised, retaining the original title, which included the word “impostor,” and sounded like it belonged in a different genre. I hit send with a smug, comfortable satisfaction.

My publisher responded to (kindly) explain its reasoning for the change, in the way one might try to talk down a hissing cat from a tree, and at that moment I knew I had to kiss it goodbye. I emailed them that I understood and was ready to “come to Jesus.” And then I sent an immediate follow-up email to clarify, the hallmark of true confidence and sanity.

Meanwhile, instead of acknowledging to myself that I’d been wrong in trying to keep the title, I worked at convincing myself I’d been right. (As Kathryn Schulz writes, being wrong feels a lot like being right.) It took a while (and this in the Bible Belt) to find Jesus. I went for a long walk, fuming, certain my dog, who is a food mercenary, was the only one I could trust. It did not initially occur to me that (duh) my publisher wanted my book to sell well (likely sales matter more to them than to me). It did not initially occur to me that a team of smart people who were dedicating hours of their lives to sharing my work and who had read my book could understand its context, especially in the market, better than I did. No. I had selected the hill I was going to die on: Having the word “impostor” by my name on a cover. This is how overidentified I was with seeing myself as a phony. (I swear I must’ve read Catcher in the Rye too early in life.)

After an afternoon sulking, I was assuaged by a well-reasoned email from a friend, pointing out some of these fallacies. Oh, right, I had been granted a wonderful team, publication with a press I admired, and a big opportunity, and I wasn’t letting myself feel the glory of that gift.

I created word lists and theme lists and began creating titles I’m sure a bot could’ve come up with based on keywords from the manuscript. I conducted straw polls. Finally, a friend (fantastic writer Natalie van Hoose) with fresh eyes landed on Rodeo in Reverse. There it was: it had been between the manuscript and the word list and Leslie’s suggestions the whole time. I loved it. My publisher did too.

*

The only editorial work left was responding to a few new comments on the manuscript in a final round of revisions. A couple weeks later and I was receiving emails—you know the ones: polite, asking how a project was going, the kind from a kind person after you’ve missed or pushed a deadline.

Thing is: I was pretty much finished with revisions on the manuscript and had been for several days. At this point, I had a couple (just two) lingering small edits (whether to cut or retain a line, whether to add or leave out a short stanza), and in both cases I knew what I’d end up doing. I was creating false dilemmas for myself.

Chief among: searching phrases from my book to be sure they weren’t plagiarized. Taking small phrases and whole sentences and running them through Google, with quotes. If it didn’t return results, I’d look it up without quotes. If it did return a result—even a coincidental match on a random blog, I’d spin out, having proven to myself I was a fraud, not a real writer, much less a poet.

Which phrases was I searching? Any phrase I thought was good.

Why did I do this?

I felt uncomfortable. I mistook that discomfort for guilt, for having done something wrong, one of the grave sins of writing being plagiarism.

*

After some consideration, I recognized it for what it was: impostor syndrome.

I couldn’t be convinced I came up with anything good; therefore, if I like part of the book, it must be from somewhere, and someone, else.

I had insisted (gritting my teeth) on holding onto a title that my publisher felt it would be best to change. It had the word “impostor” in it.

Luckily, I’ve spent the last few months reading all the Brené Brown. (I don’t mean that as Internet speak. I mean I read all of it.) So I knew that “shame thrives in secret.” I needed to name it (impostor syndrome: done) and tell someone.

Being a good Millennial, I chose to share on Instagram Stories (which is private and only my really good friends and the occasional bored scroller would see), then after 24 hours it would disappear. Oddly, this medium mirrored the anxiety I was feeling: once named and shared, my shame (in this instance) no longer made sense.

Many friends reached out with an encouraging word—one even to say she’d had the same issue when she had a story accepted for publication at a Fancy Magazine.

Reading a section from Rising Strong helped me understand why I battle impostor syndrome in the first place: I have trouble accepting gifts—from others, from the universe. Like many women, it’s hard for me to accept even a compliment without reversing it thoughtlessly or mentioning where I got my dress for how cheap. A gift that’s a talent, unearned, an inkling honed into something bigger than the self—which I believe each one of us has—well, that’s nearly impossible to accept.

The thing about gratitude is, it isn’t hard to feel grateful once you allow yourself to feel joy, to accept goodness (including your own). But that means actually that gratitude is tough to access until it isn’t. Denying gifts isn’t a higher plane of maturity or understanding—it’s the road to ruin. Being kind to myself is oddly brave for me.

*

The title of my debut book, a poetry collection, is Rodeo in Reverse. I get to work with a caring, badass team of women to make it. I’m a writer and no more or less of an impostor than anyone else, which is to say, I’m human.

I wake every morning trying to lean into and learn from joy, to feel my gratitude. This means I am working on things like “being a hugger” and doing things like tearing up when I see my husband reading or thinking of how good my friends are. I say “I love you” to friends and acquaintances who are used to me not saying anything at all, or maybe “yeah, man.” I go to parks and sing with strangers at jams. (Okay, I did this once.) I thank the roof above my head for holding steady. I thank my stars for bringing me here. It’s the hardest and most embarrassing work I’ve done, and I don’t know where it will lead, but I trust it.

*

Have you ever experienced impostor syndrome? When? How were you able to turn the corner?

*

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Poems I’ve Loved This Month: October 2017

Blue Monochrome by Yves Klein, which is a canvas filled with an exact shade of ultramarine blue, 1961. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

“Indigo” by Ellen Bass.

This poem immediately struck me with the whoosh of needing to re-read—not because it’s overly complex or difficult to understand, but because of the simplicity of its narrative, the longing so many of us have for some other life, granted “it’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.” Desire for a tattooed dad turns into desire of a totally different sort (or maybe not a different sort at all, but the desire behind the desire, behind the cobweb and the window and its screen, the thing itself, outside and wild, but also suburban, typical, banal aching. I especially love the way she describes what sets this man apart—what his tattoos, which include the indigo of a title, represent to her:

“I want to have married a man who wanted
to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much
that he marked it up like a book, underlining,
highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.”

Then there’s the title, kind of an Yves Klein monochrome print thing happening, “a kind of obsession,” as Bass might put it. I listened to an episode Abbi Jacobson’s podcast all about Klein’s work with ultramarine blue, how he was fascinated by it and wanted to exactly replicate it on canvas; he found it irresistible and mentioned wanting to “impregnate” viewers with the color. (Oh men.) Klein also composed “The Monotone Symphony,” which is about 20 minutes of an orchestra playing one note followed by about 20 minutes of silence. (Jacobson reveals this after a conversation with QuestLove about the B-flat quality he attributes to Klein’s Blue Monochrome.)

One great thing about language is how its user, like a musician, chooses to wield silence. What’s not in a poem often feels as present as what is. In “Indigo,” there’s a great transition, a turn toward the end, between the speaker/mother and her daughter:

“And now there’s everything that we can’t talk about.
We love—but cannot take
too much of each other.”

What the silence holds for this speaker can’t be kept silent.

I think of Bass and her indigo; despite the many things happening in this poem, doesn’t she offer a compelling monochrome print here, one moment washed in one color that transfixes? Within this indigo, there’s humor, dress shopping, jealousy, “radiance,” BBQ, “carnelian,” even the reds tinged blue. And oddly, like Klein’s ultramarine wish, the poem has much to do with pregnancy—literal and figurative, the speaker’s birth and her daughter’s birth and what comes to fruition in life.

I read recently that a beech tree puts out 1.8 million* beechnuts over the course of its lifetime and only one of those will grow to maturation. In one color, so many ways to strike the same note; what returns to us (repeat desires, images, conversations) returns tired and fresh, old and new, something borrowed, something blue.

*I originally had the incorrect number here.

“Sunshower” by Natalie Shapero.*

This poem contends with the devil we know.

In the midst of a barrage of sexual harassment and assault news, this poem is a beacon. Playing on the old wives’ tale explaining a sunshower (“Some people say the devil is beating / his wife”), the poem morphs the devil again and again into something less and less easy to distance ourselves from, making him both more familiar and more sinister.

This is a great example of a poem that deploys anaphora to build a poem’s complexity. It adds a sing-song musicality that lifts the folktale aspect up and undercuts the rhetoric we’ve all heard before while enhancing it and adding humor.

The anaphora may also point to the culprit; ultimately, the poem doesn’t end with the devil we call devil but with “some people … having a fair.”

“… Some people
say calm down; this is commonplace.
Some people say calm down;
this is very rare. Some people say
the sun is washing her face. Some
people say in Hell, they’re having a fair.”

“Nashville” by Tiana Clark.

At a concert I was at, the singer began with “This is a song about gentrification.” I could hardly keep my eyes from rolling out of my head; in my experience when a writer (of songs or of anything) has to tell you what something is about, it’s no bueno. But then that person wound up being Courtney Marie Andrews, and I’ve listened to her album Honest Life almost every day since.

“Nashville” begins as a poem about gentrification: what changes and what doesn’t. I’d say which history is lost, but this poem keeps history alive, refuses to bury it. It begins with Hot Chicken, which may seem trivial to non-Tennesseeans; but at a time when the South is conversely being identified with a stereotyped white Southerner and appropriated in culture (from dress to cuisine to music), Hot Chicken’s popularity is on the rise, and in this “farm-to-table” migration, it’s been whitewashed, not recalling:

“the history of Jefferson Street or Hell’s
Half Acre, north of downtown. Where freed slaves lived

on the fringe of Union camps, built their own new country.
Where its golden age brought the Silver Streak, a ballroom
bringing Basie, Ellington, and Fitzgerald.”

In the city’s recent boom, Clark razes the past, a brief racial history of Nashville, and the speaker’s more personal history, her great-grandmother Freelove, her grandmother Toy, and her husband being called an epithet in present day. This poem talks about what “bisects” the city, the speaker, and ultimately America: I-40, I-65, “the boomerang shape of the Niger River,” the white faces in a photo of a  black person being lynched. It explores the violence and violations of making lines and of redrawing and crossing them. Maybe the most amazing part of the poem is when the speaker imagines (or sees) the crossing of an uncrossable line—the past entering its future, the present, backwards through the lens:

“…black-and-white lynching photographs,
mute faces, red finger pointing up at my dead, some smiling,

some with hats and ties—all business, as one needlelike lady
is looking at the camera, as if looking through the camera, at me,
in the way I am looking at my lover now—halcyon and constant.”

The speaker “search[es] the OED for soot-covered roots” and yet the epithet hurled at her family from a passerby, a part of the Nashville scene, leaves her hunting, “the breath / of Apollo panting at the back of Daphne’s hair, chasing words”, rootless, “kissing all the trees,” what to ground her but history, her knowledge, maybe love, repeating “Who said it?”

I’m grateful for this poem for a number of reasons, but particularly as a person relatively new to Tennessee (though I’ve been in “herds of squealing pink bachelorette parties” and had “sour to balance prismatic, flame-colored spice / for white people”) who knows little of its history and is learning how and where to look for it. Her work consistently teaches me this and so much else.

“Guerilla Theory” by Kien Lam.

“The largest primate in the world
is the white man’s ego.”

Simply put, I love this poem. It’s hard for me to talk about because it moves so quickly, deftly, shapeshifting imperceptibly until one recognizes a new name must enter in, more like clouds that look like monkeys than a gorilla. It’s form, the skinny single stanza, adds to this rush; its effect is a feeling of unstoppability. Once the first line is read, it’s as though something heavy’s been dropped down a chute.

As in Clark’s poem, Babel makes an appearance. “Guerilla Theory” deals in naming and how to name an identity, how to shape an identity when names have been stripped by “letters … dropped / out of bombers”, and maybe what remains of a person who has lost part of himself.

“… I saw
a monkey’s face when I looked
at a cloud, but my mother couldn’t
even make out the head. Someone
looked at a tree and called it a tree.
Someone else looked at a tree
and called it whatever the word
for tree is in Vietnamese,
which I don’t remember anymore.
And the word for that loss
is too big to fit into a single
word.”

Colonialism kills the ability to name, steals language, makes for a speaker “full / of holes and dormant landmines.” And despite the violence, despite the quicksilver movement of the mind at work in this poem, the quiet is what most moves me. It feels right that in a poem about absence quiet works so well; the ending the kind that makes me pay attention in the way a friend who doesn’t often interject catches my attention when he mumbles something; what sticks to the speaker at the end of this poem has stuck with me. I guess I’m Lavar Burton-ing you: Read it.

“The Moon and the Yew Tree” by Sylvia Plath.

This month I was able to spend a day at the Lilly Library at Indiana University where some of Plath’s manuscripts and artwork are archived. (More on this later.) One thing I especially enjoyed and made me think “Drats!” was that the stunner at the opening of this poem was always there and always the opener, at least in the drafts at Lilly: “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.”

Though favorites change, this has often been my favorite of her poems.

Originally written in a huge monolith of a stanza, she drew brackets to create separate stanzas on the first draft (or maybe lacking paper she did this as she went). She reworked the final stanza the most; lots of abstraction (and Socrates) fell away. Eventually she cut a penultimate stanza. What I wrote in my notebook while there: “It seems she (like me & [I] imagine many others) best revises in a fury—not gradually over time, but more like triage.”

October 27th is her birthday. She would have been 85 this year. This month also saw the release of Volume 1 of her collected letters. I think of her as one of the best Scorpios, best being best of its kind: physical, sensual, sharp (as in smart and as in all elbows, unsparing), grudge-holding, and talented. I’m in the midst of an essay about her and Flannery O’Connor, so I’ll spare you my love letter for Plath and leave you instead with a Plath fact: she loved avocados and red lipstick.

“The Country of Marriage (Part V)” by Wendell Berry.

Yes, more Wendell Berry. This poem is the title poem of a most beautiful chapbook that I advise purchasing posthaste, unless I know you and you’re planning on getting married in the near future because then you will have spoiled my wedding gift to you.

I’ve just reprinted my favorite section (Part V) here:

V.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don’t know what its limits are—
that puts it in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen time and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

“We are more together / than we know, how else could we keep on discovering / we are more together than we thought?” Low whistle.

I also highly recommend watching Look & See, about Wendell Berry’s work off the page on Netflix.