YOUNG | Laura Page
TFH Poetry + Interview Series #1
acknowledgements: A version of “Piano, Ploughshare” was published by the Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, 2014. “Steven Biesty’s Man of War”, “Capture the Flag”, and “Lies About Fishing” were all published by Crabfat Magazine, 2017.
Cover Image: “Gambol” by Laura Page. Acrylic on Archival Paper. TFH 30 | twentyfourhoursonline.org
Yard Spells Chain link dreamcatcher, the demarcation between our houses, studded with the numinous eyes of dandelions she plucked in her backyard after I told her about the witching. Along almost 200 yards of rust-bitten link, the talismans blinked turmeric at me. Her head filled floral and quilted quiet, snared and riveted. Just the girl next door, on the wrong side of town, just weeds, but the night terrors stopped after that. The monsters were gone.
Piano, Ploughshare October: the smell of leaves baking in dry grass. Exorcisms of natural talent performed each Wednesday at the 3 PM piano lessons beginning that month featured chords, rickety, like a skipping share, climbing and descending under shaking fingers, a bright bulb bringing attention to ragged fingernails, a plaster rendering of Johann Sebastian Bach, the liver spots on Mrs. Waller’s hands. We played Red River Valley until the notes could be heard like a phantom limb is felt, leaf house architectures, a circle of fifths. • Accidental influencers: William Golding, Judy Blume— Are You There, God? It’s Me, a preadolescent island, flat chested, ungovernable. Five daughters meant that Mama didn’t know how to raise a son. She raised folk songs in Dutch ovens while he talked with God in a house of leaves the wind was destroying in November. We sang Red River Valley, stirred things in pots. He read encyclopedias, fixated on facts until prayers stopped howling scales stopped plowing ivory.
Stephen Biesty’s Man-of-War i. was the glossy paged 4th grade educational oddity that made me think of years like a sliced-up frigate. Scurvy was detailed in a particularly unpalatable cross-section of the Royal British Navy’s machine, as was the operating theatre, where the ship’s surgeon did his bloody work at the aft off the orlop, but decks had names like poop and sails spanker, and the whole thing seemed like a grim, floating dollhouse the way the book cut it up and offered wedges. With all the gusto for carefully illustrated snafu that I’d loved on Where’s Waldo pages, but with more realism, Biesty, with his graphite and water-colored commerce, gave me a first hint of the subconscious, the possibility of a giant, metaphysical scalpel. In 4th grade, there was 4H, butterflies throttled, pinned open, parts apart where they should be touching. In 5th grade, my class dissected frogs and cow brains, and my nostrils stung from that quick sneeze of formaldehyde. After the frog, I knew literal slices weren’t the point, though I did want, at first, to see my body working—little rugged men wrapping the rigging of my heart around their fists or would-be mutineers causing a ruckus in other waking parts. Later, I wanted to see the sub-conscious vessel, the shape of the thing, one transection at a time, up close. I wanted a clean cut, to observe all the contributing cogs and wheels in that one falling out, then that other one— those almost interminable dark days, then the sunbathed ones. I wanted to see what benign and not-benign routines, what old salt, formed the combative in me.
ii. Another oddity: Henry Frederick Reddall’s Fact, Fancy and Fable. Man of War— a phrase applied to a line of battle ship, contrary to the usual rule in the English language by which all ships are feminine. I’d imagined them little men in shirtsleeves and breeches rope-a-doped in the match between my head and my heart. And the assertiveness with which my slight body was changing certainly had to denote boys. The anticipation of boys. Lithe ocean vehicles were, no doubt, christened for the fairer sex for their fairness. But what was this buxom lady doing with so many armed boys inside of her? ‘Men of war’ were heavily armed soldiers. A ship full of them would be called a ‘man-of-war ship.’ In process of time, the word ‘ship’ was discarded as unnecessary and there remained the phrase ‘a man-of-war.’ Redux: leggy in spar, a lethal pair of knees, splayed aft and fore, the fairest sex of them all was, in fact, a man.
iii. Stephen Biesty grew up drawing the little men swinging sailor-tarzan in his heart and just kept doing it. Incredible Cross-Sections became a half-decade franchise for which he sliced up all manner of bulwarks including the human body. Biesty never uses a ruler or any kind of drafting tool, which means his Man of War is a rogue thing, free-handed, a perfection in its own class. The neat ribbons he made of my warship, the ghosts in my re-tooled galleon, have, over my years, become frayed at their edges. Not the sea-worthy they were. A thread in the fabric of those sections was pulled every time Meg, Hoyden, Gamine was invoked for me. My family’s sobriquet was Lou, a warring adjective, but they couldn’t have known that. What I couldn’t know and still don’t: what is benign and not benign? A question that, sliced down the middle, is never binary. A half-drawn thing, rudder to stern, I’m afloat— androgynous guns, the gamine, in graphite and watercolor.
Capture the Flag We competed in authenticity games, but there was no need. Everybody imitates uniquely. For instance: I once clasped K at the waist quick and not quick during capture-the-flag. Wanting to know what the new contours would feel like to another pair of hands, I made her me and I used mine— just for a second— even though girls’ bodies were supposed to be little arcs of the covenant. I sized her up as she was out-sporting and determined we were the same consecration, proportion, touched her fleeting and not fleeting, not un-innocent. The slight stiffening, her frown (would I feel so coltish?) was a flag seized to say I’d been an authentic imitator of that Biblical character, who, lunging to right a toppling arc on the road to Jerusalem, clasped golden thigh, and was felled instead.
Lies About Fishing Sometimes, when I’m being generous with myself, I think I lie to get closer to a truth. Maybe not the truth, but something. My whole childhood, I wanted Dad to take me fishing, but my Grandad never took his daughters, so Dad never took me. He took my brother, once— but only once, because fishing really isn’t my Dad’s thing. When I finally went fishing years later, I told the boy I didn’t know how to bait a hook. He gave me a Cheshire cat grin and said not true. Yes, sometimes, I lie. I say Dad did take me fishing once. I say that I caught something glittering, gasping, and when Dad said to throw It back, I put my lips to its suck instead, stole its sequins, grew a tail, and after that— Dad stopped joking about beating the boys off, pantomiming with his pole. My mother stopped trying to reel me in.
LAURA PAGE | Interview by Josh Medsker I’ve known Laura for many years, via literary adventures, and have long been fascinated by her work. Laura, I’d like to welcome you as the very first poet in the Twenty-Four Hours Poetry + Interview chapbook series! Thank you! So, to start, I want to talk about your literary magazine, Virga. What was the inspiration behind it? What made you decide to undertake this crazy endeavor? In 2015, I saw that a small press, Anchor & Plume, was looking for readers for their lit journal Kindred. I applied, was accepted, and began reading LOTS of poetry, essays, and short stories, and comparing notes with the founding editor, Amanda. It was an exhilarating process and it exposed me to so much that I would not have read otherwise. I noticed as I read that I gravitated toward a certain voice, a certain quality of imagination. Amanda’s and my own aesthetic overlapped very frequently, of course. But while I greatly admired Amanda’s vision for Kindred and Anchor & Plume, which is unfortunately no longer operational, I found myself envisioning space that could foster a more experimental, more lyrical voice. The observations and experiences with A&P were little seeds sown, and Virga grew from that. Are there any literary magazines that you always come back to… ones that you just thoroughly enjoy? There are! I’m very happy about so much that I’ve read from a journal, The Bennington Review, that went on a very long hiatus—30 years in fact—and is back in full force as of March of 2016. Benjamin Friedlander, the editor of Robert Creeley’s selected poems, 1945-2005, once said that poetry involves a “zeroing in on those points where particularity gives access to the common and commonalities take particular shape.” I think Bennington is doing this beautifully. I also love Salt Hill. They just produce, invariably, issues that are full of artistry. The introduced me to writers like Nick Greer and Pilar Fraile Amador. Some of my favorite new kids on the block, include Human/Kind, which is doing great things with short form poetry, especially the Japanese forms, haiku, tanka, cherita, etc, The Hunger, whose editors, Lena and Erin, curate issues full of pure music, and the Indianapolis Review, which is creating a real space for poets AND visual artists, one that, I think, is focused, more intentionally, on the poetry community, and on being a resource for poets.
What was the impetus to start writing poetry? Had you written in any other genre before poetry? From a pretty young age, it just delighted me that language had such power to transform, that it seemed like a means of access. I wrote poems very privately as a teenager, but didn’t really begin intentionally developing this passion until later, as a freshman in college, after reading some critiques of Adrienne Rich’s poetry. Rich, and Theodore Roethke were influences that sort of ushered me in, you might say. How do you know when a poem is working? What is your process like? For me, a poem is working when the emotional kernel that prompts it can land on an image that soothes me, that validates the feeling, somehow. Or it’s working when the image or subject I’ve landed on can escape, through a trapdoor, maybe – a hidden passage – and emerge somewhere else without its clothes on. In other words, the image or the subject is stripped down and the result is some new insight. I used to overthink process, used to feel a bit of anxiety about producing “work.” Lately, for better or worse, my process relies on writing very fast, in a very “un-thinking” way. I’ll often abandon these sorts of skeletal things for days or weeks, before returning to them and putting some flesh on the bones. How often do you write? I know some people have bursts of inspiration… some write every day… I’ve never been able to regiment my writing. I know it works for some, but I am at the mercy of those “bursts” of insight or inspiration. This has always been the case. Who are some of your favorite poets? Both established and up-and-coming? Have you noticed any aesthetic/content-based connections between them? Well, first, I love so many dead poets. Rilke, William Carlos Williams, Ann Sexton, just off the top of my head there. But contemporary established poets would include Norman Dubie, Robert Hass, Sharon Olds, Ada Limon. Favorite newer poets include Danez Smith, Paige M. Lewis. Connections…that’s a good question. I gravitate toward Rilke and Dubie for their distinct spirituality. Esoteric, I’d call it, sometimes with sexual undertones. Sexuality and Spirituality are, for me, really never divorced in poetry. The other names I’ve listed, I think, combine a confessional aspect with just this thing I can only call wisdom. It’s delightful, because some of them, like Smith and Lewis, are young and just beginning their careers, but the wisdom contained in much of their work can be as grave or mirthful as Olds or Hass. If you had to pick ONE poet who informed your work more than any other, who would it be?
How dare you. Rather than answer that nearly impossible question, I’ll tell you the name of a poet who has been heavily influencing my recent work. I bought Paul Celan’s collected work, Breathturn Into Timestead, a couple years ago, and was impressed with how much he could pack into such very brief poems. His work relies on what I’d call “impressions.” I just love his idiosyncrasies, the playfulness and innovation in language. You are also a painter. When you have an idea, a spark brewing… how do you know you have to paint, versus make a poem? I think I paint when no image or subject is forthcoming for a poem. I don’t plan paintings; I just start painting as a sort of investigatory impulse. A similar question to number six… what visual artist would you say has influenced you more than any other? Oh boy, I’m a little obsessed, currently, with the work of a Chicago-based abstract artist, Shar Coulson. She explores the interconnection between humanity and nature, particularly the repetitions of each, over time, and the conceptual movement between reality and perception. What is the purpose of art, in your opinion? I would say that human consciousness always, inevitably wants to push against the limits the natural world imposes. But not just the natural world. Really, it pushes against anything that is said to be “known” about our experience as humans. Art, I think, is a big what-if? What if this or that or the other so-called limit were not present? The purpose of art is to challenge or subvert the grooves we wear in our minds just by living on this planet. I’m kind of obsessed, sometimes, with the idea of collective consciousness, and believe that art is doing something on that level– all these humans, making it, looking at it—and I like to try to imagine what that will enact in the future. ***** Laura Page is a poet and visual artist from the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including: Rust + Moth, Crab Creek Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Fanzine, Maudlin House, and TINGE. Darren C. Demarree selected her chapbook, epithalamium, as the winner of Sundress Publications’ 2017 chapbook contest. Laura is founding editor of the poetry journal, Virga. (www.virgamagazine.com)
A note on the text: This chapbook was set in Arial. Arial, sometimes marketed or displayed in software as Arial MT, is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts. Fonts from the Arial family are packaged with all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 3.1 onwards, some other Microsoft software applications, Apple’s macOS and many PostScript 3 computer printers. The typeface was designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, for Monotype Typography. It was created to be metrically identical to the popular typeface Helvetica, with all character widths identical, so that a document designed in Helvetica could be displayed and printed correctly without having to pay for a Helvetica license. (Wikipedia)
Selected Twenty-Four Hours Press Titles: TFH#13: FIRES. Creative Nonfiction by Eric Steele Johnston and Josh Medsker. TFH#15: FABLES OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM. Fiction by Robert Moulthrop and Josh Medsker. Cover by Aaron Morgan. TFH #17: YOU ARE MY ANTI-SPAM HERO. (Anonymous Chapbook 1) TFH #18: THE USE OF TRAVEL. (Anonymous Chapbook 2) TFH #19: THE TIME-TRAVELER’S ASS AND OTHER MODERATELY ALASKAN SITUATIONS. (Anonymous Chapbook 3) TFH #20: SHAKING HANDS. Found Poetry by Christopher Luna and Josh Medsker. TFH #23: NO TITLE. SAMIZDAT/POETRY. (Anonymous Chapbook 4) TFH #28: POST-APOCALYPTIC CRACKERVERSE HYPOTHESIS. Poetry by Devon "Peach" McGillis. (Anonymous/Pseudonymous Chapbook 5)
All titles are $5.00 USD, except TFH #17 and #28, which are both $9.00. All prices include shipping to US/Canada. Add $1.00 for World. For orders, send funds electronically with VENMO or PAYPAL to joshmedsker@gmail.com, or send your orders via snail mail to: Josh Medsker/TFH 39 West. 30th St. #G Bayonne, NJ 07002 Please make checks out to Joshua Medsker or send well-concealed cash.
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