Panhandler Issue 3 by Panhandler Magazine

Poetry - Fiction - Nonfiction - Drama - Criticism - Interviews - Art

Panhandler 2009

University of West Florida

The cover, introductory and concluding photographs in this issue are of St. Petersburg, Russia, 2007. Photographs by Jonathan Fink

Panhandler poetry ~ fiction ~ nonfiction ~ drama ~ criticism ~ interviews ~ art

This issue of Panhandler is dedicated to the memory of Tyler Knisely (1987 - 2008)

Panhandler (ISSN 0738-8705) is an annual literary journal published by the University of West Florida’s Department of English and Foreign Languages. The editorial policy of Panhandler is to present in each issue many of the aesthetic forms that the majority of contemporary magazines do not have the space or the desire to publish. With the goal of bringing many of these underrepresented genres to a wider audience, Panhandler publishes substantial folios of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama and criticism. Poetry folios contain 10-20 pages of poetry. Fiction folios range from 2 short stories by individual authors to novel excerpts and novellas. Drama folios consist of either a one-act play or a single act from a larger work. Panhandler welcomes all forms of nonfiction—memoir, literary nonfiction and traditional journalism—as well as substantial and insightful criticism. Subscription rates are $5/1 year, $9/2 years $13/3 years. For full subscription and submission information please visit Panhandler on the web at the following address: www.uwf.edu/panhandler. Mailing address: Panhandler Department of English and Foreign Languages University of West Florida 11000 University Parkway Pensacola, FL 32514 www.uwf.edu/panhandler jfink@uwf.edu

Panhandler poetry ~ fiction ~ nonfiction ~ drama ~ criticism ~ interviews ~ art

Editor: Jonathan Fink Managing Editors: Brooke Hardy Virginia McPhail Doug Moon

Panhandler Folios

1. Charlie Clark Poetry /1-12 2. Kenneth Fields Interview /13-19 3. Sean Prentiss Fiction /20-22 4. Valerie George Art /23-34 5. C. Dale Young Interview /35-43

Charlie Clark

Charlie Clark received his M.F.A. from the University of Maryland. He has published poems in Crazyhorse, Forklift, OH, Smartish Pace, and other fine journals. He lives and works in Washington, DC.

poetry

Blue

The sun, so concentrated, simplifies the glass clock face to a single glowing sphere, hands and numbers burned away, no longer a clock, so I’m left, temporarily, outside time, outside the passing of seconds, though from somewhere my love shouts in three minutes time she’ll be ready to go. For now, the clock blotted, Thelonious Monk creeping from the stereo, a streak of the sun’s heat runs down my face as the whole ball of it falls behind the apartments across the way, a few stars beginning in the blackening blue sky, that dark making a mirror of the long bay windows. No, not a mirror, and not quite a palimpsest, either, though that sky, where my profile glimpses back, is just the hue of the summer of evenings I spent hauling dirt and apples for a man who threw wrenches and liked to shout time is money, docking my pay for being so new to the trade and slow to learn. Fourteen-hour days where all I got quick at was telling time by the sun, leaving the rows of younger trees only when it got down to their short tips. I imagine it so badly now, so far from the heat and sores, the tractor I trundled through those wet fields. I hated it then, no question, and counted off time’s passing by the little increments of my pay. So why, now, with flashes of that place almost visible in the twilit window, would I smile or sigh to be there again, the constant worry of rent and exhaustion giving a little twist of pleasure in my guts. And the fights, on hot blue sheets, between that woman and I, the unhappy hours of it, my head hidden under a pillow, her begging explanations for my relentless, dreamy quiet. Such sweetness. Sweetness for the one odd outburst I let slip Charlie Clark

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while she nattered some complaint about what a guru wrote one hundred years before: about imagining yourself whittled down just to bone, your body gone, and then those bones going too, ground to a fine, blue dust. This was all we came to, he claimed. A return to essences or whatever, the only truth worth knowing. Something in it made her mad at me, something sexist or too male a way to think, us men and all our muscular, bodily obsessions, our fears: loss, sagging, decomposition. I think now I know what she meant—that love of meat and skin, sweet smelling, heavy, warm to the touch, something desperate in the way I crave it now. Is it ironic that she killed all her free time on tread mills and weight machines, training her body so hard to be fit and pretty, always asking what I thought of her, nervous to show her body, hiding it in long, loose skirts and pants, smacking me if I looked much past her eyes? She had the thinnest, tightest limbs, not like bone, not that far gone, but almost as dense. Her face, sunburned, helplessly plump, always scowling at me. In the steam of those days and nights my brain bleated leave, leave, leave in flashes of mind’s eye red—today I hold it tenderly enough to yell time is money through the room, hoping my love back there will hear it, though I’m in no hurry to get anywhere, cranking Monk’s solo rendition of “Crepuscule with Nellie” a little louder on the stereo, to hear better the delicious block chords, against his right hand’s sure but sputtered phrasing, imagining him with Nellie, whoever she is, beneath the sky, Monk’s huge, odd body wrapped around her, humming chord changes, remembering the phrases and flourishes that come to him from the evening dark, things he’ll put to paper once he gets home, copying down the mood the evening gave off, trying to get right its passing, not seeing the night or feeling Nellie beside him anymore, but composing the memory, which—in my invention of the scene— he’s quietly eager to get to, the way I am now, watching myself in the windows, thinking how my love likes to do yoga here in the nude, Charlie Clark

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with so many windows free to look on if they like. Doesn’t bother me, she said, and gives the pervs something to remember. What that woman would have said, not letting me even glance beneath the sheets when our bodies clutched after each other, saying gibberish like feeling is the only thing that’s real, not the flesh that acts it out. Looking out at all the windows across the way, as the opening to “Blue Monk” jostles from the speakers, I flex a time or two, for the pervs and me, feel my body, softened since those farm days, working until starlight, counting each new glimmering spot in the sky like they were the change I made that day, and then the full darkness of those nights, slogging it out with that woman, who in the day made late period Rothko knock-offs, as big and blue as this darkened sky, framed by the long white of these window panes, paintings I loved so much I said to her I wanted to live in them, in their simplicity, like the long drone of a monk contemplating his way outside of time. Some lost thing seemed tangible just inside them, something like my twinge for what’s in this darkened window, just beyond my reflection, where I can see myself so easily, enough to make me want to walk into these windows, to have them either break or let me through.

Orange Shoe Diary Bought orange shoes today. I’m giddy. Because I keep a journal, I mark the day by writing bought orange shoes today. I’m giddy. Was it Coleridge who said poetry was experience reflected upon in tranquility? What’s this, then? Upon what does the self-conscious mind reflect in tranquility? The degree of tranquility, the quality of reflection? Tonight, in my new orange shoes, I sit beside a dead plant, one I’ve failed to throw out because I sometimes find it a convenient metaphor for the malaise of my life. Days ago, seeing the plant, my mother said it’s bad parenting to let a plant die. Now I sit beside the plant, listening to a helicopter pass above. It’s so close I can feel the rhythm of its rudders in my chest. I look from the plant to a print of Paul Klee’s “Senecio” Charlie Clark

Panhandler

to my orange shoes to calm myself, to keep from wondering who the helicopter is searching for. My shoes, I thought when I first put them on, like a pair of creamcicles on my feet. There is something inside that dies when someone else indulges you the way you indulge yourself. Wearing my orange shoes out of the store today, a man said Red, you got creamcicles for feet, and ruined the experience. No, that’s too facile. Not ruined. It hurt, especially the simile, stolen like that, my own line used against me. Still, I gave the man a smile and walked home. He was huge, in the last trimester of his own sloth. I didn’t tell him that. I’m not that shallow. I’m composed enough not to let it out until later, until now, when I can reflect upon his corpulence in tranquility. What manner of child would he give birth to? How would he teach a child restraint? I’m not a parent, but I think parenting requires frequent rising above the petty, with occasional correctives, given only when a child’s transgressions go beyond the pale. Perhaps killing a plant qualifies. Looking at the plant, I don’t want to say I let it die to better reflect the slouching indolence of my inner being, but its down-hung papyrus leaves make an appropriate companion alongside the huge orange head in Klee’s “Senecio,” each orange an orange to match my shoes. Days ago, I discovered “Senecio” translated in English means, roughly, “Old Man Going Senile,” and has nothing to do with the philosopher Seneca, as, without reason, I’d long assumed. Not the mind in reflection; the mind going blank. My mother said to assume makes an ass of you and me. I like the painting because it reminds me of the large, orange-curled hair of my youth. I watched a lot of television in my youth, in snatches, when my parents weren’t around, though they caught me at it again and again. They wanted me to grow an active mind and I just wanted it shut off. There was such pleasure in the revelation of images upon the screen: cops and thieves and revving cars, and I was nowhere noticed in it. When I was a child, my mother said never to commit a crime, because with my hair even the blind could pick me out. That my father worked in prisons made the prospect of incarceration much more real, likely, inevitable almost, each misstep of mine Charlie Clark

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putting me one step closer to the pen. Once, my father showed me a tape of fifteen haggard men in orange jumpsuits, each one stripped and searched, my father saying never to commit a crime because the result is this and long sentences. Why did my parents keep warning me about prison? Maybe they sensed something in my character. Looking at my dead plant, I wonder how I let it get so sick, if it’s something in my character. I don’t know. I have no old diary to consult for clues. Or, rather, I have only an ill-kept diary. Back then I wrote only when there was nothing else to do, when even television offered no distraction. And what I did write were only the barest bones of experience: Drank beer. Saw tit. Threw up. I didn’t see the point in elaborating. It only left a record, evidence, something for my parents to find and punish me for. There was so much then I wanted to do, though most often I wound up at home, watching Dr. Who, or David Duchovny in some late-night sleaze, wishing I were him, watching with a panicked voraciousness, hoping my parents wouldn’t catch me. Nowadays, I write down something as insignificant as sitting alone, listening to a helicopter pass overhead, looking at my dead plant, my orange shoes, and the painting of a senile man. I write down how I turn on the television and see David Duchovny anew, this time chasing aliens in the dark. The helicopter outside could have sprung from my television. I listen for the sounds of nervous breathing outside, for the fugitive to come to me. Though for the fugitive out there I feel only the vaguest mix of empathy and fear. This is about me, I think. I shudder, with a criminal fear of recognition. Whoever is out there is at best a metaphor for my own fear of exposure, just as David Duchovny is another model for something noble I’m too resigned to be. Which is why, were I to raise the blinds and look for the fugitive, I think I’d see first just darkness, then the reflection of my head coming clear, wide-eyed, indolent, and tranquil, breaking through the darkness.

Rats Scrounge in the Sunset’s Vertebrae, with Competing Closing Images The weather the color of rat hide as sun skews through it in a certain way. Not high up, not beyond the horizon, but here, Charlie Clark

Panhandler

through this park of rats and local trash, things sneaking and curling in the periphery, and there, in the fog laying down with the night. Somewhere in the mist, there’s a bit of pink. What’s the physical thing, the source of the glow, glimmer of rose-glass, molding onion skin, because there must be one, some body throwing that tone into the air about a heart’s height up. Whatever, it only shrouds away, no matter how I approach it, like sly thoughts of old lovers. The stain almost the off-pink pall of flesh, and it’s flesh it calls up in me, what cracks me open. See a woman, walking into the dark, her body just as permanently distant as that floating shroud of pink. Because I was young then, and felt both melancholy and brutal about her going, I etched our names onto a rock, then kissed and tossed it after her. Each stone of a certain weight since then has felt familiar, useless, heartbreaking in its potential. I can almost taste the body of that rock, grating my teeth, so foul as to make me shudder, and, if you want to imagine something close to it, imagine a rat, imagine that one there, beneath the bench, unafraid of me, reclining, twirling a melon rind in the space between its paws and teeth and heart. Or, better yet, think of the heartbeat patter of the rat I once caught in two paper cups, long before all this: sneaked into the store where I was working, its face nosing out from a bookshelf bottom. See the drop of sugar I laid in one paper cup at the aisle’s center; see the forty minutes I learned how still I had to stand, how cocked, ready to scoop, how deep into that cup the rat had to investigate before I could catch it, smashing the mouth of the sugared cup against the one I held. See the rat, pouring its small lightning body from one cup to the next, knocking between each with a force I had to talk my hands out of fear of, saying, rat, rat, rat, rat, rat to keep those cups together, to keep from giving in to the creature’s body’s will. Hear the thudding, held heart high, the two crushed cups forming a sort of heart in the angled way they came together, my hands filling out the heart’s shape, holding that pulse that would not stop until Charlie Clark

Panhandler

I walked it into the dark, to a dumpster in the street and there pulled the heart in two, the creature dropping into the stew of cardboard, glass, and grease. There’s nothing to weep over in this scene. The rat glad it’s free, and me, not yet thinking with voracious self-pity that I had just ripped the living body from the heart I’d made. No, that comes later, that comes tonight, when I need something to pour the most recent failure of my life into, walking in this park, surrounded by the tinctured evening mist. It’s tonight the scene becomes metaphorical, mythical, or simply useful, something by which I can explain myself; the memory locking into place, or, if not locking into place, metamorphosing into the adequate thing: yes, that image right, that’s the one, the breaking of the heart, and the body falling through the widening gash.

Sunday Meditation Hard not to wish the winter were still fully raging, that these blankets kept the body barely warm, that the fire place still burned red for hours like one obsessive thought. The weight of every molecule of the body, of the sun in the room, each bears down with such fierce presence the mind can only latch onto a phrase welled up like prayer: back out of all this now too much for us, words suddenly inside, needling, insistent as flame. It’s impossible to step back out of all this, impossible to empty the body, or the room, as again the words repeat: back out of all this now too much, words followed out the back door, though it does nothing to step into the day, nor turn back inside, into the spastic granular air of the room. __________ Charlie Clark

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The body is a temple, so goes the saying. But itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more machine. Electric, impossible to shut off, to stop the nerves from running. Never empty as a temple should be, never silent, never still, always a twitter of knees or mind, always taking in the space of a room, imagining the live presence of the air, the world of thought born in it. __________ The mind empty only if an uncontrollable confusion of particulars becomes passivity becomes entropy becomes emptiness like the crucial emptiness of air. __________ The table, junk cleared off, a shelf of books above, books laid like cords of wood waiting to burn, which, until needed, would form a wall, drawn between two trunks of pine, with not a twig nor bit of bark loose in the thin grass and overplunging musculature of roots that make up the ground, for the men who laid the wood care for precision, understand how focus begets exactitude, and the pleasure of such clean lines, such restraint. They sit in the small red heart of their cabin in my mind, smoke gesturing from the chimney into the real air of the world. In that shack they take in the fire, the way it envelopes, so certain of itself, like a lesson in purpose, in totality, and they feel their bodies burn electric with the thought. __________ Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m trying to concentrate, to focus the body of my mind on just a single thing: Charlie Clark

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the wood desk top, its body, the finish, knots, the glass sweat rings laid in it like history. I’m trying to keep all this out, stories born from the whorls and grain, to keep my mind off those myriad random spaces, empty it instead into the actual wood, into the space between two fingers held just apart, get inside that gap, the blood-pump shiver, the narrow distance of those two digits, pointer fingers in the air, thumbs wrapped into a triangle’s bottom line. __________ It brings to mind the children’s rhyme: Here’s the church, here’s the steeple open the doors and see all the people. It brings to mind the broken silence of my brother’s voice raised up in church, swatting at the mess of bees that got inside somehow, stampeding his face, how he swung, imaginary ax between his hands, their bodies splattering like paint. __________ There’s Pollock, car like a saw into the trees, wrecked drunk to force some meaning from the world. A critic I once heard called his work sentimental, each piece wishing it were his body, the action of him kept alive. Sentimental, trying to keep the pure nerve of cave-man art alive. It could be said of all art, all failed prayers to keep a moment’s nerve alive. __________ Laid down in the funnel of an MRI scanner to see how much my body had betrayed me, and told for that half hour to hold still, I couldn’t quiet Charlie Clark

Panhandler

my mind, couldn’t shut off the string of thought and afterthought swirling and growing there. I couldn’t even keep my feet from moving, ankles shuddering, the pre-sleep spasm, so much so the tech taped my feet together, sent me back in, arms crossed like a mummy, sacred. No, I thought, not like that, like someone getting an MRI scan. I wanted to hold that, thought without allusion, the bare and absolute fact of it, machine rambling, the flights of magnetics swarming invisible over my body, spirits the machine prayed down and set to map the path the sickness took. The machine an act of faith, the machine of my body churning inside. When I came out the tape around my feet was split, each foot pulling its weight’s own way. __________ Frost, your words, your directive, back out of all this now too much for us, it won’t get out of my head. Set down on paper or blazing in my mind. I admit I’m traveling in a thicket of words, lost in the ink-scratchings I’ve made of them. I stare, repeat them until their meaning falls away, until my mind falls away, a kind of breathing to read them, to say them in my mind. __________ Not to purify, not a cleansing, nor to bless the house, suddenly quiet, composed, smoke unfurls from the knot of sandalwood I’ve set to smolder in praise of quiet, the body of smoke disappearing through the light of one lit lamp, burning brighter than my woodsmen’s fire, though they themselves Charlie Clark

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burn brighter, impossibly brighter, each of them as absorbed in the fact of flame as I should be, taken instead by how my smoke points out the world of empty air, space I’ve seen exposed by the volume of a chapel’s upper nothing, the inward sloping ceiling wood, ghost-body of it whirling, held just so, billowed and snug in the lacquered, interlocking lumber, laced like two hands’ fingers, worked together, cupping space, a cracked goblet, separating the emptiness that’s held from the emptiness that falls away.

Two Sounds In my bathroom, two sounds at once pull me from my evening’s routine. One: the scrambled voices of a TV cop drama coming from the next room, a thing I swore days ago never to watch again because I always watch it idly, with one eye, so to speak, giddy and bored by each week’s gloss and gore, and because it offers no more than distraction, a way to get closer to the day’s end, and I don’t want distraction, I want attentiveness, composure, an impulse that arises from so many things, but which I trace specifically to an exhibit of Buddhist art I once saw, to one Buddha in particular, sitting, sublimely delighted as usual, with a bucket at his side. But for the bucket, you could have cut the piece in half and kept the symmetry exact. I’m a hundred jittery, misshaped pieces. Even brushing my teeth I get so riled I don’t count the strokes I give my molars the way the dentist warned I should, but try instead to hear what’s happening onscreen in the next room, if it’s an episode I’ve already seen. If so, I think, I might try to write during it, or at least through the commercials, Charlie Clark

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mash something together and see what comes, like reading tea leaves or an exquisite corpse. The second sound is, I swear, a saw cutting something in the bathroom of the apartment above me, so I think Rear Window, one of Hitchcock’s perfect Chinese boxes of murder, Raymond Burr hacking up his wife because he couldn’t handle the distraction, and how afterwards, if only for a night, he sat in the darkness of his room enjoying a cigar while outside the courtyard sang the chaos of a slaughtered dog. It’s a terrible thought, envying a murderer’s repose. I don’t know who lives up there, and doubt someone really is cutting up a failed love, though if that is what’s happening, it must be the clearest, saddest expression of frustrated desire, for things to go that horribly astray with a person who once must have meant the world, the best intentions ruined. These thoughts tear at me like the teeth of little worry dolls. They run such a violent, scattered track tonight, buzzing alongside the chatter and the reps of the saw I try to match my brushing to, so keyed I start hopping on one foot, thinking this is the sound of one foot stomping, thinking of my neighbors below, what the sudden, steady slam of my heel into the tile sets off in their minds, if it’s one more pin for their attention to ping-pong off like it’s become in mine, or if below me someone is simply looking up at the ceiling, surrendered to the rhythm until the rhythm disappears and there is nothing to regard but a body in a room, whole, silent, still.

Charlie Clark

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Kenneth Fields

Kenneth Fields is a professor of creative writing and literature at Stanford University. His collections of poetry are Classic Rough News, The Other Walker, Sunbelly, Smoke, The Odysseus Manuscripts, and Anemographia: A Treatise on the Wind. His current projects are a novel, Father of Mercies, and a collection of essays on Mina Loy, H.D., Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis, J.V. Cunningham, Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Ben Jonson, Wallace Stevens, Jorge Luis Borges, Henri Coulette, and others. Fields teaches the Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop for the Stanford Writing Fellows. He is developing a two-part course in American film, Men in the Movies: Film Noir and the Western. He delivered the Russel B. Nye Lecture at Michigan State University’s American Studies Program: “There Stands the Glass: Voices of Alcohol in Country Music.”

Virginia McPhail

Virginia McPhail is a graduate student at the University of West Florida where she studies English Literature and works as an editor of Panhandler

Doug Moon

Doug Moon is a graduate student at the University of West Florida where he works as an editor of Panhandler and teaches English composition. His thesis, a cycle of short stories, is forever forthcoming. Doug Moon: Your collection The Other Walker was published in 1971, and you’ve been writing and publishing poetry since then. How have you seen poetry change and develop over the years and perhaps how has your poetry changed? Ken Fields: My poetry has changed somewhat in that I just needed to be able to write in different ways. The Other Walker was a book that I didn’t completely understand. And I’m not the kind of poet who writes a poem and figures it out later or what a collection could mean, so I was maybe halfway through that book thinking that I was nearly done and had a freshman class in which I was having them learn to write about their past and telling them you think you understand it but it’s not like your tail that follows you around. You have to discover it. And I had a couple of assignments, and I had this rare moment that teachers don’t often have where I thought, you know, maybe

interview

there’s something to these assignments I’m giving them. [laughter] Maybe I could try it myself. So I wrote a poem about being a twin, and my twin died when we were a day old. I remember going back to the little graveyard, and I was back recently again, too, but seeing this little tiny head stone, and I was a little boy and I started crying. I knew all about it. It was this weird, powerful thing. I always hated the theme of the double. It always feels so contrived, so I wrote this poem about my twin in my twin’s voice. When I got through it, I started crying again. That’s not something I do when I finish a poem. Then I realized that there were a lot of other double poems in that book, and I hadn’t noticed that before. It had this sense of something that was evil or awful, some secret about me that I didn’t know and that I didn’t want to know because I couldn’t change it. Sometimes I thought other people could detect it, and I had ways of keep-

Kenneth Fields

Panhandler

ing them from revealing it to me. So that book took shape, and it made me write out the rest of the poems, and I could do that. Still a long time. I had a book called Sunbelly and I had a book called Anemographia, which was a little tiny private book, a treatise on the wind. It was more or less in haiku form. So I was already doing other things. Then I made the discovery with the help of a doctor who intervened with me that I was an alcoholic. I started writing Classic Rough News about that time. Suddenly, I understood what this secret other self was in the first book. Although I even identified it with alcohol in the writing of the first book, somehow it didn’t click with me. So that part of it with my own kind of writing I suppose, that’s partly how that stuff evolved. I was writing in blank verse sonnets, so I was probably thinking of Lowell’s blank verse sonnets. Something of Berryman’s The Dream Songs, though his character never does get sober; my char-

acter starts out trying to be sober. So there’s that. I don’t know. I guess it changes the poetry. It wasn’t that I was even wedded to Lowell, for example. But it would have never occurred to us in the 60s and 70s that there would come a time when most young people would not be reading Lowell. So that’s a way that things have changed. I mean, I like Bishop’s poems, but it never would have occurred to us that people would just assume automatically that Bishop was a superior poet to Lowell. Well, it had so much to do with us for the 60s and so much political stuff as well and it went away. So that’s one of the ways in which I think some kinds of poetry have changed. I’m probably better on how mine have changed because I don’t always keep up. I keep reading all the old people, 16th century up. That’s what I like to do. I’ll try to answer questions more briefly.

of plays on something of the sonnet, with some that are longer and a couple that are shorter. I guess it allowed me to do some things—what I liked was the idea that I didn’t start out to write characters. I had one character, and then suddenly there were other characters. There was more than one Burton and then there was Billy. Then there were two Billies who spelled their names differently. I didn’t know that the female Billie was gay until later in the sequence when she sort of revealed herself to me. So it turned out to be something like, I suppose, writing a novel. I improvised them. I went to my secret office in the library and would write one a day or sometimes

that much from the poems, a couple places maybe. But I had a sense of improvisation. Whatever I wanted to write about I could write about. I could sit down and write the word “chainsaws” on the page. I’d think I always wanted to have a poem with chainsaws in it, so then chainsaws were comforting to Billy’s mind. And I had these different characters with various troubles, and most of them related to alcohol. I didn’t think of it as a constraint. I’m not sure that Dante would have thought of it as a constraint. Unless it means we need to have something we call a constraint to talk at all to be understood. In English, right, instead of some unknown language I make up for myself.

“When you decide that you’re going to do this thing, it seems like the last stop— after this is the nut house or death. What if it doesn’t work?”

DM: No, extended answers are what we’re in for. In Classic Rough News the poems abide by similar formal constraints with very few exceptions. What work do form and constraint do in constructing poetry for you? KF: I guess in some ways I think of it as a kind of lens. If you have a lot of lenses, you can see a lot of different things. I didn’t bring my camera in, but I like having different lenses. So I don’t think of them as constraints. They’re kind of avenues for freedom and for perception. That’s how I think about it. They’re sonnets, mostly. The sonnet itself was not just fourteen lines. But it sort

two or three a day. I was trying to figure out how I could live my life not drinking. Which seemed hard at the time. So I guess the sonnet—I wanted to see how that short form could be one to contain all kinds of digression and quotation. So there’s many quoted things. Nobody should know where they all come from. There must be some days I forget where some of them come from. So it’s a different sort of way of revealing character. So I was probably thinking it was a combination of Ezra Pound, but writing in sonnets, blank verse sonnets, and maybe Horace. Those ways in which the odes often will start in one direction and shift to another subject, that weird relationship. So I was thinking a lot about that. I’d played jazz as a kid and liked jazz. Nobody would know

Kenneth Fields

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V i r g i n i a McPhail: Many times when you have poetry, you don’t have characters that continue to develop. So that just fascinated me. It took me a while. I had two Billies. All of a sudden I realized the names were spelled differently. Well, one’s male and one’s female. KF: No, it took me a while to figure that out, too. VM: So where did these names come from? KF: Maybe the core of it was that my twin who died when we were a day old, his name would have been Billy in my family. And I had some Burton stuff in there. I was depressed at having to give up alcohol. VM: How long has it been? KF: Twenty-five years. Alcohol and

marijuana. VM: I really liked going through the book and got to like this character. KF: Except maybe at the end a little bit where I was fooling around, but that book pretty much is just organized in the order I wrote them. Without knowing exactly where it was going to go. I had some ideas. So I’d just go ahead and think, “Today is going to be Billy, the male Billy,” who was a vet and had all kinds of other issues as well. VM: I know about that, coming from the 60s, I picked that up. KF: Well, there was something in the 60s, a kind of craziness that was interesting. And I was trying to distinguish what had been true craziness for me and for others and a kind of craziness that I could maintain without hurting anybody but not drinking. It sort of let me do the slightly wilder thing. I always wrote my poems kind of deliberately. I still do that sometimes, but I thought, you know, I should be able to—I know how to write poems now, I should be able to see if I can write them fast. And I was thinking of Miles Davis, sort of late career, when he was hiring very young kids to play with him, and Tony Williams was a young kid, and I said, “What do you look for in a musician?” and he said, “Speed, you need to be able to play a song fast,” and his songs weren’t always that fast. If you can play fast, you can play slow, and you can play anything if you can translate that thing from your idea into something on the page then you can do it. I guess I was thinking about, say, the pieces of a poem getting spread out as if you were doing a big chord or something like that.

A ninth or a sharp ninth or something like that. Where there’s a lot of space in between. And it allowed me to think about making transitions quickly. And the truth is I talk that way, and I’m interested now in digression and tangents and “going off on a tangent” is how we describe it. Mathematically a tangent touches a circle and if you take it 25 miles or 25 inches, if you bring the line back down to the center of a circle, it’s a right angle. And so a tangent can be related to a subject, and instead of feeling apologetic that I talk that way, that I talk that way in class, I thought, well, there are a lot of people who did that. Horace was one. Why don’t I just dignify it instead of feeling guilty about it and teach it as a subject and write my poems that way, so when Stern says something like, “I begin in writing with the first sentence and trust in almighty God for the second.” Why not think of it that way? VM: That’s a good line. KF: Yeah it is a good line. VM: One of the lines you had just struck me. In “The Wain” you write that “goodbyes are sadly easier than I imagined.” That just really hit me. Not only that your goodbye was easier, but what I was missing there was nothing was regretful. There was no regret.

across as much in the book—maybe that would be in other poems later— was my sense of fearfulness. I was afraid that I couldn’t stop drinking. When you decide that you’re going to do this thing, it seems like the last stop—after this is the nut house or death. What if it doesn’t work? And then there’s the other fear that it will work. Later when I gave up marijuana I had the same fear. And that second fear came from not having any idea of what being sober felt like. So I thought it’d be like in The Nut House, which is a bar I used to go to, with the taps turned off. I knew how drunks talked to each other, I was afraid to even go around other drunks. I thought they’d be so pissed off they’d just be yelling at me all the time. I thought, “What if I could do it?” I’d have this horrible life. As if alcohol was doing me a lot of good. I told my wife that when the doctor finally intervened, I was furious, but I was partly relieved. I was driving home and I said I was not going to drink again, but we’re not having any more fun. As if the last few months or couple years before you stop drinking had been a barrel of laughs. And as if I got to say, for the both of us, that’s it for the fun. And she said, well I thought, I guess that’s what it means, for better for worse. That’s how we hook up with people. We get them set up so they believe, oh yeah, the drinking is the good times. Now that I really want him to stop drinking but I guess this is going to be the bad times. Our minds are backwards sometimes. I had fun working with some of the stuff early on, and I started about the time I had stopped drinking. But I got better at being a human being.

KF: Maybe if there’s any regret, it’s kind of weird. “Wain” is wagon, so in other words, being on the wagon. At the beginning I really thought I wanted to get sober. Part of me was hoping it’d be so hard I couldn’t do it. So when I began to see it wasn’t as hard as I thought. It wasn’t impossible. There was regret for that. The VM: That’s wonderful. What do you other side of it that doesn’t come think are your contemporary influ-

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ences in poetry? What trends or movements interest you? KF: Well I was at Stanford a long time ago. VM: How long have you been at Stanford? KF: Forever. I came to Stanford in 1963 as a graduate student. And Yvor Winters was my teacher. And he was a friend, and I loved him, and he was a grouchy kind of guy. But he was a real genius and a great poet. And his wife Janet Lewis stayed my friend long after Winters died. She died in 1999. She was a great novelist and a great poet. So in ‘67 I got my PhD at Stanford and I was hired to stay on the faculty, so I’ve been there ever since. So ’63, ’67, forever. And the influences, well, my first teacher in Santa Barbara was Edgar Bowers, and he was a wonderful poet. J.V. Cunningham would be an influence. William Carlos Williams, certainly. Wallace Stevens. And a lot of other people we’ve spoken of, I love. For this particular project, and I hope I don’t sound too much like them, but Berryman and Lowell were people I thought about a lot when I was writing these poems. DM: For students who are writing poetry right now and developing manuscripts, what advice would you give them as far as developing them for publication? KF: You know I’m not very good at that. The only things that have ever happened to me, the way I’ve gotten things published is by chance. Somebody will get in touch with me or something like that. So I’m not good, and I haven’t done all the ambitious things which is like, you know, making sure I’m getting out

to magazines all the time. It must be some defect of mine. There have been times in the past, I don’t think I do that now, somebody would write, “I want some poems—send them to me.” And I go, “Right.” And I won’t send them, and then more, “Please send them to me,” that kind of thing. So I guess my advice would be don’t do it the way I do it. But putting books together. In the advanced creative writing classes I teach, the Stegner workshop classes, and I’ve done that forever, I tell them not to refer to their stuff as their manuscript. When they give readings, they go, and here’s another one from my manuscript. Call it your collection of poems. They can figure out they’re not available, or somebody will ask. Right away I ask them what the title of their book is. And they kind of go, “Oh, I don’t know.” But when you have two poems put together, try to figure out what the title is. I can sometimes go through your manuscript, I tell them, and can find you maybe 20 or 30 titles. Some are going to be bad. Just from the book itself—underlined words and phrases and things. Those are lenses in some way. If they’re right, you can think, “Oh, I didn’t realize I was up to that. That’s something.” When somebody’s reading a book, it’s like this italic moment: Oh, that’s the title of the book. There’s this joke I had, where I had Jeremy Fickle. I made him up. People have written about him in reviews once in a while, and I don’t get that many reviews, talking about the 18th century Jeremy Fickle, and I just made the quotation up. I was writing on a newsprint pad taking notes, those kinds of things, sometimes different colors, that was part of the sort of improvisation. I was trying to get away from a list which was harder to break up, so I would do circular

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lists, one thing over here and one thing over here, and the pad I was working on was about this big, and I couldn’t find it, it may be hidden away, but at one point I was trying to use it as the cover. But the the brand was Classic, the texture was rough, and it was news print. News. So it was right there Classic Rough News. Classic and roughness and news. Those kind of jostle each other in a way that I liked. So that’s how I came up with that title. But I ask people to find a title and be open about different ways of organizing their materials because you can find out some things about yourself if you’re lucky that will almost allow you to see which other poems you need to write. As if you graph it. There’s something here that I can concentrate on that’s useful. There’s a kind of superstitiousness about those things. DM: Well that’s a part of the process, too. KF: It is, it is. DM: Teaching a writing workshop, does that offer an interesting dynamic for you when you’re writing as well? KF: Yeah, I don’t mind it. I used to not like, and that’s partly because when you’re teaching sometimes you have less time. But people who have real jobs sometimes have even less time, and some of them manage to write eight or ten hours a day, so it’s not so bad. Yeah. They don’t hurt each other, but I have more and more tried to discourage people from hostile readings of each other’s poems. Sort of the way it was in the old days, and I don’t think that helps anybody. So I say, your first responsibility is to try and understand the

poem before you say what you don’t like about it. And what you don’t like about it might be the most important thing. What I found is that some really wonderful poets come into our program, and they are really experimental in one way and conservative in another way. Not because we are a conservative program. But often they will talk about, well, this here seems to be from left field. And I say, what, just because it moves over here? What phrases do you use all the time? Taking risks. That’s how you talk about poems. And yet when somebody has taken some kind of a risk, you all pounce on it. Be adventuresome. Take some risks. But then when they get into practice, it’s like, “Well, I don’t know, that doesn’t seem to follow.” So I guess in my own sense, I don’t teach my poems to them, but that sense of spreading things out a little bit and making room for digression and stuff has made me a different kind of teacher in that I don’t come down on them that try to do that. I try to let them at least see some of the reasons for operating that way. You could come up with a list of really great poems that could have been effectively stifled by a creative writing class. Flannery O’Connor said that she thought it was the job of a creative writing class to stifle talent. And that was good, but we’ve taken that a little too hard, I think.

has a novel in his desk drawer. He says, the miracle would be to find a colleague who did not have a novel in his desk drawer. But I started writing that novel, and it is partly about myself. Although I’ve got a different character who’s doing it and who’s not exactly aware of his relation to alcohol, even though I think it’s an alcohol counselor. So he oughta know, right? And it has to do with his relationship to his father. So part of it is one of these impossibly constructed novels where it moves back and forth from Texas in the 20s, 30s, to contemporary times, and back and forth. It has to do with kind of larger family configuration about alcohol and about violence.

got a whole chunk coming, a send up of the English department. But somebody said that doesn’t work, you have to pull that out. So I may never finish it, but that’s what Father of Mercies is about. DM: Unless a novel is literally some superstitious compulsory thing that everyone in an English department has to write, you’ve consciously decided to write a novel as opposed to poetry. Does the novel as a form offer something that poetry doesn’t? KF: Yeah, I don’t think in terms of superiority. One of the things about novels I knew before I started writing one is that you can’t keep them all in your head at once. Flaubert has a letter in which he’s finished a short version of Madame Bovary, which is a short novel in the first place. He complains what bothers him is he can’t keep the whole thing in his mind. I thought if that meticulous man couldn’t do it with his own novel, then we need to give that up. James had that idea, and Percy Lubbock, the book is an attempt to write, it’s an old fashioned book on novels, and he attempts to write in James’s style and it doesn’t work, but right at the beginning he’s got this great description of what it is that’s problematic about reading a novel. That you turn the page — your whole attention is there — and then you turn the page and that goes away. You know, you can’t get it all back. Some people, when I’ve been talking to them about that, said, “Well then poetry’s superior,” and I said, “No, it’s not superior. It’s just another kind of form.” But isn’t it

“And he asked the students when they were reading Du Fu if they ever had the feeling that they were at the end of a collapsed culture.”

VM: Can you tell us about your novel Father of Mercies? KF: Richard Russo, one of his characters tells somebody else every colleague in the English department

So that’s what that’s about. And it becomes a kind of murder mystery, too, because, I mean, why not? The main character is doing some research, and he’s down in Santa Barbara. He’s drinking and he obviously blacks out because he kind of comes to on a long pier out there. He hears voices and what he hears is someone beating somebody with a strap while somebody else holds him. And then they throw the guy over the thing, I think they kill him and throw him over, and he can’t figure out why he won’t call the police. But the trouble is that the guys who do the killing, they’re kind of professional killers. They find out they’ve been observed. They start trying to find him, and his daughter comes to visit, and she’s in danger. So I’m probably trying to do too many things. And I’ve

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interesting to have a form in which you do that? And what I found that’s interesting about writing a novel is that you’d just be doing it all the time even when you weren’t writing. During the day you’d be thinking, “I wonder what’s going to happen to that guy? Well, what if this happens? What if that happens?” I’d be away from it for a long time, and my friends who write would say, “Oh, that’s awful. You can’t do that because you’ll kind of forget where you were.” Well, with me, I don’t care. I always figure there’s more where that came from. Something else will happen. It’ll happen again in some way. What helped me with that was, Henri Coulette, a friend of mine who was a poet, a wonderful poet, and I knew him for a while, and then I spent a summer with him and Peter Taylor, who is a terrific Southern novelist, short story writer mostly. Peter, I guess the summer before, he would talk to Hank over breakfast about what the writing he’d done in the afternoon was. And Hank said, what happened last night? And he said, well, you know, Miss Rebecca’s young man came to pay his respects to her father and he struck him down in the entry way. This would surprise Hank because he was keeping up on it. He’d say, “He did? Why did he do that?” And he’d say, “I don’t have any idea, but I’m going to try to find out today.” I love that because it goes against the idea that you would plot something out completely ahead of time. I’ve told people in any writing that if you already know exactly what you want to say before you write it, don’t write it. You may think you know, but leave room for discovery. I guess Classic Rough News was my first experiment with that. I realized that a whole lot of my lectures are that way, and some of my essays are

that way. I’m collecting some essays that probably nobody would want to touch because they are organized in peculiar ways.

I ended up writing the poem that addressed that subject in the art gallery. Is this enough? Well, we wish it were enough to hold this culture together, but probably not.

DM: You’ll be reading tonight at Writers in the Gallery. Are you VM: What ingredients go into a going to read mostly from Classic reading that make you say, “Man, Rough News? this was cool tonight, or good lord, so glad that’s over with.” KF: I’m going to read Classic Rough News. I’ll see how it feels when KF: Well, now, this is not the time I’m there, but there are a couple of to ask me that. [laughter] I think poems—one’s a little poem that I that poetry readings are very interhaven’t published, and then there’s esting things. And they are strange somewhat longer poem about my performances, so that you can have mother and father, old days in Tex- somebody whose poems are inas, that I’ll probably read, that I may stantly apprehensible and that will start with. I was also asked when the sometimes be a kind of success. And Cantor Center, the Stanford cen- you can have others that, let’s say, ter for the arts, like a big museum, I’ve heard Thom Gunn read a lot of when it opened if I would write a times. When he was alive he was the poem for that occasion and I did. best poet alive writing in English, Later I was asked if I would write and now that he’s dead he still is. a poem about a particular show. It He gave great readings. But I think was essentially paintings that are the last reading he gave, you know, owned by people with Stanford students were saying, “Well I liked connections or Stanford alums. It X better.” But some of the things was fabulous. So I walked around in Thom read are not immediately apthere for a long time, and I wrote a prehensible. So you can have people poem about being in the art gallery. who know the poems and know I thought, well, since we’re in an art what the poet is up to so the new gallery, maybe I’ll read that at the poems at least are followable. That end or something. I was also, and can make for a good reading. Other I’ll say this tonight, but I was team times I think it’s just interesting to teaching a course with Lee Yearly hear how a person reads and to see who was in religious studies, and them, and you might think—it’d be he does Dante and he does classic like watching Syriana. My friends Chinese poetry. I’ve done it twice. were all uptight because it was so He’d dropped the Dante out, so it hard to follow. I just relaxed and was Chinese poetry and all the stuff thought that this will be good when I do, Wallace Stevens, American In- I see it again, this will be clearer. So I dian poems, things like that. And he think the ones that don’t go well are asked the students when they were the ones in which the person doesn’t reading Du Fu if they ever had the seem to have any way of connecting feeling that they were at the end of with the audience they are reading a collapsed culture. And they didn’t to. know how to answer or what to think. Du Fu is pretty clear about that, that it was true. So after that

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Separate Camp The scattered books on my side of the bed, Torn covers, broken backs, and the hacked limbs— A fortress in defeat, or under siege, At best a losing battle. Will my life, Clutters, dustrats, middens of papers, gradually Topple in visions that would kill a wino?— Dishearten the purest nun? Is this my France, Hyperdefended, my old Maginot Line? A cluttered, like a cloistered virtue squints, Missing the closest foe: castle and host, Book and bookworm, clap and claphound. I know Myself what I fear the most. Priesthoods of self, Cutting my nose or something worse to spite The unexorcised adversary of my life.

—from Classic Rough News

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Sean Prentiss

Sean Prentiss grew up (as a boy) in Bangor, Pennsylvania. He currently lives (2,542 miles from Bangor’s quarries and river) in the perpetual rain and snow of northern Idaho where he teaches at the University of Idaho. Though Sean has published essays and poems before, this is his first published story. He (and his characters) can be reached at seanprentiss@gmail.com.

fiction

When a Boy Likes a Girl in Bangor, PA I.

hen a boy likes a girl in Bangor, Pennsylvania, this boy can’t bring that girl roses or offer to take her to the local Italian restaurant (that’ll go out of business in two years). Instead, this boy has to say to that girl, Come with me to the quarry because this boy knows that the quarry water will be cold and the July night will cast down a shale blackness. At the edge of the quarry, this boy will strip off his clothes (leaving them scattered like autumn leaves on right angle rocks) and dive into water so blue-black that it looks like a two day old bruise. That girl, awkward and afraid (she’s never skinny dipped before) will slowly peel off her shirt and tan bra, set them on neatly folded jeans and her new white panties. Then that girl is running toward the water’s edge and transforms from a shy, exposed teenager into an ash-white angel. And she is jumping (leaping, really leaping). And this boy watches that angel try to fly, to fly. As this boy watches that angel, he knows (even though that girl, herself, has no idea) that she is trying to fly over and away from this dark town (and its 238 years of prayers gone wrong), over the quarries

(where men, maybe hundreds, once cut slate), even over the outstretched arms of this boy (who will grab for that girl in moments). Then there is a splash. Rippling circles inside circles inside circles as that girl folds into this boy’s arms to escape the cold quarry water (and everything that is her seventeenyear-old life).

hen a girl likes a boy in Bangor, Pennsylvania, she can’t ask this boy on a date. Instead, that girl has to wait for this boy to ask her out (with stammering questions). Then she’ll say, detachedly, Yeah, I’ll go to the prom because she knows the moment she shows any interest (even as light as a summer breeze) this boy (with dirty blond hair and a scarecrow-slender build) will flee because that’s what boys do when they grow up in a town built on brittle rock. After slow dancing and, later, the crowning of some other girl as queen, this boy will lean in close enough that that girl can smell this boy’s breathe and cheap cologne. And that girl (knowing boys from Bangor) will kiss this boy hard and with a wild, searching tongue (though it’s a first date) because all that boys from here talk about is that mechanics job in Jersey with benefits and how after a year this boy can buy that ’87 Mustang with the V-8

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engine. And that girl wants nothing more than to ride shotgun, so she (soft in all the right spots and with long, hair-sprayed bangs cascading over a green sequined dress) lets this boy’s tongue wander her mouth. II.

hen a boy likes a girl in Bangor, Pennsylvania, he can’t tell her she looks beautiful with her thin neck and hazel eyes. Instead, this boy says, Come to my cabin because he knows there will be a fridge full of his uncle’s Pabst and maybe, if this boy knows the right friends (Dwight or Steve), joints to roll. Standing on this boy’s cabin’s porch after the prom, that girl (so drunk and stoned as to nearly float away) hears the river gurgle-gurglegurgling thirty feet away (full of dying shad running a hundred miles to the Atlantic). Another world, that girl thinks as she watches the river flow south. Down the shore. That girl tries but cannot image what it all looks like (the ocean lap-laplapping against soft sand, the long shore stretching forever away, kids building sand castles on the beach or kids drunk and making out in the boardwalk arcades). And all of it (the leaning cabin, the empty aluminums strewn across the red linoleum floor, the rough lung pot smoke hovering like river

fog, the dying fish streaming some place farther than that girl can imagine) will be romantic enough (if that girl is fucked up enough) to convince that girl that this boy’s bed is the bed that will take her places she’s never been, places she’ll never go (not even if she lives eighty-seven years in this town like her alcoholic grandmother).

hen a girl likes a boy in Bangor, Pennsylvania, she doesn’t say, Call me tomorrow. Instead, that girl says, Take me for a ride because she knows the back roads will be dew-wet black on this new moon night and she will be away from her parents who always warn her of the things boys do. That girl and this boy drive past Bangor’s elevated public pool (the oldest in America and almost ready to collapse) that was built during the Depression (by her grandfather and the WPA). That girl knows none of these things. She only remembers swimming there as a child. As this boy and that girl head to the far edges of town, they drive past one of many back-road bars (the Oak and Maple) with their cold Yuenglings in frosted mugs that her father drinks religiously (as though he breathes through the longnecks). As the wind hum-hum-hums through the open window, this boy’s hand is now on that girl’s soft thigh (clutching and grabbing and clutching and grabbing to the acceleration of his station wagon). This boy slides his hand down. And if that girl understood metaphors, she’d realize that this boy might just be a metaphor for a slate miner (like both his grandfathers),

digging deeper into her quarry. And maybe that girl is just a metaphor for slate (worth something today but nothing tomorrow). That girl thinks this boy ought to keep his hands to the wheel as he rounds sharp corners near her grandfather’s grave (he died, her mother always says, Of everything— heart and liver and kidney and lungs all at once. That girl wants to say, No or Careful or Slower. But like all girls from Bangor, that girl says nothing. She has learned to stare at some far off distance only Bangor girls can see. III.

going farther than a life burned up insides of Pennsylvania Power and Light (like the boy’s father) where this boy will (in a year or two) shovel coal into furnaces that produce a toxic smoke that ribbons from our long and tall and ominous smokestacks all the way to heaven (at least that’s what this boy’s mother always told this boy before sleep).

hen a girl likes a boy in Bangor, Pennsylvania, she never says, Goodnight boy as this boy pulls into that girl’s driveway. Instead, that girl exits the boy’s Chevy Monza (which from above—with its doors wide open—looks like a lit bird in flight). That girl walks around the front of the car (feeling the warmth of the hood and hearing the engine gently ticktick-tick itself to sleep). That girl kneels in the gravel (her knees sore and cut from pressing on rocks). And because that girl knows boys, she unzips this boy’s jeans, slides them below the steering wheel and (as that girl dreams of this boy leading her somewhere far away, maybe even as far as the gum-stained sidewalks of Bethlehem) that girl takes this boy into the warmth and safety of her mouth.

“Rippling circles inside circles inside circles as that girl folds into this boy’s arms to escape the cold quarry water...”

nd when a boy likes a girl, he’s got to talk to that girl just right—as if this boy is too cool for his three-room cabin, the midnight quarry, that girl. As if this boy’s too cool even for Bangor, Pennsylvania with its paint-peeling row homes, run down groceries, and burned out streetlights. This boy has to talk as if he’s heading (maybe not tomorrow but definitely by next year) to someplace farther than the Crayola crayon factory in Wind Gap or (for god’s sake) Belvidere with its pharmaceutical plant. This boy has to talk as if he is going farther than Hackettstown’s candy-sweet smelling Mars and Mars factory where that girl will get a second shift job in seventeen years, when she turns thirty-four. And this boy has to talk as if he

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IV.

hen a girl likes a boy, she’s got to talk just right. As if this boy is just a metaphor for the ancient elevated pool that’s just waiting to be torn down the first chance this town gets its hands on money (which everyone knows will never happen). As if that girl cares for this boy as little as she cares for this town’s dark and busy taverns

(the Red Geranium, Five Points, the Richmond Hotel) and its boys (turning to men) who look exactly like her father (they punch in every morning to work and punch out every night from the bar). That girl speaks as if she’s leaving the first chance she gets (maybe not tomorrow but definitely next year) (with or without this boy) though she knows (as if taught from first grade on or maybe just somewhere in the red marrow of her bones) that she’s not going anywhere unless you consider ten miles to Pen Argyl and Majestic Garments Factory someplace (and people here do). But Majestic, where that girl’s wide-hipped mother has worked since ’87, has never been remotely regal. And god, that girl prays (her teeth are clenched), that girl prays. She closes her eyes and sees (this time she really sees) this boy driving south from Bangor and later navigating the thin roads of Flicksville (watching carefully for stop signs and turning cars). That girl (her eyes shut so tightly) imagines this boy’s hands grasping the steering wheel so hard (his knuckles small white hills) because this boy is terrified that if he even thinks of letting the wheel go, the car will turn around all on its own and take them both back to Ott Street in Bangor. If they turn around this time (even though it’s just a dream), this boy and that girl (they both know) will never get another chance to escape. Our girl (so afraid that the rest of her life will be as dark as the quarry’s water) imagines her hand latched to this boy’s warm (almost sweaty) thigh so forcefully that our girl fears (or hopes and prays to our slate skies) that she is leaving a deep and lasting bruise.

nd when a boy likes a girl, it’s almost like our boy has to whisper to the blue-black night because that girl is no longer even there (she’s not even close). But that girl is not gone like the river (currenting to someplace better). She’s more a metaphor for the quarry or the shad (abandoned and slowly dying).

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Valerie George

Valerie George received her Masters in Fine Arts from the University of California at Davis. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Casa De Dona in Barcelona, Spain, The Sarai Media Lab in New Delhi, India, and the Horse Hospital in London, England. Nationally, her work has been shown at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York, NY, Adobe Books and San Francisco Arts Commission in San Francisco, CA and Forum Gallery located at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Valerie currently teaches Sculpture at the University of West Florida and lives and works in Pensacola, Florida and San Francisco, California. She will be lecturing the summer of 2009 at Stanford University. To view all of Valerie George’s work, please visit www.valeriegeorgeart.com.

art

Valerie George writes: “Recovering Joyce: In The Air Force is a body of work derived from the estate of my late aunt, Betty Joyce Brown. I did not know her intimately, but after her death I had the opportunity to archive the photographs that she took over the last forty years of her life. Not only did I discover that Aunt Joyce was an ardent photographer, but she was also a well-traveled woman, a racecar driver, and a highly esteemed captain in the United States Air Force Nursing Corps during the Vietnam War.

There is no exact number of how many women served in the Air Force during the Vietnam War. Their experience is virtually exempt from the documentation of the war. This knowledge is what moved me to recreate and recontextualize this personal and visual narrative for a contemporary audience. I salvaged 24 images from the pile of photographs she took while in Vietnam. I was surprised to discover her images entirely lacked any of the horrors usually found in wartime photography. Instead, they comprise an intimate document of the gender structure of the military at that time, and the nurses’ attempts at normalcy within a chaotic climate. Here, I provide eight photos that best encapsulate the gender politics of the military, the sense of camaraderie, and how she personally navigated the traumas of war.

The broader setting of the images oscillates between the tropical exterior landscape of Vietnam and the interior space of the nurses’ barracks which were decorated entirely in pink, from pink walls and carpets to pink sheets, blankets, and towels. This is offset with the constant presence of army-green jeeps, tents, helmets, and fatigues. Within these complex backdrops are images of women trying to perform their “femininity” and maintain a sense of normalcy amid the un-represented chaos that obviously existed in a wartime hospital and that is conspicuous in its absence. As a whole, her photographs provide an interesting and touching account of the rare perspective of a woman’s experience in the male theater of war. The following images are representations of the 14-inch-in-diameter, digital-ink-jet prints. In their original presentation, they are laminated and mounted on Plexiglass disks.”

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C. Dale Young

C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time, serves as Poetry Editor of the New England Review, and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of The Day Underneath the Day (TriQuarterlyBooks, 2001), The Second Person (Four Way Books, 2007), and he is currently completing a third book manuscript of poems titled TORN (Four Way Books, 2012). He is a previous winner of the Grolier Prize, the Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Stanley P. Young Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Young has taught at several writers’ conferences, including the Catskill Poetry Workshops and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. His poems have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The Best American Poetry, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. He lives in San Francisco with the biologist and composer, Jacob Bertrand.

Brooke Hardy

Brooke Hardy is a graduate student at the University of West Florida where she is an editor of Panhandler and teaches English composition. She is also the president of the UWF chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor society.

Doug Moon

Doug Moon is a graduate student at the University of West Florida where he is an editor of Panhandler and teaches English composition. His thesis, a cycle of short stories, is forever forthcoming.

interview

Doug Moon: Thanks for letting us cree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, interview you and for reading to- ran / Through caverns measureless night. to man / Down to a sunless sea.” So I don’t really remember reading Brooke Hardy: So I guess I have a one poem and being like, “Oh my really introductory question to ask god, poetry.” I kind of always have you. What was your introduction to been around poetry. I guess all my poetry, and can you remember the brothers and sisters, really, but none first poem that you either read or of them are poets or writers. I’m the that you wrote? only one. [laughs] C. Dale Young: I don’t know if I can remember the first poem I read. My mother’s a literature teacher. So I’ve been around poems for a long time. She used to teach British romantics. I guess the earliest poem I can remember is “Kubla Kahn” by Coleridge because she used to read it to me and my younger sister to get us to fall asleep. I think I can probably even recite the opening lines of “Kubla Kahn”: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome de-

DM: So was there a gradual point where poetry started to interest you toward where you wanted to be a poet? CDY: It’s kind of a serendipitous thing. I can definitely tell you the first time I was blown away by a poem. I was a junior in high school and we had to take English Lit. I think it was American Lit, then English Lit, then World Lit, or something like that. I actually had a teacher—and

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I’m not making this up—her name was Kathy Doody. So she was Miss Doody. And Miss Doody had us all assigned various writers and once a week you would have to come in and do a little presentation on the writer. She usually required that you memorized either the opening of a story, if it was a fiction writer or a novel or something, or a poem. I was assigned W. B. Yeats, and I’d never read anything by W. B. Yeats. I still joke with people all the time that for me—for many poets, there’s the one, the one poem that they read and they might not even understand it, but it just blows them away, and for me it was Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” I read that poem, and I’d heard poems like I was telling you, most of my life, but I read that poem and I was stunned. I was just struck dumb. I didn’t even understand what the poem was about, but

there was something about it that was mesmerizing. And when I knew that it wasn’t just me was that I went in to do my little spiel on Yeats, etc., and talked about Ireland, etc., and I had memorized the poem and stood there and recited the poem, and what struck me was that everyone in the room was rapt by the poem. And I thought, “Wow, wouldn’t it be amazing in your life to be able to do something that would have that effect?” I didn’t even think I actually thought I would be writing poems, but I remember being completely stunned by that.

hen I went to college, I started out in studio art, so I was actually a painting student, and how I ended up writing poems is that I got kind of drafted into working for the literary magazine as one of the art editors. Because they had tons of editors but they all did poetry, fiction, etc. I was drafted into doing this by someone a year ahead of me. There weren’t that many painting students at Boston College. Week after week after week after week after week, we would have these editorial meetings, and it was always sitting there listening to them talking about poems and stories, poems and stories, many, many more poems than stories. A lot of the people on the editorial board were pretty good poets, or at least I thought they were good poets at the time. They were all talking about how they were going to take such and such poetry workshop, so I decided that I wanted to take this workshop, too. So I went to the teacher and she said, “Well you can’t take the workshop because

you haven’t taken any of the prerequisites. You haven’t taken Intro to Creative Writing. You haven’t even taken Beginning Poetry Writing. This is a senior-level creative writing class.” So I went back the next day again, and I was like, “I really want to take this class.” I basically went to her office every day for about a week, and she broke down and said, “Fine, on Monday bring me ten poems. I don’t know if I’ll let you in the class, but if you get in the class and you get a C, don’t complain to me.” Getting a C at Boston College is like failing out of college. I left there all excited, but I had no poems because I’d never written any poems. So I went back to my room and over the weekend I wrote these

of knowing the body. How do these things reconcile? CDY: I don’t think they do. I don’t think of poetry in terms of medicine. I don’t think of medicine in terms of poetry. There aren’t that many doctor-poets out there in the country, but I know certain ones really see a link, and I think they exploit that link. But I actually don’t. That’s both the truth and also a lie. There are aspects of both that are similar. Both involve listening or observing things and trying to put them together in a way that is meaningful for someone else. I’m not sure that I understand the question completely because are you asking about the language of naming?

“I guess the earliest poem I can remember is ‘Kubla Kahn’ by Coleridge because she used to read it to me and my younger sister to get us to fall asleep.”

DM: In The Second Person, there’s the poem “Invective.” The speaker is faced with this quandary that there ten godawful poems. I turned them doesn’t seem to be an intersection in, and she said, “Fine, you can take that the speaker can identify bethe class.” I’ve never stopped writ- tween the two. So I guess we were ing poems since then. But that’s wondering if that is something eswhy I say it’s kind of serendipitous sential in your poetry, whether or because if I weren’t working at this not there is an intersection between magazine, I would never have met the two. these people who wrote poems, and I would have never thought that CDY: I don’t think I probably think that was something I could do, or of it that way. I think it ends up in even try to do. So I hope that an- the poems because parts of you end swers your question. up in yours poems. But I never sit down to write and think directly BH: Yes, that actually does. Com- about medicine. I actually, when pletely. This moves on to a different I first started writing, I did everyarea: in reading your poems, they thing not to write about medicine. often deal with corporeality in re- The irony is there’s a poem in my lation to our inability to capture an first book that everyone assumes I essential way of classifying the body, wrote when I was in medical school. especially in its parts. In your line I think it’s the second poem in the of work as a doctor, however, that book. It’s “Complaint of the Mediseems to rely upon a specific system cal Illustrator.” I wrote that poem

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six years before I went to medical school. I started it six years before I went to medical school. People assume because of the subject matter that I must have written it as a freshman medical student studying anatomy or something like that. But I didn’t. I think though that, again, I was saying it’s hard to keep your life out of your poems even when they’re not autobiographical. At this point, I have been a physician for a decade. I spend the vast majority of my time on this earth being a physician, which is kind of interesting because I have a lot of friends who are in literature and poetry and writing and things, and I don’t think many of them actually believe I’m a physician. I think they think I play one on TV or something. Then I have people in medicine who have no idea that I write at all. It’s not that I’m purposefully trying to be schizophrenic or to keep them apart. It’s just that, for me, the only thing that puts them together, even though it sounds narcissistic, is the fact that I do them. I don’t really sit down and think of them as interconnected or intertwined. DM: Is that an obstacle you’ve ever faced when you’re submitting poetry and people have this expectation, “Oh, he’s a doctor/poet, I’m going to read some doctor poetry”? CDY: I don’t know. I don’t think until recently most people would know enough about me or my work to have that expectation. I don’t know if that’s true now and I’m just not aware of it. I meet people all the time who have no idea that I’m a physician. So I don’t know about that. Maybe. [laughs] I’d have to ask some poetry editors out there. The thing about it is that at this point I don’t feel particularly old, but I

started writing and publishing poems in 1993. I have the tendency to feel like that was a few years ago. But then I stop and start doing the counting and, wait a minute, that was 15 years ago. It’s hard for me to tell how much people actually know about me. Though I guess some people do. [laughs] DM: In The Second Person there seems, as I was reading it, there’s a series of related images throughout the sections. For example, the Pacific and weather imagery in the first section, and the second section has more medically inclined images, anatomy and parts. Do your poems typically begin with an idea or an image and these become the prompts for discussion in the poem? CDY: I have a messed up way of writing. I didn’t know it was a messed up way of writing until I started talking to other people about writing. Actually I’ve had other poets when I talk about my process, they couldn’t imagine writing a poem like that. I almost always know the last line. That’s usually the first thing that I have. It’s not usually even image-related, it’s usually the last line because I have two things in my head, and I can’t really make sense of the two things at the same time. As I think about it, I come up with, almost invariably, I’d say 98-99% of the time, is the last line of the poem. Once I have the last line it could be a long time before I come up with the first line, and for me the excitement or the joy of writing the poem is to figure out, “How do I get from point A to point Z?” I know the first line. I know the last line. What has to happen in between? I have friends who, they have the title, then they just write the poem. I would probably keel over and die tomorrow if

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I woke up and knew the title of my poem. The title of my poem usually comes long after the poem has been drafted, revised, revised, revised, has several fake titles. I can’t think of many times writing poems where I just knew the title. That’s pretty unusual. To go back to what I was saying, sometimes people think that just doesn’t sound tenable to writing. I had a friend who said she could never write a poem like that because she would feel like the poem was already solved. If you knew the last line, what was the point of writing the poem? But then it goes back to that thing I was saying that for me the excitement is getting from the first to the last line. When I write short stories, it’s the total opposite. I never know how the story ends. I never know what the last sentence is. I usually end up coming up with the first sentence and I just start writing. I kind of discover the story as I go along. It’s a completely different experience. I have no idea why my brain is wired that way. I don’t know why it has such a difference. I would expect for them to be similar but for me they’re not similar at all. DM: So that’s the composition of individual poems, but I was wondering about the work as a whole. The Second Person is organized according to the four sections. I noticed the last poem in the first section is “Maelstrom.” I think the last line is “Rain coming down. It started like this.” This seems to me to encapsulate the entire section and its recurring imagery. Maybe this is me projecting myself onto the poem. CDY: [laughs] I like it. It sounds great though. DM: Well, good. Absolutely take credit for that.

CDY: Like, “Yes, yes, that’s exactly what I planned.” DM: But I was wondering about the composition of the sections of the book. When you’re putting together a book of poetry like that, does the organization of the book largely come after the poems? Or when you were composing them individually did you have some idea of how they might be structured into a collection? CDY: I guess I have to say I’m lucky. The one time my being obsessive compulsive is a good thing in this regard. I have never written a book, so to speak. I know people who have projects or stories or some kind of narrative arc, and they have it and they write the poems. They kind of know the architecture of the book they are writing. I can’t imagine writing that way. Again, I guess because I know the last line first and the whole thing is coming up with the space in between, it would be really hard for me to conceive of all these different poems. I think for all three books, even the new one that just got taken—I’m still working on it—the books came out of the poems. I write a lot of poems. I publish a whole bunch of them. At some point I have so many poems, I sit down and start looking at them. Some things cohere and some things don’t. So some things just get thrown out. It could be published in The Atlantic Monthly or something, but it doesn’t fit with anything else. Once you start seeing how things cohere then things like sections start to come up. Then there’s the next level of, “Where do the sections go in order for the book to make any sense?” So for me it’s kind of more assemblage than an idea from the

get-go. There’s no way I could have said that back in the late 90s, “Oh, I just started The Second Person.” There’s no way I could have done that. You know, there are poems in The Second Person—I think two or three poems—that were written before the first book. But they didn’t fit with the first book. They didn’t fit at all. It was weird because they kind of predated—they came into existence before I had become obsessed with what was going in the second book. It’s the same thing with the new manuscript. There are at least two or three poems in there—one could have gone into my first book. And one or two could have gone into the second book in terms of chronology, but they just didn’t fit. If I had to actually sit down and say, “OK, I’m going to do a book on, I don’t know, scorpions,” it just would never happen. I would become stymied by the idea that this is what I’m doing.

sounds like a poem.” But then they don’t go anywhere because the lines don’t materialize. It’s really weird to talk about creative process because it always sounds kind of mystical and bizarre. It really brings out the California in me. I really sound like someone from California. You really just have to be open to possibilities. Again, I think it goes back to having an idea for an entire book. If I had an idea, just a flat-out idea and I was like, “OK, I’m going to sit down know and write this poem,” I’m probably not ever going to finish this poem because I’ve already committed too much. Again, because for me the writing of a poem is connecting A to Z, so to speak. That would rule out almost all these others possibilities. I would never be able to reach line six. I would be stuck.

DM: Along those lines, do you have that problem with certain formal constraints? “Triptych at the Edge DM: So Scorpions is not a forthcom- of Sight” follows the same formal ing title. constraints. Does that pose a similar difficulty? CDY: No. [laughs] CDY: It’s very funny; when my first BH: You’ve been talking about what book came out, a lot of people labeled you usually start out with in a poem. me a formalist. Which is very weird Before that, what would you say are because in the entire book—I’d have your poetic triggers, or what usu- to go back and check—but I think ally prompts you to write a poem? Is there’s two or three poems that are there something where you end up quote unquote “metrical.” I know hearing a line in your head? there’s a sonnet. And I know there’s a poem that is in rhyming iambic CDY: It varies a lot. I have stuff float- pentameter. But I’ve been struck by ing around in my head all the time. the fact that I keep getting labeled But I have to come up with a line. as a formalist. I think it’s just that If I don’t have the line, I don’t have I probably obsess about things in a any—it’s knowing that something way that people who used to write sounds like a line that makes me metrical poems maybe would do. For start looking for the first line. So if I me, though, almost any poem that I don’t have anything like that I won’t have that is formal, I didn’t sit down actually start looking. Sometimes I with the intent of it being that form. have things that pop up in my head “Maelstrom” is a perfect example. I and I think, “Oh, that definitely started “Maelstrom” probably six or

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seven times. Trying to write it the way I would normally write a poem in that I just kept trying to write a 20-25 line poem, which in my head at the time was the correct number of lines or something. And it never worked. It was always prose-y, or it sounded kind of dull. The time that I started working on it, when I actually drafted the poem, I realized that one of the lines was very close to another line. I thought, “Hey, that’s actually in the position of the repeats or variations in a pantoum.” So I went back and tried to shift this draft that I had, which was pretty bad, into the pantoum form. It was really weird because it happened almost instantly. Different forms have different strengths and different weaknesses, and I think that the subject matter is such a bizarre, obsessively strange scenario that the pantoum made the poem significantly better. I have never tried to write a pantoum. I used to joke that I would never write a pantoum because I always slightly despised that form. But it kind of arose out of the playing with the drafts. I say this to my grad students all the time, and I think they’re convinced it’s just like this mantra I have and I don’t actually believe, but I actually really believe it: I don’t actually think the writing is getting down the first draft. For me, I always refer to it as drafting. I always say that and people think I’m an architect or something. The real writing comes in the revision and being open to possibilities. That’s an example of if I weren’t willing to try something, I probably would never have that poem. Yeah, forms. I think I have two my name; I have one villanelle, one sestina, one pantoum, a

couple of sonnets. That’s about it. DM: It kind of sounded like you were listing them like felonies or something. CDY: I kind of feel like they are. [laughs] I served a month for my sonnet, two weeks for my sestina. BH: You’ve been talking about the revision process. How do you usually approach the revision process? Do you do revisions until you feel comfortable? CDY: Yeah, I think almost with the exception of one or two poems I have, they’ve all been through a lot of revisions. A friend of mine who

teachers was notorious for revising things even after they’d been published in books. I remember when his selected poems or new and selected poems was about to come out, he was still changing words. He was kind of crazy because he’d change a word and then ten years later he’d change it back. It’s interesting because if you go through various editions of the book, you find these teeny, tiny changes. It’s almost like he’s writing for some poor academic 200 years from now who can write a dissertation on, “What did Donald Justice change in this edition versus that?” He never felt that a poem was completely finished. I don’t know if I’m that way, but I still pick and poke. Even now, I have this new manuscript and I’m still changing lines and changing words. I think if you get really satisfied with your poems you should be very nervous. [laughs]

“For me, though, almost any poem that I have that is formal, I didn’t sit down with the intent of it being that form.” was teaching an undergraduate class wanted to do a session talking about revision, so he pestered a whole bunch of us for drafts. He asked if there were any poems that we had where we had every single draft. It’s harder now because with the computer when you change things you hit save and then the other version doesn’t exist anymore. But there was a period where I was really obsessed about tracking changes, so I remember I would print after every save. So I actually had a complete record of this poem. The poem is “33rd and Kirkham.” The funny thing is I don’t even have them now. My friend David is the only one who has all of these drafts. I think he has all nine or ten drafts. I have some that have been through twenty drafts. I have some that I’ve worked on for ten, twelve years. I don’t know. One of my

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BH: In one poem in particular in The Day Underneath the Day, “The Apprentice,” the persona seems to be expressing anxieties about the creative process. What role do you see anxiety playing in the creative process? CDY: Anxiety about—just general anxiety? DM: The sort of anxiety of the creative process. CDY: I have to look at the Apprentice now, I don’t remember it being like that. DM: Brooke just felt you should be anxious.

CDY: I should be anxious? Well I’m anxious now! [laughs] BH: That was the point of the question, to elicit that response. CDY: [looking at poem] Now I can understand why you’d say that. I don’t really sit down and write—I know there are people who say they sit down to write for posterity, and all the great poets before them are looking over their shoulders. When I sit down to write, it’s about the loneliest, most solemn thing. I don’t have music. I don’t keep any images on the wall in my studio where I write. My partner is a composer and a biologist, and his studio is spotlessly clean. It’s immaculate. Grand piano. Large table. Scores. Sheets. Music. Pens. Pencils. All of his CDs are catalogued perfectly. You can just walk in and say, “Mahler,” and he’ll walk you over to the Mahler section. Or, “Brahms,” and there they are. My studio is a disaster zone. There is nothing on the walls. There are papers, books, folders, submissions to NER, student essays. There’s just stuff everywhere. I think you can only see about one-eighth of the floor in my studio. Everything else is just covered in papers and books. Strangely enough, I actually know where everything is, and I am so obsessed about that space, I won’t actually let someone go in there and look around. But when I sit down to write, I’m not really thinking about anyone. I mean, usually, at this point, we were talking about the fact that by the time I actually sit down to write, I’ve already thought about the first line and the last line, and many times, I have most of the lines in between. So when I sit down it’s this weird grappling to get it down on paper. I don’t really feel that anxiety

because for me the writing is what comes after you have the first draft. I think I’m much more nervous and jittery once I have the draft and I start really picking it apart. When I start saying things like, “C. Dale, why would you do that? That’s a terrible word.” Or, “God, how many times can you use the word ‘dark’ in a poem? You’ve already used it 40 times in your first book and 50something times in your second book. Do you really need it in the next book?” That’s probably when I start feeling issues of anxiety, but not in the actual writing. I think in the actual drafting, getting it down, I’m just trying to get it down. I’m not really thinking about other stuff.

time I sit down to write, it’s like I’m writing a poem for the first time.” I remember when I first heard that, thinking, “Oh that has got to be crap. This is someone who has six, seven, eight, nine books, all these awards. You can’t possibly tell me that she sits down and it’s alien to her.” But over time I’ve grown to see that that’s kind of true because I always think, “Well, in five years, this is going to be so much easier.” But it never is. It’s still as hard. You learn how to be comfortable with yourself and your own voice over time. But the actual process of putting together a poem is still work. It’s not easy. Those New Yorker cartoons where the muse comes floating in the window and whispers and the poet just e’re both kind of maniacal- exudes this poem, it’s a cartoon. It looking when we’re writing. just doesn’t happen like that. I wish My partner, Jacob, sometimes you it did. But it doesn’t. know he’s writing and sometimes you don’t know he’s writing. You DM: You’re also writing short stosometimes know he’s writing be- ries, could you tell us about those? cause you hear the piano. But other We didn’t have the opportunity to times you don’t hear anything. You see any of those. hear this weird silence. And you think he’s not writing, but he’s ac- CDY: Oh my god, I don’t know if I’d tually writing with a pencil. But ever show you one of my short stowe both have commented that the ries. [laughs] It’s weird. When I first other looks really frightening when started writing, I always wanted to they are working. write fiction. I’m almost embarrassed to say this but I was actually kicked DM: Is there any sort of hard- out of a fiction writing class and learned wisdom you’ve gathered in told to study poetry again. [laughs] your years of writing poetry that But for years I thought I could not you would impart upon beginning write fiction, that I just wasn’t capapoets? ble of writing fiction. I’m not really sure what happened, but I read a lot CDY: I don’t know if there’s any- of fiction. I’ve read almost as much thing to impart. I think there’s al- fiction as I have poetry. I went to ways the whole read, read, read, visit a university in the spring, and write, read, revise, write, write, re- I was on a shuttle bus to go to the vise, read some more. It just never airport, and a sentence—I thought gets easier. I remember a very laure- it was a line—it was something to ated poet who was asked that ques- the effect of “No one would have tion, and she said, “Every time I sit believed him if he had told them down to write, it’s horrifying. Every that such and such could disappear.”

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So I pondered this for a while, and I thought, this doesn’t sound like one of my lines. This doesn’t sound like a line of poetry. I don’t know what that is. I remember kind of joking with myself in the shuttle bus, “Oh, maybe that’s the start of a story.” I was actually chuckling out loud. I wrote it down because I didn’t want to forget it. Then ten or fifteen minutes later, I opened that laptop, and I started playing with it. Once I had the sentence then I started writing more. I think within three days I had written about 3,200 words of the story. And I thought, “That’s really weird.” I showed it to a couple of people, and they were like, “That’s a pretty good start,” and I was like, “really?” Then I wrote another story. So far, I’ve written six stories this year, but I don’t know why now. In some ways it’s actually much more fun for me because I don’t have the same investment. If I write a story, no one knows my stories. I’ve never published any stories. I don’t really feel like I have anything at stake. It’s just this kind of mental exercise. DM: In preparation for the interview, and when you were coming to Writer’s in the Gallery, I started stalking your blog. CDY: [laughs] Oh. That’s just great. DM: Very recently there was a link you posted to a question about political poetry. The question was “Any thoughts about political poetry in our current climate? Will it make a comeback? Do we have an obligation as poets to comment about the world at large and how exactly do we do that?” So since you didn’t answer that on your blog, I was hoping maybe you had some thoughts on the political nature of poetry.

CDY: I’m one of those people who thinks that every single poem, every single story, every single piece of art is political. That’s probably not what people want to hear because I think when people say “political poetry” they have a very specific thing in mind. They want a poem of protest, or a poem of witness, or on and on and on. But for me, a lot of those poems end up just being propaganda. They’re not much different than the leaflets that people from other countries drop on the countries they are bombing. I wouldn’t be surprised to find poems from the United States all over Iraq. But the thing about it is that the idea that you have the right to sit down and write a poem is a political statement in and of itself. That is not a normal thing. Everyday people don’t do that. It sounds strange, but if Jacob sits down and writes a violin concerto, there aren’t very many people out there that just do that. That is a political act. You cannot divorce the person from the works. That adds another level of it being political. I think the reason I put the link on the blog is that I always find those kinds of things—I find them interesting because they always elicit some kind of response, either ire or shock or “Why is he posting this?” I’m kind of perverse in that I like doing that. I post lots of things just because I know it’s going to spark one of my readers’ interests. I don’t know. We could all sit around and write poems protesting this or protesting that. But I don’t know if they would end up being really your poems. But at the same time, we live in a world right now that’s very different, and I know as an editor that I don’t have the same patience that I used to for another poem about walking in the woods. It could be a great poem, but I’m

C. Dale Young

Panhandler

just like, “Do we really need another poem about a birch tree?” No, we don’t. Does that mean I want people to go out and write about protests or loss of rights or some amendment? Well, if they got to it on their own out of something genuine, sure. But the problem I have with a lot of the “political” poetry is that it’s not arrived at in a genuine way. It’s arrived at either because they want to sensationalize or they want to show that I’m so thoughtful, I’m writing something to protest, etc. It always rings out false. It always rings out, for me at least, like propaganda. I think that there have been some great political poems, but a lot of what I think of as “political poems,” other people might disagree. I think Whitman wrote some amazing political poems. Even Lord Byron wrote what I consider to be some amazing political poems. But they’re not necessarily what people today when they say “political poems”—that’s not exactly what they mean. DM: Do you have a Family-Feudstyle, top-five list of propagandistic poems you’d expect to find in Iraq after the invasion? CDY: [laughs] It’s funny because right after 9/11, I did an interview on a public radio station and the guy asked me, did I think that there would be great poems that came out of 9/11, and I said, “Yeah, but they won’t show up for awhile.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Anything that shows up in the next two or three years is going to be propaganda.” The host was horrified. How could I be saying this? How anti-American. How unpatriotic of me. But I actually think that that is pretty much right. I think that the best poems I’ve seen that relate to 9/11 have been coming out in the

past year or so. They have perspective. They have the difficult parts of putting together things that are not pleasant but at the same time are almost inevitable. I just don’t think that’s possible six months after 9/11. I saw horrible poems written by some amazing poets published in the year or two after 9/11, but most of them were 9/11 poems. The poems that I’m seeing now are deeply disturbing, picked over—there’s something about a mind being able to process that whole thing. Not just the event, but all the things that led to it, what has happened after it, that make for a more powerful poem. So you I think that’s political. But like I said, I am one of those people that thinks every poem is political.

to convince themselves that they are making progress or something. I think you have to think that you’re doing something different to do it at all. It’s really weird because when the book came out, and I actually sat down and read both of them, I was like, um, it’s not that different. They are different books, but it’s definitely still me. I know right now that I have this nagging sensation that the new book is just radically different. But I’m sure again, I’ve just lived long enough now to know that that’s probably not true. It might be a variation or something like that. But I think it’s a tormented book. That’s about the only way I can put it. [laughs] But we’ll see. We still have some time to change it.

DM: Would you tell us about the DM: Or at least torment it more. manuscript you’re working on? CDY: Yeah, or it will torment me CDY: It’s slated for February 2012. more is more like it. That was at my request because I can’t imagine getting it actually “book ready” faster. There are so many things that go into—I think the final manuscript is due in January 2010, and people are kind of shocked by that. But there’s a lot of stuff. At least my publisher, Four Way Books, does a lot of things to prepare to release a book. Even the advanced copies are usually an advanced run of the book. They’re not even galleys, so there’s a lot of stuff they have to do. I’m just not really ready to do that. I just have a lot of other things I have to do as well. It’s titled Torn after a poem of mine. It’s—I don’t know what it is yet. I think that it’s probably—I thought that when I published my second book or when I was putting together, I thought my second book was radically different from my first book. I think that’s something a lot of writers and artists do C. Dale Young

Panhandler

Proximity I have forgotten my skin, misplaced my body. Tricks of mind, a teacher once said: the man with the amputated right arm convinced he could feel the sheets and air-conditioned air touching the phantom skin. There must be a syndrome for such a thing, a named constellation of symptoms that correspond to the ghost hand and what it senses. This morning, I felt your hand touch me on the shoulder the way you would when you turned over in your sleep. What syndrome describes this? Not the sense of touch but of being touched. Waking, I felt my own body, piece by piece, dissolving: my hands, finger by finger, then the legs and the chest leaving the heart exposed and beating, the traveling pulses of blood expanding the great vessels. The rib cage vanished and then the spine. If your right hand offends you, wrote Mark, cut it off and throw it away, for it is better for you to lose a part than to lose the whole. But I have no word for this phantom touch, and the fully real feeling of the hair on your arm shifting over my own as your hand moved from my shoulder and out across my chest. Desire makes me weak, crooned the diva, or was it Augustine faced with his own flesh? Whisper me a few lies, god, beautiful and familiar lies.

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;from The Second Person

C. Dale Young

Panhandler

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