2004 THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE SIXTEEN NUMBER
contents cover * PHOTOGRAPH by Grace Silvia 2 * ETCHING by Alyssa Pheobus 3 * Translating 1973 by Hilary Hammett 4 * On a Photograph of My Father by Alex Nemser 5 * LITHOGRAPH by Hilary Hammel! 6
The Plague of Whimsy by Aaron Thier
7 * PHOTOGRAPH by Yali Lewis 10 * PHOTOGRAPH
by Yali Lewis
12 * BOSTON POST ROAD by Peter Feigenbaum 13
Order of Things by Valerie Idehen
1/4 A The Exchange by Adam Eaker 15
A
Coming to Know About Jozeffs and Istvan: A Peek Between the Covers by Venkat Lashminarayanan
19 * LITHOGRAPH
by Hilary Hammell
22 * PIAZZA SAN MARCO 26 * INK DRAWING
by Jessica Kung
by Tyler Coburn
28 * OIL PAINTING
by Adriane Quinlan
30 * Interview with Louise Gluck by David Gorin 32 * INK DRAWING
36 * INK 141
by Peter Feigenbaum
DRAWING
by Marvin Astorga
Horoscope by Adam Farbiarz 42 * PHOTOGRAPH
by Anya Meksin
43 * Red Ridge Farm by Nicole Dixon
ETCHING
Alyssa Pheobus
2
Translating
1 9 7 3
Hilary Hammel!
On September 23, 1973, Pablo Neruda died ofleukemia, twelve days after the military coup that overthrew hisfriend Salvador Allende, Chile's newly elected Socialist president, and installed the dictatorship ofGeneral Augusto Pinochet. Shortly after Neruda's death, his homes in Valparaiso and Santiago were robbed. It begins in the prepositions,the giveaways. Inverting geography to our backward language — as to, in which,toward which — we don't understand the direction a cat walks, the way the fishing boats move. Neither can we see,from this hemisphere, the reason the dunes of Iquique are blind. But the similes remain clear as a footfall on a sidewalk, those collections of objects,those odes to common things. Or call them elemental odes,elementary,everything. From across the world, metaphors are forkfuls of corn. There were cases of moths,collections of wooden mermaids,the windows made to look like portals,the house he called an island. This we can see: the stasis in the belly of a sea lion, the sugar in the milk, the ship imagery everywhere. But action doesn't translate — wars on Sundays at the market,blood pooling on a canvas, the slow lick of the sun on a shoulder. These are born and die in Spanish. And 1973 is all verbs — (what is the word for coincidence?) its name on every Avenida in every city, the banks, the offices of professors returned from 19 years in Germany or Venezuela,a stone at Isla Negra. This asphalt strip pulled tight between Peril and Antarctica vibrates like a tuning fork,the smell of fresh gasoline between sand, mountains,and an ocean of imagined graves.
3 .1111111
IF
J
0 n
a
Ph otogra p h My
of
Fat her Alex Nemser
My father, carrying two suitcases, one large, one smaller, is about to take a step down from a porch and straighten out. The porch, a frame of rusticated columns and battered metal banisters,stands grey. He has just come out of the door — the screen, slow in closing,is just ajar or stuck — wearing a suit like a party costume. From the right, the sun's white camera flash in the black and white snapshot, shines between the cracked, white columns of the porch. My father,the `human corkscrew'at dances, appears caught in mid-step, his right foot raised just off the next step,the bags throwing his balance. His body tilts off-kilter towards the side with the much larger bag: he leans over, his crooked hair and crumpled tie swinging oddly to one side in motion. He wears his suit pants low down on his hips — where I wear mine — and takes a bow-legged step. His glasses slip,jolted by his stride, and hair hanging past his ears and covering them falls down his face and blurs his features. That hair he'd never see again, he cut it all to take a job; my mother cried. But when did balances and checks become so unavoidable? Did he lose his feet, his bearings, knocked by the rush of dogged hours? Or did he start and never cease to see each passing minute quickly disappear?
4 8
The
Plague
of
Whimsy Aaron Thier
Where the city was sandy,like the sea, and the birds tasted
vasive a decay, and too clean. The man was not rotting, but
more like fish than fowl,a Ferris wheel turned slowly against a
falling to dust.
pale sky. Each spring a carnival washed up on the shore, and
'Perhaps you have become desiccated; he told the man.'We
like the other things that came inevitably from the greenblue
will hydrate you:
waters, no one worried very much about it. It remained for
While an iv was administered,and while the patient, waxen,
three weeks,and during that time usually everyone made one
demonstrated its inefficacy, the doctor whispered to his nurse.
visit. Children made several, of course,and the hateful made
'Nurse Bibbs; he asked her,'what do you suppose is the
none.
matter?'
But not everyone who wanted to go was able to make the
She answered,but he didn't listen.
trip. For instance: the infirm. And to attend to them,the good
'Probably just an infection ofsome kind: he said. He mixed
doctor Marlin Harrington remained behind also, moving
up a cocktail of anti-pestilential medicines and poured it into
through his hospital like a spider on a web. He had patients of
the patient.
all sorts: he had neuralgias, polialgias, post- and pre-traumas,
'We'll wait:
chronic fatigues, elephantiases. He had patients fat and tough
They waited. Dr. Harrington consumed a cucumber sand-
as a keg of lard,and patients fragile as a bubble in the breeze.
wich, asked the bodybuilder some questions,and returned to
But today there was something different, he knew at once, when Nurse Bibbs said to him:'There's something you'd bet-
while,the patient seemed to grow gradually more insubstan-
ter see.'
tial. When Dr. Harrington returned, he found Nurse Bibbs
his office in order to straighten the things on his desk. Mean-
And when he saw, he saw a withered husk of a man whose
seated bedside with her hands clasped beneath her chin and
skin fell off in flakes, whose hair thinned on his head, whose
her lips sagging in a limp frown.
tooth fell clicking on the tile floor.
'My God;he said.
'Well then; Dr. Harrington asked him,'what's troubling
In the ward there was a foamy, pearly, electric light. Like a
you?'
liquid, it got in around things: it got in around the patient, it
The man could make no answer,tears dripped from his loos
_
ening jowls. 'Leprosy?' The man was moved to the ward, which housed a feverish madman and a bodybuilder. Meanwhile,in his office, Dr. Harrington puzzled. What could it be, he wondered,if not leprosy? But it was a sort he had not seen before — indeed he had seen no leprosy ever, such a thing being rare, naturally — but he hadn't read about leprosy of this kind either. It was too per-
seeped into him,and it filled him up. 'He's transparent.' The bodybuilder called out from traction:'That bastard.
i
What's the matter with him?' Three days later, the dead man's neighbor gave Dr. Harrington an interview: 'No. No,he seemed rather excessively friendly.' 'And when did you first notice that he was ill?' Dr. Harrington asked.
6 —.No\
* WINNER
ofthe SPRING 2004
YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE PRIZE
PHOTOGRAPH
Yali Lewis
for ART 7
'I don't know. He certainly didn't ever complain. Not even recently. Before he got too weak,he was in the highest spirits.
She proved to be the notable V. Scarlet Lamella,author of such auspicious novellas as Sentiment and Sensuality and the
But I guess three weeks ago. He was giving a party,and I
more experimental Moments ofIncoherence. Her readers num-
thought he looked pale:
bered very many; they nipped at the baited hook of her dan-
The dead man's neighbor could say little else. He had not been particularly close to the dead man.They had quarreled often. Only lately had relations been amiable. 'I think he knew he was dying. He wanted to make things right with everyone.I'm sorry I didn't know him better. The past month he was lovely to be with: At the fair the people ate fried dough and gummy candy and
Nurse Bibbs and Dr. Harrington brought her up to the ward and administered antibiotics. With the help of their first efforts,she seemed to linger on the lip of a faster decay. 'I don't know what the trouble is. I've told you I feel wonderful:she said. But in the next days she grew weaker and weepier. Her son,
vomited them over the rails of the raised platforms. On the
the boy who had brought her to the hospital, visited frequently
fourth day,a man dressed in a bobcat suit offered another
and spent long nights by her side. They chatted happily at first,
man,uncostumed,the favor of an ethnic slur. Coupled in vio-
but the disease drew her up mute by the middle of the week,
lence,the two were removed. On the same day,it rained hard
and the boy was forced to sit in silence.
in the afternoon and ruined some of the caricaturist's work. Each day sons and daughters asked their parents,'Can we go
'How old are you?'Dr. Harrington asked him. 'Sixteen:
to the fair?' and mothers and fathers sometimes answered 'yes'
'Do you have a father? Anywhere you can go?'
but more often'No.It will be here for weeks. We'll go soon.'
'I have a father.'
And in the hospital,things returned to normal. No one spoke of the man who had turned to dust. The bodybuilder and the madman avoided the subject as gracefully as their scattered wits permitted; the doctors and nurses who had not
'And he's...' 'And I don't know where he is. I could go to my grandmother's. She's been sick, though.' 'Sick?'
more tangible dangers. Even Dr. Harrington and Nurse Bibbs
'Stomach flu. I called her and told her about this.' He indicated the bed where his mother cried silently and he added,
tried to put it out of their minds. These things happen,they
'She'll die, won't she?'
been present regarded the story as a faint rumor in a world of
told themselves,and sometimes there's no explanation. Last
'We don't know.We don't know what it is.'
year in Mississippi,someone got the bubonic plague.
Dr. Harrington was hesitant to draw blood from the wom-
One week after the arriving and the passing on of the dead man,a woman was delivered to the hospital. The boy who arrived with her told Dr. Harrington,'She's sick, but she wouldn't come in. She only came because I told her we were going to the fair. But I whispered to the taxi driver: The woman accepted the ruse with a wave of her white hand. Dr. Harrington felt a chill. He could be not be certain, but he could be reasonably certain — and really certainty and uncertainty didn't matter in the face of his grim premonition — her skin was flaking,she spoke in a dry quiet coughing voice,and there were tears in her eyes. 'I feel as well as I've ever felt:she told him.
8
gling grammar.
an's wasted body — but a prick, only a prick,for science: 'Anything?' Nurse Bibbs asked. 'No. And I'm afraid it'll kill her if! take more blood. I don't know what I'd test for anyway.' In the following days V. Scarlet Lamella was pronounced dead, her son became ill and was soon pronounced dead,and the waiting rooms began to fill with cheerful wraiths. Like a drug, the disease burned out parts of the brain. Dr. Harrington noticed that a mental decay preceded the physical decay, and sufferers felt healthier and happier as they grew weaker and weaker. The ward contained those in the terminal stages, but other rooms in the hospital, private chambers and offices, were
filled with bedding and sleeping pads to accommodate the ballooning number of the afflicted.
good day — if his coffee was well-brewed, his paper wellcrisped, his dog well-mannered — then he feared the worst,
At the fair, a local band called'The Flowering Annuals' played sets that yawned endlessly into the night. Each band
and he cried silently in the shower before work. The hateful would inherit the city, he thought. The man who
member plafed a different song,except the bassist and the drummer,who played the same song because they were lovers.
was too sullen and too bitter to bend even to the most pathetic of gestures: the children at his door, his neighbors at his door,
The people who watched sang different songs also. Dr. Harrington could hear them,their voices borne gaily on the
the mayor at his door bearing gifts and foods to coax him out: 'Come on,Alec, you've been holed up too long.' He would
breeze, as he walked through the hallways of his hospital. He looked upon the weeping faces and he said to Nurse Bibbs:'The way they cry so much,but their faces always look
survive the plague of whimsy. He would close his doors in the face of that good-will and he would open them again one
so dry...'
morning when the world was finally and ultimately quiet. He would die only much later, older and crueler, in the wasted
'Yes;she answered. 'It's a paradox:
town. That was how it would come out in the end, Dr. Harrington knew. And the injustice of it, and the biological inevi-
'Yes.'
tability, made him beat the wheel in anger as he drove. Sometimes he saw people on the streets, talking, running,
'And it's a paradox too:the doctor said,'that they cry so much,but they're so happy.' 'But people cry when they're happy,' Nurse Bibbs replied. Dr. Harrington had made little progress. It wasn't leprosy and it wasn't the plague. Patients in the early stages sometimes
standing, hauling things from the gutted shops. They wore ragged,colorful clothing and talked loudly with one another. They always waved as he went by, and he waved too. As long as people were waving,there was something left to him,and there
responded to antibiotics, but the medicine only seemed to
was a reason to go to work.
stave off the inevitable.
To those who responded to his notices, complaining of good cheer, he gave a mix of antibiotics. Almost always these people
Nevertheless, he posted notices: PLEASE REPORT TO THE HOSPITAL IF YOU EXPERIENCE THE FOLLOWING SYMPTOMS: GAIETY, LEVITY, FLIPPANCY, JOLLITY. THESE ARE THE EARLY SYMPTOMS OF THE DISEASE. THE DISEASE IS CURABLE IN THE INITIAL STAGES.
went off again and did not return for a good while,if ever. Some of them,he hoped, might have survived. Others came back to him and collapsed at the door. There was no way to tell who had been sick in the first place. As the rooms of his hospital began to empty,he sat with
If anything, he could achieve a quarantine. The problem was that the disease was most communicable in the early stages,
bowed head and heard the dissonant requiem on the wind. They were singing at the fair, always singing,singing not in joy
when it was hardest to detect. It was then, when the infected felt their most vital and friendly, that it jumped from citizen to
but in a profound and merciless ignorance.
citizen.
And there at the fair, indeed,the people sang and laughed and gambled and punched one another happily on the shoulder.
Gripped in the rhythms of the disease,the people flocked to the fair. The whirling rides produced wide arcs of vomit in the
From stores in town they had dragged long rolls of fabric, boxes of bells, markers, paints,stickers, and they had made them-
air, and the wide-eyed, wet-eyed carnivalgoers sprinted from each to each, and from here to there; from game stand to game
selves garments that suited them in their new and changed world.Some wore robes and skirts, blue and purple and striped, heavy with bells and chimes. Others wore nothing.
stand, and from food court to food court. Dr. Harrington felt the warm lick of death on his neck. Each day he looked for signs of the disease in himself. If it was a
They painted on their naked bodies, wrapped strips of tape around their forearms,and pierced their parts with hooks and rivets and railroad ties. 9
4
PHOTOGRAPH
Yali Lewis
10
4
Though the dead lay around them,they were unabashed. Their lives were too precious and too beautiful to be spent in
sky, into a green minivan,into a red soft-drink. The sense of replacement,of change,of flow, was a pleasure.
mourning for those who were lost. Themselves,they preferred
Mornings,when he awoke to realize that he was alive and not yet sick with the disease that would kill him,Dr. Har-
to think that when their time came, whenever that might be, the others would go on just as they had, without grief or sorrow or a batted eyelash. They cooked up the sea-birds that came down for crusts and crumbs,and they made cotton candy and popcorn until there was nothing left. The carnival was to have packed up two weeks ago and gone offsomewhere else, but none of the original staff were anywhere to be found. Now the operation was run,though haphazardly, by whoever happened to be standing by. People filled the spinning tea-cups and called out,'Pull
rington thought about his life. Where had he come from? From a mining town in West Virginia. As a youth he lay, lounged,languished in the grass on summer afternoons and daydreamt of different days, happy though he was. He dreamt of a wooden cabin in the snow and of a warm female body. He dreamt of baseball stardom and of literary celebrity. Then he blinked and found himself flotsam in the darkened sea of adulthood. To cheer himself up he wed a small surly bride and
that lever, will you?'
had by her one child, whom she took with her when she left. He passed through these memories in wonder.The birth of
Men and women fornicated wildly at the corners of refreshment tents and at the edges of footpaths. Boys of fourteen
his child, a cup of coffee on a particular morning: each moment was graced with the same beautiful impermanence. His
made love to women of forty. A man and a goat repaired to the ruined city to have their bliss. None were idle too long, or
life was the sum of millions of moments bursting and vanish-
alone, and semen mixed with soda and flavored slush in rivulets on the ground. The days blossomed and died, and the carnival grew and
In the still of the morning still the sun was shining,there at the end of the world,and the fuzz of the waves mingled with
grew until it grew no longer, and began to wilt. Still, even then, the air of enchanted mirth did not fade. Dr. Harrington tended to the last few men and women in his hospital, and his only hope was to give them a death without pain. He did not despair. Instead,and to his faint and diminishing surprise, he saw a calm and crisp beauty in his work. He felt compelled to write verse. The epidemic gave to him a sense of quiet oblivion,and he felt himself borne along inevitably, but not tragically, toward the abyss for which he had always been
lug like breath on a cold afternoon.
the crunch of broken glass in his ears. As he walked through the empty town,the present seemed no stranger than his quiet past. He went to the fair. He drifted vaguely through the gate, he sniffed the air, and he saw thousands of variously colored lights. The people danced and bobbed and waved their arms, and on their many faces, he saw tears flicker and flash. He went off into the crowd to ride the rides and taste the fried food,and he never again came out. The crowd swallowed him up,like a bacterium engulfing a spot of rot in the sea. *
destined. When he was alone in his office, he liked to look at his reflection in the inert television screen and then switch it on and watch himself disappear into that oblivion; into a pale blue
11
BOSTON POST ROAD
Peter Feigenbaum
12
4
* WINNER
ofthe SPRING 2004
FRANCIS BERGEN MEMORIAL PRIZE
of
Order
Things
Valerie ldehen
for POETRY 4
After almost-lovers in spring.
A flowering fledgling writhes,frees — a butterfly outflutters a jelly jar — shy lest storms had learned of a two who almost were. One hears one has a charm now — and sighs a little less. Every night tears into blue half-light. Lilies peek from buds — sound enough in spring — this unlikely half-mast of fission, this corolla attack of pace. This arrange a clutter of aftersmiles everywhere. This Chicago. This Egypt. There is a lilting if.
01
13
The
Exchange Adam Eaker
There was a logic to the family I lived with then, A German clockwork's back and forth. They would Have terrible, guttural fights, then retreat To separate rooms,each with bottle in hand, And an hour later there'd be laughter, dancing, Barging in on the bathroom,rolling about on the floor. The daughter and her boyfriend,an aristocrat Who bowed when he shook my hand, would occupy The shower and camp out there for hours. There'd be a pitter-patter of water and laughter, And my bladder would ache. There was only One bathroom,and I had no wish to disturb. My boots hadn't arrived, and on the walk to school The snow soaked my blue-tinged feet. We lived Near a theater built by Bismarck and the famed Botanical gardens of the university, closed for the winter. You could peek in from atop an old Roman wall, Row after row of brown and deep green. The mother had gotten a letter from her ex-husband In Hamburg,refusing to send any more money. She had terrible headaches, dyed her hair in the sink, while The weight-lifter son immersed himself in pornography. The grandmother came over,she had an enormous Bosom and told me lots of stories while she cooked. She clucked about the slutty cousin who slept with The whole village soccer team,some niece who'd married A Turk. Shaping liver dumplings with old chubby hands, She told me all about her apendectomy,right after the war. They'd made a mess of it, and afterwards her stomach had Fallen open in the streetcar, exposing all her Dank intimacies to the view of strangers.
14
4
* WINNER
ofthe SPRING 2004
FRANCIS BERGEN MEMORIAL PRIZE
for FICTION
Coming
to
Know
About A
Jozeffs Peek
and
!sty an:
Between
the
Covers
Venkat Lakshminarayanan
'Though the beginning from which I started was humble,'testified Jozef-Matilte Jozeffs, unembarrassed,to a room of Hungarian dignitaries — among whom was the very much esteemed Istvan Tamas — 'I have accomplished more in a single lifetime than most men accomplish in a millennium!' His audience,as the Reader ought, progressed slowly and with incredulity through his report,for by the time this Jozef-Matilte had reached the advanced age at which reflection becomes appropriate, his memory — crowded with defunct cartographic terminology, prayers to sea gods, and certain types of trigonometric trivia — appears to have evicted all but the vaguest notions about his origins, the circumstances of his departure, or any other sort ofjuicy gossip that one would want in an autobiography. By profession, Jozef-Matilte was a sailor: this much — perhaps only this much — was certain. But Jozef-Matilte, by loud assertion, made attempts to create hundreds of other beliefs within the heads of anyone listening to his testimony. It is true of sailors, he claimed, that they all begin their careers for identical reasons, which might have been the reasons that he found himself immersed in the watery life: some character of the local food that drove him towards a diet of molasses and seasalt, some character of the local women that caused him to prefer the distant hope of locating a mermaid and reconciling his anatomy with hers (the sailing sorts, who could not help but
end up debtors,scoundrels, and mercenaries,also could not afford to be leg men). With all this said about seafaring,that there once existed a circumstance which Jozeffs abandoned in favor of seafaring was enough to convince Jozeffs that this original condition must have been dreadful, or as he put it, humble. Reflection — not any particular piece of evidence — led him to claim, '...beginning...(etc.)' Jozeffs, for all of his skill in altimetrics and clinosidal formulas,seemed to possess no memory and was therefore unable to produce even a single anecdote about his personal history — only unstructured and disquieting digressions concerning omens.These omens — which he strung together as a narrative, as though they constituted the factual matter of his early life — could just as easily have been inferred through working backwards: he knew he was a sailor; hence his claim of once spilling water at dinner without mentioning fire. Similarly, that he was unmarried would have been predicted by his once wronging a woman in lust, and that his body had become lean without showing bone would have been predicted by once having eaten without chewing properly. * Among the more controversial claims that Jozef-Matilte Jozeffs made in his testimony to Istvan Tamas'court was that he left Hungary (specifically the Koros Delta region) sometime in the
15
..•••••
middle of the seventeenth century It is not entirely unreasonable that this part of the world could have produced a sailor.
exceptionality, at least in popular imagination. Many similar men — Yousef-Matilte, Jozef-Atilla, and Matilte Matilte-Jozef,
Most of the locals worked in shipping,and those that didn't
for example — become sailors and were subsequently forgotten,
still engaged in nautical sports. Mothers demanded promises from their first-borns that they would not go near the docks, for odds were they'd return embarnacled,gypsiefied, drowned,
sometimes by their own families. Matilte-Jozef's wife forgot
or a sailor; nevertheless,concessions were made for athletic pursuits such as stone-swim-dash, the Triple Floatsam,or the
any man who produced any evidence whatsoever that he and
freestyle soak. Mothers were not oblivious to the fact that reputations and family pride were at stake, as were commemorative cups and ceremonial prize daggers. But even the flashiest Scalibur:forthcoming, commemorative dagger (cf. Vance-Granville Press) was only a fraction as impressive as the least extraordinary sea scar (cf.'Appendectomy wound:how unremarkable!:in print, Tissue and Abrasion Quarterly). Furthermore,it was glory that was rewarded in sport — power, athleticism,and other similar skills that would require the building of muscle, proper dietary practices, and in extreme cases,a bathing cap. This was unattractive to the sailor. His victory consisted only in surviving — he was not the sort that would consider himself entitled to anything further, as this would require quite a bit of planning ahead.In the pursuit of survival,the distinction between excellence and mediocrity was
what he looked like, and,despite a strong desire to remain true to her husband,became an easy target for suitors. She trusted she had once exchanged vows,and would immediately lie with that man in passion. After years at sea, Matilte-Jozef shows up at his own doorstep, with a box of Turkish Delight and a gigantic Asian orchid, only to find her in hot embrace with the fraud Yousef-Matilte.'But I'm your real husband; he insisted, and indicated the word Matilte branded into his left breast as though it were proof.'You'll have to do better than that; replied Yousef-Matilte, who bore the identical tattoo,except in cursive. Jealous rage turned into celebration as the two men, after talking briefly about genealogy, realized that they were so closely related that a child fathered by either one would just as easily be mistaken for the other's offspring. They decided,then and there,to begin sharing everything equally but the arrangement collapsed when it was revealed that Yousef-Matilte had unfairly claimed the more delicious half of the Turkish Delights.' Celebration again became jealousy and the two
obviated as a bogus one. The sailor fled from land with a single aim:to return from a voyage whose length was just slightly longer than the lifespan of the local money lender and to do so with a mind that remained sufficiently reasonable that it could judge whether the whole affair was worth it or not. Might Mr. Jozeffs fit the bill? According to the facts at our disposal,the likely answer is'No:Either he perished at sea,or returned from it in an unreasonable condition; the facts that describe his survival are incompatible with the ones that speak to his sanity. The only records testifying that there was any-
Matilte-lozefhad laid claim to the right half, but as Turkish was read from right-to-left, Yousef-Matilte had no choice but to eat his brother's halfin the process ofreaching his own.
screamed at one another so loudly, day and night,that their ears were impervious to the sound of Jozef-Atilla pulling a fast one (followed by a slow one) on their wife. But these fanciful tales — mostly unsubstantiated heresy, kept around merely because they are easily accommodated by the memories oflaymen and the unacadem-
ic — serve only to distract the Reader from the more interesting question about how our hero, the sailor Jozef-Matilte
alone speak to his heroism — either contradict themselves,or
Jozeffs — a man about whom few facts are known,except that his disabled memory hides his origin — became immortalized
else are out-and-out fictions. Nonetheless,in such folklore, Jozef-Matilte Jozeffs is so fre-
in lore and legend. The natural question to ask is'A legend, we have all learned in our studies, is endowed by its Creator with a
quently presented as a hero — a man whose day's work con-
beginning, middle,and end. So how can there be a legend about this Jozeffs, when not even he himself could account for his own beginning?'This question is absurd and therefore col-
thing remarkable at all about this Jozef-Matilte Jozeffs — let
sisted of showcasing not only his might,but also his reasonability and wit — that we may take it as evidence of this sailor's
11
lapses upon the slightest introspection. This step I will leave for the Reader as an exercise; he is free to use the backs of
even ones,the secrets of death and eternal life. He thereby unwittingly taught the cat how to live to an uncountable age,
these sheets or the margins if it will aid him in his calculation.
which was much longer than the snakelet's original estimate of the cat's lifespan (15,999 days). More years went by,and after
* The name lozef-Matilte Jozeffs' is peppered throughout the folklore of a region in the extreme north of Hungary known as the Koros Delta. The Koros River Delta was populated by between twenty- and thirty-thousand, most of whom are now deceased. The primary religion of the area was Calvinetics, though some objected to its hierarchy and stuck to ancestor
the snakelet revealed the final story (entitled 'it is turtles all the way down!') the cat, weeping,told him that he would have to uphold his end of the bargain by eating the snakelet.'What makes this especially difficult is that I fear that I will die the minute I eat a snake; I've avoided them my whole life, as I have been told they're poisonous:(He had been banking on the fact
worship.
that he'd be long dead before the snakelet finished his storytelling, which is why he accepted his offer in the first place). Star-
Most of the ancestors involved in the matter hated all of the extra attention, and advocated a peculiar strain of animism
tled, the snakelet asked what had happened to all of the other snakes who had come to visit the cave. Hadn't they been sent,
that worshiped only those beasts smaller than the size of a chicken egg (since most of the evil done in the world was per-
one by one,for the cat to feast upon? The cat did not understand; he had merely had them over to practice knot-tying,
formed by individuals who were egg-sized or larger). The moral status of unborn chickens, who are exactly the size of eggs,
and had subsequently wished them well and sent them on their way,the same way they had come (it was then that the snakelet
was left unspecified and those who asked about it were accused of being busybodies and made to stand in the corner. A popular folk myth,still told in the area, describes the exis-
realized that snake tracks look the same coming as they do going). Minutes after having eaten the snakelet,the cat realized
tence of evil in the following way: in the early universe' a cat
the deliciousness of flesh. The secret to eternal life, it became clear, had made him immune to poisons,so he left his cave,
who inconvenienced a large community of snakes convinced them that he would keep mostly to his own
dug up the snake pit, and ate all of its residents. That same cat, still alive, plagues mankind — trying to convince men,as they
business if they sent one of their kind over to him each night. Time passed in such a
sleep,to eat the flesh of snakes,cats, and one another. And out of that desire, man molests his fellow man.
a ... which
consisted only ofcats, snakes, and an uninteresting but necessary stack of turtles who supported the universe on their backs but never involved themselves in the narrative...
way until one day,the snake who volunteered to go was a very clever orphan snakelet, and knew stories which explained the origin each of the 16,000 objects in the
* The twin Koros Rivers, it was thought, must have originated from the same point,and therefore early geographers con-
world (from Aix-la-Chapelle to Zugspitze) as a result of having paid close attention to omens.Alarmed at
ceived of their region as a triangle of infinite length. It was before the Age of Satellites,so it was upon the shoulders of giants,
seeing snaketracks which went in — but none which came out —he hollered to the cat from outside of the cave:'I will tell
trampolinists,and trustworthy birds that the craft of cartography rested. They worked in committees,and when one such
you all of the stories that I know,one a night. Then and then only, after I finish, will you eat me:The cat agreed and invited
committee revealed that the rivers actually ran parallel to each other, those with strong nationalist ties threatened to riot. By
him in. Over the course of hundreds of years, the snakelet imparted the wisdom of the world to the cat, who was an excep-
the time an elegant non-Euclidian proof demonstrated how both sets of observations could be simultaneously true (in
tionally good listener: he revealed why the world included both shadows and sunlight, water and fire, odd numbers and
non-Euclid's words,'They can have their cakes and eat them too') it was too late: the delta, by any name,lay in shambles.
17
'Heap,'a memorial sculpture, was created by collecting the shambles into a pile tall enough to appear very imposing,even
ages who had promised them cities of gold, but instead hi-
from space, with the hope that any future trampolinist or giant
jacked their freight and cursed the first-mate with halfwitted-
would be impressed by the sculpture to the point that he
ness(when in truth he had been that way ever since puberty).
would ignore surrounding geography:'If Heap had existed just
Perhaps it was an encounter with a gigantic Persian sea-kro-
a few years earlier,' children's choirs would sing,'none of this
mo — rather than a gambling debt,a regrettable affair about
would have happened:
which he couldn't keep quiet, or a shaving accident — that ex-
But the stories that describe Jozef-Matilte — sometimes as a trickster and sometimes as a strong-man,often as an old man
plained why the captain returned decapitated!In this way was born the sailor's secret that eventually sucked the wind out of
but,on occasion,as a precocious or physically tremendous
the north-Hungarian economy and fed the ocean floor with
child — have endured far longer than this Heap, which has left
crates of Magyar freight. Not more than a few hundred yards
no traces and for all we know may have been a misrepresentation (in actuality, an ordinary mountain) or an exaggeration (a
off the coast of the Atlantic, mere inches under the nose of the Emperor's Council of Cartagrophers, was born the institution
molehill made into a mountain. We shall not here concern
of the travel lie.
ourselves with those questions which inquire into the nature of
On one hand,it was the first time in history — this Second
the molehill). Even as late as the redistributive revolutions that
Age of Miracles — that sailing was elevated to the same stature
came to infect the Proclaimed German Empire of the modern
as the quantitative sciences,such as Microscopery,Hydropon-
era, Jozef-Matilte's name was employed in last-ditch efforts to
ics, or Nautical-Sports Medicine. The nature of the world,
rally citizens' confidence in their ailing government.'
which Science had revealed to be empirically knowable,threat-
3 The historians among you will recall that it did; people bought bonds as though they were hotcakes. Unfortunately the scheme worked so well that people pulled money away from other household necessities such as education, actual hotcakes, and even clothing. The rest of Europe assumed this wasforfashion's sake and followed suit; within a decade most on the Continent had developed strong ideological ties to nudism.
The Jozef-Matilte described by historical
ened to lay itself bare; fueled by mathematical discoveries such
fact, in fact, was an ungifted sailor who la-
as Newtonian Calculus and this handy trick that lets you calcu-
bored aboard ships dispatched by the Em-
late tip by doubling tax, a burgeoning scientific class was itching to ogle. Erlaubensiglers, to the naked eye,seemed identical
peror's Council of Cartographers. At least one of his captains came from a class of explorers known as the Erlaubensigler — literally'permit sailors' — who received heavy subsidies(and prestigious sailing permits)from
to ordinary seamen taking up their usual role as survival artists who dropped off the face of the earth until either catastrophe struck or their crimes-on-land had been forgotten. In the eyes of the Empire,they had as much to do with advancing knowl-
later of Leopold 1) in exchange for carrying
edge as an Anatomist's voyage deep into realm of biles and corpuscles,or a Cosmologist's joyride through the Milky Way
surveying equipment onboard during their
by way of optics.
expeditions. They were expected to return
On the other hand,the great Magyar hope — that the difference between an Erlaubensigler and a sailor was something
the court-of Emperor Ferdinand in (and
with detailed maps of the Far East,Africa, and the New World along with careful anthropological reports, based on state-of-theart techniques in surveying and ethnography,about the customs and tastes of the new
peoples they discovered. In practice,the risky nature of sea trade created a perverse incentive: permit in hand,sailors would sail no more than a few hundred yards into the Atlantic before tossing their cargo overboard. Weight shed,they would spend the night painting fake bruises on their bodies with jaggery or coal and — as was the habit of sailors — dreaming up all the ways that adventure rather than trickery could explain the (often shabby) condition
18
of their return. From their imagination resulted frightful sav-
more than the possession of a permit — was actually a massive myth. A permit would not turn a sailor's pumpkin into a carriage, or outfit his pegleggy stump with glass slippers. Tenaciously,sailors held to their habits of perpetual debt,scoundrelry, and mercenariness. But although permits exhibited absolutely no magical properties, those who held them consistently actualized the inconceivable. They managed to secure trading alliances with the Supreme Commanders of the moon, the Pole Star, and the Chole Empire of Western India. They opened up real estate dealings with the Kingdom of Atlantis, and returned to their homelands with undecipherable contracts — notarized with stray markings that were to be taken as
I
1411110EODEVAU:1
Mashlima
0'
Savage handwriting — that promised title-right over entire tracts of the as-of-yet untamed Central Americas. For a time, it
A man concerned with the facts and only the facts will find the facts describing Mr. Jozeffs to be interesting only in service
appeared that the Magyar Empire was bound by neither the Koros Rivers, nor the Atlantic Ocean,nor even the God-given
of a larger discussion of his historical context. His parentage is uncertain, as he was either a bastard or the son of one. Plau-
boundaries of the planet Earth. Crucially, travel liars preyed only upon those for whom the
sible candidates, based on town-hall records (which are notoriously unreliable,to the point that the Dewey Decimal system
ways of the sea — the look ofjaggery on skin,the twitch around the eyes and change in respiration by which one tells when a
ranks these documents in the'Folks 8c Folklore section'...`I just couldn't in good conscience call these non-fiction; a colleague once overheard Mr. Decimal fretting) include local bas-
sailor is lying — were unfamiliar; among them powerful though landlocked men such as Leopold i (and later Rakoczi II). Soon,as it became Europe's habit to let their permits follow their fantasies, it became standard practice to grant immense rewards and kingdom-wide adulation unto those who could reliably comment on the nature of the wonderful and other-worldly. It became the way of the land that honest-togoodness exploration earned a man scurvy or a peg leg, while a travel lie delivered with sufficient care as long as it was not unimaginable that a man could live to tell it — would bring a court to tears, and riches to the teller. Success consisted not in nautical expertise; the great difficulty confronting an Erlaubensigler was ensuring that among those on board,there was at least one accomplished liar or, more accurately,some confidence man who would index the mere fact of his literacy (still a rarity among sailors) as proof ofsome knowledge of storytelling. At the very least, a literate gentleman could be counted on when forgeries became necessary,such as when his captain signs a real estate contract with Savage Provost of Atlantis upon acquiring that istand's Golden Healing Beach. It is therefore unsurprising that the most famous among them,Jozef-Matilte Jozeffs, was not particularly well-suited for sea life. Indeed,it was unlikely that he got much farther than the first third of the first grade(rampant but highly patterned misspellings indicate that he knew his alphabet up to'13'but no further),since permit season begins in December. Nymphland-type fables'imply that Jozeffs was respected, but not necessarily for either kind of intelligence — 4 Common forms include those in which the microscopic villain Thumbkin would defeat Jozeffs at wrestling or would stealfrom him, but would eventually receive horrific justice at the hands ofa ravenous bumblebee or a lustful millipede.
20
booksmarts or streetsmarts. He may never have made it to sea if the structure of rewarding Erlaubensiglers did not make it profitable for certain crews to scour the countryside for storytellers, then smuggle them aboard to cook up fantastical voyages, the retelling of which would make their shipmates wealthy.
tard-makers such as Matilte Matilte-Jozef, or Yousef-Matilte. Born into a community consisting mostly ofjunior sailors and unemployed persons, he likely spent his adolescence involved in the smuggling business ('smugbiz'): either crate-smashing, the Long Jump,de-seaweeding, keeping lookout,or supplychain management. Given what we know about Jozeffs in particular, chances are he was most useful in creating a diversion.' 5 E.g.,'Hey sail's untied,' which would usually work, even if the sail used buckles! Other times, one might sing thefirst portion ofa sea shanty, and would feign trouble remembering the end — usually some rascally punchline — until some concerned sailor would gleefully assist.
Most who were born in such communities stayed there until death or marriage, at which point they would leave by sea in search of Mermaids.Though no certificates speak to it, the fact that Jozeffs did the same likely evidences that he once experimented with marriage,love,or both. It is widely thought among the relevant academics that these'Mermaids'— even the dishiest — may not have actually resembled women but were more likely ocean life or in some cases, saltwater monsters such as sea-Kromo. Sail-
or's boats,in any case, were floated. Beginning sometime in the 168os,civil administrators became concerned with low-level corruption in the Empire's legal system. Outlawing bribery outright seemed a lofty goal,so lawmakers proposed a'common-politick' host of reforms,including requiring that officers keep records of arrests, trials, and prison admittances. While this did not completely eliminate frivolous arrests, it ensured that those that did occur were worth bragging about. It is generally accepted that the most reliable biographic information concerning Jozeffs is what has been extracted from these arrest transcripts and imprisonment records. We are most certainly lucky that Jozeffs was so clumsy in his smuggling matters! Officials caught him pacing to and fro along a dock,waiting for the return of his partners,surrounded by crates of indigo, a sheep under each arm.'What has occupied
you for so long? And how,so suddenly, are all of you in moustaches? For this you go home?'he asked one of them while
Documentationwise, at this point Jozeffs drops off the earth's surface. If his career with permit-sellers consisted of his work-
handing him a crate.'Now away with us! If it is dark and I am not yet home my sister, overcome with suspicion, will sum-
ing as a professional concoctor of lies, then it is clear that his
mon the police!'
would be directly issued under his name.In all likelihood, he
Overcrowding required that prisoners be sent by sea to populate the New World or, if weak or unskilled,to intern for col-
worked on ships the remainder of his life, and either retired
onists. Though intended to build the necessary skills that would allow these offenders to eventually become colonists themselves,in practice few accomplished anything further than hand-copying manuscripts or brewing molasses. Luckily for Jozeffs, the position allowed him to learn reading and writing, which in turn improved his penmanship (once so poor it
being onboard had to be kept secret; it follows that no permit
comfortably and without fanfare, or perished at sea. Men working Jozef-Matilte's job recognized that it was an unenviable — indeed, dangerous — position. Though they were explicitly chosen to be unfit for testimony, what they knew nevertheless posed a threat to the paranoids among the Erlaubensiglers. Many storytellers were killed at sea by their employers or crew (though red savages, sea monsters,sun diseases, and salt mad-
caused him to be ejected from several academic positions that he had held at various smuggling colleges, as well as from the
ness often undeservedly took the blame).
first grade). Living on a ship while tending to ship matters made him a better worker — it became apparent that he had it
the books on Jozeffs. But we will explore a (by now) well-docu-
in him all along, but the inconvenience of a morning commute had been getting in the way. After months at sea, authorities
their covers once again! We will come to that by way of a short
re-opened his case and,following a brief interview,concluded that his role in the robbery was ambiguous — tricky Jozeffs
the master of efficiency and the Appointed Lord of the Inter-
managed to mask his involvement by speaking primarily in the
The Reader is certainly familiar with the work of the es-
passive voice. The lost period of Jozef-Matilte's life is, as the name indicates, either undocumented or foolishly documented on the types of paper that disintegrates over time. Nobody can tell which (The Reader is discouraged from even trying!). When certain kinds of rice-sheet were first brought from the Far East, trading-class Europeans did not appreciate their nutritive value and instead were drawn to their archival potential. History has suffered for their irresponsible experiments with eggroll skin and its ilk. It is unlikely that he was on dry land very long; if he had been, he would have given in to old habits (smuggling, bastard-making) and been accounted for in prison logs. Most likely, he was swept up in the majesty of the Erlaubensigler. More accurately, he was useful to Erlaubensiglers, who sought literate men with sufficient nautical experience that they did not pose a nuisance, but without such great skill that their opinions — in case of a double-cross — would appear respectable to royal solicitors. Jozeffs was thereby able to find his way onto shipping crews, and was sufficiently trustworthy that he was accounted for as an asset rather than a liability on their rosters. *
At this point it may be with great confidence that you close mented historical quirk that may compel you peek to between digression,through which we will befriend Istvan Tamas, chamber. teemed Istvan Tamas,a one-time sailor himself who restored both order and reason to the Magyar trading empire, who worked with supernatural stamina and had no use for luck. Afraid throughout his childhood of being captured and bullied by tough rogues,at a very early age he sought refuge in the Lorand Institute for Fundamental Research, which was shaped like a castle, and enrolled as soon as possible so that he could remain permanently within it. His exacting and acute mind soon earned him the coveted rank of First Among Readers,and the accompanying prize of a two-week exemption from gym lessons. By the time he concluded his education with a combined degree in Analytics and Geoskoppik-verwaltung-wunderkraft, the heart of Europe had been bled of its wealth; its heavy investment in subsidized exploration had yielded inconsequential gains and had furthermore blurred the distinctions between data and fiction (indeed, the separation between craft and craftiness!). At a time when all of Europe's knowledge of non-Europe depended on honest accounts from those that had made the trip, nothing prevented a lie from doing science's respectable job. A deteriorating economy demanded a steady supply of leadership; it waited for the long-arm that would outlaw the Erlaubensigler and pull minds out of gutters. Hence, Istvan's climb to power was swift. 21
Upon graduation, he desperately sought employment in the worst job market, proportionwise,since the Bronze Age. Be-
be substitutable in a variety of assembly-line processes. Trade schools, which found eager pupils among the rural, allowed
tween the issuing of the first sailor's permit and the six-hundredth (a span of about 200 years), inflation had rendered
minimally-skilled workers to develop a solid technical base that would allow easy transition between entry-level industrial
printed money almost worthless. Indeed, many found it far more profitable to cut out from their currency notes portraits of Emperor Leopold I (later Harmig iv), install them in
jobs. Istvan's contribution was to bandage the leak that funneled capital towards impractical (usually imagined) sea voy-
frames, and resell them as patriotic artwork. While patriotism did its part in reforming monetary policy by encouraging the purchase of bonds, periods offad investment diverted capital towards chancy projects. After years of falling prey to false botanists who promised high returns on costly magic beans,savvy consumers had no choice but to adopt a risk-aversity that stipulated,among other things,that they were best served by assuming that all beans were non-magic. The unexpected result was a tragic and spectacular epidemic. In hundreds of villages, gigantic beanstalks sprouted violently from the digestive chambers of naïve beanbuyers; consequently, burrito sales, already suffering,fell to about zero. A few industries, however, actually profited from the onset of economic depression. Those selling barrels-with-shoulderstraps found that their business skyrocketed, bolstered by insolvents looking to get clothed `on the cheap:The proprietors of peep-shows also
Study ofDomestic and External Nation-Sustaining Activity(intended as a practical guide capable of withstanding changes in governments,and bound in solid iron so as to resist rough handling), were simple enough to outline in a single paragraph,though illustrations and footnotes pushed the final length to several volumes. His theories are built from observations borne out of his brief experience at sea as a blubbersifter, a post so rarely preferred to unemployment that it was usually reserved for punishment or else for halfwits. Istvan enjoyed the position because it allowed him to do something with his hands,and working the vat had the meditative side effect of undoing some of his senses. By participating in casual banter with his crewmates, he eventually developed an appreciation for the peculiarities of sailing men — particularly the liars among them. I have excerpted below a crucial passage:
prospered by cleverly altering their normal skin shows to cater to depression-era fantasies. For a nominal sum,drooling patrons — in the privacy of their own booth — could watch stop-
A liar, when confronted with the task of concocting facts from thin air, must make use of certain habits which have served him well in his past routines. These
motion films of smartly dressed families eating three-course dinners.
habits are not limited to twitches of demeanor or shifts in the pitch of his voice. They extend to the content of
Istvan was single-handedly credited with saving the Magyar empire the millions of pounds of gold that, by the late 1800s,
his discourse,and predict the characteristics of his lie even before it exits his mouth.
were invested in newborn industry. Joint-stock arrangements provided easy money to factories that, in turn,created jobs
By applying these principles, which were founded in reason, Istvan trained himself in the science of discrimination. He
and manufactured the world's textiles, gun internals, and leather goods. Western Hungary,due to the ready availability
could separate the lying sailor from the truth-teller, and inferred punch lines merely from set-ups, all without employing telepathy or mesmerism. His secret was his mastery over the
of river banks(and thus water power) manufactured standard factory irons that only needed slight modification in order to
24
ages and away from these profitable internal matters. His measures, written up clearly in The Path to Wellrule: A
general formulas of tale-telling that made up most sea fare, which would constrain a sailor's fantasy — 'like strings do to a
tic, or the Antarctic; and any tale in which a sailor spends more than fifteen hours riding a dolphin, whale, mermaid or
lute: he waxed. The remaining paragraphs of his study consist of a meticulously-detailed,illegibly tedious anthologram of
other brute of marine-biological origin. A secondary appendix includes a list of popular techniques used to dupe the markings
every species of sailing lie, the so-called 'prime subformulas.'
of adventure,such heated codliver oil to imitate burns,certain fruits or spices to create bruise-seeming discolorations,and
Among them: + Real Estate Deals with Savages. Sample phony savage script (surprisingly,some knew calligraphy while oth-
certain cuts of squid to substitute for a visit from a willing lady. Upon his return from seafaring, Istvan published his tell-all
ers, only the markings from tic-tac-toe) may be found
Road to Wellrule, and was almost immediately appointed to the Royal Council's Court of Internal Affairs. He was given the
as an appendix. + Fantastical Explanations Concerning the Death of Crew Members. Included are long lists outlining the symp-
authority to preside unilaterally over the Interchamber,a court of law whose jurisdiction was officially limited to reforming the
toms of rum pox,salt fever, and the reviled Dutch groin-blight (curiously identical to the symptoms of
permit-sailor system but whose work had far-reaching implications for the scientific, hydrographic and cartographic commu-
French trench-mouth,implying that scandal occurs whenever the French and Dutch share trenches!).
nities as well as the ailing Hungarian economy. Istvan was charged with nothing less than setting the standards that deter-
+ Imaginary or Implausible Political Systems(such as `retrocracy, all-for-one-ism, kingdoms ruled by children,
mined which sorts of things counted as true,and which sorts of things didn't — his heavy responsibility was to dictate who
and one-for-all-ism). + Detailed Anatomies of More Than Thirty Bogus Sea Monsters. Most are squid variants (i.e., Finotaur),
was granted the Emperor's favor and his subsequent Subsidy. He was considered one of the most eligible bachelors west of
but a few are interesting half-beasts, such as catfish or rabbitcod. Predictability — the sin of telling a tale already accounted for, or a composite of, Istvan's prime subformulas — was what signaled that an Erlaubensigler's account was a figment or a fabrication, rather than wholesome data. If one grants,for fancy's sake, that a testimony were a chemist's broth,then Wellrule would not be entirely unlike a massive Litmus paper (and Istvan, by extension, not entirely unlike Litmus)! Also included are certain categories of stories, distinct from
the Urals. As early as 1800,Istvan had already begun personally presiding over the large-scale revocation of sailing permits. Revocation was almost always accompanied by charges of one or more of the following:fraudulence, misappropriation of the King's finances, mutiny aboard a permit-vessel, mutiny of the Emotive virtues against their captain Reasonability, and sodomy (either pre-meditated or impulsive). Those close to Istvan remember this demanding period of his life as a paranoid time, during which he refused to eat any food that had not been pre-
the subformulas, that, though they were less commonly occurring archetypes, were nevertheless sure-fire indicators of dis-
pared under his constant supervision. So that he did not have to forgo baked goods, he commissioned the invention of the glass-bottom oven; the same technology was applied towards
honesty: any tale in which a sailor spends more than fifteen hours underwater; those tales crucially featuring super- or zero-gravity; any story involving aircraft, anti-aircraft, the ar-
the design of the invisible evening gown,which,as late as the days of the Proclamation of the German Empire,continued to sell like hotcakes.
25
-
INK DRAWING
Tyler Coburn
Of the six-hundred-some permits that had sustained professional Erlaubensiglerism, Istvan revoked three-hundred in his first ten years as Commisioner of the Interchamber,and the remaining three-hundred in his second ten years. Many were issued to sailors who had,at the moment of revocation, been deceased for some time. They were disgraced posthumously. Like their living counterparts,they were usually tried,convicted, made to apologize,fined,then disposed of — except all done in effigy. Effigies that were found innocent were put up for adoption. While some landed very desirable jobs in department store windows, most were taken in by unsympathetic rural households that put them to work in the fields as scarecrows. The less well-crafted were doomed to seasonal unemployment,and could only afford to have families in the month of October, during which they could find temp jobs in haunted houses. It is the revocation of one such permit — the one issued to a wealthy, deceased shipper by the name of Franzis Ned — that has generated much recent scholarship in the field. His trial required that several witnesses be brought before the Interchamber,including a number of deckhands who eventually admitted to having tossed cargo overboard and having been paid to lie about it. Netl is only worth mentioning because among those called forth to testify in his trial was a middleaged-seeming gentleman who had accompanied Ned on several sea journeys(presumably as a ledger-man,but likely as a full-time liar), though nothing in his demeanor or appearance (both thoroughly un-sailorly) suggested that he had so much as taken a walk along the beach. He reported his name as Jozef-Matilte Jozeffs, and Netl's diaries reveal nothing about him other than that he managed the accounts and came with the ship as a package-deal. The transcript of his testimony reveals that Jozeffs was an evasive and cantankerous gent, who would not respond to questions but would instead make ridiculous claims about his professional qualifications. Though he would volunteer no
26
information about his title onboard Netl's ship, he insisted on
pulp, which bear the marks of being previously handled. No
being referred to as'CAPTAIN over the Captain of captains'
man ought to live on another man's paste!' Curiously, Ist-
throughout the trial. At various points throughout his exami-
van — possibly because of Jozeffs queer and unconventional
nation, he claimed to have introduced the latitude/longitude
testimony — did not press any charge of fraudulence,but rather
system to the Western world, to have had male children by
convicted him of'public disorder,and behaving like an ob-
over 200 women (several of whom were Amazons,though all
stacle placed before justice: Additionally, after a visit to his
educated Europeans believed such women to be absolutely
cell, Istvan seems to have allowed Jozeffs the option of choos-
infertile), to have been the first non-eunuch male allowed into the personal fortress of Ravilal Bhole (the divinely appointed
ing his own sentence. Nevertheless, Jozeffs appears to have been strong-armed into agreeing to death by sea-soak,and the
Grand-Chancellor of the Chole Dynasty),and most outra-
next evening was attached to an enormous plumb-bob and
geously,to have assembled the first reflecting quadrant — when
dropped into the leftmost of the two Koros rivers. A mere courtroom flare-up — even in the context of the aus-
octants had already been in common use for nearly a century at the time of his trial! Though he would only provide cryptic
tere Interchamber — would not motivate a scholarly inquiry
and misleading hints about his family or place of origin (first
into the history of this Jozeffs. Nor would the interesting
he claimed to have no fathers,then to have three, and finally,
though distracting detail about Istvan's unprecedented deci-
after withdrawing all of his earlier statements, declared that the
sion to allow Jozeffs to decide his fate — and Jozeffs'surprising
only thing he knew was that he started from 'humble'and'un-
decision to send himself to the bottom of the ocean without
remarkable'stock), he was eager to volunteer astrological data that suggested that he was over one-hundred-and-fifty years
any measure of comfort save the stalwart companionship of one plumb-bob. The explanatory gap that we aim to fill is the
old. His testimony was punctuated with unmotivated, unverifi-
following: by any estimate, it is clear that one Jozef-Matilte
able exclamations that'he had accomplished more in a single
Jozeffs was arrested for smuggling and subsequently sent on a
lifetime than many men do in a millennium.' Crucially, he re-
punitive sea mission sometime in the early 17005 or slightly
fused to provide any evidence that might have incriminated the deceased Erlaubensigler Franzis Netl. He would speak only
before. And ioo years later, through the work of the vigilant Istvan Tamas,another Jozef-Matilte Jozeffs — making specific,
about issues concerning his own personal sea adventures, persistently refuse to name his crewmates,and also claimed that
though unintelligible, claims about navigational technology
he had never seen nor heard of any Ned in his fifteen decades as a sailor. With a case based exclusively on the circumstantial
found on board a commercial vessel captained by the wealthy
testimony of notoriously unreliable deckhands, Istvan had no choice but to send Netl's effigy away with a stern warning.
man brought before Istvan's Interchamber be identical to the character who,nearly a century earlier, had set sail on a disci-
Held in contempt for making a mockery of the Intercham-
plinary shipping mission and had taught himself the alphabet
ber, Jozeffs was detained for a week, during which time he re-
while onboard — implying that he had been at seafor at least a
fused to ingest anything but would mutilate his entrée until it
hundred years, and had returned in a perfectly preserved condi-
was but a mush. He repeatedly demanded to speak with priests,
tion? Or could it be the case that the insensible gentleman
then with rabbis, but when any arrived he would merely show
'Jozef-Matilte Jozeffs' had — in order to beguile Istvan and con-
them his food and complain 'all they serve me is paste and
found his powers of explanation — feigned the identity of some
that had been out of vogue for at least an entire century — was and influential Franzis Netl. Could this badly-balanced gentle-
27
-
historically insignificant sailor who had been unremarkably extinguished one-hundred years earlier? Apart from assisting us in articulating the'Jozeffs paradox' in its most concise form,there is no further resolution that any available record may provide. Either there existed some ludicrous hundred-plus-year-old man who briefly appeared before Istvan's Interchamber, or by some feat of impersonation a seaaddled deckhand accurately assumed the identity of a gentleman with whom he had next to nothing in common.But to decide which of these two conditions obtain requires collecting an impossible piece of data:the sort that resides within the brain of Jozef-Matilte Jozeffs and in no other place. Here,the modern academy is as powerless as Istvan was in discerning which portions of Jozeffs' Interchamber testimony are lies. Few conclusions — aside from that Jozeffs spent part of his life occupying boats,that he sailed on them during the age of Erlaubensiglerism, and may have earned a living by imagining areas of the world just beyond his observation — may be drawn from the facts as stated. If the Reader chooses to proceed beyond these facts, he is advised to do so with great caution and healthy skepticism,and to leave some sort of a trail that will allow him to easily trace his steps backwards. *
1
OIL PAINTING
Adriane Quinlan :
28
h.,.
1=N=
Interview David Gorin
with
Louise
Gliick
Haven, * conducted by telephone on March 27 and 28,2004 from 37 Lynwood Place, New
Louise Gluck was born in New York City in 1943 and raised on Long Island. She is the author of nine books ofpoetry, including The Triumph of Achilles (1985), which won the National Book Critics Circle award, Ararat (1990), which won the Bobbitt National Poetry Prize, The Wild Iris (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize, Vita Nova (1999), which won thefirst annual New Yorker Magazine's Readers Award and the Ambassador's Award, and most recently, The Seven Ages (2001). Her many honors include the William Carlos Williams Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and,for her book ofessays, the PEN/Martha Albrand Awardfor Nonfiction. In 2001, she received the Bollingen Prizefor Poetry. She has recently completed a new manuscript ofpoetry. In September of2004, she will begin teaching poetry as the Rosencranz Writer-in-Residence at Yale. Louise Gliick is currently the judge ofthe Yale Series of Younger Poets and the twelfth Poet Laureate ofthe United States.
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Connecticut
IMP
You've said in another interview that you have to hear 'a kind of
remind you that you don't know yet what to do. Many of my
sound, a tone'in order to begin a poem. I'm interested in that
books began that way — with a single line that haunted me.
term, tone. Like coloring in painting, tone in poetry can seem
Ultimately, I understood how to use it. Sometimes it's much
intangible compared to the art's other qualities. How does one
faster — sometimes you hear the sound and very rapidly the
begin to communicate the tone in one's mind — which seems as
book or poem organizes itself. But I think that this has been
though it could exist there in the abstract — to a tone on the page?
characteristic of my work before it was of a quality to be called
* It doesn't go like that. Tone announces itself in the presen-
'my work:Even when I was a child,I listened to that spirit,
tation of an example. Suddenly, you have a line in your head that sounds to you unprecedented. It isn't that you then move to analyze the qualities or attributes of that sound and aug-
that voice, which didn't seem of my making.
ment it, it's that you see the track or road or river that you're
household where three different languages were spoken, only one
supposed to be following,and all of a sudden, you become a speaker of that language, that tone. But you don't formulate it as an abstraction,and then communicate it or decant it; you
of which was natural to him — and that was whatforced him to
The poet Henri Cole, in an essay, mentioned that he grew up in a
be sensitive to tone. Can you point to anything in your childhood
hear it as utterance,and realize you've never made that sound
thatforced you to learn tone? * No [laughter] — everyone spoke English. It was usually a rather encoded English. My fa-
before. Once you understand its properties, you usually under-
ther was a very witty man and interested in literary form,
stand to some degree or other — maybe not fully immediately,
though too timid to really press himself— or so I judge...that
but sometimes — you understand what subjects that tone is for.
may be unfair. My sister and I wrote books and little rhymes
So in a way,thematic issues form themselves around the emer-
very early. And I read poetry very early. Not because the house
gence of that sound.
was so filled with books of poetry — there was much more fiction and history. But somewhere I came on an anthology,and
Has your notion oftone been evolving, or is it something you fig-
then around the same time a little book of the songs from
ured out in retrospect that you have alwaysfollowed? * It has
Shakespeare's plays. I was tiny — I'm sure I had no idea who
always been clear to me that that's how I work. I get little frag-
was speaking and what was happening, but I understood that
ments or shards of language in my head. Sometimes they just sit there without issue for many years. Initially, they're very
this was the language that I wanted to speak. I used to recite the poems to myself in my head when I was five or six years
consoling because they prove that there's still something to be
old. If you said'What's this about?'I couldn't have told you,
done; ultimately,they start to seem a torment because they
but I did hear the tone right. I think sometimes teachers are so
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Peter Feigenbaum
preposterously cautious about the poems they'll let children hear because they think they have to predict what the child will
You feel when you find one that you've discovered something.
understand as subject. But you can hear tone.
experience.
I'd like to talkfor a moment about certain moments in your work
Help me understand what it means to come to a point where you
where the speaker becomes aware ofa certain cycle ofrepetition,
can no longer sustain ignorance. * You develop new forms of
an awareness that constitutes what seems like true experience. In
being ignorant — like a sort of resourceful bacteria that learns
'From a Journal,' you've written: I loved once,I loved twice, and suddenly the form collapsed: I was unable to sustain ignorance.
Later in The Seven Ages, in'The Ruse: you expand on the same
It feels more like making something up than describing
in the presence of antibiotics how to survive.[Laughter.] If one form doesn't work,then the devious self evolves another. Is this a metaphor that could be applied to your cycles ofrebirth with respect to each new book ofyours? * There's usually a period that precedes writing that seems to me roughly analogous to ignorance. It's filled with compulsion,illusion, and
theme:
confusion. The poem that you quote is about the death of a Never before. Never with anyone else. And then the whole thing repeated exactly with someone else. Until it was finally obvious
fantasy: as fantasies change,experience adjusts or undermines them,and then new fantasies gradually emerge out of bleakness — and who knows what they become. Unable to sustain ignorance,the particular myth that the situation in the poem
that the only constant was distance, the servant of need. Which was used to sustain whatever fire burned in each of us.
serves no longer can be earnestly enacted. It's that full-hearted earnestness and ardor that the myth requires,and it depends in that poem on ignorance — a certain kind of blindness. How that relates to cycles of composition is a little more mysterious.
The eyes, the hands — less crucial than we believed. In the end
I do feel that there are different forms of ignorance — some of
distance was sufficient, by itself.
them very bleak,and some of them a kind of willed creation of
It seems that the real object ofaffection identified here is not the romantic other but the process ofpursuit,for which distance is the fuel. In those last three lines, Ifeel a painful irony bordering on
a premise,a fantasy about love,a fantasy about the life. Gradually, that premise is undermined by observations that occur as you live through the thing. Ultimately,the force of experience, ideally, corrects the ignorance — but it leaves you rather
sarcasm, but also an earnest and equally painful wisdom — as though the distance were insufficient to satisfy the self, yet simul-
desolate.
taneously the source ofthought, insight, and ultimately poetry, which seems like a satisfaction in its own way. Or is it? * Of
When you've completed a poem about some moment ofchange or
course it is. Anything you turn into a poem becomes something to which you're grateful — it hardly matters what it is. In the second poem you quoted,there was no sense as the poem
suffering in your life, do youfind that your writing has changed anything about the way you think ofthat moment? Does writing about it help you achieve a kind of mastery over it? Is a poem simply the mapping ofthe struggle? * Absolutely it changes it.
evolved of transcribing my experience analytically. The poem said those things, and I regarded them and moved them
If you get out of an experience a poem that you think is a good
around until they made a more interesting poem.Very often, as you work on a poem,you'll change a positive statement to a
word,you never really think that — you think'this is alive,' if
negative version of itself simply because it's more electric on the page, more persuasive, more unexpected. Cumulatively,
you feel that the experience, which may have been devastating,
these things represent your thought,but your thought is dialectic, filled with arguments:'and yet:'but suppose,'and premises that then get undermined.I like to find them on the page.
piece of work or an exciting piece of work —'good'is a terrible you're excited about a piece of work — if you feel that, then has had this remarkable issue. The poem would not exist but for the experience. You find that you cannot regret the experience. If someone said,'Would you go back to that period before such and such has happened?' you think: and not have
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written whatever poem that seems to you to have been produced by that? No — all of a sudden,that becomes your muse,and you want to thank it daily with huge offerings of fruit and flowers. You make it sound disastrous to even consider life as anything other than a poet. * [Laughter.] I'm sure everybody has these same strategies. The advantage of working in your head — as a scholar,or a maker of art, and I would include all forms of art — is that you get to re-process experience. For the scholar, that would mean he or she would be capable of insights that had not been possible before. But you see it is also in love affairs: that's the world I know best. I think artists certainly have these faculties. You see it all the time in love affairs: you break up with someone,you think your heart is shattered, you think you won't survive,and three years later you're happier than you've ever been with someone else. And you think,'What if that relationship had enduFed — that one whose loss I thought I couldn't bear?'You would not have your present happiness — which comes about and exists because of the mutations to the self that occurred during the catastrophe. What shifted in your work and your life between Vita Nova and The Seven Ages? * The Seven Ages surprised me because I was thinking after Vita Nova,which was written very quickly, that there would be a long period of silence. I hadn't even gotten to the point where I was beginning to be anxious when I wrote The Seven Ages— so it seemed like a freebie. The experience it came out of'most deeply, the immediate catalyst, was the fact that I had moved a lot of my plants from Vermont here [to Cambridge]. I didn't think that perennials so large, so old — they were twenty year old plants — would survive the move. I didn't know what the different soil would be to them; I thought they would like the milder climate, but I didn't realize that they'd have much less sun. I was not very hopeful that they would live here. The Seven Ages was written the summer after the fall in which that work was done — and those 34
plants,they came back! I was euphoric. I think that released something. Let's see, what's changed? I bought property. Vita Nova was written in a space I was renting. Vita Nova was, psychologically, like putting your flag on the moon — like saying,I live here, this is mine, this can't be taken. I felt fragile, and that power of the gesture was somehow pressing, psychologically. By The Seven Ages, I was much more established. I was a property owner. I was,all of a sudden,a garden owner.The first summer,the defects of the garden were not present to me; I was simply happy that the plants existed. I also felt that I could hear this new tone. Some guy said to me at a reading, maybe eight years ago,'You are going to write the great erotic poems of old age:And I thought,fuck you, I'm not old![Laughter.] But then I started thinking that it would be fun to do — to sound very ancient, the voice ofsomeone who has been through it all, and to be writing about Eros.You're always looking for new assignments or new tasks. Even though I objected out of vanity in the moment,it ended up being a very useful spur, that little remark. I have no idea who that person was. In the past year or two, you've been named as the u.s. Poet Laureate, the winner ofthe Bollingen Prize, thejudge ofthe Yale Series of Younger Poets, and most recently, the Rosencranz Writer in Residence at Yale. (That's a lot of Yale!) How has all this attention affected your life and your work? * The Bollingen Prize was a very, very great honor. I think it's the thing that's happened to my work that makes me most purely happy. It's a list you're very happy to see your name on — unlike most. They do no publicity; nobody knew about it except the people I told, and it gets embarrassing to tell people. There was no little notice in the paper. So that did not bring great attention. As for the Yale Series: I'd realized by then that I really, really, really like reading manuscripts and choosing a winner. I love looking for gold in those big boxes. I think most poets really don't want to do that. For me,it's exhilarating. What made me
other institutions as a second job that there weren't many
nervous was the idea of writing five forwards — it was the only piece of it that held me back. That,and what had become the
schools I liked. I didn't want to go somewhere I found uncon-
habit of the [Yale University] Press to send on only a very few
genial; I knew I'd feel very unhappy. But Yale is a school I've
finalists — something like ten. But I was able to say,'No,I need to read at least a hundred,and probably more.'We also revised
ly to me. When this invitation came,it was the right time: I
the screening process. I love doing the reading. I love it because
was ready to stop commuting that distance, I was ready to
now,four different times — twice for Yale and twice for other contests — I found these writers whose work I had never seen
think about a shorter work week. Well, that I feel mixed about;
before, who seemed to me completely amazing.You don't do it
in the new place. My tendency is to want to explore those lives
out of altruism; you do it out of your vampire-ish hunger to
that are offered me. I don't know how that will play out. I'll
feed. This is an energy source. I don't mean that every manu-
probably want to stay more nights than one, but then I'll be
script you read is, but when you come on something like [the
back in the same situation that I found so difficult at Williams.
ones I found],it is. You work on these books as carefully and
But at least we're beginning with the idea that I'll spend one
profoundly with the writer as he or she chooses to allow. And I push my interventions very hard. The writing of the prose for-
night.
wards I still find very scary, but I love everything else. It's a gift to me to be able to do this.
How old were you when you published yourfirst book? * The poems were written starting at about when I was eighteen
The laureateship: I said at the outset that I'm not fond of public life, I'm not going to do these things that people have
years old. The book finally got published when I was about
always felt very warmly toward. It has always been very friend-
the downside of it is that you don't really experience a rich life
twenty-five. I was sending it around complete when I was
done not as an obligation to the job but as freelancers. That seemed ok with them. We'll see. The job itself had been modi-
twenty-four.
fied (not to suit me)from eight trips to Washington D.C. each
That's awfully intimidating. * There are about three [poems]
year, with eight events,to three. I wanted to be sure they didn't
I'd save. But I've been writing seriously my whole life. I felt
mind my disinclination to exhibit myself in the press. The events themselves have been quite wonderful.In February,I
like I was an old pro when I was eighteen. Now that I look
planned a two day double reading by poets with one book — some of them winners of these contests, and two oth-
book of a child, it wasn't bad — but it was filled with echoes,
back,I say, boy,I had no life out of which to write yet. As the even though I didn't mean it to be.
ers. It was an extraordinary event, with a panel in between. I felt very excited to have been able to bring together these peo-
Who were the echoes that you had to evade? * I think there
ple who didn't know each other and were so taken with one
was a heavy Lowell influence in that early work — but not the
another. The Yale job — I hope it turns out to be a good thing. I've
earliest work that was in that book. Mainly,I read Eliot and Yeats. I didn't know that there were poets who were still alive.
been very happy at Williams,but the demands of the job phys-
I didn't even realize for a while that my teachers actually were
ically have gotten to me more. It's a three and a quarter hour
still writing — in that wildly egocentric way that students have.
commute;I spend three nights a week there. That feeling of fractured life that initially was exhilarating started to seem sim-
I've had encounters like that with my students in which it's
ply exhausting. I knew from the couple of times that I taught at
ter, to be a mentor. And I was like that too with my teachers.
clear to me that they think my main job is to help them be bet-
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Once I discovered Plath and Lowell, I felt both aggrieved and exhilarated. I felt aggrieved because I thought, that's my material! What are they doing with it? And then I thought, no one will believe me. That's right...no one should.I had this strange sense of usurped property. I think I was trying to do my own work in that vein too, because all of a sudden I could hear a way in which that kind of material might be used. Anyway,it's not a book I can read without a little embarrassment.I mean, it's been a long time since I've read it, so I hardly know. What has been the greatest challenge to you as a teacher of poetry? * Mainly,I like to teach. But I like to teach when I
1614111'31Vgif, 1
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Marvin Astorga 36
have students I know how to talk to. And that turns out not to be everybody. I don't know how you figure that out. The hard thing is that sometimes that kind of rapport develops more slowly with some than with others,and you have to work as hard and be as present even if that rapport is not there. For me, the hardest challenge is working through a period of formal constriction in the classroom. Who have your own teachers been? * Leonie Adams was the first teacher, and she was an amazing,amazing, amazing teacher — she seemed to know everything.She was a brilliant reader of poems.I don't mean that she declaimed them,though she
did that too, but her analyses of the limitations of a particular
a certain way, making clear that you haven't exhausted the
work — this was a workshop,so our work — they were remark-
possibilities of the work.So that you come away both disap-
able. And then there was a point at which it was clear to me that my taste and hers were unlike. She read a poem aloud to
pointed — because you wanted to have written a great poem — and exhilarated, because you were at a dead end,and
us...she often did that — I remember being introduced to Ber-
now you have a new road. He was unfailingly that way. He
ryman's dream songs by her, and I wouldn't have known how to read those but for her. She showed with her voice how you
gave one the sense that he took one's work extremely seriously. I think that's the other great gift that a teacher can confer,that
did it — and once I heard it, I understood the mechanisms.On the occasion I remember best,she read a poem,not naming the author, because she thought it was a disaster. I thought it
sense that this is worth my time. I think it's ofimmense use to
was amazing. It was James Wright. And then I thought, I need
someone once said at Williams that my classes were like poetry
to find a teacher who is going to show me how to write that
boot camp.I'm too stern, I'm too hard,I'm too severe,I'm
poem.This was the School of General Studies at Columbia, and there was one other teacher: Stanley Kunitz. By then I'd
never satisfied... But the ones who like me realize that I take their gifts very seriously, and that the reason I'm hard on a
been studying with Adams for two or three years, so I was very
poem is because I think that the talent is considerable. We ex-
students. What I think students sometimes expect instead is praise. I know that many of my students haven't liked me...
used to her and to her classroom — and I am never good with
ist in that little room to serve the talent, not to serve the ego. I
change.I'm very conservative and fearful, and here was going to be this whole new person I was going to have to convince of
lingered in Stanley's periphery for many years. He became,
my gifts. It was quite nerve-wracking,but I felt I had to do it
gaze made the book finished. After a while,I began to form
because I knew that Leonie Adams wasn't going to be able to help me write the poems that I thought I wanted to write. Kunitz was astonishing. A great teacher is someone who is a
those relationships with peers, but I still felt a sense of very
great reader,and who is willing to take the time to be that — to go over every poem very carefully, to talk to the student about
success. It was a period in which I was writing nothing.She
where it falls off, and most crucially what strategies might be possible to get around its limitations. It isn't simply an act of diagnosis, but the outlining of plausible alternatives. Not giv-
after he was my teacher, my advisor; he read the poems; his
great debt to him. Very briefly, I studied with Adrienne Rich. That was not a was going through a transition in her own life, and I was exactly the sort of self she had become impatient with ...or so I appeared. I subsequently developed for her considerable admiration, but at the time we didn't get on.
ing you words or sentences, but by describing the problem in I'd like to ask you also about the way your poems have addressed their own style. In 'Rainy Morning,'you've addressed your own work using thefigure ofthe poet's husband as a mouthpiece: You don't love the world. If you loved the world you'd have images in your poems.
Elsewhere, in 'Memoir,'you have what seems like a kind ofreply or clarification: And if when I wrote, I used only a few words it was because time always seemed to me short as thought it could be stripped away at any moment
A few words were all I needed: nourish,sustain, attack.
Thosefew words — 'nourish, sustain, attack'— are all actions, not 37
images. Ifthe excerptfrom 'Rainy Morning'is a self-criticism, voiced by thefigure ofthe husband, is it an earnest one? Or does the impulse to limit the image in your work — ifyou agree that such an impulse exists — comefrom another source, such as a will to power achieved by way ofsilence, omission, and self-censorship? * [The first quotation] is about the meaning of imagery, what is suggested by it. In the husband's judgment,its absence proves insufficient love of the world. It's certainly my own idea, but earnest isn't the way to characterize it. Preemptive, probably.Sometimes on the page, I'll say the thing that it seems can be said about me,and in possessing it, disarm the assailant. It's a preemptive move in the poem;I also thought it was pithy and funny. But it simply arrived on the page as utterance,and I thought oh,I like that. It's an interesting pairing because I think they're performing versions of the same move.I think that'Memoir'isn't preemp-
Meadowlands. And yet, in those books the poems were all selfcontained, and relatively short. Judgingfrom 'Prism'and 'October,' it seems you've moved on to an entirely newform:aform in which the poem is long, and made of many smallfacets. In what other respects does thisform and project differfrom what you've done in the past, and why the change?* I think that the [forthcoming] book,once it got written, adheres to the model you describe. The poems are interrelated, and the book makes a journey from first poem to last. You are intended as a reader to begin at the first page and not stop until you get to the last, helplessly enthralled. But most of the poems are much longer. That was different. They had gotten a bit longer in The Seven
tive so much as offering a hypothesis or an account to explain what the speaker has noticed. Not a lot of words here. Which, of course, is not particularly true of The Seven Ages as a book,
Ages, but these are lots longer. Many of them in multiple parts. In some,like'October,'the parts can be viewed separately, but the point of them is what they make together. I didn't know
though I suppose the manner remains austere. It's a way of saying the aim is exactness, to reduce utterance to only that which is essential, and nothing ornamental. Nothing there to persuade the ear that a miracle has occurred. I don't like look-
that this is what [the book] was going to be. I thought it wasn't... I thought it was going to be a group of disparate poems about which I had no ideas, and for about two years,that was what I
ing at a poem that scrutiny makes less. I want to look at a poem where the more you look at it, the more mysterious it becomes,the more charged and immense it becomes. It's about an ambition to locate essence. There's a line in 'Dedica-
was guessing — mainly because I didn't see how'Prism'and 'October'could ever be part of the same structure. It was very exciting to discover that they were.
tion to Hunger'in Descending Figure,talking of a tree:
Do you have afavorite word, or afavorite kind of word? * No... Though...when I say that, my second thought is that probably'no'is my favorite word. I think that I have favorite
until the limbs were free of blossom and subterfuge: I felt what I feel now,aligning these words —
The idea of suspicion of blossom — which the poet is not setting down as a thing to be admired but a thing to be questioned — each time this happens,it's an act of questioning. It's shutting the door on a certain strategy. It says that by naming it, you can't use it quite so freely anymore. I think it's a way of staying in motion,staying in search of.
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The books you've published in the lastfifteen or so years seem to behave as books rather than as collections ofpoems,such that each book is not merely an anthology but a unified work meant to be read as a whole — particularly, in my mind,The Wild Iris and
structures...I like argument,I like undermining the statement that has just been made.I don't think of writing as words much,though obviously it involves the choosing of words. For me what's hypnotic and endlessly absorbing is English syntax. I remember being very young and reading Milton's sonnet on his blindness — over and over and over and over — and realizing that no single word in that poem is complicated. The Lati-
nate suspensions of the sentence — sometimes it's printed as a
happened to anybody except me.I got whiplash. I had never
single sentence, which is my preference...but I'm not a Milton scholar — are absolutely extraordinary. Many marvelous writers have characteristic syntactical moves or ways of placing a
afraid, of course, made it all that much worse. It was judged to
word in a sentence order and in a line to alter your perception
that in my experience. Neck pain is really savage — and what
both of the word and of the sentence it's contained within. I ended up writing an essay on Milton's sonnet,and I teach it
was difficult about this was that it was relentless, so that it seemed my destiny. There would be periods when I would
when I teach Intoduction to Poetry. I don't even much like the
think it was getting better, then it would come back. I've had
sonnet form. But no favorite word.
the same experience in a much more minor way with athletic
had a physical injury as frightening. The degree to which I was be entirely minor by those who examined me,but it wasn't
injuries — dance injuries — but nothing like this. There are a lot When poems are in standard metricalform, line breaks are pres-
of nerves up there. And I felt as though pain had silenced
ent, at worst, simply because that's where the lastfoot is, and at
me — that I would never write again. Then I found a drug that
best to place emphasis or do something else. Since your early
helped; then I started thinking that the drug had silenced me,
work, you've moved awayfrom a kind ofintensely regular meter, so your breaks are not governed by metricalfeet. Do you have any
because it was destroying my brain cells. I've gone through versions of this in every silence.You seize on that thing in your
loose principles ofline breaking? What do you see that the line
life that has changed —'I'm not living in Vermont anymore,'
break offers in terms ofpossibilitiesfor poetry? * Oh,what it
or'My marriage just broke up,' or'I just got married'— it
offers — the possibilities are myriad! James Longenbach has a
doesn't matter what it is — 'I just had a child.' Any large change can be held responsible for a silence. The word 'silence'
wonderful essay on this in his new book of essays. I don't have any theory, premise, notion in my head; I think,like most writers, I just work by a kind of instinct. It always seems to me
in fact it's a terrible ordeal.So I thought, well,those other si-
sort of smell. It's how you do the order of a book too.You
lences,they weren't the real silences — this is the real one, be-
don't reason it out; you smell it out, you feel it out. That's
cause I've killed my brain cells, and all I can think about is
what you do with a line. Every poem has its own requirements in the line unit — where it's broken, and what kind of enjamb-
how much my neck hurts. I thought,I'm not going to get any
ment you look for, or whether you use an end-stopped
lous novel called Versailles. Her name is Kathryn Davis. We
is a little tame — it seems sort of voluntary or monastic — but
work out ofthis. Then a friend of mine wrote a quite miracu-
line — all of this is going to do a great deal to establish a tone.
were talking about it when I read it in manuscript,and she
When you see it right, you know it's right; when you see it
said,sort of by-the-way, that it was her book about whiplash. I
wrong,your fingers can't move over the typewriter keys. They
said,'That's whiplash?'I knew she'd had it, because we talked
stumble. The way when there's a word wrong,or a phrase
about it a lot. I asked,'Were you having a lot of pain while you
wrong — I get to a certain point and I think,I'm just going to run through it, and I can't: my hands won't move.Then I go
That meant that there was something still, maybe,to be found.
back to the beginning and try to figure out what's wrong. But there's no large idea that my poems are illustrative of. Tell us about'October.' * In the beginning of 2000,I was in a very minor car-accident. Nothing happened to the car, nothing
were writing it?'— and yes,she was. So that was a good sign. Then as I was going through these crises, September iith happened. I was stranded in San Francisco and couldn't get home. I was about as scared as I have ever been. I think I have always felt as many do,though not all, that — in fact, this seems so hallucinatory, it doesn't even seem possible I felt it — but I had
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created a conviction in which the outside world — the world of public affairs, of countries,of nature — that world was sane, untroubled. It did not mirror my inner turbulence. And all of a sudden,it seemed that was wrong,that the outside and the inside were replicas of one another. I was completely frightened.So those two things were working on me. Meanwhile,I had written 'Prism'laboriously,and without any feeling that it was much good. My friends thought otherwise. But I felt so defeated that it was impossible for me to form any accurate impression of that work. Then I started working on'October,'and I thought that it wasn't good either. I wrote the sections in an order other than the one in which you see them.The first was the first written; the last section written was [section number] three —'come to me,said the world'— over a period of maybe six months. I was on drugs,I was still in pain. When I finished it, the response to it was very intense on the part of the readers who read it. I thought this was really quite curious: maybe these conditions — my sudden feeling of freefall in the world because of the events of the Trade Center,and my feeling of personal doom — maybe they hadn't silenced me.So then they became a potential energy source. It didn't play itself out fully until two
feels like a large endeavor. And since it's still a secret, no one has seen it. It has about it an aura of freshness and just-cornpletedness that will be taken from it once it's in print — then it's not new anymore or yours anymore,and judgments are visited on it. Now it's in that happy period before that has occurred,and I choose the people who see it. So there's a general serenity — somewhat marred by having the flu — but in a way, this seems a piece of that whole activity to me. My friend called to see how I was feeling and said,'Well,this always happens to you after you write a lot:and I said,'Yes, it does!'But I didn't expect to be in this place. I would have said at the beginning of January,or the middle of January, or the last week of January, that I didn't have a prayer of writing a poem in years. I just didn't see it; I didn't see where one would come from. I felt stupid and blank, and grateful that I had teaching to absorb me. I remember, when I finished the first poem,lying on the
years later. But that process by which you start feeling grateful to horrible things — that was already underway.I don't know how I accounted for my silences in the intervening two years,
psychoanalyst's couch and saying,'You should look at me really closely now,because you are never going to see this again: I am happy. I am so happy. I am happy — just look.I'm not going to say a word;just look at me.'And it's true it didn't last — I mean,I found many things to worry over in the ensu-
but I did come to take pride in those poems.It was the first time that I felt my own judgment in regard to my own work — my instantaneous, visceral, as-I-was-working-on-it
ing days. But there was that moment of silence having been broken that was so extraordinary — I felt, I'm saved. Unfortunately, no sense of agency; a sense of some divine force having
judgment — was questionable. That's curious to me. People have said very excited things about [the new book]; but I didn't feel writing the poems the usual euphoria I feel when I am writing very fast. I don't know what to make of that, but
intervened — like the'get out of jail free' card in Monopoly. Then of course you start worrying that you won't finish once you think that it might be a book: what if you don't finish it, what if you run out of ideas... I had no idea that at the end of
I'm now very pleased with the work.
March I would have a book.I'm very grateful. *
Is there anything you can say about the book you wrote in February? Does it have a title? * Yes, but it's a secret. It has everything a book shoula have — it has page numbers,an order,a title. You'll hear some of those poems [at the Yale reading in April]. I haven't decided whether to hold them back from magazine publication or not.There's something in me that feels that it would be nice for it to be perceived entire, newly, but I might change my mind about that.
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As a poet, where are you right now? * I'm in the stage where I don't have to worry about writing, because I've just written. That stage will last a couple of months...maybe even six or eight ...it may even take longer. I think I've just finished what
Horoscope Adam Farbiarz
'The kilogram is the last remaining base unit ofthe si that is still defined by a material artifact. The international prototype is kept... in a vault at the BIPM [Bureau International des Poids et Mesures].' - BIPM statement on
mass
When the kilo That is the kilo chipped You fell, but fell no faster. And Pollux,in neither sky nor hell, inched toward Castor. When the human That is the human grew old Your body slowed, but slowed no more. While four lovers of Jupiter circled their tireless master. When the names That are the names faded You prayed,still unheard. And your constellation, unaffected,still burned.
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PHOTOGRAPH
Anya Meksiii
42
Red
Ridge
Farm Nicole Dixon
They still talked in those days of warm,oat-smelling things I hardly knew the meaning of — how Mitzi had thrown another shoe, and the new Frisian just kept bolting her feed. When they didn't speak it meant my father was out in the barn with his girls. We had no stallions then and in the house too there was only Ellen,smacking her lips beside me in her sleep, and my mother humming as she sharpened our new ice skates downstairs,and me wedged between posts of the banister to listen as my father came in. Why couldn't you have come?he said,low. I — she needed you out there. My mother stopped grinding the blade and was silent. All the stalls of my mind were filled with quivering flanks. It didn't matter, he said. It was stillborn anyway. I sighed,crept back to bed to think of names. Mickey. Gypsy Rose. Blue Star of Summer. In those days words came and went and bent easily and horses were always still born.
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The winner of the Francis Bergen Memorial Prize for Poetry is 'Order of Things'by Valerie Idehen. The winner of the Francis Bergen Memorial Prize for Fiction is'Coming to Know About Jozeffs and Istvan: A Peek Between the Covers'by Venkat Lakshminarayanan. The winner of The Yale Literary Magazine Art Prize is Yali Lewis. The prize for poetry was judged by J.D. McClatchy,the prize for fiction by John Crowley and the prize
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