Why write poetry now?

Posted on November 27, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post by Ina Roy-Faderman

In the two months before the US midterm elections, I stopped writing poetry. In fact, I stopped being a poet, with all that implies beyond writing: participating in panels, providing poetry workshops to local kids, assisting in online poetic projects. In the welter of day jobs, parenting, day-to-day “women’s work,” and pacifying the machine that keeps my chronic illness under control, I felt that I couldn’t add anything else. Given the potential impact of the midterm elections, and the fact that I can no longer pull all-nighters, I decided that poetry had to go.

The current state of US politics is damned personal in my household. I’m a birthright citizen. My spouse is Jewish. We’re an interracial couple. My parents were immigrants at a time in which only ten people were allowed into the US from their birth nation each year. My in-laws are gay and were only able to get married thanks to Gavin Newsom. Basically, we’re the kind of family a small, currently-emboldened sub-group of Americans would like to remove from this country and maybe this planet.

So I stopped writing poetry. Instead, I engaged in the political activities which so many middle-aged women are quietly engaged in: calling Congresspersons and emailing Senators, protesting, phone banking and texting, squeezing a few dollars from family budgets to support organizations that stand between us and the mob that seems to be running our country. Creative writing was even, in a way, involved: I texted potential voters with personal messages and sent postcards of encouragement to far-away blue voters.

But now that the midterms are over, barring ballot counts and recounts working their way through bureaucratic tar, I’ve got a moment to look at the decision I made. And I am reconsidering the idea that it had to be a choice: writing or activism.

Since 2016, talented, well-known writers have filled the online multiverse with entreaties that and reasons why We Should Continue to Write In These Dangerous Times. Often, they are fiction writers, not poets — maybe because fiction writers have a direct awareness that the dystopian elements of the political current climate are seeping into writing everywhere. Fiction, after all, has the ability to illuminate and comment, more or less directly, on the ills of our time. In contrast, poetry seems indirect, almost indulgent. Why write poetry now?

After wrestling with the question and with my conscience, I’ve identified three reasons that, for me, writing poetry in these times is not just necessary but right and important.

1. Creativity is a bulwark against authoritarianism

I was recently a panelist at a speculative fiction writer’s convention. Another writer described a science fiction convention that was held in the PRC prior to the advent of the internet. The underlying “ask” from invited American speculative fiction authors: tell us how to do this, because we don’t know how.

Hierarchical cultures and authoritarian political systems stifle creativity. It need not be in the form of a conspiracy or a conscious plan (but see e.g. the UK’s Profanity Act, the PRC’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the USSR’s Glavit). Rather, creativity depends upon individuality and in turn nourishes it. Through existence and manifestation, creativity subverts external limits placed on individuality, including those of oppressive governments. Creations built of words threaten the foundations of authoritarian systems, since those systems rely on people believing that the world is “as it is told to us.” Tell a different story, and the imposed system is no longer a given, “just the way things are.” As poet-activist Francisco X. Alarcón has said, “Poets question dogmas, notions taken for granted, and speak ‘truths’ that defy the ruling order of things.”

We don’t have to live in a formally authoritarian government for poetry to illuminate the limitations of narratives supported by people in power. Against an apparent, militaristic threat to the US’ European allies, WWI soldiers exhibited both strength and heroism, characteristics we admire and promote. But e.e. cummings’s poem, “’i sing of Olaf glad and big,” reminds us that there are other incompatible, but equally moral, stances to be taken by those drawn into war.

2. Poetry is community

Community is at the heart of activism. When our actions are motivated by the needs of more than ourselves, we are activists working with and for a community.

Inherent in the use of language is a presumed audience. When we create with words, we are presuming that we are not alone –- that the possibility of communion with an audience exists. In creating with words, we both assume and create community.

Poetry, as a creation of words, is founded on the knowledge that we can share a vision with another. This sharing is the beginning of a greater understanding of what we might to for others. As poet Sonya Renee Taylor says in an interview in Autostraddle, “…art is an essential element of how we make the messages of activism accessible and how we invite new people into the dialogue and how we open up new minds to the issues. “ By existing, the poem creates an audience-shaped space. The audience enters that space, and a community is born. And the best thing about the space – it can expand as needed. It is an encompassing space, but not a constricting one.

3. Silence = Death

I was fortunate. When “Silence = Death” was coined, I survived. I was a medical student in the San Francisco area when AIDS appeared. People in my community were getting sick, quickly, and we had no idea why. Most healthcare workers — who were not, by and large, personally affected by illness raging through their communities — were still hurting. Doctors were forced to suit up in plastic to comfort beautiful people who were dying. This is not the way to comfort anyone, but it was what we were told we could do.

The community that finally did — that went beyond what we were told we could do — wasn’t largely healthcare workers. Rather, community activists — suffering and watching suffering — refused to stay silent, who refused to stand by while lovers, friends, and neighbors died.

My activism then, such as it was, was small. I held the hands of men in wheelchairs who knew they’d never walk again. I gave blood. I lent my hands in the clinic in which some students refused to work. I came left the clinic and took shifts caring for a dying friend whose parents had left his clothes in a box on the street when he became ill. I acknowledged that there were many other people who were dying with no help at all.

I hadn’t written anything creative since my teens, but I started writing again. It was therapy, an outlet. But at some point, the outpouring became more; it became my hope for conveying to people who were in outside the zone of suffering just what suffering looks like.

To be silent is to allow pain, need, anguish to go unnoticed. For a poet to be silent is not just to silence herself but to let others, those in power, determine what is important and what is not –- who matters and who doesn’t. Poetry balances the scale; in writing it, we say, “We live. We matter.”

The midterms are over, and I have space to breathe. But the long-term work needs to be done, and it won’t get done by short-term actions, no matter how necessary. The people who are close to me, and the people who aren’t but are also fighting for their lives, their identities, their rights to pursue simple peace, are being subject to shock after shock in the US. And that is not okay. While the last two months required immediate action, I cannot continue to put aside my contribution to longer-range change. I can’t let those who feel no pressure to go into hiding, feel no fear of hate being unleashed against them, live in their quiet, safe bubbles. I will make the time for poetry. I return to poetry to say, “No, you don’t get to look away. Not from me, not from mine, not from people you think don’t matter. We live. We matter.”

Ina Roy-Faderman (inafelltoearth.com) teaches college and graduate biomedical ethics and is an associate fiction editor for Rivet Journal and librarian for a school for gifted children. Her poetry, fiction, interviews, and literary analyses have appeared in The Rumpus, Transition: Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books), HIV Here and Now, Inscape, Midwestern Studies in Philosophy and elsewhere.

Jenna Le Reviews Max Ritvo’s The Final Voicemails

Posted on October 30, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

Max Ritvo’s The Final Voicemails (Milkweed Editions, 88 pp., published Sept. 2018) is actually two books: the first 41 pages are devoted to “The Final Voicemails,” a selection of 21 of Max Ritvo’s late poems, culled by Louise Gluck after his death at 25 from Ewing sarcoma, whereas the final 33 pages are given over to “Mammals,” a near-complete reproduction of Ritvo’s undergraduate thesis at Yale, where he studied poetry writing under Gluck. The poems in ‘The Final Voicemails” are far more powerful than those in “Mammals,” due to their emotional stakes being greater, although “Mammals” offers an interesting glimpse of alternate directions Ritvo’s trajectory might have taken if cancer had not first shadowed and at last curtailed his days.

Prior to picking up this volume, I had already read a great many of the poems that comprise “The Final Voicemails” proper, having scoured the websites of literary magazines for any trace of Ritvo I could find in the days immediately following his 2016 death. Being reunited with these poems, inhaling their familiarity, after all that time, felt like a real tangible gift, a quietly nourishing experience. Two years have passed since the world lost this poet, two years during which many things have happened and we remainers have lived and changed; at the end of that interval, for us to come back to these poems, or to have them rise forth to meet us in the form of a newly printed and bound book, can seem surreal, all the more so because the thoughts and images in the poems have the air of being as fresh and immediate as they did on the first encounter. As the readers, we are put in mind of Einstein’s train-cars, the thought experiment used to explain the theory of special relativity, and for a moment we cannot be sure whether we are on the train-car that was moving or the train-car that was stationary the whole time.

The passages I like best are pretty much the same ones I liked best two years ago. Of particular note, there are the stanzas about red berries at the end of the title poem, with all its deliciously unexpected turns (mimicking the turns of the tango the poem references two pages earlier): at first, the berries serve as a simile for the “mild passions” that distract or detract from self-knowledge, but out of nowhere they pivot to become the most real thing in the poem, the thing on which everything else hinges. Anticipating/preempting an imagined interjection from his reader (or interlocutor), the poet assumes an intimate directness, saying, “Don’t ask me to name [the berries] — / I’ve never been that kind of guy. / Red berries — sour, sticky. / If you really want to know, / come here, just try them.” The language is at once disarmingly casual (“guy”) and intoxicatingly soaked in romantic nostalgia (“I’ve never been” — three words that lay out upon the table the poet’s whole childhood, his entirety of past experiences, subtly contradicting the poem’s earlier assertion that self-knowledge had remained elusive: “All this time, I thought my shedding / would expose a core”). This passage about the berries exposes a kind of core, revealing the poet’s self-understanding that he is not “that kind of guy”: i.e., he does not see himself as the type of person who stands on ceremony with regard to the technical nomenclature for things; he prefers lived experiences, things that can be touched and tasted. The stanza’s last line (“come here, just taste them”) is simultaneously an alms-giving and a seduction, proffering fruit that, just seconds ago, were no more than one abstract arm of a simile but now, through verbal legerdemain, have flared to life.

That poem’s my very favorite, but there are plenty of nuggets of beautiful wisdom to be found here. Consider “Quiet Romance,” where the poet re-frames the encounter of man with death as a two-way street, the two parties equally afraid of one another: “I can hear already / a roaring in the distance, / half salt, half horse, // I like this, I’m scared, but / so’s the sound. We’ll both be guests.” From reciprocal fear, it’s only a short step to reciprocal esteem and hospitality: hearing Ritvo say it with his voice’s customary air of trustworthy authority, I am greatly tempted to believe it.

Or consider “Earthquake Country Before Final Chemotherapy,” where the poet, just by saying so, magically transforms himself into “the ghost in the bridge / willing the cars to join me, // telling them that death was not wind, / was not weight, // was not mist, / and certainly not the mountains — // that it was the breaking apart, / the replacement of who, when, how, and where / with what.” Death, in this portrayal, is a corruption of sentence structure, a flattening of grammar; does this mean poetry, with its three-dimensional — sometimes even four-dimensional — grammar, is the key to achieving anti-death? Reading these poems, I come close to being convinced it is.

I want to carry this book with me as a physical talisman for a while. I feel a wish to press it into the hands of all my fellow sarcoma doctors, if not all other readers. There are many layers here, ranging from the surface bodily descriptions of the cancer experience (the cachexia, the pain, the loss of appetite) to deeper layers of evocation, and if you don’t pick up on all the layers the first time, you can keep coming back for the others. This book will keep existing, and there is something we could all learn from keeping it close.

Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018; 1st ed. pub. by Anchor & Plume, 2016), which won Second Place in the 2017 Elgin Awards. Her poetry, fiction, essays, book criticism, translations, and visual art appear in journals including AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and West Branch.

Finding Poetry in “Olga Picasso” – and Almost Everywhere Else

Posted on September 25, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post by Larayb Abrar

Many professors in my college English classes ask their students to “define poetry.” What is it, really, if not sentences separated by line breaks on a page? Often, they receive answers like, “it’s beauty”, “it’s heightened language”, “it’s a distillation of feeling – but like in an intuitively unobvious way.” But there are many occasions when I find poetry off the page. Sometimes something as simple as watching people coincidentally walk across a park to the same rhythm of a particular song playing in my headphones gets me thinking of the clockwork nature of the world, of how the disparate puzzle pieces ultimately click. I see it in the way smoke lightly dances and twirls off a cigarette on a warm summer day. Or in the way the blinding red and orange lights of a car become soft pastel hues when reflected onto puddles. It’s moments like these when I see art created right in front of me.

A year ago, I visited the Musée Picasso in Paris. Its collection comprises several works and archives that document not only the masterpieces of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, but also his personal life and creative process. At the time I visited, a special exhibition called “Olga Picasso” which ran from March 21, 2016 to September 3, 2017, detailing the life of Picasso’s first wife, Olga Khokhlova, was on display. While Picasso is mostly known for his work on Cubist and Surrealist artwork, it was during this time period that he delved into portraiture depicting an often pensive and thoughtful Olga. Juxtaposed with Olga’s portraits were excerpts of letters sent to her and photographs she had kept of herself with her family. The exhibition as a whole spanned through 14 rooms over two floors, each room laced with its own complex representations of trauma, joy, family life and melancholy.

Olga Khokhlova was a Russian ballet dancer who met Picasso while on tour. In many of Picasso’s works, she is depicted in an established and static manner, likely due to the severe depression she was undergoing due to the economic crisis in Russia and food shortages her family was suffering. The exhibition started off by focusing on the life Olga left behind. The initial images we see are not Olga, Pablo’s happy wife, but rather the opposite. She is seen reading, or staring off into space, passive. She is an empty woman, afflicted by the pain of her migration, her inability to return home, her helplessness in the face of this crisis. As I reflected on 20^th century paintings in light of today’s refugee crisis, the images struck a chord; Olga’s experiences became something I could live through vicariously. The poetry emerged completely off the page and hit me harder than anything words could muster. What’s notable here is Picasso’s perceptiveness in depicting Olga’s story, his empathy in unfolding her narrative so subtly and yet so precisely. It was a beautiful, pithy distillation of emotion.

A year after my visit to the Musée Picasso, in my last, dwindling days in New York City, exhausted from a full day of packing and scrambling to buy things last minute, I lay down on my bed, facing the window. It was a little after sunset and the Manhattan buildings against the sky looked exactly like something out of Picasso’s blue period. The buildings several shades of dark blue, their edges blurred against a slightly paler blue sky. Right in that moment I saw the puzzle pieces clicking, the circularity, life mimicking art, the artsy final shot straight out of a Woody Allen movie as my time in New York drew to a close.

Of course, not everyone experiences these moments, and not everyone can. Sometimes events are just random and it’s difficult to find any meaning in them at all. But while it may be easy to concentrate on the big event, the front page splash, or the major headline, it can be equally rewarding to notice the small peculiarities in the random. The French writer Georges Perec compiled a small, roughly 40-page document titled, “An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris” in which he writes down his observations of place Saint-Sulpice over the course of three days. Most of this text is written in bullet points, with many repetitions. He writes about the busses passing by, what color they are, and the direction they go in, he makes note of the pigeons around the central plaza, he notices when the pigeons have flown away, he writes down characteristics of the people walking past him, and even takes note of the words written on a woman’s handbag. It’s not as though Perec has taken these individual instances and delved very deeply into them, but rather the stringing together of these seemingly random occurrences produces a text which at once reveals the eerie, melancholic yet touching narrative of this area and exposes the repetitive nature of everyday life.

Perec’s focus on the small, mundane, daily on-goings of place Saint-Sulpice can be generalized to any place in the city. They may seem meaningless, seeing as hardly any of his observations connect with one another; there is no full circle magic Woody Allen moment happening here. And yet, he creates poetry specifically by focusing on the ordinary experiences of everyday life. While I still don’t know how to define poetry, maybe one way of seeing it is as something that does indeed transcend the page, and something we can find in an image, an encounter or in a speech. The poetic is all around us; we just need to stop looking so hard for it.

Larayb Abrar is a junior at NYU Abu Dhabi majoring in literature and creative writing. She contributes often to her independent college newspaper, The Gazelle. Her academic interests lie in post-colonial and gender studies. She has performed spoken word poetry at several venues in Abu Dhabi and occasionally dabbles in stand-up comedy.

Indolence, Politics, and the Good Gray Poet, Part 2

Posted on September 11, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

Walt Whitman and Harry Stafford, 1878.

A Blog Post by Reuben Gelley Newman

To see the first half of this two-part post, click here.

National context undeniably informs the poetry we create, and America’s conflict and social upheaval during the late 19th century often intersected with Whitman’s personal life and poetry. He tended wounded soldiers in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, bearing witness to the turmoil it unleashed. Readers both lambasted and celebrated his overtly hetero- and homo-erotic poems, which inspired British intellectuals to advocate for acceptance of homosexuals in the 1870s and 80s. Although he outwardly denied any homosexuality, he had relationships with men almost 40 years younger than him, including George and Susan Stafford’s son, Harry, whom Whitman met at a printing shop. (There’s an obvious power imbalance considering the age gap and Whitman’s cultural status, and it’s impossible to tell exactly how equitable the relationship was. From letters, it seems like it was relatively consensual, if tumultuous, but we should probably still be skeptical.)

Drawing on these rich and complex experiences, he wrote obviously political poems, such as his elegies for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain, My Captain.” His erotic poems, including the famous homoerotic “Calamus” ones, were also socially conscious in their disregard for Victorian prudishness. But his expressions of indolence — particularly during his time at the Staffords’ farm in southern New Jersey — can hardly be political, right?

I’m not so sure. Today, I don’t feel as if “indolent” poems, or poems that express joy more broadly, get all that much traction in the poetry market. (Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities seem like exceptions to this.) But reading Specimen Days, I wonder if indolence, in the sense of “love of ease,” can be a counterpart to and part of the political.

For poets from marginalized backgrounds, or even for Whitman — who, as I said in Part 1, was disabled later in life, though hardly “marginalized” — perhaps writing openly about pure joy or indolence could be empowering. Recall the definition of “indolent” that reads “free from pain.” Freedom from pain, of course, is virtually impossible for any human to experience, and that kind of indolence might be even rarer for marginalized poets. Still, “Indolent” writing could serve as an important contrast to taut, emotional poems that explore political situations or recount injustices against the speaker. It could also simply exist by itself. Although it’s important to be aware of the political, no one has to write “political” poetry. It’s a political choice to write a “nature poem,” say, whatever that is — but it’s not necessarily a bad choice.

And that brings us back to Indolent Books. As Michael said, “indolent” refers to some of our “slowly progressing” poets. (Although not all of them are slowly progressing—take Logan February, who has published two chapbooks and whose first full-length collection is coming out next year!) But Indolent’s mission is also strikingly political. Look no further than our online projects What Rough Beast and HIV Here & Now, and our mission statement:

Ultimately, Indolent publishes books the editors care about. The main criteria are that the work be innovative, provocative, risky, and relevant. Indolent is queer flavored but inclusive and maintains a commitment to diversity among authors, artists, designers, developers, and other team members.

Does this political mission mesh with the historical definitions of “indolent” I’ve discussed? I don’t know. What I do know is that “indolent” and “political” poetry have coexisted for centuries, since well before our good gray poet. As Whitman realized, literature can be an escape, a fantasy, and a utopia: a place free from pain. But his optimistic vision of America was also grounded in political reality. I think such grounding is deeply necessary for poets, both personally and collectively. We need not be optimistic, of course; our poems can turn grief into anger. But whatever our viewpoint, through writing our own hurt and our nation’s, we might begin to free ourselves of pain.

In addition to interning here at Indolent, where he edits the blog, Reuben Gelley Newman is an undergraduate at Swarthmore College. His work appears in Alexandria Quarterly, What Rough Beast, and HIV Here & Now, and is forthcoming in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, 2nd Edition.

Indolence, Politics, and the Good Gray Poet, Part 1

Posted on September 6, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

Related image

A Blog Post by Reuben Gelley Newman

I’m here to talk about indolence — not just your typical laziness, idleness, or slothfulness, but indolence. The adjective “indolent” derives from the prefix “in” and the Latin word “dolens,” meaning “hurting,” “suffering,” or “grieving.” In the 18th and 19th centuries, an indolent ulcer or tumor was “painless” (OED), and, seemingly, that morphed into Merriam Webster’s current definition of “slow to develop or heal.” But since the same period, “indolent” has also described humans: “averse to exertion or toil”; “slothful, lazy, idle” (OED). Why, then, is it the name of our press?

Michael Broder told me he “often used it to mean something like moving at a relaxed pace.” He applies the idea of “slowly progressing” to poets: writers who, for whatever reason, take a longer time with their poetry than many — and, possibly even because of that, produce excellent work.

Interestingly, the noun form of indolent has other connotations, including the more positive “love of ease,” and, in obsolete meanings, “freedom from pain,” and “a state of rest or ease, in which neither pain nor pleasure is felt” (OED). And here’s where “the good, gray poet” of American democracy, Walt Whitman, comes in.

I’ve been doing research on Whitman’s relationship to his paralysis later in life. After a paralytic stroke in 1873, Whitman was debilitated, and his conception of himself as such comes through in his 1882 prose memoirs, Specimen Days (available on Project Gutenberg if you’re interested). Much of the memoir recalls his visits to the farm of his friends, George and Susan Stafford, in southern New Jersey, where he spent a lot of time idling about in nature. One passage, titled “Summer Sights and Indolencies,” reads:

June 10th.—As I write, 5-1/2 P.M., here by the creek, nothing can exceed the quiet splendor and freshness around me. We had a heavy shower, with brief thunder and lightning, in the middle of the day; and since, overhead, one of those not uncommon yet indescribable skies (in quality, not details or forms) of limpid blue, with rolling silver-fringed clouds, and a pure-dazzling sun. For underlay, trees in fulness of tender foliage—liquid, reedy, long-drawn notes of birds—based by the fretful mewing of a querulous cat-bird, and the pleasant chippering-shriek of two kingfishers. I have been watching the latter the last half hour, on their regular evening frolic over and in the stream; evidently a spree of the liveliest kind. They pursue each other, whirling and wheeling around, with many a jocund downward dip, splashing the spray in jets of diamonds—and then off they swoop, with slanting wings and graceful flight, sometimes so near me I can plainly see their dark-gray feather-bodies and milk-white necks.

Here Whitman truly embraces indolence, in the sense of not just being “free from pain” but of being free, entirely, to observe the world around him, to delight in each and every thing. Take an earlier, more famous example from “Song of Myself”: “I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” Here, as in Specimen Days, a certain languor seems to renew his soul. Perhaps this is the kind of indolence Whitman craved — and needed — in an America that was fraught with political turmoil. Indolence might be something we, too, crave. But in a world that requires change, does our poetry require politics, and can indolence fit into a political poetics? I’m gonna go be indolent now, but I’ll have more thoughts for you on Tuesday.

In addition to interning here at Indolent, where he edits the blog, Reuben Gelley Newmanis an undergraduate at Swarthmore College. His work appears in Alexandria Quarterly, What Rough Beast, and HIV Here & Now, and is forthcoming in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, 2nd Edition.

Taking the Words Off the Page

Posted on August 28, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post by Larayb Abrar

I recently went to a semi-final poetry slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe that featured a line-up of three very talented poets. As their performances brought their word-play, rhymes and rhythms to life, I thought about the effects of saying a poem out loud, as opposed to directly reading it on the page. As a spoken word performer myself, I wonder: what does it actually mean to take the words off a page and manifest them in front of so many onlookers? What changes?

What comes to mind first is Aristotle’s rhetoric triangle that puts the text/context, audience, and writer in relation with one another. Traditionally, while the writer provides credibility to the text, they are often removed or at a distance from the audience’s engagement with a text. Moreover, while the writer’s influence may affect the audience, the audience cannot do much to influence the writer. Similarly, in the conventional understanding of the triangle, the text is a stand-still, frozen object. To perform a poem modifies this triangle, giving it a more circular nature.

As a poet gets on stage and not only recites their poem but acts it out, coupling it with hand gestures, voice inflections and changing rhythms, the writer and the text become almost inseparable. Simultaneously, audience members react to each line coming from the poet’s mouth by snapping their fingers, laughing, cheering or nodding along. This energy goes right back to the poet, affecting their delivery of the poem and even sometimes the content of the poem (text) itself. This morphing of the rhetoric triangle into a feedback loop isn’t only more engaging, but as 20^th century philosopher J. L. Austin would put it, it can also act as a gateway to seeing spoken word performances as “speech-acts”.

In describing language as a speech-act, Austin asserts that speech doesn’t only describe things in evaluative (true/false) terms, but that the utterance itself can create truth: it can make things happen. It stirs feelings, emotions, and reactions, much like a poem does. When the poet is on stage, even if they’re revealing something personal, they’re still creating a persona: they’re performing a role. Spoken word poetry is then similar to the way that the theatrical stage has potential to create a contested or imagined space, push social boundaries, and expose an audience to that performed reality.

To give a more concrete example of performativity allowing for social boundaries to stretch, in the 1960s a series of performative interventions took place right on the street. These performances were referred to as “happenings,” which is exactly what they were. The actors involved with these “happenings” performed out-of-context, often absurd material lacking any kind of plot, such as walking with boxes on their feet or emptying a suspended bucket of milk over their head. The point of these performances was indeed to push the social boundaries of what was considered acceptable. Doing it on the street, right in the public eye, allowed for these absurdities to be a part of everyday life.

In Blythe Baird’s 2016 spoken word poem “Pocket-Sized Feminism” performed on Button Poetry, she confesses, “Once, a man behind me on an escalator / shoved his hand up my skirt / from behind, and no one around me / said anything. / So I didn’t say anything, / because I didn’t want to make a scene.” Hearing Baird say this as opposed to reading it on a page suddenly makes it real. Not only do we get to witness her pain, but through her performance she is able to retroactively correct her error of not speaking out before. The performativity here normalizes this discussion of violation and, in real time, gives Baird the space to speak out that she previously did not have.

The interaction between poet and audience not only normalizes the speech, but also incites other actions, whether they be as small as a laugh or as drawn out as a blog post. So whether a poet is slamming about the current political landscape, illness, or even their beloved, it takes all of the emotion and perspective and truly puts the content out there. Performing gives the poet a direct, intense connection to the audience and an opportunity to create reality as they speak.

A Fine Line: Bridging the Political and Poetic

Posted on August 22, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post by Jada Gordon

When I was approached by Indolent Books to help curate and edit poems for What Rough Beast, I was given clear guidelines for how to select them. The poems were to be “politically adjacent.” That is, while the poems may, and often do, reveal a clear political stance or perspective, we do not want political rants or diatribes or artless attacks on Donald Trump, his orange hair, his small hands, or similar pettiness. In short, we do not want doggerel. Rather, we want poems that portray what it is like to live in the current political climate. In the process of choosing poems to be published, I was stuck between two rocks and a hard place: I had to ensure we were caught up with the daily posting and that the poetry was “politically adjacent.” As I was looking through the poems in Submittable, I asked myself one essential question: “How can I identify if a piece is politically adjacent?”

After posing that question, I thought of the current state of affairs we’re in as a country. We’re all stuck in a similar way. Politically, personally, and artistically, we have internal and external conflicts constantly pulling us in different ways. Politically, we live in a country that seems to be at odds. One half of the country believes in the President and the administration; the other half has absolutely no faith in the President and the administration—but then we have people caught in the middle. It’s a constant game of tug of war between two sides and we’re caught observing as artists—and in a twist of events, even choosing sides. As editors of a poetry series with a progressive orientation, how can curators deal with a submission that is “politically adjacent” and also happens to be politically conservative? That is a question that could apply to any publication, conservative or liberal/progressive. The lines of subjectivity, opinion, fact, truth and fiction are becoming more and more blurred. How do we as artists skate along the lines of poetry and politics? How do we express our perspectives without undermining our poetics? How do we merge art with politics?

This topic has been discussed many times, but I felt the need not only as a writer but as a reader to ask this question again. Artists have had a long history of being political through different artistic mediums. There are visual pieces such as Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With in 1964, which depicted Ruby Bridges, the first black child to be sent to an integrated school, being escorted to school by the National Guard. Another painting, Dmitri Vrubels’ The Kiss (1990), shows Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German President Erich Honecker enthusiastically kissing each other. Lastly, poet Sharon Olds’s open letter to Laura Bush in 2005 explained why she wouldn’t attend the White House dinner in protest of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq War.

This long history of artistic resistance makes it no surprise that politics and poetry, like fear and faith, are inherently intertwined these days. With the Trump administration in full swing, there have been many artistic responses to Trump and the administration. However, as an editor seeking “politically adjacent” work for publication, I have to look for poetry that portrays life as we live it in the current political climate, but that does not descend into rant or diatribe. As writers observing this administration, people want to make their voices heard in opposition to those who silence them and a government that encourages that silencing. On the other hand, we seek work that utilizes all the resources of poetry. The feelings, thoughts, and emotions can and indeed should be present, but not at the expense of craft. It may be a fine line at times, but it’s all about a balance of creativity and message that successfully merges art and politics.

Politics is all about balance and messaging: the balance of the personal and professional life, the balance of catering to divided parties, the balance of different types of people that look to the politician to help them. Poetry is also about balance and messaging: the balance of poetic craft to tell a personal story. The balance of expressing thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and opinions in a way the draws the reader in rather than pushing the reader out. Politics and poetry have had their fair share of controversy that has made both mediums historically unique. Political moments like the Watergate scandal of 1974 and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (which faced and won an obscenity trial in 1957 upon publication) are landmark examples of that controversy.

Poetry is subjective. What, in the end, qualifies as poem as “politically adjacent”? What makes the merging of poetry and politics so enticing is that the reader experiences the poem as a conversation to which they have been invited rather than a lecture to which they have been subjected? There is no one way for the poet to balance their own creative objectives with the needs of the reader, just as there is no one way for the statesman to balance their own political agenda with the needs of the citizens whom they are elected serve. In both cases, it is a matter of craft.

Jada Gordon is a writer, editor, and poet from the Bronx, NY. She’s won the 2017 James Tolan Student Writer Award and published and edited the magazine for BMCC’s Writing Club, The Writers’ Guild. She’s also been published on WordPress and in Sula Magazine.

“Some Days It Seems We’ve Found It”: Jacques J. Rancourt’s “In the Time of PrEP”

Posted on August 16, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Book Review by Reuben Gelley Newman

In 1993, the black gay HIV+ poet Melvin Dixon, in his speech “I’ll be Somewhere Listening for My Name,” charged future generations, “by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us.” Jacques J. Rancourt’s chapbook In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018) not only takes up that charge, describing a present both startlingly different and unnervingly similar to Dixon’s past, but takes us to a somewhere where Dixon, perhaps, could be listening. In this somewhere, Rancourt can title a poem “I Don’t Go to Gay Bars Anymore,” then continue: “someone tells me & sure enough / another boards up.” In this somewhere,

The speaker both wants to live in that precarious Jerusalem — Rancourt’s San Francisco — and prays, simply, to live and to be seen. But this “holy city / swollen with light & sound…won’t last,” and its danger resounds through Rancourt’s tender, precariously balanced poems.

The chapbook begins with the expansive “Love in the Time of PrEP” — a title echoing Gabriel García Marquez’s famous book — in which the speaker and his husband are haunted by a rainbow, a “broken spectre,” while climbing a volcano. Everything is refracted — space, time, history — and the poem transitions seamlessly between intimacy and reflection, ending with “two Berkeley freshmen” who

This poem is on one level a plea for remembrance, but it also values those freshmen’s naivety. The chapbook’s epigraph, from the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, reads: “My approach to hope…can best be described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision.” Rancourt’s own “backward glance” links the boy’s foolishness with that of some gay men in the ’80s who contracted HIV. He sees, in the present, a world where those boys can act “as if none of this every happened”: a world both freer and scarier. And in the future, he envisions a world where, perhaps, remembrance of tragedy can foster greater appreciation of our relative freedom.

The chapbook’s cover, an untitled collage by the artist Barton Lidicé Beneš, depicts a little boy playing with HIV pills and birds — whose bodies are made of the pills — eating them. To me, this juxtaposition of pills and play evokes the freshmen’s naivety and recalls Dixon’s devastating quip: “As for me, I’ve become an acronym queen: BGM ISO same or other. HIV plus or minus. CMV, PCP, MAI, AZT, ddl, ddC. Your prescription gets mine.” Rancourt is not an “acronym queen” — though PrEP, as he notes, stands for “pre-exposure prophylaxis, a pill taken daily to reduce the chances of HIV infection” — but there is play in his danger, and danger in his play.

Indeed, the sheer joy of Rancourt’s language and imagery shines through despite the constant threat of death. “The jizz drifts like smoke” through the “holy Jacuzzi” in “At the Place of Bathhouses,” but “what has happened before / will happen again—the fog belt will roll in with the chill / of the dead…” The incantatory “Litany” takes its wordplay seriously: every line begins with the words “One man,” yet midway through the poem we read how “One man slept with ten men & survived / Ten men slept with one man & died.” Instead of confronting a homophobe, the speaker of “The Counter-Protester in the City” leaves his wedding cake topper on a bench nearby, while his younger self

In the Time of PrEP comes on the heels of a very different book addressing HIV/AIDS in the present, Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead. For Smith, the “us” is more specific: black, queer, and HIV+. But the book rings with a similar yearning for utopia: “please, don’t call / us dead, call us alive someplace better” (“summer, somewhere”). These books — along with many, many more by queer writers of all colors and genders — answer Dixon, who ends his speech with a plea to support gay and lesbian publishing, because, he insists, “our voice is our weapon.” Rancourt’s voice, with its wide-ranging depiction of grief, love, and history, is not only a weapon but a medicine. In “The Fall,” there’s a boy who, during sex,

Imagine Dixon’s name spoken back into the past, echoing throughout the well of history. Imagine his name spoken into the future, “a backward glance that enacts a future vision” where queer, HIV+ voices can thrive. I’ve only hinted at the importance of religion to Rancourt’s work, but perhaps we can think of his vision as, rather than mere “hope,” an act of faith. Though the litany of men Rancourt remembers remain chillingly nameless, he prays for them — and prays for a different future — despite their anonymity. In The Time of PrEP speaks queer identities to the past, present, and future. It searches for that somewhere we might never truly reach.

Dealing with Rejection as a Young Writer

Posted on August 14, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post by Sophie Allen

As an emerging writer, I’m used to form rejections, personalized rejections, and the worst kind of rejection of all: no response. Getting rejected is incredibly demoralizing, and I’ve dealt with it in a lot of ways, ranging from healthy to damaging to unreasonable. Normally when I get rejected I can take a deep breath, remember that rejection has little bearing on the quality of my writing, and move on, but sometimes those emails hit me where it hurts. I do not recommend crying in public as a pastime, though I have partaken in it before and probably will again.

In some ways, it can be nice to get a rejection. It’s a sign that someone is out there, reading your work, and you should keep pushing forward until the person who reads your work decides it’s right for them or their publication. It still hurts to know that a person sat down, looked at what you wrote, and didn’t want it, but at least you know you’ve been considered. Not hearing back at all can be devastating, especially when it seems easy to press a button and send a form rejection.

It’s difficult to see the value in one’s effort if there is no payoff, whether it comes in the form of recognition, readership, or money. Yes, I write for myself, but it’s still work, and it’s gratifying to have that effort noticed by other people. This could also be due to the fact that I was brought up under an economic system where people’s value is determined by their output, but that’s a different blog post.

It’s a comfort and a burden to know that there’s no objective measure of talent in creative areas. I try to remember this when I doubt myself; I have no guarantee that I’m actually skilled or doing anything right except what meaning I can take from my own experiences. It’s up to me to decide what effect other people have on my morale and perception of my own work. I would like to think that every poem I’ve revised again and again, that I’ve cried over, that came to me in the middle of the night was worthwhile and intrinsically valuable, but part of me only believes the published ones have merit.

I had a poem published recently that I wrote in July of 2017. I’m very proud of it and I’d been sending it around for just shy of a year. Despite the numerous rejections I racked up since last summer, I still think this poem is pretty good and I think it deserved to be picked up; I’m extremely grateful that it was. But there are other poems of which I’m equally proud which might never be published at all.

For instance, I sent work to a journal recently and was told that a poem came “close” to being selected for publication. I still think the piece is pretty good and will continue sending it out, but it’s a little disheartening to see that someone liked my piece, but still didn’t think it was a good enough fit.

Still, it’s hard not to think of rejected pieces as bad poems, or at the very least, as not good enough, even if I know that a significant portion of the reading process relates to a publication’s aesthetic and its editors’ preferences. I think what I’m trying to reckon with as a writer with virtually no career experience is the idea that yes, I write because I love it, but loving something doesn’t pay the bills. There are a lot of things about this industry that need to change, and I’m not sure how to change them, but for now I need to accept that sometimes, everyone gets ignored. Everyone gets rejected. All I can do is work harder.

Sophie Allen is an English major at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is an Opinion/Editorial columnist at the Daily Collegian, the independent student newspaper at UMass. In her spare time, she enjoys reading murder mysteries and writing poetry. In the future, Sophie hopes to write for late-night television.

Writing Classics Queerly

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post by Reuben Gelley Newman

I’ve been thinking recently about the politics of writing a poem called “Ganymede and the Eagle.” You may be familiar with Yeats’ poem “Leda and the Swan,” which describes the Greek god Zeus taking the form of a swan and raping a human woman. But in the myth, Zeus also soared down from Olympus as an eagle to take a boy, Ganymede, to be his cupbearer. The story had obvious homoerotic subtext, and Ganymede’s name eventually morphed into the Latin word “catamitus,” a boy or effeminate adult male kept for anal sex by an older man, and the equivalent word “catamite” in early modern English.

Wait a second, adolescents “kept for anal sex by an older man?” Isn’t that child abuse? From a modern perspective, of course. From an ancient perspective, no. The Greeks in particular had a tradition of pederasty, in which young men were sexually pursued by older men and at least in theory received educational and moral mentorship as well.

This seems like a horribly unequal power dynamic to us, and it was. Many wealthy Greek and Roman men could have sex with women, boys, and slaves at their whim. It was also considered unmanly to bottom, or be in the “passive” role, and some poets dissed their enemies through sexual insults. For example, in one poem, the Roman poet Catullus tells his friends: “I will butt-fuck you and skull-fuck you, Aurelius, you pussy-boy, and Furius, you cocksucker!”

That’s a translation taken from a Huffington Post article by Indolent’s Michael Broder where he argues that this wasn’t hatred so much as camp. There’s definitely a debate to be had there, but the point is, however inequitable ancient Greece and Rome were, we can also recognize their queerness today. That’s what drives my desire to write about them.

Already, though, by thinking about it as “Ganymede and the Eagle,” I’m implying that Zeus rapes Ganymede like he rapes Leda in Yeats’ poem. I’m making it more familiar (if still horrific) to modern sensibilities by framing it as cis-white-God-rapes-young-innocent-boy. But who am I to do that? Is this how I’m sympathizing with the #metoo moment in an inauthentic way? And why do I need classics to do that anyways? Is classics just a bunch of Western canonical bullshit that writers are obsessed with?

I don’t have answers, but I can hint at some. I’m trying to talk about different ways queerness has been conceptualized across time, and how there’s queerness, in some form or another, everywhere. I’m queering classics, something poets like Carl Phillips and Reginald Shepherd have done for a while. I’m not at all the first to queer the Ganymede myth, either: see Jericho Brown’s powerful and chilling take here.

This trend fits into the broader paradigm of poets and other writers rethinking classics, as exemplified by feminist poems like Carol Ann Duffy’s “Eurydice” (available on Genius, of all places!) or epics like Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Because classical culture has influenced Western civilization in so many ways—both good and bad—I think this is important work.

But I’m trying to do it self-consciously. Right now, there are actually two poems: one a stripped-back retelling of the myth, the other a prose poem, weaving Ganymede in with broader concerns about Jewishness, queerness, and my own identity. They’re both ambitious, and I’ve gone through several drafts of each. In the first, I’m trying to portray Ganymede as more than just a passive victim, but I still wonder if I should write yet another poem in Ganymede’s voice, as Carl Phillips does with Leda in “Leda, After the Swan.” The second one has the potential to be too sprawling and disjointed, something I’ve worked hard against.

The joy of it is that I’m taking risks and asking myself the hard questions: about how poems can be political, about the politics of writing about classics, and about my own positionality. Although I feel like the poems are relatively finished now, who knows where they’ll take me? Their making, like the subject matter, is quite queer indeed.