Book Review: Will the Real Folks Please Stand Up?: Rebellion, Authenticity, and Identity in Hick Poetics

Review by Abby Minor

Hick Poetics: An Anthology of Contemporary Rural American Poetry, Edited by Shelly Taylor and Abraham Smith, Lost Roads Press, 2015, Paperback: $25.00, ISBN 978-0-918786-61-6, 392 pages.

I was raised by a man who had opinions about the word “creek.” My father never missed an opportunity to remind my sister and me that folks who use that word to describe moving water are (I kid you not) “trying to sound like they’re from the city.”  To him the word for what ran through our yard was rightfully “crick,” rhyming with “stick,” or, significantly, with “hick.” At the same time, he and my mother (a Jewish New Yorker who couldn’t give two hoots about rural nomenclature) sent us to a private Quaker elementary school, and my pipeline-welder dad eventually got a PhD in physics. So I grew up with the idea that while you might not actually want to live in a coal patch, intimations of hick-ness could earn you something—but I wasn’t exactly sure with whom or to what end. And I’m still not.

Part of the answer to that question—what do you get when you flash your hick badge?—lies with two distinct, and distinctly related, early-20th-century developments in U.S. thought. On the one hand, Americans came to think of one of our preeminent rural places, Appalachia, as especially white; on the other, we came to associate “nature” with healthful, masculine vigor. The first idea was a fantasy of purity: in the decades surrounding the century’s turn, when interest in the “science” of eugenics reached a peak in the U.S., a surge of social scientists, reformers, and folklore collectors strove to delineate what they perceived as reliably “white.” Faced with Emancipation, migration, and immigration, culture workers turned their attention to Appalachia. And Appalachia, despite the significant presence of African American and non-Anglo mountaineers, seemed to fit the bill.  The idea of Appalachia as a stronghold of Anglo culture was most visible in the work of folk-song collectors, and you can see it still in many old-time music communities. Indeed, early-20th-century song collectors’ work had a lot to do with the fact that, seventy years later, my father—who would never think to trace his father’s banjo to West Africa—would explain to me with pride that his West Virginia kin still spoke Shakespeare’s English.

The second development, the sense of nature as an antidote to cultural effeminacy, was a fantasy of authenticity. This fantasy congealed in the form of the Back to Nature movement, and on that subject it’s worth quoting Modernist scholar Robin Schulze at length:

“Confronted with the specter of a degenerate Europe and the increasing threat that America, too, would inevitably become decadent and artificial as its own culture evolved, upper- and middle-class white Americans turned back to nature for the sake of the American race.  They chose to value not culture, not the artifacts of their evolving civilization, but the idea of health. Always anxious about their poetry, pictures, and music, the art that never seem wholly unique or mature, Americans opted to denigrate such artifice as the root of degeneracy and revel instead in the vigorous life that heading back to nature promised.  If Americans could never truly have a culture, they could best Europe by being fit, and nature was the key to that fitness.” 

It’s not difficult to see how these twin fantasies—one of purity, the other of authenticity—fit neatly together in many ways, or how the Anglicized Appalachian came to represent a holy trinity of related fictions: the eugenic vigor of whiteness; the durability, masculinity, and restraint of working culture; and the innocence of American wilderness. He represented a stay against an impressive array of threats: fainting Europeans, unfit swarthy masses, the regressive culture of underdeveloped “savages,” and the dainty nerves of anemic artists, academics, and the urban effete. This picture was precarious and potentially contradictory (couldn’t the poor, large families of Appalachia also resemble the degenerate masses? How exactly could the culture of the folk be void of the artifice that supposedly defined culture itself?), but it stuck. And so the people of the rural mountains became what the country needed them to be: in historian Fred Hay’s words, “America’s sole surviving remnant population of pure Anglo-American stock”; in other words, a multiple-pronged, reactionary fantasy.

Where I live, in northern Appalachia, people still perform a gauntlet-flinging brand of white rusticity partly born of those century-old fantasies. And while it’s common to associate contemporary gestures of rural bravado with conservatives, in truth performances of hick-face range from the tattered snap of a Confederate flag flown from the back of a PA pick-up to the aggressive stomp of a Brooklyn-based jug band at the local brew pub. Nearly everyone in my rural milieu, from Trump supporters to liberal organic farmers, has their own version of adamantly rejecting “creek” for “crick,” and while I can trace the spit and swagger of these gestures to certain histories, I still can’t entirely parse them out. And so I turn to poets; I read rural poets to find out how we handle the ideologies we’ve inherited, how we echo or interrupt the interlocking isms and fears that still haunt our rural imaginary. 

▫  ▫ ▫

There’s spit and swagger to spare in Hick Poetics: An Anthology of Contemporary Rural American Poetry, published by Lost Roads in 2015.  Editors Shelly Taylor and Abraham Smith frame the collection in terms of reclamation and rebellion: “hick in our minds is a powerful rib-jab reclamation of power: it is us taking back this idea of the pastoral—ours to begin with anyhow—a la Johnny Cash’s middle finger,” writes Taylor; Smith calls it an anthology of “roughly reedy exhalations” and “a book built for hearing what some natives & near natives of the pasture have up their grassy, greasy sleeves.”  When Taylor muses on the anthology’s title—“Why hick, you ask? What a terribly derisive word in this modern age of ‘best be careful not to offend’”—there’s a hint of pride at the prospect of offending. In their short introductory essays, both Smith and Taylor use the word piss—Smith uses it three times.  

Rib-jabs, greasy sleeves, pissing—these are not the Back to Nature movement’s innocent rubes. Like reclamations of other slurs (niggah, bitch, queer), Smith and Taylor’s hick reclamation requires some strut and chutzpah, and it plays with the angel/devil dichotomy by which marginalized people are often defined.  Just as nostalgia for an imaginary, simple (white) past hangs around Appalachia and other rural places, so do jokes about toothless-ness and incest.  The rural poor have been not only rosily romanticized, but also politically, economically, and culturally pushed aside. Like dichotomous virgin/whore images of women, like our films that show black people as either saintly or monstrous, the innocent mountaineer and the idiot hillbilly are two sides of the same coin.  We imbue class and region, like gender and race, with contradictory meanings: we see the “folk” as degenerate or salt of the earth, as ignorant or intuitive, as licentious or admirably embodied. Twin strands of glorification and repugnance abide.

Hick Poetics challenges the glorification by glorifying the repugnant.  It hollers back a hundred years at those early folklorists: Hey, we’re not just milk-fed fiddlers, and we can write in ways that are weird, fragmented, experimental, and unhinged.  In rejecting the traditionally-pretty pastoral, Smith and Taylor want us to see not only rural people but “nature poetry” as edgy, funky, rusty, raw. What Taylor describes as “this tough-minded collection of hick poems” does not do what traditional nature poetry has done; readers find fewer revelatory walks in the woods and more roadside trash.  In one of the book’s short essays—each of the anthology’s forty poets introduces their own work—we “find ourselves in the litter of illegal fires, broken bottles, last night’s sex.” Whereas the whitewashed Appalachian promised to stave off degeneracy, Hick Poetics often revels in it, taking pleasure in being a little bit bad and dirty, greasy and grassy, junky and tough.  And, yes, full of piss. 

There’s a class-based protest against the insufferable tidiness of bourgeois aesthetics running through the anthology.  Nathan Hauke’s poems look at the “Dull glint of tinsel near the tree dump” and “A young mother picking lice out of her husband’s hair in Sunshine Coin-Op”; the anthology abounds with “the bruised faces of elderberries and actual bruised faces”, “the dumpsters // behind the TV factory”, and “People who burn old tires indoors in homemade woodstoves.”  And yet, Hick Poetics also often feels like the song of a people split by complexities of aesthetics and class: that line about burning old tires reads, in its entirety, “It’s hard to write about supposedly being a hick when you know or have known real hicks. People who burn old tires indoors in homemade woodstoves, for example.”  For many rural-born poets, the fact that we teach college students or attend conferences or use words like “afterimage” or write poetry—or never burned tires indoors—makes us the city slickers scoffed at by our hometown folks.  That tension is one of the anthology’s major themes: Juliana Spahr writes that she’s been accused of being “a hillbilly fraud”; Juan Felipe Herrera’s sister describes him as “‘del pueblo,’ not from ‘el rancho’ where you know how to make adobe, roast forty pounds of green chiles”; Danielle Pafunda relates: “Am I a hick? I ask. You grew up twenty minutes from the mall, my partner crows.”  

Smith seems to dismiss the urgency of that apparent tension between academic conferences and making adobe (or burning tires, or whatever our home community’s particular rubric for hick-ness is) when he writes:

“how we live now authenticity is clawed at until it bleeds something. perhaps these ain’t ‘authentic outpost inlookings’…but i know this: the stuff of the pastoral is the stuffing puffing up most poets, sometimes; pasture grass gargle, a commonplace. & I do know this book to be looking you square in the star eye.” 

But in the pages that follow, just exactly what it means to be “looking you square in the star eye”—what it means to be sufficiently greasy and grassy rather than stuffed and puffed—isn’t so easily set aside.  The struggle to reconcile the down-home and the intellectual (or the urban, suburban, or urbane) persists: Pafunda responds to her partner’s crowing, “I spent as much time scratching poison sumac and bug bites, as much time up in trees as he did.”  Yet she acknowledges, “I’m a city girl, I’m pretty bourgeois”—then again, “My house was full of guns”—then again, “I’ve never shot a gun myself”—then again, “I know how to hold one, how to aim.” A tension remains.  

As someone who grew up stomping cat litter into the drain field of the busted septic tank (thanks, Dad—real Shakespearian), I know what it’s like to want to honor the rough and rusty, to rub the tire piles and the wood piles in the faces of families who hug on porches while a light snow falls in Christmas-time commercials for Apple products.  So when these poets attend to “paint huffers lagoonside” and “the wall of a rusted-out stove,” I get it. When Ander Monson describes wanting “To manifest resistance to those who’d try to ruin our ruins, to those who choose to flatten us with their attention or inattention,” I get it. When Tim Earley howls, “JANE SMILEY WRITES of THE SCOTCH-IRISH: ‘Mean as a snake and twice as quick…’…. Fuck you, Jane Smiley….gum it up in the Berkeley, gum it up in the New Yorks City, POETRY! POETRY! POETRY! you subhuman fucks,” I more or less get it.  I get that to pay attention to paint huffers and rusted-out stoves can be to reject romanticized ideas about rural purity, to offer a legitimate hymn to the peripheral. 

But I’m struck by how this need to prove ourselves as sufficiently rusty can feel anxious, and by how the terms of this struggle between rural realities and whatever threatens them are still, just as a century ago, so often gendered. It’s difficult not to associate rural-ness with a kind of masculine “real-ness” (whether what’s real consists of racial purity or syntactical fracturing or guns and rust), and too easy to express our thoughts about authenticity—as poets or as country people, or both—in terms that seem to equate the inauthentic (whatever it is) with the feminine (whatever it is).  It’s not so much that what counts as “real” has remained the same since the Back to Nature movement’s apex, but that whatever we call authentic gets coded as tough.

When I feel my own hick rebelliousness coming on (why do I so often mention my father’s tobacco chewing habit, but not his PhD in physics?), I think of the “REDNECK”-emblazoned confederate flags flying from porches and trucks in my neck of the woods, and I pause.  I find it hard to avoid the association between hick swagger and white, masculine defensiveness—“hick,” whatever else it may mean, surely signals rural white masculinity in popular culture—or to resist reading Hick Poetics as, at times, insufficiently attuned to that association.  “This idea of the pastoral” might have been “ours to begin with anyhow,” but I’m not sure who the word “hick” belongs to at our current cultural moment, who it belonged to in the past, or who “we” are. While it’s clear that the anthology aims to challenge and expand popular ideas about who (and what attitudes) count as rural—Taylor and Smith have gathered poets of different races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, visions, and bearings—it still sometimes seems to gloss over hick’s attendant meanings, and so the hick-as-white-masculinity thing can feel like the elephant in the anthology’s otherwise imaginative and visionary room. In aiming to reclaim what’s been prettied-up by systems of power, Hick Poetics, like my rebel-flag-flying brethren, occasionally engages in a kind of strutting and finger-tossing that has its own thorny power dynamics. 

Describing the literary scene in Fayetteville, Arkansas, poet Matthew Henricksen writes, “We drink coffee and beer and look at trees. We read Frank Stanford…until three AM.  We hardly hear the echoing yelps of universities who only hire book prize-winning PhDs and publishing houses who outsource their printing to Mexico.” And in his introductory note, Smith folds the reader into that coterie of yelpers when he describes the anthology’s poets as “not from where you are now, i am guessing.”  What strikes me is that in throwing the bird at the same urban and/or academic pretense that the Back to Nature movement promised to cure—and that the likes of Tim McGraw still love to disdain—we summon some politically interesting bedfellows. 

I want to resist equating broken appliances or hazardous forces, including the prosodic forces of fracturing and narrative skittishness, with authentic hick-ness—however true to our experiences those things might be, however tempting it is to haul out the rusty washer when tenure-track New Yorkers come around or the dis-associative leaps when traditional nature poets come around—because doing so doesn’t so much broaden as simply reverse the narrative of rural-ness as sweet and recuperative.  I want to challenge what seems unsatisfying about the traditional pastoral without coding it as effeminate and relying on busted septic tanks and jagged syntaxes to beef it up. I want to be skeptical of the romance of fiddles (or lyres), but also of the romance of damage; I want to agree with Adrian Kien that “brutality and survival” have a lot to do with both wilderness and poetry without rejecting gentleness, without calling on that particularly American brand of nature-as-tough invented, in part, as an antidote to art itself.   

▫  ▫ ▫

And yet on the tricky subject of authenticity Hick Poetics is, in its poetry and especially in its prose, largely both gratifying and challenging. “When you grew up in the rural South,” writes Greg Alan Brownderville, “even if you work diligently to understate everything, it’s hard to talk about your background without appearing to ham it up and parody yourself.”  Michael Sikkema describes “constantly navigating the country vs. ‘country’”, and Jen Tynes writes of her home town: “In the gift shops around the (man-made) lake that brought in much-needed tourist dollars, you could buy corncobs with a label attached: hillbilly toilet paper.” In naming the weird layers of caricature and commodification that hick-ness accrues, these poets acknowledge the slippery contours of conversations about region and class, as well as the inevitably performative aspects of identity, even as they identify very much as of-their-places.  I hear a wryly complicated comment on rural identity and language when Tynes writes, “…what am I / supposed to covet next? / Another slang for storm.”   

One of the best things Hick Poetics does, even if it does so implicitly, is to address North American realities of place-related loss, as well as the ways in which white supremacy, racism, misogyny, queer-phobia, and whitewashing of rural places are so deeply intertwined with environmental degradation. In other words, the anthology blurs the (man-made) line between the politics of social life and the politics of environment: “My poems engage the subject of Inupiaq cultural and biological extinction,” writes Joan Naviyuk Kane, “…Hick poetics prevents me from losing perspective in the destructive events of recent history and enlarges my awareness of the vast and self-replenishing resources of the human spirit, voice, and intellect.”  Kane’s poem “Nunaqtigiit” picks up where her prose leaves off:

From time to time the sound of voices 

      as through sun-singed grass,

or grasses that we used to insulate the walls of our winter houses—

walrus hides lashed together with rawhide cords.

…

The sky of my mind against which self-

betrayal in its sudden burn

fails to describe the world.

…

Leaning against the stone wall ragged

I began to accept my past and, as I accepted it,

I felt, and I didn’t understand:

      I am bound to everyone.

The scale of loss Kane’s poems engage is distinct to indigenous experience, but the final line of “Nunaqtigiit” points to the ways in which the anthology’s poets are bound together in contending with the still-unfolding erasures of colonization.  They are bound not by the inevitable losses of mortality and accident, but with those caused by spiritual illness and injustice. Hick Poetics tells how “The farms that no longer farm now frack”; how “you cannot love bugles/or understand a calendar/ as long as there is a slaughterhouse”; and, in Juliana Spahr’s poem documenting indigenous Hawaiian’s struggle to access shoreline, “how certain of we have rights on paper yet not in place.”

It’s satisfying, not to mention accurate, to encounter such a broad range of social experiences under the hick umbrella. Brownderville’s “Song for a Kiss” describes a Civil-Rights-Era-childhood in Arkansas, a black girl’s kiss on a white boy’s neck, his disgust, and, later, when he’s grown and yearns to return it: “At once I felt ashamed / for dreaming that my kiss—belated blessing—would be worth a good goddamn. / That it could heal, heal anything: her, me, home.” Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s dream-like, urgent poem “Sudden Where” speaks from the perspective of young people living in foster care; the poem begins, “Talon-plucked speckled trout from bitterroot bed,” and goes on to extend that image:

  …Thought we were unbreakable

tried so many times to snuff ourselves—each other—blunders were our closest

friends. Kept us from soaring over cloud dreams, swimming in deep water,

skimming surfaces in grasslands without a notion when we’d make it back

to the piney mountains calling us home. That was fostering. Sudden where.

Being left to airs, to talons lifting, sometimes tearing scales as they raised us. 

Reading Hick Poetics is like looking through a kaleidoscope at many, sometimes radically different, North American ways of understanding land: while some poets describe wilderness as a space of terror, disappearance, silence, or absence, others see its recuperative powers—think of Coke’s “piney mountains calling us home.” While some express uneasy or ambivalent relationships to land and place, others struggle to (re)claim those relationships: when Crystal Wilkenson writes, “I am Black. I am Appalachian. People don’t often acknowledge our presence but we are here….We’re here. We’re here,” you understand why she needs to repeat herself.  

The anthology also captures painful tensions between regional identification and radical not-fitting-ins.  Writes genderqueer poet TC Tolbert, “my body my word my horror my healing my home my leaving my god my (w)hole my south,” while Spahr reflects: “5,000 miles from this place, I still wake up at least once a week and think I am there and have to reorient myself.  It is as if I go there in my sleep to rest…And yet I’m not fucking moving back there ever, so don’t ask again mom.” Lisa D. Chavez notes simply, “Leaving Alaska was like leaving a lover, losing a limb.” That friction between identification and distance is a hallmark of artistic life, and it makes for rural vernaculars variously defined: “With what should I encircle my throat so as not to inconvenience the blue air”, writes Earley; a Brownderville speaker “Got so drunk, / I felt like I was working / a Rubik’s Cube with my / eyeballs”; D.A. Powell goes “splat in the oatmeal: granddaddy facedown / disappeared the way a prize hog we were fond of”; and Gillian Conoley manages something between an Appalachian ballad and an Elizabeth Bishop poem when she writes:

no more

shall I wear that old black dress, greasy all around.   no more shall I

wear the old black bonnet with holes all in the crown.

One of the anthology’s emotional currents is a kind of affectless-ness, an opacity that aims to tread lightly, I think, where traditional nature poets have sometimes gone heavy with sentimentality. Dreamy non-narratives and distant speakers (“The bell rings and I assume my charges, / your name bleeding slowly through my blouse, a sparrow // carved it thus, a titmouse, and so it weeps in lieu of me,” Pafunda writes) can move us beyond clichés about human relationships with nature, and can challenge established ideas about what counts as a narrative, or even what counts as a self. Such approaches search for language that feels more honest, more accurate than what co-editor Smith calls “pasture grass gargle, a commonplace.” And yet it’s this dis-associative reserve that backlights and makes striking two of the anthology’s other important tonal strands: moments of straight-up humor, and moments of what I’ll call “land-love.” Hicks are, after all, funny; listen to Michael Earl Craig: 

My little horse must think it queer.

But who cares what he thinks? 

Listening to an animal might get me killed

look what happened to Walter.

And hicks are often lovers; the hicks I’ve known are helplessly, gruffly, often irrationally in love with their home places (“Abigail,” my father would say, “I’ve been all over the world, and central Pennsylvania is the prettiest place there is.”). Linnea Ogden’s poem “Long Weekend” strikes a tone both grumpy-funny and loving—“I hate everything easily this year but /The mockingbirds oh”—and Herrera issues a beautiful, unselfconscious call to affection for the world when he writes, 

let us gather in a flourishing way

en la luz y en la carne of our heart to toil

tranquilos in fields of blossoms 

In another poem, Herrera even instructs us to learn affection from the world: 

the wren

& the tree, always the tree & the

brambles, they are the presidents

of kindness 

Funny and loving, brash and kind, opaque in its ellipses and reservations, talkative and sparse, strutting and tender—Hick Poetics does, ultimately, what a good reclamation project should do: it muddies the waters, it complicates the terrain. The anthology itself feels (to use Tynes’ apt phrase from her stand-out essay on region and racism and class) “generatively rigged.” It’s not perfect and it’s not unified; it uses scraps and, like giovanni singleton, “would do a ‘hybrid’ and douse pinstriped overalls with blue velvet jacket, thinking Thoreau-ian thoughts.” And it puts me in mind of a funny thing that happened a few months ago.

Stationed at a white board at the local nursing home, where I teach a weekly poetry-writing class, I was transcribing memories and details for a collective poem. Most of the folks who come to sit at the dining-room-table-turned-classroom every Friday afternoon are near-centenarians who grew up in farming families rooted for generations in this valley, and yet they’re hardly dogmatic about regional identification; on most days, they accept me as someone more or less “from here,” Jewish mother notwithstanding. But when you’re paying attention to language, slips and gaps show up.

“I’m from the fourth house up the crick road,” one of my students said, and I dutifully wrote it down. I spelled the word as I’d heard it: C-R-I-C-K. My students looked at me, confused. “What’s that word you wrote?,” asked Ralph. “Crick,” I said, “just like Gretchen said.”  “Well,” Gretchen chimed in, “however you say it, you spell it the same as anyone.” 

Turns out it’s pronounced to rhyme with “stick,” but it’s still spelled C-R-E-E-K. Even my dad didn’t know that. 

Notes

Robin Schulze’s work on the Back to Nature movement appears in her book The Degenerate Muse.

Anyone Who Would Talk with Me: An Interview with Julia Spicher Kasdorf

By Amy Lee Heinlen, for The Fourth River

Julia Spicher Kasdorf visited Chatham University as the guest poet for the 2014 Summer Community of Writers (SCW). It was here that I heard Julia read from her enquiring and provocative new project in which she folds language, history, and place into powerful and distressing poems which record the voices of those involved in the Western Pennsylvania natural gas industry boom. Intrigued by her new poems,, I emailed Julia to find out more about her project and this fierce poem.

The Fourth River: At your reading during SCW, you read a series of profoundly moving poems from a current project. Will you elaborate this project?

Julia Spicher Kasdorf: Oh, thanks for saying that you found them moving! The project, which I’m now calling Shale Play, is a series about impacts of shale gas development in Pennsylvania. I’m still working on it, hoping to eventually publish it with photographs.

Last year I was fortunate to have time off from teaching, thanks to a sabbatical from the English Department and a fellowship from the Institute of Arts and Humanities at Penn State. I took 17 or 18 trips to northern PA (Tioga and Lycoming Counties) and southwestern PA (Westmoreland and Fayette Counties, where I grew up). At home and on campus, I learned all I could through print and on-line sources about the history, engineering, and technology of this industry. It can be argued that the current gas boom started at Penn State, with the research of geoscientist Terry Engelder, and that Penn State has shaped state policy and local practices, for better or for worse. Quite a few faculty members in fields outside of geoscience—forestry, agricultural economics, hydrology, rural sociology, landscape architecture and education—do research in this area, too. I will add that the faculty is not of one mind on the issue, despite the common perception that Penn State is in collusion with the industry.

But I really wanted to see what’s happening in local communities. Like Zora Neale Hurston says, “You got to go there to know there.”

I have contacts in western PA from growing up there, and Judith Sornberger and James Guignard at Mansfield University helped me to understand the lay of the land up north. Then I just drove around and sat in diners and talked with anyone I could find who has had experience with shale gas—landowners, leaseholders, workers in the industry and workers around the industry like waitresses, people who live near compressor stations, people who live near wells, an attorney, clergy, activists, anyone who would talk with me. One conversation led to another, and I wrote down everything I could.

TFR: During your craft talk at SCW, you noted the difference between a poet of document and poet of witness. I’m interested in how you think about your role as a poet while you work on Shale Play. Has your view of your role as a poet changed during this project compared to your previous poetry collections?

JSK: This is different from previous collections in that it’s my first self-conscious project of poetry. Sleeping Preacher reads like an autoethnographic project book, but I wasn’t mindful of that when I was writing many of those poems in graduate school. My most recent collection, Poetry in America, makes documentary gestures, quoting voices in my small town during the Iraq war, for instance, and citing historical events. But this is the first Project Book I’ve attempted. It came after teaching a course in documentary poetry: Reznikoff, Rukeyser, C.D. Wright, Mark Nowak, and so on. I’m intrigued by that work, and then we have this industrial invasion happening in rural Pennsylvania that I wanted to understand and record. I’m a poet. I start with language. I’m not an activist who must simplify the discourse. I’m an artist drawn to the complexity and emotional intensity of the situation. I listen. I want to hear how this development will change language along with the landscape. I want to amplify voices—including the voices of memory—that shape experience. That’s how I entered the project, anyway. The more I see and hear, the more I’ve come to identify with those who have been harmed.

TFR: I’m interested to know more about the relationship between the “citizen with too much memory” and the “I” in your poem, “Among Landowners and Industrial Stakeholders, a Citizen with Too Much Memory Seeks Standing to Speak of Recent Events in Penn’s Woods.” What does it mean that she “seeks standing to speak?”

JSK: The “citizen” is the speaker, is the author. The title comes from something I was thinking about. In these Marcellus Shale communities, when there’s a public hearing about something—a pipeline going in, say, or a compressor station venting volatile organic compounds or making a ridiculous amount of noise—there are often restrictions on who has “standing,” which means who is permitted to speak at the meeting. You might have standing if you have a business interest at stake or if you own property within a certain distance. So what qualifies me to speak about shale gas development? This poem is my answer to that question. I guess “too much memory” is a way of saying that I’m a “stakeholder” because of all I carry in my mind and body. My only claim on this place is knowledge of public and private history, how that information comes off the land when I move through it.  

TFR: One thing that struck me is the difference in the tone of the title from the poem itself. I think the title feels distant both because it is written in the third person and because it is explanatory. This has a similar feel to the titles of the poems you read at SCW. How did you come to decide to title this piece and other poems in your project this way?  What work do you feel it is able to do first for you as the writer and then for the reader?

JSK: Yes, this title! Maybe it won’t stay. The poem used to be called “Witness Trees,” but that sounds too much like POETRY, doesn’t it? I’d begun writing these flat titles for the other monologues. The poems are often quite raw, but the titles establish the identity of the speaker with reference to place and often a topic or central concern, for example: “A Student from Tunkhannock Articulates Shale Gas Aspirations” or “A Mother Near the West Virginia Line Considers the Public Health.” The title functions like a handle for the reader to grab onto. This is one of few poems in the series that’s spoken in my own voice, so it seemed only fair to pin that kind of title onto myself, too.

TFR: There is so much history in this piece. It is American history in so many experiences: Native Americans, settlers, the lore of your ancestors, family you’ve known, and your personal ties to the land all show up here. I was struck by the gas company’s invasion of the landscape, most notably in places important to the speaker’s family history, juxtaposed with the early Pennsylvania pacifist settlers’ often violent encounters with the Native Americans. Do you feel that pacifism influences the actions of the people living in these regions today? Or how do you view the juxtaposition working in this piece?

JSK: Certainly for some pacifists living in these regions, that ideal persists and determines actions, and yet one lesson of Penn’s Holy Experiment is that violence cannot be externalized or eradicated entirely.

The piece works associatively, turning from one form of violence to another. You’ll find trees or wood in almost every section. Trees have been associated with human bodies from antiquity—think of Myrrha. Jeff Gundy, a poet friend, read this and said he thinks it’s like surrealism, except that the piece is made of events from memory and history, not imagination and dream. Every statement is factual, as far as I know, except the location of the place where my dad’s feed truck lost its brakes in the 1950s; that happened on another mountain nearby.

TFR: Clearly, you have researched this topic in a variety of ways. What has the process been like as you decide what historic morsels stay in, what gets set aside?

JSK: So much of it relies on the sifting of memory; I have the kind of mind that hoards details and trivia. When people have been able to live in the same place for a long time, stories get inscribed on the landscape the way junk collects in the attic. Yet, places change. That compressor shed at the end of Peight’s lane felt like a violation when I spied it. I was thinking about gas development and suddenly seeing its signs everywhere on the landscape.

I grew up knowing the story of what some people call “the Hochstetler massacre,” but after he was rescued from the river, Jacob had to make a deposition to General Bouquet, so there are records I could read. I researched in various ways, mostly digitally, which felt like such a luxury, discovering all those mostly useless but really interesting details! The corner trees/witness trees turned up in a New York Times piece about forestry studies. Some of the details in the fifth section were passed on from my father-in-law, John Ruth, who’s working on a book about the early history of eastern Pennsylvania, the arrival of the Mennonites, and Penn’s sons and the broken treaties that led to the involvement of Native people in the Seven Years War between England and France.

I wanted to move through time and think about violence in this landscape, but beyond that, intuition determined which details to include.

TFR: This piece explores the complicated, even violent relationship the speaker has to the land she calls home. One of the last sentences of this poem rings with a tension that I have often felt myself, “I drive home and cook my groceries on a gas stove.” What have you found that poetry is able to do when confronted with the dualism of the negative impact of the gas drilling practices on the land and communities close to the drilling versus the modern conveniences most Americans have come to expect?

JSK: Poetry can help us face the facts and feel the grief of this reality. We’re all in it. We’re all implicated. Perhaps there can be hope in that, too, if it means that we can see that we’re all responsible for caring for these places and communities, and for finding sustainable ways to live.

---

Amy Lee Heinlen studies poetry in the MFA program at Chatham University where she also works as a librarian. Her poems have appeared in The Mom Egg Review, multiple volumes of Voices in the Attic, and The Red Clay Review. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, daughter, and two cats.

From Chaos to Cosmos: An Interview with Joseph Bathanti

From Chaos to Cosmos: An Interview with Joseph Bathanti

By Beth Royce, Assistant Editor, The Fourth River

Joseph Bathanti is the author of ten books of poetry, three novels, a book of short fiction and two books of nonfiction. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, at 23 he moved to North Carolina to focus on prison outreach with VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program. He has been living in North Carolina and working in the prison system ever since. He was the North Carolina Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014 and his work has won several awards, including the 2016 North Carolina Award in Literature, the Roanoke Chowan Award, the Donald Murray Prize, and others. He traveled to Pittsburgh in January as a visiting professor at Carlow University. While here, he visited Chatham University’s Words Without Walls program and I got a chance to sit down and chat about his work in the prison system and with Vietnam veterans.

To read some of Joseph Bathanti’s poems, click here.

The Fourth River: You spent your morning with the Words Without Walls program, and I know you teach writing and hold workshops in the prison system. How have you seen creative work positively impact inmates?

Joseph Bathanti: I’ve been doing this now for 40 years but this is the first time I’ve ever been to a PA jail because I spend most of my time in North Carolina prisons. I really feel strongly that stories are things that save us. And that often the very things that have destroyed us, when framed as stories, and written down, can save us. This is especially the case with incarcerated folks whose lives have gone awry in so many ways. If they can get a bead on what has gone on in their lives—through story – and just get the writing down in a cogent way, I think it helps a lot. The idea is that you control the memory or the memory controls you. There’s something about ordering a story into a narrative that makes it go from terrific disorder into order; from chaos to cosmos.

TFR: That makes me think of the opening of Half of What I Say is Meaningless where you talk about integrity in nonfiction writing. Where is the line, in creative nonfiction, between creativity and dishonesty?

JB: I think often, in creative nonfiction, we’re dishonest without realizing. We’re dishonest because we’re digging deeply into memory. I think as you move further from the action that spawned the writing, you also get further from that objective truth. So we shoot for a kind of emotional truth all the time: This is what it felt like to me. I think as long as you don’t deliberately lie—we lie often without really knowing it. So creativity comes from the ways we navigate that emotional terrain and through the narratives that come out of it.

I mentioned today at the jail that, lately, I’ve been working mostly with Vietnam veterans with PTSD. These are guys that probably average around 70 years old. They’re the last people who would have ever thought of themselves as writers, but they’re finding writing to be really companionable in a number of ways. A lot of them have tried to stuff, into that box we all have, those memories that are so jarring and horrifying. Yet they’re still dogged by the memories. So, in writing about them, they’re gaining a kind of freedom from the memories.

When we’re sitting around the room with these vets, if someone brings up a story, it instantly triggers a memory in another guy and gives him permission to tell his story. And one of the things I think is interesting about CNF is the fact that if you begin to remember, if you dig deeply, and engage in the task of deep remembrance, then it all comes back to you.

TFR: Do you have a specific writing process?

JB: I don’t know that I do. Whatever I do seems to work in its own way. I travel, I teach, I have all sorts of things going on. So, for me to say that I’m going to be at this place at this time every day and write is just setting myself up for failure. But when I walk down the street here in Pittsburgh, every sidewalk crack triggers some sort of memory. So my writing is very much memory/image based. I’ll remember something and, suddenly, that memory seems so extraordinary that the trove opens. I am an autobiographical writer and I encourage my young students to go there since we all have that arsenal of memories.

TFR: In Chatham’s MFA program, there’s a lot of talk about the writing life, post graduate school. Do you have any advice for continued writing when there are no clear deadlines or schedules to abide by?

JB: I’m a habitual and pathological note taker. I don’t keep a journal, but I’m always taking notes. And most of the time those notes are kinds of photographic short hand that will trigger where I was and what I was thinking at the time.

I also think it’s very important to develop the habit of writing. A lot of my students say they write when they’re inspired. But if you wait to be inspired to do anything, like lose weight or cut the grass or wash the dishes—where there’s very little to be inspired about—then nothing ever is accomplished. Writing is a utilitarian task that has to be done. At some point after I moved to North Carolina, I got the hang of the fact that if you don’t sit at a table and write, you won’t pile up pages. And if you don’t pile up pages, you’re done for. That’s the practice, right? There’s no way to get better if you don’t write.

And of course reading. You have to read habitually to study how other writers accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish in your own work. In reading like a writer, you’re taking lessons from other writers and their books. You are learning from what they don’t do well and you’re especially learning from what they do well.

TFR: What are you reading right now?

JB: I’ve been working with veterans, so I’ve been reading a ton of work from veterans. Robin Olen Butler, a Vietnam veteran, just had a novel come out called Perfume River. I’ve also been reading a lot of the literature that has sprung out of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Roy Scranton has a new novel called War Porn. Also Phil Klay’s Redeployment and Brian Turner’s amazing memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country.

TFR: What writing advice are you glad you didn’t take?

JB: You know it could be arrogant to say this, but I often didn’t listen to my teachers. But I wasn’t a smart aleck about it. There were things I wanted to do and felt confident about. So I think I avoided being discouraged because I held on to my own stubborn notions. It wasn’t like I wasn’t really listening. I was listening. But maybe some of the advice wasn’t for me. So I did what I tell my students to do: I took all the things from my teachers that were helpful and left behind the things that weren’t helpful. And I tell my students to follow that very stricture with me when it come to the advice I dole out to them. You have to find a teacher who appreciates your work, in the same vein that you have to find an editor who appreciates your work. I do editing work, occasionally, and sometimes I’m not in the position of appreciating a really wonderful piece that comes in front of me because of personal taste, etc. Another editor, with a different set of eyes, preoccupations, and personal tastes, might seize enthusiastically on the same piece I might reject. The point is: Never give up.

TFR: What have you been most surprised by in your writing life?

JB: That I’m a writer. I mean, that I’ve had success. Just because it seems unlikely that this would have happened. It’s something I’ve dreamed of doing. It’s not like anybody knows who I am, but I’m surprised that something so wonderful happened to me. I was just some kid with dreams on the streets of Pittsburgh. Becoming a writer seemed pretty unlikely.

Telling Two Stories in One Breath: An Interview with Tyehimba Jess

by Jessica Kinnison

American poet Tyehimba Jess entered the MFA program at New York University in 2002 with half of his poetry book leadbelly written. His colleagues knew what he was going to bring to every workshop—another leadbelly poem.

leadbelly (2005) follows the story of Louisiana-born folk singer Huddie William Ledbetter, born in 1885, from Shreveport, LA to Texas to Angola Prison to New York City. leadbelly was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and was voted one of the top three books of the year by Black Issues Book Review.

A two-time winner of the Chicago Green Mill Slam team, Jess was Chicago’s ambassador to Accra, Ghana. He is the author of African American Pride: Celebrating our Achievements, Contributions and Enduring Legacy (2003), and his work has been featured in numerous anthologies. A Cave Canem Alumni, he received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and won a 2006 Whiting Award. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

I interviewed Jess immediately following his reading at the Allegheny County Jail as part of Chatham University’s Words Without Walls Black Writers Series. He visited to tell the story of how Leadbelly’s music lives in each of us as Americans. He says, “At least people are saying his name. They are saying his name.”

.

The Fourth River: Why do you write and for whom?

Tyehimba Jess: I used to write for political purposes strictly. I was interested in writing poems that would inspire people to take political action. That’s what “when niggas love Revolution like they love the bulls” is all about. Those poems were for black people.  But you know you can’t control who reads your work.

So, after a while, I came to accept the idea that I was writing for everybody. Even when I thought I was writing for black people, not all black people agreed with what I was writing. It is difficult to say that you are writing for one particular group of people.  It can limit your imagination. After a while, I was like, “OK, I am writing for the entire world.” I think that later on, it became about writing for me.

The more I write, the more I realize it is about conveying a message. My poetry is pretty clear. Generally, you know what I am writing about by the end of a poem. I try to write that way. But it is working internally, as well.

When I am doing these poems, these syncopated sonnets and all that, I think I am trying to find a way to tell two different stories in one breath. I am looking for metaphors beyond the rhetorical that link into the shape of the poem and [into] the way the poem is read on the page.

FR: What do you think of the academic world as a space for writers?

TJ: I am part of a few different streams of poetry phenomena that are having an effect on the way poetry is being perceived in academia. One is slam: slam was started because of a man named Mark Smith in Chicago who was really disenchanted with the way poetry in academia was presenting itself as a kind of boutique, elite pastime that was not interested in connecting with the ordinary Joe Schmo on the street.

I think that the brilliant thing about Mark is that he was able to start this institution that’s very simple, very organic and really, in a way, doesn’t get the kind of credit in academia that it deserves for its impact on American poetry.

He’s one of those people who deserves a MacArthur grant because he saw a need and he filled it in a very simple way, in a way that answered the call of so many people who were interested. He helped throngs and throngs of people to understand that poetry doesn’t have to be outside of their grasp. It doesn’t have to be something that is performed by other people. They can perform it.

Whatever complaints people may have about slam, it brought poetry to the people and the same with Cave Canem. It’s an institution for black poets started by Toi Dericotte and Cornelius Eady that really eliminated the isolation that so many black poets felt on a fundamental level. The thing about Cave Canem is that it created a connection for black poets nationally and internationally that enabled us to grow at a rate we would not have been able to obtain without that community.

FR: Why did you choose poetry as your form for leadbelly? It reads like a novel.

TJ: First off, I am not as good at fiction as I am at poetry. I seem to be more geared toward saying a certain thing in a certain amount of time. leadbelly is almost all prose poems when he is speaking. Partly because I thought of him in terms of prose, really simply and not all enjambed. You know, it is prosaic and it follows a particular arc. It is linear in that respect. I think those are reasons it seems like a novel, in a way.

FR: Philip Larkin once wrote, “the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.” In your case, what are you preserving in your poems?

TJ: Yes, I guess I am in the business of historical preservation. There were a few things I was trying to preserve. One was Leadbelly’s legacy but also the idea of the work that the old music has done for us.  When I say “us,” I mean nationally what that work has done.

That legacy continues. The thing I think about a lot is the roots of the music, particularly in regard to the African community and the African-American contribution. With this new work I am doing, it is beyond the music. It is about theater and literature as well. When you look at the intellectual property, so much of that property has been generated from the black community.

Paying homage to Leadbelly, trying to present a portrait of his life, to me, meant recalling the pain and the joy that went into making that music. It lies at the bottom of American music. So I guess I’m back where Philip Larkin was: at the bottom of his preservation.

FR: So under everything is the need to preserve?

TJ: Yes, I would say that. Continue that story forward. Just having people say the word “Leadbelly” today in 2013, I am glad to be a part of that. And it’s not just him; it is the story and everything that the story entails, that idea, that aesthetic.

FR: You were a DJ at the University of Chicago for 10 years.  Who were some of the people you played most?

TJ: Man, I played so many people: Alice Coltrane, Sonny Sharrock, Art Ensemble of Chicago. I think the beautiful thing about Chicago is that they have something called AACM. It is really sort of an avant-garde arts organization.  I was very privileged to see these guys walking around the neighborhood. Overseas, they were superstars. You know, they were just phenomenal musicians. So I got the opportunity to see them on a regular basis. Lester Boyd, Malichi Favors, I got to see Sun Ra a couple times, Fred Anderson.

There was a little bar called the Velvet Lounge. It’s still there. It was the best music in Chicago. It was very cheap. The musical legacy in Chicago was wonderful. Then you also had the blues musicians. So my show started out as all jazz. Then it started to include blues, too. Like I played Muddy Waters, then I’d play John Coltrane, then I’d play some Sun Ra, then I’d go all the way back in the shed to get some Robert Johnson. I’d go back and forth and back and forth. I was playing with what Amiri Baraka would call “The Music,” the idea of the genres of music just drifting together into a continuum, especially with jazz and blues. I loved it. Then I would do interviews with political prisoners, prisoners of war and activists.

FR: I noticed that you use variations on blues phrases in leadbelly like “black snake moan.” Did you put them in while you were writing or did you go back and texturize the piece with common blues phrases?

TJ: It was probably a combination of the two. It’s kind of like the first pass: I go through a poem and have these weak words and stronger words. I take out words that are not contributing to the energy of the poem, and I think about words that could make the poem more active or add to the texture, and I go back and throw in a lot of other allusions. I try to reach in as many directions as I can. Some of them come naturally and those are the ones that I am actually more weary of because they are more likely to be cliché. If they are clichés, I try to come back and change them up a little.

FR: Do you think people who don’t listen to blues would notice blues phrases?

TJ: It’s hard for me to say what people’s perception of blues is. I think partly because I have been listening to it for so long. It is hard for me to detach myself from the lack of understanding regarding blues. If you were to say the word “blues” to most people, maybe one of the words that would come to their minds is “Eric Clapton” or “B.B. King” or “guitar” or the opening of the Dave Chapelle show. So there are a lot of standard images that people come up with. I am trying to write either against that or to deepen that understanding. I think that is true with anybody. If you were to say “polka music,” I probably wouldn’t know that much. I should. I think “accordion.” That is part of my charge to understand how all those musics can relate.

FR: How did your perspective on the book change after you went to Shreveport for the first time?

The most important thing I did there was visit his grave. I also met his grandniece. He is buried in this churchyard that is off of a dirt path that is off a dirt path that is off of a one-lane road. It’s way the fuck out. He died in New York but he was buried down there. It gave me an impression of where he walked. Of course, I was seeing Shreveport past its heyday. I could still see the streets and soak in the atmosphere. It was good to see the places I had written about.

I always felt guilty about the ability to claim that territory. I wanted to treat it with the respect it deserves. I wanted to treat him and the place that he came from with respect. I felt like it was incumbent upon me to give it a visit and say “Hello.” So, in a way, it gave me a kind of permission to continue on that journey of seeking out the details of his legacy.

FR: Is it true your immediate family would not exist without the Great   Migration?

TJ: You could say the same thing for probably at least half of black people in America today. The South was repressive. The North was repressive but in a different way.

FR: Michele Norris said that her parents didn’t talk about the South because they didn’t want to put rocks in their children’s pockets. If they put that anger in their pockets, it would weigh them down. Your parents were active in the community and also in race relations. How did that affect you and your writing?

TJ: It affected me in several ways. One is my dad is an avid, avid reader. He probably had 30 magazine subscriptions and books all around the house all the time. Both of them were very intent on having us read. I have an older brother and an older sister. My brother went to Michigan. My sister went to MIT. I think that my parents’ support and insistence upon college and that exposure to the necessity of reading at a very young age affected me.

As far as their relationships with their hometowns: I went down to visit my grandmother in Greenville, South Carolina when I was a kid. It was like visiting another planet.  This was in the 1970s. Greenville at that time was not the Greenville it is now. It is really a big, bustling city now. Back then, it was not a big place. There was a dirt road in front of my grandma’s house.

My dad didn’t talk very much about (well he didn’t talk that much at all) about South Carolina and his life down there. And my mother would talk about Oklahoma to a certain degree; she still does.

I think that their attitude was similar to what you are talking about. When you look at it, it really was like going from one country to another country. I mean, my dad was in the Confederate state—South Carolina. He still has his high school diploma. The signature on it is Strom Thurmond’s. My dad is 80 years old. It was like an entirely different land of opportunity. There is no way my father would have been able to work for the Department of Public Health in South Carolina at that time. There is just no way; it would not have been possible.

My mother left Oklahoma because she could not attend the nursing schools there. My mom also lived in Little Rock, Arkansas. She graduated before those nine students marched up the steps to that high school. Their attitude was the one of most black folks at that time: they wanted to get out.

FR: You changed your name legally in 1999. What did your parents think about that?

TJ: They were reluctantly accepting of it. I was living as Jesse Goodwin before I changed it, formally, in 1999, but [informally, starting in 1992], everybody called me Tyehimba Jess. You will be surprised how quickly you find yourself around nobody who knows your original name. It caught on within a couple years.  By the time it became legal, it had pretty much already happened anyway.

FR: Tyehimba means “we stand as a nation.” What does that mean to you?

TJ: I got it from a book in college. I took a lot of time trying to find a word that would be appropriate. This word, to me, infused the idea of black self-determination. You know, working together to achieve various and sundry goals. On the other hand, I didn’t want to completely abandon my family in that process. I was disturbed by our name being Goodwin because it was passed down from a slave owner. So I decided to keep my first name and make it my last name. My first name was Jesse, and that is my father’s name and his father’s name.

FR: Did your writing change once you changed your name?

TJ: My name came slowly.

FR: The name was your public persona and slowly became your private persona?

TJ: I think I was part of the last generation to change our names to African names. I mean, I don’t know what 20 year-olds are doing now, but I don’t think they are changing their names to African names. Many of the artists at that time were changing their names if not legally, informally. So it was not a unique thing.

The good thing about it is that I did not change my name more than once and I really carefully considered it before [the change]. I waited for seven years before I made it legal. So I had a long time to live with it. The decision to make it legal, to me, meant that I could stop leading a double life. Stop being Tyehimba Jess until I needed a check signed. It seemed inauthentic. I didn’t consider the name inauthentic. I considered the state’s right to claim what my name was illegitimate. One of my questions was whether or not to give the state that legitimacy, but after a while, I knew that, practically, it was the thing to do.

FR: Where did you start on the page when writing the syncopated sonnet about the twins?

TJ:  I started with the middle. I finished the middle because really the middle is based off of another poem I did called “Blind Tom.” It was the first one I made that went down and back. It was about Blind Tom being buried in two different locations. So, when it came to the McCoy Twins, I was wracking my brain as to how to approach talking about them.

I guess the form and the subject matter came simultaneously. I thought, well, I will mimic the shape of their bodies. So how can I do that? I already had the Blind Tom thing, so I thought I could reverse the polarity to have two heads and one middle. Then I can come up and have one head and two middles. So I did one and I did another one and another one. Those things are like a puzzle.

FR: You said that you don’t write in forms, but there are many forms in leadbelly.

TJ: I guess the counterpointes I’m doing are forms. I also call them double-jointed. That crown of sonnets in the book was the first set of poems in form I ever wrote. The thing about sonnets is that they are long enough to say something and short enough to get to the point. At this point in our history, sonnets can be unrhymed and all kinds of stuff. Fourteen lines, oh, it’s a sonnet. It’s got this kind of elasticity to it. And the rhyme scheme can be as strict as you want it to be and as loose as you want it to be. I am going for the story, in particular.

FR: Which professors did you study with at NYU?

TJ: Philip Levine, Marie Howe, and Sharon Olds.

FR: Did any of those teachers give you a major suggestion for leadbelly that you rejected?

TJ: Yes, Phil Levine told me to put the book in third person. I seriously considered that for a long time. And I couldn’t do it. It was difficult. In that class, I agreed with 99 percent of the things he said. He is a very, very sharp guy. It was hard to do that when I first rolled up in there. I couldn’t do it. It was not a physical thing. It was a mental thing. For me, that is the trope of the book. It would have lost immediacy. I love Phil, though. We are both from Detroit.

FR: Do you feel you have any secret or conspicuous flaws as a writer?

TJ: I don’t think I do personal poems very well.  I think there are some things in my aesthetic that may not be in other people’s aesthetic, such as alliteration. Sometimes I just wallow in it, just roll around in it. I have to check myself.

FR: What was the first poem you wrote in leadbelly?

TJ: It was the one where he is in Red River. He’s run away and they send a dog after him. And he drowns the dog. That was the first poem. It kind of came out of nowhere in a way.

FR: What was the last poem?

TJ: After I finished the book, they wanted me to chop off the last section. My publishers did. The very last poem I had written a year or so ahead of time, then I decided [it] was going to be at the end.

FR: Why?

TJ: Because it is positioned at his christening. I think it is interesting to hear him talk about how he got his name at the end of the book. It is about being broken in a lot of ways.  It is a story about coming into one’s identity.

Jessica Kinnison lives in New Orleans, LA.  Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Juked, Cossack Review, Pif Magazine Anthology 2013, and The Southern Humanities Review, among others. Her story “Bone on Bone” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.

American poet Tyehimba Jess entered the MFA program at New York University in 2002 with half of his poetry book leadbelly written. His colleagues knew what he was going to bring to every workshop—another leadbelly poem.

leadbelly (2005) follows the story of Louisiana-born folk singer Huddie William Ledbetter, born in 1885, from Shreveport, LA to Texas to Angola Prison to New York City. leadbelly was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and was voted one of the top three books of the year by Black Issues Book Review.

A two-time winner of the Chicago Green Mill Slam team, Jess was Chicago’s ambassador to Accra, Ghana. He is the author of African American Pride: Celebrating our Achievements, Contributions and Enduring Legacy (2003), and his work has been featured in numerous anthologies. A Cave Canem Alumni, he received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and won a 2006 Whiting Award. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

I interviewed Jess immediately following his reading at the Allegheny County Jail as part of Chatham University’s Words Without Walls Black Writers Series. He visited to tell the story of how Leadbelly’s music lives in each of us as Americans. He says, “At least people are saying his name. They are saying his name.”

.

The Fourth River: Why do you write and for whom?

Tyehimba Jess: I used to write for political purposes strictly. I was interested in writing poems that would inspire people to take political action. That’s what “when niggas love Revolution like they love the bulls” is all about. Those poems were for black people.  But you know you can’t control who reads your work.

So, after a while, I came to accept the idea that I was writing for everybody. Even when I thought I was writing for black people, not all black people agreed with what I was writing. It is difficult to say that you are writing for one particular group of people.  It can limit your imagination. After a while, I was like, “OK, I am writing for the entire world.” I think that later on, it became about writing for me.

The more I write, the more I realize it is about conveying a message. My poetry is pretty clear. Generally, you know what I am writing about by the end of a poem. I try to write that way. But it is working internally, as well.

When I am doing these poems, these syncopated sonnets and all that, I think I am trying to find a way to tell two different stories in one breath. I am looking for metaphors beyond the rhetorical that link into the shape of the poem and [into] the way the poem is read on the page.

FR: What do you think of the academic world as a space for writers?

TJ: I am part of a few different streams of poetry phenomena that are having an effect on the way poetry is being perceived in academia. One is slam: slam was started because of a man named Mark Smith in Chicago who was really disenchanted with the way poetry in academia was presenting itself as a kind of boutique, elite pastime that was not interested in connecting with the ordinary Joe Schmo on the street.

I think that the brilliant thing about Mark is that he was able to start this institution that’s very simple, very organic and really, in a way, doesn’t get the kind of credit in academia that it deserves for its impact on American poetry.

He’s one of those people who deserves a MacArthur grant because he saw a need and he filled it in a very simple way, in a way that answered the call of so many people who were interested. He helped throngs and throngs of people to understand that poetry doesn’t have to be outside of their grasp. It doesn’t have to be something that is performed by other people. They can perform it.

Whatever complaints people may have about slam, it brought poetry to the people and the same with Cave Canem. It’s an institution for black poets started by Toi Dericotte and Cornelius Eady that really eliminated the isolation that so many black poets felt on a fundamental level. The thing about Cave Canem is that it created a connection for black poets nationally and internationally that enabled us to grow at a rate we would not have been able to obtain without that community.

FR: Why did you choose poetry as your form for leadbelly? It reads like a novel.

TJ: First off, I am not as good at fiction as I am at poetry. I seem to be more geared toward saying a certain thing in a certain amount of time. leadbelly is almost all prose poems when he is speaking. Partly because I thought of him in terms of prose, really simply and not all enjambed. You know, it is prosaic and it follows a particular arc. It is linear in that respect. I think those are reasons it seems like a novel, in a way.

FR: Philip Larkin once wrote, “the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.” In your case, what are you preserving in your poems?

TJ: Yes, I guess I am in the business of historical preservation. There were a few things I was trying to preserve. One was Leadbelly’s legacy but also the idea of the work that the old music has done for us.  When I say “us,” I mean nationally what that work has done.

That legacy continues. The thing I think about a lot is the roots of the music, particularly in regard to the African community and the African-American contribution. With this new work I am doing, it is beyond the music. It is about theater and literature as well. When you look at the intellectual property, so much of that property has been generated from the black community.

Paying homage to Leadbelly, trying to present a portrait of his life, to me, meant recalling the pain and the joy that went into making that music. It lies at the bottom of American music. So I guess I’m back where Philip Larkin was: at the bottom of his preservation.

FR: So under everything is the need to preserve?

TJ: Yes, I would say that. Continue that story forward. Just having people say the word “Leadbelly” today in 2013, I am glad to be a part of that. And it’s not just him; it is the story and everything that the story entails, that idea, that aesthetic.

FR: You were a DJ at the University of Chicago for 10 years.  Who were some of the people you played most?

TJ: Man, I played so many people: Alice Coltrane, Sonny Sharrock, Art Ensemble of Chicago. I think the beautiful thing about Chicago is that they have something called AACM. It is really sort of an avant-garde arts organization.  I was very privileged to see these guys walking around the neighborhood. Overseas, they were superstars. You know, they were just phenomenal musicians. So I got the opportunity to see them on a regular basis. Lester Boyd, Malichi Favors, I got to see Sun Ra a couple times, Fred Anderson.

There was a little bar called the Velvet Lounge. It’s still there. It was the best music in Chicago. It was very cheap. The musical legacy in Chicago was wonderful. Then you also had the blues musicians. So my show started out as all jazz. Then it started to include blues, too. Like I played Muddy Waters, then I’d play John Coltrane, then I’d play some Sun Ra, then I’d go all the way back in the shed to get some Robert Johnson. I’d go back and forth and back and forth. I was playing with what Amiri Baraka would call “The Music,” the idea of the genres of music just drifting together into a continuum, especially with jazz and blues. I loved it. Then I would do interviews with political prisoners, prisoners of war and activists.

FR: I noticed that you use variations on blues phrases in leadbelly like “black snake moan.” Did you put them in while you were writing or did you go back and texturize the piece with common blues phrases?

TJ: It was probably a combination of the two. It’s kind of like the first pass: I go through a poem and have these weak words and stronger words. I take out words that are not contributing to the energy of the poem, and I think about words that could make the poem more active or add to the texture, and I go back and throw in a lot of other allusions. I try to reach in as many directions as I can. Some of them come naturally and those are the ones that I am actually more weary of because they are more likely to be cliché. If they are clichés, I try to come back and change them up a little.

FR: Do you think people who don’t listen to blues would notice blues phrases?

TJ: It’s hard for me to say what people’s perception of blues is. I think partly because I have been listening to it for so long. It is hard for me to detach myself from the lack of understanding regarding blues. If you were to say the word “blues” to most people, maybe one of the words that would come to their minds is “Eric Clapton” or “B.B. King” or “guitar” or the opening of the Dave Chapelle show. So there are a lot of standard images that people come up with. I am trying to write either against that or to deepen that understanding. I think that is true with anybody. If you were to say “polka music,” I probably wouldn’t know that much. I should. I think “accordion.” That is part of my charge to understand how all those musics can relate.

FR: How did your perspective on the book change after you went to Shreveport for the first time?

The most important thing I did there was visit his grave. I also met his grandniece. He is buried in this churchyard that is off of a dirt path that is off a dirt path that is off of a one-lane road. It’s way the fuck out. He died in New York but he was buried down there. It gave me an impression of where he walked. Of course, I was seeing Shreveport past its heyday. I could still see the streets and soak in the atmosphere. It was good to see the places I had written about.

I always felt guilty about the ability to claim that territory. I wanted to treat it with the respect it deserves. I wanted to treat him and the place that he came from with respect. I felt like it was incumbent upon me to give it a visit and say “Hello.” So, in a way, it gave me a kind of permission to continue on that journey of seeking out the details of his legacy.

FR: Is it true your immediate family would not exist without the Great   Migration?

TJ: You could say the same thing for probably at least half of black people in America today. The South was repressive. The North was repressive but in a different way.

FR: Michele Norris said that her parents didn’t talk about the South because they didn’t want to put rocks in their children’s pockets. If they put that anger in their pockets, it would weigh them down. Your parents were active in the community and also in race relations. How did that affect you and your writing?

TJ: It affected me in several ways. One is my dad is an avid, avid reader. He probably had 30 magazine subscriptions and books all around the house all the time. Both of them were very intent on having us read. I have an older brother and an older sister. My brother went to Michigan. My sister went to MIT. I think that my parents’ support and insistence upon college and that exposure to the necessity of reading at a very young age affected me.

As far as their relationships with their hometowns: I went down to visit my grandmother in Greenville, South Carolina when I was a kid. It was like visiting another planet.  This was in the 1970s. Greenville at that time was not the Greenville it is now. It is really a big, bustling city now. Back then, it was not a big place. There was a dirt road in front of my grandma’s house.

My dad didn’t talk very much about (well he didn’t talk that much at all) about South Carolina and his life down there. And my mother would talk about Oklahoma to a certain degree; she still does.

I think that their attitude was similar to what you are talking about. When you look at it, it really was like going from one country to another country. I mean, my dad was in the Confederate state—South Carolina. He still has his high school diploma. The signature on it is Strom Thurmond’s. My dad is 80 years old. It was like an entirely different land of opportunity. There is no way my father would have been able to work for the Department of Public Health in South Carolina at that time. There is just no way; it would not have been possible.

My mother left Oklahoma because she could not attend the nursing schools there. My mom also lived in Little Rock, Arkansas. She graduated before those nine students marched up the steps to that high school. Their attitude was the one of most black folks at that time: they wanted to get out.

FR: You changed your name legally in 1999. What did your parents think about that?

TJ: They were reluctantly accepting of it. I was living as Jesse Goodwin before I changed it, formally, in 1999, but [informally, starting in 1992], everybody called me Tyehimba Jess. You will be surprised how quickly you find yourself around nobody who knows your original name. It caught on within a couple years.  By the time it became legal, it had pretty much already happened anyway.

FR: Tyehimba means “we stand as a nation.” What does that mean to you?

TJ: I got it from a book in college. I took a lot of time trying to find a word that would be appropriate. This word, to me, infused the idea of black self-determination. You know, working together to achieve various and sundry goals. On the other hand, I didn’t want to completely abandon my family in that process. I was disturbed by our name being Goodwin because it was passed down from a slave owner. So I decided to keep my first name and make it my last name. My first name was Jesse, and that is my father’s name and his father’s name.

FR: Did your writing change once you changed your name?

TJ: My name came slowly.

FR: The name was your public persona and slowly became your private persona?

TJ: I think I was part of the last generation to change our names to African names. I mean, I don’t know what 20 year-olds are doing now, but I don’t think they are changing their names to African names. Many of the artists at that time were changing their names if not legally, informally. So it was not a unique thing.

The good thing about it is that I did not change my name more than once and I really carefully considered it before [the change]. I waited for seven years before I made it legal. So I had a long time to live with it. The decision to make it legal, to me, meant that I could stop leading a double life. Stop being Tyehimba Jess until I needed a check signed. It seemed inauthentic. I didn’t consider the name inauthentic. I considered the state’s right to claim what my name was illegitimate. One of my questions was whether or not to give the state that legitimacy, but after a while, I knew that, practically, it was the thing to do.

FR: Where did you start on the page when writing the syncopated sonnet about the twins?

TJ:  I started with the middle. I finished the middle because really the middle is based off of another poem I did called “Blind Tom.” It was the first one I made that went down and back. It was about Blind Tom being buried in two different locations. So, when it came to the McCoy Twins, I was wracking my brain as to how to approach talking about them.

I guess the form and the subject matter came simultaneously. I thought, well, I will mimic the shape of their bodies. So how can I do that? I already had the Blind Tom thing, so I thought I could reverse the polarity to have two heads and one middle. Then I can come up and have one head and two middles. So I did one and I did another one and another one. Those things are like a puzzle.

FR: You said that you don’t write in forms, but there are many forms in leadbelly.

TJ: I guess the counterpointes I’m doing are forms. I also call them double-jointed. That crown of sonnets in the book was the first set of poems in form I ever wrote. The thing about sonnets is that they are long enough to say something and short enough to get to the point. At this point in our history, sonnets can be unrhymed and all kinds of stuff. Fourteen lines, oh, it’s a sonnet. It’s got this kind of elasticity to it. And the rhyme scheme can be as strict as you want it to be and as loose as you want it to be. I am going for the story, in particular.

FR: Which professors did you study with at NYU?

TJ: Philip Levine, Marie Howe, and Sharon Olds.

FR: Did any of those teachers give you a major suggestion for leadbelly that you rejected?

TJ: Yes, Phil Levine told me to put the book in third person. I seriously considered that for a long time. And I couldn’t do it. It was difficult. In that class, I agreed with 99 percent of the things he said. He is a very, very sharp guy. It was hard to do that when I first rolled up in there. I couldn’t do it. It was not a physical thing. It was a mental thing. For me, that is the trope of the book. It would have lost immediacy. I love Phil, though. We are both from Detroit.

FR: Do you feel you have any secret or conspicuous flaws as a writer?

TJ: I don’t think I do personal poems very well.  I think there are some things in my aesthetic that may not be in other people’s aesthetic, such as alliteration. Sometimes I just wallow in it, just roll around in it. I have to check myself.

FR: What was the first poem you wrote in leadbelly?

TJ: It was the one where he is in Red River. He’s run away and they send a dog after him. And he drowns the dog. That was the first poem. It kind of came out of nowhere in a way.

FR: What was the last poem?

TJ: After I finished the book, they wanted me to chop off the last section. My publishers did. The very last poem I had written a year or so ahead of time, then I decided [it] was going to be at the end.

FR: Why?

TJ: Because it is positioned at his christening. I think it is interesting to hear him talk about how he got his name at the end of the book. It is about being broken in a lot of ways.  It is a story about coming into one’s identity.

---

Jessica Kinnison lives in New Orleans, LA.  Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Juked, Cossack Review, Pif Magazine Anthology 2013, and The Southern Humanities Review, among others. Her story “Bone on Bone” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012.

A Poet’s Quest for the Universal Truth: A Conversation with Li-Young Lee

By Alyssa Guelcher for The Fourth River

Born in 1957, Li-Young Lee has written a vast collection of poetry that is quiet, thoughtful, complex, and very much focused on the minutiae, on complementary and contradictory forces, on the yin and yang nature. His works include four books of poetry, Rose (1986), The City in Which I Love You (1990), Book of My Nights (2001), and Behind My Eyes (2009). His memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995), draws from his childhood experiences as the son of Chinese exiles. Fleeing persecution in Indonesia, Lee and his parents travelled through Hong Kong and Japan for several years before reaching the United States in 1964. He has garnered many fellowships and awards, among them the Whiting Award, the Lannan Literary Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award.  

In April, 2017, Li-Young Lee visited Chatham University for the literary event, Dialogues: Writing in Divided Times. This is part 1 of a 2-part interview.

***

With gratitude to Alyssa, this interview is for Elia, who asked about joy and hope.–Li-Young Lee

The Fourth River: Your poetry has a strong focus on ancestry, or more specifically, the concept of lineage—that is, a kind of cosmic continuation from one generation to the next. In this, you look primarily to the past, to your heritage, and especially to the/your father. The poems “Mother’s Apple,” “Father’s Apple,” and “The Apple Elopes” stood out to me in Behind Blue Eyes. This triptych clustering heightens the tension between parent and offspring (who will inevitably move away from the family tree as he grows older and becomes his own person). Would you expand on that tension you feel yourself, in relation to the past, but also in the context of your children, whom you talk less about in terms of this continuation of generations? It must be different because, as I understand it, they grew up here in the United States.

Li-Young Lee: I love your question. You know, part of the problem for me is that I’m discovering that my mind performs two acts. There’s an act of remembrance. The ancient Greeks thought the memory was the muse—that memory is the muse. But there’s an act of thinking, too. The problem with thinking, it seems to me, is that it inevitably becomes philosophical. I think philosophy leads to mystification. I know we live in a time when the philosophers are very much respected, when philosophical thinking is respected. I think it’s a form of mystification. I think that’s dangerous. Not all philosophy—I think there’s practical philosophy that’s very profound. But somehow, the philosophers always end up mystifying us. You have philosophers like Nietzsche. You have philosophers like Heidegger, like Derrida. They get more and more mystifying. And it leads to crazy things. So it seems to me that remembrance is very important, and I’m trying to remember past my own biological, personal origins, to some sort of transcendent ground. Does that make sense?

TFR: Absolutely. I think that theme definitely goes beyond the Asian-American heritage, or your personal family heritage; you reach back to more human roots, more universal roots, quite often.

LYL: Yes, and I know that word, “universal,” is under siege nowadays, but I feel we need to keep that word. We need to interrogate that word. We need to understand what it really means. I think there are people, or parties, let’s say white males, that say, “Well, anything that is a white male is universal.” And then there are other parties that say, “There’s no such thing as universal.”  That’s not the way to go.  I think what we need to say is, no, just because it’s white male doesn’t mean it’s universal. We need to get to the absolute; I believe in that. Just because somebody co-opted the word and misused it, doesn’t mean we throw the word out. That means we need to rehabilitate the word.

Given the way the world is, we need to arrive at some common place between persons, between human communities, between races…I don’t even understand that word anymore. I thought we were one human race. When did we become, I don’t know, different races?  But that probably was used by the victimizers, the people who victimized other races. They probably said, “Well those people aren’t even the human race. We’re humans.” But we just went along with their definition of the word. I think we’re one human race. We’re going to have to come to some kind of consensus.

I’m trying to remember some transcendent ground, because I do have kids, and I’m doing this for my own children’s sakes. They cannot afford to have a father who doesn’t see a ground that is deeper than his own opinions. I had a father that I struggled with that.  He would say things that would make me think, “What you’re saying feels to me like a universal truth.”  Then he would say other things, and I would think, “That feels like opinion.” I don’t want opinions. I want truths, because I can’t get through this life just with somebody’s opinions.  That’s not a real provision. That’s not real food. That’s not real water.

I tell my kids all the time, “You’re going to have to interrogate everything I say.  Everything. It’s going to make for a little difficulty in our relationship sometimes. But in the long run it will make for a really good relationship, and it’ll keep you safe.”  I tell them, “If there’s anything I say that feels true to you–you weighed it, you measured it, you thought about it—then keep it. And, if there’s anything that feels like it’s just opinion, throw it out.”

I hope I’m pointing to something bigger than myself because at some point I’ll be gone. If I have to spend my whole life pointing to something truer and bigger than me, then they will be okay. But if I just pointed to myself the whole time, what is that?  So I think this struggle to find universal truths is absolutely dire.

And I do believe that as artists we are trying to discover the subtle body of universal laws and principles that underlie all manifestation. You know, why is that tree manifest? Why are you manifest? Why is this light coming through the window manifest?  How do poems, essays, manifest? If I say to you that this is a poem, that word makes a figure in your mind. There’s a figure of a poem. There are also figures inside a poem, figures like in “Apple Elopes” of apples, mother, father. But the poem itself makes a figure; that figure comes out of a ground.

What is the ground of that poem? The ground of the poem is all the possible ways you could say something.  That ground is so deep it’s like there are a billion ways to say something, trillions. So that ground is a massa confusa, as the Romans called it—a massive confusion. There are a trillion ways to say something. That poem is one way to say it.  You’ve made a decision to say it this way. The more that poem becomes this way to say it, non-negotiable, the stronger the figure is lifting off the ground of all the possible ways to say it.

For beginning poets or artists, the hardest thing for them to do is to get that figure/ground dilemma right. Sometimes, there are other ways to say something that might even be better than what you have. So the figure the poem makes isn’t strong enough.

That struggle for the figure from the ground, it seems to me, is our daily struggle in this society. There’s a culture. It’s a massa confusa.  There’s just stuff pouring in through the Internet, through TV, news, everywhere. There are a billion versions of ways to be.

It’s like that song, “Season of the Witch”: “When I look out my window / So many different people to be.” I love that song. There are a million ways to be out there. How do you find your destiny, your singularity, your primacy?  That struggle for your own personal figure, I think that’s probably why you’re an artist; you’re trying to write something that differentiates you from all the other voices.  The learning process is you imitate the great ones. You have to imitate a master.  After you’ve done the imitation well enough, then you understand all the principles, and then you can do your own thing.

So this struggle—figure/ground—is profound, and I think that’s why we practice art, and why the practice of art is important. Can we say something that’s so distinct—the figure of the poem is so distinct—that there’s not a single word that’s exchangeable?

TFR: In the context of your children, does the way you approach this universal truth differ between Li-Young Lee the poet and Li-Young Lee the son or the father?

LYL: No, no. Everything I learn from trying to write poems, I bring into my life, and everything I learned in my life, I try to bring into my poems. I’m trying to make my poems more real, and I’m trying to make my life more true in regards to what I learn from making poems. For me it’s all the same project: I’m making a strong figure that’s connected to the transcendent—a real transcendence, not a false transcendence—and trying to give that to my children, to keep reminding them, “Your life has more meaning if it’s grounded in the transcendent.”  Otherwise, it’s just grounded in the culture, and what is that? The culture we live in is founded on murder and violence.

TFR: Especially in this day and age, it’s divisive; that was the theme of our event [“Writing in Divided Times”].

LYL: You know, I have this idea about division. I think there are happy divisions, for instance, between the lover and the beloved. I don’t think a lover and the beloved should be merged. In that situation, the more separation there is…like that’s the beloved, and this is the lover. We’re not merged. I’m not going to assume that what I think, she’s thinking, you know? I’m not going to assume that what I feel, she feels. I think that’s unhealthy. But that doesn’t mean that when the lover and the beloved meet that they don’t change places: the lover becomes the beloved; the beloved becomes the lover. But I think when there’s this kind of merging…when I project…. Let’s say my wife and myself, if I project myself onto her as she projects onto me, there’s no separation. We don’t really know who we are. So those kinds of divisions that are mediated by love, by genuine interest…I’m interested in who she is. I’m not interested in just projecting my junk onto her. Do you know what I mean by projecting?

TFR: Yeah.

LYL: That’s separation and division in the best way. I don’t even want to say, “that division”—that threshold. The threshold is really an important symbol in marriage, in love. That threshold is honored, and it’s observed, and it’s mediated by love, and interest, and curiosity in each other. That’s good division. When there are divisions that are mediated by violence, mediated by selfishness, mediated by ego—I don’t like those divisions.

TFR: The image that comes to mind, and I think this is a common theme in your poetry, is the yin and yang—not necessarily even a binary system, but you have these opposing forces that also work together.

LYL: Yes, absolutely. There’s a practice called Taiji that I’ve been practicing ever since I was a child. “Tai” means extreme, ultimate.  “Ji” is polarity.  So the study of Taiji is the study of ultimate polarity, extreme differentials….

There’s a book called The Book of Changes from China.  It was written, I think, 2,500 maybe 3,000 years ago. We call it I Ching. It’s the study of polarities, of yin and yang, and all the ramifications.  It starts out with yin, which is the broken line, and yang which is the solid line, and then all the possible combinations.  This is a book of great peace and love, and it’s not just a book of divination. The I Ching is deeper. I’m having my students look at it…they’re just getting knocked out by it. All literary principles are in this book. It’s amazing. One of the students was having a real difficult time understanding closure until she read the hexagram for closure. And there’s an inner hexagram. The inner hexagram for closure is disclosure. And then she realized the missing part of her understanding of closure was disclosure. You see, the opposites exist within each other.  She was trying to think about closure in and of itself.  It doesn’t make any sense in and of itself. It was so profound.

Now, the thing that makes it so interesting to me this is this: three hundred years—it might have been five hundred years—after The Book of Changes was written in China, another book of changes appeared in Rome. Ovid wrote it. It’s called the book of changes, the book of transformations. We call it The Metamorphoses. That book is so violent. It is so violent and disturbing. And both books are trying to talk about the beginnings of the universe. The Fu Hsi book of changes is trying to get to the bottom of…so what are the principles that underlie the manifestation of the universe. How did this whole world, this universe come to be? How did human beings come to be? And it turns out into the book of love, great peace, great understanding. And then, in this other book of changes, Ovid tries to understand where we come from. Where does human culture come from? Where do the stars come from? He’s trying to understand it too, and it’s so full of violence.

I’m not going to say, well, that’s the West. That’s too easy. What I do notice is that in Ovid’s book of changes, he tries to narrate, he tries to put a human face on all the forces and tries to understand them that way. When he says “yang,” he doesn’t say “yang.”  He says there’s a male god. When he says “yin,” he doesn’t say “yin.”  He says there’s a female goddess. These two get together, and immediately it becomes violent. So I keep thinking that there’s some capital error we make in our thinking when we project a human face onto universal forces. Somehow, the human takes over, and it becomes violent. But Hsi was wise enough to say, no, no, let’s keep it yin and yang. They’re not human. They’re beyond human. And there is way less violence in it. There’s almost no violence. I want to say there’s no violence, but I’ve only been reading it for a few years so I’m going to keep studying it.

Am I off on a tangent, Alyssa? Is this interesting to you? 

TFR: Yes! This is very interesting.

LYL: Good, good.

So, these two books of changes, Alyssa, you know, somebody should look at that and go, “What’s up?”  You know, I think part of the problem this is when we project a human image onto universal principles, something happens.

I think if we do it the other way…if we assimilate the universal principles this way, it’s better. I think peace in the world might be impossible. This projection thing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Judeo-Christian tradition, but they have this concept of original sin. And people keep asking what is that? What is that? I mean, I know a little bit about the Judeo-Christian tradition. I’ve studied it. My father was a Christian minister, but I’ve also studied the Eastern traditions. I’m studying now the pagan traditions: the Greek gods, those kinds of things. And this original sin thing, I think it’s projection. I think the worst thing we can do is project. You know the word “sin” actually means “error.”  So, there’s an original error, and that’s what the Judeo-Christians are proposing. I would say that feels pretty original. That’s pretty early in our psyche that we do that without even knowing we’re doing it. You know what I mean? So, that error is earlier than, let’s say, eating the wrong thing…I don’t know…telling a lie. Where does all that come from? That comes from something earlier. I think it comes from projection. I think Ovid was projecting the human image onto universal forces, and they became more and more violent. You know? Whereas Fu Hsi was trying to understand the universal forces purely without any human narrative. And what happened was this wonderful, profound, peace-giving, love-giving view of our human mission, of the universe. I think that’s crazily amazing.

**

Alyssa Guelcher is an MFA student studying creative nonfiction at Chatham University.

Always Writing for the Accident: An Interview with Cornelius Eady

By Shannon Sankey, for The Fourth River

Cornelius Eady is the author of eight poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (1991), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; and Brutal Imagination (2001), a National Book Award finalist. With Toi Dericottte, he co-founded the Cave Canem summer workshop and retreat for African American poets in 1996. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. In April, 2017, he participated with poets Danez Smith, Li-Young Lee and Adriana Ramirez, in the Dialogues: Writing in Divided Times event at Chatham University.

The Fourth River: What literary accomplishment are you most proud of?

Cornelius Eady: I don’t really think in those ways. You write the poem and then you write the next poem. You write the book and then you write the next book. You hope that what you’ve done is your best work at that moment.

There’s a lot of poems that I think have worked well. I remember finishing certain poems and realizing I might have pushed it a little further than I normally would have. When I finished “Gratitude,” I thought I had done something that was new for me. It was a little more than a good poem. Finishing “Emmett Till’s Glass-Top Casket” was a moment I thought I had done something slightly better than average. There are par poems, and then suddenly, you write something above par.

TFR: How do you transcend the par poem?

CE: It’s just chance. I’m always writing for the accident. So much of writing is accidental. You have a certain amount of craft, but it’s about being available for the poem. For whatever reason, the elements are right, and you end up some place you weren’t expecting to go.

TFR: Do you have favorite poems to perform at readings?

CE: Galway Kinnell wrote a poem called “Oatmeal,” and it was always his sure-fire, can’t-miss poem. I think “The White Couch” is my “Oatmeal,” at least for now. “I’m A Fool to Love You,” the story my mother told me about meeting my father, works well. I don’t always read them, though; it depends on where I am and to whom I’m reading. You don’t want to get so complacent that you fall asleep at the mic.

TFR: When did you and Toi Derricotte sense Cave Canem was something special?

CE: We knew it from the first year. The fellows we invited that first year knew it, too. They felt invested. Toi tells a story about when we looked at each other that first year, as if to say, “What happened? Who’s running this place?” The fellows felt they could come to us and help us shape the programming. And that’s what happened. Part of the secret of why it worked, why it still works, is that the fellows can, unlike at other workshops, influence what goes on. In some ways, it was an improvisation. We had a basic shape of what Cave Canem was going to be, but they added to it. It became a living, breathing thing.

TFR: What disappoints you in contemporary American poetry right now?

CE: There’s too much emphasis on prizes. There’s too much of, what I consider, a Protestant work ethic that compels you to grind books out. When I entered poetry, you published your first book—and that’s it—from that point on, you were a poet. You didn’t have to defend it or justify your existence. This new model is unfortunate. It produces a lot of premature books, books that should have percolated longer. James Wright wasn’t writing a book every 2 years. Jack Gilbert wasn’t writing a book every 2 years.

It’s about the way you live your life. It’s not a matter of trying to get a product out. There is such a superficial, artificial perception of what it means to be a career poet. If you’re not up at that white-hot pitch, if you’re not spewing out prize-winning books, then you’re not a real player. That’s so false and unreal. I think a lot of poets fear they’re losing this poetry game.

TFR: What excites you about contemporary American poetry right now?

CE: We’ll read manuscripts for Cave Canem and find a certain voice or style, and we’ll say to each other, “This person has got to be here.” And we usually call it right. We’ve seen this wave approaching. We’ve been privileged to see these voices to start to arrive.

These poets seem to be changing the game. There’s a generation of people who grew up with Cave Canem. It’s not a superficial thing. It’s not just books and awards. There are more poets of color directing programs, editing magazines—even The New Yorker. It’s astonishing. I remember all the letter campaigns to The New Yorker pleading a case for writers of color. There has been a marked change since then.

One of the complications of this becomes: did we inadvertently invent our own elite? Is Cave Canem perceived as just a career stop? You can’t control how people perceive it. You can only go back to writing. The workshop hasn’t essentially changed. It’s a place where the poet can go to write the hard poem or the joyous poem or the poem he or she didn’t feel comfortable writing any place else. Once you write that, you realize you can carry it out to the larger world.

**

Shannon Sankey’s poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming at Poets.org, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, The Weeklings, Atticus Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a copywriter and co-editor of Stranded Oak Press. www.shannonsankey.com

Interview: Branching Out with Adam Reger

By Marcella Prokop

Pittsburgh writer Adam Reger has written a children’s book, a humorous book about pirates and the US Navy, and several articles for Pitt Magazine. He also works as a ghostwriter and an editorial assistant at the American Economic Review. Adam’s story “Woman in the Woods” was published at The Fourth River and can be found here. I spoke with him about the value of experimenting within the craft of writing.

The Fourth River: If there is a process to becoming a writer, what is yours?

Adam Reger: I don’t know if there was a process; I feel like it’s all just fallen into my lap. With the ghostwriting thing, I just placed an ad on Craigslist and somebody contacted me. With Pitt Magazine, it happened that the editor there was someone I went to grad school with.

FR: You worked as Editor-in-Chief for the literary journal Hot Metal Bridge at one point. Was that a valuable experience?

AR: I got a lot out of it. An MFA journal wants to give you the infrastructure where you can take on responsibility. It was great to see the other side of running a literary magazine and to understand rejections, why people weren’t ready to have their stories read by editors, much less published.

FR: Is networking a big part of the publishing industry?

AR: I’m discovering it is. I’ve always been interested in copywriting, and I’m trying to do more with that. I have a couple of books and they recommend calling people out of the blue, but I’ve found that having connections and using them is a faster way of getting anywhere. I’m still trying to branch out and try all kinds of things.

FR: So which lit journals do you read—print and online?

AR: I try to sample as many as I can. That’s way easier to do with online lit magazines, but my list is scattered and incomplete. I subscribe to Hobart, Pear Noir!, Sycamore Review, and McSweeney’s. I’ve always liked what I’ve seen in Electric Literature, A Public Space, and Subtropics. And online, I really like Juked, Pank, Twelve Stories, and Hot Metal Bridge.

FR: Why sample as many as you can?

AR: I feel fine checking on a movie for a half hour, and if it doesn’t catch my attention, I’m okay with putting it aside. Same thing with music, or anything. I have the same approach across all media. Maybe it’s an issue of being selfish with my time.

FR: In a world where all things are now digitized and available online, do you see a demise in the print publication world? Would it matter?

AR: I don’t think it will go away completely. I feel the market for lit magazines is focused on people who like the book as an object. I don’t see [the market] completely going way, but being there for people who like books as art. I think eventually it will be a matter of making different formats available. You can get a journal on your iPad or whatever, or you could get a printed copy delivered.

FR: Your story “Bedroom Tapes,” appearing online in The White Whale Review, melds several different levels of action. To me, it is a story about a man wondering who he might have been had he only acted out his desires. Is that what you were going for?

AR: That’s a good chunk of it. Some of the biographical details about the narrator are from when I was living in Philadelphia after college, so for me, it’s kind of a story about that time in my life and the feeling I had, in retrospect, that I just wasn’t ready to do much of anything. The part where he thinks he would kiss his roommate is just one (fictional) example. That narrator really isn’t ready to deal with the world. I am fond of the part where he considers kissing his roommate because it gives people kind of a handle on the story, like “He wants to act, but he can’t.” And here it’s not that the narrator is secretly gay (although, who knows, I think someone could read it that way), it’s more like he’s not even really formed yet, or he doesn’t know what he wants yet. I think this is a story that you can read different ways, and it doesn’t really give you one of those satisfying “Aha!” moments at the end. I think I sent it to a friend once and said it was “a slow jam.” That still seems pretty accurate.

FR: “Satisfying” is one of those words that has lost meaning because we all use it so much. What does it mean?

AR: If anyone likes the story, then it’s satisfying.

FR: The setting in “Bedroom Tapes” is a character as much as any of the people, and you’ve created a whole atmosphere on several different levels: music, film/visuals, and touch. How did you manage that?

AR: I guess I was working around not having a strong plot. I went through a few drafts with more plot and just kind of gave up and tried to work with what the story had going for it, which was atmosphere and sense of place. I’ve never thought about the atmosphere on different levels thing. (Maybe I shouldn’t admit that.) But I guess I paid attention to the details because I felt like I had to give a potential reader something to compensate for there not being a super-compelling plot. And building the character and providing good sensory details was the best way I could see of doing that.

FR: You’ve written about procrastination, calling it “the Saturday problem.” How do you deal with it, or are you immune?

AR: I’m definitely not immune. The main thing is to acknowledge it, that you are going to want to do other stuff. I hate to think of writing as something I have to get over with, but that’s kind of what I do. On the weekend, I want to get out and run errands or see a movie, so I’ll make myself do my writing in the beginning of the day.

Marcella Prokop holds an MFA degree from Chatham University’s creative writing program. She lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  Cover and interview photos by Adelaide Eichman.

Interview: Ann Pancake

By Beth Royce, Assistant Editor, The Fourth River

Ann Pancake writes of Appalachia. Originally from Romney, West Virginia, Pancake’s characters often find their place in a similar climate. She is an accomplished writer in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, her work spanning countless journals, most recently Georgia Review, Harvard Review, and here, as part of the Melanie Brown Lecture tribute issue, in The Fourth River.

As part of the Melanie Brown Series, Pancake’s essay “Our Own Kind” delves into an upbringing in West Virginia. She illustrates a childhood in which her and her brother fought tirelessly against gender stereotypes. Their personal struggle to break free of gender roles led them to physical fights with each other, until finally, they were able to find out how to be “[their own kind of boy, [their] own kind of girl.” An upbringing in rural West Virginia exasperated the internal struggle for Pancake. But she doesn’t come to blame Appalachia for her hardships. She instead celebrates the hardships and West Virginia in her stunning description of the place she comes from.

Pancake is an avid admirer of her roots. She reiterates in “Our Own Kind,” that her childhood among the rough outdoors made her into the person she is today. In an interview with Appalachian Journal, she says, “Appalachians have qualities that other Americans need. If dominant America would adapt certain Appalachian characteristics, the culture at large would have more life-sustaining qualities.” She denotes this idea in her creative work by portraying her characters as self-sufficient, passionate folks with their own, unique ways of living.

In my interview with Pancake, I asked: “What is your favorite thing about ‘Our Own Kind?’” She responded: “I think my favorite thing about the essay is how much it meant to my brother Sam, one of the main characters, and the kinds of conversations he and I had after he read it.”

After doing research on Pancake’s history as a writer, I asked her questions about her writing life, as well. After earning a B.A. in English from West Virginia University, Pancake traveled the world, spending time in Japan, Thailand, and American-Somoa. She then came back to the United States and began work on her M.A. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She would eventually go on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Washington at Seattle. She’s published a novella, a collection of short stories, a novel, several personal essays, several academic articles, and even poetry.

When asked what surprises her most about her writing life, she said, “That I’ve actually published several books and that I had the stamina to finish a novel.  I still can’t believe I did that.”

Pancake’s surprise at her success is admirable, but unexpected. As an astounding writer of nature, place, and human connection, she has earned the right to brag about her achievements. Her work spans all genres and she is proficient at telling both nonfiction and fictional tales. The writing world is lucky to have Ann Pancake as a contributor. And we at The Fourth River are lucky to have had the pleasure of publishing her work.

Between Memory and Imagination: An Interview with Debra Marquart

By Kelly Kepner, Managing Editor, The Fourth River

This year marked a decade of the Melanie Brown Lecture Series at Chatham University. The Fourth River honored the series and its acclaimed writers by featuring the work of previous Melanie Brown lecturers in the most recent online issue, O.3. I had the privilege to interview Debra Marquart, Chatham’s first Melanie Brown Lecturer, about her piece, “Living to Tell the Tale,” and the importance of being flexible with ourselves as writers.

The Fourth River: What’s your favorite thing about this piece?

Debra Marquart: The story of this roots-journey that I took to France, Ukraine, and Russia in the late 1980s is something that I’ve always wanted to write in its entirety. The story is complicated by the fact that the tangled history of my obscure ethnic group, the inaccurately named Germans-from-Russia, spans multiple migrations across continents over the course of two centuries. I’ve always struggled with how to get the historical layers into the narrative. My own disastrous research trip came to an abrupt halt, as this essay suggests, when I ran into 120 degree heat in Odessa while I was doing field research. What I like about this excerpt from the larger narrative is that it just dips into a moment—that panic moment on the Odessa Airlines plane—and it doesn’t worry so much about capturing the entirety of the tale. Hopefully, as writers, if we can live with writing something with tattered edges where so much of the “rest of the story” is merely intimated, we can begin a process of telling the whale of a tale that connects to the moment.

TFR: In “Living to Tell the Tale,” your travel plans, and ultimately the story you’re writing, change as your health deteriorates in the rising temperatures. Is your writing process generally flexible, even when health and logistics don’t force you to change plans?

DM: So funny that I started to answer this question above. I find I often write in the cracks between things. My entire first collection of poems was written between the hours of 3 and 5 AM, because I was working a full time job, and I was in graduate school. So, I would collapse into bed at 9 PM after my graduate night class, then something would shake me awake at about 3 AM, and I’d go to my writing desk to work for about two hours. Then I’d go back to sleep a few hours and get up to go to work by 8 AM. I’d take my notebook and handwritten drafts with me to work. When I’d get a few minutes, I’d type them up, and I’d always be amazed at what I had written. Now that I have five books published, and three more books in evolving draft form, I find my process hasn’t changed much. I know there must be people who have their lives arranged so they have all the time in the world to write. My life has never been that way, so I have to settle for writing in between things, getting the work done in fragments, bits and pieces, then working toward editing the fragments and getting them to coalesce into something more complete.

TFR: What writing advice are you glad you didn’t take?

DM: Probably any bad advice I get comes first from my own inner consciousness. My inner editor is very exacting and demanding, so it’s sometimes hard to move the words onto the page. So, maybe the worst writing advice I get is from myself. Again, as I mentioned in the question above, I don’t like to let things go out until all the edges are finished, so sometimes I have to disregard my inner mandate and let the work go out into the world, perhaps a little earlier than I might have been willing to allow.

TFR: What have you been most surprised by in your writing life?

DM: I’m always amazed at how much there is to write about. I have notebooks and files full of memory prompts—things overheard in passing, images that seem ready to be put down on the page, events that occurred in my life or in my awareness that need to be reported through writing. As my writing life continues, I find the subjects continue to spread out and get more rich and complicated. This is a surprise, because when I was younger, I had this idea there was just so much to write about, then I’d be done. But somewhere between memory and imagination, the material unfurls endlessly ahead of my writing pen. I can never hope to catch up.

TFR: What up and coming writers are you reading right now?

DM: Oh my goodness, I seem to be reading about thirty books at a time, and I read pretty widely across disciplines and genres. I’m teaching a study abroad class in Ireland, so I’ve been dipping into some new Irish authors. The novelist, Sarah Baume, who wrote Spill Simmer Falter Wither, is one of the most engaging novelists I’ve read in years. I just taught MFK Fisher’s Long Ago in France, which is a milieu piece about the three years Fisher spent in Dijon, France starting in 1929 when she and her husband of three weeks moved there so he could pursue graduate work at the university in Dijon. It’s remarkable how Fisher was able, fifty years later, to transport herself and the reader through memory to a place so changed over time.

I finished Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk a little over a year ago, and the book still rings in my ears and echoes and haunts me. I also just taught Lauret Savoy’s new book, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape. My students absolutely loved it, and I think it should probably be required reading for every American—it’s that powerful in its analysis of the hidden, submerged, and subsumed layers of American history, especially as those layers still can be traced, if one knows how to go about looking. Savoy offers the reader strategies for how to look for the invisible.

Lastly, I’m writing about music right now, so I’ve been reading some music-related books: David Byrne’s How Music Works and Salome Voegelin’s Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art.

TFR: What did it mean to you to be part of the Melanie Brown Lecture Series?

DM: I was just remembering that I was unable to attend the lecture the evening it was originally planned. I was so honored to receive the invitation, and there was a lovely dinner planned. There was this horrendous ice storm in Iowa on the day that I was to catch my flight, and the roads were closed. I felt terrible missing that original event. Fortunately, we were able to reschedule for the following day (I believe). I still remember that drive to the airport the next morning when the roads opened. There were cars in the ditch and SUVs rolled and resting on their roofs as I drove at 30 mph from Ames to the Des Moines airport. When I finally got to Chatham and met everyone, I felt as if I was being welcomed to a family dinner, a celebration. The community of writers there is so strong and supportive, and I always look forward to seeing my good friend and former colleague, Sheryl St. Germain.

Debra Marquart was the 2008 Melanie Brown Lecturer at Chatham University. She is a professor of English in the MFA program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University, and serves as the senior editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation, the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award, and Elle Magazine’s, “Elle Lettres” award. Marquart authored a collection of short stories entitled, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, as well as the poetry collections, Everything’s a Verb, and From Sweetness. Among other honors, Marquart’s work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Wachtmeister Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Mid-American Review Nonfiction Award, The Headwater’s Prize, Shelby Foote Prize for the Essay from the Faulkner Society, the Paumanok Poetry Award, and an NEA Fellowship. When Debra’s not writing or teaching, she performs with her rhythm and blues project, The Bone People.

To learn more about Marquart’s publications, or her work with the The Bone People visit her website at www.debramarquart.com.

**

Kelly Kepner is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Chatham University. She serves as managing editor for The Fourth River, marketing director of The Crawl Space Journal, and is the founding editor of the independent children’s book press, Winding Path Publications. For more information, visit http://www.kellykepner.com.