Mark Bryan - The Tornado Man

Dirt mattered. It made a difference that my family owned land, and that it was good fertile land; it supported crops, it supported grassland for cattle, it supported trees of many kinds. It supported everything that we were about. When I was small, I realized that the land supported our house, held it up from—what? What would happen to the house if the soil beneath it suddenly melted away? What was underneath it?

In the little Methodist church we went to every Sunday, I heard the word firmament, I learned the importance of a good foundation: You have built your house upon the sand. I could imagine the consequences: one good rain and the sand would wash away; the house would fall down, an idea inevitably invoking images of wolves and pigs. Build your house upon a rock. And build it of brick, lest there be a storm of wolf breath.

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http://striplight.org/clean.aspx

Mr. G. handed out an assignment: something mimeographed. The odor of fresh mimeograph ink is still a tangible presence in my memory, indelible. The assignment had that reek, part chemical and part sexual. But we were juniors in high school; everything was sexual.

In a school full of abysmally bad teachers, Mr. G. stood out. It was not that he was a better teacher than any of the others; he wasn’t. He was lazy and often ill-informed. But he was younger than the others. He had just turned 30 a couple of months before, and that had been a shocking day; it was 1966 and our trust, rumor had it, was not to extend to anyone over 30 years of age. Not trust Mr. G.? Not trust him to do what? The truth is that, having turned 30, Mr. G. suddenly seemed unspeakably ancient, like all his colleagues. Before that, he had been ours somehow; now he was theirs.

What Mr. G. had that the others lacked was an element of hipness. He was blandly handsome, slightly moon-faced but clear-eyed, with a sort of transparency about him: very white skin, blond hair kept close-clipped but not buzz cut like a coach’s. He cultivated a blasé irony that eleventh graders recognized and appreciated. He wore his own mediocrity lightly and forgave mediocrity in others, but he abhorred outright stupidity and was merciless in hostile pursuit of it. He was, in short, a sort of meta-highschooler himself, a big man on a small campus who has outlived his time.

About the high school I attended, I want here to say as little as possible. It was wretched in and of itself, and its wretchedness compound by the fact that during the eon I attended it (1964-1968) it was completely and adamantly segregated—was, in effect, locked down where African Americans were concerned. In Mississippi, there was a war going on. Nobody said so, but that is the truth. Our school was a citadel in the conflict; we had our battlements and our cannonade. Enormous mental and spiritual energy that might otherwise have been expended on our education went to the war effort. Enormous resources also went to the maintenance of two “separate but equal” school systems in a community that could scarcely support one. It is not surprising that the school was, as I have said, abysmally bad. For me, though, in ways I would spend years coming to comprehend, it was a disaster.

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livxuponxhope

They put the big gloves on my hands. They covered my head with the veil. They lit the necessary incense, and the aura of pine surrounded me.

Everything we needed was abandoned there, like theater props left backstage after the play’s run ends. It was as though the Rapture had come, and the inhabitants of a world had suddenly disappeared, leaving behind not less than everything:

I saw an arbour with a drooping roof
Of trellis vines, and bells, and larger blooms,
Like floral censers swinging light in air;
Before its wreathed doorway, on a mound
Of moss, was spread a feast of summer fruits,
Which, nearer seen, seem’d refuse of a meal
By angel tasted or our Mother Eve;
For empty shells were scattered on the grass,
And grape stalks but half bare, and remnants more,
Sweet smelling, whose pure kinds I could not know.
Still was more plenty than the fabled horn
Thrice emptied could pour forth, at banqueting
For Proserpine return’d to her own fields,
Where the white heifers low.

Years later, when I read these lines from Keats’s “The Fall of Hyperion,” the scene was familiar to me, curiously homelike for all its alien imagery and antiquated diction.

But that was in the future. Now, my brother and my cousin were arraying me for the quest they had conceived for me. We were in an old shed on the family farm; it was full of the smell of dust and rotted wood, and another, overpoweringly sweet smell which was not new to me but which I could not identify; shortly it would be forever etched in my olfactory brain: the perfume of beeswax.“He’s ready,” my cousin said to my brother, and then to me, “Out.” (more…)

For all you poets and writers out there, only three days remain before AGNI’s summer hiatus begins on June 1st. If you plan to submit before the fall, do it now. (Unless you’re a subscriber, in which case you’re allowed to send submissions through snail mail throughout the year.)

Nathan Simpson

Begin with a human figure—a silhouette of a human figure, for the moment, backlit by sunset—a human figure walking down a road. The road is a dirt road, hard-packed reddish-beige earth. Down its center a pair of bare ruts run, where passing cars and trucks and tractors have flattened, hardened, and buffed it to a kind of ceramic sheen. The person in view, however, does not walk in the rutted center of the road, but in the gravel on its narrow shoulder. One’s first interpretation of this fact might be that he—for let us now deploy the masculine pronoun—walks as he does for safety’s sake; but any traffic in a place as remote as this would be obvious even from a great distance, and if he so chose, he could walk the center of the road without danger either to himself or to the animal he leads on a length of hemp rope. It is more likely that his position is a concession to the animal than to any merely human consideration. The old brown mule follows the man at a distance of about six feet, walking entirely off the road, from where it stops often to snatch a mouthful; when the mule stops, the man stops, in a sort of enforced symbiosis of which the mule most often appears the dominant component. Still, the rope is long enough that the man could, if he chose, walk the center, and let the mule still graze the shoulder. Surely it would be easier to walk along one of the ruts, flat and hard as a sidewalk, than in the gravel along the road’s edge; yet surely walking as he does is a choice—dictated perhaps by a deference that precludes his seizing the center.

Though more than fifty years have passed since the time of which I write, if you stood today in the place where I locate the lens of my memory, the scene would be remarkably similar. Both man and mule are decades dead, the road remains still unpaved and fundamentally unaltered though likely now it is in worse repair than it was then.

About the length of hemp rope, who knows?

*

There are questions about everything I have described here. About the road, for instance, it is worth wondering when it came to be here, and how, and especially why. It is a rural road maintained—however intermittently and poorly—by the county board of supervisors, and yet is serves, almost entirely, a single farm. The road is an ovoid loop appended to a slightly wider main road that runs several miles before terminating in a blacktop road that extends another fifteen miles to the nearest (tiny) town. The loop was a three-mile detour, so to speak, through the farm, and was used by almost no one other than those who lived there—all members of one extended family plus their employees. Is it usual for county governments to build and maintain roads for such constituencies and narrow purposes? (more…)

In the Wall Street Journal, William Amelia examines the legacy of poet John Claire, who overcame poverty and an almost complete lack of formal education to become the greatest English nature poet of the 19th Century (before dying in the madhouse). Claire taught himself meter, never learned spelling or grammar, and was described by a London bookseller as ”low in stature, with light hair, coarse features, awkward, is a fiddler, loves ale, likes the girls, somewhat idle, hates work.”

As the article mentions, Claire’s complete works are now available online.

This week we’re delighted to have poet T.R. Hummer guest edit the Unstressed blog. Hummer is the author of seven books of poetry, and a selected collection called Bluegrass Wasteland appeared in 2005. A collection of essays on the art and craft of poetry appeared in 2006 under the title The Muse in the Machine. The winner of numerous awards for his poetry, he now teaches in the creative writing program at Arizona State University. Learn more here.

Read Hummer’s poem “Argument from Design.”

Certain kinds of introspection are less like meditative journeys and more like putting one’s hand into an ant colony. For me, thinking about my early experiences with the official educational process is an exercise in ant excavation: painful, revelatory of ugly inhuman things, and generally uncanny. To revisit there, for me, is to reenter a narrative that has the dark numinousity of a primal scene, simultaneously repellant and fascinating.

It’s impossible for me to know how I would be different had I grown up in another place (for present purposes I leave out of account the possibilities in growing up in other times)—or whether I would be different, in any fundamental way, at all. I have grown, over subsequent decades, into a selfhood that I experience less as a unitary thing (like a potato or a stone) than as a semi-random composite, like a coral reef. This composite has turned out to be a reasonably fertile medium for poetry and other kinds of writing. To what extent poetry is its necessary product I can’t say; whether I would be a poet had I not undergone the education that was given me I can’t know. All I know is how it was and how it is. For other writers, the “education of the poet” as a subject has been mostly either prescriptive or descriptive; in my own case, it takes the form of a cautionary tale, and the majority of the caution is directed at me and me alone.

*

I have written elsewhere, at some length, in poems as well as prose, about the place that was my jumping-off point from nonbeing: eastern Mississippi, a farming community, from 1950 onward. My family was sufficiently typical there to be virtually invisible by reason of protective coloring—literally coloring, given the state of race relations in that place and in those days. Basic facts: 1. we were white folk; 2. white people owned, and controlled, just about everything there was in that place; 3. white people were a distinct minority of the population, which was approximately 70-30 black to white. These three simple facts give rise to wide-reaching and, to say the least, unpleasant social dynamics.

For present purposes it is not necessary to rehearse the whole history of race relations in America. Suffice it to say that I lived through a vital transition point in our history—the Civil Rights Movement—beginning on the wrong side of it, and I lived through it first in my nerves and muscles and belly and bowels more than in my mind. Institutional education, never completely disinterested or impersonal in the good sense, never “objective,” was complicit in the maintenance of the status quo. This too I have written about elsewhere, limning out the basic principle of education in the context of institutional racism from the side of the racists: that the process centers on mentally blinding one’s children. If African Americans were, in that particular version of the weird old America, invisible, they were only so by reason of the blindness of white people. Therefore it was the “God-given duty,” as it was perceived in that place, to pluck out one’s children’s eyes.

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Sally Molini’s poem “At Ruann’s Having Tea with the Future” was published this morning on Linebreak. Molini’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in LIT, Beloit Poetry Journal, elimae, and 32 Poems, among other journals, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is co-editor for Cerise Press, an online international magazine and lives in Nebraska.

Since Johnathon started with this question last week, and because I’m curious about such things: How did “At Ruann’s, Having Tea with the Future” come into being? What prompted it?

There actually was an initial image for this poem. I once walked by an oceanside deck full of tables set for dinner, a bright white napkin folded in the shape of a sail sitting on each plate. For some reason I never forgot those napkins. This was at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego; I’ve never stayed there but it’s quite a place, a sprawling Victorian beach resort with lots of flagged turrets, carved balconies, gazebos and open vistas full of what must be recreational splendor.

Anyway, the poem grew from that one image, the original setting and contents of the piece changing over time. Wasn’t sure what I wanted to say until I added a bit about the current job market, and so, far from the pricey red peaks of the Coronado, the ailing economy found its way into the poem. I also liked the idea of someone reading tea leaves for a person who doesn’t pay enough attention to or maybe doesn’t understand completely the accumulating signs and directions of her own life, which is something to which I can relate.

Do you have a usual writing process?

I usually start out with a line, an image, or a phrase. I’m a slow worker, am unfortunately not prolific; a poem can take me a while to finish. Often it helps to get away from the screen or keyboard, so I’ll walk around the living room and stare through a window out into the backyard while working on something. I like getting past that beginning phase of the poem, enjoy revision the most, when there’s something coming together on that no-longer blank screen. I least like starting out with a new piece, having to develop and expand that first flash of an idea or line. There’s resistance and doubt to push past, which is probably typical for other writers.

In other poems of yours that I’ve read - ”Elegy for an Estranged Friend“; “In Lumbini, Doing the Continental Shift“; “Remains at 920 Prospect“; “Bird in the Hand Alley” – you seem to see the human elements of a poem through the lens of dense natural imagery. What draws you toward these images, or how do they arrive?

Not sure why I’m drawn to certain images or how they arrive — seems the best lines or phrases sort of pop up out of nowhere as I work, which doesn’t sound very intellectual. Ideas come from the usual daily bumping into people and objects. Memory obviously triggers a lot, people and events that have ripened with distance and so come to mind with a little perspective or malleability.

The natural world can offer clues about what’s happening on different levels, physically, spiritually, etc. In the poem, “In Lumbini” mentioned above, there’s a glowworm crawling on a bathroom floor — there are various meanings in that glowworm and its world, which is also my world. We’re connected, that little bug and I; the possibilities, the how and why of that connection calls to me.

I tend not to analyze or think too much about the creative process; it definitely has its mysteries and I like keeping it that way, don’t want to try and solidify some view.

Which poets or poems have influenced you the most – in life or in writing? How do you see these poems or poets working to inform your poetry – or do they?

A teacher once told me that the poets one reads and studies become a kind of chord of voices which shapes one’s own voice. I like that idea, a sort of ongoing weave of developing sensibility. To name just a few poets whose work I love and keep close: Gerard Manly Hopkins, John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop and T. S. Eliot. Contemporary poets: Tom Lux, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Dean Young, Eleanor Wilner. Sometimes a poet’s attitude or views can be more influential than their work. For example, I love Keats’ poetry, yet reading his biographies and prose writings have had more of an effect on how I view and read poetry.

Let’s assume that your favorite poets are, as we have always suspected, superhuman. If you could steal five literary superpowers from your favorite poets, which superpowers would you steal and from whom?

I wouldn’t mind being empowered with:

1. The narrative scope and skill of Elizabeth Bishop.
2. Hopkins’ breadth and depth of diction and sound.
3. Eliot’s abililty to blend the big and small picture — I guess most poets strive to do this, but Eliot has a certain style of penetration, has so captured the strange bleak meanderings of modern times.
4. Eleanor Wilner’s lifelong dedication to civil rights coupled with her writing’s cosmic/mythical point of view.
5. Tom Lux’s reading prowess, so direct and honest; his vocal rendering of a poem the simultaneous sound of heart and irony.

If someone at a bar were to ask you what you do, would you tell him or her that you’re a poet? If so, when did you decide to call yourself a poet? If not, why?

I call myself a writer. I like what Louise Glück’s said in her essay “The Education of The Poet” — I use the word “writer” deliberately. “Poet” must be used cautiously; it names an aspiration, not an occupation.

Finally, here’s our (soon-to-be) traditional rock-star question: What’s the greatest amount of money you ever earned from poetry, and how’d you spend it?

“Little World, Flitting Away,” a poem about the ever-increasing number of extinct species and our dying natural world, made $100 when it took 3rd place in Fugue’s annual poetry contest a few years ago. Not sure how I spent the money; probably on books.

An Interview with Joe Wilkins

This month, probably because of my birthday, I’m sitting through one of my quarterly info panics, wherein I become convinced that my near constant checking of RSS feeds and Twitter streams and tumblelogs is destroying my brain, my personal relationships, and whatever small amount of literary talent I once possessed. And in the midst of this, I stumble across Salon’s 1998 interview with poet and novelist Jim Harrison, who I am convinced said the following just for me:

Before I went to Paris I did an old traditional ritual. I went up to my cabin and vomited up the world for five days. No contact with newspapers, radio, nothing but running my dog. I think even Jesus said you have to step aside in the wilderness and rest awhile, an interesting view. You have to avoid suffocating in lint. We’re not choo-choo trains on a track. Nothing tells us we can’t swim across a lake and climb a tree. We’re human beings.

I will now spend the rest of the day trying not to buy Harrison’s entire back catalogue. And reading this lovely, lovely poem, “Awake.”

The Unclutterer Workspaces pool on Flickr depicts many lovely spartan work areas. It’s not limited to writers, or even creative types in general, but I needed something to tide me over while I send out more requests for entries in our Where the Magic Happens series.

A YouTube clip of that espisode from Mad Men where Don Draper reads from Frank ‘O Hara’s book Meditations in an Emergency. The reading is from the last section of “Mayakovsky.”

(via BAP)

An extensive how-to from Smashing Magazine on switching from print to the web.

Making the switch from print publishing to digital publishing is a big step. But as costs for everything from paper to shipping increase, making the jump to digital is becoming more appealing to publishers of both newspapers and magazines. It’s a complicated process, though, and if not executed effectively, it can leave readers feeling alienated and disenfranchised.

A nice primer on web design & production differences for the print crowd, but I’m surprised to see non-native formats like PDF and Flash given such serious consideration. Web publications should speak the Web’s native language — HTML.

Interviewed in Guernica, poet and novelist Jesse Ball describes the difference between publishing his first book of poems (March Book) and publishing his first novel (Samedi the Deafness):

Yeah, it is pretty silly. I wrote that book of poems and then nothing happened at all. I was happy to have written it, and I wanted people to read it, but it didn’t help me to get a job or anything; nothing came of it. The novel, on the other hand, was this huge sort of fanfare.

(via Bookslut)

As Johnathon mentioned, the new Linebreak submission manager is now functional. We currently have a huge backlog of submissions, and while typically we have managed to respond to submissions within 30 days, we’re running a little behind schedule right now.  If you haven’t heard back from us after 2 months, feel free to give us a little nudge.

While thinking about Adam Clay’s post on poetry’s role in addressing poverty and desperation, I stumbled across Wikipedia’s entry on the concept of the American Dream. The phrase was coined by historian James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book Epic of America. Adams wrote:

The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Something to consider if any of us work up the nerve to write about our modern day tent cities.

After trying to search online for the restraints of alcaic verse, I realized that there is literally nothing on the internet that describes the form – which meant that even my earlier post mocking Google’s suggestion for the  phrase “alcaic meter” turned up when I tried again. No good.

Therefore: a short public service announcement seemed in order. Let me know if I miss anything, and I’ll gladly correct or add it.

* * *

Greek meters like sapphic verse and alcaic verse are based in a prosodic system called quantitative verse, which measures the length of syllables rather than the stress pattern. However, in English, it’s proven – at best – to be very hard to replicate the quantitative system: English poets tend to hear stress patterns rather than the length of syllables.

Partially due to this, even the best information on the internet about alcaic verse simply describes it as a syllabic form, which has the pattern of eleven syllables in the first two lines, nine in the third and ten in the fourth. This isn’t an unprecedented approach to writing in alcaics. W.H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” is a good example of this particular pattern. Below, you’ll find the first two stanzas:

When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
to the critique of a whole epoch
the frailty of our conscience and anguish,

of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
who knew it was never enough but
hoped to improve a little by living.

As you can see, the third line is typically indented a little more than the fourth while the first two are flush with the left-hand margin. This is another aspect of the form that’s usually preserved, if only to signal that the lines are different lengths, but this isn’t always the case.

Strict alcaic verse, though, is slightly more complicated. In this approach, stressed syllables are substituted for what would be long syllables in quantitative verse, effectively using an accentual-syllabic prosodic system in order to imitate a quantitative one. The pattern is delineated below, where “x” signifies a stressed syllable and “-” signifies an unstressed syllable:

xx-x-x–x–
xx-x-x–x–
xx-x-x-x-
x–x–x-x-

“Alcaic Figure” by Sidney Wade is a solid example of this approach. I’ve included the whole poem as an example, but the link will take you to the original version, which I found on Google Books.

ALCAIC FIGURE

I’m sweating. Tossing. Sleep is impossible.
Damn blankets. Ankles caught in the undertow.
Hot breath of sttentive mosquitoes. A swelling of
doubt and the whining of tiny woodwinds.

Bad day. I didn’t do it the way that I
should have. This heat is brazen. I think of my
two beautiful daughters. I’m never the mother I
want to be. Barking. It sounds like oboes.

No. Horns. I could get up and continue to
read Death in Rome. I won’t. All the characters
repel me. I’m breathing the one thousand two thousand
three thousand laurel tree where the hell is

that dog? There’s sand awash in the bed sheets, I
hold off the weight, the terrible slowness of
tides. Nine thousand ten I am sinking now, classical,
shifting impurities, reedy, stranded.

Pale waves, the sea is scrambling to climb up the
beach foaming notes like Morpheus muttering -
shades, white and sublunary, washing ashore to those
masses of children with pale blue faces.

Enjoy – and good luck!

Books begat computers, which begat instant messaging, which begat talk bubbles, which begat … bookshelves.

Bookshelf-annotation : clusterflock.

Just a reminder: Linebreak’s tireless editors consider submissions throughout the year, so don’t be strangers this summer. Submissions should be uploaded through our new submissions manager. Our email address for submissions has been retired.

The submissions manager, by the way, is our own creation, and something we’d like to share with other literary journals. If you’d like to try it for your own publication, email me at jw@linebreak.org.

Collin Kelly rounds up some tweeting poets, and provides a handy link to Mashable’s favorite 100 literary types who are active on Twitter.

Twitter seems perfect for poetry in so many ways — the 140-character limit creates a form in and of itself — but I’ve yet to see anyone make full use of it. (What “full use” means here is anyone’s guess. Perhaps I’ll know it when I see it?) I’m surprised we haven’t seen a poetry-related, Twitter-based web app yet — something in the vein of Foamee or Favrd. I have a few notebook pages of app ideas, but none that I haven’t been able to talk myself out of.

Also Twitter-related: Dan Baum just finished tweeting the story of his firing from The New Yorker. It’s impossible to link to a sequence of tweets, but the story starts here and ends here.