Keisaku Palm

January 16, 2024

Carol Moldaw

Keisaku Palm

for Miriam Sagan

Gravity brought down the palm frond’s wide
and weighted sheath-end first: the bark,
still loosely attached like coarse black fringe,
lashed my ear when the stalk fell straight
from on high and thwacked the top of my crown.

On my way to the internet-connected garage,
taking the river-rock steps two at a time
to outrun the mosquitos, my laptop
compressed like a held-in prayer to my chest,
I was stunned into place and all the thoughts

that had squash-balled the box of my brain
since receiving your news, dropped like the flies
the shoemaker swatted—all in one blow.
It was like being clapped with the stick
a Zen master uses to wake a drowsy pupil.

I knew you’d know the name of the stick
and like the anecdote… comic relief
to round out my concerned earnest reply.
Keisaku stick, you wrote back with a link:
a flat wooden slat, for focus or courage—

not necessarily a rebuke. To request it,
bow the head and place the palms together,
expose each shoulder in turn to be struck.
The crack when the pinnate frond detached
was loud and startling as close-by thunder.

What master was it who summoned the stave
down to school my cloud-crowded head?
On the lichen-splattered steps, the slap set off
a nerve wave of remembrance, a transmission,
your image from youth, “promiscuous with stars.”

Works

Ampersand

January 16, 2024

Nicholas Friedman

Ampersand

We squeeze between erratics fuzzed
with moss to a stand of Krummholz firs,
deranged, wind-sculpted, then step from the trail
while he bends for breath. After a silence,
he turns to face me. Finally, I think,
he’ll use the word that we all fear,
the one that names his mutinous blood.
Instead, he explains how “ampersand”
was once the 27th letter,
before it became the namesake of
the mountain on which we’ve stopped to rest
so near the peak. “And per se and,
which really means and, by itself,”
he says, as if this just occurred
to him. And then, “Okay.” Our poles
tick-tock the granite as we climb
to the scrubless dome. From there, we see
a ferrous stain of maples below;
the small town where we’ll spend the night;
loose clots of hikers making their way;
and everything we’ve traveled for
receding, already, to a symbol.

Works

Dear Geryon—

January 16, 2024

Jehanne Dubrow

Dear Geryon—

At twelve I lashed my own magenta wings
beneath my shirt, afraid of how they stirred,
moved independently, soft whisperings
of feathers at my back. Ungainly bird,
I sat alone, the schooldays like a cage.
I hunched over a book, my scarlet hand
a tanager that pecked across the page,
red fingers hopping through a meadowland.
The only place I flew was in my mind.
There strangeness had a perch, a branch to bear
the weight of what I felt. I could unbind
myself and catch the currents of the air.
How wide my wingspan then. How bright
a streak against the ruminating night.

after Anne Carson

Interviews, New Interviews

Jehanne Dubrow

January 6, 2024

Jehanne Dubrow

Interviewed by Taylor Johnson

“Dear Geryon—,” “Dear Glass—,” “Dear Camera—,” and “Dear Cat’s Eye Marble—” all embody the form of a right-aligned sonnet. Could you share a little bit about how you employed form and formal structures when crafting these poems? How did the writing process shape or reflect their content?

These four poems come out of a series of Anne Carson-inspired pieces. So, even though these are rather traditional sonnets, I was also asking myself: how would Anne Carson engage with the page, if these were hers. Carson is so thoughtful about white space. And I thought that the right-hand alignment might be a choice she would make. The poems—the fact that they’re epistolary sonnets—is also inspired by a move Carson makes in her 2015 translation of Antigone, which she titles Antigonick. In Carson’s translation, the play contains a similar epistolary moment, in which the poet addresses Antigone in a very intimate, direct fashion, almost as if they’re friends. I find this moment really moving and wanted to express myself in a similar way, speaking to moments (as well as characters and objects) in Carson’s writing.

It appears that Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red was a significant touchstone in the creation of these poems. How has Carson’s work influenced you?

For a while now, I’ve been working on a very long essay about Autobiography of Red, tentatively titled “Red Monsters.” The essay is about queerness and the queering of form: hybridity. There were prose poems I wrote in the voice of Geryon (I imagined Geryon attending a Zoom meeting with students in a creative writing class and answering their questions about his relationship to Carson’s writings). And there was a sequence of these sonnets. I also wrote an epic poem about Arachne, entirely in Sapphics! It was a bisexual retelling of how Arachne is transformed into a spider, and maybe the poem will never see the light of day. But, together, these pieces form something of a weird and perhaps unpublishable manuscript.

Reading Carson’s work has given me permission to bend genre, to be strange, to play with allusion and intertextuality. I don’t know if I always succeed in following her model. But I’m certainly grateful for the permission her work has given me to experiment with form and to queer genre.

When working so closely with another writer’s work, how did you distinguish your voice and personal style from that of your subject? What were some of the highlights or challenges you faced when writing this series of poems?

Hopefully, when working on any project, form and content become inseparable. I think these poems still sound like me, like sonnets I would always write. But the landscape of the poems is certainly informed by Carson’s work. The biggest challenge of writing these pieces was to make sure they could stand on their own, without prior knowledge of Autobiography of Red or “The Glass Essay.” I want readers of Carson’s poetry to feel that spark of recognition when they read my sonnets. But I hope the poems also function without additional context.

In “Dear Geryon—,” I was quite drawn to the speaker’s “own magenta wings,” and later, in “Dear Glass—,” to the description of a glass splinter lodged into the speaker’s hand. Such images seem to emphasize some of the themes that recur throughout this series of poems—beauty, pain, and artifice. Would you discuss the craft behind these themes? Does your body of work share these themes with Carson, or are they part of this project alone?

My writing is grounded in the body. I’m drawn to images that are connected to sensory experience, especially when those images also speak to psychological trauma. Carson is so skilled at constructing images that engage with the body. When Geryon meets (and falls in love with) Herakles, Carson writes: “They were two superior eels / at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.” Later, when the two teenagers fight, Carson says they are like “two cuts” that “lie parallel in the same flesh.” I love the physicality of this language.

I’ve always believed that poems should contain lots of big ideas. But the poets I love always conceal abstractions within images. These poets understand that ideas, in themselves, may not be compelling until they’re given flesh, a beating heart. Perhaps, this is why I return to Carson again and again—because she understands how to root ideas, how to anchor them in bodily sensation.

Beyond Carson, what are some poems that haunt you?

Some of my touchstone poems: Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas,” Louise Glück’s “The Wild Iris” (that whole collection, really), Natasha Trethewey’s “Incident,” Anthony Hecht’s “The Book of Yolek,” Marilyn Hacker’s book-length sonnet sequence, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” (especially the Felstiner translation), Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Albatros”(one of my favorite ars poeticas), Rita Dove’s “Adolescence II,” Robert Pinksy’s “The Unseen,” Tarfia Faizullah’s “The Interviewer Acknowledges Shame,” Czesław Miłosz’s “Encounter” (“Spotkanie,” which is even lovelier in the original Polish), and Beth Bachmann’s “Paternoster.” The Odyssey (hard to pick a favorite translation, but I love the Lattimore, the Fagles, and the Wilson versions). Oh, and I’m pretty passionate about Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces. That whole book is a haunting.

Do you have any advice for new and emerging poets?

I’m going to say the same thing that everyone seems to say. Read. Read more. Read across centuries. Read across continents. Avoid trends. Don’t worry about what’s in fashion. Just read what interests you, what terrifies you, what distresses you, what perplexes you. Don’t read solely what you like or what validates your opinions. Yes, reading can be a comfort, a kind of mirror, reflecting one’s own understanding of the world. But it can also be something that destabilizes us, in all the best ways. We can read to be enlarged by reading beyond our comforts. We can be pushed beyond our small, narrow selves.

Interviews, New Interviews

Nicholas Friedman

January 5, 2024

Nicholas Friedman

Interviewed by Chloe Cook

Could we begin with location? “Ampersand,” like other poems in your collection Petty Theft, is grounded in the Northeast where you currently live. (For example, “Cozy Cottages…” is set in Cape Cod.) What is your connection to the Northeast, and how does regionality inform your work?

I appreciate the soft pitch to get me started. I was born and raised in Syracuse, NY, a city most people associate with snow and lack of sunlight. In this, they’re not wrong. But Syracuse is where I’ve imprinted, so to speak, and where I’ve returned with my wife to raise a son. That’s the biographical element.

Getting to what I think you’re really asking, I would say regionality informs my work the way it does most other writers: it’s the familiar against which I judge the unfamiliar. The hemlock in my backyard isn’t a palm tree, and that’s partly how I understand it.

Of course, the familiar has a way of becoming invisible over time, and it takes a departure and a return to really see it again. Because of that, I suspect most writers are willfully prodigal in some sense. I certainly have been. We go away and return, sometimes chastened, with a refreshed sense of our origins.

Even though the eponymous peak in “Ampersand” isn’t terribly far from my home, the poem’s trajectory roughly fits the pattern of departure and return. It’s an out-and-back hike, for one. Then there’s “the small town where we’ll spend the night,” a proxy for home that appears changed in light of a distressing moment. I’ll spare you dissection of the frog beyond that.

“Ampersand” discusses the history of the beloved icon—it doubles as a mountain and a punctuation mark (though was once a letter and a phrase). The final lines (“everything we’ve traveled for / receding, already, to a symbol”) seem to symbolize (forgive me!) memory. It’s as if the speaker is saying, “This moment has already become part of my history.” What do you think is the relationship between memory and poetry—do they form some sort of sticky web? Is the past the only tense of poetry? Can we reconcile poetry with the present?

I love this question. I think what you’re sensing is the way the poem records the moment of its formation. “Ampersand” has clear narrative elements, but it’s basically a lyric poem. Like other lyrics, it feels like a moment elongated, inspected, and somehow suspended in time. A fly in the amber. I hope the poem creates tension between the present and past, experience and recollection.

To read a lyric poem is to see movement in the inert; presence in what’s obviously past; and elegy for the living (or poetically revived). What recedes to symbol in “Ampersand” is the pair’s experience of their environment and of each other－an experience that dulls in some places and brightens in others as it becomes poetry. The moment captured by a lyric poem has passed before it hits the page, but it’s also in a perpetual present. Like a flea circus, it’s much more alive than one might think on first inspection.

There’s another, less self-reflexively literary sense of recession toward symbol in “Ampersand,” but I hope that meaning will come through without more coaxing.

“Ampersand” is written in unrhymed tetrameter (and many poems in Petty Theft do rhyme). What draws you to more formal styles of poetry? Perhaps tradition[DL1] , or the joy of using your wit to approach tricky commands? Do you think it’s important for aspiring poets to learn about formalism?

I think it’s crucial for aspiring poets to learn about formalism in the sense that the vast majority of poetry written to date, the last hundred years or so notwithstanding, contains elements of traditional form. That said, the idea of “formalism” has about as much appeal to me as a smoking jacket. I’m concerned with execution. As a reader, I’ve simply noticed that a lot of the poems I find most moving and surprising are formal in some way－though not always obviously so. My desire to better understand those poems－and to write similarly moving poems with similar tools－is the only sustained interest I have in form.

Getting back to our discussion of place, I would say that many poems get their evocative and intellectual force by moving away from something. “Verse,” of course, has its etymological roots in “turn.” There are innumerable ways for a poem to turn or return, whether formally (as in a sonnet), emotionally, or narratively. Form is especially useful here in that its regularity offers a baseline for change.

Of course, many bad metrical poems clunk along like a boot in a clothes dryer. Others let the music of natural speech overlay the felt metrical pulse of the poem. “We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick.” That’s Frost, a poet much maligned by readers with presumptions of his fustiness. In reality, Frost is a semantically slippery, metrically irregular poet. “The Wood-Pile” is a perfect example, both for its metrical oddity in some lines and soldierly order in others, as well as for its interest in how being “far from home” simultaneously confuses and clarifies.

Do you believe the contemporary poetic landscape is open to formal-leaning poets? Has “craft” become secondary to content (or even sentimentality)?

This question is something of a bear trap, but I’ll step into it. Frankly, I think that a great deal of contemporary poetry is self-obsessed. Now, I want to be careful to distinguish between the impulse to draw on personal experience－no harm there－and the assumption that enumeration of one’s griefs and harms done is a sufficient condition for poetry. In my view, contemporary poetry has become a cult of the individual poet. We’ve turned away from poetry as the primary concern. You might argue there’s more originality to be found in contributor notes than in most contemporary poetry.

I think the elevation of the poet above their work comes with unfortunate consequences for formal poetry in particular. In a good formal poem, the poet is often harder to see. Poets who use form of any variety know just how magically useful it can be in helping to get out of your own way when you’re writing. I suspect this makes formal poetry less interesting to a readership that wants to see the poet suffering through some kind of lived reality. More engagement with form might be the antidote we need for a poetic landscape dominated by poets instead of poetry.

Who are the poets who haunt you? Are there any collections you find yourself reaching for in periods of creative drought?

Larkin. The Whitsun Weddings.

Lastly, give us a sneak peek! What are you working on now?

My second collection, Paradise Is Burning, is slated for publication with Able Muse Press, so mainly I’ve been editing poems in preparation for that. To be honest, though, I haven’t written more than a handful of pages in the last year and a half. Since defecting from academia, I’ve spent most of my free time raising my son, fly fishing small streams, and－much more recently－painting with acrylics. I suspect I’ll find my way home again, but it’s been a great joy getting lost.

Interviews, New Interviews

Carol Moldaw

January 5, 2024

Carol Moldaw

Interviewed by Olivia Burnett

Your website bio describes you as an “American lyric poet.” What draws you to writing lyric poetry, and how do you see yourself engaging with the lyric tradition?

Lyric poetry draws me to it by its crystalline beauty, by the way it can be a sound chamber, a still point, fireworks: both arresting and in motion; moving in ways that can’t be paraphrased. It can, through sonics and image and voice, distill mysteries as well as clarities. Its lucidity is not superficial and not explanatory. The lyric tradition, to the degree that I know it through a lifetime of reading, has shaped and guided me. In that sense, I’m in conversation with it, in conversation with Sappho (in many translations!) and Louise Bogan, to name two poets whose sensibilities have shaped mine.

I particularly loved your poem “Painter and Model (II)” from this issue of Subtropics. Do you have any experience with the visual arts? Are there specific visual artists who have influenced your writing?

I don’t have experience as a practitioner of the visual arts (I draw like a not particularly gifted three-year-old) but engaging with art is meaningful to me—thought-provoking, emotionally-charged, and awe-inspiring—and has been for as long as I can remember. I have vivid memories from girlhood of the roomful of Clyfford Still paintings at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art when the museum was on the fourth floor of the War Memorial Building. They were so powerful and mysterious, without precedent in my life. The poem “Painter and Model (II)” was influenced by thinking about the writings of the British painter, Celia Paul, whose body of work I greatly admire. Its companion poem, “Painter and Model (I),” is more of an ekphrastic, examining Lucien Freud’s “Painter and Model,” after having read Celia Paul’s first memoir, Self-Portrait. Other specific poems of mine have been influenced by different works, such as Walter De Maria’s land artwork, The Lightning Field, which inspired my sequence “The Lightning Field.” I don’t think any one single artist has had an outsize influence on me, but certain artists and pieces resonate with me. I’m thrilled that a watercolor and pastel piece by Cecily Brown will grace the cover of Go Figure.

In the same poem, you describe “solitude [and] self-denial” as “integral to [the artist’s] calling.” What would you say is the poet’s version of these qualities? What is integral to the poet’s calling?

Actually, in “Painter and Model (II),” I mean to be noting that Celia Paul herself seems to consider “solitude and self-denial” as integral to her calling and, also, to be contrasting that to my own temperament and circumstances. A certain amount of solitude is integral to any artist’s work, I would think; it’s just a matter of the amount one needs or has available. I value solitude enormously but find that I do best when it is balanced within the context of friends and family. I’d say that importantly a poet needs to be able to observe both inner and outer phenomenon, to listen, to hear into silence, to conceptualize—find words and images for—the inchoate as well as the palpable. Obviously, a poet needs to have a love of language, though not a blind love. A poet needs always to be interrogating language. Curiosity, perseverance, self-sufficiency, a love for the art itself.

I love that you say poets “cast our muses sidelong looks.” How much discretion do you feel is necessary when writing a poem? How much of a separation do you tend to place between yourself and your speakers?

After reading Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John, I started to think about the difference between the way artists put their subjects in a pose, but poets gather their materials from what they perceive in the course of life. They create their own freeze frames. A painter might have someone pose for hours, week after week, and a poet might take just as long constructing their material, not necessarily surreptitiously but sort of on the sly, without (one hopes) anyone aware of being watched.

While I’ve written persona poems, in general the “I” in my poems is a version, a portion, of myself. I thought a lot about discretion when I was writing the poem “Beauty, Refracted,” in which I tried to record—in order to understand—a version of events my family experienced when our daughter was young. I knew that it wasn’t even primarily my experience and I tried to be respectful of that. I also wanted to preserve a sense of what had occurred, or at least my understanding of it, for my daughter.

I think where I ran up against this the most was in my novella, The Widening. It has been misread as a memoir and even as a series of diary entries, but I think it falls more under autobiographical fiction. It’s in the third person and there are subtle layers between the character and the narrator’s perspectives, understandings. Some of it is pure fiction, and it wasn’t until later that I realized, with pain, that I’d done a disservice to people who would see themselves in characters and see themselves portrayed doing things they hadn’t done, and perhaps also to people who saw themselves portrayed rather rawly. I would think twice about that today.

Moving onto “Keisaku Palm,” I’m interested in the fact that the speaker has this everyday experience that immediately triggers something else in her mind. As a writer, do you tend to find yourself making immediate connections like this and shaping a poem around them, or do you tend to find those connections through the writing process itself?

Those immediate connections are very rare, though I have to say that having a large palm frond fall on my head didn’t seem to me an everyday experience! A poem of mine that comes to mind in this regard is “The Butterfly.” When I sat for an hour or so with a butterfly on my finger, I knew immediately that the feeling it gave me was something I had to try to capture in words. It took me a long time, years, to be able to surrender to the poem itself. It had to wait for information I didn’t have at the time of the experience, the notion of the God having “secret names.” Once I heard about that, the poem coalesced and found its form.

Sometimes an occurrence will bring up the sense of connecting to a deeper or larger meaning immediately, but even then, the process of writing gives it body and uncovers unexpected connections, resonances. So, the answer to your question is that both occur, the immediate connection and then what is uncovered, made manifest, in the writing. I find it satisfying when I’m able, through the writing and shaping, to express something that moved me profoundly but that, at first, I almost had no words for. Writing is always an exploration and a discovery, in the course of which, something new is created.

Your seventh book, Go Figure, comes out next year. How different has the writing process been for this book compared to your previous books? Do you have any advice for newer poets when it comes to putting together a collection of poetry?

From the very beginning, even though I didn’t know what the unwritten poems would be like, I wanted this book to move from poem to poem in one sweep, without sections. Of all my books, only my first one, Taken from the River, which was shorter, didn’t have sections. I knew that I wanted it to have an internal flow and build that was beyond logic, beyond “subject,” beyond chronology. I wanted images and ideas to come and go and reappear with an organic intrinsic rhythm and for resonances to accrue as the book went on. As poems accumulated, I placed them in clusters and the clusters kept shifting and growing and then eventually met at the edges.

My advice to newer poets is probably too old-fashioned to be useful unless the cycle of fashion changes. I like to see where a poem leads, to let the poems take the lead, to write poem to poem, to let themes reveal themselves, to the extent that I pay attention to themes at all. I find that if I state intentions to myself too consciously and too early then I stymie myself. I like things, ideas, to rise to the surface and unfold. The intentionality comes in the shaping of elements as they start to appear and even that shaping has a lot of unconscious energy. So my advice to newer poets is to let those things happen and then to choreograph the elements that have revealed themselves.

Is there anything else you’d like to add about the poems featured in this issue?

I appreciate this opportunity to talk about my work. Your questions were thought-provoking! To the discussion about “Painter and Model (II),” I’d just add that part of what drew me to Celia Paul’s writing, besides its lyrical beauty and ability to express subtle thoughts, is her dual perspective, as a painter first and foremost, and as a muse as well, the muse of a painter with a formidable reputation (in more ways than one). This is a particularly female dual-experience. The one thing I did understand about Go Figure from the outset was that in it my experience and perspective as a woman artist were of foremost importance.

Works

Black-Eyed Suzie’s

May 2, 2023

Erin O’Luanaigh

Black-Eyed Suzie’s

My first regular gig. Of late an aging child prodigy,
now I sounded like a woman and was one.
“I don’t know whether to take you over my knee
or take you over my knee,” some barfly Cicero said.
(“Why don’t you think about it and get back to me?”)
The microphone was somehow always wet,
the crowd forever three drinks deep. I thought
my classical training counted for something,
could bounce a textbook off my diaphragm,
belt an F5, sight-read anything. I liked to brag
that everyone I really dug was dead. Onstage,
hands folded, I nodded dutifully as the trumpet
player ran laps around “All the Things You Are”
and the rest of the guys walked offstage for
a Newport break. At last, our married bandleader
fired me because he “couldn’t trust himself.”
(He looked, for all the world, like a hardboiled egg.)
Sniffling, I packed my tote bag while the trumpet
player, that callous bastard, went on whistling
and polishing his horn. Ah, Suzie’s. C’est la vie!

Works

Salomé

May 2, 2023

Erin O’Luanaigh

Salomé

Running Wilde’s imagination was a wish
to see behind the curtain of Mark’s prose,
in which he only noted that she “danced
to please King Herod’s guests,” then fixed a dish
served cold. Her charms (and how many she disclosed),
her need at last to catch the Baptist’s glance
added flesh to Wilde’s fabricated romance—

added scandal when, in an opera by Strauss
(its libretto lifted whole-cloth from the Wilde),
his star refused to strip down “like a whore.”
She waited backstage, cross-armed in her blouse
while a ballerina, willing to go unveiled,
ran out to Herod’s feet and covered for her,
then slipped behind the curtain like a metaphor.

Interviews

Erin O’Luanaigh

May 2, 2023

Erin O’Luanaigh

Interviewed by Gregory Calabro and Peter Vertacnik

Could we start by hearing a little bit about the importance of form in these poems—especially that of “Salomé” given how its shape deviates from a “typical” sonnet (though we’d love to hear about any of the other five as well).

“Salomé” is an odd one, isn’t it? I wanted to split the sonnet in half to mirror the two Salomés and the two Salomés. It’s hard to remember now why I chose that rhyme scheme [abcabcc defdeff]. Maybe I wanted to affect a miniaturized sonnet in each stanza? Regardless, the rhymes are a bit hidden at first and then suddenly gang up on you.

For me, finding the right form for a poem is a bit like archeology; a form typically arrives embedded within a poem’s idea and my job is to excavate it. “Marriage,” for instance, had to be in couplets, but somewhere along the way, I uncovered the need for rhymes that never quite line up. And “The Phoenicians” is a fake-out syllabic poem, organized only visually. It’s a step beyond the arch-fabrication of the syllabic nonce form—like a desert mirage.

While we’d like to allow you to maintain some distance between yourself and the speaker in “Black-Eyed Suzie’s,” we know that you spent time working as a professional jazz singer. In what ways does your jazz background inform your poetry, especially when it comes to rhythm?

Jazz stretches the ear. You learn to hear minute subtleties in chord voicings, to lay different rhythms on top of each other. Jazz improvisation’s lessons are formal ones, marked by both freedom and rigor—you can drift as far afield as the changes allow, but eventually you have to find your way back into the melody and the “pocket” of the rhythm. (I find that bee-bop is as close an approximation to poetry as there is: it’s all stanzas.) I’m sure syncopation has helped expand my sense of meter. And when I first started writing poems, my sole understanding of the poetic line was as a musical phrase.

But since so much of musical training—maybe especially vocal training—is meant to be absorbed into the bones and then half-forgotten, it’s difficult to speak about the ways jazz has influenced my work with any certainty or specificity. And it’s more than likely that my classical training has had as marked an effect on my poetry as jazz. (As suggested in “Black-Eyed Suzie’s,” I first studied to be an opera singer.) Sometimes I even wonder if a knack for vocal mimicry influenced my poetry the most. Before I ever sang “as myself,” I was a little parrot (my poor family!) and soaked up lots of lessons just by impersonating different voices. Imitation is, after all, a time-honored form of apprenticeship, like copying the paintings of the Old Masters.

While on the topic of music, you mention a few specific musical pieces and composers in these poems (works by Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Irving Berlin all make appearances). What connections do you see between your own art and that of music—both in these poems and in your life more generally?

Music is still the most important art form in my life, though I no longer perform regularly. I was lucky to have been steeped in music from very early in my childhood. On the weekends, my grandmother would play recordings of operas, Italian folk songs, classical music. (Her immigrant family had a stint in vaudeville as a troupe of mandolin players; both of her sons, my uncles, are musicians.) One of my happiest childhood memories is sitting in the pillow fort I’d made on her screened-in porch and hearing something sublime issuing from the kitchen stereo: Beverly Sills in Traviata—my first Violetta. As I got older, my grandmother would give me the librettos so I could follow along. She and my grandfather would take me to the opera and to Woolsey Hall in New Haven to hear the Yale Symphony Orchestra.

My grandfather and I loved car rides—we seemed always to be driving somewhere—and that’s when we would listen to his favorites: Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole, the soundtracks to just about every Golden-Age Broadway musical. These records, along with the old movie musicals we loved to watch, were my introduction to the Great American Songbook and my first inklings of jazz. (Then my uncle bought me my first Coltrane record when I was 12 or 13. The hard stuff!)

Any artistic exposure outside of poetry is infinitely useful to poetry—a cross pollination. But one particular lesson that no doubt carried over from my musical education is a sense of the sheer height and breadth of tradition. It wouldn’t have been uncommon, for instance, that I might have heard the same Chopin piece interpreted by Argerich one day and Rubenstein the next, or that my grandfather might have three different versions of “That Old Black Magic” on rotation in the same car ride, or that I might get into a debate about the relative merits of Beverly Sills and Anna Moffo’s Violettas. I think I came to understand something about the responsibility required of the artist to both art and audience—a stance, say, both ad orientem and versus populum. You owe fealty to the text, to history, to your forebears, to the chain of interpretations in which you’re just one link. Also, you owe the audience in front of you a good time. Both recognitions help stave off the solipsism to which poetry is sometimes prone.

We found the list at the start of “Gallery Gods” wonderfully ambitious, both in its length and imagery. Would you mind talking a little bit about the process of putting together those first four stanzas and how those images relate to the “you and I” that follow?

An interest in architecture runs through my work, and Chicago is one of the best cities in the world for great skyscrapers. When I sat down to write the poem, I began by making a list of all the towers I had seen during my first whirlwind trip. I was struck all over again by each one’s individuality and, at some point, had the idea to treat them as mammoth Rorschach blots. The combination of the overstuffed list and the wild, somewhat far-fetched similes hopefully generates the feeling of dynamism and exhilaration that the poem describes.

The “you and I” are on an architectural tour of the city, and a bit drunk on the constant axis shifts. One minute they’re at the base of a giant structure looking up, the next they’re atop it looking down, feeling the elation of being on top of the world. As they summit these skyscrapers, they themselves start to become embodiments of the spirit of possibility that built the city.

Reading your poem “Marriage,” we were astounded by your ability to marry (excuse us) allusions across different art forms—film, poetry, music—and to do so in such a seamless fashion. Do you find these connections first in the artworks themselves, or is it rather your experience with these works that bring them together? How did it come about in the writing process?

How kind! Thank you. I think it must be my experience with these works. The motley collection of allusions here is as faithful a self-portrait as anything I’ve written, encompassing lots of things I love: old movies, classic pop ballads, Marianne Moore poems. I wanted to illustrate the nature of this relationship in shorthand, through artworks that the couple might discuss or use as touchstones. But really they’re just works that I use as touchstones, straight out of my mental lexicon. So all I can say, without intending to be evasive or mysterious, is that each one simply arose in my mind as needed.

Finally, a softball: What are you reading right now? Or, if it’s a better fit, what are you rereading now and what brought you back to it?

I’m a PhD student, so this time of year, my reading choices are limited to those selected for me. Luckily, I’m taking wonderful classes; most recently, I’ve had the pleasure of rereading Wuthering Heights and Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary. I’m also the co-host of a classic literature and film podcast called (sub)Text, for which I just finished recording episodes on Donne’s Holy Sonnets 10 and 14.

Works

Late Style

July 22, 2022

Mary O’Donoghue

Late Style

The last time I went overseas the passenger next to me asked if I knew about the plight of the Icelandic pony. It was as if we’d been talking for years.
When they go abroad for competition, she said, they’re not allowed to come back. The purity of the bloodline. They might pick up a cold and infect the entire population. Of horses, I mean.
I hadn’t heard about it. Was it for real, I asked, with all the advances, inoculation and the like? And if it were true, and those horses could never reenter, they must long for their own chilly turf. They must be depressed mooching round Wales, or wherever.
You’ll make me cry, said the woman. I swore I wouldn’t cry on this flight. And now I’m going to cry about your fucking little ponies!
Hang on. They were her little ponies. She had introduced them, and I told her so.
She twisted away to the window. She came back to say sorry. The ponies’ predicament might have been true back in the day. She wasn’t sure if it still obtained.
I’ve been on a short fuse, what can I say? I resigned from my job, she said, I sold my house less than market. That’s how much I’m not coming back. I love the country but I can’t stand the scene. Leonard Cohen.
When it came time for me to leave this country forever, the logics of travel were blasted and I made many tries and false starts. On one call, my wait time was eight hours, so I mixed and proofed and baked a loaf of bread and read a short novel in which an Austrian man lived his whole life in 160 pages. I had just gone back to reread the most heartbreaking part when someone answered my call to say they couldn’t put me on the route I wanted. But there was another, involving four stops and three airports, two of which were in the same city, which I could thread by taking a taxi, as well as a fee in the five hundreds for having to pass like an apparition through the bigger of those airports. The man on the line sketched the route optimistically, saying other travelers had made the trip just fine.
A bit tired on the other end, but hey!
He said all was forgiven because they got to where they most wanted to be.
I said no, I would try again tomorrow, and I did, and the next day. And during and around all those calls, I worked to cut off old connections.
The old connections weren’t too many and my circumference was limited. Everyone’s circle had shrunk. Henry James said real-life relationships didn’t simply stop dead, but a writer could draw a selfish circle and decide what was in and what didn’t matter a damn. A writer could make it look like friends and lovers fell over cliffs and were done with. It was callous, but truer now of life than of books. A person had to fight to keep familiar faces in mind, and I hadn’t. I felt more bereft of books I boxed for the library shop than of people I hadn’t seen in years.
So I got a more chestnutty color for my hair and sent text messages to people in cities and towns. Friends and colleagues, people I’d left for jobs in other cities and towns. We had all done the due diligence of trying to stay in touch, until one month became six, one brutal heat wave the next year’s polar vortex. From there the years piled up like dense galactic time. We were growing older and more wan, like endives, or the fat Belgian asparagus. I still wanted their approval, all of those people. I wanted them to know I’d done well, or fine, or tolerably. I might still do, given time.
I gauged their interest in getting together online. Nobody truly got together that way, I said, though dating and teaching and counseling were getting accomplished in the LowBlue light. Most of them responded, but they didn’t know the urgency. They said they’d love to, asked to kick it forward a week, were so glad I’d gotten in touch. My hair turned out like goulash, but I kept washing and rinsing until it toned down to something less alarming. In the end six people wanted to get together soon. Open to any day of the week, any time, they sounded avid as the unemployed or the brokenhearted. None of them knew the others. Still, I scheduled them all in one meeting.
At five in the afternoon, I sat at the screen and waited. My posture was healthy, my distance from the screen approachable. I’d gotten used to working remotely. The word had northerly extremes. I could set up a syllabus in the boreal forest or run a meeting on an oil rig. Remote work just called for honorable perseverance and the well-timed gushy routine. It meant being the first to flick into action. I was a light in an office block stairwell and I longed for the bulb to pop.
I waited for the shivering light of six people’s entry. They materialized, cautious, hopeful, faces in good light and bad. There were glitches and hesitations, apologies, logging out and back in. Some were more practiced and looked straight ahead like friendly newscasters. Others hunched and gazed down, the screen a missal being pored over.
I had seen some of these people only last year. In other cases, world leaders had been and gone. Someone looked younger, someone dejected. My sense of occasion was waning. But here they were, thanking me once more for reaching out. They peeped coyly left and right, birds in the apertures of a dovecote.
It was my job to take an ax to the frozen sea. So. Had anyone read Agatha Christie lately? I said she was forever gathering strangers in a house or on a remote island. It took them days to figure out the reason for being there, but by then it was too late. A body on the shoreline, another in the dumbwaiter.
Once I got going it was hard to stop. The ice might re-form. They looked at me in dumbfounded amusement and I rattled on. Sometimes it turned out that a few of Agatha’s characters weren’t strangers at all! They knew one another in sinister ways, unspeakable events stemming from years before. So. Had anyone guessed why they were here? I rolled back in my chair. Onscreen my smile was lopsided and my left side always, always my worst.
Why aren’t you doing this for a living? one friend asked. I mean, seriously. You could. Are you?
Yes! Yes, another chipped in. It’s just like a podcast or something. Rescuing the classics and putting a new spin on them. You should be.
The two people I knew best were in the same trade but didn’t know each other. They started speaking at the same time. One professor stopped, the other waved her on. Please, please. I was untalented in this decorous warmth. I associated it with people who’d been curated for success from their potty training to their PhD. Please. No, please, you go, they insisted. Me, I trampled others to get to the line, afraid I wouldn’t get to the end of my thought.
It’s so good to see you, said the professor who’d been yielded the time. What has it been, five years, more?
Three, I said. But remember. They were bad.
I would work to keep my remarks short in this meeting. Let others do all the talking.
The other professor said I looked great.
You look younger! I mean, you always looked young. But now you look younger. How can that be? No fair!
This spurred the other professor to ask what I was eating and doing for exercise. Everyone leaned in for further inspection. I was a buffet item, diners poking round me and wondering about my components.
It’s gluten! I mean, it’s not. You’ve cut out gluten.
The first professor said nobody ever regretted getting rid of all their wheat. Except in those world-building games where it’s the next best resource to bricks and ore.
The second professor asked me to remind her of my age. She said she had recently coauthored a paper on women and aging. “An Objective Hermeneutics of Hotness.” A detour from her usual field of endeavor, but a whole lot of fun. She said she came out of the project determined never to dissemble or disguise when it came to her age.
OK, let me see, she said. She slipped her glasses down her nose and back up. Forty-five?
I made a greater-than sign with my thumb and finger. No. No. I refuse to believe that. You’re not in your fifties.
I didn’t say I was in them, I said. I’m not deep in the thicket. But I am over the threshold.
Two people still hadn’t spoken. One sent a chat message to say there were sound problems. The other relented and said it was nice to be asked to this. He used to want to be my lover at one time, and he still sent a birthday message at exactly nine in the morning on every turning of my year.
And what is this, exactly? Hi, everyone, by the way!
I said I was leaving the country for good. The jig was up. Fifteen years. They wouldn’t have known, I said, but I’d always had my limit set. A woman on the radio said she took stock in year five and really made an audit at year ten. But by then she was waist-high in paperwork and memorizing the thirteen original states. It was too late for U-turning when you went that far down the pike, she lamented. The radio presenter tried to rally her, asking which were the two longest rivers in a cheery Saturday voice.
I heard that show, one friend said, the first to the podcast idea. I answered the Mississippi but forgot about the Missouri. Hey, wait. Don’t you have the Tombigbee down there?
Sort of, I said. I flow into it at a certain point.
I was asked about work from here on out. I said my institution would let me work out my contract remotely. I’d be doing the same old thing, just with a six-hour time difference. They were pulling back my health insurance and rounding down their retirement contribution. I sounded tedious, like a documentarian narrating labor abuses. Still, attempts were made to tackle my news as though it had some vital import.
That’s not too bad. I mean, I don’t know how academia works, but that sounds civilized. Is it?
We will always go back to the sea. JFK.
I keep seeing academia called academe. Which is it?
But someone keenly wanted to cut to the meat. Why was I taking this step, after all this time, just when things were slowly turning for the better?
I thought of the weather app. Times of cloud, clearing to mud and sun. Instead I told them about the graveyard on the edge of town. It was called Memorial Park and had knee-high stones and no significant trees of any stature.
That’s not where I want to join the shades, I said. I’m leaving the country and heading home.
Their screens clouded over.
Everyone’s been thinking like that. Who’ll be responsible for my decline and disposal. But for goodness’ sake. You’re nowhere near.
That person, the deferential professor, looked left, smiled at a person or a pet nearby. Then back to the screen with full concentration.
If you and I were talking one to one, I’d be telling you this sooner. But no time like the present moment and a bunch of total strangers. So.
A head and shoulders joined her, got too close to the camera, filled the screen with stubble and collars. It was the colleague I used to call And Its Discontents. He was forever tacking that phrase on to topics and thought.
Yes, she said, tilting her head on his shoulder. We’re engaged. Re-engaged.
He lifted her hand closer to our eyes. A green scarab ring. He kissed the beetle and wrung the hand awhile. Years ago they got married so antiseptically that nobody realized they were spouses until they divorced. And then it was a public duel to the death every day. He took to wearing ascots. My group of online guests suited this man.
Now he took both her hands and kissed them separately. Then he kissed each finger. I prayed nothing more was to come, no sucking, no “Round and Round the Garden Like a Teddy Bear.” People were sitting back now. Somewhere popcorn was on the hop. I was still emcee, though, and had to keep the show going.
I wanted to say goodbye from this end, I said loftily, rather than notify you from the other.
She hasn’t heard from you in a year. A year. And she has tried. And now you bring us on, on here, for this dog and pony show?
And Its Discontents was stung and he caught on like contagion.
Very true, said first professor. I’m not sure what you need from us. Everyone’s burned out being online and trying to cope.
The would-be lover cleared his throat.
This. Is. Weird. And I’ve been to funerals this way. And weddings. I’ve taken cooking lessons. All of that was weird, but this is just weird.
The tiles were flipping against me. I found the ones that knew me best and threw myself on their mercy. I asked about their wedding plans. That beautiful back garden, maybe? They’d always loved to host.
They were clever, anxious people who used to plan potluck dinners. They persevered even when nobody brought anything tasty or pricey. Blueberry beer, the rubbery wrappers for spring rolls. Kitchen paper for cleaning up after. Nobody ever stayed to help.
And Its Discontents moved to the moment. His wine balloon visible now, he struck it with a pencil and said that remarriage to the same person was like an artist’s late style.
The idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal. Adorno on Beethoven’s later work. Disharmonious, catastrophic even. And thus modern! Here’s to my dear disharmony!
He turned to kiss his betrothed’s ear and raise his glass higher, closer to us all. And to whatever else you’re all on here celebrating!
I had attended their first wedding, invited because I was new to the country and collectible. The bride’s father drank small bottles of Japanese beer and watched all the clever, anxious people get very familiar with the open bar. All night he watched them like a hunter’s dog waiting for birds to drop in the wetlands.
The re-betrotheds huddled even closer together now. They gazed out winsomely, like shelter animals who needed to get adopted together. Maybe I had done something valuable here. An unexpected, possibly hopeful event had come to people’s attention. I was ready to end the call on this note.
`Someone’s background changed to a hovering fog in which kitchen cupboards dissolved. People touched their necklaces and their collars. Someone parted their hair from left to right. Children in framed photos looked fat and thin and extraterrestrial. Lassitude was gathering. My eyes looked droopy, in need of serum cold from the fridge.
The would-be lover tried again. He asked me to summarize what had been going on in my life since last we’d spoken or spent time.
I take it back, he said. Not summarize. Synopsize is a better word, don’t you think?
He was sending out beams of old longing and I had no choice. The Synoptic Gospels, I said, to keep things ticking over.
That doesn’t come from the same word, he said, burrs in his voice like a knife halfway to sharpened.
And Its Discontents rumbled to be heard.
The Synoptic Gospels! The Jesus in those three texts is wooden compared with John’s guy. Now he’s kooky and mystic. I call him Lennon Jesus.
This released people to wind down.
We could stay on here all night, I said. The hard kernel of the party that refuses to crack. It was lovely to see you all.
When God is set to close a door, someone jams their foot to hold it ajar. And a new member joined the meeting. An old friend who’d texted that he couldn’t make it but had good reasons. The first thing I saw was how thinned he was. His eyes were wintry and his shutters coming down.
Don’t worry, don’t worry, he clamored. Hey, everyone. I’ve had my liver out and a new one fitted back in its place. If you’re wondering, the pain feels like the weight of Australia.
I said the Irish bardic poets used to put slabs of rock on their stomachs to slow them down enough to focus on their art. The pressure, the solitude, I suppose.
I don’t believe that, he said. Still, though. Buddhist monks in training were known to sleep on stone or wooden pillows. They woke up many times in the night to meditate.
He jabbed his thumb into his pillow.
This thing, though. Filled with foam. Nuggets fall out every day, but I just can’t find the hole.
It was a lousy pillow. It was a lousy room. The stuff of care and cleaning was tubed and lumped all around him.
I said I’d send a pillow. Two.
They don’t let anything in, he said. They’re fanatical about foreign bodies.
Your little starstruck innuendos. And Its Discontents sang in low barks. Inadequacies and foreign bodies.
Wait, my thin friend said. Wait. I know it! No. I don’t know the song. But I know it’s Van Morrison.
He sat back satisfied and gained some height against the feeble pillow. He said I was exactly the same. I peeled back hair and showed roots, I squinched my eyes to show all the lines. When he laughed, it seemed to hurt him blissfully.
That’s not my point, he said, his voice smoothing out, his chest settling under the covers. I didn’t say you look the same as ever. You just are.
Only two others looked like they believed it. And Its Discontents tilted things by giving a thumbs-up. Nobody could leave in good conscience because the new arrival’s cheeks were promontories, the skin polished and raw. He was hungry for an audience. I bet he finally looked like one of his uncles I heard about sporadically. They had wine cellars dug into dark hillsides. Their wives died more than they did, and suddenly, and young.
When I said I was leaving the country, he said he already knew. Like a bolt of blue from the sky. I knew. I just did.
He asked if we knew the ancient Greeks didn’t have blue. He wondered why he was thinking of it now.
It’s thought they couldn’t see it because they couldn’t make it as a pigment, he said. They were sure of red, though. And yellow and white and black.
I was wearing my reds again, and he was glad. And the Greeks would be glad of my red.
So the Greeks were color blockers, I said.
I pulled my turtleneck up and over my nose.
That’s not a bad look, he said. Monte Cristo. You have the eyes to carry it off.
He turned us toward a big window. He told us to look at the magnolia.
It’s as old and tall as a ship, he said. This place has a lovely vista. Even when I see the things in the trees. The meds, don’t you know.
He shied his head, as though listening to beautiful, heart-shaking music.
Donne sur, he said.
One of the professors sailed in.
Gives onto, overlooks, looks upon, opens to, she said. French is such a generous language. I wish I knew it better. I wish I could return the favor.
We were gathering carefully round him now, with anything we knew and could contribute.
Pillow sham, someone noticed. The stupidest of all household decor.
The pillow sham was quilted and patterned with autumn foliage. New England, long drives through tannic light. Small, self-contained towns and an unfriendliness that was still somehow reasonable.
Who needs this? He hauled the pillow out from under his back and worked off the pillow sham. Who needs as much stuff as this?
We’ll need the shams to trade with zombies when they come, I said. They love all that chambray crap.
If you go on a road trip anytime soon, he said, at least get a dog. At least grant me that. The company. And not beside you, either. In the back. With the seatbelt designed for dogs. Because if it’s a big dog, and you hit the brakes, Buster goes sailing forward and breaks your neck. Think about that.
For someone who never learned to drive, he knew some useful protocols. Where am I traveling, anyway, in this picture? I asked. And Buster was an inadequate name.
I don’t know, he said. I don’t care if you’re only driving around the block or to another county. That’s what you call them, isn’t it, counties? Woman and Dog in Car in County Blah at Twilight. I can see you in it.
It was dark at his window by now. The magnolia loomed like a galleon. His eyes were lit with dark mirth and exhaustion.
I told him about an alert sign on the interstate. MISSING SENIOR. 86, LAST SEEN DRIVING A YELLOW HONDA.
Yellow! That’s a full-fledged person that can’t be contained. Go, him!
I worried the story ended in the Honda gone into a tree, its wings folded round the valiant senior.
The one who needed love and recognition conjured a different road trip for me.
If you were a missing senior, you would make it all the way to a bright beach city. I know that about you! No stops for gas and snacks.
He was dreamy in his storytelling, his head cupped in his hands.
Hey. Hey, now!
It was the professor who dabbled in hermeneutics.
She’s neither missing nor a senior.
I gammed on a moment, giving adorable, childish waves to anyone along the coastal roads. I said I would excel at being a missing senior because I’d make sure not to be found.
That is kind of sad.
She was back, more loudly, the friend with mic problems. She said it was horrible to think of anyone being missing and not being found. Her eyes were dim with concern.
I worry about people, she said. I worry about all of you, and I don’t know you. I worry about all the people you know that I don’t know.
The friend on the hospital pillow brightened with interest. Ooh, his eyes said. We’ve got a live one here.
And Its Discontents honored her anxiety.
That’s perhaps your pure altruism coming through. The concern and wish to aid complete strangers. Most people are reciprocal in their dealings. Like, what does this gain me?
He was holding his wineglass askew now, close to capsizing, and his gallant lady brought it back to rights. I’d forgotten how subtle, how elegant a person she was. Some of us got a few short grabs at grace, others held it all the way through.
The friend who worried about everyone said she didn’t want to help strangers, per se. It was just that she thought about them more than she used to.
That was my cue. I wrote a private message to the hospital. Let’s not wait so long the next time.
He bopped back at top speed.
Maybe next time I’ll have a few cute kidneys to show off!
There was an air of reluctance to call it an afternoon. Because of the high, narrow bed and the medical machinery’s little red lights, it seemed we were leaving someone to the empty room Blaise Pascal said no man should be afraid to sit in alone. Yet he was and I saw it. I sent another message.
I hope whoever’s changing your catheter is getting something out of the transaction.
You! You haven’t changed! Actually I’ve promised him all the martinis I’ll never drink again.
While I was laughing and crying and explaining nothing, I was thanked and wished well and bidden farewell. Everyone said it was nice to meet everyone else. Then, like items from a magician’s tablecloth, they all went away.
I made tea and put away things in the kitchen. I tried to count off everyone who’d spoken. The night was cooling and quieting round me. Someone hadn’t. Or had they? One spring I counted the whippoorwill’s cries, in that off-hour when the sky gets marooned between dark and light. I was new to town and trying to learn. My tally was seven hundred, though I heard the record ran to a thousand.
Then pipit, pipit from the front room. The laptop. Someone was budging around, huffing, speaking to themselves in birdlike bleats. My friend in the hospital was moving his sheets as loudly as sheafed paper, trying to find the one cool, comfortable spot everyone knows to be there. I stayed behind the lid to listen to his feedback. Anything could happen next. Believing themselves unseen, unheard, people did rash stuff during lulls in their online meetings. I waited for an indiscretion. I loitered until I heard his name spoken by a nurse who wanted nothing but ease and relief for him, who maybe even loved him. I stayed up late until his room fell fully into silence within the full and sumptuous darkness cast by magnolias. I stayed in my chilly front room at a meeting I hadn’t left or ended.