Fogged Clarity Podcast

Because, shit, it’s too dry to snow but it’s cold

and the crocus is cold under the wind, wind

the cat contemplates through the screen, geese out

on the river now terrorized by swans . . . But nobody’s

bored with this; it’s elegant just being alive in an age

of advertising, not seeing any ads but this weather.

There’s wind on other planets, it’s somehow

interesting to know, and a broken shed latch

swings hard against the plywood door. This brings me

to radio, the little half-lit awarenesses fluttering

inside of each morning, the cat and the cricket she eats,

the man and the woman he needs—one soft

and wholly graspable in front of the other—

until there’s just sky and song in the distance,

no clouds present for breakfast either, just two herons

out near some cattails. You know what I mean?

David Dodd Lee has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014). His poems have recently appeared in Guernica, Field, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, and The Nation, among other journals. Lee teaches creative writing, visual art, and literature at Indiana University South Bend, where he also serves as editor-in-chief of the university’s 42 Miles Press.

The Austin songwriter discusses breaking from a Southern Baptist upbringing and plays two poignant, sharply political songs from his latest album in this session recorded backstage at the Arc in Ann Arbor, MI.

David Ramirez is a musician and songwriter from Austin, Texas. He has released four full-length albums, the most recent of which is 2017’s We’re Not Going Anywhere (Thirty Tigers).

I had one of those sinking spells—she was no more than an infant,

blue eyes . . .

I thought I could smell some reel-to-reel tape

So I bought a pill halver . . .

Most of the furniture sat fading in the sunshine—

The child moved her tiny hand . . .

My blood pressure moderated (again), misguided, but innocent . . .

One more in a long series of “isms”

It was an ordinary garden-hose type of summer day in Caledonia

A vision painted there, but blinking at me, sadder than Modigliani

The infant liked this way too much

Her head growing taller, and thinner

Somebody handed me a card

You want to donate flowers?______ or food?______

David Dodd Lee has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014). His poems have recently appeared in Guernica, Field, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, and The Nation, among other journals. Lee teaches creative writing, visual art, and literature at Indiana University South Bend, where he also serves as editor-in-chief of the university’s 42 Miles Press.

The Colgate University Political Science professor and author of The Polarizers: “Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era” discusses the 2018 midterm elections, Bernie Sanders, and the media’s inability to save us in an exclusive discussion.

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This morning I’m pleased to be joined by Sam Rosenfeld, assistant professor of political science at Colgate University and author of The Polarizers: Post-War Architects of Our Partisan Era. Rosenfeld holds a PhD in history from Harvard University and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Review, Politico andVox, among other outlets. Sam, I appreciate you taking the time.

Sam Rosenfeld: Thanks so much for having me.

BE: Absolutely. Let’s talk first about your book The Polarizers. And congratulations on that. It came out in December of last year and it’s incredibly pertinent to the times we’re living in. So we’ve been hearing so much of late about divisiveness in America and we daily witness the enormous partisan divide in Washington. Your book reveals that such ideological separation was and is the plan of activist politicians and thought leaders on both the right and left following World War II. The book evidences that party polarization was a deliberate response by these individuals to combat what they saw as a growing lack of discernible difference between Democrats and Republicans. Can you explain why the engineers of party polarization regarded and seemingly still regard unity and a relatively unified national political ideology as a problem in the first place?

SR: Absolutely. So, the middle 20th century party system that is forged in the New Deal realignment of 1930’s, and then consolidated in the early post-war era is one that still to this day is a lot of gauzy nostalgia for among commentators who lament contemporary polarization and came of age in an era when things seemed a lot more civil and consensual. It was a party system in which it was, for contingent historical reasons–particularly the Democratic party, which was the dominate electorate majority party for many of these decades, after the New Deal–contained within it both the most liberal and activist political actors, and at the national level was the center left party. But also contained within it conservative and reactionary and, on the question of race, the most white supremacist faction of American politics in the form of southern Democrats who had disproportional amount of power in Congress. So the majority center-left party contained these hugely divergent ideological factions. On the right, in the Republican Party you also had a minority progressive–a northern Republican progressive tradition–dating back to the Mugwumps and capital-P Progressives that still had influence in the party, as well as a bunch of small government stalwart conservatives. So in both parties you had these big, internal ideological factions. And that meant that when policy was made, when legislation and legislative coalitions were put together, it was routinely done on a bipartisan basis. You had ad hoc coalitions of Republican and Democratic liberals to do some stuff. And then you had an institutionalized coalition of what was called the Conservative coalition of largely southern Democrats working with Republicans to block liberal legislation. But what it basically meant was that the parties, which is what organized the electorates votes and behavior on election day had much less influence shaping policy making. And bipartisanship–the norms of working across the aisle in various ways–were institutionalized and regularized. This is how people expected politics to happen. On the one hand, that makes it look like what was going on there was a unitary consensus, where people just didn’t disagree in that...

The poet discusses Denis Johnson, Larry Levis, Coos Bay, and the obsessions behind his latest collection of poems, Early Hour.

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This morning I’m pleased to be speaking to one of my favorite poets working today, Michael McGriff is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of stories Our Secret Life in the Movies which he co-authored with J.M. Tyree. He also served as translator for Swedish poet and Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer’s collection of poems The Sorrow Gondola. McGriff’s latest book of poems Early Hour was released in August of last year and takes its name from a painting of the same name by German Expressionist Karl Hofer. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at the University of Idaho. Michael, thanks for taking the time…

I wonder if you could explain the marriage of influences behind your latest book, Early Hour; I’ve heard it referred to as a meditative sequence of Hofer’s painting, but then we find the “Black Postcard” poems in homage to Tranströmer interspersed throughout—this with all the poems seemingly situated in this landscape of an almost post-industrial Northwest that has for a long time served as your backdrop. Can you talk about the tonal similarities you found in the work of Hofer and Tranströmer and how you found their respective aesthetics to align with the mood and geography of the Northwest you grew up in?

Michael McGriff: That’s…I’ll try! I think the way–your question, I think, describes the book “aesthetically”, perfectly. It is a synthesis of the section of so-called “Black Postcard” poems that are an homage to Tranströmer and there’s all the poems that are directly engaging the painting “Early Hour”, which is the name of the book. Of course, all the landscape markers are my obsessive aesthetic images which are images of my hometown in the Pacific Northwest. But the book…I had all these things cooking anyway, but the book sparked into life when I was at the Portland Art Museum and I saw the painting “Early Hour”, by Karl Hofer who was a German Expressionist painter who I really had no knowledge about, but this painting kind of caught me dead in my tracks. The more I looked at it the more I was totally overwhelmed by it, and mostly because it seems, on first glimpse, to be a pretty ordinary European painting. You know, it’s a naked guy and a naked woman in bed and in repose; they’ve got a dog at their feet. There’s a landscape in the background. But there’s just something spooky about it, and the guy starts to look really deathly the more you look at him. You know, then you look on the placard: it was painted in 1935, the guy’s a German, and then all of history sort of triangulates the foreboding tones. So, I wrote in response to that painting for quite a while. Or at least it was in the back of my mind while I was writing.

BE: Early Hour (Hofer’s) seems concerned with probing that space that exists between the woken man and the sleeping woman–to those unfamiliar with the piece we’ll post it alongside this interview–the separateness despite the intimacy of the circumstance seems a tension that propels a lot of the poems, and some have called Early Hour a book about desire. Is desire a product of the ultimate unknowability of an other, even a lover? Do you think desire is the yearning to bridge that gap?

MM: Yeah, I do. I mean, the book kind of situates itself like you’re saying. It’s got the apostrophic address: the speaker of the book reaching out to this other, this lover, however you want to characterize her. But beyond that, I think, it’s that and that component of the self or however you want to think about it, as well. But I think you’re totally right. I love that about the painting. They’re so physically close together, those two figures, but they’re really in vastly different worlds at the same time.

In music

but there is no music

on acreage

but no land remains

in history

but no past will do

in the landscape

but the orchards are dead

the deeds handed over

only the rotted sidewall

of memory

which can bear no weight

where we salted the hay

where the barn

became char to its studs

where we blamed

the closest thing

which was you

whose name

even now

we refuse to say

even now

who we lashed

and dragged

and chained

and obscured

and watched burn

as we rhymed

our bodies

with all the old lies.

Michael McGriff is the author of several books, most recently the poetry collection Early Hour (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) and the linked story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (A Strange Object, 2014), which was an NPR Best Book of 2014. He can be found online at MichaelMcGriff.com.

Those who sleep, doubt, fall

on their faces from lying positions

while the dross of street lamps and chatter

of night-shift life run on the darkness.

Sleep is the ordination of senses.

Let the lonely bureau preach it,

confident in its bowl of change.

Let the options of interpretation remain

throughout the morning until in the rebus

of day, day descending, the ambiguity seems

specific: kiss at the top of a Grand Central stair,

cool as the tunnel breeze, her and her leaving

with the city slung over one shoulder.

For this to happen the world must be

both stubbornly lawful and temporary.

For the city to appear so clearly and suddenly,

the heart must be godly; sleeping waking.

Confirmation then was in her touch sinking in;

knowing remembering.

When the dream recurs, then what?

You’ll know Grand Central Station was everywhere

on a rainy day when you leaned out and kissed

at the top of a stair—the city resurrected.

Chard deNiord is the poet laureate of Vermont and author of six books of poetry, most recently Interstate, (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). His book of essays and interviews with seven senior American poets (Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall. Maxine Kumin, Jack Gilbert, Ruth Stone, Lucille Clifton, Robert Bly) titled Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on 20th Century American Poets was published by Marick Press in 2011. He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Providence College and a trustee of the Ruth Stone Trust. He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife Liz.

Nothing has changed. Somewhere

to the right of the living

they still mistake independence

for a virtue, a defensive

indifference, an Eden

of last resort, and now

that the War of 8:15

has broken out in the terminal

we can see dreamcatcher earrings

for what they are: dangerous excess.

All the while, vehicles

sleeker than English

are passing us by, and low wages

are weighing the sins of commerce.

Nothing summons our homeless

like homecoming, its promises

of poor judgement and altruistic display,

so we go on, dull our dystopian luster

with schools of choice, and elect

another one-man humanitarian

disaster, a dollar-scented dollar

for everyone crying their way up

the Grayhound steps or thumbing

a well-loved copy of The Joy

of Looting. Nothing has changed.

Talking sane to crazy

will still make you crazy

before it makes them sane.

Benjamin Paloff is the author of two poetry collections–And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011), both from Carnegie Mellon–and of a critical volume, Lost in the Shadow of the Word: Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe (Northwestern, 2016). His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, A Public Space, The New Republic, and elsewhere, and his many translations from Polish, Czech, Russian, and Yiddish include, most recently, Bozena Keff’s On Mother and Fatherland (MadHat, 2017) and Richard Weiner’s The Game for Real (Two Lines, 2015). Twice a fellow of the NEA–in poetry as well as translation–he teaches at the University of Michigan.

1.

Here I am—the annual physical, these days

euphemized as a “well-check,” a ruse

of language I like in some happy way,

much better than “get on board” for “obey.”

Still, in settings like this one, I confess

I sometimes find myself thinking of Larkin,

almost wanting to make conversation

with the Larkin-id I try to hold at bay.

To be honest, I’d prefer my inner

Bishop. I like to believe I have one,

but she comes at lonelier times than Larkin.

Today his vexed misanthropy’s the winner,

though this waiting room’s surely pleasanter

than his—no coughs, no odor of medicines,

mostly young college women (this is Larkin) here for pills.

Other ailments, mysterious or invisible.

There’s a photograph of a Bishopian moose;

a months-old New York Review of Books;

magazines about hunting deer and ducks—

all the usual ones for the homey goose

and the common self-important white gander.

Four of my wait-mates are older than I,

the rest magnificently young. I wonder why

no forty-ish, middle-aged working folks?

 

2.

It would have been better had that one

young woman not begun to cry.

Of them all, she seems to have come alone.

Or perhaps not, since one of the other ones

approaches, takes her hand, sits at her side.

I smile at the comfort-giver, whose head

laid upon the weeper’s turns her smile a frown.

Or so it looks. Not to me, but to Larkin.

Back and forth the two women rock, quietly.

A door opens. The weeper is called in.

Larkin might have imagined a story

at this point; Bishop would have lived through hers.

I’m doing both at the same time really.

Like daydream sampling, poetically.

Nevertheless I wait with the others,

and how that is, is the real mystery.

 

3.

For men and women of our era, young or

old, in our era it is likely just time

until some disaffected gander bursts

through a waiting room door, rifle on rapid fire.

You know it’s true. Let today not be my time,

I think to myself. Although as I do,

I think it for you and you and you too,

lovely as you are, my fellow waiters.

I am one of you, you of me, a while.

But tell me, do you wonder, as I do,

if she cries because she’s pregnant, despite pills?

Of all mysterious and invisible ills,

is it I who thinks of this now, or Larkin?

Somehow, despite daily terror, we go on.

Nothing stranger could ever happen.

To them, the others. To me, or to you.

Bishop wrote “the War was on.” The Great War,

1918. Our war’s waiting. How unlikely.

Then so is Larkin, peacefully dead for years.

Here it’s the seventh day of November,

2017. I’ll be seventy

in twelve hundred days, give or take a few.

Unless I won’t be. It’s good to remember

the waiting we do, in this, our normal war.

There is music, then bullets from above.

How have we come to be here? It’s anyone’s fate:

here’s your shooter, here’s your spot, here’s your grave;

bleed and die, be tallied—premature, permanent, late.

Whatever place we’re in, what we do is wait.

So God, Mr. Shooter, let the weeper be safe.

Call this almost a prayer. Let almost be enough.

What might survive of us? Luck more than love.

Robert Wrigley lives in the woods near Moscow, Idaho. His most recent book is Box (Penguin, 2017). There are only two or three things he longs to do as often as catching and releasing native westslope cutthroat trout.

Not even the Mexican saints can see

how you unbutton your shirt tonight

to show me the ghost of a zipper

the sawbones left, taking back

their staples. All your summer

the taking out, sherd by sherd,

a kind of dig, the slug he left you with,

the rent-a-cop gunning for his baby mama,

who caught you by mistake.

Pizza-parlor aprons they dropped

over you, all the tattoos coming

up roses that night, and then

your other blood, their luggage, the

forgiveness from those who once said

we don’t own you, you are dissed, you are not owned,

who didn’t say the wounded

somehow are easiest reclaimed,

the saints they brought you

collapsed into wooden dolls,

who can’t see, having been turned

to face the wall above the bed—

and like another kind of sniper

I’m above you lying down,

all our wearable ammunition unloaded

if not glittering still warm

when you say scar gonna fade quicker,

when you say shoot here.

Michael Tyrell teaches writing in the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. He is the author of the poetry collections Phantom Laundry (UK: Backlash Press, 2017) and The Wanted (US: The National Poetry Review Press, 2012) and his poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Agni, The Best American Poetry 2015, Fogged Clarity, The New England Review, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (US: NYU Press, 2007).