Fogged Clarity Podcast

From there you could see the whole town: tear it down. Tear it down.

-Mike McGriff

To preserve the town, first turn your back

on the world. Lose yourself completely.

Then begin to undress in a creaking

hotel where the floorboards each speak

resonances to you, & their shifting

makes clear your small town tectonics.

Forget vows of marriage. Leave your suit,

tie, & swank attire at the cleaners on Main

where they ruin each piece to keep you from leaving.

Stay as long as you can—which is to say

let the town enter you every time you leave it

bound for better places. Have a speed trap

in mind from which to retrieve memory

as when arrested: the true story of how

the girl you loved dreamed of loving

women, though her Methodist folks kept this

bottled for years. Write today how the blonde

arc of her hair pulled across either eye

was like parentheses around semi-colons

—or her cheerleader’s sway down the hall

in high school walking past your locker.

Will she ever date me if I don’t play football

but am great at trumpet? you wondered

while staring. Sex felt impossible.

Now it’s the little things you return for:

onion rings at Sonic, Blizzards at Dairy

Queen, one last drive past the house

where you found Annalise & her girlfriend

kissing: the brief rapture of that. The plain

truth. The beauty. Re-remember

your friends who were not themselves here

for years until leaving: which you, too, understand.

Poetry was a way to get girls to date you

in Yearbook & college. You remained a virgin

well into your 20s. & yet when asked about desire

in a future interview, you will say you return

to what feeling meant here: that unchecked fire

in your chest which, when lit, burned the whole

goddamn town down. Disappeared it. Everything.

J. Scott Brownlee is the author of Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, a finalist for the National Poetry Series and winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize. He’s also the author of the prize-winning chapbooks Highway or Belief (2013 Button Poetry Prize), Ascension (2014 Robert Phillips Prize), and On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County (2015 Tree Light Books Prize). He lives in Philadelphia and is a core faculty member for Brooklyn Poets.

I was doing something wrong with my life.

In the highlands sunlight outlined the lodgepole pine

Making a black absence in the blue sky

The exact shape of a pine. Let me sketch for you

The red cedar alone in the lower dark

With its sash of moss woven from pure-green

Filaments of age, or the white aspen swimming

In its riffle of sky, or the vine maple’s

Old Welsh scrawled in gnarled script

Across the underbrush. Yes, I was doing something wrong

With my life. Listen. The foley has forgotten

The birdcall and the horse’s breath

And your stomach but not the brittle tick of leaves

Falling like sunlight, like someone approaching fast from behind.

Everything we need to know is locked up

In this folio of rock I see you reading with your mind.

Nothing is too hard when you know how alone you are.

Matt Rader is the author of Desecrations (McClelland and Stewart 2016). The author of three previous collections of poetry, and the book of stories, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This, his work has appeared in journals and magazines across North America, Europe, and Australia. He teaches Creative Writing in the Department of Creative Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. He lives in Kelowna, BC.

Musée de Préhistoire des Gorges Verdon

The good cave. Tucked up in the cliffs of Verdon,

Prehistory, where-we-come-from. That’s you

Shucking snails with a stick. That’s me learning

To hide under a hide, naked. The progressive

Abandonment of relative chronologies. The slow

Sedimentary drip of turquoise minerals, ancestry.

Thus each excavation phase is a reflection

Of an idea of an idea. We see it mocked-

Up in the Musée—on film and 3D—our heads

Gripped by black omegas that speak to us

Our language, the current last words on how

We imagine we imagine what it was like

Before cooking fires, stone-knapping, the Levallois

Technique. And after. All that absence in absence

in absence. The good cavity. We’ve been

Coming here as a family year after year after year.

Matt Rader is the author of Desecrations (McClelland and Stewart 2016). The author of three previous collections of poetry, and the book of stories, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This, his work has appeared in journals and magazines across North America, Europe, and Australia. He teaches Creative Writing in the Department of Creative Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. He lives in Kelowna, BC.

Canadian poet & author Matt Rader sits down with Tarn Painter-MacArthur to discuss weaving temporalities, his childhood caretaker, and his forthcoming collection, Desecrations.

TRANSCRIPTION

Tarn MacArthur: Hello and welcome to another Fogged Clarity interview, I’m Tarn MacArthur, and we’re lucky to have the poet and author Matt Rader with us today. Matt, good to see you today, even over Skype.

Matt Rader: Likewise.

TM: Matt is the author of three collections of poems, Miraculous Hours, Living Things, and A Doctor Pedaled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno, and more recently, he came out with the short story collection, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This. His soon to be released book of poems, Desecrations, will be out from Penguin’s McClelland and Stewart press this spring. Just to get things started, Matt, I want to talk a bit about the old books versus your new book, they feature similar traits but your new book ventures into a new landscape. Your previous work focused primarily on your home province and Vancouver Island, what was the impetus for your new book to focus primarily on Ireland?

MR: I don’t think it was any conscious decision, like I thought, fuck, Vancouver Island is done. Along the way, I’ve been reading Irish poets for a long time, and this new collection does have a lot of Ireland in it but it also has BC and Canada. One of the major influences on me as a writer is Michael Longley, and a critic once said of Michael Longley that “he was an Odysseus for who every landfall was a homecoming”, and I think in the context of Longley that had to do the way Longley writes about Japan or Greece, but he’s really always writing about Ireland, Northern Ireland in particular. And I think for me, going to Ireland was a kind of way for me to see my own Island. And whether or not readers are reading Vancouver Island when I write about Ireland is neither here nor there. For example, the first time I went to Ireland I thought a lot about the idea of being indigenous—what it meant to be indigenous to the island of Ireland, and what it meant to be indigenous in the context of the island I come from which is on the Salish Sea, and has had different names, and there are three cultural nations aside from the settler nations on Vancouver Island. I was born and raised there, it’s the island that I know, the one I feel most connected to. Ireland was an interesting case for me because the idea of indigeneity in that context is a fraught one. The short answer is, I got invited to Ireland. Then I got invited to Ireland again. Then I got invited to Ireland again. So I was just by happenstance going there. And so that’s why it’s Ireland [in the book] and not New Zealand.

TM: Right, that’s understandable. Still, in this manuscript, Desecrations, you’re focused on similar things in Ireland as you were to Vancouver Island—a particular eye for detail of the landscape, and discussing how the history of that landscape and place can still be viewed today. The sort of idea of collapsing temporalities, which plays a big role in this book and has played a big role in your past two books, especially A Doctor Pedaled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno. Could you talk a bit about how you look and deal with temporalities? You seem to want to avoid the general trend of viewing Time as a linear thing, and encompass more than our general programming to view history as past and today as present.

MR: I definitely think this has been a theme, it appears in these two books of poems, it also appears in the poems, so really in my life its been about ten years of thinking about this problem of history and it really has to do with my experience of being in places and in a particular location. First, encountering my own history: being in a place I’ve been in before and encountering my own presence in that place previously; and second, kind of like you say,

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity, this morning I’m pleased to spend time with the poet & author Paisley Rekdal. Rekdal is responsible for a book of essays, a memoir, and four collections of poems, including 2012’s Animal Eye—a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize—and Imaginary Vessels forthcoming in November of this year from Copper Canyon Press. Among her numerous awards are fellowships from the NEA, and the Fulbright and Guggenheim foundations, an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and two inclusions in Best American Poetry. She teaches in the Creative Writing program at the University of Utah. Paisley, welcome, thanks for taking the time.

Paisley Rekdal: Thank you for having me.

BE: It’s a pleasure. Let’s go for big air: We see throughout your poems, a wariness of certainty, and of both the notion and stability of truth. What would you point to as the foundation of this suspicion; and do you think such suspicion grows in proportion to one’s intellect?

PR: That is an incredible question, and it’s a hard one to answer. I suppose an easy answer is also a complex one, which is my suspicion of a uniform narrative comes, I think, from being bi-racial, being aware of the possibility of being read two ways at one time depending on who’s looking at me; also being aware of two very wildly different types of family stories. But I think that that’s a starting point; I think being alive in the world and paying attention to your place in it also makes you aware of a multiplicity of narratives that make it very difficult to reconcile these things. So, for instance, I live in Utah, I live where there’s a lot of nature and the relationship that the animal and the human have in urban spaces is sometimes violent; its surprising, we live kind of on top of each other. So you’re always wondering how one set of decisions is going to effect, environmentally, a whole host of other lives potentially and vice-versa. So I think it’s the idea of narratives coexisting with each other, but of course, the more you read—anyone could experience this—whether you have an engagement with nature or you’re speaking about race in these particular ways, I think that there are so many ways in which any narrative gets automatically complicated that doubt and uncertainty seem to be the only places to reside in the world. Look at the people who seem most certain and how little we trust them.

BE: You make a good point. When humans are involved, I think certainty becomes far more suspect, but I do have an unwavering trust in the “isness” of nature and the natural world; a world which you devoted a lot of attention to in your last book, Animal Eye. It’s curious to note that most of the animals that appear in that collection are being observed in captivity; causing one to contemplate the forceful suppression of instinct and intuition. I wonder if, and how, you see such suppression occurring on a human level, particularly in this country, America?

PR: Yeah, I read a book many, many, many years ago, actually when I was at the University of Michigan, that talked about how you could tell a lot about a society by the way in which it created its zoos, not just its prisons, but its zoos. And this idea of forceful… the creation of spaces to preserve the illusion of the natural seemed to be very American vs. a lot of first-world nations where zoos try to create this idea of performing nature for people. And its easy to walk away from that and start seeing how we do that to each other. One of the reasons I was interested in talking about animals, and animals in particular, in captivity, is because a lot of the ways we talk about ourselves and talk about people we don’t don’t like in society–we use the lens of the animal to see those people and we describe ourselves and them as animals.

We should admire Rambler roses,

so resilient their vines green what was bare

ground in a single season, then scale up

and overtake trees, strangle whole canopies,

if we can stand our own sort.

And prize Redbreast sunfish,

that flash a brilliant blood color. They breed

in streams native trout cannot survive now

because the water is hot, because the shade

was bush-hogged away. Though some among us

have named the plants that fill in after a clear cut

“nigger pines,” we are the most tolerant

of species. Which is to say, where such a kind

succeeds, nothing else can.

Rose McLarney has published two collections of poems, Its Day Being Gone (Penguin Books, 2014) and The Always Broken Plates of Mountains (Four Way Books, 2012). Its Day Being Gone was a 2013 National Poetry Series winner. She has been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and Warren Wilson College; and won the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry and Alligator Juniper’s 2011 National Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Missouri Review, Green Mountains Review, and dozens of other journals. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers and is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University, and the Poetry Editor of The Southern Humanities Review.

I can almost touch her

cheek in this London train that

jostles us together, as time

jostles back and forth

between us on her phone, the videos

she plays as if only she

can see them. Here

is a nightclub, here a pool,

a cluster of girls in a mosque’s

courtyard, now they’re clutching

each other, screaming

as a jeep heaves them

across the desert’s dunes.

The girl’s cheek is warm,

exposed. Her headscarf has come

loose, and I can almost see

each gold link in her swaying

necklace. The girls are falling

together, laughing. She taps them away

and her whole hand fills

with a man’s torso: black skin,

black hair, his wide grin

at the screen pointed towards him.

Go back, I want to tell her,

as lights flare in her palm,

and now I taste the sweet

slick spill of drinks, the ache

of sweat as the whole world throbs

up through my feet. Go back.

Here is a boyfriend, there

a brother, a girlfriend, cousins,

father, mother. Someone’s

dancing in a darkened corner.

Now she’s tying up

a sister’s hair, the sun sinking

into the ocean’s purples. A scarf flaps

across my face. There’s a woman

beckoning me to stand

upon a square of carpet, moonlight

splashing over a landing. Go back.

The baby is sleeping. Now

it’s awake. Stop, I want to tell

her, as another young man climbs

towards us from the pool.

I can almost taste

his sunbaked knee, the waxy drip

of water in his curls.

He is so beautiful. But so

is the desert in which

two camels emerge, a girl

on the back of each, the sands

beneath them brown and pink.

The air fills with the acrid scent

of gas. Go back. More people

are already arriving:

friends, strangers. I can’t

remember. Only that I worried

I would be left, and so rushed

to meet them. Far off,

a string of yellow: city lights

or car lights, it doesn’t matter. Only

that all these people move there

together, and I am now

among them. I am carried

to this place. The lights

there are warm and distant.

Only the dark now

winks between us.

Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, a memoir, and four books of poetry. Her most recent collection of poems, Animal Eye, was a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize, the Balcones Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize. Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, the University of Georgia Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series Award and a Fulbright Fellowship, Rekdal’s poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, in two editions of the Best American Poetry series and on National Public Radio. Her next book of poems, Imaginary Vessels, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in Autumn 2016.

There will be sweat at the back of your neck

seven months out of the year. That’s true,

that and an ugly history too. At least, in the South,

the Ice Age never quite passed through.

I can say that while glaciers scraped the North

clean, here there was only a little winter.

From the warm, deep dirt that remained,

plantations’ fruitage came.

Then their produce, poverty. It’s still fresh.

But a great diversity survived,

of animal species, I mean. Our mud is home

to half the mussels on the continent.

Those fine beings filter tainted water.

While the country’s sole cavefish swims

unbiased nearby, with no color, no eye.

Rose McLarney has published two collections of poems, Its Day Being Gone (Penguin Books, 2014) and The Always Broken Plates of Mountains (Four Way Books, 2012). Its Day Being Gone was a 2013 National Poetry Series winner. She has been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and Warren Wilson College; and won the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ New Writing Award for Poetry and Alligator Juniper’s 2011 National Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Missouri Review, Green Mountains Review, and dozens of other journals. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers and is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University, and the Poetry Editor of The Southern Humanities Review.

Award-winning poet James Kimbrell discusses finding form in the Marianna Caves, the force of love, and bait shrimp as spiritual ligature.

TRANSCRIPTION (by Michael McDermit)

Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This morning, I’ll be speaking with the gifted poet James Kimbrell. Kimbrell has published three collections of poetry, including 1998’s The Gatehouse Heaven—selected by our current poet laureate Charles Wright for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize; 2006’s My Psychic; and his most recent book, Smote, published just last year. His many awards include an NEA fellowship and a Whiting Writer’s Award, and his poems and reviews regularly appear in Poetry, Pleiades, The Nation and Meridian, among other journals. He currently serves as a professor of Creative Writing at Florida State University. James, welcome. Thank you for taking the time.

James Kimbrell: Thank you, Ben. It’s a pleasure to talk with you.

BE: Your most recent book, Smote feels channeled—not only in its intensity and interwoven narrative, but in its freedom: the intuitive line breaks, the shift within individual poems from the prosimetric to more conventional lineation, and the assemblage of voices enacted by bisection and italics. Are you able to achieve this freedom because of a deep rooting in craft? That is: Are your wings spread in Smote because you’re confident in the learn-ed feathers and fibers that spun them; or are they spread because they’re spread and gravity be damned?

JK: Man, that’s a great way to put it. Maybe a little bit of both, I think. I’ll tell you, the other day I was with my wife in Marianna, which is not too far from Tallahassee, and she’s an attorney, so she was meeting with a client; so while I was waiting for her I took a little daytrip over to the Marianna caves. You go into these caves and–you’ve probably been in a cave before–there are these straws that form before they’re stalactites, they’re just straws. They’re hollow in the center; the water comes down and then eventually the water starts flowing on the outside which creates a solid rock and then it can form a column as it goes all the way down to the ground. Well, that growth of that straw into a stalactite into a column happens at about one inch for every hundred years. You sit there and you look at it, and you think: “What an incredible way to witness the passage of time, and the creation of form.” Because it’s a shape–it’s hollow on the inside and that shape starts to change. But what creates that shape and form organically is repetition–of dropping water, of water through a particular porous passage in the rocks. I think if you have a force, a voice, a statement, on the one hand, that may seem not terribly formally coherent–if it goes through a passage over time, form starts to work its own magic. It doesn’t end up being forced; it ends up being something that comes out of the repetition of a certain action over a period of time. I think the poems happen that way. I mean I still count syllables, I still count stresses at some point during just about every poem’s composition. But I also have the sense that there is a best possible shape for any given poem, and that if I keep listening to it and keep fiddling with it, that shape will manifest itself. Then it’s just a matter of getting out of the way, and letting that happen, and trying to be sensitive to it, maybe above and beyond what my intentions might have been for the poem. In this way the poet steps out of the shadow of his/her intentions or hopes or ambitions for it and it becomes its own presence. I think that helps lend itself to form as well. It’s like the way a child turns into an adult.

BE: Did you see that happening in Smote?

JK: Yeah, I think so. Gradually. But it took,

Two songs from the Boston songwriter’s new album September Sun are featured amid a discussion spanning black holes, herb gardens, and shoe closet recordings.

Samantha Farrell is a songwriter living and working in Boston. She has released three full-length albums: Spiritus, Luminous, and her most recent, September Sun (2016). Farrell has toured extensively, and has shared the stage with The Dave Matthews Band, Ingrid Michaelson, and Matt Nathanson, among others.