Fogged Clarity Podcast

“[Miami] is a profoundly American city – a place that reminds us that ideals matter more

than the color of our skin, or the circumstances of our birth…”

—Barack Obama

 

You waver in the face of the word journey. This could mean more loss, but all the not-belonging has metabolized into longing, so you walk. You walk past the clump of fried dough huddled on the roof of your mouth. Past the fallen arch in your right foot and the hyperextended elbow that arches when you point. You walk past the dead poet’s grave and the deaf gardener who tends it. You nod in agreement when the gardener smiles and shakes his head “no” at your request for directions. You walk past an old woman wrapping bruised mangoes in newspapers and past ancient, onion-skinned women who haul small houses and big-boned grandkids on their backs. You walk as far as you can and farther still. Cars race by, exhaust scorches your shins. Miniature flags from thirteen different islands wave at you from rearview mirrors. Wherever you stand, a new accent washes up from a far shore. Castilian, Creole, Patois, and Portuñol lap at your ankles. In this city, anyone claiming to be a native is laughed at or promptly interrogated. People put a hand on a stranger’s shoulder. He thinks he’s from here, they chuckle, offering a shot of strong, sweet coffee in a tiny medicinal cup. A woman wearing a neon bikini sells foot-long hot dogs from the median of a busy street. Your clothes have not yet unpeeled from the northern bitter. The long sheaths of your hippie skirts hover at your waist like attendant women preening and adjusting them against the city’s prying winds. You’ve arrived. You don’t realize it yet. You won’t for weeks.

People stare at your hyperextended elbow when you point to “over there.” You can’t understand their directions anyway. Street names are carved into curbstones. Each street has an official name, a baptismal name, a nickname, and a number accompanied by court, place, terrace, and drive.

At night, you sleep through your own dreams. During the day, you listen. You stand up straight and crack open your sternum as if it were an ear probing a chest for a murmur. You cock your head forward. You listen with antlers and hooves, pawing at a flint of moon-colored bone in the ground. Idiomatic expressions flip from one language to the next like reversible gloves. Even university professors catch themselves saying, “Put attention” and “Te llamo pa’tras.” In this city, one word multiplies like the word “carne” becomes meat, flesh, fruit, and sin.

You start varnishing yourself into this unfinished language, and after a few years, you’re attuned to its subtleties. At the grocery store or the movies, you observe how this city’s citizens elevate each other on a step ladder of ch words and cooing diminutives – oye chuchi, mi chinitia, cholita mía, chocherito de mi vida, only to be blunted by the augmentative insult – soplón, mamón, maricón. The speed with which the diminutive may be felled by the augmentative in no way negates its sincerity. In fact, the short-term memory of this city’s inhabitants is virtually non-existent, which roller-coasters them into endless cycles of flirtation and bickering. They bark in media interviews. They grunt and hurl in post-election polling. The simple act of dropping a child off at school elicits a frenzy of prayers and blessings, shrieks and reproaches. You would think this speaks to their passion for family and community if it weren’t for the pushy elbows and indiscriminate shopping cart wheels, the horn blaring and fist raising of daily life. They have vanished before. They have fled their country or they’ve been kicked out. You suspect that they fear starting over again in a strange place where their right to belong is challenged.

Other notes on language: you nibble on the word for the crust of dried rice that sticks to the...

The poet discusses autonomy, apocalypse, and Larry Levis. (full transcript below)

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This afternoon I’m pleased to be joined by the poet Jeffrey Schultz. Schultz’s debut collection, What Ridiculous Things We Could Ask of Each Other was selected in 2013 for the National Poetry Series and published by the University of Georgia Press. Among other distinctions, he is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, and, as of this month, Fogged Clarity. Jeffrey, I appreciate you taking the time.

Jeffrey Schultz: It’s my pleasure, thank you so much for having me.

BE: In both your debut collection and the chapbook manuscript you sent me, Resolution in Living Memory of Sky & Gooseflesh, there seems a pronounced frustration with cultural forces, chiefly American, that impinge on the individual beyond our control. Bombarded with inanity and excess; challenged by the anesthetizing routines required for survival, what’s seemingly at stake in your poems is the preservation of autonomy and, by extension, dignity. Given our current social and technological climate do you feel as if this autonomy is in greater jeopardy now than in the past?

JS: Yeah. I mean, thank you, it makes me so happy that that’s coming across in the poems. It seems to me that the rights of the individual to freely develop as the individual are deeply endangered right now, and maybe to some extent the more we’re told that the individual is central to life. There are all these technologies that are based around sort of projecting individual identity, I mean, mostly internet things, and I feel that to some extent the more our culture turns toward the individual in that way the more the individual is commodified and turned into not itself at all, but, in fact, is just another sort of functional piece of the larger social economic system. Which doesn’t sound great to me.

BE: No, and I think poetry is an assertion of the individual and works so strongly against that, saying: Here I am. But of course, autonomy presents its own set of troubles, namely: uncertainty, restlessness, and questions of meaning, and I think we find your work both elucidating and struggling with these issues as well as those I mentioned before. I wonder if you’d speak a bit to the dynamic between the internal and the external in your poetry. To what degree do your speaker’s anxieties stem from observing the world, and to what degree are your speaker’s a priori anxieties shaping how the world is observed?

JS: Yeah, I mean I think more and more when I’m writing I’m trying to be conscious of that balance or that dialectic between those poles. It seems that they rise out of each other, right, that those individual worries and anxieties rise out of those social anxieties and those social anxieties are manifestations of collective individual anxieties. And so what I would hope to look for are ways that can speak to the relationships between those without coming down on one side or the other as a first principle. The question of autonomy becomes very complicated then, you want sort of maximum autonomy within a system that realizes relational dependence. There are lots of ways I have not figured out how this works yet. When I say “yet” I guess I’m very hopeful that I could, or that someone could. But that brings up a series of questions about language and the function of language, and figures, and structures in poetry– how to be able to speak simultaneously to that level of the particular and that level of the universal in a way that doesn’t necessarily privilege the development of one over the development of the other,

If the marrow was fireworks and alcohol, the quick promises that never bother to shrug

when they run out of technique, then we should have never worried when the last five

years looked eerily similar to a dog humping the air to completion.

Darren C. Demaree‘s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in The South Dakota Review, Meridian, The Louisville Review, Diagram, and The Colorado Review. He is the author of As We Refer To Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), The Pony Governor (2015, After the Pause Press), and Not For Art Nor Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology.

I wake and walk

in a body

that demands daily

but suffers not.

Neither saint nor ruler

angel nor power

neither things present

past or to come

shall be my water.

For as necessary

as air

and as unnoticed

as my beating heart

I go forth

from within,

boundaryless,

infinite.

Yvonne Higgins Leach‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Reed Magazine, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Windfall, and Wisconsin Review, among others. Her first collection of poems, Another Autumn, was recently published by WordTech Editions.

The instructor said to loosen

my knees, to wallow in my pain,

to low, even. My head and forearms

on her counter, I was shaking it slow

for my wife watching with the rest.

I felt exactly like a man

trying to act like a woman

to be thought of as the kind of man

willing to act like a woman

to please his wife. The tittering said

for the men I was doing it right,

but the instructor wanted a different sway.

She lifted my stomach to make my spine

a buttress, to tuck my tailbone.

I felt a quiet alignment, a sleeve

of light fluting through oak canopy

into bowls in the undergrowth,

deer beds, lobes and buds around them

bright, some webbing trembling

like water. When the instructor

tapped me on the shoulder I returned

to my seat. Fear creates tension

creates pain. That’s what she kept

repeating.

David Thacker is a PhD candidate in poetry at Florida State University and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Idaho. A recipient of the Fredrick Manfred Award from the Western Literature Association, his poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Subtropics, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere.

in the future will be violence, sometime

a gun will appear in a public place

and bodies will fall, for here, where

my daughter four days old on my chest

sleeps, her fontanel against my chin,

is America. I’ve known it all along.

Sometime bullets will rip through

sheetrock, and someone’s neighbor

will enter a squad-car. Each breath

out through my nose nudges a tuft

of hair above her ear. Sometime a man

will force a woman or girl under

his weight. Or men. This life.

What do we do against such human

guarantees? My daughter stirs, working

fists she doesn’t know are hers.

David Thacker is a PhD candidate in poetry at Florida State University and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Idaho. A recipient of the Fredrick Manfred Award from the Western Literature Association, his poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Subtropics, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere.

1.

How strangely satisfied I am constructing

containment as I assemble my child’s

crib. Side-rail A’s tongue judders

into the headboard’s groove, and a bolt

spins in. Torquing the Allen wrench,

I’m godlike: it disappears in my squeeze,

burrows another bolt. But step two requires

translation. Language—another

of so many cribs, the human tongue

honed for babel. Coupled and propped

any construct can stand steady enough

to hold some fragile thing awhile, given time

becoming custom, so our marriage

develops its dialect and familiar plush.

Which is also a cage as it holds up,

a scaffold. Through these bars, our child

will see much. My wife calls dinner.

I know she means five minutes.

2.

Driving the slow lane, traffic grumbled up

and passed. The boxed crib jutted

from under our trunk lid, loomed

over the bumper. Plain and honey-colored,

which looks more shellacked Cheerio

than gold, expensive enough I winced

and slowed for each divot. That sensation

overtakes me often these days—Doppler

shifts of others zipping by even in clunker

versions of their lives while I brake.

I barely glimpse Corvettes anymore. Pregnancy’s

a road trip plod among commuters; the womb’s

a Winnebago with the vanity plate PANDORAS,

Elpis merely an apricot drifting in syrup.

We have too many maps. Right now

I want to idle in my child’s past.

3.

My wife’s belly ripples, ridges, and quiets.

A full half hour we’ve pined for every nudge

and jab, agape when a butte’s cast up, held

for a palm, a wince, before it melts. She guides

my hand like a metal detector. My only day at a beach

I was buried to my chin, and the sand held me

like a mold. I want to ask the thrashing skin,

Will you treasure the genes we’ve given you?

4.

Here are bad teeth and perfect vision.

Here is skin that blushes easy under sun.

Here’s a small heredity of melanoma.

Here, have some height, claim your share

of curls. Here’s enough muscular grace

to twitch at rhythm—we can only get you

that far. Here’s a wife, a husband,

and a worn movie: she’s absorbed in costumes,

he’s over-focused on plot. Some nights

the man construes himself into a dither,

the woman hardly saying a word. And here,

at the breakfast table, peaches, which he

picked out because, under touch, they give

like loam, as she said they should,

remain in a bowl between them. If only

they’ll talk to each other, ask forgiveness,

slice a peach into squares. We can only

get you that far. And here is parenthood:

coupling resolve with coming up short,

utter happiness and utter lack, what you are

stuck with. What we, every day, offer.

5.

As much as we wish it otherwise,

most of what we do turns waste.

The crib will serve its purpose,

become trash, but the leftover peaches,

like all bodies, consumed, broken

down tomorrow in the after-lunch

crucible of your mother’s digestion

and recast—a freckle on your skin,

a ligament of one eye’s lens,

as even the single shining brainfold

that may hold these words, then change them.

David Thacker is a PhD candidate in poetry at Florida State University and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Idah...

Where in the world is there room for this:

the daisy could stay forgotten, pressed

between pages until disintegration, no one

remembering to care. So you memorize this: how

we placed the daisy so gently under

the passage we together read, how we placed

the book in its dusty place on a shelf.

By day this street steams

with transients and trash-talk,

but at night, light slops over the edges

of street lamps that turn your walk home yellows then browns,

and what staggers beneath

has no shadow, only an oily smudge

trailing. The egg with bacon

grease, the hooker’s lipstick

mark on a glass.

Under the web of MUNI lines and buzzing

telephone cords, you imagine heaven as endless

sidewalks, well-lit and freshly paved. You imagine

living there rather than here, but you come back

to my apartment, go

to your knees in the light to tell me this, to point

to the dictionary, say, Page 1631,

between vocabulary and voice. To say,

remember this. But I don’t. I remember

vivid and volatile, I remember white petals

exploding from the page.

Ciara Shuttleworth‘s work has been published in journals and anthologies, including Alaska Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, The Norton Introduction to Literature 11e, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. Shuttleworth received an MFA in poetry from University of Idaho, a BFA in painting/drawing from San Francisco Art Institute, and a BA in studio art from Gustavus Adolphus College. She was a 2014 Jerome Foundation Fellow and The Jack Kerouac Project of Orlando’s spring 2015 resident at the Jack Kerouac House.

The poet discusses impermanence, process, and her new collection, The Diener.

*A full transcription of this audio interview can be found below.

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: You’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This morning, I’m pleased to be joined by the poet Martha Serpas, whose third collection of poems, The Diener, was recently released by LSU Press. In addition to teaching Creative Writing at the University of Houston and crafting poems that have been featured in The New Yorker, The Nation, and here on Fogged Clarity, Ms. Serpas holds a degree from Yale Divinity School and has served as a hospital trauma chaplain since 2006. A co-producer of the 2012 documentary, Veins in the Gulf, she remains active in efforts to conserve the threatened wetlands of her native Louisiana. Martha, glad to talk with you.

Martha Serpas: Good to talk to you, Ben.

BE: Well, the second poem in this collection “Betsy”—the title referring to the 1965 hurricane— evidences themes and fascinations that persist throughout The Diener, I wonder if we could begin with you reading that?

Martha reads her poem “Betsy”.

BE: Thank you. You are working toward, and arriving at, some very big things in this poem and the book at large. Namely this question, I think, as to whether wholeness and continuity, in both an organic and spiritual sense, leave room for the concept of the singular soul… What are your thoughts on that interpretation?

MS: In terms of?

BE: Are you working against this notion of the singular soul towards one of more collective harmony, or the soul as it may exist collectively?

MS: Well, I think that’s one of the questions that propelled me in thinking about these poems, the first poem questioning whether we are able to be creators at all, singularly, or whether we really only rearrange what has already been created. So I’m working through this idea of the singular artist, and then with respect to a sort of collective spirit, I think that question extends to the natural world and the separation between a collective human experience and the experience of the natural world.

BE: You grew up in a land of a very pronounced natural impermanence and, I imagine, Christian faith was relied on in answer to the anxieties it created. Were you, yourself, raised in a religious household?

MS: Oh, absolutely. I was raised in a Catholic household, but in a particular context of Cajun Catholicism. One thinks of Catholicism as being very inculturated, you know Catholicism in Mexico is extremely different from Catholicism in Italy etcetera, and within those places very much localized. While Cajun Catholicism is very practice oriented, and it’s very family oriented, and not very doctrinal at all. So I grew up in a place of rituals that are very specific to the place, of sacramentals, practice of the rosary, and less so an emphasis on theological doctrine.

BE: That’s fascinating, because Christian tradition as it commonly exists seems far too confining for many of the ideas that emerge in The Diener. How did examining religion at Yale help you to transcend some of the more stifling conventions it entails?

MS: Well I was… There were a lot of Catholic students at Yale, but the largest population is Episcopal and the heritage is Congregational, so even though, as I say, there were a lot of Catholic students, the instruction and the tradition and the doctrines we were examining were wholly Protestant. So I think, by contrast, I really recognized the aspects of Catholicism that had formed me, and especially informed my poetry, in a way I wouldn’t if I hadn’t experienced three years of that sharp contrast.

BE: There’d seem to exist a great divide between your role as a poet and your role as a hospital chaplain. The former demands you investigate your beliefs,

where quiet does not calm but claims,

a sound-absorbing shell forbidding

the comfort of even a doctor’s footsteps

on a shiny linoleum floor. Lighting altered

to lose all sense of time, silence deeper

than any in the Arctic, the Urals.

Cosmonauts, bereft of their Pushkin,

their Ukrainian folksongs, stifling

the urge to cry out, sound of nothing

like icy waves giving way to flames.

Lack of chirping cricket, scurrying mouse,

lonesome wail of a factory whistle, gurgling

and splashing of a rising Volga River.

Siberian silence—two inseparable sisters

announcing they’re no longer speaking.

Echo-less room where books, palette,

paintbrush, pencil and paper are forbidden.

It might be a day, days, a week or more

(they never say). Minute by minute,

1-2-3, eyes on me, silence morphing

to a deafening let me out! Every ounce

of will to keep one’s mind: Poyekahli!

(“Off we go!”), to rise in a trembling rocket,

gaze on a glittering sickle, one’s home an orb.

To, awestruck, orbit, become a cloud

of racing fire, then roll three times

through waving wheat, land face first

in a field never smelling so sweet.

Martha Silano has authored four books of poetry, including The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, and Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia Books 2014). She also co-edited, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press 2013). In 2015, Two Sylvias Press will release a second edition of her award-winning first book, What the Truth Tastes Like. Her work has appeared widely, including in Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and North American Review, where she received the 2014 James Hearst Poetry Prize, as well as in many anthologies, including American Poetry: The Next Generation and The Best American Poetry 2009. Martha edits Crab Creek Review and teaches at Bellevue College.