Erica Wright

Wednesday's Poem: Lovestruck in Aisle Ten

There’s a genre of poetry that I like to think of as “throwing cans of Pabst off a Brooklyn apartment building roof.” Like Justice Stewart on porn, I know it when I see it. It basically celebrates being young, clever, and annoyingly-but-not-devastatingly destructive. It celebrates being cooler than you. These poems might include a few funny moments, but usually add up to navel-gazing. After reading the first line of Randolph Pfaff’s poem “Dear Jeny,” I thought a cheap can of beer might appear sailing into an alley, but I was wrong, and I apologize.

“Dear Jeny” begins, “I know this is your name because I read it on your embossed name tag.” There’s a sly flippancy in this opening. We soon know that we are in a hardware store, and that the speaker is obsessed with this woman he knows nothing about except that he likes her ponytail. Then the flippancy ebbs, and the poem becomes about escaping ourselves, the selves we never thought we’d be. The ones stuck in the same rundown place or job. Not better than you, but the same as. There’s a brutal honesty to the speaker’s admission that he thought he would be someone else, and no one—however fine her ponytail—can change that.

“Dear Jeny” appeared in this month’s online edition of PANK.

(This is the Heights, not Brooklyn, the best I could do.)

Wednesday's Poem: Parking Lots and Truck Stops

One Sunday when I was around seven, my father took me to a deserted parking lot to show me a killjoy. She had nested in the gravel with her three wee ones. If we got too close, she would pretend to have a broken wing. She would dance herself away from the nest, so that we—the predators—would eat her instead of her chicks. This may have been the moment when I concluded that birds are better than people.

The truck stop waitress in Colie Hoffman’s prose poem “Cuckoos” seems to agree with me. She objects when the speaker tells her about cuckoos unwittingly raising babies that are not their own. It is not ignorance, the speaker speculates, but a need for connection. She says, “Maybe the birds would rather raise strangers than be alone in the night.” In this logic, birds are no better and no worse than humans. It is a fairer conclusion than my early one, yet still painful. It is also surprising coming so soon after those piranhas. Yes, piranhas. You’ll have to read on to find them squirming on their hooks.

“Cuckoos” appears in the latest issue of TYPO. (It is the second poem on the page.)

 

Wednesday’s Poem: Even Odysseus Sang the Blues

Our word “nostalgia” comes from two Greek words, nóstos (homecoming) and álgos (pain). As anyone who has been truly homesick knows, the pain is physical; your limbs ache, not to mention your eyes. Think of Odysseus crying on his rocky shore. And yet, when we wax nostalgic, we often ignore these negative feelings as if they were embarrassing rather than natural. In his surprising poem “Rangers,” Kyle Constalie embraces these darker aspects. Indeed, the first line evokes fire ants, which, for the record, can take down bunnies, squirrels, dachshunds, and the like. More than these vicious insects, though, Constalie explores a complicated relationship between siblings. He writes, “Let's howl at each other. / If only to state our fondness for one another / as meanly as we can.” And it is the fondness, the tenderness, that is most memorable, despite the insults, tears, and—yes—deadly fire ants.

“Rangers” was recently published by Konundrum Engine Literary Review.

 Patrick Dougherty's Brooklyn Botanic Garden installation, which he described as "lairs for feral children or wayward adults." 

 

Wednesday’s Poem: A Dirge for the Tar Heel State

In the latest issue of The Dark Horse, there is an essay by Clare Pollard titled “Frederick Seidel and the Impossibility of Goodness.” Pollard concludes that Seidel’s poems “are our awful mirror.” This comment made me dig out my copy of Evening Man, a limited-run edition of poems that I read once and then put away because I didn’t want to damage the book. (It’s signed and everything!) Despite only having read it once, I’ve been haunted by the poem “Boys,” which uses a lot of difficult language, namely, racial and homophobic slurs. In his typically aggressive manner, Seidel explores the ways in which racism and homophobia are bred into us, are unnatural.

Indeed, the opening of the poem exclaims of two gas station attendants, “I didn’t notice they were colored, / Because older boys capable of being kind / To a younger boy are God.” These lines make the climax of the poem—when the speaker’s father insults an elderly black man—painful. We know that the possibility of a color-blind world has ended for this boy and for so many like him.

In another stanza, an older version of the speaker drives to a party and then decides not to attend because the host might be gay. The speaker confesses, “I was violently heterosexual and bad.” He knows homophobia is bad, and he still turns his car around.

I tried to find this poem online to share with you all. While there is plenty of commentary about it, there is no full version. How then, you ask, does this qualify as a Wednesday poem? I’m afraid it doesn’t. I’m afraid I’m heartsick that hate has been institutionalized in North Carolina, that a young man, breathless for the world, might turn his car around because it’s been instilled in him that homosexuality is wrong. It’s not. But as Seidel writes in “The Death of the Shah,” “Cruelty has a huge following.”

 

Wednesday's Poem: Why We Need Poets Not Pundits

In some ways, political poetry is the great pariah, noble but un-publishable. Partly this stems from the challenge of writing a successful political poem. It’s not enough to rail against policies; poets must rail with aplomb and appropriate line breaks. José Luis Gutiérrez writes unabashedly about the state of the U.S. economy in his poem “Biomechanics.” He uses the metaphor suggested in the title, attacks on the body as stand-ins for attacks on the nation. However, he does not pussyfoot around the subject: “Adam Smith had it wrong: the economy isn’t run // by an invisible hand but by a ghost-ship manned / by a crew of severed limbs.” On a day when the president’s new slogan, “Forward,” is being criticized as Marxist, I am proud of poets who protect the nuances of language. Who do not scream, but woo.  

As a side note,  Gutiérrez’s poem is dedicated to Bob Hicok. I recently read Hicok’s astonishing 2010 collection, Words for Empty and Words for Full, and highly recommend it.

“Biomechanics” appeared in the latest issue of DMQ Review.   

 

 

Wednesday’s Poem(s): A Discreet Conversation

Recently someone told me that they like how Guernica is curated. Now I can’t stop using that word as a compliment: You’ve really curated your outfit well today. I like the way you’ve curated your living room. Do you ever think about curating professionally? Maybe people have been using this word for years to describe journals, but I’d never heard it in that context before. I am glad it exists, though. Often when reading a journal, I am impressed not only by the selections, but by the conversations those selections have with one another.

When I cracked open the electronic spine of Thrush’s latest edition, I read “Biology” first for no good read. I am a fan of several other contributors, but Anne Champion’s name jumped out at me. The poem dissects (pun-intended) the high school arena, which is not quite Hunger Games, but sure is brutal. The students mock a gay student by electing him homecoming queen; they shun a girl for her sexual exploits. The viciousness of this increasingly familiar environment leaked into the other poems.

For example, when I read Mary Stone Dockery’s “June’s Child,” I felt the meteorological oppression she describes and also the melancholy that could be caused by any number of things, but in my mind—fresh from reading “Biology”—the scorn of others. The speaker begins, ”Finally, I wanted to give up my grief, / the boiling cocoon wrapped in beeswax / and scent of burning lilac, the concrete / heaviness of my arms, the heat of cicadas.” At first we agree with her, yes give these up! But then comes the realization that giving up grief and plain ol’ giving up are not so far apart.

“June’s Child and “Biology”  appeared in the March 12^th issue of Thrush. I like the way this issue is curated.

 

Wednesday's Poem: You Say Tomato, I Say Gazelle

The ghazal is far and away my least favorite poetic form. First, it’s name is too insider for me. “It’s pronounced huh-zul,” I can almost hear someone intoning at a cocktail party. Even though it would be cooler if it were pronounced like the animal. Then, there are the requirements. The first and second lines must end with the same word, then every second line of each subsequent couplet must end with that very same word. Got it? If not, don’t fret; you never have to write one. Ever.

This Wednesday poem project has been nothing if not surprising. The latest bombshell comes from Sarah J. Sloat with her rousing poem, “Book of Hours Ghazal.” I probably would have skipped it except that the editors at Linebreak—Ash Bowen and Johnathon Williams, among others—really know what they’re doing. They consistently choose great poems, often from unknown or emerging writers. There are enough heavy hitters, too, to lure in new readers.

I’m not sure if there’s an easy word to choose as your ghazal anchor, but “slowly” seems like a particularly challenging choice. Right away, I can think of all sorts of cliché things that move slowly. Sloat sidesteps these possible minefields with aplomb, leaping gracefully (like an, err, antelope) to a new place with each stanza. She intones, “Blood, too, / is a heavy breather that serves its queen slowly.” And in the tumult of this poem, this declaration rings true.

When reading the same word over and over, it can almost disappear on the page. Yet, there’s something about the sentences that Sloat constructs that make us hear that “slowly” every time. We can’t get away from it. And maybe it’s this feeling of no possible escape that is the ghazal’s magic. It is insistent; it forces you to pay attention. And in the case of Sloat’s imagining of the form, that’s a good thing.

"The Book of Hours Ghazal" was published by Linebreak on February 7, 2012.

 

Wednesday's Poem: Murder, My Sweet

Last summer I read James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, and since I couldn’t make heads or tails of the endless characters—much less figure out who dun it—I gave over to the atmosphere. I flinched at the violence, drank up the gossip, and pitied the un-pitiable men. And while I enjoyed the exercise, I couldn’t help wishing for a shorter version. When I stumbled across Ed Skoog’s poem “Ghosts of 1952,” I thought, now this it more like it.

It turns out noir isn’t limited to films and novels with fog-strewn covers. Skoog imagines a kidnapper handing himself over to the police because “Love talked the murderer back into civilization.” What comes across most clearly is the speaker’s fetishizing of this shadowy figure. He wants to possess “a sin / so heavy to unburden,” too. You can almost see the copycat plan forming in his mind. The poem is thrilling and, yes, graciously spare.

"Ghosts of 1952" appears in the current issue of Burnside Review.

 

Wednesday's Poem: Where the Tracks End and the City Begins

Yesterday I walked down to the tracks in Atlanta and watched a long train rush past. I lost count, but there were certainly more than a hundred cars. It was the kind of train that would have made me late to school as a teenager in Wartrace, Tennessee. Beyond the tracks rose the impressive skyline, and that view seemed to encapsulate what I love about Atlanta—the collusion of rust and gleam.  

I’m familiar with the established Atlanta journals: Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta Review, Five Points. Arts & Letters isn’t too far away in Milledgeville. This morning, though, I went on a hunt for an Atlanta-based online journal and found a doozy in Loose Change. The issues are organized by piece name rather than author, and what better way to emphasize the importance of an attention-grabbing title? The most recent issue features “Sometimes She Spells the Hyphen” and “What Hovers.” I couldn’t locate a contributors’ page at all, indicating a preference of work over reputation. I liked this journal right away.

One of the fifteen pieces in the most recent issue is “Bones to Pick” by Kathleen Brewin Lewis. An older couple snacks on a day as they would a chicken. They eat until there’s nothing left, until they must decide “Which one of them will turn in for the evening, / which one will sit up alone in the dark.” There’s both intimacy and violence in this couple, and the accompanying artwork by Marcy Starz perfectly captures that combination. Not only are the warring impulses clear in Starz’s title, “Consonance and Dissonance,” but also in her medium, oil on repurposed bed sheets. It’s a skyline next to railroad tracks.

“Bones to Pick” was published in the most recent issue of Loose Change.

Wednesday's Poem: Cracking Open Emmett Till's Casket

For the past few weeks, one of my students has been working on a poem responding to “Emmett Till’s Glass-Top Casket” by Cornelius Eady. Eady’s poem may not from 2012, but it is painfully relevant. Which is to say, Emmett Till was younger than Trayvon Martin, but only by three years.

In 1955, Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was accused of catcalling a shopkeeper. The shopkeeper’s husband and brother-in-law kidnapped the teenager, tortured him, killed him, then dumped him in a nearby river. When his body was recovered, it was returned to Chicago where his mother insisted on a public funeral. The mother also insisted on a glass covering for the coffin, so that the public could bear witness to the horrors inflicted on her young son.   

The speaker of Eady’s poem is the casket itself (now on display at the Smithsonian). The casket explains, “Once I held a boy who didn’t look like a boy. When they finally / remembered, they peeked through my clear top. Then their wild surprise.” And what did they do? Did they recoil from the bloated, mutilated body? Perhaps some did, but they also rallied, bringing well-deserved scrutiny to Mississippi’s race relations.

Eady’s poem begins, “By the time they cracked me open again, topside, abandoned in a toolshed, I had / become another kind of nest.” The coffin had become a haven for possums, creatures renown for their ability to play dead. But racism is alive and well no matter what sleepy-eyed dreamers might pretend. It is time to crack open Emmitt Till’s coffin once again and admit that we haven’t come as far as we should have in the last fifty-seven years.

“Emmett Till’s Glass-Top Casket” was published in the April 5, 2010 issue of The New Yorker.