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Rena Priest

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I couldn’t have been more thrilled to hear that Rena Priest will be our new Washington State Poet Laureate. I took a workshop with Rena at Chuckanut Sandstone in 2018, and have been happily singing her praises ever since. She is an exceptional poet and—you have only to meet her once to know this—a generous and kind teacher.

Plus, I had just ordered her book Patriarchy Blues, from Village Books so that I could include her in my blog line-up this April. Serendipity all over the place!

Patriarchy Blues was published by MoonPath Press in 2017, and received an American Book Award in 2018. Many (all?) of its 26 poems are about desire, specifically, the lopsided desire that comes of living in a patriarchy. Dedicated to “the subterranean homesick matriarchy,” the book holds up a mirror to the world and the world puts on its lipstick and dances. Scissors desire the thread and the moon longs to turn her face away. “Can you climb into a person’s / longing for you and float away?” asks one poem (“The Encyclopedia Britannica, Sunshine, a Mosquito”); another, “Is desire not acted upon a betrayal?” (“Creeping Out of Orbit”).  And, always, this lushness, the body nourished by drums and bells and honey.

This is the final poem in the book.

Quiet Children

I notice how bees keep flying
to the emptiness in the tree
where their home used to be.
They don’t disturb the children
playing in my driveway, oblivious
to the hovering above their ears.

I watch them from my steps
and listen to the green collision
of a million leaves, unsettled by a breeze.
A car staggers by, dragging along
a swarm of summer dust.
The children have all gone quiet.

They are in a circle, wiggling
and whispering about something
on the ground. I investigate, and see
a wrecked hive, the color of winter.
The older boys, in their cruelty
were at it last night with stones.

I shoo the children away, tell them,
“Go play.” The doomed larvae strive
and vibrate. I cringe, but can’t help
looking and looking, even days later,
at those starving conic bodies,
shimmering in their pale hexagon cells.

—Rena Priest

Follow this link to the Facebook page of Children of the Setting Sun to register for the Passing of the Laurels ceremony being held Wednesday, April 14, 2021:  https://www.facebook.com/ChildrenSSP/posts/2734324456692048.

Kathleen Kirk

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Today’s post is even more like an interview than a review. I have three of Kathleen Kirk’s chapbooks—little poetry books that address a single subject—and when I learned that The Towns (Unicorn Press, 2018) is actually one of eight poetry chapbooks, “each one a bit different in its impetus, composition, and arrangement,” I knew that I wanted to hear more.

I did know a bit about Kathleen’s background, as I reviewed her ABCs of Women’s Work last April. But I’ll let people do their own spelunking into her background: check out Escape Into Life, an on-line magazine of literature and art, where she is the editor, or her (delightful) blog—Wait! I have a blog?!—to learn much, much more.

This year I emailed Kathleen and asked her to tell me about her books and how she creates them. I had fun looking up the presses (of course Unicorn=unique books!), and am including the links so you can take a tour, too.

Nocturnes (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2012) captured a bunch of poems set at night, and often musical in quality (like musical nocturnes) or responding to night time paintings. Living on the Earth (Finishing Line Press, New Women’s Voices Series No. 74, 2010) gathered poems of place I was exploring after returning to live where I’d grown up, and in the context of worrying about and valuing our dear planet. An earlier chapbook, Broken Sonnets (Finishing Line, 2009), contained and celebrated my awareness of being “broken” but perfectly okay in sonnets that respected but also broke traditional forms of the sonnet. I guess I knew I was done when I’d broken the form in all the ways I could at that time.

Interior Sculpture: poems in the voice of Camille Claudel (dancing girl press, 2014) was a commissioned work, providing poems to create a dance/theatre piece, and I pursued Camille Claudel’s biography and work to voice a series of poems set to dance, and a few more.

In Spiritual Midwifery (Red Bird, 2019), I found I was gathering from a series of ekphrastic poems I’d been writing, often on paintings with religious topics, as well as poems on how life itself had engendered in me a personal spirituality, enhanced by motherhood; the poems clung to each other on their own—again, probably instinct and logic, as that chapbook ends with a poem called “Last Step.” My very first chapbook, Selected Roles (Moon Journal Press, 2006) is the bridge between my life as a professional actor in Chicago and my organic life as a poet. In these poems, I speak in the voices of characters I have played or in the persona of an actor playing those roles.

I am still looking for a home for my chapbook manuscript The Cassandra Poems, in which I speak in the voice of Cassandra, the mythological character and the character in Agamemnon, the play by Aeschylus, as if she were still alive today, a prophetess whom no one will believe, which, as a poet, I feel like lots of the time. Most of these poems have been published individually in journals, and a couple new ones are due out soon in Levitate, but I would love to see them all together in a chapbook.

I have not lived abroad, as Kathleen has, but I have spent a lot of time in small, western towns—and of course I’ve read one of Kathleen’s influences, The Triggering Town, by Richard Hugo. Another influence was The Outlaw Years, by Robert M. Coates, about outlaws along the Natchez Trace. Kathleen explains:

Outlaws might yearn for towns without being able to belong to them, because they are outside the boundaries of the law. I found I was writing poems based on [poems of] Richard Hugo and Theodore Roethke…involving repeated words and images. I applied the form restrictions to small towns and outlaws alike, to see what would happen!

To put her books together, Kathleen relies on “1) instinct 2) logic, a paradoxical juxtaposition.” In The Towns she used town names in the titles, particularly at the beginning of the book, “to root us in place.” The outlaws are introduced early, and sort of take over as the poems progress, putting us “outside the boundaries.” The logic of ending with “The Last Word” is hard to refute.

I got to do the release reading for The Towns at Ryburn Place, a shop and visitor center run by Terri Ryburn in the renovated Sprague Super Service gas station along old Route 66, in front of a map where I could point to several of the towns in my poems on or just off Route 66! Other towns in the book are elsewhere in the Midwest or in the American South, and “The Towns” (the title poem) is a mini-autobiography via all the towns and cities I’ve lived in, which also goes to Europe and comes home again. I always cry reading that one out loud, because it comes back to small-town cemeteries.

Photo by Malte Luk from Pexels

The Towns is comprised of 15 poems. Outlaws recur, town names, obviously, but there’s also a kind of intrusion of the natural world into every poem–and, I admit, it’s that element that grabs me every time. In “Beason,” we feast on a series of almost-disjointed images (I had a sense of flipping through a series of postcards), the poet/persona is the outlaw, breaking boundaries, or she’s the “outlaw” deer:

Beason

That upstairs window has a woman in it,
or a dress-form. That door is falling off
because a deer walked right up the porch
steps and knocked. I don’t know much
about the town of Beason, except what
I’m not saying, but I know enough to bite

the hand that feeds me this mango, its
hard pit knocking against my teeth
a modified Morse code for love.

It’s possible he’ll leave me here
in Beason at this little lake
where I turn to drop my empty cup
in the rusty can; he’ll run off
in his car, abandon me to the geese.
If he does, I can walk determined

up the road to the nearest mailbox
and right on up the porch steps
to knock, wild-eyed and alive.

—Kathleen Kirk

 

Sharon Bryan

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Last fall, on the recommendation of Kathleen Flenniken and Holly J. Hughes, I decided to take a Hugo House course from poet Sharon Bryan. Wanting to get to know her a bit, first, I purchased three of her books—and plunged in.

Sharon’s Flying Blind (Sarabande Books, 1996) is, itself, a plunge. It drops a reader not so much into the tangible stuff of a life, as into language. And, from there (because from where else?) we swim back into life. I knew right away that I wanted to write a blog post about this book. Its 40-some poems are arranged without sections. Titles point us toward the book’s obsession: “Be-,” “Conjugation,” “-Esque,” “Ode to the OED,” “Subjunctive.” The last begins: “If only”—in a book where nothing is quite what it seems. As the poet writes in “Dissembling”: “Let’s keep an eye / on what’s impossible, its friction // with what is.”

Beneath this layer of playful verbal acrobatics, there is another layer. As Frederick Busch says in his cover praise: “behind the brainy and considering voice-in-the-poems is real woundedness, real and interesting experience, a particular history and earned awareness that refuses to let the book be ‘abstract.’…It’s felt thinking.”

I emailed Sharon and asked how Flying Blind came into being. Her response was a master-course:

After my second book came out, I knew I wanted to make a different kind of poem from the ones in those books. I didn’t think they were bad, but I knew they didn’t reflect my sense of the relationship between language and the world, which is that language creates the world we live in and move through. In those first books, the reverse is true: the poems describe the world as if it were a given. I was determined to find a way to write new poems grounded in that sense of language as shaper of what we see and feel. So I took a deliberate six-month break from writing poems to get the old voices out of my head, and during it read and re-read books from philosophy and anthropology about language. When I started writing again, I wrote poems that started with language as subject matter. I was also able to draw on humor—something central to me—in a way I hadn’t before.

I’d written maybe a dozen or fifteen poems before I discovered the order they should be in. I was keeping them in alphabetical order in a folder so I could find them easily when I gave a reading, and one day I joked to myself that maybe that could be the order. But then I thought, “Wait, it’s all about language. I can use that order.” It wasn’t a strict sense of writing a poem for each letter of the alphabet—I didn’t. But it gave me ideas for some poems. And I knew that I wanted the last one I wrote to be the first in the book, so I gave it a title that would put it there: “Abracadabra.”

But the biggest discovery of all for me didn’t come until the manuscript was almost finished. Only then did I see that while the surface of the poems was all about language, the emotions that drove the poems came from the deaths of three friends a decade earlier. The three were Richard Blessing, Richard Hugo, and Hugo’s stepson Matthew Hansen. All three had died of different kinds of cancer within a two-year period. All three were poets, they knew each other and had many friends in common, so it was a community event, very intense and moving. I came to realize that in my grief I had thrown myself on the mercy of language as if it were a safety net—and it was. I would never have presumed to tell their stories myself, but those three told them through the poems I wrote.”

That line, “I had thrown myself on the mercy of language” made me decide to use almost all that Sharon emailed to me. It’s the answer to a puzzle I’ve been stymied by while working on a book of elegies about my parents. “We can’t quite see / the world,” she writes in the title poem, “but we have it / in translation.” Reading this book made me think about how my usual reliance on the concrete, the event exactly as it happened, is a sort of crutch, a nostalgia. To paraphrase Richard Hugo (a quote she deployed more than once in our class): you owe reality  nothing, the poem, everything. [Or, as Sharon elaborated in another email exchange, “we write to get at the truth of how we think and feel”—not that we don’t revere the truth but that “reality” can get in our way.]

What to do with this insight? Well, she has a poem for that, too:

Minutiae

Having things is a way to forget
about them: straight teeth, enough
food, the midnight blue silk dress.

As if memory and longing were kissing
cousins, and to have were to quench
the light and heat of desire.

So writing things down, love
or the list of groceries, is a way
to leave them behind, perfused

with a certain day that will rise
like ether from the wrinkled page
when you come across it. Forgetting

keeps things whole by letting them
go—the woman become a tree,
for example, or the man a constellation.

What clings to us is incidental,
dust too fine to cohere
and become forgettable.

—Sharon Bryan

You can read more of Sharon’s poems under the poems tab at her website, and I especially recommend the video at the bottom of the page (look for “from Eureka”).

Don Mee Choi

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Don Mee Choi is a citizen of our troubled world. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, lived in Hong Kong, and now lives in the United States, in Seattle, Washington. Reading her newest book, DMZ Colony, challenged me to throw out my lens on the crises in global politics, particularly immigration, and try on a new perspective. The Academy of American Poets site addresses her multi-form, surprising art by quoting Craig Santos Perez:  “Choi translates feminist politics into an experimental poetry that demilitarizes, deconstructs, and decolonizes any master narrative.” It is hard for me to say more.

I am reading DMZ Colony for a Hugo House class this spring. All by itself, it is an education in global politics. It was published by WAVE books (2020), and is the 2020 winner of the National Book Award for poetry. The NBA judges hailed DMZ Colony as a “tour de force” of personal reckoning, and also wrote of this moving interweaving of poetic forms and translation:

Don Mee Choi’s urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but “during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.” Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all “victims of History,” so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist.

“Migratory latticework” and “bricolage” do much to help us imagine this book. And do explore the Poetry Foundation and other sites. But much of DMZ Colony is in images, and you really have to hold it in your hands to experience it.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to one section:

One starless night, I was stranded….I decided to translate the stories of eight girls who survived the Sancheong-Hamyang massacre, which took place in Gyeongsangnam-do, a southern province of South Korea, in 1951. My decision to translate the girls’ stories wasn’t entirely mine alone. It can take billions of years for light to reach us through the galaxies, which is to say, History is ever arriving. So it’s most likely that the decision, seemingly all mine, was already made years ago by someone else, which is to say, language — that is to say, — translation — always arises from collective consciousness.

And here’s one poem (printed in white lettering on a black page):

We too were born under the bridge. Every night, we listened to the whispers of the angels bathing in the river. They too cried and sang, Sky, sky, sky. Our lullaby. They didn’t blame our nations. Migrating from pole to pole they watched our falling stars, our failing planet. They too were hungry. They too were homesick. We the fatherless watched the angels depart. Our farewell. In reality, we were all motherless.