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Sylvia Byrne Pollack, Risking It

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RISKING IT, Sylvia Byrne Pollack. Red Mountain Press, Seattle, WA, 2021, 68 pages, $19.95 paper, www.redmountainpress.us.

Today’s gift is a recent book by a local poet, Sylvia Byrne Pollack. Pollack first crossed my radar in March 2021, in a Seattle Times  article: “At age 80, Sylvia Byrne Pollack of Seattle will publish her first book of poetry.”

As my friends push toward 80, her age seems less surprising than it once may have. But even so, a noteworthy accomplishment.

Not that Pollack has been idle up to now. She earned university degrees in both zoology and developmental biology, then earned a master’s in psychology. Although she has retired from her career as a cancer researcher, she brings all these lenses to her poetry.

And more, of course. In these poems Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa gives up a few secrets and “Trellised tomatoes / splay…. / get drunk on their own sweet juices”; the poet ripens, and a persona named “the deaf woman” laments the Trump presidency. I got a little drunk on the poems with their exquisite detail and sonic pleasures. As Sharon Bryan promises on the book’s back cover:  These poems “dare us to be fully present in our lives.”

Island Time

Out on the island I know how things mesh,
how the tides wash and rinse kelp beds
every six hours, rising then falling, shifting
month by month so summer’s extremes
become the gentle sloshing of equinox.

On the island I know where to pick blackberries,
how to find the Good Cheer Thrift Store or a farm
with fresh eggs. I know which beach yields sand dollars,
where to dig clams, pick mussels. I collect
drift wood, boil crabs, compose a chowder.

Out here I’ve learned the patience of herons
studying light and shadow. They wait for
ripples, glints of light, stand rooted to one spot
only as long as the fishing is good.
They keep their own schedules.

From my cabin I look east at the hulk
of the mainland, glad to be where time
is elastic, stretches and snaps back—
longline trolling me through seasons
of decision and desire.

—Sylvia Byrne Pollack

I recorded this poem, too. And (if I got my technology right) you can listen to it below.

You can watch the book launch on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=493697958573100.

Read more about the poet in this Entropy review by Mary Ellen Talley: https://entropymag.org/risking-it-sylvia-pollack/

Carl Dennis, Earthborn

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EARTHBORN, Carl Dennis. Penguin Books, 2022, 128 pages, $20 paper, www.penquinrandomhouse.com.

A friend told me to please, please read this book. It is dedicated to my friend’s mentor and dear friend, the late Tony Hoagland (1953- 2018), and includes passages from his Sweet Ruin and a poem memorializing him. So, I found a copy on-line and I read the whole book this morning.

I should mention that my initial impression was that this poet was not my cup-of-tea. But I got up early today and drove one of my daughters to work, and for about 26 minutes (our entire drive), she recounted in excruciating detail how much the boys in her senior high school class hate the novels they are reading in English class. How they gripe constantly, tell her she’s stupid for choosing the books (she didn’t choose them), plagiarize their assignments from Spark Notes, etc. So. Even though Dennis’s poems didn’t seem — at first — what I wanted to read, I decided to set aside all pre-judgment and lose myself in the poems.

The magic worked. I ended up being engaged — even charmed. I found myself wanting to write a Bethany-Reid poem “in the style of Carl Dennis.”

Earthborn is brand new, published just last month, Carl Dennis’s 13th volume of poetry. I believe I read his 2001 Pulitzer-winning book, Practical Gods, but it’s been a long time since I sat down with his poems. Poetry Foundation helped educate me about Dennis’s philosophy and approach to poem-writing (and I recommend reading that, too), but — in my own words — each poem in Earthborn is like a thought-experiment. “Nothing is improved by being praised,” begins the first poem; another: “Once the seasons were gods…” Another addresses Socrates. The Puritans turn up, and Columbus. And Tony Hoagland. Not that any poem is the same as any other.

In the first poem, Dennis writes, “I want to be one of the witnesses of the familiar,” and that, as much as anything I read about him, helped me to understand his voice.

The opening of his poem, “Primitive,” offers an example of what I think I mean — a sort of address to a religious idea:

It wasn’t a conviction that life is holy
That kept me from drowning the spider I found
In the sink this morning, that caused me instead
To cover it with a cup, slide a postcard beneath it,
And carry it out to the patio. It was more
The thought that it seemed unfair to kill it…

I had a sense of him, picking up each idea of a poem and turning it, one way and then another, like a faceted stone. What if I hold it this way? What if I set it at this angle in the light?

Here’s one poem that got me thinking about how some novels are thought-experiments (maybe they all are) — what if the character made this choice…what if she made this other choice?

Art and Life

It’s no surprise that in fiction the central figures
Tend to learn more by the end than people
Commonly learn in the actual world,
Where many keep making the same mistakes.

Novelists start with their own experience,
Which includes going to bed convinced
That their current project is almost finished,
Only to find, in the candid light of morning,
That it still needs many more months of work.
What better proof that learning goes on
Even in sleep, that one’s sense of fitness
Grows in the night like corn or bamboo?

Is the newest version truer to life
Or simply more shapely, more charming?
Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
The hero before was recognizable,
A man, say, liable to fritter away his life
In random pastimes. But now he does more
To resist his temperament, so readers,
Instead of looking down from on high,
May be willing to stand in his shoes awhile.

As for the heroine, the revision suggests
She is still a woman who hides,
Beneath her apparent warmth, a seam of coldness.
But now the coldness conceals a wound
That makes trust a challenge.
Now she wants to know where her courage
Is supposed to come from
If she can’t find it when she looks within.

The more they learn, the truer they are in spirit
To the fact that every draft of the novel
Is another chapter in the single story
Slowly unfolding in which the author
Learns by trial and error what the work
Needs more of to be complete.

In the meantime, it’s clear that the hero’s remorse
Near the end of the manuscript for the grief
His want of direction has caused the heroine
Is more convincing than it’s ever been.
Instead of giving a speech that seems
Too polished to be spontaneous,
He seems to be groping for words, not sure
What he’ll say until he says it, and then
Not sure if he ought to be satisfied
Or open to one more try.

–Carl Dennis

When I Googled Dennis, I found a number of videos on-line, and poems at The New Yorker. I hope you’ll take a deeper look.

Naomi Shihab Nye, The Tiny Journalist

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THE TINY JOURNALIST: POEMS, Naomi Shihab Nye. BOA Editions, Ltd., 250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306, Rochester, NY 14607, 2019, 124 pages, $17 paper, www.boaeditions.org.

Naomi Shihab Nye is Palestinian-American and her father was a journalist all his life. The tiny journalist is a Facebook writer named Janna, a Palestinian girl who has been posting videos since the age of seven. The dedications, author’s note, and epigraphs in this book are an education on Israeli/Palestinian relations, Apartheid, and Palestinian suffering.

It Was or It Wasn’t

Arabic fairy tales begin this way,
so do Arabic days.
A pantry is empty
but Mama still produces a tray of tea and cookies
for the guest.
West is the still the way we stare—
knowing there’s blue space and free water
over there. There’s a Palestinian and a Jew
building a synagogue together in Arkansas.
They’re friends, with respect.
Actually our water
isn’t free either
nor are the fish my friends in Gaza
aren’t allowed to catch.
It was or it wasn’t a democracy,
a haven
for human beings,
but only some of them.
You can’t do that with people,
pretend they aren’t there.
It was or it wasn’t a crowd.
Diploma, marriage, legacy,
babies being born,
children being killed,
it was or it wasn’t going to work out.

These are not sophisticated, craft-conscious poems. They are like a voice, whispering in your ear. “If you live like a real human being— / that is the issue. Not winning and hunting others. / Not dominating. / Not sending their sewage their direction. / Did you know? Did you know they do this?” (from “Losing as Its Own Flower).

Advice

My friend, dying, said do the hard thing first.
Always do the hard thing and you will have a better day.
The second thing will seem less hard.

She didn’t tell me what to do when everything seems hard.

Rather than look for reviews to quote, or try to describe this collection, I would love to give you enough to reveal the many facets here. Probably not possible.

Grandfathers Say

Grandfathers say the garden is deep,
old roots twisted beyond our worry
or reach. Maybe our grief began there,
in the long history of human suffering,
where rain goes when it soaks out of sight.
Savory smoke from ancient fires
still lingers. At night you can smell it
in the stones of the walls.
When you awaken, voices
from inside your pillow
still holding you close.

The book ends with a short poem, “Tiny Journalist Blues”; the last lines, “Nothing big enough / but freedom.” Amen.

Read more and find additional links at https://www.boaeditions.org/products/the-tiny-journalist.

 

 

 

 

 

Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem

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POSTCOLONIAL LOVE POEM, Natalie Diaz. Graywolf Press, 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600, Minneapolis, MN 55401, 2020, 105 pages, $16.00 paper, www.graywolfpress.org.

In these astonishing poems and prose pieces, Natalie Diaz spins herself out of river water and dust. Reading this book, all the way through, this morning, taught me that I am going to have to find more ways to say “Amazed.” It’s a gift, but a living one like a rooster or a baby—or a knife to your throat. It wakes you up and makes you look at things you didn’t want to see, things you’ve studiously avoided.

Diaz has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Postcolonial Love Poem. Here’s a sample of the buzz from a 2020 review in The Guardian:

Natalie Diaz’s second poetry collection – up for this year’s Forward prize – opens with its title poem, in which past and present blur in an eternal conflict. “The war never ended and somehow begins again,” she declares. Diaz, a US-based poet and MacArthur “genius grant” winner, identifies as queer, Mojave, Latinx, and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian tribe. In the US, she is, as the minotaur in her poem “I, Minotaur” suggests, “citizen of what savages” her. To be savaged is to be brutalised by her nation, but also lurking beneath the verb is the savage, a slur for indigenous people. —Emily Peréz

Diaz is “a language activist” and dusts the English of her poems with Spanish and Mojave words. This book is a protest poem—see “The First Water Is the Body”—and it’s a celebration and a lament of place and family and identity, also sex and basketball. It blows my mind.

Here’s the title poem:

Postcolonial Love Poem

I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite,
can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this
when the war ended. The war ended
depending on which war you mean: those we started,
before those, millennia ago and onward,
those which started me, which I lost and won—
these ever-blooming wounds.
I was built by wage. So I wage love and worse—
always another campaign to march across
a desert night for the cannon flash of your pale skin
settling in a silver lagoon of smoke at your breast.
I dismount my dark horse, bend to you there, deliver you
the hard pull of all my thirsts—
I learned Drink in a country of drought.
We pleasure to hurt, leave marks
the size of stones—each a cabochon polished
by our mouths. I, your lapidary, your lapidary wheel
turning—green mottled red—
the jaspers of our desires.
There are wildflowers in my desert
which take up to twenty years to bloom.
The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand
until a flash flood bolts the arroyo, lifting them
in its copper current, opens them with memory—
they remember what their god whispered
into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life.
Where your hands have been are diamonds
on my shoulders, down my back, thighs—
I am your culebra.
I am in the dirt for you.
Your hips are quartz-light and dangerous,
two rose-horned rams ascending a soft desert wash
before the November sky untethers a hundred-year flood—
the desert returned suddenly to its ancient sea.
Arise the wild heliotrope, scorpion weed,
blue phacelia which hold purple the way a throat can hold
the shape of any great hand—
Great hands is what she called mine.
The rain will eventually come, or not.
Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds—
the war never ended and somehow begins again.

—Natalie Diaz

Diaz’s notes and epigraphs are an education in themselves, by the way. And one of the epigraphs in this book is from Hortense Spillers, someone I read in graduate school and when I was writing my dissertation on American (literary) illegitimacy:

“My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.”

–Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”

Natalie Diaz is needed in just that essential and gut-wrenching way. She should be required reading.

You can read more by clicking her name at the top, or going to Academy of American Poets.