Two Poems by Oriana Ivy

ANIMULA

What do you look like, my soul? 

Do you have big eyes and small breasts?

Arms that stretch across continents,

and a fish’s tail? All the aquamarines

and indigos of ocean,

and the approaching night —

between me and me, a streaming veil.

A childless woman is always a virgin,

weaving a shroud, pregnant with herself.

When did you teach me to dress in the wind?

To carry speech like loose change?

You made my life a foreign language,

homeless without endearments.

Death will come to me in Spanish,

La Muerte with its music, 

its slow kiss of vowels —

long returns of the Baltic,

white dunes where my life began — 

where I swam in your cold love

like the tears of the bronze mermaid

who remembers her lost name.

I cannot bear to think of my face

becoming ashes, but you say you are 

most beautiful just before

vanishing. Don’t drown,

you whisper, and one blue 

eve you’ll see me flame 

then go out like the sun.

But having been.

LISTENING TO GABRIELA READ IN SPANISH

La noche es infinita, she begins.

What is born in her mouth

slides out slippery like moonlight.

I pour infinity

into my native tongue,

let it create another world:

The night is not finished.

The night is not finished, it waits

behind the unfinished trees.

It makes the dogs bark,

makes coyotes laugh. What

do they hear that we cannot hear?

Infinidad, she says because

we’re infinite, but we are not

finished: the Universe is mostly

dark laced with dark,

pierced by the cry of the beginning.
There’s a space like a lover

that opens only once. Gabriela

waits, a lily burns in her hand.

What will you say to her?

Can you utter such a total Yes?

Do not ask if the angel

is real. Who wants a heaven

that is always day? We need

la noche, our native land,

black leche of the soul,

white of stars.

Oriana Ivy was born in Poland, and came to this country when she was 17.  Her poems, essays, book reviews, and translations include Poetry, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, Nimrod, Spoon River Review, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, and many others. She’s the prize winning author of the chapbooks April Snow (Finishing Line Press) and From a New World (Paper Nautilus), and has a new one, How to Jump from a Moving Train, forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. A former journalist and community college instructor, she leads the online Poetry Salon and writes a poetry-and-culture blog.

Excerpt from Ærotomania by Adeena Karasick

we are “in harmony with our [prospective] annihilation”[i]

& asks you please put on your masque before debording[ii]

And as we rub shoulders

with abundance

between what is seen an unseen; heard between scenes, screens, schemes, screams

cockpits, lifts, radios, earbuds

as both a site of public and private space, the airplane celebrates itself

as an ever-shifting site of escape and refuge

reminding us how escape

is always entry into new dimensions –

This is particularly underscored in the fact that the gematria for the Hebrew word for airplane, “matos” also relates to the word for captive (ASIR)

and to flee (ARAH)

So not only at the nexus

of escape and refuge but

of concealment and exposure

  all servile, surveilled

a     salient      valence

of secrets swerves veils

the airplane functions

as a FOULCAULDIAN Panopticon

with a concerted distribution

of bodies, lights, gazes

a privileged place

where one is “able to judge at a glance

without anything being concealed from [it]

how the entire establishment is functioning”

---

i. For according to Batailles, “extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror”. See both
     Visions of Excess and Story of the Eye.

ii. In French, déborder means excess, exuberance, profusion, overflow; pleine à déborder: full to overflowing

Celebrating the 106^th year anniversary of the first commercial flight, Ærotomania

investigates how the airplane as an erotic theater, a social text of secret motives, is structured like a language. Like the cubism of Picasso and Braque or Gertrude Stein’s “studies in description”, through “a system to pointing” calls attention to the process of recognizing an object and to the role of language in that process. Between leisure, labor, utility and entertainment, Ærotomania exposes how the airplane, like language is neo-formally acculturating and reshaping telos, housing the flow of power and capital within it.




Adeena Karasick is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “one long dithyramb of desire, a seven-veiled dance of seduction that celebrates the tangles, convolutions, and ecstacies of unbridled sexuality… demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London. She teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, 2018 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking and 2018 winner of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University. 

REBRANDING DEMOCRACY by Bola Opaleke

I was born into the arms of the white sun

I live just to praise its beauty.

Spurred by the golden spires

made to appease the falling magma

in my name, I turn & shine like a thousand stars.

Though there’s fire underneath my skin

& the songs of life would not cease to pull

me closer to dances that would not embrace my feet.

Bones of boys & girls who sprinkled blood

upon the language they cannot speak

become ordinary dust in my hands,

Omoye called out their names but the smoke

from my eyes have seen how quickly

names get burnt. We bury our dead inside

the stomach of the earth, yet in praying

for them we look up to the skies.

I run from east to west, like the pendulum,

gathering the tears of those who laughed

the first time I cried in the arms of the white sun

–as a king who will never ride a white horse.

When my new parents gave me alaari with which

to chase after Omoye I asked, confused, if they did not know

that Omoye has already walked naked to the marketsquare?

*alaari   a rich, handwoven cloth, brightly colored (Yoruba, Nigeria).

Bola Opaleke is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. He is an emerging poet in that, in spite of being 46 years old, he has had no book of poetry professionally/traditionally published. His poems, though, have appeared or forthcoming in a few Journals like Glass, Frontier Poetry, Rising Phoenix Review, Writers Resist, Rattle, CBC Books, Cleaver, One, The Nottingham Review, The Puritan, The Literary Review of Canada, Sierra Nevada Review, Dissident Voice, Poetry Quarterly, The Indianapolis Review, Canadian Literature, Empty Mirror, Poetry Pacific, Drunk Monkeys, Temz Review, The Pangolin Review, and others. He holds a degree in City Planning and lives in Winnipeg MB. bolaopaleke.com

The Way a Door Waits to be Opened: In Conversation with John Guzlowski

DCW: I don’t know if you have ever seen Nardwuar’s interviews, but he always leads with this question, which I think is an important one: Who are you?

JG: Who am I?  That’s an impossible question to answer. 

Let me explain what I can’t explain: I did my dissertation on the sense of the self in contemporary American literature.  The focus was on the postmodern notion that there is no definable self.  I can not explain who I am nor can I explain who you are.  All I can give you is a sense of my self that is a fiction I’ve created or agreed to, or in part created and agreed to. Likewise, I can’t tell you who you are.  You are a fiction I’ve created based on the bits and pieces of you I know. 

So who am I? 

I’m a 71-year old guy with bad knees, vertigo, eyes that go in and out of focus, polyps in my left nostril, arthritis in my elbows, two broken feet that never heeled properly.

I’m also a writer who writes poems, novels, and essays about stuff that has nothing to do with all that. 

I write about snow and sparrows, the world in the morning, the world at night, the friends who are still here and wondering where I’ve gone to, and the friends who are waiting in their graves for my memories to give them some breath.

I write about God and aging, my wife and my family, the way a door closes and the way a door waits to be opened.  

I write a lot about my mom and dad, the lives they had after they left the concentration camps.

I write about standing at a bus stop in Chicago in the pearly gray rain waiting for a passing crucifixion just the way I did when I was a kid 50 years ago.

So who else am I?

I’m also still what I once was: a kid born in a refugee camp after WWII, growing up in a Polack neighborhood in Chicago, listening to my mother tell me how she saw her mother raped and killed by the Germans, dreaming of Walt Whitman and Dostoevsky, listening to my father telling me about how he watched German soldiers ripping the breasts off women with their bayonets, reading everything there was, going to schools and colleges and failing until I didn’t, dreaming with Kerouac on the roads I took, finding friends and losing friends, teaching and marrying and having a family like no family I had ever had, and growing and growing and growing.

And still that’s not who I am.  It’s just a story I tell my self.

Just yesterday, a friend I had in 6^th grade got in touch with me on Facebook.  I haven’t spoken or written to this guy in like 60 years.  I asked him who I was in 6^th grade.  He wrote back, “You were a tall, skinny, bad boy.” 

I was surprised.  I think he had me confused with someone else.  Or not.

DCW: You taught at the collegiate level for a few years. I think I remember you mentioning that at times you used to commute by plane. Can you tell us how teaching has informed you as a human being? What about your craft? How has teaching informed your writing, or vice versa?

JG: I started teaching in a university as a grad student in 1973 and finished as a full professor in 2013.  40 years.  How did that inform me as human being?  I think the most profound influence was on how I interact with people.  I was a shy kid.  I didn’t like to talk, didn’t like to put myself forward.  Part of this I think came from being an alien, a foreigner, a person who wasn’t from around here.   I was the outsider, I couldn’t speak English, didn’t know shit from Shinola when it came to being an American, didn’t know about pilgrims or Independence Day or Bing Crosby or Aunt Jemima.  And my parents were even worse.  The way I reacted to all of this was to pull back, hold back.  I didn’t like to talk to people, didn’t like to tell them what I was thinking or what the weather was like or what time it was because if I did they might recognize how alien I really was.

Somehow I found myself teaching, and teaching forced me to talk and to tell people what I thought I was thinking.  Just like this.  Without all those years of teaching what I would be writing right now wouldn’t be here and you wouldn’t be reading it.  I wouldn’t even know who you were or who the fuck I was.

Ditto with the craft.  Spending 40 years reading what writers wrote opened me to the possibility I could put words down on a paper that would somehow explain all the stuff I couldn’t explain.  The great writers I was reading always seemed to know what was going on in the world they were turning around and around in.  And I wanted to be that kind of person too.  Making sense for a moment of everything.

DCW: How important is travel to a writer, poet, artist? How has travel helped to shape your point of view?

JG: Travel – if you’re paying attention while you’re doing it – will teach you one of the most important lessons you can learn as a writer.  You are a stranger, and you are not a stranger.  You’re in the story you are living, and you are not in the story you are living.  When I travel, I am always looking for what I don’t know, have never experienced, but what I always realize is that what I don’t know is in fact part of what I know. 

I think a lot of this in some way reaches back to where I came from.  I wasn’t born here.  I was born in a refugee camp in a country (Germany) where my parents had been enslaved in concentration camps because they were considered subhuman.  I was a stranger in Germany, and a stranger here in the US.  Traveling now – and I travel a lot – reminds me I’m a stranger.

How does this impact my writing?  If I didn’t feel like a stranger, I probably would never write, probably I wouldn’t see the point of writing.  I would just assume that my views and ideas, my vision, was just like the vision everyone else has; and then what would be the point of writing it down. 

DCW: Do you believe in inspiration? What keeps you coming back to the work?

JG: I absolutely believe in inspiration, the muse that speaks to me.  When I first started writing, I thought the idea of a muse was just a gag, some bullshit left over from the Greeks.  But then I met a terrific poet named Gray Jacobik who said, “Listen to your muse.”  And I thought she was kidding me too, but she wasn’t.  She believed all writers and artists have a muse, someone who speaks to them. 

I finally came to believe it after that.  What I noticed was that thoughts and words were always popping into my head, and I didn’t know where they were coming from, but there they were, and I had to write them down immediately because the muse wasn’t going to whisper twice what she whispered once. 

Is the muse real?  I don’t know, but what I do know is that I have to listen to this voice and write down everything that it says to me because some of this stuff is really really good.

By the way, I wrote a poem of advice to a creative writing class once and it touches on the idea of muses, and here’s the last stanza:

Fourth, find a muse.  I’m not kidding.  Mine is a mother

of two who died in the snow outside of Stalingrad,

shot in the forehead by a German foot soldier

from a little town in Bavaria.  She comes to me

when I’m busy grading papers or talking with friends

and she begs me to remember her children, all the children.

What will this muse do for you?  Ask her, she’ll tell you.

DCW: Who were some of your favorite writers to teach? Who are some of your favorite writers to read? Why?

JG: My favorite writers to teach are pretty much my favorite writers to read. 

My favorite poets are: Whitman, Dickinson, Robert Frost, Tadeus Rozewicz, Milosz, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot, Ai, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Donald Hall, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

My favorite prose writers are: Toni Morrison, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Dostoevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Kerouac, Emerson, and Paul Theroux.

Why do I like them?

I like serious, gloomy writers.  I like writers who talk about everyday things too, tools and hammers, car parts, branches and limbs of trees, the way a head turns when a person feels too much sun on the back of his neck. 

When I was teaching creative writing, I always was telling students to make sure their writing had everyday things in them, things like hands and arms, feet and lips in them.  Someone recently asked me what good writing was and what good writing wasn’t.  There’s a long answer and a short answer.  The long answer involves criteria and personal biography, the short answer involves a simple statement.  Here’s the short answer.  What I feel is “good” is what touches me.  All the writers I mentioned above touched me, shaped me, mothered and fathered me. 

Here’s a poem I wrote about reading that tries to get to the heart of this:

What Reading Means to Me

Sometimes, you’ll be sitting in a car

Reading a novel you’ve read before

Waiting for your wife or husband

To get done with the shopping

And you come to a part

About something so close

To you that you feel the writer –

Even if she’s making it up –

Must have in some past life

Lived that moment you lived

In some life, lived a pain

So hard you want to take

The writer’s hand and hold it

Against your own chest

And say nothing.

DCW: We’ve chatted about music a bit. Why do you think music is such a powerful avenue for self-expression? Do you see a relationship between poetry and music? What do they do for each other?

JG: I tend not to draw lines between the different types of art.  Music, poetry, prose, art, photography, dancing, movies, theater?  All of them wash over me and clean me and shake and spruce me up and get me moving toward the next moment and the next word.  It’s always been this way for me since I was a kid.  One moment I would be reading a Spiderman comic and the next minute I would be reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and the next minute I would be listening to Son House sing Dead Letter Blues and the next minute I would be humming the Midnight Sonata and staring at a painting by Salvador Dali or Monet.

I love to sing and I love to shout out my poems and I love to watch a movie or a TV show that is like nothing else I’ve ever seen. 

But I know that not everything feels this way, and when I think about the power of music I think a lot of that power comes because music is the first art form we’re introduced to.  Before a kid reads a book or watches a TV show or anything, he’s probably listened to his mother sing a lullaby, and he’s heard his dad singing “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” or “Heartbreak Hotel.”  And the kid will carry this music and this memory through his life, and he’ll listen to every single song to see if it evokes the memory of his mom singing a song about a deep well and the little girl peering into it.  And even when he’s on his deathbed the kid will be thinking of that song, remembering it like it’s the passageway to heaven and soon he’ll be hearing her sing it again.

DCW: What does the writing process look like for you? Where does a poem “begin”? How do you know when a poem is “finished”?

JG: The writing process pretty much looks the same all the time.  I hear a phrase in my head, a combination of a few words or phrases, and I like the sound or the image or the thought, and I write it down.  Sometimes, if I’m lucky, as soon as I start writing the phrase I heard in my head, it will lead me to another phrase and another phrase and another phrase.  I don’t try to force it.  I just try to let the words lead me to where they want me to go. 

If I’m lucky, I’m finally sitting there at my desk looking at about a dozen lines, or 20 lines, and I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got.

What follows is generally a slower process of revision and playing with the poem.  When I was teaching creative writing, I used to tell students that editing wasn’t editing, it was really experimenting.  When you make a change to a poem, you’re experimenting with it, playing with it, trying to see what else you can do.  Sometimes this process takes a couple days, sometimes longer. 

How do I know I’m finished?  When the poem sounds right.  When I can read the poem out loud and it feels fluid and like it came from me immediately without hesitation or any kind of editing, that’s when I know it’s finished. 

DCW: Thank you for your time, John. I truly appreciate it. Is there anything else you would like the people to know?

JG: The only other thing I want to tell people is that they shouldn’t get discouraged when their poems don’t seem to work or they can’t find an audience.  Even if you are the only one reading your poems, they are still working, still doing their job on you the writer, opening you up to what’s inside you in a way that will make you happier and happier with your creativity as the years go on.

Remember that always, and buy one of my books.  Thank you.

John Guzlowski's writing appears in Rattle, North American Review, and other journals.  Echoes of Tattered Tongues, his memoir about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany, won the Benjamin Franklin Poetry Award and the Eric Hoffer/Montaigne Award.  He is the author of three novels and a columnist for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy.

Two Poems by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

To The Graduates

One’s retired already

into the police. Scratching down

what you have and have not done

according to the called-in debris

washed ashore with every

panting broadcast.

If I’m feeling fucked with

I guess that’s because I set aside

big cuts of my shadow

to trick myself into thinking those bad thoughts

I’m having don’t fit inside a body.

It would be pretty funny if it didn’t inspire

such doom.

Not that you slipped free of your shadow, either.

But enough about us.

I reckon the others are working through

a shed of phantoms—yet they rise,

catch their trains, sleep late in falling snow.

Look at me, surrounded by rocks and trash

just begging to be flung into traffic.

Day After the Election Poem

The moon’s biggest at

dusk these days, lured up

through wet smoke

from the Catalinas. I can

hear some coyotes tonight.

They like to leap the so-called walls.

Night birds sounding out against

a rattled truck’s alarm in the grocery store lot.

These sounds all singing together, howling out—crying

reduced to talking, talk spun into a bad dream.

Muttering graveled into what is called thinking.

I would like to buy a hatchet. I would

like to carry it home on my shoulder.

Follow my shadow home

But those days are over.

What’s changed, you ask from the future?

Well, someone had drawn a swastika on the door

of the toilet stall long before the election.

Carved in, perhaps, with a car key or the nubbed

point of a pen in the hot morning. Up, then out.

Over, then down. & so on.

Nobody’s written anything next to it yet.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson wrote a book called Meadow Slasher (Black Ocean 2017). He lives in Seattle.