inquire

A Conversation: Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, Daneen Wardrop, H. L. Hix

TRIO: Planet Parable, Run: Victoria Woodhall – A Verse History, Endless Body Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop (Etruscan Press, 2021).

HH: In the “Trialogue” at the end of Trio, responding to a question about publishing three books together in one volume, Karen says she feels that “everything I say is overheard in a much more intimate, shared space.”  That observation reminds me how radically the conditions of the experience of a poem affect the experience: it’s a very different experience to read a poem to oneself in privacy than to hear a poem read aloud to an audience gathered at a bookstore for a reading, and it would be another very different experience to overhear one person reading a poem to another. 

Because those words, “overheard,” “intimate,” “shared,” do apply to my experience as a reader of this volume, I wonder if, rather than my posing a question, our lingering over those words offers a transition from the conversation that is Trio into this conversation.

KD: Hello, everyone! Harvey, thanks for your opening comment. Perhaps, in being called to respond to my own words, I can start us off. As I sit here in my tiny office, in this tiny house, in the tiny state of Rhode Island, I am surrounded by bookshelves that were knocked together with pinewood by my husband when we moved in. When I run my eyes over the thin and thick spines of my books, I swear I can hear the spectrum of voices streaming out, the same way I could tune from station to station on my grandmother’s old analog radio on the nights I would sleep over, lying there in the dark in her spare room after she had washed up dinner and turned out the lights. The voices might come from anywhere, from down the road in Providence or even from Boston, and if the weather was right I could pull in sound from very far away, faint but real, a human voice traveling through the air to me as I struggled to stay awake and listen, warm under blankets sweet with my grandmother’s perfume.

This is what I think about when I look at my shelves of poetry books. They are all speaking at once in every wavelength. To hear any single voice, I need to scale space and create an intimacy that allows listening: I pull out one book and open it. What Etruscan has done with Trio is scale an intimate space that includes three voices. It’s like a breakout room. We can overhear ourselves and one another very well in this shared space as our books reflect and absorb echoes, and we can invite others to enter and hear the reverb.

HH: I can see and hear and smell those rooms, the pine-board bookshelves, the grandma-scented blankets.  Your memories evoke memories of my own, as they must for Diane and Daneen as well.  I’ve never been to either of the rooms you describe here, but I feel now as though I have been, as though they are part of my experience, too.

It’s beautiful how fluidly it happens that literal rooms that host literal listening become figurative rooms for figurative listening.  I’m thinking of the rooms and the listenings in the poems of Trio.  The speaker in Karen’s “This Noon,” watching a spider on the window screen and listening to “a dove out there, cooing, / still calling from somewhere.”  Diane’s Victoria, listening to the room and the people in it, to hear the voices of Odessa and Delia.  The speaker and LiLi at the dinner table in Daneen’s “Caesura,” listening as “Paper wind ruffles / paper sheaves.”

Listenings that create intimacy?  Listenings that are intimacy?

DW:  Oh my gosh, we’re talking about sounds in a room!  What a hallowed subject, given the autonomy—and the history—of that poetic room.  Those sounds depend on the acoustics of the room, too, the ways each poet sets up her room/poem/stanza, with its own set of shapes and baffles to enhance the sound.  Karen and Diane use combinations of dashes and Rukeyser-like punctuation, as in the colon, (among many other punctuation effects) to create certain acoustics and bring out their music—as a recording studio engineer will nail egg cartons to the walls in some areas to absorb certain frequencies but leave other more bald sonic textures in the room to let other sounds rip.  Karen’s sound is so big she even writes, “If the Sound Is Too Big for the House . . . Rip the Roof Off!”  (Karen deals in such elemental forces—marl, clouds, water, that she can hazard such powerful sound effects.) In some poems Diane actually times her lines—as for instance in a sequence that ticks through hours, starting with Victoria Woodhull (who ran for president) and ends up several hours later with Shirley Chisholm!  What a gorgeous way to set up the click track to create the rhythm in that room!   (In addition Diane will at times square a colon so that it exists as a kind of multiple of itself—and presents a risky and beautiful feed-back effect.)  

DR: I have said this elsewhere: All day I incubate sounds to be newly carnated. This is not entirely true: It is rare that I get to do this all day! But it seems honest to think of poems as incubations of sounds that birth and enliven both writer and reader. The room I read and write in is small too, so I thrill at the title of Karen’s poem, which Daneen had mentioned, “If the Sound is Too Big for This House We Can Blow the Roof Out.” In the room where I read and write, I sit next to a wall of family photographs: of children and grandchildren, ancestors and ultrasound profiles. To the left of my desk is a framed Xeroxed watercolor by Elizabeth Bishop. It features a calm domestic scene from an orange-brown room: a rectangular table with a plaid tablecloth and a pot of pink blossoms, from whose small mouths pour forth energies of sound and song. I think of the whole photo grouping as a wall of tongues. Can you hear their voices? They sound like wind. // They line up at the edge of heaven: These are the tones of Karen piping in. Then in chimes Daneen, tuning to sound-slice and sound-slice. // This is how we stand, she reminds: in a room together, the stanza’s stopping place. That chamber. In much the same way that the finch in one of Daneen’s poems chooses his location for the acoustics, we three, Karen, Daneen, and I live in a shared sound-surround. The fact that we ended up choosing this chamber after each individual book was already fully composed serves only to underscore how musically well our clocks and clouds, our marl and thoughts line up.

HH: A “shared sound-surround,” yes.  An attentive and intentional receptivity.  It’s as if the more enclosed the space is, the more open it is to what originates outside it.  The room from Karen’s childhood, alive with voices from Providence and Boston; the too-small house with its roof blown off (which recalls Emily Dickinson’s feeling “as if the top of my head were taken off”) and “this scrap of scorched page whirling up” out of it; and so on.  The rooms are often small, as Karen and Diane note that their studies are, but this openness/porousness makes them also huge, infinitely capacious.  Voices fill them, from the books crammed onto the pinewood shelves, from the pink blossoms in the reproduced Bishop painting (which recall the marguerites embroidered on the doily in “The Filling Station”).  And the voices are shaped, then, enhanced, as Daneen describes.

These room-poems are open to elemental forces (they can, as Karen sings, “pull from some place I can barely imagine / a muscular force that could split rock”); they are open to human history (Diane’s Victoria hearing in her own name the “rights / of the lower million against the upper ten”); they are open to the physical world (as in the very first words of the very first poem of Daneen’s book, “Draw into your room the birds curled // by a finger, draw to your chest the mountains between slats of blinds”).

The smallest room, the most wide-open space?

KD: Harvey, this last question of yours tumbling out there in the air makes me think about constraints, which makes me think about form, which is my most favorite subject. It’s a beautiful conundrum that the constraints of form in poetry make it possible to create something much larger than a small room – a defined space that gets really big on the inside. Trio is like a frame that defines a space with three books, each one of which contains multiple interior windows that open deeper. The intricate patterning of individual poems draws you further inside, where you see more form unfolding. It’s very fractal. I wonder if the impulse the three of us had at the very start of the project to emphasize pattern and use centos to add dimension was a response to the layers we saw happening (The lake says, how / loosefitting do you want your sentences?). There is so much interesting form in this volume, much of it invented or wildly hijacked. Diane’s book is a master class in playful formal experiment from beginning to end, and the ecosystem of Daneen’s book unfurls so organically that you halfway expect it to leaf out. The poems turn the inside into the outside and escape!

Diane, I would love to hear about the decisions you made about form. You speak in lists, letters, telegrams, crossouts, a playscript, the tolling of a clock tower, a sort of abecedarian ouija board language, not to mention regular couplets, triplets, and some poem shapes I don’t even know the names of. Do you think of form as a constraint that helps you write? Or would you say that differently?

DR: To answer this I’ll take a little detour. Lately I’ve been writing exclusively (obsessively) American sonnets. Into one sonnet I wrote this particular line: “The sonnet’s a prison I lock myself in / so I can find new ways to break free.” Again, this brings us back to the image of the small room as the most wide open space. It is bigger than Idaho itself! When I think of this room, I think of the American illusionist David Blaine dangling over the Thames in his plexiglass case. I might just as easily substitute “form” for “sonnet.” Form gives us ways to break free as we dangle over a river; form lets us effectively “juggle orange balls’” in the snow, couplet by couplet, as in Karen’s poem “I Hear the Many.”  Writing American history as verse was challenging. I knew I needed to ask forms to help me winnow decades of characters, events, and struggles into shapes that could work. Daneen’s sonnet “Gift” gives us some beautiful metaphors for thinking about form: “a butterfly house . . . / / clapped-closed and no stopping.” The box comes without instructions./This is not sadness, Daneen’s poem reminds.Form—the box of whatever proportions—is a bouncy house, is the bomb, is the joy. It’s a fear to be entered. Daneen, we want to hear from you on this! 

HH: By way of continuity as we listen for Daneen’s thoughts on this, I would only observe the multiple “levels” on which the form you’re describing, the defined space that is big on the inside, occurs in the book.  As noted already, it is happening at the level of individual poems, and at the level of the whole, the book of books.  It strikes me that it also occurs even within poems, as for example in the periodic form of that totally ordinary and totally beautiful and poetic form, the list.  Karen’s “as the story falls out / onto her tongue // in honeysuckle, / aster, bittersweet, rue.”  Diane’s “On the edges of sight / I see objects: eggs, flasks, / large bottles, lorgnettes / with metal frames”….  Daneen’s “stiffened hem / of the sheet, / dried star of spittle, pink Rx.”  To give only one example from each collection, and only one kind of form-within-form.

DW:  I’m drawn to the image of turning inside out and then back again.  As the four of us “talk,” I also experience, with you, that sense of compression and release.  And I love the bouncy house!  (Perhaps before every big decision, a person might choose to live in that bouncy house for a while, to stay altogether in the moment in order to keep balance.  In other words, we might make choices with a lived sense of balance!  We could all read a poem before we go vote!)  

Thanks, Diane, for bringing up sonnets.  Maybe Wordsworth’s sonnet, “Nuns Fret Not,” could be noted here, especially when paired with what you said, Karen, about “constraint.”  Wordsworth wanted a “narrow room” for his lines.  So here we’re back to that primary, tiny room, and Wordsworth is with us—!—saying that “in truth the prison is not a prison.”  Because it’s there that we get to hear melodies.  

If I may, I’d like to return to your idea, Karen, about the ecosystem of a poem—something I’ve been pondering, too, as maybe others have, given the urgency of thinking in ecosystems as a way to restore our globe.  It strikes me that both of you, Diane, and Karen, use layerings and forms to grow ecosystems that sustain your worlds.  Diane, I read your book as a complex living construction of politics, outre rituals, family interactions, and more.  Karen, your book seems to me to work in a complex layering of earth and water interleaved with human agency as well as natural agency, including spiritual conversations.  You both include spiritual conversations.  You both tend to your poems, keeping them viable and interacting.  Do you think of the parts of a poem as systems organic to the whole?  How do you deliver such multiplicity and complex interactions?   

HH: As a way to second Daneen’s questions, I merely add here a favorite moment or three from spiritual conversations in these books.  (As this spiritual conversation, ours at this moment, continues.)  From Karen’s “Digression Before a Prayer,” the digression’s culmination: “When it turns and stings me, yes, / the sudden venomous self, I might curse you / or the sky or history. Or suffer, then confess.”  From Diane’s “Demosthenes’ Auguries,” the P.S. that Victoria’s spirit guide adds to his initial message to her: “For debate practice: / chant speeches while running or short of breath. // Until your full readiness, / shave half your head—so you dare not enter the polis.”  And from Daneen’s “Counterpoint,” this recognition in lieu of a way to thank birds for teaching humans music, “Robins // feed morning to a pinking sky—my / vertebrae, each, // tuning to sound-slice and sound-slice.”

DR: I think of Karen’s prose-poem “I Saw Egrets Flying” as one which enters and enacts, and then proceeds to explode—with the poem’s own freedom and within the poem’s reasonable bounds—its own system. I am struck by its honest conversation with itself, its antennae waving around trying not to tie “Egrets Flying” inside too tight a hem. The poem wonders “what the point is of keeping a record. . . . Everything seemed impossibly complex, impossibly cute, or impossibly misquoted.” This sums up the poet’s dilemma in so many ways. The 21^st-century globe is precisely these things. And less. And more. So what does the poet do? Well we get cues from Daneen’s poem “Body worlds”: “the holding simply part of a day slapping by.” What is there to do but tend and hold the world through the bones of poetry. One poem at a time may help restore the globe. Because: music. Because: the tick of Victoria Woodhull’s clock. Because. Struggling. Joy. Because, as Daneen reminds, we must “entice / space with more loquats.” I could do nothing but say that sentence all day, and doing so, suggest into being its system.

[A note to the reader: The four-way conversation had reached this point when Lian Wardrop, Daneen’s daughter, on 17 February 2021, wrote with the grievous news that Daneen was in the hospital with the brain cancer from which, on 8 April, she died.  The other three participants in the conversation decided to suspend the conversation at that time.  We return to it now, in mid-June, hoping that in extending the conversation we may participate in honoring Daneen’s life and work.]

KD: Thank you, Harvey, for your transition note and for the opportunity to return to our conversation after the shock of losing Daneen so suddenly. Just this week (mid-June 2021), Diane and I reserved time to read Daneen’s Endless Body to each other. We spoke the book over the phone, our voices warm in each other’s ears, personal and intimate and all sound, intentionally avoiding the disembodied, distracting talking-head self-consciousness of zoom. Daneen was with us, between the lines, between the words, between the letters, her body-mind-soul-spirit truly endless but also ever-present in the way all poets are ever-present whenever their poems are read aloud. Because so much of Endless Body calls up the human experience of attachment and loss, it’s impossible to read it now without thinking about her departure from the ones who loved her most. Her book is a piercing reminder not only of our ephemerality but of the indelible marks we leave on one another. As we head toward Trio’s publication date in July, I recognize the gift of her mark on me and feel very conscious of this extra psychic load. How to carry the book for her is something I think about every day.

DR: Yes, I am so grateful to resume our conversation, difficult though it is without Daneen. So, I’ll try to tell a little story. The other day Karen and I read aloud to each other over the phone all of Endless Body, she and Itaking turns, poem by poem. On this particular Wednesday in June, I had just received my box of 25 author copies of Trio. The title of the first poem by Daneen I was to read was “Gift,” the first line of it: “A mix-up—the package arriving two weeks after she was.” And a few lines later: “The box came without instructions. / This is not sadness. I come in and out of the blunt.” Of course, I carry a terrible sadness, sharing this anecdote, even as Daneen’s presence | voice | endlessness knows to “tilt and fly without stopping—” like the butterflies this poem is ostensibly about. I am still processing the sudden loss of this glorious butterfly house of a person: our cherished Trio partner. I believe fully that Daneen’s poems will show us how to proceed. I thank the poetry heavens that Karen, Daneen and I get to continue to sing together, though in this more attenuated way.   

KD: Something that really struck me, Diane, was that day in March when we met virtually with Phil Brady, Bill Schneider, and Pamela Turchin from Etruscan Press. I can still picture all five of us in separate zoom squares but with the same lost expressions, the incomprehensibility of what Daneen was going through and how that could be. We had been so thoroughly in the same headspace with her for months, making Trio – the word “coterminous” occurs to me, where it is hard to tell where one mind ends and the next begins. The work of poetry publishing is a labor of love, after all, so maybe it is no surprise that we all seemed to be facing the loss of a beloved. I think I had been rendered speechless. Being together on that day, even virtually, and hearing you all put words to the reality of it helped me so much in feeling less alone in my grieving. Did you have any moments like this?

DR: Karen, I absolutely have moments like this. The sadness of losing Daneen so suddenly is beyond expression. Being together with the other Etruscans virtually helped us all grieve and bear each other up. What I most want to hold on to from your above musings is this: “it is hard to tell where one mind ends and the next begins.” I absolutely believe that you, Daneen and I are still of one mind. Our book serves as a nonstop reminder of this. I guess I believe that death does not destroy consciousness, the very stuff it seems to be made of. Daneen’s mind is–well, how can I improve on her words?–an endless body. 

KD: The story of Trio changed into a story none of us saw coming. Somehow, somehow… I want to be able to tell that story to readers as we put the book into their hands this summer. Early in Endless Body, Daneen ends her poem “Stir the Lake” with these lines: “The darkness—a liquid you can wash your body with— / benevolent as a thing / given with no forethought—” (the dash as her pointer and no ending period, of course). Does this image seem like a key to you?

DR: Yes, you have plucked an ideal image from that beautiful poem, including your remark on the limitless dash! So much of that poem is about crisscrossing time zones and blotting out boundaries: the key line about “mother in the branches,” the image of the nephew trying to figure out how to feed his virtual kittens while “mush[ing] around in the snow,” not to mention the line about Thomas Merton rubbing the leg of the poem’s speaker. And, of course, in part two of that poem, these lines reverberate with an instruction and a reminder very well suited for the two of us: “Point a body at between. // She overcame her departure time.”

HH: What a loving way to experience Endless Body, by reading the poems to one another, hearing Daneen’s voice in your own.  I’m struck by the words you’ve put together since our resuming the conversation (“body-mind-soul-spirit,” “presence | voice | endlessness”).  We receive from the language a great many words that gesture toward this terrible, beautiful fact about our human experience: that the living die and that the dead live.  The individual words gesture toward the fact but no one of them captures it, so we string them together, and combine them into poems.

Continuing your thought about how the limitless dash in Daneen’s poem illustrates this fact, I want to associate it with Daneen’s very first reply in the “Trialogue” conversation at the end of Trio.  It is as if she anticipates this moment, recognizing that the three collections share a preoccupation with this mystery.  “We all seem to be attracted to raw, material energies — the elements, electricity, water waves — and at the same time to spirit guides, mediums, and other odd gods. Some days it feels like a kind of spirituality made of the material realm.”

It makes me wonder whether, in your experience of reading Daneen’s book to one another, or in the experience of receiving the physical books, you heard any additional moments of harmony?

KD: This question really makes me miss Daneen because, as a musician, she would have been able to talk about harmony so much better than I can. Let me try this. I increasingly hear Trio as a chord, three notes played together to resonate as a kind of moveable triad. You could consider my book essentially a planet-sized stab at trying to figure out what the heck we are doing here together and why it isn’t working out better. (Hear that baritone hum start up.) Diane’s book gives us Victoria Woodhull as an individual who lived that quandary and was astonishingly prescient in how she spoke to power. (The altos take over with their big lungs and have a lot to say.) Daneen’s book covers the rest of the scale with landscape and weather and human gesture and wit and open space that turns into image and then back into open space. (A few sopranos wind up going for the descant.) Evidences of that sound:

From Planet Parable: “Though everything else has changed, / what you believe in must remain / otherwise how explain this // key in your hand, punch-cut once / then hurled into the works? // Insert, turn. The presence of the key / suggests a solution to pursue…”

From Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull: “I submit the Declaration of the Rights of Persons. / I submit I am called to walk down the aisle of nation. / I submit: the after-side pegs me its carrier pigeon. / I admit elation.”

From Endless Body: “Tracks in a hops field— / the plush slide hooves leave in  dew, // loose prayerbeads, / breath hovers then spreads to all points— / horns of flowers growing. // We hear clover bend under passing wings.”

DR: The harmonies are endless, and often page-free. But turn to almost any page, and you’ll find one that brings together themes of the three of us hewing our lines. Start with Karen’s poem “Taking a Night Kayak Through Bullock Cove”: “Three strokes is all a paddler / needs to know to pull this craft.” Or these lines in her “A Closed Four-Dimensional Spacetime Manifold of Vanishing Radius”: “[I] comprehend the world in total out there, a presence in itself without me, and so know / its dizzying scope….” These moments could be said to foreshadow those lines in Run that suggest the lingering presence of Woodhull (“[A woman unfleshed, the after-effects”; “I hold with you earthlings mesmeric connections”) as well as reverberate with lines in Daneen’s Endless Body, which sing of the deceased mother (“God in the minimal and the maximal. // My mother in the branches”).

These harmonies are plain reminders of how the strings thin in the veil that hangs between this world and the next. How very still-with-us is Daneen.

HH: I love how both of you, in testifying to the harmony of Trio, draw attention to the feature we could gesture to by making use of capitalization and pluralization: that the harmonies in Trio sustain and are sustained by its Harmony.  Both of you give examples of particular harmonies, and both of you affirm the presence and influence of a broader Harmony.  I take you both as implying a reciprocity: there is Harmony in Trio because there are so many harmonies, and there are so many harmonies because there is Harmony.  (“Endless” harmonies because “page-free” Harmony, in Diane’s words.)

Another consonance — another harmony — in your observations occurs in Karen’s remarking the urge to try “to figure out what the heck we are doing here together” and Diane’s recalling “how the strings thin in the veil that hangs between this world and the next.”  It signals for me a way in which Trio fulfills that possibility of poetry to find/create harmonies/Harmony in how we are, together in this world, and how we are together, between this world and the next.

I’m anticipating that your thoughts along these lines, how the poetries in Trio are Poetry, might be a fitting culmination to this conversation, might ready it to follow Trio out into the world?

KD: Gosh, how these poetries are Poetry? The whole enchilada – a paradox of immanence and transcendence, mystery and discovery, life in all its forms, the permeable membrane between mind and the physical world. Also resistance to power, immunity to falsehood and pretense, common cause with otherness, scrutiny of history. In Daneen’s poem “Lake Michigan Dragon,” she says, “We’ve trailed a hundred wooden stairs down the sideways-leaning staircase, / handrails here and there roped to leaning shrubs— / sections pulling apart, each tippled stair / so narrow we could barely hold hands, we stepped down…” In “Victoria Solos the Stuff of Free Love,” Diane says, “This is love. When I cease using my, seas ease leaves into freefall. / This is my love: this slipping of strings, fringe reef leafing into tree. // This is the love: limbs that snap through the lungs to sycamore out.”

DR: This beautiful question about presence and Harmony, immanence and consonance whisks us close to the realm of the wordless. Since Poetry prefers to speak in poetries rather than prose, I offer the following centos–one line from each book, Planet Parable, Run, and Endless Body, both stanzas lineated in this order–as a response:

A breeze and the sound of a breeze

I lend you a mother’s merge of self and other 

the apples backward-bursting 

Under spinning skies with Silence 

this slow, ethereal edict this evening: 

next you and next you and— 

A Conversation: Katerina Stoykova, David Caplan, H. L. Hix

Katerina Stoykova, How God Punishes (Broadstone Books, 2017)

David Caplan, Into My Garden (Ben Yehuda Press, 2020)

HH: When I went back to re-read these two books, one thing I noticed that I hadn’t noticed before is the presence of the question.  David’s poems often pose questions (by my count, six of the first seven poems in the book, for example, include a question); in Katerina’s book the very first page of poetry identifies erasing the questions as one of the ways God punishes, and the very last page takes the form of a Q&A.  Am I overemphasizing the presence or the importance of the question in How God Punishes and Into My Garden?

DC: I think you are right: questioning is very important to the poems of Into My Garden. Many consider life in a yeshiva, an institution devoted to the study of traditional Jewish texts. The speaker of many of the poems is both like and unlike me. He struggles to understand how he might live a life faithful to the ideas he wrestles with. In this context, questioning does not violate religious belief. It is an important part of it.

Many of the books that the speaker studies, Chassidic discourses and Talmudic tractates, involve questioning and debate. In Chassidic discourses, the leader of a Chassidic sect might raise a number of questions about a seeming anomaly in a Biblical passage. The Talmud presents generations of sages debating issues that range from the technical to the theological. In the yeshiva’s study hall, partners read and translate these texts from the original languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish. They pose questions to each other in order to understand what they are reading. A good question, the precise, searching raising of a telling difficulty, is highly prized. I was attracted to this environment because the concerns that drive the yeshiva students struck me as profound. Why does the soul descend into this world? Why is holiness so deeply concealed?

KS: In How God Punishes the title itself could be considered a question. Each poem in the collection silently refers to the book title and offers an aspect of the answer. Those answers, however, instead of quieting the questions, create more. I see How God Punishes as a book about the ego and its universal filters that cause us to destroy ourselves. It’s a book about learning to make different decisions and learning to see with different eyes. Despite the frightening title, the book was supposed to be ironic, if not funny at times. At least I see it as such. Questioning is important, whether the questions are implicit or explicit.

HH: Various elements of what you’re saying (e.g. that yeshiva students pose questions in order to understand, that How God Punishes is about how to decide differently and see differently…) strike me as dispositional.  Your observations start a chain of associations for me.  A month or two ago I read a book, The Scientific Attitude, in which the author, Lee McIntyre, argues that science is not characterized primarily by a method, but by an attitude of caring about evidence and being willing to change one’s understanding on the basis of evidence.  And I find myself often applying James P. Carse’s distinction between finite and infinite games, games “played for the purpose of winning” and games played “for the purpose of continuing the play.”  And (of course?) Keats’s “negative capability,” the capability of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

I’m not trying to equate those ideas, with one another or with what you’ve just said, but they all seem to me related to disposition.  Both books, Into My Garden and How God Punishes, seem amenable to description as manifesting and cultivating a disposition of openness, curiosity, flexibility, and so on.

DC: Harvey, I certainly hope my poetry shows what you call “a disposition of openness, curiosity, flexibility, and so on.” At the same time, it is useful to distinguish between a poetic method/ attitude and the Torah study that the yeshiva students practice.

My first time at yeshiva, I found myself falling behind in our study of the Talmud, a challenging dialectic text written in concise, allusive rabbinic Aramaic. I organized some extra practice study to the already long day and diligently charted the argument (the various sides, issues, etc.) between the sages that we had been studying. After several days, I was finally caught up and very eager to see how the argument we had been working through would conclude. We translated a new passage in the text until I got a phrase that roughly meant, “When Elijah comes” then the section concluded. I asked my study partner what this curious phrase meant. He said that we will know the answer to the debate we had been studying when the Messiah comes. We won’t know until then.

Of course, I found that conclusion to be frustrating at the time, but it also offers an important lesson. From a traditional Jewish perspective, to study these texts is to immerse oneself in God’s will and wisdom. It also to encounter the limits of human knowledge and wisdom. There is a limit to “playfulness” and “openness.” When a student studies a Chassidic discourse and thinks he sees a problem (a contradiction, for instance), the assumption is that the student does not understand the text; the mistake is his. That is not to say the students don’t struggle with the sacred books they read. They struggle mightily with them, but they struggle to understand the complex wisdom and make it a part of their life.

The poems in Into My Garden try to combine these two modes of inquiry: the poetic and religious. To see how they might align, of course, is also to understand how they exist in tension.

HH: Aligned, because both the poetic and the religious attempt “to encounter the limits of human knowledge and wisdom”; in tension, because they differ in how they make the attempt.  Or something like that?  (I assume we’re speaking here of healthy forms of the poetic and the religious, not more debilitated forms: advertising jingles, dogmatic fundamentalisms, and such.)  To register yet one more voice in relation to our conversation, your phrase “to encounter the limits of human knowledge and wisdom” evokes for me this sentence from Simone Weil: “We know by means of our intelligence that what the intelligence does not comprehend is more real than what it does comprehend.”  Poetry and religion as animated by recognition that I am more comprehended than comprehending?

KS: Reading Into My Garden, I enjoyed walking into the world of the speaker. I did encounter both the poetic and the religious and I admire very much what David has been able to do. Inhabiting this book is like spending time in a temple. Prayers, books, constant questioning of one’s own life in an attempt to lead a life closer to God. I felt these poems close to my heart, even though I encountered words and terms foreign to me. I implicitly trusted in the intergity of the speaker to lead me from one light-filled page to another.

As for How God Punishes, my hope is that each page acts as a mirror to give the reader a permission to recognize and accept aspects of their own “flawed” humanity. My hope is that the reader feels the relief of “me too”, followed by “and that’s okay”. Often we don’t want to really know ourselves, because we’re afraid of what we might find. I want to quote a line from Into My Garden here: “Don’t be afraid. You are always afraid // of the wrong thing.

HH: And that line from David’s book reminds me, Katerina, of this aphorism from your Bird on a Window Sill: “Things look different when we do not defend ourselves from them.”  Maybe both of the modes of inquiry David identifies in Into My Garden, the poetic and the religious, are breakings-down, or at least, willing suspensions, of our normal defense mechanisms?

KS: I think so. To me, faith (in anything) implies openness. Defense mechanisms are, by their nature, closing mechanisms.

DC: I agree that faith (and the incorporation of it into one’s life) requires openness: “the will to change,” to borrow a phrase from Adrienne Rich. Also, faith involves grappling with its limits, with doubts, struggles, misgivings and mistakes. In this sense, lyric poetry offers an attractive means to express faith (as I conceive it) since lyric poetry most powerfully expresses an argument with itself. (In the canonical demonstration of this principle, a sonnet’s sestet often turns against the opening octave’s argument.) Katerina, one aspect of your poems I admire is their doublemindedness. Beautifully lines turn against themselves, the liveliness of their lack of resolution. “The need / to endure // and the endurance / of need // have never / made peace.”

HH: What a precise and elegant characterization of that quality in the poems.  I would never have gotten to that description, but it seems exactly right as soon as you say it.  That quality of the poems is there throughout, so the passage you cite, David, makes me think of this one, in which the second instance of being “given / everything” occurs as a replacement of, rather than an addition to, the first: “everything / you’ve ever wanted // for everything / you’ve ever had.”

Katerina’s poem makes me think of Wislawa Szymborska’s “Nothing’s a Gift,” in which the speaker identifies the terms as having “to pay for myself / with my self, / give up my life for my life,” and later in the poem says, “We call the protest against this / the soul.”  And that reminds me of David’s hypothesis (introduced with an as if) about the soul in “Chassidus by Telephone”: “as if that were the reason / the soul descended into this world, / to link arms with friends and sing.”

I don’t have a conclusion or a point here.  I’m just trying to notice what I take as connections across some of the ideas and questions at play in this conversation and in Into My Garden and How God Punishes.  Because the “moments” in our conversation so far (“learning to see with different eyes,” “To see how they [poetry and religion] might align, of course, is also to understand how they exist in tension,” and so on) do seem connected to me.  In a way that invites openness, that welcomes more answers and more questions.  That enables us to have an “argument” with one another, not in the animosity-poisoned mode of contemporary political speech but after the manner of David’s description of lyric poetry as “an argument with itself.”  (Yeats: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, and the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”)  Argument with oneself as a method of openness, a breaking-down of defense mechanisms, a form of faith.

KS: Perhaps ultimately, at the most internal level any argument is an argument with one’s self? Even if we argue with others, or our own circumstances, we would have to check in with ourselves at some point. In How God Punishes there is a moment where the speaker decides to not believe in God in order to prevent embarassment upon potential discovery that God doesn’t exist. This is the opposite of openness. This is defense. Contraction of one’s life. 

HH: Another echo for me.  Your insight here, Katerina, about openness in preference to closure, expansion in preference to contraction, calls to mind for me the words that in Middlemarch George Eliot puts into the mouth of Dorothea, as her description of “a belief of my own”: “That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”  Not that poetry or religious faith as embrace of sound doctrine achieves the opening/expanding/widening, but that poetry or religious faith as argument with oneself, as checking in with oneself, sustains the disposition toward opening/expanding/widening?

Keying in that question mark recalls for me the opening of our conversation.  I hope, and I believe, that our placing question marks sometimes where a period could have been placed is not a writerly tic the three of us happen to share, but one manifestation of an attitude we share.

A Conversation: Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Dan Beachy-Quick, H. L. Hix

Fiona Sze-Lorrain, Rain in Plural (Princeton University Press, 2020)

Yin Lichuan, Karma, translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain (Tolsun Books, 2020)

Dan Beachy-Quick, Arrows (Tupelo Press, 2020)

Dan Beachy-Quick, Stone-Garland: Six Poets from the Greek Lyric Tradition (Milkweed Editions, 2020)

HLH: I have the feeling reading these books that any one moment contains all the others, so I have the sense that even my starting us with a very simple observation won’t prevent the conversation from leading somewhere interesting.  When I read Fiona’s “Never Once,” I immediately associated it with Dan’s “The Made Thing Considers Itself,” for no reason smarter than that they both employ anaphora.  But even if my initial basis for associating those poems is superficial, I wonder if either of you has a sense that there is something deeper there to be seen.  Each feels to me as though it is significant to the collection it’s in: do they “talk to one another” across the books?

DBQ: “Never Once” is a poem in Rain in Plural that strikes me deeply, as so many do, but does so for slightly different reasons, not the least of which is the most obvious—that the anaphora works the poem toward a different formal stance than the others. Somehow that opens a means of consideration, the “wound open to interpretation” that difference might mark. This is a large thing to say, and I’m not sure it’s right or true or even responsible, but I feel in that ongoing “After” of the poem an aspect of your work, Fiona, I’m just apprenticing myself to—and it is a profound kind of afterness. By that I mean I can feel the poems finding themselves at the far advent of the mind having formed, having collected within it the strange facts of experience and history that build a resource of unconscious possibilities, and much of the pleasure I find in the poems comes from the deeply strange resonance of the images, that feel to me simultaneously emerging and submerging back into that source, that resource, made of a kind of afterness. In this way it could be that the poem of mine you mention, Harvey, acts as the opposite side of the same fact, where the poem feels to me seeking after an origin, a beginning, found nowhere, but hidden in itself, in the poem—or, another way to put, a beforeness. I feel this contrariness, this harmony (“jointure” in the old sense) in the translated work as well, just so struck by how the direct, liberated, bodily work of Yin Lichuan’s poetry bears in it an ethos I find in some of the ancient Greeks I’m translating—Anacreon, Archilochus, both coming most quickly to mind. It makes me think there are ways as poets we are continually retrieving, renewing; or maybe it is truer to say, some force moves through the poet writing the poems, and turns our attention where the form needs it to go. I feel this somehow, Fiona, in your elegies, eulogies, requiems that haunt your book.

HLH: Just to tag on, Dan, to your observation about retrieving/renewing.  The combination of afterness and beforeness in retrieving and renewing makes me want to add restoring to the list, by association with an entry in the daybook of a poet I know that you and I both admire, George Oppen: “A poem is written to test, salvage, restore — two or three words.  Or one word.  More likely one word.”  I am led back to the two poems, to read Fiona’s poem as a retrieval/renewal/restoration of the word “after,” and to read Dan’s poem as a retrieval/renewal/restoration of the word “made.”

DBQ: & this from Emerson: “Genius is the repair of the decay of things.”

FSL: Having poems converse across books—or languages, for that matter—can be a dynamic and fluid experience.  It tests boundaries, mobilizes them, erases them . . . and opens up spaces.  It allows us to think of poetry as an expression beyond form: what does it want to say or offer?  What has it now said?  Given what is said, what can be heard?  [What do we hear or not want to hear?]  And what does the making of a poem mean in our and others’ lives?  At its best, such conversation—very much a travel—brings poets of different time-spaces together, not just in consensual contexts or agreements, but also through differences.  Dan has picked this up from the start: the “wound open to interpretation” that difference might mark.  It is such conversations that teach us to trust one another, and even transform reciprocity.  Mutual trust is a powerful mirror: it helps us look into our own poetic vulnerabilities, unmask ourselves [when or if we hide behind the poems we read or write], and learn from one another as well as the ancients.  This may be what you both meant by retrieval, renewal, and restoration.  I, too, think you are hinting at processes that are much more organic and sometimes inexplicable.  

These three constructs become pregnant and meaningful once we identify them with realities—the actual, the emotional, the complex, and the unknown—which aren’t quite as “neat” or “straightforward” as they seem in theory or dialectics.  They don’t come free or without risks.  For instance, the renewal bit might work very well, but the restoration part could fail, maybe only to make the retrieval more relevant.  Or all three phases may happen asynchronously, who knows.  They probably don’t need resolution as much as we want them to bring us resolution.  More and more, I come to realize how an existence simply can’t always “make sense” as societies would like, or induce “results,” “plans” and “productivity”… even though as someone fairly Cartesian by temperament, I don’t wish to let artistic generosities and humanness make room for confusion and ambivalence.  It is in times of chaos that time sees who resists and is lucid.  That is how I try to see creation—the making of some-“thing” for instance—and a soulful life.

“Never Once” indeed relates to my commitment and attraction to the “ongoing” and its unpredictabilities.  The poem began with a thought that in itself carries a doubt or question: perhaps a poem cultivates an afterlife, and if so, might this afterlife sustain its [or any] present?  Could it generate ongoing possibilities—visually and/or behaviorally as “circles” or “curves”… plastic forms or the so-called irregular, “clouds,” and so forth . . . rather than “lines,” “squares,” or “points”—in turn dismantling the “one-way” unity of time and dimension:

After reaching different planes of existence during an induced sleep

                                                                        for science and mainstream journalism

After the dismissal of a caregiver

After listening to the last stretch of Callas: her aria and its antipositivism

After a duel in Umbria, in which the maestro lost his secret

After nonthought/nonaction via a nonself/nonmoment—preferably with some emotion

After every king, his children, and their revised list

            of queens, plays, and errors

After after, après, dopo . . .

                               in English, the word was used before the Middle Ages, the fall

of Rome

and a wound open to interpretation—

By extension, a translation can be an afterlife of a poem.  I tend to have a difficult time intellectualizing the choices of interpretation to justify a translation.  It takes away much of its inner beauty and silence.  Seeking a poem’s afterlife allows me to live by the less materialistic endeavors of language, the spiritual grounds of aesthetics.  I still have a long way to go.  How a poem once written reflects a certain way of life—concrete conduct and course of action—seems more vital to me than it being a product of thought to regenerate thought.  Ultimately, what one says or writes has no or little value if it is not being practiced or acted upon—or worse, if contradicted and negated by action, a marker of decision and thought.  In this sense, its philosophy aside, I read Dan’s poem, “The Made Thing Considers Itself” as demonstrative in precise ways.  The incantatory feel of the piece—its accomplished music—follows up with the title and its intent or doing. 

More broadly, though not to simplify or generalize, Arrows expands mind and thought to the larger—nature, the divine, and then to other surprises and invitations.  It is a deep book with deep respect for language.  In “Eidos,” I am offered room, and a sense of the pace and setting:

While rain gains weight at the window

Frame the ever lessening portion

Still mine

                of mind

Called the open sky

In another, “The Oracle at—”, the poetic voice seems to snap back at [or to] a plain fact—mortality:

Death

Has a savings account for future

Travel called the mind. Called mind

To mind, but not much was there.

This poem stopped me: life and money.  It is darkly funny and serious and efficient.  The gravity prepares me for others such as “Drone.” 

I should add that earlier on, when I mentioned “circles” or “curves” or “clouds”… instead of “lines,” I thought of lines from Dan’s opening “Primer: astronomy”:

     spin darkly to say

I I I your kind

    stutter waits

          for one line

               to break so

           sky tilts, cracks

     and clouds tumble

into the gap

HLH: Already this conversation has stirred much into circulation for me.  I am drawn strongly to (drawn strongly by) Fiona’s praise of mutual trust, how “it helps us look into our own poetic vulnerabilities, unmask ourselves … , and learn from one another.”  That we need help regarding our vulnerabilities seems inherent to vulnerability.  And vulnerability has everything to do with our collecting, as Dan puts it, “the strange facts of experience and history that build a resource of unconscious possibilities,” and with, as Fiona puts it, our practicing or acting upon what we say or write.

Helping one another look at our own vulnerabilities feels urgent to me, always, but never more than in our present historical moment, so charged with mutual distrust, so bent on the pretense of invulnerability.  Fiona’s words call to mind other recent beckonings toward helping one another in our vulnerability.  In Hiding from Humanity, Martha Nussbaum calls for “something that I do not expect we shall ever fully achieve: a society that acknowledges its own humanity, and neither hides us from it nor it from us; a society of citizens who admit that they are needy and vulnerable, and who discard the grandiose demands for omnipotence and completeness that have been at the heart of so much human misery, both public and private.”  Adriana Cavarero in Inclinations advocates, against the centrality of rectitude as a moral metaphor, with its implications of autonomy and self-sufficiency, choosing instead “vulnerability as a paradigm of the human,” with its permission for us not to have to stand upright but to incline toward one another, depend on one another.  And with specific regard to poetry, not to mention concord with Fiona’s Cartesian temperament, Lyn Hejinian in her essay “Reason” presents theorizing as “the very opposite of theorem-stating,” describing it instead as “a manner of vulnerable, inquisitive, worldly living, and it is one very closely bound to the poetic processes.”

All this leads me back into the books, in which, alerted in this way, I see vulnerabilities everywhere.  The “white and round and so quiet” vase “shrouded in dust” that in “Vase” evokes from Yin Lichuan’s speaker the experience that “dust is so moving and tender.”  The call in Julianus’ epigram for Archilochus to the passerby to be quiet near Archilochus’ grave, not to avoid disturbing the person buried there but “so that your step doesn’t wake / these wasps sleeping on the poet’s tomb.”  Dan’s evocation in “Personae” of the moments “When I see what I can see / No more,” Fiona’s in “This winter…” of the moment of giving “the sun my bones to lick, glad to feel mortal before salting the bean curds.”  I experience such moments as offering trust and inviting trust.

DBQ: It feels so much is at hand, there is in the conversation so many paths one could take, so many threads one could try to weave together, I hardly know how or where to begin. Some thoughts angle weirdly in the echo-chamber of the mind. I hear so distinctly Fiona—your question of the poem cultivating an afterlife. I feel too that the poem might contain an afterlife, the undergrove of the poem, in which words come to us bearing the entirety of their utterance, have heaped within them as within an urn the fragments of consciousness that have informed them across, but an unlike an urn, the fragments are able, or are learning, to speak. Maybe it is truer to say they are teaching us to speak.

I find something of this nearly impossible lesson articulated so succinctly in one of my favorite sequences in Rain in Plural. In section V of “Sea Ballads,” “Late Shower,” you write, as if in apostrophe: “Nostalgia, heal my lacuna.” I feel a profound ethical plea here, and one tied to the various forms of trust and vulnerability Harvey speaks so movingly of. It is as if you’re teaching us how one wound might help us learn not to heal, but to navigate another. (Here, too, I hear your encouragement to think toward action, toward a poem manifesting itself in how we live our lives.) The wound of home, the wound of memory, the wound of life and what life has lost, every trace still within us, or traces enough, to help us reckon with that lacuna—the gap, chasm, synapse, abyss of other sort. What has gone missing from us, or in us, in a different way. This positing of absence within absence, the subtlety of feeling difference where most would find none, it feels nearly redemptive to me.

As do other aspects of Rain in Plural. The “Cyclical” in “Sea Ballads.” Moon & Ocean & Womb. These patterns cosmic that govern our lives when our lives are vulnerable enough to admit to them. How desire, lust, sexuality offer themselves as aspects of macrocosmic motions in the microcosm of the self. (I could even feel numbers, the letters of the alphabet, moving through as the grave pull of the moon does. Pythagoras.) Such motions occur then, just as Fiona says, by also manifesting in the ways we live our life, and in the quietest of ways, I often feel myself most moved:

I made a bowl of sakéd ginger,

looked for a sail

in and out of its horizon, and prayed

without Amen.

The domestic here is also the realm of the philosophical, ontological, and theological—that feels right to me.

HLH: Your term highlights for me one thread that runs through this conversation, and it sends me back to read the poems (and the books, each in its wholeness) as ethical plea.  By contrast with ethical imperative.  A plea, as much as a charge, to “take stock of the endings of those lives you left behind” (the fifth of Fiona’s “Nine Solitudes”); a plea to search for what one holds in one’s hands (Dan’s “Some Rules of Grammar”); a plea for hearts to “think the same as the world they encounter” (Archilochus, “Two Fragments”); a plea to love in one’s fingers rather than in the tip of one’s tongue (Yin Lichuan, “Truth”).

The poem as ethical plea recalls to mind Audre Lorde’s sense of poetry as something that “forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”

FSL: Dan can no doubt speak better than me in terms of the ethical urgency of writing.  His experience and corpus of work—I was also thinking of his prose book Wonderful Investigations, my introduction to his poetry—consistently brings up the big question of “the church of mind,” to borrow his words.  By extension, to suggest ethics as associated with thought, or so “the rational thought” that Dan would mention, and to suggest poetry as a vehicle for all of these through beauty, that is a honorable vision. 

These seem or sound obvious, one may mock, but our current political chaos should be lessons enough to make us come closer to the earth than to cling to egos and intellect and technology and the material knowledge, and to find solutions through similar channels: “But men are infinite generations of fools” is truer in my opinion, than “It’s difficult to cleave to goodness,” says Pittacus in “Fragment” (Simonides).  For if so, should “goodness” be easy then?  Isn’t it supposed to be difficult, anyway?  These are my questions and doubts, and some of the ways I seek to improve myself.

I realize how varied yet generative our work put together can be read.  Both of you translate, too, on top of your own writing.  So the vehicle of poetry can run on different engines, different “rational thoughts.”  I am keen to know about Dan’s ways of seeking songs in songs for his writing and translation, and Harvey’s nimble approaches to intertexuality, his ways of weaving song to song—and how all of these nourish and keep alive one’s engagement with the work, the ethics of the practice, and if I may, the vocation of creating.

DBQ: This notion you give us, Harvey, of plea—an ethical plea, so different from an ethical demand, so different than the imperative. (I hear in my mind Whitman: “Poetry judges not as a judge judges, but as sunlight falling on a helpless thing.”) And this quiet and disquieting reminder Fiona offers us that beauty is part of this plea. And more, Fiona so honestly, so nakedly, reminding us that being good is difficult work, and that in some way, poetry still invests us in the possibility that we can better ourselves, be more worthy of the world we are given. I hear in plea a way of speaking this is ever-opening itself, ever more vulnerably, to the possibility of another. A plea is made not using force, but surrendering to it—surrendering to the possibility of it. I suppose I think of it in such ways in part by Fiona’s wonderfully nested question to me—of how to seek songs in songs. There is a line Susan Howe writes in an essay, something to the effect of: “I have risked my whole life on the possibility of an immense pattern.” I suspect my own searching bears in it the same faith, and the only way I can seek out what I most need to learn is by a kind of singing, a kind of song, that cannot be discovered as something original in myself, but only as an origin in another. To learn to follow in the drift of another. To point at wanders away up ahead. It is a kind of audacious reticence—to step toward and yet also step away. I find this paradoxical quality (I almost want to call it a virtue) in the last poem of Fiona’s Rain in Plural.

Sprit, I don’t tell myself you control our field,

            the random face

            of a god who leaves us old,

            an alley to somewhere hypnotic,

            prolonged

            and curved at each turn.

& just below:

I don’t tell

a soul—what you intuit

on a peak. I won’t tell others how storms heal

            or stop the countdown,

why echoes blink

to preserve drift.

I won’t paint your dream in this portrait.

I find in that moving forward only to refuse a form of wild care. Of leaving possibility open so as to preserve…preserve something…what, I don’t wholly know. Maybe, to steal from one of Fiona’s titles, to preserve the the saying from the said.

HLH: This moment in our conversation, its particular harmony (Fiona’s “vocation of creating” and Dan’s “audacious reticence”), makes me think of music.  We seem to be rubbing here against the “common-sense” distinction between activity and passivity.  In “ordinary life” we typically treat them as mutually exclusive (you’re either active or passive, not both), but music performs a counterexample to that exclusivity.  Music invites (demands?) a receptivity that is personal and interpersonal.  I think of Wallace Stevens’ “… she was the maker of the song she sang,” and Jan Zwicky’s “Musicians,” which describes musicians after a rehearsal “still breathing almost in unison, like people / the searchlight has passed over / and spared…”  Or Paul Woodruff’s account (in his book Reverence) of an amateur string quartet’s rehearsal as an example of the virtue of reverence, because:

(1) The musicians have been engaged, more or less harmoniously, on a project as a group; (2) their project involved ceremony; (3) they have felt themselves largely without ego; (4) they have felt themselves to be part of a clearly defined hieararchy that was painless for all of them; and (5) they have achieved in the end a shared feeling of inarticulate awe.

I know that Fiona is a musician, and that I’m a failed musician (a few years of lessons in classical guitar, to no effect!); I don’t know, Dan, about your musical experience.  But I see in the poems attunement — that musical metaphor — to this concern.  In Fiona’s “The Problem with Music,” activity (“I broke my guzheng, string by string”) meets passivity (“I did nothing”), and culminates in a paradoxical merger: “Telling myself I must do nothing.”  Dan’s “music” ends, too, in paradox: “clarity / will not ever / cohere.” 

Coherence seems to have (to be?) a fragility that can be summoned (Fiona’s word “vocation” — a calling) but not owned.  Property rights are rights of exclusion: owning my house means I can keep others out of it.  Ownership closes us to one another, but what can’t be owned, can’t be kept, opens us to one another, and to ourselves and our world.  Again Stevens: after the song, even “The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there” fix “emblazoned zones and fiery poles, / Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.”  And Zwicky: after rehearsal, “even / the gravel dust stuttering at their feet / is coherent.”

FSL: Doing nothing can be a state of passivity.  Doing nothing can also be the most active state of being and consciousness—Taoist “nothingness” is far from being nothing, for instance.  So in that sense, doing nothing is doing something.  Is silence music?  Yes.  Does it need to be music?  Of course not—yet that doesn’t mean it can be allowed to mutate to some kind of “noise” or “lies” or “flattery” or “pollution.”  More crucially, Harvey has highlighted one of the most problematic realities that we humans face in our constructed societies: ownership and the sense and privilege of proprietorship, and why people who need to own simply cannot arrive at a certain spiritual profundity.  At that end of the day, it is about giving up what we can give up in order to seek further the unknown.  I think that is what poetry is about.  That is what writing and translating as forms of poetry and expression are about.  Let me read these lines from Dan’s translation of Theognis:  

. . . those who do not die give

Sudden gifts of many kinds to those who do.  Submit,

You must.  Wed yourself to the gifts the gods give,

Whatever those gifts are.

And these from Dan’s beautiful poem, “Some Consequences of the Made Thing”:

Feel a silence there that reminds you of a scent.

Crushed grass the hooves galloped through

Or is it the binder’s glue?

Some silence never not real finally can be

Heard. Silence before the first words.

Precedent chaos. Or marrow work.

Or just the sound of the throat opening to speak.

Like those scholars of pure water

Who rode through mountains and meadows

To drink from each fresh spring a glass

And then with brush and ink wrote poems

On the differences of sameness,

You too feel yourself taste the silent page

Of the end and the silent page of beginning.

They taste so much of whiteness never more

White than white that’s been lost.

DBQ: I might only add, though “add” feels the wrong word…I might only quickly and quietly pick up this thread that feels most dear in that it feels it weaves this conversation, and so weaves us, most together. It is in that sense of “ethical plea” you mention, Harvey; and it is in this question of ownership you mention, Fiona, the necessary and true: “it is about giving up what we can give up in order to seek further the unknown.” That the gift of this conversation, its humble demonstration of what it is to open one’s thinking always in relation to another’s thought—not to do the work for oneself, but with, and in ways, for, another—feels also to me the most truthful work. It’s learning to share a silence that does not deny or erase, but opens, and invites those who can listen to it in. A reverent trio, apprentice still to their instruments, hardly knowing yet each instrument is. But how learn, but play them together? & I’m no musician at all. I can’t even carry a tune.

Susan Aizenberg, First Light (Gibraltar Editions, 2020)

Rupert Loydell, Cathedrals of the Soul (Ravenstongue Press, 2020)

HH: Of course we’ll let this conversation go where it wants to, but there are some obvious points of contact that led to associating these two books as an interesting basis for conversation, so let me open the conversation in that vicinity. If you set the two physical books side-by-side on your desk, what is the first thing you begin to think about?

RL: Well, the first thing is that I don’t want to leave First Light on my desk, it’s a very tactile object that needs picking up! And then I started thinking about the physical differences, that perhaps First Light fits into a tradition of fine printing and poetry, whereas Cathedrals has more of a handmade, craft feel to it. That’s not to elevate or lower Denise Brady or Angela Annesley’s work, just me thinking aloud. They both work with print (Angela is also a painter) but perhaps situate their publications differently? Other Ravenstongue booklets are on sale in National Trust property shops and craft outlets, and feature stories to do with Cornwall. I offered my poem sequence to Angela as something she might be able to work with, and although I saw and agreed the prints and proofs, it was very much her project and is her press, though I should emphasize I’m very pleased to be part of it!

Maybe that’s me projecting on to the books though?

SA:  Hello, Harvey and Rupert. Sorry to have taken so long to reply. The first thing I want to say is that I enjoyed your poems very much, Rupert. And the chapbook is lovely.

On to Harvey’s question:

I agree with you, Rupert, that these books are situated quite differently and part of two different publishing traditions—which, as you so rightly point out, is not a knock on either—a craft tradition, as you say, for Cathedrals, and letterpress/fine arts for First Light.

The obvious physical differences are the first that struck me as well, especially the tactile differences. First Light is hand-set letterpress, done on an historic Vandercook proof press. The books are hand-sewn and the endsheets are made by hand from recycled fabrics.  Each copy is numbered.  

I’m struck, too, by the differences in the relationship between the visual artwork and the poems in our books. In Cathedrals there is a clear pairing, whereas First Light includes only 3 linocuts, none of which are intended to match or illustrate specific poems. The reader’s experience of the poems and art will thus be quite different, I think.

Finally, this difference as far as the physical books and their making: Angela is both the artist and publisher of Cathedrals, while Kevin Bowman, the artist who made the linocuts, was commissioned by Denise Brady and Gibraltar. Denise, with the help of an assistant, did the actual making of the books– setting type, printing, sewing, etc. All the choices as far as paper, typeface, etc., though she kindly shared them with me for my opinions, are hers, and of course she had to approve Kevin’s work.

Briefly, the process was this: I asked Denise if she would be interested in considering my manuscript. She was, obviously, and also obviously, happily, decided to take it. After accepting my poems, Denise reached out to Kevin, whose work she knew, because she thought his work would be a good fit with mine. Kevin read the ms. and then made his linocuts; his intention he said, was not to illustrate the poems, but rather to make art they inspired.  I think he did an amazing job, by the way –when I saw his work I was thrilled at how the linocuts felt so right with my poems.  

I too, am very pleased to have this book, to be a part of this tradition, and honored to be a Gibraltar Editions poet. The press has a storied lineage – Denise’s co-publisher is Guy Duncan, the son of Harry Duncan, who is widely considered one of the masters of the fine arts books movement, and they founded the press to honor his memory. And I am beyond thrilled with these books, themselves – when I opened my box of copies and held the first one, I cried at its beauty.

Having said all that about First Light, let me say a little more about Cathedrals of the Soul.  I like the poems and the accompanying illustrations very much. I love the pocket-size of the book and its feel in the hand. I love the idea that an individual artist makes these books and that they are so widely available in the kinds of settings you describe. I imagine your work gets into the hands of readers who may not be traditional poetry-readers in this way, which I think is wonderful. The book feels very personal and very reader-friendly. It’s truly among the best-made and best-looking chapbooks I’ve seen. 

Also, Rupert, I’d like to hear more about your working relationship with Angela, because clearly your process was very different from Denise’s and mine, and especially than mine and Kevin’s. 

You didn’t ask us to discuss the poems yet, Harvey, but one thing that struck me is that there is at least one large difference there, too – in Cathedrals the poems are all thematically related, and the book works as whole in a lovely way. In First Light there are some poems that relate in that sort of direct way, but the collection as a whole is not intended to have a single theme and the subjects and styles of the poems differ.

I’ve asked myself, what are the similarities between the books? They, too, are obvious, I suppose, but thinking aloud – both are very short collections and offer readers something different than a traditional full-length collection, no? They’re more of a glimpse into our work, and of course they not only include visual art, but are works of art themselves. I think, too, they have in common that those who buy these books include different readers than those who buy more traditional collections. I suspect at least some are interested more in the artwork, and in the books as lovely objects. 

Thanks to you both!

RL: This is interesting stuff Susan, thank you. I’m actually pretty ignorant about fine art letterpress, although a tutor at my Art Foundation Course, John Easson, published a letterpress chapbook series – as The Quarto Press – which my friend and mentor Brian Louis Pearce was the poetry editor for. Otherwise, I own a limited edition of Ted Hughes’ Crow with art by Leonard Baskin, and a few William Everson and Robert Lax letterpress editions. My world has been more utilitarian: I started Stride magazine using my mother’s Gestetner duplicator, learned to staple booklets then make paperbacks using bricks and glue, bought a photocopier, learnt to screenprint, etc. Now of course the magazine is online, and I ceased Stride Books (which for the second half of its 30+ years life used commercial printers and then print-on-demand to produce paperback editions).

You ask about my working relationship with Angela, and I have to inform you I pretty much handed over my poem sequence, which was originally entitled ‘Thirteen Cathedrals’, to her as an offering for the press. Angela has worked at Falmouth University for most of my time there, but I have only got to know her better through my friend and colleague Kingsley Marshall, now Head of Film, who I collaborate with on book chapters, academic papers and conferences (about Brian Eno and Twin Peaks, since you ask).

Angela paints and prints, and also runs Ravenstongue. The small format and different audience appealed to me, and as ‘Thirteen Cathedrals’ didn’t seem to fit into any of my planned poetry books, and had been published in the online poetry magazine Amethyst Review, I wondered if the brevity and visual components of the series might inspire her. After that it was pretty much Angela’s project, although I saw the her prints and then proofs of the book, and also allowed her to retitle the sequence.

I tend to work in sequences and sets of work (like Harvey, up to a point), and this sequence was inspired by Giles Gordon’s novel Ambrose’s Vision: Sketches Towards the Creation of a Cathedral. Gordon is a fairly neglected post-war novelist who was part of a loose group of experimental writers which included Eva Figes, Ann Quin, Alan Burns and B.S. Johnson, although he later abandoned writing and became a publisher. I have an interest in this group of writers and use them in my teaching; they are slowly becoming more known again and brought back into print.

One thing I struggle with is when things become too ‘precious’. This isn’t a charge I am raising against First Light by the way, and as an artist and writer I know that framing, context, production and such all affect the reception of the work, but part of me thinks poetry and painting have to be ‘tough’ and stand for themselves, which is why I still sometimes produce stapled photocopy pamphlets as Analogue Flashback Press, and folded sheets as Smallminded Books.

I guess, I want it all: lo-fi chapbooks, the sharing of digital texts, mail art projects, commercial paperback books and beautiful print editions too.

HH: It’s interesting to me that what suggested thinking about these books together was their shared difference from “regular” commercially-printed books, but actually beginning to think about them together has led us immediately to much more subtle and fine-grained points of similarity/difference.

Both books are handmade limited editions, rather than commercially manufactured, yes, but the handmade-ness realizes very different artistic values, and is realized through very different processes.

The word “precious” does seem to me to help toward articulating those different artistic values.  “Precious” can have positive connotations, and apply to something very good, and it can have negative connotations, and apply to something bad. The positive sense indicates successful assignment of value: I hold something precious in this good sense if I rightly recognize its value (its rarity, say, or its association with a person I love). The negative sense indicates a misassignment of value: I hold something precious in this bad sense if I assign it a value that properly belongs somewhere else (emotionally substituting it for someone I love, for instance).

I’d want to say of the physical books that First Light aims toward the positive sense of “precious” and Cathedrals of the Soul aims away from the negative sense of “precious.” And it seems apt, too, about the poems. Susan’s poems seem to me to try to achieve preciousness in the positive sense of the term, and Rupert’s poems seem to me to try to eschew preciousness in the negative sense of the term.  So even though the word “precious” could be used in a characterization of either aesthetic, it doesn’t refer to the same thing in the two uses. It’s not that Susan’s poem try to do what Rupert’s poems try not to do. The aesthetics are different, but not so simplistically opposed. Does that characterization seem apt, to you the poets?

RL: Yes, that seems one possible way of describing the two books, and a very interesting one as such. One thing I think I was looking for in offering my poems to Angela and Ravenstongue was a solidity to accompany fairly abstract poems. Despite the fact some of the poems mention materials (feathers, glass, paper, mercury, bones) others are more abstract and less literal with their use of fire, alchemy, dreams and sound. Although I am a writer who believes in the reader doing some work, I was also interested in how the mass and bulk of cathedrals, their very real, weighty architecture and history, could be reconciled with my abstractions, without images becoming too illustrative. I think by her imaginative use of pattern, form and focus on details such as gargoyles, something new was brought to the sequence of poems.

They are perhaps an aid to reading in this instance, a way of contextualising the provocation and abstraction, without – I hope – compromising the inherent doubt and confusion of the poems.

SA: Thanks, Harvey and Rupert. 

First, Harvey, to answer the question you ask above: if in characterizing the physical book of First Light as aiming towards the positive sense of the word “precious,” the term is understood to mean a book that although, yes, beautiful and finely made, is first about the poems, and meant to be held, read, and well-used, then I can see that. It’s not a word that I’d have used, however, and I have some reservations about the idea, because for me, when “precious” is applied to an object, unlike say, to refer to a person who is precious to us, it often connotes a Faberge egg or the like, which would be inaccurate in describing what Gibraltar aims for.  Denise says for her the poems are always the first consideration, and she also is very clear she means for her books to be read and touched. I know, Harvey, you don’t mean the term to imply otherwise, but it seems to me a tricky abstraction. As far as thinking about aiming towards the “precious” in my work – again even in the positive sense of the word – I have to say I don’t think about my work in terms of overall characterization. I try not to think too much about that sort of thing.  Having said that, if I did, I don’t think “preciousness” would feel right. 

Rupert, thanks for telling me more about how you work; it was very interesting. I’ve never done any

publishing myself. Along with writing poems, I’ve taught creative writing, been poetry editor for a

couple of journals and co-editor of an anthology, and have written a couple of essays, but I’ve never

had an interest in publishing a journal or making a book myself. 

I hope all is well with you both & look forward to continuing our conversation.

HH: I think what I’m trying to sort out with the two-different-meanings-of-”precious” question is the inclusivity of the differences between the two books. Because we’re engaging in this conversation during an historical period of deep, violent division, I’m very aware of divisive differences, that are in themselves (or are presented as) either/ors.  They divide us into opposing teams, and create conflict. So it seems profoundly important to me — lives-are-at-stake level of importance — to get at this quality of difference that does not divide.

The books feel very different to me: I feel different when I experience the books, different conceptually, emotionally, even physically. But I feel invited by both books, welcomed, even beckoned. Each material difference (sewn binding, stapled binding…) signifies, because each realizes an aesthetic commitment, but nothing makes me choose sides. 

Different aspects of myself are invoked in different ways. If I just open each to its exact middle, Rupert’s “The mercury cathedral” invites me to apply my wit (in the Elizabethan sense) to pick up on the double entendre of the last line “a heavy metal heaven.” I’m challenged to be conceptually nimble. Susan’s “Eleanor Remembers Her Soldier” invites me to feel the “something” that “hovers in the dark between us.” I’m challenged to be emotionally available.

I’m sure I’m not saying this well, but even if it’s not something to be explicated, it still seems worth wondering over, admiring, this quality of invitation and inclusion that, precisely because of their differences, the two books share.

SA: Harvey – I’m up in the very early morning, still dark, and opened my phone to find your email.  I think you’ve said this more than well, beautifully, in fact; thank you. I love so much the ideal of – and deeply believe in – the “difference that does not divide.”

RL: As I get older and reflect on several decades of writing, publishing and making art I become less and less convinced of publicity & marketing, and more persuaded by the notion of offering work to the public. I was going to say gifting, but of course financial transactions are involved, so perhaps offering is a better word.

What I mean by that is that once I have produced a finished painting or poem all I can do is place it somewhere, be that a book or magazine, art gallery, or Instagram and see what happens. The work must find its place in the world. Different methods of publication (different strategies if you like) to do so are interesting and different times of offer. One hopes that they are all inclusive, but of course an academic journal may not be accessible to non-academics, magazines are read by different audiences, there are different types of galleries, from community arts spaces to high-end commercial ventures.

For me, having previously published the Cathedrals poems in Amethyst Review, an online poetry magazine of ‘new writing engaged with the sacred’, Ravenstongue was a way of reaching a new audience. The sequence may also end up in a paperback poetry collection in the future, which means I have three different audiences covered.

SA: Thank you, Rupert.

For some reason, perhaps because today would have been her 93^rd birthday, what Rupert writes here has me thinking of my mother. She was a painter who put aside her work for most of her early and middle adult years, until at around age 50, she began again to paint. For the next thirty years, she painted every day with a devotion and joy as great as that of any artist I know, and with only rare public showings. Please feel no obligation at all to look at the attached, but in case it’s of interest, I wanted to share with you a few of her paintings and a little piece I wrote about her and her work.

Best to you both—

HH: One concern (perhaps among several) that runs through all the issues we’ve touched on so far, from books as tactile objects through Susan’s mother’s paintings, is the many pressures on communication: who gets to communicate in what way and about what to whom. Economic pressures (you can communicate more freely if Google or Facebook or Amazon make money from your communication), political pressures, legal pressures, social pressures, and so on.

The things we’ve noticed in this conversation (like the conversation itself) all seem to me to be instances of trying to create tiny “breathing spaces” for liberty and autonomy in the systemic pressures, tiny intimacies in the pervasive surveillance. The decision to make a book by hand and in limited quantities, when the system imposes mass production and enforces economies of scale. The decision to write in rispettos when the system says to tweet. The daily practice of painting when the system says that’s not what mothers do.

There’s a connection, I think, between Rupert’s impulse toward offering work and Susan’s disclaimer, “Please feel no obligation at all to look at the attached.” Both contrast (for me, powerfully) with the ultimately threatening “listen to me” and “look at me” and “do what I tell you to” of so much discourse now, of advertising and business and politics…

RL: Well, there are two (probably more) things here. Firstly, the commitment to practice, to keep painting and writing, an idea which seems to be unpopular these days. For me it’s about engagement rather than a daily routine. I have never been a 9-5 studio painter, nor a poet who writes every day, but I am constantly reading and editing my poems, drawing and using a sketchbook with and about my paintings; even the daily act of going to studio each day (even for a quick 5 minute peek) maintains my relationship with my work. I am also keen to not go with the first idea that comes to me but to spend time refining and adapting ideas, often in series or sequences of either poems or paintings, which may perhaps be a way of hedging my bets!

The second thing which is really important in my writing is to get away from the ego in confessional poetry. I don’t want to go as far as some of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and reject what they decided was a hierarchy of grammar and syntax, but neither do I want my poems to be about me, the poet, sharing something I have felt or done so that a reader can empathise with me. This very much seems to be what Harvey is calling a ‘look at me’ writing. I’m keen to use disrupted syntax and experimental processes, along with different – perhaps conceptual or philosophical, theological or abstract – themes and content to write about the world; and, of course, narrators and characters rather than the personal. (I am not, of course, so stupid to think I am not in the mix!)

I must also say, within this conversation (having previously privately emailed Susan) how wonderful her mother’s art is. Some of it reminds me of Andrew Wyeth at his best (which, for me, is his empty rooms, house exteriors and landscapes), and Susan has an informed and interesting way of writing about both the artist and her work.

I sense I may have avoided replying to Harvey about his idea of making space being a form of resistance, an idea which I can only agree with. I also think that for me it is a way of processing the world, helping me sieve through and deal with the huge amount of images, words and ideas that come our way each day, despite my best attempts at dodging it by distancing myself and not engaging with the likes of social media.

SA:  Harvey and Rupert: It’s Election Day as I write this—I voted weeks ago, so nothing for me to do today but hope. I half wish I had the discipline not to watch as the results come in tonight, but I will watch. I remember watching CNN four years ago, late that night and deep into the morning, stunned at the results. I won’t be stunned this time, and I’m determined not to become depressed, either, as I did four years ago, if Biden doesn’t prevail, but I am hoping, fervently, that he wins by a landslide.

But that’s not what I want to write about here. First, so much of what you’ve each written, above, resonates for me –the idea of “breathing spaces” and “offerings,” the notions of our work as practice and a way of processing the world. And thank you Rupert, for your kind words on my mother’s work. What you’ve shared, above, about your own practice, Rupert, has me thinking, as I write this afternoon, about the welcome turn mine has taken over the last few months and especially since this summer. I have always been an extremely slow writer. Muse came out in 2002 and Quiet City not until 2015. During the years I was teaching full-time I often finished only 2-4 poems a year.  This did not change immediately when I retired in 2016 because although lack of time to work played its part, it wasn’t the only issue. I don’t know that I know all the reasons I worked in this way, and I’m not sure why it changed, but beginning sometime last fall I began to work more freely and more regularly. I can’t overstate how happy this made me.

Then, this summer, Leslie Ullman proposed that she, Betsy Sholl, and I do a poem-a-day exchange during the month of August.  The arrangement was that we would send each other a new poem every day and that we would not comment on them except very briefly and only in terms of encouraging the process—no workshop-style critiquing. Given my working history, I was very unsure I would be able to do it, but I was excited by the idea. I knew of other groups of poets who did this sort of “grind” and had wanted to try it. It turned out that not only was I able to do it; I loved doing it. Harvey, you heard me speak of this at my reading. It was exhilarating, exhausting, unpredictable—it was fun. And to our surprise, we each wrote a good number of good poems, some close to finished, which was especially unexpected.

So I now have a thick folder of drafts from August and the months before, and I am working daily on revisions, moving from poem to poem—which also is new for me. I have almost always worked on one poem at a time, even though I’ve always believed working on more than one at a time is much healthier. I love to work, and I feel lucky and deeply grateful to be able to work as I am now.

Well!  Talk about writing in a “look at me” way. I’m hoping you both like talking process as much as I do. I enjoyed reading about your practice, Rupert, and Harvey, I would love to hear more about yours. 

Thanks & best to you both—

HH: Our conversation seems to me to be addressing very clearly why and how practice, and the commitment to practice, matters. I think of Iris Murdoch’s succinct insight that “it is a task to come to see the world as it is.” What we are calling here “process” and “practice” might be performed as writing, but they are performances of recognition and valuation.

When Rupert says he is “keen to not go with the first idea that comes to me but to spend time refining and adapting ideas,” that is a mode of resistance. No pressure is stronger or more pervasive in contemporary society than the pressure not to refine and adapt your ideas. You are a data point, a consumer, a demographic. Or, as my employer insists I am, “human capital.” To spend time refining and adapting ideas is a radical defiance of the status quo, the existing world order.

It appears to me that the same is true about Susan and Leslie and Betsy exchanging poems. To listen to other persons as they refine and adapt ideas is to recognize them as persons, not to regard them as data points, consumers, a demographic, human capital. Again, this seems to me a radical defiance of the status quo, a dwelling in possibility.

RL: It’s interesting to see my practice framed as resistance, as it’s not something I would have consciously used as a way of thinking about my work. But I do think you are right, Harvey.

I do a lot of collaborative writing, and have learnt to surf the wave of energy that produces and to trust my collaborator(s) and work quickly and responsively. The editing can come later! I confess that is pretty much my attitude towards solo writing, get something written that I can then work with: collage, free write, steal phrases from books or CDs on my desk, whatever; but get a first draft down. Then I can spend weeks and months tinkering and refining.

I’ve never found workshopping very helpful, I confess, but I do have trusted writer friends (some who I have never met apart from emails) I can share work with and get intelligent feedback. And one thing that gets my goat is an editor trying to edit my poem during submission. I would just like a yes or no, an acceptance or rejection thank you. The poem is finished, of its specific time, and is no longer available for tinkering with, especially by someone I do not know. I’m sure I am not alone in having finished bad poems (which are not submitted) but I am not someone who is endlessly revising 30 years of work. (End of rant)

Various poet friends have taught me the value of planning projects in advance, with Sheila Murphy in Arizona being the person who most challenged and informed me regarding that, when we taught a residential creative writing course together. I have found a commitment to exploring a theme, using variation and differing voices, approaches and ideas, consistently rewarding, be that for a small sequence like the cathedral poems, a chapbook, a full collection or – as in the case of my annunciation poems – something that spills into several books.

Harvey and I have spoken before about ‘occasional poems’, which he appears not to write. The hardest thing in the world for me is to gather up and shape a book from my occasional poems, an exercise I have just started doing, well aware that many readers are put off by any exploration of faith & doubt, or spirituality, however cynical, questioning or witty that might be. A very different set of people responded to Wildlife (2011) and The Return of the Man Who Has Everything (2015) than Dear Mary (2017) and A Confusion of Marys (2020), let alone the chapbooks and more fugitive editions I have published. I guess both fugitive editions and daring to try and discuss belief away from either new age or militant belief systems might also be seen as a form of resistance, just as trying to argue the case for a broadminded and questioning liberal arts education system might be?

HH: There continue to be exciting and beautiful continuities — “threads” — running through this conversation. These descriptions of process have many points of contact, no doubt, but one that seems to me especially worth highlighting unites Susan’s word “unexpected” with Rupert’s “responsively.”

It’s a basic problematic of life, correlating expectation with outcome, adjusting the two to one another. We have ways to describe poor correlation: e.g., I’m delusional if my expectations are too loosely correlated with outcome. And we value certain correlations more than others: for instance, “hope” names an especially prized correlation between expectation and outcome, a correlation we find worth “clinging to.”

In poetry, it’s a point of identity between form and content: a poem creates expectations, then fulfills or subverts them. And the same with collaboration. So Susan’s exchange with Leslie and Betsy, and Rupert’s various collaborations, Susan’s with Kevin Bowman and Denise Brady in First Light, and Rupert’s with Angela Annesley in Cathedrals of the Soul, create unexpected outcomes in part because they heighten responsiveness.

Responsiveness only to oneself is a feature of tyrants (Creon or Trump) and one contributing cause of tragedy. Responsiveness to the world around one, including and especially the persons around one, is an urgent human need. Poetry and collaboration both seem to me valuable as forms of responsiveness practice.

Tony Diaz, author of The Aztec Love God (Fiction Collective, 1998), interviewed by Gerald A. Padilla in Latino Book Review:

 

“It seems that Democracy needs to be rebooted every 50 to 60 years. That duty has fallen on the shoulders of Chicanas, Chicanos, and Latinxs this time around. However, we’ve been prepared for this. What our community used to do to simply survive, will now help us thrive, and together we will overcome this oppression and lead the nation into an era of Enlightenment.”

 

 

Ralph Clare, in Electronic Book Review, reviewing Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), 2017):

 

“Surely there are dangers with any system of thought that relies solely upon logic and scientific truth, as well as with any anti-systemic or purely mythical thought that throws science out entirely. Both lead to the possibility of gross manipulation, be it by warmongers and technocrats or cult leaders and snake oil salesmen, or a mixture of both—i.e. Donald Trump.”

 

 

Andrew Joron, author of The Absolute Letter (Flood Editions, 2017), interviewed by Barbara Claire Freeman in OmniVerse:

 

“Stopping this cycle of violence means radically changing the world system. But we first have to set fire to our minds—using words, the stuff of poetry—before we can set fire to a system based on capitalist greed, on the one hand, and cultural xenophobia, on the other. Poetry—which has no market value, and whose operating principle is xenophilia—wants something other, makes a space for the other.”

 

Assotto Saint, author of Stations, interviewed by Charles Michael Smith in Book Maven:

 

“I deal with black gay issues because my art right now is an answer back. It’s a reaction. The world is still fucked up and why not have it coming from a different perspective and see it from there?”

 

Veronica Golos, author of Rootwork, from her Artist Statement preceding a selection of poems on the Best American Poetry blog:

 

“Ultimately, what we mean to do, I think, is to ‘break the ice’ that surrounds the reader, and the poet.”