Archive for ‘Literature’

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October 27, 2010

Interview with Poet Jack Hayes

If you’ve already read my review of The Spring Ghazals by Jack Hayes, then you know that I really admire this book.  So, as an added bonus, I was able to ask John a few of the questions that I had around his creative process and his work.

From what I’ve read on your blog, The Spring Ghazals has a really interesting back story. Can you explain your inspiration for the book and why you chose to write it?

First, I want to say thanks, Jessica, for making the time & space to present this interview to your readers—much appreciated!

The inspiration for the book came from emotional pain, frankly—an old pain that dates back to the 1980s; an old love affair that I never got over, one that ended badly & abruptly & with a lot of unanswered questions.  The woman & I went on to lead very different lives, & were never in touch from the late 1980s until she contacted me by email in 2008.  In ’08, I’d not written poetry for about 12 years, but shortly after she contacted me, I began writing what would become the “Kitchen Poems” section of the book.

Sadly, the friendship that I hoped would develop didn’t work out, & once again, almost exactly 21 years after the first rift, there was a second one—again, abrupt & harsh & with a lot of unanswered questions.  I was devastated & I felt distinctly “unstuck in time.”  It was as if I was simultaneously living in 1987 & 2008 & at various points in between.  Also, being in touch with this woman started me thinking about other people I’d known in my “past lives,” people with whom I’d lost contact for various reasons, & I began to really experience regret about this perceived gulf between my current life & my past.  In the “every cloud must have a silver lining” department, I’ve since been able to contact many old friends & rebuild these relationships.

Why I chose to write the book?  Thru much of the process the only choice was whether to keep going or not—I felt compelled to do most of the writing in the book.  Not long after this second rift, I ended up in therapy, & my therapist told me that I would need to “create my way thru” the depression.  The Spring Ghazals ultimately was an attempt to do this & an attempt to communicate feelings & experiences that seemed almost overwhelming at the time.

Those who are curious can find a bit more of the “back story” on my dedicated Spring Ghazals blog here.

What is your favorite poem in the book and can you please describe the story behind this poem?

This is a challenging question!  For one thing, I tend to see the Ghazals, Helix & Grace sections as each being a unit more than individual poems.  But perhaps a good poem to discuss would be the ghazal entitled “What Can We Talk About That Will Take All Night” (the title is a quote from Kenneth Patchen, a favorite poet of mine.)  This poem looks back not only to the relationship from the 1980s that briefly returned as friendship in 08, but also to an earlier love/friendship in the late 70s—a situation that in many ways resonated with the later relationship—many of the same issues gave both relationships an amazing vitality & also made them extraordinarily complicated.

So this poem essentially exists in three time periods: Burlington, VT 1978; Charlottesville, VA 1987; & Indian Valley, ID 2009.  The poem is also characteristic of the book as a whole because it contains some of the motifs & images that recur throughout—the book contains many repeated images.  In this case, the “skybluepink porcelain/Blessed Virgin,” red rose blossom on a white/pergola,” & the mandocello’s low/C-string tremolo” all connect the poem to other moments in the collection.  Also, the poem’s conclusion: “the echo of unsaid words” not only encapsulates (I think) something that’s consistently true about regret, but also encapsulates a lot of the book’s raison d’être—the book itself is “the echo of unsaid words.”

When reading the book, I was given a sense that I was peeking into a very specific emotional time for the narrator, even though the poems seem to span many calendar years. Did this make it difficult to create an order of poems for the book?

Yes, the book is mostly concerned with events, both physical & emotional, that took place in 1986-87 & 2008-09—how those events resonated with each other.  But as mentioned in the previous question, the poems also branch out into other losses I’ve experienced in my life—not lost loves & friendships, but also to the loss of my father who died in 2005 after suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.  As far as the order goes, the sections were almost all written as discrete entities in discrete periods of time: the “Kitchen Poems” were written in late spring/early summer of 08; the ghazals in the spring of 09, & the Helix & Grace poems in the winter of 2010.  The “Cloudland” section is an exception—some of those prose poems were written as posts on my Robert Frost’s Banjo blog in the late summer of 08, while a few were added in January & February 2010.

Why did I order the poems as I did?  It’s true that some of the “Kitchen Poems” are a sort of major chord contrasting with the overall minor chord feel of the book.  I believe if I’d placed these first in the book it would have created a narrative arc along the lines of “first I was happy, then I was sad.”  & that seems to me not only too tidy, but also false to my experience.  All in all, I’d say the order seemed pretty clear—the Ghazals, Helix poems & Grace poems all appear in the order they were written, because I see them as all incremental.

One of the major elements of this book is the amount of things (objects, flora and fauna, food, etc.) that you reference in the poems. What inspired you to include these specific details?

Interesting!  It’s probably my lifelong mental skirmish with WC Williams & his “no ideas but in things” dictum!  But seriously, I’ve always used observed objects & landscapes to ground my poems.  As far as the food poems go, my old friend is quite involved in the “foodie” world, so there was a bit of an “in-joke” there when I began the “Kitchen Poems,” which she actively read & much to my delight, seemed to admire.  As far as the many objects go: they all have personal associations, & as you mentioned to me on Twitter, they are each in themselves invocations of a sort—invoking them both takes me back to another time & place & also underlines the fact that I can’t physically access that other time—despite the apparent physicality of “object memory.”  I suppose the floral & fauna work in much the same way, tho these often are invocations of the present time—I live in a very rural area, & invoking these things “brings me back” to my current time & place—tho there’s also a bit of alienation too, because there’s a tension between past & present.  & despite the pastoral background—which I do find beautiful—there’s also a tension there because my past involved town & city life to which I’m probably more temperamentally suited.  As Frank O’Hara wrote, “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy….” I don’t go that far, but I do acknowledge an uncomfortable isolation in rural life.

Another intriguing element in this book is your use of received and created forms. Clearly you use the ghazal form, but you also use a created form in the Helix poem. What was your process behind using these forms?

The ghazals were much inspired by Adrienne Rich’s ghazals, both her sequence “Homage to Ghalib” & especially her “Blue Ghazals.”  Sadly, these are now out-of-print.  I’d been aware of the form for some time & despite being a poet who likes to tinker with forms, I’d never turned my hand to it before.  The couplet form intrigued me—for one thing, I haven’t tended to write much in couplets, so there was a newness there.  Obviously, the fact that ghazals traditionally deal with lost love was a major factor in using the form.  & of course, I should say that beyond the couplet form & the themes, these ghazals stray far from the traditional form—there’s no set pattern of repetition (tho there is quite a bit of more random repetition) & no rhyme.

The Helix poems—I wrote the first two in late January, & I was originally thinking of a sort of classic Japanese poem except transplanted very much in late 20th century/early 21st century U.S. soil.  I’d re-read Basho’s Road to the Deep North last winter.  It wasn’t until the second poem in the sequence that I came up with the name “Helix.”  I do see them as a sort of spiral of objects & recollection, & the thought of intertwining strands certainly made sense to me in terms of the book’s themes.

***

If you want to learn more about The Spring Ghazals, check out the book’s dedicated blog or simply buy it on Lulu!

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October 24, 2010

Review: Spring Ghazals by Jack Hayes

The Spring Ghazals by poet and musician Jack Hayes, is a meditation on loss, memory and time.  Throughout the poems, Hayes conjures a world filled with well-worn beauty. The details of this beauty, from the color of spring wildflowers to the taste of familiar foods, contrast with the melancholy that is at the root of many of his poems. These specific, evocative details are the greatest strength of this volume of poetry. As a reader, I was inspired by the precision of his details, especially as they helped me to create an emotional (as well as physical) landscape.

The book is broken into four movements: Spring Ghazals, Kitchen Poems, Helix Poems and Cloudland. Each movement presents a different perspective on either the past affair that inspired the book or the narrator’s current life.  Each section stands well on its own, but taken together they trace an arc of grief and acceptance over time.

The first section, Spring Ghazals, details the aftermath of a tumultuous affair. All of the poems in this section take on a loose ghazal form. Stanzas are in couplets and each couplet relates tonally, but not in overt subject matter. These ghazals are voiced by a bruised and hurting narrator. The details in the poems are seen through the lens of loss and grief.  For example, in Ghazal 5/3, the narrator observes: “…I’m walking thru glass almost unscathed the Conservatory of // Flower’s glass dome on a gray spring morning…” Even surrounded by lush beauty, the narrator only sees the sharp glass and gray skies.

The second section, Kitchen Poems, finds the narrator in an entirely different emotional space. The poems here are distinctly more narrative and evoke a domestic comfort. Each poem (save the final poem) is titled with a different comfort food dish, like “Fondue”, “Macaroni Cheese”, and “Potato Salad”. Despite the warmer tone, the narrator’s loss still lurks here. In “French Toast,” the narrator hears Hank Williams playing in the background and he states: “my blue // heart my red heart my golden heart opens & closes & / shrinks & grows – the world I know the people I / hold in my heart as it grows & breaks…”

Helix Poems, the third section, may be my favorite. According to Hayes, the Helix Poems follow a form of his own devising. Each poem is written in tercets, and the poet describes new and different objects or animals on each line. Interspersed with these objects are personal observations. The effect is that the descriptions of the object build a picture of the emotional tone, which is then confirmed by the observation at the end. The poems are hypnotizing. They remind me, in some ways of the chants of Walt Whitman or the lists of Raymond Carver.

The final section of Cloudland feels like a bridge between the invocations of the Helix Poems and the domestic intimacy of the Kitchen Poems. In this section, the narrator provides a summation of and separation from his past wounds. In the title poem, the narrator asks, “Is poetry living in memory or is it fetching memory into the present moment? / Is it making a memory where past & present & future coalesce?” In this line, the narrator tips his hand at the book’s project, to capture memory and time within a poem or series of poems. While I read these poems, I recognized that the narrator will still be preoccupied by the past affair, but the poems have given him a space to explore his preoccupation.

Hayes’ book is a testimony to the power of poetry to distill and reexamine experience. The poems feel like a series of mile markers on a stretch of road. They are records of a longer journey, where as a reader, I knew I was only catching short glimpse. I look forward to seeing more.

 

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May 3, 2010

What the Internet Was Made For

I love the internet, almost too much.

This morning, I was listening to the April 12th episode of The World’s Technology podcast and learned about Such Tweet Sorrow. I wish I had learned about it earlier.  Basically, there is a group of actors/performers who are acting out a modern version of Romeo & Juliet over the internet.  Each character has a Twitter account and they tweet constantly, as if the play were happening in real time. The performance is enhanced by Juliet’s love songs on You Tube, a Tumblr blog, and last.fm playlists, to name a few.

I think what impresses me the most is how thoughtful this project really is. The performers didn’t just tweet, they created an interactive universe, using as many of the internet’s tools as they can. They interact as I truly believe these characters would interact on the internet, which makes sense, as they are all members of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

If you love Shakespeare or would just like to see how the internet shapes art and performance, I implore you to check this project out. (Catch up on the story here.) It’s truly brilliant.

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April 9, 2010

NaPoWriMo #9: The Language of Poetry

The Language of Poetry

(after Fereydoun Faryad)

The language of poetry I learned
from winter, on days so cold
we burn. From salted streets
and rusted car doors, from the stamp
of my shoes in snow. I learned

the language of poetry from silence,
the quiet of snow, the nothing
of too early nights. From building

fires, from huddling close, from never
feeling warm, despite my best efforts.

Around here, the language of poetry
is learned from numb fingertips, from not
licking light posts, from waxy tubes
of Carmex, from black ice, from gaining
winter weight and shedding
on the first sunny day.

I learn (and relearn) the language
of poetry in layers
like striated blocks of ice
that slowly melt in me each spring.

***

9 down, 21 to go.

(5 on prompt, 4 off prompt)

I loved today’s NaPoWriMo prompt, but I just couldn’t make it work. I tried to write a poem about the taste of broccoli, my least favorite vegetable, and I just couldn’t get it to work with the suggested words. I also couldn’t just produce my own poem out of thin air.

So, I went to my poetry shelves and began thumbing through pages. I came across a book called Heaven without a Passport by Persian poet Fereydoun Faryad. I opened to a random page and found this poem: “The language of poetry – I learned / from stars, from birds, from leaves / and from itinerant knife sharpeners.” I fell in love with that poem and I decided to borrow the first line and write about where I learned the language of poetry.

Through this NaPoWriMo challenge, I am remembering that I can use many different resources to write poems, from prompt sites, to my own inspiration, from found texts and borrowed first lines.  I have to use all of my resources in order to keep going.

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March 16, 2010

Inheritance

I have a friend who is a book lover. Since he is a bit older than me, his book collection is much more varied. While I have never been to his house, I imagine that he has books crammed in every nook and cranny.  Every so often, he weeds through his book collection and gives me things that I may find interesting.  He knows that I am a poet and all-around English nerd, so his gifts tend to be old poetry collections or theory books.

When I saw my friend on Sunday, I hit the jackpot.  He gave me a series of old theory books and journals from the ’70′s and ’80′s.  They are, in chronological order:

The cool thing about these old journals is that I can read through some of the tables of contents and find a famous poet.  The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (an anthology, really) is the biggest jackpot, with contributions from Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Rae Armantrout, and others.  But some of the smaller journals have less obvious gems. Extensions 7 has contributions from Paul Celan and Andrei Codrescu, The Moduralist Review has a piece by Kenneth Rexroth, and Sub Stance has something by Antonin Artaud.

What I like about all of these is that they represent a specific space and time.  Some of them are well made and some of them are mimeographed and saddle stapled. These saddle stapled ones feel handmade and for me, they represent a time when you would grab a group of friends and crank out a journal, just because you like poetry a whole lot. I can just imagine the editors sitting in someone’s living room, hand editing a poem and retyping it on their typewriters.  I just about passed out from delight when I received this bounty.

My plan is to delve through these new finds and figure out which ones I would like to keep and read. For the ones that aren’t keepers, I may use them as fodder for some poetry cut-ups in my art journals. They will be repurposed into something new, but still handmade. I’ve received quite the inheritance.

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December 24, 2009

On Clutter & George Clooney

Yesterday, my husband and I were able to venture out to the real world to see a movie.  Despite all of the hype surrounding Avatar, we chose to see Up in the Air. We made the right choice.

Good movies (to me) are the ones that make me reflect upon my life. They make me ask: Have I made the right choice or right choices? Am I living my life in the right way? In Up in the Air, the main character (played by George Clooney) espouses a pretty simple, business-speak philosophy: What’s in your backpack? He sees all of us as turtles, carrying every thing we’ve ever owned, every person we ever care for, on our backs. All of these things slow us down, holds us back from our real lives that are always just beyond our reach.  Of course, as the movie progresses, he is able to distinguish between the unneccessary things that hold us back and the necessary things that make our lives worth living.

At the beginning of the movie, I admired this character’s portability. Everything he needed in life could be fit into a business travel wheel bag. He packed it with precision and care. He carried it everywhere.  I have always longed to be that light, to be the person who can distill my life to its essentials.

In actuality, I am a hoarder.  Not reality-tv-series level or anything, but I like to collect stuff. It shows in my life. My purse or bag is always crammed with receipts that I no longer need, silverware,  random items I may or may not use in my travels.  My home is no better. I collect books like they’re going out of style, I have piles of paperwork I mean to file (but forget to) lying on my desk. I have mementos, half-finished projects, and candles I rarely light littered throughout our condo. My half of the bedroom closet is a scary, haphazard sort of place.  I’ve always wondered what would happen if I just got rid of it all, burned it up as Clooney’s character suggests in the movie, and start over.  What would I keep?

Of course, we learn that Clooney’s character packed too light, that he leaves too much behind. He cuts out the crap, the bulky collections, the non-essentials, but he also cuts out the people he wants to love. I have zero desire to cut people from my life, even on my most introverted days.

I have to believe that there’s some sort of middle ground between saving and discarding that I haven’t found yet. I  know that I connect the things in my life to memories of my past experiences and my identity.  Take my book collection, for instance. (Don’t really. You can’t have it.)  It’s always expanding and contracting.  Every time we try to sell off some of our books, I try to imagine what my “finished library” would look like, what it would say about my reading tastes and personal past. Instead, the library is always in progress, always a reflection of the things I’m reading and thinking about now and in a vague back then. We have a finite space (our 900 square foot condo) in which we can only store so many books, contain only some of the symbols of our interests.

I’ve been thinking about this dilemma all morning. Not just about my books, but about all of my living spaces, physical and emotional. What are the things that I want to retain, that reflect who I am right now?  What are the things I can shed, without judgement or regret, the things that are no longer me? Of the things that I keep, how do I want to keep them, so that they are displayed with care and precision? These are the questions that are, for me, the hardest to answer.

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August 4, 2009

The Women Who Came Before Us

I didn’t know my grandmothers very well.  I wish I had.

My father’s mother, Fritzi, died when I was relatively young.  I have fond memories of her: going to the Children’s Museum, eating hamburgers and sundaes together at Bob’s Big Boy, trying on her make-up and jewelry in her apartment.  To a little girl, she was a great grandma.  It was only later in my life, after she had died, that I heard that she could be difficult and controlling. Her husband died very young and she spent much of her life alone, following her children and grandchildren across the country.

I knew my mother’s mother, Iris, a bit better. She didn’t pass away until I was in college, but we never lived in the same city. I knew much more about her life. She was a nurse in the Air Force, a stay-at-home mom, a devout Catholic and Republican.  I knew she defied her father to attend nursing school, leaving the Midwest for Los Angeles.  Her husband also died young, so she lived alone for the last fifteen years of her life.  I remember Christmases at her home and our first meal of boiled corn beef, cabbage, and carrots at every visit.  When I was a teenager, I learned that she struggled with mental illness throughout her life.  As she got older, her symptoms worsened.  Just as I was old enough to get to know her well, she became more and more unknowable to me each day. 

I had always thought that I bore more of a physical resemblance to my father’s family. When my maternal grandmother died, my mother and I went through the steamer trunks filled with her letters and photographs.  I found a picture of Iris when she was nineteen (my age at the time), posing outside of her nursing school.  We were mirror images of each other, from our petite frames to our dark hair.  I never knew.

After reading Ruth Reichl’s new book, Not Becoming My Mother, I’ve been thinking of Iris and Fritzi and what their lives must have been like.  Reichl is the same age as my parents, so her parents were of the same generation.  She writes about her mother’s life, seen for the first time through her personal letters and notes, and comes to a new understanding of her mother’s struggles with mental illness.  She paints a portrait of a woman who was stunted by her the limited choices that women had in those days.  It’s heartbreaking to realize the wasted potential, not just in Reichl’s mother, but in all the mothers of that generation.

Without those women, my mother’s generation wouldn’t have broken away and forged a new path. Without my mother choosing to work, raise a family, and have a career, I wouldn’t have nearly as many choices and opportunities as I have.  I’m the first generation that gets to take things for granted: a college education, a marriage that’s a partnership of equals, a career that uses my strengths, and a choice regarding whether or not to have children. I wonder if my grandmothers were still alive, what they would think of my life? Would they be proud of how far I’ve come? Would they be jealous, as Reichl’s mother was, of all of my opportunities?

I would highly recommend this book to all women, regardless of your age or your relationship with your mother or grandmothers. I think it offers all of us an important shift in perspective, reminding us of the lives that were sacrificed so that we could thrive.

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July 12, 2009

Away We Go

I’ve always considered myself a bit driftless. I’ve lived in three major cities and one small city in my life. My close family lives in California, Massachusetts, and Nebraska.  While I have many close friends that live in Minneapolis with me, I have several who are spread across the U.S., literally from coast to coast.  With all of this rootlessness in mind, I’ve always wondered what it would be like if my husband and I picked up and moved again.  What if we just selected a city we liked, based upon whether it was close to friends or family or just had a landscape that resonated with us, and started over?

With all of that in mind, we saw Away We Go this morning.  Written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and directed by Sam Mendes, the movie follows a thirty-something couple who are searching for a city to raise their soon-to-be born child.  Of course, that’s just a cover. What they’re really searching for is community, family, and their place in the world.  They make pit stops across North America, from Phoenix to Miami, visiting friends and family while trying their lives on for size. 

While the movie isn’t perfect, some of the comedic characters are truly just broad stereotypes, it deeply resonated with both me and my husband.  Whenever we travel somewhere together, we talk about the same thing:  What if we lived here? What if we moved? What would our lives look like in this place? What is the right place for us? We’ve even gone so far as to making lists of the qualities our perfect home would have, from access to the wild to excellent public transportation.  The only certainty in all of these conversations is that we’d go there together, wherever the “there” happens to be.  We always return home, thanks to mortgages, steady jobs, a great circle of friends, and a love affair with our neighborhood in Minneapolis.  But we still talk about it, every time.

I think that the search that this movie touches on is a generational search for community. Our generation has, for better or worse, dispersed ourselves across the country, often far from family, friends, and familiarity.  We follow jobs and scenes, make choices based on the best evidence at the time, but we’re all wondering if the places we find ourselves in are the right ones. Even as we shuffle from city to city and home to home, we’re looking ahead and behind.

I don’t know if we have models for finding the right kind of roots. Most of our parents picked cities after college and stuck with them, building their community from the ingredients they found there.  (My mother though is quite the nomad and moves about every five years, so she’s the exception that proves the rule.)  Most of our grandparents lived in the places they were born, close to their extended families, which has its own kind of comfort. 

So, how do you do it, build a life and a family in a city that you love? Is it time and experience spent in one place? Is it traveling place to place, collecting bits and pieces of the right life, and pasting a life together like a collage? I strive for the kind of rootedness that the characters find at the end of the movie. (I won’t say where and spoil the fun, if you choose to see the movie).  Although, I wonder if I’m just craning my neck too far and not seeing what’s in front of me. 

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