On Dustin Pearson’s A Season in Hell with Rimbaud

A Season in Hell with Rimbaud by Dustin Pearson. Rochester, NY. BOA Editions, Ltd. 2022. 96 pages. $17.00. Paperback.

Dustin Pearson’s collection A Season in Hell with Rimbaud finds itself in conversation with Rimbaud and influenced by Dante as the speaker goes on a Dantean journey through Hell in search of his brother. Despite the influence of tradition that is evoked throughout Pearson’s poetics, this collection reexamines the Hell narrative as the Hell lyric that navigates a relationship between brothers and questions the world at both a beginning and an ending. Pearson’s Hell becomes both grotesque and dreamlike that leaves the reader questioning how much is dream and how much is Hell. The poems in this collection also explore who we are to another, or who others are to us.

“Who in your life would you walk through fire for?” asks Pearson’s speaker in the first of two poems titled, “Things I’ve Thought, Things I Do.” The speaker is asking this question of his brother; however, the poet also acknowledges the reader and asks them to ponder this question of themselves, too. The speaker’s own vulnerabilities are put on full display throughout the poem when Pearson writes, “The thought of asking that question used to bother me, having to listen to a list that didn’t include me, // or thinking the one name you’d say wouldn’t be mine.” In the final section of the poem, the speaker begins to confront their own fears, “Brother, I never thought my answer would be you. I’m not disappointed like I thought I’d be.” This poem becomes an acknowledgement of love, but it’s hard to not feel the sadness with which it leaves the reader, too.

This prosaic diptych of poems becomes a sort of confessional refrain after the second “Things I’ve Thought, Things I Do” builds upon the first which helps to anchor the book. The repetition allows the speaker to negotiate the Hellscape Pearson offers to his readers through the speaker’s search of understanding not only their brother, but themself. These sectional poems offer a breadth of space on the page as the speaker searches inward, “These days when I sift through the past like this, when you’re lying next to me on the bed before you’re lost again, I’m trying to tell you what I will miss.” This final line of “Things I’ve Thought, Things I Do” guts the reader with the speaker’s raw confession, once again, to their brother and leaves the reader contemplating their own histories, relationships, and what they are unwilling or unable to say.

Pearson’s speaker remains confessional and vulnerable within these poems. However, at times, this confession leaves the inner exploration of the speaker and feels as if the poet is speaking directly to the reader. “The World at Its Beginning” leaves readers with a tenderness. In it, Pearson’s speaker concludes: “I tell myself / I’d follow him anywhere / to keep the world / from ending.”

The last four lines of “The World at Its Beginning”––and the last four lines of Pearson’s Hell Lyric––become a compassionate reach from the speaker to his brother, from the poet to the reader. The poet is prevalent throughout the invention that is this collection which makes for another juxtaposition of speaker and poet. With the diptych of poems “Things I’ve Thought, Things I Do” and the final poem “The World at Its Beginning,” the self-searching chants through the outward compassion and both juxtapose the darker images that wander through many of the other poems in the collection. The speaker has been giving us the vulnerabilities, but it is the poet who has given us the realization of the final lines that end this collection. Dustin Pearson’s A Season in Hell with Rimbaud is an epic lyric worth entering Hell for.

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor

An Interview with Nebraska State Poet Matt Mason

Matt Mason has run poetry workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus for the U.S. State Department and his poetry has appeared in The New York Times. Matt is the Nebraska State Poet and has received a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council. His work can be found on NPR’s Morning Edition, in American Life in Poetry, and in several hundred other publications. Mason’s 4th book, At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros, was released by The Old Mill Press in 2022. Find more at: https://matt.midverse.com/

You’ve served as Nebraska State Poet since 2019 and the position is a five-year appointment. How have your efforts as the Nebraska State Poet shifted, evolved, or surprised you despite the challenges surrounding the pandemic?

Well, yes, the main challenge is right there: the pandemic. My plan as State Poet has been to bring poetry events physically into all 93 of Nebraska’s counties. That seemed reasonable at first and then a bit impractical. Even so, I’m catching up and still have a shot before I’m done. During lockdowns, I shifted a lot of what I do to online appearances, which was okay but I definitely prefer being in a room with people to talk about poetry: it’s much more rewarding and effective, but you do what you can. I also made a major life shift by leaving my salaried nonprofit position to try and make my living as a writer and speaker. One year in, that plan is still going but I’m not sure how far, ultimately, it can go. So wish me luck…

Are you looking forward to a second term as Nebraska State Poet and how do you see the Poetry Pen Pal Program evolving into your second term, or beyond?

Right now, I actually feel that I might only serve one term. This position has been good for me in terms of exposure and I feel more Nebraska poets should benefit from it. And even if I’m not a CURRENT State Poet, I’ll always have been one and have that credibility, so I feel it will still help me as I’m not about to stop this kind of work which I’ve been doing since way before being named State Poet. The Poetry Pen Pal Program is one I’d love to continue, but it will need a new funding source. The program allowed me to go into communities around the state for a couple days with 2 other poets traveling with me, and it existed thanks to funding from the Academy of American Poets and the Mellon Foundation along with help from Humanities Nebraska, but it was part of a one-time fellowship.

How was it getting the opportunity to share the stage and have a conversation with U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón?

Oh, you know my answer: it was fantastic. It was my first time meeting Ada and she was nothing but wonderful. Add on to that how her event packed the Holland Center, a huge venue in Omaha. On this side of lockdowns, poetry audiences have struggled, so that was encouraging to see.

Since we published your poem “Mistranslating Neruda” back in the Fall of 2001 in vol. XXII no. 1, how has your relationship with submitting to literary magazines changed as your career has grown and evolved?

It’s really waxed and waned, mostly depending how organized I am in that particular month or year. I still do it about the same: getting poems out in bursts, then not sending anything out for stretches. One good thing now is that I get more requests from magazines to send them work in the first place. That’s a real honor (and the acceptance rate is a LOT higher that way as even State Poets still get plenty of rejections).

Your collections The Baby That Ate Cincinnati (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2013), I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2020), and At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros (The Old Mill Press, 2022) are all very focused on their respective themes: parenthood, Nebraska, and Disneyland. When you’re compiling a collection, do you approach it with themes in mind or do you discover those themes as the collection begins to take shape?

Yes, having a theme helps me organize the poems. My first book was much more scattered, but I still worked in a loose theme to help me select the poems and put them together. Those next three were much more centered and it helps me to work that way.

Will Rock Stars (Button Poetry, 2023) be a departure from such focused, themed collections?

Nope, it’s largely around the theme of “Rock Stars,” mainly with poems about 80s rockers, English Romantic poets, and others we might call a rock star.

You have had a fairly prolific few years having published three collections since 2020 and two back-to-back in 2022 and the forthcoming Rock Stars expected in September 2023. What effect does publishing so many collections so quickly have on your writing?

Actually, not a lot. For more than 30 years now, I’ve had a deadline to start at least one new poem each week, so I have a lot of poems. And when I type up the handwritten poems, I sort them into files based on themes, so books like Rock Stars and I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon have poems written over decades collected together in those folders. So I’m writing probably the same amount but I’m now benefiting from having more recognition as well as a large number of poems consistently written and worked on. It’s all in the poetry long game.

There was a gap between publishing your second full-length collection The Baby That Ate Cincinnati and your third full-length collection I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon. How did you spend the seven years between publishing those two manuscripts?

Like I said in the last question, the writing itself followed about the same schedule. In those years, though, I did a lot of poetry education work around the state with the Nebraska Arts Council, Humanities Nebraska and others as well as also seeing the nonprofit Nebraska Writers Collective, which I led until 2022, expand incredibly with the work it does in high schools, middle schools and correctional facilities. I also had a 2-week residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts where, instead of writing new poems, my focus was to gather poems into manuscript shape. That’s where I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon came into shape as well as parts of Rock Stars and at least 2 others I’m working on now.

Your poems seem to be rooted in Nebraska in some way or another, has that been a conscious decision of yours throughout your career or has Nebraska just been a place that lets itself in while you’re writing?

Sort of, I tend to write about what’s around me, so Nebraska is what I tend to be swimming in. Even the Disneyland book has a good deal of Nebraska in it!

What advice might you have for emerging poets?

Let yourself reinvent what a poem is. Don’t worry too much about what you’ve been told poetry is supposed to be, let yourself write the poems you wish you read more of in classes or on your own (even if you’re not sure if those are even poems or not).

***

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor

An Interview with Marisa (Mac) Crane

If you’re looking for a beautifully queer abolitionist novel that isn’t afraid of asking hard questions, Marisa (Mac) Crane’s debut I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is for you. In the world of this novel people who commit acts considered punishable by the government are assigned an extra shadow by The Department of Balance and forever labeled a Shadester. Shadesters are publicly shamed for their actions, watched by the state, actively discriminated against, and harassed. We follow a Shadester named Kris as she navigates life as a single mother to her daughter who was given an extra shadow for “killing” her wife Beau in childbirth. In order to do this Kris must learn to live with her grief over her lost wife while also establishing a new understanding of love in an authoritarian state which denies both her and her daughter humanity. Throughout the story Kris encounters challenges making us consider complicated questions of addiction, family, betrayal, and, perhaps most importantly, forgiveness. 

Crane’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Passages North, Joyland, The Offing, No Tokens, The Florida Review, TriQuarterly, Lit Hub, Catapult, F(r)iction, and elsewhere. An attendee of the Tin House Workshop and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well an American Short Fiction Merit Fellow and Sewanee Writing Conference fellow, they currently live in San Diego with their wife and child. I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is their first novel and it was a January Next Pick and New York Times Editors Choice. 

They were kind enough to answer a few questions for us here at MAR. Please note Crane uses they/them pronouns, so take care to use they/them when discussing them and their work. Thank you! 

Gen: One of the many things I admire about your novel is the depth and intentionality you bring to your world-building. How did you come up with these ideas for shadows and “Shadesters?”

Mac: Thank you, that means a lot to me. About eight or nine years ago, when I struggling with a lot of shame, self-hatred, and regret, I wrote a short poem that read, “If the shadows of everyone you’ve ever hurt followed you around, day in and day out, would you still be so reckless with people’s hearts?” I foolishly thought shaming myself would help me avoid hurting people, but it of course did not. Years later, the first line of the novel popped into my head: “The kid is born with two shadows.” Eventually, I connected this line to the earlier poem I wrote and soon was able to build a world that runs on shame and punishment, a world, much like our own, that is racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, and beyond, a world that is the very antithesis of healing and growth. I wondered, “Even if the government abolishes the prison-industrial complex, how can they still manage to mess it up? How can they still foster a harmful and punitive society?” I was really interested in the intersection of shame, oppression, parenting, queerness, and the power of community.

Gen: What stood out to you in the process of writing about parenting?

Mac: It was incredibly hard because I felt like I was method acting as a widow grieving her wife, because I had to lean into the trauma of that, into the pain and fear of the unknown around raising a disenfranchised kid under an oppressive government. And also the everyday fears of parenting: Are they happy? Am I a good parent? Am I failing them? Will I mess them up? How do I keep from messing them up? How do I give them a beautiful future? It was emotionally trying and draining, especially because I was more or less writing into many of my own fears. I wasn’t a parent yet when I started drafting the book but my wife and I had just begun talking about family planning. Attending seminars, learning the ins and outs of fertility treatment. I was scared for a thousand reasons, and I used those fears to channel some of Kris’ experiences, in order to access a deep and painful part of her.

Gen: Though your book is a work of fiction I’ve found myself thinking of it as an abolitionist text which is able to use dystopia as a platform to discuss questions of surveillance, marginalization, shame, and punishment. What role do you see dystopia having in the examination of social issues?

Mac: It thrills me that you think of it that way because that really was my intention. Honestly, maybe I’m biased, but I see dystopia as the best way to examine social issues. Octavia Butler, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, George Saunders, George Orwell, Jessamine Chan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Aldous Huxley, Lois Lowry, on and on and on—writers that I admire the hell out of, writers who have written stories with staying power, stories that touch and move people, that force them to examine the world we live in. With dystopias, the unfamiliar (yet familiar!) setting provides a necessary distance to get readers to pay attention, to engage with the text. I mean, I know that realism can and does provide social commentary as well, but sometimes, I think, if it isn’t done expertly, it can feel too much like hammering readers over the head with ideas. I view dystopian work as an act of distancing in order to close the distance.

Gen: Can you share a bit about your writing process for this book? Did it change in any major ways after finishing it?

Mac: Yeah my writing process changed considerably in that…I will never write a book the way that I did Exoskeletons ever again. I was on unemployment and basically racing against the clock to get a draft done before I got a new job. Which was fine for what I needed at the time, but it meant I had to do countless drafts afterward, which felt very daunting. And it didn’t help that it’s written in about a million fragments because I wound up moving the fragments around obsessively like a puzzle until they clicked. I’m such a brat about revision. I really don’t like it. Nowadays, I spend a lot of time thinking and brainstorming and writing notes before I ever actually decide to write a story, essay, or novel. Once it takes shape in my head, I sit down and write very slowly. The resulting draft is much much stronger and something I feel confident I can polish and fix up without blowing it up. Plus, I’m a parent now. A lot of the “writing” has to happen in my head when I’m doing other things. The most generous thing I ever did for myself was to view everything as writing. Living is writing, doing the dishes is writing, rocking my kid is writing.

Gen: Do you have any advice for novelists starting out?

Mac: Oh goodness, I am always hesitant to give advice because it tends to feel so prescriptive and well, through the lens of what works solely for me! But if I have to give advice, I would say: Don’t forget to play and delight in your work. Take risks, throw yourself into whatever your obsessions are, and be unapologetic about it. 

–Gen Greer, Blog Co-Editor

What We’re Reading, with Assistant Editor Mays Kuhail

I’ve been enjoying reading more poetry over the summer, and I’ve recently picked up If They Come for Us, a raw and poignant collection by Fatimah Asghar. I was instantly drawn to the rich themes of South-Asian culture, identity, and the undeniable link between past and present in the effects of political turmoil and violence. Asghar employs varied forms in this collection featuring both lyrical free verse as well as more experimental forms. I was especially intrigued by the creative experimentation which I thought worked really well with the themes Asghar taps into.  In “Microaggression Bingo,” Asghar contrasts intense and complex notions of Western microaggressions with a simpler bingo card form, many of which ring true in terms of one’s ability to address such statements and actions. In “Script for Child Services: A Floor Plan,” Asghar lays out her poem as a floor plan to portray being an orphan in the foster care system. I don’t think I’ve seen innovative forms like the ones Asghar makes use of. The collection is also a very informative one and builds on other intersectional struggles which share common themes and hardships. I often found myself having to pause to put the collection down and take in the work. It can be a quick read, but I held onto the collection for a couple of weeks to make sure I was able to grant each poem enough time and thought and to connect recurring threads anchoring the work, especially with more haunting and complex pieces.

—Mays Kuhail, Mid-American Review