“Forcemeat” by Henry Goldkamp was selected for publication by Mid-American Review poetry staff for issue 42.1.
“Forcemeat” brings you into a unique moment between two people as they play a game of deciding if something is more like a muskmelon or muskrat. “The felled log we set on this noon. // That would be muskmelon.” But, more than a game, these images take you as a reader through an emotional journey that is set by the speaker but up to the reader to interpret. The form and spacing works to guide you through the piece, to pause at the right times, to experience the new.
“Forcemeat” is uniquely itself, and unlike many poems we receive in our submissions manager. It was something as poetry editor I’m always keeping my eye out for, something that surprises me, changes me, and lingers. “Forcemeat” was a poem I couldn’t shake. The distinct voice Goldkamp works into this piece helps ground it and give these unnamed characters life. There are many things our editors found to love in this piece, and images that felt distinct to something Mid-American Review gravitates toward. As a reader you walk away with part of this poem following in your shadow, hiding in your mind. It leaves you looking at everything and asking, “Is it closer to a muskmelon, or a muskrat?”
A poem that moves between languages has a special mystery. As a Mexican American writer, the Spanish/English code-switch speaks to me in a personal, almost mystical way. Through its agility, I feel the fluidity and tension of dual language, culture, myth, and perception. I sense the poem’s exploration of “otherness,” but also its “both-ness,” which especially fascinates me. What type of experience would compel a writer to enmesh two languages to communicate meaning? What is gained through the mergence, or the mezcla (mix), and the semi-obscurity of blending languages? I think that through code-switching, the poet inhabits dual identities simultaneously and “appears” to readers as constantly transfigured. This means that a code-switching poem is a shapeshifting poem, and in that sense, poetry is made metaphysical.
Code-switching, or moving between more than one language in a poem, is an inherently daring move. The writer risks losing or alienating readers, obscuring the poem’s message, or skewing its ultimate landing and interpretation. Yet, poets who achieve this shapeshift imbue their poems with multi-textural meaning and voice that extends beyond literal translation. This act of linguistic agility often defies and invites multiple interpretations. It creates separation, mystery, and play. It imbues the poem with cultural nuance, regional parlance, idiosyncrasy, phrasing, music, humor, and voice. Poets who code-switch fearlessly and are masters of this linguistic fluidity include Eduardo C. Corral, Natalie Diaz, Iliana Rocha, and Natalie Scenters-Zapico. Eduardo C. Corral’s stunning “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel,” from his book Guillotine, is one example of an arresting English to Spanish code-switching poem.
In “Testaments,” Corral explores the stories of people displaced from Mexico along the borderlands of the United States. The “testaments” described in the poems revolve around graffiti and random messages scrawled onto water stations scattered throughout the desert. In this twenty-five-page poem, there is an arresting sense of loneliness and anonymous yet personal anguish. We share the visions of a speaker who is lost, ill, exiled, thirsty, hungry, afraid, wandering, and desperately lonely as he staggers between borders and cultures. The language mesh that happens in “Testaments” is deeply poignant. Diane Suess calls this an “erotics of loneliness” and says of the poem’s striking calligrams that blur walls of words in both English and Spanish, “it’s as if I’m reading through smoke, through tears” (Corral, back cover).
One of these calligrams creates a blurred cross shape using the word “clavo,” or nail. Running through the center of the cross is the phrase “Me falta un clavo para mi cruz,” or “I’m missing a nail for my cross.” Another juxtaposes random graffiti from the borderlands like “BUILD THE WALL STOP DRUGS” above “chinga tu madre gringo ™” (Corral 15). Another calligram in the poem, composed of the speaker’s haunted thoughts and prayers, says “Déjame viver, Señora de Las Sombras,” or “Let me live, Lady of Shadows” (Corral 23). The speaker tells The Lady of the Shadows (which we can interpret as death) “no hay dinero / ni trabajo” followed by “the dead gather.” This heartache and anguish are raw, and straddle both worlds. In “Testaments,” the speaker observes “God is circling like a vulture / gracias nada mas / corazón de oro / a quién vas engañar” (Corral 35). This is language that clearly expresses dread and struggle—even if the literal meaning of each word isn’t precisely grasped.
I think that intuiting the meaning of unfamiliar wordscreates its own engagement and mystery that deepens the experience of a poem. For the average reader whose primary language is English, words like diablo, río, corazón, for example, likely exist at some level of fundamental comprehension. Yet, even less commonplace words like molcajete, calavera, and charro, when taken in the context of an engaging poem, are thrilling linguistic gestures that invite further immersion and investigation. I find the musicality, delicacy, and bravado of Spanglish and its particular code-switch especially intriguing because the languages push in a “prickly” way against each other. When a phrase in Spanish is inserted into a stanza in English, a thrust and swagger happen that is part of the music, part of the shapeshifting. This happens when the speaker in “Testaments” observes “Blood soaks my sneakers. The handkerchief / around my head / reeks like sobacos” and “A severed hand / black yarn around / the thumb. Welcome / to the cagada” (Corral 21). Here, “sobacos” are “armpits” and “the cagada” is “the shit.” But doesn’t that swagger and music lead you to a strange sense of intuited understanding through context?
Even if the words in the poem are of a specific dialect not immediately understood, the reader can still sense an authentic utterance—and that these particular words have simply been chosen because this is how the poet experienced the poem. The speaker in “Testaments” says “I try to recall the taste of Pablo’s sweat. / Whiskey, no. / Wet dirt, si. / I stuff English / into my mouth / spit out chingaderas” (Corral 11). Regional aphorisms and untranslatable figures of speech create an innate sense of withholding, or inability for certain expressions to exist beyond linguistic boundaries in a single form. So, the poet must keep both language and meaning fluid and flexible, as in the lines “Cada noche / I sleep / with dead men. / The coyote was the third to die.” The stitching of languages is innate and hypnotic, as in “there’s a foto / in my bolsillo / of a skeleton / shrouded / in black flames: / Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte” (Corral 11). It’s a dynamic gesture and a dazzling process to feel happening in a poem.
The Spanish/English code-switch has a special significance for me as a reader, but it has also changed my linguistic parameters so that I’m drawn to poetry with unfamiliar terrains. This makes the experience of turning to poems an act of seeking the shapeshift; that is, I turn to poetry not only to be immersed in a story, and a psyche, but also another psychic reality with its own elemental textures of language, phrasing, music, and thought. Immersing ourselves in the poetics of multiple languages is vital for growing in perception, awareness, and empathy—and code-switching is the mystical crossing that allows it to happen. As Eduardo C. Corral writes in “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel,” “a proverb: beauty / can’t be talked into speech. The sky isn’t blue. / It’s azul.” and “Saguaros / are triste, not curious.” Perhaps beauty cannot be conjured by speech, but it can be built and transfigured within these careful layers.
––Mary Robles, Mid-American Review
Note from the editors: The works in this craft essay are cited from Guillotine by Eduardo C. Corral. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2020. 72 pages. $16.00, paper.
On Thursday, October 5, Benjamin Percy visits Bowling Green State University as the 2023 guest for the Edwin H. Simmons Creative Minds Series. He will read from his work at the Donnell Theatre of the Wolfe Center, 7:30 pm.
Benjamin Percy is known for world-building, but in some ways that term is misleading. He does build worlds, but most commonly it’s our world advanced past a circumstance—sometimes horrific, sometimes nebulous—that has irrevocably shifted its mores, practices, and structures. The speculation inherent requires not so much building as re-building, blending the familiar with the jarringly different. At the same time, that speculation reveals often unpleasant truths about who we are as humans, and how we treat those who stray from our tight definition of human.
Red Moon provides an early example, one that turned out to be uncomfortably prescient. The story sparks from a prion virus that causes lycanthropy. Some with the virus take medication and try to live as invisibly as possible to protect themselves and their families. Others, reacting to anti-lycan laws and violence, are building a war. The general populace of uninfected citizens does not come off well, treating the infected with hostility regardless of circumstance. That we have now, a decade later, seen some of this same level of disgust and suspicion toward the ill through a pandemic is not at all reassuring, but it does underscore the insight of Ben Percy’s writing.
The Comet Cycle shows similar perception. In The Ninth Metal, a meteor fall—less a shower than a hailstorm—has embedded a new metal into the earth of a northern Minnesota town. The discovery offers a new energy source, but produces in its wake a dysfunctional boomtown, delivering, as one character puts it, “a millionaire a day.” That “omnimetal” also produces a new narcotic, potential weapons, and a ferocious land rights battle pushes the dread to the forefront. We—humanity—will not handle it well. The Unfamiliar Garden moves to Seattle, and sets its protagonists against changes in climate, a dangerous fungus, and murder. The Sky Vault heads north to Fairbanks, Alaska, and blends the current questions with an ominous WWII secret. Each novel in the cycle thus builds a new world out in time and place from the central event, the comet’s debris, while allowing its characters to make choices in response to those changes, to each other, and to an ever-morphing concept of “familiar.”
Following Benjamin Percy’s oeuvre could be likened to a choose-your-own-adventure, a trait very much in keeping with his writing itself. He has published three short story collections, and his short stories have appeared widely in such publications as Esquire, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and Orion. He has also now published seven novels; his first novel, The Wilding, appeared from Graywolf Press in 2010, and his second, Red Moon, came in 2013 from Grand Central. His current project in longform fiction, the Comet Cycle, closed with The Sky Vault, published this month by William Morrow.
On another path, Percy is writing for comics at DC, Marvel, AWA, and Dynamite, with his best known projects including Green Arrow, Ghost Rider, X-Force, Teen Titans, Nightwing, and Wolverine. For the latter, he also wrote two podcast series, The Long Night and The Lost Trail. Continuing into further media, Percy is writing screenplays and adapting stories for TV, both his own (The Ninth Metal, Summering) and others’ (Urban Cowboy).
And, as a generous and varied craftsman, it only makes sense that that Ben Percy would offer what he knows to the public, this time in the form of Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (Graywolf, 2016), a collection used widely in the classroom, including at BGSU.
In all of his work, Benjamin Percy has much to teach us about writing, about building stories, but also about the myriad ways in which we cope with disaster, with change, and with each other.
Robert Anthony Siegel is a writer and writing coach. He is the author of a memoir, Criminals, and two novels, All Will Be Revealed, and All the Money in the World. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, and Ploughshares, among other places, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014, and Pushcart Prize XXXVI. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Robert taught in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington for 22 years, helping students write and publish their first books. He has also taught at Hollins University in Virginia, Tunghai University in Taiwan, and the LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore, and is a regular at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and a BA from Harvard. You can reach him at robertanthonysiegel@gmail.com.
Sheeraz: Your story “Flight” brilliantly uses setting—doors, borders, roads, tree branches, air, water—as metaphors of fluidity, abandonment, and departure. It also juxtaposes two spacetimes, one in the close-up of Violet’s basement defined by its slow, careful motions, while the other in the narrator’s mental long shots of speedily changing places as he imaginatively follows his father driving from Buffalo to the Canadian border, “eating packets after packets of peanuts” in a plane, sitting on a bench overlooking the sea in Tel Aviv, looking at his passport. What is the magic that layers the setting into the architecture of a story like “Flight”?
Robert: If I’m understanding you right, Sheeraz, you are asking what makes the setting important to the emotional movement of a story like “Flight,” which is about growing up while your family is falling apart. Maybe the best way to answer that question is to go back to first principles for just a second. A fiction writer’s most basic task is to show what a character is feeling without explicitly stating that feeling. One of the most interesting ways to do that is through character perception, by which I mean revealing what a character is feeling by tracking what they are seeing. Instead of saying “I’m sad,” your character glances outside the window and notices the bare branch or bedraggled patch of old snow (apologies for the cliché, but you see what I mean.) In “Flight,” doors, roads, borders are all images of loss.
Using perception to reveal emotion does all sorts of interesting things to a story, recasting perception as a form of expression, and making setting into a mirror in which a character’s feelings are reflected. There is nothing artificial about this; it is true to the way we experience life: when I’m happy about something, the bare branch just looks austerely beautiful.
Sheeraz: Irene in “The Silver Door” lives in an old-age home and doesn’t like its silence at night, “the way the tree outside her window threw shadows on the wall,” and “the residents—shrunken, hunchbacked, tremulous, hard-of-hearing, foul-smelling, caked with rouge.” At the same time, she is haunted by the fear of being sent to the memory care unit, where every door is locked with a key. How does our memory define and decide our relationship with a place? How does a place—despite all its silences and shadows—become a character’s desire?
Robert: Place and desire are intertwined in wonderful ways in fiction. In “The Silver Door,” Irene looks down on the other residents at the old age home, in large part because they remind her of her own vulnerability. The problem is that she is losing her memory, and she doesn’t want to be transferred from independent living to the memory care unit across the courtyard because that building is locked; she won’t be able to go outside anymore. In a sense, the geography of the story is the story: two buildings staring at each other across a courtyard, one of which represents life and the other loss—loss of freedom, loss of memory, loss of self. You can’t live in the first building without staring at the second. But what Irene learns by the end is that you can stay in life just a little bit longer if you open yourself to the people around you and accept their love. In that moment, the victory feels total, even if it is short-lived.
Sheeraz: How would you define the setting in creative writing? Your award-winning story, “The Right Imaginary Person”, is set in Japan. In what ways can a writer’s firsthand experience of a place be beneficial? Is there anything like knowing more or knowing less about the setting?
Robert: For me, direct personal experience of the place I am writing about is crucial. The more I know about the place where my story happens, the more lines I will be able to draw between the character’s emotional experience and the details of the character’s physical environment. I spent three years as a student in Japan, just long enough to feel myself a kind of intimate stranger there, speaking the language but not of the language, full of a yearning I couldn’t quite define. That is the feeling I tried to capture in “The Right Imaginary Person” by evoking my memory of the place as accurately as possible.
At the same time, I know that many other writers work differently. I’m rereading The Ambassadors, for example, a wonderful book that left a big mark on me when I first read it, and I’m surprised to see how little time Henry James spends on the physical reality of Paris, even though Paris as a place of personal transformation is crucial to the story. What matters to James is what people say and don’t say, and what they think about each other.
One last thing—it’s humbling to be read with such close attention and generosity of spirit, and to be asked such deeply considered questions. Thank you, Sheeraz, I’m truly grateful.
Raza Ali Hasan, the Pakistani-American poet, earned a BA and an MA from the University of Texas, Austin, and an MFA from Syracuse University. The published collections of Hasan’s poetry include Grieving Shias (2006), Sorrows of the Warrior Class and 67 Mogul Miniatures (2008), which loosely follows the Urdu poetry structure of musaddas. Ali currently lives in Boulder, where he teaches at the University of Colorado. You can reach him at ali.hasan@colorado.edu.
Sheeraz: Your musaddas poems in 67 Mogul Miniatures successfully invoke far-flung places and different historical periods. How does a poem shape its landscape and history?
Ali: Each musaddas poem in 67 Mogul Miniatures is only tangentially (not by subject or place or historical context) related to each other via a narrative questioning arc about the state of the global south, and the urgent answers sought and found. And so the places and history and times all change from poem to poem. Different landscapes are hinted at in each six lines of poem, but cannot be built over a set of poems. Thus the formal constraints of the architecture of my book’s borrowed from the great Pakistani (South Asian) poet Muhammad Iqbal’s “Shikwa” and “Jawab-e-Shikwa” leave little room for anything other than clay models for larger unwritten versions. With such a tight space for words, pictures of different places and occasions are made with as few words as possible. A description of musical night out, in poem no. 3 in the collection, to see a Qawwali concert starring Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, does not even have enough space to spell his name out. The whole thing is evoked with “Khan”, “Karachi”, “tabla” and its “unsteady beat” and a “harmonium” and its “wheezing.” A poem about Prophet Muhammad’s companion, only has two words that set up the historical context for the poem: the name of the companion, “Bilal,” and the hyphenated word “crescent-world.” Sometimes literary landscapes are invoked by just two names, “Qais” and “Leila,” or the cinematic world with “Zeba” and “Waheed Murad,” or the Iraq War with just one word, “children” and one line, “unburied littering its smudgy, tar highways.”
Sheeraz: Most poems in Sorrows of the Warrior Class are set in the Cold War. What is the process of giving a clear sense of time?
Ali: The Persian poet Ferdowsi’s epic poem Shahnamah, or more accurately, the miniature illustrations of its heroes (Alexander the Great, Sohrab, etc.) and stories serve the role of antiquity in my poemshere. The 1950s and 1970s are evoked via American movies shown in Pakistani Cinema houses and by the poems on the ouster of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in the fifties and the coup and hanging of Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s. For the first half of the American Cold War, the tropes of heroism, valor, dignity, and hope from Shahnamah still seemed timeless.
Sheeraz: How do you conceptualize the role of setting in poetry?
Ali: For my work, the setting (in place, in culture, in history) of my poems, however achieved, with much labor or just a word or two, is crucial. My serious, somber poems, have to announce their origin and their place of denouement. A perfect example of that is my long poem “In That Part of the World,” published in my first book, Grieving Shias, whose very title alerts the reader to its crucible, its location: Afghanistan.
On Thursday, September 21, at 7:30pm, Margaret Kimball, a visual artist and writer, will present on “Word and Image” as part of the Prout Reading Series at Bowling Green State University.
Kimball holds two MFAs, in visual communication and creative writing, both from the University of Arizona. Her first book, published in 2021, is a visual memoir titled And Now I Spill the Family Secrets: An Illustrated Memoir. In it, Kimball traces her family’s history, attempting to reconstruct events from her childhood and adolescence as she rewatches old family videos, interviews family members, and sifts through photographs, diary entries, legal documents, and medical forms. The book centers around mental illness, particularly how her mother’s illness shaped the childhoods of Kimball and her siblings. Throughout, Kimball grapples with the very nature of her project: the illusiveness of the past, the challenge of understanding others’ experiences, and the tensions of putting family secrets into writing. Near the end, she questions her desire to make narrative sense of events that exceed the structure of a linear story, reflecting that “Mental illness defies logic. That was and probably still is the limitation of my pattern-seeking brain, a mind that wants a clear story—point A to point B with narrative arc and all that.”
Kimball’s direct, thoughtfully crafted narration can stand on its own, but is perhaps best encountered in its intended form: a blending of text with beautiful black and white artwork. The pieces below, from a series on Kimball’s website titled “Diagrams for Self Improvement,” complement her reflections in the memoir on the non-linear nature of writing:
In spite of the seriousness of her subject, Kimball’s writing is sprinkled with humor, whether it’s the volume of thoughts impeding meditation, criticism of her childhood clothing and haircut, or commentary on her decision to alter reality a bit by rendering a duvet color in a more pleasing pattern or a cat in her preferred color.
In addition to her memoir, Kimball’s writing has been published in Creative Nonfiction, The Believer, LitHub, Ecotone, Black Warrior Review, South Loop Review, and elsewhere. She created a mural for the city of Cleveland in 2016, as well as a series of postcards. As an illustrator and hand letterer, she has produced work for a wide range of clients, including Verge, Smithsonian Magazine, Macy’s, Marks & Spencer, Boston Globe, Little, Brown, Simon & Schuster, Diageo, Ogilvy, and Random House. Her forthcoming memoir, A Brief History of My Affairs, will be published in 2025.
