“Pastoral” by John Beardsley: A Review

Published in Vol. XXXVI, no. 1, John Beardsley’s poem “Pastoral” is reviewed by an editor of Mid-American Review.

As we enter Beardsley’s “Pastoral,” we take from the simple and familiar title a sense of impending rural comfort. The compendium of our experience with the pastoral rushes forward and leaves us anticipating a romantic exploration of rural life and landscape. 

We then are given the first line of this “Pastoral,” in “The snow sang like a shot,” and immediately know that there is a complexity here. Our attention is called to a dominating feature of this landscape, the snow, which seems to live so fully and joyously that it sings, but like a shot. The juxtaposition of the staunch violent noise of a gun firing with the purity of a living, singing snow leaves the reader fascinated about this world, this pastoral, in which the violent and the beautiful can exist in such magnificently direct proximity.

Beardsley continues to develop his initial image by crafting the snow into an all encompassing entity that “sunk all it could see / into its curves and blued / barrels…” The snow takes the underlying forms of the pastoral landscape and makes them its own, adopts them into its own intimate contours. But this pastoral snow is as willing to reveal as it is to consume and “gave it out / again blistering.” The snow releases the forms held within it just as strikingly as it takes them in.

Once we find ourselves situated within the poem’s snow capped pastoral body, the speaker of the poem enters, a voyeur over the snow, “looking across it.” The speaker looks through the snowscape “at the long black body / of an animal I cannot / name…” Just as the speaker cannot identify this black creature streaking through the trees, we are left with a blurred image of the animal fleeing from the “shot” through the white gleam of the snowy landscape. The animal “…moved like / a loss a blood through / paper birches.” We are struck again by the brilliant contrast of beauty and violence involved in the image of an obscured animal moving fluidly, “like a loss of blood,” through the trees of the landscape, staining the glistening snow with the ruby traces of its recent wound. The bark of the “paper birches” seems to magnify the contrast of red and white.

Next, we arrive joltingly at a sense of isolation within the snowfield, as “it was talking to itself.” The landscape maintains its sense of life and voice, but now it seems highly personal, as if the speaker of the poem is overhearing the field’s intimate laments. But the speaker is not obtrusive. Instead, they identify with this overhead self-intimacy, identify with the field talking to itself, “as I do at night.”

At this point, we see the speaker and the landscape as two isolated, intimate figures that share a sense of value in the personal voice.

But the speaker must address this bleeding figure that runs through the snow topped, birch-laden woods. This unnamed animal that seems so integral to the scene at hand. “O stranger in the distance,” the speaker announces, “I’ve made you a fetish / of neck-wrung chickens / to keep off our fathers’ / hungering ghosts…” In this shocking moment, the speaker reveals a depth in his sentiment for the distant stranger. The motives and actions of the speaker are brought into question, as well as the history involved in their complex present state.

The obscurity behind the “stranger in the distance” allows our minds to wander, wondering if perhaps the stranger is no longer the wounded animal, wondering if perhaps the stranger is now, to the speaker, something or someone beyond this scene in the snowy woods. We become aware of a depth in the obscurity of the images.

Still, the speaker is engulfed in the interaction of beauty and violence that has so far saturated the poem, as “I bound / their throats in my sawn-off hair.” But again, their internal stance on this interaction is questioned as they cry out, “O god of embarrassment, / god of bullets-in-the-back,” and make a sacrifice to this addressed being, exclaiming that “I give you my teeth, pink / at the root.” They proceed to “Sleep in this lot I’ve dug / where even the snow can’t see.”

We arrive back at the initial image, the all-encompassing snow that has taken every feature of the landscape under its vast white arms, into its body. But not the speaker. The speaker arrives at a point so personal, a point so privately intimate that they sleep “where even the snow can’t see.”

The final line of the poem revisits the ongoing theme of beauty interacting with violence. It weighs the joy of song against the brutality of retrieving that joy from within the core of a conflicted individual, as the speaker proclaims, “I’ll scrape out the song from my lungs.”

Accepted: “The Barnum Interview” by Michael Hurley

In the poem “The Barnum Interview,” Michael Hurley crafts an imaginative interview with P.T. Barnum, who becomes a completely unlikeable—but strangely seductive—speaker.  As with all well-done persona poetry, Hurley’s Barnum casts an unusual view of the world, but one the reader wants to believe could be real.  Barnum’s observations accumulate into character, perhaps most chillingly with the statement that men and women are “all small enough to fit inside a cage.” 

This persona sees everything through the lens of the circus, with other humans as its commodities, and unfolds in a finely-engineered, call-and-response format.  There is just enough of a looseness and disconnect between the questions and answers to create an eerie atmosphere, but all seem inevitable of Barnum’s character. 

The questions asked of Barnum generate as much interest as the answers: They are plausible, but uncommon to the celebrity interview format.  He is asked, “When did you realize you were mortal?” and responds with an anecdote about a man selling him an x-ray of his teeth; the first time Barnum understands that he has a skeleton inside of him, even though the x-ray is later revealed to be no more than a crude drawing.  A mix of long and short answers—ranging from full paragraphs to two-word, matter-of-fact conclusions—tightly control the pacing of the poem, and offer a wealth of world-and voice-building.

While the work is interesting on a first read and gives a quick first impression, this piece is one that yields more with each perusal.  It tackles large issues (God, death, human cruelty, money) with fine-tuned details that age well: teeth as cranberries, a train as success, humans as owls, mandrakes as a trick.  Barnum doesn’t care to know he lives on a spinning planet, and instead turns his attention to hedonistic pleasures and whatever happens to exist within train’s reach.

These strange images also play with the clichés of the circus.  The phrase “The crowd goes wild” leaves familiar territory when it is used to answer “What happens when you die?”  This poem does not avoid those images and phrases known to the circus and the time period in which P. T. Barnum lived, but rather recasts them in new material.

All of this adds up to a persona that can relate any image, any theme, and any question to the circus and the personal character it takes to lead one.  By reflecting on his own experiences, this Barnum indirectly shows the reader what he offers his circus audiences: the knowledge of mortality, but given by an illusion that forces you to think about what’s inside yourself. 

Barnum himself knows he is not above the call of the entertaining con man, and when asked about the x-ray he knew was fake, “Did you buy it from him?” responds, “Of course.”  This punch of an ending reminds the reader how captivated a human can be by what’s constructed and what’s cruel.  Even though readers of this poem will and should dislike this Barnum character, he couldn’t have built the world’s most well-known circus without the support of a roaring audience.

Interview with Sam Martone, On Fiction No. 3

In this interview, Former fiction editor Lydia Munnell chats with Sam Martone. Martone’s fiction story “Night Watch at the House of Death” appears in Volume XXXVI, issue 1.

I’m interested in the way ideas happen for writers—do stories start with an image or a character or a situation or are they fully formed for you? How about “Night Watch…” in particular? What kicked it off?

For me, it’s usually some glimmer of a concept or image. I’ll stumble across the Wikipedia page on spite houses or build off a pun I made on Twitter. For “Night Watch…” specifically, I think a lot of it came from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. It’s been so long now since I read it, but I’m almost sure there’s a section about bodies being rigged up with bells to ensure they were dead. Not sure if it’s one of his stories-within-the-story or if it was based on an actual past practice, but it certainly got my attention, and from there I placed it in the anachronistic setting and expanded on why one might have to do this with the recently deceased.

In some sense you seem like a project-based writer. Your two chapbooks, for instance, both seem to have been conceived as projects. Is that true? If so, talk about the way that process is similar to or different from writing an individual piece. 

 I definitely do tend to work on things with projects in mind, although I often have too many projects I’m juggling at once, which means nothing gets done, or whatever fragments do get done end up coalescing into a new project. That was kind of the case for the first chapbook (from Corgi Snorkel Press). Some of those stories were conceived as parts of other projects, others were just individual pieces, but they all shared a number of similar concerns and ended up working well together. Thinking toward the greater whole is just how my mind works, but I actually think it’s a bit inhibiting. For example, I’m working on all these stories set in Arizona right now and realizing how repetitive all the talk about the heat and the desert landscape will read when they’re put together. Probably my favorite stories, the stories that have been the most fun to write, were ones totally independent of any bigger plan.

What role does the internet play for you? Video games? (of course I’m thinking of your most recent chapbook here but also stories where it might be less apparent) If these places are particularly fertile why would you say that is? And what about a story like  “Night Watch…” that’s less obviously connected?

 I really love the internet and video games and pop culture/media of all kinds as raw material of sorts for fiction. In large part I think they’re fertile grounds for writing because so many writers actively avoid pop culture and contemporary technology in their stories for fear of dating their work or cheapening it somehow, but I think, for example, a Netflix binge is such a familiar part of most of our lives, that to purposefully exclude that stuff from fiction ends up limiting our ability to write about what it means to be human in the U.S. today. Lately I’m finding that I love fictional works within fiction almost as much as I love the fiction itself. Mike Meginnis’s novel Fat Man and Little Boy depicts these great invented movies throughout the second half of the book. They complement (and eventually connect to) the “real” story very well, but they’re also just an immense pleasure to read on their own. “Night Watch…,” even though it doesn’t talk explicitly about any real-world pop culture, still has a narrator who’s deeply affected and driven by the stories he sees in film. I think that’s what I’m most often interested in, in a lot of my work: how the stories we see in art and entertainment cause us to reinterpret and reconstruct the world around us, for better or worse.

 

You’re an editor at Origami Zoo Press. At MAR we see all kinds of (probably coincidental) trends pop up among submissions and work we read. What are you calling out as trendy right now (for better or worse)?

We’ve been closed for submissions for a while now at Origami Zoo, but I recently served as a guest editor for SmokeLong, which meant I read a week’s worth of subs and selected one story to be published in their weekly installments. Among those submissions, I don’t know if it’s something about the 1,000 word limit, but I received a number of fishing stories. Also a tendency toward one word titles that played with archetypal stories (i.e., “Myth,” “Fairy Tale,” “Urban Legend”).

Now, things I’d like to become trendy is another story: 1) lasers. 2) heists. 3) someone saying “you’re going to want to see this.”

 

“Night Watch at the House of Death” is, at least in part, a story about love and connection and loss. What’s a favorite love story? (please use that apply that label as broadly as you’d like)

I’m pretty drawn to love stories in general, both as a writer and a reader, so this is hard to narrow down, but I think “The Ballad of the Sad Café” by Carson McCullers is my favorite story that pretty explicitly examines love and what it means to love.

 

The monotony of work and the waiting associated with work almost make the world of “Night Watch…” feel like a kind of purgatory. Talk about a terrible job. 

Yeah, it’s interesting you mention this, because a lot of my stories involve narrators working terrible, tedious, but nonetheless life-consuming jobs. Oddly enough, in real life I’ve been fortunate to never really have a particularly monotonous job. Maybe I’d be a bit less fascinated with writing such stories if I actually had to experience it on a daily basis…

An interview with Christina Duhig, author of “Lesson” (by Coral Nardandrea)

I was a Gender Studies major in college, and I’m a person who, generally, just cares. It’s difficult for me, as an assistant editor on the MAR staff, to pass up a poem that speaks to something bigger and manages to remain artistic. Any of us can say an alarming amount of women are murdered each year—each day—but few people can say that in a way that’s different. Thankfully, “Lesson,” by Christina Duhig, does just that.

A poem like “Lesson” is hard to read. It deals with what every girl who makes it to womanhood deals with: the violence she knows is happening around her, and the violence she is unable to fully escape. “Lesson” speaks to the author’s first time grappling with this knowledge—a young girl trying to imagine the details of a murder and how this experience impacts her future.

All young women have the moment they realize they need to worry about something more than most of their male friends. The “don’t go out alone” discussion, the “take a friend to the bathroom” discussion. The moment they watch a newscaster talking about a woman who has been assaulted or killed or both. Duhig brings awareness to that in a way that hurts. Because it needs to.

When I first read “Lesson,” that hurt sneaked up on me. Duhig uses short, clipped sentences and powerful, controlled diction to put the reader exactly where she needs them to be—in the moment, on those train tracks, in the flames. Duhig forces readers to live these moments in time with her nine-year-old self, forces them to look at the dental records the way she looked at them, to “learn to see the body beneath the body.”

Duhig’s “Lesson” is such an important addition to Mid-American Review. A poem that reminds us what we don’t want to be reminded about, a poem that forces us to remember the moment we understood.

Do you have a writing ritual of any sort? Tell us about it.

I need a stack of poetry books, an iced coffee, and— about an hour into the effort— I usually need a cookie. Substitute iced coffee for Diet Coke, a cookie for a sleeve of saltines, books for different books. The caffeine helps with focus. The food soothes desperation. The books, of course, unlock the head- space.

Has your idea of what makes a poem a “poem” changed since you began writing?

My aesthetics and the aesthetics I appreciate in a poem have certainly evolved over the years. I’ve come to embrace a short and succinct title, the kind that seemed “too easy” when I was younger. (I was no good at writing those long, delightfully clever titles anyway.) I shy away now from abrasive language, which appealed to me as I was figuring out my feminist politics. What hasn’t changed is my desire for sincerity and the sense of urgency I feel as both reader and writer when piecing together meaning. I love the lines in Marianne Moore’s “The Steeple Jack:” “it is a privilege to see so/ much confusion. Disguised by what/ might seem the opposite.” I’m drawn to well-ordered confusion in a poem—the way the poem’s order shifts as it moves down the page.

What is your biggest writing-related success, other than a publication?

Cue the list of writing-related successes I wish I’d experienced by now. I’ve written a number of poems that attempt to confront the traumas that women I care about have endured. Each of those poems— poems that feel “finished” and honest—are my best “writing-related success” because they are my best effort to confront violence and support women, in writing. “Lesson” is one of those poems. Though I never met the woman that poem is about, her story—as I heard it on the news when I was nine years old—was the first of many I’ll never forget.

What was the most useful feedback you received for “Lesson” that helped it evolve into the poem it is?  

In “Lesson’s” early drafts the last three lines—a couplet and a final one-line stanza—were clunky and vague. I think I knew the couplet in particular was off, but I didn’t know how to fix it until a friend suggested that it wasn’t scary enough, that the poem had to hurt more. She was right.

A few years later, satisfied with the revised couplet, another friend suggested that the last line—“girl, fire, track, man”—move into the body of the poem. I resisted at first. I loved the last line. I felt power in the line, and I wanted that power. But, together, we moved the line, and the second line of revised couplet became the last line of the poem. She was right, too. The poem had to hurt.

Do you ever feel you are unable to write out of fear?

Yes—

Without this sounding like a therapy session, I am almost three years out of a terrible run involving deaths in my family, a breakup, bed bugs, panic attacks and parallel anti-depressants (my first!), adjunct exhaustion, and my escape (rescue) from Brooklyn. I’m convinced the poems that will ultimately result from all of this will finish my book, but I’ve also realized that I have a habit of avoiding the place where the poems are scariest, where they should hurt most. And I just have no interest in fear and hurt right now.

“Lesson” has a very distinct message concerning violence against women, and how women learn about this violence. What were some techniques that you used to help tackle such a loaded subject?

I tried for years to write a poem about her death, and in doing so I tried any number of times to find out more information about her. One of those times, I entered the right search terms, and the news was right there. I was stunned by how many of the details I remembered, and stunned again by the details I either never heard or forgot. In particular, that he “started a fire with gasoline.” At nine, when I heard “she was burned,” my little self imagined matches or a lighter held to her skin. And that’s one of the images—even as an adult—that stayed with me. Realizing, finally, the disconnect between how he actually set her on fire and my attempt at nine years old to understand how she was burned, the poem wrote itself.

So, time? Recollection? Detail?

I also can’t tell you how grateful I was to learn her name.

Accepted: “No Paper Cowboys” by Bryn Agnew

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Fiction Editor Tom Markham discusses the marvelous “No Paper Cowboys.”

Genre: short fiction

Title: “No Paper Cowboys”

Author: Bryn Agnew

MAR Issue: 36.1

First Line: “Your parents stand on the porch as you park your car under the awning where the chicken snake ate the baby swallows.”

The evocative image in the opening line of Bryn Agnew’s “No Paper Cowboys” sets the stage for a tale of consumption. That the story is told in 2nd person—“Your parents stand on the porch”—brings us close to the affected character, allowing us an interiority crucial to understanding the unavoidable struggle that consumes this main character.

The setup is one we’re all familiar with—a young college student returns home for a family Thanksgiving celebration—yet the insight here feels fresh, cutting to the core a young person’s first real identity crisis: feeling like a stranger both in that new living environment as well as in the old. This sense of having one foot in one world and one in the other is brought out nicely through the italicized lines that are interspersed throughout the narrative. These lines, usually quotes from, we can assume, texts and situations the boy encountered at school, are often direct, internalized responses to the actions or requests of this main character’s family. Sometimes the interactions between internal and external are simple—“’Why don’t you go for a walk?  Get some fresh air.’  It’s plain to see, the sun won’t shine today, but I ain’t in the mood for sunshine anyway”—while other times they are a little more abstracted, pointing to the unease deep within the main character’s psyche.

The main character, the “You” in the story, is doing his best to reconcile his estranged world of the past with his new fresh but ultimately unsatisfying frame of mind, but the efforts are fruitless. The futility is shown most starkly in his family’s frustrated attempts to cheer him up with mundane, homey tasks. Sandwiched into this doomed task of fitting his new self back into his old life is the revelation that things don’t appear to be going so well socially at college, either, so at the story’s core, we are given this bit of insight—the boy is unhappy in both worlds—and we watch it eat away at him while his family attempts, always uselessly, to rescue him.

When the boy finds himself relating to a hunted deer shot by his family for the meat we know things won’t end well. The boy gets injured wrangling a cow on the family farm, a task his father conscripted him to, and in the final moments of the story, a fleeting image of the deer comes across the boy’s visage, leaving us with one lingering italicized thought: “You cannot believe such a monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing.”

“No Paper Cowboys” is a poignant look at the inexplicable pain that comes in periods of life’s tough transitions. It ends on a very somber note, but it is one that leaves us strangely hopeful, for we come back to the 2nd person voice, reading these words with our own voices echoing in our heads, realizing we’re not alone in this struggle, even though it sometimes feels that way.

What MAR editors said about “No Paper Cowboys”:

“I really enjoyed the narrator’s silence when everyone else is constantly discussing him. I feel like this was a very effective way of seeing inside this character.”

“The second person is done really well, and to a wonderful effect. Lovely prose, lovely energy, lovely sadness; it packed a punch for sure.”