Poetry – Page 6 – Mid-American Review Blog

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.

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.

Pets with MAR: Smoky

Today’s pet is Smoky, owned by MAR 35.1 contributor Rebecca Foust. According to Rebecca, Smoky “likes poetry, but only if it comes with a doggie treat.”

If you’re a poetry lover like Smoky, grab an issue of 35.1 to read Rebecca’s poem, “Dynamic Response of Multi-Layered Soil Media in the Frequency Domain.” You can also check out her contributor interview here. But you’ll have to find your own reading glasses — Smoky clearly needs his.

Want to include your pet in this special Pets with MAR blog series? Simply send your photo, along with your pet’s name and any other relevant details, to mar@bgsu.edu.

MAR Asks, Emily Schulten Answers

Emily Schulten is a poet from Bowling Green, Kentucky. She is the author of the collection Rest in Black Haw, poetry available from New Plains Press. Her poems appear widely in nationally recognized journals such as Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, New Orleans Review, Fifth Wednesday, North American Review, Salamander, The Los Angeles Review, and others. She’s here to today to talk about her poem, “Navigating the Afterlife (Book of the Dead),” which appears in MAR 35.1.

Quick! Summarize your story/poem/essay in 10 words or fewer.

Attempting control over mortality despite its being a futile effort

What can you share about this poem prior to its MAR publication?

“Navigating the Afterlife (Book of the Dead)” I wrote after my brother began dialysis and his search for a kidney donor. It has a counterpart, “Navigating the Afterlife (Burial Goods).” Both were written quickly and follow into the category of those rare instances in which a poem comes to the writer more crafted than not. In the end, I obsessed over line and image quite a bit but ultimately changed little. This poem uses one of the ancient Egyptian burial customs of funerary texts, books that were placed into the coffins and that included the spells necessary to resurrect the deceased. I hope it’s a nice vehicle to illustrate the human longing – even desperation – for immortality (or perhaps only the difficulty in letting go). I also hope it might lead to consideration of the various ways cultures sought immortality throughout history, juxtaposed with the ways of doing this in the modern day.

What was the best/worst feedback you received on this poem?

I was collaborating with a friend and fellow poet who was writing a poem based on his reading of “Navigating the Afterlife,” and he could not completely connect with its narrative. That is, he took away the mythology of the piece and its quirks, where I’d hoped it was clear that this poem is about the desperation of a man who knows the abandonment of a father through death and is facing being on the other side of this prospect. Many of us can relate to the frustration of a reader’s takeaway being different than that which we, as author, intended. Or worse – no takeaway at all.

What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?

A stronger closeness to Keats’s negative capability: particularly, those brief moments “without any irritable reaching,” that without the practice of my craft I’m quite certain I would not’ve developed.

Your biggest writing-related regret?

In connection with my previous response, my broadest regret is that there are still such a great deal of moments in which I remain incapable of comfort in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.” As a matter of fact, this applies to both writing-related and non-writing-related regrets.

Thanks for the interview, Emily!
Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor

MAR Asks, Rebecca Foust Answers

Today on the blog we have Rebecca Foust, whose poem, “Dynamic Response of Multi-Layered Soil Media in the Frequency Domain,” appears in MAR 35.1 and was recently reprinted in Poetry Daily. Foust’s fifth book, Paradise Drive, wonthe 2015 Press 53 Award for Poetry and will be released in April. Here, she discusses living in Robert Frost’s house, writing while miserable, and how proofreading seventy pages of scientific writing inspired her MAR poem.

Quick! Summarize your poem in 10 words or fewer.

Existential musings on geodynamic principles, rendered in long-line couplets.

What can you share about this piece prior to its MAR publication?

The poetry workshop I attended in the summer of 2013 at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown was part of a consciously-adopted program to wean myself away from writing in form. I’d taught my grad school class three years earlier on the sonnet, and for a time became obsessed with the form. I learned to tell a Miltonic from a conventional volta, a Spenserian from a Shakespearian rhyme pattern, and a curtal from a caudal sonnet (but don’t ask me about any of those things now). I was transfixed by Hopkins, Herbert and Donne. I suffered with Anne Bradstreet and cackled and winced my way through Berryman’s Dream Songs (OK they have 18 lines but I’m not the first reader to see them as variations on the sonnet form). I reveled in Rilke. Gobbled up anthologies (Penguin’s is the best) and ferreted out sonnets written by modern poets, by contemporary poets, and poets (like Pound, Merwin and cummings) who I never in a million years would have guessed were sonneteers. And along the way wrote hundreds of my own fourteen-liners. Some evolved into tolerable sonnets, and 80 of the best went into Paradise Drive, the book that will be released by Press 53 this April. Like many other writers, I found an unexpected freedom a discipline that, in the process of forcing me to choose words for sound rather than sense, unhooked the carabiner of logical thought.

Eventually, though, I began to feel the constriction of writing poems that Annie Finch noted can fit on the palm of the hand and William Drummond likened to “the bed of Procrustes” I wanted more room. I wanted my poems to be bigger, to have room to get up and walk around, to breathe. But no matter how I tried, I still found myself coughing up neat little bundles of bones wrapped up in skin and fur. When I began dreaming in sonnet, I knew it was time to take steps. So I signed up for the generative workshop taught by Victoria Redel, whose fierce, funny poems are mostly in free-verse.

It was one of those rare workshop experiences where the dynamics were just right and the class gelled into a perfection of intimacy, inspiration and late afternoon swims at Herring Cove. Midway through the week, Redel gave us an assignment to write a new poem using long lines all in one-syllable words.

No way was I going to show up the next day without a new poem. But I had a problem. My daughter, a grad student in Structural Engineering, had just emailed me her master’s thesis, asking could I please proofread it by the next day. I also had anotherproblem: no internet connection. So that night I read 70 pages of scientific writing on my phone and also wrote the assigned poem, pretty much at the same time.

It took hours to slog through those pages, which might as well have been written in Greek and one page of which—all equations—actually was. But now and then its language resonated with a weird kind of math-music, and some bits were interesting. Who knew that waves are constantly moving through the ground we stand on and that some of those undulations are called “Love Waves?” Every time I saw something like that, I copied it down.

Later I focused on writing the poem. Because it was 3 am and I was exhausted, I began by throwing in the towel and giving it the same name as the thesis. Then I played around with the extracted lines, rendering the technical jargon into the simplest possible one-syllable vernacular. I got the idea of writing in couplets, using the first line to hold the quoted material and the second its truncated translation. All the time, of course thinking about my daughter—the child she’d been, the young woman and engineer she was about to become.

That first draft ran to three pages and was a holy mess, but I had a new poem that didn’t look anything like a sonnet, and yea the sun was beginning to rise. So I fueled up on espresso at The Wired Puppy and headed over to the FAWC student center to print it out. My memory is that all the poems read in workshop that day were very good first drafts. I know I left feeling like I had something worth working on.

The following week, “Dynamic Response” got put through its paces at a second FAWC workshop led by one of the best teachers on revision I know—Martha Rhodes. It was Martha who, noticing that the epigraph was after “a daughter’s master’s thesis” asked “It’s your daughter, right? Why not just say that? I changed the “a” to “my” and then felt able to allow the speaker to address her daughter directly as “you,” allowing intimacy to offer counterpoint to the extreme impersonality of the lines using technical jargon. Subsequent revisions cut all but the most interesting lines from the thesis, and where insistence on one-syllable words resulted in clunky syntax, I allowed polysyllabic words to sneak back in. Summer ended, and I put the poem away for a few months. When I looked at it in November it seemed ready, so I sent it out to MAR and two other journals.

What was your reaction upon receiving your MAR acceptance?

That was in July. I was the Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the time, living in Robert Frost’s house in Franconia, NH and picking up my mail once a week from the Frost Place’s administrative offices a few miles away. When handed the fat envelope, I acted nonchalant. But I was elated. For one thing I’m a fan of MAR and have been sending poems there regularly for the past six years. For another, getting a poem accepted on the third try is not exactly my norm. And finally, the acceptance was like earning a chip at AA—something tangible I could hold onto when I felt myself slipping back into the habit of spitting out owl pellets instead of poems that had some meat on their bones and could breathe and bleed.

You’re at a family reunion and some long-lost relative asks about your writing. What do you say?

I don’t write it, it writes me, so quit bitching.

What do you consider your biggest writing-related success?

Getting to live alone in Robert Frost’s house all summer before going on to a residency at MacDowell last year was amazing. But the best thing has been to watch the emergence of two poets I’ve been working with over last few years. One, a young man who crossed the Sonoran desert when he was seven in order to reunite with his parents in this country, may be the youngest poet ever to wait tables at Bread Loaf. Last year he graduated with an MFA from NYU, and a few weeks ago he received an NEA grant. My other mentee lives in a retirement home and won’t tell me her age. But she just published her first chapbook, a moving and delicately-wrought slave narrative called Unicorn in Captivity. These things feel bigger than anything that’s happened to me.

Your biggest writing-related regret?

I’m supposed to say here that I regret not taking my writing seriously until I was in my fifties, but that’s not true. Things have happened exactly as and when they should have. Sometimes I regret the decision, made in 2007, to start publishing my work. Writing was more fun—and pure—when I was doing it without any expectation of seeing it in print. On the other hand I was writing like one poem a year, and not really trying very hard.

Your biggest non-writing-related regret?

Wasting three years in law school? Or maybe moving, 36 years ago, so far away from my family in Pennsylvania? But relocating to CA is also one of the best things I did in my life so it’s hard to say.

Tell us one strange thing about yourself that does not involve writing.

I collected rocks, fossils, and artifacts obsessively for the first 25 years of my life, and then carried that collection around with me from house to house for three decades. Last year we moved again, and when the guy finished loading it onto his truck, I gave it to him—just like that.

Tell us one strange thing about yourself that does involve writing.

I write best when I am miserable. It can be emotional or physical. The corollary is that when I feel great, my writing pretty much sucks.

Can you show us a photo of you holding your MAR contributor’s copy?

Thanks for the interview, Rebecca!
Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor