Winter Wheat Writing Festival Is Back to BGSU!

We’re thrilled to announce that Mid-American Review’s twenty-third Winter Wheat Writing Festival is back to BGSU from November 9th to November 11th. This year’s festival boasts an exciting lineup of over 45 in-person and online workshops covering fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and more. The full workshop schedule can be found here.

We’re honored to introduce our distinguished keynote speaker, Faylita Hicks, renowned for their critically acclaimed poetry collection, HoodWitch. Additionally, we’re excited to feature one of BGSU’s faculty members, Sharona Muir, the author of the story collection Animal Truth and the novel Invisible Beasts.

Winter Wheat is also featuring not one, but two exciting open mic nights on Friday and Saturday evenings. Friday’s open mic will take place at Howard’s Club in Downtown Bowling Green, and will be followed by a music performance by Zack Fletcher + The Toro Quartet, By the Willow, Chloe and the Strings. The event is co-hosted by Pella Felton and Bea Fields (THEYDAR). Our second open mic night will take place in Prout Chapel at the BGSU campus. Attendees are encouraged to attend both events and to share their own work with the audience! 

More information on our website. 

Winter Wheat is open to the public and free of charge. To register, visit our website: www.bgsu.edu/winterwheat.

To individuals with disabilities, please indicate if you need special services, assistance or appropriate modifications to fully participate in this event by contacting Accessibility Services at access@bgsu.edu or 419-372-8495. Please notify us prior to the event.

––Mays Kuhail, Winter Wheat Coordinator

Featured Writer: Charles Fort + Interview

On Thursday October 26th at 7:30pm, Poet Charles Fort will be reading some of his work for the Fall 2023 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University. The reading will be held in the Prout Chapel on the BGSU campus. The event is open to the public.

Charles Fort has preserved a decades long career that has produced 16 full-length books and chapbooks of poetry which include: The Town Clock Burning (St. Andrews Press) and We Did Not Fear the Father: New and Selected Poems (Red Hen Press). Fort’s poetry has appeared in countless literary journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2001, 2003, and 2016 and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors throughout his career. During his time as a professor of poetry and creative writing, Fort held the Reynolds Endowed Chair of Poetry at the University of Nebraska-Kearney where he is now Distinguished Emeritus Endowed Professor. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University.

Fort’s poetry becomes a response to his lived experience and at times seemingly addressed to someone specific, as if the epistle is holy, or, perhaps, he makes it the holiest form in which his poetry can love. In “Prose Poem for Claire Fort” from The Town Clock Burning (St. Andrew’s Press), Fort addresses his daughter, remembering her birth. The poem opens with the date and time placing us into his world at 3:23am. Fort writes, “Winter brings my wife a child and your birth arrives with the morning tide like wings alive in a jar.” Fort’s poems feel like song, like something that must be taken care of, protected. A theme throughout many of Fort’s poems is family or parental figures. In his poem “We Did Not Fear the Father” from The Best American Poetry 2001, Fort explores a more complex relationship to parenthood and family dynamics. In the final line, Fort writes, “We did not fear our father until he stooped in the dark.” His work examines the complex nuances of these relationships and peels back the layers to understand each as honest and complete as any great poet does.

To find out more information, visit Charles Fort here: https://www.poetcharlesfort.com.

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Blog Co-Editor

Assistant Editor Christopher McCormick conducted the following interview with Charles Fort via email.

Christopher McCormick: You famously wrote 300 villanelles. What was it that drew you to the form? Can you share any insights or discoveries you made while completing this project?

Charles Fort: I have now completed 500 villanelles. I believe I am finished. I started writing them 10 years ago. The subjects include: Stravinsky, Hendrix, Beethoven, Duke Ellington, Van Gogh, Beatles, Motown, Miles, Coltrane, Pinter, Manson, Charlie McCarthy, Robert Johnson, Woodstock, Coleridge, Little Black Sambo, Knucklehead Smith, Bergman films (complete catalogue) the Inferno, the ancestral Fort journey on the ship Golconda––A Villanelle Vérité Redoublé––On May, 14, 1868, the ship Golconda set sail from Savannah, Georgia to Liberia. The journey of 7 generations of Fort ancestors starboard…There is a city named Fortsville, Liberia, Stephen Hawking, others…

I was a member of a well-known weekly workshop in West Hartford, Connecticut (via Northampton, Mass. and Cape Cod) led by the former President of The Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens, once called the friends of Wallace Stevens until one member noted his scarred writing/comments on race. I credit Stevens for allowing me to disregard Ashbury and the Ashbury Jr’s that walked the halls of Bowling Green in 1975-1977. I introduced a new villanelle to workshop each week for years. The group nearly asked for reparations.

CM: “We Did Not Fear the father” is driven by two seemingly contradictory emotions: love and fear. Does contradiction play an important role in the shaping of poems?

CF: Was it Vonnegut who said writers observe the terror and absurdity in the world. I might add beauty to that paraphrase. Love, fear, and the fear of love. In an early draft of “We Did Not Fear the Father,” I called my father the scaremonger! I changed it to the honorific term: our provider.

CM: “Prose Poem for Claire Fort” begins and ends with the image “wings alive in a jar.” In fact, repetition appears throughout your work in very interesting ways. How does repetition factor into your creative process?

CF: I want repetends to dissolve the rivets of poetic forms. No matter the form, I want to alter tradition in subversive-hidden ways. At times, I create a narrative thread that allows for a contemporary sensibility inside a vessel overflowing—shipwrecked with coal and precious stones.

CM: Some of your poetry touches on personal loss, most notably your wife, Wendy Fort who passed from Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. What does it feel like to release such intimate work into the world?

CF: I wrote poems about my wife immediately after her passing into everlasting light. I felt guilty and torn between being a husband and father with two daughters. I was ashamed I was a poet. Had I taken advantage of such grief? I had to write about my experience and reveal it to the world.

CM: You seem to be equally comfortable writing in free verse, form, and prose. Are any of these favorites?

CF: In my Graduate Workshop and Seminar, in the first half of the semester, I introduced the sonnet, villanelle, sestina (using the six images within the line), prose poem, and a form I created I called a medievalist-echo-verse. The second half of the semester the students wrote whatever form or free verse they wished.

The aleatory nature of the creative process in the arts and sciences, the sullen craft. I paraphrase Stravinsky: The more one toils with the creative process, the more one is set free.

Typing poems was like playing my silver clarinet as a lad for ten years and a tenor saxophone for one. I remember the exact moment I went from writing in longhand in large artist sketchbooks to a computer. First drafts to eternal final drafts. One of my professors at Bowling Green spoke of the three conditions of language: Educated—job interviews, speaking to your parents, grandparents, asking for money: Colloquial—capturing the linguistic nuances of your birthplace: Jive—the polyphonic, street wise, warnings, and when to run fast. The writer might want to learn to master all three levels of language and write them into their work at the same time, following physics into the past, present, and future at the same moment.

CM: Do you approach writing free verse, form, and prose differently?

CF: No. I first begin all my writing in prose. As a lad, I wrote up to fifty pages on single-spaced 8 x 14 legal pads. I would capture the images, phrases, and lines that caught my eye, ear, and heart. The fifty pages might become one sonnet or many other forms. 

I write blues, jazz, poetry of witness, pastoral poetry, etc. I admire Hopkins and Etheridge Knight.

CM: What is the single most important attribute of a good poem?

CF: Tear away from the historical and cultural definitions of poetry until the center falls apart. There is good poetry and bad poetry. One needs an hourglass, compass, and the heart’s metronome to locate the best words in the best order.

CM: You have multiple poems that share the title “In a Just and Miniature World.” What is it about that title that captured your imagination? 

CF: If I may say so, I love its musicality and lyricism. I think of the child who walked into the wilderness and came upon a poem nailed to a birch tree. The poem was Loveliest of Trees. The child became a poet. I wrote In a just and miniature world decades ago in a poem titled “The Writer at His Desk” now called “The Writer”—the poem won the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize judged by Fred Chappell. I read the poem outdoors wearing my father’s very old shark skin suit in front of the Jarrell or was it the O. Henry Sculpture? Maxine Kumin was the main speaker. I felt like Robert Frost reading trying to read against a strong wind. 

CM: Many of your poems combine images of the natural world with intimate scenes of family life. Does this suggest a special connection between the natural world and the human world?

CF: Yes! I attended the first Earth Day. As a lad, I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Observe and remove environmental racism! Save the birch trees! Save us from war!

CM: What role does American history, world history, and personal history play in your poetry?

CF: It is difficult to escape history. I try. Imagination is central to my work no matter the subject. Kafka knew there was no escape.

CM: You, along with your late wife, Wendy Fort, staged a performance, Afro Psalms: a Special Showcase in Ekphrastic History, with Charles Fort and Wendy Fort, that combined poetry with visual art and dance. How did you find these three mediums worked together to create an experience for your audience?

CF: I collaborated with my late wife with the dance she choreographed to my poetry. I wrote a libretto that was set to full choir and orchestra at Thalian Hall in Wilmington, NC. The poem went on to win the Poetry Society of America Prize for poem best set to music. I stayed at the Gramercy Hotel. The ceremony was hosted by George Plimpton across the avenue at the National Arts Club. Denise Levertov was the main guest. I sat in a rather elegant leather chair that once sat JFK. I sipped the rarest single blend scotch I could find.

I have read my poetry accompanied by nearly every instrument in the world. Violin to Piano to Double Bass to Saxophone. When the saxophonist was not available, I became the saxophone!

***

––Christopher McCormick, Mid-American Review

Why We Chose It: “Forcemeat” by Henry Goldkamp

“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?”

––Megan Borocki, Poetry Editor

Craft Corner: Code-Switching as Shapeshifting in Poetry

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 words creates 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 Renia White’s Casual Conversation

Casual Conversation by Renia White. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd. 2022. 80 pages. $17.00. Paperback.

Although I usually don’t have much patience for poetic metaphysics, the abstraction common in Casual Conversation didn’t keep me from effortlessly gliding from poem to poem. I can recall very few collections I’ve enjoyed that passed through the same zip code as words like “epistemology,” but Renia White had me in a chokehold when, in the beginning of “I am not prepared for the inverse of this,” she observed, “how dangerous a logic we’ve made // proof is what happens afterward, to show us / the during was true.” The first half of this poem is completely abstract, yet White’s sharp, clean verse clears and composes such a vivid scene of concepts that it felt complete.

Imagery is scarce in Casual Conversation (with some stunning exceptions, such as “all over, but only here.”) Instead, the poetry sustains itself by the natural roll of thought through white space, line breaks, and stanzas. These are skillfully applied to incite rhythmic pauses in the reader for a steady momentum. 

This is not to say that Casual Conversation exclusively generalizes. While the collection offers a bird’s eye view of racism, brutality, incarceration, it is punctuated by poignant specificity. In the final poem of the first section, “some plans should be thwarted,” the speaker requests, “I wanna live real quick.” She is immediately shown “the way to tilt toward unending” (another example of her killer abstract language) and this plea for life is fulfilled throughout the following section. 

The middle section “lives” as an individual Black woman (and girl) anchored to the American landscape of flippant and brutal racism. Yet tender moments of kinship and joy pepper this chapter. I’m very fond of the connection forged in “in the name of half-sistering” ––“build a wedge called daddy and gulf us / in the name of your stolen thing,” she challenges a playground antagonist, “a sister ain’t a partial feeling. she so mine, we so sistered.” 

The arguments in these poems are clear, weighty, and impactful, whether they are grandiose or personal. Again, I am not typically fond of its rhetorical delivery method, but Casual Conversation shines in its abstractions. It thrives not by flourishes of language so much as careful manipulations of it, by the clarity of its thought. While my feet barely touched the concrete on my trip through Casual Conversations, I was surprised to find that I did not miss it.

––Jamie Manias, Mid-American Review