Review: Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó’Tuama

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poem to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó’Tuama. W.W. Norton & Company. 384 pages. $22.99, hardcover.

On Being Studio’s podcast Poetry Unbound, hosted by Pádraig Ó’Tuama and first broadcast early in 2020, sets a high bar for all poetry media. It is gently-voiced, ceaselessly generous in its readings, and effortlessly vulnerable. Ó’Tuama’s essays on the poems he chose are a gift, and one which leads listeners to find themselves in poetry. In each episode, Ó’Tuama presents a poem then speaks both personally and critically to its merits and its stake in the world. Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World follows the podcast’s same formula. Whether written or spoken, Ó’Tuama’s essays on this anthology’s 50 poems—from poets like Kaveh Akbar, Ada Limón, and Tracy K. Smith—comes across with a prayer-like sense of devotion to the medium. This is a gracious anthology, a true labor of love, and a testament to poetry’s reach that celebrates each word of every poem. 

I first came to Poetry Unbound during the COVID lockdown of early 2020. By that point in my life, I had lost interest in opening myself up to what poetry could teach me. Poetry Unbound became an invitation to remember how poetry can be at once meaningful, devastating, and beautiful. I feel that my creative writing life since coming to Poetry Unbound is indebted to this series, and I still often turn to this book, and the podcast to which it owes its title, any time I feel a need for inspiration or grace. There is a wonderfully intimate feel to this anthology, as Ó’Tuama’s essays in both book and podcast form are, first and foremost, points of personal connection. At the same time, they invite readers and listeners into a world of utmost faith in what poets have to offer us. Some of my favorite poems and essays from this anthology are on James Wright’s “A Blessing,” Margaret Atwood’s “All Bread,” and Dilruba Ahmed’s “Phase One.” Any time your passion for writing or faith in poetry wanes, turn to this book. Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World offers a terrific balm to any hurt, and undoubtedly keeps its title’s promise. 

—Samuel Burt, MAR

Interview with Jeff Fearnside, On Poetry No. 5

Jeff Fearnside, author of Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air, A Husband and Wife are One Satan, and, most recently, Ships in the Desert, is a writer of fabulous range and grace. After his poem “What We Call Home” was featured in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI, Jeff agreed to speak to a few of our curiosities around his poem, his award-winning short story chapbook A Husband and Wife are One Satan, and the subjects of his work. Many thanks to Jeff Fearnside for sharing his thoughts and for making this interview a genuine treat.

—Mays Kuhail and Samuel Burt, MAR

Your poem “What We Call Home,” which was just published in Mid-American Review Vol. XLI, is a terrific celebration of belonging. Notably, this poem does not follow any specific speaker. However, the poem’s questions and attentive quality suggest that the poem comes from a place of deeply contemplative observation. What role does the natural world play in your writing life, and what has spending time in nature meant for you as a person?

Nature has played an extremely important role in my life ever since my earliest memories. I grew up exploring the fields and woods behind my childhood home, climbing trees, bushwhacking through sumac, searching for arrowheads in the sand. Those were much different times. It wasn’t unusual at all then for us kids to head out after lunch and be gone until dark. Usually it was me and my brother though often just me alone. I had an extremely difficult relationship with my father, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that nature saved me in many ways. Being in the outdoors was one of the few places where I felt like myself and free—there and in the world of books. So it’s not surprising that the two combined and nature has played such a prominent role in my writing. It’s not something I consciously think about. It’s just part of who I am.

Adrienne Rich wrote in her essay “Someone Is Writing a Poem” that to write a poem you must believe that “an ‘I’ can become a ‘we’ without extinguishing others,” and that “a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images.” This quote came to mind at the “We” in your poem’s title. As you entered this space of universality, what were you hoping the strangers who come across your work would find?

Those are beautiful ideas from Rich, and I completely agree with them. The “We” in my poem’s title certainly is meant not only to reflect all of humanity but also to invite everyone into the worldview of the poem and experience its sense of belonging, its sense of home. Its setting is a natural place. So the “We” is intended to include even more than just humans. It also includes the blackbird who is the focus of the poem and by extension all animals. It includes the cattail-lined water spot where the blackbird lives and by extension all of the natural environment.

This may seem like a lot to divine from such a short poem—it’s an unmetered sonnet with a Shakespearean rhyme scheme, so everything occurs in fourteen lines—so I’m glad you earlier mentioned the lack of any specific speaker in it, for that highly detached point of view emphasizes the scene playing out. This is about putting the reader right there with the blackbird. That’s where the connection is. That’s not just the world of the poem. That’s our world. Humans and nature are one.

As a writer, you work in many genres. Your poems have been published widely, your short stories collected in A Husband and Wife are One Satan won the 2020 Orison Chapbook Prize, and you’ve recently had a book of essays published by the Santa Fe Writers Project, titled Ships in the Desert. What is different for you, in terms of your process, feeling, and state of mind, when you sit down to write a poem like “What We Call Home” versus a short story like “The River?”

The feeling and state of mind remain the same no matter the genre I’m working in. There’s always a spark, an enthusiasm for an idea, that drives me to write anything, and I always write best when I allow myself to fall into that feeling and write uninhibitedly, without overthinking it.

However, the process for each genre is a little different, because there are different reasons to write in each. For me, poetry is best for those crystalline moments we encounter in life, where it’s more about image and feeling. The basis of a poem can come to me quickly, though it often takes many days to get everything just right. I usually write first drafts of poetry longhand. There’s something about producing work by hand that way, physically putting pen to paper, that seems to connect me to deeper parts of my subconscious. Scientific studies have shown that students remember more when they take notes by hand as opposed to typing them, and I sense something similar occurs in my writing, with writing and memory being so inextricably linked.

Stories lend themselves better to prose. Which stories move me toward fiction and which to nonfiction depends entirely on whether they would be better served by use of imagined details, in which case I generally opt for fiction, or a grounding in realistic information, in which case I generally opt for nonfiction. That’s not to say my fiction can’t be realistic and my nonfiction imaginative. It’s more about the mode of storytelling. If a story is better served in third-person omniscient point of view, for example, then I would be tempted to render it in fiction. But many others writers use third-person omniscient to great effect in their nonfiction. John Hersey and John McPhee immediately come to mind for this with their reportage or literary journalism style. Being a former newspaper journalist myself, I also sometimes employ that style in my nonfiction. So it’s not cut and dried. I don’t follow a formula for anything. I trust my gut feeling about each idea and allow it to lead me. Once I settle on a prose genre and begin writing, I typically use a computer, even for first drafts. It’s a simple practical matter in this case: While it’s easy enough for me to type a poem based on a longhand draft, it’s too time-consuming for me to do so for longer prose pieces.

Editing is the same for everything I write. After completing a draft—and in the case of poetry, typing it on a computer—I print it and go over it on paper. I can do some editing on a computer, but it’s a lot easier for me on paper. This is an important part of my writing process. This is where I try to understand what a piece really wants to say. I’ll go through many drafts, adding, cutting, rearranging, refining. When I get to the point where I begin putting back punctuation I removed earlier, or vice versa, then I know I’m done.

Your chapbook A Husband and Wife Are One Satan is a rich collection of stories on culture, history, and quotidian life. How do you capture the setting, in this case Kazakhstan, and all of its particularities in a way that’s almost familiar to readers who have never been there?

I strongly believe that underneath the cultural apparel we wear, humans are fundamentally alike. So the best way to make a foreign culture familiar is to expose the similarities that are right there already. We all love, hate, feel crushing disappointment and rising joy, take pride in our work, mourn the deaths of loved ones, and so on. No one culture has a monopoly on any of these universal feelings. So making a particular culture seem real involves tapping into the commonalities we share while at the same time rendering the culture as accurately as possible in its details, which comes from observing those details in real life, really paying attention to and absorbing them. It’s probably obvious, or at least should be, but it can’t be stressed enough: Being a close observer is essential to a writer.

Despite the stories in A Husband and Wife are One Satan tending to be short, your characters come across as complex and three-dimensional. How do you develop vivid characters in little page space?

I’m happy you feel this way! I don’t know if there’s any trick to it other than simply remembering and having curiosity about people and their behaviors. For example, many of the epithets the couple of the title story exchange with each other are real phrases my wife’s grandparents sometimes used with each other. I loved the vividness of these epithets and the richness of Russian idioms in general. It was that interest in language that prompted me to write that story.

But those two characters are otherwise nothing like my wife’s grandparents were! The story isn’t anything I had heard or witnessed. It all came out of those phrases, which led me to the further idea of a bickering couple who also cared for each other more deeply than they realized. That’s where the universality of human feelings comes in. There’s often a thin veneer between love and hate. So I just followed that. And I peopled the world of that story with composites of those I knew or had observed while freely imagining the details of their lives. For all of the stories in that collection, even the characters with some basis in reality are 90 percent invented.

Earlier, I said it’s important to have curiosity about people instead of an understanding of them because I don’t think understanding is necessary. Can anyone really know the heart of another? But in being curious about others, we want to reach out to and connect with them. So that’s also essential, not just to a writer but to anyone who wants to get along in the world.

In this short story collection, we got a variety of full-bodied stories revolving around such subjects as normalized wedding rituals in “Accomplices to a Tradition,” or metanarrative storytelling in “The River.” How do you decide which stories are worth telling, and what challenges do you face in making these narrative decisions?

I’m very much an intuitive writer when it comes to those kinds of decisions. I always try to get a sense of what the story wants to be, not what I think it should be. Certain stories seem to demand certain perspectives. It just seemed clear to me that “Accomplices to a Tradition” had to be told from the first-person point of view—the story essentially demanded that the narrator take part in what was happening, however reluctantly, for as the title alludes, our societal traditions are collectively built, not just by those who actively do so but also by those who remain quiet about their dissent.

In “The River,” the first-person is working much differently. There, the point of view highlights the element of unreliability in a distinct way, which is important to the metanarrative you mention, the nested cups of stories within the overarching story. I don’t plan something like that as much as feel my way through it. That I can to do so undoubtedly stems from my having read a lot high-quality literature and absorbed the techniques used. That and a lot of practice.

As to challenges, the main one is remaining open to possibilities. A story can go in any direction until you put words on the page, and then it becomes committed to something, and once that commitment is made, we as writers can be reluctant to go back and play with other possibilities. I’m not immune to that any more than anyone else. I can feel stubbornly wedded to my own ideas, my “darlings,” as Faulkner called them. But we have to be willing to give up on any idea, no matter how much time has been spent on it, if it isn’t working. We have to be willing to get it right.

At one point in “A Husband and Wife are One Satan,” the character Raim greets a Muslim customer, Murat with “Assalamu alaikum,” then welcomes a Christian customer, Kolya, in Russian, shaking each of their hands in accordance with their respective cultural customs. How else does your work reflect the cultural diversity and pluralism of Kazakhstan?

My most recent book Ships in the Desert has a section devoted to just this idea. The book is a collection of essays about different subjects, from the environmental catastrophe of the Aral Sea to my host family during my first months in Kazakhstan, but the most relevant essay in relation to your question is “The Missionary Position.” The United States has often been called a melting pot or, more recently, a salad bowl, to better represent how cultures here both integrate and remain distinct, but we’re far from the only country that has embraced multiculturalism. Kazakhstan is home to more than one hundred different ethnic groups. My students there came from many different backgrounds: Kazakh, Russian, German, Uzbek, Korean, among others. This reflects how the country and Central Asia in general is a literal crossroads between Asia and Europe. It’s been an important region economically and strategically for centuries. In fact, it and not Europe was the center of world power in medieval times. The Great Silk Road facilitated not only the trading of goods but also the trading of ideas, fashions, and religions. It wasn’t and still isn’t a homogeneous region. I talk about all this in more detail in “The Missionary Position,” but really, anything I or anyone else writes about Kazakhstan or Central Asia has to reflect cultural diversity and pluralism if it wants to be accurate.

The title of this collection, and of one of its stories, A Husband and Wife are One Satan, is a translation of the Russian saying “Муж и жена – одна сатана.” How else does your knowledge of Russian, Kazakh, as well as other languages influence your writing in English?

I have to give a big thanks here to my wife Valentina, for I rely on her a lot to help me work through understanding many things about the Russian language. I’m not fluent in it. I can follow it pretty well in normal, everyday circumstances. Just don’t ask me to translate War and Peace from the original! But I studied it and used it a lot while living overseas. I studied Kazakh as well, though less intensively, and I used it far less often. Both languages helped me understand my own language better. I taught English overseas, and my students constantly asked me questions about things I as a native speaker had simply absorbed at an early age. My students’ questions forced me not only to analyze what I had absorbed but also to compare it to their native languages. I had studied other languages in high school and college, mainly Spanish but also some German, but that kind of classroom experience is very different from the immersion experience I had in Kazakhstan. It was there for the first time that I fully understood how we actually have to think differently when speaking another language—and how it works the other way around, too, that another language can change the way we think.

How that plays out in my writing is subtle, but it’s there. Even though my dialogue is overwhelmingly rendered in English, I’m always considering whether it sounds right to the way certain characters would think and speak in their native languages. In my mind, I try to hear them in their native tongues, and if I don’t know exactly what that might be like, I ask my wife, at least for Russian. Then I try to get the feeling of that into English. It’s a lot like translating.

Still, even though our different languages suggest differences between us, just as our cultures and traditions do, these differences are essentially cosmetic. I believe strongly in the underlying unity of humanity. So I try to write characters that behave true to their own humanity. To achieve this more believably and consistently is an ongoing, lifelong task. There’s always more for a writer to do. The work is never finished.

Poetry Review: Chopping Wood in the Moonlight by Ken Letko

Chopping Wood in the Moonlight by Ken Letko. Flowstone Press. 2021. 33 Pages. Paperback. 

Chopping Wood in the Moonlight is Ken Letko’s tribute to nature and simple living. In these tightly crafted poems, the author utilizes his years of traveling and collected wisdom to celebrate a life lived authentically. In the title poem, Letko invokes the ancient Chinese poet Li Po as he contemplates whether he likes chopping wood at day or by moonlight. In the end, the speaker decides to let the owl show him “how / to glide through trees,” or, in other words, to follow their natural inclination, whatever that might be on any occasion.

In “Enjoying Illusions,” the speaker muses on a smudge left by a finger on their back door window. Each angle from which the speaker views the smudge reveals a different resemblance to a rabbit or a zombie walking their backyard. It is this playful meditation which makes the book so charming, as when, at the end of the poem, the speaker admonishes the reader to play their own games with perception, asking “how many windows / have you washed today?”  

The true strength of this collection, however, lies in its quiet, imagistic nature poetry. The poet’s home in the “redwoods of Del Norte” certainly helped inspire some of the collections most immersive meditations on nature and what it means to inhabit it. In one of the opening poems, “Bright Angel,” the speaker shares the revelation that every living thing is connected by using a symmetrical conceit wherein “ferns become deer” and later “deer become ferns.” In Chopping Wood in the Moonlight, Ken Letko invites readers to spire to insight by following him on his mystical journey through nature. 

—Christopher McCormick, MAR. 

Poetry Review: The Track the Whales Make by Marjorie Saiser

The Track the Whales Make: New and Selected Poems by Marjorie Saiser. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 181 pages. $19.95, print.

The Track the Whales Make begins with a section of new work and then features poems from Saiser’s seven previous books, starting with the most recent and then moving backwards in time. Like Saiser’s poems themselves, the book’s construction creates a sense of what is fleeting. As the reader steps back further into Saiser’s work, the world and its ordinary things and relationships continues to transform in beautiful reverse.

The new poem “Sometimes I Remember to Watch” explores not the sunset, but the pink sky it creates opposite itself. Saiser captures the feeling of an ever-shifting world, which shifts whether or not we pay attention: “It’s brief, no matter whether / I raise my glass or turn my back. / The glow is, and then is gone….” Saiser draws the reader’s attention to the pink sky, not to the “audacious” sunset or anything more obviously breathtaking, because there is something beautiful and unmatched in that fleeting quiet. Throughout her poems, Saiser takes the ordinary and the ignored and finds the innate beauty in them, found largely in the fact that they, too, are fleeting.

Saiser’s poems are ultimately about love. Whether that be love for nature, parents, children, or even love gone awry, the heart of Saiser’s work is love, which courses through not only the depicted relationships but also the ordinary, fleeting things that she so deftly captures. In “I Didn’t Know I Loved,” Saiser discovers love in unexpected, everyday things, such as the speaker’s mother’s “big hands / slicing iceberg lettuce / with a thick-bladed knife” or “the head of the nail, / the blow of the hammer, / blueprints become the shell of the house.” There is a sense of gentle and welcomed surprise at the realization of love for these small things. Again, Saiser creates a sense of something fleeting, as the love is only now realized and has gone unnoticed for so long. This poem blends the love of family and home with the love of nature, creating a patchwork of an everyday world with love woven into the little things, only to be noticed now, when the choice is made to look.

—Mary Simmons, MAR

Poetry Review: Unholy Heart by Grace Bauer

Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems by Grace Bauer. The Backwaters Press: An Imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. 2021. 169 pages. $19.95. Paperback.

New and selected poetry collections can sometimes be cumbersome when approaching any poet to experience their work. I always find that’s because we must figure out where to begin. With Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems by Grace Bauer, it’s best to start at the beginning and move actively to the end. This collection surveys the body of Bauer’s work from early poems to new poems.

“Eve Recollecting the Garden” opens this volume of poetry as a meditation on the creation story. During my reading of Bauer’s collection, I kept returning to this Edenic exploration of Eve’s stolen voice, “Dolphin, Starling, Antelope / were syllables you stole / from me…” (3). Presumably speaking to Adam, Eve accuses him of literally stealing her words. Bauer gives Eve the voice many creation stories never seem to do and allows her space in which Eve’s truth is finally spoken. Thematically, Bauer’s opening poem resonates as true today as it had when it was first published.

In “Update on Emily,” the closing poem in this collection, Bauer’s voice becomes much softer and contemplative. Bauer slows down and works through the puzzling she presents to us. The poem opens with what could be taken as a harsh statement of inevitability, “Because Death stops for everyone / and is rarely ever kind, / she writes her letters to the world–– ” (166). The poem moves quickly into a rumination on the necessity of what it means to live a life. For the speaker, it’s the act of writing letters. However, the poem asks whether the letters will be important to Emily, or for the world. Bauer eventually comes to the conclusion-less realization that we end up the same either way because the letters exist at all.

Through the inverted mirror between the urgency of creation in the opening poem “Eve Recollecting the Garden” and the quiet contemplation of death in the final poem “Update on Emily,” Bauer bookends us in waiting. Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems is a collection of believing that spans a career recording Bauer as a needed voice in poetry.

—Tyler Michael Jacobs, MAR