Chicago, IL | March 3, 2012

Episode 57: PSA Presents: A Reading and Conversation with Mary Jo Bang and Ed Roberson

(Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Mary Jo Bang, Ed Roberson) Two contemporary masters will read, followed by a discussion about craft and influences, moderated by PSA Programs Director Darrel Alejandro Holnes, with questions from the audience.

Published Date: May 1, 2013

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Chicago on March 3rd, 2012. The recording features Mary Jo Bang, Ed Roberson and Darrel Alejandro Holnes. You will now hear Alice Quinn from the Poetry Society of America provide introductions.

Alice Quinn:

Thank you all for coming. I met Mary Jo Bang in 1993 at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts in a class with so many really interesting people, several destined to become important, radically interesting poets, including Timothy Donnelly who just won the Kingsley Tufts Prize for his book The Cloud Corporation, and who was co-poetry editor of the Boston Review with Mary Jo for 10 years from 1995 to 2005.

Mary Jo was a wonderful photographer whose portraits sort of resembled those of Carl Van Vechten, the great chronicler of the figures of the Harlem Renaissance, at least to me, petite, alluring, clearly brilliant, sharp-eyed, quick to sort cant from content. Mary Jo was and remains an entirely unique figure.

She's written six books of poems. The first, Apology for Want was chosen by Edward Hirsch for the Bakeless Prize. The others, all with captivating titles are Louise in Love, Downstream Extremity of the Isle of the Swans, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon, Elegy, and the most recent, The Bride of E, a hugely evocative enterprise with the intensity and commanding aura of an interiority of a late Bergman film.

"Images and moments possess a haunting immediacy," quote, "bad was the highway that suited me in a bad rain," for instance, or, "Sunny misspelled Wednesday and was made to wear a dress," or "the sweater of the seventh year, the white trim, mystery of my sister, the splendid genius of distance."

Mary Jo was a Discovery of the Nation Award winner, she has received a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Award from Princeton University and her books, Louise in Love and Elegy, I'm happy to say, both received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress.

She lives in St. Louis where she's a Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing program at Washington University. She's also about to publish an amazing translation of Dante's Inferno with fabulous illustrations. Mary Jo is passionately admired by some of the most commanding figures in American poetry. And I'd like to end by quoting poet John Tranter's eloquent praise of her work.

"Mary Jo Bang's poetry is vivacious, and at the same time, mysterious, its surface glitters with the sparkle that the brightest American writing has always given off, and in the depths, it reveals a mixture of smoky, quirky complexities, a blend that is hers alone."

Please welcome her.

Mary Jo Bang:

Thank you Alice. Thank you Ed in advance. And thanks to the PSA. And thanks to all of you for coming. Alice probably doesn't remember our very first meeting. I went to Columbia University to visit prior to beginning school there and she was in the office xeroxing as if she were a secretary. And she said, "Oh, hello. I'm Alice Quinn. I work at the New Yorker." And of course, I well knew what she did at the New Yorker, but I thought it was very modest of her that she worked at the New Yorker.

I'm going to read mainly new work today. And these poems come out of a preoccupation, several preoccupations, one of which is with the brain and how the brain works, and then, secondarily, how the brain works at this moment, making sense of a political and social situation that seems new and strange often. So you'll find some historical talk and some consciousness talk, I guess.

An Autopsy of an Era.

"That's how it was then, a knife through cartilage, a body broken. Animal and animal as mineral ash. A window smashed. The collective howl as a general alarm, followed by quiet. Boot-black night, halogen hum. Tape snaking through a stealth machine.

Later, shattered glass and a checkpoint charm, the clasp of a tourist-trap bracelet. An arm. A trinket. Snap goes the clamshell. The film in the braincase preserving the sense of the drench, the angle of the leash, the connecting collar. A tracking long-shot. The descent of small-town darkness."

Excuse me a minute.

A Calculation Based on Figures in a Scene.

"There are still many marvels, you know. The festivals on Fridays. The divider in the center of the wasteland. On this side, flesh, on that, an iron claw and a new-made screw fallen from the factory window.

At noon, the doll doctor pushes the arm back into the socket. "There," he says. Day is done. He wishes he could smoke, but he gave that up long ago. The rubber sole of the nurse's right shoe makes a squeak when she reaches the room. Silence surrounds the empty bed. The body is elsewhere.

"When they want more," she says, "I give it." "When they want less," she says, "I take it away. I always let them choose." The doctor drums his fingers on the doll's flat abdomen. A sea of blood moves back and forth to a song of no mercy."

This next poem is an ekphrastic poem based on a painting by Max Beckmann. Beckmann was labeled a degenerate artist during the Nazi regime and he fled Germany and went to Amsterdam. And from there, he tried to go to the United States for many years unsuccessfully. And finally, I think, in 1946, he was successful. And he came to St. Louis, Missouri and the museum there now has the largest collection of Beckmann paintings in the world.

This particular painting is called Masquerade and it has two figures, a woman and a man. The woman has on a cat mask and the man just a eye mask. And she holds a skull and he holds a bludgeon.

Masquerade: After Beckmann.

"We're sitting here quietly. You're feeling your arm, I'm feeling my face. We're supposed to stay quiet and live the waiting life. We were told to be a portraitist's object and imitate a sad fate. We are a skull times two. We're supposed to stay quiet. Her moment is looking at a watch that says now. Its red face reminds me of the eye of an ogre. Its shiny rim reminds me of her moments' handcuffs. I don't want to speak about what can't be fathomed, mourning and missing rings cut from corpses, her moment's refusal to show his real face."

I always feel like I should apologize for the doom and gloom in these poems. I apologize.

I went to East Germany for the first time a couple of years ago and I've been back now another time. And in some ways, that geography is the psychic landscape of my childhood. Growing up, there was always this sense of those poor people who were behind the Iron Curtain. And it was an interesting experience.

There's a kind of memory that is called episodic memory and it includes both things that happened to us in our own personal lives, so a birthday party, a trip to the zoo, but also, those things that happen in society that define the moment of our lives and that creates a sense of identity, "We were alive when this happened," whatever this is.

So it was interesting when the wall fell because I had grown up thinking that the world would be defined forever by the fact that this wall existed. And it was actually rather unnerving to have that change even though I was very happy about the change, but there was this sense that nothing can be counted on, both good and bad. That was very kind of destabilizing to my sense of history.

The Numbers.

"I'm making a strudel of bluebirds. A pied piper is playing a strange song to the sound of a shredder that's going nonstop. Each ordinal number is isolated. Each receipt gets eaten. Each is made safe. The dish is hot from the oven. The mesmerizing sound lulls like a candle on a table makes a mirror of the eye. A knife draws a line down the center. This is mine. This is yours. There is no way out. Every language gets speckled with references to what it is to be after, shredded, sleeping, eyes closed, homeschooled to ignore what you don't want to see. Now, down the disposal of the feathers, the unfed, the crust crumbs, the monogrammed small plates stamped "I" for idiocy, mine and yours.

After the fall of the wall, I felt anything was possible, history would no longer exist. The mic goes out, the sound softens. The books burn down to embers, then ash. The fever hospital closes for lack of a solution to the seven deadly sins, betrayal for one, intolerance for two, greed for three, cruelty for four, large cars for five, war for six, suicide for seven, when it kills more than one."

I have saved a cherry poem for the last one, hang in there.

Costumes Exchanging Glances. I have something in this poem that I never thought I would put in a poem and it's a printer. And one of the projects I think that I'm interested in now, and have been for a while, is how to get the world in the poems. And I think I began, as a poet, thinking that the world of interiority was the definitive world and the world that the poet had access to.

And then, as the world became more present to me, I thought, well, how does one incorporate the world? So at first, I thought you do that on a large scale, but it seemed to me that there are certain things that are so ubiquitous and so define our lives and they have to do with computers. So in some ways, this printer in the poem keeps shocking me that I've allowed that to get in the poem and I don't know whether I should be happy or disappointed.

Costumes Exchanging Glances.

"The light on the printer blinks on and off in advance of printing any document. I say document, but a document in this case can be an envelope, anything drawn or written that will fit on a sheet of paper eight and a half by 11 or smaller. The printer has limits, I'm influenced by this and by other limits as well. Even as a child, the timidity, the overriding fear of what might happen if in error, the switch above the door, the bark peeled back to expose the pure. Excitable neurons work on an optic nerve. What you see is. Some become ironing board smooth, umbrella stays hold them up. Is it possible to call oneself pure? Pure what? Lymph? Skin? Autoimmune? I'm sick of explanations. A life is, like Russell said, of electricity, not a thing, but the way things behave, a science of motion towards some flat surface. Some heat, some cold, some confusion can leave some after-image, but it doesn't last. Isn't that what they say, that and that historical events exchange glances with nothingness?"

There's a poem in the Bride of E that has the biology mistress in it, and I'm amused and interested in that concept. It came from a book that's a girl's guide, it was published in London, in England, in the '60s. And they would have kind of mini graphic novel stories and then stories that were illustrated and crossword puzzles. And they all had a moral lesson. And in this one story, somebody trips the biology mistress who's bent on evil.

So I put that in that poem, but I kept thinking about the biology mistress and I think I am so curious about it, I had to write another poem and put it in because the idea, of course, the brain seems to me the biology mistress.

Silence Always Happens Suddenly.

"She'd been talking about the story where the cat had been belled. Now the cat sat alone learning. "Why learn behaving, slinking, fetching? Why?" No reply.

The telephone rang. "It's the biology mistress," the cat said. The fine print zeitgeist was act and consequence, a mere image inference, the perfect mate.

The clear message was, the world's full of fear, finessed slightly more.

"Death," said the cat as it lifted a souvenir trinket mermaid castle from the fish tank, "is day plummeting behind a cruise missile set for a mid-size city.""

One of the ways I'm conceptualizing these poems as they begin to collect into a group is that someone is watching a circus, the circus of human behavior, more or less. This poem is called The Circus Watcher. Sorry, I'm going to take another drink.

The Circus Watcher.

"I wear red to match the air that comes over the fence and fills the jar in which I keep the day. I say, "Every dog looks like no other," but that isn't true, not entirely. Difference is slippery. I say, "Just look at my head how it tilts to look up at these over-large leaves." They're large and blue, the better to be seen by my pin cushion eye. So bright in the light.

I'm sad. I'm happy. I keep busy. I count the eight legs of the tick on the table, arachnid and such. The book I leave open, the wind blows it shut.

In late April, I make a schedule, June to July, July to August. I begin to realize, the circus will be places, minds, people, pleasure, the drumming, all of these. I practice when I'm not sure of myself this repetition, no, no, no, new. I think that chaos fascinates me. I say, "I am part of that, one of the characters in a cage.""

I have two more poems and they're part of a project where I did what's essentially an erasure of Mrs Dalloway. It started because I needed to play a game and so, I thought, well, there's this book in front of me and maybe I could make a poem by taking words as they occur and write a poem from them. And when I finished that poem, I had exhausted the first 50 pages of Mrs Dalloway.

I still had some time before lunch and so, wondered what to do next, and looked at the book and there were 300 pages. So I thought, well, if I divide each 50 pages into a poem, I could reduce Mrs Dalloway to six poems. It's the abridged version, the Reader's Digest abridged version. And that meant that I would have to finish the poem by that 50th page.

And as I began to take words, of course, the poem became mine and somewhat Mrs Dalloway's or Virginia Woolf's because she's offering up these words to me. I'm going to read two poems from that project, the last two poems, one is called Opened and Shut.

"She had prepared a looking-glass: hair, dress, thought, sofa in the glow of dogs barking beautifully close up, and once, flames eating the edge of the sofa.

Her eyelashes blurred. Chin, nose, forehead, some lips, the cheek. The glass looking first at one thing, then another, nose, eyes, evening.

She sat looking at the map of her hands, the window, the clock, her pulse.

The body was busy thinking, conjuring the museum of a moment: emotion, scenes, people, bags of treasures, heaps of theories. Theories to explain feeling the here and the back of the hand. A theory allowed one thing after another, first, dinner, then morning.

Her hand was the world, to get to it, she had to look at herself. To get at the truth, one would have to disregard anything false, yet the truth was intangible.

One eye on the horizon: a long indeterminable, mere straightness, a few plants, that indescribable purple.

Doors being opened, visual impressions, as if the eye were the brain, the body entering the house."

That was 200 to 250. And this is 250 to the end. And the last line of Mrs Dalloway is there she was. Someone said, "Where's Clarissa?" There she was. So this is called There She Was.

"The house stood. The cars were standing. She was walking over to the dog, which had to be remembered. "Shake hands," she said. He straightened, bent, straightened. His manner was irreproachable, that being with a tail.

It was extraordinary, life was, furs being petted, people standing upright, panic, fear, tight skirts, ankles, thought. The creature standing, her giving little pats.

She was enjoying standing there. She had forgotten this feeling, ordinary things, curtains, biscuits, bones, a creature raising one foreleg, the movies.

She stood looking as if she would solidify, Darwin draped in black, remembering the flora or fauna. Of course, she would really only be remembering a garden, trees, wallpaper, a sea lion barking, a doctor of misery on the verge of difficulty, a boy gone, death, death without life, terror, fear, disaster, punishment, profound darkness, evening.

She walked to the window, sky, clouds coming into the room. How odd she thought to be."

Thank you very much.

Alice Quinn:

I think this is an exceptionally exciting pairing of poets actually. Michael Palmer... Oh, I want to say I'm going to introduce Ed Roberson and then, the conversation is going to be moderated by our new programs' director at the Poetry Society, Darrel Alejandro Holnes.

Michael Palmer has called Ed Roberson, "one of the most deeply innovative and critically acute voices of our time." His book Atmosphere Conditions from 1999 was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize and was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Nathaniel Mackey who has written, "Ed Roberson's labyrinthine, syntactically double-jointed lines work at a nervous, disconsolate pitch, peculiar insight and curious angle at the forefront of the tutorage they bring. His most compendious volume to date perhaps and certainly true to its title, To See the Earth Before the End of the World moves in many directions, often all at once, a 360-degree jitterbug waltz of a book."

I'd like to quote a couple of lines from Ed's interview with another wonderful poet, Lisel Mueller, which I feel shed light on some of the special virtues of his poetry. One is about his discovery of the music of Thelonious Monk. Quote, "The wrong notes would be all the right notes. It was the most exciting thing." And this passage about going to church as a youngster, "I was raised in a church, a Southern African Methodist church with all the emotional trimmings. I was never a real believer, but what I did believe in was what music of the stories allowed people to feel, what the musical structures of the religious allowed you to think or feel. What I always wanted to do was not write the stuff that's pretty, but write the stuff that cut way deeper, that was almost terror to deal with. It's best for me when I'm humbled into writing or look at it, be silenced, but enabled to stand up to it and write a poem that says, "Here's a response to the call of that moment. That music it will make you think.""

Ed Roberson has written eight collections of poetry and his honors include Lila Wallace Writers Award and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, which recognizes extraordinary poetic genius. His work has been included in Best American Poetry. And for many years, he taught at Rutgers. Now he's living here. And this morning, at the Palmer Hotel, I enjoyed reading his suite of nine Chicago poems. The sixth one opens, "The street in the opening between buildings is running a strip of the el like a frame by frame tape, the windows of the train, different shots of the sky, then it breaks, and the clouds are caught up in the walls of nearby glass-skin architecture. I never get to see what I think would be the whole movie. I, too, move on."

Please welcome him.

Ed Roberson:

Thank you all for coming.

. And I thank the Poetry Society and the conference for inviting me. I'm especially nervous because folks from all over are here. I have friends in Maine and California and I see you all staring at me and I'm a little nervous.

But I'm going to take the chance here today, one of the things that always fascinated me about Mary Jo's poetry was she's not afraid of the strange, she doesn't back off, and I kind of always appreciated that in her work. And it kind of seems like she doesn't even bother to push it into a nice acceptable form. And the last couple of things that I've been working on have been sort of telling me to stop pushing things too much into too tight a form and to let things sort of be as ridiculous and crazy as they are.

So I'm going to do something dangerous for me, I'm going to read work that's not published, that's brand new and maybe not even finished. I was at a [inaudible 00:26:47] reading earlier in the week and one of my students said, "But you have to be brave and show people what you're doing while you're working." So I want to read a couple of doodles, doodles that I think some of my students will be familiar with, but doodles nonetheless. Let's...

It's from the Newark Airport. "His was an aviation's generation who traveled in public in public clothes, not in his pajamas, not to say dressed up, but down to earth with a coat. A tie, maybe, depending on who was to meet him. A difference between telling people what they can do and offering assistance, seeing your body.

There was no shoving in his lines. When he was ordered aside, ordered out of his coat, his jacket, his shoes, his arms up to the side, by this way or this way, one's joy in ordering folks to do this stuff, what he did was mocking obedience to the poking at his crotch with the wand gesture, clearly, the threat to drop his pants like a man takes off his jacket to fight with a little whipper-snapper bent over in front of him just to say, "What's happening here?" to say, "My body has been my territory for 68 years, you don't walk in here by no magic wand and think you got my respect. There is a movement of address that supersedes your orders by eons, way eons, and it has found its way to shove your orders down your throat.""

"The good woman forgives God, his being. She wore a faint perfume of pain relievers on her, which she didn't seem old enough to have earned, except somewhere in her eyes, the break there's no rub or plaster for, you could see shift the light. She stares with a tightness of gritted teeth. A glimpse gets through that says she'd never strike, never strike again though. If she ever did, no, she stays the right.

How could a God have so disappointed one of its strong? What God-held weakness gave way before her for her to witness an act of God as act rather than spirit, just an act?

You sense the good woman she was before something happened that she still is in her, but that is hers, not anyone else's, not God. A cost for which she has paid in forgiving."

"What road does it take the ground to release a foot to flight from forward to air and step less up? Is air a home to come to, to return to or the idea in a vanishing point, a light created by the landscape of rods and cones where the paths come together?

New York to LA is no more than what you have to get there. Have is, have equals is, well, it's feet, wheels, the next seat belted in, flying, transfigured by cash, it's God of everything, the wings, which now is more than the foot it was. And in this case, it's only money. Like people say, "It is what it is." The way they say it to say what you're seeing, you know, what I'm saying, you know. Everything changes everything. Always trying to change up against the steady going down. The is what it is is.

The short flights have stepped to keep above ground are still the ground we stand. The breathing of statues won't transcend this. The waves don't lift the seabirds off their seat in the water the way rollercoasters hoist their riders into the airtime. The track bumps rather than continues into flight. Different senses to alight and to land, but they both come to the end of a ride. Throw up your hands."

I have a poem where I say that I've never seen a pronghorn antelope, and it's true. I mean, I saw them but I was riding by them and I didn't know what to look for. So I really was looking and not seeing. And last September, I was in Wyoming for two weeks and it was all over the place and the animals all decided, "Ed's coming, let's all hide." So I didn't get to see any buffalo, any grizzlies. I didn't get to see anything.

But the very last day, I was going to the airport, and Beth Loffreda, who's my host, said, "Oh, let's drive down here. We've got a couple of minutes." And we made this turn and there's a flock of them. I say flock because they moved like birds. There they all were. And pronghorns have very good sight, so they were a little ways away, but the minute we stepped into sight, they just all turned and looked at us and then just slowly moved away.

So this thing about never having seen an antelope, finally, it hit me this way. "Antelope don't look like they put their feet down on anything, they seem to picket the ground, to pick at it, to pinch themselves off the ground into air. Whereas, horses seem to dig at, to scoop away the distance.

Ezekiel, the wheel almost never lifts to miss a measure. But that song has no organic round of evolution it has won, unless in a long-lost sea or our roll of the foot flat, part, not whole of the wheel, the tape on the ground.

Is this why the marchers sing through those death marches, measure, calling out to each other to keep up, to not get picked off, touch the fellow footstep as all that sound of the earth and to know where to go silent, traceless when we steal away and run?"

There are certain things, when you're growing up, you hear at the dinner table. And one of the stories I heard was, my father, from South Carolina, saw a dog, he was lost, he was lost and he saw this dog that had no head and it led him home.

Later on, when I began to study world folklore and anthropology and stuff, a white dog, for a lot of people, and I guess that's where he got it, a white dog is your mother come back. He lost his mother when he was seven.

"A white dog with no head shining in the dark, like a bulb not giving off any light to the tracks, met my father at a railroad he didn't know was there. When he got lost as a little boy coming home at night, he followed the dog in the tracks to where he knew where he was at and never saw the dog or the railroad ever again. He thought he saw that white before when he was littler on his mother's dress before she died.

When they came north, my dad liked ironed white shirts when he went out dressed up to gamble. He never lost anything. He never saw even in the dark of his days. I'd never even seen a picture of that grandmother. What is there to see, to take except what she took him?"

Those are off the top of the desk doodles, nobody ran out of the room, so I guess I can keep working with them.

Okay, what I'd like to do then is read some poems from the book To See the Earth Before the End of the World. And I always like to read the title poem and the poem that answers it to sort of give folks the flavor of the book.

And I always sort of introduce this, I worked in Alaska and had to go past the Portage Glacier, constantly driving past Portage Glacier. Sometimes we'd get out of the van and sort of walk up and sort of look at the glacier. A few years ago, I saw the New York Times, it said that people were actually in a race up the valleys to sort of look at the glaciers because they were melting so fast. And they had a picture of Portage Glacier that was just shocking to me. So that's what started the sequence of poems.

"People are grabbing at the chance to see the earth before the end of the world, the world's death piece by piece each longer than we.

Some endings of the world overlap our lived time, skidding for generations to the crash scene of species extinction, the five minutes it takes for the plane to fall, the mile ago it takes to stop the train, the small bay to coast the liner into the ground, the line of title fought to a nation until the land dies, the continent uninhabitable. That very subtlety of time between large and small.

Media note: people chasing glaciers in retreat up their valleys. And the speed watched ice was speed made invisible. Now, it's days and a few feet further away, a subtle collapse of time between large and our small human extinction.

If I have a table at this event mine bears an ice sculpture. Of whatever loss it is, it lasts as long as ice does until it disappears into its polar white and melts the ground beneath it into vapor, into air.

All that once chased us and we chased back to a balanced chasing back, tooth for spear, knife for claw, locks us in this grip. We just now see our own lives taken by taking them out. Hunting the bear, we hunt the glacier with the changes come of that choice."

Topoi.

"The plane begins its descent into Newark from the west at the Delaware Water Gap. The whole width of the state of New Jersey is the base of a triangle underlying that approach to its point.

Geography test, problem off the wall to the ground, whole highway systems unfold again below, the maps we rode. But at what point did we become so familiar with such long perspective we could look down and recognize the pile of Denver by the drop-off and crumble of the plate up into the Rockies, or say, "That's Detroit" by the link of lakes by Lake St. Clair, some 30,000 feet above Lake Erie while just barely spotting Huron on the horizon?

Some earlier hunter had a similar picture in his head for getting around, and what he saw seems map, his feet figured, what a Boeing 757 picks up and puts down pacing off my passing through the world by air.

But we've seen the ground ball up into one step and stand on nothing else, our footing in the vacuum, diminished sky of solar space.

Yet we haven't seen again his vision, haven't yet dreamt from it even such map as he had hunted by. We haven't seen answered from that garden's gazing ball whether there is direction after all the dream-lines have been hunted to circumference.

Like trained bear dancing on a circus ball, we look down, our feet in a step from which there is no step off, the footprint of all of step ever taken. The hunted step kept far and fast enough away from the hunter to keep the distance of its life, shortens to none between them or is that shit outcome stepped in become their one, in perspective, step from which there is no step out of in the sense of the surface over which a phenomenon exists? Well, the earth is the footprint of life.

Gaia's gravity-swayed steps take on orbit. We, in the tropic of balance, in a basket on her head, a blue wrap of sky, sun ripens the thin rind of the plane home.

Sweet fruit of the journey of all journey, fruit of all step, home is a sweet fruit of all of step that is ever taken. The earth is all of step ever taken by most of us, we think.

But the aisles of air, we walk about with a seatbelt sign off hung off our back, angel's wings or motion-lines such as drawn in cartoons or the tesseract of four dimensions. Cube sunk in a square of space, sunk in a space of time. Our cubed world worn as helmet among strung dimensions far distant enough to see the ball that all our ways are woven from. Sand, the lens grinder's patient hand, sore elbow, head in the stars, he looks down at his feet sunk in time.

The footprint of life is death. The grave, there is no step out of, the compost earth. The earth is the footprint of life."

Teapot Boiling: How to Begin the Day.

"That a beautiful woman goes to pieces, never finishes her cup from a little coffee shop somewhere says war, shouldn't be convenient as add water and stir.

But somewhere, water begins to boil, the ticking pop of the gases faster and faster, the first few shots explode into full fire, surface turmoil wails from a single, simple teapot, begins a simple day towards its disasters.

Don't believe the writing on the packaging, it's more difficult than it says."

Here it is. "A swaying path swallowed what we gave it for directions by foot until we no longer understood the laceyness of our maps. And we sat down in fields of violets, hope woke open, and copied the direction of patterns of sowing in the forming dunes in their written over, their own writing or the floating schedule on the silvery back of the river, snake, always knew. From its shed moment we copied the runoff. On ending of its ink, we drank it, made us black, the earth."

"The red spot on two mating cranes was their prisoner, but it was their dancing that would not let go of their beauty, the bruise of who holds who, the half, missing half, or the accomplished egg of the masked dancer half in the crane suit. That spot is almost an unoccupied music in our time that won't let go, someone dressed up like nature trying to dance up a future.

Putting on paint and feathers, stepping one of us through survival, do we all?

If we teach the phoenix to dance, would it partner my walk, my way to walk? Tell time? Would I fly? Unable to be anywhere but here, can I get out of here? The secret how to hold my spot between steps in that burning midair to the next. How much secret of my own step can I get turned over to me by the torture of possession in this mass, in this bird dance, this interrogation of ground going after the air?

To wear the moment costumed in a feathers present, its plumage consequence of scales event nailed down, spots swimming before its eyes is to be possessed by, mated to what mask we've made see and what it sees cast in the steps thrown on the ground, ourselves as messianic bird cult far behind the celled machines of our disappearance.

The messianic bird cult far behind the celled machines of our disappearance sees us making up wings to save a bird among our species with sticks and wax. I beg to be taught to dance back from over the edge of the end."

I'll read a couple of this. I have nine Chicago poems, I'll read a couple of them.

The Season Opener.

"The ants are licking open the peonies unwrapping the seal to the tight globes of bloom. They gang up on and chase away a ladybug. I can sit here on the porch stoop as on the step of an amphitheater and watch ours. Ours is a great sports city, the tour guides say, even the house roofs of bleachers. Some ball is always in the air ready to open its colors. Fragrance like stadium food scent reaches the street. Our mouths drop open, tongues about to do the work.

The wind is so high, the lake surface contracts in a gasp. The waves jump straight up. Our side must be winning. I can't hear the crowd of whitecap I see from the bus run. The joggers and cyclists look as though, hysterically, they carry themselves the news and breaking sound that maybe there's not another side to water, nor to the whole of what we play. We field against a fog or the home game in solids, ice and a change of uniform.

We contend against what is and is ourselves though. We want a side that isn't ours to have of the universe, to have us on our feet like the waves cheering on this morning. This morning, we want our messengers to lie. A pool of good news dead silent at our feet for us to walk open. Our winnings, winning or not, all still won a life that lets us live it, the excitement of winged ankles, seas of dancing streets in the envelope he carries.

When the waves jumped straight up, the messenger sand smashed them into pieces for winning. When the surface fainted back, the stampeding sky sank its foot in that face to leave winning.

There were two countless words for the score, you hear the roar of silence over winning. Someone screaming, "What are you doing? What are you doing?" Something answers, "I'm winning." Doing nothing is thrown out the window to eliminate that way to deal with winning. We burned gridlocked cars in morse code before we took off running to say living is winning. Lake Shore Drive reads, "Chicago is living, living life city," quoting the song, "winning.""

"The John Hancock Building has never struck the actual oil it looks like it should. Wildcatters call this a dry hole, but it isn't. It has the pool of Lake Michigan on the bottom when you're looking from the top. "What an amazing hole," he said. Enchantment's name to call into what we all are looking for, a spell to an opening as deep into seeing.

He had the gift of new, first time in a city. Pickpockets hadn't cited yet the eyes, the bulging wealth of openness, the shiny change. We were watching the old movie of our century, our village root. The well's drawn, words dip and drip into volumes in our pack trying to solve our plot. A closeup on the winch rope, frayed by so continuously raising the question. It cuts off, not to mislead the viewer though, and screened on our bodies, the billboard buses, the city wall, the crude that is this day struck from our drilling."

Thank you. [inaudible 00:49:40].

Darrel Alejandro Holnes:

I think we'll have another round of applause for our readers today. You guys were great. So I'll start out by asking, you each extend a myriad of traditions as you write the modern lyric, tell us about the dissolution of the distinction between high and low culture and how your work exercises its freedom.

Mary Jo Bang:

Well, I'm not a cultural historian, but there are many reductive ways to plot that, you can go back to the industrial revolution and you have the romantic poet who had elevated subjects and suddenly, you have people walking around an urban center, and in Paris they were called flaneurs, and observing life and incorporating that into their poems.

So I think it begins a long time ago, and high modernism starts blending those moments and sort of obscuring where they come from. So it's no longer someone... You don't know that you're overhearing speech as you walk by a doorway. You don't know where Marie in the beginning of the Wasteland is coming from. But I think that that introduces these kinds of poetic strategies, which we've continued because they do match our world. Our world has constant stimulation and input. And so, the poet begins to try to incorporate those in the poem.

Ed Roberson:

Very much so. Mary Jo's smarter than I am. My first reaction when I got the question was, I guess I've kind of lived through a kind of life where the high and the low were always collapsing into each other. If you're in a Black neighborhood, there are folks who are high folks and folks who are low folks, but you also notice that they're also in the same church on Sunday.

And if you travel a bit around the world, people's idea of high and low, you begin to see how that moves around and shifts on you, so you're constantly taken by surprise at what is high and low. I remember meeting a man in the Ecuadorian jungle who was going to introduce me to his family, basically, to his sons. And he had a line of four wives and a whole room full of sons. And I just thought it was just interesting, this good-looking man, beautiful wives.

When I got home and when I got back to some kind of folks who knew what was going on out there, they said, "He's the person who pinpoints whose head gets shrunken." So actually, he was a federal judge. I didn't know that at the time. I just knew that this was an important man, I had no idea what the high of that importance was. I just knew that here I was, a guest who was meeting an important man. He didn't have a Mercedes or anything, but you could tell.

So I think our time, as Mary's pointing out, we've been able to live through that high and low and people have resisted bringing certain kinds or things into your work. You write a poem, you're not allowed to say motherfucker. Carolyn Rodgers says it 11 times in one poem, and she says she's not going to say it again, but she says it 11 times. And the very last part of the poem is she says if she doesn't say it, you all know that there's a whole lot of mean motherfuckers out there, she doesn't need to say it. So that kind of thing, the way she was able to move the...

What started the poem was she was told that ladies don't do this, the new age of Black women don't do this kind of thing. Well, she said Black women do what they damn well please, and she writes this poem and says that this is the last time she's going to say this word, and she does, she gets the last word. But we've lived through times where we could see that kind of thing begin to collapse and not collapse from the top, towed down, people have taken the right to condense things. I think that's a continuation of what you were saying.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes:

So it sounds like we're talking about roots, both literary and personal and community roots as well. And I wonder who are the poets that you think about and have thought about when you're writing and approaching all of the different subjects that you each have?

Mary Jo Bang:

Well, I think that there are obvious answers to that, but maybe that's not true, maybe what's obvious for me isn't obvious for everyone else because Elliot, and particularly early Elliot, is very important to me. Maybe that's not true for everybody else. Gerard Manley Hopkins was extremely important to me. I think there was a moment when I began studying poetry where I had this received notion of what the poem was, and it was a fairly limited idea of what the poem was. Even though I had, when I was in high school, encountered Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind and EE Cummings, but still, I think there are certain people, even from the past, they blow apart your idea of the poem, and Hopkins, for me, was one of those, I think EE Cummings was too, I think it's surprising to me how few people read his work, talk about it, write about it critically. Berryman's very important to me. Stein's very important to me. I mean, that's just the ones that come readily to mind.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes:

And has your relationship with those poets and their work changed over time? How would you map that?

Mary Jo Bang:

Well, I think one of the ways to map it is to see who else is influenced by those people and to see what permission people gain from reading those works. And I think that that interests me a lot. I am interested in poetry in general, not just my own poetry, and I'm interested in trends and I'm interested in the history of this art and the cultural reception of it. And so, there are a lot of different ways to figure those pieces. There are many different puzzles and they all have a sky, but what else is in there varies when you decide through what veil you're going to look at the past.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes:

I see. I see.

Ed Roberson:

For me, I guess, it comes up. I'm not a very orderly writer, not a very orderly person for that matter, but the poems sort of just start anywhere and there's no set time of day or I don't have a writing schedule, any of that kind of thing. So that kind of being hit by the poem is usually being hit by a particular poet. And they come from all over. People will notice in my work, Spicer for instance, I learned an awful lot from Spicer. I would never try to write it, but the Wallace Stevens line is really fascinating to me. And as I do things, as I sort of start to do a poem, the poem is sort of talking to me, the poem will sort of tell me who to run to the bookshelf and pick up and read or who to try to remember. So it's not very orderly for me, it's sort of poem by poem, someone will pull my ear and work on me. It's not a [inaudible 00:58:33].

Darrel Alejandro Holnes:

Right. So we're talking about your foundation and other writers, but I'm hoping you can also talk about your foundation in other disciplines as well as you engage nature or history and literature. Who are some of the scholars and the thinkers that you think about or some of the theories that you consider? I know that, recently, Ed's work has been seen as ecopoetics and ecocriticism especially. And Mary, it's so obvious how you engage history and literature and you referenced your Mrs Dalloway project earlier today, can you talk about this kind of genesis and the thinking behind engaging these different subjects?

Mary Jo Bang:

Well, again, I think it's a question of if I single out certain writers, it's because they come to mind. Beckett is a big influence for me, and Virginia Woolf was, Joyce was. But I also read widely in studies of consciousness and the brain and so, people like Oliver Sacks have been extremely important to me. And I read the New York Review of Books, and so, I read a lot of essayists who publish there. And then, that pushes me in new directions. And unfortunately, there are too few hours in the day to read everything one wants to read and also be a teacher and also be a writer. But I'm as likely to pick up a book of nonfiction as I am another book of poetry.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes:

Right. That's wonderful.

Ed Roberson:

You mentioned being associated recently with ecopoetics, that's mostly past experience, it's not something that was planned or a set out kind of study. I'll sort of remember something that happened and go look up that part of the country or what's going on there and pull stuff in like that. But I continually try to tell folks that this did not happen with any kind of order, this is mostly me just strolling along the street and going in certain doors and falling out into certain alleys. It's very accidental for me. My life has been very accidental, and I kind of gotten used to liking it that way. That's the reason, I guess, I like Spicer. I don't have any martians pushing me into these doors, but there's an equivalent to that somewhere directing me. I don't plan, I just let it happen and write it down as it happens and then, lose it.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes:

So that's a bit about what's happening internally with your writing process. And I wonder, externally, about how your poems are received. And Mike Powell, an LA based Detroit artist said, "I make art to give other people my problems." And I wonder what brought you to writing and what do you hope your reader takes away from each poem?

Mary Jo Bang:

I think if I said anything, I'd just be making up something because I don't think I can control that and I don't want to control that. I want people to be able to participate in meaning construction and that participation will come out of their own reading practice and their own particular relationship to language and associations that happen in their minds. I think I've never been a very directive reader, I don't want to insist that a poem be read in a particular way. So I really want to leave a certain kind of openness in the poem, and yet I want to satisfy my own need to have said whatever it is that I feel compelled to say, and I do feel compelled. I mean, we are social animals, and part of speech is to have a connection to others. And so, I think that I'm very astutely aware of that interaction and that speaking back and forth to someone, even though I don't know who that is.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes:

Right.

Ed Roberson:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. To sort of build on what Mary Jo has said, for me, I have no idea what's going to happen once I'm finished with it and send it out there. And then, sort of real early on had the sense that there was going to be a course of readers reading the poem in all these sort of different ways.

So for me, what you're saying, that sort of field of associations, if I think of that field of associations as the audience, then they're there when I'm writing, that's the company that we're all in chorus as we're writing. And you sort of can refer back to specific historical moments and like you can pull up names, but I hear a lot of noise going on and work out that noise into a poem. But yes, I think I have that same feeling that folks are there for me in the writing and they disappear once the poem is finished, I have no idea what happens next.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes:

So thinking about what happens next, we've talked about your internal process, we've talked about how your work is received and I'm wondering what's next? Where would you like to see, or do you imagine American poetry will head to in the next few years? Whether you want to think about what you in particular are working on right now, or I know you guys are wonderful teachers out there and you have so many different students, what do you see it might be happening in poetry right now?

Mary Jo Bang:

Well, I'm very excited that poetry seems to be able to tolerate a lot of plurality and I really celebrate that and celebrate it in my students. I really don't want them to sacrifice any kind of their own compulsion to say and to say in a certain way and to talk about whatever their preoccupations and obsessions are. So I think there was a time when there was a lot of pushback against doing things oddly or doing things a different way. And now, I think that we have examples of excellence throughout a kind of tapestry of possibilities, and new possibilities keep getting written, and that makes me happy. And it's probably fortunate because we have all these training programs called MFA programs where there's a lot of activity and a lot of writing. So I think it's an excellent time to be a writer and to be able to decipher oneself exactly how one wants to write against tradition or out of tradition or any kind of hybridization of both of those strains.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes:

Right.

Ed Roberson:

The same thing, I'm really glad to see the students moving away into their own directions, the younger writers doing that. There's something else though that is pleasing to me that I see in my students. Students, my students at least, not only try to break away from the old and investigate things new, they don't treat the words as just machines. They don't forget to bring the feeling through with the words.

You can do the thing where you do your cutup and you do your paste-up and you put it together and it looks pretty as a graphic and you have no idea what the hell it says. That's nice if you want to do Museum of Modern Art stuff, but if you want to write a poem, what I'm proud of in my students is they'll do that, they'll do all the modern things of dealing with fragmentation, multiple voice, outsider voice, but also, I see people also remembering to bring into this experiment that they're working with, bring into this experiment the experiment of their own feelings and say, "This is what happens to me when I tackle this thing," and bring that feeling with them, not just the words as freed from the page or disconnected from the page.

And that disconnection is perfect, it allows you to get rid of the old-fashioned and to bring in the new. So I'm not downing the disconnect, that's right. But also, I wanted to see people bring the mind, the feeling and the person with them in that new arrangement. It's always nice to see a nice abstract, but it's nice to see a but in there or somebody doing something, somebody feeling something.

I say I have a friend of mine, he's a sculptor, and I looked at this one sculpture of his, at least for the last year. And all of a sudden, I was walking around the studio, and I looked at it from this one angle and I said, "That's a butt." And it's this beautiful, elegant curve that actually is a female curve. And he said, "Yeah, it's a dancer. You didn't see that before?" And I had just looked at the structure, the way the thing did not fall over or held up, and stupid. And he's 85 years old. The real feeling was that beautiful feminine curve in there that is the dancer, took me that long to pick it up. So bringing forward that into the poem, not just manipulating the wood, but bringing that forward into the poem is what I'm proud of my students for doing.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes:

That's wonderful. That's our time. Thank you Mary Jo. Thank you Ed.

Alice Quinn:

And you Darrel.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes:

Thank you AWP.

Alice Quinn:

Thanks to Ed.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes:

Mary Jo and Ed will be signing books at the back of the room. Remember to visit poetrysociety.org if you like this and other programs.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning into the AWP Podcast series. For other podcasts, please visit our website at www.awpwriter.org.

 


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