65º ~ a mixed up sky today, moving fast from cloud-cover to sun to cloud-cover but the winds all up in the higher levels, preparing for unseasonable highs, more raking time?

The end of the semester is upon us.  At PTC, we have one full week of classes left and then a week of finals.  Still, I’m clinging to my poetry time as best I can while still teaching, grading, and prepping for end of the semester business as the spring semester hovers in the wings.

For poetry this week, it’s been all about the reading.  Camille Dungy came to Little Rock over a year ago.  Ack!  I’ve had her books Suck on the Marrow and Smith Blue on the to-read stack for far too long.  


Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010) puts me in mind of Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, although a book that stands alongside Dove’s rather than in its shadow.  In this collection Dungy provides narratives in plain speech that open a glimpse into the slavery of the 19th century in America.  It teaches gently with a preface that the U.S. did in fact withdraw from the international slave trade but did not end slavery within its borders, leaving slaveholders having to find new ways to gain labor: by breeding their current slaves, by smuggling in foreign-captured slaves, and by kidnapping free African Americans from the North and enslaving them in the South.  While I’m sure I learned of this once upon a time in a history class, I was startled awake by the preface and then by the poems, confronting once again a system so brutal far too many of us turn our eyes away.

Suck on the Marrow is divided into four sections.  The first contains the story of Joseph Freeman, a once-free African American kidnapped in Philadelphia and sold into slavery on the Jackson farm in Virginia.  His story is echoed by his wife Melinda’s voice in the fourth section as she has to move on with life.  In between we get voices of others, Molly & Shad, and a woman who reinvents herself, escaping slavery only to become a prostitute in an attempt to earn enough money to gain a true freedom.  Finally, there are two “loose” poems at the end of the book, one a found poem, “‘Tis of thee, sweet land,” and one a prose poem serving as a kind of glossary for the entire book.

Here is a glimpse from “Survival.”

The body winnows.  The body tills.  The body knows
sow’s feet, sow gut, night harvested kale.  The body knows
to sleep through welted dreams, to wake
before night succumbs to morning.

Wheat, wheat, tobacco, corn: the body knows.


Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011) takes a huge leap away from Dungy’s previous book and becomes global in its protest.  The poems in this book form a much looser arc, branching from the devastation of war (and the technology of war) to environmental devastation to our own human mortality and the losses we suffer when we choose to love.  Here, Dungy’s skill with the lyric form, still laced with narrative hints, shines.

Without being heavy-handed, these are political poems, and in the end, Dungy is left with one wish, the wish that language might cause change.  Here’s an excerpt from “Association Copy,” in which the speaker holds a copy of one of Levine’s books that another poet has sold in a used bookstore, that other poet’s name inscribed in the front cover denoting ownership.

Mostly, I want to believe you held onto the book,
that your fingers brailed those pages’ inky veins
even in your final weeks.  I want to believe
words can be that important in the end.

 This may seem a rather basic statement, but when taken in the context of the entire book which refuses to turn away from the horrors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the melting of the global ice caps, these few lines vibrate with importance. 

~~~~~

Finally, one last call for poems to be submitted to Heron Tree (if you read this post today, Saturday, 1 December).  Our submission inbox closes tonight!  Hurry, hurry!  We are notifying on a rolling basis and will begin publication in January!  (Do the exclamation points denote my excitement well enough or should I add more?)

50º ~ bright sun, clean skies, trees at about 1/4 leaves remaining, highs around 60º, lows around 40º for the week to come

The biggest news on the block is this:  Heron Tree accepts submissions through December 1 (next Saturday).  If you haven’t sent us poems, we really, really, really want to see your work.  Remember, we read blind, so I can’t tell if you’ve submitted yet.  We are sending decisions on a rolling basis but had so many submissions in September, that I think we are still responding to poems from the beginning of the reading period.  Our guidelines are here.

We will start publishing poems the first week of January 2013!  So exciting!

I have to say, serving as a co-editor has been a game changer.  I plan to blog about that exclusively after the reading period (meaning after the semester is over!).  Still, if you have any inclination to help read for a journal and get the opportunity, I highly recommend it.

~~~~~

Most of this week has been filled with family, so not too much poetry going on.  My folks were down from Iowa and Mom & I planted pansies, which she just couldn’t get over, since they are a summer flower in Iowa.  She has been such a huge help in the front yard as I did not inherit her gardening skills!  This year we were especially thankful for my dad’s surgery, which happened a year ago in December.  He now has a fully operational Deep Brain Stimulation Therapy computer running through his brain and it has improved his quality of life by leaps and bounds.  Parkinson’s can be such a frustrating disease, but this has made a world of difference.  (Disclaimer: This is not a miracle cure and does not alleviate all PD symptoms; however, the change in his demeanor and mobility has been wonderful.)

~~~~~

I did manage to finish a book of poems Tuesday morning.  Nickole Brown’s Sister has been on my desk since April, when I picked it up at the Arkansas Lit Festival, and it is a stunner.  Nickole moved to Little Rock 18 months ago to teach at UALR, and having her in town has been wonderful.  On her website, Sister is referred to as a novel-in-poems.  It traces a speaker’s relationship to her mother and her sister who is 10 years younger.  The speaker is at a loss for who her father is and envies her sister for that knowledge, all the while hating the man who fathers her sister, as he sexually abuses the speaker.  It is an emotionally complicated journey but the poems never succumb to relying on that emotion alone.  They are finely crafted, in fact, so finely crafted that the pain cuts that much deeper.

The most prominent thread woven throughout the collection is the idea of sex, pregnancy, and the fetus in the womb, then birthed.  Here is a bit from “Sticky Fingers.”

Unborn we………..listened.

We were covered
with an okra fuzz of hair………fed cravings
of white bread………fried chicken……….tomatoes
straight from the can……………all through
a pulsing straw…..a braided beam of light
to our navel.

While the speaker feels a great distance between herself and her sister whom she both loves deeply and envies just as deeply, it is often through imagining these similarities in utero that she manages to cross the distance between them.

And because the speaker’s mother plays as important a role in the story as her sister does, here’s a bit from “Somniloquy.”

Mama sleeps, her jaw knocking all night on the same
……….closed door, her canines worn flat with the pop and grit
……….of chewing a thing impossible
……….to swallow.

Sister is a difficult book on the emotional side but a necessary one.  These poems take all the speaker’s pain, regret, and longing, and create something startling beautiful in the end.   

56º ~ glorious sunshine, a few pleasing clouds wafting, the leaves that remain moved gently by a small breeze

For those keeping score, I started the week off well, keeping up my 2 hours in the morning.  I’ve slowly inched the alarm clock back a bit each week, so that I’m able to be at the desk before I’m needed on campus.  C. has been amazing at accommodating this new shift in the schedule.  (Another thankfulness: a spouse who understands the writing life.)  The urge to write new poems is creeping along in my veins nicely.  I may even have stumbled across a new obsession as I drafted a poem Tuesday morning.  I don’t want to say anything more about it yet, lest I scare it away.

I will say that what prompted me to the draft was reading Joe Hall’s Pigafetta Is My Wife (Black Ocean, 2010).  Based on the recommendation of a dear poet-friend, I picked up this book over a year ago, but just got to it.  This poet-friend raved about the book and how much it had changed her writing life.  While I found a lot to admire in the book, I was sad that it didn’t have quite the same powerful effect on me.  Hall’s book is a loosely crafted braid, part historical poems from the voice of Pigafetta, Magellan’s chronicler and one of only 18 sailors who survived the trip, and part contemporary love letter. 

I confess that I loved the historical poems exposing colonization the most and had trouble shifting gears from time to time, although I think this is more my failing than any misstep on the part of Hall.  The poems are filled with images ripe and succulent, images that are strung together in a fragmented syntax that conveys just how difficult it is for the speaker to put into words his struggle.

In one section of the long poem “Knife & Mirror,” Hall writes:

On one island, the Captain gave the gift of chains
More often, he preferred the rough equivalent
knives & mirrors

jumping back from their own startled expressions–
artillery shaking the coast

After I’d read the book through, I went back and collected words for a rough word bank in my journal, my poor lonely journal left untended for so long.  Very quickly the words began suggesting lines to me and arrows/circles soon linked groupings all over the page.  It felt great to shift to drafting full lines and eventually to what became something that resembles a full poem.  For that, I am indebted to Hall.

All week, I’ve also been reading from Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters (Belknap Press, Harvard U P, 1986).  I’ve had this book for ages but no longer remember if it was once assigned in undergrad or in  a grad school class or if I picked it up on my own.  In the past, I read mostly from the letters to T. W. Higginson and of course, I’ve combed over the three master letters endlessly.  Now, though, I feel compelled to read from the beginning.

The first few letters come from a young E.D., just 12 years old, and I couldn’t quite turn off my composition instructor brain as I read run-on after run-on after run-on.  Already in the poems, I see the woman and poet Dickinson would become, obsessed with nature, struggling with a body prone to ailments, and questioning the strict religious society that surrounded her.  What was more surprising was to read the hints of loneliness, low self-esteem, and social doubt.  In my mind, she is a giant and her poems so self-assured & steady (even when questioning), it is sad to realize that she felt many of the same things I felt at that age and still feel today more than I’d care to admit.

~~~~~

Finally, I did some collage work yesterday and here is one of the results. It
might be a little hard to tell, but I’ve moved into a 3-D phase, raising
some images off the page with “risers” made out of old mat board.

71º ~ a cold front moving across the northwest section of the state, solid gray skies, gusts, and leaves falling like snow ~ after a solid week of amazing fall weather we will downshift to cold & rain for a few days

one of my collages

This week began with a bit of a frenzy of submissions.  After having a pile of folders on my desk for the past two months, a pile from which I would pick and choose poems and journals, I decided it was time to get ALL of the sickly speaker poems out into the world.  So I matched up the remaining poems with some journals and put the rest of the folders away.  Love a clean slate / clean desk. 

Then, there was the election.  Like many Americans, I sat up as late as I could (and that’s not as late as I used to be able to) to watch the results come in.  I am happy with the results nationally, but disappointed in Arkansas, which seems determined to cling to a Republican platform with which I disagree.   While we have a democratic governor for now, our state legislature is now in complete Republican control for the first time since the late 1800s.  While President Obama leads the charge for health care, education, and forward-thinking / equality-based job creation, I’m fearful of what will happen here, especially for those first two categories. 

It turns out that staying up late is not so good for productivity.  Wednesday and Thursday required all of my focus to keep doing what I need to do as an instructor, with no time for writing/poetry.  The reward for this was Friday’s installment of the Big Rock Reading Series.  We hosted Kathleen Heil and J. Camp Brown, both MFA candidates at the University of Arkansas.  When I created the series, I marked off November as a time to host a grad student reading, and now with the addition of the program at UCA, it looks like we might expand our pool.  We had the reading at 10:00 a.m., which made me a bit nervous.  It turns out, we had 60+ folks show up, nearly all students.  Three instructors brought their students (including me).  This made me happy because for many of our students getting back to campus in the evening is a hardship due to jobs or family responsibilities. 

As for Kathleen and Josh, well, they rocked the house.  And after the reading, I got to take them to Vino’s for pizza and not only talk about Fayetteville but also offer advice as they face the nerve-wracking future that is graduating from a grad program in a dismal job market.  I’ve got my fingers double crossed for all the writers up on the hill about to head out into the world.

Yesterday, saw me sending out The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths and taking that big leap off the high board with Fevers of Unknown Origin as well.  Once that was done, it meant that every single poem available for submission was out at one journal or another and both books were out there as well.  Ack!  This morning, I was rewarded with an acceptance from a journal waiting in my inbox.  Wahoooooo!  At the moment, I have high hopes for all things poetry and have recovered from the sting of the NEA rejection (finding out that a good poet-friend received one of the fellowships went a long way to soothing my wound).

Later today, we have an editorial meeting for Heron Tree to work through more submissions.  If you haven’t sent us anything, remember that we read through Dec. 1. 

58º ~ after a weird run of days in the 80s, settling back into our amazing & beautiful fall weather, a gentle line of t-storms brought down a cold front last night, bright, clear sun

So, after my post on Tuesday morning, things pretty much went downhill this week.  It was a combination of misadventure and feeling low. 

C. was home from school all week with the pink eye, contracted from one of his students no doubt.  Teaching, the job that keeps on giving.  While I avoided conjunctivitis, I just ended up feeling achy, grouchy, and exhausted, coming home from teaching and sleeping each afternoon for several hours and then sleeping each night as well.  (Yes, I KNOW I am lucky beyond words to have a job with this kind of flexibility…it makes up for it when I’m grading non-stop.)  Normally, if I even dare take a 20-minute nap, my whole night’s sleep is off.  My body may have been fighting something off, but I think my mind was also worn down by the mid-semester blues. 

On Friday, I received that lovely NEA email so many of us received: “sorry, try again in 2 years.”  I was more able to keep the rejection in perspective this year, given all the misery left in Hurricane Sandy’s wake, but it still hurts.  FB was extremely helpful as I felt less alone in the disappointment.

Speaking of destruction in the northeast.  I tried to get on the Poetry Society of American’s website today and no luck.  Their address is Gramercy Park, NYC, so I’m wondering if they sustained damage as well.  Sending positive vibes to everyone in the path and especially those still without power.

Yesterday, I did summon the courage to send out The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths to three more publishers.  Today, I spent an hour sorting through poems from the fever book that are available for submission to journals.  I ended up sending out only one packet, but I’m good with that.  This whole process has been so different from the past.  I’ve never had the whole collection of poems written while sending out individual poems.  It brings a different light to the revisions I make, and I feel like the manuscript as a whole will be the stronger for it.  I’m hoping to start sending that mss. out in January.

In good news, that extra hour of sleep last night was reviving, and I think having more light in the morning may help me bounce back from the blahs. 

Here’s to a better week ahead!

44º ~ a quick snap in the air these past two mornings, bright sun, calm winds, and dry, highs mid-60s

First and foremost, as a weather bug, I’m sending all my sympathies to those who have felt the winds and rains and surge and snows of Sandy.  I heard on The Weather Channel last night that in 1821 another hurricane made landfall over New Jersey/New York and caused much the same destruction, albeit to a much smaller population.  I know that it is easy to feel like the forecasters are over-promoting worst case scenarios in the days leading up to events such as this, but I am so thankful they are there, saving as many lives as they can.  Coming from tornado territory, where there might only be a moment’s notice and a small portion of geography assaulted, I’m thankful there is so much lead time on hurricanes, even as I’m saddened by the huge path of destruction.

It’s a good time to give to the Red Cross if you’ve got anything left to give.

~~~~~

On a brighter note, yesterday’s mail brought my signed copy of good poet-friend Al Maginnes’ new book Inventing Constellations (Cherry Grove, 2012).  I was lucky to this book in manuscript form awhile back and let me tell you, it’s wonderful.  Al and I share several similarities.  We are both graduates of the MFA program at the University of Arkansas (although several years apart) and we both write poems that may seem at first to be “quiet” or “muted,” but that lend themselves to longer, deeper readings.  In contrast, Al is a fan of the longer poem.  He has the strength to sustain his speaker and the situation of the poem over many lines and often over multiple pages.  This is the type of poetry that invites introspection and reflection; no flash in the pan here. 

At the heart of Inventing Constellations is a speaker, close to Al himself, entering fatherhood in late middle-age and confronting all the issues of parenthood alongside his own mortality.  Amidst those poems of fatherhood are poems of science and music, poems of politics and existentialism.  These are poems that observe the world in minute detail and draw on larger truths through the minutia of daily life. 

I’ve become fond of listing titles in these mini-responses, and here are few from Al.

The Consolation of Endless Universes
Parenthood as Correspondence Course
A Gravity More Forceful
Parenthood as Bad Theology
The Moon as Absence and Desire
The Mute Amnesia of Birds
Asking the Dead to Leave
Prayer for the Imponderables

The opening poem in the collection, “The Definitions,” is a collection of prose segments exploring the nature of family and announcing that the speaker has become a father through adoption, which adds yet another layer to the woven fabric of parenthood presented in the book.  Here is one of my favorite excerpts.

A family is a boomtown, the only nest of light for miles, its laws
evolving with each new development.  Shifts work around the clock
saloons never close and the streets fill with stories that mean
nothing to anyone who doesn’t live here.

And here is the beginning of “Parenthood as Bad Theology.”

I am becoming the sermon I promised
……….I would never deliver, a sackclothed shadow,

caricature wielding the finger of admonition.
……….Smoky entreaties, curly wisps of logic
no cartographer could unwind…

~~~~~

Finally, all thanks to Helen Vitoria for the good work she is doing over at Thrush.  In the November issue, you’ll find one of the earliest sickly speaker poems, “You Taught Me Devastation.” For those of you interested in the drafting process, here’s a link to the day I set down the first draft. (RIP, Lou-Lou, my little muse-kitty.)  The beginning is quite different from where the poem ended up, but that’s the work of drafting.  The whole drafting process is so mysterious.  Here are two scans of my journal from the day this poem began.  (Thank the stars for revision!)

59º ~ a near perfect fall weekend, alas marred by another Razorback loss in War Memorial Stadium (the world is surely turning upside down)

Over the last few days, as with most of the nation, we here at the desk of the Kangaroo have been following the path of Hurricane Sandy and anticipating her merger with the two winter storms over the northeast.  All jokes of my name aside, I’m hoping everyone out east is prepared for the worst even as I’m hoping y’all see the least.

~~~~~

My week of poetry was upended a bit by some work related business and the fact that the Big Rock Reading Series hosted Padma Viswanathan on Thursday night.  Because I’m a bit of an energy wimp, I’ve learned that I need to sleep in on the morning of the readings (on days when I don’t teach), so that I can be “on” that evening.  While this means losing poetry time, it makes life much more bearable for the day after a reading. 

I’m thrilled to report that we had another wonderful evening.  Padma read two stories, “Transitory Cities” and “The Barber Lover,” which is an excerpt from her novel The Toss of a Lemon.  We had an audience of 75 people, again with about an 80%/20% split of PTC folks and members of the community.  Based on both the verbal comments after the reading and the written comments on the survey, the audience connected with the stories and with Padma and folks were grateful for her appearance.  If you ever get the chance to hear her read, I highly encourage it!

~~~~~

This morning, I caught up on the loose ends cluttering my desk and was reminded of a fellowship deadline that is right around the corner.  When I began working on it, I thought I’d just take care of one or two bits of the whole and then finish the rest this week, but something overtook me and I spent three hours at the computer, eventually hitting “submit” for the whole thing.  Asking for money is always hard for me, as I know it is for others, but I have to remind myself that the work we do as writers is valuable yet undervalued.  Fellowships are a chance to make up that imbalance.  So, I did my best, tried to be as open and clear about my needs and off it went. 

The good thing is that by the time they make the announcement, I’ll have forgotten that I sent it in, which always helps deaden the disappointment.  Of course, like most poets in America, I’m waiting to hear from the NEA…that one fellowship I’m never capable of forgetting for long.  (If anyone has already received word, please put me out of my misery!)

~~~~~

Finally, I wanted to say a few words about Heron Tree.  Many thanks to all of you who have sent encouraging notes about this new poetry journal.  I’m thrilled to be co-editing it with two dear friends.  I know many of you have submitted, and we are grateful for that!  *For those of you who have already submitted, we are notifying as we go.  We appreciate everyone’s patience!

As we set out on the journey, my co-editors and I talked a lot about how we wanted the process of selecting poems to work and about being open to revising that process if we needed to.  We decided to attempt to read the poems blind, and so far that is working.  I confess, it takes the pressure off if/when I’m reading poems submitted by a poet-friend. 

One of the techniques we have developed along the way is the “pause list.” As we read our packets independently of each other, we note down the ID number of any poem that makes us pause, any poem that we might even barely consider publishing.  These numbers get sent in emails that the others don’t open until they’ve sent their pause list.  Then, when we have our editorial meetings, we only talk about those poems with pauses, even if the poem only received one pause note.  This helps because before the editorial meeting, we can each read through the poems noted in the list and really focus on just those poems, preparing our yay or nay or maybe votes.

I have to say that accepting poems is a huge rush.  When we arrive at that YES, I get a bit giddy and let out a little ‘wahoo.’

As this has all unfolded, I’m grateful that I’m working with two other people who are sharp readers of poetry and good friends.  They keep me on my toes and ensure that I don’t become so carried away with the beautiful language or images of a poem that I fail to check for a solid foundation underneath.  They remind me that in a joint effort we are working on a collaborative aesthetic.  This is not MY journal, and I think I know now that I wouldn’t want to be an editor of one…too much pressure.

~~~~~

This next week looks a bit more conducive to poetry making, although the material needing to be graded floats there, ever at the surface, ever renewing itself.  At least this week there will be Halloween candy to carry me through!

77º ~ rising humidity, thin cloud cover, little to no wind, yellow leaves drifting groundward

A week without poetry events and no papers to grade meant a lot of rest here at the Kangaroo.  I’ve changed around my routine a bit to focus on poetry in the mornings.  How many times must I learn this lesson?  The focus and brainpower required for poetry is different than that for teaching and going about my daily responsibilities.  It must be seen to first, as my few weekday posts prove.

~~~~~

I spent the first part of the week sending out the weather/myth/fairy tale manuscript and being more thankful than ever for electronic submissions.  It simply saves so much time and paper.  I do know that those on the receiving end may print out submissions so I’m not really saving trees, but I’m hopeful that as we go along and people read more and more on the screen that they will be comfortable doing first reads electronically, at least.  (When I read the first few packets for Heron Tree, I printed out each poem; however, I quickly realized that I didn’t need the paper version.  Instead, I read them on my iPad with an annotation program…PDFpen…for taking notes.  Long live the Ents and their trees!)

~~~~~

I’m starting to feel the effects of my dry spell, in terms of drafting new poems.  For the moment, I am a poet without a subject.  The sickly speaker manuscript feels sealed off and done; however, I’m in a bind.  I really think that the weather book needs to come out first because the sickly speaker is such a different beast, and the weather book is really an extension of the motifs in Blood Almanac.  I suppose I do not have the luxury of thinking along these lines and I should be sending both books out at once.  Dilemmas!

Still, I feel adrift and have begun to notice my absence from the journal.  If history is any indication, I’ll soon find myself with lines (bad ones) bubbling up and wanting to be written down.  For the first time, I’m trying to be patient through the silent times and let the poems return of their own free will.

~~~~~

This week, along with Terry Wright’s chapbooks, I’ve been digesting Adam Clay’s A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012).  A few weeks back, you might recall, I drove up to Fayetteville to see/hear Adam read.  He and I were at Fayetteville together in the MFA Program, and he’s someone whose work I’ve always admired.  His first book, The Wash, is another one of my favorites.

In Hotel Lobby, Adam weaves a song of longing and uncertainty, but not about love or relationships; instead, these poems are about the ineffable nature of time, language, and memory.  These are ethereal poems weighed down by the objects of the world.

Here are a few titles:

Fragment for an Avoided Disaster
On the Momentum of Memory
For Your Eyelash Anchored to the Sky
As Complete as a Thought Can Be
Thought for a Stalled World
A Memory, Forgotten at the End of a Season
Myth Left in Memory
Reaching for a Lexicon, an Apple No Longer Shining

As I read this book, I couldn’t help but think of my tiny, immature grasp on language theory, on signifier and signified.  I don’t really think I know enough to use these terms correctly, but it seems to me these poems cover the same ground, questioning the act and power of naming both the concrete world around us and the abstract thoughts in our heads.  There are trains and bricks and rivers and wind, storms, and weather and none of these “reveal / that you are filled with the need / to document something” (“A Memory, Forgotten at the End of a Season”).  In “Maybe Motion Will Save Us All,” the speaker opens the newspaper “to see how the symbols add up / and where they lead” only to “find nothing.”

There is a battle going on within the speaker of these poems, one that feels familiar to me, the battle of the life of the mind versus the life of the body.  The speaker struggles to capture in language the true nature of the world.  In section 14 of “As Complete as a Thought Can Be,” he states, “I am beginning / to think a fragment / is as complete as a thought can be.”

However, lest you think there are no things in these poems, I’ll leave you with my favorite lines from “For the Driftwood I Once Loved.”

…….When I think of voice, it is the South
I think of again and again, how the South shed

its rustic laugh for a noble one, how it shed its laugh for streetcar
…….sounds and Memphis weeds in an Arkansas field.

…………..Downward sloaping sidewalk.  Hesitation wounds
in the sky.  A crabapple for each one.  A cherry blossom

…….in her teeth.  I am listening to my throat click.  I am hearing
…………..a ghost long gone.

58º ~ wind advisory in place for most of the region today but calm for now, storms passed through overnight

I’ve probably mentioned Terry Wright here before.  He’s the Grand Poobah of Poetry over at the University of Central Arkansas, having built the foundation over several decades for what is now the newly launched MFA program there.  After I read at the reception for the program, Terry sent me his two latest chapbooks:  Fractal Cut-Ups (Kattywompus Press, 2012) and Graphs (Kairos Editions, 2011).

In Fractal Cut-Ups Terry creates mash-ups to create a series of prose poems.  In each poem, two texts are fed through a virtual cut-up machine and mashed together multiple times.  The result according to Terry in the Notes section are poems that “are semi-found but consciously collaged.”  The book contains 22 poems, followed by an extensive Notes section that first lists the two texts used to produce each poem and then “provide[s] mish-mash annotation: part aboveboard end note academic documentation, part gossip and paranoia and truthiness culled from the Web, part avowedly confessional secrets and sound bites from the author.”  Each poem, then, lives again in a new way.

Throughout, the idea of fractal properties (self-similarity, theoretical infinity, and chaos theory) provide the underpinning for the book.

Here’s an example from the start of “Invasion of the Action Painters.”

Letting the world canvas dry to a Just War results in objectness.  The weapon of de Kooning was martyrdom.  The painter, a perceived threat, necessitates subconscious military action.  Only the artist, a sole superpower, envisages proactivity using tangible manifestations.  Attack creations are soon outspoken in every region, and dialogues with adversaries drip on statelessness horizons.

The Notes tell us that the two texts are a “Wikipedia entry on ‘action painting'” and a “Wikipedia entry on ‘the Bush Doctrine.'”  Did I mention that Terry is decidedly political in his work as well?  

In Graphs Terry works with another mathematical principle, the use of graphs to “abstractly represent a set of objects,” according to the Notes section of this chapbook.  Instead of a mathematical, numerical grid, Terry provides “prose diagrams.”  There are eight poems here and the same hefty Notes section as the previous book, this time where Terry lets us in on his thinking behind certain phrases in each poem.

Here’s an example from the start of “Garbage Graph.”

How apropos.  The chorus returns like another holiday.  The family’s coming for festival. They’re bringing Dionysus, god of wine — and theater.  There’s a cop out in the wings.  The bell rings announcing locker searches.

The Notes tell us that the “chorus” refers to “the bird girls in the musical Seussical — if the show had been staged on a landfill” and “festival” is “[m]ore like Landru’s fete from Star Trek‘s ‘The Return of the Archons’ than like Burning Man.”  The note for this poem is easily twice the length of the poem itself and rather than over-explaining the poem, it morphs into something different altogether.

Terry’s poems in these two collections eschew the traditional ideas of poetry and take us in a new direction of pop culture and political stances.  They contain the best of both comedy and tragedy, and they never take themselves too seriously.  Every time I read something of Terry’s I remember that it’s a big ol’ poetry world and there is room for all the varied voices.

**If you are interested in the idea of a word mash-up, just Google “virtual cut-up machine” and numerous links will pop up.